52 The New York Review
was abroad/Which could not be with-
stood.” Of how he moved from Paris to
Orléans, fell in love with a girl named
Annette Vallon, and got her pregnant.
Of how he watched with mounting hor-
ror as the moderate “rational” phase
of the revolution descended into the
grotesque bloodbath of the Terror.
Bate thinks that Words worth, on his
way back through Paris, may even have
seen the guillotine at work.
Having abandoned his lover and
daughter and returned to Britain,
Words worth increasingly came to view
his political phase as a betrayal of his
true nature and vocation as a poet.
The Prelude, the great autobiograph-
ical epic that he would spend his life
tinkering with, was now begun as an
act of penance and rehabilitation.
Henceforth he would pour his ardor
for liberty, equality, and fraternity into
poetry. Starting from the assumption
that “men who do not wear fine clothes
can feel deeply,” Words worth peopled
his verse with vagrants, peddlers, and
convicts. New too was the commitment
to a poetry that used not only the lan-
guage but also the rhythms of ordinary
speech.
Bate is excellent on how Words-
worth forged a blank verse that shed
its grand Miltonic subject matter while
taking advantage of the form’s capac-
ity for suppleness and intimacy. Here
is verse that stays close to the patterns
of human breath, with meaning spilling
over the line endings and exclamations
appearing in the middle of a sentence,
just as they might if one were tramping
the lanes around Grasmere and were
suddenly startled by a beggar or a bird.
Indeed, Words worth’s guiding ambi-
tion for “The Recluse,” says Bate, was
nothing less than “to write a personal
epic in which the vale of Grasmere
would be his paradise found.”Yet for Jonathan Bate Words worth’s
most profound radicalism must al-
ways lie in the poet’s relationship to
the natural world. Thirty years ago
Bate pioneered the academic turn to
ecocriticism with his Romantic Ecol-
ogy, followed in 2000 by The Song of
the Earth. Since then he has written
two full- length biographies of nature-
loving poets: John Clare and, most
recently, Ted Hughes. For Bate, Words-
worth is the emblematic figure of the
early Anthropocene, already warning
of the impact of industrialization on
the landscape. It wasn’t just a question
of ugly new buildings and odorous new
manufacturing processes smearing
themselves over his native Lake Dis-
trict. What the poet also saw were the
social changes that alienated human
beings from one another—the new
government- mandated workhouses,
the charitable soup kitchens, the way
young people were forced to desert the
countryside for work in the city.
Bate reminds us too that Words-
worth’s most critically and financially
successful work during his lifetime
was not “Daffodils” or “Intimations
of Immortality” but rather A Guide to
the Lakes (1810), the nearest thing the
nineteenth century had to an environ-
mentalist’s manifesto. (The irony that
the book was responsible for unleash-
ing a steady tramp of scenery- spoiling
tourists over the area was not lost on
him.) In the longer term, it was Words-
worth who inspired the founding of
both Britain’s National Trust and theYosemite National Park in California.
So it would be hard to think of a better
poet to read just now, when our abuse
of natural systems has brought us to
this moment of terrible reckoning. And
Bate is the right guide for the occasion,
blowing the dust off familiar poems to
reveal their startling resonance. After
some careful topographical sleuthing,
he persuasively argues that “Lines
Written a Few Miles Above Tintern
Abbey” is actually set a good fifteen
miles or so upstream of the thirteenth-
century ruin. A poem that is often read
as a conventional lament for a receding
Christianity is instead concerned with
the spiritual resources of the naturalworld. It is not ruined gothic arches but
“orchard- tufts” and “hedgerows” and
“houseless woods” that have become
“The guide, the guardian of my heart,
and soul/Of all my moral being.” And
that moral being, the speaker empha-
sizes, is one that relishes its communal
responsibilities with “little, nameless,
unremembered, acts/Of kindness and
of love.” The poem is an early and
exquisite working- through of what
becomes Words worth’s preeminent
philosophy: “Love of Nature Leading
to Love of Mankind.”
As to why Words worth stopped writ-
ing good poetry after 1806, Bate puts it
down to the resumption of his stalled
sex life. There were ten celibate years
between his early love affair with An-
nette Vallon and his happy and phys-
ically fulfilling marriage with Mary
Hutchinson in 1802. Bate suggests that
during that time Words worth subli-
mated his desire into writing some of
the most beautiful poetry ever written.
It is a beguilingly simple explanation,
sitting neatly alongside Bate’s other
assertion that so much of what Words-
worth wrote—in particular the psycho-logical self- analysis of The Prelude—is
Freud before Freud. More persuasive,
if less “radical,” is Bate’s endorsement
of the long- held consensus that Words-
worth’s muse was dependent on his
fractiously fertile friendship with Sam-
uel Taylor Coleridge. When the two
men were in a broad alliance, the po-
etry poured from him, and when they
started to peel apart, in 1808, he be-
came increasingly unable to access the
source of his own power.It is this relationship between Words-
worth and Coleridge that Adam Nicol-
son sets out to excavate in his kineticnew book, The Making of Poetry.
While Bate mostly confines his atten-
tion to ten years of Words worth’s life
and work, Nicolson pares things down
further. He is concerned with the
“year of marvels”—in fact, the sixteen
months that run from June 1797 to Oc-
tober 1798—during which Coleridge
and Words worth, together with Words-
worth’s sister, Dorothy, read, walked,
and wrote themselves into a new kind
of poetry.
The results of this time were extraor-
dinary. From Coleridge we have “Kubla
Khan,” “The Rime of the Ancient Mar-
iner,” “Christabel,” and “Frost at Mid-
night,” and from Words worth the new
forms of his part of the Lyrical Ballads,
including the sublime “Tintern Abbey”
together with the beginnings of what
would become The Prelude, but at this
point was simply known as “Poem to
Coleridge.” As well as facing outward
to the trails and lanes of rural England,
this strange new poetry was equally
concerned with the twists and turns of
the maturing self. For Nicolson, this
year of magical thinking is the moment
when Modernism as well as Roman-William Wordsworth; engraving by Henry Meyer, after Richard Carruthers, circa 1819Look and Learn /Bridgeman ImagesSTET!
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