The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (113 page)

He recalled later in
The Prelude
how these walks had first awakened him to the charms of nature and the virtues of cottagers and shepherds. Luckily, the headmaster at his school encouraged his interest in poetry, and introduced him to the eighteenth-century poets. He was charmed by the precocious Thomas Chatterton (1752–1770), who had captivated the literary world by forging the works of “primitive” English poets, and then had committed suicide at the age of eighteen. Surprisingly, Wordsworth’s father had made him memorize passages of Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton.

When his guardian uncles sent him with a scholarship to St. John’s College, Cambridge, they expected him in due course to take holy orders and become a Fellow of the College, like the uncle who had secured the scholarship for him. Feeling confined by academic life, he refused to read for honors, and ended with a pass degree. But enjoying nature on his walks around Cambridge gave him the sense of being born again. In 1790, before coming down from Cambridge, with a friend he took a brief walking tour of the Continent. France entranced him by its promises of the political millennium. Returning there in 1791, he plunged enthusiastically into the spirit of the Revolution.

One of his best friends was a young man on the way to becoming a general in the Republican army. An impetuous love affair with Annette Vallon, the daughter of a French surgeon, produced a daughter, Caroline. He thought of marrying Annette, staying on and joining in revolutionary politics, which might have been difficult, since Annette was a Catholic of a royalist family. Anyway, the guardian uncles would have none of it and refused to support him abroad.

Only two months after his return home in February 1793, England joined the war against France, creating a “moral” crisis for Wordsworth. His affection for the English land, nourished from his youthful rambles, suddenly was to be tested. Which would be stronger, love of England or love of “freedom”? The pain of this divided self was soon compounded by news of the Terror in France—Robespierre’s festival of slaughter, which killed the moderate Girondins who were Wordsworth’s friends. Within only forty-nine days 1,376 people were guillotined, as he later recalls in
The Prelude:

Wordsworth, now in his early twenties, suffered the disillusion of naive young revolutionaries in all ages.

Flooded by self-reproach for mistaking the French cause, for doubting his England, and for betraying and abandoning Annette Vallon, where to turn? Just then the unexpected legacy of nine hundred pounds from a friend allowed him to set up housekeeping in the countryside with his sister Dorothy, return to rural nature, and become a full-time poet. Dorothy, his companion and solace for the rest of of his life, had a great literary talent, as her posthumously published journals would show. But as a woman, she was sentenced to be “the angel in the house,” while both Wordsworth and Coleridge would borrow from her journals.

In 1795, when Wordsworth met Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who was also living in the West Country, the effect on both was electric. Coleridge persuaded the Wordsworths to take a cottage nearer him. Even before they met, Coleridge had applauded Wordsworth’s first poems about his walking tour in the Alps. Now “the giant Wordsworth,” he said, was not merely a poet of promise, but “the best poet of the age, the only man to whom at all times and in all modes of excellence I feel myself inferior.” In turn, Wordsworth’s admiration of Coleridge was boundless. Oddly these poets of individualism, who believed poetry to be the voice of the unique self, soon used the same phrases, labored over the same passages, and Coleridge even tried to finish poems that Wordsworth had left incomplete.

Coleridge sketched the contrast of their natures when he described their division of labor for the
Lyrical Ballads:

Coleridge was voluble and sociable, bookish and mystical, charmed by the exotic experience and metaphysical ideas. The withdrawn Wordsworth,
seeing himself as “the recluse,” was charmed by everyday nature and the commonplace virtues. Coleridge sought solace in opium and the mists of German speculation, Wordsworth found his comfort in rural walks, spring flowers, and conversation with shepherds. While Wordsworth’s life would be troubled by the love-child of his youth, he had a happy marriage to a childhood friend. But Coleridge made himself unhappy by his loveless marriage to a woman who had fitted into his youthful scheme for an ideal community on the shores of the Susquehanna.

The first edition of the
Lyrical Ballads
(1798) offered some of Wordsworth’s most durable poems, including “Tintern Abbey,” in which he declared:

Coleridge invoked the supernatural in his unforgettable “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”

The volume sold well enough to help pay for their trip with Dorothy to Germany. While Coleridge used the opportunity to learn German for better access to philosophy, Wordsworth was isolated by his ignorance of German and began his enormous blank verse autobiography,
The Prelude
. Only the “ante-chapel to the body of a Gothic church,” it was intended to be an introduction to “The Recluse,” an even vaster work, never completed. Wordsworth’s monumental epic, addressed to Coleridge and frequently referring to Dorothy, would record in verse “the origin and progress of his own powers, as far as he was acquainted with them.”

The Prelude
, widely recognized as Wordsworth’s masterpiece, is praised as “the greatest and most original long poem” since Milton’s
Paradise Lost
. Perhaps the longest English epic of the self, it remains one of the least read classics of English literature. But its influence on other poets has been incalculable. In chronicles of the self it holds a place somewhere between Rousseau’s
Confessions
and Joyce’s
Portrait of the Artist
. When it was
finally published after Wordsworth’s death in 1850, his wife titled it “Growth of a Poet’s Mind: An Autobiographical Poem.” A rare feat of self-preoccupation, it was a monument to Wordsworth’s sense of mission as poet-prophet, putting into verse the nuances of a long life’s thoughts and feeling. But anticipating that readers might find conceit in his unusual subject, he dared to affirm his “real humility.”

It is not surprising that John Keats, who never lived to see
The Prelude
, had already made Wordsworth his example of the “Egotistical Sublime.” The critics who accused Edward Gibbon in his autobiography of confusing himself with the Roman Empire might have asked whether Wordsworth in his
Prelude
had not confused himself with the cosmos. Yet
The Prelude
provides the patient reader with an oddly compact narrative of the seedtime of modernism—the growing belief in the shaping power of childhood, the enthusiasms and disillusions of Revolution, the obsessions with crises of personal faith, and “Love of Nature leading to Love of Man.” Wordsworth begins with the inner conflict of the divided self. “Fair seed time had my soul, and I grew up fostered alike by beauty and by fear.” He seeks solace in withdrawal:

The healing of Wordsworth’s divided self, if there was to be a healing, would come from lonely self-revelation, the remembrance of things past, of which Freud would be a latter-day prophet. Saint Augustine and others seeking solace in Confession had appealed to a higher Judge. But for Wordsworth self-revelation was all—“each man’s Mind is to herself/Witness and judge.”

Wordsworth, if anyone, should have realized how little “to herself” his mind could be. For he continued to depend on the solace of Dorothy, and on the stimulus of Coleridge. Returning from Germany in 1799, he and Dorothy settled at Grasmere in his native Lake Country where he would spend the rest of his life, and Coleridge took a house just thirteen miles away. Wordsworth’s financial worries ceased when he finally came into his inheritance, and he reached a settlement with Annette Vallon. Then, in 1802 he married Mary Hutchinson, a childhood friend from the neighborhood, and an intimate of Dorothy. Though distraught at being displaced, Dorothy somehow accommodated herself and remained William’s constant support. Mary’s family was so displeased at her marrying a “vagabond” with no gainful occupation that the Wordsworths received not a single wedding present. The marriage was happy. Mary bore five children, and Dorothy played the affectionate aunt. But the next years brought tragedy and tributation.
Wordsworth’s brother John, to whom they were devoted, drowned in a shipwreck in 1805, and two of their children died in 1812.

Then, as the opposition of temperaments might have forecast, there developed a painful estrangement between the two poets. While Wordsworth had settled placidly in Grasmere, Coleridge, who was in Malta as secretary to the governor, suffered deteriorating health. He became increasingly dependent on opium in the form of laudanum, then prescribed as a drug. When Coleridge returned to England—fat, irritable, and horrified at reunion with his unloved wife—he vented his frustration on his intimate friends. Also he had just fallen hopelessly in love with Mary Wordsworth’s sister, Sara Hutchinson, whom he knew he could never marry. He became passionate and demanding, while Sara tried unsuccessfully to cure him of his addiction to opium and alcohol. The Wordsworths were alarmed.

Convinced that he was not loved by those who had meant most to him, Coleridge broke off the friendship. He lamented into his notebooks in November 1812, that for fourteen years “and those 14 are the very life of my life,” he had enjoyed “the most consummate friendship” with Wordsworth, and been “enthusiastically watchful” over Wordsworth’s literary career “even at the price of alienating the affections of my benefactors.” And how had he been repaid? “What many circumstances ought to have let me see long ago, the events of the last year, and emphatically of the last month, have now forced me to perceive—no one has ever LOVED me.” Soon after, he stumbled into Charles Lamb’s house mumbling, “Wordsworth, Wordsworth has given me up.” Friends intervened to bring the two together, but the breach was never fully healed. Nor did the pair ever revive their historic collaboration, their alchemy of opposites.

Each hastened down his own way, Coleridge on the rocky path of opium and German mysticism, Wordsworth on the smooth ways of rural nature and friendly neighbors. As their paths separated, the poetry of both deteriorated. And as Wordsworth became more prosperous, and more conservative in politics and religion, his poetry became more voluminous but less interesting. In 1813, on Wordsworth’s own request for a sinecure, he received a modest recognition of his national eminence in the form of the distributorship of stamps for Westmoreland. He was decorated with the customary honorary degrees. Finally, in 1843, on the death of Robert Southey, after assurance from the prime minister, Sir Robert Peel, that there would be no duties attached, he accepted the poet laureateship. And so he provided Browning with a plausible subject for “The Lost Leader”:

The critics were not far wrong. Wordsworth had written most of his best poetry before his estrangement from Coleridge—before he became a literary idol. And his memorable pieces were short poems. Even the longer of them, “Tintern Abbey” (1798) and the “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” were each only two hundred lines. This lovely ode, on a familiar Romantic theme, celebrated the clairvoyance of childhood.