A Revolution in Poetry: Wordsworth and Coleridge, 1798 - James Chandler

I think we should begin I like to welcome you all and thank you for coming on this beautiful day I'm Jim Chandler I'm a professor in the Department of English here and in cinema and Media Studies I also direct this Institute I've been doing that for ten years and I've given many of these talks in the past always enjoyed them I think I'm not running out of subjects I think there'll be a lot of subjects trying not to repeat myself I want to talk to you today about a particular moment in the history of poetry a very important moment in the history of poetry in standard handbooks of English literature the Year 1798 stands out as a pivotal one the young William Hazlitt visited Wordsworth and Coleridge in 1798 when they were working on lyrical ballads and later wrote that these numbers one seven nine eight stood emblazoned in the skies he looked back on his past over this performance of Arras in 1798 and I want to talk to you a little bit about what they thought they were doing and especially what Wordsworth thought they were doing and to put this in a slightly larger frame I'd like you to be thinking about this issue in terms of larger issues about what it means to read a piece of literature from the past that has its own contexts its own attachments that's invested in a site of a language game of its own time - some people like to say moves that are made in the context of other moves known to readers at the time that we've maybe since lost sight of but how to do this without reducing the text we're talking about simply to being a document of that texts so how we hang on to some sense of the the art that produces the in this case that poetry and that makes us care about it in the first place in this special way that we care about poems there are two kinds of problems at least that matter to works of the past that we read in this way one is that it's hard to recover their initial impact in their moment because they've so much done their work I remember being at a performance of Hamlet years ago with a friend that was in college in fact and might have been Laurence Olivier's film with Hamlet and midway through in a kind of joke my friend got up and he said I can't stand watching this it's too filled with cliches but clearly the point is not that these were cliches when Shakespeare created them but they've come to be cliches for us so one problem with recovering the work in the past is that the writer has so effectively done his or her work that their innovation is no longer an innovation it's now part of the woodwork of our life that may presume in some cases too much of our knowledge of let's say in this case the history of poetry Wordsworth in fact created a kind of idiom that became importantly central for many modern poets but I am NOT going to assume that everybody in this room has that kind of sensitivity to his idiom that say we have to be cliches of Hamelin the other kind of problem is that we lose sight of the author because we have we no longer understand how the codes work not that their way of doing business has become business as usual for us but that we actually don't recognize how they work anymore my favorite instance here author I care a lot about is Mariah Edgeworth who really taught Jane Austen and Moltar Scott how to do the kind of fiction that both Jane Austen and Walter Scott did she was an Irish novelist who wrote from about 1798 about 1830 really a brilliant novelist but her way of writing fiction is involved in contacts that are lost to us and the codes that go with those contacts are lost to us so we have a hard time seeing past Jane Austen and Walter Scott to get back to Mariah Edgeworth to find her novels intelligible as readers in 1814 did when critics and readers alike agreed that she was by far the more important if it came to let's say we're IH Worth or Jane Austen Emma sold something like 3,000 copies in 1814 but her novel patronage sold 8,000 and that urine was much better reviewed in that year so what did we lose so those are two kinds of problems the cliche on the one hand and the lost code on the other there's sort of two opposite sorts of problems I'm not going to talk directly about either of those today exactly but it's the kind of problem one has when one is trying to recover a sense of how a poem worked in its own time but to hang on to its sense of the sense of it being a poem so this moment 1798 is the moment of perhaps the most important collaboration in the history of English literature I can't think of one that rivals it really were two writers of such genius as they would show over the years happen to be living together in the country in Somerset one at a cottage called outfox then Wordsworth and the other Coleridge at a cottage called nether stoie and they were within a mile of each other and walking distance right in the end of a decade where they had both undergone a tumultuous early life they were about 27 and 28 at the time coming through the decade of the French Revolution Wordsworth was himself in France in the early 1790s certainly twice maybe three times in that period he was actually sort of enlisted in the enlightened girondist party of the French Revolution they were the ultimate party they were the ones that were taken out by they were the rationalists they were the ones who were taken out by dental and Robespierre he as some of you may know fathered a child by a French woman in this period was very much gung-ho on the French Revolution and later retreated Coleridge has a similar kind of career not like Wordsworth born in the city born in the country but born in the city very much a city boy all his life was very much invested in the journalistic disputes in the city in the early 1790s they both retreated to this country Place not Wordsworth lake district up in the north but Somerset in the West they spent a year together talking about the world and about poetry and they came up with a plan to write a volume together which they called lyrical ballads first published anonymously in 1798 and then published two years later with the second volume of poems and a very very famous and important preface which explains what they're doing so we're going to be moving kind of quickly so what what they say they are is the problem why they say there has to be a preface we'll be clear if you look at your sheet there and look at the part of the preface I gave my Xerox copy away because we had needed extras they say on page 172 Wordsworth says in that first full second full paragraph it is supposed that by the act of writing in verse an author makes a formal engagement that he will gratify certain known habits of association that he not only the surprises the reader that certain classes of ideas and expressions will be found in his book but that others will be excluded and that when you write in metrical language this is a signal that you're sending to the reader it's a kind of contract he talks about this as a sort of contract and he says it's going to seem to people that I haven't lived up to my part of the bargain here I came to writing a poem you think when somebody's writing a poem they're going to fulfill their side of the deal it's going to look like I haven't done that and so I need to that to you and he goes on to explain that if you think of the position of Cordelia in King Lear I think you'll have a good sense of what Wordsworth's problem is because remember Goneril and Regan have just essentially debased the rhetoric in which they can talk to their father and so when it comes to Cordelia he says to her what do you have to say and she says nothing my lord and she and she won't say anything not because she doesn't love her father indeed it's because she loves her father it's because she cares about language that she will say nothing at all because the medium is so contaminated by the speeches of her the overhead blown flattering speeches of her two sisters so that's sort of Wordsworth position in 1798 he thinks that writers have begun to write a debased kind of poetry and so to respond to that he's got to produce something that doesn't look like poetry at all it is it's sort of like Cordelia's nothing my lord but nothing cast as a short poem rather than thinking of nothing as a short abstract poem rather than thinking of nothing as saying nothing at all so what is the problem with poetry well it's complicated it has a little bit to do with what he later calls poetic diction a sense that the language of poetry has gotten away from its a the the the way we actually feel about things our natural habits of association so he goes back to country life and to the Ballad the language of low and rustic men and he says he's going to ground his project in the language of low and rustic life top of page 174 or low and rustic life was generally chosen because in that situation the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity and he's going to produce these poems that are in the form of ballads but that are somehow not quite just ballots he's got a way of talking about why that's so - and they're not quite just ballads or just some of the contemporary easy imitations of ballads because he isn't the first person be writing ballads in the late 18th century they're valid collections all over the 18th century that needs to be clear he's starting that movement but he's doing something else with them and that something else is that he is associating them with what he calls a worthy purpose on page 175 there in italics about 15 lines down one of the most interesting things about this preface is that the is the way they do a larger analysis of the culture as we would now say this is a word that a concept that's just coming into being in the late 18th century the idea of the modern idea of a culture a system of practices that's organized in a society in a way that influences daily life they're talking about the culture of the 1790s and the relation of these poems to that culture in a way that I think is utterly astonishing for the moment and anticipates a lot of the next two and a half centuries - in the quarter century so what we might now call media theory or cultural analysis people like Marshall McLuhan I want you to listen to what they say is going on in their time he says that I'll start on bottom one seventy six this is the extra page he says I'm the stakes in this project are really high because the human mind is capable of excitement without the application of gross and violent stimulants that sounds very contemporary doesn't it think of criticisms of sensationalists films in our time or novels in an earlier time Wordsworth is himself worried about novels and he must have a very faint perception of the human minds beauty and dignity who does not know this and who does not further know that one being is elevated above another in proportion as he possesses this capability and so he says that the effort to produce or enlarge this capability is that one of the best things that a poet could do in any period but the problem in this period especially egregious because of what he calls a multitude of causes unknown to former times that are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of mind unfitting it for all voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor what are these causes one the great national events which are daily taking place Napoleon's coup is 1798 the terror 1794 and five the war with France that erupts in 1793 the fall of the Bastille in 1789 great national events the increasing accumulation of men in cities were the uniformity of their occupations think Charlie Chaplin in modern times produces a craving for extraordinary incident which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies this is really the whole modern package that he's outlining in the year 1800 it's an unbelievably pressure so you've got big national events you've got urbanization and you've got speed-up in communication and he says you might think that our writers would be combating this but no what are they doing they're inventing the gothic novel which is feeding it they're inventing melodrama the word melodrama was coined in this year in English 1800 and the storm and drunk as the Germans called it you know Schiller the kind of crazy stuff with Devils flying out of the walls and so on sickly and stupid German tragedies frantic novels and deluge is of idle and extravagant stories in verse so they're going to attack this problem by way of the very feeble instrument of poetry and they're a little embarrassed that they've got this massive problem and they're going to try to attack it with something as delicate you might say as poetry but they have great faith in its strengths so the poem that I want to talk to you about here is one that appears in the second volume Coleridge's contribution to the first volume everybody knows it it's the crime of the Ancient Mariner Wordsworth and Coleridge were already beginning to be at odds in their project by 1800 they later had a big spat and fell out and Wordsworth wrote a couple of poems for the 1800 volume which bore his name and not Coleridge's the first volume was anonymous that seem like they're sort of rewritings of the Ancient Mariner and this one called Hartley well is an example of such a poem and the issue that I want to talk to you about and respect to this poem is has to do with this a capacity to respond without excessive stimulation that he says is the most important thing it's what distinguishes us as humans one being is distinguished over another to the degree that he holds this capacity and to try to see let's to see if we can figure out what this capacity is and how the poems address it in respect to these other things that they're doing attacking the media responding to the media culture using low and rustic life and and playing if you like the role of Cordelia at the same time so I want to say that um this we we might think of the calling this capacity sympathy and sympathy is a name that it you might think it deserves to have but there's a cold tradition for looking at Wordsworth in the nineteenth century in which he's exactly not the sympathetic character so some of you may know let me start with actually with with Shelley who said in 1819 of Wordsworth he had as much imagination as a pint pot he could never fancy another situation from which too dark his contemplation than that wherein he stood it's a failure of sympathy Keats later would discriminate the two great kinds of poets in the world one the Shakespearean or chameleon poet who had as much pleasure imagining a Yago as an Imogen the bad with the good and then the Mill tonic or Wordsworth II an egotistical sublime so that idea that Wordsworth is the egotistical sublime goes with no sympathy so for these people this capacity to respond to something that excess stimulation they don't want to call it sympathy so I want to look at the person who sort of is outlining I think some of the theory behind these critiques of Wordsworth he's arguably with Coleridge the most important critic of the early nineteenth century William Hazlitt wonderful writer and a keen observer of the scene as I mentioned he was with Wordsworth and Coleridge in 1798 that's more or less how he got his start in the world but by 1818 much has happened and we're now on the other side of the Napoleonic Wars Waterloo has already happened some great poets have come along in the meantime in this period Wordsworth and Coleridge Blake nobody knows him but he's there Byron has emerged Shelley has emerged Keats has emerged Walter Scott has emerged with his novels and hazlit writes an essay on the English poets in the last chapter he does something that you might not expect from a literary history he actually addresses the contemporary scene we're used to talking about contemporary poets this is kind of a new thing that so he does a survey of the living poets and he says that he he wants it both in he gives a kind of account of the egotistical sublime and an association of Wordsworth with what Haslett calls the leveling muse that is the Democratic instinct the idea that we're that the low and rustic life is a Democratic gesture to make if you're a poet because you're trying to appeal to the to the ordinary folks is it work you're trying to write poetry away from the centers of power and fashion so hazlit has a way of talking about these two things together and he writes this thing it's falls into three parts his lecture of eighteen 18 the first is a discussion of Wordsworth the second part is a quotation of this poem Hartley well takes up the whole second part of the essay it's not Wordsworth most famous poem but hazlit thought it was absolutely key for understanding what was going on and he was no that observer of the time and then the third part is where has what speaks of this whole project that Wordsworth is engaged in at the head of what has been denominated says Wordsworth the lake school because by now they're a school he and Coleridge and Southey and there's a big battle about their work and this last part is divided into two parts and these two parts in the talk turn on a really sharp pivot in mid-sentence and I want to talk to you a little bit about that because it's a device that has late' uses elsewhere because one of hazlit's principles and criticism is that our strengths are always tied up with our weaknesses so Coleridge was the great talker of the age but he never did anything Walter Scott was somebody who had a complete command of the past in every detail but couldn't think about tomorrow so in the lead up to this moment of reversal in the Wordsworth essay Haslett makes a long series of claims for the program of the work poet the lake poets he says that these he makes some comparisons with Rousseau and he summarizes everything this way he says they these lake poets who have this idea that came out of lyrical ballads they took the same moment the method in their newfangled ballad mongering scheme which Rousseau did in his prose of exciting attention by reversing established standards of opinion and estimation in the world they were for bringing back poetry to its primitive simplicity and state of nature that's hazlit for all its force and finality though this formulation is punctuated not with a period but with a colon and what follows the colon is a surprising completion of the thought hazlit so that the only thing remarkable left in the world by this change would be the person's which produced it so it's on this point that his essay turns and it turns into a critique of egotism as epitomized in Wordsworth the head of this school now this new direction of the essay if you bear with me for a second would Haslett because he's always so fruitful elaborates a portrait of what Haslett calls a a thorough adept of this new school of poetry and what we learned of this type the words worthy and type from Haslett is that quote is jealous of all excellence but his own he does not like to share his reputation with his subject for he would have it all proceed from his own power and originality of mind his egotism is in some respects a madness a few people take an interest in his writings because he takes an interest in nothing that others do harsh words and they stuck and we know that because Keats attended these lectures and then came up with his idea about the chameleon poet so our strengths lie in our weakness and the progressive instinct to political leveling as we might put it goes hand in hand with an egotistical failure of sympathetic imagination now this principle that Haslett works out that the writers strengths and weakness are inevitably bound up with each other I think it leads to him to misjudge both sides of the issue that is I don't think Wordsworth is a ruse owest level or I once wrote a book that Wordsworth is much closer to Burke than with them to Rousseau so I was fighting that side of hazlit then and now I'm actually interested in the other side about hazlit's charge that Wordsworth had no sympathy and it's a claim that he already had launched in the first part of his little essay when he says that the reverse of Scot Wordsworth spot external but internal it does not depend on tradition or story or old song he furnishes it all from his own mind and his his own subject he is the poet of mere sentiment and this is not an isolated remark hazlit makes it about Wordsworth in many other places so in order to see whether Haslett is actually on any firm ground here I thought we might actually look at his Exhibit A which is this poem hardly well now you'll see if you've had a chance to look at it that the poem is structured into two parts clearly delineated and that the relation of the parts is one of the reason that the poem appears to be according to Haslett strangely designed but I think the poet parts are actually as odd in themselves as they are in relation to each other so I want to look at the way they're odd in themselves and then to look at the problem of putting them together so the first part if you had a chance to look at it and again you can see that Wordsworth is rewriting ancient mariner in certain ways because it's about harming an animal and that bringing bad bad things to the to the to the story the first part presents a literary hunting Ballad of a sort that might have appeared in collections like Percy's English relics or some of its German counterparts in this period burger is ballads criticism will tell you it might be a precedent for this the story roughly speaking in case you didn't have chance to get through it is of a knight once through Walter this is before Walter Scott was Sir Walter so thought well so Walter Scott who pursues a deer to its death through a long and arduous day of hunting he discovers the fatally wounded animal with his nose half touching a spring beneath a hill on further looking he sees three widely spaced hoof marks on the side of the hill evidence that the deer made a desperate effort to reach the spring before expiring next to it claiming that such site was never seen by living eyes sir Walter then announces the decision that looms so momentous Lee in the poems little etiological account it's a little just-so story it's a sort of a Kipling just so story Knight says this is a lines 57 to 64 I'll build a pleasure house upon this spot and a small Arbor made for rural joy it will be the travelers shed the pilgrims caught a place of love for damsels that are coy a cunning artist will I have to frame a basin for that fountain in the Dell and they who do make mention of the same from this day forth shall call it heart leap well the mansion was built along with the pillars to mark the place where the hearts hoofs landed in his leap Sir Walter lived long enough to make merriment within that Pleasant Bower we're told in 193 but part one concludes with an abrupt termination of sir Walter's story and the promise of another out of the blue the night Sir Walter died in course of time and his bones libary sorry and his bones lie in his paternal veil but there is matter for a second rhyme and I to this would add another tale now the promise might seem to suggest a tandem structure for heart leap well one in which two stories are told in series or in parallel one of the other one after the other a B or some kind of a a first one and that is the poet says another this sense is reinforced when we find that part second also opens with the report of a man on a journey like the first so we have a sense of a parallel the night is pricking across the plain and part one and now we get as I from halls to Richmond did repair a chance that I saw standing in Adele three Aspen's at three corners of a square and one not for years yards distant nearer well what the Speaker of the second part encounters proves however to be the ruin of the structures whose history is related in the first part thus the two stories seem to be lip related not in series one after another or in parallel but in some kind of what in fancy literary criticism terms we call chiasmus the kind of crossing like a BBA that kind of structure both term switch places in the next phase in fact it's not clear whether we have two different stories or one story told first forward and then backward but even these hypotheses don't exhaust the real structural complexity of this issue because since he's puzzled by the appearance of the ruin and a loss to divine as he says what it imported we find out that the speaker makes an inquiry to a shepherd who we are told then delivers the narrative of part one he that same story told which in my former rhyme I have rehearsed one 21 to 22 now this formulation suggests a rather different relationship between the two parts one in which the second part fully contains and contextualizes the first part we're in part two the man is walking along meets a shepherd and we're told that the shepherd delivers part one so it looks like part one is now kind of contained inside part two but this conjecture also has some problems for while the story of part one is left completely to inference in the Shepherd's two-part discourse we just are told that it's the same story the speaker does go on to quote in full the Shepherd's curious commentary on these events and this commentary by the Shepherd mediates meditate excuse me on the reasons why the vegetation in the place is all withered away and why no animals will drink the world water there the shepherd mentions two hypotheses both of them evidently superstitious one the shepherd himself dismisses 138 seven and thirty-eight some say that here a murder has been done and blood cries out for blood the other hypothesis is the one the shepherd favors and it is that as he puts it simply it was all for that unhappy heart nine 140 now at exactly this point the search for the causes of the wells distress quickly metamorphoses into a search for why it was that the unhappy heart was so attached to the well as to have made so desperate a leap to reach it in the first place and we get a series of conjectures on the part of the Shepherd 141 256 I want to just read those now what thoughts must through the that creatures brain have passed from the stone on the summit of the steep are but three bounds and look sir at this last Oh master it has been a cruel leap for thirteen hours he ran a desperate race and in my simple mind we cannot tell what caused the heart might have to love this place and come and make his death bed near the well here on the grass perhaps a sleep he sank lulled by this fountain in the summer tide this water was perhaps the first he drank when he had wandered from his mother's side in April here beneath the scented thorn he heard the birds their morning carols sing and he perhaps for all we know was born not half of her long from that self same spring the Shepherd's would seem to be an act of sympathetic imagination of a rather intense sort to go back to the idea of a sympathetic imagination that all the critics say Wordsworth didn't have he enters so fully into the case of the deer that nothing else seems to matter I think I have to I'm going to be short on time I'll probably run over but I have to tell a joke here is a Minnesota joke so a guy wants to get best prize for the best Pig at the Minnesota State Fair so he works really hard at cultivating his Pig he brings it in to the State Fair and he thinks he's going to win but at the last minute this other Minnesotan farmer comes in with this amazing Pig and he knows he's going to lose he does so afterward he goes up to the winner and he says I got admire your pig and I'm just cured you had you do it the farmer said well I dye it and the guy says well yeah I'm a no it's diet would you feed your Pig you say I fed him died of apples it's interesting because I fed my Pig apples to it anything special at the apples any special kind he's well the main thing is that they have to be really really fresh and the guy says well fresh I mean I I would I would go pick the apples and feed them is my Pig oh how can I mean I have apple trees on my farm how can you get fresher than that think I can only tell you what I do I mean if you're interested yeah okay tell me we do he so what I do is I take my pig and I hold him up to the tree and I let him eat his fill from the tree according to which apples he chooses and the guy is just astonished at this prospect and finding he says well doesn't that take a lot of time and the other farmer says what's time to a pig so I put it to you that that is the Shepherd's relation to the deer to this heart he's so immersed in the hearts world that there is no other world but the hearts time is his time the heart space is his space that's the way he thinks about the heart this shepherd in fact the whole question of what has caused the blight on the well so that it's poisoned and no animals will drink there anymore in the in the contemporary moment has been completely displaced by this question of why the heart wanted to be near the well in the first place that's what interests the Shepherd I don't know was he born there I mean was it something about the water that's what the interests of Shepherd he's completely forgotten this question of why the whole thing's gotten contaminated it's actually left to the speaker to suggest a longer or a larger perspective with praise for the Shepherd's word and the comment that this beasts not unobserved by Nature fell this is one 63 and 64 his death was mourned by sympathy divine it's a comment moreover that spells out the missing step in the Shepards reasoning on the causes of this blight in the first place that is that they lie in a natural response to the pain of the unhappy heart for the speaker this is an act of great sympathy on the part of a higher power the Shepherd himself does not refer to this act of sympathy so much as he performs it by virtue of his fully entering into the case of the beast that fell there's a kind of theology beyond all behind all this and the speaker goes on to explicate that that that's that sympathy divine that he talks about by laying out the basic tenets of what he the speaker calls his Creed and now I'm at 165 268 the being that it is that is in the clouds and air that is in the green leaves among the groves maintains a deep and reverential care for them the quiet creatures whom he loves one might say that the Shepherd's elision of the notion of nature's sympathy with the Fallen heart creates the structural possibility for the narrator's projection of the Shepherd's sympathy onto an divinity that is in the natural world that's imminent in the natural world so in other words the fact that the Shepherd has not talked about nature's sympathy allows the speaker to locate that sympathy in the space the Shepherd who is in nature and this is part of what is registered in these speakers and an enigmatic comment small difference lies between thy Creed and mine the position from which the speaker is able to make this reflection marks another aspect of this small difference for the speaker assumes a what i'll call a millenarian perspective yeah you know thousand years bernie here theologian can explain this portion after the thousand year there's going to be the line will lie down with the lamb right that's millenarian perspective a millenarian perspective on this whole fair that is a fair that is just gestured toward in the Shepherds remarks and here's what the speaker does when he draws out this millenarian instinct here's the speaker now on lines 169 to 76 the pleasure house is dust behind before this is no common waste no common gloom but nature in due course of time once more shall here put on her beauty and her bloom she leaves those objects to a slow decay that what we are and have been may be known but at the coming of a milder day these monuments shall all be overgrown now this passage represents two transformations as if they were one the fullness of meaning in nature's scene the entire erasure of the signs of the hand of man will be complete at this point when men and women need no more admonition as to what they are and have been so you don't need these signs of nature because men and women will be on that but the triumph of nature will also be a triumph over nature a time beyond the time when the ends of time its purpose and design and completion all stand revealed it's a moment as Geoffrey Hartman explained years ago of in Wordsworth of nature of leading beyond itself and into the imagination of Apocalypse the Shepherd can see his way to the disappearance of the stones and trees and fountain but he cannot reflect on what it means to be positing such a disappearance and yet nice riff it's alright but he cannot reflect on what it means to be positing such a disappearance and yet it is the Shepherd's act of sympathy his capacity to feel for passions that are not his own that powers the poem so how does the strange design of the poem work to relate these two issues the fact that we've got this apocalypse on the one hand and yet it's the Shepherd's sympathy that seems to be the the bridge to this vision of Apocalypse so I'm going to skip over a review of what how everybody's tried to solve this and usually they try to solve it by positing that the Speaker of the second half of the poem is pretty much just plain Wordsworth that's what we should think my friend David Bromwich who some of you read in the New York Review of Books were a good book on Wordsworth and he said that one has it it was reading this poem to the audience in 1818 he would have impressed it on his audience that the voice which emerged at the end his words were thought but I think this might not be quite right so let me tell you why let's look at the strongest evidence the moral that the speaker draws at the close of the poem and what is presumed to be that speak the poet's own voice words for its own voice 177 and 180 I want you to look at this if you would one lesson Shepard led us to divide taught by what she shows and what conceals never to blend our pleasure with our pride with sorrow for the meanest thing that feels now this passage has a lot of resonance it's got the rhyme in the Ancient Mariner behind it right Coleridge is long poem of 1798 we have in four years Wordsworth is going to write his most famous Paul in the intimations ode how does it end the meanest the meanest flower that blows thank you so very close to this this is a sort of trial run for that line and this certainly sounds like a sentiment and one spoken with authority and finality it seems to advocate a kind of purity of the sort that has led gestured toward in his epithet the poet of mere sentiment for Haslet as for his disciple Keats what determines that the writer has sympathetic capacity conversely is that plasticity of imagination that brings together the most opposite extreme extremes the moral sentence drawn at the end of this poem might initially seem to indicate that it fails hazlit's test so to bolster the case people sometimes bring up another passage that Wordsworth wrote I think I'm not going to read it now it's from home at grasmere and it's in miltonic blank verse it's very autobiographical this is a speaker that we do have to associate with Wordsworth and he talks about his visit to Hartley well in this in this long passage of blank first miltonic blank verse amid the records of that doleful place by sorrow for the hunted beasts who there had yielded up its breath the awful trance the vision of humanity and God the mourner God the sufferer and so on so this projected epochal ISM in that passage helps to make somewhat more intelligible the strange reference to the milder day and Hartley well we can see that really is apocalyptic it's this milder day that comes after time and now the question becomes sorry the problem in explicate ahartry well by resort to this passage though is that in its insistence that the apocalyptic trance is its insistence is actually produced by a mixture of joy and sorrow that's in the sorry that's in the home with grass bear passage when the heart of his poor creatures suffers wrongfully both in the sadness and the joy we found a promise and an earnest that we Twain a pair of seceding from the common world might in that hallowed spot for ourselves secured so I'm saying there's a little problem in the sense that here in this passage from home at grass pier when they're pointing to the milder day out of heart leap well joy and sorrow are mixed hazlit says pure sentiment this is joy and sorrow why the mixture and now the question becomes what bearing might this have on how we read the signs of the ostensible moral of Hartley well the one drawn by the speaker about not mixing sorrow with our pleasure or our pride remember he says we shouldn't mix our sorrow with our pleasure or our pride but when Wordsworth is doing this in his own voice in the other poem he has a mixture of joy and sorrow looks like a problem for that idea of proving that this poem is in words for his voice by connecting it with the other poem which we know isn't his voice okay so it's about mixing emotions okay so well there's a distinction to be made between joy on the one hand and pleasure on the other it remains the case that we're the home at grasmere fragment insists on sorrow yoke to its opposite this highly stylized ballad stanza insists on sorrow unalloyed and while speaking of the style of this concluding ballad stanza let it also be noted that the speaker introduces that weighty sentiment about not mixing sorrow with pleasure or pride by way of a brief injunction or invitation which fits nice litany Glee into the space of a single line one lesson Shepard led us to divide catching something peculiar in the line Bromwich again notes that the Wordsworth e'en speaker is likely to get the lion's share of things in any division with the Shepherd okay good joke for him the point is that the has Lydia is the has Lydian one he wrote a book about hazlit before he wrote this book that the speaker merely absorbs the shepherd for whom he lacks true sympathy he just absorbs this he doesn't he's egotistical sublime he takes the Shepherd into himself he doesn't go out to identify with the shepherd it's a point like Haslett that Bromwich means to be making at the poets at Wordsworth expense or at least to be suggesting that Wordsworth makes it at his own expense but there is a syntactical ambiguity in this line that makes it very difficult to see it as forming a coherent whole given the lack of case inflection in English and the conventions of subject verb inversion in poetry the line can be read in two antithetical ways with equal plausibility one let us to divide one lesson to let one lesson divide us two that though those are perfectly reasonable readings in the conventions of English grammar and indeed the first interpretation involves yet another breakdown of possibilities 1a let us to share a single lesson jointly 1b let us to each take our separate shares of a single lesson now I take these what we call syntactical ambiguities especially the primary one let us to divine one lesson let one lesson divide us to as reasonable readings even fairly casual readers of Wordsworth might be reminded here of his play on words in the great ninth stanza of the intimations ode which we won't have time to go into so the question is where in the case of heart leap well do we locate what you might call the agency or the motivation for this play on words whose whose play on words is it so introducing the lines that seemed to prohibit a mixture of sorrow and pleasure at the end of the sad tale of the unhappy heart the poem has apparently framed its grave and moral sentence with what we could reasonably call a certain playfulness and even perhaps with the prideful display of syntactical wit nor is this kind of element of the poem confined to syntax to the word to the way words are put together it also is more evident at the level of semantics and phonetics how words mean and how they sound so I'm now talking about the central figure of the heart I've all along been echoing phrases from the poems such as poor heart and unhappy heart in order to prepare you to hear how the titular Red Deer is being linked with what we might call the red center of human dearness in western iconography I believe it is quite impossible to read the poem without hearing har har har T as heart HAART all the more so in light of a narrative about an organism whose death is analyzed in terms of a tropism for home that's what the Shepherd says this is this where there's this pool where the grew up it's a narrative that has a marked allegorical resonance as the specific inflection of the passage in homeland grass fear makes clear home as they say is where the heart is there does seem to be some precedent in the allegorical tradition for treating subjects in this way passage from Renaissance books suggests how the red deer might be used to allegorize a basic human moral capacity Shakespeare puns on this and Twelfth Night will you go to the hunt my lord what curio the heart har T why so do I the noblest that I have oh when mine eyes did see Olivia first me thought she purged the air of petulance the instance I was turned into a heart and my desires like fell and cruel hounds air sins pursue me so Shakespeare's pointing on heart and heart as well I but I'm inclined to I'm not proposing that we eat reread heart leap well as an allegory and certainly not as that kind of an allegory what we see in the Renaissance emblem book but I am inclined to press further on the poems wordplay and to read it rather as a poem of what we might call mixed feelings rather than pure sentiments indeed I'm inclined to read it in relation to the features of the mode poetry that Schiller called sentimental so now I just will sort of summarize the last bit I told you that conclusion would be oral that's the part I was reading from the text so why does she lore matter to this another way to do this talk would be to frame it as I do in the book starting with Schiller but I wanted to talk about lyrical ballads and the revolution and all that first to set it up in 1795 Friedrich Schiller wrote two important books one he started on the night that he heard about the beheading of louis xvi he word reached him in vimar I think it took about three weeks and so in the Louie was beheaded in January 21st 1793 and in mid-february and by Marv Schiller gets word of this and starts his famous letters on aesthetic education to try to make an aesthetic solution to the violence of the modern world very much at the moment that Wordsworth isn't three years earlier year before he wrote a book that recently invoked by orhan par MOOC by John Adams and I even sentimental music he wrote a book called on naive and sentimental poetry and the distinction he makes between naive and sentimental poetry is this he says that whereas the naive poet experiences different degrees of the same emotion the sentimental poet experiences my turn I just did that make you feel better the the sentimental poet experiences mixed emotions I want to get your ring it's much better than this back to the point it was important so that naive poet has different degrees of the same emotion the sentimental poet has mixed emotions and the reason that the naive poet has mixed emotions is because the the sentimental poet reflects as he composes and his poem is built on it on this principle of reflection on a kind of double image producing two conflicting images or perceptions or representations says sure so from the naive poet you get different intensities of the same emotion but from the naive poet you can get two different emotions that are mixed why because of reflection how does reflection produce mixed emotions well I've got about 200 pages on this in my book but the short answer is that you think about laurence sterne it's the idea that in the act of sympathy when we pass over by reflection into the into the place of the other as people like Adam Smith and Shaftesbury were saying we should do in the 18th century we occupy their emotions that's what Adam Smith says commercial sentiments are all about if I'm going to make a deal with you I have to know what it's in your interest to get out of the deal so I have to be able to identify with your interests when we sit down to the bargaining table which means that my mind will in that sense be divided and the sentiment that's constructed out of that will be of a mixed nature between the two of us so that idea of the sentimental coming out of this whole 18th century tradition as involving mixture which Haslett doesn't seem to get is very much crucial to this poem but here the sense of mixture has to do with the sort of images and perceptions in the two parts so that they cannot be quite resolved to give you a more familiar example of how Wordsworth uses this the poem I think I did a talk on a few years ago and we're almost at the end and I think we're going to have one question Tintern Abbey the famous poem where he's sitting on the banks he's looking out over the river and he's remembering what it was like when he was there earlier and he says and now he's looking at the scene he's remembering the last time he was there and he says so it's a reflection producing two images in conflict and now with gleams of half-extinguished thought and many recognitions dim in faint and somewhat of a sad perplexity the picture of the mind revives again while here I stand not only with the sense of present pleasure but with pleasing thoughts that in this moment there is life in food for future years so it's a vexing mixed emotions double image of the past and the present that comes out of reflection not naivete but reflection and what I wanted to say in sum then is that thinking about what he's doing not just with his own past in this poem which is also in lyrical ballads but with the Ballad past he's producing the same kind of mixture and note that if you go back as hope you will tonight and read the poem again you'll see that not only is the ordinary life of his little journey because he did take this journey he actually stopped at a place called heart leap well with his sister they saw the footprints they asked the Shepherd that seems all to have happened but he cast it as a ballad to make it more archaic but if you go back and look at the first ballot the one that's supposed to be the naive ballad you'll see that it's full of these beautiful touches that wouldn't have been part of any ballad that you would find in Percy's relics and the one that I think is the most moving and I'll close with that is the image of the of the hearts breath on the water which I think you have to think of as a gesture like the beginning of the of Genesis it's the breath on the water right now that's not a ballad writer who's producing this image this is a highly advanced sophisticated poet who is producing this image if somebody can find a provider you can read it it's in the first part would you read it for me and you'll have the last word thank you thank you for coming you

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Keywords: poetry lecture, wordsworth william, british poetry, Lyrical ballads, james chandler, University of Chicago, french revolution and literature, romantic poetry, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, uchicago, english poetry, wordsworth poetry, chicago university, UChicago, words worth, wordsworth, William Wordsworth, wordsworth and coleridge, James Chandler, french revolution in english literature, romantic poets, university of chicago, william wordsworth poems, ballad

Id: OTfiEHm3_pQ

Length: 57min 7sec (3427 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 22 2011