“Ifeel like the first men who read Wordsworth. / It’s so simple I can’t understand it.” Randall Jarrell’s bemusement is a reminder that, from the start, Wordsworth has provoked people to wonder what they want from poetry. “It may be considered as characteristic of our poet’s writings,” remarked William Hazlitt in The Spirit of the Age,
that they either make no impression on the mind at all, seem mere nonsense-verses, or that they leave a mark behind them that never wears out. . . . To one class of readers he appears sublime, to another (and we fear the largest) ridiculous.
On the 250th anniversary of Wordsworth’s birth, Hazlitt’s smaller class of readers appears to have won out. And one book to which the poet’s contemporaries didn’t have access—his autobiographical masterpiece, The Prelude, published posthumously in 1850—has left behind an even bigger mark. As Helen Vendler has recently observed, Wordsworth “mapped the region that we still inhabit, inventing an acute psychology of mind.” Which is to say: he’s not just sublime; he’s subliminal.
And yet, Adam Kirsch’s question is a good one: “Has there ever been a great poet as tempting to laugh at as William Wordsworth?” One way to account for this puzzling state of affairs is to claim that there are two Wordsworths—“Two Voices,” as the poet J. K. Stephen put it: “one is of the deep . . . And one is of an old half-witted sheep.” For every line that intones “the still, sad music of humanity,” there’s another that drones the shrill, mad music of inanity. But the neatness of this explanation evades the peculiarity of Wordsworth’s bequest. He inspires not just opposition but uncertainty, which is why the bewilderment of his early readers is often more revealing than the assurance of disciples or detractors. “We have been at a loss to know whether to take him as in jest or in earnest,” wrote one critic; another admitted that “we are almost as much at a loss to select particular instances of Mr. Wordsworth’s beauties as of his defects. They are so infused into each other.” To be mystified is to be with Wordsworth.
The mystery deepens when one tries to make sense of the person behind the poetry. “A plain, elderly, white-haired man, not prepossessing, and disfigured by green goggles.” Ralph Waldo Emerson’s first impression of Wordsworth did not bode well. The begoggled sage then held forth, and his guest came away from Rydal Mount feeling that he’d been in the presence of “a narrow and very English mind.” That was in 1833. Emerson had been subjected to the unlovely sight of an individual who had become an institution, but he still felt it necessary to remind readers that “new means were employed, and new realms added to the empire of the muse, by his courage.” Perhaps this reminder is still needed to offset the feeling that we know Wordsworth all too well. The critic John Bayley once noted that “Wordsworth’s poems are like one’s parents’ clothes—always out of fashion.” In many ways, the criticisms of his first poetic children have stuck. Percy Shelley denounced him in 1815 for abandoning “truth and liberty” and turning Tory (other accusations followed—he was “cold,” “a male prude,” “a kind of moral eunuch”). It wasn’t long before Lord Byron rechristened him “Turdsworth” and dismissed his work as “drowsy frowzy.”
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