Wordsworth Before Coleridge

The Growth of the Poet’s Philosophical Mind, 1785-1797

Mark Bruhn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351045414
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire

Drawing extensively upon archival resources and manuscript evidence, Wordsworth Before Coleridge rewrites the early history of Wordsworth's intellectual development and thereby overturns a century-old consensus that derives his most important philosophical ideas from Coleridge. Beginning with Wordsworth's mathematical and poetic studies at Hawkshead Grammar School and Cambridge University, both of which tutored the young poet in mind-matter dualism, the book charts the process by which Wordsworth came, not to reject this philosophical foundation, but to reevaluate the indispensable role of passion within it. Prompted by his reading in 1793 or early 1794 of Dugald Stewart's Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, Wordsworth rejected the exclusive rationality of William Godwin's political philosophy and the anti-passionate morality of Alexander Pope's philosophical poetics. Subsequent exposure, between 1795 and 1797, to Cambridge Platonism and English Kantianism supplied the key ideas of mind-nature fitness and multilevel psychological activity that, along with Stewart's analysis of imaginative association, animate Wordsworth's signature philosophy of "feeling intellect, " from the initial drafts of The Pedlar and The Prelude in 1798 to the "Prospectus" to The Recluse and The Excursion, published together in 1814. By presenting for the first time a fully nuanced account of Wordsworth's intellectual formation prior to the advent of Coleridge as his close companion and creative collaborator, Wordsworth Before Coleridge reveals at long last the true sources and abiding originality of the poet's philosophical mind.

1 An Independent Mind?

Wordsworth at Cambridge, 1787–1791

1. Wordsworth’s Independent Mind

In the sonnet “Written at Cambridge, August 15, 1819,” Charles Lamb, who did not have the benefit of a university education, imagines how one at Cambridge would have altered the substance of his thought and the very forms of his speech:

I was not train’d in Academic bowers,
And to those learned streams I nothing owe
Which copious from those twin fair founts do flow;
Mine have been any thing but studious hours.
Yet can I fancy, wandering ‘mid thy towers,
Myself a nursling, Granta, of thy lap;
My brow seems tightening with the Doctor’s cap,
And I walk gowned; feel unusual powers.
Strange forms of logic clothe my admiring speech,
Old Ramus’ ghost is busy at my brain;
And my skull teems with notions infinite.
Be still, ye reeds of Camus, while I teach
Truths, which transcend the searching Schoolmen’s vein,
And half had stagger’d that stout Stagirite!¹

Lamb figures himself as something of an intellectual infant babe, a “nursling” scholar who would have imbibed “unusual powers” and “strange forms of logic” from the “twin fair founts” of his alma mater to “clothe [his] admiring speech” and fill his “skull […] with notions infinite” bequeathed from dead “Schoolmen” such as Aristotle and Ramus to their kind. My allusions to Wordsworth are not merely adventitious in this context, for Lamb must have had his friend in mind as he imagined his way into the cap and gown of a Cambridge scholar. Lamb wrote the sonnet shortly after Wordsworth published The Waggoner with a handsome dedication to Lamb for being “in some measure the cause of [the poem’s] present appearance.”² Deeply gratified, Lamb wrote to thank Wordsworth for the honor on June 7, 1819, and to express the wish that he might equally “call forth the ‘Recluse’ from his profound dormitory.”³ Given that The Excursion was already published, Lamb is likely recollecting unpublished parts of The Prelude that he heard or read in manuscript, possibly in 1806 when he heard The Waggoner.⁴ If so, the collegiate metaphor “dormitory” may disclose exactly which portion of The Prelude Lamb was recollecting, namely, the Cambridge books, which he likewise appears to be echoing in the sonnet “Written at Cambridge” two months later.⁵

If Lamb is consciously alluding to the unpublished Prelude, then we might easily discern a touch of his habitual gentle mockery of Wordsworth in the claim that “I nothing owe” to Cambridge, for “Mine have been any thing but studious hours,” followed by the paradoxical boast that he could accordingly “teach / Truths… transcend[ent]” that, in the still more awful alliteration of the final line, “half had stagger’d that stout Stagirite!” Lamb’s implicit gibe is, if intended, finely pointed. While Lamb has preserved his native genius only because he never matriculated into Cambridge’s “Academic bowers”—had he in fact done so, he admits, his “brain” would have been “busy” with institutionally mediated “notions infinite” rather than its own transcendent truths—a real genius might boast that he preserved his native gifts uncompromised by “studious hours” even though he did matriculate at Cambridge, indeed, even though he stayed on for four full years and duly took his degree.

So, of course, Wordsworth does boast concerning his “Residence in Cambridge,” claiming that “hither I had come with holy powers / And faculties” but not ones easily trained to academic “learning, moral truth, / Or understanding,” for “I was otherwise endow’d” (P2, 3.83–84, 91–93). After just a few weeks, apparently, once the initial “glitter” and “dazzle” of Cambridge had “pass’d” away, these original endowments, so fugitive among the natural distractions of the North, suddenly announced themselves to the young scholar’s now inward-turning attention:

As if with a rebound, my mind return’d
Into its former self…
* * * *
And now it was, that thro’ such change entire
And this first absence from those shapes sublime
Wherewith I had been conversant, my mind
Seem’d busier in itself than heretofore;
At least, I more directly recognized
My powers and habits; let me dare to speak
A higher language, say that now I felt
The strength and consolation that were mine.
As if awaken’d, summon’d, rouz’d, constrain’d,
I look’d for universal things; perused
The common countenance of earth and heaven:
And, turning the mind in upon itself,
Pored, watch’d, expected, listen’d; spread my thoughts,
And spread them with a wider creeping; felt
Incumbences more awful, visitings
Of the Upholder, of the tranquil Soul,
Which underneath all passion lives secure
A steadfast life. But peace! it is enough
To notice that I was ascending now
To such community with highest truth.

(3.94–97, 101–120; italics added)

What is perhaps most remarkable about this seldom remarked sequence is the way it screens out almost completely the significant institutional context in which Wordsworth “awaken’d” to the interior life of the mind and thus to the central theme of his greatest philosophical poetry. Unlike Lamb, who in the short space of fourteen lines nevertheless paints the Cambridge scene, from the “towers” of the university to the “reeds” of the river Cam, and pays at least lip service to the foundations of the undergraduate curriculum, Wordsworth in a verse paragraph of over four times the length deliberately “make[s] short mention” (3.69) of all these contextual matters, implying that the university setting was entirely extraneous to the introspective drama that unfolded there within his mind. In the verses I’ve italicized, Wordsworth’s grammar and diction reiteratively insist that, shortly after his arrival at Cambridge, his mind came into a steady state of self-possession by its own independent agency and volition: “my mind return’d / Into its… self,” “my mind / Seem’d busier in itself,” “I… turn[ed] the mind in on itself.” Wordsworth thus claims to have introspectively “felt” and for the first time “directly recognized” endowments that were apparently always already there: “My powers and habits,” “The strength and consolation that were mine.” Though “creeping” at first, Wordsworth asserts that he quickly took to the surprisingly capable wings of his newly hatched mind, which was “ascending” even “now” to “highest truth”—by implication overleaping, at the very outset of his undergraduate studies, the plodding step-by-step ascent mapped out in the requirements of a four-year curriculum.

Wordsworth’s vaunting self-assertion at the apparent expense of his own educational privilege and preparation would certainly make a fine target for the punch line of Lamb’s Cambridge sonnet, which turns belatedly, as it were at the twelfth hour, against the institutional discourses it had seemed in the preceding lines set to celebrate: “Be still, ye reeds of Camus,” Lamb abruptly commands with what is quite obviously fabricated authority, “while I teach / Truths, which transcend the searching Schoolmen’s vein.” Wordsworth may thus deserve the shaft of Lamb’s satire whether Lamb aimed it that way or no, and yet it must be granted that Wordsworth’s story of his introspective awakening does not entirely conceal the presence of powerful impersonal forces at work, shaping the substance of the poet’s new self-regard. Undercutting the extract’s self-reflexive grammar and pronouns is an increasingly abstract and self-transcending strain of diction that emerges as Wordsworth struggles to reformulate his introspective experience in the “higher language” of “universal things.” The mature poet’s natural-philosophic drive to generalize the particular data of his own mental experience appears to belong equally to the youth, who deliberately “spread [his] thoughts, / And spread them… wider,” until he “felt / Incumbences more awful, visitings / Of the Upholder.” The Oxford English Dictionary cites Wordsworth’s use of the rare “incumbences” to illustrate an obsolete but eminently Wordsworthian definition of “incumbency”: “The condition of lying or pressing upon something; brooding; a spiritual brooding or over-shadowing.”⁶ One wonders just where Wordsworth picked up the term, but the answer is surely not from his own unassisted introspection. The same goes for the self-distancing appositives that are meant to elucidate the portentous phrase “Incumbences more awful” as “visitings of the Upholder,” which is to say, “of the tranquil Soul / Which underneath all passion lives secure, / A steadfast life.” The diction of these lines belongs to the discourse fields of religious meditation and homiletics, and whatever else it may signify in this particular context, the “tranquil Soul” upon which Wordsworth settles at last does not simply and exclusively denote his own mind but refers to something separate and greater, emanating from beyond him (hence capable of “visiting”) and now heavily impending upon him, irresistibly urging his first experiences of interiority toward universal truths that even the mature poet still conceives in widely attested and institutionally mediated terms. So what exactly was this at least partly self-external spiritual prompting which not only “awaken’d” and “[a]rouz’d” Wordsworth in his first term at Cambridge but also “summon’d” him, as to an ecclesial office, and “constrain’d” him, as with a solemn obligation? Though Wordsworth declines to elaborate further (“But peace! it is enough / To notice that I was ascending now…”), the abstract implications of “incumbences” in the later senses of “offices” and “obligations,”⁷ coupled with the sense of compulsion registered in “summon’d” and “constrain’d,” strongly imply the overshadowing presence of some powerful social and religious institution that, despite all protestations to the contrary, still impinges deeply upon the substance and style of the passage at hand.

Wordsworth suggests as much when he sums up in terms of “ascending… / To such community with highest truth.” The prepositions in this curious phrase are placed at odd angles to one another, as though Wordsworth has contrived simultaneously to flirt with but still not quite endorse a more natural reading: “ascending with such community to highest truth.” The whole paragraph, of course, makes clear that Wordsworth is using “such community” figuratively, to express an intimate relation between his own mind and the high truths with which it communed, but even the deeply introspective context cannot quite silence the metaphor’s interpersonal origin and connotations. Though begged, as it were, under metaphorical erasure, the question of which “such community” Wordsworth may be literally thinking is nonetheless crucial, for with this sequence Wordsworth as early as 1801 begins enlarging the poem on the growth of his own mind⁸ with the strong claim that his seventeen-year-old self was already on the track of the unprecedented epic theme he elsewhere identifies as the “fear and awe / [That] fall upon us often when we look / Into our Minds, into the Mind of Man, / My haunt, and the main region of my Song.”⁹ Such philosophical precocity is hard enough to fathom, but Wordsworth’s stronger claim—that he discovered this introspective tendency and theme independently, while he was at Cambridge but rather in despite of his studies there—is surely impossible to credit, no matter how frequently or firmly he repeats it.

And repeat it he certainly does, making it in the end a philosophical keynote of his poetic autobiography. In new composition dating from January 1804 at the latest, Wordsworth picks up the slender thread of Book 3 just where he left it in 1801, with self-promoting claims of introspective independence:

Of Genius, Power,
Creation, and Divinity itself,
I have been speaking, for my theme has been
What pass’d within me. Not of outward things
Done visibly for other minds, words, signs,
Symbols, or actions; but of my own heart
Have I been speaking, and my youthful mind.
O heavens! how awful is the might of Souls,
And what they do within themselves, while yet
The yoke of earth is new to them, the world
Nothing but a wild field where they were sown.
This is, in truth, heroic argument,
And genuine prowess; which I wish’d to touch
With hand however weak; but in the main
It lies far hidden from the reach of words.
Points have we all of us within our souls,
Where all stand single; this I feel, and make
Breathings for incommunicable powers.

(3.172–188)

Ten books and many months later, Wordsworth will reiterate “This… heroic argument” of self-authoring and self-sufficing interiority,¹⁰ only now with a prophetic confidence inspired by his interim achievement:

Imagination having been our theme,
So also hath that intellectual love,
For they are each in each, and cannot stand
Dividually.—Here must thou be, O Man!
Strength to thyself; no Helper hast thou here;
Here keepest thou thy individual state:
No other can divide with thee this work,
No secondary hand can intervene
To fashion this ability; ‘tis thine,
The prime and vital principle is thine
In the recesses of thy nature, far
From any reach of outward fellowship,
Else ‘tis not thine at all.

(13.185–197)

Is this the voice of self-assurance or does it rather protest too much and thereby expose the impossible pretensions of Wordsworth’s autonomous mind?¹¹ Either way, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• A Note on Citations
• Introduction
• 1 An Independent Mind? Wordsworth at Cambridge, 1787–1791
• 2 Growing out of Pope: An Essay on Man in Wordsworth’s Philosophical Poetry, 1785–1794
• 3 Beyond Godwin: Elements in Wordsworth’s Politics, 1794
• 4 Toward The Prelude: Elements in An Evening Walk, 1794
• 5 The Finishing of Wordsworth’s Philosophical Education, 1795–1797
• Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index