Reviewed by
Brian Bates
University of Denver

In Wordsworth Writing, Andrew Bennett challenges several pervasive myths about Wordsworth, revisits the most significant cruxes of twentieth-century Wordsworth criticism, and sheds fresh light on Wordsworth’s poetic practice. Bennett carries out this three-pronged revision by questioning the assumption behind many studies of Wordsworth’s life and poetry: that Wordsworth composed poetry without actually writing. Wordsworth has long been considered a poet who composed aloud while walking outdoors, but Bennett contends that this view of Wordsworth as a spontaneous poet of nature misrepresents how he wrote the majority of his poetry. Instead, Bennett demonstrates that Wordsworth’s concern with the process of writing—from thinking about writing, to inscribing words on the page, false starts, writing blocks, and re-writing—defined his poetic identity, choice of subject matter, and passion for poetry.

Although Bennett’s argument cuts across the grain of much Wordsworth criticism, it also explores why so many critics have upheld the notion that for this Lake poet writing and, more particularly, written words were worthless. From the “Preface to Lyrical Ballads” (1800) to the Fenwick Notes (1843), Wordsworth often publicized his written poetry as a kind of speech and fashioned himself as a poet who composed extemporaneously because he immersed himself in natural and inspiring surroundings. In chapter one, Bennett traces how this branding of Wordsworth occurred in the nineteenth century and then closely examines the evidence that critics, biographers, and painters have drawn upon to interpret Wordsworth’s poetic habits. After demonstrating that this evidence is sparse, ambiguous, and occasionally unreliable, Bennett turns to Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals because they offer the closest account of William’s perambulatory compositions. Bennett concludes that Dorothy’s uses of “composing” and description of her brother’s writing process reveal that William most often composed indoors and that when he was outside, he primarily sat down to write while composing. Chapter one reconfigures Wordsworth as a working and often frustrated writer. However, this unmasking of Wordsworth does not recount how many of Wordsworth’s contemporary critics and satirists saw through his public attempts to divorce writing from composition. They lambasted him, early and often, for presenting himself as a poet of nature who labors without laboring.

Bennett’s empirical proof of Wordsworth’s writing habits and quibbling about how much Wordsworth composed aloud or wrote with a pen might seem inconsequential. Chapter two, however, quells such doubts by turning to “the most famous example of the Wordsworthian denial of writing,” his poem “Tintern Abbey” (45). Bennett maintains that Wordsworth’s title change in 1815 from “Lines Written” to “Lines Composed” reveals most acutely Wordsworth’s efforts to present himself as a spontaneous poet of nature who disengaged writing from oral composition. Most nineteenth- and twentieth-century critics, including New Historicists, have reified this image of Wordsworth composing the entire poem aloud on his walking tour. Bennett, however, argues that the process of writing the poem in Bristol, at the end of this tour, structures its thematic ideas and form. From its deictics “these,” “here,” and “this,” and tension between present and past composition, to its repetitions, absences, and figurations of the country and city, “Tintern Abbey” lauds speech and natural inspiration but also anxiously records how necessary the city and writing were for its creation and are for its reception.
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JackCragwall Uncategorized Andrew Bennett, Brian Bates, William Wordsworth

Reviewed by
Matthew VanWinkle
Ohio University

Adam Potkay’s ambitious study provides a deep background for a word of particular interest to Romantic era writers, a word that since has fallen into relative disfavor. By tracing instances of joy through a range of religious and literary texts, Potkay seeks to establish two constants in its variable history. The first is that joy, as distinct from words or concepts nearly synonymous, bears a close relationship to narrative. The second is that joy is inextricably involved with questions of ethics. Given how rapidly he surveys two and a half millennia of cultural history in the West, Potkay cannot always give each of these claims equal or consistent attention. Even so, he develops these claims persuasively, supporting them with a richness of detail and a clarity that still recognizes complexity. The result is a thoughtful and a bracing book that suggests both the need for and the appeal of further scholarly interest in its subject.

John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding supplies Potkay’s initial definition of joy: “a delight of the Mind, from the consideration of the present or assured approaching possession of a Good” (4). With this formulation as the foundation for the ethical dimension of joy, Potkay articulates its narrative features in terms of reunion and fulfillment. Its unique relationship to narrative distinguishes joy from the emotions and experiences that it otherwise closely resembles. Unlike happiness, joy cannot be pursued; it is a something given, usually unexpected in its arrival no matter how long it has been anticipated. Unlike ecstasy, joy retains some sense of self, however transformed; it never fully eradicates individual personality. Happiness always tells the same story of virtue, while the radical disruption of ecstasy resists narration altogether. Joy is a resting place, if not entirely a conclusion, the satisfaction of desire rather than the keenest experience of it. This hesitation between expectation and completion means that it has a wider variety of stories to tell.

If its uncertain proximity to conclusion gives joy a narrative vitality, it also complicates its ethical significance. Taking the gospel of John as the point of departure for his first chapter, Potkay emphasizes the ways in which joy locates the tension between self and other in the Christian tradition. The joy of salvation involves either the absorption of the self in a larger good or the participation of a transformed self in this same good. In both cases the self finds its reward as a member of a chosen community, in a belonging that surpasses longing. Yet the unity of this belonging defines itself against a recalcitrant larger world. In its most extreme form, as it sometimes appears in the writings of Augustine, the joyous reunion with God precludes even this belonging; enjoying the company of one’s fellow believers becomes only a means to the greater end. While Aquinas, supplementing the gospel of John with Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, reasserts the virtue of finding joy in one’s fellow creatures, the ambiguities of individual and communal salvation remain a concern both for eschatology and for psychology.

A version of this concern becomes even more acute in the wake of the Protestant Reformation, as Potkay argues in his third chapter. As sacramental traditions lose some of their ability to reassure, the need to display the conviction of one’s salvation grows more urgent. Where Augustine might have recognized a serene, introspective sense of fullness as joy, Luther places a new emphasis on joy as the public expression of gladness. At the same time, Luther acknowledges that the expression of joy does not in itself produce the foretaste of reunion with God that it hopes to represent. This disparity provokes unprecedented misgivings over the dangers of joylessness. Potkay expertly explores the significance of these misgivings in the first book of The Faerie Queene, where Redcrosse is unable to fully vanquish—indeed, comes to resemble in subtle ways—the treacherous Sans-Joy. The perils of joylessness also shadow the sermons of John Donne, whose personal religious history (Potkay suggests) would make the story of joy as reunion especially alluring and fraught. On one hand, Donne’s championing of ecclesiastical joy “would seem to allow for an enlightened religious pluralism.” On the other, “its stance of embattled group separatism generates further, intra-group separatism” (87-88). The inner experience of joy is shared by all denominations, eroding their ostensible differences; the increasingly various ways of articulating this experience reinforce these differences.
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JackCragwall Uncategorized Adam Potkay, Joy, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Blake, William Wordsworth

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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admin No. 2, Vol. 1 John Rieder, law, lawyer, Mark Schoenfield, profession, William Wordsworth, _The Professional Wordsworth_

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.

admin No. 2, Vol. 1 Bhuddism, John G. Rudy, Mark Lussier, self, subjectivity, William Wordsworth, Zen, _Wordsworth and the Zen Mind_

Reviewed by
Beth Bradburn
Boston College

Nancy Easterlin’s Wordsworth and the Question of “Romantic Religion” vividly manifests both the advantages and the pitfalls of an interdisciplinary approach to literature. Easterlin addresses the question of Romantic religion by thinking about religion, and by bringing to bear the cumulative insights of the field known as psychology of religion. She argues persuasively that the psychological study of religious experience may productively rediscribe some important tensions in Romanticism; for example, she points out that it is “the paradoxical discrepancy between religion defined, on the one hand, as affective experience—state of heightened consciousness or intuition of the divine, for example—and, on the other, as organized belief systems that describes the characteristic and manifestly problematic religiousness of romanticism” (29). The tension between individual and social that seems to pervade Romanticism is, in other words, also the paradox of religion.

This recognition opens up a partial insight into the formal project of Romantic poetry. Easterlin contends that religious debates which distinguish spirituality, or subjective religious experience, from ritual and dogma are brought on by the faltering of orthodox beliefs. It is precisely religious orthodoxy, however, that promotes the faith that affirms the authenticity of subjective religious experience. Any effort to validate individual spirituality through poetry actually ends up undermining faith, because “the highest order of religious experience is by definition extraconceptual, and therefore extralinguistic” (49), and because the very project of writing poetry calls attention to the individual human consciousness and cognitive processes at work, thereby weakening the perceived reality of mystical states.

This psychological paradox provides the key to Easterlin’s reading of three of Wordsworth’s major works. “Tintern Abbey” sets up and expresses the paradox. The Prelude and Ecclesiastical Sonnets both represent efforts to resolve it, The Prelude by “deemphasizing religious experience per se and instead elaborating a monistic conception of reality which is the characteristic result of mystical experience” (47), and Ecclesiastical Sonnets by moving away from the spiritual toward the orthodoxy of ritual and dogma. Easterlin attributes Wordsworth’s poetic decline in part to the gradual failure of his conviction that poetry can provide the assurance offered by religious institutions.

This approach works well in the chapter on “Tintern Abbey,” which Easterlin insists is generated by a “contingent need to recover, reinterpret, and communicate the value of mystical experience” (64). She argues that several passages are best interpreted, in terms of both language and imagery, as attempts to render a particular type of religious experience; her insight demonstrates a most effective use of interdisciplinary study. Psychologists of religion have a typology of religious experience that literary critics lack; some aspects of “Tintern Abbey” are visible only from the vantage point of another discipline. “Psychology of religion,” by the way, is a subfield of the contemporary discipline of cognitive psychology, not of psychoanalysis. Easterlin devotes a large part of her first chapter to distinguishing psychological models from psychoanalytic ones, and her eloquent critique of literary scholars’ over reliance on Freudian theory invigorates her crossing of disciplines.

Of course, one problem with an interdisciplinary approach to literary scholarship is that the imported discipline may be emphasized at the expense of literary critical or historical considerations. Wordsworth and the Question of “Romantic Religion” falls into this trap, resulting in a general sense of inadequate historical grounding. Though Easterlin’s explication of the psychology of religion is important and interesting, I sometimes felt that I was learning more about William James than about William Wordsworth. Other than the major poetic texts under consideration, there is very little of Wordsworth’s other writing, or even other Romantic-era material, quoted or alluded to. While I find plausible the assumption that a neuropsychologically grounded theory of religion has some claim to transhistorical application, Easterlin’s speculations about the effects of an unstable religious orthodoxy suffer from the absence of any discussion of how that instability played out both in Wordsworth’s life and in the larger historical and cultural context.

Moreover, the entire project of interpreting Wordsworth’s poetic trajectory in terms of a move toward religious orthodoxy depends on the unexamined premise that traditional poetic forms have a fairly simple relationship to traditional religious dogma and ritual. Easterlin appears to take it for granted that linguistic features directly represent philosophical concepts, saying, for instance, that “Wordsworth’s habit of merging literal and figurative language” (98) is an elaboration of his philosophy of the inseparability of the real and the imaginary. Such assertions are symptomatic of a larger problem with the book; ultimately, Easterlin’s application of psychology of religion does little more than rename philosophical and aesthetic tensions to which the Romantics themselves consciously attended. The potential for new insight is realized only in partial and sporadic ways.

Clearly, however, the potential is there; I never lost faith in Easterlin’s insistence that what cognitive psychologists now know about religious experience in general may help us understand Romantic religious experience in particular. The book is valuable and instructive for its intelligent effort to work outside psychoanalytic theory; but attempts to rethink the psychological models we use to understand Romanticism must integrate other recent critical insights, particularly those of New Historicism.

admin No. 1, Vol. 1 Beth Bradburn, Nancy Easterlin, religion, spirituality, William Wordsworth, _Wordsworth and the Question of 'Romantic Religion'_