Transatlantic Transcendentalism is a richly-informed and luminously intelligent exploration of this complex but crucial subject. Thorough yet concise, dense yet lucid, it reflects an impressive knowledge of the primary and secondary texts, yet relentlessly focuses on what the author designates “the Romantic triad.” This distinguishable yet integrated trinity of Nature, Spirit, and Humanity preoccupied Romantics on both sides of the ocean. —Patrick J. Keane
By 1798, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, though by then largely disenchanted by the course of the French Revolution, were still considered dangerous radicals by the Pitt government, which had set spies on them. In that year, hopping a looming draft into the militia, the two poets and Dorothy Wordsworth sailed to Germany. The Wordsworths hunkered down in Goslar during the coldest winter of the century, where William began work on what would eventually become his great autobiographical epic, posthumously published a half-century later as The Prelude. In contrast, the gregarious and convivial Coleridge travelled to university towns, omnivorously ingesting German philosophy and German beer. Once back in England, armed with his own version of the thought of Immanuel Kant and of other German Idealists, Coleridge was uniquely positioned to shape the philosophy behind British Romanticism, and to become the principal transatlantic conduit of these ideas to America.
To let the cat out of the bag right off, the book under review is a remarkable study. Transatlantic Transcendentalism is a richly-informed and luminously intelligent exploration of this complex but crucial subject. Thorough yet concise, dense yet lucid, it reflects an impressive knowledge of the primary and secondary texts, yet relentlessly focuses on what the author designates “the Romantic triad.” This distinguishable yet integrated trinity of Nature, Spirit, and Humanity preoccupied Romantics on both sides of the ocean. It also provides Samantha Harvey with her main theme and organizing principle in tracing the transformative impact of the philosophic, theological, and critical thought of Coleridge on his American disciples—principally Ralph Waldo Emerson, but also James Marsh, who introduced Coleridge to New England, then (a development of special interest to many connected with Numéro Cinq) restructured the University of Vermont on Coleridgean principles.
Harvey’s study of the Coleridge-Emerson connection is the most recent volume in the “Edinburgh Studies in Transatlantic Literatures” series (a study of Emily Dickinson and British Victorian poets is forthcoming). The sixteen books in the series range widely in subject, but all are globally oriented, exploring ideas and texts unconfined by temporal or national boundaries. One crucial example of an overarching Romantic and Transatlantic subject is the one that matters here: Coleridge’s committed and pivotal mediation of the categories of nature, spirit, and humanity. Harvey’s book is in fact organized on the basis of this Romantic triad. Following a general introduction, and flanked by two historical chapters tracing Coleridge’s impact on Transcendentalism in Boston (Chapter 2) and Vermont (Chapter 8), Harvey devotes one chapter (beginning with “Nature”) to each category of the triad, with a pause midway. That chapter, “The Landing Place,” alludes to Coleridge’s description of a spiral staircase, with its various “landing-places” analogous to the perspective-gaining pause before continued cognitive mounting. Here, Harvey surveys Coleridge’s “method” and practice of “distinguishing without dividing,” before moving on to chapters on “Humanity” (5) and “Spirit” (6). The penultimate chapter focuses on Emerson’s seminal book Nature (1836), a text structured on Coleridge’s distinctions, “method,” and the categories of the Romantic triad. Despite this culmination, the final chapter, on Coleridge’s influence on curricular and philosophic developments in Vermont, is anything but anticlimactic.
A primary emphasis in the Edinburgh series is the dialectic between “affinity and contrast,” and this study is no exception. “Coleridge’s influence on Emerson reveals a complex blend of the categories of contrast and affinity, particularly the way in which key ideas endured and yet were substantially modified as they crossed the Atlantic” (12). Harvey traces not only Emerson’s immense indebtedness to Coleridge, but the ways in which the American Transcendentalist’s appropriation and assimilation of his benefactor stimulated his own creativity: the sine qua non for an apostle of self-reliance and originality. In Harvey’s wonderfully well-chosen lead epigraph, Emerson advises us to “take thankfully and heartily all” our succession of teachers “can give.” Eventually the “dismay” that attends an “excess of influence” will be withdrawn, and the benefactor “will be no longer an alarming meteor, but one more bright star shining serenely in your heaven, and blending its light with all your day” (1).
That last phrase is a transparent allusion to Emerson’s favorite line in his favorite poem, Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality…,” a poem that haunted the American Transcendentalists as much as it did Coleridge. But often, most obviously in Nature, Emerson went out of his way to cover his tracks. Nevertheless, as Harvey notes, some contemporaries “recognized his massive and largely unacknowledged debt to transatlantic sources” (3). Recent studies have tracked these debts—to Carlyle, to Wordsworth, and, above all, to Coleridge, both as original thinker and (even more than Carlyle and Victor Cousin) as Emerson’s principal filtering conduit to German philosophic thought. Harvey is perfectly aware of Emerson’s re-filtering, his “selective assimilation” of his principal benefactor. “Coleridge’s eclectic amalgamation of Christian, Platonic, and German idealist concepts fundamentally shaped Emerson and the development of Transatlantic Transcendentalism.” But “key ideas” of Coleridge were “appropriated” by Emerson and other liberal American thinkers, who separated those ideas from Coleridge’s Anglican conservatism, while “discarding many metaphysical subtleties and secularizing his theological language” (96). Though Emerson’s splendid essay-lecture, “Quotation and Originality,” is almost the last word on the fascinating and paradoxical subject of thankful inheritance and creative innovation, I’m delighted to be in accord with Samantha Harvey when she writes, “I agree with Patrick Keane that Emerson could very well be the best example of Thomas McFarland’s ‘originality paradox’ in which a profound indebtedness can enable, and even enhance, the originality of a writer” (3).
This raises the issue of Harvey’s own originality. The Edinburgh promotional literature describes Transatlantic Transcendentalism as “the first book devoted to Coleridge’s influence on Emerson and the development of American Transcendentalism.” And Harvey herself twice repeats the verb “devoted” in claiming that “to date no book has devoted itself to elaborating Coleridge’s vital role for Emerson and Transatlantic Transcendentalism, a lacuna which this book endeavors to remedy”; and, again, that, however well-known to Romantic scholars the “connection between Coleridge and Emerson,… surprisingly there is no single monograph devoted entirely to the subject” (19). With those caveats registered, I agree wholeheartedly with Harvey’s and Edinburgh’s claim. And not only is this the first book-length monograph devoted solely to the connection, it’s one that I suspect (despite Harvey’s modest anticipation of fuller studies to come) will prove hard to improve upon.
When it comes to transatlantic studies in general, and even to the Romantic triad in particular, Samantha Harvey is, as a good Emersonian, “thankfully” generous to her co-workers in the field. She praises such transatlantic “pioneers” as Robert Weisbuch, Leon Chai, and Richard Brantley; notes the work of James Engells and others on Emerson’s adoption of Coleridge’s creative misreading of Kant; acknowledges that her formulation of the Romantic triad itself is “beholden to scholarship by M. H. Abrams, Thomas McFarland, Seamus Perry, and John Beer”; and remarks on the “deep influence” on her book, especially her chapter on “Spirit,” of Abrams’s landmark Natural Supernaturalism (1971) with its “elaboration of the underlying spiritual paradigms” adapted, altered, and, generally and most dramatically, secularized by the Romantics (16).
I was happy to be included in such distinguished company when it came, specifically, to the galvanizing impact of Coleridge on Emerson: “Patrick Keane has done the most work on the pair in Emerson, Romanticism, and Intuitive Reason [2005]. I agree fundamentally with Keane’s approach, which he describes as ‘an exploration of elective affinities, family resemblances, and analogies binding together [many creative individuals] in a visionary company.” But, she adds, by including Milton, Wordsworth, and others, I “obscured Coleridge’s crucial impact on Emerson in a profuse tangle of interrelations” (19). Guilty as charged. Of course, I was writing a different book than hers; but the result is indeed a “profuse” comparative study. More to the immediate point: for those seeking an informed, illuminating, carefully laid-out analysis focused on the Coleridge-Emerson relation, the one indispensable book to read, for now and the foreseeable future, is not mine but Samantha Harvey’s.
§
How does Harvey go about her project? With good reason, she attends closely to the familiar Coleridgean distinctions inherited by Emerson (between Reason and “mere” Understanding; between active, creative natura naturans and passive, static natura naturata, between Genius and “mere” Talent, as well as between the “primary” and “secondary” Imagination). But she rightly devotes even more attention to Coleridge’s “method.” This orchestrated mode of inquiry permanently shaped Emerson’s own cognitive processes, and was to have a pervasive influence among the Vermont Transcendentalists led by James Marsh, and thus (158-59) on the subsequent pragmatism of John Dewey. Emerson enthusiastically concurred in Coleridge’s high valuation of his “Essays on the Principles of Method” in The Friend. There he presents, as the indispensable introduction and “basis of my future philosophical and theological writings,” a “method” of thinking (at once intellectual, spiritual, and literary) that was coherent, progressive, and ever-ascending: a dynamic mode of inquiry immensely appealing to Emerson for those very reasons. Method commenced “with the most familiar truths…gradually winning its way to positions the most comprehensive and sublime.” Nothing will “more aptly prepare the mind for the reception of specific knowledge” than “the full exposition of a principle which is the condition of all intellectual progress, and which may be said to even constitute the science of education, alike in the narrowest and in the most extensive sense of the word” (67-68, citing The Friend 1:445-46).
Samantha Harvey has her own “method” when it comes to elucidating difficult texts. Coleridge and Emerson can be obscure, even self-contradictory—whether exhilaratingly or maddeningly. Though also true of Emerson, for whom consistency was famously the hobgoblin of mediocre minds, Coleridge’s dense and sinuously dialectical thought, always moving (sometimes staggering) toward a projected synthesis, can be confusing in the course of enacting that process. Opposites are reconciled only to generate yet more opposites, to be reconciled in turn at a higher level. Yeats spoke of “images that yet/ Fresh images beget,” and Coleridge, more exuberantly than apologetically, said his thoughts “bustle along like a Surinam toad, sprouting out of back, side, and belly,” elsewhere describing the prose in which these thoughts were conveyed as spawning parentheses resembling Surinam toadlings. Coleridge’s organic Dynamic Philosophy is both reflected in, and often made more difficult by, the sheer length and complexity of many of his progressive and digressive sentences. In the Dedication to Don Juan, Byron, no man for toads, depicted the author of Biographia Literaria as “a hawk encumbered by his hood,” expounding in darkness “metaphysics to the nation—/ I wish he would explain his Explanation.”
Leaving Byron’s delightful irreverence aside, there is no question that in reading Coleridge, there are syntactical nettles that need to be grasped and worked through before “Explanation,” let alone evaluation, can begin. Enter Samantha Harvey, whose characteristic pattern, or “method,” is to cite a passage of Coleridge (or of Emerson) at some length, then paraphrase and unpack it. Emulating Coleridge and Emerson, Harvey has an enviable gift for apt quotation; and, like Abrams in Natural Supernaturalism, she eschews glib and “knowing” citation. She always quotes sufficiently, reproducing enough of a passage not only to preserve its context but to generously invite the reader to work and learn along with her. Her explanations can come at a cost. “Nothing is got for nothing,” as Emerson famously reminds us; and Harvey’s repeated rhythm of quotation followed by explication leads to some redundancy. Yet it is a cost more than offset by the resulting clarification. Her careful and informed explications and synopses are invariably models of astute comprehension conveyed with lucidity.
Having just mentioned explication, I have to add that it seems a shame that a close reader as astute as Harvey, in the commitment to her major focus, has denied herself, and us, much attention to poetry, though she knows (84-89) that the “Poet-Prophet” is the most elevated figure in the Romantic pantheon. Emerson’s best poetry was in prose; but there are no better embodiments of the reconciliation of nature, spirit, and humanity than the major poetry of Coleridge and Wordsworth. Wordsworth is the master-poet of the ultimate unity of nature, spirit, and humanity, but that unity was distilled in a single exclamation— “O! the one Life within us and abroad”—by Coleridge, Harvey’s chief celebrant of the Romantic triad, who added that line in 1817 to “The Eolian Harp,” a poem originally written in 1795.
In the one exception to this neglect of the poetry, Harvey connects Coleridge’s “Dejection: An Ode” with Emerson’s comparison of our changing “moods” to “many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue,” so that “we animate what we can,” and see “only what we animate,” since “all depends on the mood of the man.” Though she doesn’t cite the lines about “that inanimate cold world” unilluminated by the inner light issuing “from the soul itself,” Harvey does note Coleridge’s insistence, later in this same stanza of the Ode, that “we receive but what we give,/ And in our life alone does Nature live.” (89). Wordsworth also insisted on the epistemological and emotional reciprocity of giving and receiving and (continuing the adaptation of Kant he inherited from Coleridge) asserted the ultimate subordination of external nature to the sovereign mind and imagination: “The kingdom of man over nature,” as Emerson puts it in the finale of the book paradoxically, even misleadingly, named Nature.
Harvey’s citation of the Dejection Ode occurs in the course of her discussion of Emerson’s adherence to Coleridge’s fruitful misreading of Kant’s distinction between Reason and Understanding. Like Coleridge, Emerson privileges intuitive Reason, making it synonymous with the Romantic creative Imagination (an equation puzzling to inexperienced readers of Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Emerson). Thus interpreted, Coleridgean Imagination “placed the poet-prophet at the center of the Romantic triad, gazing out at the natural world, reading it for spiritual meaning, embodying those perceptions in literary form,” and transmitting those perceptions to the rest of us. For Emerson, this imagination acts as a “lens through which nature is viewed, depending on “the special abilities of the poet-prophet.” (89)
I am not suggesting that Samantha Harvey should join me in the ranks of the diffuse by putting at risk her thematic focus. But that very focus, by her own account, is best exemplified in the work of the “Poet-Bard.” However we judge his poetry, Emerson considered himself “a poet in the sense of a perceiver & dear lover of the harmonies that are in the soul & in matter, & especially of [their] correspondences” (65-66, quoting from an Emerson letter). Harvey’s comment—“Literature would prove the best medium for reconciling the Romantic triad poetically, rather than systematically”—is reinforced in the following chapter, “Humanity,” in which the “Reconciliator” is specified as “Art”: “If philosophic and metaphysical resolutions of the Romantic triad were hard to resolve systematically,” then it was up to “the poet’s imaginative powers” to evoke the “spirit of unity” (76, 82, italics added)
Though something of a lacuna, the inattention to poetry is finally a quibble considered in the full context of what Harvey so brilliantly does attend to: the crucial role of Coleridge’s distinctions and dynamic “method” in “galvanizing Emerson’s thought at a critical moment in his intellectual maturation” (141). Indeed, the extraordinary impact of Coleridge’s thinking on the whole of New England can hardly be overstated. Along with the curricular and philosophic developments in Vermont, that thought simultaneously shaped Concord and Boston Transcendentalism. Since Samantha Harvey deals rigorously and clearly with concepts that are difficult but central to an understanding of the development of American philosophy and literature, her book deserves a wide audience. Specialists will appreciate it. But, precisely because she is so good at elucidating passages that initially may seem opaque, paradoxical, occasionally even incoherent, Transatlantic Transcendentalism should appeal to newcomers seeking entrance to what Coleridge brought to America. What he introduced and clarified for his disciples on the other side of the Atlantic were the often mysterious but always intriguing interactions among the three permanent but dynamically fluid elements in the Romantic triad. The result was not only New England Transcendentalism, but an American Renaissance.
The other day Pat Keane dashed off 10,000 words on Wordsworth’s daffodils and sent them to me wondering if I might want them for Numéro Cinq. He starts off with a detour through the mine field of contemporary American literary criticism, the still fresh battles fought between the proponents of intrinsic criticism and extrinsic criticism, the New Critics who value “close reading” and the contextual critics who bring in tradition, influence, history, biography and sometimes psychoanalysis to help explain a poem. Helen Vendler’s analysis of the Wordsworth poem stands as an example of the former and after giving it fair due, Pat launches into what he whimsically calls “a few contextual elements” — those, um, 10,000 words more or less, starting with Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal entry (see facsimile page below) on the day she and her brother saw the daffodils and ending with Immanuel Kant’s immortal line about the starry heavens and the moral law. This is a gorgeous essay on criticism, on the provenance of a poem, and on Wordsworth (and his sister) — also a wonderful re-visioning of a poem that sometimes is difficult to see because it has, yes, become oh so familiar.
dg
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As my doubly plural title indicates, I’ll be wandering beyond the received text of one of the most familiar poems in the literary canon, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”—Wordsworth’s best-known poem, though demoted by some to “that damned thing about daffodils.” Since its initial publication, in 1807, the poem has been parodied and admired, despised and exalted. Today, though it can still produce an occasional groan, it is generally ranked among Wordsworth’s small triumphs, one of his self-described “simple songs for thinking hearts.” That simplicity is complicated by the fact that, while we rightly consider it one of Wordsworth’s “signature” poems, it bears the signature of more than one Wordsworth; indeed, of more than two. Yet it remains quintessentially “Wordsworthian,” both intrinsically and thematically. For “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” gives us, writ small, the theme—“the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings…recollected in tranquility”—of such indisputably major poems as “Tintern Abbey,” the opening Book of Wordsworth’s autobiographical epic, The Prelude, and the great “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.”[1]
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The mixed reception of the Daffodils poem is not an anomaly. Wordsworth’s road to recognition was a rocky one, and even after he had “arrived,” he was still subjected to withering criticism. No one who has read it can ever forget the opening of Francis Jeffrey’s Edinburgh Review reception of Wordsworth’s long-awaited epic poem, The Excursion. When it finally appeared, in 1814, Jeffrey famously dead-panned, “This will never do.” It’s hard for us to know whether to laugh or to cry; Wordsworth did neither. Seven years earlier, his friend and admirer, Margaret, Lady Beaumont, underestimating the “invincible confidence” of the poet, thought he would be distressed by the disparaging reception of Poems, in Two Volumes (1807). Responding, Wordsworth pronounced himself unperturbed by temporary attitudes. Quoting another friend well known to Lady Beaumont, he insisted that a “great and original” poet “must create the taste by which he is to be relished; he must teach the art by which he is to be seen.”[2] That was certainly the case with Wordsworth, who endured savage, often belittling criticism before he eventually triumphed, becoming the dominant poet of the 19th century, and, after a brief decline in the earlier twentieth century, reemerged in our own time as a monumental figure—widely, if not universally, considered the major poet to have written in English between Milton and Yeats.
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The friend Wordsworth quoted to Lady Beaumont was, of course, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who inspired, and was inspired by, Wordsworth and who, as a critic, did more than any other single figure to advance the case for Wordsworth as a major poet. But he was also aware of “defects” in his friend’s poetry, and readers who continue to resist that “damned thing about daffodils” will be heartened to know that he, too, thought that whatever flashed “upon that inward eye,” it ought to have been something rather more momentous than a bunch of “daffodils,” which he italicized to emphasize the trivial nature of what was being “retrospected.” As we shall see, given what he considered the bathetic emphasis on mere daffodils, he judged what have become the most famous lines in the poem—“They flash upon that inward eye/ Which is the bliss of solitude”—to be an example of “mental…bombast.”[3] As we’ll also see, though Coleridge presumably didn’t know it, those two lines were actually not written by Wordsworth, at least not by William Wordsworth. But this takes us outside the autonomous, internal world of the poem, and I want to begin with an intrinsic reading.
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The Daffodils and Helen Vendler
Helen Vendler
1
As it happens, the critic and teacher generally recognized as the most acute living exponent and practitioner of intrinsic criticism, Helen Vendler, writes at length about “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” in the third edition of her superb text for college students, Poems, Poets, Poetry.[4] After a brief two-page analysis of Robert Herrick’s “Divination by a Daffodil,” she devotes the remaining pages of her 11th chapter, “Writing about Poems,” to Wordsworth’s daffodils poem. As an intrinsic critic, Helen Vendler preaches and practices close reading, or explication. For her, a poem is essentially an autonomous artifact, a work of art to be experienced in and of itself. And it is to be experienced, she says (323, 329-31) in two somewhat different but equally indispensable ways: temporally (unfolding itself in time, with a beginning, middle, and end) and spatially (viewed from a distance as a space full of elements set in relation to each other). Vendler is, of course, aware of authorial and historical contexts: who the author is, when he or she wrote, and under what circumstances. But in examining and writing about a poem, she is primarily engaged by the interrelated elements within the particular text itself—its words, families of words, sentences, sounds (alliteration and assonance), rhyme and rhythm, etc.
As one can see from what she has to say about many of the poems in her book, not least “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” this focus on close reading is immensely illuminating. Praising “a good paper,” the sort she wants students to write, Vendler says such a paper “leaves your readers, when they come back to the poem, feeling ‘Oh, yes! And yes! Of course!’ It makes readers see aspects of the poem they may not have noticed themselves, in their more cursory reading of the poem, but now see clearly because you have showed them those things” (336). This is precisely Vendler’s own great gift. “Yes, of course; why didn’t I see that for myself?” so many of us have said over the years, responding to one or another of her brilliant close readings: explications which clarify almost everything. I said “almost everything” by design—as Browning’s Duke says in “My Last Duchess”—because, in her emphasis on the internal dynamics of the individual poem, Vendler omits most external factors. She’s perfectly aware of the contexts beyond the poem. As she says herself of this particular poem, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”: it can “be set in larger frames,” for example, “among other Wordsworth poems,” or “among other Romantic poems,” or “among poems about memory; and so on” (336). As I’ve already suggested, I will be exploring, among others, precisely those “larger frames”; but, even then, there is much to be said in favor of close reading.
There was a time, prior to the advent of the modern pioneers of close reading, the so-called “New Critics” of the 1940s and ‘50s, when it was perfectly acceptable for college professors, supposedly discussing with their students such a poem as (to choose an example once cited by the critic Richard Fogle in demonstrating old critical shortcomings) Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” to say little or nothing about how the poem actually “worked.” Instead, they would lecture about the “occasion” of the poem (the tour made by Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy); about the intense personal and literary relationship between the Wordsworths and Coleridge; and about the political context in which the poem was written (the era of the French Revolution, of which Wordsworth and Coleridge were initially ardent enthusiasts). And then, as class-time was running out, the professor would conclude by saying something like: “as for the poem itself—ah, beautiful, is it not!” This was not good enough: indeed, it was just such cursory, or negligent, treatment of poems that gave rise to the New Critics.
It’s not that such contexts don’t matter. Indeed, they mattered to Wordsworth himself, who sometimes incorporated them into the poem, or at least its title. For example, he makes sure, toward the end of “Tintern Abbey,” that readers realize that his sister has been present all along, as a silent auditor (making the poem a kind of surprise dramatic monologue). In addition, his own long title —“Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour”—gives us the precise circumstances of the poem’s composition. And his inclusion of the date, “July 13, 1798,” one day short of Bastille Day, the anniversary of the outbreak nine years earlier, of the French Revolution, is intriguing since the poem itself says nothing about politics, an absence which is itself not without interest. Unfortunately, too many historically-sophisticated critics, especially the so-called New Historicists, have so emphasized this “absence” or “political evasion” on the part of Wordsworth—what is “repressed” or “not said” in the poem—that they de-emphasize what is there, actually present in the poem. Reading through the prism of politics offers its own illuminations, but this re-swinging of the critical pendulum has ironically brought us back to the situation earlier addressed by the intrinsic critics who preceded Helen Vendler: the need to read a poem as a poem, and not as something else, either a political tract or a “message.” In The Prelude and elsewhere, Wordsworth can hardly be said to avoid politics. But a poet has the right to choose his own subject matter and theme; in “Tintern Abbey,” his focus is on his psychological-imaginative engagement with the landscape.[5]
2
Vendler begins her discussion of “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” by printing the poem in its final version, accompanied by an imaginary student’s running commentary, noting the poem’s four-beat meter and ababcc rhyme scheme, and raising questions.
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced; but they
Outdid the sparkling waves in glee;
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company;
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils. (WP 1:619-20)
Vendler’s hypothetical student, annotating the opening stanza, wonders why the “lonely” speaker is “like a cloud”; notices the natural scene of hills and valleys; and that “crowd,” generally used of people, here refers to flowers, as does “host,” usually describing “armies” (he or she omits “angels”); then remarks that the line “Beside the lake, beneath the trees,” offers a “closer focus than vales and hills.” The final line of the stanza prompts the student to ask how rooted flowers can be said to “dance”? With the second stanza’s “much further focus—up to the stars,” the student wonders about the “difference between shine and twinkle”; marks the expansion of never-ending and ten-thousand; notes that “saw becomes glance”; and that the dancing daffodils become people, tossing their heads. The waves of the third stanza are “like people too, dancing,” and the “flowers have feelings: glee.” The jocund company indicates that the speaker is “not alone anymore.” The crucial transition from saw to glance to gazed and gazed is noted, as is the glance back to golden in stanza 1 implicit in this stanza’s reference to wealth and show (itself a shift from company). Of the opening of the fourth and final stanza, For oft, the student notes, “past anecdote over, now present tense,” and follows that accurate observation with a flurry of marginal questions: “Difference between vacant and pensive? Flash; not dance or flutter or toss: why? Solitude: different from first lonely? Earlier, eye (outward and inward); now heart?” Finally, the student, observing “same rhyme-sound as in stanza 1,” has noticed at least the rhyme on daffodils in both the opening and closing stanzas.
Vendler then turns to the poem’s words, suggesting that students consult a dictionary to “check out etymologies and different connotations,” since poets have a “very specific sense of the aura around each word.” Her own search reveals words with roots in Old English (crowd, shine, twinkle, bliss), Middle English (glance, glee, gaze, flash), Latin (host, jocund, vacant, pensive, solitude), French (gay), and Greek, since daffodil itself derives from the Greek asphodelos. Wordsworth, she suggests, is “balancing” words, the Latinate (Latin-French) with the Germanic (Anglo-Saxon). She also notes the “families” of words that “help to organize the poem,” focusing on four inter-related clusters: “Glee, gay, and jocund (a family of being happy, in terms of both meaning and—in the case of the first two—alliteration); Glance, glee, gay, gaze (words connected by alliteration, joining looking and happiness); Saw, glance, gaze (a family of looking); and Float, flutter, shine, twinkle, toss, flash, fill (a family of verbs of motion).”
Discussing sentences andrhythm, Vendler notes that the first two stanzas are periodic; the sentence is the stanza. But, despite our expectation that the pattern will continue, the third and fourth stanzas “together make up the third sentence,” with the “hinge” that joins them “the couplet, ‘I gazed—and gazed—but little thought/ What wealth the show to me had brought.’ This couplet leads into the exemplification of the ‘wealth’ in stanza 4.” And since the “third sentence is twice as long as the other two,” it “bears twice the weight.” The poem’s ababcc rhyme-scheme suggests, says Vendler, an initial statement (the quatrain) followed by an additional observation (the couplet). Of rhythm, she notes that the basic iambic beat of the first five lines is purposefully disrupted in the sixth line, where, “to emphasize the unexpected motion of the flowers,” Wordsworth shifts to a strong syllable followed by a weak: “Fluttering.” She concludes her thoughts on this subject by observing that a “careful reader will see that for his concluding rhyme (‘fills/ daffodils’) Wordsworth has reused one of the rhyme-sounds from his first stanza (‘hills/ daffodils’), giving us a strong sense of the end coming back to the beginning.” (In fact, if we count slant-rhyme, Wordsworth may be said to have reused two rhymes, the final stanza’s “mood” and “solitude” obliquely chiming with the first stanza’s “cloud” and “crowd.”)
Most importantly, Vendler invites us to look at the poem temporally,then spatially.Weexamine the poem temporally to see what changes we can observe as it moves from A (the opening, with the speaker lonely, as “unconnected to the world as a cloud when floating high above the earth”) to Z (where, though “still alone,” he is “no longer lonely,” since “now he feels the bliss of solitude”). How does Wordsworth move us, persuasively, from A to Z, the point at which, alone in his room, “suddenly, unasked, the daffodils flash into his mind so vividly that he sees them with his ‘inward eye’,” filling “that empty container, his heart,” with a pleasure that recaptures “his previous pleasure on that apparently forgotten day”? How does he convince us that the daffodils have “indeed lasted intensely in his mind, without any conscious effort on his part?” The explanation lies in “all the verbs of motion, all the verbs of seeing, all the verbs of delight”—in short, those “families” of words earlier discussed. Now it is the job of the reader-critic to see, along with much else, precisely how those verbs are deployed in the poem.
Looking at the poem spatially, Vendler draws our attention to three descriptive “glances” at the same phenomenon.” The first glance (“I saw”) shows us the daffodils as many (“a crowd, a host”), in a landscape (lake, trees), and in motion (“fluttering and dancing”). The second glance (“at a glance”) shows us the daffodils asmany(like “stars that shine/ And twinkle on the milky way,” “ten thousand”), in a landscape (“along the margin of a bay”) and in motion (“Tossing their heads in sprightly dance”). The third glance (“I gazed—and gazed”) shows us the daffodils asmany (“a jocund company”), in a landscape (“waves beside them”), and in motion (“they/ Outdid the sparkling waves in glee”). If we considered these three descriptions temporally, we would distinguish between “seeing, glancing, and gazing.” But in considering them spatially, as three reiterated versions of “the same thing” (such “repetition” is actually “intensification”), what marks the daffodils is that (a) they are not alone, but many; that (b) they feel “at home” in their natural setting; and that (c) “they are not gloomily rigid but in joyous motion responsive to the waves and the breeze.” As Vendler suggests without dwelling on the point, Wordsworth’s prepositions play a crucial role in positioning the daffodils and integrating them into their natural world. They are “Beside the lake, beneath the trees,/ Fluttering and dancing in the breeze,” “stretched in never-ending line/ Along the margin of a bay,” beside “the waves.”
We also notice that the poem, still being examined spatially, is divided into two parts: “outdoors (stanzas 1-3 and indoors (stanza 4).” The outdoor part, in the past tense, tells of the particular day when the poet saw the daffodils; the indoor part, “phrased in the habitual present tense (representing something that happens often), removes the daffodils from a physical scene (in nature) to a virtual scene (in the mind). Wordsworth makes explicit, at the end, the connection between what the eye has seen, glanced at, and finally gazed at (imprinting the scene firmly) and what the heart feels.” Bringing the daffodils indoors, Wordsworth wants us to “recognize that the poem has been brought to closure.” (330-31)
The interaction between speaker and flowers is made credible by the alternation between them. The speaker governs the first sentence, with the daffodils the objects of his observation; but this governing function changes, producing “an antiphonal structure of alternation…in which the poet and the daffodils engage in a ‘syntactic dialogue,’ as first one predominates, then the other. We ‘believe in’ the speaker’s interaction with the daffodils because the poem shows it happening.” In case we missed it, Vendler points out that Wordsworth has put the word dance, in one or another of its variants, in each stanza: dancing; dance; danced, dances. And we notice that “the word dance alliterates with daffodils, making them ‘belong’ together phonetically” (331). At this point, it’s up to the student to write an essay about how the poem “works,” and Vendler devotes the remainder of this chapter (332-40) to suggesting a variety of potentially fruitful approaches to the poem and to ways to organize a coherent and persuasive essay.
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The Daffodils in Context
3
Thanks to astute observation of the sort she wants students to emulate, Vendler has provided all the preliminary spadework as well as the framework for an intrinsic analysis. I will be doing my own share of close reading; but before returning to “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” I want to bring in a few contextual elements, extrinsic to the poem, at least until its final form. To begin with, we can locate the actual incident that inspired the poem. As by now everybody knows, or else should know, the genetic episode was recorded by Dorothy Wordsworth in her Journal for Thursday, 15 April 1802. She tells us that she and William came across many flowers on this memorable walk, including the Lesser Celandine, that
starry yellow flower which Mrs C[larkson] calls pile wort. When we were in the woods beyond Gowbarrow park we saw a few daffodils close to the waterside. We fancied that the lake had floated the seeds ashore and that the little colony had so sprung up. But as we went along there were more and yet more, and at last, under the boughs of the trees, we saw that there was a long belt of them [six words crossed out] along the shore, about the breadth of a country turnpike road. I never saw daffodils so beautiful. They grew among the mossy stones, about and about them; some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness, and the rest tossed and reeled and danced, and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the lake. They looked so gay—ever-glancing, ever-changing. This wind blew directly over the lake to them. There was, here and there, a little knot, and a few stragglers a few yards higher up—but they were so few as not to disturb the simplicity and unity and life of that one busy highway.[6]
The poem that resulted—originally titled “Daffodils”—was composed later, sometime between March 1804 and April 1807 (WP 1:1005). Some readers have preferred the journal-entry to the poem. A scholar no less distinguished than Ernest de Selincourt, referring to the “unforgettable walk” of 15 April 1802, describes the Wordsworths’ encounter with the daffodils, “which William records in verse,” as “more lovely in Dorothy’s unstudied prose.” Even those who may not agree can see his point. But that prose was not quite “unstudied.” Dorothy’s manuscript (reproduced by de Selincourt on the overleaf that follows his remark), shows that she deleted six words after “a long belt of them” (“the end we did not see”), and jotted in as an afterthought, “This wind blew directly over the lake to them.” It is also worth noting, as Pamela Woof does in her edition of the Grasmere Journals, that Dorothy wrote a letter to Mary this same day, in fact, immediately on returning home from the walk along Ullswater. In this account, the wind is “furious” and “sometimes almost took our breath away”; but, as Woof notes, “it is not a creative force: no daffodils are mentioned, no partnership with the wind in dance.”[7]
In 1815, Wordsworth gave the poem its present title, dropping “Daffodils” for, I would surmise, two reasons: first, to place initial emphasis on the isolated speaker (“I wandered lonely…”), second, to defer the surprised delight of his, and our, first encounter with the flowers to the poem itself. He also inserted a new stanza (see WP 1:1006n), beginning “Continuous as the stars that shine…” A cluster of interrelated questions arise. Why did he feel the need to add these lines? How does this new second stanza affect our interpretation of the poem? What else is there in the poem that isn’t in Dorothy’s journal-entry? Alternately, what does Dorothy give us in prose, “unstudied” or otherwise, that her brother doesn’t? And what do the differences between journal-entry and poem suggest in terms of experiential response and aesthetic shaping, even, perhaps, in terms of female and male responses to the natural world? Whatever changes he made in shaping his own poem, does knowing that Wordsworth adhered so closely to Dorothy’s journal-entry alter our attitude regarding Wordsworth’s creativity? In what follows, I return to the Daffodils poem in connection with three Wordsworths (William, Dorothy, and Mary); then in connection with Coleridge and Emerson, on the subject of “eyes” and the sublimation of the commonplace. I’ll conclude by placing “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” in a larger Wordsworthian and even Coleridgean-Kantian context.
4
Even though two years passed between Dorothy’s April 1802 journal-entry and Wordsworth’s initial draft of the poem, that remarkably perceptive and imaginative entry was obviously in the poet’s mind when he sat down to write, or, as was often his practice, began to chant lines while walking. Of course, we cannot know the precise extent to which he was indebted to his sister’s observations. Considerably, it would seem, though we cannot rule out the possibility that he may have had some influence on her wording in the journal-entry, given the crucial omissions in the contemporaneous letter to Mary, and, especially, given the closeness and reciprocity of the relationship between Dorothy and her brother.
Reciprocity is, in fact, one key to the poem. “So much depends…,” William Carlos Williams opens “The Red Wheelbarrow,” a little poem as alternately loved and resisted by students as Wordsworth’s daffodils. Williams’s opening foreshadowed a mutual dependence: just as the poet depends on what he sees, the things of the world, as necessary raw material, so those “found” objects depend on the poet to perceive, frame, and so order them aesthetically—through unexpected line-breaks, division into three- and one-word couplets and juxtaposed colors and textures (“a red wheel/ barrow// glazed with rain/ water// beside the white/ chickens”)—that they are transformed into a work of art. In a similar reciprocity in “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” the Wordsworthian speaker’s mood is affected by the daffodils, which, in turn, depend on the poet (and, in this case, Dorothy, in her journal-entry, though not in her letter to Mary) to record their gaiety as they “dance” in the breeze. At the same time, as that personification or pathetic fallacy indicates, Dorothy and William are also projecting, attributing human characteristics and emotions (primarily, joy) to the flowers. The speaker in the poem begins by “naturalizing” himself, comparing his loneliness to that of a floating cloud; then reverses the process by personifying the flowers; and, finally, internalizes their supposed joy when every subsequent recollection of them so “fills” with pleasure his momentarily empty heart that it “dances with the daffodils”—all, aside from the related “Fluttering” and “Tossing,” to an iambic-tetrameter beat.
When he started to write the poem, two years after Dorothy recorded her journal-entry, Wordsworth clearly depended on that entry, both to refresh his memory and for emotional coloring. In the poem, he deploys her observations selectively, emphasizing certain aspects, omitting others, most notably her reference to those daffodils that seemed to rest their heads on the stones they grew among. Dorothy, in fact, begins by noticing these presumably wind-beaten flowers resting their heads on the elegiac “mossy stones… as on a pillow for weariness.” Whether or not this reveals a specifically female sensibility, it is a sympathetic, even poignant observation unregistered in her brother’s poem. He focused instead, and exclusively, on the flowers animated by the breeze off the lake. According to Dorothy, they “tossed and reeled and danced,” a joyous movement replicated in the poem: “ten thousand saw I at a glance, / Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.” A later, more orthodox Wordsworth would dismiss Keats’s “Hymn to Pan” (which his young admirer had been pressed to read to him) as “a very pretty piece of paganism,” even though Keats’s main source was a favorite mythological passage in the fourth Book of Wordsworth’s own Excursion. Here, however, he adds to his sister’s head-“tossing” personification of the daffodils a light but detectably pagan note, their “sprightly dance” allying them with sprights or sprites: elfin supernatural beings. I’ll return to this point.[8]
Interestingly, the description closest to his sister’s did not appear in the poem until 1815, in the couplet concluding the stanza Wordsworth added that year. This addition may be his equivalent of the phrase she had deleted, “the end we did not see,” referring to the “long belt of them,” which, together with her reference to the Lesser Celandine, “that starry yellow flower,” may have led to Wordsworth’s belated insertion of this stanza, in which the multitude of daffodils that “stretched in never-endingline” are said to be “Continuous as the stars that shine/ And twinkle on the milky way.” This shifts the focus above the cloud that “floats on high,” and far above Dorothy’s “long belt”—now extended to stars, perhaps reminding Wordsworth of another “Belt,” Orion’s. Not part of our Milky Way, Orion, so familiar to stargazers, is the easiest constellation to find, and so the best way to orient ourselves to viewing the edgewise Milky Way’s “never-ending line,” or “busy highway,” of stars. In short, even Wordsworth’s most distant, sublime, celestial comparison, added more than a dozen years after she made her journal-entry, may still be partially indebted to Dorothy’s original description of the daffodils.
However we judge the relationship between his sister’s journal-entry and the poem, we know that Wordsworth, like Coleridge, valued Dorothy’s acutely sensitive perception of the details of the natural world. In the concluding lines of “The Sparrow’s Nest,” a short lyric grouped with “Daffodils” in the “Moods of My Own Mind” section of the 1807 Poems in Two Volumes, Wordsworth says of Dorothy (lightly disguised as “My sister Emmeline”):
She gave me eyes, she gave me ears;
And humble cares, and delicate fears;
A heart, the fountain of sweet tears;
And love, and thought, and joy. (WP, 1:529-30)
Though every item in this litany of gifts to her poet-brother is crucial, his priority is, significantly, ocular: “She gave me eyes….” It seems all the more remarkable, therefore, that the lines Wordsworth himself described as the poem’s “two best”—“They flash upon that inward eye/ Which is the bliss of solitude”—were contributed not by the poet’s sister, but (he told Isabella Fenwick) by his wife, Mary. Dorothy may have given him “eyes,” but, in what borders on a co-operative family affair in the creation of this particular poem, it was another female member of the household who gave him his final and sublime image, “that inward eye.” “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” is nothing if not an “ocular” poem, one in which the speaker “saw,” and “saw,” and “glance[d],” and, more intensively, “gazed—and gazed”: a pattern culminating in that “inward eye” upon which those gazed-on and imprinted daffodils later “flash.” Wordsworth himself described the poem in 1815 as “rather an elementary feeling and simple impression [approaching to the nature of an ocular spectrum] upon the imaginative faculty, than an exertion of it….” (WP, 1:1006n)
But it must be added that it would be erroneous to over-emphasize the “ocular spectrum” at the expense of “the imaginative faculty.” Even in the note I have just cited, Wordsworth does not deny the exercise of the faculty of imagination, only of the sort of strenuous effort suggested by his italicization of the verb “exertion.” The point is confirmed by the fact that the note was written in the process of Wordsworth elevating the poem, previously located in “Moods of My Own Mind,” to a “higher” status among what he called, in the 1815 re-grouping, “Poems of the Imagination.” What we see with the physical or external eye still matters immensely, for without the initiating and necessary grounding in visual apprehension there would be no Romantic transcendence, defined by David Vallins as “at once a feeling of elevation or sublimity, and a process of contemplating, explaining, or evoking the unity of phenomena.”[9] In “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” the “continuous,” integrated belt of daffodils is further unified and internalized through the power of the poet’s “inward eye.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The phrase I’ve just quoted from David Vallins occurs in his analysis of the reinterpretation of Romantic ideas by Ralph Waldo Emerson. The legacy of the “inward eye” includes the responses of Coleridge and of his (and Wordsworth’s) American disciple, Emerson, both of whom had things to say about the Wordsworthian “eye” engaging the commonplace, the humble things of the world. Coleridge was the first and, in many ways, the most astute appreciator of the poetry of Wordsworth, a poet he ranked with (and second only to) Shakespeare and Milton. But he devoted a whole chapter (22) of Biographia Literaria to the “characteristic defects” (BL 1:119) of his friend’s work. As indicated earlier, in that chapter, he cited the lines in which the daffodils “flash upon that inward eye/ Which is the bliss of solitude” as an example of a thought or image “too great for the subject,” and thus approximating “what might be called mental bombast, as distinguished from verbal” (BL 1:136). Just as Wordsworth was not minimizing the role of imagination in his 1815 “ocular” note on “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” so Coleridge was not criticizing these lines in themselves; only their misuse, since their very sublimity leads us to expect a more significant “joy of retrospection”—such as the passing before “our conscience” of “a whole well-spent life”—rather than what he considered on this occasion the relative triviality and bathos of a recollection of mere “daffodils” (137).
Coleridge, whose compelling Mariner mesmerizes us as well as the Wedding Guest with his “glittering eye,” was not a man to undervalue the eye. In a crucial and influential passage from Aids to Reflection (1825), Coleridge identified, as a “higher gift” than the life breathed into man and animal alike, man’s “Reflection, or Reason,” associating it with the moment in Genesis when “man became a living soul” (Gen 2:7), and providing an echoing Emerson with what he would later call (in the “Idealism” chapter of Nature), the “eye of Reason.”[10] God has given us a house gloriously furnished, writes Coleridge, “Nothing is wanted but the eye, which is the light of this house, the light which is the eye of this soul. This seeing light, this enlightening eye, is Reflection.”[11]
Coleridge here aligns his biblical quotation—“And man becomes a living soul”—with the moment in “Tintern Abbey” (46-49) when, laid asleep in body, we “become a living soul.” Thus empowered, we are—in Wordsworth’s visual image—able to “see into the life of things” with “an eye made quiet by the power/ Of harmony and the deep power of joy.” Thus, Coleridge might have agreed with Wordsworth, who seems not to have been merely patronizing his wife when he described the “inward eye” lines to Isabella Fenwick as the “two best lines in” the poem. For many subsequent readers, they have certainly seemed to be the poem’s most quintessentially “Wordsworthian” lines, even if they are more Mary’s than William’s.
Of course, just as it is possible that Wordsworth had some influence on Dorothy’s journal-entry on the daffodils, Mary may, like Coleridge, have been remembering that “ocular” passage in “Tintern Abbey.” Three decades later, and across the Atlantic, Emerson, another admirer of Wordsworth, remembered both ocular images, connecting them with the premature death of his closest brother, Charles—a victim of the same disease, tuberculosis, that had earlier claimed both his nineteen-year-old his wife and his younger brother, Edward, and that had, moreover, threatened his own eyesight. Devastated by this third family tragedy within five years, Emerson wondered of Charles, “Who can ever supply his place to me? None,” he answers, for Charles was to him what Dorothy was to Wordsworth: “The eye is closed that was to see Nature for me, & give me leave to see.”[12] Emerson’s partial compensation came in the form of a metaphorical transmutation of his dead brother’s “eye” attuned to the natural world. In the most celebrated moment in his book Nature, written in the year Charles died, Emerson famously or notoriously describes a moment in which, “my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space;—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all” (E&L,10; italics added). At once lonely and exhilarated, he experiences an uplifting, a rapturous and self-transcending unity with the divine in which “the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God”: a version of Wordsworth’s less explicitly religious “sense sublime” of “A motion and a spirit, that impels/ All thinking things, all objects of all thought,/ And rolls through all things” (“Tintern Abbey,” 95, 100-102). Seven years later, in his great essay “The Poet,” Emerson looks back on that epiphanic moment, remarking how rare and difficult it is to attain “the all-piercing…and ocular air of heaven” (E&L, 451-52). Along with his brother’s “eye,” all-seeing but now closed in death, the American Transcendentalist seems to be recalling both the culminating ocular image in the Daffodils poem, that “inward eye/ Which is the bliss of solitude,” and that “Serene and blessed mood,” in which the affections gently lead us on until, our breath and even the motion of our human blood almost suspended, “we are,” to repeat the lines from “Tintern Abbey,”
SPACESPACESPlaid asleep
In body, and become a living soul;
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things. (30, 41-49; italics added)
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Dorothy Wordsworth’s silhouette
6
As with so many Wordsworthian roads, this emphasis on seeing leads back to Dorothy, who “gave” Wordsworth “eyes to see,” just as Charles’s “eye” was “to see Nature” for Emerson, and give him “leave to see.” Of course, Dorothy makes an appearance, albeit belated and unnamed, in “Tintern Abbey.” Though we do not find out until the final movement of the poem, “thou my dearest Friend…, My dear, dear Sister!” (119-120, 124), has been silently present all along, on the banks of the Wye, just as she was present when brother and sister saw the daffodils dancing in the wind beside Ullswater. But while Dorothy was there, and while her journal-entry inspired the Daffodils poem, her journal and her presence go unmentioned in “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.” It is not hard to guess why Dorothy was left out.
In what is perhaps the most repeated of all definitions of poetry, Wordsworth called it “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings…recollected in tranquility.” In the case of this poem, the supposedly spontaneous overflow took place over many years—from 1804, when he first drafted the poem, through its first printing in 1807, and its revised version in 1815, in which Wordsworth, though leaving the final stanza intact, improved the first stanza, replacing “dancing” with “golden,” and “along” with “beside” in lines 4-6. Some devotees of simplicity may prefer the original phrase in line 16, “laughing company,” to the permanent change made in 1815: “jocund company.” Though echoing the “large recompense” in “Lycidas,” the more-than-Miltonic Latinate and polysyllabic “abundant recompense” in “Tintern Abbey” seems ponderous. Here, the Latinate adjective seems less so; in addition, “laughing company” may have belatedly seemed to Wordsworth too close to Dorothy’s delightfully over-the-top surmise that the daffodils “seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the lake.” Most importantly, of course, in 1815, Wordsworth inserted an entirely new stanza. As earlier suggested, that stanza’s galaxy of “stars” may echo Dorothy’s “starry yellow flower” and seemingly-endless “long belt” of daffodils; and the new stanza concluded by directly echoing Dorothy’s description of the daffodils as they “tossed and reeled and danced.” Nevertheless, it would hardly do to mention that journal-entry, even in an appended prose note, since that would reveal that what was being “recollected” was less the poet’s “spontaneous” feelings than Dorothy’s, jotted down more than a dozen years earlier. An awkward affair best avoided.
Nor could there be room for Dorothy as a character in the poem. Though Keats would later famously and accurately refer to “the Wordsworthian or egotistical sublime,” the omission of Dorothy here has nothing to do with the “mean egotism” Emerson shed when he became a transparent eye-ball. Dorothy’s omission is thematic. “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” dependsupon the speaker’s initial isolation, wandering “lonely as a cloud,” as preparation for the moment when, “all at once I saw a crowd,/ A host, of golden daffodils,” and, caught up in their “glee,” becomes part of their “jocund company,” all leading to his very different final “solitude,” when emotion is recollected in a tranquility at once thoughtful and blissful, and his “heart with pleasure fills,/ And dances with the daffodils.” Indeed, the memory of the daffodils seems a talisman against loneliness. As long as he retains this, and other similarly vivid remembrances of Nature, Wordsworth will never be truly alone, or bereft of material for poetry. That initial loneliness and final solitude, associated with the “inward eye” upon which the remembered golden daffodils “flash,” is even more essential in this poem than it is in “Tintern Abbey,” where the repeated “I” finally yields to a petition to his beloved sister that she “not forget” that “after many wanderings, many years/ Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs,/ And this green pastoral landscape, were to me/ More dear, both for themselves and for thy sake! (158-62; italics added). The poem rightly ends by focusing on Dorothy and past, present, and future, for though she has been silent, he has read his “former pleasures in the shooting lights/ Of thy wild eyes,” and caught “from thy wild eyes these gleams/ Of past existence” (121-22, 151-52; italics added).
An ocular presence in “Tintern Abbey,” as a poignant reminder of what were once his own unmediated “wild ecstasies,” Dorothy is an absent presence in the public encounter with daffodils, the poem inspired by her strikingly visual journal-entry. But we know from “The Sparrow’s Nest” that, along with her “eyes,” Dorothy also gave her brother “a heart” and “love, and thought, and joy.” All of these, thought included, are reflected in the final lines of the Daffodils poem. When he intensely “gazed—and gazed” at the daffodils, impressing them on his memory, the poet “little thought/ What wealth the show to me had brought,” but that “wealth” is revealed in stanza 4. There the poet, indoors and in either vacant reverie or in “pensive mood,” transforms an engraved but, at the moment, involuntary memory of the daffodils into a mature joy: a renovating spot of time now restored in the mind and incorporating, along with the initial joy, the “thought” absent in his original emotional and visceral response.
There are Then/Now parallels in the “Ode” and, earlier, in “Tintern Abbey,” which opens: “Five years have passed; five summers, with the length/ Of five long winters….” In the hovering on “length,” the seasonal references, and the triple repetition of that long-voweled “five,” we feel the “heavy and the weary weight” (39) of the world. Back then, when he first “came among these hills,” it was, says Wordsworth, “in the hour/ Of thoughtless youth.” “I cannot paint/ What then I was,” says the poet, who then proceeds to do just that, magnificently:
SPACESPAESPACThe sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion; the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colors and their forms, were then to me
An appetite; a feeling and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm,
By thought supplied, nor any interest
Unborrowed from the eye. That time is past…. (77-85; Italics added)
A similar shift from feeling to thought, from past to present, comes, in “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” with the pivot—syntactical and thematic as well as temporal—from the third into the fourth and final stanza. For now, when the poet is indoors, alone and reclining in “vacant or in pensive mood,” wandering in his mind, the recalled flowers “flash” upon his “inward eye,” his last and most piercing “glance.” That brilliant, intermittent “flash” gathers to a greatness the poem’s light-imagery (shine, twinkle, sparkling). It also becomes a flash-flood, for the sudden recollection of the flowers so “fills” the poet’s heart with pleasure that it “dances with the daffodils.” The “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” has been “recollected in tranquility,” by thought supplied, but retaining, in the mind’s eye, the original excitement of what he “saw” with the outward eye. The three “glances” in the poem, and its version of that empowered “eye” that enables us to “see into the life of things,” seem fused in a Marianne Moore poem that also shifts back and forth from perceiver to the object perceived, concluding that works of art “must be ‘lit with piercing glances into the life of things’.”[13]
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7
Despite Wordsworth’s final fusion of thought and emotion, head and heart, in the Daffodils poem, some readers will concur with Coleridge that too much is being made of too little here; that, following the sublimity of the “inward eye,” the final lines “sink” into bathos. Influenced by such responses, more by the negative British reviews he read than by Coleridge’s momentary fault-finding, Emerson was among those who at first scorned Wordsworth’s penchant for making the trivial sublime. In a June 1826 letter to his Aunt Mary (whose insight into Wordsworth was at the time deeper than his own), Emerson asked, “Is it not much more conformable to that golden middle line…to let what Heaven made small and casual remain the objects of a notice small and casual, and husband our admiration for images of grandeur in matter or in mind?”[14] He had been reading British reviewers who (however inaccurately) caricatured Wordsworth as blubbering over the flower at the end of the Ode. But gradually, as he read more of Coleridge and (with the help of this mentor’s genuine insights) saw more deeply into Wordsworth, he came to admire what he originally dismissed. In Nature and elsewhere, in locating the miraculous in the commonplace, Emerson was emulating Wordsworth, the great poet of the “lowly” and neglected, of the humble, common, and seemingly trivial. Wordsworth’s “imagination” was chiefly engaged, as William Hazlitt pointed out in The Spirit of the Age, “in raising trifles to significance.” It was “his peculiar genius,” Walter Pater added a half-century later, “to open out the soul of apparently little or familiar things.”[15] Wordsworth is able to do so, as Coleridge understood just as well, and even more intimately, than Hazlitt and Pater, because he makes us “see into the life of things,” and to see what had been passed over by earlier poets, who thought such things literally beneath their notice.
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Emily Brontë
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No doubt Dorothy helped her brother see. We will never know just how much “wealth” Wordsworth owed to her meticulous, affectionate, and imaginative apprehension of the “little things” of the natural world, especially flowers. It is a detailed, discerning, and passionate attention that anticipates Emily Dickinson. And the Wordsworths’ Daffodils also anticipated another Emily, Dickinson’s “gigantic Emily Brontë.”[16] In one of the most beautiful passages the latter ever wrote, Catherine Earnshaw’s daughter (the second “Cathy” in Wuthering Heights) describes her “most perfect idea of heaven’s happiness.” She would be “rocking” at the heart of the natural world, “with a west wind blowing, and bright, white clouds flitting rapidly above,…grass undulating in waves to the breeze; and woods and sounding water; and the whole world awake and wild with joy….I wanted all to sparkle and dance, in a golden jubilee.”[17] Cathy’s idea of heaven is an earthly paradise, its primary “literary” source obvious. The entire passage (clouds, waves, breeze, woods, water, the whole world awake and joyous), and, especially, Cathy’s wanting “all to sparkle and dance in a golden jubilee,” reflects Wordsworth’s “golden” host of “Fluttering and dancing” flowers that out-danced and out-sparkled “the sparkling waves in glee,” their “never-ending” line “Continuous as the stars that shine/ And twinkle on the milky way.” Cathy’s description suggests that Emily Brontë was also familiar with William’s source: Dorothy’s loving and dynamic description of those “beautiful” daffodils that “tossed and reeled and danced, and seemed as if they verily laughed in the wind that blew upon them over the lake. They looked so gay—ever-glancing, ever-changing.”
Wordsworthian Emerson was also attuned to the sort of earthly paradise that appealed to both Emilys. He began his 1838 Divinity School Address by fusing the “gladsome pagans” in what was his as well as John Keats’s favorite Book of The Excursion, those pagans who “looked” and “were humbly thankful for the good/ Which the warm sun solicited, and earth/ Bestowed” (4:932-38), with the “pagan” of “The World is Too Much with Us.” Quoting Wordsworth’s sonnet, Emerson shocked his devout audience from the outset by declaring that he, too, would rather be “A pagan suckled in a creed outworn” than a Christian impoverished by being cut off from vital, fecund nature. And he began his Address with a deeply responsive evocation of nature’s vital, sparkling, floral beauty. In “this refulgent summer,” it has been “a luxury to draw the breath of life. The grass grows, the buds burst, the meadow is spotted with fire and gold” (E&L, 75). Those meadows were alive with flowers aglow with the light of Wordsworth’s “golden daffodils,” and sharing the pagan vitality of their “sprightly dance.”
SPACE
8
Having found the transplanted and transparent “eye” he was seeking in the aftermath of his brother’s death in Mary and William’s “inward eye” in the Daffodils poem, Emerson, reading his favorite Wordsworth poem, the “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” again found an emphasis on sight, on the mature eye, and, climactically, on a simple flower. More importantly, he was not alone in finding in this great poem lasting consolation for grief. Like so many, Emerson valued the Ode not only for its intimations of immortality, but for its appreciation of the natural world, both when it seemed, as in childhood, “appareled in celestial light,” and later, when Wordsworth loved it “even more,” though the initial radiance had been irretrievably lost. Innumerable readers in the nineteenth century and after have cherished the poem for the literally thoughtful consolation it offered to those who understand the pains as well as the joys of the human heart. In his “Memorial Verses,” written in the very month that Wordsworth died (April 1850), Matthew Arnold speculated that Time might bring us the wisdom of another Goethe, the force of another Byron; “But where will Europe’s latter hour/ Again find Wordsworth’s healing power?”[18]
That healing power takes linguistic form in the Ode. We can only reintegrate the sundered self, Hegel insists in the Logic, through knowledge, since, in his famous homeopathic metaphor, “the hand that inflicts the wound must be the hand that heals it.” As Helen Vendler demonstrated a third of a century ago in her challenge to Lionel Trilling’s celebrated essay, Wordsworth, in an intricate series of repetitions and alterations, had triumphed over what Trilling considered “the discrepant answers of the second part of the Ode.” The poem’s language reveals an autonomous pattern of self-healing—in Vendler’s phrase, a “homeopathic cure”—largely dependent on thought.[19] For example, in the Ode’s initial pastoral in stanza 3, while the lambs bounded to the shepherd-boy’s tabor and the birds sang a “joyous song,” to the poet “alone there came a thought of grief.” He claims, rather too quickly, to recover and, again “strong,” vows that “no more shall grief of mine the season wrong.” But when the pastoral is replicated in stanza 10, the true recovery fuses joy with cognition: “We in thought will join your throng.” And though the once-bright radiance “Be now forever taken from my sight,” we will “grieve not, rather find/ Strength in what remains behind,” both in the “primal sympathy/ Which having been must ever be,” and in “the soothing thoughts that spring/ Out of human suffering.”
In a now-familiar pattern, the Ode brings together the trinity of eyes, heart, and thought. For “though the radiance which was once so bright”—the celestial light attending the dawn of life, when we came from God, “trailing clouds of glory”—has “now” and forever been “taken from my sight,” the “clouds that gather round the setting sun” are said, in a reciprocal balance, to “take a sober coloring from an eye/ That hath kept watch o’er man’s mortality.” This is not the eye of that “Child,” over whom “thy Immortality/ Broods like the Day,” and who was addressed in stanza 8 as “thou Eye among the blind,” but of a mature adult acquainted with suffering and death. We have an elegiac “gathering” of the clouds around the “setting sun,” and a “sober” coloring imparted to them by a mature “eye.” But the Ode does not end in despair or defeat. Emerson concluded one of his most justly-famous notebook-entries, jotted down in the immediate aftermath of the death of his little boy, “I am Defeated all the time, yet to Victory am I born” (JMN 8:228). Concluding his Pindaric ode, a form used by the Greek poet to celebrate athletic triumphs, Wordsworth employs a similar race-image, pagan and Pauline (Corinthians 9:24), of loss and compensation, defeat and hard-earned victory:
Another race hath been, and other palms are won.
Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears. (Ode, 199-203)
We had heard earlier in the Ode of “The Pansy at my feet” (54) and Wordsworth’s most sublime masterpiece concludes with the “meanest [or, as he first wrote, “humblest”] flower that blows.” And with this, we are back—though with a more sober coloring and accompanied by a decidedly different metrical music—to flowers that, recollected in tranquility, “flash upon that inward eye,” filling, to cite the Ode, “the human heart” and evoking deep “thoughts.” Thus, the conclusion of the Ode brings us, by a route Coleridge called “rondure,” and Joyce “a commodious vicus of recirculation,” back to Dove Cottage and environs. Back to Mary, who supplied that “inward eye,” and to Dorothy, who “gave” Wordsworth “eyes to see,” and who shared with him notebook observations that, while they had nothing to do with the metrical and Then/Now orchestration of the Daffodils poem, provided him with closely-observed and already imaginatively-organized raw material. When we recall Dorothy’s loving and detailed journal-description of the daffodils, and the principal gifts that, by his own account, she “gave” her brother—“eyes,” “humble cares,” “delicate fears,” a “heart,” which was the “fountain of sweet tears,” and “love, and thought, and joy”—it begins to seem appropriate (though by Wordsworth’s order the Ode was to stand last in every collection of his verse) that in John Hayden’s splendid two-volume edition, ordered by date of composition, “The Sparrow’s Nest,” begun in the same month as the great Ode, and, like it, first published in 1807, appears immediately after the Ode’s concluding lines. Dorothy seems an absent presence here as well, though it is crucial to note that, while the final word of the Ode is “tears,” no “fountain of sweet tears” actually flows. Whatever may be invented by careless readers, whether malicious or maudlin, the lines are clear: thanks to the tenderness, joys, and fears of “the human heart by which we live,” the humblest flower that blossoms and blows in the wind can evoke “Thoughts that do often lie too deepfor tears.”
If Dorothy did not literally give her brother “eyes to see,” she certainly enhanced his own “eye” for detail and (in this instance) even design, supplying him with a vivid example of his own central theme: the joy intrinsic in vital, personified, nature. Dorothy gives Wordsworth, and us, a “long belt” of beautiful, joyous daffodils that “tossed and reeled and danced” in the lakeside breeze, recollection of which later fills with pleasure the thinking heart of the poet, so that it “dances” with those dancing flowers. Dorothy did not write the poem, but without her notebook-entry, recording precisely what she “saw” on that “Thursday, 15 April 1802”—“I never saw daffodils so beautiful”; and how they appeared to her (“they looked so gay—ever glancing, ever-changing”)—it is doubtful that “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” now considered one of Wordsworth’s signature poems, would ever have been written. Along with the “eyes” he said she “gave” him, Dorothy’s “heart” and her ultimate trinity of gifts—“love, and thought, and joy”—inform her notebook-observation of the daffodils that “tossed and reeled and danced,” seeming to enjoy “the wind that blew upon them over the lake.” Wordsworth was inspired by these details, and, perhaps most of all, by Dorothy’s final noticing of a “few stragglers a few yards higher up,” but “so few as not to disturb the simplicity and unity and life of that one busy highway.”
Here, keen-eyed “ocular” observation kindles into a genuine Vision of what Coleridge called, in a line added to “The Eolian Harp” almost a quarter-century after he originally wrote the poem, “The one Life within us and abroad.” And that “one Life” necessarily extends from earthly flowers into the very universe itself, which seems to me to explain the need Wordsworth evidently felt to add, in 1815, that stanza in which the “ten thousand” daffodils he “saw…at a glance,/ Tossing their heads in sprightly dance,” are said to have “stretched in never-ending line/ Along the margin of a bay,” as “Continuous as the stars that shine/ And twinkle on the milky way.” It has been noted recently, by Pamela Woof, that “the permanence of stars, as compared with flowers, emphasizes the permanence of memory for the poet.”[20] And that’s true, too. But the addition of this stanza emphasizes even more, I would suggest, the extension into the interstellar universe of the continuity, harmony, and unity with which Dorothy concluded her journal-entry. Echoing her previous awe at encountering “more and yet more” daffodils, until, “at last, under the boughs of the trees, we saw that there was a long belt of them along the shore, about the breadth of a country turnpike road,” she ends by stressing (to repeat the key phrase) “the simplicity and unity and life of that one busy highway.”
Orion’s belt
As with the transmutation of yellow flowers into an angelic “host of golden daffodils,” in the alembic of Wordsworth’s creative imagination Dorothy’s imagery of terrestrial unity (flowers, trees, shore, and country road) is transmuted (through the oxymoronic fusion Thomas Carlyle and, later, M. H. Abrams, called “natural supernaturalism”)[21] into celestial unity: the shining and twinkling of myriad stars on the Milky Way. If, as the final line of this stanza strongly suggests, Wordsworth had returned for inspiration to Dorothy’s journal-entry, he may have linguistically associated her “long belt” of daffodils (as suggested earlier) with Orion’s Belt, and, consciously or unconsciously, echoed her reference, immediately preceding the encounter with the daffodils themselves, to one of his own favorite flowers, the Lesser Celandine, as a “starry yellow flower.” These details may or may not have prompted his belated but sublime likening of her “more and yet more” daffodils in a unified “highway” to our Milky Way’s glowing roadway, that arching band of “continuous” stars splashed across the night sky. Whatever its genesis, the added stanza completes the poem’s (and Dorothy’s) theme of continuity and unity by fusing flowers and stars, microcosm and macrocosm.
SPACE
A Kantian-Coleridgean-Romantic Coda
Immanuel Kant
These thoughts recall the famous opening of the “Conclusion” of The Critique of Practical Reason (1788) by the preeminent philosopher of the age, to whose thought— a pivotal influence on Romanticism—Wordsworth, like Emerson, was introduced by Coleridge:
Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and the more steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above and the moral law within. Neither of them do I have to search for and conjecture as though they were shrouded in obscurity or in a transcendent region beyond my own horizon; I see them before me and connect them immediately with the consciousness of my own existence.[22] (italics added)
What Immanuel Kant says of the starry heavens above and the moral law within— “I see them before me and connect them immediately with the consciousness of my own existence”—Dorothy and William Wordsworth said of the now-famous daffodils: “We saw a few daffodils….we saw that there was a long belt of them….I never saw daffodils so beautiful….they looked so gay…” (Dorothy). “All at once I saw…Ten thousand saw I at a glance….I gazed—and gazed…They flash upon that inward eye…And then my heart with pleasure fills/ And dances with the daffodils” (William). Seeing the flowers before them, and connecting them with the consciousness of their own existence, the Wordsworths here, as so often, affirm a loving unity with nature, with the Coleridgean “one Life within us and abroad.” As Kant continued, glossing his “two things,” his sense “of the place I occupy in the external world of sense” is enlarged by an intuition of relationship with the whole: “I am not in a merely contingent but in a universal and necessary connection… reaching into the infinite” (CPR, 154). In “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” the extended, universal, even eternal harmony, the sense of interrelationship from which the “lonely” poet was at first alienated, is expressed in the immediate delight he takes in the daffodils, in the presence of whose companionable “glee,” a “poet could not but be gay.” But it is, to fuse half-lines from Yeats’s “Lapis Lazuli” and “Tintern Abbey,” a gaiety transfiguring all this unintelligible world—a world that at first seemed as aimless as the poet’s wandering, or as fluctuating as the flowers, whose natural “fluttering” was, however, instantly transformed into a no-less-joyous but ordered “dancing.” That dancing, floral and later human and emotional, is also mental, a matter of consciousness. And since that dancing company is “Continuous as the stars that shine,” it all seems part of a cosmic dance, the daffodils and the “heart” that “dances with” them participating in a post-Pythagorean harmony of the spheres.
The transforming power that fuses the infinitesimal with the infinite is that of the orchestrating mind, no longer passively afloat and wandering, but once more active and order-making. That change takes place under the auspices of Kantian Reason. According to Kant’s Theory of the Sublime, through the power of Reason, “a faculty of the mind surpassing every standard of Sense,” one is able to form “an idea of the Infinite.” Often retaining (a cause of confusion) the term “Reason,” the Romantics (Coleridge, Wordsworth, Emerson) identified it with Imagination, with what Coleridge called in the “Dejection” Ode, “My shapingspirit of Imagination” (86). The “wealth” the ocular show “had brought” to Wordsworth in “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” —as “Tintern Abbey,” the Ode, The Prelude, and the “Prospectus” to The Recluse demonstrate at length—is directly related to what Kant called the inner law, both moral and epistemological since, in keeping with Kant’s Copernican Revolution, the external world is shaped by what is within us: the co-creating mind, which fits Things to Thought.
In the poem in which he lays out his entire project, the “Prospectus” to The Recluse, Wordsworth designates “the Mind of man/ My haunt, and the main region of my song,” adding that “the discerning intellect of Man,/ When wedded to this goodly universe/ In love and holy passion, shall find these/ A simple produce of the common day.” As simple and common, we might say, as daffodils. And even the shifting agency in the Daffodils poem, alternating back and forth from poet to flowers, is later philosophized in Wordsworth’s overt adaptation of Kant’s epistemology. At the crux of the “Prospectus,” Wordsworth proclaims “How exquisitely the individual Mind/…to the external World/ Is fitted,” and how, even more rarely and significantly,
The external World is fitted to the Mind;
And the creation (by no lower name
Can it be called) which they by blended might
Accomplish:—this is our high argument. (“Prospectus,” 61-71; WP 2:38-39)
At the conclusion of The Prelude, to which he always referred as “the Poem to Coleridge,” Wordsworth tells his friend and “joint-laborer” that
SPACESPACESACESPACESPACwhat we have loved,
Others will love, and we will teach them how;
Instruct them how the mind of Man becomes
A thousand times more beautiful than the earth
On which he dwells, above this Frame of things,…
In beauty exalted, as it is itself
Of quality and fabric more divine.[23] (14: 446-54)
I may seem to have gone far afield in contextualizing—by setting, in what Helen Vendler called “larger frames”—so “simple” a lyric as “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.” There is always the danger of losing the individual poem in a widening gyre of associations, however valid each may seem to be. But had he read the poem in this enlarged context—Wordsworthian, Romantic, and Kantian—Coleridge would surely have been less likely to accuse his friend of “mental… bombast” in making lowly daffodils exemplify “what we have loved.” For these flowers are loved things which, however “common,” are so cherished that, years later, in renovating memory, they “flash” upon the poet’s “inward eye.” And, in keeping with the “out-in-out” dialectic M. H. Abrams has rightly attributed to the structure of the “greater Romantic lyric,” the inward inevitably moves outward. By means of the very poem in which they are immortalized, the daffodils expand their power to delight beyond the immediate pleasure they gave to Dorothy on that long-ago April morning in 1802 and beyond that retrospective “bliss” experienced in “solitude” by her brother, whose suddenly overwhelmed heart dances with them. For, as readers, we, too, join their throng, first as delighted, then as thoughtfully delighted, participants in the daffodils’ “jocund company.”[24]
That is as it should be, for, perceptive as his admirer Keats was in identifying him with the “egotistical sublime,” Wordsworth is a poet who chooses to “sing,” as he says in the “Prospectus” to The Recluse, “Of blessed consolations in distress;/ Of moral strength, and intellectual Power;/ Of joy in widest commonalty spread” (16-18; WP 2:37-38). Along with the “moral strength” and “intellectual Power,” which he associated with Kant, Coleridge considered that last line so quintessentially Wordsworthian that he summoned it up years later in a pivotal afterthought. Just as Wordsworth had added, in 1815, a crucial six lines to the Daffodils poem, first printed in 1807, so Coleridge added, in 1817, several thematically-crucial lines to “The Eolian Harp,” a poem first written in 1795, the year he met William and Dorothy:
O! the one Life within us and abroad,
Which meets all motion and becomes its soul,
A light in sound, a sound-like power in light,
Rhythm in all thought, and joyance everywhere— (26-29)[25]
Aside from the penultimate line (“sound” being necessary to a poem focused on a wind-harp, its music a response to the ever-changing breeze), the passage might have been written of the Wordsworths’ Daffodils. The “glee” of that “jocund company” in “motion” registers “Rhythm in all thought,” and truly spreads “joyance everywhere,” a bliss culminating in William Wordsworth’s preeminent addition to the joyance Dorothy had recorded in her journal that day: his internalization of the past scene in excited reverie. His fusion, in the present, of joy and “thought” as a result of the renovating “flash upon that inward eye” dramatizes precisely what Coleridge had in mind, and heart, when he cried out, “O! the one Life within us and abroad.”
In context, Wordsworth’s famous definition is complex rather than paradoxical. His point is that the spontaneity at the moment of composition is preceded by thought and influenced by poetic skill, and that—in a process central to my argument—the contemplative tranquility itself leads to a resurgence of emotion resembling the original emotion, but now actually “exist[ing] in the mind.” Here is Wordsworth’s complete sentence, quoted from the 1802 edition of the “Preface to Lyrical Ballads”: “I have said that [all good] poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility: the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.”↵
The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth. 2nd ed. ed. Ernest de Selincourt. Vol 2: The Middle Years, Part I, 1806-1811, rev. Mary Moorman (Oxford UP, 1969), 145-46 (21 May 1807). He adds that Lady Beaumont should “never forget” this point, which “I believe was observed to you by Coleridge.” In the “Essay Supplementary to the Preface” to the 1815 Poems, Wordsworth repeated the point, adding, “This remark has long since been made to me by [my] philosophical Friend. Wordsworth: The Poems, ed. John O. Hayden, 2 vols. (Yale UP, 1981), 2:944. (WP; though, for the major poems, I simply cite line-numbers).↵
Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and Walter Jackson Bate [Vol. 7 of the Collected Coleridge, 1969-2001]), 2 vols. (Princeton UP, 1983), 1:136. (BL)↵
Helen Vendler, Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology (Bedford/St. Martin’s, third printing, 2010), Chapter 11, “Writing about Poems, 323-40.↵
Predictably defending poetry and intrinsic criticism, Helen Vendler polarized a 1990 conference on “Revolutionary Romanticism” by fiercely rejecting what she characterized as Marjorie Levinson’s “vulgar” assault on “Tintern Abbey.” Pointing out that Wordsworth did not conceal (or “repress” or “exclude”) his “political investments and political disillusion” in his poetry as a whole, she called it “absurd that he should be obliged to mention them in every poem, or even in ‘Tintern Abbey’ alone.” Along with Levinson’s New Historicist demands, John Barrell’s criticism of the poem on gender grounds was also characterized as an assault in Vendler’s “‘Tintern Abbey’: Two Assaults,” in Wordsworth in Context, ed. Pauline Fletcher and John Murphy (Associated University Presses, 1992), 173-90. The debate is synopsized in my own Coleridge’s Submerged Politics (U of Missouri, 1994), 182-83, and, a decade later, in Eric K. W. Yu’s “Wordsworth Studies and the Ethics of Criticism: The ‘Tintern Abbey” Debate Revisited,” in Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 30 (July 2004): 129-54.↵
See Ernest De Selincourt, Dorothy Wordsworth: A Biography (Oxford UP, 1933), 137; DWGJ, 216n; and L, The Early Years, 1787-1805, ed. de Selincourt, rev. Chester L. Shaver (Oxford UP, 1967), 350.↵
When, in 1817, Keats read the “Hymn” to the now-firmly Christian older poet, Wordsworth famously sniffed, “a very pretty piece of paganism.” This seems both condescending and ironic, since his young admirer was echoing the rhapsodic aspects of the evocation of Greek mythology in a passage of The Excursion (4:858-64) his friend Benjamin Hayden (marking the lines in his copy) said “Poor Keats used always to prefer…to all others.”↵
Vallins, Coleridge and the Psychology of Romanticism: Feeling and Thought (St. Martin’s, 2000), 5.↵
Nature, in Emerson: Essays and Lectures, ed. Joel Porte (Library of America, 1983), 33. (E&L)↵
Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, ed. John Beer [Vol. 9, Collected Coleridge] (Princeton UP, 1993), 15-16.↵
Emerson, TheJournals and Miscellaneous Notebooksof Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. William H. Gilman, Ralph H. Orth, et al. 16 vols. (Harvard/ Belknap Press, 1960-82), 5: 152. (JMN)↵
Marianne Moore, the penultimate line of “When I Buy Pictures.” In her note to the poem, Moore tells us that she borrowed the quoted phrase from A. R. Gordon’s 1919 study The Poets of the Old Testament (which may partially explain her insistence, in the poem’s final line, that an art-work “must acknowledge the spiritual source that made it”). But Gordon, whose final prepositional phrase, “glances into the life of things,” clearly echoes “Tintern Abbey,” may also have recalled the “glance,” and more piercing “gazed—and gazed,” in the Daffodils poem.↵
The Lettersof Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Ralph L. Rusk (vols. 1-6 [1939]) and Eleanor M. Tilton (vols. 7-10, [1964]). 10 vols. (Columbia UP, 1939-1995), 7:148-49.↵
The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols. (Dent, 1930-34), 11:88. Walter Pater, “Wordsworth” (1873), reprinted in 1889 in Pater’s Appreciations (Macmillan reprint, 1906), 48.↵
Letters of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas Johnson and Theodora Ward, 3 vols. (Harvard UP, 1958), 721.↵
“Memorial Verses,” in The Poems of Matthew Arnold, ed. Kenneth Allott (Longmans, 1965).↵
The Logic of Hegel, trans. W. Wallace (Oxford and Fairlawn, N.J.,1892), 56. Helen Vendler, “Lionel Trilling and the Immortality Ode,” in The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics (Harvard UP, 1994), 93-114. “The Immortality Ode” first appeared in Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination (Viking, 1942), 129-53.↵
Woof’s comment was made in a 2009 BBC program on “The Wordsworths and the Cult of Nature.”↵
. The oxymoronic phrase, its terms at once paradoxical and complementary, occurs as the title of chapter 8 of Book III of Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (first published in Boston, in 1836, with the help of Emerson). It later provided the title for M. H. Abrams’s Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (Norton, 1971), a landmark study of the secularization of spiritual motifs in German and British Romanticism.↵
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason. Introduction, Dennis Sweet (Barnes & Noble, 2004), 154. But I have not adhered slavishly to this slightly dated translation, by Thomas Kingsmill Abbott.↵
1850 version, cited from The Prelude, 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (Norton Critical Edition, 1979), 483.↵
I’m thinking specifically of the shift from the outward to the inward eye and then out again to the eyes of the poem’s readers; but Abrams’s essay on “Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric” is partially relevant to “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” in a larger sense. The Greater Romantic lyrics he has in mind usually begin, writes Abrams, with “a description of the landscape,” which “evokes a…process of memory…closely interwoven with the outer scene,” issuing in a “meditation,” in the course of which “the lyric speaker achieves an insight, faces up to a tragic loss, comes to a moral decision, or resolves an emotional problem. Often the poem rounds upon itself to end where it began, at the outer scene, but with an altered mood and deepened understanding which is the result of the intervening meditation” (77). Our less ambitious poem engages fewer issues. Nevertheless, though it moves from an outdoor to an indoor scene, it certainly “rounds upon itself” since, in the final stanza, the “outer scene” returns and is internalized. There is a deepened understanding as a result of a revived memory, taking the form, of a “wealth” previously not “thought” of. In short, much, though by no means all, of what Abrams says here, including his later subhead-emphases on “The Coalescence of Subject and Object” (94) and “The Romantic Meditation” (104), applies, mutatis mutandis, to “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.” Abrams’s essay, first published in 1965, is here cited from its reprinting in Abrams’s collection, The Correspondent Breeze: Essays in English Romanticism, Foreword by Jack Stillinger (Norton, 1984), 75-108.↵
“The Eolian Harp,” in The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge, 2 vols. (Oxford UP, 1912), 1:100-102 (for the first version of the poem, see 2:1021-23). Coleridge added seven lines, of which I cite the first four.↵
In an eloquent, erudite and brilliant essay, Patrick J. Keane takes us straight into the heart of Nietzsche’s concept of perspectivism, his somewhat or so-called relativist riposte to Enlightenment rationalism and the God-backed objectivism of Descartes, which sounds daunting except that Pat is so damn entertaining and will insist on packing his essays with spectacular quotations, asides, and digressions so that you just want to stop and dwell. I stopped and thought when I got to the Nietzsche quotes on truth as a woman (and Pat’s excursus on feminism) and then the Nietzsche quotes on interpretation and text (yes, yes, while all fiction writers may have crawled out from under Gogol’s overcoat, all modern philosophy, literary criticism and politics seem to have crawled out from under Nietzsche). I also especially liked the asides on Emerson’s influence on Nietzsche (we have an image of Nietzsche’s copy of Emerson’s essays, scribbled over with notes) and Pat’s amazing appendix on The Tempest and (yes) his melancholy reference to Nietzsche’s sad last years (and we have sketches, photos and even film/video of Nietzsche a year before he died). I could go on but will stop. Read the essay.
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This essay on Nietzsche’s legacy has nothing to do with that passé topic, “Nietzsche and the Nazis,” nor, other than peripherally, with his central concepts of the Űbermensch or Eternal Recurrence, nor the contrast between the Apollonian and the Dionysian. Even the Will to Power, his thoughts on Slave Morality and Master Morality, and Nietzsche’s assault on Christianity are here subsumed within a wider challenge: to the transcendence of God and to all scientific, philosophic, and moral claims to universality. In exploring his undermining of the Absolute, especially of the traditional philosophic and religious belief that truth is One and unchanging, I will focus on Nietzsche’s radical perspectivism, its relation to earlier “modern philosophy,” and, especially, its role in contemporary thought and “theory.” Though the poststructuralist floodtide may have receded somewhat, the diffused impact remains, and Nietzsche continues to be, in the phrase of Simon Blackburn, “the most influential of the great philosophers and the ‘patron saint of postmodernism’,” his thought—according to Jurgen Habermas, in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity—“the entry into post-modernity.” But my main point is that the patron and precursor adopted and adapted by postmodern theorists is not the only “Nietzsche.” After discussing René Descartes and the ambiguous legacy he bequeathed to subsequent thinkers, I’ll turn to Nietzsche’s even more ambiguous legacy. Navigating a course between the extremes of Cartesian objectivism and the utter relativism all-too-often associated with Nietzsche, I’ll explore his primary, if not exclusive, emphasis on the inevitability of “interpretation,” his alternating insistence on intrinsic as well as subjective (even creative) reading. In my conclusion, I stress Nietzsche’s dual legacy as at once our most influential perspectival thinker and as a passionate seeker, paradoxically enough, of the very truths he more than anyone else put in question.
1
To begin with a paradox: Descartes, the father of modern philosophy, is both an “objectivist” and a “subjectivist,” a radical skeptic who also emerges as an ultra-rationalist. In this case, the dualism can be easily clarified. The skepticism is essentially methodological, a provisional first stage. Descartes overcame his famous “systematic doubt” by “finally” arriving at an indisputable first principal: namely, that in order to doubt, he obviously had to think, and to think he necessarily had to exist: je pense, donc je suis, or cogito, ergo sum—I think, therefore I am. This takes him, and us, only so far. At this stage of the Cartesian argument, the only thing I can know with certainty is my own mind and its contents. Everything else—other minds, the physical universe, including my own body (separate, Descartes insists, from the mind)—can only be inferred from this single absolutely known entity. The result is a radical dualism between body and soul, between my mind (res cogitans) and all external entities (res extensa), between “I” and both the physical world of nature and the social world of other human beings. By emphasizing this chasm between his private consciousness and everything else, Descartes introduced subjectivism into modern philosophy: the famous Ich and Nicht-Ich of Fichte, turned into English by Carlyle and Emerson as the distinction between “Me and the NOT ME.”
Paradoxically, the cogito also introduces what Descartes claims is an absolutely true and certain proposition. For the single indisputably true belief (“I think, therefore I am”) meets Descartes’ requirements for any first principle: it is self-evident and irrefutable; to deny it is to affirm it since to doubt I must think and to think I must exist. The cogito is “true and certain” insofar as it is “clear and distinct” to the mind. Finally, since it is based on “I,” it is not inferred from any more ultimate truth. So what am I conscious of? All I can know, given the absolute distinction between mind and matter, are ideas. Ideas, at least “clear and distinct” ideas, have what Descartes calls “objective reality” to the extent that they refer to external objects. But how can I know whether they do or not, locked as I seem to be in my own private consciousness?
Echoing Anselm’s ontological proof of the existence of God, Descartes undertakes at this point a philosophic version of what Kierkegaard would later call a leap of faith. Having established the certitude of the cogito, Descartes “proves” to his own satisfaction that the preeminent “clear and distinct” idea—that of God—must have a cause as real as the idea. The perfect idea, in short, must have a perfect referent:an actual, existing, infinite, benevolent deity. Such a perfect Being would not maliciously plant in his creatures clear and distinct ideas intended to deceive us. Descartes is here engaged in a spectacular, and rather obvious, piece of circular reasoning. Even if the idea of God is “clear and distinct,” our clear and distinct ideas themselves derive from, and depend on, divine sanction. God must exist in order to guarantee the “proof” ofhis own existence. This is the famous “Cartesian Circle”: a logical absurdity exposed by Kant and others, including Nietzsche, most cogently in The Will to Power §436.
Having established God as the guarantor, Descartes—free of his methodological skepticism and residual doubt—proceeds to erect on this divine foundation the whole material world, a fixed and knowable universe. Descartes was a Christian, a Jesuit-trained Catholic. Nevertheless, his philosophy led historically to mechanistic determinism and to a purely rational Deism, in which God as Prime Mover is out of a job once creation gets rolling. The Cartesian universe emerges as a law-governed clockwork (even non-human animals, lacking rational souls, are mere automata) with God as the original stem-winder, and the human mind or soul (in Gilbert Ryle’s famous phrase) the “ghost in the machine”: the sole flicker of freedom in a determined cosmos. This “Mechanico-corpuscular Philosophy” was condemned as sheer “invention” by that Romantic philosopher of dynamic organicism, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The “invention” was, he acknowledges in Aids to Reflection (1825), anticipating Nietzsche, an immensely valuable “fiction of science.” The problem was that Descartes propounded it “as truth of fact,” and so sacrificed the vital created world to a “lifeless Machine whirled about by the dust of its own Grinding”—an argument amplified precisely a century later by Alfred North Whitehead, in Science and the Modern World (1925), an organicist text celebrating Coleridge and Wordsworth, who transformed Coleridgean philosophy into great poetry, re-enchanting the world of nature.
For Descartes, our understanding of that pre-Romantic mechanistic universe is purely rational, reason being the one human faculty able in principle to gain access to a world which is itself orderly and “rational.” In this scheme, the passions and bodily instincts are a hindrance rather than a help, a blood-dimmed tide clouding our clear and distinct ideas. Further, despite Descartes’ project-initiating subjectivism, our understanding of the universe is not only rational; it is objective and universal. Anticipating Kant and his Categories of the Human Understanding, Descartes argues that human faculties of reason and sensation are, at least potentially, the same for all, regardless of gender, race, historical contingencies, culture, class, and so on. Starting from the psychological privacy of his own mind, Descartes has reached out to embrace—with supposedly absolute understanding and full certitude—an external and re-divinized world as clear, distinct, and orderly as (it comes as no surprise) the nature-schematizing, mathematical mind from which it is inferred. The universe becomes, in effect, a macrocosmic projection of the cogito, Descartes’ own mind writ large. We may wonder just how far we have moved from subjectivism after all.
2
When, following Descartes’ lead, Hegel later declared the whole of reality accessible to human understanding, that “the initially hidden and precluded essence of the universe” cannot “resist the courage of knowledge,” he was accused of “Gothic heaven-storming.” The accuser was Nietzsche (Musarionausgabe, XVI, 82), whose Zarathustra mocks the vaunted “will to truth” of philosophical distorters who manhandle the utterly unformulatable world of flux and fluent becoming, attempting to comprehend and even dominate it through crude simplification. This “will to the thinkability of all being” by those who doubt “with well-founded suspicion” that it is thinkable, is not at all a “will to truth,” Zarathustra insists, but an exercise of the “will to power.” Such philosophers want the world to “yield and bend” to them, to “become smooth and serve the spirit as its mirror and reflection.” (Zarathustra II 12; The Will to Power §517, 520).
This may seem a variation on the Cartesian projection of the cogito; but in Beyond Good and Evil and in The Will to Power (see, in addition to §436, §484, 533, 577-78), Nietzsche was penetrating in his critique of Descartes. That “father of rationalism” is described as “superficial” since “reason is merely an instrument” (Beyond Good and Evil §191). In launching his assault on the Cartesian ideal of reason as a “pure” and “objective” faculty, Nietzsche characteristically struck through the mask, selecting as his primary target the very foundation –which, for Descartes, is God himself, the guarantor. Indeed, Descartes had initially separated mind and body, spirit and matter, in an attempt to reconcile his mechanistic science with his religious faith. The Judeo-Christian God was famously if prematurely given his last rites by Nietzsche. But his madman’s announcement in The Gay Science that “God is dead” was for Nietzsche himself as elegiac and terrifying as it was liberating—no Enlightenment witticism but a personally painful conclusion he compared to “tearing out the fibers of my own heart.” That madman who ran through the marketplace seeking God announces: “We have killed him—you and I.” As God’s murderers, we are left bewildered, reduced to a series of vertiginous and unanswerable questions:
What did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night and more night coming on all the while? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers burying God?…God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. (The Gay Science §125)
With God “dead,” we are left with Descartes’ initial subjectivism and skepticism without his saving and sanctioning deity. The result has been the post-Nietzschean world of modernism and postmodernism: a contingent world torn from its divine mooring—“unsponsored, free,” as Wallace Stevens would put it in his notably Nietzschean poem, “Sunday Morning.” With the earth unchained from its sun, untethered from God and from Absolute Truth, we are condemned to be free, existentially and—by a crucial and influential extension—linguistically.
In his groundbreaking 1976 book, Of Grammatology, Jacques Derrida acknowledged deconstruction’s debt to Nietzsche, who “contributed a great deal to the liberation of the signifier from its dependence or derivation with respect to the logos and the related concept of truth” (31-32). Derrida’s argument, with its radical metaphysical and linguistic skepticism, rests on the insistence that there is no logos, no ultimate referent or “transcendental signified” outside the linguistic system, and therefore nothing to anchor or “fix” the “undecidable,” infinite “freeplay” of language. The absence of a “transcendental signified” extends “the domain and the play of signification indefinitely.” Derrida’s terms derive from Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics; but once we set them in the context of his absorption of the work of Descartes and Nietzsche, we see that at bottom they constitute God-talk—“in the beginning,” says the apostle John, “was the Word [Logos].” Following Nietzsche, but apparently with none of his metaphysical anguish, Derrida cancels Descartes’ “ultimate referent,” the “transcendental” Being “signified” by our “ideas” and language about “God.” All such subjective signifiers refer to—nothing: “an infinite nothing,” as Nietzsche’s madman says, in which we are plunging and straying without direction. There is no “transcendental signified.” God is dead, remains dead, and we are his murderers.
For Michel Foucault, Nietzsche’s Death of God also meant the disappearance of man, his murderer. Others stressed a re-centering on the human. The famous slogan, “Man is the measure of all things,” goes back to the Greek philosopher Protagoras, an ancient axiom revitalized by Renaissance humanism and enshrined in Romanticism, which transfers most of the attributes formerly designating the “divine” to the creative human imagination. But as we are told by Emerson—the American Romantic considered by Nietzsche the major thinker of the age—“nothing is got for nothing.” The apotheosis (or the disappearance) of the human inherent in the concept of the Űbermensch required—though Emerson never accepted the price—the death of God: the dark starting point of much of modern literature and philosophy. W. B. Yeats, who also resisted Nietzsche’s atheism while being deeply “excited” by him, caught in a single line the centrifugal imagery of the Nietzschean madman’s announcement: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” Unsurprisingly “The Second Coming,” the most frequently-cited modern poem, is also one of Yeats’s most profoundly Nietzschean texts. The radical crisis initiated by the pronouncement of the Death of God has been addressed in a variety of ways by such modern and postmodern continental thinkers as Heidegger, Sartre, Foucault, Deleuze, and Derrida. Whatever their differences, they have one thing in common. Like the Irish poet, all have been influenced by the German philosopher Yeats called in 1902 “that strong enchanter” (Letters, 379).
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Once the transcendent God who represented and sanctioned absolute and eternal Truth was pronounced dead, the ensuing vacuum was filled—by the mature Nietzsche who first fully emerges in the famous Preface to Beyond Good and Evil (1885)—by two wholly human-centered tasks, interpretation and evaluation, inescapable activities pursued by means of Nietzsche’s pervasive if problematic perspectivism. How does Nietzsche’s influence play out in terms of perspectivism and the need for interpretation? The latter is a particularly vexed issue since Nietzsche, a pioneer in brooding over these questions, has himself been notoriously subject to differing interpretations. Quite aside from the fact that he went through distinct phases (he was even, in his middle period, briefly a positivist), Nietzsche’s volatile and changing thought resists definitive characterization. Back in 1975, in an article in Salmagundi titled “On Truth and Lie in Nietzsche,” I struggled with the ambivalence and contradictions in this endlessly dialectical thinker. In that essay (which I stand by, though, like Nietzsche himself, it goes round in circles), I referred to John Wilcox’s then recently-published Truth and Value in Nietzsche, which made a case for Nietzsche as a cognitivist. A decade later, he was declared a radical relativist by, among others, Alasdair MacIntyre, in After Virtue, and Alan Megill, in Prophets of Extremity, though Megill praised Wilcox’s honesty in presenting passages from Nietzsche’s texts at odds with his conclusion. Megill’s own conclusion was that Nietzsche, whose dialectic exposed every contradiction in even his own argument, is a relativist for whom there is no such thing as a correct interpretation. This is not because any statement is as true as any other, but because there is no such thing “as a thing.” Everything is a “mask” for something else, ad infinitum: precisely what Derrida means by “dissemination” and the endless and undecidable play of signification.
There is, of course, much in Nietzsche to support the conclusion that he was, at bottom, a noncognitivist philosopher for whom values and truths are to be understood in solely in terms of the person who holds them; cannot be supported by bare “facts” or sound reasoning; and are created or constructed rather than discovered. This is in accord with the postmodernist position that “truth” and “value” are not universal, ontological concepts, but subjective, relative, variable. Nietzsche’s reputation as a great liberator—once based on his incendiary language, the audacity with which he punctured hypocrisy, supplied tonic correctives to plebian pieties, and sanctioned the return to heroic, aristocratic values—now derives primarily from his radical perspectivism and the characteristic brio of his formulations. Many of the most striking are to be found among fragments dating from 1885-87, posthumously published in The Will to Power. It is dangerous, as the example of Heidegger’s study of Nietzsche demonstrates, to rely on passages, many though not all of which the author himself chose not to publish. Nevertheless, let us have a representative half-dozen of these on the table, buttressed by a few other of Nietzsche’s most famous, or infamous, “perspectival” passages from texts he did publish.
Refuting the positivist position that “there are onlyfacts,” Nietzsche replies: “no, facts are precisely what there is not, only interpretations [Interpretationen]”; things exist only for human “optics,” and “all the laws of perspective must by their nature be errors.” We “cannot establish any fact ‘in itself’.” Perhaps, he adds, mocking Kant, “it is folly to want to do such a thing” (The Will to Power §481). “The criterion of truth lies in the intensification of power” (§534). For truth “is not something there, that might be found or discovered—but something that must be created” (§552). Nietzsche speaks of the “imposition” of “meaning” from one or another “viewpoint,” claiming that “the essence of a thing is only an opinion about the ‘thing’” (§556). That “things possess a constitution in themselves quite apart from interpretation and subjectivity” is, he says, an “idle hypothesis” that “presupposes that interpretation and subjectivity are not essential.” Could it not be, he asks rhetorically, that “the apparent objective character of things” is “only a false concept of a genus and an antithesis within the subjective?” (§560) Perspective is decisive. “As if,” he exclaims, shocked at the very thought, “a world would still remain over after one deducted the perspective!” (§567) “There are no facts, everything is in flux, incomprehensible, elusive; what is relatively most enduring is—our opinions” (§604).
Though these have become the familiar axioms of the poststructuralist world, even now, they retain much of their original shock value. That last formulation, wittily maneuvered into a paradox enhanced by the dash, is Nietzsche at his most ironic and audacious. Even the so-called laws of nature, he says in his 1873 essay “On Truth and Lie,” are “regulative fictions,” scientific vestigia of mythological dreaming, schematic impositions upon the chaos of the actual. Far from determining an interpretation, “facts” are shaped by our interpretive constructs. This may seem to resemble Kant; but, for Nietzsche, man’s “truths” are merely “his irrefutable errors,” for all of life is based on “semblance, art, deception, points of view, and the necessity of perspectives and error” (The Gay Science §265). Our appeals to “objectivity” are actually expressions of “subjective will”—inventions of our acts of interpretation, outside of which there is “nothing.” And yet, will includes the “will to truth,” which Nietzsche, an “immoralist” who is also one of modernity’s major moral philosophers, never quite abandons. We cannot simplify the multiplicity of Nietzsche, at once a mocker of, and a participant in, the quest for truth, enlisting in different contexts under one or the other of these seemingly incompatible banners.
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We can agree that Nietzsche attacked the Cartesian concept of objectivity, the idealized notion of a “pure” reason, freed from the allegedly contaminating influences of the body, instinct, will, emotion. From Plato on, the Western philosophical tradition has exalted reason over emotion as the knowledge-acquiring faculty. This privileging of Logos over subversive Eros has been exposed by feminists as not only phallocentric but phallogocentric thinking: resulting in the cock-sure establishment of a masculine hierarchy in which “male” intellect and ratiocination are sharply distinguished from and elevated above emotion and intuition, reductively characterized as “female” and stigmatized as inferior. French feminism succeeded in recuperating the power of intuition and the role of the body; but the ultimate reversal, or transvaluation, of phallocentrism has recently been proposed, sweepingly if rather pseudo-mystically and reductively, by American feminist Naomi Wolf in a 2012 book whose one-word title says it all: Vagina. Nietzsche opened Beyond Good and Evil with his own cunning speculation: “Suppose that truth is a woman—what then?” In the Epilogue to Nietzsche Contra Wagner, he adds that philosophic “artists” (and “we have art lest we perish of the truth” [The Will to Power §822]) consider it “a matter of decency not to wish to see everything naked…Perhaps truth is a woman who has reasons for not letting us see her reasons?” Sexist stereotype aside, Nietzsche is making a playfully subtle point: that truth, though never fully attainable, is best pursued, not by direct frontal assault, but, obliquely, perspectivally. This subtlety recalls the misread alternate title to Twilight of the Idols. How to Philosophize with a Hammer does not urge us to wield a brutal sledge hammer; we are to test for hollowness the “idols of the age,” as well as “eternal idols,” delicately tapping “with a hammer as with a tuning fork.”
While some of his prose approximates écriture féminine, Nietzsche is obviously no feminist. However, like Hume and the Romantic poets before him, and William James and others after him, feminists included, Nietzsche resisted, the valorization of Logos and of a supposedly disembodied “pure” reason disconnected from culture, history, gender, the passions—all those filters that get between us and the Kantian ding an sich, that “thing in itself” which Nietzsche dismissed in Twilight of the Idols as a “horrendum pudendum of the metaphysicians.” In the same text, he declares that “an attack on the roots of passion means an attack on the roots of life.” This insistence on the role of the passions crosses gender lines. Emphasizing sublimation rather than extirpation of the passions, condemned (again in Twilight of the Idols) as “castratism,” Nietzsche asserted, in one of the Blakean epigrams in Beyond Good and Evil, that “The degree and kind of a man’s sexuality reach up into the ultimate pinnacle of his spirit” (§175). Consequently, he celebrated, in the projected figure of the Űbermensch, the ideal of power and passion disciplined rather than denied. Emotion, will, instinct, and disciplined passion, far from clouding and contaminating “clear and distinct” ideas, were necessary ingredients in a total—integrated, holistic—human response to the world.
Here, in this case as part of his condemnation of Christianity’s assault on nature and life. Nietzsche once again proves his credentials as a central figure in the Romantic reaction to Enlightenment hyper-rationalism. Accordingly, his favorite targets, with the exception of Spinoza (whom he valued as, in some ways a “great precursor”), were the major idealist philosophers—Plato, Descartes, Kant—along with orthodox Christianity, loftily dismissed in the opening section of the Preface to Beyond Good and Evil as “Platonism for the ‘people’.” However, his earliest, most personal critique was mounted against Plato’s mentor, Socrates, with whom Nietzsche had a complex love-hate relationship. Though a questioner and a dialectician, Socrates was, Nietzsche charged, a dogmatist who presented his views and values, not merely as appropriate to himself, but, in the words of Alexander Nehamas (Nietzsche: Life as Literature [1985], 4), “as views and values that should be accepted by everyone on account of their rational, objective, and unconditional authority.”
Given his reputation as the poster-child for deconstruction and a thoroughly relativistic perspectivism, it is important to point out that Nietzsche opposes, not a quest for truth, but, rather, precisely that dogmatism (whether philosophic, religious, scientific, or ideological) that conceals, from others and from itself, the fact that its particular interpretation is decidedly not the only possible or plausible one, and therefore should not be binding on others, let alone on everyone. So much for the Kantian Categorical Imperative, or any other form of universality. And yet, for all his skepticism, Nietzsche recasts rather than rejects philosophy, and he does not dismiss either science or the will to truth; indeed, he insists that the latter persists, even for those who question its value and ultimate legitimacy (The Gay Science §344, On the Genealogy of Morals III 25). Though, for Nietzsche, truth and values can no longer be considered absolute and timeless, it does not follow that no moral center can hold, nor that truth is not to be pursued or values asserted and assessed. I will return to this central thematic point.
In the meantime, as the preceding paragraph exemplifies, there is no avoiding the problem of vocabulary: the inconvenient fact that any attempt to elucidate Nietzsche’s argument requires the use of terms he himself has displaced, even parodied. It is well to remember (to quote Harvard philosopher Josiah Royce’s “Nietzsche,” a perceptive article posthumously published in 1917) that, “Like both Emerson and Walt Whitman, Nietzsche feels perfectly free to follow the dialectic of his own mental development, to contradict himself, or as Walt Whitman said, ‘to contain multitudes’.” Cognizant of Whitman’s well-known debt to Emerson, Royce was not aware of the extraordinary extent to which Nietzsche himself was indebted to Emerson, and not only for his dismissal, in “Self-Reliance,” of “mediocre minds,” capped by his grand assertion that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” That, as Royce rightly implied, was the source of Whitman’s even more audacious question-and-answer monologue in Song of Myself §51: Out-Emersoning Emerson, cosmic Walt asks: “Do I contradict myself?/ Very well then I contradict myself./ (I am large, I contain multitudes).”
Nietzsche’s dialectical mind, anything but little or mediocre, was certainly “inconsistent” in the sense that it was capacious, volatile, and multitudinous enough to entertain apparently “contradictory” positions. That dialectic is nowhere more dramatic and deep-rooted than in his seemingly antithetical perspectives on “truth.” Nietzsche repeatedly expresses, despite his own more-than-occasional tone of vatic certitude, a deep antipathy toward those who claim any monopoly on truth. Indeed, his skepticism prevents him from presenting any of his own views, including perspectivism itself, in a dogmatic manner. If everything is a matter of “optics” and “will,” then perspectivism, too, is just one more way of seeing things, an “interpretation.” Nietzsche admits as much even in describing his own central doctrine, the Will to Power: “Supposing that it also is only interpretation—and you will be eager enough to make this objection?—well, so much the better” (Beyond Good and Evil §22).
Nietzsche is as chameleon-like as the Emerson he adored. The endless twists and turns, the playful subtleties and self-cancellations of his texts, may seem to anticipate the thoroughgoing relativism we associate with deconstruction. Nevertheless, Nietzschean perspectivism does not imply that any interpretation is as good as any other; the fact that many points of view are possible does not make them equally legitimate. Though he insists that even one’s most passionately-held convictions must remain provisional, Nietzsche also assumes that, in some sense, his own theories are valid, and he repeatedly posits a hierarchy of values. The activities of interpretation and evaluation may be limited to the humanly possible or conceivable, but, as Richard Schacht memorably put it in “Nietzsche’s Kind of Philosophy” (1996), “this does not doom all ways of making sense to perpetual parity, none of which may lay any stronger claim to the notions of ‘truth’ and ‘knowledge’ than any others, like the Hegelian ‘night in which all cows are black’.” Going further, Nehemas insists that Nietzsche’s perspectival emphases do not “imply that we can never reach correct results or that we can never be ‘objective.’”
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Indeed, when it comes to the interpretation of texts rather than of “things,” Nietzsche can occasionally turn almost sternly objectivist, claiming that we can produce an account freed from subjective limitations and biases. Attacking theologians as bad philologists, Nietzsche describes philology (his own original “field,” his expertise in which won him a university chair at the unheard-of age of twenty-five) as “the art of reading well—of being able to read off a fact without falsifying it by interpretation” (The Antichrist §52). In his original note (The Will to Power §479), he had described this ability to “read off a text as a text without interposing an interpretation” as “the last-developed form of ‘inner experience’—perhaps one that is hardly possible.” It is “hardly possible” for his more skeptical heirs to follow the leader here. Nietzsche is, after all, the master perspectivist and linguistic skeptic to whom homage is paid by all anti-foundationalist modern thinkers: by Derrida and the deconstructionists; by Stanley Fish and other reader-response critics; by Foucault, Nietzsche’s heir as a genealogist of power; and by such neo-pragmatic philosophers as Richard Rorty. Is Nietzsche, of all people (they might ask), really claiming that texts—at least some texts—are in effect “transparent,” requiring only good reading without the intrusion of “interpretation”? If “there are no facts, only interpretations,” what can Nietzsche possibly mean in such “objectivist” passages? What he means, I think, is that, if we are “good” readers, we submit ourselves to the text, letting what is there come through without precipitously imposing on it a falsifying interpretation, distorting it to suit our particular purposes—whether to satisfy an arbitrary whim or to make it serve our vested interests. The text, one might say, has something resembling “rights” of its own, which ought not to be violated by readers abusing their interpretive freedom. On this point, Nietzsche would concur with John Milton’s famous distinction in Sonnet XII: “License they mean when they cry Liberty.”
Though postmodern philosophers and literary critics often blur that Miltonic distinction, confusing many with any, there is a difference between multiplicity and what Yeats called “mere anarchy.” In Of Grammatology, the founder of deconstruction himself calls authorial intention an “indispensable guardrail… protecting” readings from the wilder excesses associated with his term “freeplay” (158). Of course, Derrida adds that the problematics of figurative language itself, with its catachreses and aporias, subtly undermine an author’s intention. But then who among us believes, after absorbing Nietzsche, that complex texts inevitably say precisely what their authors intended? Our sophistication in these matters reflects part of the ambiguous legacy of Nietzsche, aware in his twenties of the pervasively figural nature of language. In a now-celebrated 1873 fragment, “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense” (Musarianausgabe, X, 189-215), the most significant portion of which has been made conveniently accessible by Kaufmann (Portable Nietzsche, 42-47), Nietzsche argues that “the first laws of truth” were furnished by the invention of an arbitrarily “fixed” designation of things, a “linguistic legislation.” “What, then, is truth?” asks the young Nietzsche (repeating that question of Pilate he thought “the only saying that has value” in the New Testament ([The Antichrist §46]). “Truth,” he answers, in an often-quoted sentence, is “a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are….”
While such illusions and “necessary fictions” are, as the noncognitist Nietzsche often insists, valuable, “life-promoting,” even necessary for our survival (Beyond Good and Evil §4), they leave little room for faith in the stability of language. Yet, in praising “the art of reading well,” Nietzsche does not advocate, as he so often does, creative ingenuity, but close attention to what is there, present in the text. But what—to employ the rhetorical question he raised about “things” in The Will to Power—is “there” once “interpretation” has been deducted? Even if language were more stable than it seems to be, our engagement with a text would still, necessarily, constitute an act of interpretation. What choice is there? Since Nietzsche resists any dogmatic claim to univocal truth, there will always be alternative readings, but interpretations, like perspectives themselves, are not egalitarian. Some will be better informed, more comprehensive, more insightful, more “elevated,” than others. Comprehension, never complete or absolute, can be enhanced. An “interpretation” may even turn out to be—accurate!
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Let us return to the notion of “reading off” a text without imposing on it a falsifying interpretation. In such cases, Nietzsche is dealing, not with “natural” objects in the universe, but with human artifacts—whether a literary text or a theory about nature—that have been produced by human will and skill, and are thus accessible to human construal. This contrast between the physical world of nature and humanly-conceived and constructed artifacts recalls another poem by Wallace Stevens, his gnomic “Anecdote of the Jar”:
I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.
The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.
It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.
Like William Paley’s famous watch lying on the ground as a supposed demonstration of “intellectual design,” or the geometrically precise monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, Stevens’s jar stands out—ordered and unlike anything else in the surrounding “natural” world. Nietzsche might say that an art critic could offer an expert, even “accurate,” account of that round, gray, bare aesthetic artifact, but not of the alien, “slovenly wilderness” sprawling around it. Reading this poem, as in contemplating its precursor, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” we are implicitly being asked to consider which of the two, Art or Nature, is to be judged “superior”—here, the human-made jar, or the wilderness in which it is delicately “placed” (momentarily reducing the whole of vast “Tennessee” to a table or shelf). Certainly, the artifact exerts power. The “slovenly wilderness,” which “rose up to it,” and “sprawled around, no longer wild,” seems tamed, almost civilized, by the imperial jar, which, being “tall and of a port in air,” unsurprisingly “made” the wilderness “surround” it, and “took dominion everywhere.” Yet, “gray and bare,” the jar is static, sterile, lifeless. Bereft of the animal procreant urge and vegetative vitality “of bird or bush,” it emerges, though still unique (“Like nothing else in Tennessee”), as singular in a negative as well as a positive sense. And yet, and yet, this diminutive, slightly comical artifact (“round upon the ground”) remains the imposing and orienting center, the still point, around which that otherwise inchoate nature is arranged. Stevens’s cryptic anecdote itself remains—deliberately—ambiguous, but the traditional issue raised—the interaction and tension between Art and Nature, Apollo and Dionysius, Imagination and Reality, Platonic form and chaotic but fecund flux—is both determinate and accessible to interpretation, however much interpretations will differ.
Here, and elsewhere, Stevens himself seems ambivalent on this crucial question. Nor, in the end, though it has to be taken into provisional account, should an author’s own interpretation be determinative. We who are “good” readers in the philological Nietzschean sense can submit ourselves to such a text as this poem by Stevens—or Keats’s originating Ode, also thematically re-enacted in Yeats’s Byzantium poems—without obsequiously prostrating ourselves before an author’s “authoritarian” power. D. H. Lawrence’s imperative remains valid: trust the tale and not the teller, since, to adapt Pascal in a way that would be approved by deconstructionists, a poem will sometimes have reasons the poet knows not of. Should we not, therefore, strive for the best intrinsic, text-centered reading we can achieve? As Nietzsche knew, indeed insisted, we all have our own worldviews, beliefs, feelings, and perspectives—everything that makes us living, breathing, human beings, and that necessarily affects how we read the texts we read. But, he argues in his philological mode, we should, at least temporarily, set aside narrowly subjective interests in order to submit ourselves to the poem, allowing it to do its aesthetic work before we do it the Procrustean injustice of imposingourselves on it. We should “interpret” without, for example, reducing a text to a mere springboard for our private speculations, or to a helpless specimen to be submitted to a litmus test of ethical or ideological correctness, or converting it to a Lockean tabula rasa (or an ever-changing etch-a-sketch pad) on which we do our own writing.
This will seem alien to the spirit of the Nietzsche with whom we are most familiar: the perspectival subjectivist who so often imposes, both on what he writes and on his readers, his own unique personality. Indeed, he claims that “every great philosophy so far,” no matter how “objective” its truth-seeking pretensions, is really only “the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir” (Beyond Good and Evil §6). In short, consciously or unconsciously, philosophers impose rather than discover, “reading into” nature what they want to find. (As Oscar Wilde once wittily remarked of the great poet of nature, “Wordsworth found under stones the sermons he had already placed there.”) If Nietzsche’s own philosophy is also a “personal confession and involuntary memoir,” what does that say about his occasional claims to “objective reading”?
Again, we are back to the problems of “truth” and “error,” “fact” and “interpretation,” and the pervasiveness of perspective. Whether we are reading or merely “reading into,” interpretation is inevitable. Yet the fate of Nietzsche’s own writings exemplifies the damage and distortion that can occur when a text is bent to the will of a reader, especially a strong reader with his or her own agenda. The “Nietzsche” many sophisticated postmodernists know is, to some degree, the construct of Martin Heidegger, laid out in a massive two-volume study (Nietzsche, 1961) based not on what Nietzsche himself chose to publish, nor even on the Nachlass on which Heidegger almost exclusively relies, but, finally, on Heidegger’s own “interpretation”: at once insightful, influential, and often profoundly arbitrary. The reductio ad absurdum comes with Nietzsche’s brilliant heir in analyzing “power”: Foucault, who claims both to understand Nietzsche’s thought and to honor it by knowingly distorting it: “The only valid tribute to thought such as Nietzsche’s”—he writes in “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”—“is precisely to use it, to deform it, to make it groan and protest. And if commentators then say that I am being faithful or unfaithful to Nietzsche, that is of absolutely no interest” (in Power/Knowledge, 53-54). Of course, it is of interest to those who, while aware of the role of creative reception in a reader’s development of his own project, are disturbed by tortured readings handed down as legitimate “interpretations” of Nietzsche’s texts—texts having some determinate meaning even for Foucault, who, exercising his own will to power, admits to willfully “deforming” them.
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Our response to things, or people, or “texts,” is neither totally objective nor totally subjective, but a mixture—in which the thing, person, or text may (or may not) have its own intrinsic value. Two Shakespearean passages come to mind. In the famous exchange as to whether or not “Denmark is a prison,” Hamlet says the answer depends on individual perception: “for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking making it so” (II.ii): a claim echoed by Nietzsche in declaring, in a school essay he wrote at Pforta, that “nothing can be judged except from the viewpoint of the spirit involved in it.” In his most “modern,” cynically “relativistic” play, Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare presents, in the War Council scene (also II.ii), an exchange between Troilus and his older brother Hector—the Trojan champion and the one admirable character in this nearly nihilistic drama. Discussing Helen, the cause of the war and, in this play, little more than a pretty airhead, Hector declares her “not worth what she doth cost/ The keeping.” Troilus poses a rhetorical question: “What is aught, but as ’tis valued?” That draws from Hector a response relevant to the relationship between “objectivism” and “perspectivism,” a response at odds with that of Hamlet, but no less applicable to the relationship between a literary text and its readers. Rejecting Troilus’s position (here and elsewhere in the play) that value is exclusively conferred by external estimation unrelated to intrinsic merit, Hector replies:
But value dwells not in particular will;
It holds his estimate and dignity
As well wherein ‘tis precious of itself
As in the prizer. ‘Tis mad idolatry
To make the service greater than the god.
The prize and the prizer together comprise “value,” but to disregard the preciousness inherent in the thing itself, or to make the subjective “service” greater than the admired object, would be like making religious worship greater than the deity worshipped. The result—self-admiration or self-esteem rather than admiration of something “precious of itself”—is a subjectivist perversion. It is also a reversal relevant to a variety of postmodernist critics who have shifted authority, and even minimal control, away from authors and texts to—themselves, though even their autonomy is strictly limited given that readers, as most of these critics concede or claim elsewhere, are inevitably conditioned by those contexts Descartes tried to transcend but in which we are all embedded: gender, culture, history….
Hector speaks of the “mad idolatry” involved in making the service “greater than the god,” and it was Nietzsche’s “madman” who announced “the death of God.” In 1977, emulating the master, post-Nietzschean theorists Roland Barthes (“The Death of the Author,” in Image-Music-Text) and Foucault (“What is an Author?” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice), consciously echoing the Death of God, announced the “Death of the Author.” Freeing text and subtext of “authoritarian” control would be liberating, we were assured by these and other non-mourners at the authorial bier. An intrinsic reader, committed to the autonomy of the work of art itself, would agree. But the French theorists, stressing the subjectivist strand of Nietzschean thought, insisted that what we must come to see as truly autonomous was not the poems, plays, novels or essays we read, but, rather, ourselves, or the deconstructive play of language itself. With the artist removed as art’s enabling and shaping force, power was shifted to individual readers sophisticatedly engaging protean “texts.” The danger of anarchic individualism—anticipated by Descartes and resolved by the Kantian Categories, the shared mental apparatus by means of which all minds perceive external phenomena—was also anticipated by Nietzsche, who, as we shall see in a moment, expanded his optical perspective by calling for “more eyes, different eyes” (On the Genealogy of Morals III 12), just as Stanley Fish, in order to prevent the total anarchy potentially inherent in his reader-response theory, grouped readers in informed “interpretive communities”—linguistically-sophisticated schools of Fish.
There has been an even more inclusive and expansive move away from the individual reader as well as from the autonomous individual text. In the case of the New Historicists (often Marxists or critics adopting Marxian methodology), in whose work the center is often abandoned and the margins valorized, the governing authority has been shifted to history itself—though it is worth noting that this emphasis on history as the enabling factor was tempered by pioneering New Historicist Stephen Greenblatt, in the concluding essay of his 1990 collection Learning to Curse. In “Resonance and Wonder,” he himself wonders if attention to the former, the “resonance” of the temporal network in which a text is enmeshed, hasn’t detracted from attention to the linguistic “wonder” of the work of art itself, its own “internal resonances.” As suggested by the title of Greenblatt’s book, a phrase borrowed from Caliban, there is no better example than The Tempest, interpretations of which have been distorted by over-emphasizing either the romanticized relation of Prospero to Shakespeare himself or the imperial-colonial theme epitomized by the subjection of the “native,” Caliban. As the play’s finest editor, Frank Kermode, concluded in the nuanced final sentence of his chapter on The Tempest (Shakespeare’s Language, 2000): “Of course, it cannot be said that neither of these relationships exists, only that they are secondary to the beautiful object itself” (300). See Appendix for a discussion of modern re-envisionings of The Tempest, and a “Nietzschean” response to them by Harold Bloom.
What is primary or secondary depends on interpretation; a work of art “is like a bow,” said Stendhal, “and the violin that produces the sounds is the reader’s soul.” But what of authorial intention? With the author having joined God among the deceased, some egregious examples of interpretive license have been advanced under a Nietzschean banner. Once we realize that readers, not writers, “make meaning,” and that a text “really means whatever any reader seriously believes it to mean,” the “war of all against all” will be replaced by “tolerance” and the “easy equality of friends.” (Robert Crosman, “Do Readers Make Meaning?” in The Reader in the Text, 162). For all his own emphasis on subjectivist and “creative” reading, Nietzsche would be hard put to muster sufficient contempt for this I’m-OK, you’re OK version of what he called in Beyond Good and Evil §44 “the universal green pasture happiness of the herd.” Pending the dawn of this easy egalitarianism, little “tolerance” is extended to those who try to interpret texts, not as utterly dependent on language or history, or on the inventiveness of readers, but as signifying to some extent what a writer meant to communicate. Derrida did not cavalierly discount authorial intention (a guardrail protecting a reading from going completely over the cliff); but for many poststructuralists, the author, at the mercy of his or her own metaphors, has been completely displaced as an originating consciousness by the deconstructive play of language, with its own uncontrollable, autonomous logic. This can result in readings that are illogical, even silly. Everyone has favorite examples of critical excess—the titles of some MLA presentations often seemed self-parodies—committed by those who too uncritically embrace Nietzsche, Saussure, Derrida, and Foucault. As for uninformed readers who puzzle inordinately over what some poor writer might have “meant”: they were often portrayed as adherents of an intentionalist fallacy exposed almost three-quarters of a century ago by the then-New Critics, or as naive victims of an outdated objectivist delusion—and boring drudges to boot.
8
But, as we have seen, the “patron saint of postmodernism” himself is on both sides of this question—and, paradoxically, in service to some form of “truth.” The philologist in Nietzsche made him an astute close reader, committed to explicating the meaning of a text; in doing so, he was seeking, in some sense, the “truth” of that text. As a moral genealogist, he emphasized the personality of the authors he read, often disclosing, with uncanny psychological insight, the hidden forces motivating them. But, once again, he was seeking the truth, however camouflaged it may have been. Nietzsche would hardly have signed on to the postmodern idea of the Death of the Author, being himself the author of books he described as “written in my own blood”: a rather visceral validation of truth. Yet, this search for truth seems incompatible with Nietzsche’s skepticism about, and play with, language, along with that perspectivism and indeterminism that have been so immensely influential, for good and ill, in shaping postmodern debates over literary theory and the problem of interpretation. The Nietzsche invoked by poststructuralist literary critics and philosophers is the noncognitist thinker who took Socrates and Plato, Descartes, Kant, and Hegel, to task for their objectifying and universalizing of the troubled concept of “truth.” Yet, as my italicization of the word truth in this paragraph is meant to emphasize, dialectical Nietzsche was simultaneously committed to that concept, and to its pursuit.
The very first item in Kaufmann’s Portable Nietzsche, a letter from the twenty-year old student to his sister, celebrates the difficult loneliness of the explorer striking out on new paths in search of truth. Though Kaufmann doesn’t notice, young Nietzsche was in fact following a path paved by his mentor, Emerson, who posed, in his essay “Intellect,” a “choice,” given “to every mind,” between either “truth” or “repose.” Between the two, “as a pendulum, man oscillates.” He in whom the “love of repose dominates,” will accept the creed or philosophy nearest at hand; as a consequence, he gets rest and ease; “but he shuts the door to truth.” In contrast,
he in whom the love of truth predominates will keep himself aloof from all moorings, and afloat. He will abstain from dogmatism, and recognize all the opposite negations, between which, as walls, his being is swung. He submits to the inconvenience of suspense and imperfect opinion, but he is a candidate for truth, as the other is not, and respects the highest law of his being.
We do not have to imagine the momentous impact of such a contrast on the formative mind of the young Nietzsche; that impact is seismically registered in the letter to his sister, which opens with a rhetorical question, and, despite his choice of a lonely quest, echoes Emerson:
Is it decisive after all that we arrive at that view of God, world, and reconciliation which makes us feel most comfortable? Rather, is not the result of his inquiries something wholly indifferent to the true inquirer? Do we after all seek rest, peace, and pleasure in our inquiries? No, only truth—even if it be the most abhorrent and ugly….Faith does not offer the least support for a proof of objective truth. Here the ways of men part: if you wish to strive for peace of soul and pleasure, then believe; if you wish to be a devotee of truth, then inquire.
With this ardent proclamation of a philosophic knight errant, we are in the rarefied company of the most radically authentic, most severe and dedicated spirits: philalethes, friends of truth. For all his noncognitivist perspectivism and denial of “objective truth,” there is no dearth of passages, early and late, in which Nietzsche burns his candle at the altar of truth and expresses unmitigated contempt for the “lie,” a word which, in various forms, appears dozens of times in his work, especially in the late text, The Antichrist (see §8, 13, 26, 38, 42-44, 55, 62).
Theory, though it has become diffuse and often narrowly coterie, is still very much with us. So it is still the case that to so much as mention the “pursuit of truth” in post-Nietzschean, anti-foundationalist quarters is often to be dismissed as chimerical, or condemned as an insufficiently “problematized” hubristic objectivist or a hegemonic reactionary—or, worst of all, to be pitied as clinging to a tattered vestige from the past. Letting the word drop without a bemused smile may risk ridicule by progressive ideologues for whom “truth” is not merely disputed rather than a donnée, but just another lobby, a mask for bourgeois oppression. Like the neo-pragmatist Richard Rorty and other anti-essentialists, I do not believe that one can attain pure objectivity, absolute truth, or any transcendental signified: quixotic ideals that evade the real issue. But neither do I believe that the impossibility of attaining the ideal releases the individual, especially the scholar, from what the distinguished classical historian Peter Green called in 1990, in the Preface to his monumental Alexander to Actium: The Historical Evolution of the Hellenistic Age, “the harsh obligation of striving for it to the best of his or her ability. To do otherwise is as though (to draw a theological parallel) the concept of inherent human sinfulness and fallibility were taken as a self-evident reason neither to pursue virtue, nor to avoid error; or, worse, as indicating that the terms ‘virtue’ and ‘error’ had no significant meaning” ( xvi). It might seem obvious that Nietzsche, as atheist, would resist the “theological parallel,” and, as perspectivist, would respond that the pursuit of “virtue” and avoidance of “error” had (precisely) “no significant meaning,” since he himself had unmasked and transvalued those traditional terms. And yet, as we have already seen and will again, it is not at all that simple.
Green was alluding to the poststructuralist ethos then dominating some American universities, a climate in which scholarly research was (and sometimes still is) seldom or never a “disinterested” project; in which “facts” (a dubious concept to begin with) were sometimes concocted or altered to serve a political purpose; in which ethnicity, gender, and other collectively subjective factors were routinely “privileged” over scholarly “objectivity.” This skeptical perspectivism—much of it derived from some, though not all, of Nietzsche’s texts—has in many ways been beneficial. It has exposed the role of “power,” including the power of conscious and unconscious bias; punctured much essentialist afflatus; and provided a tonic corrective to disembodied Cartesian rationalism. Intellectual forces unleashed by Nietzsche have also given the lie to Kantian things in themselves, or “knowledge in itself,” including the futile attempt, in Leopold von Ranke’s phrase, to describe history “as it really was.” Still, as we have seen, this is not the whole of Nietzsche. In the very passage of On the Genealogy of Morals (a passage to which I have already alluded) in which he advised his fellow philosophers to “guard against” such “snares,” he insisted on not one, but two “optical” points:
There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective “knowing”; and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our “concept” of this thing, our “objectivity,” be. (III.12)
The scare-quotes are still required; but in our aspiration toward elusive truth and knowledge, surely it is more fruitful to deploy a wide range of perspectives rather than restrict ourselves to a single viewpoint likely to reflect our most egocentric interests. This multi-perspectival approach (“more eyes, different eyes”) to greater plausibility by means of a convergence of viewpoints resembles what the physicist Niels Bohr called “complementarity.” To dismiss this cumulative, ever-more-complete attempt to approximate “objectivity” is to license and even validate any “subjective” position, no matter how narrowly limited. Even demonstrable error—at worst, dangerous nonsense (dinosaurs walking the earth with humans, preposterous conspiracy theories, Obama as non-citizen)—becomes someone’s unassailable “truth” when one’s perception is not only influenced or inflected but totally determined by a single perspective: one’s political ideology or religious belief, gender, class, culture, or ethnicity. For example, dead white males who long conflated “the way things are” with their own myopic but hegemonic perspective have spawned, as merely apparent opposites, more conscious though equally biased successors among extremists implementing a self-segregating doctrine according to which culture and scholarship are determined by gender, race, or ideology.
9
Speaking personally: shaped in part by Nietzsche, I am a perspectivist. I’ve also been influenced by a multiculturalism which, taking into account suppressed ethnic perspectives as well as the human experience we have in common, is sensitive to the racist sins of the past—and the present. At the same time, I have not enlisted among those who often seem eager to trash (in the name of broadening) the entire Western tradition via some current “ism”—whether it’s bourgeois-baiting Marxism, or certain strands of radical feminism, or a dogmatic intolerance and exclusionary tribalism that may masquerade as multiculturalism. Such militant and atomizing extremism threatens but cannot undo the positive aspects of any of these perspective-altering ways of envisioning the world. The collapse of the brutal and dehumanizing Soviet version of Communism did not invalidate crucial elements of the Marxian diagnosis of capitalism any more than genuine multiculturalism is discredited by Islamic extremism or by what Henry Louis Gates, Jr. called a generation ago the “ethnic fundamentalism” of certain Afrocentrists who attempted to resurrect and reverse the racist pseudoscience of the past to prove black superiority. Above all, perhaps, the richest insights of feminism, transcending the necessary but transitional stage of monolithic sisterhood, have permanently changed the way we all see ourselves and our world, including much of the literature we thought we knew best.
Still speaking personally, as a literary critic influenced by Nietzsche, I recognize not only the inevitability of “interpretation” but the force of his radical linguistic skepticism, and do in part believe it. Whether accepting or resisting, I have, like every thoughtful reader, been affected by the impact of the perspectivism and skepticism Nietzsche expressed so strikingly more than a century ago. His very omnipresence indicates that few current theories, critical and political, are as novel as their more a-historical practitioners sometimes pretend; one quickly wearied, for example, of the repeated but false claim that what preceded them was a monolithic and dogmatic commitment to univocal, “correct” reading. The influence of Nietzsche has sometimes been baleful, and often deplored. Nevertheless, his most penetrating insights have introduced an exhilarating breath of fresh air. They have sharpened any number of analytical tools and made us all rethink certain facile and complacent assumptions—about power, race, and gender; about concepts and values less permanently fixed than historically and culturally contingent; about language, silence, and the problematic relation of rhetoric to reality; about the impossibility of Cartesian “objectivity” given the tendency to universalize personal or cultural biases. As a teacher of literature, I came to cast a colder eye on the belief, or pretense, that only feminist and minority-culture courses have “political” content. Though I still ardently believe in a canon of great works, a canon evolving rather than static, I have, after reading Nietzsche and those he influenced, become more skeptical of the criteria behind canon-formation—including, at times at least, even the intrinsic aesthetic value I once thought not only the principal but the exclusive determinant of admission into the pantheon of literary works that have “pleased many and pleased long.”
Yet Nietzsche’s legacy remains ambiguous. Which of the two is the more quintessential Nietzsche: the precursor of postmodernism who brought to bear the full force of his skepticism and perspectival optics? Or, however contradictorily, the dedicated seeker of “truths” that he knew could never be fully attained? The whole point of my essay is that the question cannot be definitively answered. Like Shakespeare’s Claudius, Nietzsche is a man “to double-business bound,” a noncognitist and a cognitivist, at once a destroyer and a creator, a transvaluer of values and a great liberator who was, in his own life and thought, not altogether liberated from tradition, and from the quest for “truth.” Nietzsche, who critiqued pity, is hardly one to seek it. Yet, impressed as we are by the insight, acumen and seductive “style” of Nietzsche as a genealogist of error, we cannot help but be moved by the nobility of the haunted and haunting truth-seeker.
After the “festive” opening of “The Free Spirit” section of Beyond Good and Evil, celebrating the “willing-unwilling” love of “error” as indistinguishable from the “love of life,” Nietzsche addressed a “serious word” to the “most serious”: “Beware, you philosophers and friends of knowledge, and guard against martyrdom! Against suffering ‘for the sake of truth’!” There “might be more laudable truthfulness in every little question mark you place after your favorite words and beloved doctrines.” Thus, to “sacrifice for the sake of truth” would be to “degenerate into ‘martyrs,’ crying out from their stages” in “an epilogue farce,” proving that philosophy’s “actual long tragedy has come to an end” (§24, 25). It is an irony worthy of Nietzsche that in contemplating the personal tragedy of his life, one is tempted, whatever the medical evidence, to envision him as a destroyer who, precisely, sacrificed himself on the altar of truth. In “Nietzsche’s Philosophy in the Light of Recent History” (1947), Thomas Mann, himself a supreme ironist, described, as both a “heartbreaking spectacle” and a tragic “destiny,” Nietzsche’s suffering of a “martyr’s death on the cross of thought,” with his “immoralism” best understood as the “self-destruction of morality out of concern for truth.”
Agreeing, I would add that Nietzsche remained one of those who—as he movingly put it in The Gay Science—“still take our fire…from the flame lit by a faith that is thousands of years old, that Christian faith which was also the faith of Plato, that God is the truth, that truth is divine” (§344). Even as a “godless anti-metaphysician,” fearful that the only “divine” thing left was “error,” and that “God himself” would “prove to be our most enduring lie” (§344), Nietzsche, in some profound sense, remained committed, not to the “lies” and life-promoting “fictions” that might have preserved his sanity, but to the inconvenient truths he uncovered in the course of his longing for that lost divine Truth he had himself unmasked. In this same passage of The Gay Science, he notes that the “will to truth” means—and there “is no alternative”—that “I want not to deceive, not even myself; and with that we stand on moral ground.”
But not on dogmatic ground. Discussing “the intellectual conscience,” Nietzsche insisted that “Not to question, not to tremble with the craving and the joy of questioning: that is what I feel to be contemptible” (The Gay Science §2). Ambivalent to the core, Nietzsche objects to that “beautiful sentiment,” the “faith in truth,” retained by the last “idealists of knowledge,” those “in whom alone the intellectual conscience dwells and is incarnate today,” and who “constitute the honor of our age” (On the Genealogy of Morals III 24). But in a still later work, though he again objects to “beautiful sentiments,” Nietzsche insists that
At every step one has to wrestle for truth; one has had to surrender for it almost everything to which the heart, to which our love, our trust in life, cling otherwise. What does it mean, after all, to have integrity in matters of the spirit? That one is severe against one’s heart, that one despises ‘beautiful sentiments,’ that one makes of every Yes and No a matter of conscience. Faith makes blessed: consequently it lies. (The Antichrist §50)
As he had put it in that early “Emersonian” letter: “if you wish to strive for peace of soul and pleasure, then believe; if you wish to be a devotee of truth” (no matter how “abhorrent and ugly” that truth), “then inquire.” Ironically, Nietzsche’s relentlessly inquiring spirit, an honesty exacerbating his illness, may have contributed to his final destruction, since it led to the discovery of dark truths he himself believed were “terrible” and of whose “impossibility” (as he plaintively remarked in a letter of July 2, 1885, to his friend Franz Overbeck) he wished in vain “someone would convince me.”
Charcoal sketch of the bedridden Nietzsche, made in 1899, one year before his death after a decade of mental illness. The photograph taken at the time by the artist, Hans Olde, reveals only a vacuous lassitude, the subject’s eyes half-closed and in shadow, a mind adrift. But in his drawing, which otherwise adheres very closely to his photo, Olde opens the patient’s eyes, creating a mesmerizing stare directed mostly inward. The duality of the penetrating gaze — at once half-mad and yet intensely meditative, even “prophetic” — seems evocative of what I have been calling Nietzsche’s ambiguous legacy.
Hans Olde film of Nietzsche
Appendix
Liberty and License: Re-Reading and Re-Writing The Tempest
As noted in the body of my essay, The Tempest has become something of a critical and cultural battleground, a site for combat between aesthetic and historicist readers. Exercising the hermeneutics of suspicion, many New Historicists depict intrinsic readers who insist on giving priority to what is actually there in a text—say, the text of this Shakespeare play—as both knowing and sinister: “hegemonic” reactionaries conspiring to keep the text’s “real,” if unintended, political meaning from being uttered. That “real” meaning, usually conveyed inadvertently by a politics-effacing author, typically has to do with the dominant (Western) culture’s sexist, classist, and racist suppression of its victims. Along with Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, The Tempest has been a prime text: criticized, revised, and politically re-envisioned by creative writers, typically from former colonial states. Since such revisionary and creative reading seems notably Nietzschean or Emersonian, I want to register, with reservations, an assault mounted by an eminent contemporary critic powerfully influenced by, precisely, Emerson and Nietzsche.
In the case of The Tempest —its island set in the Mediterranean but reflecting Shakespeare’s reading of Montaigne’s “On Cannibals” and of contemporary accounts of shipwreck and salvation in the Bermudas—Latin-American writers have been particularly active, beginning with Nicaraguan Rubén Dario’s 1898 essay “The Triumph of Caliban,” followed two years later by Ariel, by Uruguayan statesman José Enrique Rodó. French colonial civil servant Octave Mannoni’s influential Psychologie de la colonization (1950) was translated more pointedly into English as Prospero and Caliban. Perhaps most notably, Aimé Césaire of Martinique in 1969 rewrote The Tempest in his own play, Une Tempête, in which Caliban, declaring that “now it’s over,” rebels against the hated “image” imposed on him by Prospero, and finally threatens that “one day,” he will raise his “bare fist” against his Shakespearean master. In Césaire’s revision, master and slave end up staying on the island when the others have left. After many years together, Prospero comes to think of himself and Caliban as indistinguishable: “You-me. Me you.” This might seem to flesh out, even fulfill, those lines at the end of Shakespeare’s play (V.i.275-76) when Prospero reluctantly concedes, “this thing of darkness I/ Acknowledge mine.” But by the time Césaire’s Prospero finally claims identification, Caliban has disappeared, and the last word the audience hears—echoing and altering Caliban’s delusory and ignominious cry of “Freedom!” at the end of Act II of Shakespeare’s play—is the genuinely triumphant offstage cry, “LIBERTY!”
The factors informing such rewritings—ethnicity, economics, social class, colonial history—are among the historical and perspectival elements that condition our responses to the world, and to texts. In the debate with Cartesian and other a-historical conceptions of reason and response as pure, absolute, essentialist, universal, these contingent and conditioning factors will be weighed on Nietzsche’s side of the ledger. Indeed, they will be over-weighed by readers of Nietzsche interested only in the perspectival, noncognitivist aspect of his ambiguous legacy, and in his often brilliant exposure of an author’s hidden and subconscious motivations. My own ambivalence is reflected in Coleridge’s Submerged Politics (1994), a book influenced by, and in part written in reaction to, the New Historicist emphasis on a “repressed” or “invisibilized” content under the surface or “manifest content” of a text: what the author, bound by his or her own limiting perspectives, did not, or could not, say. As the terminology indicates, these theorists have absorbed Freud on The Interpretation of Dreams. The no less overt influence is the Marxian doctrine that works of art are determined by the dominant ideology, and resistance to it. Thus we must read between and probe beneath the lines of a literary work to tease out its meaning. It is, as they say, “no accident” that contemporary Marxian critics repeatedly refer to a text’s “not saids,” its “absences,” and “significant silences.” Nor is it surprising that some readers—politically engaged readers of The Tempest, for example—will want to creatively fill in such absences and silences in ways that remold the text nearer to their own heart’s desires.
In the Age of Theory, a poststructuralist era largely shaped by Nietzsche, most of us will agree that literary texts are not verbal icons hermetically sealed off from the world. They reflect and are influenced by the social and historical contexts in which they are complexly anchored, and they require readers, similarly influenced, to “actualize” them in what Hans George Gadamer calls a hermeneutic or dialogic “fusion of horizons” (Truth and Method, 320). The danger is that in properly asking questions from our present socio-economic horizon, we will also impose answers on the past; or that, in “recontextualizing” works of art, we may temporally limit them to their own historical moment, inflicting aesthetic injury in the process. Often, New Historicist readings, whatever their many illuminations, are closed monoreadings that risk losing the palpable poem in the attempt to recover sociopolitical realities the original author supposedly tried to evade. Marxian theorists—for example, Pierre Macherey in A Theory of Literary Production—insist that these silences and absences are inevitable, ideologically predetermined. Deconstructionists invariably find text-unravelling aporias; what many New Historicists must look for, and invariably find, in “privatized” poems is the effaced “public” dimension, the vestigial politics still lurking in the unspoken but no longer quite inaudible subtext. The claim that often follows, whether explicit or implicit, is that, having ferreted out these buried meanings, we have succeeding in “decoding” the poem, revealing its “absent” and therefore primary level of meaning—the interpretation having the highest priority. Again, Frank Kermode’s admonition is pertinent. Even when, as in The Tempest, the political dimension is actually there, in Shakespeare’s text—however blind earlier readers seem to have been to the layer of meaning often emphasized in our own age—these relations, though they exist in the play, should be “secondary to the beautiful object itself.”
In concurring with Kermode that our actual “highest priority” should be aesthetic, I am not suggesting a simplistic return to the art-for-art’s-sake school of rarified, Paterian “Appreciation.” Certainly, in the specific case of The Tempest, I would not go as far as one of my own cherished mentors, Harold Bloom. Inveighing against the contemporary critical trends he dismisses (deliberately echoing Nietzsche’s famous condemnation of ressentiment) as “the School of Resentment,” Bloom declares: “Of all Shakespeare’s plays, the two visionary comedies—A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest—these days share the sad distinction of being the worst interpreted and performed. Erotomania possesses the critics and directors of the Dream, while ideology drives the despoilers of The Tempest.” These characteristically emphatic, judgmental sentences open the chapter on The Tempest in Bloom’s 1998 study, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. He goes on to make it clear that he is open to such creative re-visitings of the play as Robert Browning’s remarkable dramatic monologue, “Caliban upon Setebos,” and W. H. Auden’s prose address, from The Sea and the Mirror, titled “Caliban to the Audience,” which, though “more Auden than Shakespeare,” catches, as Bloom acknowledges, much of Caliban’s “dilemma” and his “pathos.” What stirs Bloom’s Nietzschean wrath are the political reconfigurings I’ve already mentioned, specifically the transformation of Caliban, “a poignant but cowardly (and murderous) half-human creature,” into “an African-Caribbean heroic Freedom Fighter,” a move Bloom dismisses as “not even a weak misreading.”
This condemnation is less political (Bloom is on the permanent Left) than an allusion to his own long-held literary theory, which celebrates strong, but decidedly not weak, “misreading.” From The Anxiety of Influence on, Bloom has famously apotheosized the “strong reader,” one who brings to bear his own personality, and reads the work of others above all to stimulate his own creativity. Bloom has repeatedly acknowledged that his theory and practice derive primarily from two exemplars: Emerson and his disciple Nietzsche. Emerson insists, in “The American Scholar,” that there is “creative reading as well as creative writing,” and announces, in “Uses of Great Men” (in Representative Men), that “Other men are lenses through which we read our own minds.” At the very outset of Ecce Homo (in the chapter “Why I Write Such Good Books”), Nietzsche claims that, “Ultimately, nobody can get more out of things, including books, than he already knows.” He then goes on, “inconsistently” if prophetically, to complain that anyone who claimed to understand his work “had made up something out of me after his own image.”
This Emersonian-Nietzschean line of revisionary reading Bloom labels “antithetical,” this time borrowing his term from Yeats, who called Nietzsche his “strong enchanter,” and declared in his 1930 diary, “We do not seek truth in argument or in books, but clarification of what we already believe” (Explorations, 310). Bloom champions “strong” misprision (misreading), repeatedly asserting, from The Anxiety of Influence on, that “really strong poets can read only themselves,” indeed, that for such readers “to be judicious is to be weak.” His dismissal is therefore all the more damning when Bloom insists that the post-colonial reinterpretation of Caliban “is not even a weak misreading; that anyone who arrives at that view is simply not interested in reading the play at all. Marxists, multiculturalists, feminists, nouveau historicists—the usual suspects—know their causes but not Shakespeare’s plays” (Shakespeare, 622).
Nietzsche’s copy of an 1858 translation of Emerson’s Essays. His four Emerson volumes are the most heavily-annotated of all the books in Nietzsche’s personal library; in fact, his marginalia became so copious that eventually he recorded some forty passages separately in a black notebook. Though he often transcribed verbatim, at times he shifted to the first-person, almost becoming Emerson, his “Brother-Soul.” Since both Emerson and Nietzsche were adamant champions of utter self-reliance, this creative interaction with his American percursor not only illustrates the general paradox of originality, but incarnates a truth Emerson announced in Representative Men: providing they are kindred spirits, “Other men are lenses through which we read our own thoughts.”
Without rejecting it, I would qualify the indictment. Those “suspects” are reading the play, but reading it badly, allowing their political “causes,” which really are implicit in Shakespeare’s text, to become primary rather than remaining, in Kermode’s term, “secondary.” The stock of Prospero, that valorized magus and Shakespeare-surrogate of much of the earlier criticism, has fallen in the twentieth century. Though Prospero retains majority support, his (often justified) harshness, always there in the text, has become more evident, both to readers and, depending on the director, to theatergoers. Having become far more sensitive to the irascible, bullying aspects of Prospero, many have consequently become more sympathetic to the plight of the always fascinating Caliban. Bloom himself describes Caliban as “poignant” and applauds Auden for stressing his dilemma and pathos. What Bloom resists is the determinism, ideological and theoretical, of the political readers and re-writers of The Tempest. For them, Caliban, suppressed by Shakespeare as well as by Prospero, must be the play’s hero.
It is, in general, an intriguing poststructuralist phenomenon that so many who theoretically pronounce texts indeterminate—bereft of authorial meaning, with text and interpretation alike determined by the inevitable linguistic gap between signifier and signified, by temporal limitations, by political ideology, class or gender bias—also, in practice, repeatedly claim to have decoded, “unmasked” or “exposed,” what is “really” going on: what a play such as The Tempest “conceals” as well as what it “reveals,” even to “correct” what has been “distorted.” As Richard Levin asked in 1990—cocking a mischievous eye in his PMLA article “The Politics and Poetics of Bardicide”—who is more guilty of what the indeterminists dismiss as “hubristic objectivism.” Is it those who believe that literary works are written by actual authors whose meanings (intention having become achievement) are there in the text, to be interpreted? Or is it those for whom the “hermeneutic vacuum” left by the Death of the Author must be filled by “a universal law” that “dictates what one must look for, and must find, in every [text]?”
I would add, in the case of The Tempest, that while an Aimé Césaire has every right to recreate Shakespeare in forging his own work of art, for the most part we are dealing with revisionists who, having not found the political subtext of The Tempest adequately expressed, are compelled to “foreground” or “privilege” it in ways which, however creative and even illuminating, distort the original play. Not only as a philological “good reader” but as a moralist, Nietzsche would approve of Bloom’s enrollment of such revisionists in “The School of Resentment.” For the crucial Nietzschean concept of ressentiment—stemming from the contrast introduced in Beyond Good and Evil §260 between “master morality and slave morality,” and fully developed a year later in On the Genealogy of Morals—has to do precisely with frustration, psychological and political, arising from a sense of inferiority inseparable from subjugation. Finally, in terms of the revisionist act of creative reading performed by Césaire in Une Tempête, I have already suggested (section 5, above) that the philologist in Nietzsche, who praised the ability to “read off a text as a text” without “falsifying” it by “interposing an interpretation” would concur with Milton’s distinction, in contemplating the truth that shall make us free, between License and Liberty. “LIBERTY!” cries Césaire’s Caliban, but it means, as an act of interpretation, “License” in regard to The Tempest of Shakespeare—of whose authorial death rumors have been greatly exaggerated.
Casper David Friedrich, The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, 1818, Courtesy of Wikipedia
Contributing Editor Pat Keane goes from strength to strength; sometimes I feel that inviting him to write for NC I unleashed one of those Platonic demons — a torrent of thought, word, reference, and wit has erupted. This time he has outdone himself — “Mountain Visions and Imaginative Usurpations” is my favourite of his essays so far. He begins with Columbus sighting America but only uses that as an occasion, as a peg upon which to weave a gorgeous meditation on mountains, mountains in literature, sublimity, and poetry. Pat has more than a way with words and the gift of intelligence; he has vast reading and an astonishing memory — he seems to live in a house of words (in his mind), reaching this quotation and that off the shelf at will. Focused primarily on Wordsworth’s The Prelude, the essay leaps also from Petrarch (climbing a mountain) to Augustine, to Keats, to Yeats (“Lapis Lazuli” — see image below), to Emerson, to Kant and Nietzsche, and every reference is cited with intimate familiarity as if the author’s mind and the culture of ideas have somehow melded (think Vulcan mind-meld). Such feats are a deep pleasure in the reading. Hell, I am editing and publishing this AND I keep taking notes on the side for myself.
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This essay was completed on the first day of October, 2012. Five hundred and twenty years ago almost to the day, a man saw something, a kind of vision. “About 10 o’clock at night, while standing on the sterncastle, I thought I saw a light to the west. It looked like a little wax candle bobbing up and down….The moon, in its third quarter, rose in the east shortly before midnight…. Then, two hours after midnight, the Pinta fired a cannon, my prearranged signal for the sighting of land. I now believe that the light I saw earlier was a sign from God and that it was truly the first positive indication of land.” The flash of light Christopher Columbus saw from the sterncastle of the Santa Maria on the night of October 11, 1492, transformed human history, mostly if not always for good. Even for those of us open to the ideal vision of America as a City on a Hill, or as earth’s last best hope, there are moments when mindless chants of “USA! USA!,” accompanied by an increasingly jingoistic insistence on American “exceptionalism,” make us appreciate, if not quite endorse, Mark Twain’s sardonic entry for the traditional date in Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar: “THE DISCOVERY. It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been even more wonderful to miss it.”
Columbus’s Diario or log reveals a man of single-minded intensity, though hardly one with the elevated perspective marking the genuine visionary. I’m interested on this occasion in what I’m calling mountain vision; and, symbolically speaking, Columbus’s shipboard tower or sterncastle simply wasn’t high enough. He took the Bahamas for China and Cuba for Japan, and can hardly be said (anymore than the Norsemen 500 years earlier) to have “discovered” a world populated for millennia by native peoples, for whom Columbus’s voyage proved to be anything but a “sign from God”—emerging, instead, as a negative form of what William Wordsworth, describing the relation between the physical sight of mountains and the transforming power of imagination, termed “usurpation.”
And yet, in the full sense of the word, it was obviously “wonderful” to find America. The European Renaissance, an exciting Age of Exploration and Discovery, had a kind of rebirth in the Romantic period, which in many ways replicated that earlier explosion of science, exploration, and wonder-struck literature. The title of Richard Holmes’s splendid 2008 book seems inevitable: The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science. The discoveries discussed by Holmes—by men like Joseph Banks, William Herschel, and Humphry Davy—were, of course, anticipated by the discoveries of such Renaissance and post-Renaissance men as Robert Hooke, Andreas Vesalius, and Isaac Newton. As if to confirm the link between the two Ages, Wordsworth added some lines to the epic poem that would be posthumously published as The Prelude. Recalling the statue of Newton at Cambridge, “with his prism and his silent face,” the poet paid tribute to the range of Newton’s extraordinary and solitary genius: “The marble index of a mind for ever/ Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone” (III.62-63).
Wordsworth added those magnificent lines in 1838. In October, 1816, a younger Romantic poet, John Keats, evoked an adventurous quest for knowledge resembling that attributed by Wordsworth to Newton, and also connecting Romantic-era science with the age of European Discovery. Writing more than three centuries after Columbus, the young Keats unforgettably recaptured that initial sense of wondrous exploration and revelation. In the octave of his sonnet “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” Keats depicts himself as an explorer of “goodly states” and islands dedicated to the god of poetry. But for a young reader ignorant of Greek a vast continent or ocean lay unexplored:
Much have I travelled in the realms of gold, ………..And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; ………..Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told ………..That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne; ………..Yet never did I breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold.
Seeking analogues to express the sense of unexpected discovery he experienced on first reading Homer in the vigorous Elizabethan translation of George Chapman, Keats, in the sestet, deploys ocular images, astronomical and exploratory, of sudden revelation, stunned vision. He begins by evoking the discovery in 1781 of the planet Uranus by William Herschel, about which Keats had read in a book given him as a school prize: “Then felt I like some watcher of the skies/ When a new planet swims into his ken…”
But his second and clinching simile reflects his reading about geographical discovery in the Americas. Keats may, like Columbus, have been mistaken in details—it was not Cortez but Balboa who looked out upon the unexpected Pacific from the mountain at the Isthmus of Panama. But no one has better captured the awestruck moment of mountain vision, of revelation from the heights. Keats envisions the heroic conquistadore,
…………………….when with eagle eyes …………..He stared at the Pacific—and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise— …………..Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
Poetic technique and form alone cannot account for that breakthrough into the Sublime—the assonance, alliteration, and double caesura that produce that final catch-in-the-breath moment, with its attendant sense of monumental tranquility. Nevertheless, it seems appropriate that Keats should cast his revelation in the form of a Petrarchan sonnet (rhymed abbaabba cdcdcd). The Italian Renaissance humanist, poet, and scholar Francesco Petrarca not only established an enduring form for the sonnet; he may be said to have initiated the modern sense of mountain vision. Keats depicts the discoverer and his men atop Mount Darien, that peak on the Isthmus of Panama. On April 26, 1336, Petrarch and his brother climbed a 6,000 foot peak, Mount Ventoux. His “only motive” for making “the ascent of the highest mountain in the region,” he writes a friend, “was the wish to see what so great an elevation had to offer.” In his letter he describes the ascent in realistic detail. Unlike his brother, Petrarch tried easier, more circuitous paths up the mountain before realizing that, ultimately, he had to face the difficult ordeal of a tough vertical climb. Suspended between Medieval allegory, Renaissance symbolism, and the sheer exertion and exhilaration of the climb and the final prospect from the heights, Petrarch gives us a version of the old dialogue between body and soul, flesh and spirit, the outer and the inner worlds. In short, the climb, as literary as it is actual, is a spiritual as well as a physical ascent; and in describing it the great humanist pays no less tribute to the classical writers of pagan antiquity than he does to Christian saints.
Appropriately, however, since the friend to whom he wrote this letter was an Augustinian monk, Petrarch emphasizes Saint Augustine, a small-sized codex copy of whose Confessions, given him by his friend, he took with him on his ascent. Once atop the mountain, Petrarch took out the book and, he swears, opened the text (as Augustine himself famously had, turning at random to Romans XIII.13:13-14, at the moment of his conversion) to a revelatory passage. The words Petrarch opened to occur at Confessions, X. viii. 15: “And men go about to wonder at the heights of the mountains, and the mighty waves of the sea, and the wide sweep of rivers, and the circuit of the ocean, and the revolution of the stars, but themselves they consider not.” Brooding on Augustine, Petrarch “thought in silence” of we who “neglect what is noblest in ourselves, scatter our energies in all directions, and waste ourselves in a vain show, because we look about us for what is to be found only within.” Clinching the analogy between his initially meandering route up the mountain and his final direct ascent, Petrarch ends his paysage moralisé by requesting his friend’s prayer that “these vague and wandering thoughts of mine may sometime become firmly fixed, and, after having been vainly tossed about from one interest to another, may direct themselves at last toward the single, true, certain, and everlasting good.” (Letter to Dionysio da Borga San Sepolcro)
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For more than four centuries, for reasons elaborated in Marjorie Hope Nicolson’s Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory (1959), the human view from and of mountains, thought to be deformed expressions of God’s wrath, was largely eclipsed in Western literature. Perhaps recalling Moses on Sinai, John Milton has several supernatural “mountain” scenes in Paradise Lost. In Book V, his archangel Raphael, describing at Adam’s request the revolt in heaven, depicts “the Father infinite,” together with his Son, announcing his decision to appoint that Son Lord and vice-regent, “as from a flaming mount, whose top/ Brightness had made invisible.” This luminous eminence is echoed later in Book V, when Raphael envisions a third of the angelic host approaching Lucifer-Satan on his “royal seat/ High on a hill, far blazing, as a mount/ Rais’d on a mount,” with the chief of the rebelling angels “Affecting all equality with God,/ In imitation of that mount whereon/ Messiah was declar’d in sight of heaven” (V.596-99, 756-58, 764-65). Still later, in the final Book, Milton’s angel Michael, a “seer blest,” reveals the far future to fallen Adam from a height, assuring him as they descend that, thanks to the redemptive sacrifice of Christ, the Eden lost by Adam and Eve despite Raphael’s warning will be replaced by a “paradise within thee, happier far” (XIV..587).
Benjamin Robert Hayden’s 1842 portrait of Wordsworth (then 72), posed against Helvellyn Peak, a Lake District mountain (the third highest in England) often climbed by the poet). The painting was inspired by a Wordsworth sonnet commemorating one such climb.
This seems a version of the Petrarchan quest for “what is to be found only within.” But it took Milton’s great heir, William Wordsworth, to return poetry to human heights and to secularly redeem the false sense of “divinity within,” an autonomous instinct that proved lethal to Adam and Eve (Paradise Lost IX. 1010), but which defines the creative Imagination for poets in the Romantic tradition. Naturalizing supernaturalism, and fusing the power of Milton, and of Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant on the Beautiful and the Sublime, with his own climbing experiences in the mountainous Lake District of England, in Wales, and in the French Alps, Wordsworth gives us, at two climactic moments of his autobiographical epic, The Prelude, unforgettable examples of mountain vision.
Those symbolic moments (in Books VI and XIV) are foreshadowed in the opening Book. Dramatizing the fair seed-time in which he “grew up/Fostered alike by beauty and by fear,” Wordsworth describes, among his boyish sports, stealing birds’ eggs from mountain nests. Though the object was “mean,” the outcome “was not ignoble.” In a terrifying but thrilling moment of enhanced sensory apprehension, the solitary climber, hung perilously on the cliff, is caught up in that sublime “motion” that, for Wordsworth, animates the vital universe. The descriptions are virtually identical in the 1805 (lines 341-50) and 1850 (lines 330-39) versions of The Prelude. Here I cite the 1850 text:
……………….Oh! When I have hung
Above the Raven’s nest, by knots of grass
And half-inch fissures in the slippery rock
But ill-sustained; and almost (so it seemed)
Suspended by the blast that blew amain,
Shouldering the naked crag; Oh, at that time,
When on the perilous ridge, I hung alone,
With what strange utterance did the loud dry wind
Blow through my ears! The sky seemed not a sky
Of earth, and with what motion moved the clouds!
Registering the ministry of fear more than of beauty, the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins would echo these lines in one of the “terrible sonnets” of 1885. “Pitched past pitch of grief” in the dark night of his soul, he interiorized Wordsworth’s moment “hung” on the cliff: “O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall/ Frightful, sheer, no-man fathomed. Hold them cheap/ May who ne’er hung there.” As Hopkins knew, mountain terror rears its head elsewhere in Wordsworth’s accounts of his youthful activities in this first Book of The Prelude. In the famous boat-stealing episode, the boy (whose stealth and guilt echo that of pear-thieving Augustine in the Confessions), is not only surrounded by “mountain-echoes.” As he rows farther from the shore, his changing perspective reveals “a huge peak, black and huge,” which, hitherto hidden below the horizon, now “towered up between me and the stars,” and “strode” after him, “with purpose of its own/ And measured motion.” The memory of this terrifying spectacle—self-created by the rower yet soul-fostering” and sublime in its effect—plunged him into a world of “unknown modes of being,” with no familiar or pleasant shapes, but “huge and mighty Forms” that “moved slowly through the mind/ By day, and were a trouble to my dreams” (1850: I. 356-400).
Sublimity supersedes fear in the crossing of the Simplon Pass in Book VI. Traveling in revolutionary France in the summer of 1790, Wordsworth and a fellow climber, Robert Jones, journeyed to the Alps, the majesty of the mountains further inspiring their revolutionary hopes. The great passage is foreshadowed by a brief but telling description of how they “first/ Beheld the summit of Mont Blanc, and grieved/ To have a soulless image on the eye” (the actual sight of Mont Blanc), which “had usurped upon a living thought/ That never more could be” (VI [1805]453-57). The living thought temporarily “usurped” is Wordsworth’s imagination of the great mountain, its summit more dramatically “Unveiled” in the 1850 version, but its merely Alpine sublimity still inferior to the imaginative power of what Wordsworth’s perceptive admirer Keats would later refer to as “the Wordsworthian or egotistical sublime.”
That usurpation will be repeated, and crucially reversed, seventy lines later. Climbing along the “steep and lofty” Simplon Pass, ascending with eagerness, Wordsworth and his friend lose both their way and their comrades. At length, they encounter a peasant who tells them that they must “descend” to the spot where they first became perplexed, and that “their future course, all plain to sight,/Was downwards.” Reluctant to believe what they so “grieved” to hear, for, as Wordsworth emphasized in 1850, “still we had hopes that pointed to the clouds,” they question the peasant repeatedly, yet every word, augmented by their own feelings, ended in the fact (italicized in 1850) “that we had crossed the Alps” (524).
And here I pause to report another kind of “discovery.” On the very day I thought I had written the final version of this section of my essay, a newly-published book arrived in the mail: English Past and Present, edited by Wolfgang Viereck, consisting of papers selected from an IAUPE conference held in Malta. One essay caught my eye: “Constructions of Identity in Romanticism: The Case of William Wordsworth,” written by a distinguished German Romantic scholar and friend, Christoph Bode. To my initial dismay and eventual delight (an appropriately Wordsworthian trajectory), I discovered that he, too, was examining, with characteristic brilliance, the mountain episodes in The Prelude. Though relieved that we took the same general position, I was humbled by the ingenuity of his nuanced discussion.
For example—to return to and refocus on that crossing of the Alps—Bode persuasively argues that “it is almost as if, contrary to what the preceding lines say, Wordsworth is immensely relieved to know that from now on it is downhill.” While there is surely some disappointment (including Wordsworth’s feeling of having been betrayed by bodily senses and instincts that should have informed him when he was at the high point), compensation, though it came in retrospect, takes the form of a glorious rhetorical outpouring which is, as Bode says, “one of the most impressive apotheoses of the imagination in Wordsworth’s entire oeuvre.” The experience in the Alps was then, 1790. Now, a decade and a half later, its hidden significance is revealed in a visionary experience that apparently came to Wordsworth primarily if not exclusively in the act of writing about that Alpine crossing. Though I prefer the 1850 version, the layering of time requires citation of the 1805 text:
………………..Imagination! Lifting up itself
Before the eye and progress of my Song
Like an unfathered vapour; here that Power,
In all the might of its endowments, came
Athwart me; I was lost as in a cloud,
Halted without an effort to break through.
And now, recovering, to my Soul I say
I recognize thy glory; in such strength
Of usurpation, in such visitings
Of awful promise, when the light of sense
Goes out in flashes, that have shown to us
The invisible world, doth Greatness make abode,
There harbors, whether we be young or old.
Our destiny, our nature, and our home
Is with infinitude, and only there;
With hope it is, hope that can never die,
Effort, and expectation, and desire,
And something evermore about to be. (525-42)
What Wordsworth, that preeminent prophet of human hope, realizes in retrospect is that a man’s reach should exceed his grasp. For Romantics enlisted in the visionary company, the glory of the human spirit consists, not in attaining the attainable but in striving for the infinite, even if our mortal capabilities are necessarily finite. Reversing the previous “usurpation,” in which the physical sight of Mont Blanc imposed upon an imaginative vision, Wordsworth, “recovering,” can say to his more conscious soul: “I recognize thy glory.” It is the glory of that “awful Power” which, through “sad incompetence of human speech” (1850 version), we call “Imagination.” This is the creative Romantic Imagination, whose “strength/ Of usurpation” succeeds and supersedes the mere “light of sense,” extinguished “in flashes” that reveal to us “the invisible world.”
The lines immediately following confirm the political analogy. Once ardently committed to the French Revolution (“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,/ But to be young was very heaven!”), Wordsworth in effect revokes that delusory dream of a material, external Eden in favor of a paradise within:
The mind beneath such banners militant
Thinks not of spoils or trophies, nor of aught
That may attest its prowess, blest in thoughts
That are their own perfection and reward,
Strong in itself, and in the access of joy
Which hides it like the overflowing Nile. (543-48)
Later readers have often been distressed by Wordsworth’s increasingly orthodox religiosity (traceable in the 1850 version of these lines, where the “mind” becomes “the soul,” and that overflowing “access of joy” a more pious “beatitude”). Some will also deem his personal conversion of politics into a cognitive, imaginative revolution less courageous than a retreat to quietism. Here, it seems powerfully validated by those intuitive “flashes” (recalling the Intimations of Immortality Ode’s “master light of all our seeing”) revealing both the invisible world and a “greatness” that transcends any merely external triumph. The language remains martial, but, as Yeats would later ask in an unpublished lecture titled “Friends of My Youth”: “Why should we honor those that die upon the field of battle? a man may show as reckless a courage in entering into the abyss of himself.” Writing in 1805, at the apogee of the empire of Napoleon, that usurper of the Revolution, who had by then twice exploited the strategic significance of the Simplon Pass (the shortest route between Paris and Milan) by building suspended bridges across the ravine), centripetal Wordsworth is no less dismissive of external battle, its spoils and trophies, and equally insistent on inward strength. Like Paul, Milton, Blake, and Yeats himself, Wordsworth elevates spiritual or imaginative struggle over “corporeal warfare.”
Having recorded the inner reward of mountain vision, the poet returns to the initiating experience. Overcoming the “dull and heavy slackening” that ensued on hearing the peasant’s news, Wordsworth and his friend hastened down a narrow chasm, their pace slowing as they descended. What Wordsworth sees and hears (rocks muttering, crags speaking “as if a voice were in them”) in the Gorge of Gondo is at once natural and epiphanic. The clash of polar opposites is apocalyptically reconciled, natural flux ending in permanent form, tumult in a final peace:
The immeasurable height
Of woods decaying, never to be decayed,
The stationary blasts of waterfalls,
And everywhere along the hollow rent
Winds thwarting winds, bewildered and forlorn,
The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky,
The rocks that muttered close upon our ears,
Black drizzling crags that spake by the way-side
As if a voice were in them, the sick sight
And giddy prospect of the raving stream,
The unfettered clouds, the region of the Heavens,
Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light—
Were all like workings of one mind, the features
Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree,
Characters of the great Apocalypse,
The types and symbols of Eternity,
Of first and last, and midst, and without end. (VI. 556-72)
The Alpha and Omega of Revelation is fused—though, in Wordsworth’s case, with no reference to God—with Adam’s prayer (Paradise Lost V. 153-65) that the things of this world should extol their Creator, “him first, him last, him midst, and without end.” Though the revelation, at last, of the natural sublimity of the mountain landscape is revealed when Wordsworth is descending, we may be reminded of Petrarch, meditating on his ascent of the mountain and seeking his friend’s prayer that his “wandering thoughts” may become “more coherent” and, having been “cast in all directions,…may direct themselves at last to the one, true, certain, and never-ending good.” Both poets are internalizing the external mountain scenery, but while Petrarch’s terms are specifically Christian and moral, Wordsworth’s language, though echoing the Bible and Milton, remains nonsectarian, mysterious, Sublime. There is a striking resemblance (coincidental or a reflection of Coleridge’s Kantian influence on his friend) to Kant’s theory of the sublime, a feeling experienced when, however overwhelmed or even terrified as a merely sensual being, one realizes that, through the power of Reason, “a faculty of the mind surpassing every standard of Sense,” one is able to form an idea of the Infinite. As Bode notes of Wordsworth’s Alpine descent, now that the mountains, with all their “infinite grandeur,” are “identified as the external representation of something internal, they are no longer terrifying, but [in a serious pun] downright uplifting. The landscape does not praise God, it praises Mind,” in its most exalted, or intuitive, form: that of the creative Imagination.
3
Appropriately, inevitably, the final Book of The Prelude gives us, along with Wordsworth’s climactic mountain vision, his re-assertion of the even more sublime power of the creative imagination, that glorious faculty (to quote the final lines of both versions of The Prelude) almost infinitely “more beautiful than the earth” on which “man dwells, above this Frame of things,” in “beauty exalted, as it is itself/ Of substance and of fabric more divine.” Since in this case, and in both versions, the inner meaning of what was seen and heard on the mountain was recognized during the climb rather than retrospectively, and since in this case the 1850 version is rhetorically superior, I will quote the later text.
Accompanied again by his friend Jones and a third companion, the poet ascended at night the highest peak in Wales, “to see the sun/ Rise from the top of Snowdon.” Climbing with “eager pace, and no less eager thoughts,” Wordsworth was in the lead, when suddenly “at my feet the ground brightened,/And with a step or two seemed brighter still.” No time was “given to ask, or learn, the cause;/ For instantly a light upon the turf/ Fell like a flash.” Unlike the inner “flash” of Imagination revealing “the invisible world” in Book VI, this flash of light comes from above. It is not, however, the rising sun, the spectacle that motivated this nocturnal excursion, but the lunar recipient of the sun’s reflected light:
………………..lo! As I looked up,
The Moon hung naked in a firmament
Of azure without cloud, and at my feet
Rested a silent sea of hoary mist. (XIV. 5-6, 35-42)
The vapors project over headlands and promontories, “Into the main Atlantic, that appeared/ To dwindle, and give up his majesty,/Usurped upon as far as sight could reach” (46-50). But the mist does not encroach upon the heavens, dominated by “the full-orbed Moon,/Who, from her solemn elevation, gazed/ Upon the billowy ocean, as it lay/All meek and silent,” except for the noise audible through a rift in the clouds. Through that rift (in lines recalling the Gorge of Gondo, though reversing perspective) “Mounted the roar of waters, torrents, streams/ Innumerable, roaring with one voice!” (50-60). Once reflected upon with “calm thought,” what he describes as “That Vision, given to Spirits of the night,/And three chance human wanderers,” appeared to the climber “the type/ Of a majestic intellect.” As Wordsworth’s language reveals, that emblematic Mind is a secular variation on Milton’s Holy Spirit “brooding” dove-like over the “vast abyss,” making Chaos fruitful (ParadiseLost I. 20-22):
There I beheld the emblem of a Mind
That feeds upon infinity, that broods
Over the dark abyss, intent to hear
Its voices issuing forth to silent light
In one continuous stream; a mind sustained
By recognitions of transcendent power,
In sense conducting to ideal form,
In soul of more than mortal privilege. (70-77)
While the mountain scene is natural, and we mount to vision through the senses, those truly gifted recognize the transcendent power of the mind, its capacity to creatively mold and convert sensory apprehensions of the outward show of innumerable and ever-changing phenomena into ideal and emblematic forms, permanent and unified. The initial project, “to see the sun/ Rise from the top of Snowdon,” is now utterly beside the point. Even the moon, “hung in a firmament/ Of azure without cloud,” beautiful as it is, is secondary not only to its source of light, the sun, but to another power that bathes the world in luminous meaning. This transforming, or “usurping,” power is, as always, that of the human mind in its highest form, “intuitive Reason” (120), by which Wordsworth—like Milton, Coleridge, and Ralph Waldo Emerson—means what Coleridge called the “shaping spirit of Imagination.” For Coleridge and those he influenced, the Romantic Imagination—a faculty at once emotional, cognitive, and spiritual—echoes and alters the epistemological re-orientation announced in the “Transcendental Idealism” section of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: that “Copernican revolution” in which the shaping mind gives form to the external objects it perceives, subordinating things to thought, just as the sensual is ultimately dominated by the cognitive in Kant’s theory of the Sublime.
Reflecting his own Coleridgean reading of Kant, Emerson ended his seminal text, ironically titled Nature, by asserting “the kingdom of man over nature.” An equally Coleridgean Wordsworth, speaking directly to his friend, writes that, together, they will “instruct” others (in the concluding lines of this epic poem dedicated to Coleridge) “how the mind of Man becomes/ A thousand times more beautiful than the earth/ On which he dwells,” being “In beauty exalted, as it is itself/ Of quality and fabric more divine” (1850: XIV, 450-56). In the Snowdon passage, struggling to depict the reciprocal relationship between the mind and external Nature, Wordsworth falls back on epistemologically slippery or at least paradoxical formulations (“mutual domination,” “interchangeable supremacy”), and an emphasis on the senses and emotion before, inevitably, celebrating the power of the all-illuminating mind:
One function, above all, of such a mind
Had Nature shadowed there, by putting forth,
‘Mid circumstances awful and sublime,
That mutual domination which she loves
To exert upon the face of outward things,
So moulded, joined, abstracted; so endowed
With interchangeable supremacy,
That men least sensitive see, hear, perceive,
And cannot choose but feel. The power which all
Acknowledge when thus moved, which Nature thus
To bodily sense exhibits, is the express
Resemblance of that glorious faculty
That higher minds bear with them as their own. (78-90)
The passage is complex, but what emerges is the supremacy of what Nature merely “shadowed there”—namely, that “glorious faculty,” the creative Imagination, in the exercise of which the highest human minds, at once reflecting and exceeding the orchestrating but limited power of Kant’s pure Reason, resemble Miltonic “angels stopped upon the wing by sound/ Of harmony from heaven’s remotest spheres” (98-99).
.
4
The Prelude has long been recognized as, next to Paradise Lost itself, the greatest poem of its length in English. Excerpts, including the crossing of the Simplon Pass, appeared during Wordsworth’s lifetime, but the poem as a whole became public only after the poet’s death, in 1850. The long poem known to his contemporaries was not his autobiographical epic, but The Excursion (1814), the poem intended to be second in the triadic structure announced in the prefatory poem: “a kind of Prospectus of the design and scope of the whole” of his project, including the culminating epic, to be called The Recluse. This so-called “Prospectus” to The Recluse was of immense importance to Emerson, who reprinted its 107 lines in his anthology, Parnassus, under his own title, “Outline.” Emerson was also impressed by the poem it accompanied, The Excursion, a lesser epic which nevertheless contains several notable mountain visions. In his 1840 essay “Thoughts on Modern Literature,” Emerson remarked that “The Excursion awakened in every lover of nature the right feeling. We saw stars shine, we felt the awe of mountains….” He is recalling those moments in Book I (paralleling the formative personal experiences recounted in the opening Book of The Prelude) where the boy who would become the Wanderer interacted with the natural world. We encounter him, as Emerson remembered, as he “all alone/ Beheld the stars come out above his head” (128-29), and “felt the awe of mountains.” That boy knew his Bible; “But in the mountains did he feel his faith” (223), a feeling of sublimity in which “the least of things/ Seemed infinite; and there his spirit shaped/ Her prospects; nor did he believe,–he saw.”
…………..Such was the Boy—but for the growing Youth
What soul was his, when, from the naked top
Of some bold headland, he beheld the sun
Rise up, and bathe the world in light! He looked—
Ocean and earth, the solid frame of earth
And ocean’s liquid mass, in gladness lay
Beneath him:–far and wide the clouds were touched
And in their silent faces could he read
Unutterable love…his spirit drank
The spectacle: sensation soul, and form,
All melted into him…in them did he live,
And by them did he live; they were his life. (197-210)
At such times, the Wanderer was “Rapt into still communion that transcends/ The imperfect offices of prayer and praise,/ His mind was a thanksgiving to the power/ That made him; it was blessedness and love!” (215-18). It is hardly surprising that the American Transcendentalist, who most famously presents himself rapt in a still communion in which he becomes “a transparent eyeball” (recapturing as well the moment in “Tintern Abbey,” when “we see into the life of things”) should respond so intensely to such a transcendent moment, and even think that “obviously for that passage” the whole of The Excursion “was written.” Emerson had, as any one would, reservations about the didactic stretches of The Excursion (“This will never do,” Francis Jeffrey’s famous Edinburgh Review dismissal of the long-awaited epic, has resonated with more than a few readers). But there were other passages than the one for which the poem was “obviously” written that also haunted Emerson. At certain privileged and precarious moments (he recorded in his journal) the soul “in raptures unites herself to God and Wordsworth truly said, “’Tis the most difficult of tasks to keep/ Heights which the soul is competent to gain’” (Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 4:87). Emerson often cited these lines (Excursion IV.139-40), most memorably in his late essay “Inspiration,” where he laments the unpredictability and evanescence of such moments on the “Heights”: “with us” there is “a flash of light, then a long darkness, then a flash again…This insecurity of possession, this quick ebb of power…tantalizes us.”
Emerson was also fascinated by a related moment of “sublimity” in Book II of The Excursion, a vision experienced, as Emerson records in his journal, by “Wordsworth’s Recluse on the mountain” (JMN 8:51). The blinding mountain mist momentarily parts and the Recluse (or Solitary) glimpses “Glory beyond all glory ever seen.” He has a vision of a heavenly city, a natural phenomenon revelatory of the supernatural, an intimation of immortality (II. 827-81). Emerson, along with John Ruskin (Modern Painters, 364), thought this the most sublime of Wordsworth’s mountain visions. But Emerson was also affected by the mountain perspective with which The Excursion ends: a vision of a magnificent sunset seen from a “grassy mountain’s open side,” an “elevated spot” surrounded “by rocks impassable and mountains huge” (IX. 570-612).
All of these Wordsworthian mountain visions were consciously echoed by Emerson, striving to attain an elevated, enlarged, more affirmative perspective, especially at times when he was desperately seeking consolation in distress. Emerson suffered many familial tragedies, among them the premature death in 1836 of his closest brother, Charles. For all his alleged, even notorious “serenity,” Emerson had, five years earlier, intensely mourned the death of his nineteen-year-old wife, Ellen. In the privacy of his journal he confronted “that which passes away & never returns,” almost fearing that “this miserable apathy” will wear off, and that he will resume among his friends “a tranquil countenance.” He may even, stooping again to “little hopes & little fears,”
forget the graveyard. But will thy eye that was closed on Tuesday ever beam again in the fullness of love on me? Shall I ever be able to connect the face of outward nature, the mists of the morn, the star of eve, the flowers, & all poetry, with the heart & life of an enchanting friend. No. There is one birth & one baptism & and one first love and the affections cannot keep their youth any more than men. (JMN 3:226-27)
Retreating to the solitude of the White Mountains, and then sailing to Europe to meet Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Carlyle, Emerson had eventually recovered from that loss. But as he turned from Charles’s grave, he asked with an enigmatic laugh, what there was “worth living for.” Two weeks later, though he could say, “night rests on all sides upon the facts of our being,” he could also add: we “must own, our upper nature lies always in Day” (Letters 2:19-25). But in the immediate aftermath of the devastating loss of his brother, Emerson fell into a despondency relieved, he tells us, by intense reading of Wordsworth: “Tintern Abbey,” the Intimations Ode (his favorite poem), and, again, the speeches of the Wanderer in The Excursion. “Those who have ministered to my highest needs,” he wrote in his journal for May 9, 1836, “are to me what the Wanderer in The Excursion is to the Poet. And Wordsworth’s total value is of this kind.” Echoing the Ode, as he had in insisting that “our upper nature lies always in Day,” he describes men such as Wordsworth, who offer comfort in distress, as possessing “the true light of all our day.” Their “spirit” constitutes “the argument for the spiritual world” (JMN 5:160-61). Writing in mid-May, after ten days of “helpless mourning,” Emerson began, tentatively, to recover. “I find myself slowly….I remember states of mind that perhaps I had long lost before this grief, the native mountains whose tops reappear after we have traversed many a mile of weary region from our home. Them shall I ever revisit?” (JMN 3:77).
Here, in struggling to achieve that “most difficult of tasks,” to “keep” the Wordsworthian “Heights” or mountain tops he knew the soul was capable of gaining, Emerson was recalling, as a despairing William James later would, the mountain visions and hopeful “states of mind” dramatized by Wordsworth in The Prelude, as well as the consolation offered by his stoical yet enraptured visionary, the Wanderer, especially in the fourth and final Books of The Excursion. Comforted and “elevated” by the Wanderer’s urging of the grief-stricken to convert “sorrow” into “delight,” the “palpable oppressions of despair” into the “active Principle” of hope (Excursion IV. 1058-77; IX. 20-26), a grieving Emerson saw the “tops” of his own “native mountains” begin to reappear, to feel an influx of hope, power, and that “glad light” that is, as he says, “the true light of all our day.” In the journal-entry mourning the loss of Ellen, Emerson had feared that he was forever cut off from nature and from life itself, since there is only “one first love and the affections cannot keep their youth.” That imagery is related to his persistent evocation of the “light of all our day.” To quote the lines he repeatedly, almost obsessively, cites or paraphrases from Wordsworth’s great Ode, Emerson is struggling to recover
……………………………….those first affections, …………………….Those shadowy recollections …………..Which, be they what they may,
Are yet the fountain light of all our day,
Are yet a master light of all our seeing….(Ode, lines 148-52)
Since the recollection of those “first affections” and the intimations of immortality inherent in that light “Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make/ Our noisy years,” including “all that is at enmity with joy,” seem mere “moments in the being/ Of the eternal Silence: truths that wake/ To perish never,” it is not surprising that, in quoting the lines, Emerson invariably elevated “a master light of all our seeing” to “the master light of all our seeing.” There is one other reason, immediately relevant to the theme of this essay, for my emphasis on the “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” Since we began with the “light” seen by Columbus on October 11, 1492, and have been emphasizing, beginning with Keats’s discovery-sonnet and Petrarch’s ascent of Mount Ventoux, the imaginative internalization of exploration, it seems worth adding that, for Emerson, Wordsworth’s great Ode was, above all, a momentous act of discovery. The poem was, he insisted, a “new” voyage “through the void,” representing the “high-water mark” the human mind “has reached in this age….No courage has surpassed that” of the Ode’s author, “this finer Columbus” (JMN 14:98). Emerson revisited that journal entry, reinforcing his variation on the imperial theme, a variation resembling Wordsworth’s sublimation of “banners militant” and “trophies” of war in the lines on the crossing of the Simplon Pass. Emerson concludes chapter 17 of English Traits by asserting that Wordsworth’s Ode added “new realms…to the empire of the muse.”
5
An admirer of the Ode, but a less likely reader of The Excursion, was W. B. Yeats, who set himself—as “a duty to posterity,” according to Ezra Pound, staying with him at Stone Cottage at the time—a Herculean task. He told his father in January 1915 that he had “just started to read through the whole seven volumes of Wordsworth in Dowden’s edition. I have finished The Excursion and begun The Prelude.” But the sententious Wanderer was too facilely optimistic for Yeats’s more astringently joyful taste. Locating himself among “the last Romantics,” Yeats never forgot his boyhood image of Byron’s Manfred, poised in solitude above the clouds on the narrow ledge of the mountain glacier: an image visually echoed in Caspar David Friedrich’s mountain-masterpiece, The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, painted the year after Byron wrote Manfred. In turn, Yeats associated the Byronic hero with Nietzsche—accurately, since the youthful Nietzsche was no less enraptured than was Yeats by the solitary and autonomous Manfred, destined to become one of the principal prototypes of the Űbermensch. Unsurprisingly, Yeats’s ultimate mountain vision, epitomizing “tragic joy,” emerges under auspices less Wordsworthian than Nietzschean. I conclude with Yeats’s superb late poem, “Lapis Lazuli,” written in 1936—precisely a century after Emerson’s journal entries and six centuries after Petrarch ascended Mount Ventoux. Appropriately enough, the poem was published on the eve of World War II.
Writing, like Wordsworth, at a moment of historical crisis, Yeats is annoyed by those who cannot abide the gaiety of artists creating amid impending catastrophe. To counter their consternation, dismissed as “hysterical,” Yeats presents a panorama of civilizations falling and being rebuilt. In his famous “Ode,” Arthur O’Shaughnessy, noting that, while one age may be dying, another is coming to birth, claimed that poets “Built Ninevah with our sighing,/ And Babel itself with our mirth.” An echoing Yeats asserts that “All things fall and are built again,/ And those that build them again are gay”: visionary artists creating out of an ineradicable joy—Homeric, Shakespearean, Nietzschean—in the face of tragedy. Specifically countering the “hysterical women” of the opening lines, Yeats presents Shakespearean heroines—Ophelia and Cordelia, with the glorious queen of the final act of Antony and Cleopatra in the wings—who “do not break up their lines to weep.” Above all, “Hamlet and Lear are gay;/ Gaiety transfiguring all that dread.” Fusing western heroism with Eastern serenity and a more specifically Nietzschean joy, the poem turns in its final movement to the mountain-shaped lapis lazuli sculpture given to Yeats as a gift, and which, in turn, giving the poet his title, serves as the Yeatsian equivalent of Keats’s Grecian urn. He begins by describing the figures on the stone:
Two Chinamen, behind them a third,
Are carved in lapis lazuli;
Over them a long-legged bird,
A symbol of longevity;
The third, doubtless a serving man,
Carries a musical instrument.
In the “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” Keats’s empathetic imagination peaks in evoking scenes not pictured on the urn. Speculating about the origin of those in the sacrificial procession in the fourth stanza, he asks: “What little town by river or sea-shore,/ Or mountain built with peaceful citadel,” has been “emptied” of its people, now caught forever, frozen in stone and never to return. In a similar leap of imagination (even to the repeated ors), Yeats goes on to transform into natural aspects of an invented mountain scenery what were mere imperfections in the stone (accidents I almost added to some years ago, nearly dropping the piece of lapis while visiting the home of Michael and Grania Yeats):
Every discoloration of the stone;
Every accidental crack or dent,
Seems a water-course or an avalanche, Or lofty slope where it still snows
Though doubtless plum or cherry-branch
Sweetens the little half-way house
Those Chinamen climb towards….
Adopting, as Keats had, what Wordsworth calls the “usurping” power of that “glorious faculty,” the Imagination, Yeats not only transforms defects in the stone into features of mountain scenery; in describing what is depicted on the sculpture, he creatively imagines the immobile climbers (as frozen in stone as Keats’s urn-figures) having actually attained the gazebo they are depicted climbing “towards”:
………………………………and I Delight to imagine them seated there;
There, on the mountain and the sky
On all the tragic scene they stare….
Once “there,” they attain, thanks to the imaginative intervention of Yeats, a prospect from which, like Keats’s explorers on Darien, they “stare” out, surveying “all.” One of the two Chinese sages requests music from their companion, who, though “doubtless a serving-man,” is the poem’s musician and resident artist. “Accomplished fingers begin to play,” producing silent music from a carved instrument played by a carved man. Addressing the musical instrument carried by the piper carved on the surface of the Grecian urn, Keats insists that “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard/ Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on.” This “soft” music (just, as it were, beneath the threshold of hearing) is addressed, “Not to the sensual ear,” but, more cherished, “to the spirit.” In both poems, we have an auditory as well as a visual leap of the creative imagination, and an appeal beyond the merely sensual.
The music in “Lapis Lazuli” contributes to the softening of what might have been an austere scene. A few years earlier, in his sonnet “Meru,” Yeats had imagined other mountain visionaries: “Hermits upon Mount Meru or Everest,/ Caverned in night under the drifted snow,” or exposed to dreadful winter storms that “Beat down upon their naked bodies.” While the poet of “Lapis Lazuli” asserts that all things fall and are built again, the Hindu hermits on their sacred mountain, having entered into “the desolation of reality,” know only that “day brings round the night, that before dawn,” man’s “glory and his monuments are gone.” In “Lapis Lazuli,” where the falling “snow,” far from battering naked bodies, seems indistinguishable from cherry blossoms, the tragic vision ends in tragic affirmation.
The melodies may be “mournful,” but, again balancing East with West, the final movement also registers what Yeats perceptively identified as Nietzsche’s “curious astringent joy.” There is even a conscious echo of the gravity-defying gaya scienza of Nietzsche’s prophet, Zarathustra, who insists (I.7, “On Reading and Writing”) that “he who climbs the highest mountains laughs at all tragic plays and tragic seriousness.” Though Yeats didn’t know it, Zarathustra was echoing Wordsworth’s disciple Emerson, in turn a formative influence on the life and work of Nietzsche, who considered him the finest, and most tonic, thinker of the age. Since Emerson himself had referred to the “gay science,” it seems only appropriate that the original epigraph to Nietzsche’s The Gay Science was taken from Emerson. In a splendid passage of Twilight of the Idols (IX.13), contrasting Emerson with his friend Carlyle, Nietzsche pronounces the former “Much more enlightened, more roving, more manifold, subtler than Carlyle; above all, happier.” Illuminating rather than caricaturing Emersonian “optimism,” Nietzsche associates his mentor with his own Zarathustrian dismissal of the spirit of gravity: “Emerson has that gracious and clever cheerfulness which discourages all seriousness.” Here, at last, are the crucial concluding lines of “Lapis Lazuli,” but they require, as context, re-quotation of the whole of the exquisite final movement:
Every discoloration of the stone;
Every accidental crack or dent,
Seems a water-course or an avalanche,
Or lofty slope where it still snows
Though doubtless plum or cherry-branch
Sweetens the little half-way house
Those Chinamen climb towards, and I
Delight to imagine them seated there;
There, on the mountain and the sky,
On all the tragic scene they stare.
One asks for mournful melodies;
Accomplished fingers begin to play.
Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes,
Their ancient glittering eyes are gay.
The fact that the perspective is not quite sub specie aeternitatis, that the “little half-way house” is situated at the midpoint rather than on the summit, makes this a human rather than divine vision. But that in itself also makes it the very epitome of a modern mountain vision, an affirmation, registered in full awareness of “all the tragic scene,” in which the eyes, and the Ayes, have it. The eyes of Yeats’s Rembrandt-like Chinamen, wreathed in the wrinkles of mutability yet still glittering with tragic joy, recall another Wordsworthian “flash”—the “flash” that breaks from “the sable orbs” of the “yet-vivid eyes” of the decrepit but enduring old leech-gatherer in “Resolution and Independence,” one of Yeats’s favorite Wordsworth poems. Those “ancient glittering eyes” evoke as well the famous “glittering eye” of the Ancient Mariner of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Appropriately enough, Coleridge was the friend to whom Wordsworth dedicated The Prelude, that epic exceeding even the passages of The Excursion that haunted Emerson as the definitive celebration of the sublime glory of mountain vision.
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In conclusion: the thematically crucial point is that, for all the high Romantics, early and late, what makes these mountain visions, actual or carved in lapis, truly sublime is that their sensuous, external glory is enhanced—indeed, usurped—by an even greater glory, one “to be found,” as Petrarch said, “only within”: namely, the transforming power of the human imagination. Emphasized in the finales of Emerson’s Nature, Wordsworth’s Prelude, and (as we’ll see in a moment) Keats’s “Ode to Psyche,” that priority is definitively established in the poem in which (as Emerson recognized in re-titling it “Outline”) Wordsworth laid out his entire canonical project. In the “Prospectus” to The Recluse, Wordsworth announces (lines 28-41) that he intends to surpass his master Milton by locating the arena of action in neither the supernatural nor the natural worlds, but within the human mind. Wordsworth is still thinking in terms of mountain gorges and mountain peaks; but, sinking “deep” and ascending “aloft” psychologically rather than physically, he will “pass” by heaven and hell and all other external terrors “unalarmed,” for nothing
………..can breed such fear and awe
As fall upon us when we look
Into our Minds, into the Mind of Man, My haunt, and the main region of my song.
Fittingly for an admirer of Wordsworth, when John Keats, echoing these lines from the “Prospectus” in the final stanza of the “Ode to Psyche,” declares that he will be Psyche’s solitary “priest, and build a fane/ In some untrodden region of my mind,” he surrounds the sanctuary in that interiorized mental landscape with the “branched thoughts” of “dark-clustered trees” that “Fledge the wild-ridged mountains steep by steep.”
In context, this oracular landscape is necessarily Greek, which may remind us that in the first of his two break-through poems (the second is this Ode), the young discoverer of the greatest of Greek epic poets imagined, as the climactic analogue of his experience on first looking into Chapman’s Homer, the eagle-eyed discoverer of the Pacific staring out, “Silent, upon a peak in Darien.” Keats’s poetic temple dedicated to the one neglected goddess in Greek mythology is the autonomous creation of a young poet, as he insists earlier in the Ode, “by my own eyes inspired.” Necessarily, that temple is to be found only within, in “the Mind of Man”: Wordsworth’s “haunt,” and the “main region” of his poetry. When Keats locates his shrine to Psyche in a secluded “region of my mind,” the echo reconfirms that it is a mental edifice, a dome built in air. And yet, in the poet’s imagination—a creative imagination as delighted and fecund as Yeats’s in “Lapis Lazuli”—that shrine is surrounded by “wild-ridged mountains steep by steep.” In short, no matter how interiorized the “region,” it retains, perhaps inevitably given Keats’s reverence of Wordsworth, the vestiges of yet another of his precursor’s imaginatively-transfigured mountain visions.*
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*A sad postscript. Keats thought The Excursion, including the “Prospectus” that introduced it, one of the few things “to be wondered at in this age,” and we know, from his friend Benjamin Hayden, that the passage he preferred “to all others” was the beautiful evocation of the world of Greek mythology in Book IV, reanimating the sun-god Apollo with his “blazing chariot” and ravishing lute, and the “beaming” moon-goddess, Diana, moving “across the lawn and through the darksome groves” (850-64). Yet when Keats, urged by Hayden, read aloud to Wordsworth his early “Hymn to Pan,” the older poet famously if somewhat ambiguously responded: “a very pretty piece of paganism,” apparently condemning with faint praise. Would Keats’s hero have thought the same of the far superior “Ode to Psyche”? Though one fervently hopes not, he may have, given his hardening Christian orthodoxy by then, and what Keats perceptively and, with equal ambiguity, designated “the Wordsworthian or egotistical sublime.” The “Mind of Man” that was the “main region” of his song was, after all, first and foremost the “mind”—of William Wordsworth.
