Wordsworth's Historical Imagination (Routledge Revivals)

The Poetry of Displacement

David Simpson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138804111
• eBook ISBN: 9781317620310
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Traditionally, Wordsworth's greatness is founded on his identity as the poet of nature and solitude. The Wordsworthian imagination is seen as an essentially private faculty, its very existence premised on the absence of other people. In this title, first published in 1987, David Simpson challenges this established view of Wordsworth, arguing that it fails to recognize and explain the importance of the context of the public sphere and the social environment to the authentic experience of the imagination. Wordsworth's preoccupation with the metaphors of property and labour shows him to be acutely anxious about the value of his art in a world that he regarded as corrupted. Through close examination of a few important poems, both well-known and relatively unknown, Simpson shows that there is no unitary, public Wordsworth, nor is there a conflict or tension between the private and the public. The absence of any clear kind of authority in the voice that speaks the poems makes Wordsworth's poetry, in Simpson's phrase, a 'poetry of displacement'.

1 ‘Gipsies'

DOI: 10.4324/9781315753195-2

Life in Revolution is camp life. Personal life, institutions, methods, ideas, sentiments, everything is unusual, temporary, transitional, recognizing its temporariness and expressing this everywhere, even in names. Hence the difficulty of an artistic approach.

Trotsky (1960), 77

Oliver Goldsmith published The Deserted Village in 1770, only four years before he died at the age of (probably) 44. It was a popular poem, going quickly through five editions, and it has remained a very famous poem. Even after such a success, the career of man of letters was never to prove financially or psychologically comfortable for the author, who may have died as much as £2000 in debt. A displaced and impoverished traveller for much of his life, he had been variously actor, physician, flautist, reviewer and translator; even this does not exhaust the list of vocations he had to touch upon. Besides working in poetry, drama and the novel, he wrote histories and lives of eminent men, and a popular (though posthumously published) zoological volume – anything to turn a penny.

The more one learns about Goldsmith’s life and environment, the less surprising it seems that The Deserted Village should have been a contested poem, as well as a popular one. It is a poem that constantly redefines and unsettles our sense of the relation between the objective and the subjective; that which we may believe to have been ‘what happened’, and that which is better read as the poet’s own opinions or imaginings. It thus seems to take all sorts of risks, aesthetic and thematic. Objectively, it resides intelligibly if radically within a tradition of eighteenth-century moral poetry, and makes sense as an argument for the precise and deleterious effects of the commercial economy and the process of imparkment upon a rural world inhabited by self-sufficient owner-occupiers. To those ideologically indisposed to accept such a criticism, the poem would have been unpalatable, and the more so because it was implicitly drawn from the poet’s early life in Ireland (despite his declared location in England), where the landlord–peasant question was particularly anxious, most of all in the years around the Act of Union of 1800; a glance at some of the periodicals of the time suggests that Ireland was an even more urgent topic of debate than was the course of the French Revolution. Furthermore the idealized nature of Goldsmith’s account of life in old Auburn might have caused another class of readers to raise questions about the poem’s credibility. If such readers were not predisposed to understand it as a polemically sharpened argument, but more as a ‘slice of life’, then they might well have been disinclined to confirm a ‘realism’ that seemed to include no measure of cynicism, and nothing of a complex admission of good and ill in everything. Crabbe, in The Village (1783), took up this particular cudgel, with an alternative political agenda at work behind it; an agenda even more explicit in The Parish Register (1807).¹

Goldsmith’s poem is thus thematically contentious in its objective dimension, that is, in the historical and discursive events it addresses. It is also significantly unstable in its subjective element, that is, in the moods and gestures of its speaker. For it insists upon raising the question of the poet’s place in this ideal village of the past, or rather of the vanishing present. That the poet seems to have lived there as a child immediately compounds the presentation of the actual with that of the imaginary or the mythologically created. And this uncertainty is enhanced when we see that Goldsmith never describes his fantasies as those of a permanent integration. At best, he had hoped to retire there, to give up his ‘wanderings’ and ‘die at home at last’ (1966, 4: 291). Auburn was recalled as the place of origination, and anticipated as a place to end. In between, Goldsmith is quite explicit about the need to wander and be a man of the world. There might have been a place for the retired author to show his ‘book learned skill’ among the ‘swains’. There was, in other words, never a place for the working man of letters, with his peculiarly specialized audience and employment, in this world in which ‘every rood of ground maintained its man’ (289). And Goldsmith admits as much.

It is then an oddly disjunctive moment when, towards the end of the poem, the speaker claims that ‘sweet Poetry’ is the ‘first to fly where sensual joys invade’ (303). There is here a telling refusal to specify the balance of the particular and the general, the subjective and the objective. We are uncertain whether the ‘sweet Poetry’ is that which he, the man of letters, writes, or whether it describes in a more general sense the poetry of ideal rural life, as experienced by those who have fully participated therein. Obviously both are implied, but in the most literal sense Goldsmith as poet has already fled; what is inhibited is his chance of returning, and of writing poetry about the village, or for the village. His writing can now only register as a criticism of the new order; hence he will gain no patronage from men of power, and remain as poor as he was at first. The potential audience (for his retirement) among the village swains is embarking for the inhospitable world of the colonies; he will be alienated from that which remains by virtue of his disapproval of its behaviour.

By now it is perhaps becoming clear that these two elements in the poem, the subjective and the objective, cannot very comfortably be kept apart. For The Deserted Village is a sophisticated expression of the poet’s displacement imaged at both these levels at once. Each determines the other, although a hierarchy of determinations is visible. The final lines of the poem, penned by Samuel Johnson, counsel recourse to a ‘self dependent power’ (304) that is ambiguously economic and spiritual. The second is clear enough – self-reliance as a moral quality. But how is the first to be implemented, when the audience for poetry is disappearing, if it was ever there? And might this not threaten to convert moral self-reliance into hysteria?

In a manner analogous to the refutation of Berkeley by kicking stones, we may rejoin that the poem did find an audience, and has continued to do so. But the dilemma that it transcribes does not anticipate this eventuality; whether Goldsmith himself might have, is not a matter I can adjudicate here. By opting for the vocation of man of letters, Goldsmith has obliged himself to leave Auburn and to seek his fortune in the heart of the very metropolitan economy whose hegemony he deplores in the poem. He is thus a man of the middle ground, in which both shelter and companionship are insecure and unpredictable. What he has left behind could not afford him a living. He wishes for it none the less, but it is disappearing as a result of the doings of the very urban and urbanized readers whose favours he is obliged to depend upon. Enclosure, Goldsmith implies, makes some of the land more productive, so that what remains can be exploited for pleasure and vanity. This trend is further accelerated by the financial revolution enabling fortunes to be made in the stockmarket. The agricultural base of the economy is diminished, and the small man is driven from his holding, for the sake of the rich man’s park. But the would-be poet had already gone, aware that there was no market for his wares in a rural subsistence economy. Luxury and art had often, if not always, cohabited, as they mostly did in Goldsmith’s times. Between two worlds, he is at home in neither. His moral intelligence forces him to utter the very message that is most likely to deprive him of the patronage upon which writers depend; and those with whom he is most in sympathy are disappearing. They probably never had much money, or inclination, for poetry in the first place. Goldsmith images himself as a man compelled to earn, but destined to remain unpaid.

Thus it is that Goldsmith, as Laurence Goldstein has aptly put it, ‘discovers in a historical problem the exact form of his own alienation’ (1977, 106). We cannot, I think, choose between the two, because both are always there. We cannot say that Goldsmith fabricates a historical analogue for a personal crisis, because the personal crisis (and to call it just this is to demean it considerably) is at all times historical. No more does he present himself simply as the passive victim of circumstance. Those circumstances are indeed beyond his control – he cannot alter the course of political and economic change. But by seeking to live as a man of letters he has anticipated and perhaps conspired in the very change that he deplores. Before we read this as some kind of logical or moral contradiction on Goldsmith’s part, we must understand it as the experienced and transcribed crisis of his life. Read from this perspective, the poem can be seen to document and detail this crisis. Goldsmith was always to be at a distance from his fellow villagers, but he might yet have had his place, within the limits open to a man in retirement. But changing times have destroyed what he once experienced, and wished to retain. The lament that this change inspires is personal; but it is also clearly intersubjective, and verifiable in general terms, both discursive (at the level of publicly recognized arguments) and factual (what happened).

Minding the poet's trade

Thanks to the institutionalizing of Goldsmith as an ‘eighteenth-century’ and Wordsworth as a ‘Romantic’ poet, these two writers are not often discussed together. And the move which I now make, from The Deserted Village to ‘Gipsies’, might seem particularly odd. The first is an acknowledged masterpiece by a writer usually thought of as minor; the second has generally been judged a terrible poem by a great poet. Few critics have understood ‘Gipsies’ as anything other than an embarrassment, a poem they might wish had not been written by Wordsworth. Its speaker seems anything but a man speaking to men, and more like a pompous poet all too confident of his own high calling. I shall try to show that there is a strong continuity between the terms in which I have analysed The Deserted Village and those which make sense of ‘Gipsies’; and, eventually, that those same terms can be traced through some of the more famous and accepted poems in the Wordsworth canon.

I thus begin this study with ‘Gipsies’, because I find in it a major statement of the preoccupations of Wordsworth’s poetic intelligence considered as a simultaneously subjective and intersubjective faculty. Anxieties about labour, poetry and property are addressed here in an especially urgent way, revealing both the historical features of Wordsworth’s predicament, and the personal turn that he gives to it. A rather brief poem, it is yet one that demonstrates in a very complex way the degree to which the lyric moment is not simply informed but constituted by both literary–historical and social–historical intuitions. Its brevity, together with its traditional status as a ‘bad’ poem, makes it furthermore an apt example of the kinds of disbelief that I shall be asking my reader to suspend throughout the course of the argument that follows. In response to the question of whether a few lines of verse can ‘really mean all this’, I offer a case for a high degree of referential density; in response to the standard concern about whether Wordsworth himself could have ‘intended’ so much, I offer a reading of the poem’s language that seeks to transcend the limits associated with the conscious control of its transcriber; and in response to the almost universal assumption that this is a ‘bad’ poem, I offer the kind of reading that aspires to render judgements of good and bad comparatively uninteresting.

For ease of reference, here is the poem entire, in its first published version of 1807 (1807, 211–12):

Yet are they here? – the same unbroken knot

Of human Beings, in the self-same spot!

Men, Women, Children, yea the frame

Of the whole Spectacle the same!

Only their fire seems bolder, yielding light:

Now deep and red, the colouring of night;

That on their Gipsy-faces falls,

Their bed of straw and blanket-walls.

– Twelve hours, twelve bounteous hours, are gone while I

Have been a Traveller under open sky,

Much witnessing of change and chear,

Yet as I left I find them here!

The weary Sun betook himself to rest.

– Then issued Vesper from the fulgent West,

Outshining like a visible God

The glorious path in which he trod.

And now, ascending, after one dark hour,

And one night’s diminution of her power,

Behold the mighty Moon! this way

She looks as if at them – but they

Regard not her: – oh better wrong and strife

Better vain deeds or evil than such life!

The silent Heavens have goings on;

The stars have tasks – but these have none.

It must seem a formidable task indeed, after reading this poem, to argue for a benign Wordsworth, the poet of wise passiveness, sympathy for the meanest flower that blows, and understanding of the subtle details of ordinary life. Here, it seems as if there is no attempt to disguise or complicate what has appeared to many readers to be an odious and morally repugnant complacency on the speaker’s part. So it seemed to Coleridge, whose criticism must remain the starting point for any reading of the poem. He finds in it an exemplary instance of ‘mental bombast’:

Whereat the poet, without seeming to reflect that the poor tawny wanderers might probably have been tramping for weeks together through road and lane, over moor and mountain, and consequently must have been right glad to rest themselves, their children and cattle, for one whole day; and overlooking the obvious truth, that such repose might have been quite as necessary for them, as a walk of the same continuance was pleasing or healthful for the more fortunate poet; expresses his indignation in a series of lines, the diction and imagery of which would have been rather above, than below the mark, had they been applied to the immense empire of China improgressive for thirty centuries.

(1983, 2: 137)

As if to make matters worse, Wordsworth adds these final lines for the 1820 edition, as follows:

Yet, witness all that stirs in heaven and earth!

In scorn I speak not; – they are what their birth

And breeding suffers them to be;

Wild outcasts of society!

(1807, 212)

The expression of cultural relativism – they cannot help it, they were born that way – only makes us the more uneasy with the speaker’s self-righteousness. He disavows scorn only to introduce an equally unsettling condescension.

Coleridge was not the only one to pick on the poem. Hazlitt, in a note to his essay ‘On Manner’ in The Round Table, also published in 1817, thought it a quite shocking statement from one ‘whom we had considered as the prince of poetical idlers, and the patron of the philosophy of indolence’, and found in it more than a hint of ‘Sunday-school philosophy’ (1930–4, 4: 45–6). John Keats in turn reacted to both Hazlitt and Wordsworth in a letter of the same year. He found both right, but Wordsworth ‘rightest’, for Wordsworth ‘had not been idle he had not been without his task’. At the same time, Keats opines, Wordsworth might not have written the poem if he had ‘though[t] a little deeper at that Moment’, which seems to have been marked by ‘one of the most comfortable Moods of his Life’ (1958, 1: 174).

It is interesting that three such distinguished contemporaries should have commented in such detail on the poem, for it has received little subsequent attention. Barron Field was happy enough with the idea that gypsies are ‘naturally loitering basking idlers’ (LY, 1: 645, note), but those among Wordsworth’s admirers who do not subscribe to this view have usually opted for tactful silence. David Ferry is almost alone among modern critics in trying to fit the poem into a reading of Wordsworth’s major preoccupations. He argues that the poet ‘blames the gypsies for their mortality, for not participating sufficiently in the eternal’. His mood is not one of ‘trivial irritability’ but of ‘sublime arrogance’; the common-sense considerations voiced by Coleridge are pushed aside by the poet’s desperate desire to participate in infinity and eternity (1959, 9). Ferry is right to focus on the speaker’s longing for a kind of immortality, and to emphasize the drama of the speaker’s entire posture. Wordsworth himself first signalled this in including the poem in the category of ‘Moods of my own Mind’ in the 1807 edition. Only in 1815 did it become one of the ‘Poems of the Imagination’. We may usefully begin to read this poem by seeking to understand the terms of this ‘sublime arrogance’, even as we must not, as Ferry tends to, forget its empirical base.

Michael Friedman, one of the few other critics to attend to ‘Gipsies’, attributes Wordsworth’s unease to the presence of ‘alien social forces’ (1979, 168).² What might this alien society have meant to him, and how is it related to his sublime enthusiasm? The degree to which the ‘poet’ identifies himself with the heavenly bodies is extravagant even for the Wordsworthian speaker. Like Vesper, he is following in the ‘glorious path’ of the sun, and like the sun he has proceeded through a twelve hour cycle. He too is ‘weary’ and entitled to his rest. The speaker inscribes...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Title One
• Copyright One
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Citations and abbreviations
• Introduction: writing in history and theory
• 1 ‘Gipsies'
• 2 Wordsworth's agrarian idealism: the case against urban life
• 3 Another guide to the lakes
• 4 ‘In single or in social eminence'? The political economy of The Prelude and Home at Grasmere
• 5 ‘By conflicting passions pressed': ‘Michael’ and ‘Simon Lee’
• 6 Poets, paupers and peripatetics: the politics of sympathy
• 7 Structuring a subject: The Excursion
• Postscript: ‘The star of eve was wanting'
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index