Romantic Circles Reviews

Reviewed by
Steven J. Willett
University of Shizuoka, Hamamatsu Campus

Despite the modest renaissance in the study of versification the past few years, romantic critics continue to write about poetry as if it were little more than a textual stream of rhetoric, imagery, metaphor, ideology and selfreferentiality whose only purpose is to provide matter for hermeneutic hunters. Nowhere has this tendency been more pronounced than in criticism of Wordsworth, a poet who combined unmatched passion for the sound and rhythmic texture of poetry with a Horatian dedication to craftsmanship. As Brennan O’Donnell notes in the introduction to this superb study of Wordsworth’s metrical art, “Wordsworthians and commentators on the romantic period and on the history of English poetry and prosody have tended, with some notable exceptions, to depreciate, dismiss as irrelevant, or simply ignore the particularities and peculiarities of Wordsworth’s verse considered as verse” (2). The neglect of the metrical, rhythmic and auditory in Wordsworth is symptomatic of a general postmodernist tendency to level all literary texts to one semantic Flatland where their oral, aural and temporal dimensions are lost. Against this background of neglect, The Passion of Meter: A Study of Wordsworth’s Metrical Art stands out as the first and for some time probably the only sustained treatment of his metrical theory and practice. It rectifies a crucial omission in our understanding of Wordsworth, but does more than just that. Its close, dexterous analysis of the verse provides a virtual education in techniques of metrical scansion for the reader with little knowledge of prosody. The exposition of metrical theory is so lucid, and the examples so well chosen, that one can learn quite enough here to read many another poet with a fair degree of metrical competence.

Nearly half the Introduction (11–17) is given over to a detailed explanation of the scansion and terminology used throughout The Passion of Meter. This is necessary, since O’Donnell has chosen to employ the system of metrical analysis devised by Derek Attridge in The Rhythms of English Poetry (1982) as his chief tool for exploring the subtleties of Wordsworth’s versification. In recent years Attridge has turned his attention to literary theory, Joyce and South African fiction, but his landmark book still remains one of the most important contributions to English metrical theory in the past 25 years. It is not, however, easy reading due to the sheer density of argument. These seven pages provide as concise, accurate and pragmatic a summary as one could hope to find in such short compass. Those who would like a more thorough summary of the principles underlying the 1982 work should consult his recent college textbook, Poetic Meter: An Introduction (1996).

The Passion of Meter falls into two parts of very unequal length. The first part consists of two chapters, one that traces out Wordsworth’s own complex theory of meter from among other sources (a) his abstract public statements in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads and (b) his more practical views in letters to John Thelwall and William Rowan Hamilton (Chapter 1), and one that addresses the significant differences between himself and Coleridge on the function of meter (Chapter 2). The second part, of three chapters and a conclusion, treats the versification of the poems under the following categories: the early practice of “An Evening Walk” and “Descriptive Sketches” (Chapter 3), the varieties of stanzaic form in the Lyrical Ballads (Chapter 4), the characteristics of Wordsworthian blank verse (Chapter 5) and the poet’s late apologia for his dedication to verse, “On the Power of Sound” (Conclusion).

Thelwall and a number of revisionary prosodists writing in the period 1770–1815 insisted that the true genius of English verse music lay in independence from abstract metrical patterns. They, like many modern poets, advocated the subordination of meter to the normal prose rhythms of English. Wordsworth’s own theory of meter places him squarely in the main accentual-syllabic tradition running from Surrey to Pope and in opposition to the reformers who wanted to loosen constraints on the verse line. An understanding of his opposition to current ideas is, O’Donnell rightly insists, necessary if we are to read him metrically: “Appreciating Wordsworth’s resistance to contemporary developments in prosodic theory and practice is of primary importance in reading Wordsworth metrically. Indeed, I think that many twentieth-century commentators have failed to hear the music of Wordsworth’s verse in part because the attitude toward verse pronunciation and performance that Thelwall espouses more closely approximates our own than does Wordsworth’s” (31). While essentially conservative in his metrical practice, Wordsworth held a novel theory of meter whose articulation, scattered oven many disparate sources, is often oblique.

O’Donnell untangles the involved braid of theory better than almost any other critic I know. In essence, Wordsworth conceived of the verse line as the locus for two different systems of organization, “the passion of meter” and “the passion of sense” as he calls them in an important letter to Thelwall. The predictable passion of meter, which suggests something inevitable as a natural force, must be fitted to the widely variable passion of sense. The fitting is not mechanical or fixed, but fluid and organic in the best sense of the words: sometimes the passion of meter fully supports and sometimes significantly resists the organizing dynamics of the passion of sense.
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Reviewed by
Gary Harrison
University of New Mexico

In Landscape, Liberty and Authority: Poetry, Criticism and Politics from Thomson to Wordsworth, Tim Fulford revisits territory made familiar by Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), John Barrell’s The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting, 1730-1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), and most recently Elizabeth Helsinger’s Rural Scenes and National Representation: Britain, 1815-1850 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). Like Williams, Fulford attends to the opposition between the Country and the City, focusing in particular upon the works of Thomson, Cowper, Johnson, Wordsworth and Coleridge, as well as upon the picturesque theories of Uvedale Price, Richard Payne Knight, Humphry Repton, and William Gilpin. Like Barrell and Helsinger, Fulford examines in fine detail the complex web of relations among landscape aesthetics, poetry, rural poverty, and politics. More carefully attending to the particularities of party politics than these writers, Fulford traces a genealogy of transformations in the political inflection of landscape poetry from The Seasons to Home at Grasmere. In so doing, this remarkable book offers an implicit critique of the new historicism, while detailing the relationships among party politics, agrarian change, landscape poetry, and each poet’s unique attempt—stylistically and thematically—to claim some moral, political and personal authority for his poetic voice.

As Fulford demonstrates with fine detail and with a stylistic grace all too uncommon to much contemporary critical discourse, landscape poetry, at least since the time of Thomson, was always fully imbricated in the changing social, political, and moral debates of its day. Eschewing the monolithic view of history as a succession of grand events, the sort of history that folds literary texts back into a Glorious, or American, or French Revolution writ large, Fulford focuses upon the local and contemporary, especially the agrarian, politics in which each poet was intimately involved. Fulford takes pains to describe how each poet’s particular version of landscape poetry is shaped by the way private concerns and local incidents intersect with national issues and party politics regarding the changing status and social function of the landed gentry. Beginning with Thomson’s landscape poetry of the 1730s and 1740s, Fulford argues, the erosion of moral authority and social responsibility of the landed gentry made increasingly problematic the British poet’s ability to “represent an uncontroversial ground of liberty in which a providentially arranged natural order could be observed at leisure, thus perpetuating the taste and disinterest by which the gentry might reproduce that liberty and independence in wise government” (8). As the moral authority, political integrity, and social stability of the landed gentry gave way to the encroachment of the market economy into rural England, and as the landscapes of rural England increasingly became the sites of political contest between landed and commercial interests, British landscape poetry, as it were, lost its pastoral innocence. Because the virtual landscape was now fraught with the troublesome contradictions over land and landed interest permeating the actual landscape, the universalizing strategies and tropes of earlier pastoral and georgic poetry rung increasingly hollow. The prospect view, by means of which “the propertied classes were able to present their political dominance as confirmed by the natural scene” (3), began to lose its universal appeal as the “independence and disinterest on which depended the gentry’s and nobility’s legitimacy as the people’s representatives in parliament was being undermined” by “a system of placement, pensioners and patronage” (8).

In their struggle to recover poetic authority and to preserve, or restore, the idea of liberty within a landscape poetry destabilized by its own politicization, British poets drew upon, modified, and sometimes challenged the landscape aesthetics of their precursors. Fulford shows that Thomson, Johnson, Cowper, the picturesque theorists, Wordsworth, and Coleridge engaged in a dialogical exchange that modified landscape poetry to meet the particular ideological problems faced by each writer as he engaged in his own version of pastoral politics. As Fulford explains in the introduction: “The representation of landscape was never simply a disguised ideology presenting gentlemanly aesthetic judgment as naturally, and by implication socially and politically, valid. It was also a discourse in which that judgment could be redefined, challenged, and even undermined . . .” (5). As these writers invoked the discourse on landscape to negotiate their own conflicted relation to the politics of the country and the city, they were also faced with the task of finding new ways to figure personal and public liberty and authority in a society that no longer would sustain the pastoral-georgic ideal of an earlier era.

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Reviewed by
Samuel Lyndon Gladden
Texas A&M University

Daniel P. Watkins’s study of works by three major Romantic writers—Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats—examines the place of sexual roles and gendered struggles for power within a social and political landscape marked by profound economic change. Specifically, Watkins investigates the shift from an aristocratic, feudal economy to an emerging capitalism, and he points to gendered subjectivity as the primary experiential space through which anxieties over that shift were mediated. Posing the model of “sadeian logic” as the template for making sense of both social and interpersonal relations, Watkins reads a number of well-known Romantic works through the lenses of gender, class, and power finally to conclude that while the idealistic tendency of Romanticism remains compromised by the masculinist biases of its day, a feminist materialist investigation of the history and historicity of that dilemma—the very sort of project in which Watkins’ study participates—offers Romanticism its only way out of the convoluted patriarchalism that structured social, economic, and interpersonal relationships in the early nineteenth century.

Throughout his book, Watkins argues that “during the romantic period there are close relations between visionary idealism, patriarchy, and sadism” (60), and he demonstrates how “[the] three admittedly nonparallel categories of society, philosophy, and sexuality seem . . . to be crucial in the attempt to locate and explain, in historical terms, the romantic imagination and romantic textuality” (xvi). Anticipating skepticism about his subject and approach in the brief “Introduction” that opens the book, Watkins remarks that a central “problem” of Romanticism—in particular, how that movement’s ” . . . entanglement in the turbulent conditions of both feudalism and capitalism [and] its involvement with the declining energy of the Enlightenment project . . . [shapes] the romantic understanding and portrayal of gender” (xv)—”can be considered most usefully when gender is cast in its strongest possible form and then set in relation to other prominent, or constitutive, features of romanticism” (xvi). Indeed, for Watkins, the hallmarks of Romanticism—”[f]ragmentation, alienation, and reification”—are never overcome but, instead, are “pushed further down into the inner recesses of social life until they are almost hidden away in one of the most basic relations of human existence-sexuality” (120). Watkins offers the strongest support for his subject and methodology near the end of his chapter on Keats where he justifies the turn to sadeian logic by underscoring a phenomenological link between the almost simultaneous and, Watkins suggests, the contingent emergence of the works of Sade and the development of the Romantic attitude. Of the particular gender bias for which Romanticism has long been attacked, Watkins writes that “[i]t is important to call the logic of this masculinist poetic strategy sadeian because the word both suggests the severity of the poem’s portrayal of gender and helps to link various social and cultural energies of the age within a single historical and cultural framework” (123). Watkins concludes his study by pointing to the three ways in which such a project—which, he maintains, might seem to invalidate any reading of Romantic poetry as anything other than oppressive, particularly at the level of gender—remains useful to larger questions about Romanticism and its cultural moment. Specifically, Watkins argues that “feminism must explain the enabling logic and shaping conditions of violence if it is to be defused and its energies positively redirected”; that his project “calls attention to the historical field where oppression takes place and, therefore, where goal-oriented materialist feminism must always begin”; and that “feminist intervention . . . enables romanticism to be brought forward as history rather than as ideology or nostalgia, serving not only as a poetic expression of hope but also as a historical register of the real conditions of that hope” (129).

This reviewer’s lengthy focus on Watkins’ subject and methodology underscores the anxiety the author himself voices throughout Sexual Power and British Romantic Poetry; indeed, Watkins admits that his decision to focus on exclusively a few well-known works by canonical writers results from the fact that while he believes his model to hold true for the larger Romantic movement, these familiar and easily accessible texts function as test cases in which his theory may be satisfactorily investigated. Watkins begins with Wordsworth, whose own attitude about political revolution and whose plan for poetic revolution mark him as an important figure to consider in terms of the shifting climates that shaped the early portion of the Romantic age. Focusing on “Tintern Abbey,” “Nutting,” and the “stolen boat episode” from The Prelude, Watkins argues that Wordsworth’s meditations on the self and its place both in the narrow register of individual imagination and in the larger scheme of social relations demonstrate an obsession with emerging subjectivity, which Watkins ties to a cultural and economic shift from feudalism to capitalism. As a member of a developing capitalist society, Watkins argues, Wordsworth struggles to find a place for himself in an increasingly self-made world.
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Reviewed by

John Rieder
University of Hawaii at Manoa

One of the repeated claims in Mark Schoenfield’s reading of “law, labor, and the poet’s contract” is that aesthetic issues in William Wordsworth’s day were inevitably political issues as well. While the claim itself has become something of a literary-critical commonplace in the 1990s, Schoenfield evokes its pertinence to Wordsworth and Wordsworth’s milieu with considerable skill and precision. The primary context for Schoenfield’s historicizing interpretation is not contemporary politics but rather the growth of the free market and the rise of the modern professions. The entanglement of aesthetics with social issues arises from a tension between value and judgment, or between consumption and criticism, that inevitably accompanied the published work’s dual status as commodity and work of art. Schoenfield’s counter-figure for the Wordsworthian poetic imagination is therefore not Napoleon or empire but rather a composite character, the lawyer as critical reviewer. Many reviewers were, like Francis Jeffrey, also lawyers, and Schoenfield begins his book by noting that in classical Athens kritikos meant both critic and judge. One of the main merits of The Professional Wordsworth is that it develops this general overlapping of legal and critical domains into a supple tool for the study of Wordsworth’s poetry.

The thematic emphases of Schoenfield’s readings are hardly new. The book’s subtitle will no doubt remind Wordsworthians immediately that the poet raises the issue of a contract between poet and reader in the “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads. An extensive critical literature exists concerning the way Wordsworth’s poems and poetics treat law, justice, property, and the relation of contractual agreements to the bonds of community and to economies both of wealth and of social interaction. Schoenfield’s study is distinctive and original in at least two ways, however. The first lies in his knowledge of legal history and the specificity with which he brings it to bear on Wordsworth’s poetry. No other critic has written in comparable detail about the relevance of English common law, Blackstone’s commentaries, and contemporary legal developments to the treatment of property and rights in the Lyrical Ballads and The Excursion. The second has to do with Schoenfield’s emphasis on Wordsworth’s sense of professionalism. The turn Schoenfield gives to Wordsworth’s contention in the “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads that the poet speaks “not as a lawyer, a physician, a mariner, an astronomer or a natural philosopher, but as a Man” is away from the formula’s essentialism or humanism to its struggle to wrest priority over a certain kind of authority from the poet’s professional rivals, and especially from the lawyer who heads up the list. Schoenfield is interested in Wordsworth’s self-conception as a professional producer, owner, and distributor of words, a self-conception he links to Wordsworth’s penchant for laborious revision, his attention to the publication and republication of his work, and above all to an ongoing confrontation between legal and poetic conceptions of authority in his poetry.

Poetry’s confrontation with legal authority often evokes some variation of the “unacknowledged legislator” of Johnson’s Rasselas or Shelley’s Defence of Poetry, and Schoenfield’s analysis includes such a moment. For Wordsworth, he says, “[Poetic discourse] is not so much beyond law as a lawmaker, or more precisely, a trace of the totemic moment which, as Freud speculates, preceded law as an institution” (89–90). This sounds as if Schoenfield is placing Wordsworth’s poetics within a theory of social contract in such a way that poetic authority precedes and makes possible the break between the state of nature and political order. Thus Schoenfield writes of “the transformational power of [Wordsworth's] poetry not as a violation of custom or law but as the recuperation of the aesthetic roots of the former and a legitimate critique of the latter” (108). But the paradoxical resonance of calling poetry a “legitimate critique” of law catches more accurately the prevailing tone of Schoenfield’s work. The poet’s efforts to assert his priority over legal discourse always seem to end up repeating the legal figures and procedures they try to overcome. For example, Wordsworth’s transformation of an oral tale into written poetry in “Michael” is said to “reenact within literature the legal empowerment that is the object of his social critique” (38). This simultaneous resistance to and containment by legal discourse is the overriding burden of Schoenfield’s analysis.

The prevalence of the resistance-containment paradigm also attests to the enveloping presence and determining power accorded to market forces. The market forces at stake here are those driving late eighteenth-century English law away from the common law monumentally elucidated in Blackstone and towards statutory law. Schoenfield’s reading of “Michael” turns on the contemporary transformation of the notion of a legal contract from its common law status, the representation of an obligation that needed to be rooted in prior conditions, to the more financially responsive concept of a written instrument that itself performs the agreement. The explicit and implied contracts Schoenfield carefully unpacks reveal that an abiding tension between local and national economies involves Michael and his property in a web of “dependencies which mean and affect more than Michael can understand and contain” (39). A similar set of legal and economic tensions informs Schoenfield’s interpretation of “Goody Blake and Harry Gill.” The poem’s narrative of “a crime, a trial, and a punishment . . . overlays features of medieval law onto modern law to demonstrate the deficiency of the latter, and structures the trial as between two theories of property” (103).
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Reviewed by

Mark S. Lussier

Arizona State University

The use of Zen thought and art as a method for reading Wordsworthian poetic production is, to my mind, long overdue, especially since Wordsworth’s mode of spiritual meditation remains embedded in a “discourse of the Other,” whether anchored in the “capaciousness of natural process” or dispersed into the “isolation” of the Leech-Gatherer. John Rudy’s small book certainly achieves its twofold purpose: “It seeks to provide a Zen context for understanding the spirituality of the English poet William Wordsworth (1770–1850) and attempts to enrich the East-West dialogue” emerging with considerable force in the West during the latter half of the twentieth century (xi). As a result, Wordsworth and the Zen Mind will undoubtedly, though not unproblematically, become a foundational text as this critical concern flows into other eddies within Romantic criticism. Indeed, in reviewing my marginal annotations for this assessment, I found continual intersection with other Romantic poets generally and William Blake particularly, suggesting the need for even wider application of the strategies embodied in Rudy’s thoughtful book.

While many Romanticists continue to embrace the judgment of the second generation that the Wordsworthian process itself defines the “egotistical sublime”—a position not compatible with the practice of self-emptying at the spiritual core of most Buddhist vehicles of enlightenment—Rudy’s thorough application of Zen thought and practice points to another Wordsworth, one engaged (whether consciously or unconsciously) in the eradication of “dualistic idiom[s]” buried in Western epistemology in order to perceive that “the entire phenomenal world, all that exists, is tied together in a gigantic, interrelated, interanimative web of moving aggregates” (11, 14). Viewed in this light, it is easy to see why Wordsworth was the first Romantic poet to receive ecocritical scrutiny since such a view anticipates James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, but simply seeing Wordsworth’s commitments in “green” political terms fails to confront the degree to which, as Barbara Schapiro argues, “imagination and Nature, or mind and the material world, are mutually reflecting realms for Wordsworth” (qtd. in Rudy, 10). This aspect of Wordsworth’s poetic practice lurks on the margins of Rudy’s text, which positions itself at the point where mental and material processes coalesce.

The tripartite structure through which Rudy organizes his discussion begins with the “characterless immensity” of capaciousness in inner and outer experience (27), expands into a comparison of the resonant “paths” explored by Wordsworth and Zen (“Each thing is a revealing of and a resting place for the infinite” [65]), and ends with specific consideration of discrete Zen “moods” (sabi/isolation, wabi/poverty, aware/impermanence, and yugen/mystery) manifest in several of Wordsworth’s best-known works. The primary link between Wordsworthian and Zen modes remains the recognition of what quantum physicist David Bohm describes as the implicate state of mind/matter relations, the enfolding of one within the other. Rudy discusses this point through the representations of the Alpine crossing in the sixth book of The Prelude, where the collapse of poetic “intention” and “acceptance” of experiential flow provide the dynamic for visionary connection: “All is an endless swirl of forces, objects, and events folding inward on each other to form the pulsatory eternity of the present moment, a totality that is always with us, that is for all practical purposes the coming forth of each thing in its own right” (80).

To his credit, Rudy does not attempt to transmute Wordsworth into a Buddhist without nominal designation since “there is no evidence to suggest that he was formally influenced by the philosophy” (218); rather, Rudy’s argument confronts the problem of Wordsworth’s occasional inability to accommodate the implications of his own spiritual insights. Again focusing on the Alpine episode, Rudy argues that additional complexities arise “because Wordsworth himself had only the dimmest understanding of such experiences and resorted on many occasions to the very dualistic perspective” (84) that hinders post-nineteenth-century critical understanding of the poet’s perception that mind and matter form an implicate order. Thus, while the application of Zen to Wordsworth (and vice versa) remains the textual steady state, the author never loses perspective on the limitations of those applications. As a result, within such complex framing, a new perspective of the poet becomes possible:

Indeed, throughout the Wordsworth canon, one senses that the many references to freedom and solitude, whether direct or implicit, celebrate not a resistance to the conditions of experience nor a transcendence to a higher state beyond the vicissitudes of life but an abiding acceptance so complete in itself that all moods, all states of being, are in some way positive and contributive. (107)

In its best modes (and “moods”), Wordsworth’s poetry operates through dynamic exchange where “mind and nature, like the roaring of the one voice of the waters, are so conjoined as to be indistinguishable . . . a oneness in which all distinctions between the human soul and the soul of nature, the human imagination and the ‘imagination of the whole,’ fall inward on each other” (201).

Often those positive “states of being” reside in Wordsworth’s poetical characters, rather than the node of poetic consciousness associated with the poetic eye: the Leech-Gatherer, rather than the speaking “I” of the poem, achieves emptiness, solitude, freedom (102–6); the child, rather than the father, cuts through spiritual materialism in “Anecdote for Fathers” (118–21), and the Cumberland Beggar, although “the very image of poverty” (125), underwrites communal charity by enabling “the villagers to forget the self and partake of a deeper goodness than mere utilitarian and religious institutional strategies can reach” (128). Through such characterizations, Wordsworth continually brings into view—to use Nishitani’s phrase—”a `horizon of nihility at the ground of life’” (122), establishing a position from which to “move within ourselves to the bottomless depths of the individual” and allowing the discovery of “the true absolute, which is, paradoxically, forever negating itself through us in a self-emptying matrix of eternal creativity” (179). In a sense, one might say, Wordsworth’s best poetry encourages self-erasure (or what Blake terms “self-annihilation”) even when the poetic eye fails to enter such an annihilated subjective space.

Finally, readers should be aware of the limitations of the book, which Rudy states quite clearly in his preface: “On the few occasions when I have undertaken to comment on studies of Wordsworth, I have endeavored to avoid a critique of Western literary scholarship and the philosophical principles on which it is based, preferring instead to adumbrate lines of demarcation that provide opportunities for alternative rather than contending interpretive visions” (xii). Readers looking for a systematic analysis of Eastern thinking in a Western academic mode (a synthesis of the secondary) would need look elsewhere, but readers interested in the considerable confluence residing within Eastern and Western poetics as meditative practice will find this book extremely satisfying.