September 24, 2020 53
ticism set down their roots in British
culture.
“I wish to keep my Reader in the
company of flesh and blood,” Words-
worth would write in his “Preface” to
the Lyrical Ballads, and it is an ambi-
tion that Nicolson shares. To under-
stand what happened during those
marvelous months, the sixty- two-
year- old Nicolson moves to the place
where the three young people were
living—not the Lake District in these
early years, but gentler Somerset in the
southwest of England. He looks up old
maps, discovers forgotten footpaths,
and tramps the combes and hills, all
in an attempt to immerse himself in
“the same lanes, the same air” as his
subjects. He is engaged, he promises,
not in some “kind of elegant gazing at
the landscape... but a kind of embod-
iment, plunging in.” He wants to see
what Coleridge and the Words worths
saw, and feel what they felt, hatching
his lyrical descriptions of the natural
world with passages of acute biograph-
ical and critical analysis. So exactly
does Nicolson come to inhabit the
young people’s inner lives that he starts
to suffer from the same bodily aches,
chills, and strains that they did, a phe-
nomenon which he decides must be
“psychosomatic”—a word first coined
by Coleridge.
While in Bate’s book Coleridge is in-
evitably a minor character, in Nicolson’s
he steps forward in his slightly fleshy
glory to become the full counterweight
to Words worth’s sparer presence. The
two men’s physicality suggests some-
thing of their different temperaments:
Coleridge ebullient, drunk, high, sex-
ually incontinent, and always questing
upward to the spiritual, metaphysical
realm; Words worth now celibate after
his youthful indiscretion and disillu-
sionment with radical politics, inward,
self- contained, rooted in the natural
world, and with a marked tendency to
stare at the ground. Coleridge, with
characteristic chaotic and conditional
generosity, had already decided that
Words worth was the genius who would
write the poem that would change the
world. He saw his own job as encour-
ager and booster—one might say “en-
abler” had he not so often been a drag
on the Words worths’ limited financial
and emotional resources.
The scratchiness of this relationship,
its function as the bit of grit around
which the pearl forms, is acknowledged
right from the start by Nicolson, who
warns us not to expect completeness or
culmination. Instead, we are to watch
out for comings and goings, beginnings
and disappearances, a now-you-see-it,
now-you-don’t kind of indeterminacy.
These become apparent in a series of
close readings Nicolson offers not of
the finished poems but of their vari-
ous earlier versions. In the process he
shows Words worth gradually replacing
eighteenth- century modes with a sim-
pler poetic language that gets closer to
catching the truth of another being. It
is a bold way of proceeding, not least
because nonacademic readers are often
assumed to be restless with this level of
textual detail. Nicolson’s ability to get
us interested in twelve “uncertain and
twitchy” drafts of what would become
the minor poem “Incipient Madness” is
a thrilling achievement.
Less happy are the illustrations that
accompany the text. A note explainsthat they are woodcuts made from
timber recently fallen at Alfoxden,
the Words worths’ temporary home in
the Quantock Hills. The artist Tom
Hammick, who accompanied Nicol-
son during much of his year’s field re-
search, has produced a series of images
in bright poster colors that hover some-
where between figurative and abstract
and are only glancingly concerned
with Nicolson’s text. Their thick, rather
crude lines are the antithesis of the
finely grained and naturalistic engrav-
ing style that was brought to such an ex-
quisite level by Thomas Bewick at the
very time that Coleridge and Words-
worth were tramping the countryside.
Perhaps the images’ trippy quality is
a nod to Coleridge’s escalating drug
habit. It is hard, otherwise, to think of
any other reason for such a discordant
pairing.Jonathan Bate’s and Adam Nicolson’s
flickering, partial approaches to Words-
worth and his associates would not be
possible without the work of Stephen
Gill. Gill is one of the world’s leading
scholars on Words worth and published
what remains the standard biography,
Words worth : A Life (1989). Now Gill
has lightly updated his classic text to
take account of new archival finds
and critical approaches from the past
thirty- one years. In this second edition
you will find more about the women in
Words worth’s life: not just Mary and
Dorothy but also Isabella Fenwick,
the amanuensis and confidante of the
poet’s later years who partly filled the
emotional void left by Dorothy’s long
and abject descent into dementia.Reading Gill’s work is a reminder of
the pleasures and advantages of whole-
life biography, a form that has been out
of fashion for the past decade. Part of the
customary charge against chronolog-
ically ordered, cradle- to- grave narra-
tives is that they are too indiscriminate,
so that the reader is left overwhelmed
with details about great uncles, dinner
services, lame horses, lost earrings, and
the failure of the banking system with-
out being clear why any of it matters.
But it doesn’t have to be like that, and
Gill gives a master class in how to use
the extra room in a way that amplifies
rather than clutters our understanding
of his subject’s life—which, he reminds
us at several points, is lived in forward
time, without any clue as to what will
happen next.
Gill’s approach is not any kind of
reproach. Reading him is not to make
Bate’s Words worth any less radical or
Nicolson’s Words worth any less mag-
ical. But his commitment to writing
about the complete life, rather than
hiving off the catchier parts, does
mean that we get a joined- up reading,
a generous attention to every aspect of
Words worth’s life, including the bits
that don’t go the way we think they
should. In particular, Gill makes us see
that the last forty- five years of it were
not a dreary wasteland of blocked cre-
ativity. Words worth used this time to
revisit and recast work from his earlier
years, in a process not unlike that of an
analysand engaged in producing a ser-
viceable version of herself. It is not sim-
ply understandable but entirely what
you would expect Words worth, the first
fully self-reflexive autobiographer in
English literature, to do. QSTANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
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