Succeeding King Lear: Literature, Exposure, and the Possibility of Politics

3. Poetry against Indifference: Responding to ‘‘The Discharged Soldier’’

3. Poetry against Indifference Responding to ‘‘The Discharged Soldier’’ About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters; how well they understood Its human position; how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along. . . . W. H. Auden, ‘‘Musée des Beaux Arts’’ La poésie ne s’impose plus, elle s’expose. Paul Celan A group of so-called encounter poems have become over the last twenty to thirty years the focal points of critical debates over the political implications of Wordsworth’s poetry. These poems have in common the narrator’s encounter with vagrants, the rural poor, or ethnically marginal groups—the old Cumberland beggar, the discharged soldier, gypsies, the leech-gatherer —and have been related to similar episodes in The Prelude, such as the encounters with the blind beggar and the hunger-bitten girl. Critical positions taken with respect to these poems range from defenses of how Wordsworth displays and promotes sympathetic solidarity with the poor and how he challenges middle-class readers to confront the possibility of their own impoverishment, to condemnations of how his poems display instead sympathetic solidarity with the bourgeois reader at the expense of an aestheticized poor.1 In and through these polemics, Wordsworth seems to have emerged effectively as preeminent poetic symptom and test case for the inner contradictions of modern liberal political thought. As a generic term, the ‘‘encounter poem’’ may have a source or at least significant antecedent in Frederick Garber’s 1971 Wordsworth and the Poetry of Encounter, which examines Wordsworth’s poems as self-conscious epistemological exercises in which the poet reflects on the operations of his own 108 Poetry against Indifference 109 mind in its encounter with various objects.2 In Garber’s study, the objects of encounter were not specified as the homeless or poor per se, but as whatever objects of the poet’s intentional consciousness, such as nuts, daffodils, or the voice of the solitary reaper. This ecumenism faded as the phenomenological approach to Romanticism, and above all Wordsworth, was accused by historicist and materialist readers of participating too sympathetically and uncritically in the poet’s own ‘‘idealizing’’ tendencies, for colluding in the alleged Romantic escape from, or denial of, the realm of history and politics. With the shift in critical temper, the ‘‘encounter poem’’ has come by and large to be defined according to the category of socioeconomic class and thus to designate encounters with specifically the homeless and the poor. In this chapter I focus on one particular ‘‘encounter poem,’’ perhaps the earliest one that Wordsworth wrote that would fit the criteria of the ‘‘encounter poem,’’ however defined. Wordsworth wrote ‘‘The Discharged Soldier’’ between January and March of 1798 at a crucial moment in his career: around the time of finishing ‘‘The Ruined Cottage’’ and conceiving of The Recluse project, and shortly before writing many of the poems that would go into Lyrical Ballads. He did not publish ‘‘The Discharged Soldier’’ as an independent lyric. Significantly, however, he did plan for it—along with ‘‘A Night-piece,’’ ‘‘The Old Cumberland Beggar,’’ and ‘‘The Ruined Cottage’’—to form one of the introductions to The Recluse, the encyclopedic poem on ‘‘Man, Nature, and Human Life’’ that would include The Prelude and The Excursion but that was never completed.3 Each of these introductory poems, all written in 1798 around the time of the conception of The Recluse, somehow looks forward to or actually became part of another, longer work. ‘‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’’ became part of Lyrical Ballads, ‘‘The Ruined Cottage’’ part of The Excursion, and ‘‘The Discharged Soldier’’—anticipating Wordsworth’s autobiographical turn—part of The Prelude, concluding book 4, on ‘‘summer vacation.’’ These four introductory poems feature certain affinities. ‘‘A Nightpiece ’’ and ‘‘The Discharged Soldier’’ have been paired together as companion poems insofar as both feature a solitary walker enjoying a moment of peaceful restoration in nature.4 On the other hand, ‘‘The Discharged Soldier ’’ has also been paired as a companion poem with ‘‘The Old Cumberland Beggar,’’ since both feature a vagrant personage who is isolated from and seemingly indifferent to the society of other human beings. Crucially, ‘‘The Discharged Soldier’’ is split between these two poems. ‘‘The Discharged Soldier’’ and ‘‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’’ share, moreover, a 110 Wordsworth striking intertextual affinity. The soldier’s proverbial saying, possibly an adaptation...