September 24, 2020 51
Bliss in That Dawn
Kathryn Hughes
Radical Words worth:
The Poet Who Changed the World
by Jonathan Bate.
Yale University Press, 586 pp., $35.00
The Making of Poetry:
Coleridge, the Words worths,
and Their Year of Marvels
by Adam Nicolson, with woodcuts
and paintings by Tom Hammick.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
390 pp., $35.00
William Words worth:
A Life, Second Edition
by Stephen Gill.
Oxford University Press,
657 pp., $32.95
By the time William Words worth’s
250th birthday rolled around on April
7, it was clear there would be no party.
The Covid- 19 pandemic was climbing
to its deadly peak, and a public infor-
mation blitz had ordered people to stay
away from the Lake District, the remote
corner of northwest England that has
become synonymous with the poet. In-
deed, anyone attempting to travel to the
limestone fells and deep glacial lakes
of Britain’s most famous national park
found themselves fined on arrival by
police officers and sent smartly home.
Dove Cottage, the emblematic heart
of the Words worth heritage industry,
had been due to reopen with fanfare on
the day itself following a multimillion-
pound refurbishment. As it turned out,
the newly spruce cottage would remain
firmly shut for a further four months.
William Words worth may have been
closed for business throughout much
of 2020, but his life has remained an
open book. Three new biographical
works suggest something of the pitfalls
that beset anyone attempting to get the
grand old man of British Romanticism
down on paper. The chief stumbling
block is that all the best poems—the
ones that appear in anthologies, top
readers’ popularity polls, and make
reasonable people break the law by
traveling to the Lake District during
lockdown—were crammed into ten
early years. Words worth wrote “Tin-
tern Abbey,” “Daffodils,” “The Soli-
tary Reaper,” and “Ode: Intimations of
Immortality” between 1797 and 1807,
together with much of The Prelude, his
posthumously published verse autobi-
ography. After that, the work is gener-
ally agreed to have become indistinct
and undistinguished. When Seamus
Heaney made a selection of Words-
worth’s poetry for a new edition in
2006, all but three of his choices came
from before 1806, the year Words worth
turned thirty- six.
For once changing literary fashions
are not to blame. Words worth’s con-
temporaries had been quick to express
their dismay at the way his later work
made a mockery of the early brilliance.
As a young man he had emerged as the
chief exponent of a new kind of verse-
making, one that rejected the cool neo-
classical forms of the Augustan age in
favor of a poetry of emotion and imag-
ination that used “the real language
of men.” But by as early as 1807 this
determination to make poetry out of
the vernacular had degenerated into
a nursery sing- song that, according to
an anonymous critic (Byron, in fact)
in Monthly Literary Recreations, was
“not simple, but puerile.” Likewise,
Words worth’s commitment to an eye-
level view of rural life among the lower
and middle classes appeared to have
plunged into parody when, in 1807, he
published the sonnet “To the Spade of
a Friend.” It might have been a joke
were it not increasingly clear that Wil-
liam Words worth had absolutely no
sense of humor.
Words worth’s younger contempo-
raries, members of the loose grouping
subsequently known as the Second
Generation of Romantics, were quick
to peg his literary decline to a more
general moral dereliction. Where once
he had written of the French Revolution
“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive/
But to be young was very heaven!,”
now he appeared to have turned into a
mouthpiece for Church and State con-
servatism. In 1818 John Keats made a
visit to Rydal Mount, the handsome
villa near Ambleside to which Words-
worth had moved with his growingfamily, and was disconcerted to find
that his idol was out campaigning for
the Tories. The young man whose po-
litical radicalism had once caused the
British government to set agents to
spy on him had by now become impla-
cably opposed to widening the fran-
chise and granting full civil rights to
Roman Catholics. Most egregious of
all, in 1813 Words worth had accepted
the post of Distributor of Stamps for
Westmoreland, a government sinecure
that would pay him a comfortable £400
for the next thirty years. No wonder
that Byron, another of the second-
generation Romantics and a man who
did not need to sell stamps for a living,
had taken to calling him “Turdsworth.”
Oedipal rage must be at play here,
not to mention anxiety of influence:
without Words worth’s The Excursion,
Byron could never have written Childe
Harold, or Keats Endymion. But there
is no avoiding the sense that Words-
worth had become an increasingly hard
man to like. The liberating subjective
“I” that he had introduced into English
verse had slid off the page into a monu-
mental real- life egotism. When a young
Emerson made his pilgrimage to RydalMount in 1833, he met a kind but pomp-
ous old man who lectured his young
guest on America’s vulgarity and greed,
before throwing out the unfathomable
suggestion that what the young repub-
lic needed now was a civil war “to teach
the necessity of knitting the social ties
stronger.” Emerson had the patience
of a sage- in- waiting, but even he could
not resist letting slip his opinion in print
years later that Words worth had “writ-
ten longer than he was inspired.”It is hard to imagine any biographer
relishing a literary life of such an un-
gainly shape—so full and rich at the
beginning, so sour and meager by the
end. Jonathan Bate certainly doesn’t.
Sounding slightly thrilled by his own
daring, Bate declares in his new book,
Radical Words worth, that Words worth
had “the longest, dullest decline in lit-
erary history.” From here he proceeds
to pile on the case for the prosecution:
“His unremitting later voice... was
a counter- spirit which laid waste his
powers, subverted his ideals and viti-
ated his reputation among the creative
spirits of the next generation.” Bate
even manages to imply that Words-
worth damaged his own brand by in-
sisting on living to eighty, whereas
nearly every other Romantic poet was
canny enough to be either dead or mad
by forty. No wonder, declares Bate, that
most Words worth biographies are un-
readable—“the chances are that you
will lose the will to live somewhere
around the halfway mark”—and he
casts some side- eye at two offerings of
recent years that come to a whopping
one thousand pages apiece.
Radical Words worth is Bate’s at-
tempt to return the poet to his more
palatable incarnation as the bold spirit
who “made a difference” by changing
both the literary culture and our rela-
tionship with the natural world. Bate
says he is aiming here for the kind of
biography that follows the growth of its
“subject’s imaginative power” rather
than one that trudges dutifully from
cradle to grave. The result is a book
that is recognizably Words worthian in
the way it abjures the calendar in favor
of the “spots of time” identified in The
Prelude as those moments of piercing
self- awareness that direct and define
the growing self.
Yet while this makes Radical Words-
worth episodic, it is never superficial.
Bate, who until recently taught litera-
ture at Oxford, issues a stern instruc-
tion to his readers not to skip the long,
indented blocks of poetry around
which he builds his narrative. Instead,
we are urged to slow down, savor, and
even read the verse aloud. Radical
Words worth succeeds where longer lit-
erary biographies often fail, by keeping
the subject’s work, rather than the mi-
nutiae of his pocket diary or his tailor’s
bills, lodged at its heart.
The “radical” aspects of Words-
worth’s early life are most easily lo-
cated in his politics. Bate deftly retells
the story of how Words worth, having
arrived in Cambridge with a partial
scholarship and left with a lowly pass
degree, set out in 1791 for revolution-
ary France, convinced “That a spiritMax Beerbohm: William Wordsworth in the Lake District, at Cross-purposes, 1904Joseph C. Sloane Art Library