Wordsworth, Coleridge and the Poetic Revolution

my previous lecture I suggested that one of the key figures in the ferment that led up to the astonishing decade that began with the fall of the Bastille in 1789 was jean-jacques rousseau whose social contract led many of the intellectual foundations of the Revolution I also suggested that along with the political revolution there was a revolution in sensibility in attitudes to the emotions to women to sexual relations and to children I'm going to say more about childhood next time but today I want to begin by returning to that remark I created from a W Schlegel concerning Goethe's novel about young Verta the novel remember he said was a declaration of the rights of feeling and idea of the rights of feeling to correspond with the Declaration of the Rights of Man Rousseau too offered such a declaration in the form of a novel his nouvelle Eloise was the most widely read and widely imitated novel of the 18th century the historian of the book Robert Darnton reckons it was the best-selling secular book of the entire century without that over 70 editions in print by 1800 the story goes but it was so popular that publishers couldn't print enough copies to keep up with the demand so they rented it out by the day or even the hour Rousseau was overwhelmed with fan mail telling him of the tears swoons and ecstasy's provoked in his readers a modern reworking of the medieval story of Eloise and Abelard it tells the story of a passionate love affair that crosses the boundaries of class religious piety and decorum the full title was Julie ooh la nouvelle Oh Louise they when first published in Amsterdam in 1761 it was called leopard udders are more letters of two lovers living in a small town at the foot of the Alps the lover is Julie's tutor Sandburg under the ancien régime a posh girl cannot marry her tutor especially if he is a holy man but living in the sublime landscape of the Alps and spending time rowing on the beautiful lake they cannot resist their passions their affair must however come to an end when upper-class Julie dutifully marries a baron chosen for her behalf the Santa goes off on a world tour six years later he returns and is engaged once more this time is tutor to Julie's children they live happily and virtuously together all passion dually restrained enjoying a simple country life but Julie has an epiphany when her child almost drowns she has never stopped loving sampler and soon she expires as if from pure emotional excess for readers the book thus demonstrated the power of passion over the demands of duty and the social order the Catholic Church newly placed it on the index of prohibited books but however however often priests and moralists invade from pulpit and pamphlet against the dangers of novel reading especially for women the authorities could not prevent the spread of the cult of sensibility and there was no literary form more suited to the expression of extreme emotion than poetry so it was that in the spring of 1787 a london-based but cosmopolitan inspired monthly journal called the European magazine included in its poetry pages the first published work of a young man on the brink of his 17th birthday it was entitled sonnet on seeing miss helen mariah williams weep at a tale of distress the first half reads as follows she wept life's purple tide began to flow in language streams through every thrilling vain dim were my swimming eyes my pulse beats low and my full heart was swelled too dear delicious pain life left my loaded heart and closing i a sigh recalled the wanderer to my breast dear was the pause of life and dear the sigh that called the wanderer home and home to rest these few lines traveled the road from Rousseau to Romanticism she wept as did so many readers of Julie especially female female ones in connecting with a book a tale of distress the reader also connects with the full tide of life capital L the heart reaches out in the spirit of fellow feeling with suffering humanity the key metaphor is that of a stream a stream of consciousness perhaps that will eventually flow into the sea of the unconscious we are in the realm of sensibility the fluvial image is internalized the poet's eyes swim with tears in sympathy with those of Miss Helen Mariah Williams as she in turn weeps in sympathy with the distress about which she is reading life flows along the blood stream thrilling the veins and then the pulse slows and the heart is swelled too dear delicious pain sympathy or what we would now call empathy brings as a later and much greater poem would put it sensations sweet felt in the blood and felt along the heart sensations the swelling heart the excited flow of blood in the veins the beating of the pulse the idea that pain might have something delicious about it above all that verb felt these are going to be key words in poetry for the next forty years one might almost say that the entire sensibility of another precocious poet John Keats is bound within the nutshell of this cluster of images think of the ode to a nightingale and it's cry now more than ever seems it rich to die at the core of this sonnet is the idea that a poem can offer a momentary pause of life in moment release suspending what a latest sonnet would call the getting and spending of daily routine in which we lay waste our powers poetry can call the wanderer home to rest but what we come home to is a bond a sympathy for Humanity well you will have guessed the identity of the teenage poet by now the sonnet in the European magazine was signed Axio Lagos Lagos words Axios worth words worth it is indeed a perm about the worth of words the power of tree and Wordsworth his first published poem this is will go on in company with his friend samuel taylor coleridge to make unprecedented claims for that worth for poetry as a form of salvation a revolution of the self who then was Miss Helen Mariah Williams whom you see here born in 1761 she was brought up by her mother in Derick upon tweed after her father died while she was an infant she wrote poems from an early age brought to London at the age of 20 she was taken up by a Presbyterian minister who wrote a preface praising her first published poem edwin and alt ruder published when she was just 21 years old setting the time of the English Civil War it tells the story of lovers whose families fight on opposite sides ending with their tragic death think Romeo and Juliet with a dash of La Nouvelle Oh Louise particularly in the character of L true der who is a young woman of extreme benevolence her sympathy extending to every living thing for the bruised insect on the waist a sigh would heave her breast and oft her careful hand replaced the linens falling nest a naming there of a specific species of Finch the tender care for a bird's nest such details prefigure the delicate descriptions of the greatest of all the Romantic poets of nature John Clare of whom we will hear little in our fifth lecture of the season when they also see the young helen marie williams anticipating Wordsworth at his best L true der is compared to a lonely flower that smiles in the desert veil well that's a conventional enough image and a cure of Thomas Grey's famous lines in his elegy written in a country churchyard full many a flower is born to blush unseen and waste its sweetness on the desert earth but in the rhythm of alternating Tetra meters and try metres for stress and three stressed lines the following lines from Edwin and intruder feel very like a dry run for Wordsworth's mysterious mesmerizing Lucie poems published in 18 thus Williams so lived in solitude unseen this lovely peerless made so graced the wild sequester's scene and blossomed in the shade and Wordsworth she dwells among the untrodden weighs beside the springs of dove and maid whom there were none to praise and very few to love a violet by a mossy stone half hidden from the eye fair as a star when only one is shining in the sky the thing that is unique to Wordsworth is the intrusion of the poet's self in the final stanza signaled by a startling exclamatory pause and the heartache of the closing line she lived unknown and few could know when Lucy ceased to be but she is in her grave and oh the difference to me Wordsworth is the great poet of me of the self women were cautious about exposing their identity in print like all the novels which Jane Austen would publish in her lifetime Williams's first book of poetry was anonymous but in 1784 she boldly put her name on the title page of an epic poem called Peru two years later she gathered her early works together with many new ones in a 2-volume collection simply entitled poems it was published by the method of subscription whereby purchases paid upfront to cover the cost of production and over 1500 people signed up a remarkable number for a volume of poetry by a young woman amour Williams's readers was the teenage Wordsworth he never literally saw Helen Mariah Williams weeping at a tale of distress he read her poems and projected an image of her as the sympathetic poet his sonnet was almost certainly inspired by a passage in Peru which concerns the Spanish massacre of the Incas it's a manifestation of her empty Imperial pacifist Sensibility in a footnote she writes in anticipation of the coming revolutions and the freedom of the slaves there is much reason to hope that these injured nations may rather the liberty of which they have been so cruelly deprived and Liberty is going to be one of our watch words the climax of Peru Williams introduces a personification of sensibility reaping for the Incas a visionary figure descends from the clouds its lights on earth mild vision gentle form his sensibility wet with the dew of Tears a ray of pity beaming from her eyes sensibility addresses he to whose yielding hearts my power India's the transport blended with delicious tears the bliss that swells to agony the breasts the sympathy that Rob's the soul of rest so you can see that where the language of Wordsworth sonnet comes from his clever device is to combine this figure with its creator he makes Helen Maria Williams into the very embodiment of sensibility this idea that strong emotion weeping especially is an essential part of what it is to be human because it answers to a moral imperative to feel for others and show benevolence towards them is the key to both Williams and Wordsworth well in 1788 Williams published an anti-tip anti-slavery poem then in 1790 her first novel appeared its very title Julia revealed the influence of Rousseau in a digression in its second volume Williams introduced a new poem of her own under the pretense that it was written by a character in the novel the character is in a terrible prison the poem is called the Bastille a vision soon after her novel was published helen marie williams set off for france she arrived in paris on the very eve of the first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille she'd gone straight into the eye of the revolutionary storm later that year she published her letters written in France in the summer 1792 a friend in England containing various anecdotes relative to the French Revolution I arrived in Paris she begins her first letter the day before the Federation the fete de la serda that aerosol what's the great national celebration of the the new political regime 14th of July of course if we now call it Bastille Day she gives thanks for the good fortune of speedy journey had the packet which means a ship which conveyed me from Brighton to Dieppe sailed a few hours later or the wind been contrary in short had I not reached Paris at the moment I did reach it I should have missed the most sublime spectacle which was ever represented on the theatres of this earth and week-by-week she reported from the front line praising every aspect of the early days of the revolution it was the triumph of humankind man asserting the noblest privileges of his nature and it required that the common feelings of humanity to become in that moment a citizen of the world acknowledged that my heart caught with enthusiasm the general sympathy my eyes filled with tears her eyes do fill with tears a lot and I shall never forget the sensations of that day in the act of becoming one of her country's few field correspondents at the scene of the epoch-making events she moves her vocabulary of sensibility heart sympathy tears sensations into the political arena on the very day of her arrival in Paris a pair of Cambridge students who had just taken their third year exams crossed the channel at the beginning of a summer vacation walking tour they spent that night of 13th July 17 19 Calais and the next day they witnessed four celebrations of the Federation in the town of Arthur there they were on a far smaller scale than those in which helen marie williams rejoiced in paris but they were no less ardent years later one of the two students you can guess who remembered the day in a sonnet addressed to his companion on the road I love this once a sonnet begins Jones his friend his colleague from school Robert Jones Jones when from Calais south would you and I traveled on foot together then this way which I am pacing now he's writing this adage you know to when he's back in France I'll tell you why a bit later was like the May with festivals of newborn liberty that word again a homeless sound of joy was in the sky the antique way should earth as one might say beat like the heart of man is the heart again songs Garland's play banners and happy faces far and nigh however the purpose of Wordsworth and Jones's holiday was picturesque tourism not political engagement they did not go to Paris instead they walked through rural France took boats down the sound and Rhone rivers on their way to such great tourist sites as the monastery of the ground chakras the oats o voir the Vale of Shawnee and the sight of Mont Blanc they crossed the Alps via the simple on cars not realizing the point at which there reached the summit then wandered around the Swiss and North Italian lakes Maggiore llegando comex has like a great tour by the end of august it was back to Lucerne Zurich and Constance then in September to burn and Basel where they bought a boat to sell along the Rhine to Cologne where they sold the boat before returning to England to prepare for final examinations parata graduation in January 1791 after going down from Cambridge Wordsworth follow the typical graduands path of moving to London and not finding work in the summer he went to Wales and spent several months on another walking tour with Jones this time in Jones's native mountains back in London though he made the bold move to return to France while waiting to embarking Brighton he called on another female poet whose work he admired Charlotte Smith she gave him letters of introduction one of them was addressed to none other than Helen Mariah Williams who had missed this by this time moved to or lay on he arrived in Paris by night at the end of November he immediately fell in with the Girondins the more moderate faction in the National Assembly and he visited the Assembly he may indeed have been introduced to the more radical Jacobin Club either now or on a return visit a year later he got to know an extraordinary English philosopher called walking Stuart who we will meet at the end of this lecture so please stay awake a few days later he was off to all L to visit helen marie williams but he missed her cashier just headed back to paris however he stayed in all ale for nearly a year and made two of the most important acquaintances of his life a perot revolutionary military officer called michele Beaupre at a girl called a net velum who would bear his illegitimate daughter all these events are recorded in great detail in the epic autobiographical poem that was posthumously christened the prelude though in the case of the affair with an S he disguises it in a Romeo and Juliet like story called votre Coeur and Julia that name again among the most memorable passages in the prelude ah been embedded ode to the joy of revolutionary hope Oh pleasant exercise of hope and joy for great were the auxiliaries which then stood upon our side we who are strong in love bliss was it in that dawn to be alive but to be young was very heaven and then there is a lesson from Beaupre on the need to eradicate poverty and inequality and when we chanced one day to meet a hunger bitten girl I love this thing that was with one moment it's a great rhetorical flourish and the next it's just very ordinary down-to-earth I just felt for a walk and we meet a hunger bit and girl and when we chanced one day to meet a hunger bitten girl who crept along fitting her language self unto a heifers motion by a cord tied to her arm and picking thus from the lay in its sustenance well the girl with her two hands was busy knitting in a heartless mood of solitude and at the sight my friend that's Beaupre in agitation said she's against that which we are fighting I with him believed devoutly that a spirit was abroad which could not be withstood that poverty at least like this would in a little time be found no more and then he goes on to speak and finally a sum and crown of all should see the people having a strong hand in making their own laws whence better days to all mankind hear the language of democratic and radical politics is mingled with that of strong feeling agitation of the spirits attunement to the mood of solitude we are back in the territory of Rousseau as he moves between his social contract with its idea of the power of the will of the people and on the other hand the novel of sensibility and his reveries of the solitary Walker two weeks after the publication of helen marie williams letters written in France with Wordsworth back in Cambridge after his Alpine walking tour Edmund Burke launched the counter-offensive to this vein of radical thought reflections on the revolution in France described the uprising of the people as the most astonishing that has hitherto happened in the world a generation later the poet critic and journalist Lea hunt who had been imprisoned for labelling the Prince Regent argued in the preface to a volume of his poetry that during his lifetime there had been a comparable astonishing revolution in poetry as the Austrian regime had been overthrown in France so in English poetry the French influenced neoclassicism associated with Alexander Pope and his followers had been consigned to history this has undoubtedly been owing in the first instance ly hundreds to the political convulsions of the world which shook up the minds of men and rendered them too active and speculative to be satisfied with commonplaces the second cause he suggests is the revived inclination for our older and grade school of poetry which he says is exemplified by the elevation of Shakespeare to the stages of national poet and divine genius and is also talking about that fashion for medievalism for old Ballard's for Ossian and so forth which I talked about last time but the third and not the least hunt concludes was the accession of a new school of poetry itself of which Wordsworth has justly the reputation of being the most prominent ornament but it was in a priest of the temple perhaps was Coleridge and that preface of Lee hunts goes on to offer a succinct summary of the essence of poetry as understood by this new school the secret of poetry Leigh hunt explains is a sensitiveness to the beauty of the external world to the unsophisticated impulses of our nature and above all imagination or the power to see with verisimilitude what others do not these are the properties of poetry seeing what others do not as Wordsworth put it in one of his very greatest lyrics poetry happens when the beauty of the external world works in unison with the feelings when the beauty of the external world works in unison with the feelings and the imagination to create an elevated quasi sacred state in which even the motion of our human blood is almost suspended and we which again that idea of that pause which we saw in that first sight and we are laid asleep in body and become a living soul while with an eye made quiet by the power of harmony and the deep power of joy we see into the life of things we see into the life of things one of the questions I want to explore in the second half of this lecture is whether this new theory of poetry constituted a philosophical revolution or a political one or both and I'll seek an answer at the end of the lecture when I turn to this poem in more detail well the principal members of the new school were first known as the lake poets but eventually they and their successors including the circle around Lee hunt Keats Shelley Baron and the prose writers Haslett De Quincey and Lam became known as the romantics and their innovations were duly described as a revolution akin to that in France I think that have we stand corrected that the first person to group name them as such was the French critic he bullied ten in a history of English literature published in 1864 there he tells of how on the eve of the 19th century began in Europe the great modern revolution the thinking public and the human mind changed and underneath these two collisions a new literature sprang up so tain was thinking of a triple revolution not only the political one in France but also the industrial one in England he says the steam engine and spinning jenny create in england towns of from three hundred and fifty thousand to five hundred thousand souls and also the philosophical revolution that began in germany about which i spoke a good deal in my last lecture he speaks there of the disease of the age the restlessness of that' and Faust difficult nth with the present the vague desire of a higher beauty and an ideal happiness the painful aspiration for the infinite man suffers from doubt he expends himself like Faust in anxious researches through science and history and judges in vain it is the beyond his size for by the end of the nineteenth century it had become commonplace to use the word revolution to describe the literary innovations that had occurred at the dawn of that century so for example in another history of English literature by the biographer and scholar Edmund Gosse we read of the romantic revolution of 1798 that was the year when under the imprint of a minor provincial publisher a slender volume of poetry was published with no author's name on the cover and the unassuming title lyrical balance with a few other poems the authors were William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge although in the British Library copy of the first edition some early reader has guessed that it is by the other late poet mr. Salvi and someone else has then crossed it out and put Wordsworth poor old carriage gets left out so what were the contents of the lyrical balance of 1798 first let's think a bit about that anonymous title page why no authors names well cone which provided an explanation in a letter to his friend Joseph Cottle who was a poet himself and Cottle was the bristol publisher who saw the volume into print mister the period of our Coleridge and Wordsworth a living in Somerset in the West Country carriage never stoie Wordsworth nearby with strong Bristol connections code which had indeed delivered series of lectures attacking the slave trade in Bristol of course was a great slave port this is what Karen writes to come to patil as two anonymous publications depend on it you are deceived Kotla said oh we shouldn't publish it anonymously we really ought to put your names on it and coder is writing back to say why they shouldn't put their names on it Wordsworth's name is nothing into a large number of persons mind stinks well Wordsworth name was nothing because there only previous volumes of poetry descriptive sketches and an evening walk had sunk almost without trace Coleridge his name was mud because he had developed a reputation as a dangerous radical not only for those lectures on the slave trade but also because he edited a periodical radical periodical called called The Watchmen and Chris his poems were perceived as radical just take a look at this it's the famous caricature by James gillray in an anti radical magazine called the anti Jacobean the jacobins were of course the extreme radicals in France and he's called new morality and it's a it caricatures all the leading radical writers of the 1790s and there and that works they're bowing down at the shrine of a priest or called Lupo who was a Frenchman who had been instrumental in ensuring that atheism was at the heart of the French Revolution and notice in the background there the three figures in the sort of one is called justice one is called philanthropy and one is called Sensibility philanthropy doesn't quite mean what it means to us literally Phil from Greek philosophers love of man lipu espoused a kind of new secular religion called Theo philanthropy the idea Friends of man very word friendship friend was associated with this kind of radical anti-christian thought and with our foreign sensibility is they're associated with this new radical politics if we look closely I've just tried to put a little yellow circle on it you can see two asses there one is reading it says Sal these suffix and the one at the top is reading carriages dactylic s' these are references to volumes of poetry Southie and Coleridge had published and down at the bottom is a frog and a toad holding blank verse and there are two chats called Charles Lloyd and Charles Lamb who were very close friends of Wordsworth and Coleridge and among the verses at the bottom of the caricature we read a reference to and he five other wandering bards that move in sweet Accord of harmony and love again see how there's like that language of harmony and love is associated with radicalism those bards CdTe Coleridge and Southey Lloyd and lamb and Coe tune all your mystic harps to praise Lupo some people have actually suggested that the fifth bard the & Co is Wordsworth I don't think that's right I think it's actually cops'll for publisher but this clearly shows the way that the circle around Coleridge was associated with political radicalism well the anxiety to maintain the anonymity of the authors of the volume was such that after the Bristol edition of lyrical ballads went into print one of Coleridge's contributions to the collection was removed because they realized it ready been published elsewhere and could have been traced back to him it's hard to see on the slide but if you look on the left-hand side which is the Bristol Edition there's a poem called Lutie of a sec you see and lovechild on the right hand side which is the London Edition published a few months later it's replaced by a new poem called the nightingale a conversational poem and that led to the page numbers being screwed up in the London edition there was another difference between the Bristol and London versions Wordsworth decided that the innovative poetic project needed an explanatory preface so he inserted an advertisement in which he explained that the poems were to be considered as experiments and again that very word experiment is associated with political radicalism the French Revolution and all its works were thought of as a radical experiment in reorganizing society they were written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure the trouble with posts highly educated poets Wordsworth implies is that they don't speak the language of ordinary people they all too frequently resort to what's worth Wordsworth goes on to call the Gordon s and inane phraseology of modern writers these poems by contrast he says may seem strange and awkward but they contain a natural delineation of human passions human characters and human incidents and again those words natural associate with nature and the idea of humanity that the key he also says these are in the spirit not of the genteel poetry of the 18th century but of our elder writers by which he means the popular culture of medieval ballads and the plays of Shakespeare with their mingling of kings and clowns the elite and the people he adds that the opening are much the longest poem in the collection carriages The Rime of the Ancient Mariner was professedly written in imitation of the style as well as the spirit of the elder poets and of course that explains why the original text of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in lyrical ballads 1719 has this archaic spelling it is the rhyme of the eighth see aunt marinara it is an NC and marinara and he stopped with one of three courage later got rid of that that kind of antiquated spelling well what about Wordsworth poetry in the collection the first of his contributions is about a baby abandoned at birth the two longest poems are about respectively a Down's syndrome boy and a female vagrant others are about impoverished old people a shepherd fallen on hard times a convict an old man traveling to a hospital to visit his war wounded son and a dungeon that might as well be the Bastille not to mention a mad mother and a forsaken Indian woman and it's that kind of material that Leslie hunts friend the great critic William Hazlitt to associate lyrical ballads with the French Revolution hazlit first met Coleridge when he trumped four miles over the fields from his native web and Shropshire solely in order to hear Coleridge preach he boldly befriended his hero and got himself an invitation to nether stoie in the West Country where Coleridge was living dear Wordsworth he has has lit in early June 1798 in the afternoon Coleridge took me over to Alf Foxton a romantic old family mansion belonging to the son Tobin family where Wordsworth lived William wasn't there but sister Dorothy gave them tea and free access to her brother's poems for lyrical ballads which was still in manuscript then the next morning has lit writes as soon as breakfast was over we strolled out into the park and seating ourselves on the trunk of an old ash tree Coleridge read aloud with a sonorous and musical voice Wordsworth's Ballad of Betty fine I saw touches of truth and nature and then in the thorn the mad mother and the complaint of a poor Indian woman I felt that deeper power and pathos which have since been acknowledged as the characteristics of this author and the sense of a new style and a new spirit in poetry came over me it had to me something of the effect that arises from the turning up of the fresh soil or the first welcome breath of spring this was hazlit's acquaintance with the power and pathos of Wordsworth poetry though his relationship with the poet himself would become awkward hazlit remained a consistent champion of him as the most original poet now living his poetry a pure emanation of the spirit of the age because he saw Wordsworth's work as the English literary equivalent of the French Revolution he says it fart it had something in the principles and events of the French Revolution the change in in poetry was as complete as the change in politics there was a mighty ferment in the heads of statesmen and poets Kings and people all the commonplace figures of poetry the tropes and allegories were discarded capital letters women no more allowed in print than letters patent of nobility permitted in life kings and queens were dethroned from their rank and legitimate tragedy or poetry as they were decapitated elsewhere rhyme was looked upon as a relic of the feudal system and regular metre was abolished along with regular government well has it is slightly teasing Wordsworth at this point because he's actually writing this year in the Regency years by which time Wordsworth politics have moved to the right but there's no doubting hazlit's conviction that for Wordsworth to write about Botany Bay convicts female vagrants and gypsies idiot boys and mad mothers is to take the spirit of democracy into poetry but what about the more inward personal meditative memory based and philosophical poems in lyrical balance they can really hardly be described as Wordsworth claimed his poems were to speak the real language of ordinary men not many men or women can speak like this I have felt a presence that disturbs me with the joy of elephant elevated thoughts a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused whose dwelling is the light of setting suns and the round ocean and the live and the blue sky and in the mind of man emotion and a spirit that impels all thinking things all objects of all thought and rolls through all things therefore am I still a lover of the meadows and the woods and mountains and of all that we behold from this green earth of all the mighty world of eye and ear both what they have create and what perceive well pleased to recognize in nature and the language of the sense the anchor of my purest faults the nurse the guide the guardian of my heart and soul of all my moral being it's a famous passage from the freshly written poem that Wordsworth inserted at the very end of lyrical ballads the very last minute before publication the poem is called lines written a few miles above Tinton Abbey on revisiting the banks of the why during a tour July the 13th 1798 why did Wordsworth bother to include the precise date of composition partly to create authenticity in the memory a specific time as well as a specific place to emphasize the idea of the poem as to use of a phrase from the preface that he wrote in 1802 the second edition of lyrical ballads the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings but also surely to evoke the resonance of July the 13th the eve of Bastille Day the anniversary of his first landing in France so what is a landscape poem written in the WHI Valley have to do with the revolution in France to answer that question let's take Wordsworth back to Paris in the days leading up to the guillotine at the king and Mary Antoinette he was in the eye of the sport just like Helena I will more so perhaps he saw the blood of the victims of the September massacres in the plastic carousel he witnessed the execution of a man that he knew dorsa one of the leading moderates he would lie awake in his hotel imagining a voice tainting him with a guilty conscience for having welcomed the Liberty that had now turned to terror by 1798 he has detached himself from revolutionary fervor so one aspect of the politics of Tinton Abbey is elegiac no longer the youth a youthful enthusiast he is an older and a wiser man responsive to what he calls the still sad music of humanity and he is in retreat from the city the places of social unrest and change but the revolution within the declaration of the rights of feeling has not been revoked to answer my initial question about whether the romantic revolution was political philosophical or both in the case of Wordsworth and Coleridge as time passed and events in France became more bloody and a robe sphere and the sinister Committee of Public Safety their support for the political revolution stalled but the philosophical revolution endured how so in Tinton Abbey look again at those phrases we see into the life of things emotion and a spirit that impels all thinking things all objects of all thought and rolls through all things the Orthodox Christian thought of the period would deny that things have life what is this motion and spirit rolling through all things what is behind the claim that nature and the language of the sense as opposed to God Father Son and Holy Spirit is the anchor of my purest thoughts for nurse the guide the guardian of my heart and soul of all my moral being what would a churchman say about a crime that finds divinity not in heaven but in an earthly landscape a poet poetic voice that worships all that we behold from this green earth Wordsworth narrowly missed meeting Helena rhyme in revolutionary France but somebody did meet in Paris was a man known as walking Stuart he was eccentric he had walked halfway around the world from address through Persia Arabia Abyssinia much of North Africa and every country in Europe as far as Russia he refused to take carriages because they were both elitist and cruel to horses he came to believe that some Universal Empire of revolutionary police terror would ban his books so he urged readers to translate them into Latin a precaution against the decay of the English language and bury them seventy feet underground and passed down their locations orally until the dawn of the age of the student the stuarti and man made their disinterment possible despite these bizarre beliefs Thomas De Quincey who wrote a wonderful essay about him said that Stuart's political views seemed to Wordsworth and myself every way worthy of a philosopher there he is Stuart's philosophy expounded in books with titles such as the apocalypse of nature and the revelation of nature was a theory of materialism influenced by Spinoza and Holberg combined with a distinctive belief partly inspired by his travels in the East in a single universal consciousness Spinoza's pantheism the belief that there is no transcendent or personal deity that God is to be found in nature in things was abhorrent to the church it would fascinate Coleridge at the time of lyrical ballads a government spy overheard him and Wordsworth in animated conversation about Spinoza and reported back to the Home Office that they were in contact with a spy named nosey Spinoza spy nosy as the Baron holdback his student pseudonymous Lee published an T religious polemic the system of nature with its argument that there is no necessity to have recourse to supernatural powers to account for the formation of things this was what underpinned the state decreed atheism of the French Revolution the universe holdback argued was nothing more than matter in motion Wordsworth learned of spin from Coleridge but probably never read him he didn't own a copy of whole back system of nature till much later his acquaintance with walking Stewart in Paris meant that he didn't need a first-hand knowledge of these radically influential thinkers in his apocalypse of nature Stewart praised holdback for completing the destruction of error and purging the human mind of prejudice and he made a series of claims that I believe were profoundly formative of Wordsworth's mind he begins with matter and motion motion is the force or soul of matter and cause of all action hence Wordsworth's motion that impels all thinking things and all objects of all thought Stuart's definition of man this machine is formed of particles of matter organized so as to resemble a corded instrument of music of five strings which correspond with the five senses this idea chimed with Coleridge's notion which also deeply influenced Wordsworth of the human mind as an alien harp trembling into thought for Stuart the self and nature are inextricably linked self he says as a part of all nature is immortal and universal self pervades nature in its revolutions and operations self is as much concerned in the present or future health and happiness of nature as the Handy's is concerned in that of the body the further one reads into Stuart's apocalypse of nature the more deeply one understands that the animated nature of tintin a be of how it's vision of the life of things is deeply bound to the philosophies of pantheism and materialism that were at the ideological heart of the french revolution yes there was eventually a political retreat but at the core of Romanticism there remained what walking Stuart at the climax of his apocalypse of nature called the religion of nature and the first tenet of that religion is nature is the great integer of being or matter and motion without beginning as without end or as Wordsworth put it in his memory and the prelude of crossing the simple on paths on that walking tour with Jones in the bliss when it was dawn to be alive and to be young was very heaven and note the use of the word apocalypse echoing Stuart stifle the immeasurable height of woods decaying never to be decayed a stationary blasts of waterfalls the torrents shooting from the clear blue sky the rocks that muttered close upon our ears black drizzling crags that spake by the wayside as if a voice were in them were all like workings of one mind the features of the same face blossoms upon one tree characters of the great apocalypse the types and symbols of eternity of first and last and midst and without end thank you [Applause] you

Channel: Gresham College

Views: 19,476

Rating: 4.9183674 out of 5

Keywords: Gresham, Gresham College, Education, Lecture, Public, London, Debate, Academia, Knowledge, education, Jonathan Bate, rhetoric, literature, poetry, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, poetic revolution, romantics, Romanticism, Romantic poetry, William Hazlitt, Lyrical Ballads, Helen Maria Williams, french revolution, Leigh Hunt, Joseph Cottle, James Gillray

Id: 0wgVApASNxw

Length: 47min 4sec (2824 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 22 2018

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