Category: Romanticism

Exploding Head

Apologies if the stream of entries sure to follow don’t make much sense to a casual reader. So much has gone through my head in the last two days that if I don’t just spit it out, the headache will never fade, and I won’t be able to get any work done. I have over 800 pages of stuff to read in the next three days on top of all this explosive thinking. I suppose I could blame it on Joe Viscomi, because I got to spend a lot of time with him and it seemed like every other word out of his mouth directly related to the ideas I’m working with. But it’s deeper than that. Viscomi is perhaps the best place to start though.

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Byron in America

It is great to know experts to ask about some of these bizarre topics I’m exploring. It never fails that every question I come up with hasn’t been directly addressed, and because of that, would be a great thesis topic. Dr. Yoder e-mailed Dr. Ghislaine McDayter, a Byronist that I met a couple of years ago, regarding my question about Byron’s reception in America. I got a couple of great clues from her. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Lady Byron Vindicated: A History of the Byron Controversy, from its Beginning in 1816 to the Present Time in 1870— how’s that for an on-topic lead? The best news is that our library has it on microfiche. She also recommended a historical critical survey work, and told me that Byron mentioned his American fans occasionally in his letters.

On my own, I found a rather interesting thread in Emerson’s journals from 1841-1843. He uses Byron as a bad example in one spot (not to mention noting that he just “didn’t get” Shelley), but Emerson also mentions that his favorite teacher from Harvard, Edward Everett, used to quote both Milton and Byron, though he quoted Milton more frequently. I hadn’t heard of Everett before, but he’s certainly a prominent American of the early 19th century. It turns out he was the featured speaker at Gettysburg, not Lincoln. Another of those big guys who has been marginalized in standard histories. I tracked down Everett’s speech. It’s pretty good— though no match for Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

Emerson’s deprecating remarks are in the context of a rant against Benjamin Disraeli’s novel Vivian Grey:

The young men are the readers & victims of Vivian Grey. Byron ruled for a time Vivian rules longer. They would quiz their father & mother [,] lover & friend. They discuss sun & moon, liberty & fate, love & death, and ask you to eat baked fish. They never sleep, go nowhere, stay nowhere, eat nothing, & and know nobody: but are up for anything, Festus-like, Faust-like, Jove-like, and could write an Iliad any rainy morning, if Fame were not such a bore.

Men & women [,] the greatest or fairest [,] are stupid things, but a rifle and a pleasant gunpowder [,] a spaniel and a cigar are themes for kings. (192)

It’s safe to say that Emerson wasn’t into the Byronic hero, but I haven’t a clue about the baked fish thing.

Fortunes of Catherine and William Blake

Hearts in Stone

Nature wasn’t mute to William Wordsworth. Shelley was a big fan of the early Wordsworth, and animated nature in a similar way. Byron used to complain about Shelley forcing him to listen to Wordsworth, which claimed to dislike like a bad medicine. However similar images also occur in Byron. In my favorite short poem by Shelley, Mont Blanc, nature was animated with a voice:

Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal
Large codes of fraud and woe, not understood
By all, but which the wise, and great, and good
Interpret or make felt, or deeply feel. (80-83)

It seems likely that Shelley had Wordsworth in mind when he penned these lines in 1816, but he wouldn’t have known The Prelude. Wordsworth would not allow it to be published until after his death, in the version I’ve been referring to as the 1850. A mountain did more than speak to Wordsworth in the first book of The Prelude. Wordsworth had stolen a boat as a boy and rowed out on the lake. Nature stepped in with her “severe ministry.”

I dipped my oars in the silent lake,
And as I rose upon the stroke of my boat
Went heaving through the water like a swan—
When from behind that rocky steep, till then
The bound of the horizon, a huge cliff,
As if with a voluntary power instinct,
Upreared its head. I struck and struck again,
And growing still in stature, the huge cliff
Rose up between me and the stars, and still
With measured motion, like a living thing
Strode after me. With trembling hands I turned,
And through the silent water stole my way
Back to the cavern of the willow-tree. (1799— 104-116)

I just rolled on the floor the first time I read this. It’s like a Japanese science fiction film, where the huge mountain goes after poor kid Wordsworth. I can’t help but visualize it. There were no major revisions of this section in the later versions, though it was moved to line 400 in 1805, and 370 in the final version. Wordsworth did change “trembling hands” to “trembling oars” in 1850. He only stepped back a bit, in keeping with the far more distant tone of the final cut, and I’m glad. To me it’s one of the funniest things I’ve ever read from Wordsworth.

I’ve done quite a bit of photography in the mountains, waiting for the rocks and trees to speak to me. They never did. I would have loved to have been chased around by a mountain. I wonder if this might have been the inpiration for Zappa’s Billy the Mountain?

* Joseph Duemer stepped up to defend free verse, and wrote some good posts on Blake and Wordsworth. It’s nice to know people are out there!

Awful

Meanings change, though the words remain the same. Awful used to mean “full of awe,” not tragic or terrible. Terrible has shifted too. Rather than bad, it also means more precisely “inspiring terror.” Terror, in and of itself is not a bad thing. Moments of terror are sublime moments where the stimulus exceeds our ability to experience it— pushing life beyond the realm of ordinary consciousness. There is an awful and terrible vision to be found even in the mundane. Of course if you claim this, there is the danger you will be pronounced mad, like William Blake:

When the sun rises do you not see a round Disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea O no no I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty. I question not my Corporeal or Vegetative Eye any more than I would Question a Window concerning a Sight. I look thro it & not with it. (VLJ, E: 565-6)

That the words awful and terrible have shifted in this way shows how much that Locke’s view of emotion as opposed to clear thinking has permeated society. That Blake used a guinea as an example of the common view was no mistake. In his time, people chased after money causing the sort of problems crashing down on the US right now, reminding us of our lack of vision. There’s more to vision than valuation; there is also an element of celebration. Is vision a gift? In the 1799 version of The Prelude, Wordsworth thought so.

    The mind of man is fashioned and built up
Even as a strain of music. I believe
That there are spirits which, when they would form
A favored being, from his very dawn
Of infancy do open out the clouds
As the touch of lighting, seeking him
With gentle visitation— quiet powers,
Retired, and seldom recognized, yet kind

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Spots of Time

I don’t care for free verse. I suppose that’s why I’d really rather read Wordsworth than Whitman. But that’s just a personal bias. I agree with Blake that there should be no competition between poets, and with Thomas DeQuincey that works of literature don’t replace each other, no more than the sight of a new pastoral valley supplants the ones before it. I’m really enjoying Loren and Diane’s discussion of Whitman, because it’s hard for me to study him closely; free verse just doesn’t have the hook for me.

I’d been re-reading and thinking about The Prelude, and the issues of self and society that it raises. But more than that, I have always marveled at the way that Wordsworth butchered it. In my opinion, Wordsworth just plain revised it to death. This isn’t apparent in the lines I’ll examine today, but in sections the poem is tortuous. There are three versions to consider: a two book version from 1799, a thirteen book version from 1805, and a fourteen book version from 1850. I feel that the earliest one is incredibly tight, the 1805 is well rounded and lush, and the 1850 version— the version in most textbooks— is totally flaccid. I want to write about some of the changes.

For those unfamiliar with The Prelude, it is Wordsworth’s poetic autobiography— a strong lesson in the way we write and re-write our lives. It can be seen as the ultimate in solipsism, or as I prefer to think of it, a man writing about what he knows best— himself. I believe that knowledge of the shifting value of self and the ways we rewrite it is one of those eternally valuable things to be gained from literature. Our conception of self is never frozen immutable and solid. It is in flux. Spots of time preserved, whether in a blog post or version of a poem, make convenient artifacts to examine to get a sense of where we’ve been, where we’re going, and how we create. Ultimately, that’s The Prelude.

It begins with a memory of a river:

                              Was it for this
That one, the fairest of all rivers, loved
To blend his murmurs with my nurse’s song,
And from his alder shades and rocky falls,
And from his fords and shallows, sent a voice
That flowed along my dreams? (1799—1-6)

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Isn’t it Iconic?— William Blake takes on William Wordsworth

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesman and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Romantic principles, thought by most survivors of survey courses in English literature to be exemplified by the golden boy Wordsworth, are filled with retraction and contradiction. Iconic principles of romanticism beg to be smashed— they were while the “romantic” poets were writing. Conventional lumping strategies in pedagogy presuppose that the romantic poets had a consistency created through proximity in time. Actually, most of these poets had little in common. Some were at least internally consistent, others weren’t. Wordsworth could have easily been the poster boy for inconsistency and the model for Emerson’s comment. In deep contrast to the 1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth both expands and undercuts the iconic stricture that personal reflection is the hallmark of poetry in his Preface to Poems from 1815:

THE POWERS requisite for the production of poetry are: first, those of Observation and Description,— i.e. the ability to observe with accuracy things as they are in themselves, and with fidelity to describe them, unmodified by any passion or feeling existing in the mind of the describer; whether the things depicted be actually present to the senses, or have a place only in the memory. This power, though indispensable to a Poet, is one which he employs only in submission to necessity, and never for a continuance of time: as its exercise supposes all the higher qualities of the mind to be passive, and in a state of subjection to external objects, much in the same way as a translator or engraver ought to be to his original. 2ndly, Sensibility,— which, the more exquisite it is, the wider will be the range of a poet’s perceptions; and the more will he be incited to observe objects, both as they exist in themselves and as re-acted upon by his own mind.

William Blake annotated a copy of Wordsworth’s Poems of 1815. Under those lines in the preface, he wrote:

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Isn’t it Ironic?

My capacity for subtlety must be getting stronger. One weird critique of my work has stuck with me for years— “You aren’t very subtle, are you?” I took this to heart, though it was meant in jest. I strive for directness, but directness is not always equivalent with a lack of complexity or subtlety. It makes me feel good that I made Tom ponder my little indictment of Wordsworth. It was meant to have a certain irony.

There was a lot I wanted to say when I wrote “You’re soaking in it,” but I thought it best to leave it vague. There’s a big split between romantic theory and practice, and I want to write about it at greater length. Even still, I find it more attractive than social constructivism, where everything is reduced to the constitutive nature of social practice. It’s hard to consolidate individuality with appetite. That’s what I was really pondering. I have my own share of problems with Wordsworth— though I admire him— and in reflection, most of those problems are contained in his prefaces rather than his poetry. I’m trying to figure out whether it’s irony, or just misfortune.

”It’s like rain on your wedding day / A free ride, when you’ve already paid”— Alanis knows only misfortune, not irony. Wordsworth, I suspect, was smarter than that. But the contradictory nature of his writings and poetry are maddening. There’s more musing to come on that topic, but for now I just wanted to check the perception of irony on the web. Irony.com provides help for those into role playing games. Unfortunately, Ironymag is for women who lift weights. Irony Maiden is for fans of Daria, but thankfully, Irony Plug-ins are available. This site has an admirable aim:

We are a charitable institution, founded in 1996, devoted to ensuring that standards of English comprehension are maximised throughout the World Wide Web.
Our research revealed what many had previously suspected, and reported informally – certain web users were incapable of recognising, let alone using, irony or sarcasm. Problems associated with this included:

• inability to appreciate humour more complex than Benny Hill or Adam Sandler comedies;
• difficulty distinguishing between emails and websites satirising other people’s beliefs, and emails and websites that actually promote those beliefs;
• fundamentalist religious beliefs and political naivety;
• general stupidity.

Reflecting on the joys of sociality while alone in a bathtub was not meant to be unfortunate, but rather, ironic. I’m still undecided whether Wordsworth, Emerson, and Thoreau’s celebration of solitude was ironic or unfortunate. I’ve been reading a lot of Blake today, comparing his thoughts on solitude. I think it’s the solitude=reflection equation that bothers me most. Blake saw problems with it too. There will be more solitary reflections to come.