The Late Poetry of the Lake Poets : Romanticism Revised 9781107703766, 9781107033979

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THE LATE POETRY OF THE LAKE POETS

The long-established association of Romanticism with youth has resulted in the early poems of the Lake poets being considered the most significant. Tim Fulford challenges the tendency to overlook the later poetry of no longer youthful poets, which has had the result of neglecting the Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey of the 1820s and leaving unexamined the three poets’ rise to popularity in the 1830s and 1840s. He offers a fresh perspective on the Lake poets as professional writers shaping long careers through new work as well as by the republication of their early successes. The theme of lateness, incorporating revision, recollection, age and loss, is examined within contexts including gender, visual art and the commercial book market. Fulford investigates the Lake poets’ later poems for their impact now, while also exploring their historical effects in their own time and counting the costs of their omission from Romanticism. t i m f u l f o r d is a Professor of English at De Montfort University, Leicester. He has published widely on Romantic and eighteenthcentury literature and culture. He is editor of Robert Bloomfield, The Banks of Wye: a Critical Edition (2012) and co-editor of Robert Southey: Later Poetical Works, 1811–1838 (2012).

cambridge studies in romanticism Founding editor Professor Marilyn Butler, University of Oxford General editor Professor James Chandler, University of Chicago Editorial Board John Barrell, University of York Paul Hamilton, University of London Mary Jacobus, University of Cambridge Claudia Johnson, Princeton University Alan Liu, University of California, Santa Barbara Jerome McGann, University of Virginia David Simpson, University of California, Davis This series aims to foster the best new work in one of the most challenging fields within English literary studies. From the early 1780s to the early 1830s a formidable array of talented men and women took to literary composition, not just in poetry, which some of them famously transformed, but in many modes of writing. The expansion of publishing created new opportunities for writers, and the political stakes of what they wrote were raised again by what Wordsworth called those “great national events” that were “almost daily taking place”: the French Revolution, the Napoleonic and American wars, urbanization, industrialization, religious revival, an expanded empire abroad and the reform movement at home. This was an enormous ambition, even when it pretended otherwise. The relations between science, philosophy, religion, and literature were reworked in texts such as Frankenstein and Biographia Literaria; gender relations in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Don Juan; journalism by Cobbett and Hazlitt; poetic form, content and style by the Lake School and the Cockney School. Outside Shakespeare studies, probably no body of writing has produced such a wealth of comment or done so much to shape the responses of modern criticism. This indeed is the period that saw the emergence of those notions of “literature” and of literary history, especially national literary history, on which modern scholarship in English has been founded. The categories produced by Romanticism have also been challenged by recent historicist arguments. The task of the series is to engage both with a challenging corpus of Romantic writings and with the changing field of criticism they have helped to shape. As with other literary series published by Cambridge, this one will represent the work of both younger and more established scholars, on either side of the Atlantic and elsewhere. For a complete list of titles published see end of book.

THE LATE POETRY OF THE LAKE POETS Romanticism Revised

TIM FULFORD

University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107033979 © Tim Fulford 2013 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2013 Printed in the United Kingdom by Clays, St Ives Plc A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Fulford, Tim, 1962– The late poetry of the Lake Poets : romanticism revised / Tim Fulford. pages cm isbn 978-1-107-03397-9 (Hardback) 1. English poetry–19th century–History and criticism. 2. Lake poets. 3. Romanticism–Great Britain. I. Title. PR590.F85 2013 8210 .709145–dc23 2013014371 isbn 978-1-107-03397-9 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

For Oju A violet by a mossy stone

Contents

List of figures Acknowledgments Abbreviations

page x xii xiii

Introduction

1

part i: southey

23

1. 2.

The Lake poets and the picturesque view: the visual turn in the late Southey

29

Poetic Hells and Pacific Edens: Southey’s Tale of Paraguay and Byron’s The Island

69

part ii: coleridge 3. 4.

103

Print and performance: Christabel: Kubla Khan, A Vision; The Pains of Sleep

113

The language of love in the late Coleridge: annual verse and collected poetry

153

part iii: wordsworth 5.

197

Naming the abyss: Wordsworth and the sound of power

205

6. Picturing the prehistoric: Wordsworth’s sightseeing

244

Notes Index

279 306

ix

Figures

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

Edward Nash, La Haye Sainte, from Robert Southey, The Poet’s Pilgrimage to Waterloo (London, 1816). Author’s collection. page 42 Keswick Lake from the East Side, from William Westall, Views of the Lake and of the Vale of Keswick (London, 1820). By permission of the Wordsworth Trust. 44 Keswick Lake from Barrow Common, from William Westall, Views of the Lake and of the Vale of Keswick (London, 1820). By permission of the Wordsworth Trust. 46 Keswick Lake from the Penrith Road, from William Westall, Views of the Lake and of the Vale of Keswick (London, 1820). By permission of the Wordsworth Trust. 48 Derwentwater, Bassenthwaite-Water, and Skiddaw from Walla Crag, drawn by William Westall, engraved by E. Goodall, from Robert Southey, Sir Thomas More; or, Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society, 4 vols. (London, 1829), i, facing page 122. Author’s collection. 60 Threlkeld Tarn, drawn by William Westall, engraved by Robert Wallis, from Robert Southey, Sir Thomas More; or, Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society, 4 vols. (London, 1829), ii, facing page 152. Author’s collection. 62 Part of Skiddaw, from Applethwaite Gill, from Joseph Wilkinson, Select Views in Cumberland, Westmorland, and Lancashire (London, 1810). By permission of the Wordsworth Trust. 246 Langdale Chapel, Vale of Langdale, from Joseph Wilkinson, Select Views in Cumberland, Westmorland, and Lancashire (London, 1810). By permission of the Wordsworth Trust. 248 Grasmere, from William Green, Lake Scenery (Ambleside, 1815). By permission of the Wordsworth Trust. 250 x

List of figures 10. Gordale Scar, from William Westall, Views of the Caves near Ingleton in Yorkshire (London, 1818). By permission of the Wordsworth Trust. 11. Malham Cove, from William Westall, Views of the Caves near Ingleton in Yorkshire (London, 1818). By permission of the Wordsworth Trust. 12. Waterfall in Weathercote Cave, from William Westall, Views of the Caves near Ingleton in Yorkshire (London, 1818). By permission of the Wordsworth Trust. 13. William Westall, Rydal from Mr Wordsworth’s Field under Rydal Mount (London, ca. 1832). By permission of the Wordsworth Trust. 14. Rydal Mount, the Residence of Willm Wordsworth, from William Westall, Views of the Lake Scenery of Cumberland and Westmorland (London, 1840). By permission of the Wordsworth Trust. 15. Room at Rydal Mount, from William Westall, Views of the Lake Scenery of Cumberland and Westmorland (London, 1840). By permission of the Wordsworth Trust.

xi

252

254

255

275

276

277

Acknowledgments

Many friends have walked and talked me through this book; some, too, have been kind enough to read it. I thank Kerri Andrews, Julia S. Carlson, Paul Cheshire, Ashley Cross, Graham Davidson, Michael Gamer, Stephen Gill, Richard Gravil, Greg Leadbetter, Elizabeth Neiman, Lucy Newlyn, Dahlia Porter, Nicholas Roe and Alan Vardy. Sam Ward compiled the bibliography and index and saved me from errors. John Goodridge, Seamus Perry and Lynda Pratt provided constructive comments on particular chapters; Jeff Cowton supplied images and made the Jerwood Centre a welcoming place to study. Nottingham Trent University English Department made research leave available; De Montfort University also provided support. The British Academy, the Leverhulme Trust, the Panacea Society and the Arts and Humanities Research Council helped my work on Southey with grants. Parts of Chapters 1, 2, 3, 4 and 6 appeared, in early form, in the journals Dreaming, Essays in Criticism, Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net, and The Wordsworth Circle. I am grateful to the editors. The Wordsworth Trust kindly gave me permission to reproduce images from its collections. Publication was facilitated by a grant from the Scoloudi Foundation in association with the Institute of Historical Research.

xii

Abbreviations

BL BLJ BPW CL CN CPW CPW (1828) Duddon

ELH ERR Excursion Guide Lects 1808–19 SEL SiR

S.T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, eds. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, 2 vols. (London and Princeton, 1983). Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 12 vols. (London, 1977). George Gordon, Lord Byron, The Complete Poetical Works, eds. Jerome J. McGann and Barry Weller, 7 vols. (Oxford, 1991). Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E.L. Griggs, 6 vols. (London, 1956–71). Collected Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn, 5 vols. (London and Princeton, 1957–2002). S.T. Coleridge, Poetical Works, ed. J.C.C. Mays, 6 vols. (London and Princeton, 2001). The Poetical Works of S.T. Coleridge, 3 vols. (London: William Pickering, 1828). William Wordsworth, The River Duddon, a Series of Sonnets: Vaudracour and Julia: and Other Poems. To which is annexed, a topographical description of the country of the Lakes, in the North of England (London, 1820). English Literary History European Romantic Review William Wordsworth, The Excursion, eds. Sally Bushell, James A. Butler and Michael C. Jaye (Ithaca and London, 2007). William Wordsworth, A Description of the Scenery of the Lakes in the North of England (London, 1822). S.T. Coleridge, Lectures on Literature 1808–19, ed. R.A. Foakes, 2 vols. (London and Princeton, 1987). Studies in English Literature Studies in Romanticism xiii

xiv SL SLC SLPW SNL SPW WLB WSP

Abbreviations The Collected Letters of Robert Southey, gen. eds. Lynda Pratt, Tim Fulford, Ian Packer (Romantic Circles, 2009– ), www.rc. umd.edu/editions/southey_letters/. The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey, ed. C.C. Southey, 6 vols. (London, 1849–50). Robert Southey. Later Poetical Works 1811–1838, eds. Tim Fulford and Lynda Pratt, 4 vols. (London, 2012). New Letters of Robert Southey, ed. Kenneth Curry, 2 vols. (New York, 1965). The Poetry of Robert Southey Collected by Himself, 10 vols. (London, 1837–8). William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems 1797–1800, eds. James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca and London, 1992). William Wordsworth, Shorter Poems 1807–1820, ed. Carl H. Ketcham (Ithaca and London, 1989).

Introduction

‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,/ But to be young was very heaven’, ‘The child is father of the man’, ‘Alas! they had been friends in youth;/ But whispering tongues can poison truth’: these famous lines were long taken to be quintessential expressions of Romantic poets’ unique contribution to English Literature – the words of young poets, revering youth, embracing revolution, opposing establishments. Readers, by and large, went along with the twentieth-century canon in this regard: prompted by the early deaths of Keats, Shelley and Byron, and excited by the Wordsworth of the ‘Great Decade’, the Blake of the Songs and the Coleridge of 1797–8, they accepted that early nineteenth-century poetry is a poetry of youth. The new, the innocent, the energetic and the revolutionary were idealised, and critics laboured hard to reveal how they were present in Romantic poetry’s diction, form, metre, aesthetics, politics and philosophy. While from the 1980s the canon was transformed to include women writers such as Wollstonecraft, Robinson, Hemans and Landon, this transformation did not entirely change the association of Romanticism with youth, and of youth with innovation, since these authors wrote and died young. This book takes a different course, beginning with the premise that our absorption in the Romantic poets’ own mythologisation of youth has caused us to neglect a vital aspect of the writing of those who did not die young – its age, and its recollection of its early forms in later years, a recollection which was often a form of radical innovation. Although we have learnt, since the New Historicist critique of the 1980s, to regard ‘Romanticism’ as an ideological construction, and to critique its idealisation of imagination, genius and power as timeless aesthetic values, we have not abandoned its love affair with youth and its neglect of age. We have perpetuated its tendency to overlook the later poetry of no longer youthful poets – in particular that of the group called at the time ‘Lake poets’ – and thus inherited a truncated form of their oeuvres and downplayed their retrospective revision of their past writing.1 Since the historical effects of 1

2

Introduction

this revision were significant, such ignorance leaves us with an inaccurate picture of their careers and of the ‘Romanticism’ that was, to a great extent, defined on their terms. It allows us to forget the Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey of the 1820s, which becomes de facto the decade of the second generation Romantics. It leaves unexamined the three poets’ rise to popularity and fame in the 1830s and 1840s. It causes us to neglect over half of their writings and to overlook a number of profound poems that ponder, from their particular historical situations, universal human concerns. In The Late Poetry of the Lake Poets I investigate these poems for what they say to us now, while also exploring their historical effects in their own time and counting the costs of their omission from ‘Romanticism’.2 l a t e po e t r y a n d t h e c o ns t r uc t i on o f ‘r o m an t i c i s m ’ The obsession of ‘Romanticism’ with youth began when it was first defined as a movement in the early twentieth century by a professionalising discipline of Literary Criticism seeking to develop critical tools from within its own demarcated field.3 In the nineteenth century, the later poems of Wordsworth and Southey had been among their most popular; they did not fade from view until literary critics began to adopt the criteria that, between 1815 and 1821, Wordsworth and Coleridge set out for great poetry – imagination, genius, power.4 These criteria, treated as universal qualities rather than ideological responses to a specific historical situation, led critics backwards in a search for ‘Romantic’ poems in which they could easily be discerned. In Britain I.A. Richards and in the USA the New Critics sought, after Coleridge’s example, to show how poetic imagination was manifest in the stylistic and formal shape of poems, which became, in this process, verbal icons to be assessed by a practical criticism that eschewed contextual and historical questions.5 This process endorsed the priority given by Coleridge to the short lyrics and personal meditations of Wordsworth’s youth: the Lucy poems and The Prelude became quintessential Romantic poems; ‘Tintern Abbey’, the ‘Immortality Ode’, ‘Kubla Khan’ and the ‘Ancient Mariner’ were extolled; later verse that did not fit this bill was passed over. The Excursion was absent from the new canon, although it had been Wordsworth’s magnum opus for the Victorians. Southey’s narrative epics disappeared from view. The historical situatedness and ideological function of imagination, genius and power were, from the 1980s, subject to critique. New Historicism led away from the canonisation of powerful imaginative poems towards the contextualisation of historically significant writings, and

Introduction

3

interrogated Romanticism in relation to nineteenth-century politics and science, colonialism and empire, gender and sexuality, and visual and print culture.6 Yet while historicist enquiry became better informed and more wide-ranging, and historicist methodology more sophisticated and selfreflexive,7 the data on which they were based – the corpus of poetry – was not similarly renewed, although it had been selected by the very twentieth-century literary critics who sought to identify Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey as poets of imagination, power and genius. In other words, the ideological critique of the three poets’ aesthetic theories, and of literary criticism’s complicity with them, fell short. It was not always accompanied by a critical revision of the canon of their poetry that had been selected to perpetuate ‘Romantic’ aesthetics. In consequence, the verse that Wordsworth, Southey and Coleridge wrote after publishing their theories is still infrequently explored,8 although now we reject the values and methodology that caused previous generations of professional critics to ignore it in favour of the ‘imaginative’ poetry they located in a pre-1814 period of their own making. Thus some historicist studies of great methodological subtlety still focus exclusively on Wordsworth’s so-called Great Decade9 and Coleridge’s ‘annus mirabilis’ of 1797–8.10 Moreover Southey, a poet who was neglected before New Historicist revision of Romanticism, has continued to suffer from neglect in the sense that only now are scholarly editions of his poems being produced that give access to the texts as they were first published.11 Consequently, though a revival of interest is underway, much of this interest has centred on just two of his pre-1810 Orientalist romances.12 His explorations of lateness, in such popular Victorian anthology pieces as ‘My days among the dead are passed’ and ‘You are old, Father William’ are almost entirely forgotten. The result of our continuing idealisation of Romantic youth is that we have only a partial and insufficient historical picture of Romanticism insofar as it is still constituted by three of the major figures who have been central to it. What they wrote after 1814 is too often dismissed unexamined as ‘apostasy’,13 ‘reaction’ and ‘decline’, or passed over in silence as if it did not exist. It is time to extend our view to take in all of their careers, accepting that what we think of them, and of Romanticism, may be changed in the process. r e co l l e c t i o n , r e v i s i o n a nd d i s c on fi r m a t i o n How exactly does investigating the late poetry of the Lake poets extend our view and change our minds? It does so by opening a different perspective not just on what they wrote in later years, but on all their work. This

4

Introduction

perspective allows them to be seen neither as other-worldly imaginative geniuses nor as disenchanted apostates but as professional writers attempting to take control of their publications so as to shape their careers – trying, in effect, to find means to become recognised, by the public and by posterity, as authors.14 After 1814–17, when they fulminated against the reading public who did not buy their poetry, and against the reviewers who influenced that reading public, they sought new means to gain both sales and reputation. These included collaboration with others – artists, editors, publishers – who might give them leverage over recognised fields of literary production. In this way they became poets of recollection,15 repeatedly collecting their poems, old and new, in carefully crafted publications so as to create resonant contexts for their reading. This process repackaged their poetry in ways we have not always attended to: in 1816, for instance, Coleridge published poems he had written many years before in a collection called Christabel: Kubla Khan, A Vision; The Pains of Sleep. He added the famous prefaces that helped create the portrait of the Romantic artist as a damaged, drug-fuelled voyager into the unconscious – a visionary dreamer who cannot recall his vision. This portrait is still powerful in popular culture today, and still often associated with the year – 1797 – when, the 1816 preface declares, ‘Kubla Khan’ was written. Yet it is sometimes forgotten that it is a retrospective rewriting of Coleridge’s early years, designed both to glamorise his past and to apologise for his present inability to complete his old poems. It is a belated portrait, a myth-making exercise about age, and the forgetfulness and decline that come with age, which was designed to market Coleridge, in 1816, as a late poet unlike the jacobinical lyrical balladeer of 1798. Examining it in its publication context allows us to see the Romantic myths it helped shape – the Creative Genius and Romantic Fragment – as astute marketing strategies designed to restore Coleridge’s reputation. Here, recollection was thoroughly imbricated with print culture: Coleridge was no visionary dreamer but an agent who worked in tandem with collaborators and editors to produce a version of his writing that might give him status and sales. In effect he asserted himself as what was then a social role in the process of construction – an author – a writer recognisable from publications as their originator and owner – by pretending not to be one. Recollection of past poems was a publication strategy that burgeoned as the poets grew older. It was a successful strategy too – for it reworked their oeuvres in ways that not only revised their reputations in their own day, but also conditioned the way they came down to subsequent generations. It is only by examining their acts of recollection that we can understand

Introduction

5

our own position as inheritors of bodies of writing that were crafted and recrafted for effect. Take, for example, Coleridge’s poem, ‘The Blossoming of the Solitary Date Tree’, first published in his Poetical Works in 1828 with a preface in which Coleridge portrayed himself as an aged poet no longer able to summon the power to complete an old poem. This preface developed the strategy of the 1816 prefaces in a new direction – inducting readers into a way of reading that does not just excuse but actually depends on the author’s lateness, loss and decline – his inability to complete works for the press. Thus the text was presented to readers, and came down to posterity, as a belated early work – another Romantic Fragment. Yet it was not simply an incomplete poem of 1802, now placed in a context of belatedness by its collection in 1828, for Coleridge had substantially revised it – actually making it less complete than it was in its original manuscript. Fragmentation, forgetting and loss – influential elements of the received picture of Coleridge the other-worldly Romantic – were constructed by him late in his career not just by recontextualising old works in new collections but also by formally deconstructing them – distressing them, as it were, as an antique dealer might distress a shiny cabinet to give it the appearance of age, so increasing its value.16 For Coleridge, the value of this activity lay in selling to the public, present and future, a version of himself they might buy because it fitted a certain ideal of the poet – a figure too removed from the world of getting and spending to fit the commercial world in which poets were professionals who finished their poems. Here, recollection allowed him to market himself as someone above the market – a strategy still used by advertisers of luxury goods and one that befitted a poetry collection priced higher than any Coleridge had before published. Collected Editions, in fact, themselves reflect aging poets’ claim to be valuable. They reveal them eager to sum their careers up, to recollect the past before it is too late (revising past words they had come to regret/ improving hasty compositions) and to turn themselves into the monuments that are multi-volume books.17 Wordsworth issued nine Collected Poems, each differently arranged, as he tried to achieve authority. Coleridge produced just one, but understood it was a last bid to achieve reputation. Southey edited a massive ten volume edition, revising individual poems heavily and placing them in new sequences. With retrospective prefaces reflecting on his career, and beautiful illustrations, The Poetical Works of Robert Southey, Collected by Himself (1837–38) emphasised his editorial act of recollection in its very title as part of its bid to embody Southey as an author – to be his legacy to posterity. He was just in time, for he lapsed into dementia soon after publication.

6

Introduction

Neglect of late poetry has resulted in the status and impact of Collected Editions being obscured by modern scholarly editions, which remove poems from their places in the editions in which they were collected in the poets’ lifetimes, denuding them of the contexts that shaped readers’ experience of them at the time and subsequently, until the scholarly editions themselves appeared. A case in point is a poem published in the Sonnet Series and Itinerary Poems volume of the Cornell Wordsworth edition – a sonnet about a stone circle that Wordsworth first published in 1822 and included, in a new context, in his 1836–38 Poetical Works – themselves part of a publication strategy concocted with publisher Edward Moxon. He positioned it carefully in relation to others: recollecting old poems was a means for him to create new relationships between them and to demonstrate that he was what Coleridge, in Biographia Literaria (1817), had asked him to be – a poet of imagination. Assiduous about his reputation, Wordsworth performed recollections of this kind time and again, succeeding in throwing off old perceptions that his poetry was puerile, perverse and pompous to the extent that he became one of the few poets able to command high prices for his volumes. Furthermore, Victorian critics, reading him in these Collected Editions, did recognise him as a poet of imagination.18 Yet the Cornell Wordsworth does not reflect these editions, preferring a mixture of chronological and thematic arrangement that also makes it difficult to discern poems’ positioning in the different publications in which they appeared before they were included in Wordsworth’s Collected Editions. The sonnet on the stone circle was revised and recollected in no fewer than five publications over Wordsworth’s lifetime. On each occasion, it was read in a new context, first as a topographic poem in Wordsworth’s prose Guide to the Lakes (1822), then as a ‘Miscellaneous Sonnet’ in the 1827 Poetical Works, then as a tour poem in Yarrow Revisited (2nd edition 1836), and again as a tour poem in the 1836–38 Poetical Works, revised in later editions of the 1840s. Wordsworth kept refashioning his work in pursuit of popularity: when his sequences of tour poems won good reviews and sales in the 1820s and 1830s, he produced more, reusing old poems to do so. Thus, as he presented himself as a tour poet, recollection became a means of developing a new direction: the retrospective enabled innovation. In sum, examining the three poets’ recollection of their poems in their publications provides a historical understanding of how they made their oeuvres and shaped the reputations that have come down to us. It also highlights their changing relationships with print culture. But recollection was not just a matter of publishing complete poems in a new order or a

Introduction

7

new format. It cannot, therefore, be comprehended solely by a bookhistory methodology that attends to the publication and consumption of poetry without considering its form, style and subject-matter, its meanings and its manuscript origins. Recollection went hand in hand with revision, a process by which individual poems, old and new, were rewritten to reflect the changed perspective and needs of older poets, whether those needs were to do with achieving public reputation or memorialising an increasingly distant past. Wordsworth, for instance, revised his nature poetry so as to present the British landscape as a shared cultural heritage, rather than, as in the 1805 Prelude, a proving ground for the poet’s own selfhood – avowedly a historical place, to which the poet is a guide, rather than a ground for his own spiritual self-discovery. Late Wordsworthian nature – and this was the Romantic nature popular with the reading public in the poets’ own lifetimes19 – was significantly different from that of Wordsworth’s youth: it was a ground on which he questioned his own authority and revised the egotistical sublime of his former poetry in the direction of a more communal and traditional voice. As such, it should alter our critical perspective on his relationship with nature – a relationship that has elicited some of the most powerful criticism of the last twenty-five years. Numerous critics have sought to refute, complicate or nuance the contention that nature became for Wordsworth a category by means of which history (meaning in practice contemporary political issues) could be displaced or denied. But nearly all of us, nearly all of the time, have based our discussions on the same, early, corpus of poetry.20 Here I show how his later work was neither an escape from history as New Historicist critics argued in the 1980s,21 nor, on any simple level, an ecological poetry, as eco-critics suggested in the 1990s,22 but a topographic writing allied with guidebooks and local histories, and preoccupied with the landscape as a place marked by the deeds of past Britons – a historicised nationalism.23 Before the production of publications comes the crafting of manuscripts. In The Late Poetry of the Lake Poets I consider the manuscript culture and practices that Wordsworth and Coleridge elaborated in later years, aiming to uncover how new poems were constructed by collecting and revising fragments of old ones – a recycling activity that renewed the textual past even as the poets wrote about time, memory and recollection. I examine their habit of manuscript assemblage and disassemblage – involving the incorporation of lines and fragments written at an earlier time into new whole poems, and often a way of formally making these poems re-present the poet’s textual past even as they take a new perspective on its pastness.24 Formal recollection retrieves past work, and the past occasions which that

8

Introduction

work represented, against the depredations of time. Wordsworth and Coleridge, I shall show, were adept at this process; they produced some incisive poems that pondered their relationship to their past, and to their past work, both explicitly and by making these poems archives of old fragments. Here I examine a process that I call, after Stephen Prickett, ‘disconfirmation’25 – late work that re-collects a ‘whole way of seeing and feeling’ to which a poet had earlier been committed, but revises it so as to disclose a changed perspective from which it appears ‘partial [and] inadequate’ unless revalued in the light of new needs. We see that Wordsworth was a corrective reader and rewriter of his own verse, writing new poems that redefined older ones as well as revising both old and new poems: what he wrote in 1798 or 1805 should not be taken as the last word about him. ‘ la k e p o e t r y ’ a n d l a t e p o e t ry What prompted the three poets’ development of strategies of recollection, revision and disconfirmation? And when did they start to develop them? To answer these questions, it is necessary to ask another: why Lake poetry? The term ‘Lake poetry’ had powerful historical effects not only on the poets’ reception in their own lifetimes but also on the direction that their writing took after 1807, and especially after 1814. It is not too much to say that it was one of the decisive influences on what, when and how they wrote (and did not write) and how they published (or did not publish). It is surprising, then, that few scholars have considered its lasting effects in detail.26 When Francis Jeffrey began his 1814 review of The Excursion ‘This will never do’ and proceeded to damn its style as ‘the natural drawl of the Lakers’,27 he triggered a change in the poetry not just of Wordsworth, but also of Wordsworth’s fellow residents of the Lake District, Southey and Coleridge. That change encompassed the genres, forms and style in which they wrote, and affected their poetics and their understandings of the poet’s relationship to his readers. It was not a sudden but a gradual change that continued as they aged, and that involved a retrospective transformation of their earlier verse. It also prompted ongoing revision of the politics of their poetry, and eventually reshaped their reputations in their own era. The Lake poets, as they became known, were late born – or rather made; they were products of reviewers’ critiques, readers’ perceptions and the poets’ own responses to both the critiques and the perceptions. Their poetry and their poetics were recollected late into their careers: old works were reworked with hindsight; new ones reconfigured their earlier styles and

Introduction

9

subjects; lateness, with its attendant emotions of retrospection and regret, became a consciously adopted position. Why should Jeffrey’s 1814 review have been so potent? Because it was the culmination of a line of criticism that he had been leading for twelve years. He first attacked what he termed the ‘sect’ or ‘school’ that wrote from the Lakes in 1802, when his Edinburgh Review article on Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer listed the jacobinical innovations he thought Southey, Coleridge and Wordsworth had together introduced into English poetry. These included [t]he antisocial principles, and distempered sensibility of Rousseau – his discontent with the present constitution of society – his paradoxical morality, and his perpetual hankerings after some unattainable state of voluptuous virtue and perfection. The simplicity and energy . . . of Kotzebue and Schiller . . . The homeliness and harshness of some of Cowper’s language and versification . . . [and] an affectation of great simplicity and familiarity of language.

The innovations amounted to a ‘new system’ that was a ‘depravation of language’ and a ‘debasement of all those feelings which poetry is designed to communicate’. It combined ‘perpetual exaggeration of thought’ with ‘splenetic and idle discontent with the existing institutions of society’.28 In 1805 Jeffrey intensified his critique in a review of Southey’s Madoc; he then returned to the attack in an 1807 piece on Wordsworth’s Poems in Two Volumes. Identifying a ‘brotherhood of poets, who have haunted for some years about the lakes of Cumberland’, he saw ‘vulgarity, affectation, and silliness . . . Childishness, conceit, and affectation’ as their chief traits.29 That they persisted in these traits demonstrated a ‘settled perversity of taste or understanding, which has been fostered, if not altogether created’, by ‘long habits of seclusion’30 among the lakes and mountains: had they exposed themselves to a wider intellectual world, they would have abandoned their strange overvaluation of vulgar language and of their own experience. To be a Lake poet, then, was not necessarily to write about the Lakes but was nonetheless to be marked by living there. The aspect of the Lake poets’ ‘system’ that Jeffrey most disliked was the attempt in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads to widen the language of poetry so that it embraced the sociolect not just of gentlefolk – the ‘refined’ tongue of the upper and upper-middle classes – but also that of rustics and labourers. By affiliating poetry with the words and the concerns of the rural lower classes, the Lake poets undermined the linguistic hierarchy – in Jeffrey’s eyes a hierarchy on which aesthetic, moral and political judgement depended – that poetry was expected to support. Hence his attack on their

10

Introduction

attachment to the commonplace, the trivial and the vulgar was motivated by the politics of language: he renewed the attack so often and made it so vehemently because he viewed Wordsworth’s, Southey’s and Coleridge’s poetry as at root dangerously democratic and jacobinical.31 The Edinburgh Review, as Henry Cockburn described it, represented ‘an entire and instant change of every thing that the public had been accustomed to in that sort of composition’.32 Highly popular, it spawned both imitators and opponents – journals that responded in kind to its innovation of publishing reviews that were new in their length, detail and judicial tone. Jeffrey, a lawyer, effectively set the pattern for an expanded periodical culture in which partisan bias was disguised as forensic examination. A Whig who attacked both Tories to his right and Jacobins to his left, Jeffrey affected magisterial objectivity, dissecting books for evidence that disclosed the tendency of their authors’ characters. Older critical modes, in which the author was politely treated as a gentleman, whatever his book said, gave way to a new ‘age of personality’33 in which the critic did not merely find faults in the book but treated those faults as proof of their author’s guilt – the guilt in question usually being his or her espousal of views or innovations that reviewers thought likely to threaten the established social order. Thus radicals and former radicals such as John Thelwall and William Godwin were attacked in the Edinburgh, establishing a pattern that was followed in other journals’ belittling of Anna Barbauld and John Keats and that culminated in the scurrilous attacks published in Blackwood’s Magazine – attacks so personal that they led to a duel between its editor and one of those it attacked, John Scott, editor of the rival London Magazine.34 The Lake poets were thus neither paranoid nor exaggerating when they blamed Jeffrey for blighting their careers and their characters. By 1807 they had recognised that the new reviewing culture was losing them reputation and sales at a time when succeeding on the publishing market, rather than writing as a hobby or under a benefactor’s patronage, was increasingly essential.35 They complained bitterly in private – Southey’s response to Jeffrey’s review of Poems in Two Volumes is typical of many of their letters: I am not blind to Wordsworths faults;—nor familiar as we are with each other, is there that kind of intimacy between us which would be likely in any degree to blind me. But when I see a man take up the Poems of W. & passing over pieces of such beauty as the Tintern Abbey,—the Leech-Gatherer,—the Brothers, Michael, the Song at Brougham Castle &c., fix upon the weeds of the collection, & join in with the yelping pack of curs who are attempting to hunt him down,—I cannot but feel that it is no mark of a generous or a good spirit . . . This is a malicious age,

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11

an age of slander & of selfishness, & the spirit of the age has infected him . . . What is the consequence of this prevailing disposition to ridicule the defects of men of genius, instead of giving them the fair praise which they deserve? That those persons who take their opinions from others are deterred from purchasing the books, & the author is disheartened from laying any thing more before an ungrateful generation. [. . .] With respect to myself, these things give me no pain as they do him, but they inflict upon me a heavier injury. I cannot subsist with the profits of my pen & in consequence of the total failure of Madoc, it is tho whole years elapsed in which I did not write a single verse, & in all probability I never should have written another.36

The three felt alienated from what had become, as literacy expanded and printing became cheaper, a literary market in which more books than ever before competed for attention. In this new commercial print culture, the reviewing journals held sway over taste and purchase: while Wordsworth and Southey sold a few hundred copies of their poems, Walter Scott, of whom Jeffrey approved, sold by the tens of thousands, as did other fashionable poets including Byron, Robert Bloomfield and Thomas Moore. Consequently, they were able to demand thousands of pounds from publishers for rights to their new poems, while the Lake poets, in some cases, had to finance publication themselves. If Jeffrey’s reviews were influential by 1807, by 1814 they had cumulatively achieved a critical mass. By then, the Edinburgh had a print run of 13,000 and was read by many more; widely accepted, Jeffrey’s critiques were no longer the vendetta of one influential reviewer, but common currency. The label ‘Lake poets’ became shorthand for a consensus that the three poets were too often feeble in diction, puerile in thought, trivial in subject-matter, and perversely egotistical in assuming that incidents from their own lives would be of interest to others. So powerful was the label’s influence that in 1817 John Gibson Lockhart could declare ‘the whole critical world is occupied with . . . what is commonly called The Lake School’.37 Each of their new publications was greeted with comments on its puerility and perversity; they were derided in the Eclectic, the Monthly, the New Monthly, the British Critic, the Examiner, and the AntiJacobin, and parodied for their ‘namby pamby’ rural ballads.38 Wordsworth especially was ridiculed in review after review: he was ‘the buffoon of Nature herself’39 and his long-withheld White Doe of Rylstone was ‘the very worst poem we ever saw printed in a quarto’.40 The Lake poet label became still more common because after 1814 Jeffrey’s disdain was taken up by former allies from the poets’ radical years. William Hazlitt and John Thelwall resented their retrospective distancing

12

Introduction

of themselves from the jacobinical values of their earlier work and disliked their new-found accommodation with the establishment. Arguably, that accommodation had occurred because, unable to gain respect from and remuneration on a literary market influenced by hostile reviews, they reverted to older models of the poet’s vocation – seeking the patronage of wealthy gentle- and noblemen, and obtaining pensions and sinecures from influential friends in government. Southey accepted the Poet Laureateship in 1813 because he needed money and wanted recognition, but this led him to associate his poetry with a government and monarchy that many saw as corrupt, while his turning a blind eye to that corruption seemed at best naïve, at worst self-interestedly myopic – an instance of the narrowness of view that Jeffrey had attributed to seclusion in the lakes and mountains of Cumberland. Thus Southey’s revised, conservative path did not throw off the Lake poet label, but caused it to be given a new political slant. After 1814 the term increasingly denoted not the Jacobinism that Jeffrey had coined it to designate in 1802, but a self-blinding anti-Jacobinism. Hazlitt used it in this way in 1818, making Southey the epitome of the ‘Lake poet’ who sees nothing but himself and the universe. He hates all greatness and all pretensions to it, whether well or ill-founded. His egotism is in some respects a madness; for he scorns even the admiration of himself, thinking it a presumption in any one to suppose that he has taste or sense enough to understand him. He hates all science and all art.41

Byron then wittily summed up the liberal view of the now conservative poets: You—Gentlemen! by dint of long seclusion From better company, have kept your own At Keswick, and, through still continu’d fusion Of one another’s minds, at last have grown To deem as a most logical conclusion, That Poesy has wreaths for you alone: There is a narrowness in such a notion, Which makes me wish you’d change your lakes for Ocean.42

For Byron and Hazlitt both, Lake poetry was politically self-serving and hypocritical. The two liberals attributed to their location the three poets’ post-Waterloo conservatism, which peaked in their 1817 calls for radical journalists to be detained without trial lest they foment revolution. Wordsworth had abandoned his radicalism because he wanted to keep in with his local patron, the Tory powerbroker Lord Lonsdale; Southey had turned his

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13

coat because he regarded all social change as a threat to his domestic idyll in Keswick; Coleridge, though he had left the Lakes years before and had not, like his friends, taken a sinecure from the crown, had, through misplaced loyalty, palliated their reactionary nest-feathering in the press. The Lake poets were seen as apostates, former revolutionaries become anti-Jacobins yet pretending to consistency, blind to the corruption and exploitation spread by the establishment that, in return for pay, they now supported. To be a Lake poet was to be reactionary as well as limited and complacent, lacking in breadth of view because one was secluded from the wider civilised world. As political and cultural tensions rose in the post-war depression, this criticism of the work became criticism of the men: in 1817, for instance, Blackwood’s Magazine wrote of a ‘most miserable arrogance . . . confined almost exclusively to the original members of the Lake School’.43 If the poets had previously reacted to criticism by withholding their work from the press, or by ceasing to write poems completely, after 1814 they went on the attack on each other’s behalf, although their mutual support confirmed them as a school in readers’ minds. In fact much of their best-known work, and especially their aesthetic, was written and published post-1814 as they attempted to defend each other against the ‘Lake poet’ charge. Coleridge vindicated Southey in the newspapers and both extolled Wordsworth and justified his own literary life in Biographia Literaria (composed 1814–17), a work aimed against Jeffrey’s domination – and personalisation – of the public sphere that not only criticises reviewers but complains of Jeffrey’s private conduct. It also repositions Coleridge’s past work and that of his friends not as Lake poetry but as poetry of imagination – a concept of massive influence in subsequent criticism that was invented in reaction to Jeffrey’s label. Coleridge also recollected his poems in two publications designed to demonstrate that he was not a Lake poet but a poet of vision and dream – Christabel (1816) and Sibylline Leaves (1817). Wordsworth meanwhile was also stung into redefining the role of the poet and the source of poetic language as expressed in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads: in the 1815 Essay Supplementary to the Preface he made his major statement of Romantic aesthetics, introducing, as Coleridge was doing, a new concept of lasting critical influence – that the poet calls forth and communicates power and creates the taste by which he is enjoyed. The Essay’s origins in the Lake poet criticism were discernible in Wordsworth’s rejection of the contemporary reading public and the reviewers who shaped its choices, but also in his distancing of himself from his old jacobinical ‘system’ of basing poetic language on rustic speech. Southey’s reaction was

14

Introduction

more controversialist: he defended both Coleridge and Wordsworth and belittled Jeffrey in his ‘Book of the Prophet Jehephary’ (which friends persuaded him not to publish because they thought it libellous) and in his Laureate Ode Carmen Triumphale (1814). In the Preface to the Vision of Judgement (1821) – a poem that commences with a Lake District scene – he set out the revised aesthetic of propriety and domesticity that he wanted a remodelled ‘Lake school’ to embody – not the jacobinical ballads of his youth but a moral poetry aimed against those who criticised the Lake poets for their narrowness – writers whom, he said, belonged to the Lake school’s opposite – a licentious and immoral ‘Satanic school’. Thus, the crescendo of Lake criticism affected the three poets profoundly, leading them to retrospective redefinitions of their work that have been lastingly powerful – central statements of what literary history subsequently endorsed as the Romantic aesthetic, divorcing it from its historical context and adopting it as an universal criterion for literature. I shall be returning these statements to their historical context in The Late Poetry of the Lake Poets. The term ‘Lake poet’ persisted even when the intense disputatiousness of the immediate post-Waterloo years died down. By the mid-1820s the three poets had moved on from attacking their assailants and justifying their past careers. The Biographia, the Essay Supplementary and The Vision of Judgement were followed by less controversial works, in which old styles and topics were revised and new ones introduced. Yet Southey’s and Coleridge’s new publications were still being criticised for Lakish puerility. Much of what they and Wordsworth did in that and subsequent decades was influenced by the term’s prevalence: Wordsworth’s and Southey’s campaign to have the law changed to extend the copyright period, for instance, was motivated by their acceptance that their current reputations meant that they would never be popular enough to profit adequately from their new works when first published. A lengthier copyright period would allow them and their descendants to benefit from a slow, steady sale over many years. But to win a legal extension, they had to prove that their writing, once published, should remain their property. In other words, they were driven to a changed conception of the legal status of the literary work, and therefore of the author as the professional producer of property, in response to their current unpopularity epitomised by the Lake poet label.44 Writing, on the new model, would become a commodity rather than ‘a man speaking to men’. The three poets would increasingly recollect and repackage their writing for the market, taking, however, different courses as they negotiated careers for themselves.

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Southey, as I show in Chapters 1 and 2, defied the critics both directly and by embracing on his own terms what he was accused of being: he renewed a commitment to experimental metres that, as early as 1802, Jeffrey had seen as Lake poetry’s defining innovation, noting Thalaba’s ‘singular structure of . . . versification, which is a jumble of all the measures that are known in English poetry (and a few more), without rhyme, and without any sort of regularity in their arrangement’.45 Reviewers continued to single out works of mixed and unusual measure as being typical of Southey and Coleridge, whereas the twentieth-century canon constructed around the critical concept ‘Romanticism’ neglected these works, focusing on lyrics and blank verse poems, short and long. Thus Southey’s later experiments were doubly obscured – ignored because both late poetry and narrative romances were excluded from the canon. Yet after 1814 he published the Spenserian A Tale of Paraguay, the emblem poem ‘The Cataract of Lodore’ and the hexameters of the Vision of Judgement. This book explores these generic and metrical experiments (both innovatory and retrospective) and in the process restores a picture that has faded since the Victorian period. For Southey, Wordsworth’s example was both inspiring and daunting: I show him turning, after the exotic epics that made his name, to poetry about the Lake District – embracing the designation ‘Lake poet’ but attempting to write about the landscape and its history in a style distinct from, but influenced by, Wordsworth’s. Southey was late in turning to the Lake District as his subject-matter; when he did so he was already belated with regard to his Grasmere neighbour. His post-1814 landscape verse is both a tribute to and a revision of Wordsworth, domestic in subjectmatter, experimental in metre; in one of his last books, Colloquies, such poetry serves an explicitly political agenda as part of an endorsement of the traditional way of life still lived in the Lakes in opposition to the society being brought into being by organised capitalism. The Colloquies were like The Excursion in this respect: the nature poetry of the 1820s was avowedly political, setting out a conservative rural vision of Britain that was neither an escape from history nor a refusal of ‘progress’. Opposed to the commercial and manufacturing ethos governing both the ruling aristocracy and the middling classes, this rural vision was as radical as it was reactionary, surprisingly close to that of the democrats William Cobbett and William Hone, whom Wordsworth and Coleridge excoriated. It is time that it was restored to attention, so that our picture of Romantic nature can be transformed by a longer and wider survey that again places the late Southey alongside the late Wordsworth – two friends who influenced each other’s social and political writing about the Lakes.

16

Introduction

Pictures, I show, were a key factor in the late Wordsworth’s and Southey’s revision of their poeticisations of nature. Wordsworth developed, in parallel with Southey, a topographic writing, featuring both poetry and prose, made in response to tourist sights, and to engravings of those sights. In investigating this, I seek to develop the work of a number of critics who have recently begun to revise our understanding of the relationship of literary Romanticism, and in particular that of Wordsworth, to visual culture. Gillen Darcy Wood demonstrated Wordsworth’s disapproval, in The Prelude, VII and elsewhere, of a vulgarising turn from text to image that was epitomised by the advertisement sign and the illustrated magazine.46 James A.W. Heffernan, Sophie Thomas and Peter Manning47 however, have shown that this disapproval was never consistent or total: Wordsworth was fascinated by the new means of pictorial reproduction and was prepared to associate his writing with them, so long as he could achieve thereby a complex and considered response to the world, rather than a cheapened one of instant appropriation – a mere view that posed no moral questions of the viewer. Thus, as Julia S. Carlson has shown, he presented his poetry in illustrated guidebooks and, as Pieter Simonsen has also revealed, both published poems about pictures and attended to the visual layout of his publications.48 This move to a moralised topographic writing was a major trajectory in his post-1818 work and a major reason for his increasing popularity, as I show in chapters concerning the 1820 River Duddon volume – a collection which made his reputation. In writing not from nature directly, or not even from an original picture but from a mechanical print, Wordsworth and Southey were responding to the publishing opportunities and cultural changes produced by cheap mass reproduction of images. In charting this process, I bring to light a convergence in the two poets’ later careers resulting from the rapid developments occurring in early nineteenth-century print culture. Changing the way in which literature was produced and consumed, mass reproduction prints, and the cheap illustrated volumes in which they appeared – both made possible by technological advances – altered what, and how, the Lake poets wrote. The artists and publishers who developed the artists’ engraving technologies for the new market gave literary culture a visual turn. Wordsworth and Southey, as the resident writers of one of the most pictured regions, found themselves contributing to this visual turn, partly to boost their sales by collaboration with artists, partly to correct what they saw as a culture of sightseeing that was shallow and commodified. And so they contributed to the genres of tourism – the picture book, the guidebook – only to redefine them so that the virtual reproduction of the landscape

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17

involved far more than its alienated consumption. Their words began with pictures, only to breach the static and distant framing that pictures imposed by restoring to the pictured places what pictures omitted – histories and stories. Thus they gave the picturesque a social and moral dimension, even as their responses to pictures self-referentially put the process of viewing and picturing into question. The beautiful engravings were thus, once combined with verbal descriptions, prompts to a process of reflection upon the self in relation to the place depicted – a process that both Wordsworth and Southey later continued in works not directly tied to art. For both men, this process led in the direction of an ecological writing, the social dimension of which was organicist and conservative: what is first viewed as a scene must then be more deeply apprehended as a specific place shaped by the activities and experiences, over time, of those who dwell in it and are themselves shaped by it. One of the discourses in which social roles were dramatised in the Romantic era was Orientalism. Here too our picture of the Lake poets’ Romanticism is changed if we investigate their late poems as well as earlier compositions such as ‘Mohammed’ (1799) and Thalaba the Destroyer (1801). I look at two late Orientalist poems that intervened in debates about sexual mores – Southey’s A Tale of Paraguay (1825) and Coleridge’s ‘The Blossoming of the Solitary Date Tree’ (1828).These were correctives to what Coleridge, Wordsworth and Southey saw as the corrupting licentiousness of the fashionable Orientalist poetry of Byron and Erasmus Darwin. They demonstrate that engagement with the East remained a major aspect of Romantic writing, and not just as a form of exotic fantasy but also as a means of staging concerns about social and sexual mores. The Lake poets thought that Byron’s, Moore’s and Darwin’s Eastern verse was a self-indulgent fantasy with dangerous consequences if its morals were brought home by its readers, especially women readers who, imaginations and desires liberated, were nevertheless ostracised and vilified if they strayed outside the socially permitted roles of wife, mother, and daughter. The poets were moved by Byron’s popularity to develop, in their late work, a corrective Orientalism that conceived the East on the model of conservative bodies of Eastern knowledge – the Torah, rabbinical tradition, Jesuit colonial narratives. This was a more direct oppositionality than is suggested by Nigel Leask’s concept of Orientalist texts showing an unstable ambivalence resulting from imperial anxiety; it also reveals, contra Edward Said, that Romantic Orientalism was not a self-consistent discourse opposed in binary form to an Eastern Other, but a vigorous debate that changed in the post-war period.49

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Introduction

The Lake poets’ relationship with Byron was not simply corrective. They imitated some aspects of his style and form even as they sought to reassert their own poetic priority and moral superiority to it. This was not so much a Bloomian struggle with a revered older poet, through which a writer brings to birth a new style, as its converse – an older poet’s effort to reformulate his poetic self, made under the pressure of a younger poet who was achieving fame (and sales) by adapting his earlier work to new ends. In the case of Byron, the Lake poets found their earlier work being adapted in terms that made influence explicitly a debate about potency and masculinity: what the author of Childe Harold and Don Juan did to their discourse made the Lake poets revise their sexual politics to differentiate themselves from him. My intention here is to revise our understanding of Romantic influence, which has typically, whether seen as a matter of Oedipal struggle (Bloom) or of grateful tribute (Ricks), been studied as a relationship with past poetry – Milton, Shakespeare, Dante, Spenser, eighteenth-century poets.50 To demonstrate Byron’s influence on Coleridge and Southey is to alter our angle of view and facilitate a more complex understanding. No single theoretical model accounts for the effect of the younger on the older poets – if the latter played the forbidding father to the children who were usurping their authority, restating their achievements and rejecting innovations made in their name, they also took up the younger poets’ terms, and learnt to occupy new poetic ground in the process – emulating and imitating. Often this ambiguous relationship with younger poets produced a productive tension, resulting in poetry of uncertain voice, when the poet discovered in himself a stylistic affiliation with which he was uncomfortable when it became apparent, or directly associated with his younger predecessor. Not just Byron, but Scott. One of this book’s recurrent themes is the effect of the great popularity of Scott’s first chivalric romance The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805) on the Lake poets’ later work. Much of Wordsworth’s trajectory after 1807, I shall show, was influenced by his ambivalent mixture of admiration and resentment of Scott’s success. Finding that thousands of readers purchased Scott’s romanticisation of named border towns, while few bought his own of Lakeland places, Wordsworth began to emulate Scott in a bid for reputation and sales. His historical romances ‘Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle’ (1807) and The White Doe of Rylstone (1807/15) were narratives in which Wordsworth hoped to live down his notoriety as a poet given to puerile silliness and pompous selfregard. Like Scott, Wordsworth adopted the persona of a minstrel, treating the readers of his printed text as if they were members of a clan listening to

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the history of the local family. Thus the commodified condition of print – the poem appeared in a nationally distributed book marketed for a fashionable price – was dissimulated as the immediate, unalienated oral relationship of the feudal lord and his people. The poet, meanwhile, was a singer maintained by the lord to narrate his clan’s history when the clan was gathered: he was sure in his patron and his audience, who sat before him – the polar opposite of the condition of modernity in which Wordsworth had found himself a commercial agent without a certain patron and isolated from a distant readership. For Coleridge, also chafing at his isolation from readers and his vulnerability to the reviewers who guided the public’s purchasing decisions, the relationship with Scott was still more ambivalent. Like Wordsworth, he wished to emulate the success of Scott’s dissimulation of the alienation of the book market as a minstrel singing to a gathered audience. Unlike Wordsworth however, he knew that Scott’s success was based on unacknowledged borrowings from his own unpublished chivalric romance, Christabel. When he came to publish this poem in 1816, he risked seeming to be plagiarising a poet who, unbeknown to the public, had actually plagiarised him. To obviate this risk, he wrote prefaces – to Christabel and to ‘Kubla Khan’ – that both defer to and claim priority over Scott’s oral poetic and ‘new’ genre – the metrical medieval romance. These convoluted prefaces, which also work to differentiate Coleridge from Wordsworthian Lake poetry, became defining statements of the Romantic Poet – a bard who chants rather than an author who writes – a damaged dreamer who finds his muse in the unconscious, helped by drugs – a genius too other-worldly to compete on the commercial market with the likes of Scott and Byron. Revisionary reworkings of the kind of poet Coleridge had been in the 1790s, the 1816 prefaces had as one of their sources his need to reclaim as his own an oral and medievalist poetic that had become branded as Scott’s achievement and, to great commercial success, authorial property. Coleridge’s later poetic, that is, was motivated by his need, and his anxiety about needing, late in the day, to assert his priority to a junior poet who had made his old innovations his own and taken them in a direction which he both disliked and envied. Neither Christabel nor The White Doe of Rylstone, appearing in Scott’s wake in 1816 and 1815, achieved popular success. As bards, Coleridge and Wordsworth seemed to reviewers pale imitations of the border bard and his successor, Byron. There would be no route to popular acceptance through poems of Scott’s kind – even if they were actually Scott’s unacknowledged sources. Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s gradual realisation of this fact was a

20

Introduction

contributory cause of a further change in direction in their later writing. Coleridge developed a new, allegorical kind of poetry based on the revision of once-confessional poems and notes made in the early 1800s; he also, I shall show, remodelled his oral aesthetic into a poetic based upon the distanced communication of published author and individual reader. The persona of the (en)chanting bard was replaced by the figure of a writer dependent on, and exploitative of, the condition of print: still, however, Coleridge strove to change the distance that pertained to that condition into intimacy. For his part, Wordsworth turned to poetry that described the physical appearance and cultural history of particular places – often well-known tourist sites – alongside guidebook prose or pictorial illustrations. The watershed year, I suggest, was 1820, when Wordsworth published a collection that set the agenda for his remaining career. The River Duddon, a Series of Sonnets, judged by Stephen Gill ‘of the greatest historical importance’,51 was the first publication to bring him warm reviews: it marked the start of a gradual escape from notoriety as a perverse and silly Lake poet, for it reinvented Lake poetry as a topographic discourse portraying the region in the third person, and in recognised genres. Eschewing the experimentalism and egotism of his earlier work, it incorporated natural supernaturalism within terms that were legible to the educated public. Late poetry was not all about reworking earlier styles and genres into more publically acceptable forms: it could also take the form of a conscious departure from earlier style, an embrace of new topics, forms and metres made in order to show that the poet, though aging, was still a vital creative force. These departures, I argue, were often over-determined, involving a conscious avoidance of past methods and subjects: what seemed new was in this sense secondary. Latest-ness rather than lateness. Southey, for instance, experimented in this way after 1815, turning to the demanding discipline of the Spenserian stanza and attempting loco-descriptive verse in accentual hexameters while simplifying his diction and eschewing the ornamentation for which his early experimental poetry was known. Like late Yeats, he twinned a chastened reluctance to show off with a determination to demonstrate his undimmed energy and to assert his continuing relevance. An unexpectedness aspect of latest-ness was an altered relationship, at the level of style, medium and theme, to female readers and to the social roles that were conventionally regarded as feminine.52 This alteration, I shall suggest, was precipitated by two related events of the mid- to late 1820s. One was the appearance of a generation of women poets, influenced by the Lake poets’ earlier work, who revised the confessional lyric and the

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chivalric romance from women’s points of view. Another was the publishing phenomenon of the annual anthologies, feminine gift books in which the new women’s poetry appeared. These highly popular volumes paid well; the Lake poets all published in them, exploiting their lavish production values to produce verse that related to engraved pictures. Coleridge, in particular, found his career renewed by the annuals’ popularity: in demand at the publishers for the first time, he contributed old poems reworked and new ones too – both aimed at a largely female readership and in dialogue with the women poets who had developed his earlier style. The annuals brought about a move to a self-consciously late poetry, in which he playfully explored his inability to write as he once had done – or even to articulate the self that had once confessed its love and longing. He appeared not as the bard or lover of his old poems but as a companionable and domesticated, if damaged, old gentleman playing textual roles – a man all too aware of the irony that it was the youthful love poetry he no longer wished to write that made women readers and writers (and thus the munificent publishers of annuals) interested in his work. Belatedness was a matter not just of relationship to one’s own past work, but also to one’s peers. For Coleridge and Southey, Wordsworth’s power as a Lake poet made it difficult to occupy the same ground. Their Lake verse bore the hallmarks of being an afterword, a statement made possible by and in relationship to Wordsworth’s work and to its public reception – a poetry that acknowledged its secondary position and mixed admiration with critique. Coleridge, in particular, cast doubt on the central ‘Lake poet’ beliefs that poetry could be a sincere overflowing of spontaneous feeling. Within the mixed-media playfulness of his late texts was a rejection of sublime egotism and bardic enchantment; they revealed instead a poet displaced from himself, dispersed among discourses, seeing after-images of central experiences that eluded him before he noticed. For Southey too, the poetry he set in the Lake District was shaped by Wordsworth’s verse and by the reception of that verse as Lake poetry: his metrical and sonic experiments were attempts to speak for the place without sounding like Wordsworth. He self-consciously departed from the Wordsworthian image of the Lake poet as a man speaking rustic speech to men. For Wordsworth too, late Lake poetry, revised by rivalry with fellow Lake poets, by retrospection, and by unease at the public reception of past work was a poetry in which belatedness spawned formal, lexical and thematic innovation – a Romanticism that disconfirmed some of the most prominent Romantic motifs. It is time we paid attention to its distinctive measures.

part i

Southey

Robert Southey hated Francis Jeffrey because Francis Jeffrey, again and again, made him the epitome of everything that was wrong about a new, revolutionary ‘school’ or ‘sect’ of poets. It was Jeffrey who, when reviewing Southey’s Arabian romance Thalaba the Destroyer (1801), blamed this sect for ‘absolute meanness and insipidity’ and a ‘most formidable conspiracy that has lately been formed against sound judgement in matters poetical’;1 it was Jeffrey who returned to the attack three years later, writing of Madoc (1805), Southey’s American epic, that it exhibited ‘the affectation of infantine innocence and simplicity . . . and . . . of a certain perverse singularity in learning, taste, and opinions’ typical of Southey and ‘his associates’.2 Jeffrey was dismissive of Wordsworth’s 1807 Poems in Two Volumes, defying ‘the bitterest enemy of Mr. Wordsworth to produce any thing at all parallel to this from any collection of English poetry, or even from the specimens of his friend Mr. Southey’.3 By this time, then, the mutual faults were established; it was only after 1812, however, that they became explicitly identified with the Lake District: the term ‘Lake school’ was used first in a review of John Wilson’s Isle of Palms;4 in 1814 John Taylor Coleridge mentioned the ‘colloquial title’ ‘Lake Poets’5 and Jeffrey abbreviated this to the disparaging ‘natural drawl of Lakers’ in his review of The Excursion (1814).6 Wordsworth’s perversities stemmed, he continued, from his seclusion ‘among his lakes and his mountains’. Southey’s response to the criticism was to go on the attack, and not only on his own behalf: he urged Coleridge to write with him a joint retort to the review of Poems in Two Volumes, and in 1814 he replied to news that Jeffrey intended to ‘crush’ The Excursion thus: But you little know me if you imagine that any thoughts of fear or favour would make me abstain from speaking publicly of Jeffery as I think and as he deserves. I despise his commendation and I defy his malice. He crush the Excursion!!! Tell him that he might as easily crush Skiddaw. For myself popularity is not the mark I shoot at; if it were I should not write such poems as Roderick; and Jeffrey 25

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can no more stand in my way to fame, than Tom Thumb could stand in my way in the street. (SL, 2528)

Wordsworth’s epic poem is here identified with the Lake District’s biggest mountain:7 Wordsworth is a Lake poet in the sense he embodies the massive grandeur of the place that he writes about. Wordsworth’s imaginative sublimity was also emphasised by Coleridge, who wrote of Jeffrey’s hypocrisy when compiling the Biographia the following year, but by then it was too late: the Edinburgh, selling over 13,000 copies per issue, dominated public opinion and its verdicts were echoed by many of the new journals that imitated it. The pejorative label stuck and so did the idea that it designated failings that all three poets shared because of their Lakeland location and subject-matter. In 1816 the Augustan Review observed in Southey’s Poet’s Pilgrimage to Waterloo ‘that slovenliness which the lakers call ease, and that meanness of both thought and expression, which they term nature’.8 In 1817 the New Annual Register also found ‘much poverty and puerility of thought’, one of the ‘besetting sins . . . in all these poets of the Lake school’.9 Southey found being included in an explicitly ‘Lake’ school especially galling because he had not, before The Poet’s Pilgrimage, published poetry about the Lake District, rarely wrote about his own encounters with landscape, and had never subscribed to Wordsworth’s theories about the speech of rustics in mountainous districts being the best part of language. It was for his exotic romances that he was known – Thalaba the Destroyer (1801), set in Arabia, Madoc (1805), set in twelfth-century America, The Curse of Kehama (1810), set in India, and Roderick Last of the Goths (1814), located in medieval Spain. But with the ‘Lake poet’ criticism intensifying during the 1810s despite this exotic oeuvre, Southey took up a poetry designed to wear the label as a badge of honour. It is on this poetry that I concentrate in what follows – turning critical attention to aspects of Southey’s work that have hitherto been neglected, although, as Marilyn Butler reminded scholars in 1983, they were of considerable influence in their time.10 In Chapter 1 I discuss work that he began to publish after 1814, set in the Lakes – topographic poetry that embraced the possibilities offered by new technologies of visual reproduction and that spoke of and from the Lakes as a local place not only picturesque but historical and moral. This transformed picturesque was, in part, the result of collaborations with artists on books featuring both words and pictures: his relationships with Edward Nash and William Westall were particularly important in turning him into a delineator of the Lake District. I shall

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set these collaborations in the context of a visual turn, not just in Southey’s work but in print culture at large, tracing the effects of changes in the book-buying market and in printing technology. Southey, I shall argue, not only transformed the discourses of tourism but also helped pioneer a new publishing format which would become both popular and influential – the illustrated book of topographical views that made the landscape virtually available, at an affordable price, for people defining themselves as middle-class by buying tasteful books and displaying them in their homes. He was not, as critics have often tended to assume, simply an arch reactionary defending established political power and elite literary authority against new, democratising energies; he was also one whose late work participated in, and sought to redirect, the popular genres and formats spawned by tourism and by visual reproduction: he turned Lake poetry towards an energetic if uneasy immersion in the new print culture of commercial publishing. Chapter 2 aims to restore to attention Southey’s continuing involvement in another of the newest and most significant discourse of his times – his telling of stories about the foreign cultures with which empire was bringing Britons into contact. Before 1814 he had been the chief pioneer of the Oriental and colonial romance, exploring the anxieties produced by colonisation in a series of groundbreaking long poems that abandoned traditional epic style and replaced conventional subject-matter with plots drawn from the culture and religion of the indigenous peoples of India, Arabia and Native America. Thalaba, Madoc and The Curse of Kehama established Southey as an innovator creating a new hybrid genre to work through the dilemmas, desires and anxieties produced by a new age in which Britain was becoming the ruler of much of India, North America, Australia and the Far East. Even his 1814 epic Roderick Last of the Goths, which dealt with the conquest of Spain by the Moors, was an imaginative displacement of this new reality, for it focused on the conflict of rival cultures and religions. Byron greatly admired the poem, and borrowed from it in his own Oriental tales. The subsequent years, according to conventional literary history, were ones in which Southey lost credibility, turning to Laureate odes that toadied to the monarchy. After 1814 his work is viewed, if at all, by Byronists and by historians of radical politics who retell the tale of the younger Romantics’ revulsion by his move from radical reformism to alarmist conservatism. The story I want to relate here is different – one about the continuing influence that Southey’s poetry and prose of empire exerted on the younger generation (even as they reacted against his reactionary politics), but also one even less told – about the

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influence of the younger generation on Southey. I shall show in detail how his dispute with Byron was far more about the issue of colonialism than has been realised, and that it led both poets to write colonial poems that were departures from their previous practice, each inspired by the work of the other. Late in their careers, the two poets revisited the genre of colonial/ Orientalist romance in which each had established his reputation, each driving the other to a fictive idealisation of colonial society that would not otherwise have been written. These fictions were apparently aimed against each other and pointed in opposite political and moral directions, but in fact displayed far more in common than first appears – the later Byron became a Southeyan poet of empire as he addressed issues of power, liberty and sexuality, and vice versa – as the later Southey’s Orientalist poetry took a new direction, eschewing the complex mythological plots, various verse forms and dizzying notes of his earlier Orientalist poems, in favour of a Spenserian romance that is heavily indebted to Byron’s tales and that, like Byron, proffers an idealisation of selfless love as a model for colonial harmony. Here my argument has things to say to Byronists as well as scholars of Southey: tracing the two poets’ intricate relationship of enmity and rivalry also reveals hitherto unexplored influences and connections responsible for a new, late turn in both writers’ careers. In the process I shed new light on poetry’s role in imagining a new model for colonialism – in debating for the public what a proper, moral imperialism might look like, allowing readers to overcome their guilt about a recent imperial past characterised by slavery in the Caribbean, exploitation and corruption in India, and European diseases spread over the native people of America. My thesis, then, is that Southey’s late, revisionary return to colonialist poetry, shaped in response to Byron, helped change Britons’ minds about the nature and purpose of empire – assisting in the formation of a new ideology in which imperialism was no longer justified because it was a means of assisting commerce but instead because it might be a ‘civilising mission’ to bring a superior, Christian culture to savages and barbarians.

chapter 1

The Lake poets and the picturesque view: the visual turn in the late Southey

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Britain was, for everyone save the rich, a plain and grey place, at least in winter. Middle- and lowerclass homes lacked pictures, containing few original oils or watercolours and no colour prints. Poorly illuminated, these homes were, as William Cowper recorded, gloomy.1 It was no wonder then that there was a demand for portable images – for magic lantern slides, and for illustrations which could be taken off dusty shelves and inspected in the pools of lamplight. Charlotte Brontë would pore over an engraving so minutely ‘with her eyes close to the paper, looking so long that we used to ask what she saw in it’.2 By 1850 the situation was very different: visual media abounded, affordable by the bourgeoisie and selling by the tens of thousands. Several technological developments had enabled the public to satisfy their desire for pictures. The price of paper, which in the early 1800s constituted between half to two-thirds of the cost of a book, had fallen because of the industrialisation of textile manufacture: cloth was cheaper and more widespread and therefore so were the old rags from which paper was made. In the 1810s the stereotype and the Fourdrinier continuous papermaking machine were invented, and in the 1820s the steam press was perfected: these devices mechanised book production, making large print runs possible and further reducing unit publication costs.3 And then there were major developments in the reproduction of images: from the 1770s aquatint engraving allowed a more flexible reproduction of the varied tones of watercolour painting; from the 1820s it became possible to engrave images on steel plates, rather than the traditional copper sheets. A much harder material, steel held the lines of the burin much longer: thousands of pulls of an engraving could now be made instead of hundreds. In consequence, new forms of cheap pictorial publication began to flourish: stand-alone prints were issued in their thousands; heavily illustrated magazines created new opportunities for artists and essayists; literary annuals became the 29

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fashion: in 1829 The Keepsake, featuring snippets of verse that were now subservient to the illustrations, sold over 20,000 copies. Southey’s volumes of poetry, by contrast, were selling by the hundred. ‘Prose and verse’, Wordsworth noted, had ‘sunk into disrepute’ and must hang on the coattails of ‘a dumb Art’.4 It has often been suggested that the Lake poets were simply hostile to the new popular print culture with its dependence on visual reproduction.5 In this chapter I give a different account, examining their involvement in the transformation of one new medium in particular – that of illustrated books of picturesque prospects. These volumes, usually entitled Views, were the ancestors of today’s coffee-table books. They developed from the genre of topographical surveys – the illustrated histories of a county or region that were published in small numbers for gentlemen with an antiquarian interest in the natural history, monuments and historical remains of their locality. Unlike those rare and expensive tomes, however, they were slim in size and reasonable in price, with a far greater proportion of engravings to text. They were, in fact, volumes marketed for their pictures more than their words. Undemanding in content, they popularised domestic tourism and helped change attitudes to landscape: increasingly, it could be consumed as a series of two-dimensional pictures. A place, and the social habitus that made the place, was reduced to scenery – views to look at from a distance by passing tourists who travelled in search of scenes they saw in books. Views were a popular genre, bought to be shown off in the drawing room – items that identified the owner to his or her visitors as middle-class, tokens, that is to say, of one’s status in polite society.6 In this they anticipated the illustrated anthologies which I shall discuss in Chapters 4 and 6. But they arose from a more socially exclusive fashion – the antiquarian and picturesque tour originally taken by wealthy gentleman connoisseurs. When first defined by William Gilpin in 1768, the picturesque tour involved turning the continuous experience of being in, or travelling through, the landscape into a series of prospects that were valued in so far as they resembled the painted scenes of such artists as Claude Lorraine and Salvator Rosa. It necessitated that the traveller became a viewer, standing over and against the place in which he found himself in order to represent it, as if from a remove, as a static scene – a twodimensional artistic composition. His bodily and temporal experience in the landscape was elided, as was the landscape beyond the frame: its wider geographic, cultural and historical elements were excluded. This much has been agreed by many perceptive critics.7 What is less commonly remarked

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upon, however, is the paradox that this highly visual apprehension of place was largely textual: for all its emphasis on pictures it was first published with few or no images. Gilpin’s Observations on the River Wye (1782) featured just a few in its first edition; the guidebooks that advised tourists where to stand to see a properly picturesque view were similarly bald: Thomas West’s Guide to the Lakes (1778) was used by thousands of tourists to identify such stations, but did not include images of the views they would see from them. Before the new century the high cost of printing engravings and the shortage of engravers precluded publication with many illustrations, although Gilpin’s Observations on Cumberland and Westmorland (1786) included a few aquatints made by his nephew. The aquatint was a crucial development. Introduced to Britain by Paul Sandby, it allowed artists to reproduce for the first time the tonal effects of watercolours. Engraving became no longer just a matter of lines and dots: gradual variations of shade could be produced, making the medium able to indicate subtle effects of light and cloud – as in XII Views in South Wales, the coffee-table book Sandby published in 1775. While Sandby’s collections of aquatints were too expensive for the public at large they made views of beauty spots and ancient monuments fashionable among gentleman connoisseurs like Sir Joseph Banks and Sir George Beaumont. They turned the eyes of amateurs of art to the British landscape and thus developed the new picturesque aesthetic. The first book devoted to Lakeland aquatints appeared as early as 1787 – twenty engravings by Joseph Farington of Views of the Lakes &c in Cumberland and Westmorland, each accompanied by a prose description of the illustrated scene. Watercolourists began to depict the Lakes in its wake but it was not until John Glover successfully sold nine Lakeland scenes at the Watercolour Society in 1806 that the region became truly popular as a subject.8 By 1825, with production costs slashed by technological improvement, there were many artists marketing engraved reproductions of their watercolour views of the Lakes: the picturesque had become pictorial. In becoming pictorial, the picturesque was democratised and redefined. What had been the preserve of gentlemen educated to admire Italian landscape paintings was opened to middle-class book-buyers whose mobility might extend to the Lakes or Scotland, but not to Italy. The books of Views virtually connected them as a new, middle-class reading public united in their shared taste for revisiting, from their urban and suburban homes, the topography they saw on their annual holidays.9 They were also avid purchasers of the landscape poets that the same developments in printing could market in larger, cheaper editions than ever before.

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This conjunction was noticed by publishers and led to the appearance of heavily illustrated editions of popular poets and to a transformation of the Views genre. From 1806, when Vernor and Hood published a series of Views . . . Illustrative of the Works of Burns, Cowper and the best-selling Robert Bloomfield, it was clear that the public would buy spin-off volumes that featured aquatint engravings of scenes described in their favourite poems. This was a new marketing concept – stand-alone volumes of picturesque images and verse excerpts that were also companions to the illustrated editions of the poets that readers already owned. They could be browsed over the tea table or consulted in the armchair alongside the poem itself, to give a virtual experience, from the drawing room, of the picturesque landscapes that the poets described in words. What was it to be termed a Lake poet in a culture in which the Lakes were increasingly marketed and consumed in visual form as a series of picturesque views, as if they were exportable goods? And when poetry was sold in extracts and snippets attached to pictures: words deferring to, or, in Wordsworth’s term, the ‘laqueys’ of, reproduced art?10 When both poems and place seemed cut and packaged into commodities by the power of visual reproduction? It was, among other things, to be identified as resistant to market forces and visual representation – to be perversely insistent upon the particularity of one’s own experience, and the experience of uncouth rustics, rather than able to take a more distant, generalised view. To be egotistical, rather than picturesque. After 1815, Southey and his fellow Lake poet Wordsworth countered this identification and altered the direction of their Lake poetry by producing virtual topography – set-piece descriptions of views that were either based on pictures, meant to accompany pictures, or framed like pictures. They became guides for tourists, offering verbal portraits of landscapes worth consuming as sights. This was a turn away from the anti-picturesque aesthetic that they practised in earlier years. Yet it was, at the same time, a transformation of the picturesque as they found it in the commodifying discourses of visual reproduction of which the guidebooks and Views were examples. Southey’s illustrated Lake writing was an attempt to make pictures precipitate a continuous subjective involvement with a place (mind and body) and thereby yield, rather than mere aesthetic rules and commodified prospects, a moral and metaphysical reorientation of the viewer. Southey’s Lake writing was also a response to two further discourses – to the pejorative term ‘Lake poet’ that had been attached to him although before 1815 he had published no poetry about the Lake District, and to the Lake poetry of Wordsworth. In what follows I show that the late Southey became a Lake poet, in literal terms, in defiance of this criticism – as if to

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make the dismissive tag a badge of honour. His Lake poetry, moreover, was implicitly political – its idealisation of local attachment was a modification of Burkean conservatism akin to Wordsworth’s late work. Southey selfconsciously put his own verse alongside that of Wordsworth in a cultural intervention designed to reclaim Lake poetry from its critics, so as to show it to be a repository of a moral way of life that a commercialising and commodifying nation was abandoning at its peril. This was an act of both solidarity and rivalry: Southey wanted to support his much ridiculed friend and to make his own Lake ethos heard, distinctly from Wordsworth’s. His role in setting out this Romantic conservatism in verse has been largely overlooked; in restoring it to attention here I emphasise that it retained the radicalism of his early poetry in one respect – metrical experimentation. Southey’s Lake verse rendered the place in unusual metres so as to avoid Wordsworth’s iambic ground: his late Lake poetry was an exercise in notbeing-Wordsworth by a poet who knew Wordsworth to be one of the greatest poets in the language. ************* Before 1815 Southey was, in public, a poet of foreign climes rather than native ground. He was a Lake poet in the sense that his experimental verse epitomised the radical innovations of the Lakeland-dwelling poets, but not in terms of his subject-matter. In private, however, Southey had begun to write about the area soon after he made his home there in 1803. A letter of February 1804, for instance, shows his developing need to describe the beauty by which he was surrounded: I have seen a sight more dreamy & cheerful than any scenery that fancy ever yet devised for Faery Land. – We had walked down to the Lake side, it was a delightful day, the sun shining, & a few white clouds hanging motionless in the sky. the opposite shore of Derwent water consists of one long mountain which suddenly terminates in an arch – thus [a large ‘u’ shape drawn here] – & thro that opening you see a long valley between mountains, & bounded by mountain beyond mountain—to the right of this arch the heights are more varied & of greater elevation. Now as there was not a breath of air stirring, the surface of the Lake was so perfectly still that it became one great mirror, & all its water disappeared. the whole line of shore was represented as vividly & steadily as it existed in its actual being—the arch—the vale within—the single houses far within the vale—the smoke from their chimneys—the farthest hills—& the shadow & substance joined at their bases so indivisibly that you could make no separation even with your judgement. As I stood on the shore Heaven & the Clouds seemed lying under me I was looking down into the sky, & the whole range of mountains having one line of summits under my feet, & another above me seemed to be suspended between two firmaments. Shut your eyes & dream of

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a scene so unnatural & so beautiful. What I have said is most strictly & scrupulously true—but it was one of those happy moments that can seldom occur, for the least breath stirring would have shaken the whole vision & at once unrealized it. I have before seen a partial appearance, but never before did, & perhaps never again may lose sight of the Lake entirely—for it literally seemed like an abyss of sky below me—not fog & clouds as from a mountain—but the blue heaven spotted with a few fleecy pillows of cloud, that looked placed there for Angels to rest upon them.11

Natural supernaturalism: here the lake is a place where earth, water and sky meet, a place of dematerialisation, where a reflection is as real as the original, and what is above is also below – a place where perspectives shift and what you thought you knew is turned upside down. This was a prospect view that transformed the mode of description employed in picturesque tours and guidebooks, which simply used a generic affective vocabulary, as when Gilpin wrote of Tintern that a more pleasing retreat could not easily be found. The woods, and glades intermixed; the winding of the river; the variety of the ground; the splendid ruin, contrasted with the objects of nature; and the elegant line formed by the summits of the hills, which include the whole; make all together a very inchanting piece of scenery.12

Thomas West perpetuated this reduction of a place to scenery when describing the view from ‘Station III’ on Windermere to a ‘magnificent . . . amphitheatre and . . . grand . . . assemblage of mountains. Dells, and chasms, as ever the fancy of Poussin suggested, or the genius of Rosa invented’.13 Southey’s view is more dynamic, a scene involving the reader in natural and spiritual metamorphoses like the ‘lakes and sandy shores’ of Coleridge’s first description of the Lakes in ‘Frost at Midnight’.14 It was too good not to re-collect in print and it became a founding text for Southey’s Lake school work. In 1807 he transferred it to Letters from England, a fake travel narrative in which he wrote in the persona of a visiting Spaniard, Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella. There it formed the climax of his first – albeit pseudonymous – published piece of Lake District writing, a tour narrative of the area placed as the picturesque centrepiece of a book that is shocked by the effects of commerce and manufacture on society and the landscape. The lake view is a scene in which the natural replicates itself as the spiritual, a Wordsworthian antidote to the industrial Black Country. It is a picture of transcendence in what is otherwise an energetic and humorous traverse of the district’s sights and sounds – more a critique of the picturesque tour than a tour per se. Not content with that tour’s limitations, Espriella is, as Southey was, an early fellwalker, climbing up to Bleaberry tarn and over

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the pass from Ennerdale to Buttermere. Yet he also follows the tourist route: he uses a guidebook, visits the viewpoints and stations recommended therein, and is amused to discover that one can pay extra for a ‘superextra-double-superfine’ echo at Lodore falls.15 Published before Wordsworth’s earliest text of his Guide to the Lakes, Espriella’s narrative was, Southey saw, an innovative contribution to tourist literature, and he asked Coleridge to ‘puff’ it in the Courier newspaper ‘as the best guide to the lakes’.16 It was radical in involving fellwalking on foot as well as genteel progress by carriage, and it was new in its preference for the picturesque that nature generates spontaneously over the rearrangements made by theorists and landscapers.17 The picturesque Lakes are in this way conducive to civil society, but only if the consumption of landscape as a series of static views leads to a more active and continuous experience, involving the mind and body in motion. It was the memory of his Keswick friend William Peachey’s young and active wife rowing her boat on Derwentwater that led to the first poem that Southey set in the Lakes. Epitaph Here in the fruitful vales of Somerset, Was Emma born, and here the Maiden grew To the sweet season of her womanhood, Beloved and lovely, like a plant whose leaf And bud and blossom all are beautiful. In peacefulness her virgin years were past; And when in prosperous wedlock she was given, Amid the Cumbrian mountains far away She had her summer bower. ’Twas like a dream Of old Romance to see her when she plied Her little skiff on Derwent’s glassy lake; The roseate evening resting on the hills, The lake returning back the hues of heaven, Mountains, and vales, and waters, all imbued With beauty, and in quietness; and she, Nymph-like, amid that glorious solitude A heavenly presence, gliding in her joy. But soon a wasting malady began To prey upon her, frequent in attack, Yet with such flattering intervals as mock The hopes of anxious love, and most of all The sufferer, self-deceived. During those days Of treacherous respite, many a time hath he, Who leaves this record of his friend, drawn back

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Southey Into the shadow from her social board, Because too surely in her cheek he saw The insidious bloom of death; and then her smiles And innocent mirth excited deeper grief Than when long-look’d-for tidings came at last, That, all her sufferings ended, she was laid Amid Madeira’s orange groves to rest. O gentle Emma! o’er a lovelier form Than thine, Earth never closed; nor e’er did Heaven Receive a purer spirit from the world!18

Here the heaven reflected in the lake, first described in the 1804 letter, again features, but now to place the delicate and, as we know from the title, doomed Emma halfway between the natural and the spiritual. Her boat is suspended between the two, the only moving thing in a scene of quietness and peace, where even the most substantial things – mountains, vales, waters – are transformed into insubstantial reflections. Though an epitaph, the piece invokes conversation poems, for it begins in Somerset, where Coleridge’s 1798 poems were set, and it continues in the Coleridgean manner, echoing his vocabulary (‘beloved’, ‘lovely’, ‘old romance’). It is also a response to Wordsworth’s epitaph, the ‘Boy of Winander’:19 the setting is a neighbouring ‘glimmering lake’ in which the ‘heaven’ is also reflected in the water; the boy, like Emma, is so much a part of the lake world where sound, sight, sky, mountain and water meet that he cannot live. He dies in childhood but remains, in the graveyard, interred in a ‘vale’ ‘pre-eminent in beauty’; Emma dies abroad but is returned in spirit to the ‘heaven’ that is imaged in the lake where she loved to row. The poems are similar in their vocabulary too: Southey’s phrase ‘many a time hath he’ echoes Wordsworth’s ‘many a time . . . would he’, while the syntax, checking and then hurrying reader’s progress but poised over the steady rhythmical pulse, mirrors Wordsworth’s in such passages as that describing his boyhood skating in The Prelude: Southey suspends, from the verb that portrays Emma’s rowing – ‘plied her skiff’ – , a series of phrases describing nature’s actions, each occupying one line, each depending on a present participle; he then introduces the pronoun ‘she’ only to delay the verb it governs by including further descriptive phrases (‘Nymph-like, amid that glorious solitude/ A heavenly presence’). Only after these phrases does the reader arrive at ‘gliding in her joy’ – the verb that is governed by ‘she’ but that, being a present participle, leaves her on an image of continuous, unending motion. Thus the gliding Emma is syntactically balanced with and grammatically akin to the ‘resting’ evening and the ‘returning’ lake, a

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poised part of the unceasing processes of reflecting and metamorphosing that occur on the lake between water, earth and heaven. ‘Gliding’, of course, usually describes motion through the air: as a metaphor to portray her rowing, it affiliates her to the heavens and places her between flesh and spirit – in a liminal state similar to that of nymphs. The poise is too fragile not to be broken, like the boy of Winander’s ‘pause of silence’ when, as he listened for the owls’ answer to his call, ‘the visible scene/ Would enter unawares into his mind/ With all its solemn imagery, its rocks,/ Its woods, and that uncertain heaven, receiv’d/ Into the bosom of the steady lake’ (lines 21–5). Time resumes: suspensions of its progress do not last and indeed emphasise by contrast, in their brief and delicate existence, its inevitable march to death. Those, like Emma and the Boy, who attain the hour of splendour on the lake seem in retrospect to have been too innocent to survive on the cold hillside that is the world of linear temporal experience. They were too inseparable from, or absorbed within, the special spots sheltered within nature’s nurturing vales – spots rich and strange where all doth suffer, as it were, a lake change. The Shakespearian allusion is apposite because Southey likens seeing Emma on the lake to a ‘dream of old romance’: she occupies, to the poet watching her rowing on Derwentwater, the fluid world of poetic fable, in which time is circular and place haunted. And though he charts the destruction of this world at the hands of the wasting disease that wrenches Emma from the vale and kills her on a foreign island, Southey renews it in his own verse about the watery element by which she – and he – both lived. Derwentwater is the image of imagination, the fount of fable, the place of poetry, the magic lake of story – a place only seen when the scales are lifted from the eyes of experience by the power of innocence – by Emma, as by Wordsworth’s Boy. Through her, Southey saw it anew, even as he lamented her loss: there was more to being a Lake poet than the generalised and distanced emotional response to scenery that met the picturesque eye. The epitaph for Emma was a private poem, written for her widower; Southey waited until 1815 to publish it: it was, however, the first of a number of Lake poems he published over the next ten years. Several things precipitated this late development in a poetic career that by then dated back twenty years, and that had brought Southey the Laureateship. One was Wordsworth’s Excursion (1814) which demonstrated the possibility of making the landscape bear both a personal and political meaning that was traditional and conservative. As a Laureate poet forced to write official odes, Southey wanted to survey the state of the nation, rather than flatter minor royals, and so he needed to speak from a position of authority.

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Via The Excursion, he discovered a way to represent his Lakeland home as the basis of the way of life that he practised and wanted his fellow Britons to practise – the basis for claiming authority as a representative national poet. Thus when he found himself in the wake of its publication being criticised as a Lake poet, he moved to affirm his solidarity with its author. He became what he was accused of being to show why the Lakes made not for seclusion and perversity, but for a moral way of life that set a standard for the rest of society. And so he collected his old private epitaph for Emma in a publication, marking the beginning of what would be a deliberate identification of himself as a Lake author who could speak of and from the region as a national poet. Yet as a Lake poet he had to negotiate a difficult path rather than tread the same ground as that taken by Wordsworth, whom he regarded as being on a par with Shakespeare and Milton. In practice this meant he wrote in the style defined by Jeffrey as that of the Lake poets – finding sublimity in the commonplace, using plain diction, viewing the world from a secluded and consciously different perspective, adopting experimental forms and metres – but incorporating this Lake poetry in larger works that were on other topics, so as not to enter a competition with Wordsworth that he could not win. There was another cause too for Southey’s turn to the Lakes: he gained the chance to work with painters, and this offered a means of entering the book market that might bring popularity and respect. What became a long-term strategy of collaboration with artists began with a chance meeting. In 1815 he encountered Edward Nash during a tour to the battlefield of Waterloo. Nash sketched the by-now famous buildings where crucial episodes of the battle had taken place; he then made his drawings available to Southey to illustrate a poem describing the journey, reflecting upon the war and celebrating Britain’s victory. Southey found the sketches ‘sufficiently picturesque’ (SNL, ii, pp. 128–30) and included them in his verse tour of the sites of recent carnage; his theme was thanksgiving for the destruction of the French Revolution, but his method was that of a guidebook. With The Poet’s Pilgrimage to Waterloo to hand, one could travel through the towns, to the monuments, and around the battlefield, gaining a picture – verbal or graphic – of each place, with historical and geographical information appended in the form of notes. Here Southey was a tourist poet, but one who began not with departure, but with homecoming. The Proem details his arrival back in Keswick after the journey, a return to the shelter and stability of mountain-encircled Lakeland from the destruction and chaos of war-torn Europe:

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i. Once more I see thee, Skiddaw! once again Behold thee in thy majesty serene, Where like the bulwark of this favoured plain, Alone thou standest, monarch of the scene. . . Thou glorious Mountain, on whose ample breast The sunbeams love to play, the vapours love to rest!

ii. Once more, O Derwent! to thy aweful shores I come, insatiate of the accustomed sight; And listening as the eternal torrent roars, Drink in with eye and ear a fresh delight: For I have wandered far by land and sea, In all my wanderings still remembering thee. (Proem, ll. 1–12; SLPW, iii, p. 240)

Derwentwater provides the wanderer with a mental anchor and an emotional restorative; Skiddaw, meanwhile, is a protective monarch and shields those who dwell in its shadow, unlike the plains of Europe which were so vulnerable to the havoc wreaked by republican France. Southey’s is a politically conservative and anti-Jacobin Lake District, a place where the very landscape embodies the social and historical benefits of monarchical establishment. But Skiddaw also betokens Wordsworth, whom Southey had identified with the fell when scorning Jeffrey’s criticism of The Excursion – that poem in which the mountains also seem monarchical and anti-revolutionary (they appear there ‘stern and desolate;/ But in the majesty of distance . . . fair’ (Excursion, ii, 96–8)). As a Lake poet, Southey is happy to stand in his neighbour’s shadow, stimulated by what he acknowledged as Wordsworth’s great poetry, but having a variation of his own to offer. That variation is to do with pictured domesticity: Southey creates vignettes of familial harmony in a way Wordsworth almost never does, as the Proem reveals.

iii. Twelve years, (how large a part of man’s brief day!) Nor idly, nor ingloriously spent, Of evil and of good have held their way, Since first upon thy banks I pitched my tent. Hither I came in manhood’s active prime, And here my head hath felt the touch of time.

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iv. Heaven hath with goodly increase blest me here, Where childless and opprest with grief I came; With voice of fervent thankfulness sincere Let me the blessings which are mine proclaim: Here I possess, . . . what more should I require? Books, children, leisure, . . . all my heart’s desire.

v. O joyful hour, when to our longing home The long-expected wheels at length drew nigh! When the first sound went forth, ‘they come! they come!’ And hope’s impatience quickened every eye! ‘Never had man whom Heaven would heap with bliss More glad return, more happy hour than this.’

vi. Aloft on yonder bench, with arms dispread, My boy stood, shouting there his father’s name, Waving his hat around his happy head; And there, a younger group, his sisters came: Smiling they stood with looks of pleased surprize, While tears of joy were seen in elder eyes.

vii. Soon each and all came crouding round to share The cordial greeting, the beloved sight; What welcomings of hand and lip were there! And when those overflowings of delight Subsided to a sense of quiet bliss, Life hath no purer deeper happiness. (Proem, ll. 13–42; SLPW, iii, pp. 240–1)

Unlike Wordsworth, Southey finds his happiness in an entire family, and dramatises his children’s and his own joy at their reunion. The stanzas come to life with the quoted shouts of greeting and the colloquial descriptions of excited hat-waving – these are balanced against the more formal and archaic narrative voice (‘yonder’, ‘dispread’, ‘hath’). It is on the basis of these intensely realised moments that Southey earns the authority to coin such simple yet general axioms as those of lines 29–30 and 42. And yet Wordsworth is present – the Wordsworth who celebrated his return to a

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home at Grasmere, and the Wordsworth who exclaimed, when revisiting the river Wye, ‘Five years have past’20 – an exclamation echoed here by Southey’s ‘twelve years’. This is a poem of tribute as well as one of retrospect and relief at finding shelter in the mountains from the tribulations of the wider, more exposed world where children die and poets are homeless. It is self-consciously a late poem: the line ‘here my head hath felt the touch of time’ turns grey hairs into a secret spiritual communication. In this shelter, time has brought increase of family and of happiness as well as years – a little touch of Skiddaw in the night. The Lake District becomes Southey’s poetic ground, his foundation for a verse tour in which, because he has already shown himself to be a bard of peace, happiness and domesticity – a protective and loving father – he will have the authority to indict the revolutionaries and warmongers who have destroyed these virtues in Europe. Meanwhile, at the end of the book, Nash’s pictures transfer the domestic picturesque to the battlefield – they illustrate buildings notable because the battle of Waterloo raged around them – a farmhouse, a barn – but show them not in the midst of the fighting but months afterwards, when they are again emblems of rural peace (Fig. 1). The resulting contrast between their present appearance and the recent history that makes them worth depicting serves to endorse Southey’s political point: British victory has restored the rural peace that Napoleon’s restless militarism had disturbed, and that peace deserves picturing precisely because it is so vulnerable, as the bones uncovered by the Waterloo farmers’ ploughs (not pictured but observed in the text) remind the visitor. Nash died suddenly in 1821: there would be no more Laureate tours illustrated by his pictures. In summer 1816, however, Southey had an encounter that would take him further down the road of the illustrated picturesque – an encounter that would lead to a distinct visual turn in both his and Wordsworth’s later work. Visiting Keswick with the amateur painter Sir George Beaumont and the poet Samuel Rogers was a topographical artist – William Westall. Westall was a protégé of Sir Joseph Banks, the wealthy patron and botanist who had circumnavigated the globe with Captain Cook and who subsequently became the most powerful man of science in Europe. Banks used his great wealth to promote the pictorial representation of the world’s natural history, as part of a postEnlightenment attempt to bring within the grasp of science the flora and fauna of the remotest regions. He employed artists to travel with him and record the regions he visited – not just the plants and animals, but the landscapes and monuments – and he commissioned engravings, so that the

Figure 1. Edward Nash, La Haye Sainte, from Robert Southey, The Poet’s Pilgrimage to Waterloo (London, 1816).

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original drawings and watercolours became available to connoisseurs and scientists. In 1800 Westall voyaged to Britain’s remotest and newest colony, Australia, under Banks’s patronage, where he drew plants and landscapes, and made the first detailed sketches of aboriginal people. He then travelled in China – then almost unknown to Britons – and India, bringing back visual records of each country and its culture. After returning to Britain he worked his sketches into oil paintings; they were also the source of engravings published in the voyage narrative A Voyage to Terra Australis (1814), and again in Views of Australian Scenery (1814). By his mid-thirties Westall was an experienced contributor to the new visual culture that grew in tandem with the development of technologies for accessing and classifying nature in both local and distant parts of the world. So rapidly had this culture spread, indeed, that Westall was but one of many travelling painters and engravers: he struggled for income and reputation in London where artists and illustrators abounded, despite fellow artists’ acknowledgement of his prowess. For Westall, the patronage of Beaumont – also Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s patron – was useful. The presence of Rogers was important too: a banker as well as a poet, he had wealth enough to commission artists to illustrate his books. Westall stayed in the Lakes the entire summer, producing sketches and watercolours; he took an apartment at Grasmere and planned a move to Keswick. He and Southey became firm friends; Southey found room for Westall to stay near Greta Hall and hung Westall’s watercolours on his walls, judging him ‘by far the most faithful delineator of the scenery of the Lakes’ (SLC, v, p. 51). They continued visiting and corresponding for the next twenty years, and Westall became a powerful stimulus for Southey to attempt to pursue the course he had begun in Letters from England and The Poet’s Pilgrimage – a representation of the Lake District in words and pictures in the newly popular genre of Views. It was in hope of taking advantage of this new genre that Westall had come to the Lakes. Long an admirer of landscape engravings, Southey became Westall’s Lakeland collaborator as well as friend. In 1820 their first joint publication appeared, introduced by Southey and entitled Views of the Lake and of the Vale of Keswick. This sumptuous production demonstrated an unprecedented mastery of the colour aquatint. Wordsworth’s sister-in-law Sara Hutchinson noted that ‘the view of Derwent Water in twilight is above praise . . . I could not have believed that an engraving could have given the quiet and solemn feeling inspired by such a scene’21 (Fig. 2). Westall’s control of the aquatint medium gave the illusion of presence as never before in a reproduction – and, Hutchinson continued, the prints were ‘so

Figure 2. Keswick Lake from the East Side, from William Westall, Views of the Lake and of the Vale of Keswick (London, 1820).

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cheap’: the new methods of reproduction ensured that even a woman of very modest means could now virtually possess a favourite sight in a way formerly only possible to rich collectors who could afford original paintings. Not only the tourists, but the poets themselves were impressed and influenced – they began to frame the landscape through the Views that all so avidly consumed. Thus Southey’s introduction responded to the pictures: it was a mini guidebook designed to provide the local knowledge that the pictures could not reveal, and it showed him as an expert on the aesthetics, natural history and geography of the area, making the Lakes a special place to be visited and learnt from rather than just beautiful scenery to be enjoyed and consumed. In this respect, it was a small-scale hybrid of three genres: the picturesque, in which scenery was consumed as set-piece views reorganised according to an aesthetic derived from paintings, the guidebook, in which visitors were introduced to an area, and the antiquarian history, in which the origins of a locality’s notable features, human and natural, were documented. In effect, Southey deepened the response to the Lakes he had first set out in Letters from England and renewed the text/ picture format he had used in The Poet’s Pilgrimage: now the Laureate who sold so few copies of his poems supplemented the artist, adding to the visual representation. Here is Southey as tourist guide and guide to Westall’s Views: The stream at Barrow is inferior to Lowdore, its course being scarcely more than a mile in length: but it forms a fine cascade immediately behind Barrow Hall. A brook of nearly the same size enters the Lake about half a mile from Barrow; and the tourist who will trace it upward to the place where it falls from Walla Crag, will find beauties enough in its recesses, as well as in the distant prospect, to repay him for the fatigue and difficulty of the steep ascent.22 (Fig. 3)

In this passage, Southey is not content with mere sightseeing: he attempts to stop the picture book to which he is contributing from simply commodifying the place as a pretty view. Beauty is specific and located, not just viewable as a distant prospect (whether from the tourist’s standpoint in the landscape, or via the artist’s image). It is to be found close at hand, as well as seen from afar, in the nooks and crannies of a brook that can be ascended only with effort, on foot. Southey would take the reader through the picture frame into an active, mobile, hands-on exploration of the crag. A rough scramble up a rocky stream breaches the alienated relationship of viewer and scene. Beauty is not just seen in the prospect that Westall reproduces, then, but also discovered by an engagement with the place that is physical and mental at once – here Southey defines the terms of what

Figure 3. Keswick Lake from Barrow Common, from Westall, Views of the Lake and of the Vale of Keswick (London, 1820).

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critics now term Romantic pedestrianism.23 Paradoxically, though, it was only when collaborating on a book of picturesque views that Southey was pushed into the definition: he was pressured by the potent allure of Views to work out an aesthetic in which the visual and the virtual were only the start of a more subjective and active exploration in which the distance between viewer and viewed was overcome. This was virtual topography that a tourist could consult on the spot or read over when at home to bring the famous scene back into mind, and, crucially, to enter a more involved and critical relationship with the place than pictures by themselves allowed. It was a revised and moralised picturesque – an attempt to make pictures yield insights into the human nature that was formed by and itself formed the place pictured. Westall’s mastery of the aquatint was a vital element in this: he was able to render landscape with a delicacy never before achieved in prints, creating views that were full of mobility – an ever-changing relationship of light, shadow, sun, cloud, land and water, in which local people were also in motion, herding sheep, tending cattle, going about their work. Westall’s prints, incomparably more subtle and fluid than the crude aquatints that illustrated Gilpin’s texts, were also a world away from the devices beloved of picturesque tourists – the tinted glass that rendered a scene all blue and moonlight or all russet and autumn, the Claude Glass to flatten depths and relate objects into one plane. This moralised and mobile picturesque was taken over into Southey’s next publication, a poem that, although it lacked illustrations, began with a verbal picture of the Lakes as seen from Southey’s study window. A Vision of Judgement (1821), like The Poet’s Pilgrimage, was an oblique Laureate poem, an effort to answer the official duty of writing odes to commemorate royal occasions and yet retain a larger relevance and avoid obsequious flattery. It used George III’s death as an opportunity to envision a poetic last judgement, in which Southey consigned the king’s opponents to hell and elevated his supporters to heaven. A preface left readers in no doubt that this extraordinary procedure was an intervention in a literary controversy that was also, in Southey’s opinion, ‘political as well as moral’.24 Southey praised the monarch for enforcing moral and religious principles, and turned the tables on Hazlitt and Byron, who had attacked his move from Jacobin to anti-Jacobin as being typical of the renegade politics of the ‘Lake school’ of poets. Thinking of the sexual adventures and religious scepticism of both men (in Don Juan he was satirised, in a gross sexual innuendo on his name, as an impotent ‘dry Bob’25), Southey replaced ‘Lake school’ with ‘Satanic school’, writing of ‘men of diseased hearts and depraved imaginations’ (SLPW, iii, p. 543). He called for the government to take measures against this school and he placed his

Figure 4. Keswick Lake from the Penrith Road, from Westall, Views of the Lake and of the Vale of Keswick (London, 1820).

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own new poem in opposition to it – the work of a Lake poet who was defiantly proud of the loyal conservatism for which the Lake school had been criticised. If Jeffrey, Hazlitt and Byron were going to sneer at his perversity, puerility and pro-establishment politics with that phrase, then he would be a Lake poet, on terms that would demonstrate his indifference to their contempt. And so he began the poem with a prospect of the Lakes, seen from the window of his study, which was designed to display his credentials as a man of reliable judgement and as a poet of far-seeing imagination whose vision could be trusted. It is his capacity to take such a prospect, to appreciate its beauty and understand its natural history – to be a local authority upon, as well as a visual consumer of it that, he claims, qualifies him to take a prophetic view of the nation and its history: he is wise and insightful about politics and morals because he can appreciate the English ground that, as a viewer, he commands from a distance, reconciling its individual parts into a unified whole. If this was a variation on the ideology of the prospect view as expressed in eighteenth-century Georgic poetry, it was also redolent both of Wordsworth, whose own Lake poetry Southey felt himself to be defending, and of Westall, whose View of Keswick Lake from the Penrith Road, Southey says in a footnote,26 it replicates in words (Fig. 4).

the trance ’Twas at that sober hour when the light of day is receding, And from surrounding things the hues wherewith day has adorn’d them Fade, like the hopes of youth, till the beauty of earth is departed: Pensive, though not in thought, I stood at the window, beholding Mountain and lake and vale; the valley disrobed of its verdure; Derwent retaining yet from eve a glassy reflection Where his expanded breast, then still and smooth as a mirror, Under the woods reposed; the hills that, calm and majestic, Lifted their heads in the silent sky, from far Glaramara Bleacrag, and Maidenmawr, to Grizedal and westermost Withop. Dark and distinct they rose. The clouds had gather’d above them High in the middle air, huge, purple, pillowy masses, While in the west beyond was the last pale tint of the twilight; Green as a stream in the glen whose pure and chrysolite waters Flow o’er a schistous bed, and serene as the age of the righteous. Earth was hushed and still; all motion and sound were suspended: Neither man was heard, bird, beast, nor humming of insect, Only the voice of the Greta, heard only when all is in stillness. Pensive I stood and alone, the hour and the scene had subdued me, And as I gazed in the west, where Infinity seem’d to be open, Yearn’d to be free from time, and felt that this life is a thraldom.

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Southey Thus as I stood, the bell which awhile from its warning had rested, Sent forth its note again, toll, toll, through the silence of evening. ’Tis a deep dull sound that is heavy and mournful at all times, For it tells of mortality always. [. . .] Come, and behold! . . . methought a startling Voice from the twilight Answered; and therewithal I felt a stroke as of lightning, With a sound like the rushing of winds, or the roaring of waters. If from without it came, I knew not, so sudden the seizure; Or if the brain itself in that strong flash had expended All its electric stores. Of strength and of thought it bereft me; Hearing, and sight, and sense, were gone; and when I awaken’d, ’Twas from a dream of death, in silence and uttermost darkness; Knowing not where or how, nor if I was rapt in the body, Nor if entranced, or dead. But all around me was blackness, Utterly blank and void, as if this ample creation Had been blotted out, and I were alone in the chaos. Yet had I even then a living hope to sustain me Under that aweful thought, and I strengthen’d my spirit with prayer. (ll. 1–45; SLPW, iii, pp. 561–3)

The description proceeds in the manner in which the viewer travels through Westall’s landscape: the eye rises from the shining lake, in the middle distance, to an east-west movement along the felltops that encircle the water and frame the view. If Southey replicates the picture in the sequence by which he verbalises the landscape, he nevertheless also adds information that is not visual. The geological identification of the stream’s ‘schistous bed’ aligns the description with the discourse of natural history, while the listing of the fellnames is characteristic of the guidebook. But Southey also references the language of poetry: the tolling bell that leads him to muse reminds us of Gray’s ‘Elegy’, while the ‘winds or roaring waters’ echo the ‘winds and/ Roaring waters’ in Wordsworth’s Prelude (1850, xii, 95–6). His is a very Wordsworthian transformation of the picturesque view: the state of ‘blackness/ Utterly blank and void’ into which those waters, or the Voice they resemble, send him recalls Wordsworth’s state of ‘darkness – call it solitude/ Or blank desertion’ on Ullswater, Derwentwater’s neighbour lake (Prelude, 1850, i, 394–5). In combination, the intimation of beauty, sublimity and knowledge that he experiences in the landscape is overwhelming; he recoils into his own mind and discovers there first a blankness, and then an access of visionary power. And yet Southey remains his own man: this vision takes shape in hexameters, a metrical form that he had been longing to use for twenty-five years and that, as he explained in the Preface, was novel enough to court the

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criticism that had come his way for previous metrical experiments. Indeed, Jeffrey had as long ago as 1802 singled out metrical innovation as one of the chief faults that Southey contributed to the Lake school. Here Southey’s embrace of a rarely used metre defied such fault finding and reasserted his individuality within that school: Wordsworth did not write in hexameters; Coleridge had left his short experiment in the metre unfinished and unpublished. In metrical innovation Southey could outrival his friends. Southey differed from Wordsworth in his subject-matter as well as his metre. After the initial entrancing view, A Vision of Judgement took Lake poetry in a more controversialist direction than even Wordsworth’s ‘Thanksgiving Ode’ or ‘Sonnets upon the Punishment of Death’. Southey imagined the scene at heaven’s gates as the spirit of the dead king reviewed the events of his reign. He used this as an opportunity to criticise the political liberals and reformers whom he had revered in the 1790s. Indeed, his animus against reformers was so great that it undermined his pretentions to disinterested vision and reliable judgement: rather than surveying recent history from an Olympian or magisterial viewpoint – the viewpoint to which his visionary prospect of the Lakes was designed to raise him – he seemed unable to rise above the need to score personal and party points. Here, then, his Lake poetry, despite its success in transforming a picturesque view into a visionary stage, failed to sustain a historical perspective that the public could accept as a detached picture or accurate assessment of the age in which they lived. Some critics thought the poem a parody; others judged it blasphemous or at least presumptuous in putting divine judgements in the mouth of the dead king. Almost all thought it an embarrassing failure, rather than vision, of judgement. Southey’s combativeness had compromised his authority and his polemical rhetoric rebounded on his landscape poetry, so that Jeffrey’s and Byron’s criticisms of the Lake school seemed justified. Domestic seclusion in Cumbria had, it seemed, narrowed Southey’s views; retirement from social intercourse had limited his perspective, despite the panoramic prospect with which the poem began. Southey had become perverse, overestimating his own merits and importance, misjudging social and political affairs. He had also become alarmist and reactionary in inverse proportion to the calm and peace of his Lakeland sanctuary, assuming that his domestic idyll there could only be preserved if he identified incoming influences as threats to be repulsed. Thus it appeared that the Lakeland retreat actually generated Southey’s bellicose vehemence: it was not just a sanctuary but also a breeding ground for reactionary self-assertion and aggression.

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Criticism along these lines was only half true: Southey became more combative, alarmist and polemical the more he was criticised, and he had been criticised as a Lake poet, to the detriment of his ability to make a living, for years before he wrote the Vision. The intensification of that criticism – on a biographical as well as literary basis – by Byron and Hazlitt pushed him to a politicisation of the Lake landscape that seemed to go striding over the edge. He might not have brooded and resented so strongly had he been in the social intercourse of London rather than the rural seclusion of the Lakes, but nevertheless that seclusion did not of itself produce reactionary alarmism. Still, what lay beneath both his love of Derwent’s vale and his literary aggression was an insecurity that made it impossible for him to ignore criticism, or turn it aside by insouciant wit. For Southey, the achievement of a home, of children, of a family, of a living income, of reputation as an author was so delayed and so precarious that he always felt embattled. His quickness to identify social, political and literary criticism as threats to be repulsed – battles he might win – was a form of compensation for losses against which he could make no defence: attacks on his work by association with Wordsworth’s, deaths of parents, siblings, friends and children at regular intervals from the early 1790s until – a few months after Southey had lovingly described him waving his hat in excitement at his father’s return – his son Herbert died in 1816. A Vision of Judgement’s punitive energy springs from Southey’s unresolved rage at that untimely death; its desire to imagine the righteous receiving their reward in heaven is an offshoot of it also. Southey’s Lake poetry did not remain so extreme and so controversialist; after 1821 he made a quiet decision to desist from Laureate poems and free himself from the burden of judging the state of the nation. He was then at liberty to make his verse celebrate an engagement with landscape that evoked family life, in which the picturesque scene was the starting point not for grandiloquent moralising but for a hands-on, active movement through the place – a local knowledge gleaned from close-quarters mindand-body experience and a process he had begun in Letters from England, The Poet’s Pilgrimage, and Views of the Lake. This development was heralded in ‘The Cataract of Lodore’, a piece written to amuse children about the well-known picturesque waterfall, a station on the tourist route complete with a cannon to produce echoes, and an inn to refresh the body. Westall had pictured the place in Views of the Lake and Vale of Keswick; Southey had described it in Letters from England. In 1822 he made it the subject of a playful lyrical ballad, in one of the experimental metres for which he was notorious. He also, with a mixture of self-mockery and

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defiance, declared it to be the work of a ‘Lake poet’ writing for the nursery – embracing the pejorative label that critics had applied to verse they called puerile and childish:

the cataract of lodore described in rhymes for the nursery, by one of the lake poets 27 ‘How does the water Come down at Lodore?’ My little boy asked me Thus, once on a time; And moreover he tasked me To tell him in rhyme. Anon, at the word, There first came one daughter, And then came another, To second and third The request of their brother, And to hear how the Water Comes down at Lodore, With its rush and its roar, As many a time They had seen it before. So I told them in rhyme, For of rhymes I had store; And ’t was in my vocation For their recreation That so I should sing; Because I was Laureate To them and the King. From its sources which well In the Tarn on the fell; From its fountains In the mountains, Its rills and its gills; Through moss and through brake, It runs and it creeps For awhile, till it sleeps In its own little Lake. And thence at departing, Awakening and starting, It runs through the reeds, And away it proceeds, Through meadow and glade,

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In sun and in shade, And through the wood-shelter, Among crags in its flurry, Helter-skelter, Hurry-skurry.28

There is truth behind Southey’s joke: he was happier being the children’s laureate than the king’s. Even the text’s layout on the page is an essential part of its design of innocent playfulness: Southey wanted the lineation when published to emblematise the waterfall. It is a visual as well as a sound poem, and a characteristic Southey piece in that the comic motif goes on so long and is repeated so often, that the effect is of intensity rather than humour, as if the attempt to capture the endlessly fluid and changing water in the repeated participles, rushing metre and heavy onomatopoeia and alliteration, induces mimetic desperation. The poem, as well as the water, is ‘Confounding, astounding,/ Dizzying and deafening the ear with its sound’. Indeed, by the close, despite the layout meant to image the waterfall’s shape, the poem seems to be near to pure sound, its words transformed into the meaningless mantras of a magic spell or witches’ chant – the place name referring as much to poetry’s ability, through sound, sight and rhythm, to, as Susan Wolfson has put it, ‘figure the forming of poetry itself’.29 Southey is never a bland poet, even when writing tongue-twisters for children, and here he renders what could have been a static picture with manic energy to offer a backhanded tribute to his own Lakish muse(ic). His Lake poetry celebrates its own gleeful and childish measure as a ludic energy that, if it cannot solemnly capture the place, can parallel its watery motion in its own linguistic terms. A chant whose layout is unchantably essential to it, the text signifies next to nothing but playfully turns a view into a vision and a sound into an action:

And And And And

And falling and brawling and sprawling, And driving and riving and striving, And sprinkling and twinkling and wrinkling, And sounding and bounding and rounding, And bubbling and troubling and doubling, Dividing and gliding and sliding And grumbling and rumbling and tumbling, And clattering and battering and shattering; gleaming and streaming and steaming and beaming, rushing and flushing and brushing and gushing, flapping and rapping and clapping and slapping, curling and whirling and purling and twirling,

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Retreating and beating and meeting and sheeting, Delaying and straying and playing and spraying, Advancing and prancing and glancing and dancing, Recoiling, turmoiling and toiling and boiling, And thumping and flumping and bumping and jumping, And dashing and flashing and splashing and clashing; And so never ending, but always descending, Sounds and motions for ever and ever are blending All at once and all o’er, with a mighty uproar, And this way the water comes down at Lodore. (ll. 51–72; SLPW, i, pp. 300–3)

Southey’s hybrid Lake poem is both oral and paginal – a prompt for a party game and a text that self-consciously plays with the silent medium of print. As such it transforms the lyrical ballad: while still a written text that defers to speech and to recitation, it also exploits typography and pagination to emblematise its subject – drawing attention to its own print format and thereby asserting an independence of the oral. Thus the affiliation to a speech community and to a ballad tradition belonging to that community, so important to Wordsworth, is simultaneously engaged and undermined – in effect, disconfirmed. ‘The Cataract’ reveals Southey finding an independent way to write Lake poetry that depends upon Lyrical Ballads but exploits the contradiction at the heart of that publication – that its poems are written artefacts authored for print by contemporary individual writers but aspire to seem transcripts of the songs and speech of an oral, unlettered, anonymous folk tradition. ‘The Cataract’ eschews, of course, the autobiographical blank verse of The Prelude as a means of writing about the Lake District just as it disconfirms the lyrical ballad style – while cheerfully embracing the nonsensicality which critics found to be prevalent in both the blank verse and the ballads. In this respect, it is a humorous exercise on not-being-Wordsworth, on being a Lake poet who accepts, and turns to use, his independent position as an author committed to print. According to Celeste Langan, the Romantic era inaugurated a process whereby printed verse became distanced from the oral performance of poetry.30 A corollary of this process, she argues, is that as the written text was increasingly freed from acting as a prompt for actual recitation, it could deploy more and more complex signals for sound effects that would be heard only in the head of the reader. In a diverging argument, Andrew Elfenbein has suggested that in the Romantic era the novel, the essay and the elocutionary handbook took over the function of communicating meaning in standard, easily understandable sentences, leaving poetry either

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struggling to emulate them in blank verse that most readers found, by comparison, obscure or going to the opposite extreme and, instead of attempting to resemble a man speaking sentences freighted with meaning, revelling in its unlikeness to prose and to ordinary speech.31 Elfenbein observes the rise of heavily metrical pieces that feature thundering rhythms and regular rhymes, and that renounce complex meaning in favour of sound effect. Many of these poems – Felicia Hemans’s ‘Casabianca’ for example – became, aided by their mnemonic form, pieces set for schoolchildren to learn by heart and recite. ‘The Cataract’, however, suggests that neither Langan nor Elfenbein tell the whole story. Itself a popular recitation piece, Southey’s poem does eschew standard sentences and the speaking voice; it does parade its own rhythms and sounds, yet its typographical and paginal devices are neither signals of sound effects heard only in the silent reader’s mind nor renunciations of complex meaning. Instead, they employ the sonic and the visual independently of each other, and aim less for mimesis than for a self-consciously offered linguistic playfulness to answer the play of water. Analogous formal patterning rather than imitation of the thing itself. A post-modernist poetry avant la lettre. Romanticera poetry, on this model, was neither simply the printed internalisation of oral performance nor a retreat, in the face of prose, to blank verse imitations of speech on the one hand or simplistic rhythmic tub thumping on the other. Though written as from and for the nursery, ‘The Cataract’ was no more a childish poem than Blake’s Songs, which it resembles in that its appearance on the page was a vital part of its effect. A formal, if not thematic, response to ‘We Are Seven’ and ‘The Idiot Boy’, it was childlike, written to provoke questioning of the critical cliché that Lake poetry was puerile. And in this respect it was at the centre of Southey’s social and political vision of the Lake District. Throughout the 1820s, he combated criticism of Lake poets’ puerility by demonstrating how the culture which they versified nurtured youthful innocence, teaching an investment in the local that was the basis of a healthy society. Lakeland children, and child-orientated Lake poetry, were identified as the opposites of the commodified, commercial society that merely consumed all things from an alienated distance – whether landscapes viewed by sightseers and swallowed up by mills and manufactories, or children sent to work sixteen hours a day in those mills and manufactories. In 1820 Southey became godfather to the child of William Westall, who had married a local woman – the sister of Wordsworth’s geologist friend Adam Sedgwick. Their connection thus cemented, the writer and the artist

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collaborated on another illustrated Lakeland book, in which family and children are central. The book was ostensibly one of moral and social argument, in which Southey would set down in prose his views on the proper kind of society for Britain. But it also featured Southey’s detailed evocations of walks and prospects among the Lakes, illustrated by Westall. Sir Thomas More; or, Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society (1829–31) developed the Romantic pedestrianism of the earlier Views of the Lake, but it also did more than this. It made the verbal and visual representation of the Lake District, and of the way of life practised there by Southey’s family, emblematic of the organic, uncommodified and anticapitalist society for which the book argued. Thus the Colloquies feature earnest discussions between Southey and his alter ego, the ghost of Thomas More, about the state of England then and now, and about what kind of society it is right and Christian to advocate. But each of these discussions occurs when More’s ghost appears in the Lakeland landscape, haunting Southey on his walks among the hills and crags – and these walks, often taken with his children, are related in intimate, affectionate detail. The result is a moralised version of sightseeing and the picturesque: the familial affection and moral health of the walkers epitomise the advantages of a society based on local attachment to the ‘little platoon’32 of relatives and neighbours, a Burkean society in which the nation is an extended family. One of the walks described is that mentioned in Views, the scramble up Walla Crag, overlooking Derwentwater. Now, however, Southey is more informal and colloquial than he had been in 1820, revealing his private life as he recreates a happy family outing: a holyday having been voted by acclamation, an ordinary walk would not satisfy the children: . . . it must be a scramble among the mountains, and I must accompany them; . . . it would do me good, they knew it would; . . . they knew I did not take sufficient exercise, for they had heard me sometimes say so. One was for Skiddaw Dod, another for Causey Pike, a third proposed Watenlath; and I, who perhaps would more willingly have sate at home, was yet in a mood to suffer violence, and making a sort of compromise between their exuberant activity and my own inclination for the chair and the fireside, fixed upon Walla Crag. Never was any determination of sovereign authority more willingly received: it united all suffrages: Oh yes! yes! Walla Crag! was the unanimous reply. Away they went to put on coats and clogs, and presently were ready each with her little basket to carry out the luncheon, and bring home such treasures of mosses and lichens as they were sure to find. Off we set; and when I beheld their happiness, and thought how many enjoyments they would have been deprived of, if their lot had fallen in a great city, I blest God who had enabled me to fulfil my heart’s desire and live in a country such as Cumberland.

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The walk on which we had agreed has just that degree of difficulty and enterprize wherein children delight and may safely be indulged. I lived many years at Keswick before I explored it; but it has since been a favourite excursion with all my guests and resident friends who have been active and robust enough to accomplish the ascent. You leave the Borrodale road about a mile and half from the town, a little before it opens upon the terrace, and, crossing a wall by some stepping stones, go up the wood, having a brook, or what in the language of the country is called a beck, on the right hand. An artist might not long since have found some beautiful studies upon this beck, in its short course through the wood, where its craggy sides were embowered with old trees, the trunks of which, as well as their mossy branches, bent over the water: I scarcely know any place more delightful than this was in a sultry day, for the fine composition of the scene, its refreshing shade and sound, and the sense of deep retirement; . . . but the woodman has been there! A little higher up you cross a wall and the elbow of a large tree that covers it; you are then upon the side of the open fell, shelving down to the stream, which has worked for itself a narrow ravine below. After a steep ascent you reach one of those loose walls which are common in this country; it runs across the side of the hill, and is broken down in some places; the easier way, or rather the less difficult, is on the inner side, over loose and rugged stones, the wreck of the crags above. They are finely coloured with a yellow or ochrey lichen, which predominates there, to the exclusion of the lichen geographicus: its colour may best be compared to that of beaten or unburnished gold; it is richly blended with the white or silvery kind, and interspersed with the stone-fern or mountain-parsley, the most beautiful of all our wild plants, resembling the richest point lace in its fine filaments and exquisite indentations. The wall ends at the ravine; just at its termination part of it has been thrown down by the sheep or by the boys, and the view is thus opened from a point which, to borrow a word from the Tourist’s Vocabulary, is a remarkable station. The stream, which in every other part of its course has worn for itself a deep and narrow channel, flows here for a few yards over a level bed of rock, where in fine weather it might be crossed with ease, then falls immediately into the ravine. A small ash tree bends over the pavement, in such a manner that, if you wish to get into the bed of the stream, you must either stoop under the branches, or stride over them. Looking upward there, the sight is confined between the sides of the mountain, which on the left is steep and stony, and on the right precipitous, except that directly opposite there are some shelves, or rather steps of herbage and a few birch, more resembling bushes than trees in their size and growth; these, and the mountain rill; broken, flashing, and whitening in its fall where it comes rapidly down, but taking in the level part of its course a colour of delightful green from the rock over which it runs, are the only objects. But on looking back, you behold a scene of the most striking and peculiar character. The water, the rocky pavement, the craggy sides, and the ash tree, form the foreground and the frame of this singular picture. You have then the steep descent, open on one side to the lake, and on the other with the wood, half way down and reaching to the shore; the lower part of Derwentwater below, with its islands; the vale of Keswick, with Skiddaw for its huge boundary and bulwark, to the North; and where

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Bassenthwaite stretches into the open country, a distance of water, hills, and remote horizon, in which Claude would have found all he desired, and more than even he could have represented, had he beheld it in the glory of a midsummer sunset. This was to be our resting-place, for though the steepest ascent was immediately before us, the companions seated themselves on the fell side, upon some of the larger stones, and there in full enjoyment of air and sunshine opened their baskets and took their noon-day meal, a little before its due time, with appetites which, quickened by exercise, had outstript the hours. My place was on a bough of the ash tree at a little distance, the water flowing at my feet, and the fall just below me. Among all the sights and sounds of Nature there are none which affect me more pleasurably than these. I could sit for hours to watch the motion of a brook: and when I call to mind the happy summer and autumn which I passed at Cintra, in the morning of life and hope, the perpetual gurgling of its tanks and fountains occurs among the vivid recollections of that earthly Paradise as one of its charms.33

In a perceptive article, Esther Wohlgemut has noted of this passage Southey’s tour of the Lake District belongs to the home-grown genre of the picturesque tour, and Southey self-consciously appropriates its discourse for his own use, borrowing words from the ‘Tourist’s Vocabulary’ . . . He introduces the scene as a ‘singular picture’ complete with foreground and frame. He evokes the authority of the ubiquitous Claude, assuring the reader that the scene more than meets such an artist’s aesthetic desires.34

He also, as in earlier works, combines the discourses of the guidebook – its detailed itinerary – and the natural history – observations of local flora employing Linnean terminology. Thereby, he supplements the visual and painterly aesthetic of the picturesque with the languages of local and geographic knowledge. Southey’s purpose is not just to make aesthetic distinctions: he adapts the picturesque, in fact, so as to generate an argument about the beneficial effect of exploring, rather than just viewing, beautiful countryside. The morals, as well as the taste, are to be improved. He wants to educate readers, from his own experience, in the Higher Tourism, so as to save them, and the nation at large, from becoming alienated and commercialised consumers – mere sightseers: Of the very many Tourists who are annually brought to this Land of Lakes by what have now become the migratory habits of the opulent classes, . . . there is a great proportion of persons who are desirous of making the shortest possible tarriance in any place; whose object is to get through their undertaking with as little trouble as they can, and whose inquiries are mainly directed to find out what is not necessary for them to see; happy when they are comforted with the assurance, that it is by no

Figure 5. Derwentwater, Bassenthwaite-Water, and Skiddaw from Walla Crag, drawn by William Westall, engraved by E. Goodall, from Robert Southey, Sir Thomas More; or, Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society, 4 vols. (London, 1829), I, facing page 122.

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means required of them to deviate from the regular track, and that that which cannot be seen easily, need not be seen at all. (Colloquies, ii, p. 59)

In Wohlgemut’s words, these are ‘superficial tourists,’ whom Southey judges to be ‘rootless, conspicuous, lazy, and perfunctory . . . Fuelled by the profits of industry, they rush through the Lake District consuming vistas and views like periodicals and paper money – both of which Southey also associates . . . with the commercial class and presents as ephemeral’.35 They contrast with the Wordsworthian tourists that Southey is trying to foster, visitors guided into a more informed and engaged participation in the place – a place understood by bodily exploration, on foot, and by mental investigation aided by the information provided by the guidebook and local history. These are visitors who ‘truly enjoy the opportunities which are thus afforded them, and have a genuine generous delight in beholding the grandeur and the lovelier scenes of a mountainous region’ (II, p. 59). Wohlgemut sums up: In this formulation, the landscape of the Lake District operates as a panacea, protecting country-dweller and city-dweller alike from the moral and spiritual ills that Southey sees emanating out of the cities and manufacturing districts of post-Waterloo Britain. Set against the self-interested, superficial, and changeable landscape of commercial Britain, the picturesque landscape of the Lake District reflects old English values such as community, tradition, and slow change.36

Wohlgemut’s excellent analysis neglects one crucial fact: that the Colloquies was a joint production, both verbal and visual – Southey’s and Westall’s. Its moralising revision of the picturesque, its effort to make participation in the Lake landscape a solution to social ills, its updated Burkeanism, were all dependent upon its capacity to exemplify what it advocated, and this exemplification occurred not just through the verbal accounts of Southey’s rambles – prose versions of Wordsworth’s Prelude wanderings – but also through Westall’s pictures, which brought the scenes described within readers’ virtual view. Thus in the above description of the Walla Crag expedition, the references to viewing stations and to Claude prepare the reader to find, over the page, Westall’s picture of the view from the crag, with Southey in the foreground as the ideal viewer (Fig. 5). The reader now sees not just the view, as in the corresponding plate in Views of the Lake, but also the viewer viewing it: the point is thereby made that the process of viewing is as important as, if not more important than, the thing viewed. And this is no conventional viewing station for the sedate traveller in the post chaise: reaching it demands close-up exploration of the landscape. Southey is pictured at the top of Cat

Figure 6. Threlkeld Tarn, drawn by William Westall, engraved by Robert Wallis, from Robert Southey, Sir Thomas More; or, Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society, 4 vols. (London, 1829), II, facing page 152.

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Beck in a spot reachable only by the vigorous scrambling he describes in the text. The reader is virtually participating in the healthy process of properly experiencing the restorative landscape, a process that originates with the rambling Southeys and is repeated by the sketching Westall. Colloquies, that is to say, is self-referential: calling attention to its own status as a visual aid as well as verbal record, it aims to use the new engraving and printing technologies to bring about, at a distance, that to which it testifies. Westall’s pictures, then, are not mere illustrations of a pre-existent text: the two work in tandem as Southey explores the possibilities for verbally taking the reader further into the pictured views – adding temporal and personal dimensions to their frozen moment, while simultaneously providing a commentary on pictures’ strengths and weaknesses as ways of knowing. As a result, Colloquies is more than just a guidebook, journal, or local history: it is an embodiment of the viewing process that it describes and on whose purpose it meditates. It is the picturesque transformed by action, and that action is shared visually with the reader. Southey, of course, could not have written in this way had he not been collaborating with a visual artist who was a master of the new reproductive techniques: his social and aesthetic Lake writing – a response to picturesque theory – is inflected by the new print culture that allowed books to feature illustrations, bringing readers visually closer to places described verbally than ever before. One of Southey’s purposes in the Colloquies was to advance the cause of Wordsworth’s past poetry as a discourse that could teach Britons how to live in the present. He presents himself as the guide, in prose and pictures, to Wordsworth’s poetic Lake District, describing, for example, a walk from Keswick, along the Glenderamackin river, to Threlkeld tarn, under the rugged ridges of Blencathra. The walk takes Southey deep into the landscape, for the river descends to a gorge from a bleak bowl in the fells, where he and his companions picnic – a site pictured by Westall (Fig. 6) and described thus: A wild spot it is as ever was chosen by a cheerful party where to rest, and take their merry repast upon a summer’s day. The green mountain, the dark pool, the crag under which it lies, and the little stream which steals from it, are the only objects; the gentle voice of that stream the only sound, unless a kite be wheeling above, or a sheep bleats on the fell side. A silent, solitary place; and such solitude heightens social enjoyment, as much as it conduces to lonely meditation. (ii, pp. 153–4)

‘My friend, William Westall’, Southey adds, ‘who has seen the grandest and the loveliest features of nature in the East Indies and in the West, with the eye of a painter, and the feeling of a poet, burst into an exclamation of

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delight and wonder when I led him to this spot’ (ii, p. 155). Their walk is not simply a picturesque trip however, for it gives Southey the opportunity to recount the local history that is still tangible in the houses, castles, and sheep paths. And that local history is also national history; it turns out that a crucial episode in the fifteenth-century struggle for the crown was played out in these hills when, after the execution of his father, the child Lord Henry Clifford was sent there and brought up as a shepherd boy to secrete him from the Yorkist king’s agents. The child grew up in the landscape, and when the crown changed hands and he, by now a young man, was able to reveal himself, he preferred to govern his estates peacefully, and to pursue astronomy – a legacy of shepherd nights under the stars – rather than seek revenge on his father’s killers. Southey writes at length of the affair, citing many local histories, and concludes with a meditation on age, memory and loss only possible to an older poet: I had passed upon Blencathra one of those days which provide a pleasure for remembrance, till time and mortality, in their sure course, sadden our blithest recollections. Our talk had been of the Shepherd Lord and of his house; and I was still ruminating upon the history of that family, and the days in which a noble birth so frequently led to a violent death. (ii, p. 171)

The shepherd Lord’s rural upbringing helped him renounce such violence; he learnt, Southey suggests, a better and more stable way of life in the Lakes, which modern Britons have inherited. Southey then re-collects Wordsworth’s 1807 poem on the subject, the ‘Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle’, the old verse intensifying his new text’s movement from picturesque tour to moral reflection, an example of a response to the Lake landscape that is both personal and informed by local tradition: Love had he found in huts where poor Men lie, His daily Teachers had been Woods and Rills, The silence that is in the starry sky, The sleep that is among the lonely hills. In him the savage Virtue of the Race, Revenge, and all ferocious thoughts were dead; Nor did he change; but kept in lofty place The wisdom which adversity had bred. Glad were the Vales, and every cottage hearth; The Shepherd Lord was honour’d more and more: And, ages after he was laid in earth, ‘The Good Lord Clifford’ was the name he bore.

(Colloquies, ii, p. 159)37

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Effectively, Southey contextualises Wordsworth’s lyrical ballad, surrounding it with historical sources but also acting as a guide in how to read the landscape and the poem. The verse’s evocation of the place’s history is seen to emerge from a deep past, and it is confirmed by walking over and picturing the landscape where the events it commemorates occurred. Southey and Westall pace out the past in the present, and represent it in words and pictures to readers, with Wordsworth their talisman against the cheap novelties of contemporary commercial culture, in which ‘wealth’ and not ‘welfare’, Southey complains, is the main value. The Colloquies were the culmination of Southey’s version of Lake school literature – collaborative, visual, picturesque, historical, conservative, Wordsworthian. Indeed, while he was drafting them he was also composing a ballad that, like Wordsworth’s ‘Song at the Feast’, related a Lakeland spot to a past that persisted both in local lore and historians’ texts. ‘Brough Bells’ relates the legend of a farmer who, about the year 1500, hearing his bull bellow (or ‘croon’) with amazing volume, guessed he would be able to hear the sound from his fields if the animal was standing on the church tower. After proving the accuracy of his guess, he sold his herd and spent the money on buying new bells for the church. Southey tells the story in the deliberately simple manner of his own and his friends’ 1790s lyrical ballads – plain diction, sing-song rhyme, rustic speech, a dialogue between a local and an inquisitive narrator – exactly the characteristics that had attracted the label ‘Lake sect’. He responds, too, to another of Wordsworth’s characteristic devices, incanting local place names so as to make them evocative of the local story – so that to name one’s village is to call upon the events that have been, and still are, significant there – to bespeak tradition. Thinkest thou if yon whole herd at once Their voices should combine, Were they at Brough, that we might not Hear plainly from this upland spot That cruning of the kine?’ ‘That were a crune, indeed’, replied His comrade, ‘which, I ween, Might at the Spital well be heard, And in all dales between. Up Mallerstang to Eden’s springs, The eastern wind upon its wings The mighty voice would bear; And Appleby would hear the sound, Methinks, when skies are fair’.

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Southey ‘Then shall the herd’, John Brunskill cried, ‘From yon dumb steeple crune; And thou and I, on this hill-side. Will listen to their tune’. ‘So, while the merry Bells of Brough For many an age ring on, John Brunskill will remember’d be. When he is dead and gone; As one who, in his latter years. Contented with enough, Gave freely what he well could spare To buy the Bells of Brough.’

Like the later Wordsworth, Southey makes the church the tempo-spatial focus of the village and the district, subsuming rustic legend, the forces of nature and national history within the sound of the bells that sound out Anglicanism, past and present: ‘Thus it hath proved: three hundred years Since then have passed away. And Brunskill’s is a living name Among us to this day.’ ‘More pleasure,’ I replied, ‘shall I From this time forth partake. When I remember Helbeck woods, For old John Brunskill’s sake. He knew how wholesome it would be, Among these wild, wide fells And upland vales, to catch, at times, The sound of Christian bells;— What feelings and what impulses Their cadence might convey, To herdsman or to shepherd-boy, Whiling in indolent employ The solitary day; That, when his brethren were convened To meet for social prayer, He too, admonished by the call, In spirit might be there.

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And when the blithesome sound was heard Of birth or marriage peal, Some kindly sympathies therewith His opening heart might feel. Or when a glad thanksgiving sound, Upon the winds of Heaven, Was sent to speak a Nation’s joy. For some great blessing given,— For victory by sea or land. And happy peace at length; Peace by his country’s valour won. And ’stablished by her strength; — When such exultant peals were borne Upon the mountain air. The sound should stir his blood, and give An English impulse there.’ Such thoughts were in the old man’s mind, When he that eve looked down From Stanemore’s side on Borrodale, And on the distant town. And had I store of wealth, methinks. Another herd of kine, John Brunskill, I would freely give. That they might crune with thine. (ll. 33–123; SLPW, i, pp. 366–71)

This final image of two herds of cattle crooning to each other from a bell tower is an example of the way Southey’s bizarre humour and love of the oddities of antiquarian local history tend to waylay his ideological purpose. When he published the poem in 1838, he prefaced it with historical sources, as he had Wordsworth’s ‘Song at the Feast’. Thus he demonstrated that local oral tradition and written records met: the ballad showed that ‘history’ was alive in folk memory; Lakeland people were in touch with their roots; their institutions – here the church, in ‘Song for the Feast’ the nobility – were dear to them because of the local stories with which, time out of mind, they were invested. Locals remembered the story every time they heard the bells: three hundred years of history were present in each rudimentary peal. Recollecting the story along with other cited local history, and with his own folk ballad that revised Wordsworth’s 1798

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poems, Southey was textually ensuring the continuance of a living tradition and positioning himself as both its inheritor and its broadcaster to a wider public. That public would, he hoped, draw Burkean lessons from the poem, that a stable constitution depends on local attachment, and that attachment depends on traditions passed down, endearing old places and aged institutions to each new generation – in spite or rather because they were quirky and homely. It was on these that the ‘English impulse’ – patriotic, nationalistic – was based. It was an argument similar to that of Wordsworth’s Ecclesiastical Sonnets but considerably less pompous for being a humorous modification of the ballad style that the Lakers had employed in their radical youth. Southey, it showed, was now a Lake poet by choice, albeit one who could not resist letting his pursuit of quirky fact and formal experiment skew his knowingly ideological revision of the radical ballads that had once attracted so much critical opprobrium.

chapter 2

Poetic Hells and Pacific Edens: Southey’s Tale of Paraguay and Byron’s The Island

Since the 1790s, Southey had been a poet of empire. His ‘Botany Bay Eclogues’ (1797) and ‘Songs of the American Indians’ (1799) spoke from the position of emigrants to and indigenes of Britain’s colonies. Madoc (1805) dealt with the imagined colonisation of America by the twelfthcentury Welsh, while The Curse of Kehama (1810) treated the Hindu culture of the India that Britain was presently conquering. It was, however, Thalaba the Destroyer (1801), set in a post-imperial Arabia fought over by different kings, chieftains and sorcerers, which made his name. It was this epic romance that led Francis Jeffrey first to link Southey, Coleridge and Wordsworth as writers of a new school on the basis of its innovations in form, diction and subject-matter. In effect the first and quintessential ‘Lake’ poem, Thalaba was not about the Lakes at all, but its wilful novelty, perverse oddity and levelling politics were taken to be typical of Wordsworth and Coleridge, the balladeers of rustic simplicity. Jeffrey damned the three poets together. Jeffrey was condescending but he was also perceptive. He attacked Thalaba so strongly precisely because he appreciated that it was a challenge to literary tradition and social hierarchy. He saw that Southey had created a new form of long poem in order to deal with the complex and unfamiliar material that comprised his subject-matter – a form characterised by its mixture of verse of many metres and rhyme schemes on the one hand with prose footnotes in many languages on the other. In the late twentieth century, as critical attention turned to literature’s relationship to colonialism in the wake of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), Southey’s hybrid poems began again to seem, as they once had to Jeffrey, defining works of their age. Several critics viewed them as being revelatory of the anxiety produced in Britons by their country’s new imperial contact with foreign people in remote regions – people with unfamiliar cultures and religions that seemed, at best, exotic and, at worst, menacing.1 And this sensitivity to the age’s imperial anxieties and 69

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ambivalences was, critics agree, a result of its mixed form and dual narratorial perspective.2 Thalaba, Madoc and Kehama each featured hundreds of notes culled from histories and witness accounts. These have a strange effect on the reading experience. They supplement the verse – indeed almost overwhelm it – creating a dialogic oscillation as the reader’s eye moves to and fro between the poetry and the prose at the page-foot or canto-end.3 And they cite so many authors of such different persuasions, nationalities, periods and perspectives that focus is lost. The reader is flooded, bewildered, bedazzled, left questioning the view that the narrator of the verse presents, experiencing it as merely one of many such views – a babble of voices and languages (Southey cites long passages from Spanish, Latin, French and Portuguese sources). In fact, he cites so many sources for his story, from different civilisations in different parts of the world, that he feels it necessary to reassure the reader of its verisimilitude. Not only reassurance, but also insistence: Southey’s colonial epics demand that the reader believe the native mythology on which the plot depends – whether in Hindu gods or Arab talismans – only to cast doubt on that mythology in a carapace of notes that challenge its truth and supplement it with other authorities. The result is tension caused by the fact that the verse demands imaginative sympathy with the very beliefs and practices that the notes judge from a historical distance. By conventional standards, the result is poetic failure: Southey fails to sustain the unity of tone and single-handed control of narrative-perspective that draws readers through long and complicated stories. As Nigel Leask has shown, Southey’s epics pulled readers in only abruptly to shift their viewpoints – a reading experience likened to the vertiginous and dizzying tricksiness of the phantasmagoria and panorama.4 But the form causes the reader to experience, at the textual level, the competition of voices and ideologies that, at the level of plot-scenario, Southey reveals as the situation that Britain now faces as never before, as a result of its territorial acquisitions in other continents. Colonial encounter, and the undermining of settled, unitary identity that colonial encounter produces in individuals, both white and indigenous (as well as in the nation as a whole) is, Southey repeatedly shows, the crucial development of his times, and he finds a form to show, as well as a story to tell, its effects. The reader, it follows, is left unsettled, not knowing who or what to endorse, and finding that, as s/he moves from verse to note and back, opposed ideologies are both enforced and disturbed so that they blur and bleed into each other. In Madoc, for instance, it is a Native American prophet who is vital to this process, for it is in him, rather than in the Aztec priests (despite their resemblance to superstition-exploiting Catholic

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clergy) or in Madoc (notwithstanding his strange combination of Protestant asceticism and Celtic bardism) that Southey’s employment of contrasting traditions and perspectives is most markedly encoded. And, as a result, it is in this indigenous ‘medicine man’ that the simultaneous involvement and disengagement, sympathy and horror, that readers find most characteristic of Southey’s new poetry is most strongly experienced. This Indian prophet, based on the historical Neolin, a participant in Pontiac’s war, was the most complex representation of a Native American yet to appear in English poetry. Southey’s epics were fictive displacements of anxieties and desires transmitted by his own times. As he responded to the fanatical following that charismatic leaders such as Robespierre and Napoleon attracted, he saw that a new global age of empire was dawning, an age in which the capacity to inspire spiritual conviction would be a critical factor, as nations with the power to colonise struggled to establish their rule and as, from the disturbances and displacements created by that struggle, new alignments arose in resistance. Southey’s real heroes, it follows, were not the colonising rulers who imposed ‘rational’ order on the countries they conquered. Like Milton, he gave his devils – his resistance leaders and charismatic fanatics – the best tunes. And this was one of the reasons why Jeffrey saw Thalaba as a jacobinical work, a perverse, revolutionary production in its implicit politics as well as poetics.5 Southey’s ambivalent and unsettling epics brought him small sales, but won him avid readers among the younger poets, who were inspired by their topical subject-matter and radical departure from traditional form. Shelley was galvanised by Thalaba and The Curse of Kehama: his borrowings of theme, form and phrases, are evident throughout his Oriental romances Alastor (1816), The Revolt of Islam (1818) and Prometheus Unbound (1820). Byron’s sensational Eastern tales and Keats’s Hyperion (1819) are indebted to Southey’s Thalaba;6 Thomas Moore’s best-selling Lalla Rookh (1817) was an effort, made on Byron’s advice, to improve on Southey’s Orientalist example. Both Shelley and Moore featured the combination of verse and notes that Southey had made his hallmark: it was owing to his groundbreaking epics that formally innovative narrative poems about imperial struggle and religious conviction would become one of the principal hallmarks of Romanticism, and one of the main ways Britons understood their times and faced their anxieties and desires. If Southey was a colonialist and Orientalist poet before 1814, he seemed to turn to domestic subjects after that date – to the Lake poetry I examined in the last chapter and to Laureate odes commemorating royal occasions.

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Yet he remained an influential commentator on colonial affairs. In essays in the Quarterly Review he gave respectability among the conservative and mainly Anglican readers of that journal – the most influential of the day – to the cause of the dissenting missionaries who had begun to operate in Africa, India and Polynesia.7 In the History of Brazil (1810–19) he also advocated the Christianisation of native peoples, not principally for spiritual reasons but in order to spread European civilisation – a civilisation of arts and manufactures rather than savage ignorance or barbarian superstition. Missionary activity, he argued, would liberate the peoples of India and America from manipulative native priesthoods who enslaved them to belief-systems that left them exploited and debased – the practice of sati being a revealing example.8 These arguments gained considerable momentum: Southey became the ideological apologist for a highly successful campaign to force the East India Company to support missionary activity within its territories.9 His pragmatic reasoning and non-sectarian position persuaded many who had regarded the dissenters and Evangelicals who organised the campaign as religious cranks and moralising zealots. With Southey’s journalism and William Wilberforce’s advocacy bringing respectability, campaigners were able to garner public support as never before: 900 petitions were delivered to parliament as, in 1813, it debated a Charter Bill reorganising the government of India. The Company was forced to allow missionary activity and to set aside an annual sum for the education of Indians, and although the missionaries who subsequently began to work in India won few converts among the Hindu population, their efforts allowed the British public to feel that empire was a good and moral thing. A path was laid down which led to the overturning of the Company’s Indianist administration – in which the language of government was Persian and law was based on Sanskrit texts – by an Anglicist new guard. In 1835 Thomas Macaulay’s Education Minute argued that the annual sum the Company was required to devote to Indian education should be spent on teaching in English: echoing one of Southey’s notes to Thalaba he declared that ‘a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia’. English literature, history and philosophy should be taught, not native languages and texts.10 These aims were enshrined in the English Education Act of 1835. While Southey’s prose helped prepare the way for Macaulay and the Act, his pre-1814 poetry had both supported Anglicist notions and made Arabian and Hindu culture the source of epic stories and heroic characters. It was not until 1825 that he again addressed colonial issues in a poem – publishing the work on which I shall focus in this chapter, A Tale of .

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Paraguay. This late work at first seems more straightforwardly Anglicist than the earlier Oriental tales – it does not draw its storyline from the religious and literary narratives of the foreign culture it describes, but instead portrays the Paraguayans as noble savages needing paternalist government by superior civilised Europeans. It was, then, a late departure from Southey’s earlier practice, one that intended to endorse missionary colonialism as the moral duty of ‘superior’ Christian countries – a poem that helped define the Victorian justification of imperial exploitation as a civilising mission that, as Jennifer Pitts has shown, departed from eighteenth-century critiques of empire by the likes of Smith, Burke, Bentham and Cowper.11 In what follows I investigate how the poem came to be written – how its revision of Southey’s earlier Orientalism was bound up with a dispute with Byron, who had himself developed Southey’s earlier Orientalism in a direction of which the older man disapproved. Southey was then driven to correct the younger poet – as a father rejecting his errant son – by writing a colonial poem in Byron’s style that rejected Byron’s sexualisation of colonial relations. My aim here is to reveal the second generation Romantic poets’ influence on the first – a story rarely told – and also to demonstrate for the first time the extent to which Southey’s and Byron’s famous dispute was about poetry’s role in envisioning empire. This was a matter of mutual influence rather than rejection: each poet modified the other’s practice as they strove to correct poetry they found powerful but morally and politically wrong. Orientalist literature, in effect, was transformed by their mutual admiration, rivalry and distrust. In which respects was A Tale of Paraguay Orientalism transformed? It was an ideological departure from Southey’s earlier Orientalist poetry, in which his fascination with the indigenous cultures and religions that he wished to be replaced by Western civilisation was so great that readers were left unsure whether they should believe in, or even admire them, rather than applaud their destruction. Now, the later Southey controlled this disruptive double affiliation: the Tale, unlike Thalaba, Madoc and The Curse of Kehama, did not demand that readers believe (if only for the purposes of following the plot) the mythology of Arabs, Aztecs or Hindus, only also to dismiss that mythology as mere superstition needing extirpation. Instead, it made imperialist loyalties seem clearer, and the task of colonialism easier, because it depicted native people as innocents, without a deep and complex culture that the colonialists must overcome. It portrayed noble savages, unsophisticated, unarmed, unsupported by an organised culture – easily governable by colonists. The moral debate then centred on how they should properly be governed by those colonisers.

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As Alan Bewell and David Simpson have shown,12 the poem did raise tensions about colonial power, only to allay them with an endorsement of a British – Western – colonial gift of ethical technology – science sanctifying empire. It was, I argue, precisely its ability to address these tensions and to seem to resolve them that made it attractive for contemporaries, who wished their own anxieties and guilt about empire to be assuaged if they were to give it their support – wished to believe their nation was doing good to, rather than exploiting, the countries and people who brought it profit and power. In this respect it was little use simply omitting the issues that made people doubt colonialism – the slavery, the violence, the disease; Southey’s poem was the more effective ideologically for addressing (some of ) these issues, and then suggesting that they could be superseded by a new benevolent empire in which superior civilisation and technology would enlighten the natives. Even so, the Tale left some questions unanswered, and can be read against the grain as containing a residual indictment of the very paternalism it supports, an indictment made in the name of a lyrical attraction to natural innocence – the domestic pastoral idyll that Southey, like Wordsworth, had celebrated as a Lake poet. In what follows, then, I shall present it both as a colonialist poem meant to reform earlier Orientalist poems – to perform the ideological work of creating a new, moralising justification for empire assuaging the colonial guilt of slavery and disease – and also as a transplanted Lake poem that is lyrically invested in imagining a life of rural simplicity even as it uneasily endorses the supersession of that life in the name of civilisation. ********* In 1822 Byron was angry. In fact, he was so incensed that he was planning to return from exile to challenge and fight the Poet Laureate. Had he done so, he would have made a literary dispute a matter of flesh and blood since the cause of his wrath was Southey’s avenging himself for Byron’s attack on the Lake sect by urging the government to punish ‘the Satanic school’ of poets (SLPW, iii, p. 543). Southey was clearly referring to the author of Manfred, Cain and Heaven and Earth, and the reference was the more painful for Byron because he was presently composing another ‘Satanic’ poem, in which the hero Fletcher Christian, mutineer on H.M.S. Bounty, declares ‘I am in hell.’ That poem, The Island, like the earlier Eastern tales to which Southey took exception, was a story of illicit love, rebellion and guilt set in an exotic landscape. Located in the South Seas, and based on the travel narratives of William Bligh in Tahiti and William Mariner in Tonga, Byron’s poem was his latest production in the

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fashionable Orientalist style he had cynically advocated in 1813: ‘stick to the East; [. . .] The North, South, and West, have all been exhausted; but from the East, we have nothing but Southey’s unsaleables’ (BLJ, iii, p. 101). The public dispute between Byron and Southey was not least about Orientalism (a point which scholars have tended to ignore in their focus on the poets’ positions in the domestic political sphere). Southey sneered at Byron in The Courier of 11 January 1822 by likening him to a series of Oriental figures: If I had been told in that country that Lord Byron had turned Turk, or Monk of La Trappe – that he had furnished a harem, or endowed a hospital, I might have thought the account, whichever it had been, possible, and repeated it accordingly; passing it, as it had been taken, in the small change of conversation, for no more than it was worth. In this manner I might have spoken of him, as of Baron Gerambe, the Green Man, the Indian Jugglers, or any other figurante of the time being.

Byron composed a reply in which he tried to use Southey’s Oriental personages to his own advantage. He also lampooned Southey in verse, parodying his eulogy of George III and imagining him preparing to hire his pen out as the devil’s biographer: [. . .] here, turning round To Sathan, ‘sire, I’m ready to write yours, In two octavo volumes, nicely bound, With notes and preface, all that most allures The pious purchaser; and there’s no ground For fear, for I can choose my own reviewers: So let me have the proper documents, That I may add you to my other saints.’ (stanza 99)13

Here Byron was parodying Southey’s A Vision of Judgement (1821), a poem in which Southey not only eulogised George III but also depicted Captain Cook as an imperial hero and placed his violent demise at Hawaii alongside General Wolfe’s heroic death in Quebec. In Southey’s Vision the spirits of Wolfe and Cook, among other ‘Worthies of the Georgian Age’, welcome George to heaven.14 Praise of Cook for his explorations of the South Seas is followed by a paean to Nelson, of whom it is said ‘while his example is cherish’d,/ From the Queen of the Seas, the sceptre shall never be wrested’ (x, ll. 38–9). Southey also praised Richard the Lionheart for ‘checking the Mussulman power’ (viii, l. 23) and called for Britain to end the ‘hellish delusions’ of the Hindus in its Indian colonies (v, l. 11): he celebrated the glory of imperial rule by land

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and sea. Even his portraits of poets are affected by this: Southey makes Shakespeare an emperor – ‘Shakespeare, who in our hearts for himself hath erected an empire/ Not to be shaken by Time, nor e’er by another divided’ (ix, ll. 17–18). The principal villains in Southey’s poem are those who opposed Britain’s control of its colonies. Wilkes is hurled into the ‘sulphurous darkness’ for sowing ‘insurrection’ in America, as is Junius (v, l. 74). And poets of the ‘Satanic school’ are called ‘men of diseased hearts and depraved imaginations,’ ‘infecting [. . .] with a moral virus that eats into the soul’ (Preface, SLPW, iii, p. 543). Their ‘evil is political as well as moral’, Southey declared, urging the ‘rulers of the state’ to act against them (SLPW, iii, p. 544). Byron’s Vision of Judgment takes up the Laureate’s vision of imperial glory and undermines it point by point. Byron vindicates Wilkes and Junius, and alludes to Captain Cook. In so doing he attacks British imperialism by pointing to its effects upon the Pacific islanders whom Cook visited, including the people who had suffered under British power in Tahiti: In short, an universal shoal of shades From Otaheite’s Isle to Salisbury Plain Of all climes and professions, years and trades, Ready to swear against the good king’s reign. (ll. 474–7. BPW, vi, p. 331)

These lines reverse Southey’s praise of South Sea exploration. Tahitians had been infected with smallpox and venereal disease by British sailors, as Byron knew from accounts of Cook’s and Bligh’s voyages to that island. For Byron it was the Royal Navy, as an agent of British imperialism, and not the ‘Satanic’ campaigners and writers who resisted that imperialism, which infected peoples with sicknesses – physical as well as moral and political. Southey’s imperial heroes had, for Byron, infectious bodies as well as ‘diseased hearts’. Byron’s Vision made Polynesia (about which Southey was a well-known commentator) one of the areas in which the argument about poetry became a political dispute about imperialism. The Island did so at greater length. But it also displayed Byron’s indifference to Southey’s strictures on poetry, for it took the form of an Orientalist poem of the kind that the Laureate most disliked, idealising unmarried sexual love and condoning rebellion against authority. Byron’s depiction of the unfamiliar cultures with which Britons increasingly came into contact had allowed him to

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capture the imagination of a public avid for accounts of exotic places but uncertain about what those accounts revealed. The colonisation of cultures in India and Africa and the discovery of societies in the South Seas posed Britons questions about their beliefs in the fields of government, law, religion and morality. It was Byron’s ability to dramatise (and seem to resolve) these questions in poetic narrative that made his Orientalist verse so successful. For Southey, long a poet, journalist and historian who specialised in colonial issues, the imaginative depiction of unfamiliar cultures was a vital means towards the definition of a proper morality for an imperial Britain at home and abroad. For both men, then, the issue of the Satanic in poetry was also in part an issue of poetry’s role in shaping the morality and politics of a nation waking to find itself suddenly the dominant power in the East, West and South. For Southey, the younger poet’s success in the area was a challenge to his own prior reputation: the older, veteran writer wished to teach Byron a lesson. It was, perhaps, inevitable that Byron and Southey should have battled over the representation of the South Seas, for the Pacific islands were the most recently encountered native cultures and news of them had caused a sensation across Europe. The 1767 ‘discovery’ of Tahiti by Captain Wallis and subsequent visits by Captain Cook had introduced to Europe peoples who seemed to live in paradise. The voyage narratives told of Edenic islands on which the flourishing bread fruit seemed to exempt the ‘Indians’ from Adam’s curse that he should earn his bread by the sweat of his brow. And so the islanders’ bodies became objects of fascination to the West. They were treated as synecdoches of their island cultures – as proofs that a perfect state of nature had been discovered. They were viewed, caressed and penetrated by the sailors. They were sketched, measured and described by the accompanying naturalists. And they were imported back to Britain, alive, as curiosities, and dead, as skulls and skeletons, so that Western science might place them in its scheme of things. Contact was sexual from the start. And it was this sexual contact, as reported in expedition narratives, that aroused Southey’s and Byron’s interest, when, by chance, it became bound up with the other symbol for which Tahiti had become famous – the bread fruit. The sexy native women and the exotic island fruit, together, seemed to be responsible for the mutiny on the Bounty, in which the discipline of the navy on whom the empire depended had crumbled. When, in 1787, Captain Bligh was commissioned by the Admiralty to sail to Tahiti, it was for an explicitly colonialist purpose, for the benefit of the merchants and owners of the sugar plantations. He was to collect

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specimens of the bread fruit tree and take them to the West Indies where they would be transplanted and used as food for the slaves. The bread fruit would, it was expected, demonstrate the colonial benefits to Britain of exploiting newly discovered lands. As it turned out, it came to symbolise the temptations of Tahiti’s women and the limitations of colonial authority. In 1789 Bligh arrived at Tahiti and collected his trees but found naval discipline collapsing. On 5 January three of his crew deserted in order to live with the island women. They later took part in the mutiny, which occurred when the Bounty was sailing away from the island. It was motivated, according to Bligh’s later account, by the sailors’ desire to return to an island where ‘they need not labour and where the allurements of dissipation are beyond anything that can be conceived’.15 The mutineers cast Bligh adrift, threw the bread fruit plants overboard and returned to Tahiti. Bligh, after an epic open-boat voyage, went in the other direction back to Britain. Once there, Bligh got the backing of the Admiralty, who sent an expedition to capture the mutineers. In 1791 Captain Edwards, in command of the Pandora, arrested several of the rebels who had been cohabiting with women of the island. Edwards was a martinet: the mutineers were chained to the deck during the voyage back to Britain. Once home, they were court-martialled, and most were then executed. Yet this did not end the matter. Edwards was widely condemned for cruel treatment of his prisoners (he had left several, ironed and imprisoned, to drown when the Pandora, having hit a reef, was foundering). A campaign resulted in the pardon of two who were judged to have been intimidated into mutiny. Evidence given at the court martial, moreover, implied that it was as much Bligh’s arbitrary severity towards his officers as the delights of Tahiti that was the mutiny’s cause. Meanwhile, the fate of Fletcher Christian, the ringleader of the mutiny, remained unknown, and the court martial was left considering in his absence whether his remark to Bligh, ‘I am in hell – I am in hell’, was a confession of guilt or an exclamation of resentment.16 Christian, it was discovered in 1808, had, after sailing from Tahiti with eight of the other mutineers and eighteen islanders of both sexes, formed a settlement at Pitcairn Island, where he had been murdered in a dispute over possession of the women. By the time of the discovery, the sole surviving mutineer, John Adams, had become the patriarch of a colony that comprised the remaining Tahitian women and the children fathered by his now dead comrades. Using a Bible taken from the Bounty, he imposed a Christian education and a moral code so strict that the ships’ officers who visited the island felt ashamed at their own comparative laxity.

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Southey had been a commentator on events in the South Seas since his radical twenties when he had sympathised with Fletcher Christian in his rebellion against the tyranny of British institutions.17 He wrote of Bligh’s ‘unendurable tyranny’ and added, ‘if every man had his due Bligh would have had the halter instead of the poor fellows whom we brought from Taheite’.18 In 1809 he sympathised in the influential Tory journal the Quarterly Review with one, in particular, of those poor fellows – the mutineer Stewart, whom Captain Edwards had arrested. Stewart had then died in chains when the Pandora sank on its voyage from Tahiti to Britain. Southey related the story in a manner which shows that he regarded Polynesia as an ideal exotic setting for romantic love: A midshipman, by name Stewart, having made himself guilty in the sudden burst of mutiny, took up his abode on the island and lived with the daughter of a Chief, who had borne him a beautiful girl when the Pandora arrived, and he was seized and laid in irons. She followed him with her infant to the ship; the officers who witnessed the scene which ensued could scarcely bear to behold it, and Stewart besought them not to let her see him again. So, she was separated from him by force and sent ashore. In the course of two months she pined away, and died,— literally of a broken heart. He, happily for himself, perished in the wreck of the Pandora; the orphan has been bred up by missionaries.19

It was on Stewart and his ‘beautiful girl’ that Byron based the hero and heroine of The Island. The two poets were dependent on the same source material and were disputing its implications for an imperial nation whose power depended on the naval discipline that had collapsed in the fertile groves of Tahiti. Despite his sympathy for Fletcher Christian and for Stewart, Southey was, by 1809, quite sure that Pacific island culture was a threat to the morality of an imperial nation. In the Quarterly Review he called Tahiti a ‘Paradise of Sin’ and argued that the Tahitians’ ‘iniquities exceed those of any other people, ancient or modern, civilized or savage; and that human nature never has been exhibited in such utter depravity as by the inhabitants of these terrestrial Paradises!’20 Native promiscuity, polygamy and infanticide revealed that the South Seas needed an infusion of British order. The formerly radical Southey became a supporter of the early attempts by the London Missionary Society to convert the islanders, arguing that what was required were Britons capable of teaching mechanical arts and modern medicine. By these means islanders would be introduced into the capitalist and technological civilisation of the West.21 The missionaries would thus teach the islanders to work for a living and to replace their reliance on natural fertility and their indulgence of sexual

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promiscuity with a society that recognised the concept of exclusive property in things – and in women. Southey became a public advocate of a British colonialism designed to spread British moral standards and social practice across the globe. Opposed to commercial plantations, indifferent to points of Christian doctrine, Southey championed an imperial mission defined as the civilising of savages by the inculcation of the work ethic, monogamy and respect for property. In 1817 the South Seas were brought before the British public once more with the publication of An Account of the Natives of the Tonga Islands in the South Pacific Ocean . . . Arranged from the Exclusive Communications of Mr. William Mariner, a book that was to fascinate Byron and Southey and to trigger their public dispute. The Account told the extraordinary story of how the fifteen-year-old Mariner had been cast ashore on Tonga when the ship of which he was captain’s clerk had been wrecked. He spent four years there before being taken off by a passing vessel. Having learnt the language of the islanders, Mariner was able to provide more accurate details about their culture than had previously been available. Mariner also showed that the effects of colonialism were already blighting the islands – that the native people were, like it or not, subject to a brutal contest for power and influence between Britons. Not only British missionaries but also an escapee from Britain’s new penal colony at Botany Bay had been present on Tonga. This ex-convict, Morgan, stirred up the islanders’ resentment, convincing them that the missionaries ‘were men sent out by the king of England, to bring a pestilence upon the people of Tonga, and that they accordingly shut themselves up in this house, to perform witchcraft, and make incantations, which was the cause of the pestilence that then raged:’ (there was an epidemic disease at the time, which was very fatal among the chiefs, two or three dying every day).22

Taking the alarm, the Tongan chiefs ‘rushed upon the white men, and killed all but three’ (i, p. 68). Ironically, what the missionaries offered as a spiritual remedy for savagery was identified by the Tongans as the cause of the physical diseases which European sailors had brought. Their Bibles were judged to be ‘books of witchcraft’ (i, p. 68). As we shall see, this native reading of colonial Christianity later came to vex Southey’s imagination when he compared Polynesian customs with South American ones. Southey read Mariner’s account in manuscript for John Murray and recommended publication. In April 1817 he reviewed the published book in the Quarterly in terms that would have been both exciting and irritating for Byron, who read this number of the Review in Italy. Southey stressed the

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Tongan chief ’s cruelty, likening it to that of the French under the Jacobins and under Napoleon: Finow ‘put to death all his prisoners, some by the French fashion of a noyade as practised by the Jacobines at Nantes, and the Buonapartists at St. Domingo: they were taken out in canoes which were scuttled and sunk immediately’.23 He concluded that such practices showed the need for monarchical government – a conclusion in line with his Tory domestic politics.24 Byron not only opposed Southey’s support of the unreformed monarchy and parliament in Britain, but resented the restoration of Bourbon monarchs across Europe after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo. Yet if Southey’s political conclusions about Tonga were, like his domestic politics, galling for Byron, his review also contained stories of romance and struggles for liberty. He quoted Mariner’s story of a coastal cave, accessible only underwater: There is a cavern in the island of Hoonga which can only be entered by diving into the sea, and has no other light than is reflected from the bottom of the water. A young chief discovered it accidentally while diving after a turtle, and the use which he made of his discovery will probably be sung in more than one European language, so beautifully is it adapted for a tale in verse.25

As Mariner showed, the chief had used the cave to hide the ‘beautiful young maiden’ whom he loved.26 Having saved her from a ‘tyrant’, he confessed his love to her, whereupon she consented: ‘How happy were they in this solitary retreat! tyrannic power no longer reached them [. . .] themselves were the only power they served, and they were infinitely delighted with this simple form of government’ (i, p. 268). Southey’s invitation to poets was answered: Byron made the Tongan cave part of The Island, the poem set in the South Seas that he was composing while attacking Southey in print. Byron’s poem told the story of the mutiny on the Bounty, focusing on Fletcher Christian’s defiance of authority. It then imagined the subsequent fate of the mutineers, showing them living an idyllic life with the native women until pursued by British soldiers from a ship sent by the Royal Navy. The mutineers flee to an uninhabited rocky island, where they make a last stand and are killed – all save young Torquil, who is saved by his island girl, Neuha, who hides him in the coastal cave described by Mariner. After the departure of the British ship the couple emerge from hiding to live in bliss together in their island paradise. Byron made no use of the accounts of the real history of the mutineers who fled to Pitcairn Island, but drew his details from Southey’s review in the Quarterly.27 Here, then, the older writer set the agenda for the

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younger: for all Byron’s scorn for Southey, he was nevertheless moved to set out a vision of colonial community by the portrait of the love idyll that Southey had selected from Mariner’s account. Southey’s journalism, that is to say, played a shaping role in defining the terms of colonial romance. Byron’s poem reflected the view that Tongan sexual morality was of a different kind than that of Tahiti. Mariner stated that ‘infidelity among the married women is comparatively very rare’ and showed convincingly that the Tongans were ‘rather to be considered a chaste than a libertine people’ (ii, pp. 170, 179). If free love was practised, it did not necessarily entail promiscuity (ii, p. 174). Like an unmarried Tongan woman, Neuha chooses her lover, the sailor mutineer Torquil. She is afflicted neither by Christian prohibitions against unmarried love nor by the Tahitian practice of prostituting women for tools and trinkets, for Byron’s island is characterised by ‘love unbought’ (i, p. 110)28 and its idyllic peacefulness is symbolised by love, wine, and dancing. By conflating Tahiti and Tonga, two distinct South Sea cultures, Byron was able to avoid asking his British public to approve of those aspects of Pacific culture of which they, like Southey, had most disapproved: prostitution and promiscuity in Tahiti, cannibalism and infanticide in Tonga. Byron simply omitted such practices, as he did the introduction of venereal disease that tainted the ‘free love’ of sailors and island women. Southey later noted how the disease led the islanders to put on a new kind of display: ‘they set’, he wrote, ‘before [the missionaries] [. . .] poor miserably deformed and diseased creatures, as proofs of the efficacy of their malignant prayers, and the vindictive character of the God to whom they were addressed’.29 This grim exhibition seems an ironic inversion of the erotic dance that had earlier tempted sailors to pay for sex. Here the islanders’ disenchantment echoes in Southey’s pro-missionary text and one of the ironies of colonial encounters becomes apparent: what was offered as a spiritual cure was interpreted by the colonised as another form of bodily infection. Byron avoids such ironies by so constructing his narrative that coloniser and colonised are united in a love that reconciles the spiritual and the physical, the soul and the body. The Byronic hero and his ‘south Sea girl’ (Island, ii, l. 333) are united ‘in one absorbing soul’ (ii, l. 305) in a savage marriage blessed by nature rather than a priest. Neuha’s ‘faithful bosom’ unites her solely to Torquil, and their true lovematch becomes an embodiment of the peaceful and equal union of North and South, Britain and Tahiti. As such it acts as a fantasy that allows Byron to gloss over the more unequal and less idealised transactions that his sources revealed between the two cultures:

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The white man landed! need the rest be told? The New World stretch’d its dusk hand to the Old; Each was to each a marvel, and the tie Of wonder warm’d to better sympathy. Kind was the welcome of the sun-born sires, And kinder still their daughters’ gentler fires. Their union grew: the children of the storm Found beauty link’d with many a dusky form[.] (ii, ll. 238–45)

In omitting to tell ‘the rest’ and in avoiding the awkward detail of his sources, Byron was obscuring fiction’s relationship to history in order to associate poetry with a transcendent realm of love. Nevertheless, his poem also contains a radical critique of the apparent ‘truths’ about foreign cultures upon which contemporaries, not least Southey, based their arguments for Christianisation and colonisation. This critique is apparent in Byron’s reversal of the gender roles set out in his source material. In the Tongan story as related by Mariner and Southey it is the young chief who finds the cave and rescues his beloved by hiding her in it. Byron, however, retells the story with Neuha in the young chief ’s role. Thus he disturbs the gendered hierarchy of Tongan society (in which women were defined by their relation to powerful men). He does so in order to disturb European assumptions: Neuha’s physical and mental resourcefulness shows that her people are not ‘effeminate’ (as travellers thought them to be). She and her ancestors, Byron states in a further appropriation of virtues Europeans applied solely to their own civilisation, are ‘the valiant and the few,/ The naked knights of savage chivalry’ (ii, ll. 216–17). Byron’s attribution to the islanders of savage chivalry revalued chivalry against the argument of Burke and other conservatives that it was a product of centuries of civilisation. It also brought his idealisation of Polynesia into direct opposition to Southey’s views, for the Poet Laureate had associated Tongan savagery with revolutionary despotism in Napoleonic France. Yet while Byron’s poem is a critique of contemporary British imperialism, and of the ideology that sustained that imperialism, it is also a colonialist fantasy. It frames Tahiti through Byron’s own identification of liberty with ancient Greece. The island warriors fight alongside the mutineers against the Royal Navy, and are compared to Hercules and then to the nationalist liberation struggle in contemporary Greece that Byron was later to join (iii, ll. 53–8). However, they find no permanent refuge from the naval power they had defied. Even when they flee Tahiti they are hunted down on the uninhabited rock to which they escape. Making his last stand,

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Christian remains defiant, killing a British sailor who thinks he intends to surrender and then throwing himself to his death, uncaptured. And while Byron seems to condemn him, he also implies that, though guilty and unrepentant, Christian may not necessarily go to hell: The rest was nothing – save a life mispent, And soul – but who shall answer where it went? ’Tis ours to bear, not judge the dead; and they Who doom to hell, themselves are on the way, Unless those bullies of eternal pains Are pardon’d their bad hearts for their worse brains. (iv, ll. 351–6)

The reference to ‘bullies’ deflects judgement from Christian by alluding to Southey, who had doomed Byron to hell for his ‘Satanic’ poetry in his Vision of Judgement. Byron’s allusion to Southey was a broadside in the two poets’ dispute about poetic judgement and its moral and political consequences. But it also renewed the attack on the evangelical Christianity that was shaping British attitudes to the unfamiliar cultures of its empire. And it reminded the reader to suspend judgement of the poem’s protagonists, ensuring that if Christian’s mutiny is not positively endorsed, it is effectively condoned. Discussing The Island in a letter to Leigh Hunt, Byron had declared his intention ‘not to run counter to the reigning stupidity altogether—otherwise they will say that I am eulogizing Mutiny’ (BLJ, x, p. 90). He fulfilled this intention, both by praise of Bligh and by apparent acknowledgement of Christian’s guilt. Yet by inventing for this hellish anti-hero a defiant death in battle and by comparing him to the heroes of ancient Greece, Byron glamorised him as a resister of tyranny even as he associated him with Satan: [. . .] like a serpent, coil’d His wounded, weary form, to where the steep Look’d desperate as himself along the deep; Cast one glance back, and clench’d his hand, and shook His last rage ’gainst the earth which he forsook; Then plunged. (iv, ll. 336–41)

Thus Byron fantasised about the South Sea Islands as a last stronghold of rebellion against imperialism and the military force by which imperialism was maintained. The stronghold falls, only for the ideal of liberty pursued there (albeit perversely by mutiny) to be affirmed in verse. Yet the ideal is not left only for the poet. Christian’s cathartic death purges the isle, and the only mutineer to retain his freedom, of guilt.30

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Christian was ‘in hell’, in the poem’s narrative logic, so that Torquil could be in paradise – a paradise ‘guilt won’ but redeemed by love (iv, ll. 417– 20). With the guilt of mutiny laid upon Christian, Torquil is left seeming morally free enough to live a life of liberty and peace. Manipulation of readers’ judgement – a kind of poetic sleight of hand – allows Byron to sketch a way out of the impasse in which many of his works end, the impasse in which the struggle for liberty involves the struggler in acts of cruelty so that he comes to be, like his oppressors, guilty. At the same time the island, as Byron adapted it from Southey’s review of Mariner, acts as a refuge for love and liberty so marginal that even the remorseless forces of British imperialism cannot find it. It is the very remoteness and exoticism of the South Seas and their peoples – their ability to elude the understanding of the British navy – that allows them to preserve a geography known only to them even when British navigators and soldiers have apparently charted and subjugated the whole area. But this uncharted and unpoliced geography exists only at the very margins, in the form of a cave only reachable by those who, like Neuha and Torquil, were powerful swimmers by virtue of their island-upbringings. Byron had himself swum the Hellespont in emulation of Leander’s swim for love and freedom into the arms of Hero. He transforms the Tongan tale into a similarly heroic, but successful, struggle to live those ideals. It was a transformation that fulfilled Southey’s hope that a poet would versify the cave story. But it did so in a manner of which Southey strongly disapproved. The Island constitutes a poetic rejection of Southey’s late views on politics and on the South Sea Islands. It also constitutes a rejection of Southey’s Orientalist poetry, which Byron continued to ridicule for adopting the ‘more outrageous of their [Orientals’] fictions’ (BLJ, iii, p. 101). ‘Master Southey’s poems are in fact what parallel lines might be viz. prolonged ad infinitum, without ever meeting anything half so absurd as themselves’ (BLJ, ii, p. 137). Byron ensured that his own Tales did not alienate British readers by similarly bombarding them at length with unfamiliar Eastern mythology. Instead, he included enough accurate local colour, or ‘costume’ as it was termed, to give an appearance of verisimilitude in his portrait of the exotic, without becoming so detailed that readers became overwhelmed by its difference.31 This technique allowed him to depict the love of Neuha and Torquil in accordance with his own idealised valuation of romantic love rather than in conformity to the Tahitian and Tongan customs of which he had read. The effect was to impose an erotic fantasy upon South Sea women. This fantasy, although it was radical and libertarian with regard to European gender roles and to the fantasy which Southey and the missionaries were imposing on Polynesia, was deeply

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Orientalist. Neuha may be generous, heroic and civilised rather than savage in Southey’s sense, but she is the creature of Byron’s desire for an ideal woman, both sexual and innocent, who is active yet still deferential. For Byron, Neuha, like the South Sea nature she embodies, desires only to give pleasure to another. She is stereotyped as a minor nature goddess keen to give herself to a Western man so as to redeem him from the guilt that stems from greater experience. And if this gift is too fragile to avoid destruction by time, then it may survive through an apotheosis, as a transcendent spiritual blessing: ‘To rise, if just, a spirit o’er them all’ (ii, l. 162). To encounter a redemptive female innocence was a colonialist desire that Southey shared with Byron when imagining ‘exotic’ cultures. For Southey, innocence could not be combined with an active female sexuality: imagining such a combination led the writer to a satanic fall, not an angelic apotheosis. It was for the romanticisation of this combination that Southey called Byron a ‘public pander’ in 1822 and added that he made ‘others the slaves of sensuality’.32 To this accusation of sexual enslavement Byron replied with a gibe which suggested that Southey had himself once planned a sexual colonisation when, with Coleridge and Lovell, he had aimed to settle in America in a Pantisocratic commune.33 This was an effective tactic – to embarrass the later Tory Southey with reference to his Jacobin youth. Byron’s gibe was published in Medwin’s Private Conversations with Lord Byron in 1824, and Southey replied to it with a letter in The Courier in which he termed Byron ‘pander-general to the youth of Great Britain’ (13 December 1824). Informing a correspondent of this Courier letter, Southey also wrote that he was bringing to a conclusion a poem which he had begun in 1817, in which the innocence of youth – in particular female youth – is central.34 This poem, A Tale of Paraguay (1825), is a reply to Byron’s colonialist and Orientalist poetry that is, at the same time, influenced by it. And although A Tale of Paraguay deals with events on the South American mainland rather than the South Sea Islands, it draws on Southey’s detailed knowledge of accounts of Polynesia. The notes to the poem quote a long passage from ‘the very curious and valuable work of Mr. Mariner’ concerning the Tongan belief in an island of the dead. Southey compares this belief with that of the Guarani tribe of Paraguay in a land of souls so that, in effect, his tale of South America becomes an exercise in comparative religion. When reviewing Mariner in 1817 Southey had also compared the Tongans to the Guaranis – on this occasion the point of similarity being their martial customs.35 Southey’s comparative ethnology enabled him to collapse differences between unfamiliar cultures and

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thereby produce a generalised conclusion about ‘the dispositions of savage man’.36 And this generalised view, unseeing of the uniqueness of each of these cultures, sponsored his calls for an overall colonisation of them all by the forces of Christianity. In 1830 he compared the Protestant missionaries in Polynesia to the Jesuits in South America: Even if the mass of these new [Polynesian] Christians understood the nature of their apparent conversion as little as those American Indians whom the Spanish missionaries sprinkled with besoms to the right and left till they blistered their hands by the work; or as our own Anglo-Saxon ancestors, when they were baptized by the thousands in the Swale; the change would still be effectual in the next generation, if only care were taken to train up the children in the way they should go.37

The training of the children was crucial to the missionary enterprise, and Southey’s Tale of Paraguay records an effort by a Jesuit to do just that. Southey’s difference from Byron’s colonialist fantasy is evident not only in his exclusion of sexuality from his exotic scenes, but in his attacks on tribal life. Whereas The Island romanticised Polynesian customs, omitting discussion of prostitution and infanticide, Southey’s Tale explicitly condemned these tribal practices. The Indian family who feature in the Tale of Paraguay were noble because they had become isolated from their tribe in the forest, living without contact with other humans. Living free from hierarchy, property and vice in unspoilt nature, Southey’s Indians fulfil many of the ideals that the radical colony of Pantisocracy had been designed to put into practice. Thus Paraguay provided an imaginary stage on which could be enacted a social radicalism which Southey was no longer prepared to endorse at home. However, social equality was not accompanied by the sexual liberty that the Pantisocrats had briefly considered adopting. The last line of this stanza answers Byron’s charge that Southey, as a Pantisocrat, had intended to practice a kind of Godwinian free love. As noted above, Southey had been annoyed enough by that charge to write to The Courier refuting it a few months before the Tale was published. And the Tale went on to define the state of Paraguayan nature in accordance with conservative Christian ethics: And as connubial, so parental love Obey’d unerring Nature’s order here, For now no force of impious custom strove Against her law; . . . such as was wont to sear The unhappy heart with usages severe, Till harden’d mothers in the grave could lay Their living babes with no compunctious tear;

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Where Byron idealised tribal life, Southey deplored it. Yet his Tale, markedly different in form, style and subject from his earlier Orientalist epics, shows Byron’s influence throughout. Byron’s private verdict on those epics had been echoed by many reviewers, who also found that Southey had clotted his narratives with the mythology of the East, overwhelming his readers with details of fabulous stories that he would have them believe. In the Tale Southey confined his comparative religion to the notes. He eschewed the pompous diction and epic scale of his former works too, and dealt, as Byron’s Oriental poems did, with the familiar subject of love. And he wrote in the Spenserian stanza, suitable in itself and by association for a romance, but recently revived by Byron’s massively successful Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. To publish a poem in Spenserian stanzas about exotic regions in 1825 was to invite comparison with Byron’s poem. If Southey was rejecting Byronism in general, and The Island in particular, as a corrupting influence, nevertheless his own poem followed a form that Byronic Orientalism had popularised. But he did so only to differ: the Byronic hero, whether Childe Harold or Fletcher Christian, is a traveller to distant lands because he is self-exiled, being disenchanted with the world and too proud to submit to the authority of men and creeds in which he does not believe. His lonely communion with nature emerges from a rejection of family ties and social conventions. Southey’s heroes, by contrast, may be foreign but resemble respectable English Christians in their domestic habits. Even their relationship with nature leads them towards a faith reminiscent of eighteenth-century Christianity, for they are ‘tutor’d by instinctive sense [. . .]/ To place a child-like trust in Providence’ (Canto i, ll. 145–51). The paternalism that pervades the poem is, it appears, founded on God the Father, who will repay the Indians’ childlike trust with redemption by love. A tale of fatherly rather than of sexual love, A Tale of Paraguay is, in part, Southey’s demonstration of what a proper Byronic poem should be like – a work created as a riposte to Byron’s colonialist fantasies, but in their image. It is many other things too – another composite visual/verbal production (it was illustrated by Richard Westall, William’s brother), the work of an expert (since Southey, the author of the massive History of Brazil (1810–19), had an unparalleled knowledge of South American colonial history) and the paternalist text of a father seeking to foster the careers of the younger

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generation while at the same time showing a recalcitrant son – Byron – how to write a colonial romance after Spenser. A poem that was not retrospective but a new departure – not late but latest – in that it was born of Southey’s determination to counter a younger poet’s example and to show that he could still, though attacked as a reactionary and simplistic Lake poet, innovate and, in the process, write of the wider world in a style far from simplistic. It was also a seminal statement of the new imperialist ideology that Southey was helping evangelicals such as Wilberforce to popularise – an idealisation of empire not as trade, nor as exploitation of people and resources, nor as conquest (although conquest is its prerequisite), but as a civilising mission effected by paternalist love. In this it was part of a successful new development in poetry – a culmination of the ideological fantasies expressed by other poets at this time – by Mary Russell Mitford in Christina: Maid of the South Seas; by William Lisle Bowles in The Missionary; by James Montgomery in Greenland. All these poets were advised upon their works in progress by Southey: he became the father of a new school which transferred the paternalist idylls of his and Wordsworth’s late Lake poetry to the colonial stage. This school, along with Southey’s journalism in the Quarterly, helped create a climate of opinion in favour of missionary colonialism, widening its appeal beyond Baptist, Methodist and Anglican Evangelicals, so that it no longer seemed merely the pet project of religious and moral revivalists. It was in this climate of public acceptance that the Evangelicals were able to gain sufficient parliamentary support to force the East India Company to allow missionaries to proselytise in its territories, despite the Company’s reluctance to accept any measure that would interfere with trade by arousing the resentment of the Hindu and Muslim populations that it governed. A Tale of Paraguay was not direct propaganda, for it was not about contemporary British colonies but about eighteenth-century Jesuit South America. Nevertheless, it was important to poet and readers that the poem was based on historical events: like The Island it wanted to show that the model of colonial relations it described really had happened – and could do so again. Historical events, however, proved not to fit so neatly into the colonial romance as might have been hoped: one of my intentions in what follows is to deconstruct Southey’s fantasy by revealing the tensions that lie beneath its idyllic surface – tensions that centre on the colonial body and that make the poem ambivalent about the colonialism it frequently endorses, so that it comes close to undermining its own ostensible purport. These tensions, I shall argue, exhibit in microcosm the contradictions inherent in the ideology that justifies empire as a matter of civilising the

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colonised. Southey, as if aware of their destabilising effect on his idyll, attempts to rationalise away the ambivalence they produce: in this he is only partially successful: successful enough to palliate colonialism for many of his contemporary readers, but not for all – indeed some sharp-eyed reviewers drew their attention to the poem’s double affiliation to both the noble savagery of forest Indians and the paternalism of their colonial masters, the former, especially, opening the latter to question. The colonial masters in question were the Jesuits. The Tale stemmed from Southey’s reading of the Jesuit Martin Dobrizhoffer’s Historia de Aponibus, a book that he had obtained in November 1817, after ‘ten years vainly in search’.38 Having found a copy, he had Sara Coleridge, his niece and effective foster-daughter, complete a translation, titled Account of the Abipones, which he contrived to have published and then himself reviewed in the Quarterly. The English Dobrizhoffer, in effect, was a Southey-family effort, a production of his paternal encouragement of his literary offspring. So, indeed, was the Tale itself, for when it appeared in 1825 it was prefaced by two introductory poems, a ‘Dedication’ to Southey’s daughter Edith May (written in 1814) and a ‘Proem’ which compared the missionary conquests of Loyola’s Jesuits with the military victories of Wellington’s ‘English’ armies. These introductory poems effectively contextualised the tale as an examination of female innocence, paternal love and Christian colonisation. The Tale versifies what Dobrizhoffer saw as the most miraculous and providential experience of his entire mission in Paraguay, which lasted for nearly twenty years before he was expelled along with the rest of the Jesuits. Dobrizhoffer had discovered a family of Guarani Indians living in complete isolation in the forest, after war and disease had decimated and dispersed their tribal group. Both the war and the disease were colonial: the Guaranis had fought against the government from 1750 to 1756 after the Spanish had broken a promise by agreeing, in the Treaty of Limits, to hand to Portugal the Reductions (that is, the village colonies in which Indians lived a Christian life under the paternal authority of the Jesuits). This family were the sole survivors of a group betrayed by the colonial power and then infected with the disease brought by that power – smallpox. They lived, Dobrizhoffer stated, in penury ‘without discontent, vexation or disease’. The son and daughter, fully grown by the time the Jesuits came into contact with them, had never before seen people other than their parents. To the Jesuit they seemed spirits of nature; of the daughter Dobrizhoffer wrote ‘a poet would have taken her for one of the nymphs or dryads’.39 He brought them into the nearby Reduction and then saw them peak and pine:

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A few weeks after their arrival they were afflicted with a universal heaviness and rheum, to which succeeded a pain in the eyes and ears, and not long after, deafness. Lowness of spirits, and disgust to food at length wasted their strength to such a degree that an incurable consumption followed. After languishing some months, the old mother, who had been properly instructed in the Christian religion and baptized, delivered up her spirit, with a mind so calm, so acquiescent with the divine will, that I cannot doubt but that she entered into a blessed immortality. The girl, who had entered the town full of health and beauty, soon lost all resemblance to herself. Enfeebled, withering by degrees like a flower, her bones hardly holding together, she at length followed her mother into the grave, and, if I be not much deceived, to Heaven. (Account, i, p. 93)

Although the brother is attacked by ‘the same malady that proved fatal to his sister and mother’, he survives. He then lies down, having been called by his dead relatives, seeks and receives baptism, and promptly dies. Dobrizhoffer is grief-stricken but consoles himself that God has taken them to himself. It is this tale of discovery, baptism and early death that Southey narrates in his poem, inspired by the Christian paternalism of which he had approved in his review of Dobrizhoffer, where he extolled the Jesuit’s rational religion, a proselytism that civilised by force of sincere example.40 Using Dobrizhoffer as an example, Southey began to define general grounds for effective proselytism – in his eyes for the civilisation of savages – on the pattern of the South American Jesuits. They eschewed the ‘falsehood’ of pretended or real belief in inspiration and in miracles, in a way Protestant Methodists and Evangelicals did not.41 Instead, they brought the Indians into their village colonies, where they aimed to teach them useful arts, as he described in his History of Brazil: when they discovered any misdemeanour, clapt upon the offender a penitential dress, and led him first to the church to make his confession in public, and then into the square to be publicly beaten. It is said that these castigations were always received without a murmur, and even as an act of grace, [. . .] so completely were they taught to lick the hand which chastised and fed them [. . .]. This system succeeded in effectually breaking down the spirit. Adults, who had eluded the constant superintendence of their inspectors, would voluntarily accuse themselves, and ask for the punishment which they had merited.42

Here Southey’s phrase ‘lick the hand which chastised’ suggests that the constant vigilance by which complicity was produced caused a mental demoralisation powerful enough to dehumanise the Indians: the model of fathers and children is perverted to that of a dog and his master. ‘Never’, Southey concluded, ‘was there a more absolute despotism’: ‘whatever could

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make them good servants, and render them happy in servitude, was carefully taught them, but nothing beyond this, [. . .] nothing which could tend to political and intellectual emancipation’. The Jesuits themselves argued that ‘these Indians were only full-grown children’ (History, ii, pp. 361–2). But while Southey declared that this argument was ‘miserably insufficient’ because it caused the Indians to be left in servitude, he nevertheless lamented the expulsion of the Jesuits as ‘an irreparable injury to the tribes of South America’ (iii, p. 614). The paternalist superintendence of the Reductions was better than the brutality and enslavement that followed the Jesuits’ expulsion (iii, p. 616). Southey remained deeply ambivalent about the Jesuit mission because he both admired the Fathers’ protective care of the Indians and disapproved of the moral servitude that it brought. He was prepared to ‘hold the Jesuits justified’ for a paternalist system which saved Indians from the ‘savagery’ of tribal customs and the brutality of the secular Spanish colonists even as he deprecated the disciplinary methods by which the Indians were governed. By the time of the poem’s publication, Southey was already a published authority on paternalist colonialism. The Tale develops his existing position and complicates it in the light of domestic, as well as American, issues. The Dedication poem with which he prefaces the Tale proper is the product of a father worried about the future of his maturing children and about the legacy he will leave them. It looks back to the children’s infancy and adapts the poems that he and his fellow Lake poets had written over twelve years earlier – ‘Tintern Abbey’, the Lucy poems, and ‘Kubla Khan’ – turning a female lovedone into an inspiring nature-spirit. It is a poem of fatherly protectiveness, addressed to Southey’s daughter Edith May, named ‘May’ because she was born on the first of that month, and ten years old when the poem was written. Edith is associated with new life in spring, because Southey views her as nature’s recompense for an older sister who died in infancy. Edith’s birth in ‘joyous May’ is epitomised by ‘the birds’ loud love-songs,’ which her mother heard in childbed. Like the thrush whose song reminds Southey of her, Edith is shown to embody an innocent, pastoral and ‘blithe’ nature. Thus she is idealised but simultaneously deprived of her human individuality, in a manner that is also true of Mooma, the Guarani girl in the Tale proper. A father’s recompense for her lost sister, Edith’s natural innocence is the more precious to Southey because he knows that it is menaced by death: How I have doted on thine infant smiles At morning when thine eyes unclosed on mine; How, as the months in swift succession roll’d,

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I mark’d thy human faculties unfold, And watch’d the dawning of the light divine; And with what artifice of playful guiles Won from thy lips with still repeated wiles Kiss after kiss, a reckoning often told, . . . Something I ween thou know’st; for thou hast seen Thy sisters in their turn such fondness prove, And felt how childhood in its winning years The attemper’d soul to tenderness can move. This thou canst tell; but not the hopes and fears With which a parent’s heart doth overflow, . . . The thoughts and cares inwoven with that love, . . . Its nature and its depth, thou dost not, canst not know. (Dedication, ll. 53–68)

Here the poem fixes Edith in time, leaving her forever young, forever ignorant of the anxieties which parents bear on her behalf. But Southey ends by imagining a future when Edith will know grief and when he himself will be dead: Thus wilt thou feel in thy maturer mind; When grief shall be thy portion, thou wilt find Safe consolation in such thoughts as these, . . . A present refuge in affliction’s hour. And if indulgent Heaven thy lot should bless With all imaginable happiness, Here shalt thou have, my child, beyond all power Of chance, thy holiest, surest, best delight. Take therefore now thy Father’s latest lay, . . . Perhaps his last; . . . and treasure in thine heart The feelings that its musing strains convey. A song it is of life’s declining day, Yet meet for youth. Vain passions to excite, No strains of morbid sentiment I sing, Nor tell of idle loves with ill-spent breath; A reverent offering to the Grave I bring, And twine a garland for the brow of Death. (Dedication, ll. 95–111)

Here Southey presents his own verse as a gift that will survive the grave and allow him to solace the now-innocent child when she tastes bitter experience. Both the Dedication and the Tale it introduces are offered, on the one hand, as reminders of the mortality that destroys innocence and youth and, on the other, as testaments allowing the triumph of paternal love beyond death.

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They position Edith now and in the future as a daughter, defined by love for a wiser and more knowing father. Thus Edith is restricted, as well as protected, by the power of her father’s word. In this respect she resembles Dora Wordsworth as depicted in her father’s poetry at this time. Both poetic daughters are configured by the transformation of the motif that Wordsworth had first established with regard to his sister Dorothy and his beloved ‘Lucy’. If fatherhood reshaped Southey’s idealisation of women, the colonial context of the Tale altered it further. As narrator of the tale of the Indian family isolated in the forest, Southey adopts a paternal voice for which the Dedication prepares. He describes the birth and upbringing of Yeruti and Mooma, son and daughter of Quiara and Monnema. Protected by the forest, they are children of nature and, as the allusion to Wordsworth’s Lucy poem ‘Three years she grew in sun and shower’ suggests, Mooma is ‘less a child of earth than like a poet’s dream’ (Tale, Canto iii, l. 378). The poet’s dream which Mooma most brings to mind is ‘Kubla Khan’ since, like Coleridge’s Abyssinian maid, she enchants through her ability, lost to kings and priests, to embody nature as she voices it in song. Mooma charms the Jesuits when first they find her in the forest: Them thus pursuing where the track may lead, A human voice arrests upon their way; They stop, and thither whence the sounds proceed, All eyes are turn’d in wonder, . . . not dismay, For sure such sounds might charm all fear away; No nightingale whose brooding mate is nigh, From some sequester’d bower at close of day, No lark rejoicing in the orient sky, Ever pour’d forth so wild a strain of melody. (Canto iii, ll. 298–306)

In the Dedication poem Edith had been symbolised by the thrush that sang at her birth; Mooma, more natural still than she, seems to be a bird, a ‘songstress wild’ who ‘in her joy was carolling’ (Canto iii, ll. 326, 330). As an uncivilised and therefore unspoilt forest-child, she embodies the fantasy of the noble savage, of the gentle innocent whose closeness to nature is able to restore jaded European men, with their sad knowledge of evil as well as good. It is, of course, a fantasy that depends on the power of definition remaining with the European Fathers, in this case the Jesuits and Southey their narrator. Southey, in other words, had adapted to the colonial context a paternalist poetic strategy derived from a revisionary reworking of the nature lyricism that the Lake poets had pioneered at home. The Indians, and the very nature they embody, are vulnerable and

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innocent daughters. By defining Mooma as a bird rather than as a woman, Southey and Dobrizhoffer dehumanise her, rendering her subsequent removal to the Reduction seem less morally dubious. In the Jesuit village she will sing (and die) like a bird in a cage. Thus Southey’s idealisation of the Indian girl as a child of nature is, late in his career, put into the service of a paternalism that is aligned with the Christian colonisation of the missionaries. Southey’s depiction of the Indians’ natural religion creates a major unresolved contradiction in his Tale, one which runs deep in his (and much other) colonialist thought. The Indians’ state of nature is so joyful, innocent, virtuous and instinctively religious that it is difficult to see why they need to be ‘rescued’ from the forest by the Jesuits and brought into the strict regime of the Reduction. Yet Southey explicitly supports the removal, although his language betrays the unease he had expressed openly in his History of Brazil: They on the Jesuit, who was nothing loth, Reposed alike their conscience and their cares; And he, with equal faith, the trust of both Accepted and discharged. The bliss is theirs Of that entire dependence that prepares Entire submission, let what may befall; And his whole careful course of life declares That for their good he holds them thus in thrall, Their Father and their Friend, Priest, Ruler, all in all. (Canto iv, ll. 55–63)

The colonial situation has forced two ideals into conflict: the Christian paternalism that Southey explicitly endorses comes, in the missionary context, to be undercut by the text’s lyrical affiliation to the natural joy and innocence that the Indians embody. This is in part a matter of poetic form: the Spenserian stanza comes freighted, for writer and readers, with associations of a ‘faerie’-land of enchanted romance, in which women’s innocence is protected by virtuous knights. Articulated in the same mazy stanza-form as Spenser’s damsels, Southey’s savages are too noble, too good, for him not to regret their ‘reduction’ to a filial servitude that in other circumstances he finds attractive. And as he laments their transplantation from free forest to ordered colony, he resembles Byron lamenting the disruption of a Tahitian paradise by the troops who represent civilisation. Southey writes Day comes, and now a first and last farewell To that fair bower within their native wood,

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The crucial word in this stanza is ‘reckless’: it is poignant because it shows that the Indians are careless because they have been without cares. Their lack of experience renders them unable to judge the value of what they are leaving. We, the readers, know what they do not, that the birds, beasts and reptiles inherit a peace that they will not again share. This Adam and Eve are leaving Eden without having fallen into knowledge, an exile in its way sadder, because less merited, than that on which Southey’s verse is based in Paradise Lost. And we are inclined to blame the Jesuits who cause them to leave more than we do Milton’s Satan – despite Southey’s attempt to reassure us in the last lines that they will remain innocent. In the Reduction, as the last canto acknowledges, innocence is only maintained by submission to the Fathers’ prohibitive law and, finally, by early death. Southey’s ambivalence about the Jesuits’ paternalism comes to a head when he broaches the topic of the devastating disease of colonialism – smallpox – which he knew to have killed hundreds of thousands of Indians after its introduction by colonists. The Tale begins by identifying smallpox as a reason for colonial guilt: ‘One dire disease, [. . .] the lamentable pest/ Which Africa sent forth to scourge the West,/ As if in vengeance for her sable brood/ So many an age remorselessly opprest’ (Canto i, ll. 4–7). Smallpox, the argument ran, had spread from Africa to America via the European colonists and the African slaves they imported.43 The American natives were, in Southey’s poetic logic, suffering the disease spread from colony to colony by the slave system. But the guilt of its introduction tainted the benevolent Jesuits as well as the brutal slavers, for it was in the Jesuit village colonies in the remote forests that smallpox was most devastating, decimating tribal peoples who had no resistance to it. The transplantation of Indians from forest to Reduction often resulted in their rapid deaths, as is the case with the Guarani family who are the heroes of the Tale. And so the question arises, are not the Jesuits part of the colonial exploitation of Indians, rather than an exception to it? The Jesuits’ own answer to this question is dramatised by Southey with considerable ambiguity. He shows that for Dobrizhoffer and his kind, the

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Indians’ deaths in their Reductions could be justified because the Fathers could offer them baptism before they expired. Thus when Mooma’s family reach the Reduction and become infected, baptism is offered as a spiritual remedy, a blessing, because it leads to a heavenly life beyond the grave where the dead may be restored in body as well as spirit. As the mother and daughter die, Southey has Dobrizhoffer question his own paternalism, only to reassure himself that his actions execute God’s will, a reassurance Southey promptly endorses in order to reassure readers who might also be inclined to question (Canto iv, ll. 397–414). Southey follows this with a stanza that suggests that death is best for an innocent such as Mooma: That simple heart, that innocence sincere The world would stain. Fitter she ne’er could be For the great change; and now that change is near, Oh who would keep her soul from being free? Maiden beloved of Heaven, to die is best for thee! (Canto iv, ll. 428–32)

As in the Dedication to his daughter, Southey palliates death by identifying female innocence with heavenly spirit. Mooma, like Southey’s dead infant, functions in the poem only to inspire the father (Dobrizhoffer, Southey, and he hopes, the reader) with an ideal of other-worldly purity and virtue. The innocence of daughters is insisted upon because it salves the conscience of their fathers – the guilt in this case arising from the fact that the missionary colonialism which Southey supported is seen, like commercial slavery, to bring about the Indians’ deaths. After his mother’s and sister’s deaths, Yeruti wills himself to die. But he insists that ‘he must be baptised, and then he too might go’ (Canto iv, l. 585). Here the meaning of baptism within the poem shifts slightly. Yeruti, it appears, embraces baptism not as a spiritual cure for the posthumous consequences of sin, but as means of bringing about his own death: ‘Yeruti cried;/ “Yes, I am ready now!” and instantly he died’ (Canto iv, ll. 619–20). Thus Yeruti, at the poem’s end, seems to slip free of the Christian paternalism that has caused and would now supply the ritual meaning of his death. He uses baptism to formalise his own act of willing himself to die, an act that leaves Dobrizhoffer not in power over but in awe of him. Yeruti’s determination to be baptised appears like a customary need, common among tribal peoples, to obtain priestly sanction to die to join his dead relatives. Baptism is hybridised as it is interpreted by the Indians in accordance with their own traditions.44 Southey’s text thus makes possible a reading of baptism that conflicts with his explicit Christian endorsement, one in which the ceremony is merely a sanction for a

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spiritual act which Indians make of their own accord – an act born of social practice and religious custom. Baptism is no longer a colonial remedy for the ills of colonisation, offering the reward of a Christian heaven. Instead it becomes a means by which the colonised escape from the colony, a blessed bane, an aid to suicide – an antidote not to evil but to life itself. Southey’s highly ambivalent portrayal of baptism reveals his persistent anxieties about the costs of the missionary colonialism he advocated. In his History of Brazil he suggested that this Indian interpretation of the ceremony reflected the superstitious faith that the Jesuits themselves placed in it: An epidemic disorder appeared among them; they said it was occasioned by the water of baptism . . . Some time afterwards a cough and catarrh cut off many of them: this also was attributed to baptism . . . Many tribes have supposed it fatal to children, [. . .] the eagerness with which the Missionaries baptize the dying, and especially the new-born infants who are not likely to live, has occasioned this notion. The neighbouring hordes now began to regard the Jesuits with horror, as men who carried pestilence with them: if one was seen approaching, the whole clan assembled, and burnt pepper and salt in his way; [. . .] a fumigation which they believed good against plagues and evil spirits, and to keep death from entering among them. (i, p. 255)

Here Catholicism is another colonial disease, baptism a means of contamination not cure. The Jesuits’ rituals have their Christian meaning inverted by the Indians in an interpretation based (soundly enough) on their association of colonial ideology with colonial infection. And the Tale hints that Yeruti, Mooma and Monnema made an interpretation of this kind. The culture of the Reduction affects them like a disease: ‘strange sights and sounds and thoughts well nigh opprest/ Their sense, and raised a turmoil in the breast’ (Canto iv, ll. 202–3). And yet, despite the ambivalence of his portrait of the Jesuits, Southey does endorse paternalist colonialism. He does so because he can produce a paternalist able to succeed where the Jesuits failed, a British paternalist, moreover. That paternalist is Edward Jenner, pioneer of vaccination, and he is addressed in the first lines of the Tale: Jenner! for ever shall thy honour’d name Among the children of mankind be blest, Who by thy skill hast taught us how to tame One dire disease

(Canto i, l. 1–4)

Southey offers Jenner ‘a father’s gratitude’ – an important offer since it links the fatherly love Southey sends his daughter in the Dedication poem

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to the gratitude that fathers all over the world, and especially in the South American colonies, owe the doctor. Jenner is the ultimate paternal authority on earth, the guarantor of paternal love, because he offers immunity against children’s death from the disease of colonialism, something the Jesuits had not previously been able to achieve. As a figure in Southey’s Tale, then, Jenner is a Father of Science who saves paternalism from the limitations of the Fathers of Catholicism. He assuages the guilt of colonialism by giving immunity to its disease. Through Jenner, Europe gives recompense for the infection its colonialism introduced. The hideous malady which lost its power When Jenner’s art the dire contagion stay’d, Among Columbia’s sons, in fatal hour Across the wide Atlantic wave convey’d, Its fiercest form of pestilence display’d: Where’er its deadly course the plague began Vainly the wretched sufferer look’d for aid; Parent from child, and child from parent ran, For tyrannous fear dissolved all natural bonds of man. (Canto i, ll. 19–27)

Vaccination, then, was the white man’s ‘blessing’ to the Indian. Yet, like baptism – that spiritual cure seen by the Indians as a deathly infection – it was a remedy that was liable to be misinterpreted as its opposite, since it worked by deliberate infection of the person to be protected. It was by giving people a dose of cowpox that Jenner stopped them getting smallpox. For Southey, despite his doubts and anxieties, paternalist colonialism was a system that Britain, symbolised by Jenner, was able to put into proper working order. Armed against colonial infection – and guilt – Britain could bring its civilising mission to its colonies in the East and to the newly independent states of South America, spreading its values, if not taking outright control. The Tale played into British hopes for commercial and ideological influence in Venezuela, Chile, Peru and Brazil, new countries that had achieved freedom from Spanish domination in 1822, 1823 and 1824. The fighting, on land and by sea, had been led by revolutionaries who had been radicalised and anglicised in Britain: Simon Bolivar, José de San Martin and Bernardo O’Higgins planned and financed their campaigns in London. Although the British government, allied to Spain and Portugal during the Peninsular War, had not supported the revolutions, they had nevertheless been equipped with British arms and funded by British bankers. Bolivar’s army employed many British officers and troops; the naval victories which destroyed Spanish and Portuguese control of the

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ports were achieved by the British admiral Thomas Cochrane. He became a hero back in Britain, his every movement reported avidly in the press during the months when Southey was working hard on the Tale. Meanwhile, with the former colonies open to foreigners, British merchants and mining engineers flocked to South America: Southey reviewed several of the narratives they published on their return in the Quarterly. The independence wars, gaining momentum from 1812, had raised the hopes of liberal Britons who wished an end to despotic monarchies. Samuel Rogers looked forward to South American freedom in his Voyage of Columbus (1810); Byron welcomed the liberation struggle in The Siege of Corinth (1816). By 1824, prospects seemed bright enough for private investors to venture their capital: a speculative boom occurred as Britons bought shares in new companies trading to South America. The Tale welcomed the overthrow of Spanish despotism; it hoped for the influence of British civilisation (as embodied by Jenner). But it remained oblivious to the shiny promises of mercantile capitalism. It expressed Southey’s yearning for a noble savagery fostered by benevolent paternalism – a self-sufficient agricultural colonialism, rather like a hierarchical and racial version of the Pantisocratic community Southey had once aimed to establish in North America. And it contributed to his campaign to make missionary paternalism the method by which Britain would spread its values in its colonies, as when he wrote an ode eulogising Reginald Heber, Bishop of Calcutta (1830). It was exactly paternalism’s capacity to create the conditions that seemed to justify its continuance that most annoyed Byron about the Old Regimes of which Southey was a defender. His own view of the exchange between the old world and the new reflects this anger. Byron has no place for benevolent paternalism of the kind Southey tried to idealise in Paraguay. Freedom and health, on the one hand, or slavery and disease on the other are the only options. In The Island, he saluted South American revolution as an example to Polynesia and to Greece. To Southey this appeared self-indulgent fantasy: revolution led to anarchy; newly independent colonies could not become stable countries on the basis of the liberation of sexual desire from social structure. His Tale is opposed to Byron’s visions of free love uniting West and East, North and South in an exotic nature that stands for escape from social convention and political hierarchy. Yet it is deeply divided by Southey’s conflicting attitudes to the Jesuits and missionaries, to baptism and disease, and to the Indians, whose natural innocence is idealised only for its effective destruction to be sanctioned.

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Although the Tale did not refer to current events it could not help but be received in the context of expectation of increasing influence on the infant states of South America: to many it seemed to idealise a benevolent paternalism towards the Indian population that the governing elites of the new nations ought, but were unlikely, to adopt. To liberals and radicals, opposed to evangelisation of Britain’s Indian colonies, the Tale was naïve in its views of both colonists and natives. As a song of innocence dwelling lovingly upon simple rustics in a rural idyll, the poem was open to just the same criticism that had been levelled at Wordsworth’s ballads and Southey’s own 1790s verse: the London Magazine wrote mockingly of the pomposity with which the author delivered matter-of-fact, trivial and dull details as if they were profound. Southey’s fear that he risked moving women readers to tears was laughable: the supposedly pathetic scenes were actually ‘trite’ and ‘maudlin’.45 To The Examiner, the Tale displayed the characteristics of Lake poetry even more markedly than Thalaba the Destroyer; it was also quite clearly written in opposition to Byron’s Eastern tales: There appear to be classes of poets in the present day, very much opposed to each other, each of which embraces an injurious extreme. The first of them must have high wrought incident, intense feeling, or overwhelming passion, on every occasion; the second affect to delight in the negative of all these, and to luxuriate in the exhibition of the placid, the serene, and the passionless. The latter calls the former school ‘Satanic;’ the former stigmatizes the latter as very insipid, and next door to silly. In times past, Dr Southey diversified the simple element of the Lakes with a portion of the Arabesque; but latterly, and especially in the present instance, he has resolutely adhered to pure water.46

Although the emigration of a lyrical ballad from the Lake District to colonial Paraguay did not convince The Examiner – a liberal paper run by Byron’s friend Hunt – it was welcomed by journals more sympathetic to Southey’s politics and to the evangelisation of Britain’s colonies. The Eclectic Review asked ‘Why, why has the Author ever deserted his proper path? It is on works like this, which the public will not willingly let die, that his fame must stand, when his politics and his polemics shall be forgiven and forgotten’.47 The Literary Chronicle agreed: [t]he author, whose amiable domestic life is proverbial, seems to have poured forth his whole soul in song, and poets never write better than when they write from the heart. We are glad to see Mr Southey return to the muses, for really, after his Vision of Judgment, he had some atonement to make and some reputation to regain.48

By the late 1820s there was, then, a welcome for a born-again Lake poet, a new warmth of reception that was also noticed by Wordsworth. Southey’s

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achievement, flawed and self-contradictory, was to update Byron’s Spenserianism, and his own Lake poetry, for a nation currently debating its imperial role as a colonial power in India, Africa, the Caribbean and the Far East. It was a sanitised and de-sexualised version of the exotic romance that would triumph as a national and imperial poetry – a version that Southey, through his attack on Byron’s Eastern tales and through his own Byronic tale, helped to crystallise. Southey, the father rebuking and yet imitating his poetic son, had the last laugh, and only in part because he outlived Byron. He may have lost the battle of wit, may have suffered under Byron’s satire, but he pioneered the adaptation (in Byron’s terms, the emasculation) of Byron’s achievement for a new era. Southey’s late success, that is to say, stemmed not from his Vision or Judgement but from his telling a Tale on his poetic junior – a tale that empire-builders wanted to hear.

part ii

Coleridge

What harm have I ever done you, dear Sir—by act or word? if you knew me, you would yourself smile at some of the charges, which, I am told, you have burthened on me—Most assuredly, you have mistaken my sentiments, alike in morality, politics, and—what is called—metaphysics—and I would fain hope that if you knew me, you would not have ascribed Self-opinion & Arrogance to me. (CL, iii, pp. 116–17)

Thus Coleridge wrote to Francis Jeffrey on 23 May 1808, after reading the Edinburgh Review’s verdict on Wordsworth’s Poems in Two Volumes. His letter is remarkable for its optimistic hope that by a personal appeal from one man of letters to another he might modify Jeffrey’s public condemnation of the Lake poets for their verbal and political levelling. It was also perceptive: denying that he subscribed to the principles of rustic simplicity on which Wordsworth’s publications were based, Coleridge had begun to understand that Jeffrey’s aim was to instil, in the expanded reading public that his journal served, the traditional literary and class values of gentlemen – and to portray the new class of professional authors as tradesmen who were not to be trusted – men who sought to influence readers’ taste because they had designs upon their pockets. Accordingly, he appealed to Jeffrey as a gentleman, rather than as a professional author dependent on remuneration from the public.1 It would, however, take more than private assurances to gain exemption from Jeffrey’s damaging attacks on the Lake school: the Edinburgh continued to lump Coleridge together with Wordsworth and Southey and to see all three as enemies of a gentlemanly public sphere. For Jeffrey they represented a literary Jacobinism that was at best perverse (the result of too much seclusion from civilised intercourse), at worst politically dangerous (because it gave undue weight to the limited experience of the lower orders), and always untrustworthy, because it sought financial profit from its overturning of traditional canons of taste.

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Whereas Jeffrey’s power over public opinion induced defiance in Southey, it left Coleridge, whose ego was always less robust than his brother-in-law’s, acutely anxious. Public vilification-by-association struck home: he could not separate his profession of authorship from his private character; Jeffrey undermined his confidence in his identity as well as in the nature poetry that friendship with Wordsworth had inspired in him. Criticism deprived him of public respect and this caused him to doubt his vocation, as a letter of April 1809 reveals. [T]he unworthy Reception of Southey’s Madoc & Wordsworth’s Poems hung such a weight on every attempt I made to finish two Poems, four fifths of which had been written years ago, that I at last gave up the Thought altogether. I once remarked there were Beauties & Excellencies enough in the very worst of Shakespere’s Plays to ensure it’s damnation had it appeared in the present age. Now it is most certain, that my Poems do not contain either in kind or degree the qualities which make Wordsworth’s poems so dear to me and many much greater men and so repulsive to others—But it was enough that I should be known to be the particular Friend both of Southey & Wordsworth to draw upon me the whole clamor of those who have waged war against them. I told Jeffray that it was rather hard upon me, that for the poems, which I have published, I received the notundeserved censure that my style was too highly ornamented, and deviating from simplicity by a too constant employment of the strongest words & boldest figures of Poetry. Even the Ancient Mariner, the only poem of any size that has appeared since—& that anonymously—was yet every where criticized in the Reviews, as ‘Laboriously beautiful’—and ‘over-polished in the diction with Dutch Industry’—and now for no poems at all but only for my acquaintanceships, I am abused in every Review & Magazine, in time and out of time for the simple & puerile. (CL, iii, p. 203)

‘Christabel’ remained unfinished, Coleridge’s confidence in his poetic voice shot by Jeffrey’s Lake school critique on the one hand and, on the other (ironically enough) by Wordsworth’s exclusion of it from Lyrical Ballads on the grounds it was too different from his own work. Alienated from the public sphere that Jeffrey presided over, Coleridge yearned after an uncommodified relationship in which the intimacy of writer and reader was not a commercial trick, an illusion created to sell books. He strove to produce such a relationship by taking the means of production and distribution into his own hands – rejecting the capitalist marketplace as Blake also did. In 1809–10 he published his journal The Friend from Grasmere – a Lake school production in which the writing, editing, marketing and distribution, all save the printing, was done by Coleridge himself with help from Southey and Wordsworth.2 Posting the journal to subscribers, many of them friends and acquaintances, Coleridge avoided

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the alienation of being marketed to an unknown public influenced by reviews. His readers were predisposed to appreciate his discourse; he had met or could meet them and so could maintain the fiction of the text’s oral delivery to auditors (as if its absent readers were potentially as present as Sara Hutchinson, the amanuensis and muse to whom he dictated it). The Friend lasted longer than many expected, but the strain of writing and publishing from the Lakes proved too much and it closed in 1810, with Coleridge leaving the region to become a paid journalist in London. He continued to fulminate in private about readers’ enslavement to commercialised notions of literary value but was deferential in public, as if selfabasement would pre-empt belittling critique. For this, and for the accompanying attempt to placate the conservative guardians of taste, he was in turn abused by former radical allies such as Hazlitt – so that he was damned by both sides. It was not until the ‘Lake poet’ tag grew still more prevalent and more contemptuous in the wake of Jeffrey’s infamous review of Wordsworth’s Excursion that he decided to take a stand. This stand, and its effects on his aesthetics, his poetry and his presentation of the poetic vocation, is the subject of this section. The stand took the direct form of a self-justification of his literary life that was also a diagnosis of a crisis in the public conception of authorship caused by the commercialisation of the book market.3 The Biographia Literaria included, among the self-exculpation and deference produced by Coleridge’s anxiety about its reception, an attack on Jeffrey’s influence over the public. Rather than uphold gentlemanly standards as he claimed, Jeffrey had personalised criticism, impugning the author’s character rather than debating his writing – and this despite the fact he had been given hospitality as a gentleman when he visited the Lake poets at home.4 Coleridge went on to insist that professional authors did not, by virtue of their trade, exempt themselves from gentlemanly codes. They acted as and deserved treatment as gentlemen: he defended Southey the writer as Southey the gentleman, pointing to his exemplary personal life as well as to his work’s morality and exonerating it from a preference for the simplistic, the prosaic and the vulgar. In the process, he also dissociated himself from the Preface to Lyrical Ballads and protested against the injustice of his inclusion among the Lake sect when the little he had published was more notable for faults of over-ornamentation than of over-simplicity. Thus the results of the Lake poet critique were lasting: Coleridge was pushed not just into a defence of his friends and an attack on Jeffrey, but also into a redefinition of the vocation of the poet and his relationship to his readers. Like Wordsworth, whose 1815 Essay Supplementary rejected the

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contemporary reading public and instead imagined an idealised relationship between poet and timeless ‘people’, Coleridge argued that the print culture of his day had become a literary marketplace, dominated by selfappointed judges who were more interested in judging poets’ personalities than their poems, because they needed sensational copy to sell their journals and magazines. ‘A Crime it is’, he declared in 1809, ‘thus to introduce the spirit of vulgar scandal, and personal inquietude into the Closet and the Library, environing with evil passions the very Sanctuaries, to which we should flee for refuge from them!’5 In this all-pervasive marketplace, the new reviews could make or break writers’ careers, for writers were dependent on sales, the older system of patronage having declined as commercialism grew. For Coleridge, Jeffrey’s condescension flattered the public into thinking itself superior to the writers he reviewed; in turn, Jeffrey gained an inflated sense of his importance because the public bought his journal. Coleridge argued instead for ‘genial criticism’, a practice that concentrated on the work, not the author, and that aimed to reveal the particular merits of the writing – pointing out defects only in so far as they were characteristic, rather than ‘accidental failures or faulty passages’ (BL, i, p. 61) and raising the reader to an understanding of the principles on which the work was written, so as to enable informed judgement. He was pushed, that is to say, to argue for a professionalised literary criticism, even though practitioners of this criticism did not yet exist. An imagined literary community compensated for the contemporary culture of reviewing and saved the vocation of poetry from current obsessions with personality and commercial success. This idealised readership, Coleridge prophesied, would transcend time, vindicating the poets unjustly abused as Lakers. Posterity would triumph over the present – a prophecy that came to pass because in the twentieth century Coleridge’s definition of a genial criticism, practised by a professionalised clerisy, laid the foundation of the institutionalised university discipline of English Literature.6 Coleridge understood that to answer Jeffrey’s charges effectively he needed to set out a new poetic that did not derive poetic language from the speech of the lower classes. The Preface to Lyrical Ballads had drawn Jeffrey’s ire because it inverted the hierarchy of sociolects – a subversive poetic with implications for society in general. In the Biographia Coleridge moved to free not only his own and Southey’s poetry from the jacobinical associations of the Preface, but Wordsworth’s too. In what became perhaps the most influential critical intervention in English literary history, he introduced the concept of imagination as the key to understanding both the poet’s creativity and the poetry’s effect. As many critics have shown,7 he

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argued that Wordsworth had been misled by his own Preface, that when he wrote at his best it was not on the basis of copying rustic speech, and that when he copied rustic speech closely he was often (and here Coleridge reiterated Jeffrey’s charge) bathetically commonplace, displaying a perverse attachment to matter-of-fact things and words because he had lost perspective on how unimportant those things and words would seem to readers. If he but knew himself, Wordsworth was not a Lake poet but a poet of imagination, imbuing standard English, rather than rustic dialect, with complex patterns of thought and feeling. His odes, lyrics and autobiographical blank verse, rather than his ballads, were his contribution to English poetry. Coleridge, then, elevated Wordsworth to greatness (and configured him as the kind of poet he himself aspired to be)8 by jettisoning his poetic and the poetry most closely based on that poetic: a new Wordsworth rose from the pages of the Biographia, immune to Jeffrey’s criticism because defined in relation to the new critical criterion of imagination which, Coleridge argued, transcended the present publishing market. As a poet of imagination Wordsworth was fit to stand alongside England’s two greatest poets, who were also, Coleridge argued, pre-eminent in imagination – Milton and Shakespeare. The history of the adoption of Coleridgean imagination by twentiethcentury criticism has often been told, and since Jerome J. McGann’s Romantic Ideology we have learnt, rather than simply to use ‘imagination’ uncritically, to understand its original historical situatedness (although a tendency to focus on its denial of Coleridge’s 1790s radicalism has in practice often meant that its origin as a response to Jeffrey has been obscured). Yet the Biographia discussion of ‘imagination’ was not the only new aesthetic that Coleridge produced in response to criticism of the Lake poets. In 1816 he published a volume containing both old, never before printed, poetry and a commentary on that poetry – a volume entitled Christabel: Kubla Khan, A Vision; The Pains of Sleep. In this section I shall consider this 1816 publication as an attempt to lay out, in theory and practice, a poetic and poetry self-consciously distinguished from Wordsworth’s and from Lake poetry. Part of Coleridge’s stand against Jeffrey and the critical consensus Jeffrey had created for the reading public, the Christabel volume re-collected old work that might establish Coleridge not as a poet who was bound to minute rustic detail, but as the pioneer of a poetry of imagination, derived from fantasy. There was a priority claim in this strategy: Coleridge used the volume to demonstrate that he was the founding father of a literary school that both Jeffrey and the public respected – the school of Gothic romance and exotic tales associated with Scott and Byron. Here, then, Coleridge’s

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influential mythologisation of the Romantic poet emerged from a sense that he was being superseded in the public eye by a new generation of poets who were in fact dependent on his work. Escaping the ‘Lake school’ label by his redefinition of the poet, Coleridge had nevertheless to explain why he was now publishing poems that he had still not finished. To do so he carefully constructed a public persona – the suffering poet who cannot complete his past work – that was to become an enormously prevalent stereotype about the Romantic artist. Hence he was opposing the personalisation of criticism emblematised by Jeffrey about which he had protested by inventing a persona in response. This invention was both an apologetic and a myth-making exercise, creating an artist for whom it was already, on the poems’ first publication, too late to complete them – a forever-belated writer who could not relive the lost moment of inspiration, so damaged was he by the isolation of the creative artist in the contemporary public sphere. His poems, it follows, were late poems from the time of their first printing, when they were self-consciously presented as the fragments of an inspired dreamer and belated valetudinarian. The Christabel volume, even as it hankered after success on the book market, opposed to commercial print culture a model of oral transmission, imagining the poet enchanting an audience and the poem as a performance. By the late 1820s, however, Coleridge had developed a poetic that exploited the possibilities of that commercial print culture. Rather than harking back from textuality to orality, the poems he contributed to the popular literary annuals embraced visuality: layout, typesize, illustrations were all attended to, and words set out, in one and the same poem, according to the typographical conventions used for essays, play texts and verse. This development was in part a response to the annuals’ feminised, luxurious textual space, and in part to a conversation that Coleridge entered in their pages with women poets influenced by him, and with women readers. It continued beyond the annuals too: as he came to collect his poems for an edition that would be the summation of his career and his statement to posterity, Coleridge set out a different model of communication – a gendered allegory of textuality suggesting that male writing needed female reading. Here, too, his late style involved a disassembly of old manuscripts so as to emphasise their incompleteness: Coleridge fragmented an early poem, published the resultant fragment and invited the reader to complete it by bestowing her sympathetic understanding upon it.9 This was a radical move – an anticipation of modernist procedures. In effect, Coleridge sketched out a theory that attempted to brace the appeal to female sympathy made by the annuals with a greater stress on intellectual interaction. Coleridge’s theory expected the

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feminine reader to complete the text by reading it – bringing to realisation what the masculine writer could not without her. Reading was intended to create a mental androgyny – a manoeuvre designed as an alternative to the feminisation of the literary sphere epitomised by Gothic novels, circulating libraries and the Minerva Press. Here Coleridge intervened in debates about the role of women readers with an appeal to women’s intellects that would have earned Wollstonecraft’s approval and did win Virginia Woolf’s praise. This model of poetics as communication was new in 1828 – a late departure of an aging poet – but depended on the 1816 model laid out in Christabel: the 1828 model of reception as heterotextual intercourse depends upon the prior establishment of a male poetic persona. Yet although it depends upon the 1816 model, it also defuses the anxiety over publication that generated the 1816 model by shifting from a poetics of orality to a poetics of print. Yet it was still legislative – setting out the preferred response of the reader in advance, as if to obviate criticism – and was beset by another anxiety – about a femininity of power – and by Coleridge’s sexual/emotional needs for a femininity of succour. It rejected contemporary conventions yet struggled to envision an alternative and then to uphold that alternative.10 Thus his late poetry, a product of revision, was no simple expression of a neatly gendered model of reading but a discourse in which personal and social contradictions arose and were made visible – without final resolution. In the Coleridge section, then, I show how the older poet, recollecting earlier work for publication years after its composition, and experiencing extreme anxiety about its reception by reviewers and readers, selfconsciously embraced lateness, shaping the Romantic figure that has remained powerful to this day – the poet who is always too late to regain the moment and to complete his inspired work.11 Coleridge’s inspired poet, and the poetic represented by that poet, were, that is to say, constructions designed to defuse anticipated readerly hostility – figures whose apparent ahistoricity disguises their origin in the vagaries of publishing in 1816 and 1828. To reveal this historical origin is not to diminish their power but it is to show that the Romantic Ideology, in so far as it was shaped by Coleridge, was a late mythologisation of early work that was at its most compelling when entry into the public sphere put him under the severest pressure.

chapter 3

Print and performance: Christabel: Kubla Khan, A Vision; The Pains of Sleep

That the Creative Genius and the Fragment are cultural constructions of continuing power is a truth universally acknowledged. That they were built in the Romantic period is also widely accepted. Scholars of Romanticism have long agreed that at least some of the building was done by Coleridge, in the preface to the unfinished ‘Christabel’ and in his famous ‘On the Fragment of Kubla Khan’, with its account of the drug-fuelled visionary poet unable to finish writing his poem because of the interruption of the person from Porlock. More recently, Romanticists have begun to focus upon the publication context of Coleridge’s account, examining ‘Christabel’ and ‘Kubla Khan’ not as poems of 1798–18001 but as texts of 1816, not works of Coleridge’s Somerset annus mirabilis – the year that produced ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’ and ‘Frost at Midnight’ – but of the opium-racked London period: not early, but late.2 That is to say, although composed between 1798 and 1800, they were not published for nearly twenty years, and when they did reach the reading public for the first time it was in amended form, and with prefaces that changed the way they were read. Not only that, but they were published together, along with ‘The Pains of Sleep’ from 1803, in a little stand-alone volume, and as such made a collective impact as poems of a particular kind – poems to do with fragmentation, enchantment, reverie and, as the book’s title emphasised, ‘vision’. It is in their context in this publication that I want to explore them here so as to investigate how they became two of the most famous poems in the language as late, re-collected texts, amended so as to exemplify ideas about the Creative Genius and the Romantic Fragment that Coleridge had not conceived in 1798 and 1800 but that were conservative interventions in the cultural politics of the literary marketplace of 1815 and 1816. It was in 1815 and 1816 that attacks on the Lake poets reached a climax as first Jeffrey and then Hazlitt accused them of a perverse egotism in both poetry and politics caused by their seclusion in the mountains 113

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(see introduction, above). By then Coleridge was painfully aware that he – a poet who had published no collection of poetry since the 1790s – had invited controversy, in a polarised public sphere, by his political journalism – first jacobinical, later conservative – as well as by association with Wordsworth. While he wished to justify the journalism, he was eager to dissociate himself from the Preface to Lyrical Ballads. He had privately thought since 1802 that there was a marked difference between his and Wordsworth’s ideas about poetry; after falling out with his friend in 1810 he felt less and less inclined to remain silent about this difference when he saw himself condemned in the press as if he were a Wordsworthian poet. The accusations were, after all, debilitating – they not only, he thought, robbed him, as they did all the ‘Lake poets’, of cultural capital, they also deprived him of readers and of income. They left him embittered about the selfappointed guardians of taste who presided over the influential reviewing journals and governed the taste of the book-buying public. By 1816, belittled in the press, anxious for approval, desperate for money, Coleridge no longer knew how to be a poet – how to live out a vocation as a professional verse-writer – in a politicised public sphere that, puzzlingly, valued neither his nor his friends’ work but that rewarded younger men with adulation for poems that had been influenced by his own unpublished poetry. While the patronage of industrialists and landowners (the Wedgwoods and Beaumonts) provided some money and connections, it did not confer public approval or influence: in an increasingly commercial book market, a poet had to sell to be respected as an author. As Nigel Leask, A.C. Goodson and others have shown, Coleridge’s response to his marginalisation as a Lake poet is evident in the Biographia, in his critiques of Wordsworth’s attachment to the commonplace and of Jeffrey’s influence over the reading public.3 Calling Jeffrey ‘the commander in chief of unmanly warfare’, Coleridge impugned his sincerity, arguing that he ran Wordsworth down in public, despite admiring Lyrical Ballads in private, in order to push sales of the Edinburgh Review up: ‘a Review, in order to be a saleable article, must be personal, sharp, and pointed ’ (BL, ii, p. 157). The consequence of such personal attacks, which branded men as perverse and puerile on the basis of what they wrote, was the destruction of writers’ reputations and livelihoods: critics ‘knowingly strive to make it impossible for the man even to publish any future work without exposing himself to all the wretchedness of debt and embarrassment’ (BL, ii, p. 157). Wordsworth had withheld The White Doe of Rylstone from publication for fear of such exposure; Coleridge had himself ‘been for at least 17 years consecutively dragged forth . . . into the foremost ranks of the proscribed,

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and forced to abide the brunt of the abuse, for faults . . . which I certainly had not’ (BL, i, p. 50), these faults being those that Jeffrey had identified in Wordsworth and Southey – egotism, silliness, jacobinical overturning of established literary rules and tastes. Acquitting himself of these faults, Coleridge recognised that the public sphere had become more oppositional and personalised than ever before. He saw that the Preface to Lyrical Ballads was the root cause of critical attacks and began the repositioning of Wordsworth as the author of the ‘First Genuine philosophic poem’ (BL, ii, p. 156) – a poet of imagination whose writing emerged from a mental process that was a ‘repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I am’ (BL, i, p. 304). As for Byron and Scott – the poets who had become popular by imitating ‘Christabel’, which they had heard recited years before publication – Coleridge envied their ability to manage careers in what he called, disparagingly, an ‘age of personality’.4 They had sold themselves to a public that fed on gossip and celebrity by creating, for the mass readership they would never meet, an illusion of intimacy, via personae that identified the poet with an idealised chivalric figure – the bard, the ‘childe’, the knight of old who was motivated by honour, nobility and loyalty and who stood out against the commercialised, market-driven contemporary world.5 Ironically enough – and Coleridge was well aware of the irony since the figure echoed his own Bard Bracy in ‘Christabel’ – this anti-commercial figure brought them great commercial success, while Coleridge, the source of the motif, the chivalric tale and even of the metre they borrowed, languished in neglect. As I argue below, by 1816 he wanted to establish the priority of his work to theirs, without seeming to cavil – especially since his poems were, after all, still unfinished. He also wanted to imitate them in producing a persona that would stand between the author and the personality-addicted public, protecting himself from attack while, hopefully, enchanting readers with a mythologised poet-figure who was too other-worldly to appear either grasping and commercial, on the one hand, or rustic and jacobinical, on the other. Thus he invented the figure in the prefaces of ‘Kubla Khan’ and ‘Christabel’ – an inspired poet who drew his inspiration from his own mind but one who, unlike Wordsworth, was unable to control his inner muse because he could access it only in states of being that were unconscious and involuntary – in dream, reverie and vision.6 This poet-figure, therefore, was belated – in thrall to an unconscious self he could not recall at will, unable to complete poems because incapable of renewing the visions of the past. He was also a sufferer: the ‘Kubla’ preface implies that opium allowed access to the muse but ‘The

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Pains of Sleep’ suggests that it did so at the terrible price of repeated nightmares in which the dreamer is haunted by fear and loathing. Together in the Christabel volume, the poems establish a darker figure than is apparent when they are encountered separately, or without the prefaces of 1816, a figure that remains culturally powerful to this day – that of the creative genius who damages himself – often by drugs or drink – in an effort to explore the hidden realm of the unconscious. This figure, too, is belated, as if Coleridge shaped himself as a typical self-damaging Byronic hero – an ironic persona and backhanded tribute since Byron was both one of the poets whose printed work imitated the unpublished ‘Christabel’ and the instigator who had used the influence his success brought him to persuade the bookseller to issue this very volume. To understand how Coleridge arrived at the poetic, and figure of the poet, that he mythologises so belatedly in 1816 as he recollects old poems, it is necessary to begin in 1800, when ‘Christabel’ was dropped from Lyrical Ballads, and 1803, when ‘The Pains of Sleep’ was composed. Accordingly, in the next section I shall trace the gradual development of Coleridge’s poetic of reverie and dream from this early period when his differences from Wordsworth started to appear. I shall show how these differences became overwritten by Coleridge’s response to public attacks on the Lake poets. In further sections I shall then consider the Christabel volume itself, looking at the relationships of prefaces to poems therein, and at Coleridge’s uneasy relationship with his younger imitators. Throughout, I shall be concerned to reveal how the poems are reconfigured by the 1816 volume; I shall also show that Coleridge’s unease about publication leaves their printed form haunted by their prior oral circulation – and that in giving priority to their oral circulation Coleridge develops a poetic that hinges on the effects on an audience of metrical performance. Here my argument contributes to a scholarly debate concerning Romantic theories of metre and measure and, in particular, the textualisation, as an effect of silentlyread print, of the oral features of recitation.7 I introduce the concept of enchantment to characterise Coleridge’s understanding of poetry’s transmission through recitation – poetry as a melody or chant that not only entrances its hearers but sponsors their utterance, moving them to forms of ritualised speech act8 – prayer, song, entreaty, decree. Building on the work of Lucy Newlyn, I suggest that lateness in the 1816 volume manifests itself as a pre-emptive response to Coleridge’s anxiety of reception in print: to obviate readers’ criticism he harks back from the printed page to the sound of poems’ long pre-existence as chanted verse. He constructs a poetic persona designed to overcome his fear that in setting recited verse in type

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he risks silencing it – or at least substituting for its orally performed elements so limited and fixed a range of print devices that its enchanting effect is lost.9 Self-violating in this respect, the volume presents songs that print cannot wholly renew and complete – three fragments in search of a singer. Because of this, it necessitated later Coleridgean attempts to hark forward, to model in print the conditions in which reading type might achieve (or substitute for) the enchantment of hearing music: I shall investigate one of these in Chapter 4. In 1816 Coleridge was not able to hark forward: his model of poetic reception demanded the full oral presence of reciter – preferably the poet himself – and audience; he both admired and resented those poets who had transformed this model for an increasingly commercial book market, turning his bardic melody into an effect of print – an inferred music, heard so deeply that it is not heard at all. He feared, however, after nearly twenty years since his last book of verse, that this printed music would not sing from his own pages. Reviewers, we shall see, agreed, with Hazlitt in particular suggesting that the volume’s oral poetic was a reactionary and obscurantist betrayal of Coleridge’s 1790s democratic discourse. 1 8 0 0 – 1 8 1 6 : c o l e r i d g e ’ s p o e t i c o f r e ve r i e In 1800, after Wordsworth caused the unfinished ‘Christabel’ to be excluded from the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge lost confidence in himself. Unable to collaborate or compete with Wordsworth as a poet, he developed strategies whereby he could retain for himself a certain authority by figuring and refiguring his inadequacy in language that he could claim to be unique to himself. While seeming to advertise its failings, he carved a space (albeit an unstable one) for his verse by relating it to the realm of suspended consciousness – to reverie, daydream, trance and dream – and by criticising Wordsworth for being too attached to the material world: as early as 1802 he declared himself ‘startled’ by Wordsworth’s ‘strict adherence to matter of fact, even to prolixity’ (CL, ii, p. 830); here his private opinion chimed with Jeffrey’s first published attack on the Lake ‘sect’ for their ‘depravation of language’ and ‘debasement of all those feelings which poetry is designed to communicate’.10 He then began a series of speculations that worked towards an aesthetic in which his poetry, and the hold it sought over his readers, were defined in different terms – by analogy with states of consciousness in which the reason and will are suspended, and the normal boundary they create between outer and inner worlds blurred. On 6 August he reported a mountain-climbing

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trip in phrases that bear on this issue. Faced with a terrifying drop as he descended Broad Stand, yet too exhausted to retrace his steps, he lay in a state of almost prophetic Trance & Delight—& blessed God aloud, for the powers of Reason & the Will, which remaining no Danger can overpower us! O God, I exclaimed aloud—how calm, how blessed I am now / I know not how to proceed, how to return / but I am calm & fearless & confident / if this Reality were a Dream, if I were asleep, what agonies had I suffered! what screams!—When the Reason and the Will are away, what remain to us but Darkness & Dimness & a bewildering Shame, and Pain that is utterly Lord over us, or fantastic Pleasure, that draws the Soul along swimming through the air in many shapes, even as a Flight of Starlings in a Wind. (CL, ii, p. 842)

Here, reason and will are essential for the self to be confident enough for voluntary action; if they are suspended we find ourselves as we are in dreams, passive and masochistic in our vulnerability to emotions produced by the involuntary association of ideas in the mind. Coleridge seems as fascinated by the exploration of mental distress and helplessness as he is by the discovery of the rational power by which the mind regains self-control. Apparently, it was the exploration of mental states such as that experienced on Broad Stand that allowed him to internalise the dynamics of a sublime in which, unlike Wordsworth in the Alps, the narrator is subjected to terror and humiliation without a Kantian discovery of the freedom, and consequent superior greatness, of his own mind. The year 1803 saw Coleridge making further exploration of such mental states – occurring now, as they would frequently as his opium addiction deepened, in dream and nightmare. In October he wrote to his friend Thomas Poole, detailing a period of terrible nightmares in which ‘my Dreams became the Substances of my Life’. He noted that I went into Scotland with Wordsworth & his Sister; but I soon found that I was a burthen on them / & Wordsworth, himself a brooder over his painful hypochondriacal Sensations, was not my fittest companion / so I left him & the Jaunting Car, & walked by myself far away into the Highlands—in the hopes of forcing the Disease into my extremities. (CL, ii, pp. 1009–10)

Having left the Wordsworths and continued his tour alone, consuming large amounts of opium and walking prodigious distances, Coleridge reached Edinburgh, whence he sent, on 11 September, a letter to Southey containing the verse later entitled ‘The Pains of Sleep’. Quoting that verse in the later letter to Poole, Coleridge placed its dream imagery in the context of his vexed relationship with Wordsworth. Here is the excerpt he made for Poole:

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A lurid Light, a ghastly Throng— Sense of insufferable wrong— And whom I scorn’d, they only strong! — Thirst of Revenge, the powerless will Still baffled, & yet burning still— Tempestuous pride, vain-glorious Vaunting, Base Men my vices justly taunting— Desire with Loathing strangely mixt, On wild or hateful Objects fix’d— Fantastic Passions, mad’ning Brawl, And Shame & Terror over all! — Deeds to be hid, that were not hid, Which, all confus’d I might not know, Whether I suffer’d or I did: For all was Guilt, & Shame, & Woe— My own or others’, still the same, Life-stifling Fear, soul-stifling Shame! — (CL, ii, pp. 1009–10)

These dreams of guilt, resentment, powerlessness, pride and self-loathing had opium as their proximate cause – although Coleridge did not tell his correspondents so – but were clearly also produced by the anxiety that was coming to dog his relationship with Wordsworth. The poetry that Coleridge made from these dreams, meanwhile, was reminiscent of ‘The Ancient Mariner’ and ‘Christabel’ in that it explored a mind in a nightmarish state, as if distancing himself from Wordsworth allowed him to renew the strain of verse of which his friend had disapproved. Certainly, the narrator of ‘The Pains of Sleep’ displays the characteristics which Wordsworth had singled out as defects in his note on ‘The Ancient Mariner’ (an inability to act, a lack of character), for he is subject to a paralysing inability to distinguish suffering from doing. As the last lines suggest, the dream experience acts as an exploration of the powerlessness of the will, whether sleeping or waking: Such Punishment[s], I thought, were due To Natures, deepliest stain’d with Sin, Still to be stirring up anew The self-created Hell within; The Horror of their Crimes to view, To know & loathe, yet wish & do! With such let Fiends make mockery— But I—O wherefore this on me? Frail is my Soul, yea, strengthless wholly, Unequal, restless, melancholy; But free from Hate, & sensual Folly!

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(CL, ii, p. 984)

The end is more frightening, and still less Wordsworthian, than the analysis Coleridge had made the previous year when descending Broad Stand. Here ‘Reason and Will’ do not intervene to restore a confident and active self. The awakened dreamer remains ‘strengthless wholly’ since he discovers no means of escaping a perverse stasis in which he loathes what he wishes, and wishes what he loathes. This is, as it were, a vicious vice versa versified, but not thereby transcended. Coleridge may wish ‘to live beloved’ but cannot act to do so, because he is caught in a dream theatre of selftemptation and torture. The poem lacks the resolving conclusion in which moral and poetic power might be regained for the poet, unlike the ‘Immortality Ode’, which Wordsworth wrote at this period in response to another of Coleridge’s explorations of weakness – the ‘Dejection’ letter to Sara. Without a resolution of this kind, the poem is unconventional in terms of early nineteenth-century literary values as well as dissimilar to Wordsworth’s alternative to those values: it is neither properly moral nor a poem on the growth of his own mind. It is, however, like Wordsworth and a Lake poem in one respect: its exploration of mind is clearly derived from the commonplace doings and feelings of the poet himself; it is confessional in a way that Jeffrey found egotistical, perverse and improper. It is also an example of the kind of poetry Coleridge wanted when he told Mrs Barbauld that ‘The Ancient Mariner’ ‘had too much moral, and that too openly obtruded on the reader’.11 After 1803 Coleridge worked the ideas implicit in ‘The Pains of Sleep’ into a poetic that accounted for his ‘radical difference’ from Wordsworthian Lake poetry. This poetic related both the composition and the reception of poetry to dreaming. In April 1805 he noted that ‘there is often a dim sense of the Presence of a Person in our dreams, whose form does not appear’ (CN, ii, 2546). Dream images were symbolic, capable of evoking feelings of the presence of something that was, in fact, absent from them. Coleridge began to think of poetry in a similar way, as a note of November 1804 shows: Poetry a rationalised dream dealing [about?] to manifold Forms our own Feelings, that never perhaps were attached by us consciously to our own personal Selves.— What is the Lear, the Othello, but a divine Dream / all Shakespere, & nothing Shakespere. (CN, ii, 2086)

Here poetry is a dream of which the rational mind has taken control. The apparently objective forms and images of the poem, like those of the dream

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but now deployed for a conscious purpose by a reawakened reason, are imbued with the poet’s feelings, allowing him to gain an emotional recognition of aspects of the self not otherwise possible, even though the self itself is not recognised in them. Next, he brought his analysis of dreaming to bear upon the concepts of the symbol and of imitation, two crucial terms in his literary criticism: Hard to express that sense of the analogy or likeness of a Thing which enables a Symbol to represent it, so that we think of the Thing itself—& yet knowing that the Thing is not present to us. —Surely, on this universal fact of words & images depends by more or less mediations the imitation instead of copy which is illustrated in the very nature shakespearianized /—that Proteus Essence that could assume the very form, but yet known & felt not to be the Thing by that difference of the Substance which made every atom of the Form another thing /—that likeness not identity—an exact web, every line of direction miraculously the same, but the one worsted, the other silk. (CN, ii, 2274)

Proteus – the shape-changing god – would remain in Coleridge’s criticism a label for the kind of poetry that Shakespeare, but not Wordsworth, wrote – a poetry far removed from Lake poetry because the imaginative world produced in the poem was not visibly derived from the poet’s biographical self, being removed from the incidents of ordinary life which, as Jeffrey complained, seemed too trivial to be believable sources for it. There is also here a distinction between copy and imitation that would inform Coleridge’s thinking about Scott’s borrowings from ‘Christabel’ – an imitative poet is entranced by the poem he hears but translates enough of himself into the verse he produces in response for that verse to be, though similar in form, his own throughout. Such an imitative process, as we shall see, typically occurred when recited poetry placed the auditor in a state of reverie, or daydream, in which he was moved to symbolise himself in imagery and narrative. A much later note crystallised this idea in a highly pregnant pun: ‘Personae Somnis ¼ Dreamatis Personae, in which the subject is reorganised as an object’ (CN, v, 5670; cf. CN, v, 5642). The ‘rationalised’ or ‘waking’ dream that is poetry creates an apparently objective dramatis personae of characters or images, who are nevertheless resonant with (symbolic of) a sense of a subjective self (usually, but not always, the poet) who is not actually present.12 The onus in this theory of poetic composition is on ‘waking’ not sleeping dream, and on analogous states such as reverie and trance, when, reason and will being suspended (lulled but not completely banished), the boundaries of self and world are blurred and the imagery of the dream takes on the externality – the vivid outness – of a hallucination. In 1818 Coleridge summed the theory up in the phrase ‘a

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poem may in one sense be a dream, but it must be a waking dream’ (Lects 1808–19, ii, p. 425). By 1816 Coleridge had arrived at, although not published, a comprehensive, non-Wordsworthian poetic that was implicitly a theory both of composition and reception. Poetry was composed when an author’s inner states were projected outwards without the author’s being apparent in them; it was received when auditors, agreeing to suspend their monitory awareness of what is and is not real, allowed its rhythms and sounds so to lull them that they entered a reverie or waking dream, during which they projected the scene – the story – of the poem outwards from their imaginations, so that it acquired externality.13 He set out this reception theory in a letter written just when the Christabel volume was in production: The truth is, that Images and Thoughts possess a power in and of themselves, independent of that act of the Judgement or Understanding by which we affirm or deny the existence of a reality correspondent to them. Such is the ordinary state of the mind in Dreams. It is not strictly accurate to say, that we believe our dreams to be actual while we are dreaming. We neither believe or disbelieve it – with the will the comparing power is suspended, and without the comparing power any act of Judgement, whether affirmation or denial, is impossible. The Forms and Thoughts act merely by their own inherent power: and the strong feelings at times apparently connected with them are in point of fact bodily sensations, which are the causes or occasions of the Images, not (as when we are awake) the effects of them. Add to this a voluntary Lending of the Will to this suspension of one of it’s own operations (i.e. that of comparison & consequent decision concerning the reality of any sensuous Impression) and you have the true Theory of Stage Illusion. (CL, iv, pp. 641–2)

Here poetry is dependent on an audience’s agreement to let itself enter a dream-like state – the very state Coleridge had imagined himself entering when descending Broad Stand in 1802. A poem’s reception was akin to hallucination but it relied on a voluntary agreement to suspend one’s disbelief; it was illusion, not delusion. In the playhouse the audience communally agreed to the suspension, aided by warmth and darkness, which removed distracting sensory inputs from elsewhere. But the process happened not only in actual theatres, for it was modelled on the idea that the mind became a theatre, projecting images that acquired externality, in reverie. According to Coleridge, reverie could be induced in other kinds of performance, and by other means of transmission, than the drama. It depended most of all on metre, for which Coleridge developed an explanation both physiological and psychological. He argued that trance, reverie

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and daydream were stimulated when a mild level of sensory stimulation was continued for a period, uninterrupted by sudden, competing sensory inputs. Metre, Coleridge thought, was analogous to the mesmerist’s repeated touch – a regular repeated rhythmic pattern that strokes or massages the body, touching it through the ear (as in a lullaby). When combined with mellifluous sound effects, metre could lull the self, putting the monitors of its boundaries to sleep and thus inducing a temporary suspension of difference between self and other. In this state, the mind responds to the metrical words by investing them – the imagined scenes they evoke – with feeling of vividness and outness14 – coming to seem material. Hence we ‘see’ ghosts. The hearer is entranced, in a process that Coleridge described in 1807 when portraying the effect of Wordsworth’s recitation of The Prelude upon him: Scarce conscious, and yet conscious of its close I sate, my being blended in one thought (Thought was it? or Aspiration? or Resolve?) Absorbed, yet hanging still upon the sound— And when I rose, I found myself in prayer. (ll. 108–12 of ‘To W. Wordsworth’, CPW, i, part i, p. 819)

Here inspiration is suspension. ‘Hanging still’ (a temporal continuance that is also a spatial stasis) upon the sound, Coleridge finds all his attention concerted within: he is oblivious to his material surroundings and has lost the consciousness that is produced by reason’s monitoring of the self. Being is blended in thought – a mixed state that, retrospectively, Coleridge can find no single established name to designate: ‘Thought was it? or Aspiration? or Resolve?’ Elusive of conventional categories, blurring the boundaries of self and world, it is a meditative state that issues in prayer – an orally-delivered verbal act projecting the inner, spiritual self outwards – an act, too, depending on a verbal patterning which bespeaks its aim of effecting changes in, rather than making descriptions of, the world. Wordsworth’s metrical performance inspires its hearer, in other words, not just to reverie but to recitation, to the composition and delivery of a speech act that is, in Coleridge’s terms, an imitation – an entreaty whose formal patterning identifies it as holy. And Coleridge’s poem, in recording the event, seeks itself to be another such entrancing patterning of sound and semantics, touching its receivers as Wordsworth had touched Coleridge. Those receivers are conceived of as hearers just as Coleridge is within the poem: the poet envisages the successful scene of metrical reception as oral and immediate: words are chanted to present auditors who, enchanted,

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then make chants of their own. Song sponsoring song: entransment, but hinging upon agreement not to let material circumstances interfere with one’s willingness to endow with outness the imaginary world that the spoken words conjure up in one. That agreement was what Coleridge termed the ‘willing suspension of disbelief’. Willingness to suspend disbelief had, Coleridge suggested, conditions and limits. There were circumstances in which patterned words’ stimulation of the senses was outcompeted, as a note of 1796 suggests: A country fellow in a village Inn, winter night—tells a long story—all attentive &c, except one fellow who is toying with the Maid—/ The Country Man introduces some circumstance absolutely incompatible with a prior one—/The Amoroso detects it/—/&c the Philosophy of this. —Yes! I don’t tell it for a true story—you would not have found it out—if you had smooring with Mall[.] (CN, i, 232)

Here, because the ‘Amoroso’ has a stronger tactile stimulus in the caresses of the maid, he is not lulled by the sound pattern of the story and so detects when the pattern is ruptured for a moment. Similarly, cold, or physical pain, or sudden interruptions, hit the senses too strongly for the metrical spell to work – as Coleridge would explain in the Preface to ‘Kubla Khan’. At the other extreme, the entrancement could work too powerfully to be escaped – as when Christabel is ‘o’ermastered’ by Geraldine’s spell and unable to transform its effects on her mind and body into her own pattern of words, or when the wedding guest finds himself compelled to stay and listen to the mariner. In these cases, the story has possessed the hearer by embodying her fear and desire in repeated patterns; and there has been no endgame. Most poems and stories, Coleridge saw, prepared their audiences for release from the spell by signalling that their end was approaching. Mesmerists learnt to agree an exit sequence in advance of the séance – as hypnotists do today. The Christabel volume would dramatise the breakdowns that occur when exit was rendered impossible – when neither composition nor reception could be properly completed.15

r ev e r i e b e f o re r e v e re n c e : c o l e r i d g e ’ s c r i t i q u e o f t he p re f a c e to ‘ lyrical ballads’ Before the Christabel volume saw print most of the Biographia was written. It was not in explanation of his own poetic but in criticism of Wordsworth’s that Coleridge’s theories of poetic composition and reception were first formulated for the public. In fact, what brought them into

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focus after 1810 was public censure as a Lake poet, becoming acute after Jeffrey’s reviews of Wordsworth’s Poems in Two Volumes (1808) and The Excursion (1814). ‘I am abused’, he wrote in 1809, ‘in every Review & Magazine, in time and out of time for the simple & puerile’ (CL, iii, p. 203). By 1814 Coleridge was determined to dissociate himself from the Jacobin poetics of the Preface to Lyrical Ballads and to revive his separate poetic reputation. Rewriting his career in the Biographia began to achieve this. Here his strategy was to identify with Wordsworth alone the characteristics that Jeffrey had found to be common to the three Lake poets. Coleridge effectively conceded the justice of Jeffrey’s criticism of Lyrical Ballads while regretting its personalised and contemptuous tone, attacking Wordsworth for too great a fondness for the details of the ordinary and for an inadequate conception of the importance to poetry of metre. Mobilising his new, as yet unpublished, theory of poetry’s emergence from and reception by states of suspended consciousness, he argued that Wordsworth’s ballads destroyed the basic contract between reader and writer that permits poetic faith: ‘that illusion contradistinguished from delusion, that negative faith, which simply permits the images presented to work by their own force, without either denial or affirmation of their real existence by the judgement, is rendered impossible by their immediate neighbourhood to words and facts of known and absolute truth’ (BL, ii, p. 134). Wordsworth undermined his own genius by seeking to return the evocations of imaginative states, the ‘meditative observation’ (BL, ii, pp. 144–5) for which his poetry was notable, to particularised, and often trivial, sets of social and historical causes. These causes seemed, such was their ordinariness, comically inadequate occasions for the emotion they were said to produce, and so the ‘illusion’ upon which poetic faith depends was broken. For Coleridge, mobilising his theory of poetic illusion in the Biographia was a triply effective strategy: it gave him a ground from which he could attack the Preface to Lyrical Ballads and extol (while recognising the limitations of) the Wordsworth of The Prelude who wrote of his own mind; it allowed him to dissociate himself from the jacobinical aspects of Lake poetry, since a poetry that renounced ‘facts’ could not be held responsible for its statements about historical events and social injustices; it validated his own past poetry – the poetry criticised by Wordsworth – as being both different from, and more truly poetic than, Wordsworth’s. The resultant increase of confidence in his own work stands behind the famous distinction that Coleridge makes, in Chapter 14, between the poetry of ‘ordinary life’ that Wordsworth wrote for Lyrical Ballads and his own:

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my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith . . . With this view I wrote the ‘Ancient Mariner,’ and was preparing among other poems, the ‘Dark Ladie,’ and the ‘Christabel,’ in which I should have more nearly realized my ideal, than I had done in my first attempt. (BL, ii, pp. 6–7)

‘Suspension of disbelief’ is the key phrase here: it affiliates true poetry to daydream, reverie and trance, taking it beyond the scope of Lake poetry and Wordsworthian ballads. Coleridge then dismantles Wordsworth’s discussion of metre, replacing it with a psychological account that further linked poetry with the oral and the mesmeric. As the ‘interpenetration of passion and will’ (BL, ii, p. 66), metre arises spontaneously when people strive to keep their passion in check while speaking. It is consciously developed by the poet to blend ‘delight with emotion’ and, when combined with vocal effects – control of pitch, time, pause, emphasis, tone – what Coleridge termed, imitating what was conjectured to be the performance style of bards and minstrels,16 ‘chant’ – it acts on readers and auditors as a ‘stimulant of the attention’ (BL, ii, p. 69). Metre as music as drug: It tends to increase the vivacity and susceptibility both of the general feelings and of the attention. This effect it produces by the continued excitement of surprise, and by the quick reciprocations of curiosity still gratified and still re-excited, which are too slight indeed to be at any one moment objects of distinct consciousness, yet become considerable in their aggregate influence. As a medicated atmosphere, or as wine during animated conversation; they act powerfully, though themselves unnoticed. (BL, ii, p. 66)

Here the ‘medicated atmosphere’ and the wine are limited, mild stimulants – different in effect from the depressant that was opium taken in large doses. Limiting the dose and controlling its effects would, whether drugs or poetic measures were in question, prove to be an issue in the Christabel volume and in the supernatural poetry that Coleridge declares in the Biographia to have been his own contribution to Lyrical Ballads. A poetic that depended on the suspension of reason and will – on a stimulated dreaminess – made poetry originate beyond consciousness, and this had consequences for Coleridge’s self-presentation. The Biographia neither placed Coleridge’s poems in competition with Wordsworth’s, nor offered them as an alternative Romantic tradition in any detailed way. To do so would have been confrontational and, because several were unfinished, immodest. It would have provoked the personalised reviewers’ attacks that Coleridge feared most. Instead, Coleridge signalled his reservations about Wordsworth’s

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egotistical factualness by contrasting it with Shakespeare’s Protean verse in which the biography and personality of the poet was nowhere apparent, though his creative power was latent throughout (BL, ii, p. 27). Shakespeare effectively became Coleridge’s personification of the opposite of a Lake poet, an embodiment of the reverie poet he himself wanted to be.

p o e t i c p o w e r s a n d s u sp e n d e d a n i m a t i o n Publishing the poems that best demonstrated Coleridge’s ‘distinct current’ – the dream-like poems ‘Christabel’ and ‘Kubla Khan’ – was difficult, because, as victims of Wordsworth’s and Jeffrey’s effect on Coleridge’s confidence in himself as a poet, they were still unfinished. So while Coleridge tried to revive his reputation by writing his literary autobiography and re-collecting his verse in Sibylline Leaves, he did not intend to publish ‘Christabel’ and ‘Kubla Khan’. It took an intervention by a younger admirer, Byron, to bring a volume to press. The circumstances of its publication are worth recounting, because they are contributory factors to the myth of the musical, drug-enchanted genius and Romantic Fragment that Coleridge presents there. Encouraged by Bowles, who had told him of Byron’s enthusiasm for ‘Christabel’, Coleridge wrote at Easter 1815 asking Byron to use his influence to find a publisher for Sibylline Leaves. On 15 October, Byron wrote hoping that ‘Christabel’ would be included: but regretting the ‘want of inclination and exertion’ that had prevented Coleridge from completing it: Last spring I saw Wr. Scott. He repeated to me a considerable portion of an unpublished poem of yours—the wildest and finest I ever heard in that kind of composition . . . I mention this, not for the sake of boring you with compliments, but as a prelude to the hope that this poem is or is to be in the volumes you are now about to publish. I do not know that even “Love” or the “Antient Mariner” are so impressive—and to me there are few things in our tongue beyond these two productions. (BLJ, iv, p. 319)

In reply Coleridge blamed his supposed lack of energy on the reviewers’ attacks on him as a Wordsworthian poet: the Report had done me such exceeding Injury, such substantial Wrong—and had besides been published in the broadest language in the Ed. Annual Register, the Ed. Review, the Quarterly Review, and other minors of the same family, that I felt myself bound in duty to myself and my children to notice & prove it’s falsehood. This I have done at full in the Autobiography now in the Press: as far as delicacy permitted. (CL, iv, pp. 602–3)

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He then sent ‘Christabel’ to Byron, noting that Scott, whose recital had alerted Byron to the poem in the first place, had borrowed from it without acknowledgement in The Lay of the Last Minstrel. Byron replied that his own Siege of Corinth also contained a passage resembling it, although written before he had heard it recited (here he may have been creative with dates). He promised to include a note alerting readers to Coleridge’s earlier piece when ‘the Siege’ was published, and did so, calling it ‘that wild and singularly original and beautiful poem’ (BPW, iii, p. 486n). Scott did not acknowledge his far heavier debt to the words and metre of ‘Christabel’ until 1830. Byron’s good offices towards Coleridge continued: he sent him £100 and he forwarded the ‘Christabel’ manuscript to Murray, recommending publication. Coleridge was then moved to confess the cause of his past dilatoriness in a phrase that, as we shall see, was significant: telling Byron of the daily habit of taking enormous doses of Laudanum which I believed necessary to my Life, tho’ I groaned under it as the worst and most degrading of Slaveries— in plain words, as a specific madness which leaving the intellect uninjured and exciting the moral feelings to a cruel sensibility, entirely suspended the moral Will. (CL, iv, pp. 626–7)

The idea of suspension and the role of opium harked back to Broad Stand and ‘The Pains of Sleep’; it also became crucial to Coleridge’s selfmythologisation in the published volume, which was entitled Christabel: Kubla Khan, A Vision; The Pains of Sleep and published on 25 May, after Coleridge had met Byron and recited ‘Kubla Khan’ to him. The volume begins with a preface that echoes the correspondence with Byron and develops the ideas about poetry’s relationship to enchantment and vision that Coleridge had been working out since 1802. Much of the preface is well known, having been reprinted in manifold modern editions of the poem. One section, however, appeared in the 1816 volume but was afterwards omitted. I place it in italics here:

PREFACE The first part of the following poem was written in the year one thousand seven hundred and ninety seven, at Stowey, in the county of Somerset. The second part, after my return from Germany, in the year one thousand eight hundred, at Keswick, Cumberland. Since the latter date, my poetic powers have been, till very lately, in a state of suspended animation. But, as in my very first conception of the tale, I had the whole present to my mind, with the wholeness no less than the liveliness of a vision; I trust that I shall be able to embody in verse the three parts yet to come, in the course of the present year.17

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Here suspended animation is the obverse of suspended disbelief: in both states the imagined scene of the poem becomes present to the mind like a vision, possessing outness – seeming an external reality although projected from within. However, in the latter state auditors voluntarily suspend the operation of reason and will so as to allow the poem to lull them into a waking dream; in the former state the poet has no willpower to commit a voluntary bodily act: like his heroine Christabel, he is possessed by dream-like images he cannot articulate in words or fix on paper. Coleridge, in effect, turns his new poetic into an apology for his past failure: he cannot, the preface tells us, complete the poems he here publishes because the nature of poetic composition rendered him helpless in the face of his own imagination. He is a visionary but not a poet, but poetry, contra the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, originates within dream, reverie and vision, rather than in rustic speech and the objects of nature. It is implicit, though, that were he able to give his ideas life (to ‘embody’ them ‘in verse’) then metre – the interpenetration of passion and will – would turn the suspended animation of the poet into the willing suspension of the hearer. Coleridge’s metaphor implies that his ‘poetic powers’ lacked stimulation – perhaps because the friendships that sustained him when he conceived ‘Christabel’ had lapsed. Stimulation was a significant concept in contemporary medicine, especially in the theories of John Brown, influential both on Erasmus Darwin (to whose ideas Coleridge’s concept of stage illusion was indebted) and Thomas Beddoes (Coleridge’s physician-mentor in the late 1790s). The effect of these medical theories on Coleridge’s distinctly physiological aesthetics has been traced by Nigel Leask, Gavin Budge and Neil Vickers.18 Budge, in particular, has argued for Brown’s pervasive influence on the Romantics’ understanding of the mind-body relationship and on their accounts of the public reception of their poetry. Both Coleridge and Wordsworth, he shows, wrote in the wake of Brown’s thesis that well-being depended upon the body’s ‘irritability’ – its means of sensory interaction with the world – receiving neither too little nor too much stimulation. ‘Gross and violent stimulants’, in Wordsworth’s phrase from the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, administered in excess by modern life, left the self frenetic, nervy, edgy (WLB, pp. 744, 747).19 Such excessive stimulation required replacement by a regime of milder stimulation – such as that provided by the calmer, slower input of Wordsworth’s own metrical poetry, or by nature’s rhythms – as occurs in ‘Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey’ where the poet enters a suspended state:

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Coleridge . . . the breath of this corporeal frame And even the motion of our human blood Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul. (ll. 44–7; WLB, pp. 116–20)

Here the suspension is productive: Wordsworth finds that nature’s rhythms – its gentle breezes, the to and fro of the Wye’s tidal flow20 – lull his bodily metrics – the heart’s beat and the lungs’ suspirations. As a result, the boundaries that reason and will establish between self and other are relaxed, and he experiences an oceanic oneness in which his own spirit no longer seems separable from the spirits that animate the external world. However, if the degree of stimulation received were to drop too low, then the suspension might become so deep that Wordsworth’s state of rapture would become a state of torpor such as suffered by victims of drowning and freezing, with the voluntary powers so sluggish that he would be unable to lift the trance. Suspended animation was a relatively new concept in 1816, emerging from contemporary debates about the nature – and location in the body – of life. In the 1770s it was popularised by the Royal Humane Society which was founded to revive people – typically those who had been drowned or frozen – who showed few, or none, of the conventional signs of life. By therapies including artificial respiration and vigorous rubbing they succeeded in rescuing accident victims from torpid states, which the surgeon John Hunter argued demonstrated ‘simple vitality’ – that basic form of life which consisted not in voluntary act, or motion, but in the unconscious power to resist bodily dissolution.21 Remedial action, therefore, required an increase of sensory stimulation – hence the warming and rubbing. Certain stimulant substances – including alcohol – were recommended; opium, considered a depressant, was not. In declaring his poetic powers in ‘till very lately’ in suspended animation, then, Coleridge implies, via allusion to contemporary life science, that they are physiologically dependent elements that have waned because the bodily/ mental organism in which they dwell is not properly stimulated by the outside world. He nevertheless hints that they may be reviving – here he probably had in mind the stimulation now being provided by Byron’s support, compensating for Jeffrey’s scorn and Wordsworth’s indifference. m e t r i c a l e n c h a n t m e n t ; p r i n t pl a g i ar i s m Byron’s support placed Coleridge in a vexed relationship with him. He was an admirer but also a competitor who, having heard ‘Christabel’ recited, was publishing a poem of his own of similar kind. Coleridge was now in his

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debt, yet was the older poet whose past work had inspired the younger man. Scott, too, although not Coleridge’s benefactor, was an acquaintance who had made his popular reputation with a poem derived from ‘Christabel’. Wordsworth, likewise, had imitated its metre in The White Doe of Rylstone, published as recently as 1815 and ridiculed by critics for its Lakish attachment to the local. As he reworked his unfinished poems for publication, Coleridge had a tortuous path to tread with regard to these friendly rivals. He wanted acknowledgement as their fount of inspiration – the origin of what had become one of the best-selling new genres, the chivalric romance. He did not want his own belated poems to seem plagiarisms from theirs, but nor did he want to mention the rivalry directly. Byron was the volume’s patron; Scott’s public reputation made him powerful; Wordsworth was a reviled Lake poet from whom he wanted publicly to dissociate his verse. It is significant, then, that all three poets appear on an anonymous basis in the 1816 Preface. Excluding their names, the preface nevertheless includes an ambivalent subtext in which the poetics of reception and influence are at stake: in this section I shall bring that subtext to light, aiming to illuminate the dependence of Coleridge’s poetics of reception on a model of oral transmission as enchantment, a physiological and psychological theory of poetry not simply as metrical but also musical language: chant. This theory developed from his discussions of dream, reverie and suspended states of consciousness: chant, in effect, transmitted reverie to its hearers. Knowingly belated in that it was recollecting old, unfinished poems that, when chanted, had already inspired younger poets to popular publications, the 1816 volume harks back, with only partial success, to their oral performance, militating against its own printed status.22 The 1816 preface to ‘Christabel’ broaches the vexed topic of its belatedness and its incompleteness. ‘It is probable’, Coleridge notes, ‘that if the poem had been published in the year 1800, the impression of its originality would have been much greater than I dare at present expect. But for this I have only my own indolence to blame’ (p. vi). ‘Christabel’ had in fact circulated for sixteen years as a performance piece recited at private gatherings, and these recitals had gained Coleridge a reputation as a poet able to enchant his audience. As Hazlitt noted, there was typically a ‘chaunt’ in his recitation: a performance in which tone, pitch, emphasis, speed moved poetry away from speech patterns towards the condition of song, or psalm – a ritualised and, as Hazlitt noted, ‘dramatic’ performance in which both metre and melody are to the fore: ‘it almost amounted to a song’.23 Coleridge himself argued that ‘a poet writes in measure, and

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measure is best made apparent by reading with a tone, which heightens the verse, and does not in any respect lower the sense’.24 He was also renowned for using gestures of his hands and arms to accompany his recital: his performance was thoroughly embodied and aimed to produce bodily as well as mental responses in his hearers: their fascination was evinced by the hair standing up on the backs of their necks as well as by their rapt concentration. In the weeks leading up to publication in 1816, Coleridge intoned both ‘Christabel’ and ‘Kubla Khan’ repeatedly – to Byron, who was ‘highly struck’,25 and to Charles Lamb, who noted ‘Coleridge is printing Xtabel by Ld. Byron’s recommendation to Murray, with what he calls a vision Kubla Khan – which said vision he repeats so enchantingly that it irradiates & brings heaven & Elysian bowers into my parlour while he sings or says it’.26 In 1817 Coleridge remembered these recent recitals’ success as a ‘species of Animal Magnetism, in which the enkindling Reciter, by perpetual comment of looks and tones, lends his own will and apprehensive faculty to his Auditors’ (BL, ii, p. 239). Since Coleridge used ‘Animal magnetism’ as a synonym of ‘mesmerism’, he evidently meant that his performance of the metrical tale stimulated his hearers as a mesmerist’s voice, gestures and touch did his patients: the patterned and repeated mild stimulation ‘enkindled’ them into a ‘sympathy of feeling’ in which they apprehended, in their own minds, the imaginary scene of his poem as if it were real. In the presence of the oral poet, they suspended their own wills, ignored their difference from him, and let his chanted tale enchant them, as if by the repeated ‘passes’ of the hypnotist’s hands over their bodies. The recited ‘Christabel’, it appeared, was the inspiring practice on which Coleridge’s theory of metrical enchantment – recitation stimulating reverie – was founded. If Brown and Darwin’s physiological account of stimulation was its foundation, the experience of performing metrical verse was at its heart. It was not Coleridge alone who entranced audiences with ‘Christabel’: Walter Scott heard it from John Stoddart, to whom Coleridge had given a manuscript; Catherine Clarkson received it from Stoddart and then recited it to Henry Crabb Robinson, who performed it for John Murray; Byron heard it from Scott; Shelley, Mary Shelley and John Polidori heard it from Byron, Shelley becoming so bodily possessed by it that he ran out of the room shrieking. The poem flourished in a chain of oral performances,27 not only mesmerising its hearers but enchanting them into poems of their own by virtue of its musically performed metrics. Scott borrowed its phrases and metre for verse that he recited ‘in an enthusiastic style of

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chant’28 to the Wordsworths in 1804; unlike Coleridge however, he finished and published this verse: when printed as The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805) it made his name. Byron, declaring that ‘Christabel’ took a ‘hold on my imagination which I never shall wish to shake off’ (BLJ, iv, pp. 318–19), imitated it; Mary Shelley followed its recitation by composing Frankenstein (published 1818). It was this movement from chanted performance to silent publication that troubled Coleridge when he came to print the poem himself, and it forms a subtext to his discussion of the poem’s dates of origin in the Preface: The dates are mentioned for the exclusive purpose of precluding charges of plagiarism or servile imitation from myself . . . I am confident, however, that as far as the present poem is concerned, the celebrated poets whose writings I might be suspected of having imitated, either in particular passages, or in the tone and the spirit of the whole, would be among the first to vindicate me from the charge, and who, on any striking coincidence, would permit me to address them in this doggerel version of two monkish Latin hexameters. ’Tis mine and it is likewise yours; But an if this will not do; Let it be mine, good friend! for I Am the poorer of the two.

(pp. vi–vii)

The ‘celebrated poets’ were Byron, Scott and, to a lesser extent, Wordsworth; Coleridge’s preservation of their anonymity indicates his deference towards their reputations but also his profound unease at publishing a poem that had flourished, unfinished, in oral recitation but had been anticipated in print by its imitators so that on first publication it already seemed not just belated but outdated. He was painfully aware that it would seem a late poem because, however long the life of its oral circulation, it was print that fixed dates of issue for the public, and Scott’s Lay had been published and copyrighted for eleven years already. Not only that, but the Lay had sold upwards of 27,000 copies, so that the elements it derived from ‘Christabel’ – the metre, the refrain and even the figure of the questing bard – were widely identified with Scott’s publication. Thus Coleridge’s deference is also inflected with assertion: in acquitting himself of plagiarism he implies that others may have plagiarised him and, although he accepts that poets may independently arrive at similar compositions, his doggerel verse riddlingly implies that the borrowing is theirs and the original his. In declaring himself ‘the poorer’ as a result, Coleridge also hints that the borrowings have robbed him financially because others have profited from publishing, as their property, words and rhythms that he had left floating

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in the air of recitation. Scott would more or less accept this charge but blame Coleridge for unworldliness when, after pressure from Byron, he finally acknowledged his borrowings in print: ‘The charming fragments which the author abandons to their fate, are surely too valuable to be treated like the proofs of careless engravers, the sweepings of whose studios often make the fortune of some painstaking collector.’29 Finders keepers, in Scott’s commercial morality, since Coleridge, like the engraver, had abandoned his fragments rather than owning them by finishing and publishing them. The Preface’s discussion of plagiarism reflected Coleridge’s awareness that he had been left behind by a commercialisation of poetry in an expanded print culture. Authors such as Scott had a profoundly different understanding of poetry’s relationship to its receivers, one based on the market value of owned property – on printed artefacts in which copyright could be established.30 In a letter of 1811 Coleridge had exonerated Scott of being an ‘intentional plagiarist’ and had testified to the ‘original spirit’ of the Lay. Coincidences of wording (Scott adopted the refrain ‘Jesu Maria shield her well’) and ‘in the manner of narration and the arrangement of the Imagery’ might have arisen from both poets having had the same sources in old romances. Only the ‘likeness of the metre, the movements, the way of relating an event’ (CL, iii, p. 357) raised the possibility of theft, and on this issue Coleridge proclaimed himself unfit to judge, because unable to see his own poem objectively. He was sure, nevertheless, that Scott was not a thief: ‘his Poems are evidently the indigenous Products of his Mind & Habits’ (CL, iii, p. 361). Yet they were also, Coleridge saw, commercial products: Scott’s mastery of the print medium meant that he had translated the enchantment produced in him by Coleridge’s recited verse from orality to typography. This translation of medium arrested the chain of recital in which a poem was not property but transmission (entransment) and in which its value resided in its enchanting effects rather than in its commodity form. Even qualities as evanescent as ‘metre, movements, the way of relating’, which for Coleridge came into being as they were passed from reciter to auditor in performance, and were thus nobody’s exclusive possession, were identified with Scott’s printed page,31 which not only adopted Coleridge’s metre but also foregrounded a scene of bardic recitation – the Lay being a poem about a minstrel reciting a poem in which the recital forms the main part of the text, a poem read in a modern room masquerading as a song sung in a medieval castle. This commodification of the quest romance provided a written simulacrum of oral recitation that was powerful enough to enchant the very critics who

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had damned the work of the Lake poets: Jeffrey praised its excellence in the Edinburgh Review while the Critical approved of its refinement of the ‘rich but unpolished ore’ of ballad poetry (a verdict which must have stung Coleridge since the poem’s ballad-like metre derived from his poem). Meanwhile, Prime Minister William Pitt was just one of the many of its 27,000 purchasers who turned silent reading into performance – reciting passages at his dinner table and praising its author, who was soon welcomed into aristocratic and royal society. Scott had, in his own words, collected the unfinished and oral ‘Christabel’ and put it into a book that bore his name on the title page every time it was opened and its spell sounded out by its purchaser. And since he had not acknowledged the origin of his text in hearing ‘Christabel’, he had effaced the conditions of its production. Hence in the 1816 Preface, Coleridge felt required to end his discussion of plagiarism with a vindication of the enchanting metre of ‘Christabel’ as his own original invention: I have only to add that the meter of Christabel is not, properly speaking, irregular, though it may seem so from its being founded on a new principle: namely, that of counting in each line the accents, not the syllables. Though the latter may vary from seven to twelve, yet in each line the accents will be found to be only four. Nevertheless, this occasional variation in number of syllables is not introduced wantonly, or for the mere ends of convenience, but in correspondence with some transition in the nature of the imagery or passion. (p. vii)

As critics have pointed out, this is not a completely accurate description of the metre of the poem, and it attributes to Coleridge himself stress patterns that were in fact common in medieval verse.32 That Coleridge stretched the truth and claimed the metre as his own in this manner indicates that, if he could not beat his imitators, Coleridge was tempted to join them: metre is here reduced to what can be claimed as property, and thus, in effect, what can be preserved in print (there being no copyright in recitation). It is divorced from performance, from the very variations of tone, pitch, speed, volume and bodily look and gesture that made it, when Coleridge sounded out his poem in the presence of an audience, a form of mesmeric ritual. If the Coleridge of the 1816 volume extols an orality that the volume, as a print production, violates, he also anxiously attempts to claim the property rights that only printed authors can possess – even if so doing arrests the potential of what had previously existed only in the patterned sounds of in-the-moment recitation. While left unprinted, even the unfinished status of

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‘Christabel’ and ‘Kubla Khan’ remained open to accretion and variation because each performance was different (and a reciter might not even perform all of the incomplete manuscript). Once in print, the poems became defined as fragments – fixed as incomplete wholes – originary poems that do not fulfil the conditions of completeness culturally expected of a published text. Thus the preface is haunted by the spectre that it raises in order to dismiss, that the belatedly printed ‘Christabel’ would always be secondary to the complete, printed Lay it had prompted. Coleridge had once intended to accompany ‘Christabel’ with an essay ‘Concerning Metre’ (CL, ii, p. 716); the best that could now be hoped was that his unfinished printed text, inevitably seeming an imitation of Scott’s, could duplicate Scott’s trick of simulating the effects of metrical performance for the absent reader and so be recognised as Scott’s precursor. Anne K. Janowitz has argued that it does so – its metre causing the reader to experience the poem in the terms outlined in the preface, as a fragment of an unrealisable or infinite visionary whole.33 More recently, Ewan Jones has recast this endorsement of Coleridge’s strategy in terms of defamiliarisation: by claiming (in the Preface) that what was actually a common metre was new, Coleridge ‘foregrounds the affective dimension that all verse bears (and conceals) . . . [his] metre is not new in the way it imagines itself to be, but in its critical reflexivity to those naturalised habits of reading that together comprise a tradition’. As a result, readers cannot but dwell upon Coleridge’s emphases: metre succeeds in internalising voice: ‘from the start, we are made to see that the smallest accentual decisions are inseparable from . . . the voice we hear ourselves articulating’.34 But Celeste Langan and Margaret Russett have viewed the attempt as only partially successful, citing contemporary reviewers’ bewilderment and Coleridge’s own preference for recitation over silent reading.35 The text, it seems, measures out Coleridge’s ambivalence – his love of orality and his effort both to service and struggle against a commercial book market in which enchantment became a property owned by the printed author who produced it remotely, via typography, for the reader. Elsewhere, Coleridge veered between blaming and acquitting his followers, between hinting that, in the terms of his own theory, they were copyists offering printed simulacra of his song’s form and plot and accepting that they were imitators composing new originals of a similar form but in which their own spirit was everywhere latent.36 In the 1816 volume, he makes an implicit accusation: that plagiarism is a breaking of a spell, a betrayal of love. Scott and Byron had sold the intimacy that stemmed from poetry’s mesmeric power as their

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own, as if they were giving readers privileged access to their biographical selves – and hearing ‘Christabel’ had shown them how. But the volume does not simply resent its predecessors in print: Coleridge admired as well as distrusted Scott’s ability to make the relationship of author and reader substitute for the intimacy of reciter and audience. His comments on Byron reveal a similar mixture of admiration and unease, for Byron was not only about to publish The Siege of Corinth but had become famous by staging himself as Childe Harold, a chivalric bard living in unchivalric times who derived in part from the narrator of Coleridge’s ‘Love’ and from Bard Bracy in ‘Christabel’. The Childe was a melancholy dreamer nursing a secret sorrow and musing on the harsh world from a distance. Coleridge’s self-portrait in the 1816 volume was a tribute to him – a poet-figure made attractive because the very sensitivity that prevented him from coping in the world of business allowed him access to a deeper self than was possible in that world. Coleridge’s figuration of himself glamorised failure and ‘indolence’, identifying himself as the author who, by virtue of his biographical experience of suspended states of consciousness, could begin but not complete mesmeric poems. He was a witness both of visions and, like Byron’s Childe, of Oriental and heroic cultures, but not a hero or man of action himself – his own quest being the failed quest to complete a quest romance. Given Scott’s and Byron’s prestige in print, it is not surprising that Coleridge apologised for himself and undercut his claim to priority in the act of making it. By claiming that poetic composition originated beyond his conscious will, he avoided a self-assertive direct challenge to them even as, by detailing his composition process, he tacitly claimed both prior ownership and deeper understanding of what had become, via imitations of his unpublished verse, the most popular poetic genre of the age. Moreover, he did so at the very start of the volume: the ‘Christabel’ preface establishes the origination of a new genre of poetry – a genre very different from and more popular than the Lake school – as the primary agenda of the whole volume: it is the first text the reader encounters, immediately establishing the poet’s suspended creativity and belated condition, and poetry’s metrics and melody, as the volume’s subjects. The volume then appears not simply a collection of old poems, but as a belated foundational statement of a new school of poetry, and commentary on the nature of composition in that school, in which each preface and poem varies and intensifies the commentary – and in which Coleridge would appear, contra the critical consensus achieved by Jeffrey, as a poet very different from the Lake school.

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After a century of critical commentary, we are used to noting that the preface entitled ‘Of the Fragment of “Kubla Khan”’ both apologises for and promotes an aesthetic of fragmentation which alters our reading of the verse it precedes. We know that it internalises the muse, and is a blueprint for the psychoanalytic idea that literature represents the unconscious. We accept that it is an allegory of reading – the poet composes after reading Purchas’s Pilgrimage; we see that it develops the myth of the artist who experiments with drugs to access his inner, dream, self. We recognise that it Orientalises the poetic imagination. Reading it in its 1816 context, we also see that it deepens a theory of poetic composition and reception sketched in ‘Christabel’ and its preface – a theory aimed against the factual Wordsworth of Lyrical Ballads yet a perverse double of the imaginative Wordsworth of the Biographia. It also contributes to a self-cancelling priority claim over the kind of poetry popularised by Byron and Scott, and continues a debate about metre in oral performance and on printed page. It reflects the Christabel volume’s larger attempt to overcome its own status as a commercial publication by glamorising (even in its past and partial form) a model of poetry as an enchantment preceding and exceeding print culture. Coleridge’s simultaneous deference to and critique of both print culture and the Wordsworthian imagination as he himself defined it in the Biographia is implicit when the preface claims that ‘Kubla Khan’ was ‘published here at the request of a poet of great and deserved celebrity, and, as far as the Author’s own opinions are concerned, rather as a psychological curiosity, than on the ground of any supposed poetic merits’ (p. 51). The poem is not poetry, on the models provided either by contemporary commercial publishing or by Wordsworth’s egotistical sublime – not least because it is incomplete and its relationship to an authorial persona unclear. As before with ‘reverie’, however, ‘psychological’ implies that this is verse of an unusual kind, perhaps verse realising ‘our inward nature’ as, in the Biographia, Coleridge said he had been attempting to do in Lyrical Ballads in opposition to Wordsworth. Later in the preface this implication is turned into the famous narrative about the poem’s derivation from a dream experienced during an opium-induced reverie: The author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence, that he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a

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parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort. (p. 52)

Read after the ‘Christabel’ preface, Coleridge seems again to be in a state of suspended animation, ‘a profound sleep, at least of the external senses’. In such a state, sensory stimulation having been suspended, the mental images of the dream world have no competition from external input, and so themselves acquire the feel of vividness and externality. Yet it is fragile, dependent on a precarious balance between inner and outer. When the level of stimulation from the outer world is suddenly increased, it overwhelms the reverie and the apparent externality of the dream images dissipates: the person from Porlock interrupts, the lines and images ‘passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast’ (p. 53) and the author found himself unable to complete the fragment. And so composition, depending on a state of suspension in which reverie flourishes and inner can be projected outwards, is only partly voluntarily controllable. An unfinished poem is not, pacé Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads, recollectable in tranquillity, for the reverie from which it comes cannot be re-entered. Coleridge moves his poetry beyond the recognisable social world that can be accessed at will: although he sets the scene of writing in a Lake poetry location – a farmhouse – he is careful to announce, as if explicitly differentiating himself from Wordsworth, that he is inspired by a book – and an ancient Orientalist book to boot – rather than by the farmer’s fireside chat. Here Orientalism serves to distance Coleridge’s poetry from the sociolect of rustics: Purchas is not Peter Bell. Neither, however, can it flourish in the Porlockian business world in which Scott and Byron had succeeded. 1816 is already too late, and the poem’s first publication is a memorial of an irrecoverable past and a demonstration of an older author’s incapacity to do voluntarily what once he could do involuntarily. The Preface thus draws attention to, and provides an elegiac commentary on, the scene of poetic composition that is described within the poem itself, where the narrator claims that if he could ‘revive within me’, the gentle stimulation of the Abyssinian maid’s ‘symphony and song’, he would ‘build that dome in air’. There, the possibility of this revival is not foreclosed, and the poem conceives of a chain of enchantment in which musical and metrical recitation stimulates composition in the receiver, who then recites his composition to others, enchanting them in turn: And all should cry, Beware! Beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair! Weave a circle round him thrice,

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Coleridge And close your eyes with holy dread: For he on honey-dew hath fed, And drank the milk of Paradise. (ll. 49–54, p. 58)

These lines suggest that enchantment works to a dangerous as well as ecstatic rhythm – metre stimulating dance (‘weave a circle round him thrice’). It is as if the visionary has enjoyed the innocent foods of Eden which were prohibited to men after Adam and Eve’s exclusion from the garden – or as if, in context, he is Geraldine made more enthralling after drinking Christabel’s mother’s wine. And when read after the Preface, with its reference to the compositional reverie having been induced by opium, the verse is inevitably coloured by the figure of the poet presented there – one who has recourse to artificial ‘anodynes’ as he attempts to regulate the relationship between outer and inner and to ensure that the dream world is not overwhelmed by intrusion of too powerful, or sudden, inputs from the senses, such as those of pain from dysentery, or persons on business from Porlock. Opium, as Coleridge had written to Byron when explaining why he had not finished ‘Christabel’, excited ‘the moral feelings to a cruel sensibility’ while it ‘entirely suspended the moral Will’, suggesting that he did view the drug as an artificial means of calming the excessively stimulated so that they entered the suspended reverie states that ideally should be entered via the lulling measures of symphony and song and via the rhythms of nature (‘a light in sound, a sound-like power in light/ Rhythm in all thought, and joyance every where’ as he wrote at this time).37 The volume as a whole reinforces this diagnosis, founding the myth of the poet as an addict who takes drugs when he cannot otherwise access reverie. It is worth asking at this point how ‘Christabel’ and ‘Kubla Khan’ would be received were they not placed in relation to each other and their prefaces – how understood as single manuscripts or performances? Contemporary responses prior to publication suggest that they were experienced much more individually and much more for their plot, or lack thereof – a Gothic tale about chivalric times, as Byron’s comments on hearing ‘Christabel’ suggest, and an almost meaningless sonic and metrical rhapsody, as Lamb’s reaction to the recital of ‘Kubla’ indicates. In the 1816 volume, by contrast, they become exemplars of enchantment in action, thematising in their subject-matter the entrancement that, the prefaces tell us, they originated in and that they strive to reproduce when recited.38 Thus, read together in 1816, the two poems stage scenes that dramatise the power of metrical chant to call upon the latent power in things, as a magic spell does by virtue of its verbal patterning. In ‘Kubla Khan’ the short tetrameter lines

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allow the stressed syllables of the foreign names to stand out powerfully. ‘Xanadu’, ‘Kubla Khan’ and ‘Alph’ have, for this reason, made their way into English-speakers’ shared cultural imaginary as bywords for exotic Oriental paradises, as has the phrase ‘pleasure dome’ with which they are associated. Throughout the description of the dome, in fact, rhythm and rhyme combine to make the verse perfect for chanting: it is strongly aurally as well as rhythmically patterned; it is mnemonic. Later in the poem, of course, enchantment becomes the subject, when the metrical words and music of the Abyssinian maid, if revived within the poet-figure, become sources of his renewed music, which in turn enchants an audience – an entransment moving from actual ‘symphony and song’ to the internal rhythms and sounds of embodied thought, externalised again as ‘music loud and long’ which in turn enraptures others into the rhythmical motion of a dance: ‘Weave a circle round him thrice’. In ‘Christabel’ also, those who are expert in the organisation of rhythm – the narrator and the oral poet Bard Bracy – recognise a power in man-made metrical sound to call forth a reciprocal metrical sound from nature. The matin bell that is rung daily to commemorate the Baron’s wife’s death is, Bracy notices, echoed by the crags that surround his house – these becoming ghostly bell-ringers animated by the spirits of the dead: Between each stroke—a warning knell, Which not a soul can choose but hear From Bratha Head to Wyn’dermere. Saith Bracy the bard, So let it knell! And let the drowsy sacristan Still count as slowly as he can! There is no lack of such, I ween, As well fill up the space between. In Langdale Pike and Witch’s Lair, And Dungeon-ghyll so foully rent, With ropes of rock and bells of air Three sinful sextons’ ghosts are pent, Who all give back, one after t’other, The death-note to their living brother; And oft too, by the knell offended, Just as their one! two! three! is ended, The devil mocks the doleful tale With a merry peal from Borrowdale. (ll. 11–28, pp. 28–9)

Here the place names are important: standing out from the other words as unfamiliar proper names (like Xanadu and Alph), they are exotic to the

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reader, although familiar to locals such as Bracy. Emphasised by the metre (and the stresses that fall upon them are the more noticed because they are less familiar to the ear than ordinary nouns), they foreground the signifier rather than the signified. They are said and heard as sound, rather than for their meaning, and as such they constitute a chant, a rhythmical and sonic pattern whose incontrovertibility to ordinary speech gives it the aura of the special – something spiritual, like the chanted Latin mass, or something magical, like the spell ‘abracadabra’. This, I think, is what J.C.C. Mays refers to when he notes that Coleridge ‘explored incantation and rhythm (what [he] called “chaunting”) to manipulate forces of nature which are supernatural in that they lie beyond the conscious mind. It supposed that poems can act like charms to call for the powers residing in names and thereby adjust or control them’.39 The inclusion of the Lake District place names in the printed poem could not but seem an echoing of Scott, since The Lay of the Last Minstrel, supposedly a minstrel’s song, invoked the names of places in the Scottish borders so as to place chivalric romance tantalisingly within contemporary readers’ reach. The heroic events of the poem could almost be touched because their settings, at least, still existed and were visitable – Melrose Abbey became famous after Scott centred his fanciful poem there. Thus he invested the place name, and the ordinary local place which it designated, with a romanticised history – a heritage of deeds and rhymes that bespoke honour, valour, virtue. Coleridge was well aware of this strategy derived from his own unpublished poem, saying of Scott that ‘when you strike out all of the interesting names of places &c, you will find nothing left’.40 Coleridge’s metrical compact between humans and crags in ‘Christabel’ is altogether darker: the Baron’s bells strike out his grief and anger; the mountain echoes that Bracy rehearses in his own metrical speech raise the ghosts of guilt, desire and complicity that are explored in the rest of the poem. Here ‘Christabel’ testifies to a grim enthrallment looping from humans to nature and to humans again – a vicious oral circle that it was Bracy’s task, had Coleridge finished the poem, to break with his more benevolent song. Without that ending, Coleridge’s naming of places bespeaks a dark reciprocality – as in ‘The Ancient Mariner’ – an investment rather more difficult to draw upon as a glorious national heritage than Scott’s. A circuit of pain and guilt or a circle of inspiration: both scenarios are foregrounded when ‘Christabel’ and ‘Kubla Khan’ are published together with their prefaces. The two poems become stories that reflect upon the psychology of storytelling and the relation of dreamworld to waking world.

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They are changed in the process: the scenes in which Geraldine enchants Christabel are noticed to a degree they would not be if the Preface and text of ‘Kubla Khan’ did not dramatise states of entrancement. They are interpreted in the light of the Kubla poet’s suspended compositional states – his ‘reverie’ and ‘sleep . . . of the external senses’ – and enchanting scenes of reception – his ‘damsel . . . wailing for her demon lover’ (p. 56). We are impelled, for example, to focus upon the spell which is ‘Lord’ of Christabel’s ‘utterance’ (p. 18) and see that she is no more able to articulate her vision at will than the poet interrupted by the person from Porlock.41 Conversely, ‘Kubla Khan’, read after ‘Christabel’, is doubly a fragment: its completion, Coleridge implies, is no more achievable by conscious acts of will than were the interpretations which Christabel hoped, but was unable, to make of her dreams. Thus the context established for it by the volume as a whole makes its poet repeat her struggle and plight and she his, while he is also configured by Geraldine, whose words and touch enchant as powerfully as the mesmerising metres of the bard. ‘Christabel’, in other words, also comes to read as an allegory of poetic composition and transmission, a tale about the enchanting power of metrical speech replicating the stimulation of repeated touch and placing the self in suspended states of consciousness. Neither Coleridge nor Christabel, for instance, is able to control or renew at will the words which their dream visions prompt them to utter: the poet because he lacks the proper degree of stimulation, or finds that stimulation is interrupted; Christabel because she is a victim of a mesmeric enchantment that is too powerful for her voluntarily to lift. She is touched by Geraldine’s body and speech until she projects outwards the scene that they prompt in her imagination:42 The touch, the sight, had pass’d away, And in its stead that vision blest, Which comforted her after-rest, While in the lady’s arms she lay, Had put a rapture in her breast[.]

(p. 35)

Together, the poems and prefaces stage the power of poetic communication, but both composition and recitation fail to achieve proper resolution, since the former cannot be renewed at will and the latter induces a trance so deep it cannot be escaped. Bard Bracy’s song, which was to restore Christabel’s reputation by its demystifying power – presumably, in terms of Coleridge’s theory of enchantment, a remedial gentle stimulation counteracting the excessive stimulation of Geraldine’s performance – is misinterpreted and silenced by Sir Leoline, its enchantment unable to

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work on him because he is entranced by the stronger stimulation of Geraldine’s words, gaze and body. The unwritten, as opposed to the merely unfinished, becomes after ‘Christabel’ a theme in ‘Kubla Khan’ as well. Read in its 1816 context, that ‘fragment’ becomes more intensely an exemplification of the secondariness of writing and, after writing, print. And its preface becomes a commentary on the preface to ‘Christabel’. Not only does the ‘Kubla’ preface depict composition and reception as inward or oral, as in ‘Christabel’, but it presents a scene of writing as a secondary physical, as well as voluntary, act of labour – a material activity of putting ink on paper. Thus, the visionary poet wakes from his suspended animation and ‘appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved’ (p. 52). But he is then interrupted, and no more writing is done. And so the ‘Kubla’ poet, having been interrupted, cannot from the perspective of 1816 write down any more of his vision to be ‘here preserved’ in a publication: poetry’s inscription into the material realm has become a sign of self-loss. What blocks Coleridge – what, after the plagiarism discussion of the ‘Christabel’ preface, the person from Porlock symbolises – is the disabling intrusion of commerce on poetry’s retired reverie refuge, and for Coleridge the form which that commerce most pressingly takes is publication, which breaks the chain of oral recitation able to turn suspended animation into verse that would engender an audience’s willing suspension of disbelief. If the ‘Christabel’ poet is reluctantly prepared to emulate Scott’s translation of the oral into print – cryptically laying claim to property rights over metre that only a published author can own – the ‘Kubla’ poet lets his anxiety about publication triumph. His fear of the book market infects even the intimate process of drafting a manuscript: writing risks self-betrayal because it leads to print, while print leaves the published author vulnerable to the attacks of reviewers and the fantasies of readers. He becomes their possession – a commodified figure they buy which they nevertheless imagine is equivalent to the author himself and which they compare with the figures of more successful authors such as Byron and Scott. Thus the preface perversely delineates in print its author’s resistance to a commodification by print of which the ‘Lake poet’ label is simply the most powerful sign. It produces and mythologises a poet for whom both composition and transmission occur before print, in vision and enchanting recitation, and it glamorises his reluctance voluntarily to participate in the process of authorship that leads to this very book, so self-alienating has the process become. Coleridge is in his volume only under protest, as an involuntary visionary

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unable to write his visions, who may at best someday be able to do so when restored to a healthy relationship to readers via an unalienating scene of communication – and that scene is oral rather than written or printed. It is, in other words, not merely the case that Coleridge makes print defer to orality; it is also that he suggests that in doing so through the medium of print he undermines that very deference, eloigning the congenial conditions under which he could finish the incomplete poems by subjecting those poems to the public form of the published page. nightmare The last poem in the volume only deepens the volume’s crisis-relationship to its own appearance in print. ‘The Pains of Sleep’ alters the relationship of the poems that precede it because its biographical frankness offers a grimly ironic counterpoint to the more glamorous scenes of visionary and drug-derived composition given in ‘Christabel’ and ‘Kubla Khan’. In doing so, it endangers the volume’s strategy of self-mythologisation even as it contributes to it, for while it again depicts Coleridge as an explorer of dream-states, it also risks making him seem a Lake poet since it aligns him more closely than he wished with the Wordsworth of the Biographia and of Jeffrey’s critiques, the Wordsworth who related all the imaginative states explored in his poetry to the trivial incidents of his own life. Broaching the effects of artificial aids taken to gain access to reverie and vision, ‘The Pains of Sleep’ puts in question Coleridge’s fitness to be an imaginative poet of the kind the previous poems seemed to exemplify even in their unfinished state, ending the collection on a note of agonistic confession rather than reverie creation-from-within of an imaginary world separate from the facts of its creator’s biography. It rewrites the opium dream of the ‘Kubla’ preface as nightmare, and leaves doubts as to whether the suspended animation that, in the ‘Christabel’ preface, Coleridge predicted he was overcoming would in fact ever be lifted. To be a reverie poet, it implies, might be to replay Wordsworthian egotism in anguished form – as the poet explores his own self-abasing and addicting nightmare rather than the fertile growth of his own mental powers. As I showed above, ‘The Pains of Sleep’ had originated when Coleridge parted from the Wordsworths on their 1803 Scottish tour and, dosing himself with opium, walked alone to Edinburgh. Re-collecting it and the tour in the 1816 volume thus created subtexts about his differences from Wordsworth and his dependence on drugs. The preface to ‘Kubla Khan’ alerted readers to drugs as the cause of the pains of sleep to a degree not

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visible when Coleridge had sent the poem to friends in 1803, while ‘The Pains’ itself undercut the more alluring picture of drug-induced reverie offered by the ‘Kubla’ preface. A comment of 1814 shows that Coleridge had come to see ‘The Pains’ ‘as an exact and most faithful portraiture of the state of my mind under influences of incipient bodily derangement from the use of Opium’, ‘a Slavery more dreadful, than any man, who has not felt it’s iron fetters eating into his very soul, can possibly imagine’ (CL, iii, p. 495). In the poem, slavery took the form of possession by terrifying dreams in which reason and will were so strongly suspended that Coleridge was helpless before them: A lurid light, a trampling throng, A sense of intolerable wrong, And whom I scorn’d, those only strong! Thirst of revenge, the powerless will, Still baffled, and yet burning still! Desire with loathing strangely mixed On wild and hateful objects fixed.

(ll. 18–24, p. 62)

Read after ‘Christabel’, it seems that it is the discovery in dreams of the inextricability of desire and loathing that causes a paralysing ‘guilt, remorse or woe . . ./ Life-stifling fear, soul-stifling shame!’ (p. 63). And Coleridge the poet finds no more release in the effort to articulate the experience in this verse than did Christabel in speaking to Sir Leoline. Instead, as in the preface to ‘Kubla Khan,’ it is the inefficacy of the poet’s reason and will to control the dream imagery that is explored. Here, however, the poet does subject that imagery to the order of words that is a completed poem, but this ordering is unable to prevent its terrifying recurrence. Release from night-terrors seems possible only by another route: So two nights passed: the night’s dismay Sadden’d and stunn’d the coming day. Sleep, the wide blessing, seemed to me Distemper’s worst calamity. The third night, when my own loud scream Had waked me from the fiendish dream, O’ercome with sufferings strange and wild, I wept as I had been a child[.]

(ll. 33–40, p. 63)

Weeping like a child, an action of innocence and tenderness in which the responsibilities and authority of manhood are lost, proves Coleridge’s best escape route, allowing him to subdue ‘my anguish to a milder mood’. Neither reason nor will, but an admission of vulnerability and a request for

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love offer the only hope for a free and stable self: ‘To be beloved is all I need’ (l. 51, p. 64). Presumably, the regular gentle stimulation of loving intimacy – lost in 1803 when the tour party separated in tension and resentment – would replace the depression produced by excessive doses of laudanum, restoring the balance between inner and outer worlds. Such stimulation, however, remained a forlorn hope, not a plan of action, a hope likely to be subverted by the addiction to the mental theatre of desire and loathing. Thus the poem casts a cold eye on the idea that the suspended animation of Coleridge’s compositional powers was ending. ‘The Pains of Sleep’ leaves the reader with an image of the poet as an isolated, terrified being, in a deeper crisis than the suspended animation or departed vision of ‘Christabel’ and ‘Kubla Khan’ – although in a related state, since Coleridge viewed ‘Nightmair’ as ‘a state not of Sleep, but of Stupor of the outward organs of Sense’, a state of disturbed reason and will, during which sensory stimuli were transformed into dream forms by imagination (CN, iii, 4046). The poem represents a darker kind of reverie, neither the rapt state of Wordsworth at Tintern and of Coleridge himself hearing The Prelude, nor the entranced and visionary dream of the ‘Kubla’ preface and poem, but a kind that occurs when the poet, lacking enchantment by the gentle stimulation of metrical touching – nature’s ‘rhythm in all things’ or the poet’s measured song – has recourse to lulling doses of opium. A note of 1818 is relevant: ‘The passions of the Day’, Coleridge wrote, ‘as often originate in the Dream, as the Images of the Dream in the Day. Guilt, Falsehood, traced to the Gastric Life. See my Pains of Sleep’ (CN, iii, 4409). This suggests that, rather than subordinating the dream self to the daytime self of reason and will, the waking self is unconsciously shaped by the emotions experienced in sleep, themselves derived from transformed sensory stimuli (and Coleridge knew that his gastric pains were frequently the result of opium). The boundaries between sleeping and waking, dreaming and reasoning are broken down, the pains and pleasures of reverie and vision extend into the fully woken daytime self, rendering it doubtful whether self-control and self-knowledge can be achieved. Indeed, the note implies that the poem is an aesthetic expression of a view of humanity that is in opposition to most Christian theology and European philosophy, as well as to Wordsworthian egotism, in that it has doubts as to whether the soul is separate from, or capable of controlling the influences of, the body. And significantly, it is not a chantable poem: its metrical and sonic patterns are not meant for entrancing recitation; it does not imply, as ‘Kubla Khan’ and ‘Christabel’ do, a prior (or indeed future) oral performance by which poet will inspire hearer. The strongly stressed

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‘Ancient Mariner’ had displayed, in its form as well as its content, a grim entrancement: the wedding guest ‘cannot choose but hear’ the mariner’s story. ‘The Pains of Sleep’ has equally grim matter to relate, but Coleridge is talking to himself: the reader is an imaginary witness to a silent inner conversation – a reader-position characteristic of print – not the fascinated auditor of a tale in which the poet is symbolically and metrically, but not biographically, present. Thus Coleridge ends the volume by personalising his poetry of ‘our inward nature’ and contradicting his assertions that such poetry should be symbolic of a creative mind that is not confessionally explored but is transmitted to others by metrical recitation. Here he is no Proteus, no Shakespeare, but a perverse Wordsworth, writing of the stagnation rather than growth of his own mind. For he on opium, and not honey-dew, hath fed. It is both ironic and paradoxical that Coleridge could not advance the reverie poetic he had created, in which verse attains the symbolic power of dream imagery precisely because its relationships to the ‘real’ world and its ‘real’ author are deliberately left unspecified, without specifying those relationships and thus undermining both the poetic and his own merit as its theorist and best practitioner. In so doing he threatened its symbolic power through his anxiety belatedly to demonstrate to the public, to Wordsworth, to Byron and to Scott that he had once created a poetry to which they were indebted, a poetry that was neither the egotistical sublime nor the jacobinical ballad – not that of a Lake poet but clearly his own. r e c e p t i o n an d r e w o r k i n g It was not only hostility to Lake poetry that had increased in the almost twenty years between the composition and publication of the Christabel poems. Attitudes to gender roles had also hardened during the social and political repression that characterised the years of war with revolutionary France. In 1798 the gathering strength of the reaction was signalled by Richard Polwhele’s The Unsex’d Females, the first of many excoriating attacks on Mary Wollstonecraft for her attempts to advocate – and to live out in her own unconventional private life – a liberated womanhood displaying a vigour of intellect and body that was traditionally gendered masculine. At the same time, the man of sensibility fashionable in the 1780s – a man who displayed conventionally feminine traits such as emotional sensitivity, delicacy of taste, a tendency to tears – also came under fire. A hardening and polarisation of gender roles was revealed in dress codes: the male macaroni who wore colourful clothes of rich fabrics

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was replaced by the dandy dressed in sober black; white, figure-hugging muslin dresses emphasised young women’s willowiness. Hannah More set out the ideology of a separate domestic sphere for women; George Canning, among many, called for a heroic manliness defined in terms of warrior codes – bravery, strength, command. Thus in 1816 Christabel entered a gender climate very different from the social experimentation of Coleridge’s radical circle of 1797 – when he was a friend of Wollstonecraft who had publicly supported her arguments about women. Reviewers, reading Coleridge into his characters as the Preface invited them to do, branded him as unmanly and the poem as improper. He was, they argued, infected by the kind of womanly imagination that society must keep in check: his poetry licensed an unbridled feminine sensibility and sexuality. Hazlitt, for instance, implied that Coleridge was a feminised and pornographic writer whose style was a hangover from the excessive and hysterical sensibility of the early 1790s: There is something disgusting at the bottom of his subject, which is but ill glossed over by a veil of Della Cruscan sentiment and fine writing—like moon-beams playing on a charnel-house, or flowers strewed on a dead body. Mr. Coleridge’s style is essentially superficial, pretty, ornamental, and he has forced it into the service of a story which is petrific.43

The Anti-Jacobin was sarcastic about the volume’s appeal to the ‘woman of fashion’; the Edinburgh Review called the poems ‘raving and driv’ling’, worse than other productions of the ‘Lake school’, in fact ‘utterly without value’:44 Coleridge was more interested in teasing his readers with lubricous scenes than explaining their causes and effects. He had failed to control his text. The reviews left Coleridge, as author and man, under the pressure of innuendo – he was sensitive to charges of Della Cruscan effeminacy and a want of manly vigour because it was widely known he had left his wife and children – abandoning the conventional role of husband and father. The attacks were especially galling because in his recent writing he had set himself against what he saw as a dumbing-down of literature that stemmed from its feminisation, arguing that contemporary novels made too few intellectual demands and instead appealed to the sensuality of their largely female readers: they were a kind of stylistic masturbation. Like idle morning Visitors, the brisk and breathless Periods hurry in and hurry off in quick and profitless succession; each indeed for the moments of it’s stay prevents the pain of vacancy, while it indulges the love of sloth; but all together they leave the Mistress of the house (the soul I mean) flat and exhausted, incapable

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of attending to her own concerns, and unfitted for the conversation of more rational Guests. (CL, iii, p. 256)

He had called for a tougher literature written in longer sentences that postponed resolution and demanded intellectual effort for their decoding – a syntax of deferred gratification that he gendered masculine.45 But the publication of his old poems now undermined this remasculinisation: Coleridge responded, in the Biographia, by lamenting that his experience of enchanting audiences when reciting his poems had misled him into hoping they would be well received in print: his preference for performance over publication was only confirmed; in the former he appeared a potent bard, in the latter ‘corrupted and debased’.46 In some respects, the reviews were perceptive: they reacted to the volume as a whole, and to Coleridge’s strategy of simultaneously promoting and apologising for his poetry by mythologising the figure of the author in relation to the characters of the poems and to the readers of the volume. Hazlitt, for instance, astutely saw that the prefaces constituted a preemptive reaction to Coleridge’s anxiety of reception in print, in which the author sought to legislate for his readers the ideal position of entranced admiration that the reciter aimed to produce in his hearers. Hazlitt saw not just fear in this positioning, but also the mutual flattery of the coterie: the Lake poets, he suggested, had by acting as each other’s admirers jointly elaborated peculiar styles of performance and composition that insulated them from public opinion, causing them to overrate their own work and berate the public when it did not uphold their valuation of it. Chant and enchantment aimed to obviate public suspicion by making readers temporary members of the coterie – admirers admitted to the bard’s inner circle. There was, Hazlitt hinted, also an implicit politics in this trick. Coleridge’s chant was anti-democratic – a style that removed poetry from natural speech and rendered the reciting poet a bard rather than a man speaking to men. Here Hazlitt was developing a point often made in the elocution manuals written by radical dissenters whom he and Coleridge had both admired in the 1790s. According to Coleridge’s liberal hero Joseph Priestley, for instance, the chanting style of reading aloud sought to enthral rather than to enlighten: he decried it as a ‘vicious habit’.47 James Burgh, meanwhile, linked chant with cant: Cant, is, in speaking, as psalmody and ballad in music, a strain consisting of a few notes rising and falling without variation, like a peal of bells, let the matter change how it will. The chaunt, with which the prose poems are half-sung, half-said, in cathedrals, is the same kind of absurdity.48

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Coleridge was the son of an Anglican priest in a chantry church: he had grown up hearing psalmody; ‘Christabel’ had begun as a lyrical ballad. His poetic of chant placed him among the vocal traditions that the dissenting intellectuals who had supported him in the mid-1790s regarded as traditionalist, obscure and mystificatory – among the superstitions of illiterate balladeers and of the established church. As Lucy Newlyn points out, it bespoke (or, as it were, bechanted) his retreat to a conservative and traditionalist cultural politics in which meaning, the preserve of the few, was vouchsafed through the enthralment of audience to speaker rather than by clear and equal debate.49 From enthralment to thralldom was a short step, as Coleridge had himself complained in ‘France: an Ode’ when arguing that the radical friends of liberty had been unable to prevent the common people from being enslaved by the alarmist rhetoric of their reactionary oppressors. Now Coleridge was aiming, however defensively, to occupy the same spellbinding position he had attacked the ‘wizard’ Pitt for holding in 1798: chant, for Hazlitt, was a token of his apostasy from his former politics, an apostasy that, in retrospect, seemed foreshadowed in the preference that even the young, radical Coleridge showed for inspiring preaching over conversational discussion. Hazlitt did not, we now know, write the review that appeared in the journal that Coleridge most feared, the Edinburgh. That Coleridge attributed the review to him is not surprising however, for in one respect its hostility echoed his line of criticism. The Edinburgh also thought ‘Christabel’ had been overrated on the basis of its oral recitation, before publication, to circles of admiring poets. It belittled the new alliance with Byron that had led to the volume’s printing as a marketing strategy – a public relations campaign in which one poet’s praise of another was designed to increase sales and was a favour to be called in when a new volume was to appear. This line befitted the journal’s liberal Whiggism, its pro-reform politics, as well as the legal training of Francis Jeffrey, its editor. A print journal determined to treat only print publications as reliable evidence,50 and suspicious of oral circles of influence that smacked of coteries, royal courts and corridors of power, the Edinburgh distrusted oral transmission and rejected the notion of poets as unworldly bards. Unable to accept poets’ sincerity, or see beyond commercial opportunism, the Edinburgh justified Coleridge’s fear of reception in print. Its strictures left him more suspicious of appearing in print than ever, and the resultant crisis of confidence is apparent in the pompous obscurities of The Statesman’s Manual (1816) and the tortuous self-apologies of the Biographia of the following year – both afflicted by an anxiety about reception too deep

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to be overcome by their mode of production (they were orally composed and dictated to friends rather than written alone for the unknown public). Coleridge would not overcome this anxiety about publication until the 1820s, when literary conversations with women poets and new publication formats allowed him to embrace print as a medium in which he could rework old materials into new forms that exploited the possibilities of typography, layout and illustration. It is to these that I now turn.

chapter 4

The language of love in the late Coleridge: annual verse and collected poetry

By 1828 Coleridge was a man living in very different circumstances from those of 1816, or indeed 1803. His opium habit was no longer overwhelming; he had a stable, happy, home; he was reconciled with Wordsworth; he had found a way of replacing, on a small scale, the oral influence that his Christabel volume had modelled for his poetry. Holding informal classes in philosophy and talking at soirées, Coleridge practised what Matthew Sangster has termed ‘a small-network theory of critical discernment rather than one based on public opinion, a forerunner of the clerisy he discussed in his later works’.1 By this means, he aimed to allow his intimate conversation to inspire in others the genial criticism that the reviewing culture epitomised by the Edinburgh conspicuously lacked. And he was successful in this aim: a number of the young men who came to hear Coleridge subsequently made ideas developed from him central to the reform of education and of the church in the Victorian era.2 How to produce such influence through poetry publication was a more difficult question: while Wordsworth was producing editions of his poetical works, establishing a consistent oeuvre for the same young intellectuals who sat at Coleridge’s feet, Coleridge had issued no poetry collection of his own since the Christabel volume of 1816 and Sibylline Leaves of 1817. Both of these publications had received stinging reviews – the former was described as the ‘very babbling of imbecility’3: its poetic of dreamy reverie was rejected by the critics. Sibylline Leaves, likewise, was used as evidence that Coleridge failed to reach the contemporary public: Again: we have to allege against Mr. Coleridge, considered as a candidate for contemporary popularity, the extraordinary fault of being too varied and too short in his productions. Had the ‘Ancient Mariner’, or the ‘Christabel’, been dilated into metrical romances, first published in quarto (some two or three hundred copies, at the most), and then rapidly succeeded by several editions, of four or five hundred each, in octavo; or had one well-seasoned edition re-appeared, like an old friend with a new face, with sundry fresh title-pages, even before the town was 153

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again empty; wonders might have been worked in this way for Mr. Coleridge’s popularity. In the first instance, however, he compresses matter enough for a handsome volume into a two-penny pamphlet; then he lets a friend bury his jewels in a heap of sand of his own; then he scatters his ‘Sibylline Leaves’ over half a hundred perishable news-papers and magazines; then he suffers a manuscriptpoem to be handed about among his friends till all its bloom is brushed off; and how can such a poet, so managing his own concerns, hope to be popular?4

For this reviewer, not to be properly published was not to be a poet. It was not enough for Coleridge to write; he must be known – and to be known, on the expanding market in which hundreds of books, journals and magazines clamoured every year for the attention of an ever larger and more disparate readership, he must manage his career – be his own agent. Popularity was the new test of value, and Coleridge’s failure to compete for it in the manner of others was culpable. These were exactly the competitive and commercial imperatives to which Coleridge was ill-suited; his failure to meet them, however, influenced the value the reviewer placed on the poems themselves: Coleridge found his new collection criticised on the basis of his past inattention to marketing strategies. However personal his poems, they must also be public in the terms demanded by the press: literary judgement was commercialised and poetry commodified. Coleridge’s public complaints about this commodification led to further bad reviews and poor sales. At the same time, the general market for poetry declined: cheap paper and mechanised printing reduced the price of publications, allowing them to reach a lower middle-class audience that preferred the magazine, the novel and the annual anthology to whole volumes of verse. Paradoxically, however, it would be the annual, and the women who published in it, that would revive Coleridge’s career and offer him a way beyond the impasse he had reached with regard to the printing of his poems for the book market. In what follows I shall investigate the effect upon him of one such woman poet in particular, Letitia Elizabeth Landon (L.E.L.), investigating a literary conversation that took place when Coleridge responded to her hit collection The Improvisatrice (1824). This conversation was a print dialogue that manipulated the format of the anthologies – mixed-media mass production books that featured prose and verse intermingled, and a more lavish use of illustration than ever before. It led Coleridge into a revised mode of poetry – combining prose with verse, the confessional with the allegoric, the visual with the verbal, exploiting new textual conditions rather than harking back to a prior oral performance. Openly gendered as an appeal to women readers, this revised mode was a response to L.E.L.’s development of his earlier poems – a

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discourse about love and longing, writing and reading. It would then move from the annuals to the Poetical Works he published in 1828 and 1829 as he attempted, in the hope of emulating the influence Wordsworth’s collections were achieving, to collect his past work and establish an oeuvre that would demonstrate his importance and consistency as a poet – as I shall show in the second half of the chapter in a detailed analysis of ‘The Blossoming of the Solitary Date Tree’. This piece was a reworking of an unpublished love poem into a text about lateness, loss and age that models literary communication not as oral enchantment but as a gendered union of masculine writing and feminine reading made at a distance, through the printed book. Here my argument contributes to theorisations of literary reception not only a gendered focus but a historicism informed by recent studies of print culture: I show how Coleridge’s poetics of reception arose in gender-inflected form at a particular juncture as a response to the pressures and opportunities associated with the literary market in the 1820s and as a development of the earlier persona and oral poetic he had constructed in print in 1816.5 l.e.l.’s lyrical l osses The 1820s saw a number of woman poets, influenced by such Coleridgean tales as ‘Christabel’, ‘Love’ and ‘The Ballad of the Dark Ladie’, gain great popularity with romances and lyrics that narrated love, loss and longing from a female perspective. Of these, the most explicit in her praise of Coleridge was Felicia Hemans,6 while the most sensational in her rise to prominence was Landon.7 Astutely marketed only by her initials in the fashionable new medium of the literary magazine, ‘L.E.L.’ became the subject of public curiosity soon after her debut in the Literary Gazette in 1820. Who was the person whose intense lyricism suggested a lovelorn heart in need of healing? The verse suggested, but did not disclose, a tragic personal life. Landon was in fact a bookish young woman whose work was promoted by the Gazette’s editor, William Jerdan.8 She had not, in fact, had a tragic life, but readers were invited to identify the carefully crafted personae of her exotic romances with the author herself – a marketing strategy that had succeeded brilliantly for Byron in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage but that was more socially daring when the author was female. When in 1824 Landon published a full-scale collection, The Improvisatrice and Other Poems, Jerdan promoted the book on the basis not of its author’s skilful artifice but of her ‘simplicity, gracefulness, fancy and pathos [which] seem to gush forth in spontaneous and sweet union’.9 That ‘spontaneous

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overflow of powerful feeling’ which Wordsworth had made a prerequisite of the new Lake poetry in 1800 was now L.E.L.’s hallmark. And The Improvisatrice was a success on a scale the Lake poets never achieved: it went through six editions in 1824, its open sensuality proving popular with female readers but also, to judge by the words of reviewers, arousing men’s sexual fantasies about its author.10 The enabling legacy of Coleridge’s earlier poetry is evident throughout The Improvisatrice. Take the vehement declaration of intent made by the narrator of the title poem, a sapphic poet-artist: My power was but a woman’s power; Yet, in that great and glorious dower Which Genius gives, I had my part: I poured my full and burning heart In song, and on the canvass made My dreams of beauty visible

(ll. 25–30)11

The formal control apparent in this statement of passionate intensity proves its point: mastery of prosody allows the woman’s ‘song’ to make emotion audible. A ‘woman’s power’ turns out to be very powerful, not least because it successfully adapts Coleridge’s clinching rhyme from ‘Dejection: an Ode’, ‘power’ and ‘dower’.12 Landon’s development of Lake poetry was not just technical: one section of The Improvisatrice borrowed the Arabian imagery and setting that Southey had first popularised in Thalaba the Destroyer.13 It owed still more to Coleridge’s Spanish drama, for L.E.L. takes as one of her personae a ‘Moorish maid’, the phrase an echo of Coleridge’s Remorse (1813), in which a lovelorn ‘Moorish maid’ – a lutanist like L.E.L.’s grieving narrator – is depicted in exactly the kind of flowery, bowery moonlit setting that appears in The Improvisatrice. Nor is the influence just a matter of setting: Coleridge’s drama gives L.E.L. a blueprint for her favourite motif of the bereft heroine who indulges herself in self-pitying self-projections14 – imaginary scenarios in which she views herself as a lost lover, mourning for or mourned by her absent lover: . . . once [says Coleridge’s Teresa] I knew a crazy Moorish maid, Who dress’d her in her buried lover’s clothes. And o’er the smooth spring in the mountain cleft Hung with her lute, and play’d the self-same tune He used to play, and listen’d to the shadow Herself had made); if this be wretchedness, And if indeed it be a wretched thing To trick out mine own death-bed, and imagine

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That I had died—died, just ere his return; Then see him listening to my constancy; And hover round, as he at midnight ever Sits on my grave and gazes at the moon; Or haply in some more fantastic mood To be in Paradise, and with choice flowers Build up a bower where he and I might dwell. (Remorse, Act i, scene ii, ll. 30–44. CPW, iii, part ii, pp. 2045–6)

L.E.L. also has a ‘Moorish maid’ bemoaning her abandonment in an Oriental garden: A Moorish Romance Softly through the pomegranate groves Came the gentle song of the doves; Shone the fruit in the evening light, Like Indian rubies, blood-red and bright; Shook the date-trees each tufted head, As the passing wind their green nuts shed; And, like dark columns, amid the sky The giant palms ascended on high: And the mosque’s gilded minaret Glistened and glanced as the daylight set. Over the town a crimson haze Gathered and hung of the evening’s rays; And far beyond, like the molten gold, The burning sands of the desert rolled.

(ll. 219–32)15

The maid owes something to Christabel and Geraldine: ‘’Twas beautiful’, L.E.L. writes, ‘by the pale moonlight,/ To mark her eyes, – now dark, now bright,/ As now they met, now shrank away,/ From the gaze that watched and worshipped their day’ (ll. 338–41, p. 23). By the end of L.E.L.’s collection (which displayed further verbal echoes of ‘The Ancient Mariner’ and ‘Christabel’) it was clear that a new poet of originality and strength had appeared, new not least in adapting the confessional style of the male Romantics to a woman’s point of view, and putting female poet-narrators in place of the lovelorn male bards that featured in Byron’s, Keats’s and Coleridge’s pages. Something else was clear too, that L.E.L.’s strength – passionate intensity achieved by control of form and setting – was also her weakness. By the end of The Improvisatrice it was apparent that her improvisations all played one tune: her personae all sincerely confessed the same disappointed love and existed beyond any believable social milieu. Her settings were only superficially different: at root they existed to provide

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only a backdrop of exotic scenery onto which the heroines’ feelings were projected. The risk inherent in her work was that the sameness of the emotion and the length at which it was confessed made it tiresome. It gushed so readily onto page after page that its poetic pressure was reduced because it was too widely spread: the spontaneous overflow of facile feeling; words in love with the idea of being lovelorn, but seemingly unmarked by real emotional cost. For Coleridge, L.E.L.’s indebtedness to ‘Christabel’ and Remorse was double-edged. It suggested that his earlier poetry – which an avowedly manly critic like Hazlitt found effeminate – had had a formative effect upon a new generation of women poets, licensing their version of Gothic romance as a means of safely exploring states of passion that were socially taboo – exactly what Hazlitt had damned ‘Christabel’ for when he wrote of there being ‘something disgusting’ beneath its ‘veil of Della Cruscan sentiment and fine writing – like moon-beams playing on a charnelhouse, or flowers strewed on a dead body’.16 If ‘Christabel’ played out a Gothic romance, it also revealed that at the heart of such romances were the psychological effects of restrictive social roles. Heroines such as Christabel showed that the subordination of women within a patriarchal world not only prevented them from acting for themselves but also gave them a passionate fantasy life of unfulfilled longing that left them vulnerable to seduction. Yet Coleridge’s knightly heroes were neither seducers nor saviours of the seduced: his male characters proved to be men of inaction who won their maids not by their own deeds but as poets by singing of the brave deeds of others. In ‘Love’ and ‘The Ballad of the Dark Ladie’, Coleridge explored what J.C.C. Mays has termed an ‘aesthetics of inachievement’.17 His heroes dramatise a failure of manliness and configure a psychology of vicariousness. Unable to declare their love directly or to take willed action, they are feminised minstrels, dependent on their beloved’s overhearing their enchanting song and applying it to their own case. The listening maid must be the interpreter and then the actor: it is she who embraces him. For this reason, Coleridge’s minstrels were exemplary for the heroines of L.E.L.’s verse – all poets, artists and singers – although the vicariousness in her works stems not from an inner failure to live up to the expected heroic role but from the social restrictions that prevented women from acting in the world. So the poetry that Coleridge had written at the turn of the century and published in 1816 and 1817 – a poetry in which poetry itself is the enchanting means of action – became one of the models from which L.E.L. developed a verse that revealed love-longing to burgeon the more the lover was doomed to

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stasis. The lutes her sapphic lyricists play and the laments they sing derive from the dulcimer of Coleridge’s Abyssinian maid and the lays of his minstrel knights. When ‘Kubla Khan’ was published in 1816, Coleridge resented being accused of traits he criticised in culture at large – that his poetry’s appeal was to sensibility at the expense of intellect and to feeling at the expense of knowledge; that it indulged the kind of female fantasies that made women discontented with their social roles (the fear that Austen associates with Gothic romance in Northanger Abbey). By the mid-1820s Coleridge had done much to live down this reputation: he was now a Christian moralist and a philosopher who taught logic to groups of young men. Given this turn away from poetry to traditionally male disciplines, and given his calls for a masculinisation of style, his derogation of women’s novels, his defensiveness about the Christabel volume and his sensitivity about his supposed unmanliness, it was to be expected that he would deplore the direction in which L.E.L. had taken his earlier work. Her poetry was, after all, recognised as being hyper-feminine, as a condescending article in The Westminster Review declared: L.E.L.’s poems are, for the most part, metrical romances; generally sentimental descriptions of sentimental loves: it is nothing wonderful, therefore, that they have attracted the admiration of her female readers. Love is the great business of a woman’s life; and any one who discourses with but ordinary ability on this allimportant topic, finds in a woman a ready, patient, and admiring listener . . . L.E.L. has acquired a degree of fame by writing on love, which she by no means deserves.18

But the author of a poem named ‘Love’ could scarcely disavow the influence and in fact Coleridge was more flattered than displeased by his discovery that his work had had an unexpected offspring. He enjoyed the attention of younger women in drawing rooms and at dinner parties;19 now he was stimulated by the literary admiration that the new female poetry evinced. Encouraged that his verse had gained some currency after the years of hostile reviews, he began to rework old poems and write new ones, entering a literary conversation in which he paid tribute to yet also differed from – in the light of the contrasting viewpoint given him by age, gender and biography – the passionate intensity that L.E.L. had derived, in part, from his old romances. Writing as an aged poet looking back on his youthful love poetry in the light of the new female poetry it had influenced, he found his muse again, and reappeared as a public poet.

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Coleridge profiting fr om print: poetry in the a nnuals

The conversation saw Coleridge writing on similar subjects to L.E.L. in the same publications in which her verse appeared. These were the literary annuals – anthologies of short poems and pictures sold for Christmas gifts. A new publishing phenomenon, they were mass market, high-risk capitalised ventures: it is estimated that production of one of the more ambitious of them, The Keepsake for 1828, cost 11,000 guineas.20 It sold between 12,000 and 15,000 copies; later volumes sold over 20,000. Keenly priced, beautifully illustrated, lavishly produced (with gilt-edged leaves and silk bindings), the annuals were advertised more heavily than any literary production had been before. They were pitched as gifts for middle-class ladies, and their content was feminine: to conservative critics they represented ‘a little boudoir school . . . which should . . . not be suffered to interfere . . . with the more manly styles of art’.21 They featured Hemans’s and L.E.L.’s lyrics as well as brief and light pieces by popular poets including Scott and Moore. Their massive print runs contrasted with the 300 Coleridge secured for his Poetical Works and the 500 Southey achieved for his Tale of Paraguay. The Lake poets were resentful – Wordsworth thought writing for the annuals ‘degrading’ and ‘galling’22 and Southey, annoyed by their preference for pretty engravings23 over serious verse, termed them ‘picture books for grown children’.24 They seemed evidence of a feminisation – and in their eyes a trivialisation – of the reading public that left their own longer and more demanding poetry stranded. Decorative, luxurious, passionate within polite limits, the annuals catered for a tamed version of female sensuality. Engravings of winsome toddlers and fluffy dogs set the tone.25 But the annuals also came calling. In mid-February 1828 Charles Heath, the engraver for the Tale of Paraguay turned proprietor of The Keepsake, came to the Lake District to offer Wordsworth the handsome sum of a hundred guineas for five short poems, and Southey fifty guineas for a longer one. Both poets took the financial bait, despite their reservations about the damage that might be done to their reputation.26 Coleridge, meanwhile, had in 1826 been solicited by Alaric Watts to provide poems for his annual The Literary Souvenir. Over the next few years he would publish not only there but in many other annuals, reviving his poetic career as he found himself in demand in the new, copy-hungry popular medium.27 This new form of publication led him to revise the gendered appeal of his own work – he aimed to relate his poetry to the annuals’ largely female readership without making it a mindless indulgence of

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sensuality, and hoped to live down the supposed effeminacy of ‘Christabel’. Thus in a note to ‘Fragments from the Wreck of Memory’ that he contributed to Friendship’s Offering; and Winter’s Wreath: A Christmas and New Year’s Present, for MDCCCXXXIV, he addressed the poem to ‘intelligent female readers of poetry’.28 Almost the first poem he sent to an annual was a response to L.E.L.’s Improvisatrice. Coleridge’s ‘Improvisatore’ appeared in The Amulet for 1828, alongside L.E.L.’s ‘The Departed’. The annual placed Coleridge and L.E.L. in dialogue, whether or not each knew of the other’s contribution before publication. Both these contributions were texts about the loss of youth and love over time; both were addressed to women’s experience. Both were, at least in part, confessional lyrics. L.E.L.’s adopted the heraldic romance of Coleridge’s ‘Love’ and Keats’s ‘Belle Dame Sans Merci’: Where the many fantasies That young Hope so fondly nurst; Love with motto like a knight, Faithful even to the tomb Fortune following the wish; Pleasure with a folded plume? – Gone, gone – they all are gone. (The Amulet for 1828, ll. 39–45, p. 326)

In the ‘Improvisatore’, its title echoing that of L.E.L.’s recent success, Coleridge clearly aimed to respond to the lyricism of loss and dalliance with despair that were L.E.L.’s hallmarks both in 1824 and again in ‘The Departed’.29 He did so by manipulating the possibilities of print afforded by the annual so as to ironise the lyricist’s verse: his improvisatore is portrayed, before he delivers his extempore poem, in two different genres, neither of which is readable as a simple transcription of a spontaneous overflow of feeling or of a confessional speaker. The first is a critical dissertation, written in an apparently disembodied third person, entitled ‘New Thoughts on Old Subjects’. This lives up to its name, being a reworking of passages from Biographia Literaria concerning the importance of writers allowing us to see the familiar in new terms. Itself mixing blocks of prose with indented verse quotations, this dissertation is a preamble to a textually complex piece, the parts of which are visually and typographically distinct. Nor do they share one narrator or a consecutive narrative: their thematic links become apparent only at the end so that the reading experience has to be recalibrated retrospectively.

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The second is a dramatic scene that is rendered on the page as if it was a play script and that thereby prioritises no single speaker as the text’s narrator. Complete with would-be stage directions – although it obviously could never be performed – it also features indented verse quotations in smaller type: it visually parades its own status as a textual artefact, possible only in print. The effect is to display the improvisatore both as a manipulator of texts (he recites his own and others poems) and as a character who is himself an effect of the manipulation of texts of different kinds and origins. Identity is, it appears, multiple and textual, rather than single and confessional: speech is not a direct communication from speaker or bard to enchanted hearer. Multiple too because the man is only one of several speakers: the text features the remarks of two young women, Eliza and Katharine, as well as his own. The improvisatore seems, in this context, a somewhat comic older voice whom younger women humour as much as revere. Whereas in L.E.L.’s ‘Improvisatrice’ the different personae that the narrator assumes all sing the same song of abandoned love, in Coleridge’s text the incredulous satire of the opposite sex is directed at the poet-figure. And whereas L.E.L.’s voices are projected onto exotic backdrops that reflect their emotions, Coleridge’s appear in a realistic, drawing-room setting in which the improvisatore’s discourse is seen to be familiar and domestic: katharine. A precious boon, that would go far to reconcile one to old age – this love if true! But is there any such true love? friend. I hope so. katharine. But do you believe it? eliza (eagerly). I am sure he does. friend. From a man turned of fifty, Katharine, I imagine, expects a less confident answer. katharine. A more sincere one, perhaps. friend. Even though he should have obtained the nick-name of Improvisatore, by perpetrating charades and extempore verses at Christmas times? eliza. Nay, but be serious. friend. Serious! Doubtless. A grave personage of my years giving a Love-lecture to two young ladies, cannot well be otherwise. The difficulty, I suspect, would be for them to remain so. It will be asked whether I am not the ‘elderly gentleman’ who sate ‘despairing beside a clear stream’, with a willow for his wig-block. (The Amulet, p. 40; CPW, i, part ii, p. 1057)

Here, the sincerity that in L.E.L. proceeds from the assumption that no other perspective than the narrator’s is possible – a confessional egotism indebted in this respect to the ‘greater Romantic lyrics’ of Coleridge,

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Wordsworth and Keats – is out of the question. The ‘Friend’ is too old and too self-conscious to be the passionate lover in front of the two irreverent young women. He hopes instead to entertain and interest them by his role playing; they in turn are self-aware and mock both the deferential behaviour expected of young women and the typical older man’s assumption that he is more important than they: eliza. Say another word, and we will call it downright affectation. katharine. No! we will be affronted, drop a courtesy, and ask pardon for our presumption in expecting that Mr. — would waste his sense on two insignificant girls. (The Amulet, p. 40; CPW, i, part ii, p. 1057)

Eliza and Katharine are Austen-like women: they combine an eagerness to learn about love with a knowing wit; they possess a certain social selfassertiveness, teasing the middle-aged man and dismissing their know-all elder brother to do the feminine task of arranging flowers. The effect is of a self-ironising scene of instruction in which, rather than speaking as a lover, Coleridge portrays a man such as himself appealing to the minds of young women – proxies in the poem for the female readers of the annual – only to find his discourse punctuated by their interjections. Some of these interjections are approving; others, however, are less confirming: the women turn the jaundiced perspective of age back on him and puncture his moralising lecture – this is no passive female audience who simply look up to the older man: eliza (in answer to a whisper from katharine). To a hair! He must have sate for it himself. Save me from such folks! But they are out of the question. (The Amulet, p. 44, CPW, i, part ii, pp. 1059–60)

By the end of the dramatic section, ‘The Improvisatore’ has created a scenario not of love but of safe flirtation in which the older man’s smug pleasure in having engaged the young women’s attention is qualified by mockery that reveals he is too old to be a lover. He plays the benevolent, humorous yet wise uncle so as to reassure the women he is not pressing claims upon them and so as not to lose the attention he enjoys. What prevails is a diminished comic residue of youth’s urgent and intense language of love; the sincerity of that language is not destroyed but ironised from age’s knowing yet envying perspective, because age has experience of love’s solipsistic excessiveness, its mishaps, and its loss – which may not always be tragic so much as a matter of gradual withdrawal. Thus for example social interplay is shown to undermine the solipsism on which

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romantic tragedy often depends: while the women mock the improvisatore’s tendency to be gloomy about love, he lets them know that ‘Good men are not, I trust, so much scarcer than good women’ (The Amulet, p. 44; CPW, i, part ii, p. 1060). Reassuring the girl that she may after all find a worthy partner for her love is a worldly retort to L.E.L.’s self-dramatising posture that it is all women’s fate to be abandoned and for their love never to find a worthy object. After the play text, the improvisatore’s lyrical poem appears – already bracketed as a performance by a partial individual, a man at life’s midway playing a role, and therefore not legible by the annual’s readers as a simulacrum on paper of Coleridge’s own enchanting speech or inner feeling. The poem itself is strange, as many of the annual poems Coleridge published in the 1820s were, in that it raises readers’ expectations that it will be confessional, but then avoids confession. It is written in the third person, though about so intimate a subject as the loss of love: That boon, which but to have possess’d In a belief, gave life a zest— Uncertain both what it had been, And if by error lost, or luck; And what it was; —an evergreen Which some insidious blight had struck, Or annual flower, which, past its blow, No vernal spell shall e’er revive; Uncertain, and afraid to know, Doubts toss’d him to and fro: Hope keeping Love, Love Hope alive, Like babes bewildered in a snow, That cling and huddle from the cold In hollow tree or ruin’d fold. (The Amulet, p. 46; CPW, i, ii, p. 1061, ll. 21–34)

The similes are vivid, but the case they illustrate is scarcely present and the text does not decide which of them is more appropriate. Pronouns are scarce too: it is a text that evidences uncertainty and bewilderment not just about the order of events, but of identity. It seems that the self cannot formulate itself fully as a speaking, self-knowing ‘I’: instead of recollecting itself by remembering past experience it has recourse to personified abstractions – hope, fancy, love, poesy – as if these are independent of the person who feels them. Loss of love is not caused by a lover’s desertion; Love and Hope seem to have wandered from their host as if not located within a self. They appear unindividualised – placeholders for a personhood that has

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not cohered around them or found its own language to express and know itself. Thus how and when love was lost remains unclear. The self appears amorphous and displaced rather than, as in L.E.L.’s poem, fully present as a lamenting self because it has suffered loss. As Peter Larkin has written of another late poem, there is ‘a darker sense of incompleteness as selfinsufficingness rather than . . . as unexplored possibility’.30 Insufficingness because Coleridge’s text verbally, formally and visually frustrates any reading that might infer a single, individual voice from the marks on the page. In this respect ‘The Improvisatore’ was an early indication of the anti-Romantic revisionism of the late Coleridge – the writer who came to regard nature as the devil in a strait waistcoat and who in 1834 replaced the philosopher’s injunction ‘know thyself’ with ‘ignore thyself, and strive to know thy God!’.31 Love, if it could be articulated at all, was an eclipse – a projection of the self’s incompleteness, of its need for a supplement – that came into view when it ‘intercepted Reason’s light’ – a matter of self-confusion and self-darkening rather than self-knowledge. By the late 1820s, then, Coleridge was exploiting the conditions of print that had frustrated him in 1816 when he wanted to simulate oral enchantment in a book as Scott had done – exploiting them not to hark back to a self shaped in the transmission of voice from speaker to hearer but to cast doubt on whether any stable self can be grasped in language. To do so was to disconfirm his own and Wordsworth’s confessional lyrics as well as L.E.L.’s: poetry here prints out its own inability to define a man by ‘speaking to men’ (in effect, by representing that speech adequately on paper). Yet if there was no stable identity to be found through poetry’s printed searching, ‘The Improvisatore’ nevertheless seeks to reassure his auditors and readers that there is a strength in what remains behind of the bewildered self. That strength consists of the ‘certainty’ of loss and limit, freeing the ‘heart’ from the bewilderment caused by surviving hope. After self-estrangement comes rest, albeit in a position of displacement from all deep emotion: Now that at length by certain proof he knows, That whether real or a magic shew, Whate’er it was, it is no longer so; Though heart be lonesome, Hope laid low, Yet, Lady! deem him not unblest: The certainty that struck Hope dead, Hath left Contentment in her stead: And that is next to Best! (The Amulet, p. 47; CPW, i, part ii, p. 1062; ll. 60–7)

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To be ‘next to Best’, as the capitalisation suggests, is always to be in a supplementary position to the main entity. Here the small capitals that emphasise Contentment seem to protest too much. Contentment is not contented, for it is defined as – haunted by – what it is not quite. These less-than-ultimate lines turn the reader back to the dramatic scene that preceded the verse, and it is now read more bleakly in retrospect, its playfulness a contentedness that equals restlessness. The improviser, it now seems, exchanges roles and discourses, eluding himself in each – a textual pleasure that is also a pain and that is manifested to readers of the annual by the text’s mixture of genres, typesizes and layouts. By the end, the text has constructed a mythologised poet who playfully copes with his failure to shape himself in terms of the central tenets of Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s so-called Lake poetry. He is too old, too far past the events, whatever they were, to recollect them and himself in an overflow of feeling. He gives us not the events relived, but an interpretation of their aftermath in which they have been forgotten. And he appears not as a ‘Christabel’ bard enchanting listeners but as a domesticated old gent who seeks world-wearily to instruct and entertain young women rather than to engage their sympathy and pity. He is neither looking for them to be the audience allowing him catharsis nor aiming to blight their youth with his own experience of the inevitability of loss or, L.E.L.-like, the impossibility of surviving that loss. If there is pathos here – and there is – it is in the gradual discovery that his difference in age, gender and experience opens a gap between him and the women he addresses – they cannot yet live out the love that he long since lost and he cannot engage their passions, though he can gently instruct them. By the end of the text the women auditors and chatty scenario have vanished. For all its earlier flirtatiousness and buoyancy, ‘The Improvisatore’ ends on an attenuated grimness that makes it a song of experience to L.E.L.’s songs of disappointed innocence. This makes it a disturbing read – a discourse from an undefined elsewhere – for any sociable young woman. ‘ t h e b i j o u ’ f o r 18 28 Coleridge’s appeal to the minds of female readers, as distinct from their senses and their bodies, became important not just in the poems he published in the annuals, but in the version of his oeuvre he established as he reworked and reassembled his poems for the definitive Poetical Works, published by William Pickering. Indeed, the Poetical Works was launched onto a market already primed to receive Coleridge’s new work as that of a

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poet who addressed female readers in the annuals. Such was the annuals’ popularity that, without Coleridge’s permission, Pickering pre-published in The Bijou, as ‘tasters’, some of the poems shortly to appear in the Works, alongside two love lyrics by L.E.L. In this annual too, then, the two poets appeared together. Coleridge’s unwitting contributions included an old love poem from 1802 written for Sara Hutchinson, ‘A Day Dream’; here he appears in confessional mode, narrating a scene in which women arouse the vulnerable speaker as they comfort him: ‘Thine eyelash on my cheek doth play—/ ’Tis Mary’s hand upon my brow!’ (The Bijou for 1828, p. 147, CPW, i, part ii, pp. 1070–71, ll. 31–2). Coleridge is cosseted in a ménage à trois in which sexuality is sublimated into shelter; in an eroticisation of women’s traditional maternal role ‘Mary’ and ‘Asra’ (Mary and Sara Hutchinson) are sensual angels ministering to his grown-up child. No potent hero he, but the feminised creator of dreamy scenarios in which he is the infantilised centre of nurturing female attention. Coleridge is excited enough by the tender touching to exclaim openly, ‘O Asra! dearly love I thee’ (The Bijou for 1828, p. 147; CPW, I, part ii, p. 1071, l. 20) – a naked confession of the kind he would never make in his later poetry but that, in its context in The Bijou, emphasises that he and L.E.L. are poets of a similar kind – or that, for readers mindful of chronology, he was an originator of her soft, dreamy lyricism, in which all is suffused with love-longing: L.E.L. regenders his male fantasies, writing through the personae of young women who yearn for, and lament the loss of, the soft caresses of a heroic yet tender young man, but she keeps the sensual imagery, the erotic settings, the romance diction. Most readers of the annual would not have had chronology uppermost in their minds, hence the effect of the publication was to align Coleridge with the popular love lyricism of the new women poets, risking the charges of Della Cruscanism and effeminacy that had hurt him in 1816, after the appearance of Christabel. His newly forged role of conservative moralist and educator of young men in philosophy and theology was placed at risk: the new old poems seemed closer to being aids to masturbation than to reflection. ‘A Day Dream’ did bear signs of revision, however – revision made as the older Coleridge placed a distancing frame around what, in his 1802 notebook, had been a biographical narrative and direct address to the beloved Sara. In this it exhibited an embryonic turn towards obliquity that he developed much further in other late poems that revisited old passion. The full outpouring of lyrical confession is arrested:

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Coleridge But let me check this tender lay, Which none may hear but she and thou! Like the still hive at quiet midnight humming, Murmur it to yourselves, ye two beloved women! (The Bijou, p. 147; CPW, i, part ii, p. 1071, ll. 33–6)

The full version of the ‘lay’ will remain the private property of the beloved women – a discreet but also tantalising ending that makes the reader a wouldbe voyeur or eavesdropper straining to witness the poem’s seductive passage from the poet’s lips to the murmuring lips of the women he addresses in it. The poem knows more than it will say and has a private function as a billet doux that is declared to, but not replicated for, the public. As Coleridge re-collected the old loves of his private life in public, he again and again broke off the confessional mode. If in ‘A Day Dream’ he is a tease, in the other poems Pickering included in The Bijou he is retrospective, developing a method of displacing the personal that deliberately distanced him from the lyrical overflow and dreamy sensuality his earlier work had sponsored in L.E.L., and that was evident in her contributions to the annual. L.E.L.’s ‘The City of the Dead’ spoke directly and with urgent sincerity to The Bijou’s readers, telling them to abandon hope in this world and to yearn for the next: Weep no more that affection thus loosens its tie, Weep no more that the loved and the loving die Weep no more o’er the cold dust that lies at your feet, But gaze on yon starry world—there ye shall meet. (The Bijou, ll. 39–42, p. 15)

Her other contribution, ‘Sans Souci’, also suggested that disappointment in love was inevitable and romanticised a young woman’s resignation to loss: Is there one who sits languid and lonely, With her fair face bowed down on her hand, With a pale cheek and glittering eyelash, And careless locks ’scaped from their band. For a lover not worth that eye’s tear-drop, Not worth that sweet mouth’s rosy kiss, Nor that cheek though ’tis faded to paleness; (The Bijou, ll. 21–8, p. 78) I know not the lover that is.

After this, it seems hope can only be entertained cynically: another pleasure, another love may be chosen, but it will only be a repetition of the same process.

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Coleridge’s contributions, ‘Youth and Age’ and ‘Work without Hope’, returned to the topics of the loss of love and hope, but addressed readers cryptically and through a much more self-aware narrator. Read alongside L.E.L.’s, they seemed to seek the sympathy of female readers, as hers did, but that sympathy would only be elicited if the reader decoded the poems’ oblique allegory: she would have to exert her intelligence. ‘Youth and Age’, for instance, uses similar imagery to that preferred by Landon – flowers, tears, dew – but for a different purpose – neither to decorate the firstperson lament of the lover, nor to provide a bowery setting for her complaining poet-figure. Instead, the poem’s descriptions turn attention away from Coleridge’s own predicament by their epigrammatic condensation, their syllogistic structure and by the closure of rhyme which endow them with the aura of generally-binding logic. Flowers are lovely; Love is flower-like; Friendship is a sheltering tree; O the joys! that came down shower-like, Of Friendship, Love, and Liberty, Ere I was old! (The Bijou, p. 144; CPW, i, part ii, p. 1012; ll. 18–22)

A characteristic of this later love poetry is to raise expectations of the confessional and then move away to a general level, as at the end of the poem: I see these locks in silvery slips, This drooping gait, this altered size: But spring tide blossoms on thy lips, And tears take sunshine from thine eyes: Life is but thought: so think I will That youth and I are housemates still. (The Bijou, p. 145; CPW, i, part ii, p. 1013; ll. 33–8)

Likewise the axiomatic couplet that answers the final question in ‘Work without Hope’: And would you learn the spells that drowse my soul? Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve, And hope without an object cannot live. (The Bijou, p. 28; CPW, i, part ii, p. 1033; ll. 12–14)

These lines both invite pity and keep it at bay by impersonal allegoric figures. If this is to tantalise the reader, it is also to discipline the writer: Coleridge’s refusal of disclosure acts as a corrective to L.E.L.’s mode of address, positioning Coleridge as a former lover and lyric-writer

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now too old and too marked by loss to renew the passions and the poems of his earlier days.

e k p hr a s i s i n ‘the keepsake’ In The Keepsake for the following year both Coleridge and L.E.L. were commissioned to include poems that accompanied pictures. Visual appeal was an important part of the annuals’ marketing strategy; as McGann and Reiss remind us, L.E.L. produced many poems about the fine illustrations that made the magazines and annuals popular. ‘These sentimental commodity-poems made ambiguous capital of a popular spectacle of beauty.’32 Coleridge had previously written on aesthetics in response to the paintings of his friend Washington Allston; the new trend towards lavish illustration now allowed him to publish poetry prompted by art, as his fellow Lake poets also did at this time through their connections with landscape watercolourists and engravers. Coleridge’s participation in this visual turn took him not to mountain views, however, but to literary scenes. His ‘Garden of Boccaccio’ called L.E.L. to mind in that it described a contemporary engraving of an Italian medieval romance: her genre, her setting. L.E.L. contributed ‘Verses on an engraved portrait of the Duchess of Bedford’, a poem in which she turns from the engraving to imagine medieval scenes. Addressing the Duchess, she writes If thou hadst lived in that old haunted time, When sovereign Beauty was a thing sublime, For which knights went to battle, and her glove Had even more of glory than of love;— Hadst thou lived in those days, how chivalrie, With brand and banner, would have honour’d thee! Then had this picture been a chronicle, Of whose contents might only poets tell What king had worn thy chains, what heroes sigh’d, What thousands nameless, hopeless, for thee died. But thou art of the Present—there is nought About thee for the dreaming minstrel’s thought, Save vague imagination, which still lives Upon the charmed light all beauty gives. (ll. 9–22; The Keepsake for 1829, p. 121)

L.E.L.’s poem continues in the vein of Keats’s ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’ in that its exoticism is not direct but experienced at second hand through the printed page, in a domestic setting. Coleridge

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then differs from L.E.L. in deconstructing this process – not merely commenting on an engraving, but dramatising the social occasion in which he came to see the engraving. He takes his poem back to its origins in a friendly gesture in which his depression is relieved by the thoughtful kindness of a female friend, Mrs Gillman, who puts the engraving on his desk to amuse him. As Derek Furr has pointed out,33 this configuration of the giving of a gift as the occasion for the poem’s composition replicates the typical giving of annuals as presents, so that the poem mirrors the print context in which it appears – and this mirroring implies Coleridge’s reconciliation with book publication on the basis that the book is here no longer, in his mind, a public exposure of his intimate speech acts to an alien public governed by hostile reviewers. It is now a gift – an offering of friendship from one gender to another – a man to a woman perhaps, mirroring Gillman’s gift of the engraving to him. Of late, in one of those most weary hours, When life seems emptied of all genial powers, A dreary mood, which he who ne’er has known May bless his happy lot, I sate alone; And, from the numbing spell to win relief, Call’d on the past for thought of glee or grief. In vain! bereft alike of grief and glee, I sate and cow’r’d o’er my own vacancy! And as I watch’d the dull continuous ache, Which, all else slum’bring, seem’d alone to wake; O Friend! long wont to notice yet conceal, And soothe by silence what words cannot heal, I but half saw that quiet hand of thine Place on my desk this exquisite design. Boccaccio’s Garden and its faery, The love, the joyaunce, and the gallantry! (The Keepsake, p. 282; CPW, i, part ii, p. 1089; ll. 1–16)

Here Coleridge begins in the manner of his Lake-period poems – the ‘Letter to Sara Hutchinson’ that became ‘Dejection: an Ode’ and the ‘Lines to William Wordsworth’ written on hearing him recite The Prelude. This is a matter of address as well as subject-matter: he calls Mrs Gillman ‘O Friend!’ – the added exclamation mark signalling in print an emphasised feeling (spoken or thought) as it once did for Sara and William, the two closest companions he ever had. But he then turns away from this mode, to what is acknowledged as a world of artifice – of ‘faery’. As a result, neither the intense confessional beginning nor the response to the ‘exquisite design’ that follows is unqualified: rather, the reader is always aware that

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neither actual, present friendship nor the world of art is, or needs to be, allsufficing. Life presents both and each is richer when the other can be accessed from it. It follows that the language of chivalric love that enters his poem when he ponders on the engraved picture is dependent upon, and qualified by, a language of domestic affection which is less intense but more immediate, real and sociable – and which suggests a more equable and stable relationship between male and female than the exchange of power and powerlessness that the maiden experiences in L.E.L.’s portrait of the idealised world of courtly love (and than Christabel experiences at Geraldine’s hands). Whereas L.E.L. wants to escape from the present day, with its mundane and commodified images of beautiful women (the engraving of the Duchess) to a thrilling world of romance that existed in the past (and even there perhaps only in the pages of the poems with which she aligns her own), Coleridge suggests that this desire (and the poetry that would indulge it without a return to the present-day social world) is a tempting and enjoyable, but also escapist and limited, dream. Both poets, it turns out, find that looking at a printed illustration sends them on an imaginative trip to an Italian landscape; only Coleridge wants to come back. Addressing himself to female readers in contradistinction from L.E.L., Coleridge reworked his earlier emphasis on Gothic female sensuality into a domesticated and companionate tribute to female tact. This was not, however, to reject L.E.L.’s development of his earlier work, which had after all stimulated him into publishing poetry in response. It took L.E.L.’s intensification and feminisation of his Gothic style to bring him into print with new, late, poetry which, if it did not entirely reject that style, nonetheless reworked it so drastically that it amounted to a different discourse on love – though still a feminised one. Now in Coleridge the confessional is broached but then dispersed into multiple personae, intertexts and allegories, as if to undermine L.E.L.’s reworking of his own (and other Romantics’) earlier confessional mode, in which the self is sole, single-voiced, its moods all-embracing.34 ‘poetical works’ 1828 Precisely because they were ephemeral, and the work of many hands, the annuals defused Coleridge’s anxiety about appearing in print (although he continued to find the business of negotiating fees complex and provoking). Thus they helped renew his career as a poet. He had less at stake, and so could discover ways playfully to explore issues that had previously silenced

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his confessional verse. As he wrote for them, however, he simultaneously faced the far more daunting prospect of going to press with his Poetical Works. His publisher linked the Works with the annuals too. Not only did Pickering pre-publish some of the poems intended for the Poetical Works in The Bijou, but he pitched it to the readers of that annual as a book that would interest them: ‘The Poetical and Dramatic Works of S. T. Coleridge, with numerous additional Poems now first collected, and revised by the Author, in 4 [sic] vols., crown, 8 vo. Nearly ready.’ Many of these ‘additional Poems’ were concerned with the issues that dominated the annual verse – with the questions of how to write about love, and how to assemble a self in writing after love’s departure. They left the Poetical Works very far from being either a summative statement of a developmental career or a monument to self-consistency. They portrayed Coleridge as a textual experimentalist as he tried out genres and voices that coped with belatedness and sought an intimate audience from the unknown readership of books – as a poet of after-images, playing minor roles because he knows that the major trials and joys of his past life have dislocated, rather than consolidated, a strong poetic self. The textual experimentation of the Works derived from strategies that Coleridge had recently used in the annuals – chiefly mixing verse and prose and playing with layout and typeface. Coleridge signalled this by including, in the second volume, a section in which assumptions about poetic communication are self-referentially highlighted – entitled ‘Prose in Rhyme; or Epigrams, Moralities, and Things Without a Name’. Belonging to no known genre, the pieces collected would not be easy to criticise for failing to meet the standards of Coleridge’s, and other poets’, past. They would not be personal confessions; nevertheless, a motto and epigraph that began the section implied that past personal experience lay behind them. The motto, in Greek, translates as ‘love is ever a voluble companion’; the epigraph says In many ways does the full heart reveal The presence of the love it would conceal; But in far more th’estranged heart lets know, The absence of the love, which yet it fain would shew. (CPW (1828), ii, p. 75, ll. 1–4)

After this, the texts that follow, like the annual poems, are seen as ironic reversals, rather than spontaneous overflowings, of emotion. It seems that the passage from feeling to print is perverse: words display the presence of a love that the heart would hide or reveal the absence of a love the heart would show. A central assumption of Wordsworthian poetics – that the

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passage from emotion to poetry is direct and sincere – is thus contradicted. At the same time, it is implied that a former love is now lost – the heart no longer loves or is beloved. Rather than enchanting listeners with a song of love, the pieces in ‘Prose in Rhyme . . . and Things Without a Name’ graphically play upon their status as printed texts, unable to convey the direct confessional voice of the speakerpoet to an enthralled hearer. A salient example is ‘Youth and Age’, reworked so that it displays a range of typographical devices that were not present in the text as it first appeared in The Bijou. Some of these indicate a more varied array of emphases: italics suggest the heaviest stress, but the capitalisation of the first letters of certain nouns also gives them a stronger significance than normal – and than the surrounding, uncapitalised, nouns. Exclamation marks imply the narrator’s vehemence – visual indicators of passionate language. More unconventional, however, are capitalised words – some in a mixture of full and small capitals, others solely in small. Not all the typographical marks relate to emphatic speech: some are not convertible back to a speaking voice but signify graphically. The overall effect is visually arresting, leaving the reader questioning what and how print formulates meaning, rather than passively following conventional lines of type. Indeed, lineation is also varied: Coleridge uses multiple insets to create a stepping effect – visually stressing how one idea depends on/from the previous one.

youth and age Verse, a Breeze mid Blossoms straying, Where Hope clung feeding, like a bee— Both were mine! Life went a maying With Nature, Hope, and Poesy When I was young! When I was young?—Ah woful when! Ah for the Change ’twixt Now and Then! This breathing House not built with hands, This body that does me grievous wrong, O’er aery Cliffs and glittering Sands, How lightly then it flashed along:— Like those trim skiffs, unknown of yore, On winding Lakes and Rivers wide, That ask no aid of Sail or Oar, That fear no spite of Wind or Tide! Nought cared this Body for wind or weather When Youth and I liv’d in’t together. (CPW (1828), ii, p. 82, ll. 1–17; CPW, i, part ii, p. 1012)

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Most striking of all is the effect of the capitalisation in the syllogistic lines: in 1828 the consonance of the feminine rhyme is visually reinforced by the marking-out of the key nouns, emphasising their collective recurrence: Flowers are lovely; Love is flower-like; Friendship is a sheltering tree; O the Joys, that came down shower-like, Of Friendship, Love, and Liberty, Ere I was old!

(ll. 18–21)

After the graphic insistence of ‘Friendship, Love, and Liberty’, the inset, lower case, ‘Ere I was old!’ appears as a diminished afterthought – a qualification after a relived exhilaration – a personal exception to a general joyous truth that the text can announce but the temporal self cannot live out. The typography thus increases the poem’s pathos even as it suggests an author who can no longer feel, and confess his feeling in enchanting song, as he did in his youth. A similar procedure occurs in ‘The Improvisatore’ (introduced for the first time in the 1829 expanded edition): italics and small capitals were added to the text that had appeared in the annual: That boon, which but to have possess’d In a belief, gave life a zest— Uncertain both what it had been, And if by error lost, or luck; And what it was; —an evergreen Which some insidious blight had struck, Or annual flower, which, past its blow, No vernal spell shall e’er revive; Uncertain, and afraid to know, Doubts toss’d him to and fro: Hope keeping Love, Love Hope alive, Like babes bewildered in a snow, That cling and huddle from the cold In hollow tree or ruin’d fold. (ll. 21–34; CPW, i, part ii, p. 1061)35

Here the reader is presented with a typographic field in which some words are made to stand out: ‘Hope . . . Love, Love Hope’, for instance, becomes a verbal palindrome – the interdependence of these emotions made graphically insistent even as the poet confesses his inability to hold on to them in his own experience. The capitalisation also suggests that certain words mean more than the poem explains, as if the emphasis thus produced substitutes for a confessional and biographical account of his love life that the poet can no longer write.

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The effect of these newly collected and printed late poems was to make the Poetical Works include a contextual critique of the old poems it collected: the Works displaced them from the poetic they had previously suggested by creating scenarios in which their central modus operandi – inspiration, enchantment, entrancement, orality, speech, chant – were summoned only to be placed in doubt. It was in a piece entitled ‘The Blossoming of the Solitary Date Tree’ that Coleridge created the most complex and critical scenario of this kind. First published in the Works, this text was a revision from manuscript of an old, private love poem. As such, it illustrated the problems Coleridge faced as he tried to collect his writings. If the Works was to advance upon the partial collection he had published as Sibylline Leaves, it required more material. He possessed this material: his notebooks and papers contained numerous occasional pieces and also some intense, original and heartfelt love lyrics written in the Lake District for Sara Hutchinson. But these could not be used without the kind of modification he had carried out when turning his verse letter to Sara into the poem he published in 1802 as ‘Dejection: an Ode’. The specific causes of his yearning and distress would have to be excised, as would their address to a particular person: these were poems that flowed from, and alluded to, Coleridge’s imaginative engagement with a beloved woman who was also their intended reader. Their intense eroticisation of writing and reading would have to be revised. Such revision was painful to carry out – it involved revisiting a relationship that ended sadly – and he was anxious about doing so, writing ‘all I had to publish, and much that had far better in their present state have remained unpublished, has been forced from me’ (letter of August 1827; CL, vi, pp. 699–700). ‘Forced’ from him it may have been, but Coleridge took care to modify his unpublished material for the occasion. As in his annual verse, so in the Poetical Works. ‘The Blossoming of the Solitary Date Tree’ was pieced together by disassembling old manuscripts, removing confessional sections of text for the re-collection in print and then adding new prose in which he discussed the questions that revising these old manuscripts raised for him – questions concerning the ways in which texts communicate and readers read. The resultant text outlined an ideal model of textuality (rather than, as in 1816, orality); it pursued some of the new directions he had begun in ‘The Improvisatore’, responding to the feminised poetry of the literary annuals, and in particular to the appeal made to female readers by L.E.L. The text of an older man both emulating and correcting a younger woman’s popularisation of his earlier style, it updated the model of poetic enchantment given in the Christabel volume. It also alluded to his own and

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Wordsworth’s poems of thirty years before.36 But it gave no personal information away: Coleridge hid the love affair which had prompted his poetry of the early 1800s behind oblique references that only those who had known him then would be able to decode. The result was a meditation on loss, temporality and the diminution of capacity that comes with age, which nevertheless contemplates the necessity of rewriting the past in order to recollect it – a poem that offers its own textual relationship with the reader as a way of overcoming, albeit briefly, the universal human predicament of losing one’s past to the ravages of time. But also a poem in which gender and sexuality are represented with such instability that this offered relationship is undermined – a poem in which the late-written preface tries, but ultimately fails, to rework the disabling anxieties about love, and about masculinity and femininity, into the form of an androgynous harmony. A poem in which Coleridge broaches, and cannot entirely overcome, a gender trouble that affects his understanding of textuality as well as sexuality. The poem had not begun life in so unstable and self-reflexive a form. The manuscript dates from 1801/2. It was not, at this point, called ‘The Blossoming of the Solitary Date Tree’, nor did it have anything to do with date trees except for a solitary reference to an Arab. The 1801/2 manuscript was, on the contrary, neither allusive nor allegorical but a confessional cri de coeur addressed directly to a female reader – Sara: Hard is my Lot, a Life of stifled Pain! And oft to thee do I bewail my Doom/ Yet think not thou that loving to complain I nurse sick fancies and distemper’d Gloom, A man diseas’d in nature! O no! no! It is Joy’s greatness and it’s overflow Which, being incompleat, disquieteth me so! I am not a God, that I should stand alone, And having all, but Love, I want the Whole; The Organ, that makes outward Bliss our own, The Door, that lets it in upon the Soul! Sweet Babes make beautiful my Parlour Hearth, My Bookroom Windows shew a Heaven on Earth; And I have a Heart attun’d alike to Joy or Mirth! But even as the Gladness stirs my Heart, All timorously beginning to rejoice, Like a blind Arab, that from sleep doth start In lonesome Tent, I listen for thy Voice Beloved! ’tis not thine! Thou art not there!

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Coleridge Then melts the Bubble into idle Air, And wishing without Hope I restlessly despair! A Mother with anticipating Glee Laughs o’er the Child, that standing at her Chair And couching his round cheek upon her knee Looks up, and doth his rosy mouth prepare To ape her coming words: at that sweet sight She hears her own Voice with a new delight; And when the Babe at length relisps the Song aright, Then is she tenfold gladder than before! But should Mischance or Death her Darling take, What then avail those songs, which sweet, of yore, Were only sweet for their sweet Echo’s sake?— Sweet Friend! no Prattler at a Mother’s Knee Was e’er so deeply priz’d, as I prize Thee: Why was I made for Love, yet Love denied to Me? (CPW, i, part ii, pp. 812–13)

This poem presents a raw and naked narrator who seems, so colloquial and confessional are his words, to speak – not write – and to do so with the kind of openness and vulnerability that is typically revealed only to a beloved or to oneself. In this respect it parallels Wordsworth’s admission of blindness, disillusion and depression in the ‘Immortality Ode’. Indeed, it was written out of a verse dialogue with Wordsworth: the poets moved on parallel paths towards the disciplining and concentrating of confessional narrative that culminated in their two odes of 1802 – Wordsworth’s on intimations of immortality; Coleridge’s on dejection (a poem that began life as a verse letter to Sara Hutchinson and was published on the day of her sister’s wedding to Wordsworth). The imagery of ‘Hard is my lot’ links it not just to ‘Dejection’, with its similar analysis of the source of joy, but also to notebook entries and other private poems written about and for Sara, which both Orientalise her and associate her with the mother/infant relationship. For instance, the narrator’s self-comparison with ‘a blind Arab, that from sleep doth start’37 relates to a note of September 1802 about a ‘Mother listening for the sound of a still-born child – blind Arab list’ning in the wilderness’ (CN, i, 1244). By then Coleridge had already given Sara an Arab name that evoked the desert: ‘Asahara, the Moorish Maid’; in March, just a few entries distant from his note about the ‘blind Arab’, he wrote another version of her Arab name: ‘Gallow Hill, March 11th, 1802 S.T. Coleridge /Sara /SarHa’ (CN, i, 1150). These notes are in turn linked to the verse letter to Sara that

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was published, in expurgated form, as ‘Dejection: an Ode’. In that verse letter, begun 4 April 1802, Coleridge recalls a tender scene at Gallow Hill in Yorkshire when Sara and her sister Mary comforted him as he lay in their laps – like a child whose mother leans over it with love: It was as calm as this, that happy night When Mary, thou, & I together were, The low decaying Fire our only Light, And listen’d to the Stillness of the Air! O that affectionate & blameless Maid, Dear Mary! On her Lap my head she lay’d— Her Hand was on my Brow, Even as my own is now; And on my Cheek I felt thy eye-lash play. Such Joy I had, that I might truly say, My Spirit was awe-stricken with the Excess And trance-like Depth of its brief Happiness. (CPW, i, part ii, p. 683; ll. 99–110)

Some of these lines found their way into the poem published alongside L.E.L.’s as ‘A Day Dream’ in The Bijou. In their original notebook context their sensuality and emotionalism is more intense: Coleridge generates an erotic charge in taking a child’s position: nurtured in Mary’s lap, he is comforted and secure.38 Love is, in the poems of 1801 and 1802, to touch as a mother touches her child or to be touched as a child by its mother and to tell Sara this in verse, so that she, as a reader, will imaginatively relive the scene with the author, renewing the event because of its textual representation. As a love-maker, Coleridge is a love-writer seeking a love-reader. In 1828, we shall see, Coleridge grew to modify his love-writing with hindsight, still seeking a readerly response but questioning his need for shelter and placing his own maternal imagery in doubt. Given its private nature, it is not surprising that when ‘Hard is my lot’ appeared in print for the first time it was much changed, and revealed nothing about Coleridge’s life when it had been written. The new title led away from the biographical, as did the Preface that was now attached to the verse. And yet, for those who knew Coleridge very well, it was clear that ‘The Blossoming of the Solitary Date Tree’ was not an utter break from the past; the new text was full of allusions to its origins: it contained, as did many of Coleridge’s later poems, a private level of reference that would be apparent to those who had shared his past life and knew his previous poems – that would tell them that this new work was a reflection upon, as

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well as echo of, his old. Even the title was allusive: in 1802 Coleridge called himself, in the verse letter to Sara, ‘a withered branch upon a blossoming Tree’ (CPW, i, part ii, p. 685; l. 168); the new title harked back to this image of his own disablement within the flourishing Wordsworthian circle but also suggested the possibility that he might grow and flourish again if in a fertilising proximity to a female tree. Perhaps that ‘female tree’ was the Coleridgean verse of a woman poet: L.E.L., in the section of ‘The Improvisatrice’ concerning a ‘Moorish maid’, described ‘date trees’ shaken in the wind. Coleridge’s title may be an allusion to her text, a text itself echoing his Remorse and unwittingly using his pet-name for Sara. Where the date tree would flourish, however, was left unresolved by the allusion: it would not be in an intimate circle of friends within which his poem could be spoken and heard – an audience from whose conversation the poetry had stemmed in the first place. It would be, instead, in a silent, removed, literary circle – a virtual sharing achieved when the printed words were absorbed by a reader whom he would never meet and could only imagine. Not the immediate consolations of orality but the deferred gratification of textuality. Using a mixture of prose and verse, quotation and allusion, capitals and italics, the 1828 ‘Blossoming’ foregrounds its own written, printed status: this is an avowedly different text from the confessional lyrics and rural ballads for which the Lake poets were known, and also from the performance poetic of the Christabel volume of 1816 – that publication having failed to transform commercialised print into a chain of enchantment. Absence and incompleteness are the motifs around which ‘The Blossoming’ itself is woven. It is articulated, however, through a complex strategy which tends to universalise any biographical origins it might have had. Like ‘Work without Hope’, ‘Youth and Age’, and ‘Duty Surviving Self-Love’, it allegorises situations that may have arisen biographically, without adopting an autobiographical mode. In the manner of Spenser and Bunyan, it features a dramatic narrative in which figures stand for concepts. Coleridge had set out his understanding of allegory in an 1818 lecture: Allegoric composition is the employment of one set of images with actions and accompaniments correspondent, so as to convey, while we disguise, either moral qualities or conceptions of the mind that are not in themselves objects of the Sense, or other agents, actions, fortunes and circumstances, so that the difference is every where presented to the eye or imagination while the Likeness is suggested to the mind: and this connectedly so that the Parts combine to form a consistent Whole. (Lects 1808–19, ii, p. 99)

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Coleridge had written allegories before – his 1790s satires ‘Fire, Famine and Slaughter’ and ‘The Devil’s Thoughts’ were among his best-known poems – but always rated them below symbolic writing, in which the thing described ‘partakes of the reality which it renders intelligible’.39 Wordsworth, he had argued, was a great symbolic poet – a poet of imagination – for his descriptions of himself both detailed one individual’s internalisation of the external world and revealed it to be an instance of what all people did, if they only knew it. But to be such a poet demanded elevating oneself and one’s own life to exemplary – even prophetic – status, like Wordsworth in The Prelude. Reviewers had consistently ridiculed Wordsworth for so doing throughout his career. Coleridge, having begun on a similar course in such verse as ‘Frost at Midnight’ and ‘Dejection’, but having ceded that path to Wordsworth as his Sara-poetry became too private to publish, had no wish to make his life the subject of his work, or attract even more critical ridicule than he had already received for his association with Wordsworth as a Lake poet. Allegory, then, offered a means of revising old confessional material without revealing himself as he had in ‘The Pains of Sleep’, or again risking the imaginative mode that Wordsworth had mastered only to be derided by the reviewers. Coleridge turned to it in the face of his anxiety about the public reception of his work, as a comparatively risk-free way of articulating his deepest concerns that might even win him readerly sympathy – since it hinted at personal incapacity and desperation without going into detail. Allegory was a strategy born of anxiety. In ‘The Blossoming’ allegory is related to readership, a way of narrating issues of love, sexuality and their representation in writing in terms simultaneously dramatic and general, and without giving details of the female reader to whom the verses were originally addressed in 1801/2. To those who knew Coleridge, that reader’s identity and significance would still be discernible – Sara Hutchinson was still invoked as the addressee. To those who did not know him, ‘The Blossoming’ has the effect of putting the unknown consumer of the published poem in an analogous position to that which Sara once occupied – a female addressee whose reading of the poem is imagined as the act of sympathy needed by the lonely male author to bring it to fruition. This positioning, we shall see, has consequences for the readerly poetic that the text proposes – a poetic in marked distinction from that of Wordsworth. In effect, Coleridge creates a gendered model of reading, remodelling earlier Lake poetry in which a woman is often positioned within the poem as the provider of the sympathy the narrator needs to feel powerful and to assert his genius. Here, the feminised reader, in a similarly defined

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position, has literary work to do: she must exert her literary intelligence to allow the author’s incomplete text to reach full realisation. The female is invited – if not coerced – into readerly cooperation rather than absorbed within the narrator’s self-mythologisation: it is the text, rather than the poet within the text, that is completed by her attention. This model is set out first in the Preface, a cryptic text about the conditions needed for successful creativity and about loss and fragmentation:

THE BLOSSOMING OF THE SOLITARY DATE-TREE A LAMENT ––– I seem to have an indistinct recollection of having read either in one of the ponderous tomes of George of Venice, or in some other compilation from the uninspired Hebrew Writers, a Apologue or Rabbinical Tradition to the following purpose: While our first parents were yet standing before their offended maker, and the last words of the sentence were yet sounding in Adam’s ear, the guileful false serpent, a counterfeit and a usurper from the beginning, presumptuously took on himself the character of advocate or moderator, and pretending to intercede for Adam, exclaimed: ‘Nay, Lord, in thy justice, for the Man was the least in fault. Rather let the Woman return at once to the dust, and let Adam remain here all the days of his now mortal life, and enjoy the respite thou mayest grant him, in this thy Paradise which thou gavest to him, and hast planted with every tree pleasant to the sight of man and of delicious fruitage’. And the word of the Most High answered Satan: ‘The tender mercies of the wicked are cruel. Treacherous Fiend! Guilt deep as thine could not be, yet the love of kind not extinguished. But if having done what thou hast done, thou had’st yet the heart of man within thee, and the yearning of the soul for its answering image and completing counterpart, O spirit, desperately wicked! The sentence thou counsellest had been thy own.’ The title of the following poem was suggested by a fact mentioned by Linnaeus, of a Date-tree in a nobleman’s garden which year after year had put forth a full show of blossoms, but never produced fruit, till a branch from a Date-tree had been conveyed from a distance of some hundred leagues. The first leaf of the MS. from which the poem has been transcribed, and which contained the two or three introductory stanzas, is wanting: and the author has in vain taxed his memory to repair the loss. But a rude draught of the poem contains the substance of the stanzas, and the reader is requested to receive it as the substitute. It is not impossible, that some congenial spirit, whose years do not exceed those of the author, at the time the poem was written, may find a pleasure in restoring the Lament to its original integrity by reduction of the thoughts to the requisite metre. S.T.C.40

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Here, Coleridge offers three related narratives: first: the story of his reading and of his loss of the manuscript; second: the report of the rabbinical narrative; third: the discussion of Linnaeus’s reference to the pollination of date trees.41 Each of these narratives positions the author as a being who is dependent on readerly sympathy for his creativity to flourish. The rabbinical narrative and the Linnaean one imply that Coleridge’s failure to remember or complete his old poem resulted from his lack of what both scripture and science show to be necessary for plants and for men: a ‘counterpart’ of the opposite sex. The date tree fruits only when a male branch finds a female one over which its pollen can spread; God in his mercy allows Adam to remain with Eve so he may have a counterpart – even at the cost of exile from Eden. Adam’s and Eve’s reprieve, then, is only partial: humankind’s reward, in the fallen world, is also his fate – it is to experience the separation of masculine from feminine that constitutes fallen sexuality. Yearning and, at worst, lust, replace the prelapsarian androgyny of soul termed, in Coleridge’s lecture notes on the unfallen Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost, ‘a union of opposites, a giving and receiving mutually of the permanent in either, a completion of each in the other’ (Lects 1808–1819, ii, p. 428). Post-sin, that union is sought after but not given: fallenness is a state of universal longing for original unity (including the unity of an original text). Sexuality, textuality, love and language all bear witness that the human need for oneness is fundamental and original. The author’s solution to his ‘unnatural’ singleness is to propose reading as a substitute for the textual, sexual and spiritual integrity he lacks. The reader, Coleridge tells us, may be ‘some congenial spirit’ who will gain pleasure in restoring the poem ‘to its original integrity’. Reading, it seems, is spiritual procreation: the reader germinates the otherwise barren text. Like a second Eve, the reader brings to birth the seed of the fallen Adam/ Coleridge in the form of a date tree (poem) that blossoms and fruits in her mind. The crucial term here is ‘mind’ – or rather soul and spirit. It is a spiritual sexuality, a Platonic partnership of male and female, that Coleridge shows authors, like Adam, to need. The Preface does not, that is, equate humanity with the vegetable world but implies that what is true of the material world of plants – that sexual partnership is necessary for fruition – is true within the purely mental communication of writers and readers. Coleridge offers the reader a model in which scientific and scriptural narratives carry arguments about love and creativity – arguments that, in the confessional verse of 1801/2, he had made directly, in the first person, as he reflected in anguish on his yearning for Sara Hutchinson.

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The Preface is a text that parades its deference to other texts, and reveals Coleridge as a reader rather than a lover. As such, it modifies the more famous preface to ‘Kubla Khan’: here too Coleridge shows himself to be deeply learned in Renaissance tomes – not a carefully revising writer, but a library cormorant, whose fallible memory is the price paid for his immersion in authors so arcane that most of his audience will not have heard of them, still less read them. This was a deliberate disguise of his creative method of careful revision of texts – his own and others’. It was designed to camouflage his need to excise private material and/or to excuse his inability to revise such material, as he once had in ‘Dejection’, into a completed public poem. Anything but a Wordsworthian poet who calls forth and communicates power, Coleridge presents himself as a fading, aging, weakened author who cannot quite preserve his old manuscripts or remember where he found the stories that he indistinctly recollects. Thus when he tells the Adam and Eve story he gives it not from the source – which he cannot recall – but from memory. The reader is charmed by this absentminded figure, but is unwilling to trust him. Is the version of the fall story an ancient tradition, Coleridge’s version of it from (bad) memory, or his invention? The words on the page defer to a number of possible originals, a worrying uncertainty when the story being told is itself that of original sin. The certainty of Biblical authority is displaced, as is Coleridge’s own authority, into a slippage from text to possible text. But that, it turns out, is Coleridge’s playful point, as for instance when he refers to the ‘compilation from the uninspired Hebrew writers’ in which he had read a rabbinical tradition concerning Adam and Eve. Here he alludes to a text that, two years earlier, he had helped his friend Hyman Hurwitz publish. Hurwitz’s Hebrew Tales quotes Coleridge gratefully, and also contains a rabbinical tradition about a man who, having travelled in a desert nearly a whole day, found himself very hungry, thirsty, and fatigued. Necessity obliged him to travel onward, till at last he came to a most enchanting spot, where grew a fine date-tree, watered by a small rivulet. The fatigued traveller seated himself in the shade of the tree, plucked some of its delicious fruit, and refreshed himself. Grateful for the unexpected relief, he thus addressed his benefactor: ‘Tree! tree! what blessing can I give thee? Shall I wish thee towering branches, beautiful foliage, and refreshing shade? thou hast them already; —plenty and exquisite fruit? thou art already blessed therewith; —a refreshing stream to moisten thy root? thou hast no lack of it. The only thing I can wish thee then is, that every one of thy suckers, wherever they be planted, may flourish like thee’. ‘Now, my friend, what blessing can I give thee? Learned and wise thou art already; of riches thou hast plenty, and thy children are many. I can therefore only wish, that all thy descendants may be blessed like thee’.42

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The date tree story as translated by Hurwitz presents a Hebrew Orientalist43 rather than Enlightenment nature, since the tree is addressed as an active partner, an animate life who gives back blessing in return for a blessing received. Such reciprocal gifts enact not only human respect for nature, but acknowledgement of human dependence upon it. The tale inculcates acceptance of the similarity of the human and plant worlds. It shows that the tree and man both aim for the success of their offspring, a success that depends on mutual help: the tree saves the desert-traveller from starving; the traveller plants its suckers. A harmonious and fertile future is possible only because both parties acknowledge their interdependence. If the Preface alludes to, without fully presenting, Hurwitz’s Romantic Judaism of interdependence, it also half-recalls another text in which interdependence is central – George of Venice (a Renaissance neoplatonist responsible for introducing much Jewish scholarship into Christian thought), Coleridge hints, may be the source for the rabbinical ‘tradition’ that shows Adam choosing exile from Eden because he wished to continue his partnership with his beloved Eve. Here Coleridge’s textual citations exemplify the incompleteness which they lament: the half-remembered texts that speak of date trees and of Adam needing partners bespeak incompleteness as well as speaking of it, being a dim, truncated memory of something Coleridge has read, but which he cannot summon whole to memory, or reproduce in this text, itself a fragment. Thus the Preface is an artful construction designed to exemplify the questions it raises – questions about fallibility and singularity. It and its author are incomplete without a reader (and a scholar) to restore to them the prior texts and memories that are lost. The Preface’s playful self-referentiality culminates in its final phrase, which forms a cryptic commentary on the poetics outlined in the Christabel volume and in Biographia Literaria. The reader, Coleridge hopes, will restore ‘the Lament to its original integrity by reduction of the thoughts to the requisite metre’. Here he draws upon the critique of Wordsworth’s remarks about metre that he had made in Chapter 18 of the Biographia when he had objected to Wordsworth’s idea that a poem is plain speech with metre superadded to it. Metre, Coleridge had argued, produces a regular concentration of a reader’s or auditor’s attention: there must, therefore, be something worth concentrating on in the metrical words, or the result will be bathos. Metrical words must be pregnant with an intensity of thought and feeling to a degree rarely found in common speech – or in prose. It was the poet’s task to distil – or reduce (in the culinary sense of reducing a stock or

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sauce) – speech, or prose, so that the emotionally slack or intellectually unnecessary words were omitted and every remaining word was charged, justifying the stress that metre placed upon it. Sometimes, however, this distillation occurred spontaneously in the course of speech, when the speaker was so stimulated by the impression of the outside world on his senses that his speech was naturally charged with emotional and intellectual density; in such cases, Coleridge argued, speech became naturally metrical – the speaker weighing his words intuitively and uttering them with patterned emphasis: such speech had the power to enchant listeners’ bodies and minds. In the Preface it is just such a weighing of words that he envisages the reader performing, as she silently speaks the written words of the text in her mind. The poet, isolated and lacking emotional and intellectual stimulation, is, like Adam and like a solitary male date tree, unable without a partner to bring his power to bear fruit. The allegoric tales from rabbinical tradition and botanical science reflect upon his authorship: he can no longer generate metrical language and thereby enchant his hearers, as the poet of the Christabel volume was imagined doing, but his reader may supply this lack by devoting her own sympathetic humanity to reading, thereby distilling the feelings and thoughts that are implicit, but disparate, in his words into so concentrated a form that a pattern of emphasis arises. The reader’s imaginative attention gives due stress to his language so that it becomes rhythmical; she also gains from the process, since his words give her attention something to focus upon. He concentrates her mind and feelings. Metre – and therefore poetry – is, on this plan, no longer transmitted in oral recitation as in 1816, but a joint effort of writer and reader dependent on the sympathetic devotion of readerly attention which realises – brings to fruition – what is latent but unformed in the words on the page. A sympathetic devotion of this kind was – and perhaps still is – culturally a typically feminine role; here Coleridge makes it an essential part of reading, and reading an essential part of poetry – which is only completed when read. As poetic, this is cooperative, placing much more creative power in the hands of the reader than is usual – although it attempts to stipulate the reader’s position in advance. It is also unusually gendered: the production of poetic language requires a collaboration of masculine and feminine so that a completed poem – a thing impossible to separate from the occasion of its reading – is effectively androgynous. It is worth noting, though, that the Preface implies that originating, albeit incomplete, creativity is masculine, the complementary and responsive reading to be feminine, rather than vice versa – fair enough for a male poet thinking of his own manuscript and his own desire, but scarcely a

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poetic of gender equality if universalised. And if this is a radical poetic in granting more power to the reader, and to the multiple occasions of reading, than is usual, it is nonetheless the poet who defines in advance the reader’s response. Anxious about the book market and its presiding critics, Coleridge substitutes a beloved reading companion both for the anonymous reading public that bought – or did not buy – his books and for the theory of enchantment-by-recitation to which he had harked back in 1816. By imagining a sympathetic reader, and defining her role, he creates in advance, from the otherwise anonymous public who will read his book in unknown places and various times, a scene of reception that compensates for the still more intimate scene that he has lost – the scene in which he chanted his words to his beloved Sara in her presence (and, perhaps, heard her speak, or, still more intimately, felt her touch in reply). The readerly poetic displaces an oral poetic which, in turn, defers to a poetic of touch – as we shall see in the poem proper. ‘[A] great mind must be androgyne’, Coleridge had written in 1820, noting that Shakespeare’s was but Wordsworth’s was not, being ‘all man’ (CN, iv, 4705). His own, he feared, was not even sufficiently masculine, for his failure to complete poems and his inability to free himself from shameful addiction showed he was deficient in willpower (which he gendered as masculine). The Preface, with its vision of a collaborative poetic in which the feminine reader completes what the masculine writer cannot of his accord, is designed to compensate for this lack. In this it is akin to the annual poems that appeal to the interpretive intelligence of female readers. But ‘The Blossoming’ develops this appeal further, making what is a riddling apology for personal inadequacy also a theorisation of how poetry – and language in general – communicates, and of how gender and sexuality are inseparable from the linguistic organisation of mind. It is, therefore, both partial and situated, and universal and objective – a poetics of reception that uneasily displays its dual affiliation to both the particular and the general, and that is both more self-conscious about its own textual status and more reflective about sexuality than critics of Romantic poetics have acknowledged when exploring androgyny. Susan J. Wolfson, for example, adopts literary androgyny as an ideal derived from Virginia Woolf, of which Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley fall short: ‘Whether Wordsworthian prison-matron or Keatsian suckler, the feminine subserves a male soul-story. If female soul has a role, it is usually in a scenario of muse-courtship, a marriage-plot for male creation.’44 For all its partiality, literary androgyny in ‘The Blossoming’ demands more of female intellect than is allowed in Wolfson’s judgement: in shifting the action from the

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imagined scene of a confessional poem to the process of reading, Coleridge postulates a feminised reader who must deploy a sympathetic and sophisticated literary intelligence – admitting his own inability to be the poet of power (either masculine or androgynous) who is already strengthened by feminine succour and support. The Preface, as both apology and theorisation, changes perceptions of the text that follows, making it more a series of narrative reflections on reading than the continuous confessional lyric of 1801/2. It is a retrospective re-collection of earlier writing that turns personal verse into a selfreflexive commentary on love, and on its own status as writing – as print indeed, rather than poetic chant or manuscript. But we should not simply assume that the Preface succeeds in comprehending all the implications of the following text within its terms. Coleridge’s model of an androgyny of reading turns out to be beset by tensions that arise as he revises his old verse, tensions that appear all the more strongly for being revived so late in his career. In the last section of this chapter, I shall consider these tensions at length, examining how the Preface’s model of textual reception is tested and skewed by, even as it preconditions our reading of, the text that follows it. We shall see that the Preface does not succeed as neatly as first appears in transmuting the complex of association surrounding Sara in 1801 into an aesthetic discourse about language and love in general. Coleridge’s late revision of his early work cannot utterly resolve its stresses: the model of textuality that Coleridge constructs does not completely comprehend the varied and contradictory cries of loss and resentment that surface in what follows it. Indeed, by raising the issue of poetic writing and reading so explicitly, the Preface throws some of those stresses into starker relief. In 1828 the text begins with two sections of prose, which replace the supposedly lost opening stanzas of the 1801/2 verse. We now know that the stanzas were not lost – the manuscript survives – and that Coleridge disassembled his old text in re-collecting it for print. He deleted the confessional stanzas that contain details of his love affair. Yet readers in 1828 could not know this: to them, Coleridge presents himself as an absentminded, aging poet unable to complete his old fragments. Beneath the blaze of a tropical sun the mountain peaks are the Thrones of Frost, through the absence of objects to reflect the rays. ‘What no one with us shares, seems scarce our own’. The presence of a ONE, The best belov’d who loveth me the best, is for heart, what the supporting air from within is for the hollow globe with its suspended car. Deprive it of this, and all without, that would have buoyed it aloft

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even to the seat of gods, becomes a burthen and crushes it into flatness. (CPW (1828), ii, pp. 97–101. See also CPW, ii, part ii, p. 1021–6)

This is a text that would be difficult for the Preface’s ideal reader to ‘reduce’ to the ‘requisite metre’, for it includes unattributed quotations and employs typographical effects to indicate, by visual rather than confessional means, its different levels of significance. The capitalisation of ‘Thrones of Frost’ invites us to read the peaks as metaphors in a religious parable illustrating the need for companionship even among the gods. If we do so the unattributed quotations take on the status of traditional moral axioms, powerful because they sum up what seems to be true of nature (mountains) and the divine for which nature stands, without deriving solely from a single author (although in fact they are Coleridge’s own). When, however, the seat of the gods is explicitly mentioned, it is as part of the ballooning metaphor, and we cannot be certain whether it is related to the ‘Thrones’ or not. Coleridge had used the image of air within and without a balloon elsewhere to illustrate the reciprocity inherent in God’s creation of the world through his loving Word.45 And a similar reciprocity is present in the verbal structure of the almost-chiasmus ‘The best belov’d, who loveth me the best’: the inversion of the word order in the repeated phrase makes it another verbal palindrome, balancing the halves of the line and appearing to overcome the temporal sequence in which we read. It is a structure designed to suspend the temporal processing of text, just as mutual love is offered as a way of suspending the loss of original unity. In this way its word order as well as its meaning mirror the procedure of the larger text, aiming to replace an impossible original unity with a pattern of balanced and coexisting discourses. The second section presents the reader with another shift in discourse and challenges her to connect it with what has gone before: The finer the sense for the beautiful and the lovely, and the fairer and lovelier the object presented to the sense; the more exquisite the individual’s capacity of joy, and the more ample his means and opportunities of enjoyment, the more heavily will he feel the ache of solitariness, the more unsubstantial becomes the feast spread around him. What matters it, whether in fact the viands and the ministering graces are shadowy or real, to him who has not hand to grasp nor arms to embrace them? (CPW (1828), ii, pp. 97–101. See also CPW, ii, part ii, pp. 1021–6)

Contrasting with the first section, this seems to be a fragment of a treatise on aesthetics, a text that is confident in its ability to deliver law and represent truth. Formal and objective, it offers to draw general conclusions only to collapse, its abstract laws undermined by the unruliness of

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metaphor. Once the image of the feast is introduced to illustrate the beautiful, further metaphors disturb the generality and apparent objectivity of the prose: ‘what matters it . . . to him who has not hand to grasp nor arms to embrace them’. This graphic and distressing image of disablement shocks the reader out of the formal world of aesthetics into a personal realm where the body cannot be controlled by philosophic argument. Whether it is in the individual’s sense, as Hume and Burke suggest, or in the ‘object presented’, as a rationalist would contend, that the beautiful exists is undecided. Whether the viands are ‘shadowy’ Platonic reflections of ideal beauty or are real is shown to be unanswerable as the theoretician is sabotaged by his awareness of his disabling bodily humanity, preceding rational argument. And so this aesthetic discourse leads to a picture of its apparent author as crippled, isolated, unnamed, able neither to master his own discourse nor to confess his inability save by an image in the third person: ‘him who has not’. Seemingly a different author from those of the first prose section and the Preface, with their range of images, tales and quotations, he is read in their context as another mutilated figure of disempowerment. Taken overall, the Preface and prose sections added in 1828 imply no single author but only a diverse collection of analogous texts and writers. A common theme of the frustrations of isolation emerges, but the reader cannot easily occupy the position of ‘congenial spirit’ healing the lonely poet by reading him since his authorial identity is fragmented. She is left trying to trace him (and to find a procedure for herself) by reconciling to each other, and to their writers, the different discourses of which the text is comprised. While a reader who is privy to Coleridge’s biography and to the original 1801/2 love lyrics might infer the confessional and unitary author behind these texts, a reader who lacks this information – a reader such as the ideal female envisaged in the Preface – would struggle to do so. The Romantic model of mutual consolation through the poetry of a man speaking to men (or, in Coleridge’s case, to women) is here disconfirmed – conjured up but placed under question in the same gesture. It will not be sufficient to restore this text and its author to unity or to discover the true Law. The writer(s) of ‘The Blossoming’ seem(s) at this point too unstable, too decentred from its words for its model of androgyny to heal. Textual instability becomes more apparent still in the next section – the first section in verse and a revision of the 1801/2 manuscript. Highly compact, it summarises many of the issues and phrases that had been central in the verse that led Coleridge and Wordsworth to be associated as Lake poets.

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Hope, Imagination; honourable aims; Free Commune with the choir that cannot die; Science and Song, delight in little things, The buoyant child surviving in the man; Fields, forests, ancient mountains, ocean, sky, With all their voices—O dare I accuse My earthly lot as guilty of my spleen, Or call my destiny niggard! No! no! It is her largeness, and her overflow, Which being incomplete, disquieteth me so! (CPW (1828), ii, pp. 97–101. See also CPW, ii, part ii, pp. 1021–6)

The first six lines do not exist in the 1801/2 manuscript and constitute a cryptic, depersonalised, memory of Coleridge’s interests when he lived in the Lake District setting of ‘ancient mountains, ocean, sky’. The grammatical relations between the listed items are left ungoverned, culminating in a dash: ‘With all their voices—O dare I accuse’. The resolving main verb is omitted altogether and the ‘unity of the subject’ is only affirmed in an exclamation whose grammatical relation to the list is unclear. The past, it seems, is attractively varied but too disparate to resolve into a unified, recollected self. After this, it is a self-accusing rather than governing ‘I’ that appears in ‘O dare I accuse’, and its lack of grammatical authority is matched in the meaning of the words that follow: Coleridge’s ‘earthly lot’ undermines his manly confidence through its fertile abundance: ‘It is her largeness, and her overflow/ Which being incomplete, disquieteth me so!’ The incomplete fallen man finds the completing female world threatening rather than fulfilling – a place of endless self-displacement as in Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’. Keats felt himself overwhelmed by Wordsworth’s poetic self, and Coleridge – whose conversation had helped prompt Keats to write his nightingale poem – engages in a Keatsian dialogue with Wordsworth, since ‘the buoyant child surviving in the man’, alludes to ‘The Child is Father of the Man’. But whereas Wordsworth’s recollection of childhood allowed him to regain his past and overcome the depredations of time upon the self, here the Wordsworthian realisation is not so much a blessing as a threat, for the very source of the narrator’s disquiet is that nothing is lost except the original unity beyond or before even the childhood self. Syntactically and semantically the verse shows all nature, all traditions, all the past recurring together in an excess that is threatening because there is no end to it. The problem with nature is not that ‘the things that I have seen I now can see no more’, but that ‘imagination’ is tantalised. Nature overstimulates it, but offers no

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discoverable unity on which stable identity can rest. The self now, for the first time in the text, cries out in the first person: ‘No! no!/ It is her largeness, and her overflow,/ Which being incomplete, disquieteth me so!’ These lines are also the first in the 1828 text that remain from 1801/2. In their original context, they attested to Coleridge’s need to be completed by giving love to and receiving it from Sara; here, in Sara’s absence, they bespeak a textual identity that is fragmented and dispersed because it is unable to resolve the multiplicity of the world into verbal wholes – formed metrical statements in which self and nature could be articulated together. Nature is no longer a friend but a disquieting threat to the self: its rhythms overwhelm, and Coleridge breaks with his past and with his past poetic credo – and Wordsworth’s too: his days are not linked each to each in natural piety so much as plagued by loss, absence and incompleteness. This is a bleak realisation, and it echoed those of ‘The Improvisatore’ and ‘Work without Hope’. After the Preface and the first two sections, the text reverts to that of 1801/2. Yet the verses that now follow cannot be read as they were when first written. The narratorial self is an ‘I’ that the reader would like to equate with an author, but that remains coloured by the multiplicity of voices and discourses already encountered. For never touch of gladness stirs my heart, But tim’rously beginning to rejoice Like a blind Arab, that from sleep doth start In lonesome tent, I listen for thy voice. Beloved! ’tis not thine; thou art not there! Then melts the bubble into idle air, And wishing without hope I restlessly despair. (CPW (1828), ii, pp. 97–101. See also CPW, ii, part ii, pp. 1021–6)

As in the second section, the writer appears most strongly in his ability to find images of his own impotence. He is ‘like a blind Arab, that from sleep doth start’, an image of dependence, isolation, and emasculation, an Orientalised discourse far less assimilable to an allegory of gendered creative partnership than the Eastern tales of the Preface. The pain and anxiety involved in this self-image is tangible enough for the text to slip free of the claims of that Preface: it dramatises a personal vulnerability exacerbated by the act of writing rather than a condition of universal loss. The final stanzas strive to counteract the restless despair of the fourth by seeking a less confessional discourse, describing a scene of reciprocal love and acceptance, in which each is defined by the other, mother by child, child by mother. This relationship appears differently when read after the

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Adam and Eve story in the Preface, to which it becomes an analogue – itself highly ambivalent and with things to say about both sexuality and language. The mother with anticipated glee Smiles o’er the child, that, standing by her chair And flatt’ning its round cheek upon her knee, Looks up, and doth its rosy lips prepare To mock the coming sounds. At that sweet sight She hears her own voice with a new delight; And if the babe perchance should lisp the notes aright, Then is she tenfold gladder than before! (CPW (1828), ii, pp. 97–101. See also CPW, ii, part ii, pp. 1021–6)

Here the speaker and auditor – the one from the womb of the other – are so close that it sounds as if the difference of word and referent on which language is structured is overcome. It is as if the nearest human language to a pre-fallen, original one would be that of the ‘buoyant child’, buoyed up on mother love – a baby language, a perfect repetition of sounds without consciousness of difference. Knowing neither the words’ meaning nor itself, the child copies without introducing new intentions or significations. There is, therefore, no self-betrayal, no loss of the original maternal text through imitations which can never reproduce it exactly. And it seems as if Coleridge wants to regain a stable self by modelling his own text and its vision of the author/reader partnership on such a language. He repeats words as he discusses the child’s echo of its mother, as if to suspend difference, temporal sequence and therefore loss in his own verse. ‘Sweet’, ‘dear’ and ‘prize’ all recur in this way. It is worth asking at this point why Coleridge idealised the linguistic relation of mother and child and why he offered their relationship as an analogy for the partnership of author and reader when, in the Preface and earlier sections, that partnership is conceived as a communion of equals? Perhaps because the mother/child relationship shows baby language to arise from a still closer contact – touch. ‘[T]he first education which we receive’, Coleridge wrote, ‘that from our mothers, is given to us by touch; the whole of its process is nothing more than . . . an extended touch by promise’.46 The priority of the maternal self to the child’s self places her at the end as well as the beginning of language. Words try to recollect the maternal unity from which they spring, and dedicate the self to an original security that touch of mother’s body symbolised for the child. She becomes a path to the ideal: ‘what the blue sky is to the mother, the mother’s upraised eyes and brow are to the child, the type and symbol of an invisible heaven’.47

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But a sentimental pieta of this kind can of course only gesture towards a language of perfect imitation – and such a language, transferred to the adult world in general, would in fact be one in which the hearer was left with no independence, always mimicking the dictated words of the speaker, be they ever so loving – a model of inequality rather than harmony. And indeed the next lines suggest that this model, however tempting as the loving origin of language, cannot be returned to or relied upon in the fallen world in which difference and loss reign: But should disease or chance the darling take, What then avail those songs, which sweet of yore Were only sweet for their sweet echo’s sake? Dear maid! no prattler at a mother’s knee Was e’er so dearly prized as I prize thee: Why was I made for Love and Love denied to me? (CPW (1828), ii, pp. 97–101. See also CPW, ii, part ii, p. 1021–6)

Ending with an anguished question, the text confronts death, grief and anger. It echoes Adam’s question to God in Paradise Lost when he and Eve are to be expelled from Eden: ‘To the loss of that,/ Sufficient penalty, why hast thou added/ The sense of endless woes?’ (x, ll. 752–4). It is a cry also heard from the creature in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and in both cases it acknowledges and resents the ultimate power of a male Creator whose word is law. In ‘The Blossoming’ it is unanswered and is apparently unanswerable. It rebounds upon the fall story of the Preface for, if directed towards a God who controls ‘disease or chance’, it suggests that ‘the Most High’, having allowed Eve to survive as Adam’s companion because he understands ‘the yearning of the soul for its . . . counterpart’ nevertheless allows other loving relationships, maternal and sexual, to be denied or destroyed. On this reading, Coleridge’s linguistic ideal (in which the relationship of mother and child represents an undifferentiated, unfallen unity) proves too fragile to withstand the Law governing all who live by the Word. All language, all relationships, all selves, turn out to be vulnerable to the unremitting power of a forbidding Father. Coleridge’s myth-making and textual borrowing would then be an attempt to overcome this vulnerability, not by challenging God on his own authority, but by forming strategies and stories in which textual alliances can reassure the self and temporarily displace the Creator’s sublime Logos into a language of love. Such a reading seems persuasive, and it is not entirely ruled out by the fact that ‘The Blossoming’s’ final question is more explicitly directed at the ‘dear maid’ who has denied her love. The ambiguity suggests that Coleridge’s tongue was tied, as was Christabel’s, by his deference towards the

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Father, so that he was unable to accuse him directly, blaming instead the female figures he himself had invented for their inevitable failure to allow him to overcome the fall. On this reading he again sounds more like a deprived child, exiled from his mother (as he indeed had been) since, taken by itself, ‘Why was I made for love and love denied to me?’ is a child’s accusation. There is, it appears, no wholly innocent or fulfilling linguistic relation, none that can exclude loss, denial and a terrible questioning. The fulfilling relation and the terrible questioning were not wholly Coleridge’s, for the last stanzas, seeming the most nakedly confessional of the text, are in fact an ‘imitation of one of the Minnesinger of the 13th century’ that he had already published elsewhere.48 They end ‘The Blossoming’ on a note of intertextuality, rather than the organic unity which the critics of Romanticism treated as a sign of a poet’s original genius. They remind the reader that the authenticity of texts and the figure of the originating writer are dependent not only upon her interpretation but also upon a determination to isolate them from the other discourses, traditional and contemporary, to which they relate. The appearance in ‘The Blossoming’ of other discourses, and of parts of it in them, makes such a determination appear to be a limiting and futile conspiracy between writer and reader to pretend that poetry is a ‘man speaking to men’. In contrast to Wordsworth – and to his own earlier practice – Coleridge has his text write in his place, opening conventional assumptions about literary communication to question. The congenial spirit for whom he hopes in the Preface may be needed to give him the status of originating author of a unique poem, but she will find her task almost impossible as she seeks the ‘true’ text and author through a disassemblage of truncated manuscripts, quotations, translations, versions and fragments. Only before or beyond the first story itself, that of the fall, could a text unmediated by a context of loss and difference be found and that, the Preface had suggested, is a text we have always already forgotten. Stories, then, are allegories of absence – of an original unity, a paradise lost, that cannot be regained, even by subtle textual strategies and revisions in carefully Collected Works; they cannot, therefore, ever be finished, only disconfirmed.

part iii

Wordsworth

To modern critics, The Excursion and the celebratory poems Wordsworth published after Waterloo seem the start of a late mode in his poetry, a mode of more ornate and Latinate poetic diction, orthodox Anglican religion, neo-classical allusion, political conservatism and narratorial detachment – a departure from both the personal exploration of The Prelude and the rustic speech of Lyrical Ballads.1 To reviewers on its first publication, however, it appeared to be more of the same Lake school stuff: Jeffrey, having said of Wordsworth’s 1807 poems ‘nor is there any thing, – down to the wiping of shoes, or the evisceration of chickens, – which may not be introduced in poetry, if this is tolerated’,2 declared in 1814 ‘This will never do’ and attacked Wordsworth’s ‘puerility’, ‘self-indulgence and selfadmiration’.3 As early as 1804 Wordsworth had written ‘As to the School about which so much noise (I am told) has been made, . . . I do not know what is meant by it nor of whom it consists’.4 Now Jeffrey was letting him and the other readers of the Edinburgh Review know in detail, and Wordsworth, denied sales and reputation by the critic’s contempt, was deeply hurt.5 The depth of Wordsworth’s wound was displayed in the publications he was moved to write in self-defence. The Essay Supplementary to the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, published in 1815, was a newly worked-out statement of his poetic credo, and has become one of the formative texts of ‘Romanticism’ and of canon formation, with its concept of poetic ‘power’ creating the taste by which it is to be enjoyed – a concept later turned by De Quincey into the chief criterion of what was ‘literature’ as opposed to mere ‘letters’.6 Equally influential was the Essay’s appeal to a timeless spirit of the ‘people’ as a literary judge superior to the ‘reading public’, who are treated as a commercialised literary market captive to reviewers and unable to form independent views.7 It proved easy for twentieth-century critics to identify themselves with this spirit of the people, to imagine themselves as representative connoisseurs who understood Wordsworth’s true merits in a way 199

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the book-buyers of his day did not. Accepting Wordsworth’s terms, they became admirers and upholders of ‘Romanticism’. Yet Wordsworth’s terms were a defensive reaction against Jeffrey’s criticism of the Lake school and should not be accepted at face value. The Essay Supplementary also reveals Wordsworth distancing himself from some of the levelling and radical poetic manifesto that had drawn Jeffrey’s ire in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads. Wordsworth did not want to be a Lake poet in the terms that Jeffrey had sneered at; in his post-1814 work this desire to escape hostility to the ‘Lake school’ would be more important in reshaping his verse than a notional appeal to the spirit of the people. This desire was, of course, bound up with politics: Wordsworth’s later poetic conservatism emerged from an anti-Napoleonic nationalism that deepened in 1807 when British generals let French troops, although defeated, evacuate from Spain and Portugal. Ashamed of this betrayal of Iberian resistance to French imperialism, Wordsworth became an ardent opponent of those at home who doubted Britain’s pro-war policy and argued for peace with Napoleon. Chief among them were Jeffrey and other writers in the Edinburgh Review; Wordsworth set his politics against them and sought to make his poetry immune to their charges of Jacobinism, aligning it instead with a vision of British greatness defined as a tradition of martial resistance to foreign tyranny. Wordsworth’s problem from 1807 onwards, and especially after 1814, was how to make this conservative nationalism popular in face of the reputation Jeffrey’s attacks had given him. To do so, he would strive to establish new terms for Lake poetry, and these terms owed much to the market and to emulation of popular poets, not least Scott, whose success in locating historical romance in his local landscape Wordsworth envied. They also brought him closer to Southey: as I show, the late Wordsworth and late Southey embarked on a similar process, sometimes with the same collaborators, of endowing the Lake landscape with historical significance – making it, in effect, a national heritage.8 By the end of Wordsworth’s life, this process had succeeded in winning him the reputation and sales that Jeffrey’s criticism had denied him: in what follows I reveal how he rehabilitated the ‘Lake poet’ term in new verse that, although neglected by most twentieth-century critics, appealed to nineteenth-century readers. It did so, I argue, because Wordsworth modified his style and adopted more traditional genres: the egotism of the first-person nature poems and the simplicity of the ballads were reworked into topographical odes and sonnet sequences; Wordsworth even became a writer for the popular illustrated guidebooks – an author who, for all his scorn of popular print culture,

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negotiated a way to succeed as a Lake poet (a poet of place) in an era in which the circulation of people and publications expanded exponentially – an era of tourism. Thus I examine Wordsworth’s late re-collectings of his verse in the context of popular representations of the local, as revealed in the contemporary discourses of tourist guidebooks and antiquarian archaeology, and also in the kinds of tradition that was not written down in books – folklore and superstition. It is on his tour poems of the 1820s and 1830s that I focus, revising our view of Wordsworth’s later engagement with history and revealing him as a professional author who, despite his 1815 definition of poets as transcending the reading public of their own time, had an eye to the market. Wordsworth became a strategist for success in print, one who re-collected his poems again and again so as to gain authority and sales in the book market of his day. He did so not as a solitary genius or ‘prophet of nature’ but as a collaborator in making books in alliance with publishers and painters. These topographic collaborations were part of a turn to the visual and picturesque in his late work, a turn made alongside Southey’s similar turn, and an effort to make himself, in terms the era would approve, a national spokesman of England’s geography and history as embodied in the monuments of the Lake District. My approach is necessarily a dual one. In presenting a Wordsworth whose late work was shaped by the pressure of his public reception, I build upon the recent work of Peter J. Manning and of Stephen Gill.9 Manning and, responding to him, Tim Burke10 showed how the version of nature presented in Wordsworth’s tour sonnets both drew upon his earlier work – visibly to differ from it – and also articulated the anxiety that beset his new political involvements as a local dignitary and a dependant under the patronage of the Tory politician Lord Lonsdale. Stephen Gill also examined Wordsworth’s tour poems, drawing attention to the 1820 Sonnets on the River Duddon collection as a turning point in Wordsworth’s career, the point at which he moved towards a topographical poetry related to the aesthetics and formats of the picturesque tour.11 I shall pursue this insight in Chapter 6. It was largely as a private and retrospective poet that Geoffrey Hartman presented the late Wordsworth, viewing the post-1814 poems as afterimages produced as a paternal and paternalist Wordsworth sought to come to terms with what he inherited from the visionary insights of his earlier verse.12 Those insights were not to be relived, nor were new insights of the same kind to be experienced: the question for Wordsworth was rather how to cope with the legacy of the past than how to relive his youth. It was also

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a matter of how to reappraise the significance of those insights – insights into the relationship between the poet, nature and history – for a man now at a different stage of life. How to structure a relationship with wife, sister and daughter based on the past sharing of spots of time that must remain memories. How to write a poetry that both honoured the ambiguous legacy of those spots of time and legislated a way of living after them – a way of living appropriate for himself and for fellow Britons (the central problem of The Recluse). Hartman’s exemplary reflections upon Wordsworth’s lateness encouraged other critics to turn a phenomenological eye on the relation of late to early in the post-1814 poetry. In a profound essay of 1981, Peter Larkin presented the late Wordsworth as a poet meditating on his own belatedness with regard to his former articulations of nature, space and time. Larkin suggested a turn, not so much from as after the visionary immersion in nature sought by the young poet: any unconditional identification with nature involves a contextless reimmersion within its boundaries, precluding the gap between it and the mind through which its sacramental role can be grasped. Nature cannot of itself bind man to itself without a fatal species of creative collusion that is fitful and uncontinuable, unable to speak to an old age that seeks not the exuberance of presence but a spiritually fructifying after-presence.13

Negotiating this after-presence, the already-experienced future implicit in the past visionary moment, becomes for Larkin the main task of the later poems, which wish neither to usurp the pastness of the past by renewing it, nor to subordinate it to a superior present. He notes, ‘His belatedness needs not to be needed by his earlier self . . . [A]n unfathered son regains a lineal origin from behind as the dependent fatherhood of old-age belatedly pursues with discipleship’.14 Yet if, as here, the father is child of the man – of his own earlier self – the aging Wordsworth was never just his own admirer. As Larkin also shows, he embraces a deliberately calm, attenuated voice, often using decorous neo-classical diction rather than Miltonic sublimities, to sketch out a visionary afterlife that, although carefully limited so as not to compete with the past, is braced to a certain pleasurable attentiveness by an absorbed experience of what has gone before. The late poetry, as William Galperin and Susan Wolfson15 have shown in detail, accommodates past poetry by the incorporation of passages, by allusion, by reminiscence, by unspoken understanding of its own over-determination: in the process the father figure of Milton is cut down to the size of earlier Wordsworthian voices that can be invoked without overwhelming the

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present or being overwhelmed by it. The result is a delicate poetry of precariously achieved balance, rather than of sublime self-assertion, visionary pursuit or transcendent thrust.16 The late Wordsworth was, then, not just retrospective but a poet forced to revise his commitments and repertoires under the new, uncomfortable circumstances that come with age. As Eugene L. Stelzig put it, Most of his later poems on time and mortality aim, not for a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, but rather, for a lofty impersonality. Faced with the prospect of age and death, he had to come to some sort of accommodation with time’s unimaginable touch. A major part of the strategy of the later poetry is the employment of a traditional rhetoric and sensibility with which to frame the realities of mutability and ageing.17

chapter 5

Naming the abyss: Wordsworth and the sound of power

The defining characteristic of Wordsworth’s Lake poetry that most annoyed the critics was its attachment of undue importance to particular occasions and localities that had mattered in his own life. Not only did Wordsworth endow private names on spots of terrain that were significant to family and friends, he also recited the traditional, local names for Lakeland fells, rivers and lakes – terms that, to metropolitan reviewers, seemed ‘barbarous’ names of ‘insignificant’ places that lacked the historical associations needed for proper ‘poetical effect’.1 Neither Thames nor Avon, but Duddon and Greenhead Ghyll. What were the reasons for and consequences of this naming? As Wordsworth aged, I suggest, he came not just to sound out the names of things, but to reflect upon what was at stake for his art, in the face of critical hostility and of the popularisation of the Lake District as a tourist destination, in this very sounding-out process. He developed a self-referential attentiveness to his own poetry through which he pondered the fundamental contradiction that drove his writing. This is the contradiction between, on the one hand, what Geoffrey Hartman has termed Wordsworth’s voicing of an abyss as he searched unavailingly for a source for his poetry in a stable correspondence between words and nature and, on the other, a compulsion, delineated by critics influenced by historical materialism, to represent nature as shaped by human deeds – a nature in which history can be heard, seen and touched – even by visiting tourists.2 My starting point is a strange omission: while Marxist critics have attacked the deconstructive criticism inspired by Hartman, none has explored the fact that the Wordsworthian abyss so central to the deconstructive account is a material object as well as a figure of the endlessly retreating sound-source that lies at poetry’s origin.3 Wordsworth’s abysses are in fact caves – caves that exist in the north of England, some of them man-made and some sightseeing spots marketed to tourists. They may be figures of the retreating sonic origin of language that is pursued by 205

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poetry as it searches for a stable natural foundation for words, but they are also local and visitable places. Wordsworth’s abysses, I shall show, are significant elements of a highly unusual poetic strategy, neither purely idealist nor materialist, both self-reflexive and deictic, involving the talismanic use of traditional, Lakeland names to grasp a nature that keeps escaping being grasped in words, and an accompanying figure for this nomination process (a figure of the disappearing origin of language in voice and in sound that is also a pointing to a real place) – the figure of the cave.4 To neglect the historical reality of the caves to which Wordsworth pointed as abysses,5 and of the names he cited,6 is to risk rendering his poetry completely self-referential, endlessly figuring its own inscription, as death and absence, of that which it brings to language (nature/the self). It is to assume that the events which preoccupied him – critical hostility, competition with other poets, the historical places of the Lake District and its commodification for tourists – were secondary. They become merely the local inflections assumed by his central self-referential preoccupation with poetry’s voicing of otherness, a preoccupation that, such is the critical desire to make it exemplary for all poetry, is assumed to be unchanging – what Wordsworth is, was and will be. Here, by contrast, I want to suggest that they were fundamental – and that they allow us to understand how and why his poetry changed in its concerns and its modes of figuration. Wordsworth’s poetic naming had intense self-reflexive significance but also, increasingly as he aged, relevance to two public contexts. The first of these was the emerging print culture that served the needs of the growing numbers of tourists visiting the Lakes. In maps, pamphlets, pictures and guidebooks, local names were explained, located, and defined. They were also disseminated beyond the speech community of shepherds and farmers, becoming newly detached from their roots – distributed across the nation on paper in the pockets and portmanteaus of tourists who, once home, referred to them at leisure so as to recollect in tranquillity the places they had visited. Wordsworth’s poetic naming was one of several print mediations of Lakeland as a special place where Britons could encounter beauty and sublimity in their most characteristic and native forms: together these media began to transform a rural backwater into a landscape where English spirituality could be discovered. While guidebooks, maps and engravings named the Lakes in prose, a few miles to the north a poet was single-handedly investing the place names of the Scottish borders with the aura of romance. Walter Scott, always in Wordsworth’s eyes a newcomer and more junior poet, far surpassed the Lake poet in popularity. His Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805) combined Wordsworthian

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reverence for local places and for the history that, for local inhabitants, inhered in those places with exciting, fast-paced narrative. Obscure names of forgotten towns, like Melrose, Newark and Jedburgh, suddenly became redolent, for a mass public, of events in Britain’s chivalric past. Scott, moreover, as we saw in Chapter 3, portrayed his printed poem as an oral tale told by a medieval minstrel: thus after 1805, Wordsworth’s insistence on sounding out the local names existed in the shadow of Scott’s far more popular lays and ‘songs’. The Lady of the Lake (1810), for example, was so powerfully evocative of the places it named that it created a tourist industry. Wordsworth’s later naming of places was shaped by Scott’s success, a success he emulated with poems that sang of the chivalric past of places in his own region. The naming of places, that is, became public and historical in Scott’s wake – the elder poet hearkening to the younger one’s song. ************ ‘How art thou named?’ Wordsworth asks in a sonnet of 1824, putting the question to a waterfall.7 It is a telling question that goes to the heart of his late poetry, for it was made not by an ahistorical poet contemplating his own relation to nature as he had always contemplated it, but by a man engaged in a cultural practice that, in earlier life, he had despised – tourism. When he encountered the waterfall, Wordsworth was on a trip to a marketed beauty spot in North Wales rather than recollecting a spot of time from his innocent Lake District childhood. Thus his question resounds differently, as that of a sightseer identifying a view in his guidebook, even though it repeats a quest he had made throughout his career: viz. how to elicit from nature the name that is proper to it, how to find the word in which the being of the thing is measured. In the sequence he included in the 1800 Lyrical Ballads, ‘Poems on the Naming of Places’, Wordsworth narrated his reasons for and difficulties in conferring private names upon things, as if he were printing his own and his friends’ words onto the landscape, which might then bear his linguistic choices upon it. According to Jonathan Bate, these names reveal an ecological consciousness: they are evidence of a dwelling-in the place that honours its specificity and wholeness.8 Tony Pinkney, on the other hand, argues that these acts of private nomination ‘are shot through with gender politics and violence’ and that ‘a “romantic ecology” that is gender-blind to this extent is no ecology at all’. Both critics notice, but neither pursues at length, the fact that Wordsworth does not just impose names of his own devising on the landscape but also repeats the names by which it has been known, since time immemorial, by the local people. This traditional

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naming places him in a rather different – less individual, less new, less private and, Pinkney suggests, less violent and egotistical – relationship to the place, a relationship imbued with history. In ‘To Joanna’ (1800) traditional naming underpins private naming. Wordsworth’s nature-love is scorned by Joanna, but her satirical laughter is overawed by its own amplification and echo in the landscape: The rock, like something starting from a sleep, Took up the Lady’s voice, and laugh’d again; That ancient Woman seated on Helm-crag Was ready with her cavern; Hammar-scar, And the tall Steep of Silver-How, sent forth A noise of laughter; southern Loughrigg heard, And Fairfield answer’d with a mountain tone: Helvellyn far into the clear blue sky Carried the Lady’s voice,—old Skiddaw blew His speaking-trumpet; —back out of the clouds Of Glaramara southward came the voice; And Kirkstone toss’d it from his misty head. (‘To Joanna’, ll. 54–65)9

Wordsworth added a footnote to this incantation of traditional names, informing readers that: On Helm-crag, that impressive single mountain at the head of the Vale of Grasmere, is a rock which from most points of view bears a striking resemblance to an old Woman cowering. Close by this rock is one of those fissures or caverns, which in the language of the country are called dungeons.

His text, after this, is aligned with a nature that he knows better than Joanna does: the secret cave is evidence that the place is familiar to him, even if strangely overpowering for her. So are the recited names: ‘old Skiddaw’ who ‘blew/ His speaking-trumpet’ and ‘That ancient Woman seated on Helm-crag’ who ‘Was ready with her cavern’ appear as if they were themselves people. They – and he – are not to be dismissed by her laughter. He then chisels a private name – Joanna’s – into the rock, marking the spot where she was rebuked by the fells, and seemingly adding another name to the deeply traditional ones that prove his local knowledge. He is, he says, ‘like a runic priest’ – a significant image because a rune was thought to be a mark found on rocks and trees indicating a site of ritual importance where holy ceremonies occurred. Runes were the inscriptions of a culture that derived power from nature, magical marks encoding ancient beliefs about a place’s sacredness into the place.10 As a rune, the

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name Joanna – the name the poem vicariously reinscribes – is sanctified by the historical tradition of naming such spots that connects Wordsworth with the Druids who once occupied the landscape. ‘To Joanna’ suggests that the process of sanctification, the process, that is, whereby Wordsworth arrives at a conviction that words inscribe the spiritual powers that animate the object world, depends upon participation in a local tradition of proper naming.11 He is like a Druid not just because he is carving a new name into the spot but also because he is incanting the old, traditional names: Helm Crag, Silver How, Skiddaw, Glaramara become talismanic, as if to recite these names were, like rubbing Aladdin’s lamp, to release their hidden power from their normally sealed caves. The depths open to Wordsworth, he implies, because he renews a long history of words – names – which invoke the same objects that he, like those who spoke before him, daily sees and touches. After he made his home in Grasmere Wordsworth increasingly turned away from acts of private nomination, with their aura of the egotistical and novel, to traditional naming, thus seeming to participate in a practice endorsed by history. He worked the names of the fells into his metrical lines in poem after poem, articulating them in rhythm as if he were uttering a priestly incantation. He drew on their sound too, to create patterns of euphony that further invest the names with power – the power of sound, since the names have no current meaning other than the fell to which they refer.12 Of course, some names are more mellifluously mysterious than others – the rolling ‘l’s and internal rhymes of ‘Helvellyn’ and ‘Glaramara’ make them especially glamorous – or, to coin a term, Glaramarous. An example of Wordsworth’s procedure occurs in the 1805 Prelude manuscript, when the shepherd and his son range the fells looking for a lost sheep. Here the topos is developed at greater length than in the earlier ‘To Joanna’: the passage articulates the desire of the returned exile to claim possession of his natal place by rolling its traditional place names off his tongue. Wordsworth both recites names and discusses how names are given in local tradition – a token of the inside knowledge that only a local can have. from Dove Crag, Ill home for bird so gentle, they look’d On Deep-dale Head, and Brothers-water, named From those two Brothers that were drown’d therein; Thence, northward, having pass’d by Arthur’s Seat, To Fairfield’s highest summit; on the right Leaving St Sunday’s Pike, to Grisdale Tarn They shot, and over that cloud-loving Hill,

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Wordsworth Seat Sandal, a fond lover of the clouds; Thence up Helvellyn, a superior Mount With prospect underneath of Striding-Edge, And Grisdale’s houseless Vale, along the brink Of Russet Cove, and those two other Coves, Huge skeletons of crags, which from the trunk Of old Helvellyn spread their arms abroad, And make a stormy harbour for the winds. (Prelude, 1805, viii, 229–44)13

These lines are not merely topographic. As well as showing the narrator to be a trustworthy source because his local knowledge is detailed, they give each hill a unique character that will, henceforth, be invoked by mention of its name. Repetition drives the association home: thus Seat Sandal is ‘that cloud-loving hill’ and, in the very next line, ‘a fond lover of the clouds’. Metrical weight also serves to emphasise the inherence of the hill’s characteristics in its name: after two lightly-stressed, rapidly enunciated monosyllables where one expects an iambic foot (‘Thence up’), ‘Helvellyn’ becomes a ‘superior mount’ because its second syllable, the first heavily stressed syllable of the line, seems all the more weighty. The name is the rhythmic climax of the line, being metrically more emphatic than the other words, just as it is on its second appearance a few lines later: ‘Of old Helvellyn spread their arms abroad’. Helvellyn’s animation as a living being (implied by ‘arms’) is thus supported metrically: rhythm and trope together imbue the name of the fell, and by association the fell it uniquely refers to, with power. The process is further developed in the poem Wordsworth wrote after reading Cowper’s ‘Yardley Oak’, ‘Yew Trees’ (1804/15) – a poem about named places: the yew tree of Lorton, and the four that grow on a fellside near Stonethwaite. Of these, Wordsworth writes, But worthier still of note Are those fraternal Four of Borrowdale, Joined in one solemn and capacious grove; Huge trunks!—and each particular trunk a growth Of intertwisted fibres serpentine Up-coiling, and inveterately convolved,— Nor uninformed with Fantasy, and looks That threaten the profane[.]

(ll. 13–20)14

These trees are sinister, not least because they embody the troubles of England’s past. They are uncanny: their serpentine coilings, as critics have noted,15 echo those of Milton’s Satan when he entered Eden, tempted Eve and caused the introduction of time and death into the world. They

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become haunted outgrowths of place and time, transformed by Wordsworth’s imagination into symbols of the violence of history and the deathliness of temporality. We know that Wordsworth was sometimes oppressed by his imaginative need to transform the material world in this way. He told his friend R.P. Graves that ‘he used to be so frequently rapt into an unreal transcendental world of ideas that the external world seemed no longer to exist in relation to him, and he had to re-convince himself of its existence by clasping a tree’.16 In ‘Yew Trees’ the place name linguistically clasps the trees, insisting upon their singular materiality, making them specific and located objects, like Joanna’s rock or Helvellyn’s summit, where the poet can plausibly claim that his words articulate the real power of nature, as revealed in its shapes and sounds. Their ancientness, and their embodied violence, is palpable. They are touchstones or, rather touchtrees – matters of fact on which words seem to be grounded. One is reminded of Coleridge’s comment that ‘there was a something corporeal, a matter-of-factness, a clinging to the palpable . . . in his poetry, in consequence. His genius was not a spirit that descended to him through the air; it sprung out of the ground’.17 ‘Yew Trees’ has been much discussed by critics.18 Few, however, have dwelt on the implications of Coleridge’s remark. Yet the poem’s last lines do trace the poetic voice to an underground spring. Wordsworth imagines how it might be, under the tree’s shade: in mute repose To lie, and listen to the mountain flood Murmuring from Glaramara’s inmost caves.

(ll. 31–3)

The poet is lulled by the trees’ spell and able to hear with rare insight – or in-hearing. Reclining beneath the Borrowdale trees, he hears the sound of the mountain stream traced all the way back to its source – Glaramara’s inmost caves. Here again, the moment is made mysterious and profound by the aura of the proper name. On the one hand ‘Glaramara’ refers to nothing but the fell whose name it is: it is uniquely deictic – it points to a single thing in the world. Its use here, at the end of the poem, makes the experience untransferable and therefore precious in its locality. On the other hand, though, ‘Glaramara’ is a mellifluous, rhythmical but nonsensical sound whose reference point is not apparent from its verbal context. This doubleness produces the irresolvable tension of aporia: the readers/ auditors of the poem register the word as sublime because it both pulls them towards a symbolic world of enchanting sound that is unlocated in any particular place and puts them on the spot, assuring them of the

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scenario’s unique reality. Pointing to the thing, yet bespeaking the soundworld of poetic language that is independent of things, the sound ‘Glaramara’ acquires mystery and power because it seems to hold the opposites together (though without unity) for the space of its saying.19 Meanwhile, the onomatopoeic ‘murmuring’ increases the impression that the river effects an aural transfer, a quiet projection of itself, which language cannot denote but only mimic. Articulate speech approaches the condition of inarticulate noise. Words and world merge as sonic passages along the river, which becomes an aural, rather than visual, stream.20 It is also a single, particular stream: the process described in the poem is unique to a particular place. Wordsworth is often a poet of singularity – but in ‘Yew Trees’ singularity is still more singular, because of the deictic element inherent in the proper name. Here Wordsworth’s practice is in accordance with his theory, as set out in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800), wherein mountain names are the founding fathers of language. Poetry, the Preface argues, should be founded on the ‘plainer and more emphatic language’ of rustics, because rustics ‘hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of language is originally derived’ – the ‘beautiful and permanent forms of nature’.21 This argument effectively derives language from nouns – names for things – originally formed by people who lived among permanent objects of nature responding to something distinctive about each object by uttering a particular sound to denote it.22 Here, Wordsworth shows the influence both of John Horne Tooke and Johann Gottfried Herder. For the former, names of material things are the primary parts of language: the student of language must attempt to trace all parts of speech back to these original, stable elements. For the latter, deixis embodies an emotional recognition: originally, names were cries, exclamations that encoded a person’s recognition of the object’s specific effect upon him. He made a specific sound in reaction to the impact of the thing’s individual nature upon his witnessing self. By repeated use, this sound became a proper name; consequentially, the name of a mountain is not only fundamental in that it is linguistically prior to verbs, but also because it bespeaks the overflow of feeling that the mountain elicited in an ancient and particular community of hill dwellers. The name sounds out a social history of the emotions. Where the name remains specific in today’s tongue (as ‘Glaramara’ is), not having become a generic term by association (as ‘mountain’ has), then it is the most reliable word of all, both because it is the most primitive and because it has been used, unchanged, for generation after generation of locals. These locals both inherit it and refer it back to the

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thing it denotes – a thing they see, hear and touch daily. Thus, names like Helvellyn and Glaramara are both symbolic, because they encode people’s responses to particular objects, and (apparently) natural because they have been used, time out of mind, to point only to one visible and touchable thing. Usage, as Burke argued about custom, makes the oncenew seem, as it were, as old as the hills. But usage of this kind depended upon society remaining in place (hence Wordsworth’s suspicion of city life and the social mobility it brought). The Lake District epitomised inplacedness: it preserved a lived continuity of naming that amounted to a reciprocal filiation of people to place and place to people: its ‘sons of the hills had a consciousness that the land, which they walked over and tilled, had for more than five hundred years been possessed by men of their name and blood’.23 Joint possession: the sons of hills possess the hills as their fathers did; the names they use, like their own family names, are guaranteed by a history of the inherence of each in the other. Mutual inheritance, in effect: a relationship between land and people that depends on the continuous historical dwelling of people in place and place, in the form of names, in people. scott Walter Scott’s writing aimed to affirm continuity and blur difference – not between word and thing but between past and present. As a collector, reviser and imitator of border ballads and songs, he aimed to bridge the gap between contemporary printed and medieval spoken verse. Writing of the same places as those that appeared in the old poems was a way of doing so: it placed Scott as one of many border minstrels, while his antique style made it hard to tell that his original poems were any newer than many of the traditional verses that he collected from local singers. For Scott, then, the naming of places was, like the affectation of oral performance, a means of aligning his printed poetry with the local songs of the past: he seemed, thereby, to be not so much renewing a lost tradition as continuing an extant rural culture lost, to its cost, by the metropolis. The metropolis proved avid to receive Scott’s tales of a traditional chivalric culture still discoverable in the real, rural places that he named as if he were a minstrel singing in the castle of the local lord. Less private than the Wordsworth of Lyrical Ballads, Scott’s The Lay of the Last Minstrel recounted a local story as both a traditional narrative from the past and as if it were happening in the moment of his telling. His action-packed

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narrative placed the modern poet as a minstrel whose songs, in their form and their social function, were in an organic relationship with a traditional community. His role was to sound out its history, to make local places resonate again with the deeds done there in the past. Consequently, place names were vital to his work, as Coleridge noted when he remarked that ‘when you strike out all of the interesting names of places &c, you will find nothing left’.24 Like Coleridge, Wordsworth often felt outdone by Scott. Yet if he was sometimes envious and critical of Scott in private, he nevertheless admired Scott’s poetry of locality. After The Lay of the Last Minstrel endowed the border towns with romanticised history, Wordsworth sent Scott a copy of ‘Yarrow Unvisited’, inviting him to emend the place names in the text to make it more genuinely a poem of the Scottish borders.25 In the wake of Scott’s popular success, Wordsworth turned to a similar narrative poetry himself, telling chivalric tales about the battles fought in the north of England hundreds of years before. These new poems, supposedly oral romances, evoked the history of local families and local places: names were essential to them. They were efforts to unite the personal with the local – to conjoin in a name Wordsworth’s own response to a place with the local feeling that had been attached for hundreds of years to that place. The aim was to assume the role that Scott had assumed – the printed poet becoming a bard or minstrel, singing not just for himself but for his clan and positioning his readers as an extension of that clan, a group both contiguous and continuous. The national reading public would be remodelled on the local, traditional and familial, as in Scott – but only when it heard the local names and learnt their meaning. Wordsworth’s emulation of Scott is at once apparent in ‘Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle’ (1807). Influenced by the cult of minstrelsy popularised by Scott but originating in the historical revivalism of Thomas Percy, Joseph Ritson and Thomas Chatterton, Wordsworth offers his text as a minstrel’s performance at a feudal celebration: not written, not spoken, but sung and heard by a traditional Cumbrian noble family and all its clan – the Cliffords. This is a poem that aims to locate writer and reader as singer and auditor in an actual local community whose mutual loyalty is expressed in song, dance and feast in the baronial hall. Essential to this place-finding is the singing out of local names significant to that community’s geographical and historical identity: How glad is Skipton at this hour— Though lonely, a deserted Tower;

Naming the abyss: Wordsworth and the sound of power Knight, squire, and yeoman, page and groom: We have them at the feast of Brough’m. How glad Pendragon—though the sleep Of years be on her! —She shall reap A taste of this great pleasure, viewing As in a dream her own renewing. Rejoiced is Brough, right glad I deem Beside her little humble stream; And she that keepeth watch and ward Her statelier Eden’s course to guard; They both are happy at this hour, Though each is but a lonely Tower:— But here is perfect joy and pride For one fair House by Emont’s side, This day, distinguished without peer To see her Master and to cheer— Him, and his Lady-mother dear!

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(ll. 36–54)26

Wordsworth also invokes the name of a local mountain – Bowscale Fell – and insists upon its legendary status as the place where the young Lord Clifford was hidden from the king’s forces who wished to kill him and extirpate his family. The mountain becomes a surrogate mother to the boy, sheltering and teaching him nature’s secrets in its recesses: the child ‘entered’ ‘into caves where Faeries sing’ and was ‘told/ By Voices how men lived of old’.27 Here the Bowscale caves are the sites of a Lakeland oracle, an anglicised Delphos where nature channels its sounds into sufficiently streamlined form for them to be received as secret knowledge. The boy hears the faeries’ song in them; Wordsworth then ‘sings’ out the meaning of that song in his own minstrel-like ‘Song at the Feast’. And the communication through song, in the cave and at the party, is sealed by the place name, so singular and so venerable in its deixis that it seems to enshrine the sound of the place to which it refers. Wordsworth thus claims to be renewing in his supposedly oral verse a secret communication that is, for Lord Clifford and all his clan who know the place and the story, and thereby identify themselves as Cumbrians, already latent in the sounds ‘Bowscale Fell’. He is, in effect, bearing witness to the inherence of the place in the name, supposedly on behalf of the Cliffords, whose tradition he renews like their clan minstrel, but actually on behalf of the reader. It is in order to bear witness – to imagine himself bringing readers into the rural community which shares this magical nomination, this language of presence which is not to be found in the alienated modern society – that Wordsworth must spell out what he thinks locals already know. For him,

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poetry vouchsafes to others what is inherent in the place and its local dwellers. What it vouchsafes, however, unlike Scott’s named places, is not heroic battle or chivalric quest, but the refusal of violence and war, as his ‘Song at the Feast’ reveals: Alas! the impassioned minstrel did not know How, by Heaven’s grace, this Clifford’s heart was framed, How he, long forced in humble walks to go, Was softened into feeling, soothed, and tamed. Love had he found in huts where poor men lie; His daily teachers had been woods and rills, The silence that is in the starry sky, The sleep that is among the lonely hills. In him the savage virtue of the Race, Revenge, and all ferocious thoughts were dead: Nor did he change; but kept in lofty place The wisdom which adversity had bred. Glad were the vales, and every cottage hearth; The Shepherd-lord was honoured more and more; And, ages after he was laid in earth, ‘The good Lord Clifford’ was the name he bore.

(ll. 157–72)

This is why, as we saw in Chapter 1, Southey made the ‘Song at the Feast’ central to his Colloquies, surrounding it with historical narrative: he saw that Wordsworth had achieved what he wished to achieve and sought to extend Wordsworth’s success in transporting the place’s and name’s locality to a distant readership even while renewing the local tradition that gave both place and name their significance. Wordsworth poses as a minstrel singing to the clan, reaffirming for strangers the clan’s traditional naming wherein ‘Clifford’ comes to embody ‘good’. The ‘Song at the Feast’ was a new, Scottian development in Wordsworth’s verse, but it brought neither the praise nor the profits that Scott achieved. Jeffrey’s review of the 1807 Poems in Two Volumes in which it appeared was savage.28 Wordsworth’s next attempt at Scott’s vein of historical romance, The White Doe of Rylstone (1815) named places in Yorkshire. It was a response to attacks on the ‘silliness’ of his ‘Lake school’ poetry: it was neither set in the Lakes nor did it recount his personal interactions with rural life in simple ballad form. It followed Scott in borrowing the ‘Christabel’ metre and in using the traditional couplet form: it would, Wordsworth hoped, deliver him from the notoriety that the Preface to Lyrical Ballads had precipitated and bring him the money his

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family desperately needed. Scott had received 1,000 guineas for Marmion; Wordsworth sought 100 for his new poem – a disparity revealing the unpopularity of his work. But Wordsworth did not publish the White Doe in 1808. So great was his fear of failure after the hostile reviews of his earlier work that he withheld it. It did not appear until 1815, when it was published in the same expensive quarto format as Marmion. Earlier that year, Wordsworth had protested in his Essay Supplementary about critics of ‘palsied imaginations and indurated hearts’;29 to this dig Jeffrey responded with a review of The White Doe that called it the very worst poem we ever saw imprinted in a quarto volume . . . [a] union of all the faults, without any of the beauties, which belong to his school of poetry. It is just such a work, in short, some wicked enemy of that school might be supposed to have devised, on purpose to make it ridiculous.30

Scott or Byron, Jeffrey continued, might have succeeded with such a story. Naming of places in Scott’s manner had not succeeded in changing Wordsworth’s reception as a Lake poet; sales, after the damning reviews, were poor. Wordsworth’s reputation was now at a nadir; so was his relationship with reviewers. In 1816 he accused Jeffrey of ‘vanity . . . restless, reckless, intractable, unappeasable, insatiable’,31 but this attack made him look churlish, egotistical and bitter.32 Thereafter, Wordsworth, unable to defeat Jeffrey in controversy or shrug off the ‘Lake poet’ reputation Jeffrey had given him, would alter his poetic course still further. If his post-Scott poetry was itself a change of direction towards local historical romance, its failure to impress reviewers and public led Wordsworth, from 1819, to poeticise the local in topographical rather than bardic verse, using more impersonal voices and traditional forms than those of the pre-1807 years.

maps and guidebooks ‘Lakers have flowed in upon us like a spring tide’: wrote Southey in 1808.33 By then, the region was a well-established destination for the professional and gentlemanly classes – people with money and leisure. A local industry grew up to service their needs: Thomas West’s A Guide to the Lakes in Cumberland, Westmorland and Lancashire was published in Kendal in 1778 and went through many editions. Cumberland-born William Gilpin defined the aesthetic properties of the region more carefully in Observations, Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty, Made in the Year 1772, on Several Parts of England; Particularly the Mountains, and Lakes of

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Cumberland, and Westmoreland (1786), while Carlisle-based John Housman’s Descriptive Tour, and Guide to the Lakes, Caves, Mountains, and other Natural Curiosities, in Cumberland, Westmoreland, Lancashire, and a Part of the West Riding of Yorkshire (1800) gave a more detailed walking tour of the area. Wordsworth owned these books and also Durham-resident William Hutchinson’s An Excursion to the Lakes, in Westmoreland and Cumberland, August 1773 (1774). By 1800, then, when his ‘Poems on the Naming of Places’ were published, he knew that many Lakeland names were already defined in printed media as stations, viewpoints, tourist stops, sights. As we saw in Chapter 1, when Southey’s fictional traveller Espriella reached Lodore in 1807, he found it a thoroughly commercialised spot: even the reverberations produced by the firing of cannon across the lake were priced on a sliding scale.34 ‘Lodore’ may have resounded with the waterfall that cascaded down the fellside, but it also echoed to the commodification of a place for a new market of sightseers. It had become (as it remains) a destination cut off from its context in space and time, isolated from the present and past local community that lived and worked there, and denuded of its lived meaning to that community. Wordsworth would later campaign against exactly this kind of commodification when opposing the building of a railway to Windermere that would bring the Lakes within reach of day-trippers from the industrial towns. He worried that the arrival by train of ‘uneducated persons . . . artisans and labourers, and the humbler classes of shopkeepers’, would overwhelm the local culture with a tide of tripperish amusements: we should have wrestling matches, horse and boat races without number, and pothouses and beer-shops would keep pace with these excitements and recreations, most of which might too easily be had elsewhere. The injury which would thus be done to morals, both among this influx of strangers and the lower class of inhabitants, is obvious.35

From 1814 Wordsworth’s terror of such cheap commercialisation, threatening to alienate him and the idealised rustic community of whom he was the self-appointed bardic voice from their locality, led him to change his writing. While restoring the area’s historical past to attention in ‘Song at the Feast’ he also set about naming local places so as to represent them, to visitors and remote readers, without uprooting them from their local lived meaning – as is at once obvious in a poem such as ‘Michael’ which invests heavily not just in the idea of the local and the rural, but in a particular named locality (Greenhead Ghyll) that is made the site of an emotionally complex story that is taken for true: a process he would

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repeat in the stories of local people he located in the Duddon valley in The Excursion. Such verse tales ran alongside, and indeed influenced, a new kind of prose guidebook produced by residents who had read Wordsworth’s poetry. William Green (1760–1823), an artist and friend of Wordsworth (who admired his sketches of Lakeland rocks, trees and cottages), sold from his shop in Ambleside The Tourist’s New Guide to the Lake District, Containing a Description of the Lakes, Mountains and Scenery in Cumberland, Westmorland, and Lancashire.36 Green offered a far more intimate representation of the area than previous guides, a representation in which naming local spots betokened his intimacy with and love of the place. Green was fascinated by the character and culture of the Lakeland people. Rather than simply list sights and locate viewpoints, his Guide invested local places with historical information and traditional lore – for example, he admired the hard, labouring lives of named Honister slate miners and treated them as exemplary rustics of the Wordsworthian kind. They were men of self-reliance, physical prowess and mental endurance because they were daily in contact with the permanent forms of nature: Joseph Clark resides at Stonethwaite, in Borrowdale, from which place to Yew Crag, a distance of three miles, he walks daily. He has performed these herculean labours for several years past, without any striking inconvenience, excepting thirst, to which, others, having the same occupation are, of course, much exposed. It is supposed, that there is scarcely another man in England capable of sustaining an equal degree of labour. (ii, p. 189)

Still more impressive is another slate miner of Honister whose name is Edward Tyson, . . . a poet and a painter. Of his paintings, specimens may be seen at the inns at Scale Hill and Buttermere. Had Mr. Tyson possessed opportunities, like other men, he might have become a great artist. ‘A poetical Prospect of Buttermere, on the first day of May, 1816,’ contains some pretty lines, and much feeling for the beauties of nature; but, it most of all abounds in sentiments of unaffected piety. ‘How justly then, may we admire The wond’rous works of Nature? For, every day, we are convinc’d There is a wise Creator.’ Prospect of Buttermere

The poet is nephew to William Tyson, a wooden legged slater, who, with three sons, all excellent workmen, belong to the Honister quarries. William Tyson lost his leg at the Rigg Head slate quarry, on Scadle. Slate rocks, like the balls from cannon, have prostrated many a brave fellow; numbers of lives have been lost since the writer settled in Westmorland. A club of all the northern slaters would prove

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greatly beneficial to widows and orphans; and, a donation, of even one farthing in the pound, from proprietors, or renters, on the annual value of houses covered with slate from the English lakes, would produce a sum, the interest of which, would be very considerable. (ii, p. 190)

In 1820 Wordsworth would move towards naming Lake District places and people in the manner of Green – following Green’s example indeed. He became an explicitly topographical writer in the process, creating collections of verse named after local places, and publishing a Topographical Description of the Country of the Lakes intended to offer tourists a more profound engagement than was available through existing guidebooks. The first topographical verse collection, The River Duddon, a Series of Sonnets, has been termed by Stephen Gill ‘of the greatest historical importance’, because it marked a decisive turn in Wordsworth’s career.37 For the first time, Wordsworth appeared as a poet surveying a whole geographical and cultural region – its physical appearance, its traditions, its culture and monuments: the collection included poems that described the society and history that, for locals, were associated with the Lakeland places. It also included explanatory footnotes that described Dunnerdale in detail, and cited Green: The bed of the Duddon is here strewn with large fragments of rocks fallen from aloft; which, as Mr. Green truly says, ‘are happily adapted to the many shaped waterfalls,’ (or rather waterbreaks, for none of them are high,) displayed in the short space of half a mile. That there is some hazard in frequenting these desolate places, I myself have had proof; for one night an immense mass of rock fell upon the very spot where, with a friend, I had lingered the day before. ‘The concussion,’ says Mr. Green, speaking of the event, (for he also, in the practice of his art, on that day sat exposed for a still longer time to the same peril,) ‘was heard, not without alarm by the neighbouring shepherds.’ But to return to Seathwaite Church-yard: it contains the following inscription — ‘In memory of the Reverend Robert Walker, who died the 25th of June, 1802, in the 93d year of his age, and 67th of his curacy at Seathwaite.’38

Green was in fact Wordsworth’s precursor and mentor in this kind of writing: the poet followed the artist into what was, for him, a new kind of topographic prose, recognising Green as a reliable guide to the Lakes because, like himself, he explored the region and its people in intimate detail in pursuit of his art. Having quoted Green and placed him on a level with himself as an observer of nature so dedicated that he was at risk of rockfalls, Wordsworth then imitated Green’s procedure of describing exemplary locals. He singled out the life of ‘Wonderful’ Robert Walker as the subject both of his verse and a twenty-page biographical footnote

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that establishes him as the perfect, humble, rustic priest – a modern reincarnation of the exemplary parson of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. To name the local was to show how the particular culture of a mountain region was embodied in examples of the good and moral life. Thus by 1820, Wordsworth had become self-conscious about the name and about his power to invoke place by reciting it. He no longer simply portrayed himself as the observer of nature’s echoes, or voicer of its elusive source, nor simply recited names as talismans; he also offered himself as a tour-guide to the public, instructing them, as he once had instructed Joanna Hutchinson, in the significance of the names he sounded out. In the Duddon collection he appeared as an experienced insider – a topographic guide who takes visitors deep – and high – into the country, both in person and, virtually, by his descriptive discourse. In several poems, the reader is aligned with Wordsworth’s walking companion as the poem tells of a journey into a named place. The scenario here has the experienced local, Wordsworth, inducting an ingénue visitor into the mystery of names’ power to summon the thing they stand for. For example, in ‘To Miss Blacket at her first ascent of Helvellyn’ he imagines himself as the old man of the mountain, enthralling the young tourist with the dangerous power he finds at the top of the fell: —Take flight; —inherit Alps or Andes—they are thine! With the morning’s roseate Spirit, Sweep their length of snowy line; Or survey their bright dominions In the gorgeous colours drest Flung from off the purple pinions, Evening spreads throughout the west! Thine are all the choral fountains Warbling in each sparry vault Of the untrodden lunar mountains; Listen to their songs! —or halt, To Niphates’ top invited, Whither spiteful Satan steered; Or descend where the ark alighted, When the green earth re-appeared; For the power of hills is on thee, As was witnessed through thine eye Then, when old Helvellyn won thee To confess their majesty[.] (ll. 16–35)39

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Here, commanding the view in words, Wordsworth instructs his companion on how to command it too. He names himself as a seductive magician and figure of male potency – urging his fledgling companion to take to the air and associating her with Eve being tempted by Satan, who, in Paradise Lost, flew from the abyss of hell to earth, alighting on top of the mountain Niphates before making his assault on Eden. Satan’s aim was to wrest mastery of the world from its proper owner, God: the mountain-top view, Wordsworth’s allusion suggests, tempts the viewer to usurp divine omniscience because it gives her unprecedented superiority of position and breadth of vision. Empowered by ‘old Helvellyn’ (a metonym for Wordsworth himself), she must ‘inherit’ the legacy that he gives her in and by these very words. Here the name ‘Helvellyn’ is talismanic: ‘the power of hills’ is vouchsafed by it: its labial sonorousness, redoubled by the ‘l’s of ‘old’ and its internal rhymes half-echoed by ‘Then’ ‘when’ and ‘won’, sounds like a magic spell. The Duddon collection was not simply an assemblage of poems on named Lakeland places. Its verse evocations of Helvellyn and Dunnerdale were more personal and figurative counterparts of the prose descriptions in the accompanying prose Topographic Description. He was, in effect, combining the kind of touristic writing he found in Green with a poetic response to the region, in a hybrid publication of verse and prose. He explained in a note that the guidebook had ‘been written in the same spirit which dictated several of the poems and from a belief that it will tend materially to illustrate them’.40 His muse was now topographic – on a mission to inform visitors rather than to recollect the spots of time that had formed his mind in childhood. In 1835, he would include some of the poems, including the address to Miss Blacket, in the prose Guide itself, published on a stand-alone basis. There, they supplemented prose descriptions of mountain ascents borrowed from Dorothy’s journals. They were nakedly part of a tourist guidebook – verse illustrations designed to demonstrate, through the heightened figurative language of poetry, the imaginative and spiritual power of the hills towards which the descriptive prose could only gesture. His poetry on the naming of places now supplemented his guidebook prose so as to mediate the region to tourists with a depth that other guidebooks could not reach. It acted to induct the reader into a realm of imaginative flight accessible when the place name was sounded out in his verse: if the prose declared that the view from the mountain top was glorious, the poem made it a stimulus to an angelic – or Satanic – imaginative flight.

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If the Duddon poems aimed to soar beyond the pedestrian levels which guidebooks reached, they nevertheless depended on the conventions of topographic writing: Wordsworth needed to assure the reader of the spatial location, temporal existence and cultural significance of the places he named. His poems resonated with the new guidebooks, which also showed an increasing faithfulness to local naming and tradition. In 1823 Jonathan Otley (1766–1856), a Keswick clockmaker, mapmaker and geologist, published A Concise Description of the English Lakes and Ancient Mountains. This work explained the meaning of local terms such as ghyll and beck; it also restored local names. So Wordsworth’s Helvellyn – a name signifying mountain ascents, imaginative flights, and natural confrontations between rock and wind – resonated with Otley’s concern for fidelity to local knowledge: Helvellyn.—Different portions of this mountain have been known by different names, and it is to one of those portions that the name of Helvellyn has originally been given. Latterly however the word has been used in a more extended sense; and it is to the highest point of the mountain that travellers are now conducted as the summit of Helvellyn; although it was formerly known by another name. And that which was anciently called the top of Helvellyn, or Helvellyn Man,* is situated near half a mile to the northward, and now called the Lower Man[.] *Man is the provincial term for one of those rude obelisks, or piles of stones, which are commonly built by the country people upon the summits of remarkable hills.41

For Otley, naming was a matter not just of fidelity but also of safety. He pointed the tourist to the errors made by the Ordnance Survey, revealing that, in disregarding the inhabitants’ oral knowledge, its maps placed fell climbers in danger. The local tradition of scarcely literate rustics, Otley showed, was more reliable than the official record produced by the national cartographic survey: Scawfell And The Pikes.—One of these points being the most elevated of all this mountainous district, and indeed the highest in any part of England, some misunderstanding has taken place respecting its proper name. In Donald’s original map of Cumberland, the name Scafell extends over a range comprising several lofty points; this has been copied into all succeeding maps, and Colonel Mudge taking Donald for his guide, has designated the two rival points by the names of Sca-fell high-point, and Sca-fell low-point, or highest and lower top. This might seem a sufficient authority, but the shepherds best acquainted with the mountain, say, that Scawfell extends no farther towards the north-east than the deep chasm called Mickle Door, which divides the two principal points; and the highest point or that nearer Borrowdale, is by them called simply ‘The Pikes.’ A trifling misnomer like this may be thought of little consequence, and in such a mountain

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as Skiddaw or Helvellyn, where from one peak to another is but a pleasant walk, it would not signify much; but here the passage between the two points is attended with considerable difficulty, although they are not more than three quarters of a mile asunder; and to a stranger wishing to ascend one of these elevations, it becomes of importance to be able to make his enquiries intelligible to those from whom he may seek information.42

The shepherds’ saying was the true guide because it spoke from their bodily knowledge: the names they gave the place reflected their hands- and feeton experience of every feature of it. The Ordnance Survey, by contrast, copied the name from previous maps, magnifying their error and misleading readers because it had blithely assumed the superior authority of print. Otley strove to reconcile local naming with scientific surveying on the large-scale map of the region he published in 1818. Otley’s preference for the shepherds’ naming echoed Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads, with its central claim that rustic speech is the best part of language because it is based on the ‘beautiful and permanent forms of nature’. His critique of the Ordnance Survey’s representation of the Lakes chimed with Wordsworth’s too.43 In his 1811 poem ‘View from the top of Black Comb’ Wordsworth derived the mountain name from locals’ ostensive definition: ‘BLACK COMB (dread name/ Derived from clouds and storms!)’ (ll. 2–3). And in a sequel written in 1813 he imagined the OS geographer, perched on the mountain top with his equipment for measuring out a triangulated survey. But the geographer is blinded, his instruments rendered useless, as the ‘blackness’ for which the fell is named suddenly descends: once, while there he plied his studious work Within that canvass Dwelling, suddenly, The many-coloured map before his eyes, Became invisible: for all around Had darkness fallen—unthreatened, unproclaimed— As if the golden day itself had been Extinguished in a moment; total gloom, In which he sate alone with unclosed eyes, Upon the blinded mountain’s silent top! (‘Written With a Slate Pencil on a Stone, on the Side of the Mountain of Black Comb’, ll. 21–9)44

The abstracted exactitude of mathematics is not, Wordsworth shows, the whole truth. The geographer is surprised, and his scientific view emasculated, by an event that is not at all unexpected by the local people, for the name they give the mountain bespeaks blackness, dread and gloom.

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Needless to say, the surveyor’s unexpected experience of nature’s blinding power is not included in the ‘truth’ of the official record – Wordsworth learnt of it, a note to the poem tells us, from local report: it ‘was told me by Dr. Satterthwaite, who was Incumbent of Bootle, a small town at the foot of Black Comb. He had the particulars from one of the engineers who was employed in making trigonometrical surveys of that region’.45 The poet’s role here is to bear witness to the wisdom enshrined in locals’ oral lore that is otherwise omitted from the official discourse – the map – that now claims the authority to locate and nominate the mountain accurately. In 1817 Wordsworth followed up his topographic portrayals of Black Comb by writing a poem that named another bleak spot in the local fells. ‘Ode. The Pass of Kirkstone’ was published in the Duddon collection in 1820 and in 1835 included as the final, climactic entry in Wordsworth’s own Guide to the Lakes, supplementing a prose description of the pass that originally derived from an entry in Dorothy’s journal. Effectively, Wordsworth gave his poetic naming of the place the last word in his Guide because there it benefited from the preceding prose in which he, and Dorothy, had honoured the local. Thus the poem was framed by its publication format: the guidebook was a familiar genre aimed at tourists rather than an innovative lyrical ballad or Scottian romance. In this context, Wordsworth’s topographisation of his poetry can be seen at its most developed: the poem is only reached after the reader has approached the area through the guidebook’s impersonal descriptions and Dorothy’s more subjective tour narrative. Building on the guidebook’s detailed representation of the Lakes’ natural and cultural scene, the poem is able to position Wordsworth as a guide to the place’s inner character who inducts the reader/tourist into the spiritual lessons he has gained on the spot. First, Dorothy’s prose establishes the pass as a place of strangeness, where familiar objects are transformed in the winds and mists into otherworldly shapes and where tourists’ vision is refocused: The mists gathered as we went along: but, when we reached the top of Kirkstone, we were glad we had not been discouraged by the apprehension of bad weather. Though not able to see a hundred yards before us, we were more than contented. At such a time, and in such a place, every scattered stone the size of one’s head becomes a companion. Near the top of the Pass is the remnant of an old wall, which (magnified, though obscured, by the vapour) might have been taken for a fragment of some monument of ancient grandeur,—yet that same pile of stones we had never before even observed. This situation, it must be allowed, is not favourable to gaiety; but a pleasing hurry of spirits accompanies the surprise

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occasioned by objects transformed, dilated, or distorted, as they are when seen through such a medium. Many of the fragments of rock on the top and slopes of Kirkstone, and of similar places, are fantastic enough in themselves; but the full effect of such impressions can only be had in a state of weather when they are not likely to be sought for.46

The poem, following this description, amplifies and explores what, within the confines of journalistic prose, is indicated merely by ‘a pleasing hurry of spirits’. Added to the guidebook, it takes topographic and touristic writing in the direction of the spiritual return of the historical past. Thus Wordsworth hears, in the winds that shrill across the pass, the sound of the Roman legion that once crossed it: British history echoes sonically to the poet, and then to the traveller who traverses the pass via the poet’s words. Thus, too, he hears a spiritual communication that the name ‘Kirk stone’ (given for a boulder that resembles a church) points towards. The pass becomes a natural church: O care! O guilt!—O vales and plains, Here, mid his own unvexed domains, A Genius dwells, that can subdue At once all memory of You, — Most potent when mists veil the sky, Mists that distort and magnify; While the coarse rushes, to the sweeping breeze, Sigh forth their ancient melodies!

iii List to those shriller notes! —that march Perchance was on the blast, When, through this Height’s inverted arch, Rome’s earliest legion passed! —They saw, adventurously impelled, And older eyes than theirs beheld, This block—and yon, whose Church-like frame Gives to this savage Pass its name. Aspiring Road! that lov’st to hide Thy daring in a vapoury bourn, Not seldom may the hour return When thou shalt be my guide[.]

(ll. 33–52)47

Here ‘Kirk stone’ is a proper name that retains a meaning; the words still circulate as ordinary nouns and thereby tell all that the stone is church-like. Wordsworth uses this meaning to turn the place into a church of the winds – or, implicitly – of spirits in motion. Like a cathedral nave, the pass, an

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upturned arch, funnels vapours and channels the sounds that are borne on those vapours. Ascending the pass gives sonic immersion in a materiality that discloses spirituality – the spirits of nature and the spirits of the historical figures who have crossed this pass since Roman times. It becomes a place where otherness – the past, the dead, the immaterial – can be traced, if not captured, in the passages of air: sound and fury, signifying something. From this less-than-pretty pass the human world below seems both smaller and more valuable. The poem does not conclude with the apprehension of otherness that the pass discloses. It continues by departing from its natural supernaturalism because what Wordsworth learns in his stony church he wants to translate into an explanatory framework of orthodox abstractions that frame the pass as a place where moral lessons can be learnt for all. The lessons, however, are simplistic: —Who comes not hither ne’er shall know How beautiful the world below; Nor can he guess how lightly leaps The brook adown the rocky steeps. Farewell, thou desolate Domain! Hope, pointing to the cultur’d plain, Carols like a shepherd-boy; And who is she? —Can that be Joy! Who, with a sunbeam for her guide, Smoothly skims the meadows wide; While Faith, from yonder opening cloud, To hill and vale proclaims aloud, ‘Whate’er the weak may dread, the wicked dare, Thy lot, O Man, is good, thy portion, fair!’

(ll. 73–86)

This is less egotistical and less Lakish than The Prelude or even The Excursion. It is so pitched as to be easily legible by readers/tourists who can, with Wordsworth as their guide, relate the place, and its name, to lessons with which their Anglican education has made them familiar. Wordsworth eschews his intensely personal and, to most of his contemporaries, exceedingly perverse, representation of local fells in favour of a more publicly acceptable one. As a result, he loses the saturation of the named locality by meaning that is both personal and communal, present and past: the name proves too easily translatable into empty generics such as ‘Faith’ and ‘Joy’. This is a retreat from the consequences of vision, made under the pressure of public hostility to his ‘egotistical sublime’: it represents an unfortunate tendency in many of his later poems to transpose his

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naming of places and his sonic apprehension of the local into conventional pieties. Nevertheless, if it pays the price of a conscious effort to make his Lake poetry an authoritative guide for the many, rather than, as critics argued, the eccentric philosophy of a few, it still demands more of the tourist than the consumption of sights and the adoption of the conventional aesthetic responses typical of the picturesque. Critical reaction to the Duddon volume in which the Kirkstone poem first appeared was more positive than Wordsworth had ever before experienced, although reviewers complained that the names so central to it referred to obscure places and sounded uncouth. Overall, however, the new direction in Wordsworth’s writing was praised highly: the guidebook and the biography of Walker were admired; the Kirkstone ode thought ‘exquisite’ and ‘beautiful’ and Wordsworth was agreed to have overcome his Lakish tendency towards puerility and egotism.48 According to the Eclectic Review, ‘here and there, a little metaphysical mud, or a Lakish tincture, mingles with the stream . . . but the general character of the series is that of very noble descriptive poetry’.49 Blackwood’s declared that so far from deserving to be held up to derision as a fanciful and conceited innovator, Mr Wordsworth (judged by the genuine spirit of his writings) is entitled to be classed with the very highest names among his predecessors, as a pure and genuine worshipper of the true majesty of the English Muse.50

To the European, Wordsworth was now ‘beyond all comparison the most truly sublime, the most touchingly pathetic, the most delightfully simple, the most profoundly philosophical, of all the poetical spirits of the age’.51

cave s a nd streams I turn now from the fells of Wordsworth’s Duddon volume to a figure that also changed as Wordsworth grew older. This was the figure in which Wordsworth coupled a named fell with a cave. On the face of it, this was a strange coupling, since it is named objects’ mass, solidity and permanence that make them seem stable foundations for language, while caves, if permanent, nonetheless suggest hollowness. A becaverned fell is less solidly substantial than one unriven by fissures. Yet Wordsworth repeatedly links the fell-name with the cave: as we saw, in ‘To Joanna’, ‘That ancient Woman seated on Helm-crag/ Was ready with her cavern’ and, in ‘Yew Trees’, the poet hears the sound of waters from ‘Glaramara’s inmost caves’. Clearly then, the link between place name and cave is more than casual, despite its apparent counter-intuitiveness. Wordsworth’s later comment,

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recorded by Isabella Fenwick, helps explain why he repeatedly made the association. ‘I will here mention that a little way up the hill, on the road leading from Rosthwaite to Stonethwaite (in Borrowdale), lay the trunk of a yew-tree, which appeared as you approached, so vast was its diameter, like the entrance of a cave, and not a small one’.52 Here, paradoxically, a great, ancient object of nature resembles an aperture, as if the tree were so dense a mass that it was a black hole. For Wordsworth this is so because the tree, once a living thing, is as old and as solid as the hills and therefore offers other living things a way to conceive of permanence. It becomes an entrance, for those in the organic, temporal world, to a world that is seemingly beyond time (and thus beyond comprehension) – the unchanging world of stony materiality – the earth itself. Significantly, it is a real tree – the place names point out its actual spatial existence; they also witness, however, that it can be brought within the horizon of human saying. As such it is both a material and symbolic portal into the nature of things, an opening into the interior of time and space that can be clasped/ entered in Borrowdale. The portal is characteristically opened by speech rather than script: heard and said rather than seen and written. Thus in ‘To Joanna’ Wordsworth begins with inscription but rapidly moves to incantation, replacing silent writing with sound and speech. In fact as soon as he started explaining to the onlooking ‘Vicar’ why he was chiselling ‘Some uncouth name upon the native rock’, he had moved from the realm of reading – ideal forms of communication – to (reported) speech – communication whose materiality is sensually evident (even if its materiality is the fleeting and evanescent passage of sound). Speech, it then turns out, speaks of speech: Wordsworth tells the Vicar not about holy writ (whether runic or Christian) but about a vocal concert which produces reciprocity between man and nature as sounds are uttered and heard, given and received. The fells sounded and resounded (with) Joanna’s laughter: Wordsworth responds by incanting their names. Because they double and redouble sound, he experiences them as having agency and personifies them. Calling out their names, he does not so much mark them as great, permanent objects of nature as acknowledge and invoke them as sonically active powers. After this, the ‘runic’ inscription that he carves into the fell will be a silent memorial to a sonic revelation that it cannot re-present – unless the Druid nature-priest makes its secret hieroglyphics ring out again in his hieratic utterance. Writing, that is to say, will be of value only in so far as it again enables prophetic speech: the new name that is inscribed (‘Joanna’s rock’), must be sounded and resounded for its claim upon the thing to acquire power.

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The caves in ‘Yew Trees’ are rather different symbols of aurality, for they depend on a quiet act of hearing, rather than the loud echoing in ‘To Joanna’. Nor does ‘Yew Trees’ deploy reported speech: the narration is sober, factual and quiet, as much written report as oral testimony. Nevertheless, the caves declare themselves sonically, murmuring to the ear of the listener who is able to hear them because he is silent himself. They are accessed not by sight but by the sound of a stream continuously flowing from cave-source to its destination in the auditor’s ear. Sound, then, allows a less disturbing access to temporality than sight, and the caves turn the poet away from his visual haunting by the tree-spectres of violence and death. By so doing they represent nature unlocking its inner self because it has been both properly attended to and effectively called upon. The caves symbolise the power of sound to transmit nature’s hidden essence, its secret source, a power that the poet renews by his quiet invocation of the name that identifies them. They are tokens of the power of the name to call upon or summon up the object so thoroughly that its core objectivity passes into human terms (heard sounds, uttered words). But the name has to be resounded so that its sonic power is unleashed: ‘Glaramara’ is made to half-rhyme with ‘murmuring’ and ‘from’, so that the phrase takes on the quality of a sequence of euphonic, chiming words that signify nothing but that have mysterious powers to make things happen. Alliterative and onomatopoeic at once, the phrase acts as a linguistic key to unlock, by the powers of sonic harmony and deictic pointing, the hidden sources of nature’s forces. Thus the talismanic name, resounding in Wordsworth’s rhythmic articulation of it, would turn hearing into a process of sounding the depths, uniting man and nature beyond spatial and temporal difference. Beyond linguistic inadequacy too, for the process does not, it seems, depend on language’s achieving accuracy of denotation or perfection of meaning: the words do not define the place but sound out the specific but meaningless proper names that open its entrances. ‘Glaramara’, the cave shows, becomes akin to ‘Abracadabra’ or ‘SimsimSalamin’, a sonic code that opens secret doors and enters ‘inmost caves’. Or rather, because its mellifluous and rhythmic patterning operates on one specific secret door, one cave only, it is both meaningless – apparently a pure sound – and deictic. Deixis is not the whole story, for nomination here is a speech act that produces actions in the object world. ‘Glaramara’ does not just point to a unique mountain, but operates upon it, opening its recesses. Here Wordsworth deploys the power of sound, held in tension with the illusion of unique reference, in an effort to surpass language’s arbitrary status.

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Language, because it approaches nonsense, is heard to be a code that does not represent the world but that acts upon it. Not so much an Adamic name as a wizard’s spell or divine fiat. It is essential to this process, however, that the silent communication of writing – the poem on the page – is represented as ritualised speech, a whispered incantation. It is by seeming to tell, rather than write, that Wordsworth turns hearing into inhe(a)ring – a process that takes him from out to in, from valley floor to the hidden source. What is latent in ‘Yew Trees’ became more and more strongly featured after 1810. The older Wordsworth, reflecting upon the relationship between man, nature and writing in the course of composing his ‘philosophic’ poem The Excursion, turned increasingly to meditations on sound’s significance as a transference between nature and man, a transference effected by the poet re-sounding nature’s noises in his naming words. Within these meditations, caves appear as fonts for an inarticulate passage of sound which the poet articulates in his metrical lines. They function, too, as emblems of his poetry’s central search for foundations for words in nature – figures of figuration made, in later works, as he ponders past poems from a changed perspective, evaluating his old modes of figuration from a distance and weighing up what it is now to be the poet who once felt and wrote so. Wordsworth describes this sonic passage in the second book of The Excursion when the Solitary contemplates the Langdale Pikes which overshadow his dwelling: Many are the notes Which, in his tuneful course, the wind draws forth From rocks, woods, caverns, heaths, and dashing shores; And well those lofty brethren bear their part In the wild concert—chiefly when the storm Rides high; then all the upper air they fill With roaring sound, that ceases not to flow, Like smoke, along the level of the blast, In mighty current; theirs, too, is the song Of stream and headlong flood that seldom fails; And, in the grim and breathless hour of noon, Methinks that I have heard them echo back The thunder’s greeting. Nor have nature’s laws Left them ungifted with a power to yield Music of finer tone; a harmony, So do I call it, though it be the hand Of silence, though there be no voice; —the clouds,

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Wordsworth The mist, the shadows, light of golden suns, Motions of moonlight, all come thither—touch, And have an answer—thither come, and shape A language not unwelcome to sick hearts And idle spirits[.] (Excursion, ii, 723–44; p. 98)

Here sound surpasses sound: in a moment of synaesthetic revelation the Solitary hears the sound of silence. He sees silence too as a harmony of motion, light, shadow, mist. It is a strange intimation of unity, sensual but beyond sense, that leaves the Solitary rapt, his sick spirit cured by the influx into it of spirits – winds, motions, notes, sounds, song, all derived from their source in the cavernous crags which act as instruments transforming the wind into natural music, as if they were gigantic Aeolian harps. It is, of course, the music of Wordsworth’s prosody that effects the transformation: note how the verse-sentence is mired in short phrases – halting selfqualifications – then suddenly springs forward with a dash into the rhetorically insistent and syntactically expansive section that begins with an uplifting list, moving from monosyllables to longer rhythmic units: though it be the hand Of silence, though there be no voice;—the clouds, The mist, the shadows, light of golden suns, Motions of moonlight, all come thither—touch, And have an answer—thither come, and shape A language not unwelcome to sick hearts And idle spirits[.]

The delayed verb ‘come thither’ grammatically resolves all the various nouns, making them touch a moment before the simple, climactic word ‘touch’ appears, thus underpinning the coincidence and melding on which the simple monosyllabic verb insists. Variety here is brought into active unity. But if ‘touch’ is the climax of what comes before, it is also the unexpected hinge to what follows over the line end. The next phrase ‘And have an answer – thither come, and shape’ surprises the reader with further actions that are unexpected (since ‘touch’ does not itself imply the need for an answer), recollective (since ‘thither come’ picks up the ‘come thither’ of the line before) and new (since ‘shape’ outlines a further effect on human language). The interplay between the syntactical pace and the rhythmical weight of the phrases shapes their pattern as units of sound, building and relaxing their implicit speed and stress so that they create, as they are pronounced, a sonic flow akin to that which they discuss. In this, they resemble the lines on the ‘one life within us and abroad,/ Which meets all

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motion and becomes its soul’ that Coleridge added to ‘The Aeolian Harp’ for its 1817 republication – ‘a light in sound/ A sound-like power in light’.53 The Solitary’s grand sonic revelation is faintly echoed in a late poem that also relates the spoken name to the sounds and streams of nature, and to their sources in a cave. Written in 1824 to celebrate the baptism of Wordsworth’s step-granddaughter with the name of the local river, the sonnet ‘To Rotha Q’ also reflects implicitly, in a way his earlier poems do not, on the relationship of these sonic motions to his own verse. It concludes with the declaration that Wordsworth’s own verse is, like the river Rotha, a Stream of name more dear Since thou dost bear it,—a memorial theme For others; for thy future self, a spell To summon fancies out of Time’s dark cell. (‘To Rotha Q’, ll. 11–14)54

In these lines Wordsworth conceives as one the stream that is poetry (including this very poem) and the stream that is the river Rotha. ‘Rotha’, now the girl’s name, invokes a poem’s name and a river’s name at once. To say her name will henceforth be an incantation that calls up the stream of verse and the stream of water, currents that flow together (and the poem was composed at Rydal Mount in earshot of the river). And because these streams are intermingled and continuous, they overcome, as their name echoes in hers, the division between future, present and past (and between man and nature). To name Rotha Quillinan will be to name a stream that still flows as it did when she was first named by its banks; it will also be to summon this verse, composed on the river’s banks, which can be voiced again and again. It is this resounding of sound – the poetic river’s murmuring, metrical speech – that makes time (into a) current. In this context the cave, Time’s ‘dark cell’, is an image of the power of sound to redeem time when sight is unable to do so. Too dark to penetrate with the eyes, the dark cell embodies the limit of vision: time defies our ability to see into the life of things and renew our past. But the past is nevertheless summonable as the still continued and renewable stream of sound (river/ verse) that is invoked every time ‘Rotha’ is pronounced. If it images alienation, the cell also voices the source: it is the cave from which Rotha continues always to flow. In her name, as spelt out by the poem, Rotha will sound – and hear – nature’s life murmuring as her own. It should be clear by now that caves function in Wordsworth’s poetry as realities that are also figures of the privileged access to the origin of articulate speech in natural sound that he wishes to gain and that is possible only by deep and long immersion in a place. They appear along with the

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names of fells, rivers and streams because those names embody that immersion. As specific incantatory words (or spells) – both nonsensical and deictic, arbitrary and specific – the names hold in tension language’s contradictory pulls towards the real and the conventional. For this reason, acting in self-contradiction, they are nexuses of ambiguity, taking to a logical extreme the tendency of all language to point towards itself as well as to the world. Without synonym, apparently exempt from substitution by another word, they seem magical, sounding in Wordsworth’s lines with an untranslatable, unparaphrasable power that stems from their inherent tension and is vouchsafed from their use, for generation after generation of locals, to speak of and to one thing and one thing only. Thus the inmost caves of Glaramara, the cavern of Helm Crag, the chimneys of the Langdale Pikes, and the cleft from which the Rotha issues, symbolise the opening of nature’s door that is effected by the spoken name – as if having called upon the place by its own ancient name it then reveals its inward, essential self – the sound-source that lies within. For Wordsworth the cave becomes a trope of the paradoxical power of the proper name, revealing language’s conventionality and yet locking onto the world, to arrest the flow of différance – a symbol of a perfect correspondence between one signifier and one signified, between a single combination of phonemes/ graphic marks and a single thing.55 And because this signified, this thing is a real palpable object, it is appropriate that the cave is not just a trope but also a really existing feature of the mountain after which it is named. It is telling that the figure by which Wordsworth indicates the end of linguistic ideality, and marks the moment when words clasp materiality, is a word denoting the very interior of the material world – not just rock but an opening within rock. The cave, however, is not to be entered by writing, unless that writing can be configured as speech, sound and hearing: Wordsworth can imagine summoning the world to his words only in the moment when poet and nature are bound together by a single act of hearing and/or saying – a sonic passage in which each becomes present to the other and, by the same token, to itself. Only by re-presenting his written text as an oral communication can Wordsworth intimate the unity achieved through the long pronounced name and the long known place; equally, only by written dissemination of that oral communication can he have readers reproduce that communication at a remove, beyond the moment. And on the reproduction of that communication through publication depends his acceptance as a great poet and prophet of nature. Paradoxically then, although the cave is a secret place accessed by a special name, it is to be shared by readers in their thousands. What lets

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Wordsworth preserve the intimacy on which intimation depends while disseminating it to a public is the singular nature of reading: each individual reader privately imagines Wordsworth’s text as speech, imagining him or herself there in the moment of audition and utterance.56 The process I have just been outlining is an essential but implicit part of Wordsworth’s poetic, one that in later years he began to analyse in itself. The fruit of this analysis was the 1835 publication ‘Stanzas on the Power of Sound’. Composed over a seven-year period, these stanzas, as published, constitute an attempt to make a definitive statement on sound’s place in the universe. To this end Wordsworth prefaced the verses with a prose ‘argument’ that described the topics discussed. These topics commenced with ‘the ear addressed, as occupied by a spiritual functionary, in communion with sounds’ and concluded with ‘(Last Stanza) the destruction of earth and the planetary system – the survival of audible harmony, and its support in the Divine Nature, as revealed in Holy Writ’.57 The effect of this was to assure readers of the poem’s general relevance and Christian orthodoxy; it would begin with personal intimations, perhaps, but end with the revealed Word. And so it proved: the published text straitjackets the more personal and experiential encounters with sound that had prompted Wordsworth to begin writing the poem in 1828. The aim is to demonstrate the general prophetic importance of the poet’s role, to clarify what is vouchsafed to the initiate, the local bard, who hears nature’s familiar sounds and calls them by their local names. But the clarification involves formalisation of and generalisation about the process, removing its spontaneity. No longer arising from a particular experience, the process is described as such, but is not made to happen in the imagined place-time of the poem. Here the older Wordsworth seeks a summative formulation of what his sonic encounters with nature have meant, as if he has already written sufficient of such encounters and now, experienced as he is, wishes to weigh up what remains of their aftereffect upon him. The result is critically useful – it allows readers to understand that Wordsworth had reached a point where he wished to demonstrate formally what he inherits from his earlier spots of time, and it reveals that for Wordsworth voice has primacy over eye, as in these lines: Ye Voices, and ye Shadows And Images of voice—to hound and horn From rocky steep and rock-bestudded meadows Flung back, and, in the sky’s blue caves, reborn, On with your pastime! (‘Stanzas on the Power of Sound’, ll. 33–7)

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Here sound precedes sight: the visual is a dim image of the vocal, to which the primal creative power belongs (‘in the beginning was the Word’). Wordsworth voices a world in which even visual images are echoes of sonic passages, and even the solid rocks participate in an aural concert, returning the hounds’ baying and the huntsman’s horn to themselves. The very sky is brought into play, giving the earthly activity a new birth, and is itself transformed in the process from empty ether to a shaped aperture – a cave, as if it were itself a rocky steep containing recesses of space. The cave image betokens the opening of secret depths, the coming-into-being of nothingness (empty space taking shape) by virtue of the unifying power of sound in transit, which unites animate and inanimate as ‘one life’, in Wordsworth’s terms. Moreover, the passage is not simply a commentary on the interplay of echoes; it is primarily an invocation, even an exhortation, and thus its subject-matter is echoed or doubled by its mode of address as Wordsworth makes his verse speak to the voices it summons. The cave opening in the sky is thus an image of the power of his poetic voice to call nature into articulate form, as well as that of sonic motion more generally. Wordsworth can make caves open by the resounding power of his naming.58 The cave is the location of hearing as well as voicing, as ‘On the Power of Sound’ also reveals: a Spirit aerial Informs the cell of Hearing, dark and blind; Intricate labyrinth, more dread for thought To enter than oracular cave; Strict passage, through which sighs are brought, And whispers for the heart, their slave[.]

(ll. 3–8)

Here the ear – the cell of hearing – is fitted for the reception of the spirit of sound because it resembles the cave that is the source of profound and oracular sound – in classical myth the site of the Delphic oracle. The problem with the poem is that Wordsworth, having emphasised the power of the oracular, then undermines it by claiming too blithely to be able to decipher it. The Delphic myth reminded the Greeks of the dangers involved in interpreting divine obscurity too literally: the sounds that emerged from the cave were not easily to be understood or applied to human affairs. For Wordsworth by contrast, they are simply translatable into conventional piety: As Deep to Deep Shouting through one valley calls, All worlds, all natures, mood and measure keep

Naming the abyss: Wordsworth and the sound of power For praise and ceaseless gratulation, poured Into the ear of God, their Lord!

237 (ll. 204–8)

The problem is not simply semantic, but sonic: Wordsworth’s poetic sound effects chime too easily: the rhyme ‘poured/Lord’ is too facile to take up the sonic weight of the profound and dreadful ‘abyss calling to the abyss’ (Psalm 42.7). It reduces the Old Testament trope of the retreating sound-source from which language originates to the sing-song of a simplistic Sunday School hymn. It ensures that the end of the poem, the line ‘her stay/ Is in the WORD, that shall not pass away’, seems a trite allusion to the Prayer Book rather than a resolution, into an all-encompassing sound (Logos), of the sonic variety that articulates complexities of thought and feeling. It is characteristic of an occasional failure in the late poems that we observed in the 1835 text of the ‘Pass of Kirkstone’: an over-insistence and over-determination of the meaning of Wordsworth’s own utterance ties it too cheaply to a conventional answer that seems imported into the poem rather than generated from the terms of its verbal inquiry into the experienced world. This failure stems from the poem’s very lateness – from Wordsworth second-guessing retrospectively what his poetry had been about and how it had always worked. Self-reflection about his own art, a characteristic of his late work, sometimes led him to answers that allayed, by making accommodations with orthodoxy, his anxiety that there might be no end to and no comprehension of the intimations of immortality that he had always sought.59 Nevertheless, these accommodations are not the whole story: ‘On the Power of Sound’ contains more than Wordsworth himself knew; its intuitions about sound, words and poetry are not reducible to the Anglican orthodoxy for which he himself, at the poem’s conclusion, settled. Chief among the intuitions disclosed by the poem in spite of its author is the lexical and sonic play that links the cell of hearing with the oracular cave and the caves of earth and sky. This wordplay shapes the ear as being of a kind with the orifices through which sound flows in the material and spiritual realms. It can be read as a revisiting of the symbolic cave that Wordsworth had described in The Prelude in 1805. In Book V, Wordsworth describes how a friend, sitting in a ‘rocky cave/ By the sea-side’ (ll. 57–8), dreams of being gifted the spirit of sound, a spirit that is shown to be the source of poetry: ‘This other,’ pointing to the Shell, ‘this Book Is something of more worth.’ And, at the word, The Stranger, said my Friend continuing,

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Wordsworth Stretch’d forth the Shell towards me, with command That I should hold it to my ear; I did so, And heard that instant in an unknown Tongue, Which yet I understood, articulate sounds, A loud prophetic blast of harmony, An Ode, in passion utter’d, which foretold Destruction to the Children of the Earth, By deluge now at hand.

(v, 89–99)

‘On the Power of Sound’ may be the ode dreamt of here, telling of earth’s passing away but also of the permanence of the Word. If so, that late poem attempts to insulate humanity, in the name of the Logos, from what is here a doom-laden prophecy. In this passage inner knowledge of time’s processes leaves the prophet burdened to foretell what occurs when time, as it must, ends. The shell, then, portends secret knowledge – one reason why the dreamer is sure that it represents a book. Yet if a book, it is a speaking book. The intimation of nature’s inner being is, for Wordsworth, disclosed by hearing and speaking: written and printed pages defer to the more immediate and organic communication of sound. They do so because, unlike writing and things, voice and sound seem to have no difference in kind: as he dramatises encounters between the noises of nature and those of man Wordsworth places himself within the sonic forces of which he speaks. Those forces, moreover, reveal the passing of time and the shaping of space to the ear. This is clear enough in a comment Wordsworth made about the real-life occasions when he had listened to a sea shell: ‘This I had done for myself scores of times, and it was belief among us that we could know from the sound whether the tide was ebbing or flowing.’60 The shell offers privileged knowledge of the sea’s and moon’s temporal sway: it communicates what seems to be no less than the voice of nature. This communication cannot occur just anywhere: it needs a sound-stage across which transmission can occur. Caves – or cavernous enclosures – provide such a stage, acting as resonance chambers through which sound passes from natural to human, from outside to inside, becoming a gift not only of knowledge but of utterance. It is this transmission of like to like that Wordsworth sets out in ‘On the Power of Sound’, where the ‘cell of Hearing’ is an ‘Intricate labyrinth, more dread for thought/ To enter than oracular cave’. These lines share a structure with the Prelude passage: in both there is enclosure within enclosure, a cave within a cave within a cave – the rocky cave in which the dreamer sits, the sea shell, the dreamer’s ear. The intimation of the vast sound-source requires its containment and

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concentration by smaller and smaller auricles that allow its translation into a form which humans can receive and in turn retransmit as articulate sound (poetry). The shell that the dreamer puts to his ear is like a sounding cavern – an enclosure that is also a portal, channelling a sound-source that is so large that it is itself indefinable and uncontainable: the sea. If ‘On the Power of Sound’ is a late response to the call of the 1805 Prelude, the revisions Wordsworth made to the 1805 poem on the growth of his own mind also reformulate the figure of the cave as a source for his sounding out the origins of his poetic saying. In 1805, he described his art in these terms: Imagination, which, in truth, Is but another name for absolute strength And clearest insight, amplitude of mind, And Reason in her most exalted mood. This faculty hath been the moving soul Of our long labour: we have traced the stream From darkness, and the very place of birth In its blind cavern whence is faintly heard The sound of waters; followed it to light And open day; accompanied its course Among the ways of Nature, afterwards Lost sight of it bewildered and engulphed; Then given it greeting as it rose once more With strength, reflecting from its solemn breast The works of man and face of human life; And lastly, from its progress have we drawn The feeling of life endless, the great thought By which we live, Infinity and God. (Prelude, 1805, xiii, 167–84)

Born in the darkness of a blind cave, the stream of Imagination is traced sonically more than visually: it is both the flow of a Yorkshire river plunging through porous limestone into underground passages, to reemerge miles below, and the sound of Wordsworth’s mental history measured out in verse. The two are not merely analogous but mutually enforming: ‘imagination’ is a label for an articulation of mind that is different only in degree, not in kind, from the sound of the river. Wordsworth’s thoughts stream out loud and his printed verse, the record of that thought, aspires to the condition of pure sound. The 1850 Prelude, revised during the 1830s,61 retains the sonic emphasis, but contains its impact, turning away from the poet’s own feelings in the direction, once more, of a more orthodox Anglican understanding. Wordsworth effectively disconfirms the 1805 manuscript, reworking it so as to

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spell out what was implicit as a series of Christian abstractions. The elusive stream of imagination is raised only to be stilled, arrested in abstract nouns: ‘Faith in life endless, the sustaining thought/ Of human Being, Eternity, and God.’ These avoid the heterodox egotism of which his Lake poetry had been accused: they are more conventional than ‘The feeling of life endless, the great thought/ By which we live, Infinity and God’. They are also more stoic: ‘sustaining’ for ‘great’ suggests an older poet who has suffered the setbacks and losses that come with age and is less confident in the power of his own thoughts and feelings to intimate the infinite. By the 1830s Wordsworth, reflecting on the founding encounter of his art – considering the source of his compulsion to articulate in words the nature of nature – was striving explicitly to understand the importance of the caves that, since 1800, he had been conjuring up as he named, and thus called upon, the local fells. If he sometimes wished to define their importance in relation to a simplistic Christian orthodoxy, this was because they were places of danger for him – images of what he sought but feared would elude him or only reveal itself in darkness. Although caves configure the opening of the innermost workings of nature, their very hollowness suggests that it is less solid and permanent than at first appears. Or that language – the name – remains haunted by emptinesses, by withdrawings, even when it seems to rest on a single, solid foundation of reality. Prophetic communication may be latent in local names for local people, but what if the continuity of naming that is bespoken by names is broken? For Wordsworth, access to nature’s innermost workings depends on fleeting and evanescent sonic transfers rather than on stable or easily repeatable formulae. But the power of sound, in a lived local tradition, is always potentially subject to interruption. What if the right name cannot be enunciated, or the sounds of the cave cannot be properly heard and told? As he aged, and spent more time reflecting on the sources of his poetic power than he did staging the experiences – spots of time – in which that power was discovered in the moment, Wordsworth increasingly expressed a fear that nature would fall silent, or be drowned out. This fear of the failure of voice and hearing was related to but distinct from that of his youth, as expressed in the ‘Immortality Ode’ (‘the things that I have seen I now can see no more’ (l. 9)). It suggests that while Wordsworth increasingly recognised the central significance of sound to his art, he now feared metaphorical deafness while he had once chiefly worried about loss of (in)sight (‘when age comes on,/ may scarcely see at all’ (Prelude, 1805, xi, 338–9)). The deafness was not just metaphorical: Wordsworth’s developing anxiety was not simply an effect of his preoccupation with poetry’s

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linguistic relationship to the world, and to itself. He was not De Man, but a man responding to particular historical events that changed the relationship of words and world on the local ground. Mass tourism threatened that ground and he set himself to resist it: in 1844, for example, he objected to the building of a railway into the Lake District on the grounds that it would blight the sonic integrity of the dwellers in the place – threaten, therefore, the sources of his sounding verse. He invoked the sounds of nature to defend them: ‘Speak, passing winds; ye torrents, with your strong/ And constant voice, protest against the wrong’ (‘On the Projected Kendal and Windermere Railway’, ll. 13–14).62 Wordsworth opposed the railway because it threatened to commodify the Lakes by bringing hordes of trippers there, who would drown the local under the babble of a cheap, touristified culture of sights and prospects, without insight or inhe(a)ring. This was an anxiety that became especially pressing in his later years, as technology made mass travel easier. But he had voiced it before – on an occasion that was clearly especially shocking because the touristified place was one which ought to have been especially propitious for the passage of the power of sound. In The Prelude, Wordsworth describes a cave in Yorkshire which he calls ‘the Den/ In old time haunted by that Danish Witch,/ Yordas’. This is a cave despoiled of its prophetic sounds and reduced to being an exhibition of magic tricks, a dazzling but ultimately unfulfilling visual playground, first sublime, then ‘as lifeless as a written book’, and last full of rock formations that fancifully resemble storybook figures: the warrior clad in mail, The prancing steed, the pilgrim with his staff, The mitred bishop and the throned king, A spectacle to which there is no end. (Prelude, 1805, viii, 738–41)

Situated in The Prelude so as to mark Wordsworth’s first entrance to London, Yordas is an emblem of the metropolis – a place of dizzying variety that is romantic to the new visitor’s eyes only to reveal itself as an excessive, uncontrolled commodification of vision in which everything is made superficially to resemble something that it is not. The reason for Wordsworth’s describing it in such terms was probably the nature of his visit to it in 1800: Yordas was a commercial show cave in which the guide, in return for the tourist’s shillings, illuminated the interior with torches and likened its features to everyday objects in the world outside – one rockformation was said to resemble the map of Wales, another was called the Bishop’s Throne. Described in the guidebooks, and illustrated by

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fashionable artists, Yordas was a tourist venue, a site marketed to sightseers.63 It lived up to its name only in that it offered a false, shallow visual magic. There was no admission to the nature of nature to be gained by invoking Yordas. If Yordas is an instance of commodification despoiling nature’s inner nature, it is also a symbol of one of Wordsworth’s chief later anxieties – that the touristification of the local place might cheapen it, rendering its names commodified brands – signs of marketed attractions rather than talismans of historical tradition inhering in local speech. It was to counter such cheapening that he had fulminated against the building of the railway; it was to offer a better informed and more demanding representation of the Lakes that he had both sounded out local names, and discussed the significance of that sounding, in his later verse and in his own guidebook. By the 1840s, these strategies had met with some success, and Wordsworth found himself cited as an authority on Lakeland names in the best-selling Black’s Picturesque Guide to the English Lakes. Black’s contained a glossary of names, giving their derivations and thus emphasising their agedness in usage. Like the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, it portrayed local words as an ancient, unchanging dialect founded on the names for permanent objects of nature. But whereas Wordsworth had credited rustic speech as the authority for his poetry, Black’s treated his poetry as the authority for its prose. Thus, for example: Cove; a recess amongst the hills. Examples—Red Cove, Keppel Cove, Helvellyn. ‘The coves, and mountain steeps and summits.’ Excursion.64

In Black’s, Wordsworth’s poems, rather than shepherds’ conversations, are guarantors of the place names, more reliable witnesses than local speech because they are a nationally distributed printed discourse that tourists might know, and can consult, that nevertheless originated in contact with the things named. Place after place is defined by citation of Wordsworth’s verse. Kirkstone, for example, is described thus: Kirkstone; a pass between Ulleswater and Windermere, near the summit of which there is a block of stone, ‘whose church-like frame Gives to the savage pass its name.’65

Here, in a gesture of mutual authorisation, the place name accrues power by being included in verse, while the verse grows in authenticity by its citation as the most reliable witness to the place.66 Poetry and place are

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bound together in the name: Black’s presents the Lake District as a region that is already spoken for, or rather overwritten, a place worthy of educated visitors’ attention, rather than of the amusement of mere trippers, because it is already memorialised in a poetry that is so faithful that it defines the meaning of the local names, enshrining them in its measures. Wordsworth enters the local dictionary and shapes the itinerary, alongside his fellow Lake poets Southey and Coleridge and the poet of border names – Scott. Black’s, in effect, demonstrates the success of the late, topographic writing that Wordsworth had first gathered together in the Duddon collection: he was now the Lake poet who established the historic and spiritual depth of the region for discerning, literate visitors – the Bard of a Higher Tourism.

chapter 6

Picturing the prehistoric: Wordsworth’s sightseeing

1820 was a watershed year for the Lake poets: while Wordsworth’s The River Duddon, a Series of Sonnets took a new topographic direction and won him his first critical success, Southey began his collaboration with the artist William Westall. If Southey’s and Westall’s joint publication, Views of the Lake and Vale of Keswick, was the first of several text/picture collaborations, the Duddon collection also originated (in part) in collaboration with an artist. The Guide to the Lakes included in it had begun in 1810 as prose which Wordsworth had written to accompany the landscape pictures of Joseph Wilkinson. It retained the orientation towards tourists of this earlier visual collaboration: the sonnets described particular sights seen along the scenic river’s course; the guidebook helped visitors know which places to view when they came on tour. It had a lasting legacy in Wordsworth’s career: afterwards, he increasingly participated in the culture’s visual turn towards illustrated books and served its liking for tour poems. In what follows I chart this participation, reveal its interrelations with Southey’s, and explore the impact of his relationship with topographic artists including William Westall. I then turn to one tour poem in particular, a sonnet about a Lakeland stone circle that was first published in his prose guidebook to the Lakes and then revised, time after time, in later sequences of tour poems. My purpose, then, will be to illuminate three of the most significant features of his late career: the visual turn made in parallel with Southey and in collaboration with artists; the careful arrangement of sequences of tour poems aimed at a reading public that admired the picturesque; the repeated revision of poems in an effort to be a Lake poet who was also a national historian: writing not only of his own past but also so as to be an acknowledged legislator for his people – defining Englishness as a matter of knowing oneself to be in relationship to a deep history that is embodied in the places where past events are still marked in the everyday landscape – sites, ruins, monuments. Many of these places were once shrines: man-made markers of the spiritual in 244

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stone – churches, abbeys, henges, cromlechs. As Wordsworth struggled repeatedly to articulate their legacy for himself and for the people whose national poet he aspired to be, he arrived at a historical poetry in which contrary sources of power in the world, and in his art – sources gendered masculine and feminine – are placed in tension and his affiliation to both is explored.1 Thus his obsessively revised historical poetry reveals, at its best, a Wordsworth capable of countering, by an alignment of his poetry with natural and spiritual forces he saw as feminine, the tendency of which his late work has been accused – to halt his explorations of such major issues as time, loss and death in a simplistic endorsement of a patriarchal divinity introduced ab extra – what Hartley Coleridge referred to ‘the popping in of the old man with the beard’.2 The Lake guidebook that appeared in the 1820 Duddon collection was an expanded version of Wordsworth’s contribution to Joseph Wilkinson’s Select Views in Cumberland, Westmorland, and Lancashire. However, Wordsworth soon thought that engravings such as Part of Skiddaw, from Applethwaite Gill (Fig. 7) were so clumsy that he was relieved his contribution to the joint book was anonymous. With no second edition in prospect, he retitled that contribution Topographical Description of the Country of the Lakes and republished it with the Duddon sonnets – a case of descriptive prose written to accompany pictures becoming decoupled from those pictures, but nevertheless revised through numerous editions (in 1835 it was renamed A Guide through the District of the Lakes). It is in these later, unillustrated forms that critics have tended to consider the Guide, noting that Wordsworth took his role of introducing visitors to the Lakes more and more seriously, but omitting that it was to benefit from the popularity of books of scenic views that he turned to this genre of writing at all. And in fact there is considerable evidence that he was inspired by Wilkinson’s pictures, not all of which were crude, to publish what was in 1810, his most coherent, complete and carefully thought-out account of the Lake country as a place to see, visit and inhabit. It is notable, for example, that Wordsworth tied his descriptions to Wilkinson’s depictions, moving from viewed place to viewed place as a guide, rather than, as in The Prelude, through the spots of time that arose in the course of his personal experience. Writing for the pictures, he became a more sectionalised and systematic writer about his home landscape as a place to view, but was also provoked to think about what a viewer should discover and understand beyond pretty scenery. Textualising the visual – providing the letter-press for a picture book – led him both to serve and deepen the discourse of tourism so that picturesque views might disclose a way of life to which he, a

Figure 7. Part of Skiddaw, from Applethwaite Gill, from Joseph Wilkinson, Select Views in Cumberland, Westmorland, and Lancashire (London, 1810).

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local, could introduce the visitor. For example, discussing the valleys and chapels that Wilkinson pictured in, for example, Langdale Chapel, Vale of Langdale (Fig. 8) Wordsworth wrote Thus has been given a faithful description, the minuteness of which the Reader will pardon, of the face of this country as it was and had been through centuries till within the last forty years. Towards the head of these Dales was found a perfect Republic of Shepherds and Agriculturalists, among whom the plough of each man was confined to the maintenance of his own family, or to the occasional accommodation of his neighbour. Two or three cows furnished each family with milk and cheese. The Chapel was the only edifice that presided over these dwellings, the supreme head of this pure Commonwealth; the members of which existed in the midst of a powerful empire, like an ideal society or an organized community whose constitution had been imposed and regulated by the mountains which protected it. Neither Knight nor Squire nor high-born Nobleman was here; but many of these humble sons of the hills had a consciousness that the land, which they walked over and tilled, had for more than five hundred years been possessed by men of their name and blood – and venerable was the transition when a curious traveller, descending from the heart of the mountains, had come to some ancient manorial residence in the more open part of the vales, which, with the rights attached to its proprietor, connected the almost visionary mountain Republic which he had been contemplating with the substantial frame of society as existing in the laws and constitution of a mighty empire.3

Here Wordsworth’s text proceeds from a response to Wilkinson’s picture towards an endorsement of the human society of the dales. The reader is invited not merely to spectate but to travel through the pictured valleys with Wordsworth his guide, so as to experience a way of life formed by and forming the land. Strongly marked by his 1790s republicanism, Wordsworth’s description moves from view to landscape, to place, to human relationships; it is implicitly political, owing its understanding of the relationship between landscape and land use, and moral virtues and social harmony, to seventeenth-century republicanism. The word ‘visionary’ is crucial: it suggests that what Wordsworth sees, and would have the reader of his text see, in Wilkinson’s views, is a matter of the insight that only a view guided by local experience can generate. Thus Select Views, making Wordsworth a commentator on the region and its inhabitants image by image, valley by valley, induced him to redefine the genre: no mere picture book, the combination of prose and engraving led to a social and political vision as uncompromising as (and more explicitly republican than) anything he had ever published. Republishing it under his own name in 1820, Wordsworth staked a claim for the importance of Lakeland culture (and for himself as a guide to that culture) calculated to refute Jeffrey’s charge

Figure 8. Langdale Chapel, Vale of Langdale, from Joseph Wilkinson, Select Views in Cumberland, Westmorland, and Lancashire (London, 1810).

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that to be one of the Lake school was perversely to attach importance to the trivial, puerile and vulgar. In his guidebook, Wordsworth presented, in more detail and with more passion than in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads which reviewers so mocked, the rustic society of the Lakes as a moral exemplar for the nation at large. Wilkinson left the Lakes before Select Views appeared, but Wordsworth continued to collaborate with topographic artists. William Green, whom we met in Chapter 5, was not just a guidebook writer but also an artist who sold watercolours and prints from his shop in Ambleside. Like Wordsworth, Green believed in getting close to nature in a plain, unaffected style: he claimed of his drawings that ‘all were entirely finished while the subject was before him, for he conceives that studies are lessened in value by being retouched in the house’.4 In 1821 Wordsworth let Green publish a view of his home Rydal Mount: both the artist and the poet hoped to benefit – Green by association with a poet now gaining national respect, Wordsworth by the extra publicity Green’s print brought. Green published many collections of Views, bringing Gilpin’s picturesque aesthetic and Sandby’s aquatint technique to the Lakes. His crowning achievement was A Series of Sixty beautifully coloured plates of the Lakes of Lancashire, Cumberland & Westmorland, a volume of aquatints using two or three colour washes, costing five guineas. This large-scale work was expensive, but individual prints could be bought from Green’s shop. Wordsworth liked Green’s work because it furthered his own aesthetic – Green did not just make conventional picturesque views, but drew cottages, sheds, crags, rocks, stones and trees, rendering the local plainly in intense detail. Wordsworth bought Green’s drawings, subscribed to his publications and wrote his epitaph, praising his ‘skill and industry as an artist’; he also praised Green in his Guide to the Lakes. By promoting Green, and by letting Green sell views of Rydal Mount, Wordsworth was attempting to create the taste by which he, and the Lakes, could be enjoyed. Tourists would appreciate the landscape and culture properly – and buy his poems – because they had been educated to see into the life of things by artists such as Green. Green, that is to say, offered a virtual experience of which Wordsworth approved because it did not lend itself to shallow and easy consumption: if one accessed the Lakes from a distance through Green’s reproductions, one found oneself confronted by its particular materiality, seen to be the work of a specific combination of human labour and natural forces (Fig. 9). For all Wordsworth’s approval of Green, it was William Westall, introduced to him by Southey, whose art galvanised the poet into

Figure 9. Grasmere, from William Green, Lake Scenery (Ambleside, 1815).

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writing a new kind of verse. Initially, the impetus came not from Westall’s Lakeland sketches, but from his engravings of a nearby region that Wordsworth had toured with his sister in 1799. The gorges, caverns and waterfalls of Yorkshire had enchanted Wordsworth then; in 1818 he re-encountered them in the form of Westall’s Views of the Caves near Ingleton, Gordale Scar, and Malham Cove, in Yorkshire. Among these magnificent aquatints was an image of Gordale Scar (Fig. 10). In the manner of Turner and Girtin, the vast cleft is pictured from a low position, so the cliffs seem heightened; the air is full of cloud and mist, so the gorge seems mysterious; there are violent contrasts of light and shade, so the rocks appear threatening. As well as Gordale Scar, Westall depicted Malham Cove (Fig. 11), an enormous inland basin featuring a massive tiered cliff, from the bottom of which a subterranean river issues. This strange arena, and the nearby caves, were romantic evocations of nature’s awe-inspiring majesty; Westall’s mastery of aquatint allowed him to render cliffs and clouds in a dynamic relationship of tones, the static rock played upon by seemingly moving shadows. Wordsworth saw Westall’s Views soon after publication and was sufficiently impressed to write three sonnets in response to them. These were printed the following year in Blackwood’s Magazine,5 one being a response to the view of Gordale: At early dawn, or when the warmer air Glimmers with fading light, and Shadowy Eve Is busiest to confer and to bereave, At either moment let thy feet repair To Gordale chasm, terrific as the lair Where the young Lions couch; for then by leave Of the propitious hour, thou may’st perceive The local Deity, with oozy hair And mineral crown, beside his jagged urn, Recumbent!—Him thou may’st behold who hides His lineaments from day, yet there presides, Teaching the docile Waters how to turn; Or if need be, impediment to spurn, And force their passage tow’rd the salt sea tides.

This Ovidian poem conjures up local spectres inhabiting the gorge in response to the brooding menace of Westall’s picture, as if the engraving so concentrated Wordsworth’s vision on the spot that he felt able to find the god in the stone, or see into the life of things.

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Figure 10. Gordale Scar, from William Westall, Views of the Caves near Ingleton in Yorkshire (London, 1818).

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The second sonnet described Westall’s picture of Malham Cove: Was the aim frustrated by force or guile, When Giants scoop’d from out the rocky ground, Tier under tier this semicirque profound. Giants—the same who built in Erin’s Isle That Causeway with incomparable toil! Oh! had the Crescent stretched its horns, wound With finished sweep, into a perfect round, No mightier Work had gained the plausive smile Of all-beholding Phoebus! but, alas! Vain earth! false world! Foundations must be laid In Heaven; for, ’mid the wreck of is and was, Things Incomplete and purposes betrayed, Make sadder transits o’er Truth’s mystic glass Than noblest objects utterly decayed.

It is notable that the poem is impersonal: Wordsworth does not revert to his own experience of the place or speak in the first person. He is not present in the scene because he is looking at its artistic representation – hence the emphasis on the tiered cliff, which Westall’s low point of view makes into a looming presence in the engraving. Indeed, Wordsworth alludes to the fact he is writing about a picture, taking his terminology from the visual aids that picturesque artists used to arrange perspective and colour. ‘Truth’s mystic glass’ (changed in later editions to ‘thought’s optic glass’) treats the poet’s knowledge as a matter of trained vision, as if the observing narrator, looking through Westall’s painterly eyes, is seeing the true meaning of the scene in a crystal ball or a magic Claude glass – an optical aid to insight as well as to sight. As in the Gordale sonnet, however, Wordsworth does not replicate the picture in words but uses it as a point of departure, animating the static View by introducing a temporal dimension. The cove, he thinks, is the remains of an excavation made by the giants (who rebelled against the immortals in Greek myth). The sublime scene, however strongly Westall renders its solidity, is turned into a trace of prehistory. The picture makes Wordsworth speculate on cause and effect, creation and decay, past and present: powerful though the cove is, its incompleteness is what he most notices. Indeed, this incompleteness makes its very profundity pathetic: for all its size it reminds the viewer of the vanity of earthly wishes and futility of mortal efforts, be they ever so gigantic. Wordsworth draws a gloomy moral conclusion: the cove is the wreck of unfounded ambition; only that which is founded upon heaven can be soundly completed, and even that, though ‘nobler,’ sadly decays.6

Figure 11. Malham Cove, from William Westall, Views of the Caves near Ingleton in Yorkshire (London, 1818).

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Figure 12. Waterfall in Weathercote Cave, from Westall, Views of the Caves near Ingleton in Yorkshire (London, 1818).

Wordsworth responds to Westall’s depiction of an underground river (Fig. 12) in the remaining sonnet of the three, and there also his impulse is to put the picture into temporal motion, so that, above and below ground, the landscape discloses dynamic forces which link the natural and the spiritual:

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Here Wordsworth is the Romantic Ecologist, portraying the utter (inter) dependence of man, animal and plant upon the water cycle, which comprehends, as well as the earth’s surface, its centre (where some geologists thought there existed vast waters). Westall’s yawning chasm takes him on an imaginative journey into Dantean circles of hell, where he envisages even the damned souls being soothed by nature’s lifegiving water: the earth is a spiritual as well as material ecosystem, a ‘one life within us and abroad’. Taken together, the three sonnets reveal that Wordsworth’s response to Westall’s pictures was concerned with central questions about heaven and earth, matter and spirit, a picturesque in which the static illustration of the beauty spot serves to freeze-frame nature’s forces in action, giving the poet pause – allowing him to stand aside from the petty concerns that occupy his everyday consciousness. From the frozen moment created by the artist, he gains an opportunity to scrutinise what comes before and after the image, and to intuit the invisible powers that have created the visible scene. This is a response to the ‘optic glass’ of the artist that is far more searching than the discussions of aesthetic effect made by picturesque theorists Gilpin, Uvedale Price and Richard Payne Knight: it makes a tourist View the occasion for a profound and metaphysical apprehension of the world. It ensures that the artist’s images cannot be used merely for the consumption of landscape as a commodity: the ekphrastic verse forces the reader to think, both about what has made the scene he views and about what is at stake in the process of viewing. Westall realised that his engravings had spawned some significant new poems, and was quick to pass manuscripts of the sonnets, unbeknown to

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their author, to Blackwood’s. Wordsworth was annoyed at this breach of trust, but it was appropriate that the Views and the poems were announced together, for he could not have written as he did if he had not been deeply impressed by Westall’s pictures. And as it turned out, the publication was an augury of what was to come, since, sparked by what the Views had allowed him to achieve, Wordsworth went on to write more verse in the same vein – impersonally voiced responses to tourist sights that were familiar to readers from watercolours and prints. In 1820 the Duddon collection brought his Yorkshire ekphrastic style home to the Lake District. It was a departure in which Wordsworth became a different poet, less a sublime egotist exploring his own youth or a balladeer voicing the rural community, more a picturesque poet whose topographic verse offered a virtual experience of named places as a starting point for investigation of the poet’s relationship to the history of the nation. Wordsworth was now framing his collections as verse tours – poetic kindred of prose guidebooks that offered verbal illustrations of beauty spots. He had become a poet who saw the traces of the human past in a present-day place, leading him to ponder what that place meant now, as if to view landscape was to be a visionary archaeologist who, in deciphering the past, revealed the present’s debt to it. This, as we saw in Chapter 5, was a strategy related to, but distinct from that of Walter Scott, the popularity of whose historical narratives about the castles and abbeys he visited Wordsworth had failed to match in his own narrative poem The White Doe of Rylstone. Bruised by the hostile reception that poem met, Wordsworth turned away from Scott-ish chivalric romances towards personal reflection upon well-known places of aesthetic or historical interest – stone circles, Fingal’s cave, a covenanter’s hideout. He was now a tourist poet, moralising a single view seen on a brief visit, as much as one who responded to places that were continuously significant in his own and his friends’ lives as in Lyrical Ballads and The Prelude. If Scott was a cause of this change, so was the new genre of illustrated Views – it was thereby fitting that there should be further collaborations with Westall, and that Wordsworth should write Westall’s epitaph. ************* Buoyed by the warm reception of the Duddon collection, Wordsworth published a revised edition of his prose guide to the region in 1822. This updated Guide to the Lakes7 featured a new Lake poem, a sonnet about the enormous circle of sixty-nine standing stones near Penrith known as ‘Long Meg and her daughters’. This little poem became a work of great significance

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for him; he would revise and republish it again and again over the next twenty years. In what follows I shall ask why he did so, and suggest that it is a microcosm of most of his later preoccupations – with history and landscape, with revising old poems, with disconfirming his youthful quest for power over nature, with a turn to a picturesque Lake poetry consciously different from the rustic ballads that Jeffrey had dismissed as puerile and jacobinical. It reveals, I shall suggest, a revision, but not a rejection, of Wordsworth’s old interest in the beliefs and expressions of ordinary rustics. The late Wordsworth looks at common tradition and local belief, both recent and prehistoric: he is backward- but not simply inward-looking, interested in how the visionary moment structures what follows it – his own life, and those of his fellow Britons who are also belated with regard to their forebears. Having done so he can then offer himself as a national writer because he demonstrates that what it means to be British is to discover, in one’s response to the historic landscape, both an endorsement of orthodox doctrine and a commitment to the beliefs of the ordinary people who once inhabited that landscape.8 And having discovered this ambivalence, to wrestle with the conflicting loyalties it causes. ‘Long Meg and her Daughters’ is the popular name of the neolithic circle of standing stones near Little Salkeld in the Eden valley. Wordsworth first saw it in 1821, and was profoundly impressed, as he told Sir George Beaumont.9 Particularly striking was the fact that one stone, far taller than the rest and made of a different rock, stands some sixty feet outside the circle, its four corners facing the points of the compass, aligned so that a person standing in the centre of the circle would see the midwinter sun setting behind it. This unusual combination of a circle and an outlier stone creates a spatial tension that has always fascinated observers and is reflected in the local name. It effectively refocuses a natural space into a significant place, a place all the more mysterious because the original meaning of the arrangement remains unknown, predating as it does any historical record. On the single stone, Long Meg herself, however, traces of inscriptions remain. Facing the other stones there are a cup and ring mark, a spiral, and an incomplete concentric circle. The inscriptions and the layout entered local tradition, giving rise to several superstitious narratives, one of which was recorded by Wordsworth’s friend, the local farmer and antiquarian Thomas Wilkinson, in his 1824 volume Tours to the British Mountains.10 If I had visited it when a youth, I might have thought the monsters I saw around me were under a spell, for I have often been told they could not be counted twice to a number; [. . .] I counted the mighty stones I saw around me to seventy-five, but I did not repeat the operation. (p. 246)

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Wilkinson’s language hints at monstrosity and magic, probably because when a boy he had heard about other, more sinister, folk beliefs. One of these said that Long Meg was a witch who danced wildly on the moor with her daughters and was turned to stone for violating the Sabbath. Another suggested that were Long Meg to be shattered, she would run with blood. It seems then that stones, in oral tradition, were the frozen embodiments of a witches’ coven rather than a holy family. They were a sacrilegious rite metamorphosed, a transgressive dance petrified. And the petrifaction was disturbingly unstable: the lurking presence of the witch might again be released. In the Guide to the Lakes Wordsworth’s poem on the stones appears in a footnote to a discussion of the past civilisations that have left traces on the landscape (Guide, p. 42 note). It is presented as a personal response to one of the monuments that is worthwhile for tourists to visit, but is preceded by topographical prose – the footnote commences with a discussion of a nearby stone circle from a History of Westmoreland, and then discusses its possible Druidical origin, its inferiority to Stonehenge, and its ‘singularity and dignity of appearance’. The poem is thus framed by the detached and antiquarian prose of an informational guide, whose purpose is to equip the tourist to view the site in a historical and aesthetic context, and who looks to learned texts to provide that context. The reader comes to the poem thoroughly prepared. And yet the poet did not come prepared: he declares that ‘when the Author first saw this monument he came upon it by surprize’. The resultant poem records his raw response, a response that readers of the guidebook can now share with him vicariously, but will not themselves be able to have in reality, precisely because they are reading a guidebook that pre-frames the place textually. Here is the poem as it appears in the footnote: A weight of awe not easy to be borne Fell suddenly upon my spirit, cast From the dread bosom of the unknown past, When first I saw that sisterhood forlorn;— And her, whose strength and stature seems to scorn The power of years—pre-eminent, and placed Apart, to overlook the circle vast. Speak Giant-mother! tell it to the Morn, While she dispels the cumbrous shades of night; Let the Moon hear, emerging from a cloud, When, how, and wherefore, rose on British ground

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It is immediately apparent that the emphasis – appropriately for a prose guidebook – is on seeing; ‘I saw that sisterhood forlorn’. Yet what is seen is, at first, baffling, even after the explanatory prose of the note – for the sonnet depends upon knowledge of the local tradition that the stones are petrified dancers, yet nowhere does Wordsworth inform his readers about that tradition. It is a poem of significant absences: the footnote compares the circle to Stonehenge, and yet the Druids, whom Wordsworth assumed to be the architects of Stonehenge and other standing stones, and whom he invoked in The Prelude and The Excursion, are nowhere named. This is all the more surprising because in the Duddon sonnets of 1820, a stone circle at Swinside (no more than thirty miles away from Long Meg) is firmly associated with Druidism: near that mystic Round of Druid frame Tardily sinking by its proper weight Deep into patient Earth, from whose smooth breast it came! (‘XVII, The Return’, ll. 12–14)12

Wordsworth explains in a note ‘The Druidical Circle is about half a mile to the left of the road ascending Stone-side from the vale of Duddon: the country people call it “Sunken Church”’.13 Additionally, Ecclesiastical Sketches (1822) had included a sonnet entitled ‘Druidical Excommunication’ which Wordsworth had originally intended to be a sequel to ‘Long Meg and her Daughters’. The curious absence of Druidism allows the Long Meg sonnet to break free from the eighteenth-century scholarly interpretation of prehistoric remains in a way the Duddon sonnet had not. ‘Long Meg’ occupies itself as a poem, not just in a note, with what ‘the country people call it’, something that sets it apart from much of the poetry Wordsworth had written about ancient stones. In the 1805 Prelude, for instance, Wordsworth had treated Stonehenge as a Druid monument, as if following the theories of William Stukeley, John Toland and Edward Davies,14 and had imagined himself as a Druid priest, tracing figures of the heavens in the patterns of stones they arranged on earth, ‘gently charm’d,/ Albeit with an antiquarian’s dream’ (xii, 347–8).15 The scholarly sources were, however, less significant than the young Wordsworth’s capacity to overcome the desolation of Salisbury Plain by exercising his ability to imagine. His reverie-vision of the past demonstrated to him the power of his mind to

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see beyond the material present. The Druids were figures in and of his imagination, tokens of his growing poetic genius. History, whether the theoretical discourse constructed by antiquarians such as Stukeley and Rowlands, or the events that actually occurred on the Plain at too early a period for written record, provided the content of Wordsworth’s visions; but what was significant was his capacity to have these visions at will: ‘I called upon the darkness, and it took—/ A midnight darkness seemed to come and take—/ All objects from my sight . . .’ (xii, 327–9). It was Wordsworth’s self-reinforcing and self-reflexive assertion of his own visionary power that led Keats to talk of his ‘egotistical sublime’, and provoked critics in the 1980s to accuse him of a denial, evasion or displacement of history. As if in anticipation of such accusations, Wordsworth himself rewrote his Prelude vision of prehistoric remains in The Excursion, replacing his earlier emphasis on his own visionariness with a more detached history of a gradual progress from barbarism to civilisation, in which the decisive power was Christian enlightenment. This was less solipsistic, more conservative, and it still depended on eighteenth-century antiquarian theories about Druid religion as the reason for the erection of standing stones. The ‘venerable Pastor’ imagines a time before ‘the Name, Jehovah’ was heard in Britain, when was heard: the groans and shrieks Of human Victims, offered up to appease Or to propitiate. [. . .] By priestly hands, for sacrifice, performed Exultingly, in view of open day And full assemblage of a barbarous Host; Or to Andates, Female Power! who gave (For so they fancied) glorious victory. —A few rude Monuments of mountain-stone (Excursion, ix, 685–708) Survive; all else is swept away.

The insight admired in The Prelude is here entertained only as a tentative possibility, detached from the poet and his vocation. The vision’s sadistic voyeurism is held in check by the pastor’s commitment to Christian virtue, while the monuments that prompt it are all but erased from the landscape. These ‘rude monuments of mountain-stone’, however, are the very circles that abound in the Lake District, at Swinside, Castlerigg and Salkeld. By 1814 Wordsworth was using history differently, but it was nevertheless the same book-based history constructed by the gentleman antiquarians who made every standing stone, natural or human, into evidence of a Druidical religion they had constructed from passing references in classical texts.

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In 1822, that history is largely absent from the sonnet on Long Meg, despite the antiquarian and topographic information provided in the footnote preceding it. An awed encounter with a prehistory that is not recorded in writing is, however, very much present. The standing stones left an aging Wordsworth contemplating the dependence of human knowledge on the fragile oral traditions which inhabit each place. From the sonnet’s opening words it is immediately apparent that Wordsworth’s response to the stones, rather than the stones themselves, is the subject. It is not until the fourth line that the cause of Wordsworth’s awe is revealed – not so much the sight of the stone circle as the fact that he is seeing it for the first time. And when it appears it is seen as a ‘sisterhood forlorn’. A casual reader might well fail to identify it from this image, but could hardly miss the fact that Wordsworth’s own mental state occupies the first four lines. Wordsworth, as he hints in the footnote, is surprised by awe – ‘a gentle shock of mild surprise’ being in his earlier poetry one of the necessary preconditions for nature to be ‘carried far into his heart’.16 It seems, then, that Wordsworth is back in Prelude-vein: just as when he came upon Stonehenge or rowed across Ullswater in that poem, he here finds himself oppressed by the monumental objects of the material world, when their location and origin are met unexpectedly. The most fixed and substantial things of all – stones, looming by surprise into the seer’s ken – seem disturbingly mobile, and their mobility is then felt as a state of being haunted by the spirituality of all things, even material things. ‘Stones have been known to move, and trees to speak’.17 It is the Burkean sublime in action, except that the resultant mental state, like Macbeth’s, is one of strange self-knowledge – knowledge of emptiness, loss and isolation that is both terrifying and purifying: after I had seen That spectacle, for many days, my brain Worked with a dim and undetermined sense Of unknown modes of being; o’er my thoughts There was a darkness, call it solitude (Prelude, 1805, ii, 417–22) Or blank desertion.

As in The Prelude, so in ‘Long Meg’, Wordsworth accents the word ‘unknown’; familiar ties drop away and he plunges suddenly into an experience of unknowability that is also produced by the stones’ resistance to all normal explanation – they are ‘from the dread bosom of the unknown past’, resisting the explanations of history and natural philosophy.

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There are further echoes of The Prelude, and these lie in the lexical transitions through which the haunting is articulated. In ‘Long Meg’, vision manifests itself as the transfer of weight; the massive stones materialise, via Wordsworth’s act of seeing, into mental mass, as if visual images are petrified into stones – ‘a weight of awe’, Wordsworth says, ‘fell’ upon his spirit, ‘cast’ there (like a biblical stone thrown at a sinner) when first he saw the monument. The metaphors turn the ‘strength and stature’ of the menhirs into Wordsworth’s heavy spiritual load. They recall the disorientating shock of seeing London in The Prelude, also felt as a weight: A weight of ages did at once descend Upon my heart; no thought embodied, no Distinct remembrances, but weight and power, Power growing with the weight: alas! I feel That I am trifling: ’twas a moment’s pause. All that took place within me, came and went As in a moment, and I only now Remember that it was a thing divine. (Prelude, 1805, viii, 703–10)

But that is not the whole range of meaning. The word ‘cast’ also suggests that the ‘awe’ that fell upon him is a cloak, or a spell, since it is thrown or shed from ‘the dread bosom of the unknown past’ – from prehistoric remoteness personified as a sublime figure. This personification and the verbal metamorphoses strongly suggest the working of a spell in which a transgressive act of seeing is punished, since what emanates from that bosom is neither love nor nurture (as might be expected) but an overwhelming disability (‘a weight of awe not easy to be borne’). It is as if Wordsworth is distantly echoing the experience of Coleridge’s Christabel, whose transgressive seeing and touching brings upon itself a punitive burden of guilt that she experiences as a spell cast upon her by the witch-like Geraldine – ‘A sight to dream of, not to tell!/ . . . In the touch of this bosom there worketh a spell,/ Which is lord of thy utterance, Christabel!’18 Wordsworth’s transgression, however, is not primarily sexual. Rather, he has stumbled upon relics revealing the terrifying tendency of time to force mortals and their works into oblivion. Thus the unknown past is a bosom – normally suggesting nurture – that has instead spread (or ‘cast’) dread. It is reminiscent of Sin, the unnatural mother of Paradise Lost, who brought death into the world. The stone circle itself, when first he saw it (and when first it appears in the poem) is a ‘sisterhood forlorn’, a solitary circle of human relatives cut off from its wider community, who are long dead. This personification conjures pathos out of solid rock: Wordsworth

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suffers for his humanising insight that the circle images the fate of mortals – to be bereft of those, near and far, late and soon, who predecease them and are forgotten. In making this personification, moreover, Wordsworth honours the tradition that ‘commonly’ terms the circle a family – ‘Long Meg and her daughters’. Here the use of the proper name is significant, for it ties the poem to a particular Lakeland place that has traditionally borne this appellation for generation after generation. A place, therefore, whose name discloses its age, a history of human naming of which the poet is but the latest observer. The local name, in other words, vouchsafes a history of human impulses that led to its being given – the impulse to see, in the world of rocks and stones and trees, patterns through which we ponder our own mortality and the impulse to retrieve from that mortality memorials of what is lost. Here Wordsworth eschews his usual alignment of stone circles with antiquarian discourse about the Druids: he neither subjects the place to a teleological justification of Christianity as he did in The Excursion, nor does he use what he had read to demonstrate the power of his imagination to break free of his present circumstances as he did in The Prelude. There is, at this point, neither a conservative application of current historical theory nor a displacement of it into a song of the self’s transcendence of place and time. Instead, there is an effort, stemming from the awareness of time passing that comes with age, to scrutinise the self’s predicament in the world as revealed not just by personal encounter but also by the oral history of local tale and common tradition. And also to render the Lake District, not just for himself but for all who read his guidebook, as a region where tale and tradition are so embedded, so embodied in monuments and landscapes, that this scrutiny is forced upon one. The poem thus takes the guidebook in which it appears to a deeper level of moral and historical enquiry. The sonnet’s next ten lines are a unit in which Wordsworth struggles to find a way of discharging the burden of his awe and to reconcile himself to temporality. It is, at first, a matter of transferring the weight of his oppressive insight back to the stone by metaphorically reanimating Long Meg – calling forth the voice of one who has existed, petrified, through age after age: ‘Speak, Giant-mother’, ‘whose strength and stature seems to scorn/ The power of years’. This call to utterance is a strange ventriloquism – by summoning Long Meg’s voice he speaks, urging and urgent, on her behalf. Yet he does not say at first what it is that Long Meg declares, but calls repeatedly upon her to ‘Speak’, ‘tell it’, and ‘Let the Moon hear’. The effect of these invocations is to bring the act of speaking itself into question. It becomes an impossibility made possible, as words are

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wrenched from stony silence. It is as if two negatives, added, make a positive: the petrified Meg depresses the Wordsworth who sees her, but this very weighing down also presses out of him an empathetic declaration of what she would say if she could speak her weight. Wordsworth is able to rebound from his difficult weight of awe when he regains confidence in his own voice by imagining the weighty words the stone would utter – weighty because, having existed for so long, she would speak from beyond time – her ‘strength and stature’ scorning ‘the power of years’. The awful weight of unknowing, the lonely vulnerability to time, can be lifted if the stone can be imagined uttering at Wordsworth’s command. Thus by calling on the stone to speak he both vicariously creates a possible voice for her and gains a speech of his own that is prophetic. As he exhorts Long Meg to speak and, in the process, defines the position from which she might speak, he delivers an utterance from beyond the perspective of mortals – from one who is ‘pre-eminent, and placed/ Apart, to overlook’. There is a tinge of the uncanny in the process, an othering by which Wordsworth finds himself outside himself – both strange and familiar, and giving an access of illicit power that corresponds to the sense of normal boundaries being broken. But this uncanny is not a matter of seeing, as in Freud, but of voicing, as when a shaman voices the spirits of animals or when an oracle bespeaks the voice of the god that inheres in a place. Wordsworth regains a confident voice by calling on another’s. The self renews its verbal authority by summoning another into words and hearing that other’s words as words he would himself say if he could. Voice has primacy over vision; sound surpasses sightseeing, the sonnet transcends the prose guide in which it is published. This was not the first time that Wordsworth had described an oracular process in which the self voices itself by summoning the voices of the rocks. In Chapter 5 we saw that in ‘To Joanna’, he assumed the role of runic priest, a Druid, inscribing a language that can make nature speak. By contrast, ‘Long Meg and her Daughters’ is much more troubled and tentative. The stone never does speak, and something slips in the syntax, to the extent that the reader finds it difficult to be sure what the ‘it’ is that Long Meg is urged to tell. What seems to be the case is that the outlier stone, resuming her Earth-Mother or Time-Lord role, separate and supervisory, is urged to bear witness to what she knows of the otherwise ‘unknown past’ – communicating her knowledge to the Morn, an Enlightenment enlightener who dispels beliefs about and practices from the stones’ past. These beliefs and practices are ghostly presences – ‘shades of night’, to be banished in the interests of lightness and clarity (they are

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‘cumbrous’, like the awe that weighs the spirit down). Wordsworth then urges the stone to ‘Let the Moon hear’, just as she appears from behind the obscurity of a cloud. The Moon is to be spoken to – perhaps severely. The ‘Giant-mother’, it seems, is opposed to the cyclical and elusive nature of lunar time, for she is to be a stickler for dates, times, causes and effects: the effect of the irregularly stressed and thus strongly emphasised ‘When, how, and wherefore’ is to accent a process of explanation that is ordered and linear. Thus Wordsworth urges her to bring her daughters under the control of clear, logical speech. But what the Giant-mother is actually to say remains unclear: her explanation of the circle’s origins and purpose is not disclosed. Moreover, syntax and sense become mazy at the sonnet’s close and the thrust of exhortation is diverted into appositional phrases so that the apparent conclusion lacks syntactical force. If ‘some have deem’d, to mortal sight/ The inviolable God that tames the proud’, is, in fact, the ‘it’ that the Long Meg is to ‘tell’ to Morn and Moon, then the mode of this telling is less than forthright. Who are the ‘some’ who suddenly appear to ‘have deem’d’? Their abrupt and unspecific appearance suggests that, in order to endorse the orthodox Hebraic male God, Wordsworth was reaching for an extra authority that he had not been able to find from within the scene. It was when he did so in The Excursion, second-guessing his own investigations into being and time, that Hartley Coleridge referred to ‘the popping in of the old man with the beard’.19 Here, there is a similar sense of intrusion and arrest – as if Wordsworth had not let himself follow his questioning to its unconventional and potentially heretical end – and it is a gendered questioning which summons female voices as authorities on the origins of history and prehistory. Wordsworth did not leave matters there: the next twenty years saw him revise the poem many times and arrange it in different settings on several occasions. This was a not untypical process in his late career – he would revise and revise not just early verse, but recently written work too, remodelling until he had resolved to his own satisfaction tensions that, when younger, he had lacked the perspective to overcome. In the case of ‘Long Meg’ his revisions are doubly instructive, for they reveal a determination to achieve a less arbitrary conclusion to his questioning of divine origins, a refusal to settle for fudging difficult issues and also demonstrate the effect on his poems of the new publication contexts he carefully constructed to attract the reading public. The late Wordsworth was both a metaphysical and a commercial poet. For the ‘Miscellaneous Sonnets’ section of his 1827 Collected Poems, Wordsworth altered the 1822 text:

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A weight of awe not easy to be borne Fell suddenly upon my Spirit—cast From the dread bosom of the unknown past, When first I saw that Sisterhood forlorn; And Her, whose massy strength and stature scorn The power of years—pre-eminent, and placed Apart-to overlook the circle vast. Speak Giant-mother! tell it to the Morn, While she dispels the cumbrous shades of night; Let the Moon hear, emerging from a cloud, At whose behest uprose on British ground Thy Progeny; in hieroglyphic round Forth-shadowing, some have deemed, the infinite, The inviolable God, that tames the proud.

The insistent ‘When, how and wherefore’ from 1822 has gone; so has the antiquarian ‘wondrous monument, whose mystic round’. So, too, has ‘mortal sight’. Instead, there is an emphasis on mysterious and possibly non-verbal communication (‘behest’, ‘hieroglyphic’), on the stones as living beings (‘progeny’) and on circular patterning (‘hieroglyphic round’) – associating the stone circle with the cycles of the moon. The poem has become more interested in non-linear, female generative forces and patternings – representations of the infinite that, as the participle ‘forthshadowing’ suggests, are a continuous present without beginning or end. The last line is now less arbitrary; its identification of the Hebraic God as the ultimate repressive power (‘tames the proud’) is grammatically more tentative. The 1827 revisions show Wordsworth following more bravely where the local tradition about witches took him: they make the poem a more honest contemplation of a world governed by a female spirit working on circular and cyclical time rather than by the forbidding Word of an indifferent male Jehovah. In 1836, however, he revised the sonnet again, for a new publication context that made it speak very differently – although, once again, as a part of a volume dedicated to touring places of sightseeing interest. This republication began, indeed, with another tour involving another visit to the stone circle. In August 1833 Wordsworth and his wife journeyed to Carlisle and then came home, past Long Meg, down the Eden river to Ullswater. This brief excursion followed a longer tour he had taken in July in the company of his son John and his admirer Henry Crabb Robinson to the Isle of Man, and the west coast of Scotland. Despite the remoteness of the situation, the three men were not so often solitary walkers as they were modern tourists:

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they visited the picturesque Fingal’s Cave, for instance, on a crowded steamboat excursion. Two years later, Wordsworth published a sequence of poems suggested by these two journeys. The sequence ‘Composed or Suggested During a Tour in the Summer of 1833’ appeared in his 1835 Yarrow Revisited collection, and reappeared, augmented and revised, in a second edition the next year.20 The fact that a second edition was called for and that Wordsworth enlarged the sequence for that edition reminds us that the collection was well received at the time and that he crafted it very carefully to ensure that it would continue to be.21 He chose well-known spots so that, as he again presented himself to readers as a commentator on their native land, he did so as someone whose moral and aesthetic responses readers could share because they might visit, or already have visited, the places he described. The poems ‘Composed or Suggested During a Tour in the Summer of 1833’ were not spontaneous overflowings of feeling. None was written during the tour (which was, in any case two trips rather than one tour); some, indeed, predated it. The 1833 sequence was, in fact, a composite crafted and recrafted for publication, rather than an on-the-spot record of an actual journey – as is most clearly revealed by the belated insertion of the ‘Long Meg’ sonnet. It was not even included in the 1833 sequence when that sequence first appeared in the 1835 Yarrow Revisited, appearing only in the second, 1836 edition, where it is numbered XLIII. Taking a belated place towards the end of the sequence, and revised from 1822 for the purpose, it gives the 1833 tour a new culmination – a return to the Lakes and to a poem describing a Lakeland site that foregrounds what had hitherto been a less prominent concern – the spiritual beliefs and practices that the tour locations have prompted, over the centuries, in the people who lived among them. Thus what appeared in 1835 as a series of poems that respond in the manner of a tour-guide to tourist sites that Wordsworth’s readers might have visited, was made, in the revised 1836 edition, to have a deeper, unifying theme. ‘At Sea off the Isle of Man’, for example, celebrates a view but also resembles Blake’s Preface to Milton as it praises an era in which men imagined gods at work in nature.22 Later, at Fingal’s Cave Wordsworth notes that the mythical inhabitants imagined there by Ossian have ‘vanished’ but are subject to recall; Why keep ‘we’ else the instincts whose dread law Ruled here of yore, till what men felt they saw, Not by black arts but magic natural! (‘XXX. Cave of Staffa’, ll. 9–12)

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In 1835 the tour sequence ends somewhat randomly with sonnets about ‘Steamboats, Viaducts, and Railways’, Lowther Castle and Lord Lonsdale, and the jewellery around a young friend’s neck, as if it were determined by the things Wordsworth had simply happened to come across on his trips. In 1836 the fiction of the poems having emerged from an actual tour is maintained, but nevertheless the ‘Long Meg’ sonnet deepens the theme of the ‘magic natural’ that ‘men believed’ and that led them to endow natural objects – rocks and stones – with spiritual powers. Adding the ‘Long Meg’ sonnet carried a risk. Because it had been published and republished before, it gave the lie to the statement that the sequence had been ‘Composed or Suggested During a Tour in the Summer of 1833’. To those readers who remembered its previous incarnations, it might seem to be an impostor revealing the falsity of the sequence’s title-claim of authentic poetic response to a specific experience in a specific time and place. That Wordsworth should have risked foregrounding the manufactured nature of his sequence in this way demonstrates how important he found it to organise his publications so as to reveal his ongoing moral enquiry. Being a sightseer poet was not enough; he revised his sequence so that it seemed not just a rambling tour-guide but also a research trip into sites of spiritual significance. The mixture of tour-guide and spiritual quest is at once apparent when the ‘Long Meg’ sonnet is seen in its 1836 context. Wordsworth frames the poem within the typical discourse of tour narratives, appending a note, like a helpful guidebook compiler, to the poem’s title. The verse itself takes a tone of spiritual dread that had previously appeared in the sequence when Wordsworth contemplated the dark pieties of remorseful penitents on Iona. Here is the 1836 text of the sonnet: A weight of awe not easy to be borne Fell suddenly upon my Spirit—cast From the dread bosom of the unknown past, When first I saw that Sisterhood forlorn; And Her, whose massy strength and stature scorn The power of years—pre-eminent, and placed Apart, to overlook the circle vast. Speak, Giant-mother! tell it to the Morn, While she dispels the cumbrous shades of night; Let the Moon hear, emerging from a cloud, At whose behest uprose on British ground Thy Progeny; in hieroglyphic round Forth-shadowing, some have deemed, the infinite, The inviolable God, that tames the proud.

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After the sonnets on the cave of Staffa and the Isle of Man, the revisions to the latter part of ‘Long Meg’ acquire a deeper significance. Lines 11–13 now recur to a theme of spiritual intimation present elsewhere in the collection: in this context they suggest that the Moon has her own shadowy form of communication by ‘behest’, a form of influence that brings things to pass without the necessity for speaking and hearing – a form, therefore, to be arraigned by the clarity of speech. Using this form of influence, she has raised, as if by magic (‘uprose’) a circle-dance of daughters designed to image and invoke the cycles of the moon that they worshipped (it is a ‘hieroglyphic round’). These are the witches of local tradition, dancing their black-magic rite on the Sabbath – part, Wordsworth’s gendering implies, of a dark cult of femininity which is one way of articulating time and space: the circle of female dancers represents the cycles of the moon, cycles which, by inaudible and invisible ‘behest’, cause the uprising of periodic tides in the oceans and in women’s bodies. With these revisions, the poem’s conclusion is both more honest and more explicable. Long Meg is to tell the Morn and Moon that there are those who have judged the infinite not to be the repeated cycles and circles connecting women, waters, months and moons, but, instead, to be the single, separate, male God who brings to heel those who proudly violate his authority. ‘[S]ome have deemed’ now more comprehensibly refers to the local tradition which deems the stones to be witches who have been petrified in punishment for violating God’s day, the day that stands apart from the rest of the weekly cycle. God, the local superstition has it, ‘tames the proud’, intervening to arrest their ‘hieroglyphic round’, to freeze their ritual visualisation of eternal return, and to put an end to ‘forthshadowing’. The hieroglyphic round then shrinks to the chiselled inscriptions till visible today on the stone surface of the megalith. This God is associated with speech, rather than with the non-phonetic symbolism of hieroglyphs: if Wordsworth does not speak directly on his behalf, the matriarch-stone, uttering for him, reminds us that local tradition gives him the last word. As does the poem, for it finds in the local story a vindication of the patriarchal divinity whom Wordsworth wishes (as in so many late poems) to straighten out the dizzying turn and return of time. It suggests that seeing the stone circle and hearing the superstition attached to it prompted in Wordsworth a dread of unregulated femininity which he linked to a fear of endlessly cyclical time. Making the outlier stone into a matriarch speaking on the patriarch’s behalf – a kind of mineral Hannah More – naturalises and feminises the male and Hebraic rebuke: it assures the poet that the self-possessed voice of the rock, and of female experience,

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favours linear time, even at the price of loss and death, because meaning depends on there being a beginning and an end and a trajectory between them, all guaranteed by an infinite which stands apart from the turning circle of time, as does Long Meg from the stone circle. Nevertheless, by ending on the ‘inviolable God’, but as described by a stone-mother speaking for a vague tradition at the urging of an awestruck poet, the sonnet hardly makes a direct declaration of patriarchy. As revised, the conclusion of the sonnet, ‘Forth-shadowing, some have deemed, the infinite,/ The inviolable God, that tames the proud’, remains so loosely attached syntactically, and so temporally delayed, that it remains hard to resolve the relationship between exhorted speech, forth-shadowing and ‘the infinite’. Moreover, the equivalence between ‘the infinite’ and ‘the inviolable God’ is grammatically ambiguous: it depends upon a comma which suggests that ‘infinite’, like ‘inviolable’ is an adjective qualifying the noun ‘God’. At first sight, however, ‘the infinite’ reads as a noun, with the sonnet’s last line as a qualification of it. Whether the infinite or God has priority, then, remains in doubt: the poem comes to a curious end, its authoritative diction undercut by tentative syntax, and without the closure of a final couplet rhyme. We are left in doubt as to whether the final phrase is the ‘it’ that Long Meg is urged to tell: the phrase hangs, holding by a tenuous grammatical thread to the imperative that apparently governs it. The syntax, attempting to decide between multiple time (morns, moons and sisters) and the infinite singular God seems unable to resolve the conflict in the latter’s favour through the oracular telling of the stone. Thus the poem stages a tension between different ways in which Wordsworth understood what his poetry was, and whence it came: from an oracular voice beyond landscape but also from a re-presentation of the inscriptions – the varied patterns – in which the human is preserved on the face of the land despite the endless change that is time and the endless multiplicity that is nature.23 Such inscriptions, feminine like the cycles of time they represent, include runes and hieroglyphs – pictographs of nature’s changeability. Such patterns include stone circles, monuments created by people using natural objects to make visual meaning. ‘Long Meg and her daughters’ does not in the end have the strong assertion of a personal vision of the infinite that we might find in Wordsworth’s earlier poems. Instead, it dramatises the difficulty of reading and hearing the infinite in the finite. It is the work of an older, sadder and wiser poet who dramatises the elusiveness of the sacred and the limitations of his own efforts to speak the place’s spiritual meaning. It is also a poem where history is not merely significant because its events can be absorbed into his

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account of the heroic self. Nor is the past here a source of events whose power is elided into nature, in rebound from which Wordsworth discovers own greatness. Lore, tradition and monuments are not superseded by a revelation of the poet’s greater imaginative sublimity, but remain to trouble him as to how the past is spoken for, how its meaning is made, whether he can make it speak on his behalf. There is neither a decisive turn away from the voices of history to the inner self nor a subsumption of those voices by a self that supposedly comprehends them. There is, however, an indication of the unreliability of written records of ancient sites. Wordsworth’s poem, like several in the 1833 sequence, revalues the class-based hierarchy which relegated the oral and the local below the textual and theoretical. It is deeply occupied with how and why things come to be ‘commonly called’, by their names – of how places become endowed with intimations of immortality by story, tradition and lore, as ordinary locals respond to the refocusing of space (nature) into significant place by human efforts, the original purposes of which have been lost in time. It is worth remembering that for Wordsworth the placing of stones in patterns (as, for example, in ‘Michael’) is an activity close to that of making poetry. The maker of the sheepfold or the stone circle intervenes in the landscape, articulating its spaces by marking it with human syntaxes – spatial arrangements that are both natural (stones) and human (a circle). The poet, in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, ‘superadds’ human form (rhyme and metre) to materials that are next-to-natural (speech: itself shaped by the speaker’s uptake of the influence of the rocks and stones and trees among which he lives). For Wordsworth, as for Horne Tooke, words derive from objects,24 rather than from ideas, and this linguistic materialism means that the inscribing of word onto stone is not an imposition but a reuniting. Thus the sonnet encodes within itself an admiration for, as well as a suspicion of, the inscribers of ring-patterns on the stone called Long Meg, who are not necessarily different from the runic priest Wordsworth compares himself with in ‘To Joanna’. In revising his 1822 sonnet and his 1833 sequence, and making a changed ‘Long Meg’ its climax, Wordsworth creates a compendium of his poetic responses to places that have been in the nation’s history and are still in its geography, places of intersection between the human and the spiritual, the landscape and the infinite. He presents these places as a shareable itinerary of local fanes, producing a kind of tour-guide to the spots of ‘British ground’25 made sacred in the past.26 He constructs a national heritage of sacralised spots of time and place, pondering their origin and counting their cost – revaluing them even as he directs travellers towards them. If

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this is tourism, it is the higher tourism, for Wordsworth’s sense of heritage is that the sites that tourists visit are vital as places which ancestors have made sacred by their own responses to nature. By commemorating the places in his own responses, he renews that tradition, making himself a custodian of sacred Britain, rather than, as when a young poet, asserting his own spiritual sublimity. He thus achieves in verse what Southey had set out, in his Colloquies, to do in prose. Wordsworth continued to revise the poem, and had a reason to do so beside his own inveterate need to adjust his past writings in the light of his present understanding of himself and his career. In 1836, after years of receiving small profits from his poetry, which had sold slowly until the Duddon volume, and in the face of a poor publishing climate for volumes of verse, he negotiated a deal with Edward Moxon, almost the only publisher left in the poetry market, to receive £1,000 for a new edition of his Poetical Works.27 This deal prompted a revision of his oeuvre so that it would be fit for a Collected Edition which might be bought by readers who were reluctant to purchase individual volumes. Wordsworth also had his mind, as a poet now sixty-six years old, on posterity: he wanted his poems to reach future generations, and campaigned for an extension of copyright so that profits might accrue to his family after his death. It was time to make a definitive statement, before age made it too late, of what his poetry was. And so ‘Long Meg’ was revised again, into what became its final form. It appears in the Poetical Works (1836–38) as part of the 1833 tour sequence in the fifth volume with ‘And Her’ altered to ‘Speak Thou’; ‘Sisterhood forlorn’ to ‘family forlorn’; and ‘Thy Progeny’ to the less formalised and decided relationship of ‘That Sisterhood’.28 These changes produce the subtlest and most profound of all the texts of the poem; they are the culmination of a revision process that removes much of the 1822 insistence on what sort of explanation Long Meg must speak; it reduces the emphasis on visual judgement, emphasising speech and behest instead, while introducing further elusiveness of syntax and meaning by virtue of its punctuation. The revisions suggest not just that Wordsworth thought carefully about making his words work differently in new publication contexts, but also that he had begun by 1836 to find room in the tour-sequence genre for a demanding rewriting of his deepest and oldest concerns. As a result, the 1836 ‘Long Meg’ and the tour sequence it refocused, disclose a more complex notion of national history than the flow of a ‘Holy River’ towards Anglican orthodoxy.29 The very late Wordsworth was no unthinking reactionary or subordinator of everything to an endorsement of patriarchy.

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He allowed words to work against his ostensible conclusions – gave prominence to an alignment between verse and inscription-making and the cyclical forces he saw as feminine. ‘Long Meg’, in its final form, that is to say, foregrounded a notion of meaning-making as a feminine kind of play, embraced by humans and by nature, even if it also wished to control it in the name of a singular linearity coded as masculine. Ambivalent, with the feminine not finally closed off – a sign of a more profound and more artistically honest poetry than critics, then and now, have often credited him with, post-1810. There is also something new that is represented by ‘Long Meg’ and the revised 1833 sequence – an alignment with a discourse of tourism and a tourist public through which Wordsworth deepens the popular genre of the guidebook and the popular practice of sightseeing, dramatising them as discourses where nationality is adopted and confirmed, where versions of British spirituality can be absorbed, but showing that this is not a natural or easy process (not simply the enjoyment of seen sights uniting people on the basis of common experience); rather, Wordsworth estranges the process, revealing it as a matter of occupying oneself with the multiple stories, shapes and voices of the past – becoming, as it were, possessed. Britishness, he reveals, is a weight that is actively taken up, not an identity that is given. One confers it upon oneself by re-enacting, at the land’s significant places, the struggles of one’s predecessors there to make sense of the world beyond them in the space around them. For this, resolution is required, but conclusion may not arrive: the process of revisiting and re-enactment then goes on, feminine and cyclical like the moon-sponsored witches. There would be more tours, more poems, more presentiments of the past. There would also be more pictures, more efforts to couple poetry with profit by placing it in the new magazines and illustrated books that dominated commercial publishing. And so he became Westall’s collaborator on several projects in the 1830s and 1840s that were designed to win popularity on their own terms, rather than on those of the annuals. At Southey’s suggestion, Westall proposed a series of engravings of Wordsworthian scenes, which Wordsworth would supplement from his local knowledge. Thus in 1831 he asked Wordsworth to fill in the names of the mountains for his print Rydal from Mr Wordsworth’s Field under Rydal Mount – one of a series of panoramic views executed for the art publisher Ackermann between 1831 and 1839 (Fig. 13). Views of the Lake Scenery of Cumberland and Westmorland followed in 1840 and included engravings entitled Rydal Mount the Residence of Willm Wordsworth and Room at Rydal Mount (Figs 14 and 15) – an interior apparently showing the poet and his

Figure 13. William Westall, Rydal from Mr Wordsworth’s Field under Rydal Mount (London, ca. 1832).

Figure 14. Rydal Mount the Residence of Willm Wordsworth, from William Westall, Views of the Lake Scenery of Cumberland and Westmorland (London, 1840).

Figure 15. Room at Rydal Mount, from William Westall, Views of the Lake Scenery of Cumberland and Westmorland (London, 1840).

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wife, about the publication of which Wordsworth had some qualms, as it opened his private life to viewers. And if Westall was trading on the growing fame that made Wordsworth himself a sight for tourists to see, he also published prints designed to be bound up with the copies of the Collected Poems. Views of the Lake Country to Illustrate the Poems of W. Wordsworth, Esq. Drawn from Nature, And Engraved By W. Westall. A.R.A. was to be published in six parts by Wordsworth’s publisher Edward Moxon. Offering views of Grasmere, Lodore and Dungeon Ghyll, it was cheap at only three shillings – an affordable way to make the poet’s locodescriptive verse a composite visual and verbal experience. Westall’s death prevented its full realisation but its conception reveals that the late Wordsworth remained eager to take advantage of a publishing strategy that had brought him sales and reputation with the middle-class public. By the 1840s this strategy, dating back to 1810 but intensified after his encounter with Westall in 1818, was of confirmed success: once the ‘perverse’ and ‘puerile’ ‘Laker’ whose rustic verse was too vulgar and trivial for Jeffrey to tolerate, he was now Poet Laureate and national bard. Westall, meanwhile, was the Lake artist to the Lake poets.

Notes

i n t r o d u ct i o n 1

2

3

4

5

6

The peculiar publication history of The Prelude has meant that it is the exception to this rule; nevertheless, the painstaking editorial work that unearthed an 1805 text which Wordsworth never chose to publish, and the critical consensus that this early version is to be preferred to the late 1850 text whose publication he did approve, illustrate the cultural preference for a Romanticism of youth. Here I take my cue from the work of J.H. Prynne and Edward Said who have written acutely about late style in relation to the representation of time. See Prynne, Field Notes: ‘The Solitary Reaper’ and Others (Cambridge, 2007) and Said, On Late Style: Music and Literature against the Grain (New York, 2006). On the development of the concept of Romanticism and the effects thereof, see David Perkins, ‘The Construction of “The Romantic Movement” as a Literary Classification’, Nineteenth-Century Literature, 45.2 (1990), 129–43. Exceptions to this general trend often came from Marxist historians who were more authoritative about the Romantics’ political journalism than their poetry. Critics able to analyse both included Carl Woodring, Politics in English Romantic Poetry (Cambridge MA, 1970); Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London, 1973) and David V. Erdman, Blake: Prophet Against Empire (Princeton, 1954). Later, this impetus was intensified in influential essays by M.H. Abrams, ‘Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric’ (1965), reprinted in his The Correspondent Breeze: Essays on English Romanticism (New York and London, 1984), by Geoffrey Hartman, ‘Wordsworth, Inscriptions, and Romantic Nature Poetry’, in his Beyond Formalism: Literary Essays 1958–1970 (New Haven and London, 1970) and by Harold Bloom, ‘The Internalization of Quest Romance’, in Bloom, ed., Romanticism and Consciousness: Essays in Criticism (New York, 1970), pp. 3–24. A complete list of illuminating studies in these areas would cover many pages: the following studies have been especially instructive for this project: Susan Wolfson, Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism (Stanford, 1997); Lucy Newlyn, Reading, Writing, and Romanticism: The Anxiety of 279

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8

9 10

11

12 13

14

15 16

Notes to pages 3–5 Reception (Oxford, 2000); David Fairer, Organising Poetry: The Coleridge Circle, 1790–1798 (Oxford, 2009). See, for example, Alan Liu, Wordsworth: the Sense of History (Stanford, 1989) and James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago, 1998). A number of scholarly articles have discussed specific late poems; few monographs have been devoted to the subject. Among them are Hartman, The Unremarkable Wordsworth (Minneapolis, 1987); Peter J. Manning, Reading Romantics: Texts and Contexts (Oxford, 1990). For example, David Simpson, Wordsworth, Commodification and Social Concern: The Poetics of Modernity (Cambridge, 2009). Gregory Leadbetter, Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination (New York and Basingstoke, 2011). Studies of the later Coleridge’s philosophy and religion abound; only one monograph, however, tackles his later verse – Morton D. Paley’s Coleridge’s Later Poetry (Oxford, 1996). Only since 2004 have textual studies of Southey advanced to the point reached for Wordsworth and Coleridge in the post-war era, with the publication of Robert Southey: Poetical Works 1793–1810, gen. ed. Lynda Pratt, 5 vols. (London, 2004), followed by Robert Southey: Poetical Works 1811–38, gen. eds. Tim Fulford and Pratt, 4 vols. (London, 2012) and by the ongoing scholarly edition The Collected Letters of Robert Southey, gen. eds. Pratt, Fulford and Packer (Romantic Circles, 2009–). Thalaba the Destroyer (1801); Madoc (1805). For a summary of criticism on these texts see Chapter 2, pp. 69–71. Charles Mahoney has begun the task of retrieving this term from being a shorthand excuse for passing over the later poetry by historicising its deployment in the culture wars between the Lake poets and Hazlitt. See Mahoney, Romantics and Renegades: The Poetics of Political Reaction (New York, 2003). On the historical reconstruction in the Romantic period of the poet’s vocation into the role of professional author and man of letters, see Roger Chartier, ‘Figures of the Author’, in Of Authors and Origins: Essays on Copyright Law, eds. Brad Sherman and Alain Strowel (Oxford, 1994); Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford, 1990), 65; Martha Woodmansee, The Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics (New York, 1994), 73; Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge MA, 1993); Scott Hess, Authoring the Self: Self-Representation, Authorship, and the Print Market in British Poetry from Pope Through Wordsworth (London and New York, 2004); Brian Goldberg, The Lake Poets and Professional Identity (Cambridge, 2007); Lee Erickson, The Economy of Literary Form: English Literature and the Industrialization of Publishing, 1800–1850 (Baltimore and London, 1996). For this concept see Michael Gamer, Recollections in Tranquility: Romanticism and the Art of Self-Canonization, forthcoming. Note that this (sometimes physical) deconstruction of manuscripts is a more interventionist but not dissimilar revision to that outlined by Wolfson re Wordsworth, Formal Charges, p. 104.

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17 On revision see Jack Stillinger, Coleridge and Textual Instability: The Multiple Versions of the Major Poems (Oxford, 1994); Zachary Leader, Revision and Romantic Authorship (Oxford, 1996). On the poet’s presentation in Collected Editions see Andrew Piper, Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age (Chicago, 2009). 18 See Stephen Gill, Wordsworth and the Victorians (Oxford, 1998). 19 For the popularity of Wordsworth’s later itinerary volumes, as opposed to the dismal sales of his pre-1820 poetry, see William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge, 2004). 20 My own Landscape, Liberty and Authority: Poetry, Criticism And Politics From Thomson To Wordsworth (Cambridge, 1996) is a case in point. A rare thorough-going treatment of the early Wordsworth in the light of the later one is provided in Gill, Wordsworth’s Revisitings (Oxford, 2011). 21 See Marjorie Levinson, Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems: Four Essays (Cambridge, 1986) and Liu, Wordsworth: the Sense of History. 22 See the reply to Levinson and Liu by Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (London and New York, 1991). A further riposte was provided by Nicholas Roe, The Politics of Nature: Wordsworth and some Contemporaries (Basingstoke, 1992). 23 By topographic I mean a description of locality – geographic but also historical – similar in manner to, and informed by, those found in county histories, antiquarian compendiums and tour narratives. On topographical writing and Romantic poetry, see Dahlia Porter, ‘Maps, Lists, Views: How the Picturesque Wye transformed Topography’, Romanticism (2013), forthcoming. See also James M. Garrett, Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation (Aldershot and Burlington, 2008). 24 At the textual level, disconfirmation involved the reuse of manuscript drafts, a process in which there has been an increasing critical interest, as shown in studies by Sally Bushell, Text as Process: Creative Composition in Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Dickinson (Charlottesville and London, 2009); William H. Galperin, Revision and Authority in Wordsworth: the Interpretation of a Career (Philadelphia, 1989); Wolfson, Formal Charges. 25 Stephen J. Prickett, Words and The Word: Language, Poetics and Biblical Interpretation (Cambridge, 1986), p. 162. 26 Despite its title, Goldberg’s The Lake Poets and Professional Identity mostly considers earlier writers and models of poetic identity. Peter A. Cook marshals evidence for the term’s prevalence in his ‘Chronology of the “Lake School” Argument: Some Revisions’, Review of English Studies, NS 28 (1977), 175–81. 27 Jeffrey’s review of Wordsworth’s The Excursion, The Edinburgh Review, 24 (November 1814), 1–30. On Jeffrey’s patrolling of the literary sphere and its effect on Wordsworth, see Mark Schoenfield, Law, Labor and the Poet’s Contract: The Professional Wordsworth (Athens GA, 1996), pp. 189–223. 28 Jeffrey’s review of Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer, The Edinburgh Review, 1 (October 1802), 63–83, reprinted in Robert Southey: the Critical Heritage, ed. Lionel Madden (London and Boston, 1972), pp. 68–90.

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29 Jeffrey’s review of Wordsworth’s Poems in Two Volumes, The Edinburgh Review, 11 (October 1807), 214–31. 30 The Edinburgh Review, 24 (November 1814), 1–30. 31 On their subversion of the linguistic hierarchy, see Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language 1791–1819 (Oxford, 1984). 32 Cockburn, Life of Lord Jeffrey: with a Selection from his Correspondence, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1852), i, 31. Cited in Matthew Sangster, ‘“You have not advertised out of it”: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Francis Jeffrey on Authorship, Networks and Personalities’, RaVon (2013), forthcoming. 33 The Friend, ed. Barbara E. Rooke, 2 vols. (Princeton and London, 1969), ii, 286–7. 34 On this personalised periodical culture see Richard Cronin, Paper Pellets: British Literary Culture after Waterloo (Oxford, 2010). 35 On the need for success in a publishing market, see Jon Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences 1790–1832 (Madison, 1987) and Erickson, The Economy of Literary Form. 36 Robert Southey to Anna Seward, 4 July 1808. SL 1475. 37 ‘On the Cockney School of Poetry. No. I’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 2.7 (October 1817), 38–40. 38 The widespread use of the Lake poet term, and abuse of the poets for puerility, is revealed in Nicola Trott, ‘Wordsworth and the Parodic School of Criticism’, in The Satiric Eye: Forms of Satire in the Romantic Period, ed. Steven E. Jones (New York and Basingstoke, 2003), pp. 71–97. 39 Review of Peter Bell, Monthly Review, 89 (August 1819), 421. 40 In Jeffrey’s review in the Edinburgh Review, 25 (October 1815), 355–63. 41 Hazlitt, ‘On the Living Poets’, Lectures on the English Poets Delivered at the Surrey Institution (London, 1818), pp. 322–3. In The Complete Works, ed. P.P. Howe, 21 vols. (London, 1933), v, p. 163. 42 Byron, ‘Dedication’ to Don Juan (1818), ll. 33–40. BPW, v, p. 4. 43 John Wilson, ‘Some Observations on the “Biographia Literaria” of S. T. Coleridge, Esq.’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 2 (October 1817), 3–18. 44 On the issue of copyright, see Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright; Susan Eilenberg, Strange Power of Speech: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Literary Possession (Oxford, 1992); Gamer, ‘Laureate Policy’, The Wordsworth Circle, 42 (2011), 42–5; Schoenfield, Law, Labor and the Poet’s Contract, pp. 110–13, 255–8. 45 Jeffrey’s review of Thalaba the Destroyer, Edinburgh Review, reprinted in Southey: the Critical Heritage, pp. 68–90. 46 Gillen D’Arcy Wood, The Shock of the Real: Romanticism and Visual Culture, 1760–1860 (New York and Basingstoke, 2001). 47 James A.W. Heffernan, Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago and London, 1993), pp. 93–107; Sophie Thomas, Romanticism and Visuality: Fragments, History, Spectacle (New York and Abingdon, 2008); Manning, ‘Wordsworth’s “Illustrated Books and Newspapers” and City Media’, in Romanticism and the City, ed. Larry H. Peer (New York, 2011), pp. 223–40.

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48 Julia Sandstrom Carlson, ‘Prose Mesurée in the Lakes Tour and Guide: Quoting and Recalibrating English Blank Verse’, ERR, 20.2 (2009), 227–36; Peter Simonsen, Wordsworth and Word-Preserving Arts: Typographic Inscription, Ekphrasis and Posterity in the Later Work (Basingstoke, 2007). 49 Nigel Leask, Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire (Cambridge, 1992); Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978). 50 See Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: a Theory of Poetry (New York and Oxford, 1973); Christopher Ricks, Allusion to the Poets (Oxford, 2002). 51 Gill, William Wordsworth: a Life (Oxford, 1989), p. 333. 52 Here I build on the work of, among others, Anya Taylor, Erotic Coleridge: Women, Love, and the Law Against Divorce (New York, 2005), Wolfson, Romantic Interactions: Social Being and the Turns of Literary Action (Baltimore, 2010) and Newlyn, Reading, Writing, and Romanticism: The Anxiety of Reception.

i n t r od u c t i on t o p a r t i 1 Review of Thalaba the Destroyer; Edinburgh Review, 1 (October 1802), 63–83, reprinted in Robert Southey: the Critical Heritage, ed. Lionel Madden (London and Boston, 1972), pp. 68–90. 2 Jeffrey’s review of Madoc appeared in the Edinburgh Review, 7 (October 1805), 1–29 (p. 3). 3 Review of Wordsworth, Poems, in Two Volumes; Edinburgh Review, 11 (October 1807), 214–31 (p. 223). 4 Review of John Wilson, The Isle of Palms; Edinburgh Review, 19 (February 1812), 373–88 (p. 373). 5 In the Quarterly Review, 11 (April 1814), 178. 6 Review of Wordsworth, The Excursion; Edinburgh Review, 24 (November 1814), 1–4 (p. 1), reprinted in William Wordsworth: the Critical Heritage: Volume I, 1793–1820, ed. Robert Woof (London, 2001), pp. 381–404. On the history of the terms ‘Lake poets’ and ‘Lake school’ see Peter A. Cook, ‘Chronology of the Lake School Argument: Some Revisions’, Review of English Studies, 28 (1977), 175–81. 7 So it was then thought; in fact, although Skiddaw is the bulkiest fell when seen from the lakeside, Scafell is higher. 8 Augustan Review, 3:15 (July 1816), 45–54 (p. 53). 9 ‘State and character of the Poetry of the present age—Burns—Cowper— Wordsworth, &c.—Scott—Moore—Byron—Campbell’, New Annual Register (January 1817), 43–50 (p. 47). 10 In her Literature as a Heritage, Or, Reading Other Ways (Cambridge, 1988).

1. t h e la k e p o et s a n d th e p i ct u r e s qu e v i ew 1 Cowper, The Task (1785), iv, pp. 267–70. From 1780, however, Argand lamps brought more brilliance than candles could achieve.

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2 Quoted in Jenny Uglow, Nature’s Engraver: A Life of Thomas Bewick (London, 2006), p. 317. 3 For a discussion of these technological developments, and their effect on the book market and on Romantic writing, see Lee Erickson, The Economy of Literary Form: English Literature and the Industrialization of Publishing 1800– 1850 (Baltimore and London, 1996). 4 Line 7 of Wordsworth’s 1846 Sonnet ‘Illustrated Books and Newspapers’. In Last Poems, 1821–1850, ed. Jared Curtis (Ithaca, 1999), pp. 405–6. 5 See Gillen D’Arcy Wood, The Shock of the Real: Romanticism and Visual Culture 1760–1860 (Basingstoke, 2001). 6 On the role of the drawing-room morning call, and of the picture books inspected during such calls, in solidifying middle-class consciousness in the early nineteenth century, see Leonore Davidoff, The Best Circles: Society Etiquette and the Season (London, 1973), p. 44. 7 See for instance Malcolm Andrews, The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain, 1760–1800 (Aldershot, 1989), Alan Liu, Wordsworth: the Sense of History (Stanford, 1989) and my own Landscape, Liberty and Authority: Poetry, Criticism and Politics from Thomson to Wordsworth (Cambridge, 1996). A contrary view is offered by Peter de Bolla, who argues, in his The Education of the Eye (Stanford, 2003), pp. 120, 122, that Gilpin’s picturesque aimed to produce a ‘fantasized encounter with the real’ triggered by an ‘affective – bodily – experience in the real of looking’. This seems to me to overstate the significance of the body in Gilpin’s aesthetics; if it does appear, it is in attenuated and generalised form. Liu, Wordsworth, The Sense of History, pp. 76–80. 8 See Peter Bicknell and Robert Woof, The Lake District Discovered 1810–1850 (Grasmere, 1983), p. 76. 9 As Thomas Pfau has noted, the picturesque united readers as a polite class, through the formation of a shared taste (including a shared taste for a pseudomemory of history). Pfau, Wordsworth’s Profession: Form, Class, and the Logic of Early Romantic Cultural Production (Stanford, 1997), p. 21. 10 On the development of tourist materials that were both verbal and visual, and on their influence on Romantic representation of the Lake District, see Julia Sandstrom Carlson, ‘Topographical Measures: Wordsworth’s and Crosthwaite’s Lines on the Lake District’, Romanticism, 16.1 (2010), 72–93. 11 To G.C. Bedford of 16 February 1804, SL 895. 12 William Gilpin, Observations on the River Wye, 2nd edn (London, 1789), p. 46. 13 Thomas West, A Guide to the Lakes, in Cumberland, Westmorland, and Lancashire. By the author of The antiquities of Furness (London, 1780), pp. 64–5. 14 Line 55. See CPW, i, part i, pp. 452–6. 15 Letters from England, by Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella, translated from the Spanish, 3 vols. (London, 1807), ii, p. 212. 16 Letter of 13 June 1808 to Coleridge; SL 1466. 17 Letters from England, ii, p. 209.

Notes to pages 36–61

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18 Published in Robert Southey, Minor Poems, 3 vols. (London, 1815), ii, pp. 131–2. SLPW, i, pp. 200–3. 19 Lyrical Ballads (1800). See WLB, pp. 139–41. 20 The first line of ‘Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798’. See WLB, pp. 116–20. 21 Sara Hutchinson to John Monkhouse, 15 October 1820, The Letters of Sara Hutchinson from 1800 to 1835, ed. Kathleen Coburn (Toronto, 1954), p. 213. 22 Views of the Lake and of the Vale of Keswick (London, 1820), introduction, n.p. 23 On this, see Robin Jarvis, Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel (Basingstoke and New York, 1997) and Anne Wallace, Walking, Literature, and English Culture: The Origins and Uses of Peripatetic in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1993). 24 Preface to A Vision of Judgement (London, 1821), SLPW, iii, p. 544. 25 Dedication to Don Juan (1818), stanza 3. BPW, v, p. 4. 26 ‘This effect of twilight, and in the very scene described, has been lately represented by Mr. William Westall, in one of his Views of the Lakes, with the true feeling and power of genius. The range of mountains which is described in these introductory lines, may also be seen in his View of the Vale of Keswick from the Penrith road’, A Vision of Judgement, p. 49. 27 The poem was published under this heading first in Joanna Baillie’s anthology, Poems, Chiefly Manuscript, and from Living Authors (London, 1823), pp. 280–3. 28 The text up to this point was added in 1829; on first publication, the poem began with ‘here it comes sparkling’. See SLPW, iii, pp. 300–1. 29 Susan J. Wolfson, ‘Romantic Measures: Stressing the Sound of Sound’, in Meter Matters: Verse Cultures of the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Jason David Hall (Athens OH, 2011), pp. 53–77 (p. 58). 30 Celeste Langan, ‘Understanding media in 1805: Audiovisual hallucination in The Lay of the Last Minstrel’, SiR, 40 (2001), 49–70; see the response by Peter J. Manning, ‘“The birthday of typography”: A response to Celeste Langan’, SiR, 40 (2001), 71–84. 31 Andrew Elfenbein, Romanticism and the Rise of English (Stanford, 2009), pp. 139–43. 32 ‘To love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country, and to mankind’, Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. J.C.D. Clark (Stanford, 2002), p. 202. 33 Sir Thomas More; or, Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society, 4 vols. (London, 1829–31), i, pp. 120–2. 34 Esther Wohlgemut, ‘Southey, Macaulay and the Idea of a Picturesque History’, Romanticism on the Net, 32–3 (November 2003–February 2004), paragraphs 6–8, http://id.erudit.org/iderudit/009261ar. Accessed 20 August 2012. 35 Ibid., paragraph 7. 36 Ibid., paragraph 8.

286

Notes to pages 64–72

37 Southey cites ll. 161–72 of the text from Wordsworth’s Poems in Two Volumes (London, 1807), ii, pp. 128–38.

2 . p o e t i c h e l l s a n d p a ci fi c e d e ns 1 See Javed Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings: James Mill’s The History of British India and Orientalism (Oxford, 1992) and Alan Bewell, Romanticism and Colonial Disease (Baltimore, 1999). Also Nigel Leask, ‘“Wandering through Eblis” Absorption and Containment in Romantic Exoticism’, in Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, 1780–1830, eds. Tim Fulford and Peter J. Kitson (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 165–88. 2 See, for example, Elisa E. Beshero-Bondar, ‘British Conquistadors and Aztec Priests: The Horror of Southey’s Madoc’, Philological Quarterly, 82.1 (Winter 2003), 87–113; Carol Bolton, Writing the Empire: Robert Southey and Romantic Colonialism (London, 2007); Caroline Franklin, ‘The Welsh American dream: Iolo Morganwg, Robert Southey and the Madoc legend’, in English Romanticism and the Celtic World, eds. Gerard Carruthers and Alan Rawes (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 69–102; Rebecca Cole Heinowitz, ‘The Allure of the Same: Robert Southey’s Welsh Indians and the Rhetoric of Good Colonialism’, in Sullen Fires Across the Atlantic: Essays in Transatlantic Romanticism, eds. Lance Newman, Joel Pace, and Chris Koenig-Woodyard, Romantic Circles Praxis Series (November 2006), www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/sullenfires/heinowitz/heinowitz. html. Accessed 20 August 2012; Leask, ‘Southey’s Madoc: Reimagining the Conquest of America’, in Robert Southey and the Contexts of English Romanticism, ed. Lynda Pratt (Aldershot and Burlington, 2006), pp. 133–50; Pratt, ‘Revising the Romantic National Epic: Coleridge, Southey and Madoc’, Romanticism 2 (1996), 149–63. 3 On this oscillation in relation to the information-displaying tradition of scientific empiricism and the more digressive model of antiquarian history, see Dahlia Porter, ‘Poetics of the Commonplace: Composing Robert Southey’, The Wordsworth Circle, 42.1 (Winter 2011), 27–33. 4 See Leask, ‘“Wandering through Eblis”’, pp. 184–5. 5 Francis Jeffrey, review of Thalaba, Edinburgh Review, 1 (October 1802), 63–83. 6 As revealed by Michael O’Neill, ‘Telling Stories: Southey and Romantic Narrative’, The Wordsworth Circle, 42.1 (Winter 2011), 33–8. 7 Southey reviewed Periodical Accounts of the Baptist Missionary Society in the Quarterly Review, 1 (February 1809), 193–226; he also reviewed the Transactions of the Missionary Society in the South Sea Islands in the Quarterly Review, 2 (1809), 24–61. Earlier, he had reviewed Periodical Accounts Relative to the Baptist Missionary Society (1800–01), in the Annual Review for 1802, 1 (1803), 207–18. In the Annual Review for 1803, 2 (1804), he reviewed Transactions of the Missionary Society (Vol. 1, 1803), 189–201. In the Annual Review for 1804, 3 (1805) he reviewed Transactions of the Missionary Society (Vol. 2, 1804), 621–34. 8 On these issues in Southey, see Bolton, Writing the Empire and David M. Craig, Robert Southey and Romantic Apostasy: Political Argument in Britain,

Notes to pages 72–82

9

10

11 12

13 14 15 16

17 18 19 20 21 22

23 24 25 26 27

28 29

287

1780–1840 (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2007), pp. 142–65. On Romantic-era reactions to sati, see Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago, 1992). As is shown in Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings and in Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (New York, 1989). Macaulay’s Education Minute, www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/ 00generallinks/macaulay/txt_minute_education_1835.html. Accessed 24 September 2011. Jennifer A. Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton, 2006). Bewell, ‘A “True Story . . . of Evils Overcome”: Sacred Biography, Prophecy, and Colonial Disease in Southey’s Tale of Paraguay’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 26.2 (June 2004), 97–124; David Simpson, ‘Romantic Indians: Robert Southey’s Distinctions’, The Wordsworth Circle, 38 (2007), 20–5. Byron’s Vision of Judgment, in BPW, vi, p. 343. SLPW, iii, p. 595. Quotations from the poem are hereafter referred to by section and line number. William Bligh, A Narrative of the Mutiny on Board Her Majesty’s Ship Bounty and the Subsequent Voyage of Part of the Crew (London, 1790), p. 10. Bligh, A Voyage to the South Sea Undertaken by Command of His Majesty, for the purpose of conveying the bread-fruit tree to the West Indies (London, 1792), p. 161. See James C. McKusick, ‘The Politics of Language in Byron’s The Island’, ELH, 59 (1992), 839–56. Letter of c. 26 October 1809; letter 1703 of SL. Review of Transactions of the Missionary Society in the South Sea Islands, Quarterly Review, 2 (1809), 24–61 (p. 50). Ibid., 45. Ibid. John Martin, An Account of the Natives of the Tonga Islands in the South Pacific Ocean With An Original Grammar and Vocabulary of their Language Compiled and Arranged from the Extensive Communications of Mr William Mariner, 2 vols. (London, 1817), i, pp. 67–8. Review of An Account of the Natives of the Tonga Islands in the South Pacific Ocean, Quarterly Review, 17 (April 1817), 1–39 (p. 7). Ibid., p. 7. Ibid., p. 33. Martin, An Account of the Natives of the Tonga Islands, i, p. 268. An incisive assessment of the poem’s relation to Mariner, and to debates about the Bounty mutiny, is given in McKusick, ‘The Politics of Language in Byron’s The Island’. All citations from The Island given by canto and line numbers, from BPW. Review of Polynesian Researches, by William Ellis, Quarterly Review, 43 (May 1830), 1–54 (p. 4).

288

Notes to pages 84–107

30 A point noted in Carl Woodring, Politics in English Romantic Poetry (Cambridge MA, 1970), p. 224. 31 Leask, ‘“Wandering through Eblis”’, p. 178. 32 The Courier, 11 January 1822. 33 Medwin quoted in The Courier, 13 December 1824. 34 Selections from the Letters of Robert Southey, ed. J.W. Warter, 4 vols. (London, 1856), iii, p. 450. 35 Review of An Account of the Natives of the Tonga Islands, 11. 36 Ibid., 6. 37 Review of Polynesian Researches, 31–2. 38 Selections from the Letters of Robert Southey, iii, p. 75. 39 Martin Dobrizhoffer, An Account of the Abipones, an Equestrian People of Paraguay. Translated from the Latin of Martin Dobrizhoffer, Eighteen Years a Missionary in that Country, trans. Sara Coleridge, 3 vols. (London, 1821), i, pp. 91, 92. 40 Review of An Account of the Abipones, Quarterly Review, 26 (January 1822), 277–323 (p. 322). 41 Ibid., 278. 42 Southey, History of Brazil, 3 vols. (London, 1810–19), ii, p. 353. 43 On this see Bewell, Romanticism and Colonial Disease, pp. 1–65, 306 and Fulford and Debbie Lee, ‘The Beast Within: the Imperial Legacy of Vaccination in History and Literature’, Literature and History, 9.1 (2000), 1–23. 44 See Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Signs Taken for Wonders’, in Europe and its Others, eds. Francis Barker et al., 2 vols. (Colchester, 1985), i, 89–106. 45 London Magazine (October 1825), 231–6 (p. 233). 46 Examiner (28 August 1825), 543–4 (p. 543). 47 Eclectic Review, 24 (October 1825), 328–37 (p. 337). Cf. ‘beautiful passages . . . taken as a whole, the poem is dull’, Lady’s Monthly Museum, or, Polite Repository of Amusement and Instruction, 22 (September 1825), 162–3 (p. 163). 48 Literary Chronicle, 6.325 (6 August 1825), 497–8 (p. 497).

i n t r o d uc t i o n to p a r t i i 1 On the tensions between the traditional conception of the gentleman who wrote, but not for gain, and the professional author who sought profit – often seen as a ‘hack’, see Scott Hess, Authoring the Self: Self-Representation, Authorship, and the Print Market in British Poetry from Pope Through Wordsworth (London and New York, 2004); Brian Goldberg, The Lake Poets and Professional Identity (Cambridge, 2007). 2 On the production of The Friend see the introduction to the Collected Coleridge edition, ed. Barbara E. Rooke, 2 vols. (Princeton and London, 1969), and Deirdre Coleman, Coleridge and the Friend (1809–1810) (Oxford, 1988). 3 On this crisis as viewed by Coleridge see Jon Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832 (Madison, 1987).

Notes to pages 107–113

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4 On this diagnosis of personalisation and its consequences in the literary reviews and journals, see Richard Cronin, Paper Pellets: British Literary Culture after Waterloo (Oxford, 2010). 5 Friend, ed. Rooke, ii, pp. 286–7. 6 See Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780–1950 (London, 1958). 7 See, for example, the editors’ introduction to the Collected Coleridge Biographia Literaria, eds. James Engell and Walter Jackson Bate, 2 vols. (Princeton, 1983), i; Nigel Leask, The Politics of Imagination in Coleridge’s Critical Thought (Basingstoke, 1988); A.C. Goodson, Verbal Imagination: Coleridge and the Language of Modern Criticism (Oxford, 1988); Coleridge’s Theory of Imagination Today, ed. Christine Gallant (New York, 1989); Steven Bygrave, Coleridge and the Self: Romantic Egoism (Basingstoke, 1986). 8 Jerome Christensen examines Coleridge’s self-figuration as he lays out the genius of Wordsworth in Coleridge’s Blessed Machine of Language (Ithaca and London, 1981), pp. 131–8. 9 A gendering of the reception-by-readerly-completion that is observed of ‘Kubla Khan’ in Marjorie Levinson, The Romantic Fragment Poem: a Critique of a Form (Chapel Hill and London, 1986). 10 For Coleridge as a writer whose feminism should not be underestimated because he sometimes wavered from his ideals and, in his personal relations with women, struggled to live them out, see Anya Taylor, ‘Coleridge, Wollstonecraft, and the rights of women’, in Coleridge’s Visionary Languages, eds. Tim Fulford and Morton D. Paley (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 83–98. 11 See the verdict of J.C.C. Mays that it is ‘dialogic rather than retrospective. It looks back in order to negotiate a way forward, not to cement a long-sought position’, ‘The Later Poetry’, in The Cambridge Companion to Coleridge, ed. Lucy Newlyn (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 89–102 (p. 90). Also, ‘he needed the magical moment to pass in order to grasp its significance, to decide that his career as a poet was finished in order to begin to articulate what blocked (what indeed should block) its development’, p. 92.

3 . p ri n t a n d p e r f o rma n c e 1 I follow the dating agreed by most critics for ‘Christabel’ and ‘Kubla Khan’, it being commonly accepted that the date of 1797 for the composition of the latter given in Coleridge’s 1816 preface is a slip. 2 Examples include Anne Janowitz in ‘Coleridge’s 1816 Volume: Fragment as Rubric’, SiR, 24 (1985), 21–39 and Sophie Thomas, ‘The Return of the Fragment: “Christabel” and the Uncanny’, Bucknell Review, 45.2 (2002), 51–75. See also, on the poem’s early readings, Marjorie Levinson, The Romantic Fragment Poem: A Critique of a Form (Chapel Hill, 1986), p. 77. Thomas Macfarland argues for the fragmentariness of all Romanticism in Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Modalities of Fragmentation (Princeton, 1981).

290

Notes to pages 114–123

3 Nigel Leask, The Politics of Imagination in Coleridge’s Critical Thought (Basingstoke, 1988); A.C. Goodson, Verbal Imagination: Coleridge and the Language of Modern Criticism (Oxford, 1988); Coleridge’s Theory of Imagination Today, ed. Christine Gallant (New York, 1989). 4 The Friend, ed. Barbara E. Rooke, 2 vols. (Princeton and London, 1969), ii, pp. 286–7. 5 On the Romantic-era cultivation of an intimate persona for a mass readership, see Tom Mole, Byron’s Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy (Basingstoke and New York, 2007). 6 See Jerome Christensen on Coleridge’s figuration of poetic genius as a kind of possession in his Coleridge’s Blessed Machine of Language (Ithaca and London, 1981), pp. 130–2. 7 I develop the work of David Perkins, ‘How the Romantics Recited Poetry’, SEL, 31 (1991), 655–71; of Simon Jarvis on metre, music and performance, ‘The Melodics of Long Poems’, Textual Practice, 24.4 (2010), 607–21; of J.H. Prynne on sound and signification, ‘Mental Ears and Poetic Work’, Chicago Review, 55.1 (2010), 126–57; and of several critics who have investigated the issue of metre, recitation and plagiarism in ‘Christabel’: Celeste Langan, ‘Understanding media in 1805: Audiovisual hallucination in The Lay of the Last Minstrel’, SiR, 40 (2001), 49–70; Peter J. Manning, ‘“The birthday of typography”: A response to Celeste Langan’, SiR, 40 (2001), 71–84; Margaret Russett, ‘Meter, Identity, Voice: Untranslating “Christabel”’, SEL, 43.4 (2003), 773–97. 8 See Angela Esterhammer, Romantic Performative: Language and Action in English and German Romanticism (Stanford, 2000), pp. 144–86. 9 Lucy Newlyn, Reading, Writing and Romanticism: The Anxiety of Reception (Oxford, 2000), pp. 338–9, 369–70. As Newlyn points out, Hazlitt implied that Coleridge’s poetics of enchantment, delivered via a chanting performance-style, was mystificatory and obscurantist – an anti-democratic practice that rendered poetic meaning the preserve of an initiated few and that was aligned with the pro-establishment politics and Anglican apologetics of the later Coleridge. 10 Francis Jeffrey, review of Thalaba the Destroyer, Edinburgh Review, 1 (October, 1802), 63–83, in Robert Southey: the Critical Heritage, ed. Lionel Madden (London and Boston, 1972), p. 71. 11 S.T. Coleridge, Table Talk, ed. Carl Woodring, 2 vols. (Princeton and London, 1991), i, p. 273. 12 On this see Jennifer Ford, Coleridge on Dreaming: Romanticism, Dreams and the Medical Imagination (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 33–55. 13 On reverie as the state produced by poetic recitation, see Perkins, ‘Romantic Reading as Revery’, ERR, 4 (1994), 183–99 and John Beer, Coleridge’s Poetic Intelligence (London and Basingstoke, 1977), pp. 75, 196, 283. 14 For Coleridge’s views on mesmerism’s modus operandi see my ‘Conducting the Vital Fluid: The Politics and Poetics of Mesmerism in the 1790s’, SiR, 43 (2004), 57–78.

Notes to pages 124–132

291

15 Cf. the comment on the poem by Anne C. Macarthy: ‘Holding back the movements of judgment and doubt, the willing suspension of disbelief is equally a giving-over of the self without limit or expectation to an experience of possibility’. Macarthy, ‘“Christabel”, the Sublime, and the Willing Suspension of Disbelief’, in The Sublime and Education, ed. J. Jennifer Jones, Romantic Circles Praxis Series (August 2010), http://romantic.arhu.umd.edu/ praxis/sublime_education/mccarthy/mccarthy.html. Accessed 5 August 2012. See also Michael Tomko, ‘Politics, Performance, and Coleridge’s “Suspension of Disbelief”’, Victorian Studies, 49 (2007), 241–9. 16 The origins of Coleridge’s chanted performance style lay in the eighteenthcentury revival of folk poetry. This revival led to discussions of oral delivery by collectors and aestheticians, including Hugh Blair and James Beattie, and to the related mythologisation of oral poetry by pseudo-medieval poets Ossian and Rowley. On the revival of, and the disputes about, medieval performance styles, see Nick Groom, The Making of Percy’s Reliques (Oxford, 1999) and Maureen Maclane, Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British Romantic Poetry (Cambridge, 2008). On Ossianic bards, see Fiona Stafford, The Last of the Race: The Growth of a Myth from Milton to Darwin (Oxford, 1994). On Scott’s development of some of these motifs, see Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton, 1998). 17 All citations are from the Woodstock facsimile reprint, introduced by Jonathan Wordsworth (Oxford and New York, 1991). 18 See Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire (Cambridge, 1993); Neil Vickers, Coleridge and the Doctors, 1795–1806 (Oxford, 2004); Gavin Budge, ‘Erasmus Darwin and the Poetics of William Wordsworth: “Excitement without the Application of Gross and Violent Stimulants”’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 30.2 (2007), 279–308. 19 WLB, pp. 744, 747. 20 Damian Walford Davies, ‘Romantic Hydrography: Tide and Transit in “Tintern Abbey”’, in English Romantic Writers and the West Country, ed. Nicholas Roe (Basingstoke, 2010), pp. 218–36. 21 On Hunter and suspended animation see Robert Mitchell, ‘Suspended Animation, Slow Time, and the Poetics of Trance’, PMLA, 126.1 (2011), 107–22. On Hunter and the theories of life set out, in his name, by his pupils, see Wendy Moore, The Knife Man: Blood, Body-snatching and the Birth of Modern Surgery (New York, 2005); on Coleridge’s response to these see Trevor H. Levere, Poetry Realized in Nature: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Early Nineteenth-Century Science (Cambridge, 1981). 22 See note 2 above. 23 Hazlitt’s comment appeared in his essay My First Acquaintance with Poets. See William Hazlitt, The Complete Works, ed. P.P. Howe, 21 vols. (London, 1933), xvii, pp. 118–19; ‘song’ John Payne Collier, quoted in Lects 1808–19, ii, p. 476. 24 John Payne Collier, quoted in Lects 1808–19, ii, p. 477.

292

Notes to pages 132–143

25 Leigh Hunt, Lord Byron and Some of his Contemporaries (London, 1828), p. 304. 26 Letter of 16 April 1816, The Letters of Charles and Mary Anne Lamb, ed. Edwin J. Marrs, 3 vols. (Ithaca, 1975–8), iii, p. 215. 27 On this chain see Chris Koenig-Woodyard, ‘A Hypertext History of the Transmission of Coleridge’s “Christabel”, 1800–1816’, Romanticism on the Net, 10 (May 1998), www.erudit.org/revue/ron/1998/v/n10/005806ar.html. Accessed 11 August 2012. 28 The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, vol. i, The Early Years, 1787–1805 (Oxford, 1967), p. 633. 29 From Scott’s 1830 Introduction to the Lay of the Last Minstrel, in the Poetical Works of Sir Walter Scott, ed. John Gibson Lockhart, 12 vols. (Edinburgh, 1833–4), vi. 30 On Scott’s poem as a print substitute for the oral, performed verse tale that internalises, in the silent reader’s consciousness, the effects of recitation, see Langan, ‘Understanding media in 1805: Audiovisual hallucination in The Lay of the Last Minstrel’. 31 On this, see Langan, ‘Understanding media in 1805: Audiovisual hallucination in The Lay of the Last Minstrel’, and Manning, ‘“The Birthday of Typography”: A Response to Celeste Langan’. 32 Brendan O’Donnell, ‘The “Invention” of a Meter: “Christabel” Meter as Fact and Fiction’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 100.4 (2001), 511–36. 33 Janowitz, ‘Coleridge’s 1816 Volume: Fragment as Rubric’, 33. 34 Ewan Jones, ‘The Philosophy of Poetic Form in the Work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’, Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2011, p. 77. 35 Langan, ‘Understanding media in 1805: Audiovisual hallucination in The Lay of the Last Minstrel’; Russett, ‘Meter, Identity, Voice: Untranslating “Christabel”’. 36 As Tilar J. Mazzeo shows, the latter case was generally not considered plagiarism. See her Plagiarism and Literary Property in the Romantic Period (Philadelphia, 2007). 37 Lines 28–9 added to ‘The Aeolian Harp’ in advance of its republication in Sibylline Leaves (1817). 38 On this doubling, see Susan Eilenberg, Strange Power of Speech: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Literary Possession (New York and Oxford, 1992). 39 J.C.C. Mays, ‘The Later Poetry’, in The Cambridge Companion to Coleridge, ed. Newlyn (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 89–102 (p. 94). 40 A remark of 20 October 1811, made to Henry Crabb Robinson. See Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Lamb, etc. Being Selections from the Remains of Henry Crabb Robinson (Manchester and London, 1922), p. 44. 41 For a powerful modern reading of the poems as allegories of the poet see A.J. Harding, ‘Mythopoesis: The Unity of “Christabel”’, in Coleridge’s Imagination: Essays in Memory of Pete Laver, eds. Richard Gravil, Newlyn and Roe (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 210–17.

Notes to pages 143–155

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42 On language and the mark of shame in the poem see Richard A. Rand, ‘Geraldine,’ Glyph, 3 (1978), 74–97 and also Karen Swann, ‘“Christabel”: The Wandering Mother and the Enigma of Form’, SiR, 23 (1984), 533–53 (p. 541). 43 William Hazlitt, review in The Examiner, 2 June 1816, 348–9, reprinted in S.T. Coleridge: the Critical Heritage, ed. J.R. de J. Jackson (London, 1970), pp. 205–9 (p. 207). 44 Anonymous reviews of ‘Christabel’ in the Anti-Jacobin, NS 1 (July 1816), 632– 6, reprinted in Coleridge: the Critical Heritage, pp. 217–21 (p. 217); the Edinburgh Review, 27 (1816), 58–67 (p. 66). 45 See John Barrell’s essay on this gendering of style; ‘Masters of Suspense’, in his Poetry, Language and Politics (Manchester, 1988), pp. 44–78. 46 Review in the Monthly Review, 82 (January 1817), 22–5, reprinted in Coleridge: the Critical Heritage, pp. 244–7 (p. 247). 47 Cited in Newlyn, Reading, Writing, Romanticism, p. 346. My discussion of Priestley, Burgh and Hazlitt is indebted to Newlyn’s persuasive arguments, pp. 338–70. 48 Cited in Newlyn, Reading, Writing, Romanticism, p. 343. 49 Ibid., p. 370. 50 On the legalism of Jeffrey’s Edinburgh criticism, see Mark Schoenfield, Law, Labor and the Poet’s Contract: The Professional Wordsworth (Athens GA, 1996), pp. 207–11.

4 . t h e l an g u a g e o f l o v e in t h e l at e c o l e r i d g e 1 Matthew Sangster, ‘“You have not advertised out of it”: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Francis Jeffrey on Authorship, Networks and Personalities’, RaVon (2013), forthcoming. 2 John Beer, Romantic Influences: Contemporary – Victorian – Modern (Basingstoke and London, 1993). 3 See the Literary Gazette, 26 July 1817, 49–50, in Coleridge: the Critical Heritage, ed. J.R. de J. Jackson (London, 1970), p. 380. 4 Review in the Monthly Review, 88 (January 1819), 24–38, in Coleridge: the Critical Heritage, pp. 399–412 (pp. 400–1). 5 I am guided by a number of scholarly discussions of the annuals, detailed in notes 7, 19, 20, 23–7 below. Helpful general discussions of print culture in the 1820s include Lee Erickson, The Economy of Literary Form: English Literature and the Industrialization of Publishing, 1800–1850 (Baltimore and London, 1996) and Andrew Piper, Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age (Chicago, 2009). 6 ‘On Reading Coleridge’s Epitaph, Written by Himself’. In The Works of Mrs Hemans, 7 vols. (Edinburgh and London, 1839), vii, 272. 7 For L.E.L.’s ‘obsessive focus on romantic love, telling the “same sad tale” repeatedly’ see Glennis Stephenson, ‘Letitia Landon and the Victorian Improvisatrice: the Construction of L.E.L.’, Victorian Poetry, 30 (Spring, 1992), 1–17 (p. 11).

294

Notes to pages 155–160

8 On the production of L.E.L. the passionate poet and on the life of Landon, see Stephenson, Letitia Landon: The Woman Behind L.E.L. (New York and Manchester, 1995). For recent evidence showing that Landon bore Jerdan children, see William St Clair, The Door of No Return: The History of Cape Coast Castle and the Atlantic Slave Trade (London, 2006), p. 171. 9 Literary Gazette, 389–90 (3–10 July 1824), 417–20 (p. 417). 10 See Alaric Watts, in The Literary Magnet, 2 (1824), 106–9 (p. 108). Cf. comments in the Gentleman’s Magazine, 94 (1824), 61–3 (p. 62) on her ‘passionate intensity of sentiment’ and in the New Monthly Magazine, 12 (1824), 365–6 (p. 365) on her ‘ardent and impassioned feeling’. 11 The Improvisatrice and Other Poems (London, 1824), p. 3. 12 ‘Dejection: an Ode’, ll. 67–8. CPW, i, part ii, pp. 699–700. 13 L.E.L.’s lines, ‘And some who waste their lives to find/ A prize which they may never win:/ Like those who search for Irem’s groves,/ Which found, they may not enter in’ derive from Southey’s description of the illusory garden of Irem in Book i of his poem. 14 On Landon’s always-already-lost heroines, see Jerome J. McGann, The Poetics of Sensibility (Oxford, 1996), pp. 143–9. 15 The Improvisatrice, pp. 15–16. 16 William Hazlitt, review in The Examiner, 2 June 1816, 348–9, reprinted in Coleridge: the Critical Heritage, pp. 205–9 (p. 207). 17 J.C.C. Mays, ‘Coleridge’s “Love”: “All he can manage, more than he could”’, in Coleridge’s Visionary Languages, eds. Tim Fulford and Morton D. Paley (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 49–66 (p. 58). 18 Westminster Review, 7 (January 1827), 50–67, reprinted in Letitia Elizabeth Landon: Selected Writings, eds. McGann and Daniel Riess (Peterborough, Ontario, 1997), pp. 304–5. 19 On Coleridge’s literary relations with women, see Anya Taylor, ‘Coleridge, Wollstonecraft, and the Rights of Woman’, in Coleridge’s Visionary Languages, pp. 83–99. Less favourable verdicts on Coleridge’s support of educated intellectual women are given by H.J. Jackson, ‘Coleridge’s Women, or Girls, Girls, Girls are Made to Love’, SiR, 32.4 (Winter, 1993), 577–600 and Anne K. Mellor, ‘Coleridge and the Question of Female Talents’, Romanticism, 8.2 (2002), 115–30. 20 ‘The Annuals of Former Days’, The Bookseller, 1 (29 November 1858), 498. Cited in ‘L.E.L.’s “Verses” and The Keepsake for 1829’, eds. Terence Hoagwood, Kathryn Ledbetter and Martin M. Jacobsen. Romantic Circles Electronic Edition, www.rc.umd.edu/editions/lel/index.html. Accessed 12 July 2012. 21 ‘Strictures on Art and Exhibitions’, Fraser’s Magazine (August 1830), 94. Cited in ‘L.E.L.’s “Verses” and The Keepsake for 1829’, Introduction. 22 The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, The Later Years, 4 vols., 2nd edn, rev. Alan G. Hill (Oxford, 1978–88), iii, p. 580. 23 On the importance of engravings to the production and marketing of the annuals, see Ledbetter, ‘White Vellum and Gilt Edges: Imaging The Keepsake’, Studies in the Literary Imagination, 30.1 (Spring 1997), 35–50.

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24 Southey to Allan Cunningham, 21 December 1828, SLC, v, p. 339. 25 As pointed out by Taylor, ‘Romantic Improvvisatori: Coleridge, L.E.L., and the Difficulties of Loving’, Philological Quarterly, 79 (2000), 501–22 (p. 501). I am indebted to this valuable article. 26 On Wordsworth in Heath’s annual, see Peter J. Manning, ‘Wordsworth in the Keepsake, 1829’, in Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century British Publishing and Reading Practices, eds. John O. Jordan and Robert C. Patten (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 44–73. 27 In all he published over twenty poems in annuals, as Paley shows in ‘Coleridge and the Annuals’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 57.1 (Winter, 1994), 1–24. I am indebted to Paley’s article throughout my discussion. 28 Cited in Paley, ‘Coleridge and the Annuals’, 2. My italics. 29 Angela Esterhammer discusses the poems in the context of the Italian improvising poets who became fashionable in the 1820s: see her ‘Coleridge’s “The Improvisatore”: Poetry, Performance, and Remediation’, The Wordsworth Circle, 42.2 (2011), 122–8. 30 Peter Larkin, Wordsworth and Coleridge: Promising Losses (New York, 2012), p. 163. 31 From his poem ‘Know thyself’ (CPW, i, part ii, p. 1154, l. 10). 32 Letitia Elizabeth Landon: Selected Writings, p. 12. 33 Derek Furr, ‘The Perfect Match: Wordsworth’s “The Triad” and Coleridge’s “The Garden of Boccacio” in Context’, Romantic Textualities: Literature and Print Culture, 1780–1840, 15 (Winter 2005), http://www.romtext.cf.ac.uk//articles/ rt15_n03.pdf. Accessed 17 July 2012. 34 Esterhammer, ‘Coleridge, Sgricci, and the Shows of London: Improvising in Print and Performance’, in Dante and Italy in British Romanticism, eds. F. Burwick and P. Douglass (New York, 2011), pp. 143–59. 35 The Poetical Works of S.T. Coleridge, 3 vols. (London, 1829), ii, p. 135. 36 Paley, Coleridge’s Later Poetry (Oxford, 1996), p.1. 37 The image of the blind Arab, repeated in 1833 in ‘Love’s Apparition and Evanishment’, is related to the 1797 text (also reworked in 1828 for publication), ‘The Wanderings of Cain’. On pet names for Sara, see George Whalley, Coleridge and Sara Hutchinson (Toronto, 1955), p. 39. 38 On Coleridge’s erotic life, and his self-conscious reflections upon it, see Taylor, Erotic Coleridge: Women, Love, and the Law Against Divorce (Basingstoke and New York, 2005). 39 The Statesman’s Manual, in S.T. Coleridge, Lay Sermons, ed. R.J. White (London and Princeton, 1972), p. 30. 40 I take the text from CPW (1828), ii, pp. 97–101. See also CPW, ii, part ii, pp. 1021–26 for the text collated against manuscript versions. 41 Coleridge’s source for the Linnaean anecdote was probably James Edward Smith’s translation of Linnaeus’s A Dissertation on the Sexes of Plants (London, 1786), a work in which Linnaeus humorously personifies plant reproduction in terms of human sexual relations: he recommends, for instance, ‘the production of new species of vegetables by scattering the pollen of various plants over various widowed females’ (p. 57).

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42 Hyman Hurwitz, Hebrew Tales (London, 1826), pp. 93–4. On Hurwitz and Romanticism, see Judith W. Page, ‘Hyman Hurwitz’s Hebrew Tales (1826): Redeeming the Talmudic Garden’, in British Romanticism and the Jews: History, Culture, Literature, ed. Sheila A. Spector (New York, 2002), pp. 197–213. Also Karen Weisman, ‘Mourning, translation, pastoral: Hyman Hurwitz and literary authority’, in Romanticism/Judaica, ed. Spector (Aldershot and Burlington, 2011), pp. 45–57. 43 On ancient Hebrew tradition in Coleridge’s later thought, see E.S. Shaffer, Kubla Khan and the Fall of Jerusalem: The Mythological School in Biblical Criticism and Secular Literature 1770–1880 (Cambridge, 1980), Nigel Leask, The Politics of Imagination in Coleridge’s Critical Thought (Basingstoke, 1988) and my own ‘Coleridge and the Wisdom Tradition’, The Wordsworth Circle, 22 (1991), 75–82. 44 Susan J. Wolfson, Borderlines: The Shiftings of Gender in British Romanticism (Stanford, 2006), p. 288. Strangely, Wolfson omits Woolf’s praise of Coleridge, and the fact that Woolf derives her ideal of androgynous style from him. On Coleridge’s ideas about androgyny and gender in language, see Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London, 1929), John Barrell, Poetry, Language and Politics (Manchester, 1988). On the limitations of maleconstructed androgyny in Romanticism, see Diane Long Hoeveler, Romantic Androgyny: The Women Within (University Park PA, 1990); a less acerbic view appears in Jean Watson, ‘Coleridge’s Androgynous Ideal’, Prose Studies, 6 (1983), 36–56. 45 CN, iv, 4551. I am grateful to Anthony J. Harding for the suggestion that the air within the balloon represents femininity dwelling in the male, which, by itself, is unshaped and dispersed. 46 The Philosophical Lectures of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn (London, 1949), p. 115. 47 Aids to Reflection, ed. Beer (London and Princeton, 1993), pp. 186–7. 48 The concluding stanzas had been published by Coleridge as such in The New Times in 1818 as an adaptation from a medieval German poem.

introduction to part iii 1 See Sally Bushell, Re-reading ‘The Excursion’: Narrative, Response and the Wordsworthian Dramatic Voice (Aldershot and Burlington, 2002); Alison Hickey, Impure Conceits: Rhetoric and Ideology in Wordsworth’s ‘Excursion’ (Stanford, 1997); James K. Chandler, ‘“Wordsworth” after Waterloo’, in The Age of William Wordsworth, eds. Kenneth R. Johnston and Gene W. Ruoff (New Brunswick NJ, 1987), pp. 84–111. 2 Francis Jeffrey’s review of Wordsworth’s Poems, in Two Volumes, Edinburgh Review, 11 (October 1807), 214–31. 3 Jeffrey’s review of Wordsworth’s The Excursion, Edinburgh Review, 24 (November 1814), 1–30, reprinted in William Wordsworth: the Critical Heritage: Volume I, 1793–1820, ed. Robert Woof (London, 2001), pp. 381–404.

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4 The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years, 1787–1805, 2nd edn, rev. Chester L. Shaver (Oxford, 1967), pp. 432–4. 5 On Jeffrey’s attacks and Wordsworth’s responses see W.J.B. Owen, ‘Wordsworth and Jeffrey in collaboration’, Review of English Studies, 15 (1964), 161–7. 6 See Jonathan Bate, ‘The Literature of Power: Coleridge and De Quincey’, in Coleridge’s Visionary Languages, eds. Tim Fulford and Morton D. Paley (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 137–50. 7 See Sarah M. Zimmerman, Romanticism, Lyricism and History (Albany, 1999), pp. 76–84 on the Essay and Jeffrey. See Scott Hess, Authoring the Self: SelfRepresentation, Authorship, and the Print Market in British Poetry from Pope through Wordsworth (New York and London, 2005), pp. 220–33 on Wordsworth’s ambivalent relationship to this market – which he criticised while campaigning for an extension of authors’ property rights so as to increase his writings’ market value. 8 On this heritagisation, see James M. Garrett, Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation (Aldershot and Burlington, 2008). Garrett develops the arguments of Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983). 9 Peter J. Manning, Reading Romantics: Texts and Contexts (Oxford, 1990). Stephen Gill, Wordsworth and the Victorians (Oxford, 1998). 10 Tim Burke, ‘Lord Lonsdale and His Protégés: William Wordsworth and John Hardie’, Criticism, 47 (2005), 515–29. 11 Gill, ‘Wordsworth and the River Duddon’, Essays in Criticism, 57.1 (2007), 22–41. 12 In essays collected in Geoffrey Hartman, The Unremarkable Wordsworth (Minneapolis, 1987). On paternalism, see also Philip Shaw, ‘Wordsworth’s “Dread Voice”: Dora, Ovid and the Later Poetry’, Romanticism, 8.1 (2002), 34–48. 13 Peter Larkin, ‘Wordsworth’s “After-Sojourn”: Revision and Unself-Rivalry in the Later Poetry’, SiR, 20 (1981), 409–36 (p. 431). 14 Ibid., p. 426. 15 William H. Galperin, Revision and Authority in Wordsworth: The Interpretation of a Career (Philadelphia, 1989); Susan J. Wolfson, Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in English Romanticism (Stanford, 1996). 16 See Robin Jarvis, ‘Shades of Milton: Wordsworth at Vallombrosa’, SiR, 25 (1986), 483–504 (p. 489). 17 Eugene L. Stelzig, ‘Mutability, Ageing and Permanence in Wordsworth’s Later Poetry’, SEL, 19 (1979), 623–44.

5. naming the a byss 1 Thus, as Stephen Gill shows, in 1820 when the The River Duddon, a Series of Sonnets was published, the Literary Chronicle and Weekly Review declared ‘[n]othing is more natural than that a Lake poet should select a river for the subject of his muse; but what a name and what a river for inspiring a poet’s

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imagination, Duddon!’ The river was ‘insignificant’ with a ‘barbarous name’. The Eclectic Review thought the name not so much ‘barbarous’ as ‘ludicrous’. The Monthly Review wrote of ‘the name of Duddon’ that ‘if there really is no more than meets the ear, we own that we are not greatly struck with its poetical effect’. From William Wordsworth: The Critical Heritage, 1793–1820, ed. Robert Woof (London, 2002), pp. 767, 772, 792. Gill, ‘Wordsworth and The River Duddon’, Essays in Criticism, 57.1 (2007), 22–41 (p. 24). 2 For Geoffrey Hartman, in The Unremarkable Wordsworth (Minneapolis, 1987), Wordsworth finds an unlocated voice as he recoils from materiality into his own mind. Nature returns him to himself and to a primal, creating word that both it and he depend upon, but that only he, as its prophet, can utter, if he can but make it his own. For Paul De Man and for Cynthia Chase, the abyss takes the form of death, and it is this that Wordsworth faces: the cold inanimate otherness that is defigured by its very figuration. Countering this, largely Yale, tradition of criticism is a mostly English school in which Wordsworth is interrogated in terms of the political discourses and social practices that constituted ‘nature’ in his work and his era. Raymond Williams’s and John Barrell’s work on the politics of landscape, Nicholas Roe’s on radical and scientific understandings of nature, and Jonathan Bate’s ‘ecological’ criticism present nature differently from each other, but have in common an insistence that it should not be critically disposed of as an otherness that is an effect of the process of figuration. Nor should it be treated as a displacement of a more serious matter – history – as if Wordsworth wrote about rocks and stones and trees as an escape from ‘real’ issues such as revolution in France and reform in parliament. See De Man, ‘Time and History in Wordsworth’, in Romanticism, ed. Chase (London, 1993), pp. 55–77, Williams, The Country and the City (London, 1973), Barrell, English Literature in History. 1730–80: an Equal, Wide Survey (London, 1983), Roe, The Politics of Nature: Wordsworth and Some Contemporaries (Basingstoke, 1992), Bate, Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (London, 1991). The tensions between Hartmaninspired formalism and New Historicist materialism in Wordsworthian criticism are summarised in Paul H. Fry, ‘Green to the Very Door? The Natural Wordsworth’, in The Wordsworthian Enlightenment: Romantic Poetry and the Ecology of Reading, eds. Helen Regueiro Elam and Frances Ferguson (Baltimore, 2005), 97–111 (p. 98). 3 I do not mean ‘material’ purely as used within deconstruction to refer to the materiality of language – to the sounds and shapes of letters and words – differentiation between which produces signification. The deconstructive argument that the poem uncovers its own implication in the materiality of language, while it reminds us that language is an independent signifying system, tends to make any extra-linguistic world a pale shadow of language’s own différance. 4 Here my approach is in dialogue with that of Alexander Regier, who argues that ‘Wordsworth positions language as a medium which lies between the material and the immaterial’ and theorises ‘a poetic principle of

Notes to pages 206–210

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non-resolution’ of language’s ideal and material affiliations. Regier, ‘Words Worth Repeating: Language and Repetition in Wordsworth’s Poetic Theory’, in Wordsworth’s Poetic Theory: Knowledge, Language, Experience, eds. Regier and Stefan H. Uhlig (Basingstoke, 2010), pp. 61–80 (p. 61). See De Man, ‘Autobiography as De-facement’, Modern Language Notes, 94 (1979), 919–30. Critics influenced by De Man include Chase, Decomposing Figures: Rhetorical Readings in the Romantic Tradition (Baltimore, 1986) and Mary Jacobus, Romanticism, Writing and Sexual Difference (Oxford, 1989). See also Michael Rifaterre, ‘Interpretation and Descriptive Poetry’, New Literary History, 4 (1973), 229–57, for the argument that the apparent referentiality of the proper names in Wordsworth’s poems is an effect of the poem’s syntactical structure: hence ‘Yew Trees’ will be no less evocative to readers unaware of the historical Agincourt than it is to those who have been educated about the battle: ‘a poem is self-sufficient. As for place names, the text is all you need to understand the historical allusions: “drew their sounding bows” suffices to make “Azincour” a battle’ (p. 232). Hartman considers this apostrophe, from the sonnet ‘To the Torrent at the Devil’s Bridge, North Wales, 1824’ in The Unremarkable Wordsworth, pp. 75–89. See Bate, Romantic Ecology, p. 98; Tony Pinkney, ‘Naming Places: Wordsworth and the Possibilities of Eco-criticism’, in News from Nowhere: Theory and Politics of Romanticism: Romanticism Theory and Gender, eds. Pinkney, Keith Hanley and Fred Botting (Keele, 1995), 41–66 (p. 59). WLB, pp. 244–6. For Romantic-era views about the Druids see the discussion in Chapter 6. On Wordsworth’s elaboration of a special usage invested with emotional weight – an idiolect, see Hugh Sykes Davies, Wordsworth and the Worth of Words (Cambridge, 1986). No meaning other than to a learned etymologist, and, as Wordsworth joked, even etymology was often a guess made in response to the features of the spot: ‘Many years ago, when I was at Greta Bridge, in Yorkshire, the hostess of the inn, proud of her skill in etymology, said, that “the name of the river was taken from the bridge, the form of which, as every one must notice, exactly resembled a great A.” Dr. Whitaker has derived it from the word of common occurrence in the north of England, “to greet;” signifying to lament aloud, mostly with weeping; a conjecture rendered more probable from the stony and rocky channel of both the Cumberland and Yorkshire rivers.’ Note to the sonnet ‘To the River Greta, near Keswick’ from Poems Composed or Suggested during a Tour in the Summer of 1833, in Sonnet Series and Itinerary Poems 1820– 1845, ed. Geoffrey Jackson (Ithaca, 2004), p. 633. See The Thirteen-Book Prelude, ed. Mark L. Reed, 2 vols. (Ithaca and London, 1991). Poems by William Wordsworth: Including Lyrical Ballads, and the Miscellaneous Pieces of the Author. With Additional Poems, a New Preface, and a Supplementary Essay, 2 vols. (London, 1815). I take the text from Poems, in Two Volumes,

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and Other Poems, 1800–1807, ed. Jared Curtis (Ithaca and London, 1983), pp. 605–6. Steven Knapp, Personification and the Sublime (Cambridge MA, 1985), p. 123; Theresa M. Kelley, Wordsworth’s Revisionary Aesthetics (Cambridge, 1988), p. 165. See also Hartman, The Unremarkable Wordsworth, p. 150. R.P. Graves, quoted in Christopher Wordsworth, Memoirs of William Wordsworth, 2 vols. (London, 1851), ii, p. 480. Coleridge as reported by Hazlitt in ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’, in The Complete Works, ed. P.P. Howe, 21 vols. (London, 1933), xvii, p. 117. See Gene Ruoff, ‘Wordsworth’s “Yew-Trees” and Romantic Perception’, Modern Language Quarterly, 34 (1973), 146–60 and my own Landscape, Liberty and Authority: Poetry, Criticism and Politics from Thomson to Wordsworth (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 196–208. Cf. Hartman’s reply, noting the double affiliation of the poem’s lexis to unity and ‘yewnity’, to Rifaterre’s analysis of the poem as almost entirely a selfreferential, self-consuming poemfact. Hartman, The Unremarkable Wordsworth, pp. 129–51, responding to Rifaterre, ‘Interpretation and Descriptive Poetry’. Wordsworth delineates the process occurring here in ll. 26–30 of ‘Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shower’ (1798): ‘She shall lean her ear/ In many a secret place/ Where rivulets dance their wayward round,/ And beauty born of murmuring sound/ Shall pass into her face.’ For an incisive analysis of the import of ‘murmuring’ and sonic transfers see J.H. Prynne, Field Notes: ‘The Solitary Reaper’ and Others (Cambridge, 2007), p. 75, where he writes of ‘Nutting’, ‘murmur reduplicates itself in performative echo . . . but it will not tell anyone “what” the river sings, because it represents the auricular presence of sound; when and if it stops this must prefigure the end of natural being, the end of life itself as intimating the limit-span of human action and memory’. WLB, pp. 743–4. On Wordsworth’s language theory and its progenitors, especially Herder and Horne Tooke, see James C. McKusick, Coleridge’s Philosophy of Language (New Haven, 1986), Stephen K. Land, From Signs to Propositions: the Concept of Form in Eighteenth-Century Semantic Theory (London, 1974), Alan Richardson, British Romanticism and the Science of Mind (Cambridge and New York, 2001) and Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language 1791–1819 (Oxford, 1984). Wordsworth, A Description of the Scenery of the Lakes in the North of England (London, 1822), pp. 64–5. Later editions were retitled A Guide through the District of the Lakes (Guide). A remark of 20 October 1811, made to Henry Crabb Robinson. See Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Lamb, etc. Being Selections from the Remains of Henry Crabb Robinson (Manchester and London, 1922), p. 44. Letter of 16 January 1805, The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years, 1787–1805, 2nd edn, rev. Chester L. Shaver (Oxford, 1967), p. 530. In Poems in Two Volumes, ed. Curtis.

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27 Cf. the note on the name Blencathra in this poem: ‘It is imagined by the people of the Country that there are two immortal Fish, inhabitants of this Tarn, which lies in the mountains not far from Threlkeld – Blencathara, mentioned before, is the old and proper name of the mountain vulgarly called Saddle-back.’ In Poems in Two Volumes, ed. Curtis, p. 427. 28 Letter to Walter Scott of 18 January 1808, The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth. The Middle Years. Part i, 1806–1811, rev. Mary Moorman (Oxford, 1969), p. 192. 29 The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, eds. W.J.B. Owen and Jane W. Smyser, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1974), iii, p. 62. Henceforth W Prose. 30 Ibid.; Jeffrey’s response appeared in Edinburgh Review, 25 (October 1815), 355–63. It is reprinted in Wordsworth: the Critical Heritage, pp. 539–48 (p. 539). 31 Letter to a Friend of Robert Burns, W Prose, iii, pp. 127–28. 32 John Wilson, Edinburgh Monthly Magazine [later Blackwood’s], 1 (June, 1817), 265. Cited in Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life (Oxford, 1989), p. 306. 33 Letter of 3 August 1808 to Thomas Southey; letter 148 of SL. 34 Letters from England, by Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella, translated from the Spanish, 3 vols. (London, 1807), ii, p. 212. 35 From Wordsworth’s letter on the Kendal and Windermere Railway, to the Editor of the Morning Post, 9 December 1844. In W Prose, iii, p. 346. 36 2 vols. (Kendal, 1819). 37 Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life, p. 333. 38 Wordsworth’s note to the sonnet ‘Return: Seathwaite Chapel’, Sonnet Series and Itinerary Poems, pp. 86–98 (p. 86). 39 WSP, pp. 221–2. Ketcham argues for an 1816 date, but accepts that the poem may have been written as late as 1819. 40 The River Duddon, a Series of Sonnets: Vaudracour and Julia: and Other Poems. To which is Annexed, a Topographical Description of the Country of the Lakes, in the North of England (London, 1820), p. 214. 41 A Concise Description of the English Lakes and Ancient Mountains, 2nd edn (Keswick, 1825), p. 50. 42 A Concise Description of the English Lakes, pp. 53–4. 43 On this see Julia Sandstrom Carlson, ‘Topographical Measures: Wordsworth’s and Crosthwaite’s Lines on the Lake District’, Romanticism, 16.1 (2010), 72–93. 44 The two Black Comb poems were first published in WSP 1815. See pp. 97–100. 45 Wordsworth’s note appeared in notes of his conversation taken by Isabella Fenwick. It is cited in WSP, p. 518. 46 W Prose, ii, pp. 240–51 (245). 47 W Prose, ii, pp. 251–3. Cf. WSP, pp. 248–51. 48 Cited in Gill, William Wordsworth: a Life, p. 335. In the British Review, 16 (September 1820), 47, 49 (‘exquisite’ and ‘beautiful’) and the British Critic, 2nd series 15 (February 1821), 134 (‘beautiful’). 49 Eclectic Review, 2nd series 14 (August 1820), 170–84.

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50 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 7 (May 1820), 206–13. The review is reprinted in Wordsworth: the Critical Heritage, p. 757. 51 European Magazine, 77 (June 1820), 523; in Wordsworth: the Critical Heritage, p. 765. 52 See The Fenwick Notes of William Wordsworth, ed. Curtis (London, 1993), p. 13. 53 See Susan J. Wolfson’s attentive analysis of the sound effects of these lines: ‘Sounding Romantic: The Sound of Sound’, in ‘“Soundings of Things Done”: The Poetry and Poetics of Sound in the Romantic Ear and Era’, Romantic Circles Praxis, April 2008, http://romantic.arhu.umd.edu/praxis/soundings/ wolfson/wolfson.html. Accessed 4 August 2012. 54 William Wordsworth, Last Poems, 1821–1850, ed. Curtis (Ithaca and London, 1999), p. 40. The poem was published in 1827. 55 For Jacques Derrida that unique unsubstitutability is a language-created illusion: the name can only come to mean by its ‘functioning within a system of differences, within a writing retaining the traces of difference’. Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore and London, 1976), pp. 108–9. 56 On the roles, implicit and explicit, given to writing in Wordsworth’s poetic texts see Andrew Bennett, Wordsworth Writing (Cambridge, 2007). 57 Last Poems, p. 116 (the text of the poem occupies pp. 116–24). 58 As James Chandler puts it, ‘it is as if Wordsworth, with a kind of redundant reflexivity, were recomposing the straggling sounds of his earlier work into a sanctioned order, thus legitimating at once the soundness of its poetic principle and the principle of its poetic sound. [. . .] Through the double-sided sound capacities of poetry (and indeed of language) – its capacity both to be sounded and to refer to sound – the poem thus seems to suggest two conclusions: first, that the pre-semantic sounds of the world are made meaningful by their being semantically distinguished in such words as roar, bleat, shout; second, that when these words are themselves brought into the formal sound pattern of a poem’s distinctive music, they can be “heard” as constituting yet another kind of order: let’s call this musical order “post-semantic”’. ‘The “Power of Sound” and the Great Scheme of Things: Wordsworth Listens to Wordsworth’, in ‘“Soundings of Things Done”: The Poetry and Poetics of Sound in the Romantic Ear and Era’, ed. Wolfson, Romantic Circles Praxis, April 2008, www.rc.umd. edu/praxis/soundings/. Accessed 10 December 2012. 59 On this aspect of the poem, and of Wordsworth’s late poetry more generally, see the incisive essay by Philip Shaw, ‘Wordsworth’s “Dread Voice”: Ovid, Dora, and the Later Poetry’, Romanticism, 8.1 (2002), 34–48. 60 In The Fenwick Notes of William Wordsworth, p. 74. 61 Owen dates the revisions as most likely being 1832 or 1838. 62 Wordsworth, Last Poems, pp. 389–90. 63 John Hutton, A Tour to the Caves in the Environs of Ingleborough and Settle (London and Kendal, 1780), pp. 14–18 (reprinted in later editions of West,

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A Guide to the Lakes), Thomas Langdale, Topographical Dictionary of Yorkshire (Northallerton, 1822), William Westall, Views of the Caves near Ingleton, Gordale Scar and Malham Cove (London, 1818). 64 Black’s Picturesque Guide to the English Lakes, 5th edn (Edinburgh, 1850), p. xi. 65 Ibid., p. xix. 66 On the significance of the inclusion of Wordsworth’s blank verse in popular guidebooks, see Carlson, ‘Prose Mesurée in the Lakes Tour and Guide: Quoting and Recalibrating English Blank Verse’, ERR, 20.2 (2009), 227–36.

6 . pi c t u ri n g t h e p r e h i s t o r i c 1 In offering this picture of a late Wordsworth able to explore his conflicted poetic relationship to gender I aim to develop the nuanced discussion of gender in his early work given by Judith W. Page, Wordsworth and the Cultivation of Women (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1994), Lucy Newlyn, ‘Dorothy Wordsworth’s Experimental Style’, Essays in Criticism, 57.4 (2007), 325–49, and Susan J. Wolfson, Romantic Interactions: Social Being and the Turns of Literary Action (Baltimore, 2010). 2 Hartley Coleridge, quoted by Matthew Arnold in a note to his review, ‘Joubert; or, a French Coleridge?’, National Review, 18 (January 1864), 172– 7 (p. 177). The review is reprinted in Coleridge: the Critical Heritage, ed. J.R. de J. Jackson (London, 1970), pp. 141–56 (p. 156). 3 Joseph Wilkinson, Select Views in Cumberland, Westmorland, and Lancashire (London, 1810), p. xxi. 4 Green’s Preface to his Tourist’s New Guide to the Lake District, quoted in M.E. Burkett and J.D.G. Sloss, William Green of Ambleside. A Lake District Artist (1760–1823) (Kendal, 1984), p. 21. 5 ‘Three original sonnets of Wordsworth; suggested by Westall’s Views of the caves in Yorkshire’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 4 (1819), 470–1. 6 Cf. the illuminating discussion of the sonnet’s revisionary relationship to Wordsworth’s early work in William H. Galperin, Revision and Authority in Wordsworth: the Interpretation of a Career (Philadelphia, 1989), pp. 12–13. 7 In 1822 entitled A Description of the Scenery of the Lakes in the North of England. 8 On poetry’s superiority to history for Wordsworth because it is capable of taking into account the myths, tales and legends by which people endow places they love with meaning, see James K. Chandler, Wordsworth’s Second Nature: A Study of the Poetry and Politics (Chicago and London, 1984), p. 174. 9 Letter of 6 January 1821, The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Later Years 1821–1850, 4 vols., 2nd edn., rev. Alan G. Hill (Oxford, 1978–88), i, p. 5.

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Notes to pages 258–272

10 Tours to the British Mountains; with the Descriptive Poems of Lowther, and Emont Vale (London, 1824). Wordsworth borrowed a phrase from Wilkinson’s narrative of a tour of the Highlands in his 1803 tour poem ‘The Solitary Reaper’. 11 For details of the text’s history see the Cornell Wordsworth volume Sonnet Series and Itinerary Poems 1820–1845, ed. Jeffrey Jackson (Ithaca, 2004), pp. 237, 609–10. 12 The text is taken from its first published appearance in Duddon. 13 It is now known as Swinside stone circle. 14 On Wordsworth and theories about Druidism, see Richard Gravil, Wordsworth’s Bardic Vocation, 1787–1842 (Basingstoke, 2003), pp. 25–33, and Tom Duggett, ‘Celtic Night and Gothic Grandeur: Politics and Antiquarianism in Wordsworth’s Salisbury Plain’, Romanticism, 13:2 (2007), 164–76. See also Sonnet Series and Itinerary Poems, pp. 237–8. 15 Mona Antiqua Restaurata, an Archæological Discourse on the Antiquities, Natural and Historical, of the Isle of Anglesey (Dublin, 1723). 16 ‘There was a boy’, ll. 19; 20. 17 Macbeth, Act iii, scene iv, l. 123. 18 Part i, ll. 253 and 268–9: Coleridge, Christabel; Kubla Khan; The Pains of Sleep (1816). 19 See note 2. 20 Yarrow Revisited, and Other Poems (London, 1835) and second edition (London, 1836). 21 Yarrow Revisited was ecstatically reviewed: see American Quarterly Review, 20 (September 1836), 66–88 and Monthly Review, 2.4 (1835), 605–17. For discussion of Wordsworth’s arrangement of his poems for popular effect, see Carl H. Ketcham’s introduction to WSP. 22 This poem and all others, including ‘The Monument Commonly Called Long Meg and her Daughters, Near the River Eden’, from the 1833 sequence are cited from their published appearance in Yarrow Revisited, and Other Poems, 2nd edn (London, 1836). 23 Cp. Charles J. Rzepka, ‘From Relics to Remains: Wordsworth’s “The Thorn” and the Emergence of Secular History’, Romanticism on the Net, 31 (August 2003), www.erudit.org/revue/ron/2003/v/n31/008696ar.html. Accessed 13 May 2013. 24 See my discussion in Chapter 5 above. 25 ‘British ground’ is a phrase Wordsworth had used to associate landscape with national identity previously. On Wordsworth’s use of the phrase and its popularity in public discourse in time of Napoleonic war, see Colin Pedley, ‘Anticipating Invasion: Some Wordsworthian Contexts’, The Wordsworth Circle, 21.2 (1990), 64–70. 26 On tourism and the poetics of the 1835 volume, see J. Douglas Kneale, Romantic Aversions: Aftermaths of Classicism in Wordsworth and Coleridge (Montreal, 1999).

Notes to page 273

305

And, for Wordsworth’s Duddon sonnets as related to the tour-guide, Stephen Gill, ‘Wordsworth and The River Duddon’, Essays in Criticism, 57.1 (2007), 22–41. 27 For details of the deal, and for an original analysis of the effects of the market on Wordsworth’s revision process, see Lee Erickson, The Economy of Literary Form: English Literature and the Industrialization of Publishing 1800–1850 (Baltimore and London, 1996), pp. 59, 69. 28 The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, 6 vols. (London, 1836–8), v, p. 249. 29 See the Introduction poem to Ecclesiastical Sketches (1822).

Index

Ackermann, Rudolph, 274 Adams, John, 78 Allston, Washington, 170 Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine, 11, 149 Augustan Review, 26 Austen, Jane, 163 Northanger Abbey (1818), 159 Banks, Joseph, 31, 43 Barbauld, Anna Letitia, 10, 120 Bate, Jonathan, 207 Beaumont family, 114 Beaumont, George, 31, 41, 43, 258 Beddoes, Thomas, 129 Bentham, Jeremy, 73 Bewell, Alan, 74 Black’s Picturesque Guide to the English Lakes, 241–2 Blackwood’s Magazine, 10, 13, 228, 251, 257 Blake, William, 1, 106 Songs of Innocence and of Experience, 1, 56 Bligh, William, 77–9, 84 Bloom, Harold, 18 Bloomfield, Robert, 11, 32 Bolivar, Simon, 99 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 71, 81, 83 Bowles, William Lisle, 89 The Missionary (1815), 89 British Critic, 11 Brontë, Charlotte, 29 Brown, John, 129, 132 Budge, Gavin, 129 Bunyan, John, 180 Burgh, James, 150 Burke, Edmund, 33, 57, 68, 73, 83, 190, 213, 262 Burke, Tim, 201 Burns, Robert, 32 Butler, Marilyn, 26

Byron, Lord, 1, 11–12, 17–19, 27–8, 49, 51–2, 71, 73–7, 79–89, 95, 100–2, 109, 115, 127–8, 130–3, 137–40, 144, 148, 151, 155, 157, 217 Cain (1821), 74 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–18), 18, 88, 137, 155 Don Juan, 12, 18, 47 Heaven and Earth (1821), 74 Manfred (1817), 74 The Island (1823), 74–5, 77, 79, 86–9, 100 The Siege of Corinth (1816), 100, 128, 137 The Vision of Judgment (1821), 75–7 Canning, George, 149 Carlson, Julia S., 16 Chatterton, Thomas, 214 Chaucer, Geoffrey Canterbury Tales, 221 Christian, Fletcher, 74, 78–9, 81, 83–4, 88 Clifford family, 214–16 Clifford, Henry, 64 Cobbett, William, 15 Cochrane, Thomas, 100 Cockburn, Henry, 10 Coleridge, Hartley, 245, 266 Coleridge, John, 151 Coleridge, John Taylor, 25 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1, 25–6, 36, 43, 51, 69, 86, 105–11, 113–95, 211, 214, 243 ‘A Day Dream’, 167–8 Biographia Literaria (1817), 6, 13–14, 26, 107–9, 114–15, 124–7, 138, 145, 150–1, 161, 185–6 ‘Christabel’, 1, 19, 106, 113, 115–17, 119, 121, 124, 126–9, 131–47, 151, 153, 155, 157–8, 161, 166, 172, 216, 263 Christabel: Kubla Khan, A Vision; The Pains of Sleep (1816), 4, 13, 19, 109–11, 113, 116–17, 122, 124, 126, 128–54, 158–9, 167, 176, 180, 185–7 ‘Dejection, an Ode’, 156, 171, 176, 178, 181, 184 ‘Duty Surviving Self-Love’, 180

306

Index ‘Fire, Famine and Slaughter’, 181 ‘Fragments from the Wreck of Memory’, 161 ‘France, an Ode’, 151 ‘Frost at Midnight’, 34, 113, 181 ‘Garden of Boccaccio’, 170–2 ‘Hard is my lot’, 177–8, 180, 182–3, 188, 190–2 ‘Kubla Khan’, 2, 4, 19, 92, 94, 113, 115–16, 124, 127–8, 132, 136, 138–47, 159, 184 Lectures, 180, 183 ‘Letter to Sara Hutchinson’, 120, 171, 176, 178–80 ‘Love’, 127, 137, 155, 158–9, 161 ‘New Thoughts on Old Subjects’, 161 Notebook entries, 120–1, 124, 147, 178–9, 187 Poetical Works (1828), 5, 110–11, 155, 160, 167, 173–7, 179–95 Poetical Works (1829), 155, 175 ‘Prose in Rhyme, or Epigrams, Moralities, and Things Without a Name’, 173–6 Remorse (1813), 156–8, 180 Sibylline Leaves (1817), 13, 127, 153–4, 176, 231–3 ‘The Aeolian Harp’, 231–3 ‘The Ballad of the Dark Ladie’, 126, 155, 158 ‘The Blossoming of the Solitary Date Tree. A Lament’, 5, 17, 155, 176–7, 179–95 The Friend, 106–7 ‘The Devil’s Thoughts’, 181 ‘The Improvisatore’, 161–6, 175–6, 192 ‘The Pains of Sleep’, 113, 116, 118–20, 128, 145–8, 181 ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, 2, 106, 113, 119–20, 124, 126–7, 142, 148, 153, 157 The Statesman’s Manual (1816), 151 ‘To W. Wordsworth’, 123, 171 ‘Work without Hope’, 169, 180, 192 ‘Youth and Age’, 169, 174–5, 180 Coleridge, Sara, 90 Cook, James, 41, 76–7 Cowper, William, 9, 29, 32, 73 ‘Yardley Oak’, 210 Critical Review, 135 Dante, 18, 256 Darwin, Erasmus, 17, 129, 132 Davies, Edward, 260 De Man, Paul, 241 De Quincey, Thomas, 199 Dobrizhoffer, Martin, 90–1, 95–7 An Account of the Abipones, 90–1 Eclectic Review, 11, 101, 228 Edinburgh Annual Register, 127 Edinburgh Review, 10–11, 26, 105, 114, 127, 135, 149, 151, 153, 199–200 Edwards, Edward, 78–9

307

Elfenbein, Andrew, 56 European Magazine, 228 Farington, Joseph Views of the Lakes &c in Cumberland and Westmorland (1787), 31 Finow, 81 Flinders, Matthew A Voyage to Terra Australis (1814), 43 Freud, Sigmund, 265 Friendship’s Offering, 161 Furr, Derek, 171 Galperin, William, 202 George III, 47, 51, 75 Gill, Stephen, 20, 201, 220 Gillman, Anne, 171 Gilpin, William, 30–1, 34, 47, 249, 256 Observations on the River Wye, and Several Parts of South Wales, &c. Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty (1782), 31 Observations, Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty, Made in the Year 1772, on Several Parts of England, Particularly the Mountains, and Lakes of Cumberland, and Westmoreland (1786), 31, 217 Gilpin, William Sawrey, 31 Girtin, Thomas, 251 Glover, John, 31 Godwin, William, 10, 87 Goodson, A.C., 114 Graves, R.P., 211 Gray, Thomas Elegy in a Country Churchyard, 50 Green, William, 219–20, 249 A Series of Sixty Beautifully coloured plates of the Lakes of Lancashire, Cumberland & Westmorland (1808–10), 249 The Tourist’s New Guide to the Lake District, Containing a Description of the Lakes, Mountains and Scenery in Cumberland, Westmorland, and Lancashire (1819), 219–20 Hartman, Geoffrey, 202, 205 Hazlitt, William, 11–12, 49, 52, 107, 113, 117, 131, 149–51, 158 Heath, Charles, 160 Heber, Reginald, 100 Heffernan, James A.W., 16 Hemans, Felicia, 1, 155, 160 ‘Casabianca’, 56 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 212 Hone, William, 15 Hood, Thomas, 32 Horne Tooke, John, 212, 272

308

Index

Housman, John Descriptive Tour, and Guide to the Lakes, Caves, Mountains, and other Natural Curiosities, in Cumberland, Westmoreland, Lancashire, and a Part of the West Riding of Yorkshire (1800), 218 Hume, David, 190 Hunt, Leigh, 84, 101 Hunter, John, 130 Hurwitz, Hyman, 185 Hebrew Tales (1826), 184–5 Hutchinson, Joanna, 221 Hutchinson, Sara, 45, 107, 167–8, 171, 176, 178–81, 183, 187–8, 192 Hutchinson, William An Excursion to the Lakes, in Westmoreland and Cumberland, August 1773 (1774), 218 Janowitz, Anne K., 136 Jeffrey, Francis, 15, 25–6, 38, 49, 51, 69, 71, 105–10, 113–15, 117, 125, 127, 130, 135, 137, 145, 151, 199–200, 217, 247, 278 Review of Madoc, 9, 25, 106 Review of Poems in Two Volumes, 9–10, 25, 105–6, 125, 199, 216 Review of Thalaba the Destroyer, 9, 15, 25, 117 Review of The Excursion, 8–9, 25–6, 39, 107, 125, 199 Review of The Isle of Palms, and Other Poems, 25 Review of The White Doe of Rylstone, 217 Jenner, Edward, 98–9 Jerdan, William, 155 Jones, Ewan, 136 Junius, 76 Kant, Immanuel, 118 Keats, John, 1, 10, 157, 163, 187, 191, 261 Hyperion (1819), 71 ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’, 161 ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, 191 ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’, 170 Kotzebue, Augustus von, 9 Lamb, Charles, 132, 140 Landon, Letitia Elizabeth, 1, 155–62, 164–72, 176, 180 ‘A Moorish Romance’, 157 ‘Sans Souci’, 168 ‘The City of the Dead’, 168 ‘The Departed’, 161 The Improvisatrice (1824), 154–8, 161–2, 165, 180 ‘Verses on an engraved portrait of the Duchess of Bedford’, 171–2

Langan, Celeste, 56, 136 Larkin, Peter, 165, 202 Leask, Nigel, 17, 70, 114, 129 Linnaeus, Carl, 182 Literary Chronicle, 101 Literary Gazette, 155 Lockhart, John Gibson, 11 London Magazine, 10, 101 Lonsdale, Lord, 12, 201, 269 Lorraine, Claude, 30, 47, 59, 253 Lovell, Robert, 86 Loyola, Ignatius of, 90 Macaulay, Thomas, 72 Education Minute (1835), 72 Manning, Peter J., 16, 201 Mariner, William, 80–3, 86 An Account of the Natives of the Tonga Islands in the South Pacific Ocean (1817), 80–2, 85–6 Mays, J.C.C., 141–4 McGann, Jerome J., 170 The Romantic Ideology, 109 Medwin, Thomas Private Conversations with Lord Byron (1824), 86 Milton, John, 18, 38, 71, 109, 202 Paradise Lost, 96, 183, 194, 210, 222, 263 Mitford, Mary Russell, 89 Christina, the Maid of the South Seas (1811), 89 Montgomery, James, 89 Greenland (1819), 89 Monthly Review, 11, 153–4 Moore, Thomas, 11, 17, 71, 160 Lalla Rookh (1817), 71 More, Hannah, 149, 270 More, Thomas, 57 Moxon, Edward, 6, 273, 278 Murray, John, 80, 116, 128, 132 Nash, Edward, 26, 38, 41 Nelson, Horatio, 75 New Annual Register, 26 New Monthly Review, 11 Newlyn, Lucy, 116, 151 O’Higgins, Bernardo, 99 Otley, Jonathan, 223–4 A Concise Description of the English Lakes and Ancient Mountains (1823), 223–4 Ovid, 251 Payne Knight, Richard, 256 Peachey, Emma, 35–8 Peachey, William, 35, 37 Percy, Thomas, 214

Index Pickering, William, 173 Pinkney, Tony, 208 Pitt, William, 135, 151 Pitts, Jennifer, 73 Plato, 190 Polidori, John, 132 Polwhele, Richard The Unsex’d Females (1798), 148 Poole, Thomas, 118 Poussin, Nicholas, 34 Price, Uvedale, 256 Prickett, Stephen, 8 Priestley, Joseph, 150 Purchas, Samuel, 139 Purchas His Pilgrimage, 138 Quarterly Review, 72, 79–81, 89–90, 100, 127 Quillinan, Rotha, 233 Reiss, Daniel, 170 Richard I, 75 Richards, I. A., 2 Ricks, Christopher, 18 Ritson, Joseph, 214 Robespierre, Maximilien, 71 Robinson, Henry Crabb, 132, 267 Robinson, Mary, 1 Rogers, Samuel, 41, 43 Voyage of Columbus (1810), 100 Rosa, Salvator, 30, 34 Russett, Margaret, 136 Said, Edward, 17 Orientalism, 69 San Martin, José de, 99 Sandby, Paul, 31, 249 XII Views in South Wales (1775), 31 Sangster, Matthew, 153 Sappho, 159 Satterthwaite, John, 225 Schiller, Friedrich, 9 Scott, John, 10 Scott, Walter, 11, 18–19, 109, 121, 127–8, 131, 133–9, 142, 144, 148, 160, 200, 206–7, 213–14, 216–17, 243, 257 Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), 18, 128, 133–6, 142, 206–7, 213–14 Marmion (1808), 217 Sedgwick, Adam, 56 Shakespeare, William, 18, 38, 76, 106, 109, 120–1, 127, 148, 187 Macbeth, 262 Shelley, Mary, 132 Frankenstein (1818), 133, 194 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 1, 71, 132, 187

309

Alastor (1816), 71 Prometheus Unbound (1820), 71 The Revolt of Islam (1818), 71 Simonsen, Pieter, 16 Simpson, David, 74 Smith, Adam, 73 Southey, Edith May, 90, 92–4, 97–8 Southey, Herbert, 52 Southey, Robert, 1, 25–8, 30, 32–77, 79–102, 106–8, 115, 118, 156, 160, 200–1, 216–17, 243, 249, 273–4 A Vision of Judgement (1821), 14–15, 47–52, 75–6, 84, 102 ‘Book of the Prophet Jehephary’, 14 ‘Botany Bay Eclogues’ (1797), 69 Carmen Triumphale (1814), 14 ‘Epitaph’ (‘Here in the fruitful vales of Somerset’), 35–8 History of Brazil (1810–19), 72, 88, 91–2, 95, 98 Letters from England, by Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella (1807), 34–5, 43, 45, 52, 218 Madoc (1805), 9, 11, 25–7, 69–71, 73, 106 ‘Mohammed’, 17 ‘My days among the dead are passed’, 3 ‘Ode on the Portrait of Bishop Heber’ (1830), 100 Quarterly Review essays, 72, 79–81, 85–7, 89–91, 100 Roderick, the Last of the Goths (1814), 25–7 Sir Thomas More, or, Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society (1829–31), 15, 56–65, 216, 273 ‘Songs of the American Indians’ (1799), 69 A Tale of Paraguay (1825), 15, 17, 72–4, 86–90, 92–102, 160 Thalaba the Destroyer (1801), 9, 15, 17, 25–7, 69–73, 101, 156 ‘The Cataract of Lodore’, 15, 52–6 The Curse of Kehama (1810), 26–7, 69–71, 73 ‘The Old Man’s Comforts, and How He Gained Them’ (‘You are old, Father William’), 3 The Poetical Works of Robert Southey, Collected by Himself (1837–38), 5 The Poet’s Pilgrimage to Waterloo (1816), 26, 38–41, 43, 45, 47, 52 Views of the Lake and of the Vale of Keswick (1820), 45–7, 52, 57, 244 Spenser, Edmund, 18, 20, 28, 88–9, 95, 102, 180 Stelzig, Eugene H., 203 Stewart, George, 79 Stoddart, John, 132 Stukeley, William, 260

310

Index

The Amulet, 166 The Bijou, 167–70, 173–4 The Courier, 75, 86–7 The Examiner, 11, 101 The Keepsake, 30, 160, 170–2 The Literary Souvenir, 160 The Westminster Review, 159 Thelwall, John, 10–11 Thomas, Sophie, 16 Toland, John, 260 Turner, J. M. W., 251 Veneto, Giorgio, 182, 185 Vernor and Hood, 32 Vernor, Thomas, 32 Vickers, Neil, 129 Walker, Robert, 228 Wallis, Samuel, 77 Watts, Alaric, 160 Wedgwood family, 114 Wellesley, Arthur, 90 Wellington, Duke of, 90 West, Thomas, 34 A Guide to the Lakes in Cumberland, Westmorland and Lancashire (1778), 31, 217 Westall, Ann (née Sedgwick), 56 Westall, Richard, 88 Westall, William, 26, 41–7, 49, 52, 57, 61–5, 88, 244, 249–57, 274–8 Room at Rydal Mount, 278 Rydal from Mr Wordsworth’s Field under Rydal Mount (1831), 274 Rydal Mount the Residence of Willm Wordsworth, 274 View of Keswick Lake from the Penrith Road, 49 Views of Australian Scenery (1814), 43 Views of the Caves near Ingleton, Gordale Scar, and Malham Cove, in Yorkshire (1818), 251–7 Views of the Lake and of the Vale of Keswick (1820), 43–7, 52, 57, 244 Views of the Lake Country to Illustrate the Poems of W. Wordsworth, Esq. (1840), 278 Views of the Lake Scenery of Cumberland and Westmorland (1840), 278 Wilberforce, William, 72, 89 Wilkes, John, 76 Wilkinson, Joseph, 244–9 Select Views in Cumberland, Westmorland, and Lancashire (1810), 244–9 Wilkinson, Thomas Tours to the British Mountains (1824), 258–9 Wilson, John (‘Christopher North’), 25 The Isle of Palms, and Other Poems (1812), 25 Wohlgemut, Esther, 59, 61

Wolfe, James, 75 Wolfson, Susan, 54, 187, 202 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 1, 111, 148–9 Wood, Gillen D’Arcy, 16 Woolf, Virginia, 111 Wordsworth, Dorothy, 94, 118, 145, 202, 251 Journals, 222, 225–6 Wordsworth, Dorothy (‘Dora’), 94, 202 Wordsworth, John, 267 Wordsworth, Mary (née Hutchinson), 167–8, 179, 202, 267 Wordsworth, William, 1, 25–6, 30, 32–3, 36–9, 41, 43, 49–52, 55, 63, 65–7, 69, 74, 101, 105–9, 114–19, 121–7, 129–31, 133, 139, 145, 147–8, 153, 155–6, 160, 163, 165–6, 171, 173, 177–8, 180–1, 184–5, 187, 190–2, 195, 199–203, 205–43, 273–8 A Description of the Scenery of the Lakes in the North of England (1822), 6, 244, 257, 259–60, 262, 264 A Guide through the District of the Lakes (1835), 225–6, 245 ‘At Sea off the Isle of Man’, 270 ‘Boy of Winander’, 36–7 ‘Cave of Staffa’, 270 ‘Composed or Suggested During a Tour in the Summer of 1833’, 268–70, 272–4 ‘Druidical Excommunication’, 260 Ecclesiastical Sonnets (1822), 68, 260 Essay Supplementary to the Preface (of Lyrical Ballads) (1815), 13–14, 108, 199–200, 217 Guide to the Lakes, 242–3, 245, 249 ‘Illustrated Books and Newspapers’, 30 Letter ‘On the Kendal and Windermere Railway’, 218 Letter to a Friend of Robert Burns (1816), 217 ‘Lowther! in thy majestic Pile are seen’, 269 ‘Lucy’ poems, 2, 92, 94 Lyrical Ballads, 55, 114, 125, 138, 199, 213, 257 Lyrical Ballads (1798), 125–6 Lyrical Ballads (1800), 106, 116–17, 207–9 Lyrical Ballads (1800), Preface, 9, 13, 107–9, 114, 125, 129, 139, 156, 200, 212, 216, 224, 249, 272 ‘Michael, a Pastoral Poem’, 10, 218, 272 ‘Miscellaneous Sonnets’, 266 ‘Ode. Intimations of Immortality’, 1–2, 120, 178, 191, 240 ‘Ode. The Pass of Kirkstone’, 225–8, 237, 242 ‘On the Power of Sound’ (1835), 235–9 Peter Bell (1819), 139 Poems in Two Volumes (1807), 9–10, 25, 105–6, 125, 199, 216 ‘Poems on the Naming of Places’, 207–9, 218 Poetical Works (1827), 6, 153, 266–7

Index Poetical Works (1836–38), 6, 268 ‘Resolution and Independence’, 10 ‘Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle’, 10, 18, 65, 67, 214–16, 218 ‘Sonnet On the Projected Kendal and Windermere Railway’ (1844), 241 ‘Sonnets upon the Punishment of Death’, 51 ‘Steamboats, Viaducts, and Railways’, 269 ‘Thanksgiving Ode’, 51 ‘The Brothers’, 10 The Cornell Wordsworth, 6 The Excursion (1814), 2, 8, 15, 25–6, 38–9, 107, 125, 199, 219, 227, 231–3, 242, 260–1, 264, 266 ‘The Idiot Boy’, 56 ‘The Leech-Gatherer’. See ‘Resolution and Independence’ ‘The Monument Commonly Called Long Meg and Her Daughters, Near the River Eden’ (‘A weight of awe not easy to be borne’), 6, 244, 259–60, 273–4 The Prelude, 1–2, 16, 36, 55, 123, 125, 147, 171, 181, 199, 227, 239–40, 245, 257, 260 The Prelude (1803), 209–11 The Prelude (1805), 7, 237–42, 260–4 The Prelude (1850), 50, 240 The Recluse, 202 ‘The Return’, 260 The River Duddon, a Series of Sonnets (1820), 16, 20, 201, 220–3, 225, 228, 243–5, 249, 257, 260, 273

311 The White Doe of Rylstone, or, The Fate of The Nortons (1815), 11, 18–19, 114, 131, 216–17, 257 ‘There was a boy’, 262 ‘Three original sonnets of Wordsworth, suggested by Westall’s Views of the Caves in Yorkshire’ (1819), 251–7 ‘Three years she grew in sun and shower’, 94 ‘Tintern Abbey’, 2, 10, 41, 92, 129–30, 147 ‘To Cordelia M—, Hallsteads, Ullswater’, 269 ‘To Joanna’, 208–9, 211, 228–30, 272 ‘To Miss Blackett at her first ascent of Helvellyn’, 221–2 ‘To Rotha Q’, 233 ‘To the Earl of Lonsdale’, 269 ‘To the Torrent at the Devil’s Bridge, North Wales, 1824’, 207 Topographical Description of the Country of the Lakes (1820), 222, 228, 243–5, 249, 257 ‘View from the top of Black Comb’, 224–5 ‘We Are Seven’, 56 ‘Written With a Slate Pencil on a Stone, on the Side of the Mountain of Black Comb’, 224–5 Yarrow Revisited (1835), 268–9 Yarrow Revisited (1836), 6, 268–73 ‘Yarrow Unvisited’, 214 ‘Yew Trees’, 210–12, 228, 230–1

Yeats, W. B., 20

cambridge studies in romanticism General Editor James Chandler, University of Chicago 1. Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics and the Fiction of Letters mary a. favret 2. British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire nigel leask 3. Poetry as an Occupation and an Art in Britain, 1760–1830 peter murphy 4. Edmund Burke’s Aesthetic Ideology: Language, Gender and Political Economy in Revolution tom furniss 5. In the Theatre of Romanticism: Coleridge, Nationalism, Women julie a. carlson 6. Keats, Narrative and Audience andrew bennett 7. Romance and Revolution: Shelley and the Politics of a Genre david duff 8. Literature, Education, and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice, 1780–1832 alan richardson 9. Women Writing about Money: Women’s Fiction in England, 1790–1820 edward copeland 10. Shelley and the Revolution in Taste: The Body and the Natural World timothy morton 11. William Cobbett: The Politics of Style leonora nattrass 12. The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762–1800 e. j. clery 13. Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics, 1716–1818 elizabeth a. bohls 14. Napoleon and English Romanticism simon bainbridge 15. Romantic Vagrancy: Wordsworth and the Simulation of Freedom celeste langan 16. Wordsworth and the Geologists john wyatt

17. Wordsworth’s Pope: A Study in Literary Historiography robert j. griffin 18. The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel markman ellis 19. Reading Daughters’ Fictions, 1709–1834: Novels and Society from Manley to Edgeworth caroline gonda 20. Romantic Identities: Varieties of Subjectivity, 1774–1830 andrea k. henderson 21. Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition: in Early Nineteenth-Century England kevin gilmartin 22. Reinventing Allegory theresa m. kelley 23. British Satire and the Politics of Style, 1789–1832 gary dyer 24. The Romantic Reformation: Religious Politics in English Literature, 1789–1824 robert m. ryan 25. De Quincey’s Romanticism: Canonical Minority and the Forms of Transmission margaret russett 26. Coleridge on Dreaming: Romanticism, Dreams and the Medical Imagination jennifer ford 27. Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity saree makdisi 28. Ideology and Utopia in the Poetry of William Blake nicholas m. williams 29. Sexual Politics and the Romantic Author sonia hofkosh 30. Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition anne janowitz 31. Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt and their Circle jeffrey n. cox 32. Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism gregory dart 33. Contesting the Gothic: Fiction, Genre and Cultural Conflict, 1764–1832 james watt

34. Romanticism, Aesthetics, and Nationalism david aram kaiser 35. Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity andrew bennett 36. The Crisis of Literature in the 1790s: Print Culture and the Public Sphere paul keen 37. Romantic Atheism: Poetry and Freethought, 1780–1830 martin priestman 38. Romanticism and Slave Narratives: Transatlantic Testimonies helen thomas 39. Imagination under Pressure, 1789–1832: Aesthetics, Politics, and Utility john whale 40. Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, and Canon Formation, 1790–1820 michael gamer 41. Romanticism and the Human Sciences: Poetry, Population, and the Discourse of the Species maureen n. mclane 42. The Poetics of Spice: Romantic Consumerism and the Exotic timothy morton 43. British Fiction and the Production of Social Order, 1740–1830 miranda j. burgess 44. Women Writers and the English Nation in the 1790s angela keane 45. Literary Magazines and British Romanticism mark parker 46. Women, Nationalism and the Romantic Stage: Theatre and Politics in Britain, 1780–1800 betsy bolton 47. British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind alan richardson 48. The Anti-Jacobin Novel: British Conservatism and the French Revolution m. o. grenby 49. Romantic Austen: Sexual Politics and the Literary Canon clara tuite 50. Byron and Romanticism jerome mcgann and james soderholm 51. The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland ina ferris

52. Byron, Poetics and History jane stabler 53. Religion, Toleration, and British Writing, 1790–1830 mark canuel 54. Fatal Women of Romanticism adriana craciun 55. Knowledge and Indifference in English Romantic Prose tim milnes 56. Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination barbara taylor 57. Romanticism, Maternity and the Body Politic julie kipp 58. Romanticism and Animal Rights david perkins 59. Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediation of History kevis goodman 60. Literature, Science and Exploration in the Romantic Era: Bodies of Knowledge timothy fulford, debbie lee, and peter j. kitson 61. Romantic Colonization and British Anti-Slavery deirdre coleman 62. Anger, Revolution, and Romanticism andrew m. stauffer 63. Shelley and the Revolutionary Sublime cian duffy 64. Fictions and Fakes: Forging Romantic Authenticity, 1760–1845 margaret russett 65. Early Romanticism and Religious Dissent daniel e. white 66. The Invention of Evening: Perception and Time in Romantic Poetry christopher r. miller 67. Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song simon jarvis 68. Romanticism and the Rise of the Mass Public andrew franta 69. Writing against Revolution: Literary Conservatism in Britain, 1790–1832 kevin gilmartin 70. Women, Sociability and Theatre in Georgian London gillian russell

71. The Lake Poets and Professional Identity brian goldberg 72. Wordsworth Writing andrew bennett 73. Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry noel jackson 74. Advertising and Satirical Culture in the Romantic Period john strachan 75. Romanticism and the Painful Pleasures of Modern Life andrea k. henderson 76. Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British Romantic Poetry maureen n. mclane 77. Romanticism and Improvisation, 1750–1850 angela esterhammer 78. Scotland and the Fictions of Geography: North Britain, 1760–1830 penny fielding 79. Wordsworth, Commodification and Social Concern: The Poetics of Modernity david simpson 80. Sentimental Masculinity and the Rise of History, 1790–1890 mike goode 81. Fracture and Fragmentation in British Romanticism alexander regier 82. Romanticism and Music Culture in Britain, 1770–1840: Virtue and Virtuosity gillen d’arcy wood 83. The Truth about Romanticism: Pragmatism and Idealism in Keats, Shelley, Coleridge tim milnes 84. Blake’s Gifts: Poetry and the Politics of Exchange sarah haggarty 85. Real Money and Romanticism matthew rowlinson 86. Sentimental Literature and Anglo-Scottish Identity, 1745–1820 juliet shields 87. Romantic Tragedies: The Dark Employments of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley reeve parker 88. Blake, Sexuality and Bourgeois Politeness susan matthews

89. Idleness, Contemplation and the Aesthetic richard adelman 90. Shelley’s Visual Imagination nancy moore goslee 91. A Cultural History of the Irish Novel, 1790–1829 claire connolly 92. Literature, Commerce, and the Spectacle of Modernity, 1750–1800 paul keen 93. Romanticism and Childhood: The Infantilization of British Literary Culture ann weirda rowland 94. Metropolitan Art and Literature, 1810–1840: Cockney Adventures gregory dart 95. Wordsworth and the Enlightenment Idea of Pleasure rowan boyson 96. John Clare and Community john goodridge 97. The Romantic Crowd mary fairclough 98. Romantic Women Writers, Revolution and Prophecy orianne smith 99. Britain, France and the Gothic, 1764–1820 angela wright 100. Transfiguring the Arts and Sciences: Knowledge and Cultural Institutions in the Romantic Age jon klancher 101. Shelley and the Apprehension of Life ross wilson 102. Poetics of Character: Transatlantic Encounters 1700–1900 susan manning 103. Romanticism and Caricature ian haywood 104. The Late Poetry of the Lake Poets: Romanticism Revised tim fulford