John Cowper Powys and the Afterlife of Romanticism: Re-imagining William Wordsworth and John Keats 9798765119440

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\\b-fs02\Bloomsbury-L\ Data_Continuum\Bloom sbury-US\Wheatley040 724BPUS\Typesetting\ Production\Finals\Digita lBundle\979876511942 6_txt_webpdf

John Cowper Powys and the Afterlife of Romanticism

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John Cowper Powys and the Afterlife of Romanticism Re-imagining William Wordsworth and John Keats Kim Wheatley

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2025 Copyright © Kim Wheatley, 2025 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on pp. ix–x constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Eleanor Rose Cover image: Portrait of John Cowper Powys, 1944, by his sister Gertrude Mary Powys (1877–1952), Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales. By kind permission of Powys Estate All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Wheatley, Kim, 1960- author. Title: John Cowper Powys and the afterlife of Romanticism: re-imagining William Wordsworth and John Keats / Kim Wheatley. Description: New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2025. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2024026364 (print) | LCCN 2024026365 (ebook) | ISBN 9798765119426 (hardback) | ISBN 9798765119433 (paperback) | ISBN 9798765119457 (ebook) | ISBN 9798765119440 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Powys, John Cowper, 1872-1963--Criticism and interpretation. | Romanticism--England. | Ecocriticism. | LCGFT: Literary criticism. Classification: LCC PR6031.O867 Z926 2025 (print) | LCC PR6031.O867 (ebook) | ​ DDC 823/.912--dc23/eng/20240617 ​ ​ 364​ LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024026 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024026365 ISBN: HB: 979-8-7651-1942-6 ePDF: 979-8-7651-1944-0 eBook: 979-8-7651-1945-7 Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.blo​omsb​ury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

For Loren, Emily, and Stephen

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments  ix List of Abbreviations  xi

Introduction  1 1 “Sensations sweet”: Re-experiencing Wordsworth’s Love of Nature  27 The Language of Sensation  29 Wordsworth as Nature Poet in Powys’s Nonfiction Prose  33 Romantic Sensation in After My Fashion  39 Wordsworth Revisited: Wolf Solent  41 The Autobiography as a Rewriting of The Prelude  58 Later Reflections on Wordsworthian Sensation  77

2 “Rocks and stones and trees”: Inhabiting Wordsworthian Inhumanity  81 Mineral-Centered Criticism  82 Mineral Affinities  83 Powys’s Gray Wordsworth  86 Rocks and Stones in A Glastonbury Romance and Weymouth Sands  90 Human Minerality in Owen Glendower  94 Minerality and the Mind in Porius  97 Beyond the “ontic”  110

3 “The still sad music of humanity”: Rewriting Wordsworthian Figures of Disability and Deprivation  113 The Search for Sympathy  114

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CONTENTS

Recasting the Blind Beggar  118 Refiguring the Leech-Gatherer and the Discharged Soldier  123 “Messengers of the Grail”: Madwomen and Female Beggars  133 Re-inventing “The Idiot Boy”  140

4 “Something far more deeply interfused”: Re-envisioning Wordsworthian Transcendence  147 The Wordsworthian “Something”  151 Wordsworth and the Grail  152 Sexual Predation and “Something” in Weymouth Sands  160 The Generational Sublime  168 The “life of the generations” in Maiden Castle  169 The “continuity of life” in Owen Glendower  176 Resisting and Reconceiving Wordsworthian Sublimity  179

5 “Cloud on cloud”: Reworking the Keatsian Supernatural  181 Lucifer and “Life itself”  186 Hyperion in Morwyn  192 Porius as a Completion of Hyperion  194 Magic in Atlantis  199 Marvels in The Brazen Head  203 The Return of the Titans  207

Conclusion  211 Bibliography  213 Index  231

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First, heartfelt thanks to my wonderful friends and colleagues in the English Department at William & Mary. Simon Joyce and Adam Potkay both read large chunks of my manuscript and offered great advice. Deborah Morse also supplied excellent comments and gave invaluable support. Francesca Sawaya heroically listened to my inchoate ideas and responded with wisdom. Suzanne Raitt egged on and indulged my Powysian obsessions with much merriment and glee. The late Monica Potkay continues to inspire me. I also thank Ann Reed, Arthur Knight, Liz Barnes, Jenny Putzi, Rich Lowry, Jack Martin, Jon Pineda, Hermine Pinson, Melanie Dawson, Erin Webster, Jennifer Lorden, Benedito Ferrão, and Brett Wilson for their intellectual generosity and good humor. Supportive local friends outside my department include Dan Cristol, Martha Howard, Joyce Lowry, Phillip Merritt, David Reed, Rebecca Reimers, and Jennifer Wenska. I am grateful to belong to the amazing international community of Romanticists. It is a privilege to be able to thank Meg Russett, Jerome Christensen, Nick Roe, and Peter Manning. Special thanks as well to John Morillo for his warm and active support of this project. I am glad to thank the learned and ever-enthusiastic members of the Powys Society, many of whom I first encountered on Zoom during the first two years of the pandemic. Paul Cheshire (another fellow-Romanticist) has been particularly encouraging. The late Timothy Hyman kindly commented on a draft chapter. Kevin Taylor, Charles Lock, Chris Thomas, Morine Krissdóttir, Anthony Head, and Kate Kavanagh all helpfully answered my questions. Other Powysians who have encouraged me include Dawn Collins, Patrick Quigley, Ben Thomson, Mick Wood, and Marcel Bradbury. Thanks as well to the audiences of my talks on John Cowper Powys during a visit to Southern Cross University (thanks to Bill MacNeil), during a visit to the University of St. Andrews (thanks to the William & Mary/ St. Andrews Joint Degree Programme), and at quite a few Romanticism conferences over the years. Earlier versions of two sections of my book appeared as articles. The first was “John Cowper Powys and the Inhuman Wordsworth,” published in European Romantic Review 28, no. 6 (2017): 773–88, at https://www.tand​ fonl​ine.com/. The second was “Parodying The Prelude: The Autobiography

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

of John Cowper Powys,” published in Romanticism 29, no. 3 (2023): 281–92. In addition, a few insights from the book previously appeared in my article, “‘The Poet of Fear’: John Cowper Powys on Samuel Taylor Coleridge,” published in The Powys Journal 33 (2023): 146–65. I am grateful to the publishers of these articles for giving permission to reprint. Research for this project was funded by William & Mary semester-long leaves in 2013 and 2020, a Plumeri Award in 2015, a William & Mary summer grant in 2020, the William & Mary English Department, and a William & Mary Arts & Sciences Faculty Grant in the summer of 2023. I thank the resourceful interlibrary loan staff of Swem Library at William & Mary, who tirelessly tracked down material on my behalf. I have benefited from the help of Swem research librarian Liz Bellamy. I would also like to acknowledge the assistance of the Special Collections librarians at the University of Exeter, especially Caroline Walter. Quotations from unpublished materials from the Powys Collection are courtesy of Special Collections, University of Exeter. Quotations from unpublished letters by John Cowper Powys held in the National Library of Wales Collection are used with the kind permission of the Estate of John Cowper Powys. I am indebted to the three anonymous reviewers for Bloomsbury Academic who offered valuable suggestions for improving my manuscript. I am also very grateful for the helpfulness and professionalism of my editorial team at Bloomsbury Academic: Amy Martin and Hali Han. Finally, I am delighted to thank my family, to whom this book is dedicated: my husband Loren Council, our daughter Emily, and our son Stephen. In 1990, without ever having heard of Powys, Loren bought me my first copy of Wolf Solent, setting me on the long path to the writing of this book. All three of them have cheerfully allowed me to tell them more about John Cowper Powys than they ever wished to know.

ABBREVIATIONS

All works in this list are by John Cowper Powys unless otherwise noted. AGR

A Glastonbury Romance. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1932.

AGO

The Art of Growing Old. London: Jonathan Cape, 1944.

AH

The Art of Happiness. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1935.

AMF

After My Fashion. London: Pan Books, 1980.

At

Atlantis. London: Macdonald & Co., 1954.

A

Autobiography. 1934. Hamilton, NY: Colgate University Press, 1968.

BH

The Brazen Head. 1956. London: Picador, 1978.

CTB

Confessions of Two Brothers. With Llewelyn Powys. Rochester, NY: The Manas Press, 1916.

1929 Diary The Diary of John Cowper Powys for 1929. Edited by Anthony Head. London: Cecil Woolf, 1998. 1930 Diary The Diary of John Cowper Powys 1930. Edited by Frederick Davies. London: Greymitre Books, 1987. 1931 Diary The Diary of John Cowper Powys 1931. London: Jeffrey Kwinter, 1990. D

Ducdame. New York: Doubleday, 1925.

DM

Descents of Memory: The Life of John Cowper Powys (by Morine Krissdóttir). New York: Overlook Duckworth, 2007.

DMR

Dorothy M. Richardson. London: Joiner and Steele, 1931.

DS

In Defence of Sensuality. London: Victor Gollancz, 1930.

DY

The Dorset Year: The Diary of John Cowper Powys June 1934–July 1935. Edited by Morine Krissdóttir and Roger Peers. Kilmersdon: The Powys Press, 1998.

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ABBREVIATIONS

EL

Enjoyment of Literature. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1938.

EJCP

Essays on John Cowper Powys. Edited by Belinda Humfrey. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1972.

I

The Inmates. New York: Philosophical Library, 1952.

ISO

In Spite Of: A Philosophy for Everyman. New York: Philosophical Library, 1953.

JKL

The Letters of John Keats (by John Keats). Edited by Hyder Edward Rollins. 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958.

L

Lucifer. 1956. London: Village Press, 1974.

LFG

The Letters of John Cowper Powys to Frances Gregg. 2 vols. Edited by Oliver Marlow Wilkinson. London: Cecil Woolf, 1994.

LIH

The Letters of John Cowper Powys to Ichiro Hara. Edited by Anthony Head. London: Cecil Woolf, 1990.

LLP

Letters to His Brother Llewelyn. Edited by Malcolm Elwin. 2 vols. London: Village Press, 1975.

LLW

The Letters of John Cowper Powys to Louis Wilkinson 1935–1956. London: Macdonald, 1958.

LNR

Letters to Nicholas Ross. Edited by Arthur Uphill. London: Village Press, 1974.

MC

Maiden Castle. 1936. Woodstock, NY: The Overlook Press, 2001.

MoC

The Meaning of Culture. New York: W. W. Norton, 1929.

OC

Obstinate Cymric: Essays 1935–47. Carmarthen: Druid Press, 1947.

OG

Owen Glendower. 1941. Woodstock, NY: The Overlook Press, 2003.

PAD

Petrushka and the Dancer: The Diaries of John Cowper Powys 1929–1939. Edited by Morine Krissdóttir. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995.

PDR

Powys and Dorothy Richardson: The Letters of John Cowper Powys and Dorothy Richardson. Edited by Janet Fouli. London: Cecil Woolf, 2008.

ABBREVIATIONS

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PoK

Powys on Keats: Volume One of John Keats: or Popular Paganism. Edited by Cedric Hentschel. London: Cecil Woolf, 1993.

Por

Porius. 1951. Edited by Judith Bond and Morine Krissdóttir. New York: Overlook Duckworth, 2007.

PS

A Philosophy of Solitude. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1933.

PSE

Powys to Sea-Eagle: The Letters of John Cowper Powys to Philippa Powys. Edited by Anthony Head. London: Cecil Woolf, 1996.

PSNL

Powys Society Newsletter.

PW

The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth. Edited by Thomas Hutchinson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1909.

VR

Visions and Revisions: A Book of Literary Devotions. New York: G. Arnold Shaw, 1915.

WeS

Weymouth Sands. 1934. London: Macdonald, 1963.

WS

Wolf Solent. 1929. New York: Vintage International, 1998.

WSCS

John Cowper Powys’s Wolf Solent: Critical Studies. Edited by Belinda Humfrey. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1972.

WSDC

Wolf Solent: The Six Deleted Chapters. Edited by Morine Krissdóttir. Supplement to The Powys Journal 31 (2021).

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Introduction Writing in 1955 to Professor Ichiro Hara, the British novelist John Cowper Powys explained his “attitude to Nature” as experienced through the poetry of the Romantics: [It] can be that of Wordsworth with its grand simple bone to bone & twig to twig realism as when he makes the ass’s ear turn on the pivot in its skull! – or it can be that of Coleridge with his imaginative complexies [sic] and morbidities and occult astrological insights – or it can be that of Keats with too absolute feeling for the Aesthetic beauty of Nature & life pure unalloyed aesthetic beauty – beauty for its own sake + to hell with any ‘God’ or any ‘over-soul’ or with any ‘Something’ far more deeply interfused’! or it can be that of Shelley a pure atheistical Elementalist! (LIH, 48)1 Himself a force of nature, or at least a monumental force of literary renewal across multiple genres, throughout his career Powys recast the major themes of the Romantic poets—especially William Wordsworth—and borrowed extensively from their eloquent language. In this passage, he isolates one of the aspects of Wordsworth’s treatment of nature that he particularly admires: its supposedly down-to-earth “realism.” The image of the “ass’s ear” turning in its socket is from a stanza in Wordsworth’s 1818 poem “Peter Bell” in which an “Ass, with motion dull,/Upon the pivot of his skull/Turned round his long left ear” (PW, ll. 448–50).2 The precision of “motion dull” and “long left ear” exemplifies the “bone to bone” simplicity that Powys sees in Wordsworth. In a later letter to the same correspondent, Powys made another reference to the “ass moving its ears!” in Wordsworth,

Throughout this book, italics and underlinings in quotations from Powys are his own. Except where noted, references to Wordsworth’s poems are to The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1909) (PW). Powys owned a 1932 reprint of this edition (LIH, 65). References to The Prelude, except where noted, are therefore to the 1850 version rather than the 1805 version, since the 1850 version is the one with which Powys was familiar. The 1805 Prelude is cited from William Wordsworth, The Major Works, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 1 2

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JOHN COWPER POWYS AND THE AFTERLIFE OF ROMANTICISM

finding a “touch” of “humour” in the detail, a “whimsical passive helpless contemplation – of the ways, of the silliness, of the essential silliness, of the – of the – of the – [sic] whole bloody Cosmos!” (LIH, 63). Powys’s own responsiveness to the “ways” of the animate—and inanimate—world, often filtered through Wordsworth’s poetry, similarly extends from “passive … contemplation” of physical embodiment to appreciation of the “whole bloody Cosmos,” with much more than a “touch” of humor.3 In the passage quoted above, as well as taking inspiration from Wordsworth, Powys rather misleadingly appears equally drawn to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s psychologizing and Gothicizing of the natural world, to John Keats’s aestheticizing of “Nature & life”—what Powys sees as the younger Romantic poet’s proto-Victorian art for art’s sake—and to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s rarefied communion with “air, fire, and water” (LIH, 57). I say “rather misleadingly” because Powys was more influenced by Wordsworth—and, secondarily, Keats—than by the other Romantic poets whom he names.4 Powys associates both the beauty-obsessed Keats and the “atheistical” Shelley with a denial of an “‘over-soul’” or transcendent reality—a “‘Something’ far more deeply interfused”—a denial with which he identifies at this late point in his long life. The quoted line, taken from Wordsworth’s “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” (1798), Powys’s “favourite poem” (1931 Diary, 124), is the expression that Wordsworth uses to refer to a higher power that “rolls through all things” (PW, l. 103). The vague “‘Something,’” which Powys here italicizes and marks with scare quotes, can be interpreted as either pantheistic or otherworldly, or a mixture of the two. Earlier in his career, Powys’s own Romanticinflected “Nature-Worship” (LIH, 45) would encompass a quest for “the cosmic secret” (EL, 315), frequently represented by means of this line from Wordsworth. Still earlier, he had rejected any Wordsworthian “over-soul” in favor of a Keatsian “Sensualism” (PoK, 102, 55). The extent of Powys’s debt to Romanticism remains under-acknowledged, while his intense, nuanced, and highly literary investment in the nonhuman world invites a fresh kind of eco-critical approach. This book explores Powys’s prose rewriting of Romantic poetry in an attempt not only to expand knowledge of the afterlife of Romanticism but also to show how environmentally minded criticism can accommodate traditional Romantic preoccupations beyond valuing nature, such as responsiveness to human suffering, the quest for transcendence, and the allure of magic. I argue that even as he recreates established versions of the Romantic poets, especially Wordsworth, Powys anticipates recent revisionary critical approaches to the Romantics,

Throughout this book, Powys’s own ellipses are rendered as “…”; mine omit spaces (“...”). On Powys’s ambivalent identification with Coleridge, see my article, “‘The Poet of Fear’: John Cowper Powys on Samuel Taylor Coleridge,” The Powys Journal 33 (2023): 146–65. 3 4

INTRODUCTION

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including eco-critical approaches, and thus adds to our present-day understanding of Romanticism. My Introduction will discuss Powys in the context of Romanticism generally, before lingering over his fascination with Wordsworth and examining how prior critics have addressed Powys’s place in literary history. It will then summarize the approaches to Romanticism with which this book is in dialogue. The chapters that follow will delve further into Powys’s relationship to Wordsworth—and, eventually, Keats— because those two poets loom so large in his work. Recent reception studies have broadened accounts of the transmission of Romantic-era texts and have diversified narratives of the Romantic poets’ far-reaching cultural influence.5 Powys, whose profuse writings found audiences during his lifetime on both sides of the Atlantic, demands to be part of that story. In his popular philosophical books aimed at general readers, Powys promoted his “philosophy of life” (A, 641), a philosophy reworking conventional concerns of Romanticism that he elaborated upon and interrogated in his hefty Autobiography (1934) and in his sprawling works of fiction: most notably, his four major Wessex novels—Wolf Solent (1929), A Glastonbury Romance (1932), Weymouth Sands (1934), and Maiden Castle (1936)—and, set in Wales, his historical novel Owen Glendower (1941) and his “Dark Ages” romance Porius (1951).6 Powys has often been seen as an anachronistic odd man out from the era of Modernism because his fiction relies on many of the storytelling techniques of nineteenth-century novelists, even while, less obtrusively than his Modernist contemporaries, he experiments with literary form.7 As a writer steeped in the Western literary tradition, Powys certainly did not confine his interests to Romanticism, but he repeatedly alludes to the Romantics not only in his novels but also in his copious diaries and in his tirelessly exuberant letters, as well as in his other publications, which included volumes of poetry, a retelling of Homer’s See, for example, William St. Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Andrew Burkett, Romantic Mediations: Media Theory and British Romanticism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2016); Tom Mole, What the Victorians Made of Romanticism: Material Artifacts, Cultural Practices, and Reception History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018). These critics extend the analysis of literary influence beyond traditional reception studies. 6 Powys declared his “writings—novels and all” to be “simply so much propaganda” for his “philosophy of life,” a questionable though often quoted generalization about his wide-ranging oeuvre (A, 641). He wrote four novels before the success of Wolf Solent, the first and fourth of which are also set in Wessex: Wood and Stone (1915), Rodmoor (1916), After My Fashion (written around 1920 but not published until 1980), and Ducdame (1925). Between writing Owen Glendower and Porius, he started and abandoned a contemporary novel set in Wales, Edeyrnion (the drafts of which were published in The Powys Journal in 1991, 1992, and 1993). 7 On this tension, see, for example, Larson Powell, “A Modern Outside Modernism: J. C. Powys,” Nebula 6, no. 4 (2009): 181. Cf. John A. Brebner, who sees Powys’s novels as “Victorian” in “literary technique” but expressing a “vision” that is “urgently contemporary” (The Demon Within: A Study of John Cowper Powys’s Novels [New York: Barnes and Noble, 1973], 227). 5

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JOHN COWPER POWYS AND THE AFTERLIFE OF ROMANTICISM

Iliad, fantastical novellas, and several books of belles-lettristic literary appreciation that reveal the astonishing breadth of his knowledge.8 In his Autobiography, he called himself an “indurated romanticist … first and last” (A, 43–4). Powys’s word choice “romanticist” speaks to his role as both a performer of Romanticism and a commentator on it. His lengthy engagement with the Romantic poets is a vital contribution to their reception in the first six decades of the twentieth century and to their environmental legacy in particular. Whether or not they see him as part of the Romantic tradition, Powys’s readers have long appreciated the proto-ecological force of his writing. For G. Wilson Knight, who himself met and corresponded with Powys, “his works penetrate the secret life of vegetation, attune us to the hidden powers of rock and stone, feeling into the Wordsworthian livingness of the ‘inanimate’, of earth and sea … To read Powys is to explore creation.”9 Along the same lines, George Steiner commended Powys’s ability “to penetrate far beyond speech into the quick of animal and stone.”10 Steiner added, “Long before current notions of pollution, current notions of man’s destruction of the animal world, of the landscape, long before it became almost the overwhelming cause of political passion, he was saying all this with a kind of power and detail which no-one has matched since.”11 Oliver Marlow Wilkinson, the son of Powys’s sometime lover Frances Gregg, said, “If you examine his writing, the people are interesting, but my God! his fish, his stones, the weeds, the very earth is infinitely better. He was like something out of the earth.”12 Jeremy Hooker has called on critics to show how Powys’s “vision,” with its “prefiguration of contemporary ecological awareness,” was expressed through his rethinking of poetry, including that of Wordsworth, Keats, and William Blake.13 Embracing animism and panpsychism, especially in his later works, Powys foreshadows presentday deep ecology in his de-centering of the human. For him, the “mystery” Powys also wrote plays, including, in c. 1905, The Entermores, published in The Powys Journal 10 (2000): 60–125; in 1922, Paddock Calls, ed. Charles Lock (London: Greymitre Books, 1984); and a play adaptation of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, produced in 1922 and not yet published. 9 G. Wilson Knight, Neglected Powers: Essays on Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Literature (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1971), 412–13. 10 George Steiner, “The Difficulties of Reading John Cowper Powys,” The Powys Review 1 (Spring 1977): 10. 11 Ibid., 8. 12 Quoted in Herbert Williams, John Cowper Powys (Bridgend: Seren, 1997), 69. 13 Jeremy Hooker, “Romancing at the Cave-Fire: The Unabridged Porius,” The Powys Journal 4 (1994): 230. For Hooker, in John Cowper Powys (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1973), Powys “was concerned not with man’s place in society, but with man’s place in nature and his relation to cosmic forces” (63). For a modifying view, see Angus Wilson, who argues that Powys remains invested in the social world even as he concentrates on the psychological and the cosmic (“John Cowper Powys as a Novelist,” The Powys Review 1 [1977]: 13–25). 8

INTRODUCTION

5

of life “endows the sands of the sea and the grasses of the field with an enchanted light, and it reveals this world as a place where lobworms and newts have souls, and where the Inanimate has a disturbing porousness and transparency” (A, 61). Throughout his writings, Powys intertwines a sensitive attunement to “this world” with other themes considered central to Romanticism: what he calls a “psychic-sensuous contemplation” (PS, 7), the “bind[ing] … together” of “animate and inanimate” (EL, 312), the “tragedy of human suffering” (PS, 33), communion with “an Absolute” (LIH, 35), and belief in “a world of marvels” (A, 66). I see Powys as a unique figure in the inheritance of Romanticism in that he incorporates even psychological, existential, and transcendental themes into an all-encompassing ecological vision, encapsulated by a line that he often quotes from Wordsworth, “The pleasure which there is in life itself” (MoC, 56).14 Powys uses the shorthand term “Life itself” to refer to living and nonliving things, including human beings and their concerns, and extends it to incorporate alternative ontological “dimensions” (A, 652) and the power of the supernatural. And, counterintuitive though it sounds, Powys’s most direct access to “Life itself” is through allusions to Romantic poetry. Powys was compared by some early reviewers to Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Proust, and other major writers including Shakespeare, as well as to his Modernist contemporaries, most notably James Joyce, and he continued to receive energetic critical scrutiny for several decades following his death. Although Charles Lock still leads recognition of Powys as a Modernist,15 Powys has tended to be marginalized by literary historians, including historians of Modernism. Powys has also attracted little attention from Romanticists, other than Ian Duncan and Jerome McGann. The ongoing opening up of the transatlantic literary canon has brought about the welcome excavation of numerous previously forgotten writers, while Powys remains relatively ignored by twenty-first-century critics.16 A Powysian Early in his career, Powys says he prefers the term “Life” instead of “Mind” or “Matter” as “a focusing word for the ultimate mystery” (CTB, 50). The choice of term evokes the pantheistic “one life” celebrated by Coleridge in “The Eolian Harp” and elsewhere (l. 26). Coleridge’s poetry is quoted from The Complete Poems, ed. William Keach (London: Penguin, 1977). Wordsworth referred to the “one life” in the 1805 Prelude (2: 430) but removed it in the more orthodox 1850 Prelude. 15 See, for example, Charles Lock, “John Cowper Powys and James Joyce,” in In the Spirit of Powys: New Essays, ed. Denis Lane (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1990): 23–42. John T. Connor, in “Mid-century Romance: Modernist Afterlives of the Historical Novel,” PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2010, claims Powys as a Modernist and political (leftwing) novelist attuned to his mid-twentieth-century historical context. 16 The Powys Society publishes The Powys Journal and pursues a small-scale publishing program, and a number of PhD dissertations have focused on Powys, but no major monograph on his work has been published for decades. Some Powys criticism comes across as written for a small audience of initiates. See, for example, the writings of H. W. Fawkner, including Amorous Life: John Cowper Powys and the Manifestation of Affectivity (Maidstone, Kent: Crescent 14

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inevitably feels called upon to account in almost a ritualistic manner for this scholarly neglect. Steiner said of Powys’s omission from the traditional canon, “There is no transcendental, absolute mystery here. There are a lot of contingent accidents.”17 Evidently, Powys’s defiant embracing of an outsider status became a self-fulfilling prophecy.18 Even his most vocal admirers have habitually drawn attention to what they see as the artistic shortcomings of his fiction, taking an apologetic stance rarely found now among professional literary critics more focused on cultural significance than aesthetic merit.19 Given Powys’s prolixity and apparent imprecision, such admirers have tended not to linger over his diction and syntax. Powys called his own style “slip-shod,” claiming that “I deliberately use it” (PAD, 247), a choice that I suggest should invite rather than dissuade a close reading of his often extravagant prose, whether fiction or nonfiction. Powys often requires what he terms the “recognition of the particular kind of eloquence that has the power, in the midstream of its gigantic imagery, to reveal a humorous awareness of its own extravagance” (MoC, 37). At times, he builds on the Romantic poets’ own “humorous awareness” of “extravagance.” In line with my concentration on the public afterlife of Romanticism, in this book I attend almost exclusively to Powys’s allusions to the Romantic poets in his published works, including the letters and diaries that have made it into print. And, following Powys’s own emphasis, I focus on his rewriting of Wordsworth in particular. Wordsworth has of course been long regarded as the iconic proto-ecological poet—even as his idealization of nature has been vigorously questioned—and the development of his posthumous reputation intersects with the history of British environmentalist thought.20 I see Powys as anticipating recent “green” materialist interpretations of Wordsworth that draw attention to the physicality of his response to the natural world. In addition, I view Powys’s work as presaging so-called gray or mineralfocused criticism that addresses the leveling of animate and inanimate, Moon, 1998) and Rethinking Powys, ed. Jeremy Mark Robinson (Maidstone: Crescent Moon, 2008), the Introduction of which discusses Powys’s marginality (15–24); and Joe Boulter, Postmodern Powys: Essays on John Cowper Powys (Maidstone: Crescent Moon, 2008). 17 Steiner, “Difficulties,” 7. For Margaret Drabble, Powys “is so far outside the canon that he defies the concept of a canon” (“The English Degenerate,” Guardian, August 11, 2006). 18 In his Autobiography, he embraced the label “Charlatan!” and somewhat misleadingly repudiated “the erudition of scholars” (A, 286). 19 For measured assessments, see H. P. Collins, John Cowper Powys: Old EarthMan (London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1966), 205–20; and Charles Lock, “Polyphonic Powys: Dostoevsky, Bakhtin, and A Glastonbury Romance,” University of Toronto Quarterly 55, no. 3 (March 1986): 261–81. Powys also tends to attract critics who pride themselves on remaining with him outside the academic mainstream—most recently, Tim Blanchard, who, in Powysland: The Discovery of John Cowper Powys (Sherborne: The Sundial Press, 2018), takes a self-consciously “unscholarly” approach in arguing that Powys was “the last of the Romantics” (313, 52). 20 See Stephen Gill, Wordsworth and the Victorians (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 246–60.

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another recent eco-critical approach that de-emphasizes Wordsworth’s transcendental concerns. The “green” and “gray” facets of Powys’s rewriting of Wordsworth alike share current eco-critics’ foregrounding of the social and linguistic constructedness of nature. At the same time, I contend, Powys, like Wordsworth, keeps readers—as Wordsworth puts it in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads—“in the company of flesh and blood” (PW, 936), in the sense of anticipating present-day ethically and disability minded approaches to Wordsworth’s poetry. Yet I also see Powys as registering the limitations of materialist and human-centered approaches through his use of Wordsworth—and Keats—to hold onto the transcendental and the marvelous. If for Wordsworth, in Geoffrey Hartman’s words, nature itself “led him beyond nature,”21 for Powys, the Romantics led him back to and beyond Romanticism in several directions: toward a “cult of the senses” (A, 66), downwards to the “wisdom of the earth” (ISO, 278) and “grim bedrock humour” (EL, 317), toward and away from “the love of Humanity!” (OC, 141), outwards to “a Beyond-Nature” (PS, 162), and back to the “margins of romance” (MoC, 51). The development of the posthumous reputations of the Romantic poets has attracted much scholarly scrutiny. Critics have meticulously explored the processes by which certain Romantic poets—Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lord Byron, Shelley, and Keats—came to be canonized during the Victorian period, with the eventual addition of Blake. The growth of these poets’ fame (as opposed to their celebrity during their lifetimes in the cases of Wordsworth and Byron) took place in reprints, anthologies, illustrated editions, and other forms of commodification.22 Over the last two-thirds of the nineteenth century, these poets’ reputations solidified within an expanding culture of memorization and recitation in schools,23 alongside the advent of the study of vernacular English literature in the universities. The formation of the Romantic canon also involved the privileging of shorter lyric poetry over long poems. During the Victorian era, the major Romantic poets— associated by their early readers with resistance to modernity alongside revolutionary politics and poetics—became sanitized and sanctified, finding new audiences in a shifting literary landscape dominated by periodical

Geoffrey Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry 1787–1814 (New Haven: Yale University Press, [1964] 1971), xv. 22 See, for example, Andrew Elfenbein, Byron and the Victorians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); and Sarah Wootton, Consuming Keats: Nineteenth-Century Representations in Art and Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 23 On the role of memorized poetry in British and American public education in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, see Catherine Robson, Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012). 21

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JOHN COWPER POWYS AND THE AFTERLIFE OF ROMANTICISM

writing and the realist novel.24 Growing up in the last three decades of the nineteenth century, Powys encountered a highly selective and exclusive sense of what constituted Romantic poetry. The eldest offspring of a large, well-to-do, and immensely talented Victorian family, John Cowper Powys (1872–1963)—like his writerbrothers Llewelyn Powys and Theodore Francis (T.F.) Powys—pursued an unconventional path that, in his case, included over thirty years as an itinerant lecturer, initially in England and eventually for twenty-five years in the United States.25 He did not fully devote himself to novel-writing until late middle age. It is as if he lived several lifetimes.26 The phenomenon that is Powys thus constitutes a long and variegated episode in the afterlife of Romanticism. Powys studied history, not English, as an undergraduate at Cambridge in the early 1890s, but he had been familiar with Romantic poetry since childhood. He recalled having to memorize in school poems such as Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” (1807) and expressed gratitude for “the teachers who made me learn things by heart whether I understood them or not, just made me repeat the lines without explaining at all” (LIH, 42).27 His first public lecture, in the town hall at Hove in Sussex, to an audience of “three women and one child,” the subject of which “spread out … over three or four centuries of English literature,” touched on “the prefaces of Wordsworth” (A, 245). At the age of twenty-eight, on April 12, 1901, he lectured on “Coleridge, the Poet” at a fundraiser for “the Re-Hanging of Montacute Church Bells”—his father being the vicar of Montacute in Somerset.28 During his early career as a University Extension lecturer in England between 1899 and 1909, he covered (among other classic British authors) the standard poets as well as prose writers from the early nineteenth century.

Each of the major poets had his champions, but it was not until the 1890s that English Romanticism emerged as what David Perkins, in Is Literary History Possible? (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), calls “a totalizing classification” (106). 25 Biographical studies of the Powys family and their associates include Kenneth Hopkins, The Powys Brothers (London: Phoenix House, 1967), and Richard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983). Morine Krissdóttir’s Descents of Memory: The Life of John Cowper Powys (New York: Overlook Duckworth, 2007) (DM) is the authoritative biography of John Cowper. One can set Krissdóttir’s unflinching portrait against the charming adulatory reminiscences in Recollections of the Powys Brothers, ed. Belinda Humfrey (London: Peter Owen, 1980). I will mention in passing other siblings of John Cowper as recipients of his extensive correspondence. 26 Powys told Frederick Davies, “I didn’t begin living till I was sixty” (1930 Diary, 3). 27 Powys related how at Sherborne School when “we were repeating in turn our allotted portion” of the “Ode,” his teacher’s admiration of one stanza (ll. 164–70) had a “most rousing and startling effect” (AGO, 140–1). 28 Derek Langridge, John Cowper Powys: A Record of Achievement (London: The Library Association, 1966), 18. 24

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The topics of his early lectures—none of which have been preserved— suggest the extent to which he had inherited the Victorian canonization of the “big six” Romantic poets, including Blake, on whom Powys spoke in a 1903–4 series on “the poets of the Romantic Revival,”29 although that series also included lectures on his maternal ancestor William Cowper, George Crabbe, and Sir Walter Scott, another Romantic writer with whose works he was very familiar.30 Not surprisingly, his expertise did not extend to Romantic-era women and working-class poets (other than Robert Burns) who had vanished from literary history by the end of the nineteenth century. According to the syllabi of his Cambridge University Local Lectures, he spoke in 1900 on Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats, and in 1902–3 on the Romantic-era prose writers Charles Lamb (a special favorite of his), Thomas De Quincey, and William Hazlitt. The latter course included two lectures on Walter Pater, whose writings had helped to shape not only Powys’s “cult of the senses” but also his style of appreciation.31 Syllabi for his Oxford University Extension Lectures, beginning in 1901, included a course of six lectures on Wordsworth and Coleridge, one of which, on Wordsworth on October 7, 1902 (the eve of his thirtieth birthday), he later recalled giving at the poet’s birthplace, Cockermouth in the Lake District (LLP, 1: 17). A 1906 series was entitled “Some Poets of the Romantic Revival and After”; it began with a lecture on Cowper and Burns.32 Powys also recalled lecturing on Byron in Bremen, Germany, on the day of Queen Victoria’s death (A, 305). Other biographical details confirm his fascination with the Romantics. In 1909, some members of his family, planning a masked ball, assigned him the role of Keats.33 In 1896 and again in 1912, he visited the graves of Keats and Shelley in the non-Catholic cemetery in Rome (LFG, 1: 167), and in 1907 he visited Blake’s cottage in Felpham on the coast of Sussex.34 Henry Miller, another of Powys’s multifarious correspondents, on learning

Ibid., 48, original emphasis. W. J. Keith, in Ultimate Things: Christianity, Myth and the Powyses (Mappowder: The Powys Press, 2013), points out that this was before Blake’s “reputation” was fully established: Powys was ahead of his time in this regard (125). 30 According to his Autobiography, Powys was introduced to “Scott’s romantic poems” by the age of ten (A, 75). 31 Fairly detailed syllabi for this course have been reprinted by Langridge, Record of Achievement, 23–43. 32 The syllabus is available online at https://www.powys-soci​ety.org/sylla​bus_​JCP.html (accessed January 12, 2024). 33 Graves, The Brothers Powys, 73. 34 In his Autobiography, he records experiencing a “supreme ecstasy” outside the house in Rome in which Keats died and placing a laurel wreath on Keats’s grave (A, 295–6). Powys named Keats’s poetry among the ten books he would take to a desert island (“The Choice of Books,” The Gazette [Montreal], March 30, 1927, 2). He gave a copy of Blake’s poems to Llewelyn Powys’s wife Alyse Gregory (1930 Diary, 213). 29

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that Powys had been singing before he died, compared his “passing” with that of Blake.35 Powys’s own poetry (he published six volumes, the first two during his late twenties) is suffused with the cadences of Romantic (and Victorian) poetry.36 Not long after graduating from Cambridge, he drafted an unfinished “Autobiography” in blank verse inspired by The Prelude, much of which remains unpublished. Titles of his published poems reveal his self-definition as an admirer of the Romantics: they include “To John Keats” (1896), “To Charles Lamb” (1896),37 “To a Cousin of Keats” (1899), “Written after Reading Shelley” (1899), “On Receiving a Portrait of Keats” (1899), “Daffodils” (1916), and “After Reading William Blake” (1916). “Daffodils” reflects on modernity and expatriation, describing a “battered English actor” in Chicago glimpsing in “a shop-window, living daffodils” that carry him back in imagination to the Oxford of Shelley and other writers. In this scenario, the flowers associated with Wordsworth’s “I wandered lonely as a cloud” have become a commodity still capable of sustaining the power of memory and a love of poetry.38 “After Reading William Blake” is a more straightforward brief elaboration on Songs of Experience such as “The Human Abstract.” As I discuss in Chapter 5, Powys’s only book-length poem, The Death of God, written in 1905 but not published until 1956 as Lucifer, is a blank verse rewriting of John Milton’s Paradise Lost via Keats’s Hyperion. Powys’s wide-ranging works of literary appreciation include several essays on the Romantics. His Visions and Revisions: A Book of Literary Devotions (1915) contains chapters on Shelley and Keats, and his Suspended Judgments: Essays on Books and Sensations (1916) has chapters on Blake and Byron, both reissued in inexpensive Little Blue Books in 1923.39 Before Jacqueline Peltier, ed., Proteus and the Magician: The Letters of Henry Miller and John Cowper Powys (Mappowder: The Powys Press, 2014), 147. 36 Odes and Other Poems (1896), Poems (1899), Wolf’s Bane: Rhymes (1916), Mandragora (1917), Samphire (1922), and Lucifer: A Poem (1956). Of the first volume, he wrote, “I knew I was a mere imitating copy-cat”: “Had not a certain little girl, not long laid in the cold ground, given me ‘The Poetical Works of John Keats’?” (A, 225). The girl was his sister Eleanor, known as Nelly, who died in 1893 at the age of thirteen. The title Wolf’s Bane alludes to Keats’s “Ode on Melancholy.” 37 I discuss this poem in “John Cowper Powys on the Genius of Charles Lamb,” The Powys Journal 31 (2021): 13–14. 38 Powys reflected on modernity in a more upbeat manner in an article entitled “San Francisco City of Nature Lovers: Street Flower Market Excels Rome’s,” in which he remarked, “Wordsworth himself would have been astonished to see his authentic daffodils ‘dancing and sparkling in the breeze’ [sic] among autos and trolley cars” (The San Francisco Examiner, June 14, 1922, 9). The implication is that the beauty of the flowers survives in a twentieth-century urban setting. 39 Goulven Le Brech notes that the Byron essay appeared in a volume renamed Masters of Erotic Love and the Blake essay in a volume renamed Calls to Imaginative Conflict (“Emanuel 35

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1910, Powys had written an entire book on Keats that, according to Morine Krissdóttir, “deservedly remained unpublished for eighty years” (DM, 90). In his diary in 1934, he claimed inaccurately that Ernest de Selincourt, who had edited Keats in 1905, was “the damned bugger who wrote for Methuen my Life of Keats” (DY, 136): in other words, he unfairly blamed de Selincourt for preempting his book.40 Powys wrote these works of literary appreciation before the Modernist backlash against Romanticism, with which he never concurred, continuing to admire the Romantic poets throughout the ensuing decades, even while he wrote a pamphlet on Joyce’s Ulysses in 1923 and, in 1931, a short book on Pilgrimage, Dorothy M. Richardson’s then ongoing sequence of novels, studies that reflect his concurrent engagement with major Modernist figures of his era.41 His substantial collection of essays Enjoyment of Literature (1938), revised for British audiences as The Pleasures of Literature, includes an essay on Goethe, another major Romantic-era influence on his work. The same book features a short but richly impressionistic essay on Wordsworth, which I will be using as a jumping-off point for several strands of my argument. Powys’s novels make multiple direct references to Romantic poetry, in the course of their large-scale reworking of Romantic themes. Occasionally, the narrators of the novels use allusions to the poetry in describing the characters or in generalizing about human behavior. The characters themselves sometimes refer to the Romantics or even think in phrases from the poems. As was his practice with allusions to other writers, in his fiction and his nonfiction alike, Powys casually drops short quotations from Romantic poems into his own prose without attribution and quite often without quotation marks, quoting verse as prose, so that even though the allusions are recognizable, he tends to blur the boundaries between himself and his predecessors. As Stephen Gill notes, some of Wordsworth’s “formulations” had become “common coin” in the Victorian period, often

Haldeman-Julius and the Philosophy of the Little Blue Books,” The Powys Journal 30 [2020]: 50–1). 40 This outburst was provoked by the sight of an article by de Selincourt in the Observer on December 9, 1934. A partial version of Powys’s manuscript was published in 1993 as Powys on Keats: Volume One of John Keats: or Popular Paganism, ed. Cedric Hentschel (London: Cecil Woolf, 1993). Charles Lock’s review of this edition, in The Powys Journal 4 (1994): 232–6, notes its shortcomings. (Volume 2 never appeared.) In his Autobiography, Powys says, “Methuen and Co. found my Life of Keats too eccentric” (A, 458). In a letter, he says the book was “turned down by Methuen because I refused to change one single word” (LLW, 151). In 1939, Powys accused Frances Gregg of burning “the best chapters (on the Ode to a Nightingale) of my epoch-making (or epoch-missing since it remains unpublished) life of Keats” (LFG 2: 163). I discuss the published portion of the book briefly in Chapter 1. The whereabouts of the rest of the manuscript is unknown. 41 Powys called Richardson, with whom he corresponded, “a Wordsworth of the city of London” (DMR, 20).

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quoted without the need for identification.42 The jacket blurb for the first edition of A Glastonbury Romance called it “a brave romantic experiment in modern fiction.” The term “romantic” presumably refers to the text’s genre, but the blurb mentioned the names of two Romantic poets to appeal to readers. Its writer credits Powys with “capturing the moods of nature” and “the overtones of weather,” and claims that the novel “is, like all his work, an invocation to those ‘primordial wells of deep delights’ which Keats and Wordsworth knew.” Powys’s magisterial work of prose fiction was thus marketed using two big names from the Romantic tradition. Smudging the line between Powys and the poets, the quotation is not from Keats or Wordsworth but from Powys’s own book In Defence of Sensuality (1930).43 Previously, Powys’s publishers Simon and Schuster had run a New York Times advertisement for Wolf Solent proclaiming, “KEATS has come back to life and is writing prose.”44 Powys’s intellectual and emotional investment in Wordsworth—his “great master” (A, 275)—was of a higher order of intensity than his interest in the other Romantics. Powys recalled that the first book of poetry that he bought for himself was the works of Wordsworth (A, 146, 224), and he claimed to have memorized The Prelude (DM, 289), “pour[ing] forth line after line” from it in old age while sitting to have a portrait bust sculpted.45 His allegiance to Wordsworth fluctuated during his long career, but in The Art of Growing Old (1944), he claimed to have been an “obsessed disciple” of Wordsworth “for nearly half a century” (AGO, 20), and in Obstinate Cymric (1947), he called himself an “old Wordsworthian” whose “inner life” has been “nourished” by “this great original poet” for “more than sixty years” (OC, 164). He often identified “old Wordsworth” as his “favourite poet”46—although that changed from time to time—and called “Tintern Abbey” Wordsworth’s “sublimest poem” (OC, 164). Despite what he saw as the poet’s “uninspired wordiness” (EL, 319)—though he certainly went in for “wordiness” himself (OC, 156)—Powys drew so much inspiration from Wordsworth that in Powys’s work Wordsworth’s poetry and the man himself come to stand for—to invoke quotations repeatedly drawn on by Powys—“sensations sweet” (A, 400), “rocks and stones and trees” (DS, 8), “the still sad music of humanity” (EL, 436), and “something far

Gill, Wordsworth and the Victorians, 5. The phrase in In Defence of Sensuality is actually “the primordial wells of deep delight” (DS, 5). 44 Simon and Schuster, display advertisement, New York Times, August 4, 1929, BR8, emphasis in original. The quotation is from the historian and philosopher Will Durant quoting an unnamed friend. 45 Jonah Jones, “Athene Provides,” in EJCP, 297. 46 Quoted from “ ‘My dear Lady… .’: The Letters of John Cowper Powys to Susanne Lane,” ed. Chris Thomas, The Powys Journal 30 (2020): 185. 42 43

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more deeply interfused” (EL, 312)—phrases that I use as the first four of my chapter titles. With characteristic zest, Powys discussed Wordsworth’s poetry at some length in his letters, especially to his sister Philippa (Katie), to whom in 1935 he sent a list of his twenty favorite Wordsworth poems, declaring, “Of Politics I speak not: of Religion I speak not: of Union Jacks or Empires I speak not: but only of William Wordsworth!” (PSE, 88).47 He also expatiated on the poet in his letters to “a kindred Wordsworthian,” the Japanese scholar, Ichiro Hara, who fittingly visited Powys toward the end of the latter’s life in the course of a Wordsworth pilgrimage (LIH, 111).48 Many of these references show the influence of various strands of the Victorian reception of the poet identified by Gill: admiration for Wordsworth’s supposed proto-Paterian capacity for sensuous enjoyment of nature, his “radical humanitarianism,” and his “spiritual power.”49 Powys also seems to have been influenced by a lingering American tendency to see Wordsworth, in Theodore Parker’s feminizing phrase, as a “dear old poetical Betty.”50 He referred to him on more than one occasion as “Auntie Wordsworth” (LLW, 204), a term that expresses an indulgent attitude toward the later Wordsworth’s political conservatism and Anglican orthodoxy. However, among Wordsworth enthusiasts in the first half of the twentieth century, Powys stands alone in his appreciation of the poet’s dehumanizing affinity with rocks and stones. Powys was particularly fond of quoting from “Tintern Abbey” and the “Immortality Ode,” which he tended to treat as almost interchangeable. In his Autobiography, he chooses not to discuss the women in his life but makes one of several exceptions when relating that he would recite “Tintern Abbey” and the “Ode” to lower-class women when engaging in extramarital sexual “encounters” arranged by his friend Tom Jones (A, 366).51 Mentioning such encounters—along with other details of his extramarital erotic experiences—would have risked upsetting his wife Margaret (Lyon) Powys, from whom he had separated, yet in this instance a Wordsworth-inflected

The list includes poems to which he frequently alludes: “Tintern Abbey,” the “Immortality Ode,” “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal,” “Resolution and Independence,” and “Michael.” Less predictable choices include “The Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman,” “Laodamia,” and “Her Eyes are Wild.” 48 Anthony Head notes that Powys mentioned Wordsworth in over a third of his 68 letters to Hara (LIH, 11). Hara published editions of Powys’s popular philosophical books A Philosophy of Solitude and The Meaning of Culture as well as a translation of Mortal Strife. In addition, he wrote two books on Powys and one on Wordsworth. 49 Gill, Wordsworth and the Victorians, 213, 26, 40. 50 Quoted by Adam Potkay, Wordsworth’s Ethics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 202, Potkay’s emphasis. See also Adam Potkay, “Wordsworth, Henry Reed and Bishop Doane: High-Church Romanticism on the Delaware,” in Wordsworth in American Literary Culture, ed. Joel Pace and Matthew Scott (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 101–20. 51 Another poem that Jones “made” him “recite” was Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (A, 366). 47

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memory apparently overpowers his restraint. Self-mockingly, he mentions an “ignominious” interruption that “render[ed] my recitation of ‘Intimations of Immortality’ less opportune than it usually seemed” (A, 368). Other aspects of Powys’s own life reflect his credentials as a “neoWordsworthian”52 and as a “Confederate in the Wordsworthian cult”;53 some assume a similarly parodic note. Powys shared Wordsworth’s “mania for walking” (ISO, 254) and gave that “mania” to the semi-autobiographical protagonists of his novels.54 In 1902, writing from Ambleside in the Lake District, he told his brother Littleton, “I spent yesterday morning walking from Keswick to Grasmere down the edge of Thirlmere,” a Wordsworthian hike during which he admired “a magnificent lake!” and a “view of Helvellyn.”55 In the Autobiography, however, Powys records a less than “harmonious” ascent of Mount Snowdon (which Wordsworth had climbed in 1791) with Littleton and their brother Theodore (A, 190) and relates his “shame” concerning his failure to climb alone to the top of Helvellyn (A, 203). These two events—to which I will return in Chapter 1—literalize the challenges involved in trying to walk in Wordsworth’s footsteps. Powys also adopted the poet’s habit of naming places encountered on his walks—a practice commemorated in Wordsworth’s “Poems on the Naming of Places,” first published in the 1800 Lyrical Ballads. In his Autobiography he notes, “Wordsworth was a great one for this exciting trick of scrawling our poor human signatures, like so many lover’s tokens upon the manybreasted mother of men; and I too have derived no small comfort from it” (A, 643). In this formulation, inscribing names is an act of (quasi-incestuous) expression of love for “mother” Nature.56 In upstate New York, where he Quoted in Louis Wilkinson, Welsh Ambassadors (London: Chapman and Hall, 1936), 57. Boyne Grainger, We Lived in Patchin Place, ed. Anthony Head (London: Cecil Woolf, 2002), 51. 54 An article about Powys by Alan Devoe in a Hillsdale, NY, newspaper, probably from 1934, described him thus: “Mile after mile after mile he strides, like a more furious Wordsworth, across broad grassy meadows, down earthy country lanes, through thickets, swamps, spinneys– working his magic evocation of the deep calm inviolable spirit that broods in the primordial earth” (quoted by Dante Thomas, A Bibliography of the Writings of John Cowper Powys: 1872– 1963 [Mamaroneck, NY: Paul P. Appel, 1975], 170). 55 Powys to Littleton Powys, October 2, 1902, Powys Collection, University of Exeter. Powys implicitly acknowledged his temporal distance from Wordsworth by adding, “I drive to Windermere to lecture this morning.” 56 Mark Boseley sees the act as originating in Powys’s attempt at “assimilating a foreign countryside,” although it evidently pre-dated as well as post-dated his residence in the United States (“The Peripatetic Mode in the Diaries of John Cowper Powys,” The Powys Journal 12 [2002]: 20). In his essay “An Englishman Abroad,” Powys acknowledges that naming places in this way involves cultural appropriation: “Just as that old horse-faced incorrigible pedestrian has his ‘Poem on the Naming of Places’ so I have amused myself by ‘christening’ … every stump and stone, every rock, swamp and rivulet in this virginal Arcadia by some appellation drawn from my own people, my own history, my own gods” (quoted from Powys, Elusive America, ed. Paul Roberts [London: Cecil Woolf, 1994], 203). 52 53

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lived with his companion Phyllis Playter from 1930 to 1934 after retiring from the lecture circuit, Powys named a particular “spot” after “Tintern Abbey,” the ruin in South Wales referred to in the title of Wordsworth’s poem, explaining, “not so much because I thought of the real Tintern Abbey, as in memory of a particular hill-ridge, above a wood near Montacute, to which we used to give this name as we rested there on our way home to tea” (A, 644). As if in homage to the religious associations of Tintern Abbey that are secularized in Wordsworth’s poem, Powys records saying his (pagan) prayers on a “gigantic floor of rock” in this “New York ‘Tintern Abbey’” (A, 644).57 When living in Corwen in North Wales, where he and Playter settled in 1935, he named “The other side of the Ditch … ‘The Duddon’ (after Wordsworth’s river)” (PSE, 150), a tribute to Wordsworth’s sonnet series, The River Duddon (1820). He told his sister Katie in 1941, “I have named every stream round here ‘Copy-catting’ old poet Wordsworth my favourite author after someone I like” (PSE, 154). This expression of ownership over nature almost parodies the attitude of dominance by the masculine “I,” later identified by feminist critics of “big six” Romanticism. While living in Dorset in 1934–5, Powys even recorded meeting some descendants of Wordsworth’s younger brother Christopher who lived locally. In September 1934, with his brother Theodore, he met “Andrew Wordsworth … great nephew of William,” who “caught us up out of breath. I have never seen a young man so shy. He spoke panting & with his face turned away” (DY, 78). In January 1935, Powys’s diary recounts a social encounter with “the Wordsworth Family,” meaning Andrew, his wife Helen, and their sons Jonathan and Giles (DY, 155). Powys added, “I took a terrific liking to his baby, little Giles Wordsworth the poet’s great great nephew!” (DY, 155).58 In September 1957—by then living in his final home at Blaenau Ffestiniog in North Wales—he received “such a lovely visit from Giles Wordsworth! Aged 23” and “lectured him on his great great great great great Uncle” (PSE, 284). Powys told the young man how thrilled I was to find in what is still … my favourite of all stories Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein that along with Shelley and Byron with whom she was living then in Geneva the only way she could describe Mountains was by quoting Wordsworth! So Shelley & Byron had to sit still while Mary Wollstoncroft [sic] daughter of the Anarchist William Godwin quoted Wordsworth! (PSE, 284)

Also in upstate New York, he says he “found a spot which I have named Wordsworth Park for it resembles an outlying fold of Rydal Mount” (1931 Diary, 168). 58 Powys’s editors note that “As an evacuee” during World War II, Giles Wordsworth stayed with Powys’s sisters Gertrude and Katie (DY, 155). Giles told John Cowper that he had known them “since he was four” (PSNL 75: 37). 57

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This image of the future Mary Shelley describing the Swiss mountains by quoting Wordsworth’s poetry while in Switzerland nicely illustrates the mediation of the natural world through the Romantics.59 For Powys, to converse with Giles “was like getting a mystic poetic incantation from his old ancestral uncle,” akin to the “music” of Wordsworth’s poem “The Solitary Reaper” (PSE, 285). The following year, as if to apply the poet’s line, “The Child is Father of the Man” from “My Heart Leaps Up” (PW, l. 7) to the baby who had charmed him, Powys recalled the “perfect manners” of Giles (PSE, 298).60 As late as 1960, at the age of eighty-seven, he mentioned finding the Pelican book Home at Grasmere—which includes extracts from Wordsworth’s unfinished Recluse and from Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals—“absolutely thrilling!” (LIH, 102).61 Despite this saturation with Wordsworth, as Paul Cheshire notes, “Powys’s self-definition as a disciple of Wordsworth” is “one single thread of a complex fabric.”62 Powys’s biggest deviation from the Romantic poets lay in his decision to abandon poetry for prose. Major influences on his fiction include, as mentioned earlier, another Romantic-era literary giant, Sir Walter Scott, although Scott’s impact was exceeded by that of Thomas Hardy, whom Powys knew personally. Hardy’s influence looms over Powys’s Wessex novels, although the similarities may be deceptive.63 Powys’s other Victorian forebears include Emily Brontë (to the spirit of whom he dedicated his second novel Rodmoor) and Charles Dickens, while his Modernist precursors include Henry James in addition to Joyce, Richardson, and Proust. In his fiction set in the twentieth century, Powys implicitly expressed nostalgia for Romanticism while marking the temporal and temperamental gulf that separated him from Wordsworth and the other Romantic poets. The characters in his Wessex novels often wander alone on foot across Romantic landscapes studded with thorn trees, pools, and rocks, but they also travel by train and (occasionally) automobile, and smoke Gold Flake or Player’s Navy Cut cigarettes lit with Swan Vesta matches, details

On December 24, 1959, Powys told Susanne Lane that in his youth, “I read [Frankenstein] to my grandmother’s cook Charlotte – no! not read it! – told her the story as I took her for a row in a boat on Weymouth Bay. She was so horrified at the story that she fainted in the boat and I had to carry her over the pebbly beach into my grandmother’s house” (“Letters of John Cowper Powys to Susanne Lane,” 193). 60 He added, “We heard on the Radio some music by a William Wordsworth, also, like Giles, descended from the poet’s brother. What a powerful family these Wordsworths are!” (PSE, 298). 61 The book appeared in 1960 as a paperback edited, as Powys informed Ichiro Hara, by Colette Clark. Powys sent Hara a copy of the book (LIH, 102–3). 62 Paul Cheshire, “John Cowper Powys and William Wordsworth: ‘his cerebral mystical passion for young women,’” The Powys Journal 26 (2016): 28–9. 63 On Powys and Hardy, see Jeremy Hooker, Writers in a Landscape (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1996), 96–138; and James Prothero, Wordsworth and Welsh Romanticism (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2013). 59

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that tether them to modernity. By contrast, Powys’s historical novels contain occasional anachronistic references to Romantic poetry that serve to bridge the gulf of time rather than reinforce it. Richard Maxwell sees Powys’s turn to historical fiction with Owen Glendower and Porius as reflecting his “boyhood” familiarity with Scott’s Waverley novels.64 Ian Duncan makes the intriguing claim, “Porius as a whole resembles a Scott novel written by Wordsworth.”65 He adds, “Porius is a compelling candidate for the last great work of British Romanticism.”66 According to these lines of thought, Powys turned back even more to Romantic-era inspirations later in his career. Duncan sees the literary-historical trajectory, whereby the “transcendental intuition” of Romantic lyric gives way to realist fiction’s “immanence of individual being in the world,” as complicated by what he calls Powys’s “Romantic-Modernist aesthetic.”67 Other Powys critics have questioned the extent to which his work is beholden to the Romantics, particularly Wordsworth. H. P. Collins contends that “the ‘Wordsworthianism’ [Powys] so emphatically claims as the essential of his awakening to nature has so little of the transcendental in it as barely to warrant the name. There is in Wordsworth a sense of immanent deity, … that is quite alien to the earthy occultism of John Cowper.”68 On the contrary, I will show that Powys does espouse Wordsworthian transcendentalism, especially in the middle of his career, and that whether cognizant of an “immanent deity” or not, his treatment of nature remains bound up with his reading of the Romantics.69 G. Wilson Knight uses the phrase “super-Wordsworthianism” to characterize Powys’s allegiance to “the secret of Nature” (quoting the poet Taliesin in Porius) and to a “purely natural mysticism,” by which he seems to mean a pantheism that does not foreclose “other dimensions.”70 That is to say, Powys extends Wordsworth’s The quotation is from John Cowper Powys, Rabelais (London: The Bodley Head, 1948), 319. Maxwell points out that Scott’s novels were staple reading material for Victorian middleclass children (“Two Canons: On the Meaning of Powys’s Relation to Scott and His Turn to Historical Fiction,” Western Humanities Review 57, no. 1 [2003]: 104). Maxwell also demonstrates the influence of Scott’s poetry on Porius (“A Game of Yes and No: Childhood and Apocalypse in Porius,” The Powys Journal 16 [2006]: 84–102). In 1902–3, Powys gave a course of six lectures on the Waverley novels (Langridge, Record of Achievement, 47). 65 Ian Duncan, “Sacred Monsters: Re-reading Porius,” The Powys Journal 19 (2009): 164. 66 Ibid. 67 The first two of these quotations are from Ian Duncan, Human Forms: The Novel in the Age of Evolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), 149. The third is from Ian Duncan, “The Mythology of Escape: Owen Glendower and the Failure of Historical Romance,” Powys Notes 8 (1992): 54. 68 Collins, Old Earth-Man, 17. 69 Collins also sees Powys’s attitude to nature as less “anthropocentric” than Wordsworth, in that Powys “ignores the distinction between conscious life and ‘inanimate’ life” (ibid., 209). As I will show, some later critics have challenged the notion of Wordsworth as anthropocentric. 70 G. Wilson Knight, “Powys on Death,” in EJCP, 199–200, quoting Powys’s Autobiography. 64

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pantheism into alternative ontological “dimensions.” The phrase “superWordsworthianism” also captures Powys’s impulse to be more like Wordsworth than Wordsworth himself—and, on occasion, a parody of his “great master.” Belinda Humfrey, in the introduction to a 1972 collection of essays that she edited, offers an incisive account of Powys’s Romantic affiliations. She contends that Powys’s “ancestors” include Coleridge, Keats, and De Quincey, and she emphasizes his debt to Wordsworth: From Wordsworth come not only his outsiders and idiots, “the selfsufficing power of solitude”, a brooding on imaginative and spiritual “power”, a concern with the “individual Mind that keeps her own inviolate retirement”, but very possibly a veneration for the “Forests of Romance.” (EJCP, 42–3) I address Powys’s Wordsworth-based investment in the “individual Mind” and in the spiritual world in my first and fourth chapters, respectively. I discuss the Wordsworthian sources of some of what Humfrey calls Powys’s “outsiders and idiots” in my third chapter. And I wander with Powys and Keats rather than Wordsworth through the “Forests of Romance” in my fifth chapter. In Chapters 1 and 2, I take issue with Humfrey’s modifying claim that “Wordsworth … did not furnish Powys’s attitude to the inanimate natural world” (EJCP, 42). Like Collins’s assertion, this claim implies that Powys’s understanding of “the inanimate natural world” stays stable over the course of his writing life, whereas I see shifts in the degree to which Powys’s characterizations of nature are filtered through Wordsworth and other Romantic poets.71 Some critics who approach Powys as a more Modernist writer connect Powys’s Modernist leanings to his environmentalism. Sam Wiseman, analyzing Powys’s “deep-seated ambivalence towards both modernity (as a social, technological and industrial phenomenon) and modernism (as a literary movement),” argues that Powys is not as anti-modern or antiModernist as he seems.72 Wiseman claims that Powys’s “polyphonic” style—also stressed by Lock—can be seen as “proto-ecological”: “Powys … uses his characters’ embodiment within a teeming nonhuman life world

Other Powys critics who have stressed Powys’s affinities to the Romantic poets include Glen Cavaliero, John Cowper Powys: Novelist (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), vii; C. A. Coates, John Cowper Powys in Search of a Landscape (Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1982), 165–72; Hooker, John Cowper Powys, 13, and Writers in a Landscape, 108; and David Goodway, Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow: Left-Libertarian Thought and British Writers from William Morris to Colin Ward (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2006), 93–4. 72 Sam Wiseman, The Reimagining of Place in English Modernism (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015), 71. 71

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to undermine the centrality of human concerns, and to suggest instead a kind of proto-biocentrism, asserting the equivalent value of all life.”73 As I have already indicated, I contend that Powys’s Romantic-inspired protoecological thinking goes further in extending to inanimate matter, the whole “astronomical universe” (A, 650), and beyond. Taking a more thoroughly eco-critical approach than Wiseman, Michael Wood sees Powys as moving past Romanticism and challenging “received notions of ‘Nature’” even while “laps[ing] into problematic invocations of the supposedly ‘natural.’”74 Wood reads Powys in terms of the “greening” of Modernist studies, claiming that “Powys’s fictions are marked by an attentiveness to the non-human that is developed by looking through, and beyond, localised human perspectives; the result is a poetics that seeks to ground the human, materially and experientially, in nature understood as material reality.”75 While I certainly agree with the first half of this claim and that Powys’s essentializing of nature—and human nature—can be highly “problematic,” I take a more skeptical attitude to “material reality” as well as to the positing of “received notions of ‘Nature.’” Reading Powys through Romantic studies rather than Modernist studies, my investigation into Powys’s de-centering—and re-centering—of the human is more in dialogue with Romantic eco-criticism, which acknowledges the Romantics’ own interrogation of “Nature” and which in its later manifestations questions the materiality of the natural world. Critics taking an environmentalist approach to Romantic poetry tend to downplay its focus on experiences in which, as Wordsworth puts it, “the mind is lord and master” (PW, Prelude 12: 222). They also tend to de-emphasize the Romantics’ interest in “recognitions of transcendent power” (PW, Prelude 14: 75). Romantic studies eco-criticism began with books by Jonathan Bate and Karl Kroeber in the early 1990s that sought to make the case for the Romantics as proto-ecological.76 Bate claimed, “The poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge … foreshadows … ecology in its holistic conception of the earth as a … dwelling-place for an interdependent biological community.”77 This idealizing view was challenged in turn by feminist critics seeing Romantic poetry as perpetuating a masculine dominance of nature and Marxist critics exposing a class-based appropriation

Ibid., 62, 63. Michael Wood, “The Ecological Imagination of John Cowper Powys: Writing, ‘Nature’, and the Non-human,” PhD dissertation, University of Leeds, 2017, 34, 15. 75 Ibid., abstract, iv. 76 Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (London: Routledge, 1991); Karl Kroeber, Ecological Literary Criticism: Romantic Imagining and the Biology of Mind (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). 77 Bate, Romantic Ecology, 29. 73 74

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of nature.78 In a further refinement, James McKusick advocated “a form of ecocriticism that evades the trap of crude materialism,” seeing both “nature-as-ground” and “nature-as-construct.”79 The notion of “nature-asconstruct” allows for a more ideologically and linguistically aware reference to the Romantic glorification of nature. Led by Timothy Morton, twentyfirst-century Romantic eco-critics now routinely break down the distinction between nature and culture, while often acknowledging that the traditional Romantic idea of the natural world “out there,” however contested, is too powerful to leave behind.80 Meanwhile, proponents of “gray,” “stonecolored” criticism—exemplified by the work of Onno Oerlemans and Paul Fry—ascribe equal levels of materiality to minds and minerals in Romantic poetry.81 Sharing Fry’s interest in “things as things,” critics taking more ethics- and human-cognizant approaches—such as Adam Potkay and Mary Jacobus—create bridges from eco-criticism to disability studies.82 More recently, Lisa Ottum and Seth Reno have pulled together eco-criticism and affect studies, with its attention to the embodiment of feelings, seeing human perception and emotion as both biological and ideological.83 To some extent, as I suggested earlier, Powys’s rewritings of the Romantics anticipate these various materialist “green” and “gray” turns in Romantic studies, as well as the more human-centered approaches, while Powys’s refusal to relinquish a Romantic-authorized investment in the otherworldly vastly enlarges the notion of “nature-as-construct.” Even some of his occasional distortions of the poems, assisted in places by selective quotations and slight but telling misquotations, can be seen as presciently participating in current critical debates concerning Romanticism.

See, for example, the feminist reading by Anne K. Mellor, Romanticism and Gender (New York: Routledge, 1992), 149; and the Marxist critique by Tony Pinckney, “Romantic Ecology,” in A Companion to Romanticism, ed. Duncan Wu (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998): 451–2. 79 James McKusick, Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 15–16. 80 See, for instance, Timothy Morton, “Here Comes Everything: The Promise of Object-Oriented Ontology,” Qui Parle 19, no. 2 (2011): 163–90. On the continued usefulness of the natureculture distinction, see, for example, Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 113–14; and Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the U. S. and Beyond (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2001), 5. 81 Onno Oerlemans, Romanticism and the Materiality of Nature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002); Paul H. Fry, Wordsworth and the Poetry of What We Are (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 72 and 74, Fry’s italics. 82 Fry, What We Are, 139. See, for example, Adam Potkay, Wordsworth’s Ethics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012); and Mary Jacobus, Romantic Things: A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 83 Lisa Ottum and Seth Reno, eds., Wordsworth and the Green Romantics: Affect and Ecology in the Nineteenth Century (Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2016). 78

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Powys, like the Romantics, employs the conventionally capitalized term “Nature”—and, occasionally, using scare quotes, “‘Nature’”84—to refer to the nonhuman world, although his use of the term, like Wordsworth’s on occasion, often includes human-made objects. Powys also conventionally genders “Nature” as feminine, sometimes overtly voicing the centuries-long and now discarded idea that women are “closer to Nature than men” (AH, 105). He—or his persona or narrator, depending on the text—frequently invokes essentialized notions of gender and sexuality, as well as relying on the kinds of racial and ethnic stereotyping familiar in his era.85 Yet at the same time, in taking what one critic calls a “cosmocentric” rather than an anthropocentric view of the universe,86 he goes beyond even some presentday deep ecologists in valuing equally not just all living things but also inorganic things.87 As he himself put it, “Nature” is a loose, vague, popular name that covers a great variety of human impressions. But whether used in the philosophic-cosmic-mystic sense as Goethe or Wordsworth or Emerson would use it, or used in the ordinary popular sense, Nature thus considered includes the whole weight, mass, and volume of all the multitudinous objects, animate and inanimate, brought into existence under the pressure of evolution upon this particular plane. (AGO, 69) By “this particular plane,” Powys presumably refers to the particular ontological plane of the cosmos in which we find ourselves, but, following Wordsworth and other Romantic writers, he also often extends “Nature” outside that plane. In this book, I on occasion use the terms “nature,” “the natural world,” and “the nonhuman world” almost interchangeably in the restricted sense—inherited from the Romantics—that indicates conventional sources of value for an environmentalist outlook, but I more frequently follow Powys in using the terms “nature” and “Life Itself” (DMR, 47) in his more far-reaching sense, while resisting the essentialist assumptions

John Cowper Powys, One Hundred Best Books, with Commentary and an Essay on Books and Reading (New York: American Library Service, [1916] 1922), 46. 85 Katherine Saunders Nash, in Feminist Narrative Ethics: Tacit Persuasion in Modernist Form (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2014), makes a helpful distinction between the “outspoken misogyny” of the “flesh-and-blood” Powys and the implied author of his fiction, although the distinction does not necessarily apply to his nonfiction works, even when they employ a persona (9). 86 David A. Cook, “The ‘Autobiography’ of John Cowper Powys: A Portrait of the Artist as Other,” Modern Philology 72, no. 1 (1974): 32. 87 Ottum and Reno point out that what they call “third-wave eco-theory”—more interdisciplinary than the second wave represented by McKusick and Morton—extends “agency” to “animals, chemical processes, and even inanimate objects” (“Introduction: Recovering Ecology’s Affects,” in Wordsworth and the Green Romantics, 5). 84

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underlying his vision of “Nature.”88 As I have already emphasized, I see Powys as proto-ecological not only in using the Romantics to appreciate the nonhuman but also in reworking Romanticism to value a more expansive view of “Life Itself” that encompasses the nitty-gritty of cultural constructions and artifacts, embraces “minerality”89 as well as human “dirt” and “blood” (OG, 406), and extends beyond the furthest reaches of the cosmos, looking past the “astronomical universe” (A, 650). My study of Powys’s revisionary Romanticism thus aims to enlarge the purview of eco-criticism, combining “green” attention to human sensation with “gray” analysis of continuities between sentient and insentient things alongside consideration of ethical responsiveness to human deprivation and disability, in addition to pursuing transcendental and magical visions “beyond colour!” (Powys’s phrase [AGO, 139]). Each chapter of this book investigates a different-hued strand of his multifaceted work. Chapter 1, “‘Sensations sweet,’” argues that Powys’s Romantic-inspired “cult of the senses” anticipates recent “green” materialist interpretations of Wordsworth—such as Reno’s—that stress the physiological grounding of the poet’s love of nature.90 Powys repeatedly recommends the conscious enjoyment of “sense-impressions” (EL, 313), a reworking of Wordsworthian nature-worship and Keatsian “sensationalism” (Powys’s term, CTB, 102). Early and late in his career, Powys embraces what he himself called “‘materialism’” (CTB, 60), which coexists in his mature work with more transcendental leanings alike influenced by Wordsworth. In his nonfiction prose, Powys rewrites Wordsworth in his own image as a nature poet invested in the experience of the senses. He gives his readers a Wordsworth in touch with the elements, who participates in a “planetary sensuality” (AGO, 19), at some points ascribing a surprisingly sexual aspect to the poet’s alleged physicality. Like current materialist critics, he thus recovers Wordsworth’s attentiveness to embodiment. This chapter discusses Powys’s ambivalent attitude to Romantic sensation in his early novel After My Fashion. In more detail, it then examines how in Wolf Solent, Powys engages explicitly and implicitly with Wordsworth’s “Immortality Ode,” the poet’s eloquent meditation on the loss of bodily and emotional connection with nature. I then interpret Powys’s Autobiography as a semi-parodic rewriting

Mary Jacobus draws attention to the political and existential stakes of the phrase “life itself” in the era of climate change when she quotes Bruno Latour: “Will you say of life itself that it goes on ‘literally’ or ‘figuratively’?” (“A Perilous Change of Correspondence: Romanticism after [Nature],” in Romanticism and Speculative Realism, ed. Anne McCarthy and Chris Washington (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), 189). 89 I take the term from Fry, What We Are, 59. 90 Seth Reno, “Rethinking the Romantics’ Love of Nature,” in Wordsworth and the Green Romantics, ed. Reno and Ottum, 28–58. 88

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of Wordsworth’s The Prelude that endorses yet, at the same time, more elaborately satirizes the Romantic investment in sensation. By contrast, my second chapter, “‘Rocks and stones and trees,’” argues that Powys’s valuing of human insentience—expressed through numerous allusions to Wordsworth’s “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal”—anticipates the mineral-leaning “gray” approach to Wordsworth by Fry and Oerlemans. Powys also presages Jacobus’s more human-conscious approach to inanimate things. The chapter investigates the “subhuman” leanings (EL, 319) of Powys’s Wordsworth-inspired philosophy and his “earth-rooted” characterization of the poet in his popular philosophical works (MoC, 269). It then briefly analyzes Powys’s re-imagining of Wordsworthian minerality in A Glastonbury Romance and Weymouth Sands. I examine how Powys’s historical novel Owen Glendower explores its theme of Welsh nationalism by way of Wordsworthian “rocks and stones and stumps” (OG, 374). I then revisit and extend the concerns of Chapter 1 to show how Powys’s masterpiece Porius, set in the fifth century, combines a profound reworking of The Prelude with what Oerlemans calls “existential environmentalism.”91 More red—in the sense that it deals with the flesh-and-blood inhabitants of “our blood-stained earth” (OC, 174)—than green or gray, Chapter 3, “‘The still sad music of humanity,’” addresses Powys’s rewriting of Romantic ethical and humanitarian concerns, with a focus on his reformulation of Wordsworth’s theme of human suffering. It also investigates how Powys builds upon Wordsworth’s interest in vagrancy and states of mental instability. I claim that Powys anticipates the approaches of recent ethicallyand disability-minded critics such as Nancy Yousef and Emily Stanback,92 using Wordsworth both to unsettle the boundaries of the human and to reinvest in human well-being. I argue that in refiguring Wordsworth’s depictions of suffering—and often disabled—human beings, Powys rebukes the poet for an insufficiently ethical stance while himself—sometimes comically—enacting the limits of ethical responsiveness. Whereas Chapter 1 lingers over Wolf Solent’s allusions to Wordsworth’s “Ode,” this chapter sees Wolf as rewriting, in skeptical fashion, the “Blind Beggar” episode from The Prelude. The chapter goes on to analyze Powys’s interrogation, in his 1929–35 diaries, of Wordsworth’s troubled encounters with the decrepit Leech-Gatherer of “Resolution and Independence” and with the Discharged Soldier of The Prelude. It then interprets depictions of “mad” women in Powys’s Autobiography as variations on figures of the “madwoman” in Wordsworth’s poems (A, 570). This chapter also considers Powys’s ostentatious welcoming of neurodiversity, which fitfully resonates with Oerlemans, Materiality of Nature, 49. Nancy Yousef, Romantic Intimacy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013); Emily B. Stanback, The Wordsworth-Coleridge Circle and the Aesthetics of Disability (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). 91 92

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present-day approaches to the poet’s treatment of intellectual disability. The chapter ends by examining Powys’s painful homage to Wordsworth’s “The Idiot Boy” in his 1952 novel The Inmates, set in a psychiatric hospital, with its meditation on “the insanity of nature” (I, 215). This chapter thus proposes that Powys’s treatment of Wordsworthian figures of deprivation augments present-day connections between eco-criticism and disability studies. While each of my first three chapters suggests that Powys’s writings participate avant la lettre in various current approaches to Romanticism, my last two chapters address the extent to which his work exposes the limitations of those approaches. My fourth chapter, “‘Something far more deeply interfused,’” takes readers “beyond colour” to show how Wordsworth’s poetry leads Powys beyond Wordsworth in several visionary directions. I discuss how Powys’s Wordsworth-authorized transcendentalism slides between the kind of pantheism associated with Wordsworth’s early poetry, including “Tintern Abbey,” and an intangible “Beyond-Nature” ontologically distinct from what, following the philosopher William James, Powys calls the “multiverse” (EL, 343). A Glastonbury Romance, which figures the Holy Grail as both inside and outside nature, represents the high point of Powys’s commitment to a Wordsworth-inspired mystical “Something.” I argue that Weymouth Sands holds onto a more precarious and scaled-back idealization of “Something … ‘deeply interfused’” (WeS, 528). Implicitly conceding the pull of materialist understandings of the transcendental, Powys also projects onto Wordsworth a more earth-bound everyday sense of the mystical that I call the “generational sublime.” According to Powys, Wordsworth gives readers access to “race-memories” (DS, 41) and “the sense-feelings of the generations” (EL, 316), on occasion extending “race-memories” to other species. I show that in Maiden Castle, this form of cultural transcendence is tethered to a particular locality, whereas Owen Glendower offers a nationalistic—yet more explicitly proto-ecological—version of generational sublimity. Sometimes inviting and sometimes resisting demystifying interpretation, Powys’s renderings of Wordsworthian transcendentalism dovetail, diverge, and fluctuate throughout his long, varied career, providing alternative models for envisaging an ecological sublime. Chapter 5, “‘Cloud on cloud,’” extends my account of Powys’s prescient critique of current Romanticists’ focus on materialist and human-centered interpretation. This chapter analyzes Powys’s use of Keats’s poetry to explore another central Romantic theme: the power of the supernatural— another theme that complicates his sensation- and nature-based philosophy, and that also demands to be accommodated within a flexible Romantic ecocriticism. I show how Powys, a self-described “Magician” (A, 7), revises Keats’s fragmentary epic Hyperion to incorporate the marvelous within his capacious ecological vision. Keats’s legacy of “sensuously unearthly” language (VR, 187) helps Powys to blur the line between natural and supernatural, as

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in his early mythological poem Lucifer, which counterintuitively advocates the life of the senses. In Morwyn, or The Vengeance of God (1937), Powys somewhat unconvincingly rewrites Hyperion, projecting the restoration of the fallen Titans and by extension the healing of the earth. Porius, in which the magician Myrddin Wyllt (Merlin) is a reincarnation of Saturn, is Powys’s most thoroughgoing and satisfying completion of Hyperion. With its decisive affirmation of the supernatural, this text constitutes Powys’s most radical ecological statement. By contrast, his fantasy novel Atlantis (1954) offers a more inconclusive, though still Keats-inflected, reworking of the myth of the Titans. Powys’s later romance The Brazen Head (1956) questions his adoption of the voice of the poet of Hyperion, yet still makes a case for the survival of magic. Finally, in Powys’s playful late fantasies, the Titans live on in attenuated form. Despite interrogating Keatsian “enchantment” (MoC, 51), Powys reaffirms “the magical view of life” (A, 626). Like the book as a whole, this chapter contends that Powys brings his readers closest to the “ways” of the “whole bloody Cosmos!” when exploring those “ways” through Romantic poetry: the self-conscious allusiveness of his writing makes it more, not less, ecological. In the Preface to Enjoyment of Literature, Powys writes, “Books are more than a second nature. They are an under-nature and an over-nature” (EL, xvii). The phrase “over-nature” captures the “strain[ing]” of the external world through the “human imagination” (EL, xviii), as when Powys filters accounts of scenery and weather through allusions to the Romantic poets, seeing with their eyes. The phrase “under-nature” may be another way of saying the same thing, but it also seems to go further in acknowledging the self-evident impossibility of representing the nonhuman world without what Powys calls the “sieves” of culture and figuration (EL, xviii). More than once, Powys approvingly quotes Charles Lamb’s line, “books think for me” (LLW, 270; VR, 111), preferring to enjoy “reality … second hand or at one remove” (PSE, 184). He commends literature’s capacity to render “Nature double-dyed, so to speak” (MoC, 34).93 And in the retrospective Preface to A Glastonbury Romance (written for the 1955 edition), Powys calls himself “a born book-worm” and “hopelessly and incredulously bookish,” stressing with questionable exaggeration that the novel “is not the work in any sense of ‘an observer of real life.’”94 Among the books with which he is most familiar, more so even than novels, he names “the poetry of Wordsworth and Keats.”95 As if to enact his point, he uses an unmarked allusion to the “Immortality Ode,” “deep almost as life,” to characterize his Throughout his writings, glancing allusions to Romantic poetry, such as a reference to Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” “no birds sing” (PSE, 221), marked only by italics, register the filtering of nature through literary sources. 94 John Cowper Powys, Preface, A Glastonbury Romance (London: Macdonald, 1955), x, xv, xi. 95 Ibid., xi. 93

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romance’s “psychological secrets.”96 Despite his self-confessed weak grasp of “nature and times and seasons,”97 Powys’s critics, as mentioned earlier, often point to his nature descriptions as a major strength of his writing.98 I suggest that Powys’s representations of the nonhuman world come across as all the more compelling for being mediated through other writers, especially the Romantics, and that his reliance on Wordsworth in particular is instrumental in enabling him to create the illusion (if it is that) of a nature “out there”—as well as a “Beyond-Nature.” Meanwhile, he draws on Keats to help stretch nature into the supernatural. That is to say, the opposition between a “book-worm” and “an observer of real life” is obviously a false one.99 The literariness of Powys’s writing—for the purposes of this study, its use of Romanticism—accentuates the “voices” of “Nature”100 and enables a more thoroughly ecological valuing of “life itself,” a “life” that includes “some mysterious Beyond-life” (WeS, 388) and an appreciation of magic.

Ibid., x. Quoted in EJCP, 330. 98 When planning A Glastonbury Romance in 1929, Powys revisited some of the settings that he planned to use, and when composing the novel in 1930, he consulted Ordnance Survey maps (EJCP, 325). Yet in his diary he referred to “my teasing stupidity over Geography and compass” (1931 Diary, 4), and in some of his letters, he disingenuously proclaims his ignorance of seasonal changes, botany, and so on. He wrote to his brother Littleton, “What I find difficult as I talk of twilights so often is to remember when twilight begins in March—in April—in May etc etc etc. I am worse at that than even at the order of plants which is also a somewhat weak point!” (quoted in EJCP, 328). Along similar lines, Powys told Louis Wilkinson, “Over this blooming Nature business I am so ridiculously ignorant that I make the most incredible mistakes about – well, say about the moon and where the hell its! [sic] and about which way it rises or sets or pokes out its ‘silvery’ horns!” (quoted in Louis Wilkinson, Seven Friends, ed. Anthony Naylor (Thame: Mandrake Press, [1953] 1992), 72). 99 Cf. V. S. Pritchett’s dismissive yet telling comment on Powys (which perhaps could be said of many fiction writers): “It is as if the novelist had never met human beings and had been obliged to manufacture them out of literary sources” (“The Mysteries of John Cowper Powys,” The New Statesman 69, January 1, 1965, 534). 100 Preface, A Glastonbury Romance (1955), xvi. 96 97

1 “Sensations sweet”: Re-experiencing Wordsworth’s Love of Nature According to John Cowper Powys, William Wordsworth found “in what he calls ‘the language of the sense’ the deepest ecstasy of the contemplative life” (PS, 32). Powys’s “cult of sensations” is a reworking of Romantic natureworship much indebted to Wordsworth and, to a lesser extent, to Keats (CTB, 83). In his popular philosophical works and his Autobiography, Powys repeatedly recommends the habitual enjoyment of “senseimpressions” (EL, 313), especially in response to nature, a practice that he misleadingly names “sensationalism” (CTB, 102), although he sometimes uses the alternative term “elementalism” (AGO, 20).1 More than once, he approvingly quotes the well-known line from Keats’s November 22, 1817, letter to Benjamin Bailey, “O for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts!” (DS, 88).2 While he aspires to live by those words and effusively encourages his readers to do likewise, he also modifies Keats’s statement by coining the term “sensation-thoughts” to express a combination of “sensual” and contemplative responsiveness to the external world (A, 169, 300). According to him, physical sensations themselves can become “a sort of thinking” that might share the “sub-thoughts, or over-thoughts” of “the old earth herself,” blending with human “feelings” to create a “mysterious ‘rapport’” between human and nonhuman “things” (A, 169). They thus constitute an ecological recognition of the nonhuman: “Human sensations are Nature’s self-expression. They are the earth’s awareness of herself” (A,

Goodway comments, “Sensations, sensationalism, sensuality, sensuousness … All these terms are conventionally used in very different ways from Powys’s intended meanings” (Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow, 110). 2 Keats wrote, “O for a Life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!” (JKL, 1: 185). Powys also quotes this line in The Art of Happiness (Girard, KS: Haldeman-Julius, 1923), not to be confused with his 1935 book of the same title (27). Later in the same letter to Bailey, Keats aspires to combine “sensation” and “thought” (JKL, 1: 186). 1

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238). Several of Powys’s novels, which depict his semi-autobiographical protagonists as nature-lovers and sensation-seekers, invoke Wordsworth and other Romantic poets, including Keats, to deepen—and ironize—the characters’ sense-based attunement to the natural world. Powys’s attention to the physicality of “sensations sweet” (A, 400) anticipates the work of recent Romanticists who have combined neuroscientific and affect-oriented approaches with environmentally minded literary interpretation. In this chapter, I will first discuss Powys’s valuing of sensation in terms of Keats as well as Wordsworth. Next, I will show how in his nonfiction prose, Powys rewrites Wordsworth in his own image, at times making Wordsworth even more “the poet of nature,” in Walter Pater’s phrase, than Wordsworth himself.3 I will then briefly examine Powys’s somewhat skeptical treatment of Romantic-styled poetry of sensation in his early novel After My Fashion. In more detail, I will argue that Wolf Solent, in which the protagonist explicitly compares himself with Wordsworth, both embraces and critiques “romantic sensuality” (PDR, 19). In the last third of this chapter, I will analyze how in his Autobiography, Powys casts himself as a latter-day Wordsworth and in doing so presents his sensation-focused “philosophy of life”—as well as the Wordsworthian quest to transcend the body—in a more satirical light. Powys thus contributes a comic element to the present-day materialist reconceptualizing of Wordsworth’s love of nature. Powys’s quotation “the language of the sense” refers to the line in “Tintern Abbey” in which Wordsworth proclaims “nature and the language of the sense” to be the “anchor” of his “purest thoughts” and his morality (PW, ll. 109–10). Most critics of Wordsworth see him as valuing sensation as a basis for “elevated thoughts” (PW, “Tintern Abbey,” l. 96) more than as an end in itself. The “purest” thoughts of all are experiences of the sublime that leave sense-impressions behind, even as they originate in them and depend on them for articulation.4 My main Wordsworthian reference points in this chapter are the three autobiographical poems “Tintern Abbey,” the “Immortality Ode,” and The Prelude. Each of these charts with different emphases what Stephen Gill calls “Wordsworth’s providential economy of loss and gain,” a trajectory bound up with the degree of the poet’s connectedness to nature.5 All three poems associate a supposedly unmediated sense-based love of the natural world with the youthful self. That bodily absorption in nature, once lost, is replaced with the “Abundant recompense” of love of humanity and

Walter Pater, Appreciations (London: Macmillan, [1889] 1910), 49. Pater’s essay was first published in 1874 in The Fortnightly Review and revised for Appreciations in 1889. 4 On Wordsworth and the sublime, see, for example, Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976); and Frances Ferguson, Solitude and The Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation (New York: Routledge, 1992). 5 Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 154. 3

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transcendental awareness (PW, “Tintern Abbey,” l. 88). In “Tintern Abbey,” Wordsworth remembers “sensations sweet,/Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart,” ambivalently regrets the loss of his youthful passion for nature, and celebrates the compensatory “still, sad music of humanity” and “sense sublime/Of something far more deeply interfused” (PW, ll. 27–8, 91, 95–6). He then reaffirms his groundedness in “nature and the language of the sense” (PW, l. 108). In the “Ode,” he laments the loss of the remembered “splendour in the grass” and finds a more muted compensation in the achievement of “the philosophic mind” and the “sober colouring” of adult vision (PW, ll. 181, 189, 200). In The Prelude, his epic poem on the growth of his own mind, he traces his entrancement by nature’s “lovely forms” during his boyhood in the Lake District (PW, 1: 632–3); records setbacks to the shaping of his imagination by experiences at Cambridge, in London, and during the French Revolution; and then discovers higher joys with the help of his sister Dorothy, his friendship with Coleridge, and, of course, nature. Quotations from the first two of these poems in particular punctuate Powys’s nonfiction prose, although, as we will see, Powys draws on several other Wordsworth poems in expounding his “cult of the senses” (A, 66). Among his novels, Wolf Solent is Powys’s most sustained engagement with the pattern of growth, loss, and recovery addressed in the “Immortality Ode.” Powys’s Autobiography is an extended, partly parodic rewriting of The Prelude that also revises the stories told in “Tintern Abbey” and the “Ode.”

The Language of Sensation In casting Wordsworth as a poet whose nature-worship was grounded in the senses, Powys elaborated upon one relatively minor strand of the Victorian reception of Wordsworth. Many of Wordsworth’s Victorian admirers—notably John Stuart Mill and Matthew Arnold—had focused on his exploration of “states of feeling” and his ethical force rather than on his evocation of “natural beauty” per se.6 Nevertheless, in “The Youth of Nature” (1852), Arnold claims that Wordsworth enabled “us” to see “with his eyes.”7 Yet particularly in The Prelude, Wordsworth is suspicious of visual experience, deploring the “thraldom” of the “most despotic of our senses”—the “bodily eye” (PW, 12: 150, 128–9). The 1805 version of the poem more explicitly warns against the mere “transport of the outward sense,/Not of the mind, vivid but not profound” (11: 188–9). As if in

John Stuart Mill, Autobiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1873] 1985), 85. In Wordsworth and the Victorians, Gill discusses the poet’s afterlife. 7 Quoted from Matthew Arnold, Poems (London: Macmillan, 1885), ll. 53, 55. 6

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defiance of Wordsworth’s own assertions and other critics’ opinions, Pater stands out as the major Victorian proponent of the notion of Wordsworth as a sense-based nature poet. Pater—a strong influence on Powys—detects in Wordsworth “an exceptional susceptibility to the impressions of eye and ear,” although he gives little evidence of Wordsworth’s alleged attentiveness to “the sights and sounds of the natural world.”8 I will suggest that Powys goes further than these Victorian commentators in treating Wordsworth— at least on one level—as invested in the senses, at times ascribing to him a sensitivity to nature more characteristic of Dorothy Wordsworth than of the poet himself. In this regard, Powys anticipates recent materialist readings of Wordsworth that have privileged body over mind, or at least stressed the inextricability of the two. Noel Jackson draws attention to the ambiguity of the phrase “the language of the sense,” given Wordsworth’s skepticism toward the “immediacy of physical sense experience” and his reputation as the poet of “sublime disembodiment.”9 Nevertheless, although he does not foreground its environmental significance, Jackson interprets “the language of the sense” in materialist terms by situating it within medical and scientific discourses of the Romantic era and their Victorian legacy. Other physiology-leaning critics take a more explicitly eco-critical approach than Jackson’s. Seth Reno, for example, showing how “Wordsworth’s emphasis on ‘sensation’ draws directly from Romantic-era … neuroscience,” claims that despite its “transcendent impulses … Wordsworthian love of nature tends towards materiality.”10 Reno’s readings of “Tintern Abbey” and The Prelude stress the “physiological basis” even of the poet’s seemingly most “disembodied” responses to nature.11 Along similar lines, although she leaves the ecological significance implicit, Lisa Ann Robertson interprets “Tintern Abbey” alongside Humphry Davy’s empiricist model of the mind, arguing that the Pater, Appreciations, 48, 44. Noel Jackson, Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 8–10. He finds in Pater’s essay on Wordsworth a slippage between its ostensible celebration of Wordsworth as the poet of “sensuousness” and its acknowledgment of Wordsworth as the poet of “reflection” (210). Jackson finds this ambivalence all the more surprising given Pater’s reputation as “one of the foremost Victorian advocates of sensation in aesthetic experience” (207). Amelia Klein, in “The Poetics of Susceptibility: Wordsworth and Ecological Thought,” Studies in Romanticism 58, no. 1 (2019): 105–28, points to the long tradition of questioning Wordsworth’s reputation as a nature poet, beginning with Keats’s oftenquoted distinction between his own poetry of “negative capability” and “the wordsworthian or egotistical sublime.” (The first quotation is from Keats’s December 21, 1817, letter to George and Tom Keats; the second is from his October 27, 1818, letter to Richard Woodhouse (JKL, 1: 193, 1: 387).) As Klein observes, Wordsworth’s ostensible privileging of nature as his subject has been questioned in turn by phenomenological, deconstructive, and new historicist critics— to which I would add feminist critics. 10 Reno, “Rethinking the Romantics’ Love of Nature,” 30, 38. 11 Ibid., 41. 8 9

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poem enacts how “the mind depends on and is contained within the body.”12 While he does not presage such critics’ acts of historical contextualization, Powys represents Wordsworth as a nature poet of physical sensation in portraying him as capable of vivid detail and free from the distrust of the “bodily eye.” Powys thus participates in advance in the present-day recovery of Wordsworth’s treatment of embodiment. As I will show in Chapter 4, Powys nonetheless exalts Wordsworth for his “mysticism” (LIH, 28). Powys frequently uses the adjective “mystical,” which blurs the line between the material world and states “beyond Matter!” (AGR, 473). Like Wordsworth himself, Powys goes back and forth between valuing a sense-focused response to the natural world for its own sake and valuing that response for provoking the “elevated thoughts” of contemplation and the “purest thoughts” of transcendence. Some of the discussion in this first section foreshadows my account in Chapter 4 of Wordsworth-inflected Powysian transcendence, since the more “mystical” dimension of Powys’s “sensationalism” (DMR, 41) untethers it from what he himself, using skeptical scare quotes, called “‘materialism’” (CTB, 60). Materialist, mystical, and transcendental frames of reference are alike integral to Powys’s Wordsworth-inspired ecological vision.13 A quick look at Powys’s early account of Keats as a poet of sensation will help to clarify the development of the novelist’s sense-based version of Wordsworth. Keats’s distinction between sensation and thought had helped to shape the terms of his afterlife in the Victorian period, with critics divided over the sufficiency of poetic sensation and over the extent to which the “poet of the senses” drew on “reflection.”14 Victorian critics also worried

Lisa Ann Robertson, “‘Swallowed Up In Impression’: Humphry Davy’s Materialist Theory of Embodied Transcendence and William Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey,’” European Romantic Review 26, no. 5 (2015): 607. 13 In a 1929 letter to Dorothy M. Richardson, Powys advises her to “disregard completely [Wordsworth’s] christianity [sic], his morality, his chat about duty etc and read with meticulous care all he says when he is describing things or sensations or theories about sensations” (PDR, 20). Here Powys shows equal interest in Wordsworth’s ability to delineate “things” (the vague word choice is itself Wordsworthian) and his ability to stand back and theorize sensation. Both bodily sensations and “sensation-thoughts” can be distinguished from “theories about sensations” (what one might call meta-sensation) and a state “beyond sensation” (A, 199). 14 G. M. Matthews, ed. Keats: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1971), 267, quoting Arthur Hallam. On the Victorian reception of Keats, besides Matthews, see George H. Ford, Keats and the Victorians (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944); James Najarian, Victorian Keats: Manliness, Sexuality, and Desire (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); and Francis O’Gorman, “Critical Reception, 1821–1900,” in John Keats in Context, ed. Michael O’Neill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017): 323–30. Critics who have explored the extent to which Keats’s supposedly sense-based poetry is bound up with associative and abstract thought include Jackson, Science and Sensation; Shahidha Kazi Bari, Keats and Philosophy: The Life of Sensations (London: Routledge, 2012); and Stacey McDowell,“The Senses and Sensation,” in John Keats in Context, ed. O’Neill, 188–97. 12

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over the extent to which Keats’s sensuous language rendered his poetry effeminate. Both the image of Keats as a sensual poet and, conversely, as an ethereal figure (following his memorialization in Shelley’s Adonais) fed into this gendered language. Besides being seen as the quintessential poet of sensation, Keats was also used to authorize Victorian escapism into the realm of romance. In Chapter 5, I will discuss how Powys’s treatment of the supernatural combines these aspects of Keats’s legacy, celebrating the life of the senses from within Keatsian “purlieus of enchantment” (MoC, 51). Powys’s book, John Keats: or Popular Paganism—written in his thirties— uses Keats to proclaim a commitment to a sense-based poetics.15 In this book, Powys exalts Keats as the supreme poet of “Sensualism” and therefore as a fundamentally pagan writer (PoK, 55). He reacts against Victorian anxieties over the adequacy of sensation and over the alleged effeminacy of Keats, claiming access to the poet’s “body and blood” (PoK, 106). As Cedric Hentschel, the editor of the portion in print, points out, Powys casts Keats in his own “image” as if “to become Keats,” turning the poet himself into “a series of sensations” (PoK, 28, 16, Hentschel’s italics). The parts of the book that survive in print are written in purple prose, relying on aphoristic assertions rather than evidence from Keats’s poetry, as if to give readers themselves a succession of sensations. Powys’s comparisons between Keats, on the one hand, and Wordsworth and Shelley on the other, reveal the anti-transcendental bias of this text. Powys objects to “the ‘over-soul’ … of Wordsworth,” finding Keats “superior” (PoK, 102). One sentence forms an amusing contrast with the mysticism explored in many of Powys’s later works: “Why cannot things be things and life be life and death be death without pretty little ghosts being popped into their insides, like plums; and ‘magic’ spread all over them, like butter?” (PoK, 102). Powys’s novels will feature plenty of figurative—as well as literal—butter.16 In comparison with Keats, “how grotesquely off the track Wordsworth’s Intimations of Immortality!” (PoK, 108). Powys’s dismissive attitude to Wordsworth’s “Ode” stands in stark opposition to his mid-career investment in that poem, although forty years after writing this book on Keats, he will return to this point of view. Here he insists that Keats, “by the genius of his senses, thrills us with the courage to accept appearances as the only reality” (PoK, 108).17 Again, Powys will later acquire an interest Cedric Hentschel notes that the typescript also includes the title Modern Paganism (PoK, 9). Margaret Drabble claims, “More bread and butter is consumed and more tea drunk in the novels of John Cowper Powys than in the whole of the rest of English literature” (“The English Degenerate”). 17 Powys later offered a condensed version of this account of Keats in Visions and Revisions. Discussing Visions and Revisions, Richard Heron Ward, Powys’s first biographer, observes that the authors discussed emerge “as it were through the superimposed personality of Mr. Powys himself” (The Powys Brothers [London: John Lane, 1935], 18). As I have already suggested, the same can be said of Powys’s accounts of Wordsworth. 15 16

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in other levels of “reality.” Powys’s more complex version of Wordsworth will eventually draw on his image of Keats. As if transposing Wordsworth into Keats, in a 1911 lecture, he referred to Wordsworth as “one of the most sensuous of all poets.”18

Wordsworth as Nature Poet in Powys’s Nonfiction Prose Still early in his career, Powys defined his own “queer semi-comatose sensuality” (CTB, 170) against what he perceived at that point as Wordsworth’s overinvestment in visual experience and also against Wordsworthian interest in a transcendental state beyond sensation. As we will see, Powys will later offer what we now call a queer reading of Wordsworth in ascribing gender fluidity to the poet. In his portion of an autobiographical book Confessions of Two Brothers (1916), co-authored with his brother Llewelyn, John Cowper describes becoming drugged by “the feeling of the earth” under his feet or the “special look of a grassy bank against the sky”—but without “visualizing it in the least” (CTB, 170). His language suggests a kind of selectively embodied sensation all the more powerful for its refusal of sight. He adds, “I have a suspicion that there was something of this sluggish sensuality about the Wordsworthian attitude to Nature; only he used it for spiritual intimations, while I use it for its own sake and keep it a purely animal, or if you like, vegetable sensation” (CTB, 170). Powys will subsequently leave behind the notion that Wordsworth used his “sluggish sensuality” only in the service of “spiritual intimations” (the noun choice echoes the title of the “Ode”). In this phase of his career, Powys embraces “‘materialism,’” declaring emphatically, “The ‘something far more deeply interfused’ of the Wordsworthian ecstasy leaves me contemptuously frigid” (CTB, 60–1).19 This dismissiveness toward Wordsworthian transcendentalism will not last for long. Sensation in this early book is almost insentient, anticipating passages (addressed in my next chapter) in which Powys commends “sensations” that “revert to the reptile and the vegetable; and … even to the mineral!”20 The “‘materialism’” of Confessions of Two Brothers persists into some of Powys’s mid-career accounts of Wordsworth. Powys’s popular philosophical

“WORDSWORTH IS NEEDED IN U S.,” Detroit Free Press, November 19, 1911, 5. H. W. Fawkner includes this claim among what he calls the text’s “pseudostatements” (The Ecstatic World of John Cowper Powys [London: Associated University Presses, 1986], 69). In a letter dated April 1910 to his brother Theodore, John Cowper had called himself a “rooted materialist” (quoted in EJCP, 319). 20 John Cowper Powys, Mortal Strife (London: Cape, 1942), 140. 18 19

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book The Meaning of Culture (1929) values Wordsworth for giving readers an ecological appreciation of “aspects of Nature” that tend to be overlooked: Wordsworth, more than anyone, if we acquire the trick of putting completely aside his pieties and his moralizing, has the power of initiating us into those aspects of Nature that are not what we call beautiful at all; but are nevertheless full of the breathing life of the earth; the life of grassroots and moss-spores, of lichen-scales and puff-ball dust, of frost-marks and the creaking and groaning of withered thorn-trees. (MoC, 191–2) This list, more specific than many of Wordsworth’s own images of nature, slides from animate to inanimate, with the “groaning” of the slightly anthropomorphized “withered thorn-trees” mixing aural with visual imagery. Wordsworth’s best-known thorn tree, in his lyrical ballad “The Thorn,” is “wretched” (PW, l. 9) but does not utter any sound. Part of Powys’s mid-career rewriting of Wordsworth as the poet of visual sensation takes place in his diaries, in which his nature descriptions are occasionally filtered through allusions to Wordsworth that emphasize bodily sense-impressions. While living in upstate New York, he wrote in 1930, The light in the sky as I got a lot of stones was thrilling to me. It was Wordsworthian; O so deeply was it and more, for it was my feelings about Wordsworth’s poetry. I looked long and long at the white river and the hedge-posts against that sky and the sound of the river blent with the distant sound of a train whistle. Those human posts, that human whistle and then the cold, white, glimmering, twilight water and the red-gold chink in the sky with jagged dark edges. (1930 Diary, 98) Here the invocation of Wordsworth intensifies Powys’s immersion in a vividly recollected scene, adding an emotional, Wordsworth-inspired layer of “feelings” over an assemblage of precisely captured sights and sounds. The scene, which resembles the nature descriptions in Powys’s fiction, is supposedly “Wordsworthian” in blending natural and human-made objects and in capturing colors and contrasts. The inclusion of a train whistle incorporates modernity into a timeless rural setting.21 Along with detailed attentiveness to sense-impressions uncharacteristic of Wordsworth, the overlay of “feelings about Wordsworth’s poetry” makes it “more” than Wordsworthian, perhaps (to recall G. Wilson Knight’s term) “superWordsworthian.” Powys emphasizes particular colors again in an entry later in the same year: “Saw a regular Wordsworthian sunset over the purple

Wiseman points out that Powys links “the innovation of the train with nostalgia,” complicating his antipathy to new technology (Reimagining of Place, 70). 21

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mountains with the lemon-coloured moon, the Hunter’s moon” (1930 Diary, 167). The image is “regular” for Powys rather than for the poet, whose “colours and … forms” (a phrase from “Tintern Abbey” (PW, l. 80) to which Powys often alludes) tend to be unspecified. In his brilliantly impressionistic essay on Wordsworth in Enjoyment of Literature (1938), Powys expands upon his characterization of Wordsworth as invested in “the language of the sense.” The thesis statement of the essay links what Powys sees as Wordsworth’s groundedness in sense-impression to themes of stoicism and sublimity: He set out to convey in poetry a philosophy of human happiness that was of necessity a philosophy of human endurance; and he deliberately based it upon the senses. From the senses came all those overtones and undertones that transported him so constantly to that region, to that dimension rather, where we feel the presence of the Something else, the “Something far more deeply interfused” that lies “too deep for tears,” too deep for words, too deep for reason. (EL, 312) Further on in the essay, Powys develops his claims concerning Wordsworth’s interest in “human endurance” and in the passage from sense-based experience to a transcendental “dimension”—claims that I will address in later chapters. Here he connects the line that he often quotes from “Tintern Abbey,” “Something far more deeply interfused,” to the ambiguous last phrase of the “Immortality Ode,” “too deep for tears,” to gesture as if by shorthand—and as if by the power of Wordsworth’s phrasing and meter—to a mystical “region.” But his focus at this point in the essay is on the poet of the senses: “It was Shelley, I believe, who said that in Wordsworth the senses think” (EL, 312). Powys is presumably alluding to a line (quoted in Pater’s essay on Wordsworth) from Shelley’s satire on Wordsworth, “Peter Bell the Third” (1819), in which Shelley expresses grudging admiration for the older poet, declaring Wordsworth capable of “Wakening a sort of thought in sense” (PW, l. 312). Powys’s italicized phrase captures the enactment of embodied cognition that recent critics have found in Romantic-era writing.22 Once again, it ascribes a physicality to Wordsworth’s poetic language in

See, for example, Paul Youngquist, “Lyrical Bodies: Wordsworth’s Physiological Aesthetics,” European Romantic Review 10 (1999): 152–62; Alan Richardson, British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and Guillemette Bolens, The Style of Gestures: Embodiment and Cognition in Literary Narrative (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012). For John Savarese, in Romanticism’s Other Minds: Poetry, Cognition, and the Science of Sociability (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2020), the Romantic mind is not just “embodied” but culturally “extended” by way of socially “distributed cognition” (119, 109); in a further extension, for Wordsworth, “nature does some of his thinking for him” (14). 22

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line with some of Wordsworth’s nature poetry but at odds with his more abstract passages. Powys goes on to evoke images from Wordsworth’s poems to illustrate the “presences of nature” to which his allegedly sense-based poetics pays attention: “a raven crossing a mountain chasm, or the cuckoo’s cry ‘breaking the silence of the seas,’ or a twisted thorn on a desolate moor, or a tuft of feathered grass stirred by the wind upon a ruined wall” (EL, 312). The allusions are apparently to “Song of the Wandering Jew,” “The Solitary Reaper,” “The Thorn,” and “The Ruined Cottage”—poems that vary widely in their treatments of nature, although this list foregrounds sights and sounds. The assembling of disconnected images mirrors Powys’s own practice, in his popular philosophical books, of piling up discrete references to the external world to promote his “cult of the senses.” Such lists, occasionally with an unidentified quotation from Wordsworth thrown in, are not confined to “Nature” in the traditional sense. Powys purports to ventriloquize Wordsworth’s voice in this essay, whether restricting his scope to “sense-impressions” as in this passage, or arguing that he makes “our senses … think for us” in the grander service of grasping “the secret of existence” (EL, 313, 318, 313). In some of his other nonfiction prose, Powys uses Wordsworth to expand his account of his “cult of the senses.” He frequently brings up one of his favorite quotations from Wordsworth, “The pleasure which there is in life itself”—a line from “Michael” describing the aged shepherd’s feeling of well-being (PW, l. 77)—sometimes to express the physical grounding of “pleasure” and sometimes to indicate a generalized attunement to nature. He quotes this line at least a dozen times in a variety of contexts, often as if it needs no explanation. In his Autobiography, he hyphenates the line as if to intensify the enjoyment to be had from this sonorous line of iambic pentameter, a move that adds a layer of self-consciousness about poetic form to the description of a purportedly unselfconscious state (A, 286). In The Art of Growing Old, he equates “the pleasure which there is in life itself” to “the basic awareness of the miracle of being alive” (AGO, 204). Further extending his sense-based understanding of Wordsworth, Powys’s nonfiction prose includes various references to the poet that explore his “sensationalism” in terms of gender and sexuality—surprisingly, given Wordsworth’s reputation as a writer with little interest in eroticism.23 In his Autobiography, Powys discusses his sort of “literary criticism” as a “power … of diffusing [his] identity through” the “identity” of the author under discussion, offering as an example his ability to “understand … the physical

Acknowledging that reputation and applying it to himself, Powys wrote to Richardson in 1929, “May be I’ve got something Wordsworthian in me that makes it hard to treat the things of love, … in any but a somewhat heavy-handed manner” (PDR, 19). 23

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quality of Wordsworth’s flesh and blood” (A, 319, 320). Powys here claims a bodily knowledge of Wordsworth, yet he links it to “spiritual eroticism” and to his own “vice as a voyeur” (A, 319). The act of “penetrating with my spirit the stuff out of which his flesh is made” (A, 320) nonetheless captures the embodiment of the “spirit.” This chameleonic art sounds Keatsian rather than Wordsworthian. Powys claimed that during his lecturing career, he perfected the art of merging himself with the authors he expounded upon: “I became the figure I was analysing” (A, 457). In this passage, he includes Keats and Blake as examples of such authors, using more bodily language to express this “transmigration of my soul”: “I serpentined myself into the skeleton” and “actual nerve-centres” of “my author” (A, 457). He connects his “young-girl-like receptivity” to the way in which “Wordsworth’s young women give themselves up to the elements” (A, 457). Powys’s reshaping of the poet involves some questionable assumptions concerning Wordsworth’s depiction of women.24 Earlier in the Autobiography, he modifies this emphasis on fleshly “stuff,” describing his own fantasy of “girlish metempsychosis” as “Wordsworthian” (A, 274). Discussing his own “almost maidenly detestation of the grosser aspects of normal sexuality,” he claims that Wordsworth shares his “nonhuman cult for impossibly slender sylphs”—an appetite that requires “refining upon flesh-and-blood” and the “winnowing” of “flesh-and-blood, till it becomes purified if not beyond Nature certainly beyond normal human nature” (A, 275).25 Here the erotic object is imagined as thinned out and “purified” of the physical body. He adds, When I write my essay about my great master Wordsworth, I shall show how his cerebral mystical passion for young women is intimately bound up with his abnormally sensual sensitiveness to the elements. He wanted his girl to be an Elemental. And in his poetry—where people betray their deepest souls—he loved, above all, to imagine himself a girl. (A, 275)26

In The Art of Happiness, Powys conventionally genders the distinction between sensation and thought: women, Powys asserts, are “nearer to Nature” (AH, 134–5) while “all men are more imaginative than women” (AH, 151). Women represent “another Nature” standing between men and nature (AH, 197). 25 Cf. Powys’s comment to Phyllis Playter: “How ‘William’ as Coleridge calls him, wd have adored you, tiny Thin. … Its [sic] funny how no other poet has realized the full mysterious depth of a girl’s sense of Nature like he did – Dorothy must have revealed a thousand lights & airs & wandering breaths to him – more than the French girl [Annette Vallon] ever did, I trow!” (Powys to Phyllis Playter, May 15, 1928, National Library of Wales). With a hint of nationalistic suspicion of Wordsworth’s love affair with a Frenchwoman, the passage implies the superiority of incestuous feeling. 26 Cheshire, in “John Cowper Powys and William Wordsworth,” uses this statement from the Autobiography—which he sees as “a projection”—to question Wordsworth’s “asexual reputation” (11, 20). 24

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Powys’s essay on Wordsworth, however, offers no evidence for these eyeopening assertions, which would seem to exemplify Powys’s projection of his own psychology onto the poet’s, although the essay links Wordsworth’s supposed insight into “the brooding receptivity of girlhood”—as well as into mothers and “aged men”—with his interest in “the passive state of being” that allegedly enables closeness to the natural world (EL, 313, 314). Powys’s reliance on Romantic poetry to expound his sensation-based philosophy helps to bring out its ecological significance partly through the power of association with Wordsworth’s reputation as the “poet of nature,” but partly because his twisting of Wordsworth into a “sensual” poet foregrounds the appreciation of the nonhuman. With his allusions, Powys taps into Wordsworth’s purported ability to embody nature even as the act of quoting draws attention to the distance between verbal expression and the natural world. In the context of Powys’s rewriting of the Wordsworthian “language of the sense,” eco-critics might ask to what extent that rewriting directs readers toward or away from what Kate Rigby calls a “sense of nature’s agency” as opposed to the unavoidable cultural mediation of its “givenness.”27 Another quotation from “Tintern Abbey” that Powys recycles brings out the interplay between, in Rigby’s words, “a sense of the power of memory and imagination to refashion reality” and “an appreciation of the power of place to alter human moods and sensibilities.”28 Right before the line about “nature and the language of the sense,” Wordsworth restates his commitment to “all the mighty world/Of eye and ear, both what they half-create,/And what perceive” (PW, ll. 106–8). This “two-way dynamic of place and perception,” as Rigby puts it,29 is acknowledged by Powys with frequent allusions to Wordsworth’s “half-create … perceive” formulation, which he usually renders as “half creates and half discovers” (DS, 266).30 Adding the extra “half-” downplays slightly the possibility of a nature “out there” or “nature-as-ground”: the mind’s perception or discovery, like the mind’s contribution, is inevitably only partial. Powys’s bookish reliance on literary allusion would seem to foreground the half-creating of nature by the mind, dissolving individual perception into a layering of voices from the past that collectively imagine “nature-as-construct,” making a case for the ecological power of art. In addition, although Powys gives scant attention to Wordsworth’s versification, his sense-based prose version of the poet prompts

Kate Rigby,Topographies of the Sacred: The Poetics of Place in European Romanticism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004), 13. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid. 30 An early interpreter, William C. Derry, attributed the expression to Powys himself (John Cowper Powys: An Interpretation [Boston: Meador, 1938], 24, 107, 108). Wordsworth’s own footnote to the line containing “half-create” acknowledges its close resemblance to a prior source (PW, 207). 27

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the question of how nature’s “colours” and “forms” may be appreciated through “Wordsworthian forms” in the metrical sense (OC, 123).31 Powys treats Wordsworth’s poetry as a source of sensual enjoyment—a “sensation” (LIH, 43)—in its own right, even as he half-creates his own version of the poet and half-discovers Wordsworth as an assumedly more authentic version of himself.

Romantic Sensation in After My Fashion While Powys’s first two novels Wood and Stone and Rodmoor make passing allusions to Romantic poetry, his third novel, After My Fashion (written around 1920), set immediately after World War I, critiques his own sensebased appreciation of the natural world with pointed references to the Romantics, including Wordsworth. The protagonist Richard Storm—a version of the so-called “Powys-hero”32—is a latter-day Romantic poet who reads (or tries to read) Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience (AMF, 92) and whose enjoyment of his return to the English countryside is refracted through occasional allusions to Keats.33 In an outdoor scene of lovemaking between Storm and the woman he is soon to marry, Nelly Moreton, the pair are rather ominously “entoiled in woofed fantasies” like the lovers in Keats’s “The Eve of St Agnes” (AMF, 116). Storm’s backstory— self-exile in Paris—and the New York setting of the second half of the novel allow for some reflection on the extent to which Powys’s cult of sensations is not only potentially self-indulgent but also nation-specific, bound up with responsiveness to English vegetation and landscape. Storm’s writing (never on display for the reader) is unfavorably contrasted with the art of his lover, the American-born dancer Elise Angel (based on Isadora Duncan, whom Powys on one occasion called his “only true love” [LLP, 1: 252]).34 Elise’s

In an unpublished letter to Playter, Powys wrote, “I am reading ‘The Prelude’ from the very beginning — some of the lines have that curious finality-weight like the falling of an ash-tree branch in the night that I like almost better than any sort of poetry” (Powys to Phyllis Playter, October 16, 1928, National Library of Wales). The comment acknowledges the decisive effect of Wordsworth’s use of blank verse. 32 The term “Powys-hero” was apparently coined by G. Wilson Knight in The Saturnian Quest (London: Methuen, 1964), 24. Katherine Saunders Nash claims that the term has misled critics into seeing Powys as approving of his protagonists (“Reading Like a Girl: The Rhetoric and Narrative Discourse of John Cowper Powys,” PhD dissertation, University of Virginia, 2006, 9). 33 Krissdóttir sees the “self-mockery” of the novel as Powys’s acknowledgment that he was “a third-rate poet” (DM, 164). 34 David Balcom Stimpson claims that Duncan helped to inspire Powys’s “philosophy of life” as articulated in The Complex Vision (1920) and reformulated in After My Fashion (“Inspiration Beyond Words: The Powys-Duncan Affair (Part II),” la lettre powysienne 27 [Spring 2014]: 44). According to Stimpson, the character of Elise Angel was also based on Frances Gregg. 31

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dancing is “an art that created the taste that was destined to understand it” (AMF, 180), an echo of Wordsworth’s idea, in his 1815 “Essay Supplementary to the Preface,” that an original author engages in “creating the taste by which he is to be enjoyed” (PW, 951, Wordsworth’s emphasis).35 Although her art represents a Modernist reaction against Romanticism,36 the use of the Wordsworthian formulation aligns it with the revolutionary impact of Romantic poetry, implicitly relegating Storm’s work to outdated imitation. In a heated conversation, Elise criticizes Storm’s poems for what she perceives as their lack of novelty and their lack of feeling. She objects, “They are so overloaded with sensations that one doesn’t get any emotion at all from them” (AMF, 219). In the dialogue that follows, Powys uses Storm to defend his focus on sensations and acknowledge its limitations: ‘What do you mean by sensations?’ said Richard … ‘The whole purpose of what I’ve been writing is to get into it the very essence of the English country – and that’s a “sensation”, isn’t it?’ ‘It may be to an Englishman, my dear,’ she replied. ‘It isn’t to me. All this indiscriminate piling up of flowers and trees and grasses, all this business about lanes and fields, seems to me just heavy and dull. It seems to get in the way of something.’ ‘That’s because you’re an American,’ he threw at her indignantly. ‘Any English person reading what I’ve written would be reminded of the happiest moments of his life.’ (AMF, 219) Storm goes on to insist, “The happiest moments of a person’s life in England are associated with old country memories,” to which Elise rejoins that “to write about ponds and ditches for the benefit of English people” is not “art” but “the merest personal sensation of one individual!” (AMF, 220). Richard’s generalizations, which imply that “old country memories” transcend class, gender, and historical epoch, are here placed in a questionable light. Elise’s dismissive phrase “for the benefit of English people” exposes the narrowness of Richard’s nation-based aesthetic, and her mention of “an Englishman” hints that it is further narrowed by gender. The rest of the quarrel invites further criticism of Richard’s point of view. Richard, enraged, retorts, “My poetry deals with those elemental feelings that the race has always had. My earth soul is not a bit different from Wordsworth’s earth soul or Virgil’s either, or Plato’s for the matter of that!” (AMF, 221). Storm’s response shifts the terms of the argument,

In his study of Dorothy M. Richardson, Powys attributes the saying to Coleridge (DMR, 31). Florence Marie-Laverrou contends that Elise’s art stands for “depersonalised emotion against isolated lyrical emotions and sensations” (“Dancing, after Her Fashion: John Cowper Powys and Isadora Duncan,” The Powys Journal 20 [2010]: 54). 35 36

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making the leap from earth-based sensations to the “earth soul,” without acknowledging the Wordsworthian dynamic whereby loss of sensation yields to transcendental compensation. This grandiose claim also demands questioning. Can Storm, or any writer, express the “elemental feelings” of “the race”? And how do those “feelings” grasp an “earth soul” that crosses the centuries? Moreover, is the intuition of that soul confined to great minds of the European tradition? Powys does not completely debunk Storm’s assumptions, but he further undercuts his “mystical sensationalism” (AMF, 221) when Storm is thrilled by Elise’s dancing in a new theater in New York, a transcendent art of the “new world”: “The crudity and rawness of the crushing materialism around that bold experiment gave it an angry and free power which the very mellowness of more civilized places tended to undermine” (AMF, 271). Storm’s bias continues to be revealed with the notion that England is more “civilized.” The novel goes on to kill off this would-be Romantic poet, but as if to acknowledge his ambivalence to a “bold experiment,” Powys never again set his fiction in the United States.

Wordsworth Revisited: Wolf Solent In Wolf Solent, his first successful novel, published in 1929, Powys undertakes, in Belinda Humfrey’s words, “an urgent revisiting of Wordsworth.”37 The protagonist Wolf Solent is another version of the Powys-hero, an acutely self-conscious nature-worshipper and sensation-seeker. At the age of thirtyfive, having lost his teaching position in London, he returns to his native Wessex after a 25-year absence to work as a research assistant for the shady local squire, John Urquhart. Wolf immediately becomes torn between two young women: the flawlessly beautiful working-class Gerda Torp, whom he marries, and the bookish and ethereal Christie Malakite, whom he identifies as his soulmate. The novel, in a mostly Hardy-esque realist mode but with some non-realist elements,38 features a cast of other memorable characters Humfrey, “ ‘Let Our Crooked Smokes Climb … from Our Bless’d Altars!’ Wolf Solent: Designs, Writing, Achievement,” in WSCS, 16. Humfrey calls the book “a deeply Wordsworthian work in its optimistic concepts” (26). Critics are divided over the novel’s degree of optimism. H. W. Fawkner, for example, stresses its “negativity” (John Cowper Powys and the Soul [London: The Powys Society, 2010], 109). Prothero calls it “a novel about a modified, twentieth-century Wordsworth who gets all but completely absorbed into the world according to Hardy” (Wordsworth and Welsh Romanticism, 57). 38 One non-realist element is the use of animal names for characters, not just Wolf but the surnames Otter and Weevil. Margaret Moran discusses this feature of the novel and more generally the interplay between realism and romance (“Creative Lies,” in WSCS, 199). Another non-realist element, as Collins notes with only slight exaggeration, is that “John Cowper is capable of filling the heavens with aeroplanes and leaving the roads virgin of motor-cars” (Old Earth-Man, 73). Collins points out that World War I is “never mentioned, nor are any changes attributed to it” (73). Such artistic choices create the feel of an alternative reality. 37

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with whom Wolf sometimes reluctantly interacts; they include Wolf’s vibrant mother and his dead father. As a result—or so he thinks—of some of his human entanglements, Wolf loses his precious “life-illusion” in the form of his personal “mythology,” his imagined participation in a cosmic clash between good and evil (WS, 8).39 Powys presents this private “mythology” as partly continuous with and partly discontinuous from Wolf’s fervent enjoyment of “sensations” (WS, 7), raising the question of whether this enjoyment can survive his fall. The novel thus replays yet to some extent challenges the familiar Wordsworthian trajectory of loss and consolation. Toward the end of the novel, Wolf compares himself with Wordsworth, aligning his acceptance of a “narrower” and “simpler” existence with the theme of the “Immortality Ode” (WS, 611). However, the novel concludes on a divided note, offering a tempered critique of Wordsworthian selfdefinition even as it celebrates a supposedly Wordsworthian sense-based connectedness to the natural world. The narrative is written from Wolf’s point of view,40 but his perspective is far from reliable. Critics have debated the extent of Powys’s distance from his self-absorbed and self-dramatizing protagonist.41 The character is certainly semi-autobiographical. Wolf, like his creator, remembers idyllic summer visits to his grandmother at Penn House in Brunswick Terrace at Weymouth. More generally, Wolf’s quest for sensations—if not “sensationthoughts”—resembles that recorded by Powys in his Autobiography and recommended by the author-persona of his popular philosophical books. Yet Wolf’s fixation on his own sense-impressions is treated with plenty of skepticism. Wolf Solent thus expands upon Powys’s acknowledgment, in After My Fashion, of the narrowness of a Romantic-inflected cult of sensation. Moreover, Wolf’s entrancement by the “non-human” world is undercut by his doubt as to the independent existence of that world (WS, 101). Given a narrator who comes across as collaborating with Wolf’s self-deceptions, it is challenging to distinguish between the implicit author’s endorsement of Wolf’s frequently shifting understanding of “reality” (WS, 240) and moments when the reader is invited to question Wolf’s interpretation of Nicholas Birns comments, “Mythology should almost be in two sets of quotes, as Wolf already has an ironic distance from it” (“Yellow Bracken: Meditations on Gerda, Wolf, and ‘Mythologies,’” Powys Notes 13 [2000]: 47). 40 In his Autobiography, Powys refers to rebelling in Weymouth Sands and A Glastonbury Romance against “that Henry James rule of ‘straining’ the whole thing through one character’s consciousness” (A, 544), implying that he had followed that “rule” in Wolf Solent. In his review of Wolf Solent, Percy Hutchison praised Powys for yoking Joycean “stream-of-consciousness” with “fictional personages of flesh and blood” (“A Novel of Signs and Portents: ‘Wolf Solent’ is a Notable Addition to Psychological Fiction,” New York Times, May 19, 1929, BR 1). On this and other initial reviews of the novel, see my article, “A ‘Book for the Ages’: The Early Reception of Wolf Solent,” The Powys Journal 34 (2024): 82–119. 41 See the essays in WSCS. 39

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events, especially because he tends to view life through classical and literary analogies. These analogies at once lift his story to the level of archetype and humorously reveal his self-aggrandizement. The literary analogies are certainly not confined to Romantic texts, but the depiction of both Gerda and Christie chimes with Wolf’s eventual sense of himself as Wordsworth redux, while a thin thread of allusions to Keats is associated with a Gothic subplot that may or may not be the “product” of the darker side of “Wolf’s imagination” (LLP, 2: 85). The characterization of Gerda and Christie helps to develop the theme of the sufficiency of bodily sensation, since Gerda, associated with the novel’s “romantic sensuality,” as Powys put it, is found lacking by Wolf in comparison with the more ethereal Christie. Critics have called Gerda “Wordsworthian”42 because of her closeness to the natural world: Wolf is attracted by her ability to imitate the song of a blackbird, and, in one scene, she sleeps on the earth, “trusting nature” and possibly participating in “some strange non-human eroticism” (WS, 311, 313). Gerda’s “bird-like whistling” is counterintuitively an “expression” of “mysterious silences in Nature” that are “worshipped” by Wolf (WS, 101). The detail evokes Wordsworth’s Boy of Winander, who hoots to the owls and is met by a “silence” that binds him closer to the landscape (PW, Prelude 5: 380). Gerda also whistles one night from an ash tree, a possible allusion to the moonlit ash tree recalled by Wordsworth as a “fairy work of earth” (PW, Prelude 6: 94). On that occasion, her “whistled bird-song” expands to encompass “all the defiant acceptance of fate” found “in green grass, in cool-rooted plants, in the valiant bodies of beasts and birds and fishes … ‘mountains and all hills … fruitful trees and all cedars’” (WS, 358, Powys’s punctuation). In this sentence, the marked quotations from Psalm 148 distract attention from the unmarked allusion (“cool-rooted”) to Keats’s “Ode to Psyche,” as if nature can be embellished by other texts but is automatically mediated through Romantic poetry. Gerda experiences her own journey of loss and recovery in that (through her interactions with Wolf and other male characters) she loses and then regains her ability to whistle like a bird, but the novel does not linger over this ostensible healing of the young woman’s broken bond with nature. Christie, meanwhile, one of a succession of sylph-like female love-objects in Powys’s fiction, as a quasi-bodiless “Elemental” being, is more aligned with an evasion of direct sense-experience, at least from Wolf’s point of view (WS, 411). Wolf obtusely tells her that he can “hardly remember what she looks like” (WS, 339) and—in a deleted chapter—sees her as “almost devoid of ordinary human senses” (WSDC, 110).43 And he associates Humfrey, “Wolf Solent: Designs, Writing, Achievement,” in WSCS, 19. Morine Krissdóttir discusses the composition of the novel in her introduction to her edition of the deleted chapters (WSDC, 13–29). Powys told his brother Llewelyn that his publisher Max 42 43

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Christie with “intimations belonging to another region” (WS, 264), a phrase perhaps suggesting the transcendental “elsewhere” of Wordsworth’s “Ode” (PW, l. 60). But Christie’s prose work “Slate”—more akin to Modernist fiction than a Romantic poem—expresses her own amoral investment in the “senses” and allegiance to “Nature” (WS, 469–70). At the end of the novel, she makes a symbolic escape from Wolf by bringing about her father’s death (or so it seems) and devoting herself to Olwen, her father’s child by her dead sister.44 Wolf’s dead father William Solent is associated with the ghost of Hamlet’s father rather than with any aspect of Wordsworth, but his earth-bound zest for life is connected with that of the poet’s contemporary, the Romantic prose writer Hazlitt, through his deathbed exclamation, repeated several times in the novel, “Christ! I’ve enjoyed my life!” (WS, 19). The exclamation echoes the reputed last words of Hazlitt, “Well, I’ve had a happy life,” cited by Powys in his Autobiography as a stance with which he identified (A, 315). Wolf aspires to be able to say the same thing, although his convoluted thought processes and shifting moods seemingly interfere with such straightforward satisfaction.45 His implicit distance from such uncomplicated feeling is part of his distance from Romantic authenticity. Wolf’s mother, Ann Solent, is a “formidable” antagonist who opposes him with her worldliness and “cynicism” (WS, 290). Through quoting Keats, she is also associated with the novel’s Gothic subplot. Over the grave of James Redfern, Wolf’s predecessor in his role as secretary to Urquhart, she quotes from Keats’s “Isabella” (1820), the poem in which the heroine sheds tears over the disembodied head of her lover, buried in a pot of basil. The scene, recalled more than once, feeds into a Gothic scenario, in which Urquhart, whom Wolf perceives as a figure of “actual evil” (WS, 36), along with several male coadjutors, takes a necrophiliac interest in the corpse of Redfern.46 Rather than taking sides with one parent over the other as he assumes he

Schuster had asked him to cut “300 pages” and that he would be writing a chapter (Chapter 19 in the final version) to “bridge over this gulf” (LLP, 2: 82). The cut evidently accompanied other revisions. For interpretation of the deleted chapters, see Ben Jones, “The Disfigurement of Gerda: Moral and Textual Problems in Wolf Solent,” The Powys Review 2 (1977): 20–6; and Charles Lock, “Aethereal Disturbances and Dangling Men: On the Deleted Chapters of Wolf Solent,” The Powys Journal 33 (2023): 166–88. 44 Powys and Playter owned a doll named Olwen whom they treated as a daughter. 45 In a deleted chapter, Wolf thinks, “no one will hear me cry out on my death-bed ‘Christ! I’ve had a happy life!’ ” (WSDC, 221). 46 In a letter to Llewelyn Powys, John Cowper claimed that the book centers around “Urquhart’s necrophilism and Wolf’s ‘mythology’ ” (LLP, 2: 84). The claim ascribes a disproportionate weight to the hidden Gothic plot of the novel. In a comment on “Isabella” in his book on Keats, Powys sympathizes with the worship of dead flesh: “Is it necessary further to point out how to the Pagan senses of that poor girl it was so much, it was all, to have under her hands the actual flesh and blood of that dear head?” (PoK, 89).

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must, Wolf must seemingly side with the anti-Gothic Wordsworth over a Gothic reading of Keats. Although its implications will eventually be left behind, the quotation from “Isabella” is the novel’s most extensive allusion to a Romantic poem. Without herself ascribing to what may be Wolf’s paranoid fantasy about his predecessor, Wolf’s mother helps to seed the fantasy with her provoking address to her daughter-in-law: “Are you looking for Mr. Redfern’s bones? … You look like that pretty girl in the poem, leaning over her Pot of Basil; doesn’t she, Wolf?” (WS, 366). With “a mock-sentimental intonation” (WS, 366), Ann Solent quotes these lines from the poem about Isabella ignoring her natural surroundings to fixate on the dead love-object: ‘And she forgot the stars, the moon, and sun; And she forgot the blue above the trees; And she forgot the dells where waters run; And she forgot the chilly autumn breeze. She had no knowledge …’ (WS, 366)47 These lines may represent the threat to Wolf’s enjoyment of nature posed by this Gothic subplot, a threat that never fully materializes. Wolf’s collaboration in the novel’s Gothic counternarrative is indicated early on when he perceives Urquhart’s library window in terms of a quotation from another Gothic-influenced work by Keats, “The Eve of St Agnes”: “His dream of the writing-table by a mullioned window ‘blushing with the blood of kings and queens’ turned out to be a literal presentiment” (WS, 49). Wolf’s writing of a bawdy local chronicle for Urquhart will eventually destroy his “life-illusion.” Wolf will ultimately dismiss the “perversity” of Urquhart (WS, 602), although his continued characterization of the squire’s interest in Redfern in terms of the Keats poem attests to the power of the fantasy: “Whether Mr. Urquhart had been content to press his perturbed face against the cold featurelessness of Redfern’s mortality, or whether, like Isabella in ‘The Pot of Basil,’ he had carried ‘so dear a head’ back to his secret chamber, seemed at that moment a question that left him utterly incurious!” (WS, 535). The alternatives seem almost equally improbable, with the Keats allusion underscoring Wolf’s comically grotesque hypothesizing.48 The novel leaves open the possibility that this lurid Gothic narrative is “largely” Wolf’s own invention, building on community gossip (LLP, 2: 85).

Powys quotes accurately from stanza 53 of the poem, ll. 417–21. The quotation is broken off by Wolf’s interruption, “Don’t, mother” (WS, 366). 48 Cf. Keats’s own comment that “Isabella” was “too smokeable,” that is, open to ridicule (JKL, 2: 174). Ian Hughes points out, “Grotesquely, ‘so dear a head’ is not from ‘Isabella’ but from Shelley’s ‘Adonais’ (line 3), where the head is of course Keats’s” (“Fact and Fiction in Wolf Solent,” in WSCS, 114). 47

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One other character who deserves mention in the context of the novel’s revisionary Romanticism is Jason Otter, the “moody” poet who threatens Wolf by mocking his enjoyment of sensations.49 A diatribe uttered by Jason at one point clarifies that Wolf’s cherished sensations extend beyond the natural world to include everyday experiences: “Those feelings you have when you stretch out your legs in the morning, and when you walk home to tea, swinging your stick, … and when you drink that bottle of gin of yours … and when you enjoy those books in old Urquhart’s library and tell yourself stories about them, … and when you look over gates on your walks and think that Nature is something!” (WS, 419) Jason’s scornful voice would seem to be that of an anti-Wordsworthian poet; although the three poems of his that appear in the text are full of nature imagery, they each have a sinister edge. He is thus associated with the Gothic strand in the novel.50 In a deleted chapter, Jason is directly opposed to Wordsworth when the child Olwen (herself associated with a typical Gothic theme in that she is the offspring of incest) asks eagerly, “May I learn your poetry instead of Wordsworth’s?” (WSDC, 220). If retained in the published version, this would have been the first of only two explicit references to Wordsworth’s name in the novel. The question comes across as a possible debunking of the novel’s engagement with the poet. The first chapter of the novel, describing Wolf’s train journey from London to Dorset, establishes the connection between Wolf’s grandiose moral awareness—his “mythology”—and his quest for “certain sensations” (WS, 7), but that connection fades in and out over the course of the narrative. Wolf’s “trick” of “sinking into his soul” gives him access to his “private … ‘mythology,’” which is “limited entirely to a secret sensation” (WS, 7–8). The use of images of leaves and pools to depict this inner space creates the impression that Wolf’s precious “life-illusion” is completely bound up with his enjoyment of nature, but this is misleading. The scriptwriter as well as the puppet of his own story, Wolf sets up suspense at the outset by wondering if his return to his native region will threaten his “whole secret life” (WS, 9). Wolf is immediately ironized by the fact that his awareness of external evil, symbolized by a wretched man he “had seen on the steps outside Waterloo Station,” is unreal in comparison with his “occult cosmic

Peter G. Christensen, “Jason’s Poems in Wolf Solent,” in WSCS, 143. Jason is further associated with the Gothic in a deleted chapter when Wolf accuses him of villainizing Urquhart (even though Wolf himself does exactly that) “like a story of Mrs. Radcliffe or that awful what’s-his-name Lewis” (WSDC, 82). Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796) is one of the “frantic novels” denounced by Wordsworth in an anti-Gothic passage from the Preface to Lyrical Ballads attacking the current “degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation” (PW, 936). The deleted chapters play up the novel’s Gothic subplot. 49 50

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struggle,” although he remains haunted by the man’s face (WS, 3, 8). I will return in Chapter 3 to the novel’s treatment of the destitute man on the station steps, in the context of Powys’s reworking of the Wordsworthian theme of human suffering. This early in the novel, it is not clear if the “sensations” that constitute the “purpose” (WS, 492) of Wolf’s existence are entirely bound up with the “sensation” that is his “mythology,” or whether they are separable from his “whole secret life.” Before too long, Powys drives a wedge between Wolf’s “mythology” and his attunement to the natural world: Wolf, ever the eager analyst of his own feelings, “tried to analyse what sort of philosophy it was that remained with him during all the normal hours when his ‘mythology’—his secret spiritual vice—lay quiescent” (WS, 42). This statement distinguishes between Wolf’s “normal attitude to life”—his “philosophy”—and what he now thinks of as his “vice” (WS, 42). The former, which takes up much more space in the novel, is exemplified by a scene in which Wolf participates in “some primitive life-feeling that was identical with what these pollarded elms felt, against whose ribbed trunks the gusts of wind were blowing, or with what these shiny celandine-leaves felt, whose world was limited to tree-roots and fern-fronds and damp, dark mud!” (WS, 55). Here the language shifts into descriptive detail that vividly supports the ecological implication of human– nonhuman equivalency. Despite the intensity of Wolf’s introspection, it is as if he cannot decide whether his “mythology” needs to be fed by his natureworship. Rather than deciding for him, Powys seems more interested in exposing that nature-worship as fussily self-conscious yet at the same time as revealing it as authentically Wordsworthian. Powys vacillates again over whether or not bodily sense-impressions are integral to Wolf’s “mythology” in a passage in which Wolf reflects upon the power of memories. The memories are visual vignettes of the kind that Powys piles up in his self-help books when advocating a life of sensation, and in his essay on Wordsworth: They had to do with wild rain-drenched escapes beneath banks of sombre clouds, of escapes along old backwaters and by forsaken sea-estuaries, of escapes along wet, deserted moor-paths and by sighing pond-reeds; along melancholy quarry-pools and by quagmires of living moss. (WS, 95) Wolf calls the memories “Indescribable!” (WS, 95), but like Wordsworth in “Tintern Abbey,” Powys describes in saying he cannot describe, in his case with adjective-rich lines that make the images evocative. Wolf takes the investment in remembered scenes to an extreme that almost parodies this central Wordsworthian concern: But memories of this kind were – and he had long known it! – the very essence of his life. They were more important to him than any outward

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event. They were more sacred to him than any living person. They were his friends, his gods, his secret religion. (WS, 95) Even while granting the validity of the Wordsworthian theme of the sustaining power of recollection, Powys invites readers to question Wolf’s priorities and whether his claims match his experiences. Even when Wolf’s sensations are tethered to his “hidden [moral] struggle,” they have “no outlet in any sort of action” (WS, 406, 8). One set-piece description in particular severs the connection between Wolf’s “mythology” and his cultivation of physical sensations. Instead, it concentrates on rewriting Wordsworth as nature poet, lingering over Wolf’s direct sense-impressions to celebrate in Romantic fashion both the wondrousness of nature and the power of the imagination. The passage is a description of a cloudy sky noticed by Wolf on his way to consummate his newly formed relationship with Gerda, in the chapter entitled “Yellow Bracken.” Wolf, often in the habit of portraying his life in Shakespearean terms, perceives the sky as a “heavenly ‘congregation of vapours’” (WS, 138), putting a bright and literalizing twist on the metaphorical “vile and pestilent congregation of vapours” complained of by Hamlet (2. 2. 336). Many other details of the description rework Wordsworth’s account of his vision from the top of Mount Snowdon in the final book of The Prelude, exploring the quintessentially Romantic theme of the interaction of mind and nature leading to transcendence. Powys will later parody Wordsworth’s Mount Snowdon scene in his Autobiography and will radically rewrite it at the end of Porius, but on this occasion he seems to echo his great predecessor in order to authenticate Wolf’s experience. In Wordsworth’s poem, the sight of a “sea of hoary mist,” a “still ocean” of “solid vapours,” and the sound of roaring waters through a “rift” yield “the emblem of a mind/That feeds upon infinity” (PW, Prelude 14: 42, 44–5, 56, 70–1).51 Powys repeats Wordsworth’s image of an “ocean” of clouds with “hollow spaces” (WS, 138). In the novel, instead of an auditory image, another visual image appears through the “gulfs”—another layer of “mist,” this one “pale yellowish” (WS, 138). With the mention of color, as often, Powys re-conceives Wordsworth as a poet who relies on rather than distrusts the “bodily eye.” Meanwhile, as in Wordsworth, physical sensations produce a higher kind of “vision” (PW, Prelude 14: 64): “Nor was even this vaporous luminosity the final revelation of these veiled heavens” (WS, 138). Powys’s word choice here gestures to the Christianized vocabulary of the 1850 Prelude even as he offers a secular version of transcendence. Looking up, not down like the

Fry, however, sees this as a “natural revelation” rather than a transcendental one (Fry, What We Are, 126). 51

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poet, Wolf glimpses “the vast blue sky” as if it were “[t]‌ranscending” the clouds and “nearer than they were” (WS, 138). The spatial disorientation reflects a loosening of his hold on the senses, reproducing Wordsworth’s “recognitions of transcendent power” (PW, Prelude 14: 75). Wolf perceives the “entrance into an unknown dimension” as a “celestial Toll-Pike of the Infinite,” a facetious phrase that threatens to demystify the sublimity (WS, 138). Moreover, whereas Wordsworth’s Mount Snowdon passage is the final sublime climax of the poet’s verse autobiography, Wolf’s communion with the sky is left behind as a poetic interlude in the linear unfolding of events foregrounded in realist fiction.52 Other passages in the novel destabilize such moments of communion by casting doubt on the materiality of the natural world. At one point, Wolf tells Christie, “I’m sceptical about the reality of everything; even about the reality of Nature. Sometimes I think that there are several ‘Natures’ … several ‘Universes,’ in fact … one inside the other … like Chinese boxes … .” (WS, 240, Powys’s punctuation). The ecological implications of this claim are left unexplored here, but a later passage hints at them. Wolf says to himself, “I refuse to believe, … and I never will believe, until the day Nature kills me, that there’s such a thing as ‘reality,’ apart from the mind that looks at it! … The ‘thing in itself’ is as fluid and malleable as these trees” (WS, 336). The phrase “thing in itself” in Wolf’s internal monologue alludes to Immanuel Kant’s “Ding an sich,” objective reality independent of an observer, the impossibility of which is a Romantic commonplace. Wolf in this instance stands as the spokesman for Romantic immaterialism. Yet his next thought allows for the possibility of an outer world of coexisting observers extending even to vegetation: “These trees, this old-man’s-beard, these dark ditch-plants … they all see what they’ve the nature to see … No living thing has ever seen reality as it is in itself. By God! there’s probably nothing to see, when you come to that!” (WS 336, Powys’s punctuation). The final two sentences of this quotation return to an immaterialist position, but the notion that trees and plants “all see what they’ve the nature to see” momentarily grants the material world its own integrity, in line with Wolf’s own purported ability to “be conscious with the consciousness of vegetable things and mineral things” (WS, 40). (There is some humor in the possibility of Wolf being able to shed his self-consciousness to this extent.) In a letter to Powys, his friend Louis Wilkinson vehemently objected to the novel’s apparent dematerializing of the external world: “And what sophistical poppycock, all this ‘philosophizing’ about ‘reality.’ Of course any object is strained through the consciouness perceiving it, but the object remains itself.

Cf. Ian Duncan on how Charles Dickens replays yet subsumes Wordsworthian epiphanic vision in Bleak House (Human Forms, 151–7). 52

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The whole business is sheer lunacy.”53 Wilkinson would seem to be missing the point, since Powys may be satirizing his protagonist for too eagerly granting and denying nature an existence independent of the mind. With or without the “thing in itself,” the vacillation over whether Wolf’s “mythology” is separate from his enjoyment of sensations will eventually enable Powys to align Wolf’s story with Wordsworth’s trajectory of loss and gain, and to revise that trajectory. Powys’s treatment of Wolf’s fall, the loss of his “mythology,” akin to selling his soul, invites the reader to question Wolf’s own after-the-fact self-identification with Wordsworth. Several plot points unsettle the implicit analogy between Wolf’s loss of his “life-illusion” and the disappearance of the “visionary gleam” of childhood (PW, “Ode,” l. 56). As I mentioned earlier, Wolf tries to write his own life story.54 He fears in advance that he will fall, decides for himself the causes of his fall, and tries to fight against it while at the same time convincing himself that the fall is out of his own control. Powys thus re-imagines the fading of childhood “splendour in the grass” (PW, “Ode,” l. 181) as a psychologically layered process experienced belatedly and wilfully by a self-deceiving adult. This process is further complicated by the vacillation over the extent to which Wolf’s enjoyment of sensations can be separated from his “life-illusion.” Since the beginning of the novel, Wolf has been conscious of the vulnerability of his “mythology.” At some point he arbitrarily decides that two actions—getting paid for finishing Urquhart’s lewd book and committing adultery with Christie—will destroy his “life-illusion.”55 When he resists the opportunity to sleep with Christie, he becomes aware of “a certain obstinate recovery of his secret soul” (WS, 447)—even though he has not yet lost it. He thinks, “His life-illusion had been given back to him!” (WS, 447). In the midst of the emotional drama of Wolf’s rejection of Christie, he sees himself as the passive recipient of a gift. After Wolf has indeed “killed” his “life-illusion” (WS, 505) by keeping the payment for working on Urquhart’s book,56 the question of the connection

Quoted in Wilkinson, Welsh Ambassadors, 48. Cf. Charles Lock: “The contrast between Powys’s and Wolf’s depiction of characters illustrates and embodies the conflict between the legitimately omnipotent author and the wilful, egocentric protagonist trying to make his own story” (“Wolf Solent: Myth and Narrative,” in WSCS, 121). It can be difficult to discern the “contrast.” 55 The deleted chapters intensify and soften the link between Wolf’s “mythology” and his sensations. They also make Wolf’s fall more gradual, as Wolf hesitates more over resuming work for Urquhart, at one point thinking, “Between them all … they have numbed my ‘mythology’ … But … I’ll recover my ‘mythology’ ” (WSDC, 126). 56 Ned Lukacher sees Wolf’s acceptance of Urquhart’s money as “identification” with Urquhart’s taboo “desire” (“Notre-Homme-des-Fleurs: Wolf Solent’s Metaphoric Legends,” in WSCS, 91). One might think that working on Urquhart’s book would damage Wolf’s integrity as much as being paid for it, but his willingness to make the distinction draws attention to his rigid notions of self-determination. 53 54

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between Wolf’s “mythology” and his enjoyment of everyday sensations takes on added urgency. At one point, he encounters “a patch of shining celandines” that “entered into the very nerves of his soul with a long, shivering, restorative poignance” (WS, 489). Nature here is “restorative” in classic Wordsworthian fashion. Wolf asks, “Is it dead? … Well, even if it is, I’ve still got some sensations left!” (WS, 489). Despite this modified affirmation, on a later occasion Wolf asks himself, “This killing of his ‘mythology,’ how, [sic] could he survive it? … What were his sensations to him now? What was the air of a morning like this, without those mysterious emanations from the glimmering depths?” (WS, 526). Apparently, the sensations have for practical purposes been “killed” (WS, 553) along with the “mythology,” since the natural world is nothing “to him” without the “mysterious” glamour that it shed. He also tellingly distinguishes between his “sensations and his enjoyment of his sensations” (WS, 541), as if the loss of his “mythology” has destroyed the latter. Wolf thinks he is beginning a “posthumous life” (WS, 549)—a possible allusion to a letter from the dying Keats to Charles Brown in which he wrote, “I have an habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am leading a posthumous existence” (JKL, 2: 359). Like his later comparison of himself with Wordsworth, Wolf’s selfcharacterization in terms of Keats demands to be taken in a skeptical light. Two passages in the deleted section that allude to Wordsworth complicate the eventual association between the loss of Wolf’s “mythology” and the theme of the “Immortality Ode.” The first connects Wolf’s “mythology” not with the power of a Wordsworthian connection to nature but with Powys’s alternative image of Wordsworth as the poet of stoicism and endurance. Wolf is self-pityingly contemplating his “heavy crowded days”: “He turned his mind wearily upon its interior pivot, like a donkey’s ear upon its skull, and he gave a grim introspective glance at the evasive treacherous levels where his ‘mythology’ dwelt. That mystic fountain seemed at this moment only one more burden to carry!” (WSDC, 158). The image of the donkey’s ear alludes to the lines in Wordsworth’s “Peter Bell” in which an “Ass, with motion dull,/Upon the pivot of his skull/Turned round his long left ear” (PW, ll. 448–50)—lines which, as we saw, Powys would later associate, in a letter to Ichiro Hara, with a “whimsical passive helpless contemplation” supposedly characteristic of Wordsworth. Such an attitude only very momentarily reflects Wolf’s state of mind as he reflects on the disappearance of his “inmost life-illusion” (WSDC, 158), although toward the end of the book he will adopt an attitude of resigned endurance. The other Wordsworthian allusion is especially noteworthy as it is to the “Immortality Ode,” the poem that will later be quoted to gloss Wolf’s consolation for his fall. The phrase, “those portions of his thought which went too deep for words” (WSDC, 185), once again referring to Wolf’s “mythology,” recalls the final line of the “Ode,” “Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears,” a line suggesting the recovery of transcendence despite the loss of “the glory and the dream”

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(PW, ll. 206, 57).57 The allusion thus gives the impression that Wolf’s loss of his vulnerable “life-illusion” will resemble the secularized “felix culpa” of the “Ode”: he will survive his fall with an intensified love of nature. A passage that returns to the Wordsworthian theme of the power of recollection insists that Wolf’s “power of … enjoyment … had been killed,” yet a Wordsworthian echo helps to cast doubt on this notion (WS, 553). While teaching, Wolf recalls “fragments of old memories”—an assortment of “mystical vignettes” (WS, 552–3). The assemblage of visual “images” (WS, 553) once again resembles the kind of passing sights that Powys will associate with Wordsworth in his diaries and in his essay on the poet. According to Wolf’s train of thought, the value of the “mystical vignettes” is negated by the “murder[ing]” of his “mythology”: It was ironical that at this very moment, when the power of his enjoyment of it had been killed, he seemed able to articulate his philosophy of the ideal road more definitely than he had ever done before. What it really had meant, this philosophy, was a power of seeing things arranged under a certain light … a light charged with memories of the past … a light capable of linking his days in flowing continuity! Well, it was all lost now … (WS, 553, Powys’s punctuation) Wolf claims his “enjoyment” is “all lost,” but his notion that the lost “light” was “capable” of “linking his days” evokes the well-known three-line epigraph of the “Immortality Ode”: The Child is father of the Man And I could wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural piety. (PW, 587) The epigraph (from Wordsworth’s poem “My Heart Leaps Up”) is at first contradicted by the “Ode”’s emphasis on the fading “light” of childhood but then reaffirmed by the “sober colouring” of adulthood (PW, ll. 69, 201). The allusion suggests that the loss may not be as absolute as Wolf thinks. Wolf’s awareness of his recovery is spread out over the novel’s last two chapters, building up to his inspiring memory of an epiphany involving Wordsworth. During his final walk of the novel with his mind in a state of “misery,” Wolf realizes that “the simple chemistry of his body … was coming to its own conclusions” and restoring to him the power of enjoyment of natural “beauty” (WS, 600). Even without the light conferred by memories, physical sense-impressions have a power of their own: “There had occurred This episode in the deleted section does however undercut Wolf’s transcendental “thought” by comparing it with Weevil’s “life-illusion,” the sight of young women’s legs, which yet carry a hint of sublimity: Weevil tells Wolf, “it’s as if they were more than they are!” (WSDC, 184–5). 57

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an actual ‘resurrection’ of his body” which leads him to perform “the gestures of exultant wellbeing” regardless of his emotional state (WS, 601). The phrase “actual ‘resurrection’” invites questioning, with its problematic term “actual” and its obtrusive quotation marks. This is not the only moment when Wolf sees himself as Christlike. But readers are invited to accept the truth of Wolf’s assertion, “Walking is my cure” (WS, 601). The climax of Wolf’s purported “resurrection” is spread over the last five pages of the novel. Wolf’s eventual conclusion that “It’s my body that has saved me” (WS, 613) is at once affirmed and strongly qualified by the depiction of the workings of his mind. Walking in a field of buttercups suffused with golden light, he becomes preoccupied with “strange, far-drawn associations” (WS, 610). The train of thought leads him to transcendence: The thing became a symbol, a mystery, an initiation. It was like that figure of the Absolute seen in the Apocalypse. It became a super-substance, sunlight precipitated and petrified, the magnetic heart of the world rendered visible! (WS, 610) Wolf’s active mind shifts here to Biblical revelation, turning nature, as in Wordsworth’s Prelude, into “Characters of the great Apocalypse,/The types and symbols of Eternity” (PW, 6: 638–9). The paragraph’s final sentence with its phrase “super-substance” yokes together the tangible and the ineffable, casting doubt in advance on the over-simplification a page later, “What was left to him now was his body” (WS, 611).58 Wolf’s loss and recovery are finally couched in explicitly Wordsworthian terms as he contemplates “the memory of another blundering mystic, another solitary walker over hill and dale, who in his time, too, discovered that certain ‘Intimations of Immortality’ had to take a narrower, a simpler form, as the years advanced!” (WS, 611). On this occasion, Wolf is not remembering a past feeling but a certain impression of Wordsworth seen in the light of the “Ode.” Humfrey stresses the comic dimension of Wolf’s self-identification with Wordsworth.59 Wolf puts himself on the same level as the deprecatingly characterized “blundering mystic.” Humfrey notes that the passage referring to Wordsworth was a late addition to the manuscript, probably inserted around the same time that Powys shortened the novel.60 I suggest that the passage may skew the text’s engagement with Wordsworth as well as clarify it. Other critics shed doubt on the revelation. John Hodgson claims, “The authenticity of this new beginning begs substantiation” (“ ‘A Victim of Self-Vivisection’: J. C. Powys and Wolf Solent,” in WSCS, 50). 59 Humfrey, “ ‘Let Our Crooked Smokes Climb,’ ” 26. 60 Ibid. Humfrey suggests that Powys added the extra passage “soon after” his August 16, 1928 letter to Llewelyn (26). 58

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As already noted, the analogy between Wolf’s loss of his “mythology” and the vanishing of the “glory and the dream” in the “Ode” invites questioning. The poem superimposes a narrative of inevitable and universal loss—the fading away of heavenly light—over a personal lament about altered vision.61 It then hesitates over the extent of the consolation that it offers. The “Ode” grants the adult a “philosophic mind,” the ability to love nature “[e]‌ven more than” he did as a child (PW, ll. 189, 196), and possibly transcendental feeling (“Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears”). These various affirmations are unsettled by some perfunctory phrasing and by the irregular rhymes and line-lengths characteristic of the ode form. Wolf’s invocation of the “Ode” rather than “Tintern Abbey” with its more emphatic “Abundant recompense” helps to shed doubt on whether “narrower” and “simpler” equate to better. The narrator, as if on Wolf’s behalf, at this point offers these lines from the “Immortality Ode”: “But there’s a tree, of many one, A single field which I have looked upon, Both of them spoke of something that is gone.” (WS, 611) The lines are from the fourth stanza of the poem, referring to the realization that the natural world has lost its childhood “glory” (PW, l. 118). These particular lines are not the most obvious ones to quote, compared with such resounding statements as “Where is it now, the glory and the dream?” (PW, l. 57). The choice of these lines smudges the loss, since they give the impression that not every “tree” and “field” may be affected. Powys—or Wolf—misquotes slightly, replacing “speak” with “spoke,” a substitution that seems to make the loss more definite but which may also hint that the loss has already been superseded. For Wolf, the “something that is gone” is his “life-illusion,” yet the question arises as to whether Wolf even needs to recover from the loss of what was an idiosyncratic secret “vice.” The Wordsworthian parallel would make more sense if the “something that is gone” equated to the power of enjoyment of sensations that Wolf feared that he had lost along with his “mythology,” but as we have already seen, his mind is still capable of conferring “light” (WS, 553) and his power of bodily enjoyment is essentially unchanged. Wolf then remembers a previous epiphany experienced during a “visit … paid long ago to Weymouth,” a memory that helps seal his contentment with a supposedly “narrower” and “simpler” existence: Gene W. Ruoff asks, “Why call upon the awesome power of a myth of origins, bearing deeply upon the very essence of being, in order to address a question of changing appearances?” (Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Making of the Major Lyrics 1802–1804 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 235). 61

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He was drinking tea alone, drinking it from a particular china “set” belonging to his grandmother, a “set” called Limoges. Beside him was a book with a little heap of entangled bits of seaweed lying upon it, which he was separating and sorting. There came a moment when he suddenly realized that the book, beside which was his teacup and upon which was the seaweed, was The Poems of Wordsworth. A thrilling ecstasy shot through him then. In a flash he associated the heightening of life that came from his tea-drinking both with the magic of the floating rock-pools where he had found the seaweed and with the magic of Wordsworth’s fluctuating inspiration; and there came upon him a sense of such incredible loveliness, “interfused” through existence, that he jumped up from his chair and began rapidly pacing the floor, hunching his shoulders and rubbing his hands together … . That experience came back to his mind now. “If I can’t enjoy life,” he thought, “with absolute childish absorption in its simplest elements, I might as well never have been born!” (WS, 612, Powys’s punctuation) In this climactic passage, Powys pulls together memory, sense-perception, and Wordsworthian sublimity. The scene has clear autobiographical elements: as mentioned earlier, Powys’s own grandmother, like Wolf’s, lived by the sea at Weymouth; Powys undoubtedly drank tea at her house. Powys and Playter owned “Limoges” china.62 Moreover, in the Autobiography, one of the memories that gives Powys “rapture” involves a glance at a copy of Wordsworth’s poems (A, 37). He says in his Autobiography that “I can recall the sudden sight of my pipe ... lying upon the Poetical Works of Wordsworth” (A, 37–8). Later he mentions the “psychic-sensuous thrill” he received from the sight of this book (A, 299). But, in this scene, as elsewhere, the novelist’s closeness to his hero does not preclude irony. Wolf’s realization is far from simple. First, the memory combines the adult act of solitary tea-drinking with the childlike sorting of seaweed. The act of “drinking tea alone” could be taken as a bathetic updating of Romantic solitude, although Wolf’s grandmother’s ownership of the special tea set may undercut his solitariness. By invoking Wordsworth again, the novel registers Wolf’s distance from the poet as it deepens its reworking of Wordsworthian themes. The remembered experience involves various layers of time: finding the seaweed in the first place, sorting it while relishing tea, being moved to “thrilling ecstasy” by the seaweed/teacup/book combination, reacting in a physical manner, and arriving at a recognition based on this (relatively distant) memory. Wolf’s enjoyment of tea has been sporadically on display throughout the novel, but here it is elevated to the level of the “magic” of the rock pools where the seaweed was found and

Unpublished letter from Powys to Phyllis Playter, April 24, 1928, National Library of Wales.

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the “magic of Wordsworth’s fluctuating inspiration.” The realization that the book was not just a convenient surface but The Poems of Wordsworth is what triggers the “ecstasy.” On the one hand, the focus on the materiality of the book—its cover rather than what lies inside it—reduces the “walker over hill and dale” to a physical object to be glanced at rather than read. On the other hand, the use of Wordsworth as a (past) source of “inspiration”— even if or especially if “fluctuating”—cancels out the association of Wordsworth with a “narrower” and “simpler” vision: this version of the poet represents unmodified joy. The one-word quotation “interfused,” alluding to the transcendental line in “Tintern Abbey,” “Something far more deeply interfused,” shifts the terms of the Wordsworthian dynamic of loss and gain from the somber recovery of the “Ode” to the more joyous “recompense” of the earlier poem. Yet with the recollection of this scene, the dynamic no longer seems to fit, since Wolf’s past self has apparently preempted the consolatory sublimity. Wolf’s bodily reaction of jumping up from his chair, however, could be seen as demystifying that sublimity even as it is recollected.63 Moreover, his interpretation of his epiphany calls for interrogation, since this complex memory seems far from “childish absorption” in the “simplest elements” of life. Apparently, Wolf’s reflection about “childish absorption” refers not just to the playing with the seaweed and the memory of the rock pools as one might expect, but to the “thrilling ecstasy” in which inanimate objects come together and to the “sense of ... incredible loveliness” that represents a heightened state of consciousness. If “childish absorption” itself encompasses transcendental awareness and can be recovered, there has been no loss. It is as if Powys’s complex protagonist falls only to become more like his unfallen creator. The epiphany that follows is another sign that Wolf’s enjoyment of life continues on more than one level. It builds on his excitement over the field of buttercups, which he now imagines to be transfigured into “Saturnian gold” (WS, 612). The vision confirms that the magic of a “field” can be recaptured (presumably accounting for the choice of the lines mentioning a “single field” from the “Immortality Ode”). Such a display of imagination casts doubt on Wolf’s claim that “It’s my body that has saved me” (WS, 613). The final pages of the novel reveal his busy mind still at work, as he admires the slime of a snail, embraces the essential solitude of “every soul” (WS, 613), takes on an attitude of stoical endurance, and accepts the likelihood

A line in the deleted section of the novel anticipates this moment but with very different connotations, being associated with the pleasure of the money to be gained for working for Urquhart (the very money that will supposedly damage Wolf’s soul): “He would have liked to have jumped to his feet and strode up and down the room, rubbing his hands violently together” (WSDC, 207). The re-use of the line in a different context suggests the continuity between the unfallen and the fallen Wolf. 63

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of Gerda’s infidelity. Powys seems to be piling up one form of recovery after another, as if Wordsworthian consolations might be insufficient.64 The very last words of the novel have provoked much discussion, as they seem to scale back Wolf’s recompense to the point of banality: Wolf thinks, “Well, I shall have a cup of tea” (WS, 613). Wolf already appears to have forgotten his transcendental realizations, or perhaps they led him to the acceptance of everyday domestic pleasures. The tea could be seen as at once a debunking and an affirmation of “romantic sensuality.” Powys discussed the ending of the novel in a letter to his brother Llewelyn (August 16, 1928), somewhat fancifully imagining a more dramatic Dostoevsky-inspired or “Aeschylean finale” instead of its “present close in a quiet minor key” (LLP, 2: 85). He says that “in that golden Saturnalian meadow at the close … something … emerges to help [Wolf] cope with things, even on a more earthy basis, … with his assurance still held that the material world is not all there is” (LLP, 2: 86). According to this explanation, Wolf’s awareness of transcendence undergirds and survives his “earthy” attitude of endurance at the end of the novel. As we have seen, the novel has gone back and forth in questioning the sufficiency of bodily sensation. Powys does not mention how the passage concerning Wordsworth factors in, perhaps because he had not added it at this point. Pondering whether his ending would be found “satisfying,” Powys told Llewelyn, “To Hell with ‘convincing’” (LLP, 2: 85). He added, “Of course it isn’t all honey for Monsieur Wolf at the end. It isn’t a ‘happy’ ending exactly … it comes down to stoical ‘brass tacks’” (LLP, 2: 85). This comment acknowledges the ambiguity of what Glen Cavaliero called “that celebrated cup of tea.”65 I see the anti-climactic cup of tea as part of the text’s discomfort with the Wordsworthian pattern of growth, loss, and resurgence. Yet the novel as a whole has succeeded in celebrating a purportedly Wordsworthian sense-based appreciation of the nonhuman world even as it criticized Wolf for indulging in sensations for his own private gratification. Through Wolf’s distorted, untrustworthy, and sometimes comical point of view, it has enabled readers to share a sense of wonder not just at the “material” existence of living and nonliving things (WS, 40), but at the power of the imagination to half-create and transfigure everyday “reality.” Moran claims that “Wolf has a Wordsworthian determination to resist the impulse to grieve, and instead to derive strength from what remains behind” (“Creative Lies,” 210). Humfrey, by contrast, calls Wolf’s “mental climax … almost as inadequate as Wordsworth’s explanation of his benefits after his confrontation with The Leech-Gatherer, or Coleridge’s moral that we should be kind to animals at the end of The Ancient Mariner” (“Introduction,” EJCP, 34–5). Timothy Hyman says that the “ending is in some way abject: the reader feels cheated” (“The Modus Vivendi of John Cowper Powys,” in EJCP, 130). 65 Glen Cavaliero, “Maiden Castle Revisited,” The Powys Journal 9 (1999): 35. Lock points out that the cup of tea could be seen as “sacramental,” like the teatime “feast” (WS, 291) that Wolf earlier partakes of with his mother (“Wolf Solent: Myth and Narrative,” 129). 64

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None of Powys’s later novels, with the possible exception of Porius, draws on Wordsworth to the same extent as Wolf Solent, but like Wolf, they implicitly question even as they promote Wordsworth- (and Keats-) inspired sensual enjoyment and sensation-thoughts. In Chapter 4, I discuss how Powys’s treatment of sensations in A Glastonbury Romance, Weymouth Sands, Maiden Castle, and Owen Glendower is bound up with his re-inventing of Wordsworthian transcendentalism. For now, I turn to Powys’s Autobiography, written from 1933 to 1934 while he was living in upstate New York, to explore its sharpening of his critique of a Romanticinspired cult of sensation.

The Autobiography as a Rewriting of The Prelude First, a few words on the challenges of interpreting Powys’s extensive body of autobiographical writing. Powys instantiates the Romantic commonplace that writing is self-expression even while—like the Romantics themselves— he embraces writing as performance.66 His Autobiography is disconcertingly (some might say appallingly) self-revealing and self-concealing—most obviously in refusing to mention the women in his life (although it makes some lower-class exceptions). Like the authorial voice of his other nonfiction prose works, the “I” of the Autobiography can be seen as an untrustworthy persona. Moreover, the availability of other autobiographical material encourages one to approach the Autobiography with a skeptical eye. As mentioned in my Introduction, in his early twenties, Powys had written a draft autobiography in blank verse, modeled on The Prelude, which remained unpublished during his lifetime.67 Divergences between that text and the prose Autobiography help to shed light on his fictionalizing of his experiences. Powys’s co-authored Confessions of Two Brothers also differs radically from the Autobiography. Even in—or especially in—his diaries (which he expected would be published),68 Powys fictionalizes his life as On Romantic writing as performance, see, for example, Jerome Christensen, Lord Byron’s Strength: Romantic Writing and Commercial Society (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); and Margaret Russett, Fictions and Fakes: Forging Romantic Authenticity, 1760– 1845 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 67 Written in the mid-1890s, this incomplete but partly revised poem of 649 lines was first published in part in PSNL 27 (April 1996) with commentary by Paul Roberts. (Page numbers refer to the reprinted version in PSNL 100 [July 2020], 44–52.) The rest remains unpublished. The alternative titles “A CHILDHOOD AUTOBIOGRAPHY” and “AN EARLY AUTOBIOGRAPHY” are both deleted on one page of the transcription of the manuscript held in the Powys Collection, University of Exeter. 68 In his diaries, Powys sometimes uses constructions such as “I must now inform my worthy Readers” (1930 Diary, 207). On the artfulness of his diaries, see Frederick Davies (1930 66

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a quasi-literary text to be analyzed alongside his novels. Yet, as with The Prelude, it is difficult to avoid relying on the autobiographical writings as authoritative sources of biographical information.69 Certain events that Powys recorded make for uncomfortable reading. In his diary for December 19, 1930, he refers to the “shame” with which he remained haunted for “going with a young girl of twelve to that ‘Madame’s’ house near the station at Brighton when she said ‘you like them young’” (1930 Diary, 209).70 This comment points to the dark side of Powys’s unbounded celebration of “life itself.” It is as if by making this confession, Powys unloads part of his guilt—or “shame” at the detection of it—onto the future readers of his diaries, forcing them to carry around that “shame.” And in a 1958 letter to his sister Katie, listing his youthful transgressions, Powys claims, with a less remorseful tone, that at the age of fifteen he “made incestuous love to Nelly in a wood” (PSE, 301). (The reference is to their deceased sister Eleanor, seven years younger than John Cowper.)71 While this fleeting recollection may be taken to endorse the idealization of sibling incest by second-generation Romantic poets Shelley and Byron, it also satirizes the Romantic constructions of childhood innocence and the childhood bond with nature.72 Such queasiness-inducing incidents raise the question of how to approach writing from the past, autobiographical or not, that conflicts so radically with present-day assumptions concerning gender and sexuality.73 My reading of Weymouth Sands in Chapter 4 will address whether the untrustworthy narrator’s careless treatment of sexual predation jeopardizes Powys’s Wordsworthian transcendentalism. In his Autobiography, Powys presents the development of his “cult of the senses” in Wordsworthian terms, rewriting Wordsworth’s emotional

Diary, 7). Krissdóttir calls Powys’s diaries “a fairy tale,” yet she relies on them to verify events discussed in her biography of Powys (PAD, xviii). 69 Wordsworth’s biographer Gill says of The Prelude, “we must resist the proffered key,” yet he inevitably relies on The Prelude as a “source” of “evidence” (Wordsworth: A Life, 7). 70 The event is listed as one of several reasons why he, self-dramatizingly, should be condemned to “a million years of Purgatory” (1930 Diary, 209). 71 Powys’s late fantasy “Abertackle” imagines versions of his parents, Charles and Mary Po, wondering about “incest” between their rebellious son Gor and their daughter Nelly (Three Fantasies [Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1985], 77). 72 Powys addressed Frances Gregg as “little incestuously loved sister (Shelley would understand that!)” (LFG, 1: 24). Commenting on this sentiment, Gregg’s son Oliver Marlow Wilkinson claimed in a note, “Jack himself strongly defended incest, urging that it should be made legal” (LFG, 1: 24, n. 191). To Powys, Colette Clark’s edition of Home at Grasmere was “about the love between William and Dorothy Wordsworth, brother and sister” (LNR, 158). He added, “Of all families in the world we Powyses ought to stand up fiercely in favour of Incest” (LNR, 159). 73 Rachel Hope Cleves, in Unspeakable: A Life Beyond Sexual Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), discusses the difficulty (and undesirability) of seeing past such historically specific assumptions.

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trajectory of loss and recovery—a pattern, as stressed earlier in my discussion of Wolf Solent, bound up with the degree of the poet’s connectedness to the natural world. This story of loss and gain, explored in “Tintern Abbey” and the “Ode,” is expanded upon with great subtlety and nuance in The Prelude. Powys’s draft blank verse “Autobiography” had explicitly addressed the Wordsworthian theme of “visionary glories passed away/Of childhood’s wonder never to return,” adding “And yet there much remains.”74 The poem describes Powys’s early childhood in both more positive and more negative terms than the prose Autobiography, with pervasive echoes of scenes from Books 1 and 2 of The Prelude and Wordsworthian turns of phrase.75 Like The Prelude, it offers general passages of meditation that tend to be clouded by its specific recollections. In a particularly elaborate passage, it takes Wordsworth’s notion of lost childhood “glories” as a jumping-off point for a two-pronged theory of compensation:        And must we say with him, The mighty bard of Nature, that such dreams Of former times attest our present joys, Of stern necessity less beautiful, Less happy, less divine, than in those days When childhood wore Heaven’s own peculiar grace? Or rather shall we say that such vague dreams Are the best product of experience, Can only come when after toil and storm, Childhood’s sweet pleasures put so far away Win deeper meanings, win and take to them Significance beyond their former worth? Or rather, shall we say that what on Earth Is precious, valuable beyond the sway Of rescued passion and mere animal joy Grows, strengthens, deepens, broadens to the end And the old man whose mortal senses fade

Quoted from a transcription of the manuscript, Powys Collection, University of Exeter. As Roberts points out, the poem gives a more nostalgic account of Powys’s early years in Derbyshire than the prose Autobiography, and a “gloomier” account of his subsequent time in Dorchester, alleviated by memories of idyllic summers at Weymouth (“A Blank Verse Autobiography,” PSNL 100: 47). Alluding to Wordsworth’s “Ode,” Powys claims that Dorchester “Stole the first glory from the Universe” (PSNL 100: 47). The poem is dedicated to Littleton Powys and addressed to John Cowper’s future brother-in-law Thomas Henry Lyon. Littleton Powys is apostrophized in extravagant, quasi-erotic terms as if he were Llewelyn Powys, taking a “wild delight in nature”—like Dorothy Wordsworth of “Tintern Abbey”— and “enamoured passionately/Of life for life’s sake”—implicitly a double of the youthful John Cowper Powys. These quotations are from a transcription of the manuscript, Powys Collection, University of Exeter. 74 75

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Has this—that by his longer life on earth The threads of delicate affinity Between his mind, his body and the mind And bodily forms of Nature are drawn close, Are made at once more complex and more near, So when he comes to die what in him holds Of Nature and the natural elements Sinks back, dissolves and with no shock or pain Blends with the wholesome dust from which it rose? (PSNL 100: 52)76 Powys the poet poses the question of if “we” really grow to be less “happy” over time as Wordsworth ostensibly claims. He then asks whether memories of childhood experiences acquire “Significance beyond their former worth” or whether “mere animal joy” (an echo of the boyhood “glad animal movements” (PW, l. 74) of “Tintern Abbey”) “deepens” into a higher, “more complex” binding with “Nature.” Powys repeats “Or,” but his second alternative is really a variation on his first. For all its expansiveness, the passage simplifies Wordsworth in that it fails to acknowledge the “mighty bard”’s own emphasis on “Abundant recompense.” But it lays the ground for the prose Autobiography in the sense that the latter will elaborate on the “threads of delicate affinity/Between [the writer’s] mind, his body and the mind/And bodily forms of Nature.” While writing his Autobiography, Powys described it in terms that resemble Wordsworth’s autobiographical epic poem. He told his brother Littleton, “The main portion of it will be the History of the Growth of and Development of a solitary Human Consciousness & its reaction to Books and Nature.”77 Powys’s capitalization of nouns makes this “History” sound self-consciously portentous. As Humfrey has noted, Powys’s Autobiography

The transcription in the Powys Collection capitalizes “Him” in the first of these lines, as if Wordsworth is God. 77 Quoted in EJCP, 337. Although Wordsworth’s autobiographical epic poem downplays the effect of books on his psychological development in favor of foregrounding the “ministry” of “Nature” (PW, 1: 351, 355), the fifth of the fourteen books of the 1850 version—the version that Powys read—is entitled “Books” and it connects “books and Nature” (PW, 5: 423). The most farcical scene in Powys’s Autobiography involves his disposal of an “obscene” book in “that noble Dresden river” (A, 397), an episode that reflects sardonically on Wordsworth’s meditation on the perishability of books in Book 5 of The Prelude. Addressing the power of memory in a later letter to his brother Littleton, Powys described his composing of the Autobiography in terms of what might be considered one of Wordsworth’s “theories about sensations”: “I have only to call up one episode after another to feel every feeling I had mount up & surge up and brim over as I write” (quoted in EJCP, 339). This sentence recalls a wellknown sentence in Wordsworth’s Preface to the Lyrical Ballads: “poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” (PW, 940). 76

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is “part parody of The Prelude.”78 Powys foregrounds the unreliability and satiric edge of the autobiographical self when, toward the end of the book, he claims that he has treated “myself as if I were one of my own fictional characters,” with a “touch of caricature” (A, 642).79 A reviewer of the Autobiography commented, “The man himself is a greater compound of fact and fiction than any of the characters he ever spun.” The same reviewer adopted Powys’s own Keatsian and Wordsworthian terms, citing the phrase “sensation thoughts” and adding, “The life of sensation which Keats prayed for, Powys has answered. ‘Sensations sweet’ and damned ‘felt in the blood, and felt along the heart.’”80 The addition of the adjective “damned” to the quotations from “Tintern Abbey” darkens this acceptance of Powys’s philosophy of sensation. I will argue that in the Autobiography, Powys revises Wordsworth’s interplay of psychological loss and gain in ways that sometimes endorse and more often humorously undercut his own sensebased Wordsworthian philosophy and therefore its ecological implications. Insofar as he stresses the physicality of sensation, however, he continues to anticipate the materialist recovery of Wordsworth as nature poet. As mentioned earlier, recent critics have recaptured the bodily dimensions of the poet’s love of nature, exposing the physiological basis of even his transcendental imaginings. In depicting himself as a “Wordsworthian” and a Wordsworth-in-training, Powys succeeds in embracing and ridiculing both what he sees as Wordsworth’s investment in sensation and the Wordsworthian sublime, ultimately revealing the bodily “dimension” of transcendence (A, 274, 644).

“Introduction,” EJCP, 20. On the Autobiography as a rewriting of The Prelude, see also Hyman, “Modus Vivendi,” 125 and 145. Michael Ballin calls the book “unique in its blend of romantic, Wordsworthian motives and thematic and psychological modernism” (“The Protean Self: Techniques of Self-Representation and Literary Form in Autobiography,” The Powys Journal 6 [1996]: 66). Robert Caserio approaches the Autobiography in the context of other Modernist-era autobiographies that privilege impersonality and “dissolution” over traditional linear cause and effect (“Powys among the Autobiographers 1900–1940,” The Powys Journal 24 [2014]: 60). See also Robert Caserio, “Abstraction, Impersonality, Dissolution,” in Modernism and Autobiography, ed. Maria DiBattista and Emily O. Wittman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 197–210. 79 Jeremy Hooker, making a case for the book’s “artistic coherence,” contends, “Powys’s life is, literally, his own creation” (“ ‘A Touch of Caricature’: The Autobiography of John Cowper Powys,” in EJCP, 55, 50). Ballin observes, “The narrator of the work becomes a fictional character who undermines concepts of normality both by his studied abnormality and his paradoxical, self-contradictory portrayal” (“The Protean Self,” 69). Krissdóttir asks if the Autobiography is “an immense conjuring trick” and a playing at “maze games” (DM, 292, 294). Mark Boseley suggests that Powys caricatures himself in his diaries as well as in the Autobiography (“The Peripatetic Mode in the Diaries of John Cowper Powys,” 12). 80 T. B. Cowan, “AUTOBIOGRAPHY. By John Cowper Powys,” Chattanooga Daily Times, December 16, 1934, 15. 78

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In his first chapter of the Autobiography, an account of his first seven years, the Powys persona, Wordsworth-like, looks for the origins of his adult self in childhood, but for all his enthrallment to Wordsworth, he discovers that the child is not father of the man.81 Throughout the book, Powys imitates yet unsettles the pattern whereby, as Gill notes, “Wordsworth presents his whole life as a series of distinct phases, characterized by different responses to Nature.”82 Powys establishes his Wordsworthian credentials at the outset by celebrating the River Dove of Derbyshire, his native county, a river mentioned in Wordsworth’s Lucy poem, “She dwelt among th’untrodden ways.” The passage corresponds to the description in Book 1 of The Prelude of the early inspiration provided by Wordsworth’s own native river, the Derwent (PW, 1: 269–81). Like the home of the “unknown” Lucy (PW, l. 9), Powys’s native village, Shirley, was “as far removed from any town or city as if it had been ‘among the furthest Hebrides’” (A, 3)—an allusion to “The Solitary Reaper” that improbably equates a young boy in a late-Victorian English vicarage to a “solitary Highland Lass” in the Romantic era (PW, l. 2). But despite these auspicious beginnings, Powys repeatedly expresses surprise and even dismay that he cannot locate the origins of his “cult of the senses” in his early years. He writes, “What I cannot find in my memory, do all I can to find it, is the faintest evidence of that conscious embracing of Nature with a psychic-sensuous ecstasy in which I came to experience later my deepest sense of the purpose of life” (A, 29). The phrase “psychic-sensuous ecstasy” suggests the partly physical and partly mystical kind of sensation extolled in his nonfiction prose: not content with looking for Wordsworth’s early “sensuous” appetite for the nonhuman world in his younger self, Powys looks in vain—not unexpectedly, one might think—for a less bodily and more cerebral response, the kind that Wordsworth associates with his adult self. A “conscious awareness of what Wordsworth calls ‘the pleasure which there is in life itself’” (A, 29)—a quotation from “Michael” that I have already discussed—is precisely what Powys fails to identify in his own childhood. Yet in the same chapter, as if accepting the Wordsworthian idealizing of childhood feeling, Powys twice recalls the unmatched “rapturous delight” he experienced over owning an “axe” made out of a “laurel-bough” (A, 37), a gift from his father. Powys’s elaborate portrait of his father is in itself a departure from The Prelude, in which Wordsworth only mentions his father when referring in passing to his death, and in which the poet describes the “Imagination” as “an unfathered vapour” (PW, 6: 592, 595).83 Cf. Hooker on the Autobiography: “If it is indeed the child who is father of the man, in Powys’s case it was in a sense the man who recreated the child, of whom the man was then reborn” (John Cowper Powys, 18). 82 Gill, Wordsworth: A Life, 153. 83 Powys also diverges from Wordsworth in giving space—despite his self-confessed misanthropy and love of solitude—to his five brothers and to several of his male friends, whereas the 81

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Powys’s exultation over this “enchanter’s weapon” immediately casts the love of nature in a somewhat ironic light, especially since in describing his father’s “cruel hewing and wounding” of an “ancient laurel-bush” (A, 2), he uses word choices that recall Wordsworth’s autobiographical poem “Nutting” (originally intended for The Prelude but published in the 1800 Lyrical Ballads). In “Nutting,” the young Wordsworth destroys hazel trees with “merciless ravage” and then feels a proto-ecological “sense of pain” on behalf of the “sullied” bower (PW, ll. 44–50). Powys’s father’s sarcastically phrased “natural desire that his son should behold [his] deeds of devastation and glory” causes him to take the “protesting” child “by force” to the “devastated spinney” (A, 3). Reworking the erotic charge of “Nutting” in terms of Freudian family romance, Powys satirizes his “fetish-worship” of the “laurel axe” (A, 3, 38).84 The “glory” here is sardonically treated, a far cry from the “glory and the dream” of Wordsworth’s “Immortality Ode” (PW, l. 57). Nevertheless, in connection with the thrill of his father’s gift of the axe, Powys explicitly invokes the “Ode” as if identifying his youthful rapture with the “visionary gleam” of Wordsworthian childhood (PW, l. 56).85 He continues, But it may—as Wordsworth hints of similar feelings in his “Intimations of Immortality”—represent something much deeper and more tremendous. The point about it that seems to me tragic—as it really did to Wordsworth, though he made the best of it in his sturdy stoical manner—is the fact that these ecstasies occur at rarer and rarer intervals as we grow older. (A, 38) The “something much deeper and more tremendous” may equate to the “something far more deeply interfused” of transcendence, but at this point Powys does not dwell on that possibility. While the colloquial phrase “made the best of it” seems to shed doubt on the Wordsworthian notion that the “philosophic mind” of the adult outweighs the vanishing of “celestial light” (PW, “Ode,” ll. 189, 4), the heavy term “tragic” acknowledges the power of the nostalgia in Wordsworth’s poem. However, as if dismissing Wordsworthian regret, Powys then adds briskly, “But after all this mystical

poet refers only glancingly to his three brothers, without even naming them (PW, 12: 350). Wordsworth, unlike Powys, offers a brief tribute to his (deceased) mother (PW, 5: 256–60). Powys’s omission of his mother is in line with his self-imposed rule of excluding women from the story of his life, a rule that, as I have already mentioned, he occasionally breaks. 84 Discussing the laurel axe, Avril Horner and Grevel Lindop point to the “darker side” of Powys’s “spiritual quest” (“Geoffrey Hill, John Cowper Powys, and ‘The Laurel Axe,’” Notes and Queries 38 [236], no. 3 [1991]: 348). 85 The reference to the “Ode” in the Autobiography’s index calls it “Intimations of Mortality” (A, 671), as if to turn it into an anti-transcendental text.

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advantage of childhood over manhood … is more than compensated for” (A, 38). The word choice “compensated” echoes the “abundant recompense” of “Tintern Abbey” as if it is not to be questioned. According to Powys, “It may be hard to be a man; it is much harder to be a child” (A, 39). Having invoked Wordsworth’s moving lament for the loss of the “glory and the dream” of childhood, he later writes, apropos of his time at Sherborne “Prep.” School, “Is it not a strange thing, how, if you are an Englishman of the upper-middle class, you suffer the greatest hardships of your life before you are twelve years old?” (A, 92). This jarring—and self-pitying— claim punctures the “dream.” Moreover, whereas Wordsworth grew up roaming the Lake District, “Fostered alike by beauty and by fear” (PW, Prelude 1: 302), “Fear”—capitalized as an un-Wordsworthian personified abstraction—in Powys’s case allegedly made his youthful self a “helpless neurotic” (A, 39). Powys says, “I live for sensation” (A, 40), but, for the most part, the “language of the sense” has to wait. For Powys as for Wordsworth, nature is the best teacher, but its educative influence does not begin until he is grown up. Yet he steals a march on Wordsworth by recalling in his early years a full-blown encounter with transcendence of the kind that the poet reserves for the two great sublime climaxes of The Prelude, the “Crossing the Alps” passage in Book 6 and the ascent of Mount Snowdon in Book 14. Powys’s experience, however, initially comes across as comically bathetic. Recounting another early memory, Powys describes the sublimity of his father’s thick boot-soles: The greatness of my father as a personality was first manifested to me not as a priest, not even as a trimmer of laurels, but as the possessor of boots with enormously thick soles. If I could capture now the significance of the soles of my father’s boots I should be master of one of the great clues to the secret of the cosmos. … Those great boot soles … gather[ed] into themselves that element in life that might be called inscrutable ecstasy. (A, 4–5) In fastening on mundane boot-soles as a source of the sublime, Powys mocks his own distance from Wordsworth, as he did in recounting his father’s trimming of the “ancient laurel-bush” (A, 2). But at the same time, this passage lines him up with the child of the “Ode,” enraptured by the “glory and the dream.” It also, with the image of the “great boot soles,” establishes the towering personality of Powys’s father as a source of transcendence in its own right.86 The “significance” of the boot-soles, Powys insists, points Hooker notes that “the magnificent portrait of the father” is “recognised as one of the book’s principal triumphs” (“A Touch of Caricature,” 53). Powys told his sister Lucy in 1951 that the “best part” of his Autobiography is its description of their father (“Letters to Lucy Amelia Penny [née Powys],” The Powys Journal 1 [1991]: 118). 86

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to “the secret of the cosmos.” The implication is that it far surpasses the “Gleams like the flashing of a shield” (PW, Prelude 1: 586) that Wordsworth experiences in childhood. Powys’s meditations on this mystery do not end with his emotional reaction of “inscrutable ecstasy.” He provides another paragraph analyzing the way in which the memory of these “inanimate objects” has continued to give him a “thrill of psychic release and mysterious joy” over the years (A, 5). The memory thus aligns with the images of the landscape near Tintern Abbey that subsequently enabled Wordsworth to “see into the life of things” (PW, l. 50). Like Wordsworth, Powys vacillates over whether experiences themselves involve a feeling of transcendence or whether memory confers it. Powys stamps the experience as authentically Wordsworthian and sublime when, quoting “Tintern Abbey,” he attaches to it a “mysterious sense of something ‘far more deeply interfused’” (A, 5). In contrast with this precocious encounter with transcendence, passages in Powys’s subsequent narrative of his time at Sherborne “Prep.” and Public School come across as burlesque versions of some of the episodes in the early books of The Prelude that recount the shaping of Wordsworth’s imagination. In Book 1 of The Prelude, “Nature” punishes the young Wordsworth for borrowing a boat by giving him the illusion that a mountain peak “Strode after [him],” enlarging his “brain” with “huge and mighty forms” (PW, 1: 351, 385, 391, 398). By contrast, Powys as a schoolboy endures bullying and the “misery” of communal bathing and organized sports with no emotional benefit—rather the reverse (A, 93). In Book 2 of The Prelude, Wordsworth and his schoolmates supplement their “frugal” everyday “meals” with “rustic dinners on the cool green ground” (PW, 2: 78, 89), a literalizing of Nature’s benign ministration. Powys, on the other hand, indulges in his “savage greed for sweet-meats” including “Cadbury’s chocolate-cream” (A, 83–4). The inclusion of the brand name locates Powys in a modern world of mass-produced commodities far removed from Wordsworth’s pre-industrial childhood in the Lake District. Meanwhile, as if to correct his distortion of Wordsworth’s developmental arc, Powys records, from during his school days, one equivalent of what Wordsworth calls “spots of time”—moments of visionary illumination during childhood (two of which are belatedly recounted in Book 12 of the 1850 Prelude).87 Looking forward to a mathematics lesson that he knew would consist of “long reveries,” Powys receives a “wave of ecstasy” from the sight of his copy of Euclid, turning it into “a sort of consecrated wafer, into which every lovely sensation I had ever had, had miraculously gathered itself” (A, 128–9). This description has transcendental overtones. He compares this “infinitesimal sensation” to “Proust’s ‘Madeleine’”: it teaches him the value of “some

Although Powys repeatedly refigures Wordsworth’s “spots of time,” he never cites the actual phrase. 87

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negligible fragment of matter” (A, 129). The episode rewrites Wordsworth— and Proust—in that Powys precociously appreciates its significance during the moment that it is experienced, and can revive it “at will” (A, 129). Powys here sets aside Wordsworth’s education at the hands of nature and evokes the mysterious Arab dream episode from Book 5 of The Prelude, in which a stone represents “‘Euclid’s Elements’” and a shell represents poetry, both threatened by an apocalyptic flood (PW, 5: 88). Critics disagree over how the allegorical dream expresses Wordsworth’s understanding of the relative value of nature, science, and art.88 Powys’s lesson is far more legible. Perhaps the most striking way in which the Autobiography rewrites The Prelude is that Powys’s imaginative awakening to nature occurs in the very situation—while he is an undergraduate at Cambridge—in which Wordsworth’s imagination “slept” (PW, 3: 260). Wordsworth presents his time at Cambridge as a lull in his development, during which he experienced “a strangeness in the mind,/A feeling that I was not for that hour,/Nor for that place” (PW, 3: 80–2). Like Wordsworth, Powys “did not gain much from Cambridge,” but unlike Wordsworth, he “gained all the world from Cambridgeshire! Oh how can I express my deep, my indurated, my passionate, my unforgettable, my eternal debt, to that dull, flat, monotonous, tedious, unpicturesque landscape? … every swamp-pool, every rushy brook, every weedy estuary, every turnip-field, every grey milestone, every desolate haystack became part of my spirit” (A, 183). Powys finds the underwhelming scenery all the more powerful for its mundaneness.89 Crucially, he discovers during his walks in Cambridgeshire, using the term for the first time, “what might be called sensation-thoughts” (A, 169).90 Not only that, it turns out that he gained plenty more from Cambridge, in an episode that radically refigures the emotional trajectory that Wordsworth traces in The Prelude. The episode constitutes the delayed climax of the chapter on Cambridge: The greatest event in my life at Cambridge was a very quiet event. … It was indeed a sort of Vision on the Road to Damascus. I remember the

See, for example, Theresa M. Kelley, “Spirit and Geometric Form: The Stone and the Shell in Wordsworth’s Arab Dream,” Studies in English Literature 22 (1982): 563–82. 89 On attitudes to Cambridge by Powys and other writers, see Graham Chainey, A Literary History of Cambridge (Cambridge: The Pevensey Press, 1985), 163–4. 90 Powys thus recapitulates the kind of small-scale “affirmation, loss into gain” that Gill identifies in Wordsworth’s implication in The Prelude that his “lack of application at Cambridge” allowed “the development of powers that academic study would have stultified” (Wordsworth and the Victorians, 186). Powys’s brother Littleton, in his own autobiography The Joy of It (London: Chapman and Hall, 1937), explicitly compares his own experience at Cambridge with Wordsworth’s, quoting the lines from Book 3 of The Prelude in which the poet says he “let the stars/Come forth, perhaps without one quiet thought” (PW, 3: 257–8). Unlike Wordsworth and John Cowper, Littleton does not convert loss into gain, lamenting that during his Cambridge years, “to a large extent I lost touch with Nature” (97). 88

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exact spot where it took place. Not far from Trumpington Mill … to the rear of the Fitzwilliam Museum—there stands an ancient wall; and as I drifted along … I observed, growing upon this wall, certain patches of grass and green moss and yellow stone-crop. Something about the look of these small growths, secluded there in a place seldom passed, seized upon me and caught me up into a sort of Seventh Heaven. A few seconds ago, before touching my pen to tell you what kind of Seventh Heaven it was, into which … I was transported, I felt all that I have ever felt, of the burden of this extraordinary moment. It certainly penetrated every recess of my being. I would call it a beyond sensation, and it lies in my consciousness now, like a sunken ship, full of fathomdeep treasure. But the touch of my pen … breaks the spell. I can tell you nothing! It has, however, whatever its fluctuating mystery might be, a power upon me that is like the power of a hidden Mass, celebrated by no human hands. It is impossible for me to describe it! And yet I never see the least patch of lichen, or moss, or grass, in the veinings of an ancient rock but something of the same feeling returns. Not, however, quite the same; for that impression, that vision of “Living Bread,” that mysterious meeting-point of animate with inanimate, had to do with some secret underlying world of rich magic and strange romance. In fact I actually regarded it as a prophetic idea of the sort of stories that I myself might come to write; stories that should have as their background the indescribable peace and gentleness of the substance we name grass in contact with the substance we name stone. (A, 199–200) Still at Cambridge and living through the equivalent of Book 3 of The Prelude, Powys makes up for lost time with an experience that anticipates key episodes from later books of Wordsworth’s epic poem.91 The passage also replays Wordsworth’s realization that (to quote the 1805 Prelude) “I was a chosen son” (3: 82). This scene conflates Wordsworth’s “spots of time” with a “quiet” revision of the “Crossing the Alps” passage. Powys takes the “old stone wall” from the second spot of time (in which the young Wordsworth waits on a misty mountainside prior to his father’s death)—a scene of sensory excess from which the adult poet later “would drink/As at a fountain” (PW, 12: 320, 325–6). The mention of grass may also allude glancingly to the first spot of time—in which the very young, lost Wordsworth stumbles upon a place near Penrith Beacon where a hanged murderer’s “name” was “inscribed” on the “turf” and the boy experiences a feeling of “visionary dreariness” (PW, 12: 238–56).

Cf. Collins, who finds this “vision” to be that of an “animist or occultist” rather than that of a “true Wordsworthian” (Old Earth-Man, 23). Hyman cites the “Vision on the Road to Damascus” scene as a “foundation” of Powys’s “Quest” (“Modus Vivendi,” 26–7). 91

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Combining Wordsworth’s childhood prefiguring of encounters with transcendence with the poet’s sublime after-the-fact meditation on the power of imagination, Powys draws attention to the act of writing with the mention of his pen, putting himself in the same position as the poet as when, looking back, he alleviates the disappointment over unknowingly crossing the Alps with the massive compensatory realization of “Effort, and expectation, and desire/And something evermore about to be” (PW, 6: 606–8). Powys’s “very quiet event” at Cambridge foreshortens Wordsworth’s trajectory of emotional growth, giving him in retrospect what Wordsworth in “Tintern Abbey” calls “Abundant recompense” before he even knows he has anything to lose. Powys establishes himself here as a storyteller inspired in Wordsworthian fashion by the “rich magic” of greenery emerging from rock or stone, traveling with the poet “beyond sensation,” and by implication ready to move beyond the story told in The Prelude.92 This moment of revelation is undermined soon afterward in the Autobiography in a passage in which Powys recalls failing, at the end of his time at Cambridge, to win the University Prize for a poem on the seemingly inevitable assigned topic of the Lake District (A, 203). In The Prelude, Wordsworth contemplates a wondrous sunrise in the Lake District during his first summer vacation and dedicates himself to poetry: “I made no vows, but vows/Were then made for me” (PW, 4: 334–5). Powys’s “vow” to become a poet had been made “in the Prep. yard, between the stars and the urinal” (A, 140). Yet after his self-mockery, Powys once again grants himself a glimpse of Wordsworthian transcendence. He adjusts the connotations of a phrase from Wordsworth’s “Ode” in order to express a mystical response to the beach at Weymouth, where he had often enjoyed staying as a child. His adult “re-visitings of Weymouth were attended with thoughts that, as Wordsworth says of the weight of custom, were ‘heavy as frost, and deep, almost, as life’” (A, 264–5). Wordsworth uses these words—the lowest point of the “Ode”—to signify the pressure of the material on the immaterial, the soul’s increasing distance from its heavenly origins, but Powys, returning to a beloved location as Wordsworth returns to Tintern Abbey, uses the poet’s phrasing to affirm the possibility of transcendental vision. Immediately after the quotation, he writes, “There were certain moments when those pebbles opposite Brunswick Terrace seemed to contain a mystery that pressed upon my brain, they and the deep greenish-grey volume of inrolling waves that were so deep just there until I felt as though they belonged to a life within life” (A, 265). Powys’s repeated “re-visitings” of Wordsworth’s word choices

Images of plants alongside rocks and stones recur in Powys’s fiction, emblematizing the coexistence of the “green” and “gray” components of his ecological vision. 92

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from the great lyrics add a quasi-mystical resonance to his own prose even when, as here, he changes the poet’s meaning. I mentioned in the Introduction that the Autobiography includes a parody of Wordsworth’s ascent of Mount Snowdon. This episode in the book steals another march on the poet. Wordsworth climbed Mount Snowdon in the summer of 1791 with his friend Robert Jones and used his account of the excursion as the second sublime climax to The Prelude, saving it for the final book of the poem and describing the poet’s vision on the mountain as “the emblem of a mind/That feeds upon infinity” (PW, 14: 70–1). Powys visited North Wales (where he was to settle more than four decades later) during a Cambridge summer vacation with his father and two of his brothers, a trip that, in an anti-Wordsworthian turn, “by no means returns to my memory with any feeling of pleasure” (A, 187). Prior to his ascent of Mount Snowdon with his brothers Littleton and Theodore, a pony that he had hired allegedly fell down a waterfall, and, Charles Lamblike, he told his father that he “detested mountains” (A, 189). Powys records his father’s “grave” reply: “It’s a pity you came with us then, John, my son!” (A, 189). The actual climbing of Snowdon “was, I regret to say, anything but a harmonious adventure” (A, 190). Transcendence is nowhere: John Cowper “kept the purse” with “rigid economy,” and Littleton almost had to “carry both his brothers up the last half-mile of our ancestral mountain” (A, 190). Instead of confronting a revelatory “vision” (PW, 14: 64), in the “Climber’s Book” in the “hut upon the summit,” they inscribed the cliché, “Love Never Dies,” and then proceeded to belie those words by descending to fisticuffs (A, 190).93 Powys wrote later to Littleton, “Do you recall our climb of Snowdon? And how I was so stingy with the money? And how you and Theodore (encouraged by me) fought in a field; … or am I inventing and mixing things up?”94 The parodic tone intensifies with Powys’s account of his failure to climb Helvellyn, the highest mountain in the Lake District. This dispiriting experience occurred during a post-graduation trip to the Lake District, which he initially recalls in positive, Wordsworth-tinged terms, I went with an unequalled companion to Ullswater—my father willingly providing the expense to give “dear John” his opportunity—but a certain tiny little yellow flower, adapted to rockeries, and triumphantly planted at the end of our terrace walk, was the best thing I brought back. That and a memory of those singular prefaces of Wordsworth, which, for the

Nevertheless, later in the book, Powys refers back to “quarrelling” with his brothers on “the peak of Snowden [sic]” as if he carried something “sacred” away from it (A, 462). 94 Quoted in EJCP, 338. 93

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print bothered me, my companion read aloud, are all that remain of this academic tour. Well! not quite all; for I never see a pink stock—whose smell is perhaps my favourite of all smells—without thinking of a small plant of this flower that grew in the garden of the cottage where we stayed. The contrast between the wild, bare, Ullswater mountain and the sweet security of this heavily scented flower struck deep into my being. (A, 203) In contrast with Wordsworth, whose trip to the Swiss Alps during the Long Vacation of 1790 caused “pain” to relatives careful of his “worldly interests” (PW, 6: 330–2), Powys has his trip “willingly” financed by his father, but— again unlike with Wordsworth—his emotional payoff is minimal. The passage records Powys’s first acquaintance with Wordsworth’s prefaces—the Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802), the “Essay, Supplementary to the Preface,” and the Preface to his 1815 Poems. Powys goes to the Lakes and forms a memory not so much of the place but of Wordsworthian prose, putting himself at a bookish remove from the region that inspired Wordsworth’s poetry. Other details by contrast gesture toward Wordsworthian authenticity. Powys’s unnamed and gender-neutral companion—his sister Gertrude (DM, 71)—stands in for Wordsworth’s friend Robert Jones, with whom the poet traveled to the Alps a year before their hike up Mount Snowdon. The transplantation of the flower to “our terrace-walk” recalls the “terrace walk” near Wordsworth’s childhood home in the Lake District (PW, 1: 286). The passage modifies Wordsworthian nature-worship, however, by stressing  the limitations rather than the power of memory, limitations reflected in the diminutiveness of the plants and the small print of Powys’s edition of Wordsworth. Yet for all its apologetic tone, this passage does little to prepare the reader for the letdown that follows. Powys continues by relating a more powerful—and comical—memory: The memory too of a certain particular kind of shame comes back to me from that trip, a shame that I have only quite recently learned the trick of disposing of. I left my companion with the intention of climbing alone to the top of Helvellyn; but about a mile from the top fear seized me and I came pelting down like a frightened beast. All the way home, on the shores of the lake where our cottage was, my oak stick, my magic stick “Sacred,” seemed to utter speech, as I grasped it by its curved handle. It kept repeating at every step I took “Recreant … recreant … recreant!” And my impression now is—or my fancy, if you will—that it departed after that and removed itself from me, so that I saw it no more! … After my gran rifiuto [an allusion to Dante’s Inferno], in refusing to carry it to the summit of Helvellyn, “Sacred” disappears. (A, 203–4)

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Wordsworth and Coleridge were known to have ascended the mountain, addressed as “old Helvellyn” in The Prelude (PW, 8: 68). In old age, Wordsworth had famously been pictured on top of Helvellyn in a painting by Keats’s friend Benjamin Robert Haydon. The failure to reach the summit of Helvellyn dramatizes Powys’s inability to match his great predecessor, but it also inflates the Powys/Wordsworth analogy in serving as another distorted rewriting of the climactic scene from Book 6 of The Prelude discussed above. In that scene, loss (disappointment over not noticing crossing the Alps) yields to the gain of sublime insight. By contrast, for Powys, on this occasion, loss follows loss as his anthropomorphized and incongruously named walking stick abandons him as punishment for his humiliating retreat.95 I have already discussed Powys’s sexualizing of the poet in the Autobiography along the lines of his own “cerebral mystical passion for young women.” Powys’s often disconcerting account of his erotic life is thus implicitly bound up with his Wordsworthianism. The voyeuristic aspect of this “passion” is on full display in the sixth chapter of the Autobiography, “Southwick,” an account of Powys’s time as a lecturer at girls’ schools in Brighton before his marriage, the provincial equivalent of Book 7 of The Prelude, “Residence in London,” in which Wordsworth describes his enthrallment by the spectacles of the metropolis. Wordsworth presents his stay in London as a detour in his poetic development, while his fascinated language reflects his ambivalence toward the variegated “sights” of the city (PW, 7: 675). Despite the parallel with The Prelude, Powys recounts the spectacles of Brighton with no trace of Wordsworth’s discomfort with the superficiality of visual experience. Powys’s list of intriguing sights includes “the cockles-mussels-and winkles-sellers, the minstrels with blackened faces, the Punch-and-Judy shows, … the photographers, the fruit-and-nuts pedlars, the toy-balloon men” (A, 217). This sensory overload (enthusiastically welcomed by Powys) corresponds to Wordsworth’s mesmerized depictions of the multi-racial “crowd” in London (PW, 7: 221) and the phantasmal entertainments of the fair. Wordsworth’s London has “Negro ladies in white muslin gowns” (PW, 7: 228); Powys’s Brighton has minstrels in blackface, a detail—like the mention of photography—that emphasizes what Wordsworth fears yet is drawn to: the artifice of modernity. Powys also takes a step far beyond Wordsworth in this chapter by lingering over his “maniacal pursuit of the sensations of impersonal lust” (A, 217–18), a “frenzied eye-lust” (A, 242) at odds not just with Wordsworth’s suspicion of the visual but with the poet’s dismay at the “spectacle” of prostitution (PW, Prelude 7: 394). In addition to mentioning sleeping with “street-girls” (A, 240), Powys by contrast later befriends a prostitute, Lily, who sheds

Krissdóttir analyzes the incident in terms of Powys’s anxieties about his poetic abilities and his sexuality (DM, 72). 95

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over “the great City” of London itself an aura of “poetry and romance,” “magic,” and “a deep rich intoxicating glory” (A, 345), the word choice “glory” tapping into—yet also helping to demystify once again—“the glory and the dream” of Wordsworth’s “Ode.”96 Reflecting his ongoing rewriting of Wordsworth’s developmental arc, Powys’s chapter on his travels in Europe stands in for Books 9–11 of the 1850 Prelude, “Residence in France,” but it contains no equivalent of the threat to Wordsworth’s imaginative development posed by the failure of the French Revolution. At the same time, he continues to define himself and his “philosophy of life” both by means of and against Wordsworth. Here the reference point is “Tintern Abbey” rather than The Prelude. Speaking of walks he took in Germany (in less picturesque surroundings than the countryside around Tintern Abbey), Powys writes, “Often and often since then, ‘amid the din of towns and cities I have owed to them, in hours of weariness, sensations sweet, felt in the blood and felt along the heart, and passing even—’ but since, you, reader, are neither Tom Jones, nor one of ‘Tom Jones’ girls,’ I will quote no further” (A, 400). Powys here breaks off with a self-deflating reference to his habit, mentioned in my Introduction, of quoting Wordsworth during sexual encounters with young women supplied by his friend Tom Jones, including Jones as a beneficiary of his recitation. The reference reinforces the tangibility of the recollections by putting them in an incongruously erotic and social context. In the poet’s lines, the memories actualize the “sensations” so that they become bodily or quasi-bodily, “felt in the blood and felt along the heart,” perhaps even more embodied than at the time they were experienced, since Wordsworth’s phrasing “along the heart” makes the “heart” more literal than figurative. Physiological “sensations sweet,” as in recent materialist readings of this passage, are paramount.97 Cutting off the quotation before it turns to the “purer mind,” Powys on this occasion pointedly ignores the poet’s extrapolation to ethics (kind acts) and transcendence (seeing into the “life of things” in an out-of-body experience [PW, “Tintern Abbey,” l. 50]). Powys’s account, in the final three chapters of the Autobiography, of his many years as an itinerant lecturer in the United States, at once undercuts and confirms the Wordsworthian pattern whereby the poet’s imagination is healed and deepened by reunion with nature. On one level, Powys needs no

The Romantic-era source of this idealization is presumably Thomas De Quincey’s account of his friendship with a London prostitute in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821). Powys devotes a passage to De Quincey and Ann in his late fantasy “Topsy-Turvy” (published posthumously in Three Fantasies), 45–7. Powys’s early play The Entermores offers a sympathetic portrayal of so-called street-girls. 97 Jackson offers a materialist reading of this passage (Science and Sensation, 144–5), as do Reno (“Rethinking the Romantics’ Love of Nature,” 40) and Robertson (“ ‘Swallowed Up In Impression,’ ” 608). 96

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recompense, abundant or otherwise, for the loss of youthful “dizzy raptures” (PW, “Tintern Abbey,” l. 87) because the world for him has more “sensual pleasures” (A, 498) than it had when he was a child. On another level, his life in America shows that, like Wordsworth, he does develop—specifically by expanding his “life of psychic-sensuousness” to include new sources of the sublime (A, 507). Powys finds in America “Nature in her most aweinspiring mood” (A, 574), a line that rewrites Wordsworth’s reference to the imagination as “Reason in her most exalted mood” (PW, Prelude 14: 192). Powys’s reformulation elevates the power of matter over that of the human mind, ascribing the source of sublimity to the personified “Nature,” able to hold her own when “confronted” by the “terrifying thing” that is “an ‘amusement park’” (A, 574). All Powys’s forms of enjoyment locate him on “that psychic-sensuous margin of life which is the most precious thing in the world” (A, 493). That “margin” is the place where individual bodily sensations pass into a “cosmic eroticism” (A, 531)—a feeling that merges the ecological and the transcendental. Despite his sporadically comic deflatings of Wordsworthian transcendental feeling, Powys achieves authentically sublime experiences in an American urban setting through memories tinged by another Wordsworth poem, this time the well-known 1802 sonnet, “Composed Upon Westminster Bridge.”98 Referring to the cul-de-sac in New York where he lived with Phyllis Playter in the 1920s, Powys recalls “certain indescribable Sunday mornings in Patchin Place when New York lay in deep gulfs of ethereal silence” (A, 547). Once again, like Wordsworth in “Tintern Abbey,” Powys attempts to describe the “indescribable”: Never have I known in all my life such a heavenly silence as that was! It was a silence that seemed as if it were being gently washed by mysterious subaqueous tides at the bottom of the world. It was a silence that made you feel as if the very pulse of the Absolute had been turned to stone. … Yes I shall think of that absolute stillness, that stillness of the great white bare, world-debutante actually asleep at last. (A, 547) Powys’s awe at the “silence” and “stillness” of New York on Sunday mornings resembles Wordsworth’s awestruck response to London in the sonnet, which famously begins, “Earth has not anything to show more fair” (PW, l. 1). Wordsworth’s London appears “silent, bare,” and devoid of human activity. Powys picks up on Wordsworth’s slight anthropomorphizing of the city with his image of New York as “the great white bare, world-debutante.” Both writers express astonishment that a

Late in life, in a letter, Powys quoted the last six lines of the poem (“Letters of John Cowper Powys to Susanne Lane,” 183). 98

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major city is capable of “stillness”: Powys’s “Never have I known in all my life” echoes Wordsworth’s “Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!” (PW, l. 11). Wordsworth’s poem ends with an exclamation of amazement at that “calm”: “Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;/And all that mighty heart is lying still!” (PW, ll. 13–14). Cleanth Brooks’s classic analysis of the poem emphasized its paradoxicality: “The most exciting thing that the poet can say about the houses is that they are asleep … to say that they are ‘asleep’ is to say that they are alive, that they participate in the life of nature.”99 Similarly, for Powys to say that New York is “actually asleep” is to see it, in Brooks’s words, as “actually alive.”100 Wordsworth’s poem does not spell out the transcendental implications of this discovery that the city participates in the beauty of nature. But for Powys, drawing in his reader with “you,” the “silence … made you feel as if the very pulse of the Absolute had been turned to stone.” Powys’s revelation is as “exciting” as—and more explicit than—Wordsworth’s: the “heavenly” quietness of the city creates the illusion that a transcendental reality partakes of the inorganic, a twist on the Romantic notion of nature taking one beyond nature. The final chapter of the Autobiography, an account of Powys’s happy four years in upstate New York after his retirement from lecturing (1930–4), stands in for the passage in The Prelude in which Wordsworth celebrates his return to “Nature’s presence” (PW, 12: 206). Powys’s later move to North Wales has been seen as a sort of homecoming akin to Wordsworth’s move back to the Lake District in 1799,101 but in the Autobiography, Powys’s retreat to rural New York is his equivalent of Wordsworth’s return to his native region, since Powys claims to find in the New York landscape a resemblance to his native Derbyshire.102 Like Wordsworth, he gives credit to “Nature” for his renewal, which, in his case, involves a freeing from “erotic viciousness” (A, 614). Yet at the same time, Powys continues to mock his self-assigned role as a latter-day Wordsworth, and in doing so arrives at an expanded definition of his “philosophy of life.” In this final chapter, Powys ultimately embraces the Wordsworthian identity of a prophet of nature—though not

Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1947), 6–7. Fry calls Brooks’s insight “profound” and sees it as speaking to Wordsworth’s treatment of “things” in general (What We Are, 145). 100 Brooks, Well Wrought Urn, 7. 101 Prothero sees Powys’s move to Wales as akin to Wordsworth’s return home to the Lake District in 1799 (Wordsworth and Welsh Romanticism, 71). The analogy has a layer of irony if one accepts Ian Duncan’s point that Powys’s “place of origins was a fiction” (“Mythology of Escape,” 53). 102 Like the rest of the America chapters of the Autobiography, and in line with Powys’s policy of not including women in the book, this chapter is highly misleading in never mentioning that Powys lived with Phyllis Playter. He gives the impression that apart from neighbors, he is living in Romantic solitude. 99

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necessarily one that Wordsworth himself would recognize—while “acting the zany” (A, 641). We have seen that in the Autobiography Powys both mocks and celebrates the kind of sense-based enjoyment of nature that he attributes to his “great master.” At times, Powys comes across as more like Wordsworth than Wordsworth himself. We have also seen that despite his commitment to the “language of the sense,” in the course of the book, Powys has stumbled occasionally on experiences of out-of-body sublimity. The most momentous of these are his ecstatic encounter with his father’s boot-soles, his Euclid-inspired revelation at school, his profound visionary experience at Cambridge, and his mystical quiet Sunday mornings in New York. The book’s final transcendental episode, however, reaffirms the bodily origins of “Something”—a single capitalized noun that, throughout Powys’s writings, can be taken as a shortened allusion to Wordsworth’s “Something far more deeply interfused.” In his final chapter, Powys tells of his “magnificent oakcudgel,” a gift from his youngest brother Will (A, 644). With this object, he circles all the way back to his first chapter’s description of his childhood rapture over his father’s gift of a wooden axe: “This stick has been one of the greatest pleasures I have had since my father cut me that laurelwood dagger at Shirley!” (A, 644). Powys nods to the Wordsworthian theme of the vagaries of memory as the axe morphs into a “dagger.” With this exclamation, continuing his revision of Wordsworth’s economy of loss and gain, he insists on the recovery of youthful joy—not that he ever really lost it. In this passage, moreover, he goes on to reclaim the power of Wordsworthian transcendence, while acknowledging—as his earlier episodes of sublimity did not—its physiological basis. He calls “this great stick” a “Druidical cudgel, endowed with singular psychic potentialities” that has made him “supernaturally aware” of his own “romantic weakness” (A, 644). Yet this heightened sense of his “feminine fragility” generates a transcendental strength: But then it is that from beneath all this weakness, a weakness which grows upon me till I feel as if this great giant’s club were stalking along of its own volition, dragging a nervous “Rural Dean” in tow, there suddenly rises up, from within my ribs, from a dimension, as it were, within the very marrow of my skeleton, a towering and invincible Something, that, like a terrible Genie from a cracked bottle of smoke, seems able to grasp this mighty stick as if it were a straw! (A, 644–5) The labored syntax of this long sentence with its multiple comparisons itself enacts the surprising transformation. In this rendering, the Wordsworthian transcendental “Something” emerges from within Powys’s psyche and within his “marrow,” with a “terrible” force that is the essence of the sublime. As so often, Powys ridicules himself—with his “feminine” weakness and

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absurdly artificial phallic power—even as he proclaims his ability to tap into an alternative “dimension.” It is as if his experience with this cudgel redeems his failure to climb Helvellyn. In this passage, with its mention of “ribs” and the “marrow” of his “skeleton,” Powys continues to anticipate approaches to Wordsworth that stress how his poetry of disembodiment remains bound up with the physicality of the human body. As I will show in Chapter 4, some of his novels will implicitly register the limitations of such approaches by pointing to ontologically distinct transcendental “levels of life” (A, 652), also often defined for Powys via Wordsworth. In a different kind of Wordsworthian fashion, nature will finally lead Powys to “a BeyondNature” (PS, 162).

Later Reflections on Wordsworthian Sensation Powys’s final major autobiographical statement on his cult of sensuality represents a shift in perspective, doubling down on the assertion that Wordsworth is a nature poet who deals in the five senses but rejecting his mystical leanings. Obstinate Cymric, a post-World War II collection of Powys’s essays inspired by his adopted homeland, concludes with a long essay, “My Philosophy up-to-date as Influenced by Living in Wales,” that uses several references to Wordsworth to insist, in contrast with much of Powys’s previous writing, that bodily sensation is sufficient: it does not need to serve as a pathway to transcendence (OC, 175). In this text, he also admits that “twice blest sensations” often turn out to be “haunted” (OC, 143), giving a dark twist to his long-held cult. Quoting from “Tintern Abbey” in a characteristically lengthy sentence, he writes, And as I look down on the three kinds of richly green mosses that alternate with those that are so startlingly yellow and red, and then, in this late autumn, gaze across the foresters’ plantations where the dying lioncoloured larch-needles show like the skins of gigantic savages stretched out on the hillsides with the dark, grey spruce branches flung across their nakedness, I set myself to disentangle the deep inanimate mysteries with their speechless sensations of enjoyment beyond enjoyment that are hinted at in Wordsworth’s attempt to describe what he felt in youth when scenes like this “haunted” him “like a passion” and were to him “an appetite that had no need of a remoter charm by thought supplied, or any interest unborrowed from the eye,” to disentangle these ecstasies—as I have every right to do, for William of Cockermouth thought of himself as a teacher just as Jesus of Nazareth and Paul of Tarsus thought of themselves, and the teaching of all teachers is something that we have a right to

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carry further … yes! to disentangle these divine sense-enjoyments from the divinity that has been so fatally thrust upon them and so needlessly associated with them. (OC, 175) Beginning with detailed attention to vegetation and scenery from the dominating vantage point of a perceiving “I” who “look[s]‌down” and “gaze[s] across,” this passage implies, with “scenes like this,” that Powys and Wordsworth not only viewed the same landscape but also perceived it in the same way—with attention to varieties of colors and different kinds of mosses and trees, awareness of the season, and alertness to the juxtaposition of the “richly green” and the gloomy “grey.” Elsewhere in his poetry, including the Lyrical Ballads and The Prelude, Wordsworth certainly referred to types of trees, responded enthusiastically to the seasons, and captured visual contrasts (often in ways that showed the lingering influence of the eighteenth-century distinction between the beautiful and the sublime). But Powys’s nature description here comes closer to the nuanced detail of Coleridge’s “This Lime Tree Bower My Prison” than to the glancingly evoked scenery of “Tintern Abbey.” Powys’s use of “hinted at” and “attempt” does however register the tentativeness of Wordsworth’s description of the feelings sparked by nature. This sentence rewrites the poem by quoting from it selectively, making it more a celebration of what Wordsworth has lost (visual pleasure) than what he has gained—the “something far more deeply interfused” that Powys so frequently invokes in his earlier work. Although he associates Wordsworth with religious “teachers,” he implies that to “carry” his teaching “further” is to reject Wordsworth’s pantheism. Yet even as he seeks to demystify “divine sense-enjoyments,” his language shows the pull of the sublime with word choices such as “deep … mysteries,” “speechless” and “enjoyment [of nature] beyond enjoyment.” Late in life, in his letters to the Wordsworth scholar Ichiro Hara, Powys makes several comments on the “Immortality Ode” that clarify how his own personal sense-based “attitude to Nature” side-steps the trajectory of emotional loss and gain presented in Wordsworth’s major autobiographical poems (LIH, 48). He first acknowledges Wordsworth’s loss of a feeling of connectedness to “life” together with a layer of slightly more mystical feeling: “I think what he feels in the Ode he misses so isn’t his own poetical inspiration but just the natural ordinary earthy animal enjoyments of life touched with the touch of natural romance and poetry that we all experience without being particularly sensitive or gifted, those emotions that all youthful animals feel” (LIH, 43–4). Powys here takes Wordsworth to speak for us “all” and he asserts that the overlay of “romance and poetry” is itself “natural,” blurring the line between sensation and sensation-thought. But rather than try to explain the loss of the “visionary gleams [sic]” (LIH, 45), he immediately quotes lines in truncated fashion from toward the end of the poem that emphasize the compensatory “philosophic mind” (LIH, 44).

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Pressed by his correspondent about what “Wordsworth lost or declares he lost as he got older” (LIH, 45), Powys sounds unconvinced that the poet really lost any sensual or mystical enjoyment. He offers a theory: “I think the simple natural piety in Wordsworth led him astray both in thinking of himself in youth and as a young man by leading him to associate too closely, O much too closely! the ecstasies he got from worshipping Nature with the Religious Creed he had been taught in the Sunday School” (LIH, 45–6). As if he knows Wordsworth better than the poet knows himself, Powys implies that if Wordsworth could have dissociated nature-worship from a childish version of Christianity, he would not have felt any sense of deprivation. Powys expands on this point: “What I feel now as an old man is that I have exactly the same thrill of pleasure in the sight of the earth and the mountains but that the peculiar religious emotion that Wordsworth … got from being young and lost when he got older was exaggerated and even possibly misunderstood by him himself” (LIH, 48). This quotation is from the letter in which Powys goes on to praise Wordsworth for his “bone to bone & twig to twig realism” (LIH, 48). Powys in “old age” retains the “animal” enjoyment of “Nature” that Wordsworth mistakenly thought he had relinquished (LIH, 49). At this point in his career, Powys thus offers a modified rejection of the Wordsworthian pattern of development that he had previously grappled with so searchingly—and somewhat humorously— in Wolf Solent and even more subtly and sardonically in the Autobiography.

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2 “Rocks and stones and trees”: Inhabiting Wordsworthian Inhumanity We have seen how Powys used Wordsworth’s poetry to authorize—and interrogate—a sense-based appreciation of the nonhuman world, anticipating current revisionary physiology-based approaches to Wordsworth. In his 1938 essay on the poet, besides characterizing him as the poet of the senses, Powys praised his “inhuman stoicism,” a “power of endurance” that “share[s]‌the subhumanity of rocks and stones and trees” (EL, 319, 315). This “contortion of rigid endurance … binds animate and inanimate together” (EL, 312). In the same essay, Powys commends Wordsworth’s “subhuman” ability to “touch … what might be called ‘the Thing in Itself’” (EL, 319), as if countering Wolf Solent’s hesitation over access to external reality. In this chapter, I address a neglected strand of Wordsworth’s earlytwentieth-century legacy by exploring Powys’s revelation of the “inhuman,” rock-like side of the poet. The “rocks and stones and trees” of Wordsworth’s lyrical ballad “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal” have loomed large in latetwentieth- and early-twenty-first-century eco-critical study of Romanticism. I will argue that Powys’s mineral-focused version of Wordsworth anticipates the investigations of some latter-day critics into the poet’s treatment of the relationship between moving and unmoving things. In concentrating on “rocks and stones,” I will suggest that Powys’s Wordsworth foreshadows Paul Fry’s “gray” reading of the poet in Wordsworth and the Poetry of What We Are (2008), while at the same time presaging Mary Jacobus’s more human-leaning meditation, in Romantic Things: A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud (2012), on Wordsworth’s treatment of inanimate nature. I will first briefly discuss the place of “rocks and stones and trees” in the work of a few latter-day Romanticists including Fry and Jacobus, before examining Powys’s own Wordsworthian affinity with rocks and stones. Next, I will explore the “inhuman”—and “subhuman”— aspects of Powys’s Wordsworth-inflected teachings as expounded in some of his own popular philosophical writings, before elaborating on Powys’s

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“gray” characterization of Wordsworth in his 1938 essay. I will then turn to some scenes from Powys’s novels to analyze his fictional re-imaginings of Wordsworthian minerality. These stone-filled scenes at first sight work against Powys’s revisions of the Wordsworthian “language of the sense” and his Wordsworth-inspired quest for “a Beyond-Nature” (PS, 162) but ultimately help to generate—rather than interfere with—more humanfocused and transcendental themes. This chapter builds to an interpretation of Powys’s masterpiece Porius as a mineral-conscious rewriting of The Prelude.

Mineral-Centered Criticism Wordsworth’s “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal” is so well known that its cryptic vision of the dead female love-object (a “thing”) “Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course/With rocks and stones and trees” (PW, ll. 7–8) has almost become a shorthand for the contested relationship between humanity and nature. Prior to its prominence in Romantic eco-criticism, the poem had attracted a flurry of readings from critics more interested in language, time, and memory than in bodies, minerals, and vegetation.1 Unlike those earlier critics, Onno Oerlemans claims that Wordsworth’s poetry, while “seek[ing] to transcend and humanize the material world, … confronts the physical (as opposed to cultural or economic) materiality or otherness of nature.”2 As if to say that the poet really can come close to Kant’s “Ding an sich,” Oerlemans finds in Wordsworth “direct confrontations with matter” and “unblinkered investigations of the spiritlessness of the external realm.”3 For Oerlemans, “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal” instantiates what he calls “the material sublime.”4 In emphasizing Wordsworth’s acknowledgment of “the inert, inorganic, and permanent in the physical world,” Oerlemans follows in the footsteps of Fry, who had called for a criticism that is not green but “stone-colored,” focused more on the inanimate than the animate.5 Refining Oerlemans’s environmentalist approach, Fry returns to the interpenetration of human and nonhuman in Wordsworth’s poetry, but rather than stressing the mind’s perception (as opposed to half-creation) of the external world, he

See, for example, Paul De Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” in Interpretation: Theory and Practice, ed. Charles Singleton (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969), 173–209; J. Hillis Miller, “On Edge: The Crossways of Contemporary Criticism,” in Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism, ed. Morris Eaves and Michael Fischer (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 96–126. 2 Oerlemans, Materiality of Nature, 34. 3 Ibid., 39. 4 Ibid., 43. 5 Ibid., 65. Fry, What We Are, 74. 1

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exposes what might be termed the petrification of the human, claiming that “Wordsworth discovers the ontic unity of the human and the nonhuman in the sheer minerality of things.”6 For Fry, Wordsworth “reunites consciousness with the natural world from which anthropocentrism has estranged it.”7 Jacobus goes a step beyond or around Fry: if Fry finds in Wordsworth’s poetry the nonhuman within the human, Jacobus does the same thing in order to reclaim the human from the nonhuman. She mixes a focus on “inanimate natural phenomena” and “the sheer resistance of things … to being seen, sensed or understood” with attentiveness to what she calls the “takenfor-granted texture of being alive.”8 Jacobus allies her “post-Derridean” approach to “the recent burst of ‘thing theory’” that “corresponds to a current interest in theorizing, not only the animal, but also the expressivity of the nonhuman and inanimate.”9 She uses Wordsworth to contemplate “trees, rocks, and clouds” along with “the visual, aural, and tactile aspects of human experience.”10 Although her comments on “A Slumber” foreground the dehumanizing “pull of insensate things,” her concluding discussions of rocks in Wordsworth reclaim the value of “human experience,” while trying to avoid reverting to the pathetic fallacy.11 Jacobus points out that Wordsworth’s rocks at once refuse and invite anthropomorphism: they sing, lament, and mourn.12 “[Marking] the limits of subjectivity and readability,” rocks—and the people with whom they are compared—“set down markers for the limits of the human,” while by implication marking the limits of attempts to de-anthropomorphize the human.13

Mineral Affinities I suggested in my Introduction that among Wordsworth enthusiasts in his lifetime, Powys stands alone in appreciating the poet’s dehumanizing affinity with rocks and stones. Fry, however, finds anticipations of his own “ontic-phenomenological” argument in Pater’s reflections on Wordsworth.14

Fry, What We Are, 59. Fry concedes that his reading runs counter to many of Wordsworth’s own claims (ibid., xii). 7 Ibid., 177. 8 Jacobus, Romantic Things, 3. 9 Ibid., 4–5. 10 Ibid., 6. 11 Ibid., 1. 12 Ibid., 151. 13 Ibid., 174. 14 Fry, What We Are, 64. In anticipating Fry, Powys himself follows Pater, who wrote of Wordsworth: “By raising nature to the level of human thought he gives it power and expression: he subdues man to the level of nature, and gives him thereby a certain breadth and coolness and solemnity” (Appreciations, 49). 6

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Moreover, two of Wordsworth’s other nineteenth-century admirers saw the poet’s appearance—if not his poetry—as itself rock-like: the artist Benjamin Robert Haydon said “his head is like as if it was carved out of a mossy rock, created before the flood!”15 and the dramatist Sir Henry Taylor described the poet’s “rough grey face, full of rifts and clefts and fissures, out of which, some one said, you might expect lichens to grow.”16 These descriptions resemble comparisons between Powys himself and rocks, made by various people who knew him. Frances Gregg, commenting on a photograph of Powys, told him, “You look like a lichened rock” (LFG, 2: 154). Gregg’s son Oliver Marlow Wilkinson said of Powys that “he himself gave the impression of a rock with a vegetable furze at the summit; a mound washed by the rain, dried by the wind and sun” (LFG, 1: xxix). Expanding on this point, Oliver Wilkinson memorably claimed that Powys was “more plant than animal; more mineral than either. He was dust and rock and feather and fin talking with a man’s tongue.”17 In more extravagant language, Alan Devoe, a journalist who profiled Powys during his time in upstate New York, described him as a comical mixture of mineral and animal: “He presents an appearance craggy but terrifying … There comes at once to mind the image of a hulking grey wolf … His hair is not human hair at all but a vast grizzled mane … The furious shakings of his head, the grotesque gestures of his arms, … are inalienably extra-human.”18 Devoe added, “The passionate affection with which Powys cherishes the non-human and the inanimate in nature is Wordsworthian, without the sentimentality of Wordsworth.”19 Powys himself would not have accused Wordsworth of taking a sentimental attitude to the nonhuman and inanimate. Besides apparently physically resembling a rock, Powys repeatedly expressed his emotional affinity for mineral substances. On multiple occasions in his diaries, he compared himself with stones, at one point abjuring himself, “Be a Stone O Man!” (1931 Diary, 167). In upstate

Quoted in Paul O’Keeffe, A Genius for Failure: The Life of Benjamin Robert Haydon (London: Random House, 2009), 182. 16 Henry Taylor, Autobiography (London: Longmans and Green, 1885), 1: 181. 17 Oliver Marlow Wilkinson, in the Introduction to Seven Friends, 15. In the same passage, Wilkinson continued, “John Cowper Powys had talent in describing a person; genius in describing a fish: even more genius in describing the water in which the fish swims, and the stones on the floor of the stream” (15). Along similar lines, Richard Heron Ward claimed that “this outlandish and yet so perfectly natural figure would appear, while it remained a human being, to have bones composed of Portland stone, flesh of ancient Wessex earth, skin of that curiously naked, uniformly coloured Dorset grass, and clothing as easily comparable to the surrounding gorse-bushes and spare, wind-bent trees” (The Powys Brothers, 2–3). Relatedly, George Steiner remarked on “the almost intolerable density of presence which [Powys] imparted to the stones under his shoes” (“Life-Size,” The New Yorker, May 2, 1988, 118). 18 Quoted in Dante Thomas, A Bibliography, 169. 19 Ibid., 171. 15

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New York, he often kissed or tapped his head on stones as part of his pagan rituals, calling himself a “Rock Worshipper” (1930 Diary, 130) and praying to “sticks and stones” (A, 323). He named one particular stone “Phyllis” after Phyllis Playter, another one “the John Stone” (1931 Diary, 247), and two others “Perdita” and “Tony,” calling them “our Stone Children” (PAD, 119).20 He referred to Perdita as “The only daughter I shall ever have! A stone – & the proper daughter for a stone to have!” (PAD, 80). In his diaries, Powys often identified Playter with grayness, imagining her as “grey Cimmerian Lichen” living in a crevice of her “Stone” (1931 Diary, 191). Powys sometimes referred to himself and Playter as “the two Inanimates” (DY, 36). After moving to Wales, he dedicated stones to family members and friends, to an extent that, according to Krissdóttir, “assumed absurd proportions” (DM, 364).21 He treasured his own talent for depicting inanimate nature, telling Henry Miller, “When in my writings I am really most myself and at my best it is … by certain airy-humorous descriptions about children, half-wits, idiots, animals and even certain animistically observed and subhumanly recognised INANIMATES!”22 Upon moving in 1955 to Blaenau Ffestiniog in North Wales, he told Miller that he appreciated its lack of “vegetation”: “It is just the naked planet itself, earth in time & space a promontory of Rock.”23 Powys also wrote a poem called “The Stone” (1933) in which a mourner waiting on a stone imagines his dead body absorbed into the mineral substance, which will continue to “watch” and lay to rest his dead lover’s ghost.24 In his Autobiography, he several times mentions a “singular” housekeeper who “went by the name of ‘Aunt Stone,’” inspiring a later reference to a (deceased) “American Aunt Stone” (A, 253, 634).25 Powys sometimes explicitly linked this affinity with stone to his admiration for Wordsworth. While still in upstate New York, he wrote in his diary, “Rushing water, stone and branch! I thought deep of Wordsworth my favourite poet and of matters connected with the real proper way to dig into the tough fibres and Bleak stony rock-bed of Nature’s ways &

Paul Roberts notes that Tony was the “pet name” that “Powys and his wife gave to their son Littleton Alfred” (John Cowper Powys, “ ‘Owen Prince’: Chapters from an Unfinished Novel,” ed. Paul Roberts, The Powys Journal 4 [1994]: 55). 21 Krissdóttir quotes his phrase “Stone-Souls” to refer to rocks that he had “named and baptized” (DM, 364). 22 John Cowper Powys, Letters to Henry Miller from John Cowper Powys, ed. Ronald Hall (London: Village Press, 1975), 27. 23 Proteus and the Magician, 113. 24 Quoted in EJCP, 351. Francis Berry’s 1962 sonnet “For John Cowper Powys on His Ninetieth Birthday” addressed the novelist with the line, “Magus, you kiss life into the dead stone” (quoted in Knight, Neglected Powers, 36). 25 Wolf Solent has a character called Dimity Stone, perhaps based on Aunt Stone, whose “most casual observations were rich in philosophical plaintiveness” (A, 253). 20

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looks & symbols” (1931 Diary, 61). Although, as we have seen, like some Victorian admirers of Wordsworth, he was particularly fond of quoting from the autobiographical lyrics “Tintern Abbey” and the “Immortality Ode,” he also alluded frequently to “A Slumber,” using it to convey his competing dehumanized characterization of “the man” whom he described as “so sublimely, so obstinately, so stupidly natural!” (EL, 320). The phrase “rocks and stones and trees” is one of his most frequent quotations from Wordsworth, usually unmarked. Powys’s Wordsworth-inflected interest in stone-like insentience reaches its peak in Porius, the romance set in fifthcentury Wales that he wrote in his seventies. In his earlier nonfiction writings, Powys at times treats Wordsworth’s poetry as a piece of the “Inanimate” (PS, 153). And in his hands, Wordsworth as human being and poet takes on the mysteriousness and miraculousness of “existence” itself (EL, 313).

Powys’s Gray Wordsworth The stony version of Wordsworth that fitfully emerges in Powys’s nonfiction texts offers a stark contrast to the poet for whom the “mind is lord and master” (PW, Prelude 12: 222). Throughout his 1930 self-help book In Defence of Sensuality as well as in later reworkings of its claims, Powys uses the phrase “rocks and stones and trees”—sometimes truncated to the first two of the nouns—to stand for the “sub-human” (DS, 265, 9). In this book, Powys coins the phrase “ichthyosaurus-ego” to point mainly to continuities between the human mind and the nonhuman world (DS, 9).26 The “human reptile” part of the “ichthyosaurus-ego on its mud-bed” finds the “peace of the ultimate” by tapping into the “experiences of rocks and stones and trees” and their “peaceful goodness” (DS, 23, 33, 282, 223, 68). One might object that celebrating the miracle of human “consciousness” (DS, 116) is one thing; affirming “the experiences of rocks and stones and trees” is another, not to mention their morality, but Powys, arguably like Wordsworth himself, slides easily from the organic to the inorganic and vacillates over the ethical significance of its “air of enduring” (DS, 222). The wise Wordsworth, as an exemplary ichthyosaurus-ego, by implication, finds in himself “the primordial passivity of rocks and stones and trees” (DS, 8), stares “stoically and defiantly” at the amoral “First Cause,” and, rather than engaging in “Effort, and expectation, and desire” (PW, Prelude 6: 607), “looks forward to nothing!” (DS, 250). He thus shares what Powys refers to, this time alluding to the Lucy poem “Three Years She Grew,” as the “magical calm of ‘mute, insensate things’” (DS, 278). As I have already

In an unpublished letter, Powys referred to himself as “the Ichthyosaurus.” Powys to Playter, January 6, 1930, National Library of Wales. 26

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noted, Powys follows Wordsworth’s lead in favoring the vague term “things” to encompass the animate and inanimate universe.27 In his follow-up volume A Philosophy of Solitude (1933), Powys more explicitly uses Wordsworth to advocate withdrawing from social life the better to confront the “Inanimate” (PS, 179). He praises the stoical Wordsworth for putting readers in touch with what he calls (“twisting” Gertrude Stein) “the region of Stupid Being” (PS, 34). Sometime in the early 1930s, Powys wrote an unpublished draft sonnet with the revised title, “On reading a modern humanistic criticism of Wordsworth saying that he is weak in Drama.” Dismissing the unnamed “humanistic” critic, the poem belittles “Human Drama” as “the dance of midges” in comparison to the knowledge of “calm rocks” and “high precipitous ridges” implicitly possessed by Wordsworth.28 Later in A Philosophy of Solitude, re-invoking “Tintern Abbey” and “Three Years She Grew,” Powys claims that the elements possess a “deeply-interfused cosmic unhappiness” suggested by “the strange expectancy of ‘mute insensate things’” (PS, 168). “Mute insensate things” are darker in this book, as is Wordsworth’s ineffable “something far more deeply interfused,” but inanimate “things” are still capable of lending human beings a “non-human serenity of spirit” (PS, 124).29 A “solitary walk” is therefore better than “a lively gathering of friends” (PS, 173). Powys has much to say on the subject of walking, a “mania” that, as mentioned earlier, he shared with Wordsworth (ISO, 254), seeing it as a means of “get[ting] back to a primordial world of rock and stone” (PS, 153). Unmoved states of mind apparently require physical movement.30 In his next manual, The Art of Happiness (1935), in which he continues to advocate “a stoical resolve to endure life happily” (AH, 19), Powys adapts the line from Wordsworth’s “Michael” that he often brings up in more human-centered passages, “the pleasure which there is in life itself,” into the line “The pleasure which there is in life and death” (AH, 49), a watchword On Wordsworth’s use of the term “things,” see especially Potkay, Wordsworth’s Ethics, 71–89; James Castell, “Wordsworth and the ‘Life of Things,’” in The Oxford Handbook of William Wordsworth, ed. Richard Gravil and Daniel Robinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 733–46; and Christopher Ricks, The Force of Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 8. 28 The draft poem was first titled, “On Receipt of a Certain Professor’s Essay on Wordsworth very properly animadverted upon by the sender with the word ‘he lies’ writ in pencil by A.D.F. [Arthur Davison Ficke].” Powys Collection, University of Exeter. 29 A skeptical reviewer contrasted the book with In Defence of Sensuality, saying that Powys “aspires now to be something other than the dinosaur – it is the mud itself which is his goal!” (Alan Burton Clarke, “Mr. Powys Tries to Escape from Prevailing Materialism,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, February 19, 1933, 22). This reviewer finds in the book “a vast pathetic fallacy – an emotionalism based on stones” (ibid.). He sees Powys as going beyond Wordsworth (and Walt Whitman) in seeking to “identify himself with the alleged spirit of stones” (ibid.). 30 Marshall Brown’s analysis of old gray stones in Wordsworth stresses their refusal “to lie still” (Preromanticism [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991], 361). 27

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of “magical value” because it enables us to share the deathlike “inanimate world of the non-human” and feel “a strange awe in the presence of its patience, of its dumb endurance” (AH, 49). If we give in to the “misery of futility,” Powys claims (an apparent reference to twentieth-century existential angst), “We drag down the confederate spirit in stones and trees” (AH, 60). Explicitly dismissing political movements such as communism and fascism, he asserts, “The cause of your country and the cause of humanity are nothing compared with the cause of the cosmos” (AH, 65)! Here, in a far from rare moment of rhetorical extravagance, Powys sets aside a narrowly human- or even earth-centered ethics, despite the concern he expresses elsewhere for “our blood-stained earth” (OC, 174) and his grounding of that concern in “stones and trees” filtered through Wordsworth. Scaling back to a more earthly frame of reference, in his later book Mortal Strife (1942), Powys sees Wordsworthian “sensations” that “revert to the reptile and the vegetable; and … even to the mineral!” as antidotes to the gloom of World War II.31 Although Powys uses his 1938 essay on Wordsworth to rehearse the Wordsworth-inspired themes of sensual enjoyment, restorative memories, and the quest for transcendence in addition to “human endurance” (EL, 312), the essay further extends his counterintuitive account of the poet as a paradoxically mute, insensate, and inhuman stoic. In this text, Wordsworth himself takes on the tinge of a mineral, as Powys lines him up with “rock,” “stone” (EL 316), “soil,” and clay, in addition to “the terrible patience of old trees” (EL, 320, 317).32 Unlike later critics, Powys is not afraid of the pathetic fallacy. He had written in The Meaning of Culture, “What … used to be derided fifty years ago as the pathetic fallacy, namely that Nature feels, in some intimate way, even as we ourselves feel, must now be regarded as … approximately true” (MoC, 166). Conventionally conflating the poet and his work, Powys points to “something hard and tough … at the core of the man’s nature” (EL, 309). He imagines a neighbor responding to Wordsworth’s bodily stiffness with “There goes Mr. Wordsworth, off for one of his walks. I don’t think I’ll bother him today” (EL, 309). For Powys, this comically unsocial demeanor is a badge of honor. “What really confronts us in Wordsworth,” he claims, “is a strong, hard, selfcentred, unsociable temperament that has the power of responding to the inanimate and the elemental as if it were itself tough as a gnarled tree, hard as a weather-beaten stone, majestic in its inhuman aloofness” (EL, 314–15).

Mortal Strife, 140. Powys sometimes gives the impression that in writing about Wordsworth, he is writing about his own father, whom he referred to as “a man of rock” (A, 652). In a later letter to Ichiro Hara, Powys referred to Wordsworth’s “cart-horse simplicity” (LIH, 58). He added, “I don’t believe any two readers of English poetry on this planet have quite the same devotion to the work of old simple-minded heavy cart-horse William W. as you & I have got” (LIH, 65). Hara had “named” Powys “side by side” with Wordsworth (LIH, 60). 31 32

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Imitating Wordsworth’s “stoical self-centeredness,” we too can “share the subhumanity of rocks and stones and trees” (EL, 315). Throughout the essay, Powys portrays the “lonely,” tough, impervious Wordsworth alongside other versions of the poet, or, rather, he fuses the unmoving Wordsworth with more familiar characterizations (EL, 319). “The essence of Wordsworth’s inmost teaching,” Powys asserts, is a stoicism that draws its strength from forces outside humanity. It is a stoicism that endures as rocks and trees and plants and animals endure; but inasmuch as it is an inhuman stoicism, it endures as in the presence of something beyond the categories of human thought. It endures, like the sleepless eye of the whole astronomical world, in a cosmic expectation as undisturbed by hope as it is untroubled by despair. (EL, 319) This “inhuman” ideal coexists uneasily even in this essay with other Wordsworthian preoccupations of Powys: his impassioned promotion of sensual enjoyment, his investment in relieving human unhappiness, and his interest in how the material generates the immaterial or beyond-cosmic. Addressing Wordsworth’s “hard, stupid, wooden imperviousness,” Powys claims that “it is this very hardness, as though some nervous fibre in him had turned into stone,” that enables him to transmit “the pathos of the human generations” (EL, 315)—the generational sublime that I will discuss in my fourth chapter. At the same time, the poetry’s “startling intimacy with the voices and the silences of the inanimate … brings us close to the cosmic secret” (EL, 315). Part of the value of Wordsworth’s stoniness for Powys, that is to say, is its power to ground the “language of the sense” and (invoking “Tintern Abbey” again) what he here implies is the quasitranscendental “burden of the mystery” (EL, 315). The final claims of the essay return the reader to the “still sad music of humanity,” not by way of an alternative route to inhuman aloofness but by way of mineral substances. Powys’s concluding back-handed compliment is that reading Wordsworth is like wading through soil. “Casually turning the pages of any complete edition of Wordsworth’s poems,” he writes, “the heart of even the most devoted adherent must often sink in weariness, if not in actual indignation. Never was there so much dulness, so much convention and tedium, so much sluggishness” (EL, 319). “And yet,” he adds, “for a reader who has once got on the track of the Wordsworthian secret no selection is really quite satisfying” (EL, 320).33 Apparently, tedium has its value. Reading the poetry itself becomes a test of endurance, like

Powys may be rebutting Pater’s claim, “Of all poets equally great, he would gain most by a skilfully made anthology” (Appreciations, 40). 33

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plowing through mud. In the last sentence of the essay, Wordsworth’s mass of dullness is suddenly granted the dignity of epic: The best way is to regard all this mass of pontifical meandering as the only soil, thick enough, heavy enough, weedy enough, clayey enough, unconscious enough, to produce the particular kind of enchanted root, which the immortal gods called Moly, and which the Messenger gave to the much-enduring Odysseus, so that he might enjoy unbetrayed the perilous embraces of the daughter of the Sun, and learn from her how to hear without losing heart “the still sad music” of the unnumbered nations of the dead, who shall see that Sun no more. (EL, 320) The “unconscious” Wordsworth generates the magic herb that will enable a heroic reader to enjoy sensuality in the face of not only human suffering but also human mortality. The “pleasure which there is in life itself” is bound up with “the still sad music of humanity,” but these preoccupations resurface not because the inhuman Wordsworth is human after all but because the “soil” that is Wordsworth’s poetry itself mysteriously produces consciousness and kindness or, to phrase it differently, returns us to anthropocentrism and ethics and the power to enjoy. As Powys puts it in A Philosophy of Solitude, “Can pity come from the rocks …? Why not?” (PS, 161). Like Wordsworth giving a “moral life” to the “stones” of the “high-way” (PW, Prelude 3: 128–9) in a gesture that may challenge Fry’s “gray” reading of the poet, Powys readily anthropomorphizes the inanimate, downplaying what Noah Heringman calls the “radical alterity” of nature.34 Such moments tend to come across as more questionable than comparable moments in Wordsworth, perhaps because the pathetic fallacy is less disconcerting in verse than in prose. Powys’s repeated use of Wordsworth’s “half creates and half discovers” formulation (discussed in my previous chapter) concedes that a belief in feeling rocks is what Fry calls an “efficacious illusion.”35

Rocks and Stones in A Glastonbury Romance and Weymouth Sands As I have already suggested, Powys’s linkage of Wordsworth with stones and immobility is interwoven with his rewriting of other Wordsworthian

Noah Heringman, Romantic Rocks, Aesthetic Geology (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), 56. 35 Fry, What We Are, 203. In contrast with Fry’s reading of Wordsworth, Angus Wilson differentiates Powys from Wordsworth in claiming that in Powys’s work, “the world of stones … the vegetable-mineral world exists in its own right” (“John Cowper Powys as a Novelist,” 19). 34

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concerns such as a sense-based love of nature and the quest for sublimity. By the same token, Powys’s fictional treatment of Wordsworthian minerality coexists with quasi-realist representations of the pursuit of sensual pleasures and higher things. Powys’s first published novel was entitled Wood and Stone, but its schematic theme of self-effacement versus self-assertion does not anticipate his interest in the kind of human stoniness—or stone-like humanity—that he later associates with Wordsworth.36 And as I have already discussed, the Wordsworthianism of his first successful novel Wolf Solent takes a different direction. The next two of Powys’s major Wessex novels, A Glastonbury Romance and Weymouth Sands, however, sporadically invite a Wordsworth-inflected “gray” reading, as do much more so his later historical novels Owen Glendower and Porius. A Glastonbury Romance does not explicitly mention “A Slumber” (although it quotes from “Michael”), but it explores the appeal and limits of human insentience, especially in an early passage that evokes Wordsworth’s “The Thorn” as well as the Salisbury Plain episode of The Prelude—and perhaps Guilt and Sorrow, the Salisbury Plain poem that Powys would have read. In this scene, the hyper-aware John Crow (another Powys-hero) limps across Salisbury Plain on his way to Glastonbury, rests by “the fallen stones of a ruined sheepfold” (as in “Michael”), stirs a “blue-grey pond” with his stick like the stationary Leech-Gatherer in Wordsworth’s 1807 poem “Resolution and Independence,” and stops by a “dead thorn tree,” before gazing at Stonehenge and embracing “stone-worship” while surrounded by a “vague, neutral, Cimmerian greyness” (AGR, 77, 81, 84, 89).37 (In my next chapter, I will examine the more ethical and humanistic aspects of Powys’s rewritings of the Leech-Gatherer.) The episode makes no explicit reference to Wordsworth (or the Stonehenge scene in Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles [1891] for that matter), but its allusions to “Resolution and Independence” and “The Thorn” lay the foundations for John Crow’s later boast, “What I really am is a hard round stone defying the whole universe” (AGR, 381).

G. Wilson Knight claims, however, that even in Wood and Stone, “stone is impregnated, continually, with a spiritual significance” (Neglected Powers, 400). Yet one character emphasizes in contrast the spiritual significance of wood: “Remember, this is no longer the Stone Age. The power of stone was broken once for all, when certain women of Palestine found that stone, which we’ve all heard of, lifted out of its place! Since then it is to wood—the wood out of which His cross was made—not to stone, that we must look” (Wood and Stone: A Romance (New York: G. Arnold Shaw, 1915), 440). Another character comments, “There’s nothing in the world but the roots of trees that can undermine the power of Stone!” (463). 37 In August 1929, while planning the novel, Powys visited Stonehenge and told Playter that the stones “seemed to retain … super-human and sub-human consciousness” and authorized “worship of the Inanimate” (quoted in DM, 277). Disconcertingly, the novel attempts to translate the “language” not of rocks and stones but of “trees” as “wuther-quotle-glug” (AGR, 73). 36

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Yet Powys also modifies the scene’s celebration of Wordsworthian grayness and immobility both by marking its historical distance from the poet and by using it to explore competing Wordsworthian concerns. Crow hobbles along at the “pace … of an extremely old man” (AGR, 80) but only because, unused to walking so far, he has a blister on his heel. Powys further registers the modernity of his own moment of writing and that of his fictional world by having Crow depart from Stonehenge in a “little motor car” (AGR, 92). His tracing of Crow’s shifting moods, ambivalently treated by the narrator, owes more to Wordsworth’s stated goal in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads to explore the “influxes” of human feelings (PW, 935) than to an investment in the “almost subhuman” identity of this character (AGR, 87). The “ashen grey sky” at Stonehenge makes Crow think of “fleeing hosts of wounded men with broken spears” (AGR, 76), a possible allusion to the “vision clear” of the “Past” experienced by Wordsworth on “Sarum’s Plain” (PW, Prelude 13: 314, 320) and a detail that emphasizes both authors’ interest in the liveliness of the imagination rather than continuities between people and stones. The skeptical Crow “recognize[s]‌” that Englishness and the passage of time make “this great Body of Stones” into “authentic Divine Beings”—a “mystery” re-invoked a thousand or so pages later at the end of the novel and linked with the mysticism of the Holy Grail and nature’s “fathomless inhuman compassion” (AGR, 103, 1174, 1170). Transcendence trumps minerality. As I will discuss in more detail in Chapter 4, the novel thus moves beyond its momentary tethering of human consciousness to what G. Wilson Knight called “the secret life of sticks and stones”38 and confronts instead an otherworldly “defiance of Matter” (AGR, 1174). Powys’s darker next novel Weymouth Sands returns to the “gray” pursuit of finding the inanimate in the human, but only fleetingly in terms of Wordsworth. As I will show in Chapter 4, its main use of Wordsworth is in service of its conflicted treatment of transcendence. Rocks and stones dominate the book: mineral aspects of the coastal Dorset setting—Portland quarry-stone, the pebbles of Chesil Beach— variously sanction and interrogate the dehumanization of human beings. The protagonist known as Jobber Skald is considered by his lover Perdita Wane to be “inhuman,” so connected to his birthplace that he seems to have “a vein of oolite in his disposition” (WeS, 352, 340). Charles Lock, in his reading of Weymouth Sands, foregrounds the significance of stone and its “dematerialization” by grayness: for him, the color gray represents “the transition from matter to what is beyond or within (the mental, the psychic, the spiritual, the transcendent).”39 Despite setting Neglected Powers, 404. Charles Lock, “Weymouth Sands and the Matter of Representation: Live Dogs, Stuffed Animals and Unsealed Stones,” The Powys Review 6, part 3, no. 23 (1989): 32. Elsewhere, Lock addresses the technological connotations of the color gray and the interdependence of gray and 38 39

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up this distinction, Lock makes an observation in line with Fry’s reading of Wordsworth: “In all this book’s modulations from stone to vegetable to human to animal, none is presented as more worthy than another.”40 Lock concludes by finding in the novel “the fusion of flesh and stone, the inseparability of organic and inorganic.”41 The novel’s narrator makes one direct reference to Wordsworth that pertains to this investment in minerality. The neurotic Magnus Muir is described as “treat[ing]” people at a social gathering “as if they were some inanimate group of rocks and trees” (WeS, 297). Here a fleeting allusion to Wordsworth’s “Slumber” invites a questioning attitude to this character’s somewhat anti-social behavior. Rather than lingering over the novel’s treatment of human minerality, Chris Campbell offers an eco-critical reading of the novel that explores its attention to the socioeconomic consequences of historically specific shifts in the ownership of Portland’s stone quarries, its sympathy being on the side of Jobber Skald as a “dispossessed worker.”42 Campbell concludes, however, that the novel subordinates its “socio-ecological” concerns to its psychological and mystical themes and that its “de-materialis[ing]” of “the supposed solidity of rock” suggests its “ghostly … apprehension of history.”43 By contrast, as I have already mentioned, I see Powys as incorporating his human-centered and transcendental themes within his expansive ecological vision. In Chapter 4, I will show how elsewhere in the novel Powys uses Wordsworth to authorize the possibility of a transcendental “Something … deeply interfused” (WeS, 528), intertwined “at the level of form,” as Campbell puts it, with “sexual predation.”44

green. See Charles Lock, “The Literature of Ecology and the Ecology of Literature: Reflections Green and Grey,” Anglo-Files 154 (November 2009): 31–40. 40 “Matter of Representation,” 34. 41 Ibid., 37. Lock notes, “In the novelist’s structuring imagination, stones and characters are interchangeable” (25). Powys himself claimed that “the book deals … with the psychic interplay of spiritual and chemical forces” (“ ‘Remembrances’: Weymouth Sands,” Modern Thinker, November 1933, reprinted in The Powys Review 3, part 3, no. 11 [1982–3]: 16). 42 Chris Campbell, “Limestone and the Literary Imagination: A World-Ecological Comparison of John Cowper Powys and Kamau Brathwaite,” The Powys Journal 30 (2020): 83. 43 Ibid., 84, 85. Campbell thus sees Powys’s work as defusing its environmental concerns and “ultimately … not interested in challenging the workings of global capitalist modernity” (87). See also Campbell’s “Glancing Backwards: George Lamming, John Cowper Powys and Vexed Visions of Labour in the Capitalist World-Ecology,” Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism 20, no. 2 (2016): 170–82, in which he similarly argues that Weymouth Sands displaces its interest in “socio-ecological formations” onto “a realm of perverse eroticism” and “obsolete mysticism” (178). 44 Campbell, “Limestone and the Literary Imagination,” 87.

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Human Minerality in Owen Glendower Powys’s historical novel Owen Glendower, written in the late 1930s after he had settled in North Wales, deepens the Wordsworthian themes of the human bond with the inanimate and the petrification of the human by giving them ethnic, religious, and ethical associations. Owen, “self-anointed Prince of Wales,” leader of a Welsh rebellion against the English in the early fifteenth century, has been seen as a variation on the Powys-hero—introspective and capable of “exteriorizing” his soul (OG, 324, 460).45 But this self-projection rarely involves communion with the external world in Wordsworthian fashion. Attentiveness to visual sensual detail is mostly siphoned off onto the novel’s other protagonist, his less introspective young follower Rhisiart ab Owen.46 For Ian Duncan, Owen’s ability to project his soul outside his body (literalized late in the novel as a supernatural apparition) is the “negative capability of self-emptying.”47 The Keatsian term—the obverse of what Keats called the “wordsworthian or egotistical sublime”—points to Powys’s anti-egotistical treatment of Owen: his “exteriorizing” takes the form of “queer ‘attacks’” (OG, 100) analogous to the involuntary blackouts suffered by Rhisiart (experiences that incidentally unsettle both characters’ political agency).48 It is Owen’s lifelong friend, Broch-o’-Meifod (a character not based on a real person) who has a “strange yearning for the impersonal, for the non-human,” an “insatiable longing for the calm of the inanimate” and a “desolate and dehumanized world, of wet mists upon grey rocks” (OG, 726–7). A gigantic man with a bald head like a “granite ball,” Broch-o’Meifod at one point is even confused with a “rock” and a “stone” (OG, 718).49 Even though Owen exemplifies the habit of “escaping into his soul” See, for example, Fawkner, Ecstatic World, 103. Humfrey, by contrast, sees Owen as a “tryout” for the magician-figure Myrddin Wyllt of Porius (EJCP, 28). 46 Duncan calls the novel’s depiction of the growth of Rhisiart’s mind a “prelude, in the full Wordsworthian sense” (“Mythology of Escape,” 66). Modifying his point and alluding not to The Prelude but to the “Ode,” he adds that given Rhisiart’s passive role, “The visionary gleam is reduced to a Freudian peep-show” (ibid., 66). Like other critics, Duncan comments on the novel’s use of anachronistic literary allusions, seeing them as “dissolv[ing] the historical into the synchronic and tautologous space of sheer textuality” (60–1). 47 Ibid., 74. John T. Connor picks up on Duncan’s term in finding in Powys’s Welsh novels “a negative capability of cowardice, evasiveness and empathy for inanimate things,” identified by Powys as characteristically Welsh (“Mid-century Romance,” 56). 48 Robin Wood questions whether Owen’s “trances” are epileptic fits, but notes that they have a voluntary aspect, making them quasi-shamanistic (“Queer Attacks and Fits: Epilepsy and Ecstatic Experience in the Novels of John Cowper Powys,” The Powys Review 31/32 (1997): 27). 49 In an unpublished letter to his brother Littleton, Powys linked “this imaginary ancestor of our own called Broch o’ Meifod” with his own sight of “a stone like the head of a man coming out of the ground” (John Cowper Powys to Littleton Powys, March 2, 1941, Powys Collection, University of Exeter). In another unpublished letter to the same correspondent, Powys claimed 45

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that Powys identifies with the aboriginal Welsh, Owen is Brythonic rather than pure-blooded while Broch is an aboriginal Welshman identified with “the endurance of primordial matter” that is “descended from the peaks of Snowdon” (OG, 17, 404).50 In the first of these phrases, “matter” itself is given a nationalistic valence, as if the endurance of rocks is bound up with the tenacity of the Welsh national character. While the opposition between the two allies is unsettled at one point by Owen’s own appreciation of “grey mists” (OG, 462), Broch is a “great death-lover” while Owen is a “great lifelover” (OG, 533). Broch’s allegiance to “matter” is only slightly undercut, once when an interlocutor objects that “life and death” are bound up, and once when Owen wryly observes, “He’s had long enough with his mists and rocks” (OG, 635, 730). The line could be an oblique comment on the question of to whom Wales belongs. Broch’s Wordsworthian minerality makes him the voice of “heretical” religious views that are perceived as potentially damaging to Owen’s political prospects among “patriotic Welshmen” (OG, 375). In one scene with explicit allusions to Wordsworth, a dialogue between Broch and the enthusiastic young Lollard, Walter Brut, sets the former’s worship of death against Brut’s equally heretical proto-Protestantism. Brut makes a speech that could be seen as an existential critique of Powys’s Wordsworth-inspired interest in the endurance of inanimate things: “Coming down the mountain, … I felt as I saw a mass of broken rocks and an old twisted thorn that they too were waiting and enduring. Enduring what? … Enduring Hell!” (OG, 374). Here Powys imports the decrepit tree from Wordsworth’s “The Thorn” into a desolate Welsh setting that represents the postlapsarian “loneliness” of “all Nature” (OG, 374–5). This point of view resists the lining up of human beings with enduring inanimate objects. In response to the Lollard’s outburst, “the natural human light” in Broch-o’-Meifod’s eyes goes out and is replaced by a “look … that resembled the endurance of rocks and stones and stumps” (OG, 374).51 Powys warps the line from “A that “the House of Powys deduces lineage … thro’ the Barons of Maen y Meifod” (John Cowper Powys to Littleton Powys, March 5, 1941, Powys Collection, University of Exeter). Littleton Powys later stated that “the old Burke’s Peerage” had recorded that line of “descent” but that the book had since been revised in a “more honest and less romantic” fashion (Still the Joy of It [London: Macdonald, 1956], 140–1). 50 Duncan claims that Owen is only “really” granted “aboriginal” status through “contagion with Broch” (“The Mythology of Escape,” 74–5). 51 For Duncan, who sees the novel as coming “torturously to terms with the historical failure of its own Romantic-modernist aesthetic” by seeking what Powys calls the “mythology of escape,” Broch is “the transcendental term of the mythology of escape which cannot be admitted … for then there would be no romance, no narrative motion, no rhetorical force, but a subWordsworthian lyric of ‘rocks and stones and stumps’ …—the true negative sublime against which the novel has been striving, yet towards which it gazes in fascination” (“The Mythology of Escape,” 54, 74). According to Duncan, Broch’s yearning for rocks is the novel’s “final realization of spirit of place, the transcendental poverty of a world without history: a ‘primal

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Slumber Did My Spirit Seal,” removing live vegetation to underline Broch’s “shockingly inhuman” demeanor (OG, 375). Broch contrasts “the warm, loving, human heart” of Brut—and Jesus—with the “lonelinesses” that are the “messengers” of a “different Revelation” (OG, 375) that is postChristian and implicitly post-human. He calls himself the “voice” of a “newborn Spirit in unknown spheres” symbolized by a comet in the sky, but the association of his “lightless eye-sockets” (OG, 388, 375) with inanimate “rocks and stones and stumps” makes him the avatar of a world without a “heart.” Yet the distinction between love of life and love of death is not sustained on an ethical level. Active where the morally ambiguous Owen is passive, Broch is a force for good in the novel, the enemy of “pain” (OG, 442, 747). The implication is that Broch’s kind acts are driven by, not contradicted by, his bond with “those rocks” and “those stumps” (OG, 375). He tells a dying man who thinks he has desecrated a sacred sword, “A man’s dirt and a man’s blood are more precious than rusty bronze!” (OG, 406). He offers a dying woman spiritual consolation, later saying “The lie was life’s!” (OG, 475). Two more glancing allusions to Wordsworth blend humanizing and dehumanizing impulses. First, at the end of the novel, Broch tends the dying Owen by a fire outside a “‘hermit’s cave’”—“really the entrance” to a prehistoric fortress, Mynydd-y-Gaer (OG, 724), also featured in Porius. The allusion (even indicated with quotation marks) to the hypothesized “hermit’s cave” of “Tintern Abbey” “where by his fire/The hermit sits alone” (PW, ll. 23–4) perhaps ironizes Romantic solitude: in answer to his grandson’s question about the mound’s mysterious occupant, “Art thou the Hermit …? Or is the bald giant the Hermit …?,” Owen explains somewhat deflatingly, “Broch and I are both hermits” (OG, 722). Second, after Owen’s death, his only surviving son Meredith reflects on Broch-o’-Meifod’s heroic cremation of Owen’s body, his thoughts offering a twist on Powys’s advice in his popular philosophical books: “To force yourself to enjoy endurance— that was the pleasure of life!” (OG, 766). Given the context of bereavement, the last phrase could be taken as an allusion not to the original line from “Michael,” “The pleasure that there is in life itself,” but to Powys’s rewriting of the line as “The pleasure that there is in life and death.” Although Meredith may be misunderstanding and belittling Broch’s affiliation with stone, this realization once again pulls together “the life of the living” and “the life of the dead!” (OG, 766) before the novel concludes with a transcendental turn that I will discuss in Chapter 4.

supremacy of grey slate’ ” (75). Cf. Connor, who sees Powys’s Welsh novels as shifting bleakly into an “atavistic, anti-epiphanic sensual nihilism” (“Mid-century Romance,” 199).

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Minerality and the Mind in Porius Powys’s lengthy historical romance Porius, written in the 1940s and originally published in an abridged version in 1951, offers a more profound and much more Wordsworth-influenced investigation into human insentience.52 (As with Owen Glendower, critics have addressed the text’s self-conscious usage of anachronistic literary allusion, the reliance on which in this case befits Powys’s choice to write in the romance genre rather than the genre of historical fiction.53) As I mentioned in my Introduction, Duncan contends that “Porius as a whole resembles a Scott novel written by Wordsworth.”54 Duncan adds that it is “as if the poet had chosen to write The Prelude in the form of Ivanhoe”—autobiographical epic in the genre of historical romance.55 I use these claims as a starting point for the analysis that follows, though I would adjust them to suggest that Porius resembles a cross between a Scott novel and a Henry James novel written by Wordsworth.56 In this

On the text’s early publication history, see Michael Ballin, “  ‘A Certain Combination of Realism and Magic’: Notes on the Publishing History of Porius,” Powys Notes 7, no. 2 (Fall and Winter 1992): 11–37. A full-length composite version—incorporating bridge passages that Powys inserted when cutting his manuscript—was edited by Wilbur T. Albrecht (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University Press, 1994). My references are to the more authoritative edition based on Powys’s corrected typescript, edited by Judith Bond and Morine Krissdóttir (New York: Overlook Duckworth, 2007). 53 W. J. Keith points out that Powys tended to use the term “Romance” to refer to Porius (“The New Porius: Plenty to Praise and Only a Little to Query,” The Powys Journal 18 [2008]: 151–2). Keith finds in Porius some parody of the romance form (“Beyond Novel, Beyond Romance: Reading the Complete Porius,” The Powys Journal 14 [2004]: 13–14). On the genre of Porius and its mythologizing of history, see also Hooker, “Romancing at the CaveFire,” 229. Michael Ballin labels it “Gothic-historical romance” (“Porius and the Comedy of the Grotesque,” Powys Notes 10 [Fall and Winter 1995]: 14). Connor calls Porius an “ethical romance of the negative sublime” (“Mid-century Romance,” 222). 54 Duncan, “Sacred Monsters,” 164. Powys had originally planned to focus the work on Boethius, in whom he found “romantic modern and Magical Wordsworthian … elements” (quoted in DM, 351). 55 “Sacred Monsters,” 164. Drabble describes Porius as “more like a mountain landscape or an epic poem than a novel” (“The English Degenerate”). 56 Powys told an associate of his literary agent, “My story combines the tricks of story-telling and the old romantic melodramatists with the modern form of psychology.” He added that in some “scenes” it is “ ‘conscious’ … of being written after Dostoievski and of being contemporary with certain exciting and very modern psychological novelists!” (quoted in R. L. Blackmore, “THE MATTER OF PORIUS,” Powys Newsletter 4 [1974–5]: 6). Cf. Steiner, who finds in Porius a “Shakespearean-epic sweep of historicity with a Jamesian finesse of psychological detail and acuity” (“Life-Size,” 116). Jerome McGann, by contrast, finds in Porius a “programmatic turn against the inheritance of Flaubert and James” (The Scholar’s Art: Literary Studies in a Managed World [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006], 184). Richard Maxwell calls Porius “a historical romance with a modern novel trying to wrestle its way out” (“Porius, Mitchison and the Period Character of Historical Fiction Between the Wars,” The Powys Journal 6 [1996]: 112). 52

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awe-inspiring narrative, which unfolds over the course of a single week of October in the year 499, characters of Jamesian complexity confront their destiny in a primeval Welsh forest at a moment of historical crisis. But this “Dark Ages” romance is far more Romantic than Modernist. It makes a direct (though unmarked) allusion to “A Slumber” with the phrase “rocks and stones and trees,” hinting at the Wordsworthian inspiration behind its treatment of the continuities between human beings and inanimate nature (Por, 253). The listing of nouns with “and”—polysyndeton—that often appears in landscape descriptions in Porius—such as “rocks and streams and hillsides” or even “grass and trees and bushes and moss and mud” (Por, 252)—echoes the line from “A Slumber,” adding a Wordsworthian tinge to the novel’s mesmerizing accounts of fifth-century Welsh scenery. Like Powys’s Wessex novels—including the fourth one, Maiden Castle—and like Owen Glendower, Porius addresses, among other concerns, familiar Wordsworthian themes of sensual connectedness with the natural world, the power of human endurance and the search for transcendence, but it also goes further than his earlier works of fiction in claiming the possibility of what Fry calls the “the ontic unity of the human and the nonhuman,” even while it explores the tension between what Jacobus calls “the limits of the human” and the “texture of being alive.” Like other Powysian protagonists, the aloof hero Porius ab Einion (the introspective son and heir of a Welsh chieftain whose domain is threatened by a Saxon invasion and local betrayals) possesses the ability to sink his body and soul into the elements, “to unite things and isolate things, to immerse [him]self in things and to escape from things” (Por, 93)—a process that he confusingly names “cavoseniargizing” (Por, 92).57 A thirty-year-old of massive physical strength and abnormal sluggishness, Porius wanders through the romance that bears his name amid wartime alarums and excursions with no real quest other than the desire to indulge in his “mania” (Por, 104). In the course of the meandering story, our hero marries the ethereal Morfydd; seduces a young aboriginal giantess and indirectly brings about her violent demise along with that of her father; experiences the death of his spiritual mentor and soon afterward the death of his own charismatic yet capricious father;58 buries his dignified Roman grandfather; encounters a “magic child” (Por, 673); and—even more momentously—takes on the role of protector of the emperor Arthur’s

On Powys’s choice of the term “cavoseniargizing,” see Robin Wood, “This Ridiculous Word ‘Cavoseniargizing,’ ” The Powys Journal 25 (2015): 185–93. According to Charles Lock, “Cavoseniargizing is … a word taken, like Porius, from a stone, a lithogenic word” (“Porius: A Week without History, a Word without Sense,” Powys Notes 11, no. 2 [1998]: 22–43). 58 Powys’s list, “The Characters of the Book,” published in The Powys Newsletter 4 (1974–5), more elaborate than the list in the published versions of the romance, refers to Prince Einion as a “capricious despot” (15). 57

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counselor Myrddin Wyllt (Merlin), eventually rescuing this mythological figure from the stone tomb in which he has been imprisoned. Yet, for the most part, Porius stays out of the action, which typically happens offstage. When he kills sixteen of his Saxon enemies, almost farcically using a corpse as a weapon, it is as if in passing. Porius several times resolves that his plan for the future is to behave with deliberate passivity by obeying his ambivalent bride Morfydd and his “overloving” mother Euronwy (Por, 478), while devoting himself to his bond with “things,” the organic and inorganic phenomena of the nonhuman world. This interaction between self and “things” includes passages when, as in The Prelude, “the mind is lord and master,” but it also yields the nonhierarchical “disclosure of things as things” that according to Fry is “the sole function of the Wordsworthian imagination.”59 Porius looks back to a lost Golden Age (the age of the Titans) and looks forward to a projected future Golden Age that may or may not transpire, but remains grounded in its fifth-century here and now, in “rocks and stones and trees.” In a sense, the book is based on a stone: Powys chose to set his romance in the fifth century because of the era’s lack of historical documentation, but he singled out one existing historical marker, the so-called Porius stone in North Wales, the factitiousness of which does not necessarily unsettle this grounding in minerality.60 Myrddin Wyllt is the reincarnation of the god Cronos and the avatar of the new Golden Age, roles that I will discuss in Chapter 5 in examining the novel’s rewriting of Keats’s fragmentary epic poem Hyperion. In the rest of the present chapter, I will examine how the romance revisits Wordsworthian psychological epic with its quest for transcendence only to fold it into an immanent or “material sublime” (to borrow Oerlemans’s phrase) as exemplified by the stone-colored vision of “A Slumber.” To put it another way, it is as if the eight cryptic lines of “A Slumber” were stretched out to the epic proportions of The Prelude and beyond. In a bold revision of The Prelude, the novel explores how the twists and turns of Porius’s hyper-alert consciousness coexist with the emptying out of his personality through his confrontations with matter.61 It is a Bildungsroman that, as Jeremy Hooker observes, is “about the un-making

Fry, What We Are, 139. On the era’s lack of historical documentation, see Powys’s “PREFACE /or anything you like/ to PORIUS,” Powys Newsletter 4 (1974/75): 8 (this Preface has never been published with the novel). On the “Porius stone,” see Joseph Slater, “The Stones of Porius,” Powys Newsletter 3 (1972–3): 29–31; and Lock, “Porius: A Week without History,” 31–4. Maxwell, like Lock, discusses Powys’s realization of the inauthenticity of the Porius stone; Maxwell relates this to the “forgery” that he sees as inherent to the genre of historical fiction (“Period Character of Historical Fiction,” 101–6). 61 Powys told his sister Lucy that the book would be “heathen propaganda” for a kind of “materialism” (“Letters to Lucy Amelia Penny,” 116). 59 60

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of a man.”62 Even less than in Powys’s previous major rewriting of The Prelude—his Autobiography—this text’s exploration of the interaction of mind and nature does not faithfully reprise the Wordsworthian pattern of emotional loss and compensatory gain; rather, this story of inner growth through encounters with the external world—spread out over the course of a single week instead of decades—proceeds through fits and starts, and is not always centered on the protagonist. Unlike in Scott’s historical novels, the narrative’s structural digressions—so characteristic of Powys—contribute to eddies and sideways shifts in a revisionary Wordsworthian account of psychological growth and dissolution that fittingly in places is dispersed onto other characters whose experiences blur the distinction between human and nonhuman in various directions.63 While the large cast of characters—in particular, the prophet Myrddin Wyllt and Porius’s scholarly uncle Brochvael ab Iddawc—helps to develop the romance’s psychological, supernatural, and philosophical themes, ultimately Porius celebrates human beings’ fundamental “inhumanity” (Por, 557) and prefigures the “existential environmentalism” that Oerlemans identifies in “A Slumber.” Porius’s tired “thoughts” at one point aspire only to the “quiet” of “stones” (Por, 675). A relatively early scene presents a seismic shift in Porius’s mental growth—at a point when the book has barely begun to explore the workings of his consciousness—through a recognition of the breaking down of the distinction between human and nonhuman. Porius’s first encounter with Myrddin Wyllt reveals the existence of an “extraordinary being, the extent of whose underlife was so much larger than his own,” a man whose “very identity seemed slipping back into the elements” (Por, 75, 74). Supporting the sinking body of Myrddin Wyllt, Porius “shared the recession backward of the bones under his grasp into those animal worlds and vegetation worlds from which they had, it seemed only yesterday, emerged” (Por, 74). This remarkable passage contains a glancing allusion to Wordsworth with the phrase “rocks and stones,” implying that this vast sense of human potential—a potential that is also regression—owes something to the poet: The human frame he held became an organism whose conscious recession into its primordial beginnings extended far beyond the prophet’s temporary existence. It was as if what he held, and what he could so easily

Hooker, “Romancing at the Cave-Fire,” 222. On Porius as a Bildungsroman, see Keith, “Beyond Novel, Beyond Romance,” 9. 63 Cf. Collins: “Porius comes very near to obliterating the distinction between conscious and unconscious life altogether” (Old Earth-Man, 144). The poet Taliesin, compared with Walt Whitman by Powys in a note, is a mouthpiece for Powys’s sensation-based philosophy who also embraces “non-sentience” (Por, 20, 379). Henning Ahrens, in “Into the Bone-World: Taliessin’s Song in John Cowper Powys’s novel Porius,” The Powys Journal 7 (1997), sees Taliesin as a proto-Romantic poet (160). 62

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have crushed, became a multiple entity composed of many separate lives, the lives of beasts and birds and reptiles and plants and trees, and even rocks and stones! This multiple entity was weak and helpless in his grasp, and yet it was so much vaster, so much older, so much more enduring than himself that it awed him even while he dominated it. (Por, 74) The bodily “frame” of the prophet dissolves the “human” into the nonhuman while retaining the power of the “conscious” will as if uniting a mind-centered with a mineral-centered Wordsworthian sublimity. The latter form of sublimity places the “lives” of “rocks and stones” on the same level as other “lives.” Seeking “to share the power” of this quasi-supernatural “entity,” Porius senses in this huge composite earth creature … the dark greenness of leafy hollows and the dim passivity of ancient tree-trunks and the long endurance of rocks piled dumbly upon rocks; and yet there was in it too the fluttering of huge imprisoned wings, and the coiling of great serpents and the feverish relaxings of feline sinews and under it all the hushed growths of green mosses, yellow funguses, grey lichens, drawing their sustenance from the innumerable nipples of leaf mould and from the darkly scented pores of ribbed peat, and from the crumbling rubble of sandstone. (Por, 74–5) As in many passages of Porius, this elongated sentence blends mineral substances with animal activity and vegetable “passivity,” ascribing a Wordsworthian tinge of consciousness to the “ancient tree-trunks” and enduring “rocks,” and movement (“crumbling”) to the “sandstone.” This passage also foregrounds the color-palette of the novel: the “green” of vegetation, the “yellow” of autumnal leaves—or in this case “funguses”—and the “grey” of rocks and lichens. The effect is to intuit what Fry calls “the sheer minerality of things,” even as in this gray- and greenish-yellow-shaded text, trees loom almost as large as stones. The “embrace” of Myrddin Wyllt brings about the loosening of the boundaries of individual consciousness (Por, 75). Following this scene, Porius encounters for the first time the enchantress Nineue, Myrddin Wyllt’s paramour, whose “pure grey” eyes of a “unique unearthly grey” align her with the indifference of minerality (Por, 85). The reader is not introduced to Porius’s practice of “cavoseniargizing” until this episode, when Porius suspects that Nineue participates in the same “secret game,” his “non-human indulgence” (Por, 94). The sharing of the “game” deindividualizes the practitioners just as the game itself detaches them both from the human and the transcendental alike: It obliterated humanity as completely as it obliterated God. It obliterated the future. It obliterated every sort of worry and every sort of responsibility.

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It was above or below all love and all hate. It had nothing to do with any anima mundi or any soul of the world. (Por, 94) Briefly embracing Nineue, Porius has a “sensation of the unfathomable and the infinite” that is checked by his “intercourse” with the “keys” of an ash tree, one of several majestic ash trees that appear in the novel (Por, 105). Porius’s “impersonal desire” for Nineue blends with his “feeling” for the ash tree (Por, 105). His later (adulterous) sexual encounter with “the coldblooded Nineue” will involve a “subhuman, almost saurian, sensuality” (Por, 653). As the narrative proceeds, it will keep track of Porius’s growth through repeated references to his practice of “cavoseniargizing,” although for long stretches it loses sight of its hero’s interior development. A later reference to “cavoseniargizing” makes the practice resemble Powys’s cult of the senses, a “secretive psycho-sensuous trick of ravishing the four elements with the five senses … like making love to the earth-mother herself” (Por, 46)—a kind of ecological eroticism. But as I have already implied, the “trick” partakes of Powys’s gray as well as green ecological vision. Duncan calls it “anti-epiphanic.”64 In other words, it relates to both the “ontic,” to repeat Fry’s term, and the psychological threads of the romance. The passage that contains the phrase “rocks and stones and trees”— as opposed to the exclusively mineral “rocks and stones,” which recurs repeatedly—extends the novel’s exploration of the vastness of human possibility—a vastness that is also a diminution, since it subordinates and dissolves the human into “an elemental tragedy” (Por, 253, 252). The passage occurs in the chapter entitled “Myrddin Wyllt,” which is written from the magician’s point of view and in which Porius does not appear. The chapter starts with a negation of the Mount Snowdon episode of The Prelude (which will be elaborately reworked at the end of the novel), distinguishing the “morning’s mist” from the kind of fog that makes an “undulating ocean”—Wordsworth refers to a “billowy ocean” (PW, Prelude 14: 55)—from which a “hill climber” would be able to emerge (Por, 251). No corresponding transcendental revelation will be on offer in this passage; instead, there is a “tragic elemental mystery play” (Por, 252). This extraordinary description of the sinister “greyness” of predawn light—in which the word “grey” appears six times in the space of a page or so—attributes to the first faint light of day “a tragic greyness, far more deathlike than … darkness,” calling it a “death-cold, corpselike, alien entity newly arrived on earth from heaven knows where … a thing in itself” (Por, 251–2). Despite the phrase “thing in itself,” the focus of Ian Duncan, “The Art of Sinking,” Powys Notes 10, no. 1 (Fall and Winter 1995): 10.

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the passage, leading up to the reintroduction of Myrddin Wyllt, is on “those of the human race who can watch with equanimity this death-cold stranger” (Por, 252), Myrddin Wyllt being one of them. He is one of the rare “creatures of earth” capable of detecting “differences … between the dawn’s relation to particular rocks and stones and trees” (Por, 253). The allusion to “A Slumber” uses the Wordsworthian formulation to point to the prophet’s at-oneness with external nature. Contemplating the “ash grey effluence” that “remains … the saddest thing upon earth,” his “mood” is of “complete relaxation,” “ineffable peace,” and “abandoned passivity” that lets “the phantom waters of the world flow past him, carrying the dead, carrying the living, carrying the unborn” (Por, 252–3). The implication is that while the narrator himself is attuned to existential sadness, with his magical powers Myrddin Wyllt occupies a space beyond it that sweeps “rocks and stones and trees” up into a death-accepting vision transcending the “earthly years” mentioned in Wordsworth’s poem (PW, l. 4). At this point, Porius has yet to reach that stage in his development. Porius’s momentous experience in the mountains with the land’s last two aboriginal giants causes a decisive shift in the workings of his mind followed by—in an anti-Wordsworthian twist—seemingly irreparable mental damage involving a figurative as well as an actual “prison of submerged rock” (Por, 483). This rock-strewn scene mingles psychological deepening with a focus on the continuities between bodies, minds, and minerals. Porius seeks out the giants (the “Cewri”) near Craig Hen, the “Old Stone,” a “great fragment of rock,” its “phantasmal enormity” (Por, 469) aligned with the “elemental proportions” of the young giantess to whom he is drawn (Por, 472). When the narrative shifts momentarily to her point of view, she perceives Porius himself as stonelike, “a pillar of basaltic slate” (Por, 472). Porius’s “extraordinary encounter” with the giantess—before their sexual encounter—takes him beyond “even the experience of holding Myrddin Wyllt in his arms,” giving him a new sense of “division between his mind and his body” (Por, 473). Here his mind becomes “once for all … the dominant partner,” but the “for all” is short-lived (Por, 473). Turning points tend to prove deceptive in this novel. Shortly after this “metaphysical crisis,” Porius’s Herculean body takes him to another new phase of existence (Por, 473). Porius’s “rape” of the “goddesslike young girl” whom he calls “Creiddylad”—queasily referred to as “a ravisher’s possession of yielded virgin soil”—takes place on a “platform of rock,” fulfilling the “deep sex-yearning of one primeval form of matter for another primeval form of matter” (Por, 478–80), wording that attempts to set aside sexual morality. Mineral-tinged sexual conquest gives way to mineral-related violent death, after Creiddylad’s father accidentally smashes her skull when pursuing Porius, and plunges with her corpse into a deep tarn, dying upon a “projection of splintered rock … between two jagged teeth of slaty stone” (Por, 483). Other critics have addressed the weighty

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symbolism of this scene.65 From a psychological point of view, this scene of trauma will henceforth be “a portion of [Porius’s] consciousness,” as if he will be haunted forever by these “two ghastly apparitions” trapped “under the splintered rock” (Por, 483–5).66 The next stage in the story of Porius’s erratic mental growth exemplifies Powys’s revisionary understanding of Wordsworth, recasting The Prelude more emphatically by way of “A Slumber” in insisting that a deeper selfknowledge comes through a confrontation with the finality of death. This realization was anticipated earlier in the novel’s account of Myrddin Wyllt’s contemplation of the “elemental tragedy.” Following the destruction of the Cewri, despite part of Porius’s “dazed consciousness” remaining trapped “under the splintered rock,” his mind returns to “the secret healing process of ‘cavoseniargizing’” (Por, 485–6), suggesting that, after all, as in The Prelude, mental recovery is possible. Soon afterward, the memory of the dead giants gives him a new “extraordinary sensation” as “a chasm opened into something deeper yet”: “It was nothing less than an ecstasy of enjoyment, of exactly the same nature as his familiar ‘cavoseniargizing.’ Only there was this difference. This ecstasy included every experience he had ever had” (Por, 494–5). This vision involves seeing “the whole world” as “weeds, stones, reeds, minnows, newts, water beetles, mud!” (Por, 495).67 The fullest “enjoyment” paradoxically comes from this celebration of lowly living and nonliving things. Further, the “living souls” of the giants are reduced to “a pair of broken skulls tapping against a scoriac splinter!” (Por, 495). This stark confrontation with matter extends the “scope” of Porius’s “habitual ‘cavoseniargizing’” to include “the fullest realization of death” (Por, 495). At this point, the narrator offers a psychological observation that seems to set aside the indifference of minerality: “The shock of his rape of the cawres, and her death so quickly after, had roused forces within him which he felt were enlarging if not altering the whole nature of his consciousness” (Por, 495–6). This line from Porius’s point of view with its fussy hesitation (“enlarging if not altering”) puts him momentarily in the position of the poet of The Prelude analyzing the growth of his imagination. Yet, re-emphasizing the text’s revision of The Prelude, Porius’s newly heightened state of self-awareness takes him beyond the mere bonding with

See, for example, Krissdóttir, DM, 380. Richard Maxwell, however, says, “I don’t know if interpreting this scene is possible or even desirable” (“The Lie of the Land, or, Plot and Autochthony in John Cowper Powys,” in In the Spirit of Powys, ed. Lane, 207). 66 The splintered rock can be read as an allusion to Wordsworth’s poem “The Brothers” (1800), in which the splitting of a rock symbolizes a family tragedy. In Wood and Stone, Powys had reworked the story told in the poem. 67 Connor—who dismisses “cavoseniargizing” as “psychological claptrap”—stresses the crucial difference between Porius’s ecstatic “intercourse” with the ash-seeds and his death-conscious, guilt-ridden ecstatic enjoyment in this passage (“Mid-century Romance,” 214). 65

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the elements in a particular “time” and “place” to encompass “his soul’s complete annihilation” (Por, 495–6). He can now incorporate his strangely modern neuroses—or “nervous afflictions”—into his appreciation of material existence, to force himself to enjoy both the outward world, with all its forms and colours, its splintered rocks, jagged spikes, dizzy peaks, slippery precipices, and the inward world with all its prickings and ticklings, its messings up and missings out, its throbbing and pulsings, its heavings and spasms, all that the mind whistled to him, all that the conscience clamped down upon within him. (Por, 496) This breathtaking sentence includes a glancing allusion to Wordsworth, the phrase “forms and colours” recalling, as often in Powys’s work, “their colours and their forms” from “Tintern Abbey” (PW, l. 79). In Wordsworth’s poem, this unspecific phrase refers to the landscape experienced by the youthful self with a purely visual pleasure, later transcended, but in Porius—as in Powys’s novels more generally—such pleasure is recuperated as integral to a mature mindset. The “splintered rock” that trapped the dead Cewri is now just one of multiple “splintered rocks” coexisting with a psychologically sophisticated “inward world.” This is an experience of transcendence that remains tethered by minerality and that decisively incorporates the mineral within the human. It is as if this imaginary person living in a somewhat fantastical vision of the year 499 unites a post-Freudian Modernist reworking of the meditating “mind” inherited from Wordsworth and other Romantics, with the mineral-leaning Wordsworth celebrated in Powys’s nonfiction prose. Later in the novel, picking up again the phrase from “Tintern Abbey,” Porius looks forward to the “forms and colours of the world … assum[ing] startlingly unfamiliar and overwhelmingly new forms and shapes!” under the control of Myrddin Wyllt (Por, 614). Even unimagined psychological territory continues to carry a trace of Wordsworth. The climactic scene of Porius, in which its hero scales yr Wyddfa (Mount Snowdon) and rescues Myrddin Wyllt from a stone tomb, reworks Wordsworth’s ascent of Mount Snowdon in the final book of The Prelude,68 playing with the possibility of subordinating the investment in the minerality of the human to transcendental insight, only to build to the naturalistic revelation, if it can be called that, of “an unfathomable power … at once divine and human, animal and elemental … simply to enjoy,” a “power” that despite this leveling language, is still “within” Porius and subject to his “will” (Por, 748–9). More fundamentally, the scene is the ultimate representation

Keith recognizes the allusion but does not linger over its significance (“Beyond Novel, Beyond Romance,” 20). 68

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in Powys’s work of the material sublime, defined against the Wordsworthian transcendental sublime of the Snowdon and Simplon Pass episodes of The Prelude and drawing some of its artistic power from the tension between the Wordsworth of The Prelude and the Wordsworth of “A Slumber.” Further revising the concluding set piece of Wordsworth’s autobiographical epic, the scene at the end of Porius is integrated with the supernatural plot of the romance, the freeing of the “titanic” figure of Myrddin Wyllt so that he can bring about a “second Age of Gold” (Por, 750).69 Thirty pages from the end of the chapter, the account of Porius’s initial ascent of the mountain at first seems to promise a recapitulation of the scene in Wordsworth, in which the young poet and his companions walk up Snowdon at night in order to see the sun rise and instead find a weightily symbolic moon-rise above the layer of fog: The ground under his feet as he went forward grew steeper and steeper. He was impeded by rocks, by rushing torrents, by falling cataracts, by precipitous and slippery gorges. Two or three times he suffered an extremely disagreeable fall. (Por, 721) The steepening terrain implies a pathway to superior insight, but aspects of nature that in Wordsworth contribute to revelation such as the “torrents” (PW, Prelude 14: 59) here impede progress, while one can obviously read Porius’s physical falls as premonitions of metaphorical descents. Yet, re-establishing the Wordsworthian parallel, later in the same paragraph, the language hints at the “tremendous prospect” of the sublime: Porius perceives “the up-shouldering, up-heaving, up-curving, up-gathering, up-toppling, up-toppling, up-towering ascent of the supreme ridge, and, in the midst of that ridge, the supreme peak of the mountains of Eryi” (Por, 721). The climactic scene of the novel will indeed prove “authentically sublime” in Duncan’s phrase,70 but—as the overstretched language here perhaps suggests—its sublimity will arise more from matter than from “a mind/That feeds upon infinity.” In this chapter, Porius finally pursues a practical quest, the freeing of the prophet, symbolizing the freeing of time itself, but his “purpose” is “as misty as this huge peak of Eryri” (Por, 741). Part of the chapter’s revision of The Prelude’s Mount Snowdon episode consists in the amount of interpersonal and contemplative business that has to be taken care of before Porius approaches the summit of the mountain, although some of On the double time-scheme (mythic and chronological) of this scene, see Paul Cheshire, “Powys’ Cronos: Punishment, Rebellion and the Golden Age,” The Powys Journal 23 (2023): 79–99. 70 Duncan, “Sacred Monsters,” 163. 69

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his “philosophizing” (Por, 726) may feed into the final subordination of the transcendental sublime to the material sublime. Wordsworth barely mentions the “youthful friend” and the “trusty guide” with whom he climbs Mount Snowdon, and their journey’s only interruption comes from a “hedgehog” that is “unearthed” by a dog (PW, Prelude 14: 3, 9, 23). Porius, by contrast, encounters various other characters on his way up the mountain, including the sinister, death-loving Medrawd, Arthur’s nephew, who possesses no shred of the humanity of Broch-o’-Meifod of Owen Glendower. The various delays and digressions combine to suggest that Porius, unlike the “higher minds” referred to in Wordsworth’s epic poem, is not destined to hold “converse with the spiritual world” (PW, Prelude 14: 90, 108). Meanwhile, before the final ascent, Porius’s “‘cavoseniargizing’” reaches a new peak. This intensification of his connection with the “primeval elements” is not a fresh turn but another reminder that Porius’s psychological trajectory diverges from that of The Prelude in staying with rather than leaving behind “natural entities” (Por, 735). Powys’s revision in this scene of the light imagery in The Prelude plays with readers’ expectations concerning the relationship between physical and spiritual illumination. Signaling its large-scale reworking of its source text, the scene in the novel takes place toward sunset in contrast with the nighttime scene in the poem, so it is the “fierce” sun (Por, 739) rather than the moon that breaks through the “mist” (PW, Prelude 14: 15). Still occupied by a conversation, this time with his foster brother Rhun about the “‘mystery’” of gender differentiation, Porius “suddenly” becomes “conscious that there had appeared a slit or rent in the veiled sky, and that through this slit or rent the sun was shooting a dazzling ray of blinding light” (Por, 739). The moment reprises—and anticipates—Wordsworth’s sudden sight of the “full-orbed Moon” and his awareness of a “rift” in the “ocean” of cloud (PW, Prelude 14: 48, 55–6) below (not above) him—an image that Powys had previously refigured, not just earlier in this novel in a scene involving Morfydd (Por, 629), but also, as we saw, in Wolf Solent. On Porius’s trek up Mount Snowdon, the “dazzling ray of blinding light” threatens to outdo Wordsworth’s “flash” of moonlight (PW, Prelude 14: 39), but then as Porius draws nearer to the summit, an “ice-cold mist … covered that lonely peak. Not only had the sun disappeared, but in its passing it had carried off the whole sky” (Por, 740). Here the narrative seems to have taken its protagonist to a very different figurative place than the poet’s, away from rather than toward a granting of epiphanic insight. Light then reappears briefly in service of the material rather than the transcendental sublime: “a faint gleam of … sunlight” pokes through the mist, conferring “yellow gleams” on “a queer pile of huge stones” (Por, 740–1)—Myrddin Wyllt’s prison. Powys continues his rewriting of Wordsworth’s light imagery when the setting sun illuminates Nineue, Myrddin Wyllt’s captor, on horseback—a figure of “sorcery” and

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sexual temptation; Porius fleetingly finds “the whole occasion … a little comic” (Por, 745, 742).71 The abrupt snuffing out of the “yellow light” (Por, 746) marks the distance once again of this episode from Wordsworthian transcendental revelation, even as the narrator has repeatedly hinted at the possibility of such an outcome. The confrontation between Porius and Nineue sets the scene for the climax of the material sublime. Uttering “weird syllables of the aboriginal tongue” of the giants, Porius experiences his own words in terms of “element against element” (Por, 743). When Porius resists Nineue, an elaborate comparison merges the mineral with the mythical: He tore himself from her side and from the side of the horse, just as if she and the horse and himself had been for twenty thousand years some primordial out-cropping of earth’s rocky ribs, resembling, by pure cosmogonic chance, the fearful mate of the terrible sky in the act of being implored by a cloudy Herculean shape to have mercy on her own offspring; while now in catastrophic upheaval, this fragment of elemental sculpture had rent itself out of those earth ribs; and lo! the sculptured rock that was the man had divided itself from the rock that was the woman and the horse. (Por, 746) The “fearful mate of the terrible sky” is the goddess Gaia, “the faithless mother of us all” (Por, 267): Nineue is momentarily figured as the parent rather than the love-object of Cronos/Myrddin Wyllt and here is represented as an outcrop of rock with which Porius—a “cloudy … shape”—is merged. Even when he breaks free, he retains the shape of “sculptured rock.” Unexpectedly, Powys continues to allude to The Prelude: the somewhat melodramatic “and lo!” echoes Wordsworth’s “and lo!” (PW, Prelude 14: 39), the exclamation that marks the sudden sight of the moon above the clouds. However, the only illumination in the scene that follows comes from a “phosphorescent gleam of inconceivable decomposition” (Por, 748). The word choice might suggest the decomposing of Wordsworth’s text. The dramatic climax is a confrontation with the recalcitrance of stone, as Porius the man of rock does battle with the “grey monolith, resting on four horizontal stones” beneath which Myrddin Wyllt is imprisoned (Por, 746). At one point, he exclaims “Stone!” in a “subhuman frenzy” (Por, 747). Porius thus remains differentiated from the mineral substance, but his effort to dislodge it makes him resemble “no longer a mind or a body but some impersonal force of Nature” (Por, 747). Nineue has given him an enchanted

Duncan contends that the scene “(as always in Powys) … actively courts the ridiculous” since it is the size of Nineue’s nipples that frees Porius from her “erotic spell” (“Sacred Monsters,” 163). 71

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meteorite that he puts inside his mouth, literalizing the incorporation of the mineral within the human.72 Once he opens the stone tomb with his “superhuman” strength, however, Porius perceives rather than participates in the sublimity of the “shocking gulf” that holds Myrddin Wyllt, who looks like a “petrified creature” (Por, 747–8). After Porius has temporarily taken on the subhumanity of stone, his “very human” attributes are emphasized: he wakes Myrddin Wyllt from his trance as if accidentally by dropping the meteorite “into the abyss” and afterward collapses into an “ague fit” while the prophet seals the tomb (Por, 749). Powys’s romance then registers its final turn away from both the psychological-transcendental story of The Prelude and the existential sublime of “A Slumber” when Porius is passively transported by magic to Harlech on the coast of Wales. Yet even at this point, Porius’s location on a rock above a mist-covered sea once again recalls the transcendental revelation of Wordsworth’s Mount Snowdon episode, while his position against a “broken wall” (Por, 751) recalls the poet’s “Waiting for the Horses” spot of time in The Prelude, another scene in which supposedly the power of the mind takes precedence. The embrace of minerality in Porius is ultimately only one aspect of the text’s multi-layered Romanticism, and as we have seen, it remains intertwined with more human-focused and transcendental themes. In Chapter 5, I will return to Porius to examine its completion of the mythological story told in Keats’s Hyperion. One of Powys’s later letters to Ichiro Hara chimes with my reading of Porius in suggesting a “gray” reading of “Tintern Abbey” and the “Ode” by linking them with “A Slumber”: “I always feel when I read again his Intimations or his Tintern Abbey that he is actually in touch with some deep interior Dimension of rocks and stones and trees, of mountains and of the ocean hidden from most of us” (LIH, 97). As usual, Powys does not flag his standard quotation from “A Slumber,” as if the line itself somehow instantiates the nonhuman world. This passage has a faint echo of Keats’s letter to John Hamilton Reynolds in which Keats says of “Tintern Abbey” that Wordsworth’s “Genius is explorative of … dark Passages” (JKL, 1: 281). In Powys’s formulation, Wordsworth is “actually in touch” with the essence of the inanimate. Powys enlarged on this observation in a Preface that he wrote for Hara’s Japanese edition of The Meaning of Culture (1958). In this piece, Powys draws on Wordsworth again to insist on human beings’ senseand elements-based “attitude” to the “planet earth,” our “old Mother” (LIH, 138). Our “five senses” lead to a higher “sense”: Powys continues, And what is more, and here I touch the fringe of the most tremendous of all mysteries, we apprehend from contact with her, a sense – as the

For Richard Maxwell, by putting the stone in his mouth, Porius momentarily takes on the role of Saturn eating stones instead of his own children (“A Game of Yes and No,” 99). 72

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most elemental of all earthly poets says – ‘of Something far more deeply interfused’. What this ‘Something’ is that rotates along with the bones of our best-loved dead ‘in its diurnal course, with rocks, and stones, and trees’ will no doubt be still the same mystery that it is today when time has advanced … many years into the future. (LIH, 138) In this passage, Powys twists the phrase “Something far more deeply interfused,” which he very often employs to gesture to a transcendent dimension. By linking it to two lines from “A Slumber” (quoted, like most of his poetic allusions, as prose), he tethers the “mystery” to the earth, in line with his repudiation of Wordsworthian transcendentalism in old age.

Beyond the “ontic” In a profound review-essay of Fry’s book, Geoffrey Hartman criticizes Fry’s mineral-centered approach for its anti-humanist and anti-transcendental bent.73 But even Fry’s reading offers glimmers of bodily awareness and mysticism, as when he calls for a criticism that is “not dull gray but gleaming at times the way rocks, depending how you look at them, gleam at times.”74 I noted the “queer pile of huge stones” that shines with “yellow gleams” at the end of Porius (Por, 741). Hartman sees Fry’s treatment of images of rocks in Wordsworth as evoking “a vision even if it comes only as glimpses or flashes,” a vision not of transcendence but “revelatory immanence,” which for Hartman’s Wordsworth encompasses a “human and social nexus”75—the “still sad music of humanity.” Yet in his 1964 book on Wordsworth, Hartman had taken the “old grey stone” on which “William” sits in “Expostulation and Reply” as an emblem of inorganic nature’s separateness: “Activity, feeling, individuality, are not exclusively human. Nature has ‘passions’ of her own.”76 According to Hartman, “The nonhuman diffuses a ‘still, sad music’ of its own.”77 As we have seen, in his nonfiction prose and in scenes from his fiction culminating in Porius, Powys brings out that strain of nonhuman—or “inhuman”—music in Wordsworth even while his “stupid,” “unconscious,” “clayey” version of Wordsworth eventually points back and forward, as in Jacobus’s reading, to the joys, pleasures, and poignancies of a human-centered outlook. Although

Geoffrey Hartman, “Paul Fry’s Wordsworth, and the Meaning of Poetic Meaning, or Is It Non-Meaning? Letter to a Colleague and Friend,” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 8, no. 1 (2010): 1–22. 74 Fry, What We Are, 73. 75 “Paul Fry’s Wordsworth,” 18, 20. 76 Wordsworth’s Poetry 1787–1814, 154–5. 77 “Paul Fry’s Wordsworth,” 18. 73

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one would expect Powys’s Wordsworthian treatment of minerality to work against his commitment to a cult of the senses and his interest in alternative dimensions, we have already seen that his “ontic” theme coexists with— and even helps to generate—his more psychological and transcendental concerns. Moreover, for Powys, the “soil” of Wordsworth’s poetry produces an “enchanted root”: “rocks and stones and trees” yield an intensification of existential awareness with a supernatural tinge. My next chapter will investigate a much more human-focused aspect of Wordsworth’s early-twentieth-century legacy in exploring how Powys’s recasting of Wordsworth’s figures of deprivation and disability—including the stonelike Leech-Gatherer—feeds into his Wordsworth-inspired ecological vision. Powys’s gray, stone-colored Wordsworth deepens the Romantic humanistic imagination, as well as the Wordsworth-inflected quest for transcendence that I will elaborate on in Chapter 4.

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3 “The still sad music of humanity”: Rewriting Wordsworthian Figures of Disability and Deprivation I now turn to Powys’s engagement with Wordsworth’s humanitarian sympathies, encapsulated in the euphonious phrase that he quotes from “Tintern Abbey,” “the ‘still sad music of humanity’” (EL, 436).1 We have seen that Powys uses Wordsworth to celebrate sense-based nature-worship and, contrastingly, human insentience, incorporating both within his farreaching ecological vision. In A Philosophy of Solitude, he approaches Wordsworth’s treatment of the relation between human and nonhuman from a different angle: Over and over again Wordsworth will separate from every human association some primordial elemental event – the fiery sun descending into the sea-waves, the grey light falling upon a single stone, the gulfs of empty air surrounding some promontory of bare rock. And when he does introduce human life … it is always in order that the tragedy of human suffering should be in some mysterious way ennobled and rendered more endurable by being seen against the background of these cosmogonic presences. (PS, 32–3) As he does elsewhere, in this passage Powys identifies Wordsworth with visual images of natural phenomena and brings out his “grey” investment in “bare rock.” But here he claims that Wordsworth’s juxtaposition of human When Powys quoted the phrase “still sad music of humanity,” he imagined the softening of sadness: “When Wordsworth looked at any landscape with its woods and fields he drew something from its ‘colours and forms,’ and divined something in its ‘language of the sense’ that charged with a mystical hope the ‘still sad music of humanity’ even if it didn’t change its key” (EL, 436). 1

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and “elemental,” when it happens, serves the purpose of easing “the tragedy of human suffering.” This confident generalization acknowledges that Wordsworth’s depictions of “human life” focus on pain and deprivation, but its claim about the natural backdrop ennobling “suffering” and making it “more endurable” is not necessarily borne out either by Wordsworth’s figures of deprivation or by Powys’s re-imaginings of them. In his 1938 essay on Wordsworth, Powys describes him as (among other things) a poet invested in “suffering” (EL, 311). Powys lists “Resolution and Independence,” Wordsworth’s semi-autobiographical poem about an ostensibly restorative encounter with an aged stranger, as well as “Ruth,” the sad tale of an abandoned woman, among the poet’s “grotesque lyrical vignettes of tragic endurance,” and he finds the same “austere” mood “diffused” in The Prelude (EL, 317). In a related vein, Powys praises “The Idiot Boy” and other lyrical ballads for combining “a certain tragic intensity … with a grotesque childishness” (EL, 317). As mentioned in my Introduction, Belinda Humfrey claims that Powys took from Wordsworth what she calls “his outsiders and idiots” (EJCP, 42). In this chapter, I investigate Powys’s creative reworkings of some of the suffering and deprived human beings described by the poet. Powys’s Wordsworth-inflected fascination with human beings in pain and with non-normative human bodies—and minds— demands disability-minded critical scrutiny, while his related appreciation of what he calls Wordsworth’s “grim bed-rock humour” (EL, 317) extends the legacy of Romanticism in an often-overlooked direction. Oliver Wilkinson wrote of Powys, “He raises the humble, he ennobles the outcast, he glorifies the inadequate.”2 The same line could of course apply to Wordsworth, whose poetry radically celebrates “one human heart” as he put it in “The Old Cumberland Beggar” (PW, l. 146). However, for both writers, Wilkinson’s statement calls for modification. I will argue that in refiguring Wordsworth’s depictions of suffering—and often disabled—human beings, Powys rebukes his “great master” for an insufficiently ethical stance even as he registers and replays the poet’s own self-criticism. In doing so, he foreshadows the approach of recent ethically minded critics of Wordsworth. At the same time, he himself—sometimes with “grim … humour”—dramatizes the limits of an ethical response.

The Search for Sympathy In a book published in 1980, James Averill explores Wordsworth’s inheritance of sentimentalism, the eighteenth-century cultural preoccupation with

2

Seven Friends, 16.

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heightened emotional receptivity.3 He contends that Wordsworth gradually became aware of “the moral implications of finding personal pleasure in the contemplation of other people’s suffering.”4 Averill stresses the literariness of the poet’s “sympathetic response” but sees Wordsworth as sensitive to the “problems of exploiting human misery in literature.”5 Walter Pater, in the essay on Wordsworth that I have already referred to, had praised the poet’s mastery of the “sentiment of pity.”6 Stephen Gill discusses how for some later nineteenth-century readers, “Wordsworth was primarily the poet of human suffering.”7 Gill suggests that the appeal of that notion has to do with Wordsworth’s supposed advocacy of a consoling vision. According to Gill, both Elizabeth Gaskell and Leslie Stephen, for example, “responded to the gravitas of Wordsworth’s depiction of human suffering and to the consolation” offered most explicitly in the long poem The Excursion (1814).8 Powys goes further than his Victorian forebears in lingering over the moral implications of Wordsworth’s treatment of bodily pain and mental suffering, and, relatedly, his treatment of the physically and intellectually disabled. The idea of Wordsworth as a poet of human suffering has fallen out of fashion over the past few decades, but recent Romanticists have returned to the ethical questions that arise in the literary treatment of bodily or mental distress. Some historically leaning critics see Wordsworth’s ethical engagement with human sufferers as unsettled by the ghostly aura with which he invests them, suggesting that these spectral figures register alienation from modernity.9 Mary Jacobus notes that “one might view” the “dehumanization” of Wordsworth’s figures of “deprivation, extremity, and old age” as “what recalls [the poet] to, or enforces, his own contrasting humanity.”10 Yet, she adds, “Moving with the collective anonymity of apparitions—they cross over into the realm of the barely human, taking the poet along with them.”11 Importantly for my larger argument, eco-critics Lisa Ottum and Seth Reno draw on Timothy Morton’s notion of “dark” ecology, which “embraces a range of unlikely affective stances,” to contend

James Averill, Wordsworth and the Poetry of Human Suffering (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980). 4 Ibid., 38. 5 Ibid., 10, 13. 6 Pater, Appreciations, 52. 7 Gill, Wordsworth and the Victorians, 133. 8 Ibid., 134. 9 See, for example, Alan Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment: Nature, Man, and Society in the Experimental Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 90; David Collings, Wordsworthian Errancies: The Poetics of Cultural Dismemberment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 2–17; David Simpson, Wordsworth, Commodification and Social Concern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 86. 10 Jacobus, Romantic Things, 156. 11 Ibid. 3

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that “Wordsworth’s bizarre confrontations with ‘discharged soldiers, blind beggars, grief-crazed mothers’” can be seen (in their words, after quoting Morton) as “truly ecological.”12 Addressing the broader category of Wordsworth’s “‘border’ creatures,” Adam Potkay and Nancy Yousef both disentangle “sympathetic identification” from ethical responsiveness.13 Yousef points out that Wordsworth’s “poems of encounter” have often been “derided” for “failings (of sentimentality, objectification, moral complacence, quietism),” but she stresses the poems’ own recognition of the limitations of the “sympathetic imagination” and what she sees as their achievement of ethical “attendance to others.”14 Emily Stanback, taking a disability studies approach, continues this focus on sympathy and ethics in distinguishing carefully—as Wordsworth and Powys may not—between suffering and disability. Stanback sees Wordsworth’s “otherworldly” characterization of “disabled figures” as reflecting “the ways that non-normative bodies and minds are often felt to destabilize or challenge the borders of humanity.”15 She follows Ato Quayson, who coined the phrase “aesthetic nervousness” to refer to disability’s “short-circuiting” of “dominant protocols of representation within the literary text.”16 Quayson argues that the representation of disability “automatically” calls for an ethical response.17 For Stanback, Wordsworth’s depictions of disabled people model “ethical inquiry and sympathetic growth” while engaging in self-interrogation.18 I suggest that Powys anticipates some of the concerns of these latter-day critics through his ambivalent treatment of the various figures of deprivation and disability that he substitutes for Wordsworth’s, while he adds an element of sometimes self-mocking dark comedy that further complicates the sympathy generated for his Wordsworthian sufferers. In his autobiographical writings, despite professing both early and late in his career “not” to “love humanity” (CTB, 59), Powys expressed his “almost hurtingly strong sympathy with tramps” and prayerful concern for other “down-and-out persons” (A, 276, 650). Morine Krissdóttir notes, “From the earliest years in America to the late years in Wales, a significantly large amount of space in Powys’s diaries is devoted to descriptions of, comments on, sympathy with and guilt about tramps, down-&-outs and men on the

Ottum and Reno, “Introduction: Recovering Ecology’s Affects,” 13. Potkay, Wordsworth’s Ethics, 49, 50; Yousef, Romantic Intimacy, 9. 14 Yousef, Romantic Intimacy, 81, 129, 131. 15 Stanback, The Wordsworth-Coleridge Circle and the Aesthetics of Disability, 244, 271. 16 Ato Quayson, Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 15. 17 Ibid., 22. 18 Stanback, The Wordsworth-Coleridge Circle and the Aesthetics of Disability, 230, 238. 12 13

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dole” (DY, 215).19 Recalling the 1920s in New York, Powys’s friend Boyne Grainger confirmed Powys’s courtesy and generosity to “any tramp.”20 Later, in 1937, despite his small income at the time, Powys mentions budgeting what he calls “Tramp money” and donating funds to help support a crippled woman named “HANNAH” whom a neighbor had bought (!) at a fair (PAD, 251). In his Autobiography, he also insisted on his identification with outsiders: The deepest emotion I have is my malice against the well-constituted as compared with the ill-constituted. Dwarfs, morons, idiots, imbeciles, hunchbacks, degenerates, perverts, paranoiacs, neurasthenics [sic], every type of individual upon whom the world looked down, I loved, respected, admired, reverenced, and imitated. (A, 515–6) Here he lumps together sufferers from physical and intellectual disabilities with various kinds of social outcast. He himself had been labeled “the English degenerate” (A, 404). In his Autobiography, he also meditates on the confluence of old age, poverty, purported mental instability, and the risk of homelessness: What I would admire in myself would be the courage to live like a tramp, or at any rate if I had to have a roof over my head, like Wordsworth’s leech-gatherer, or like that sly old peddlar, the hero of the “Excursion.” What I have been doing in my walks for these last four years has been to imagine myself a solitary elderly man, regarded as half-crazy by his neighbours, who has escaped the workhouse, or “poor-house,” as they call it in America, by means of some infinitesimal relief, or dole, upon which he can just manage to live. “Mad John of Rats’ Barn” I would be then, and if I couldn’t sell leeches I could at least look at newts. (A, 623) Romanticizing poverty, here he uses Wordsworthian analogues in “imagin[ing]” himself performing in front of the local community. Powys repeatedly identified with the decrepit Leech-Gatherer in Wordsworth’s “Resolution and Independence.”21 Powys himself suffered from a physical disability in that he was beleaguered by digestive ills that twice required surgery. He suffered from

Krissdóttir points out that “Powys was writing during the Great Depression in America, the mid-30s in Dorset when there was so much rural unemployment, and the war and post-war years in Wales” (DY, 215). 20 Grainger, We Lived in Patchin Place, 20. 21 Powys wrote of Phyllis Playter: “’Twas a change for her to meet a Wordsworthian & leave Huysman [sic] for the Leech-Gatherer!” (DY, 210). Elsewhere, he called himself “an aged Leech-Gatherer” (quoted in Louis Wilkinson, Welsh Ambassadors, 28). 19

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chronic constipation that, beginning around his sixtieth year, necessitated regular enemas. Remembering an earlier stage in his life, he describes writhing in pain from his “gastric ulcers … intensified by spasms of villainous dyspepsia” (A, 272–3). He says that he would give lectures while “bent double with the ulcers in my stomach” (A, 244). The phrase “bent double,” to which I will return, is applied by Wordsworth to the LeechGatherer (PW, l. 66). Powys’s Autobiography also recounts two major periods of mental ill-health. In his twenties (during the 1890s), his “neurotic aberrations … toppled on the verge of madness,” and in 1917 he “came nearer to insanity … than … ever … before” (A, 216, 593). Powys’s son, the Reverend Littleton Alfred Powys, predeceased him in 1954 at the age of forty-one after a wasting disease following a motorcycle accident, an illness that John Cowper called a “monstrously weird mysteriously unique affliction.”22 On his deathbed, Littleton Alfred composed his blank verse poem “Ode to the West Wind,” inspired by Shelley’s poem of the same name, by pointing to letters on a board with “a peacock’s feather in his mouth” (LFG, 1: 250), so that his words could be transcribed by an attendant. John Cowper’s own experiences of ill-health were not so poignantly bound up with the Romantics, but while recovering after surgery, he read the letters of Keats and recalled his desire for quiet while hospitalized by quoting a line from Adonais, Shelley’s elegy for Keats: “a deep and liquid rest, forgetful of all ill” (A, 372). In what follows, I show how in Wolf Solent, Powys reworks Wordsworth’s account of the Blind Beggar of The Prelude Book 7, and then how in his midlife diaries and his Autobiography, he represents his own troubled encounters with versions of the Leech-Gatherer, the ailing Discharged Soldier of The Prelude Book 4, and the madwomen and female mendicants depicted by Wordsworth in poems such as “Ruth” and “Beggars.” Each of these examples, to varying extents, reproduces and at the same time interrogates what Powys calls Wordsworth’s “grotesque” treatment of human sufferers (EL, 317). I conclude this chapter by analyzing a Powysian twist on Wordsworthian neurodiversity, Powys’s conflicted re-imagining of “The Idiot Boy” in his fantastical 1952 novel The Inmates, set in a psychiatric hospital.

Recasting the Blind Beggar In Chapter 1, I showed how Wolf Solent re-imagines the Wordsworthian interplay of emotional loss and gain, marking its deviation from the autobiographical arc so compellingly presented by the poet. I also discussed

Quoted in DM, 407.

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the implicit author’s distance from Wolf’s self-dramatizing perspective. I mentioned in passing “the face on the Waterloo steps” (the title of the first chapter), a face that is perceived by Wolf as a haunting symbol of societal evil. My concern now is with how the novel’s treatment of the “face” at Waterloo Station transmutes the episode of the Blind Beggar from the “London” book of The Prelude, turning it into a reflection on the grotesqueness both of human suffering and of human beings’ response to others’ pain. Wordsworth’s Blind Beggar passage appears in the midst of his fascinated and dismayed account of his stay in London, an episode that marks a detour in the story of his imaginative development. The passage has received extensive commentary, but to quote it from the 1850 version, the one that Powys would have read, defamiliarizes it slightly: And once, far-travelled in such mood, beyond The reach of common indication, lost Amid the moving pageant, I was smitten Abruptly, with the view (a sight not rare) Of a blind Beggar, who, with upright face, Stood, propped against a wall, upon his chest Wearing a written paper, to explain His story, whence he came, and who he was. Caught by the spectacle my mind turned round As with the might of waters; an apt type This label seemed of the utmost we can know Both of ourselves and of the universe; And, on the shape of that unmoving man, His steadfast face and sightless eyes, I gazed, As if admonished from another world. (PW, Prelude 7: 635–49) The 1850 version adds the parenthetical phrase “(a sight not rare)” as if to gesture toward a humanitarian crisis that defies full attention. As we will see, Powys builds on this hint of self-criticism in his prose reworking of the scene. The Blind Beggar is confounding because he cannot be known, in contrast with the “Old Cumberland Beggar” of the Lyrical Ballads, who receives regular aid from his rural community, ethically problematic though that aid may be. Wandering through the “pageant” that is London, the poet is unnerved by the blind man’s “steadfast face and sightless eyes.” Discussing Wordsworth’s Blind Beggar, Stanback claims that “critics tend to emphasize the beggar’s blindness for its philosophical, symbolic, and cultural implications while rarely attending to it closely as an embodied difference that provokes the speaker’s embodied response.”23 Potkay, for example, sees

Stanback, The Wordsworth-Coleridge Circle and the Aesthetics of Disability, 239.

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the beggar as “the Other who cannot be assisted, both because he embodies in himself the misery of masses and because he repulses the speaker as a figure for his own self-blindness, stultifying the autobiographical and moral project of The Prelude.”24 According to Potkay, this passage “is where ethics reaches its limit”: “the force of this end-of-the-line face is apocalyptic.”25 By contrast, for Stanback, the “visceral … uneasiness” of the encounter with the Blind Beggar eventually helps to generate Wordsworth’s “consecrat[ion]” of the “humblest.”26 In his version of this figure, Powys diminishes both the sublimity and the physicality of his “face.” I see the recurrent image in Wolf Solent of “the face on the Waterloo steps” as an extended rewriting of the encounter with the Blind Beggar that contributes to the ironizing of Powys’s Wordsworthian protagonist. While Wordsworth’s beggar provokes epistemological reflection and transcendental imaginings (for better or worse), the man outside Waterloo Station provokes ethical questioning that is used to critique Wolf and implicitly by extension Wordsworth. The novel does not call the owner of the “terrible face” (WS, 8) disabled, but Powys may have been inspired by the memory of disabled military veterans, some with facial injuries, that he saw outside Waterloo Station when he visited England in 1924.27 The man on the Waterloo steps is also thought to be based on a “beggar” whom Powys saw in Chicago in 1925 with a “‘shocking’ face; and a body out of which the bones had been as completely taken as Phyllis takes them out of the fish on my plate” (LLP, 2: 7).28 Filtered through his protagonist’s consciousness, Powys’s fictional treatment of those sufferers is less graphic. At the beginning of the novel, on the train leaving London, Wolf reflects on “the appalling misery of so many of his fellow Londoners” (WS, 3). The rest of the passage sets human “misery” against scenes of nature in springtime:

Potkay, Wordsworth’s Ethics, 146. Potkay here follows Geraldine Friedman, who argues that in “presenting a double not only for Wordsworth but for The Prelude as well, [this passage] questions the legitimacy of autobiography as self-representation” (“History in the Background of Wordsworth’s ‘Blind Beggar,’” ELH 56, no. 1 [1989]: 125). Celeste Langan also draws attention to the “consanguinity” of poet and beggar (Romantic Vagrancy: Wordsworth and the Simulation of Freedom [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995], 182). 25 Potkay, Wordsworth’s Ethics, 146–7. 26 Stanback, The Wordsworth-Coleridge Circle and the Aesthetics of Disability, 246, 248. 27 According to Krissdóttir, Powys would have seen beggars, “many of them mentally or physically crippled ex-servicemen,” on the steps of the station (DM, 215). She adds that many of the “begging ex-servicemen … had terrible shrapnel injuries to the face, the result of trench warfare” (WSDC, 14). 28 Peter Easingwood, in “The Face on the Waterloo Steps,” in WSCS, makes this suggestion concerning the figure’s source (55). 24

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He recalled the figure of a man he had seen on the steps outside Waterloo station. The inert despair upon the face that this figure had turned towards him came between him now and a hillside covered with budding beeches. The face was repeated many times among those great curving masses of emerald-green foliage. (WS, 3) The image of the man—or rather his anguished “face”—seems to interfere with appreciation of natural beauty while at the same time apparently enhancing by contrast Wolf’s enjoyment of the sight of the landscape. Wolf, like his creator (and arguably like Wordsworth in The Prelude and elsewhere), uses awareness of human “despair” to intensify engagement with the nonhuman. In tension with that engagement, unlike Wordsworth in the Blind Beggar passage, Powys nationalizes yet also globalizes the “despair”: It was an English face; and it was also a Chinese face, a Russian face, an Indian face. It had the variableness of that Protean wine of the priestess Bacbuc. It was just the face of a man, of a mortal man, against whom Providence had grown as malignant as a mad dog. And the woe upon the face was of such a character that Wolf knew at once that no conceivable social readjustments or ameliorative revolutions could ever atone for it – could ever make up for the simple irremediable fact that it had been as it had been! (WS, 3) Problematically, Wolf in this last sentence seems to set aside the value of attempting to bring about any kind of societal change, while the fussiness of his allusion to Rabelais and his abstraction of the “Protean” face into a generalized “mortal man” invite readers to question the extravagance of the final claim. The passage immediately following also provokes skepticism concerning Wolf’s priorities since his “thought” abruptly changes “direction” (WS, 3), just as Wordsworth’s train of thought switches to other “scenes” (PW, 7: 652) in Book 7 of The Prelude. However, in the course of Powys’s novel, the memory of the “Waterloosteps face” (WS, 39) comes back to Wolf on at least twenty-five occasions. The very recurrence of “that face by the Waterloo steps” (WS, 22) throughout the novel could be seen as a rebuke to Wordsworth, who, though subjected to other sources of admonishment elsewhere in The Prelude (including the Discharged Soldier) and in some other autobiographical poems (including “Resolution and Independence”), never returns to the Blind Beggar except in the act of writing The Prelude, leaving him behind in the crowd. But even as it persistently recognizes the suffering behind the “wretched human face” (WS, 31), Powys’s novel relentlessly exploits the man’s suffering to expose Wolf’s inner catastrophizing. At one point, Wolf reflects,

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That face upon the Waterloo steps gave you your happiness. It was the only gift it could give. Between your happiness and that face there was an umbilical cord. All suffering was a martyr’s suffering, all happiness was a martyr’s happiness, when once you got a glimpse of that cord! (WS, 140) It is easy to question Wolf’s abstraction of the man, presumably too “despairing” (WS, 74) even to beg, into a justification for his own quasiWordsworthian philosophy of happiness.29 Yet the haunting image of “ghastly despair” (WS, 74) at moments by-passes its satirical function. The “figure on the Waterloo steps” (WS, 235) takes on various levels of symbolism and degrees of dehumanization, its hallucinatory memory becoming both more and less bodily and unreal than that of the Blind Beggar. Its “hurt” merges with that of other sufferers, in a way that further mocks Wolf’s mystical fantasizing (WS, 196). The man on the steps is a source of guilt and fear (WS, 304, 330). He mingles with birds, animals, and fish (WS, 353); he is reduced to an “eye” (WS, 356) and even the “steps” themselves (WS, 431). In the key scene in which Wolf resists having sex with Christie, it is ostensibly because he looks in a mirror and sees the man’s “lamentable countenance”: All the sorrows in the world seemed incarnated in that face, all the oppressions that are done under the sun, all the outrages, all the wrongs! They seemed to cry shame upon him, these things; as if the indecision that tore at his vitals were a portion of whatever it was that caused such suffering. (WS, 443) With these lines Wolf finds the source of the “suffering” of the whole “world” in himself.30 The memory of the man’s face, “terrible in its misery,” acts as a “sort of conscience” (WS, 448) in that it prevents Wolf from committing adultery, though at the cost of emotionally wounding his soulmate.31 In the same scene, the man’s suffering is at once belittled and amplified when Wolf compares it with that of characters in The Brothers Karamazov (WS, 448). Later in the novel, Wolf grandiosely makes the “Waterloo-steps man” stand for the evil of the “First Cause” (WS, 597). Near the end of the novel, the “man of the Waterloo steps” is “saved” but not by Wolf, and only in the

Easingwood sees Powys’s consistent ironizing of Wolf’s perspective as “a form of grotesque comedy” (ibid., 64). 30 For Ben Jones, in “The Look of the Other in Wolf Solent,” the man on the steps represents a “misery which [Wolf] gradually comes to understand is at least in part of his own making” (WSCS, 131). 31 In the deleted chapters, Gerda’s beautiful face is disfigured by an injury, and it is his pity for her that restrains him from physical infidelity. Unlike that earlier version, the finished novel highlights the issue of ethical obligation to strangers. 29

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sense that the privileged Lord Carfax gives a job to a “shabby-looking” ex-waiter who reminds Wolf of the man on the steps (WS, 588, 608, 587). This unsettlingly inadequate resolution sets aside the “misery” represented by the man on the steps (WS, 588), allowing for the elaborate Wordsworthinspired concluding scene that I discussed in my first chapter. The novel thus ends by subordinating Wordsworth as the poet of human suffering to Wordsworth as the poet of psychological growth, damage, and renewal (contorted though that may be) in what could be seen—with the final anticlimactic mention of a cup of tea—as a comical throwing up of hands.32

Refiguring the Leech-Gatherer and the Discharged Soldier My second example, taken from Powys’s diaries, of Powys’s rewriting of a Wordsworthian encounter with a figure of human disability—the aged Leech-Gatherer of “Resolution and Independence”—expands on the trace of self-interrogation dramatized in his fictionalizing of the glimpse of the Blind Beggar. Powys frequently mentioned “Resolution and Independence” in his letters and nonfiction writings, at times apparently distracted, like the speaker of the poem, Wordsworth in his own comments on the poem in his 1815 Preface, and some of Wordsworth’s critics, by the “huge stone,” “seabeast,” and motionless “cloud,” with which the old man is compared, from seeing the man as a sufferer (PW, ll. 57, 62, 75). Powys’s 1938 essay from which I quoted earlier likens Wordsworth’s own “character” to “the cloud to which he compares his reserved old leech-gatherer, [that] ‘moveth altogether if it moves at all’” (EL, 311). This reference registers what Jacobus calls the Leech-Gatherer’s “imperviousness,” his partaking of the “ambiguity of the undead.”33 For Stanback, “Resolution and Independence,” like other Wordsworth poems depicting disability, dramatizes the cognitive slippages that occur in trying to “make sense of a startling body.”34 Wordsworth’s

Powys used the image of the man on the steps to mock the limits of his own responsiveness to human “despair.” Returning to England from America in June 1929 a few weeks after the publication of Wolf Solent, Powys wrote in his diary, “Arrived in Waterloo Station – no sign of ‘the Steps’ – but I thought for a moment of ‘the man on the steps’ and then forgot him in a quaint absent-minded impulse to make a note of the cost of the taxi … !” (1929 Diary, 21). This is just one of many moments in the diaries where Powys puts his own weakness on display for his future “unknown reader” (1930 Diary, 188). With similar self-directed irony, he wrote, “We all went to London together – to Waterloo station where I saw no steps at all!” (unpublished letter from Powys to Phyllis Playter, June 11, 1929, National Library of Wales). 33 Jacobus, Romantic Things, 155. 34 Stanback, The Wordsworth-Coleridge Circle and the Aesthetics of Disability, 233. 32

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self-absorbed speaker does not even see the Leech-Gatherer as a beggar, and he is not alone: according to Potkay, Wordsworth’s “old man wants nothing.”35 Powys’s essay on Wordsworth does, however, stress the poet’s insight into “the terrible patience, under one’s own and others’ suffering, of old trees, old animals, old men, and old women” (EL, 317). Powys claims that Wordsworth is particularly invested in “masculine old age,” seeing him as drawing inspiration not just “from the brooding receptivity of girlhood” but “from the outward-gazing contemplation of aged men” (EL, 313). His association of “suffering” with old age assumes what age studies critic Margaret Morganroth Gullette calls the “decline narrative.”36 Meanwhile, his inclusion of “old trees” and “old animals” in his list downplays the primacy and by extension the ethical urgency of the human. Nevertheless, Powys will later identify Wordsworth as a writer “represent[ing] the wisdom of old age” (AGO, 19). Powys’s versions of the Leech-Gatherer in his diaries come across as more fully realized than the old man in Wordsworth’s poem, foregrounding the poem’s own questions of how much a person owes to aged and infirm strangers, and how much can be learned from them. Powys’s first diary reference to the Leech-Gatherer changes his gender and perhaps partly for that reason sees him simplistically as a figure of joyful inspiration. While living in New York in September 1929, Powys wrote, Mrs Daniels was here. She enjoys life with infinite gusto. She is over seventy & absolutely alone. She has just done her room whitewash scrubbing painting even the ceiling. She is my ‘Leech-gatherer’, like in ‘Resolution and Independence’ by Wordsworth … I’ll think of Mrs Daniels painting her cieling! [sic]’ (1929 Diary, 80) This last line jokingly alludes to the at once resounding and perfunctory last line of Wordsworth’s poem, “I’ll think of the Leech-gatherer on the lonely moor!” (PW, l. 140). Powys will carry around with him the image of the zestful Mrs. Daniels just as the young poet will supposedly draw sustenance from his memory of the Leech-Gatherer.37 But does Wordsworth’s old Potkay, Wordsworth’s Ethics, 155. Jacobus notes that “Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal entry makes it clear that the Leech Gatherer was a beggar” (Romantic Things, 206` n. 16). The man in the poem, by contrast, does not beg. John Savarese discusses the poem’s elision of the old man’s fractured skull, mentioned in the journal entry (Romanticism’s Other Minds, 122). 36 Margaret Morganroth Gullette, Aged by Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 36. 37 Powys had previously made a more somber reference to Mrs. Daniels, reporting that she had “gone off her head” (unpublished letter from Powys to Phyllis Playter, April 22, 1928, National Library of Wales). However, a month later, he referred to Mrs. Daniels’s “high spirits” and quoted a neighbor’s view that she was “a real lady” (unpublished letter from Powys to Phyllis Playter, May 22, 1928, National Library of Wales). 35

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man enjoy life and does the poet really benefit from the encounter? Powys himself wrote, “That heroic old wayfarer got his leeches and his chimneycorner, while we, through the mediumship of Wordsworth, have our nerves fortified and our imagination quickened by the poem to which they both contributed” (EL, 357). Powys’s mention of a “chimney corner” assumes with no foundation that the poet helps the old man monetarily, while in this statement, in contrast with later critics, he sees the poem as having an improving effect on the reader.38 His later diary references to the poem, written in the winter of 1934–5 when he was living in Dorchester, are more nuanced and self-critical than the one about Mrs. Daniels, explicitly identifying himself with the Leech-Gatherer. In these passages, Powys performs both the part of Wordsworth’s speaker and the old man whom he encounters, substituting a more morally aware and more consciously self-dramatizing persona for Wordsworth’s humorless and self-centered young poet. This extended episode begins with a disconcerting image. In a lengthy diary entry for November 17, 1934, recounting one of his twice-daily walks, Powys wrote, “I saw before me a figure like a man but without a head going slowly along” (DY, 121). Here we find an immediate recasting of the Wordsworth poem, in which the Leech-Gatherer’s “extreme old age” (PW, l. 65) makes him seem phantasmal: is this “figure” really human, and does that affect the perceiver’s level of sympathy? The phrase “without a head” conjures up a monstrous apparition, appearing as unexpectedly “before” Powys as the quasi-Providential “something given” in the poem (PW, l. 51), although the figure’s slow movement makes it less uncanny than the “[m]‌otionless” insentience of Wordsworth’s “Man” (PW, ll. 75, 55). Unlike Wordsworth’s speaker who contemplates the man before speaking to him, Powys’s reaction is immediate: I hurried in pursuit. It was a very aged tramp bent so low with age – like the ‘Leech-Gatherer’ in the poem that ‘head & feet came together in life’s pilgrimage’. He turned to the right along that lane with trees where I once turned before & I followed. Twice I addressed him but could not see his face so bent was he. (DY, 121–2) In these sentences, the figure shifts into focus from a “figure like a man” (is he or isn’t he?) to a “very aged tramp,” whose resemblance to the man in Wordsworth’s poem underlines rather than obscures the fact that he is a person requiring assistance. The man’s turning down a “lane” that Powys has taken “before” will soon take on a symbolic significance. The repeated

Yousef, for example, finds in the poem “moralistic self-incrimination” (Romantic Intimacy, 132). 38

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“bent” echoes the line in which Wordsworth refers to the man’s “feet and head”: his “body” is “bent double” (PW, l. 66). Powys’s persistent attempt to attract the man’s attention satirically revises Wordsworth’s poem in which the speaker zones out while the old man is speaking, “longing to be comforted,” and repeating the questions, “How is it that you live, and what is it you do?” (PW, ll. 117, 119)—a feature of the poem amusingly parodied by Lewis Carroll in his 1871 poem “The White Knight’s Song.” Powys then describes the stranger in more prosaic and practical terms than those in which Wordsworth characterizes the man in “Resolution and Independence”: “He had a heavy bundle in front another behind hung on his shoulder by a string & another in one hand while the other hand held a stick. I finally stopped him & offered him a shilling & we entered into conversation” (DY, 122). In offering money, Powys pointedly revises another aspect of the poem parodied by Lewis Carroll, the young man’s obliviousness to the old man’s need for financial help. Powys is then confronted with an eye-opening revelation denied to Wordsworth’s immature speaker: “But lo! when I saw his face – he was Myself at Seventy-Five – 15 no 12 years older than I am now” (DY, 122). There is no need, it turns out, to remember Mrs. Daniels back in New York—Powys himself is the Leech-Gatherer! The disorienting force of this realization is registered by the emphatic numerical correction (“15 no 12”)—perhaps not so “very aged” after all then—and the temporal discordance of the claim, “he was Myself at Seventy-Five”: Powys’s own future self exists in past tense. The “very aged tramp,” is not, like the Leech-Gatherer, “The oldest man he seemed that ever wore grey hairs” (PW, l. 56), but his “face” presumably makes knowable Powys’s own impending bodily deterioration. Powys continues to mix self-distancing with self-identification: He was a tramp. He did not know where he would sleep that night which was already coming on. 75 years old! But he smiled & talked like a Philosopher. Finally I gave Myself in him five-shillings but what he wanted was an Alms House room to himself. Lodgings are no good he said & the Work House is worse. He had a face very like my own only bearded. The only thing I could have done was to have made myself responsible for him for the rest of his life. This I had not the spirit to do. It made a lasting impression on my mind. (DY, 122) The old man’s philosophical speech lines him up even more with the LeechGatherer: Wordsworth’s old man speaks with “lofty utterance” (PW, l. 94). The extra five shillings (offered after the realization that the man embodies Powys’s own possible future self) could be a reward for being an interesting conversationalist, or, alternatively, a gift of thanks to the old man for showing Powys a road not taken. The extremism of Powys’s reaction in imagining that he should have taken it upon himself to support the old man “for the

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rest of his life” seems to arise from his self-alignment with this cheerful and intelligent stranger, and perhaps criticizes the overly blithe and possibly even dismissive conclusion of Wordsworth’s poem. Powys’s own failure to meet this moral obligation has a ring of theatricality: in a sense, he uses the old man to set himself up for rueful self-debasement. The story does not end there. Powys’s diary entry for the next day begins with self-reflection and self-castigation: Up at 7:15 & damned nearly not up! for I was awful tired, very unwilling, unwilling, unwilling, to Rise & meet the Day! For that Tramp was in my mind. That face of the crooked man that I had to bend down to talk to! That face that was my face – & he said to me I was like you once – don’t be too soft-hearted as I was! And he relucted at taking my money lest I wanted it. How can I forget that bent man aged 75 – who knew not where he was going to sleep that night but who despised the tea that was no tea of the Workhouse? It has made a deep impression on my mind. It has made [me] shorten to a minimum many of my rigmarole prayers! Why has it done this? Because it has shamed me out of the extreme pharisaism of doing things that may be no good & probably are no good; only to feel good in the easiest way! I looked at the Moon tonight & cut very short my prayers to her! She is even now looking down on that crooked back so bent that it would be small rest to him to lie on his back whenever he did or does lie! (DY, 122) Powys is temporarily haunted by the “face” of the “Tramp” partly because it is attached to a disturbingly “crooked” body that forces him to stoop to confront it, and partly because the “face … was my face”: it is like looking into a mirror. It now turns out that the old man himself had made a comparison between himself and his would-be benefactor, warning Powys not to be “too soft-hearted.” It is as if the man himself voiced Powys’s own unacknowledged concern about giving away money. The old man’s disdain for the “tea that was no tea of the Workhouse,” which paints him as a beggar who is a chooser in preferring to do without tea at all, would naturally strike a chord with the tea-loving Powys. Powys’s failure to give the man what he wants—“an Alms House room to himself”—makes him realize that his pagan prayers on behalf of the homeless are a way of “feel[ing] good in the easiest way” without actually performing good deeds. There is little point in praying to the moon since it illuminates the “bent” back of the man. In this passage, Powys expresses a sort of visceral sympathy with the man in imagining him unable to have a comfortable night’s rest regardless of his type of lodging, even as he berates himself for his ethical shortcomings. In several other diary entries, Powys refers to this “very aged” man in terms that implicitly criticize the young poet’s attitude to the Leech-Gatherer in “Resolution and Independence.” Two months later, Powys re-encountered

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the man, reaffirming the Leech-Gatherer parallel with the phrase “bent double” and expanding on his self-critique in a way that again reflects on Wordsworth’s poem: It was raining a thin wetting rain from the Sea. And half way to Henning’s … lo! I overtook Myself at 75 – that old man! I cannot praise him too much now that I have called him myself – but he is bent double, weighted down with all manner of belongings. He has a fine noble aristocratic face – his name is Williams, like Sir Robert of Herringston, his under-lip is like the pictures of Rabelais – sensuous but not vicious – large eyes & dark thick eyebrows and a white beard. I have to bend to talk to him. His clothes and boots are serviceable & strong & he carries in a sack an extra pair. But he suffers from terrible fits of Asthma. I gave him 4/6 & let him go off in the Rain. Where is he now? Where is he while I am talking to the T.T. [Phyllis Playter] about Homer? I let him go off in the Rain. ‘My Regan counsels well: Come out of the Storm!’ It was a test of my character & of the real value of all my confounded tricks & pretences – my virtue, my damned ‘sanctity’ & my fuss about prayer. For I had not the spirit or courage or magnanimity or unselfishness to really fuss myself about him and get him a lodging & look after him while he lives! ENEMA! (DY, 178) (The day’s entry ends with “ENEMA!”: Powys wrote “ENEMA” in uppercase letters every three days in his diary presumably to remind himself when to have the next one, although this exclamation also serves to debunk his more rarefied thought processes.) In this passage, new details emerge: Powys sounds attracted by the old man’s “fine noble aristocratic face” just as he previously was by his manner of speaking. “Williams” is a common name, but Powys uses it to hypothesize a connection with local Dorset gentry, dignifying “that old man” while betraying more readiness to invest emotionally in a vagrant if he is “noble.” Another detail narrows the gap between the old man and the 62-year-old Powys: the man’s “dark … eyebrows” dilute the impression of old age given by his “white beard.” This version of the Leech-Gatherer is an asthma sufferer, literalizing the “feeble chest” mentioned in the poem (PW, l. 92), though he may be “bent double” not so much by old age as by the effort of carrying his possessions. Not only does he have a name, he apparently owns (one hopes) waterproof footwear. Unlike King Lear, this old man does not have the option to “Come out of the Storm,” although Powys self-aggrandizingly places all the blame at his own door. Powys turns his own response into a performance, with the rhetorical repetition of “let him go off in the Rain” and “Where is he … Where is he …?” Re-emphasizing his “There but for the grace of God” reaction, he contrasts his own privileged circumstances (possessing the leisure to discuss Homer with his domestic partner in the comfort of their home) with those of the old man. With a characteristic mixture of self-awareness,

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self-deception, and class-inflected guilt, Powys berates himself and moves on. The climactic “ENEMA!” could read as a sardonic substitute for the questionably recuperative sentiment expressed in “I’ll think of the Leechgatherer on the lonely moor!” These passages about Powys’s Leech-Gatherer alter ego could also be seen as a rewriting of Wordsworth’s description in Book 4 of The Prelude of his encounter with the Discharged Soldier, with its dramatization of ethical self-critique. That episode concludes with the young poet kindly arranging a night’s lodging for the suffering man, whereas Powys extravagantly imagines supporting Williams until he dies but then does not follow through. Powys thus calls attention more than Wordsworth to ethical obligation, generating more self-condemnation when he leaves the old man without shelter. In two subsequent diary entries in the spring of 1935, Powys recounted seeing another “tramp” with similarities to the Discharged Soldier (DY, 216), and, though relatively brief, they can be read as a possibly unconscious revisiting of that powerful episode from The Prelude. The Discharged Soldier passage has a complex textual history, having been first drafted in 1798 as a separate poem. The 1850 version, which Powys would have read, is shorter than the freestanding poem and the 1805 version, omitting the separate poem’s implication that the speaker would pay if necessary for the ailing man’s lodging for one night (“The service if need be I will requite”)39 and thus inviting more questioning of whether his act of charity goes far enough. All three versions express guilt or “self-blame” for hesitating at first to offer help, but the 1850 version adds more explicit self-criticism by mentioning that the young poet asked the soldier more personal “questions, better spared” (PW, Prelude 4: 408, 438). Like the Blind Beggar passage, the encounter with the Discharged Soldier has been extensively analyzed. Critics have variously seen the Discharged Soldier’s “uncouth shape” (PW, Prelude 4: 387) as a spectralization of historical ills and as representing the young poet’s initial self-distancing from an alien other who is in some sense a disturbing version of himself.40 The 1850 revision distances the man even more by introducing him with the stagy “but, lo!” (the phrase echoed by Powys in his account of the aged tramp):         but, lo! an uncouth shape, Shown by a sudden turning of the road,

Quoted from “[The Discharged Soldier],” in Major Works, ed. Gill, l. 155. Bewell, for example, in Wordsworth and the Enlightenment, contends that “Wordsworth makes the observer the observed and admonishes him for his dehumanizing fictions” (90). Matthew C. Brennan, who sees the soldier as the poet’s “alter ego,” analyzes the passage’s composition history to reveal Wordsworth’s process of psychological self-healing (“The ‘ghastly figure moving at my side’: The Discharged Soldier as Wordsworth’s Shadow,” The Wordsworth Circle 18, no. 1 [1987]: 19). 39 40

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So near that, slipping back into the shade Of a thick hawthorn, I could mark him well, Myself unseen. He was of stature tall, A span above man’s common measure, tall, Stiff, lank, and upright; a more meagre man Was never seen before by night or day. Long were his arms, pallid his hands; his mouth Looked ghastly in the moonlight: from behind, A mile-stone propped him. (PW, Prelude 4: 387–97) The 1850 version also omits “as it seemed to me” (1805 Prelude 4: 408), making the man more monstrous with the definite “never seen before by night or day.” The rest of the passage delineates the poet’s overcoming of “specious cowardice” (PW, Prelude 4: 410) in approaching this ghostly figure. In his reading of “The Discharged Soldier” (the separate poem), Potkay sees it as grappling with the question of how much human beings owe to chance-encountered strangers; he argues that ethical obligation in the poem is “underscored,” not thwarted, by the frustrating of sympathetic connection.41 Arguing along similar lines, Yousef sees the episode as “a resolute dismantling of the connection between sympathy and charity.”42 Stanback, by contrast, focusing more on Wordsworth’s response to the soldier’s “non-normative body,” finds in the episode “the distressing but ethically important feeling of shared humanity with one who is irrefutably different from oneself.”43 Either way, the poet’s emotional gain, if any, is left implicit. Powys’s diary entries from April 1935 about his two anxious encounters with a man resembling the Discharged Soldier in preternatural height and mysteriousness achieve a little of what Yousef calls “sympathetic convergence” (something she finds lacking in this and other Wordsworthian encounters); yet, in contrast with Wordsworth’s account of the Discharged Soldier, the first one displays a failure of ethical “attendance to others.”44 As with the philosophical tramp, Powys does not immediately identify with this stranger, though unlike with the old man, he immediately recognizes his humanity, in contrast with Wordsworth’s reference to the Discharged Soldier as “an uncouth shape”: As I went along the street I passed a very very tall young man with a small brief case (new) but with no coat – very very long legs in grey trousers one hand in’s pocket holding up his thin jacket & revealing his tightly Potkay, Wordsworth’s Ethics, 57. Yousef, Romantic Intimacy, 128. 43 Stanback, The Wordsworth-Coleridge Circle and the Aesthetics of Disability, 231, 235. 44 Yousef, Romantic Intimacy, 131. 41 42

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clad equally thin buttocks. I took him for a commercial agent – but when I saw him bend down & search the gutter I thought ‘He’s a tramp’ for this is the time (Nine o’clock) when they come out of Workhouse on the Damer’s Rd. And I feebly took a step … after him – but my crafty Rationality, aye, its tricks persuaded me still that ‘twas not sure he was a tramp – so I did not pursue him. I’d have felt nervous anyway in offering him money – but aye the North Wind today is icy Cold – & how it must have pierced that tall thin young giant & must be piercing him now somewhere – I know not where – but I went on ‘austere’ trying to enjoy myself. (DY, 216) The repeated “very very” registers the disconcertingly non-normative body of the deprived though not visibly disabled young man, with the prurient reference to “thin buttocks” intensifying the bodily recoil. Powys struggles to decipher the stranger’s social position: the young man’s new briefcase suggests recently acquired white-collar employment, while his lack of overcoat and his apparent scavenging mark him as impoverished and homeless. This tall man with a briefcase is harder to make sense of than the older tramp with his heavy belongings. The details rework the lines in which Wordsworth grasps the soldier’s former occupation: “he was clothed in military garb,/Though faded, yet entire” and takes his measure: “in his very dress appeared/A desolation, a simplicity” (PW, Prelude 4: 398–9, 401–2). Unlike Wordsworth, who “asked/His history” (PW, Prelude 4: 416–7), Powys refrains from accosting the young man and instead pieces together a hypothetical backstory, imagining him having spent the night in a particular poorhouse. He constructs a tension between the instinctive though irresolute desire to help (“I feebly took a step”) and the “tricks” of his “crafty Rationality,” with the phrasing downplaying his own responsibility, and uses the resulting uncertainty (“’twas not sure he was a tramp”) to avoid “offering him money,” again unlike Wordsworth who, after hesitating to help, commits the soldier to “charitable care” (PW, Prelude 4: 450). Despite recording more of his “moral dodging” in this passage (DY, 123), Powys sympathetically identifies with the scantily clad stranger to the extent of thinking of him as feeling the “piercing” cold, not just in the past when glimpsed but in the present in an unknown location. However, the insistence on the degree of the young man’s suffering (the wind is not just from the “North” but “icy cold”) underlines the uselessness of the sympathy. Powys’s dissatisfied concluding line, “I went on ‘austere’ trying to enjoy myself,” recognizes that these acts of imaginative projection are insufficient, in contrast with Wordsworth’s perhaps overly complacent reference to his “quiet heart” (PW, Prelude 4: 469). Powys’s second, briefer, diary entry about “that tall thin young giant” both reprises and departs from the first entry, recycling different details from

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the Discharged Soldier passage: “Met the tall, thin, grim, queer-looking phantom-man & spoke to him on the bridge. He had a rough accent – who can he be?” (DY, 220). The phrase “phantom-man” echoes Wordsworth’s “uncouth shape” and has a similar effect in diminishing the stranger’s humanity, but just as Wordsworth slides from spectralizing the man to recognizing him as a human being and engaging him in conversation, Powys on this occasion overcomes the nervousness of his earlier encounter and exchanges words with the sufferer. Although he speaks to the man, he does not record offering money. Powys does not relate what the man says in reply, in further contrast with Wordsworth who gives few of the soldier’s exact words but does allow him two lines of speech. The man’s “rough accent” provokes baffled speculation presumably because it conflicts with the class connotations of the previously mentioned briefcase. Powys’s apparent lack of attempt to find out about the man’s past obliquely criticizes Wordsworth’s uncalled-for questioning of the soldier. Yet in this entry, curiosity seems to trump both sympathetic identification and ethical action, further distancing Powys from Wordsworth and reducing the encounter to a slightly absurd and belated confrontation between the overly self-conscious writer and an emaciated ghost with an uneducated working-class accent. Powys had previously reworked the Discharged Soldier episode in a paragraph of his Autobiography, recounting a journey by ship across the Atlantic during World War I. The context is his feeling of mortification about returning to America and ceasing to contribute to the British war effort, a feeling that may underlie the somewhat self-disgusted tone of the passage: There was a derelict from the American Army, or at any rate some unfortunate soldier who was returning to America to be punished, on the ship with me, … and I used to drink tea with this forlorn wretch and promise to help him by writing letters on his behalf. But he was a singularly unappealing individual, sulky and scurvy-spirited, and when I thought of all the heroic, generous, sweet-natured young men tortured and murdered by our patriotic madness, it seemed a poor thing to be devoting my energy to the composition of letters on behalf of this one poor, sullen cross-patch, who under a normal condition could hardly have been more than a disobliging “bell-hop.” But there it was! The poor devil could bleed if you pricked him, and could lap up a can of ship’s tea with scarcely less gusto than I myself. (A, 591) This passage exemplifies the distinction between sympathetic identification and ethical usefulness: in contrast with Powys’s diary entries about the tall young man in Dorset, it refuses the first but grants the latter. In this account, Powys has not taken the trouble to find out the legal status of “this forlorn wretch” and expresses revulsion at his personality intensified by the imagined contrast with idealized victims of the war. Whereas Wordsworth’s Discharged

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Soldier is sick, perhaps from a tropical disease,45 Powys’s is merely “sulky.” The sarcastic phrase “our patriotic madness” hints at Powys’s complicity with that “madness.” His condescension comes through in the repetition of “poor,” the childishly demeaning term “cross-patch,” and the shrinking of the soldier’s dereliction of duty to the petulance of a “disobliging ‘bell-hop.’” Powys’s “promise” to write “letters on his behalf” seems to lower Powys’s opinion of himself (“a poor thing”) yet he reluctantly recognizes the man’s shared humanity, with his allusion to Shylock’s line “If you prick us, do we not bleed?” (from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, 3. 1. 64) perhaps carrying connotations of resistance to anti-Semitism. As in his diary entries, Powys ruefully dramatizes his own experience, this time with “But there it was!” Yet his distance from “it” is uncertain. The initial reference to tea-drinking suggests the creation of a shared civilized space amid the discomfort of a sea crossing during wartime, whereas the final mention of “lap[ping] up a can of ship’s tea” reduces the soldier and Powys to the same animal-like level. In a letter written at sea, Powys had given a briefer but more sympathetic and dignified account: “There is an American sergeant here – I talk to him every day at tea-time in the Library – who is condemned to 25 years imprisonment, for abscence [sic] without leave.”46 Like the diary entries about the “phantom-man,” the account in the Autobiography revises Wordsworth’s Discharged Soldier episode in that the Powysian narrator is older than the man requiring help, although just as self-conscious as the young Wordsworth. But like Wordsworth, Powys never mentions his soldier again. It seems that the “wretch” mainly offers an occasion for anti-war sentiment and grudging acceptance of equality. However, the “scurvyspirited” soldier is far from being the only “ill-constituted” member of society depicted in Wordsworthian terms in the Autobiography.

“Messengers of the Grail”: Madwomen and Female Beggars Powys’s treatment, in his Autobiography, of two so-called madwomen and a woman whom he calls an “Ideal Beggar” (A, 570) can be seen as offering a mild critique of Wordsworth’s sympathetic treatment of madwomen and female vagrants, implying that Wordsworth’s investment in these outsiders does not go far enough, although the extent of Powys’s own investment in the women is questionable. These accounts differ from those of men needing

See Alan Bewell, Romanticism and Colonial Disease (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 117–19. 46 John Cowper Powys to Theodore Powys, September 25, 1918, Powys Collection, University of Exeter. 45

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help, in that they ultimately take a transcendental turn that sidesteps both sympathetic concern and ethical usefulness. The figure of the (temporarily) mentally disturbed woman recurs in several poems in the Lyrical Ballads, including “Ruth” and “The Thorn” (both singled out in Powys’s essay on Wordsworth), “The Mad Mother,” and “The Female Vagrant.” None of these is a poem of encounter between poet and female victim, except perhaps “Ruth,” in which the narrator belatedly refers to coming across the homeless woman. But apart from “The Thorn,” in which Martha Ray’s suffering is opaque to the fussy persona telling her story and therefore to the reader, the poems are all attempts to bring out the poignancy of the traumatized woman’s feelings. In his Autobiography, Powys mentions encountering two different madwomen, describing them in terms that perhaps most reflect on “Ruth,” one of the poems that he identified as “grotesque” (EL, 317). “Ruth,” written in a bouncy verse form at odds with its sobering subject matter, tells the story of a woman who is abandoned by her “lawless” husband, goes “mad,” then later flees from her “prison” and lives alone in the woods (PW, ll. 162, 170, 183). The “I” that is the narrator—other than the interjection “God help thee Ruth!”—only appears in the penultimate stanza, in which he sees her reverting to childhood play (PW, ll. 169, 217–22). This narrator admits no personal or community responsibility for “Ill-fated Ruth,” though he seemingly tries to compensate for this lack of assistance in the jarring final stanza, by imagining her “corpse” being buried in “hallow’d mold” and mourned at a “Christian” funeral (PW, ll. 223, 223–4, 228). Powys may expose Wordsworth’s objectification of his madwomen, but to some extent he falls into the same trap, in his case generating some comic mileage from these “mystical figures” (A, 569). Powys’s descriptions of supposed madwomen in his Autobiography violate his self-imposed rule of not mentioning “all the way through it one single feminine person!” (LFG, 2: 17). The implication may be that ethical urgency motivates him to over-ride his rule, but the violation may conversely suggest that these and other lower-class women whom he mentions (including “street-girls” [A, 241]) do not really count because they are not “ladies” (A, 9). The first “mad woman” is one that he repeatedly encounters in his twenties while working in Sussex as a lecturer: “She was wont to carry a heavy basket and whether I had the decency to help her with this object I cannot recall but I used to enter into conversation with her” (A, 213). Powys’s inability to “recall” whether he helped with her “heavy basket” is inauspicious, but his “enter[ing] into conversation” may be a form of ethical attendance to the unnamed woman. However, he then proceeds to diminish her by reducing her “symbolic” value to that of an imaginary Tarot card, “the Woman with the Basket” (A, 213). As if to balance out this potentially dehumanizing abstraction, he then elevates—yet still demeans—the woman by recasting her in terms of classical mythology: “my ‘Woman with a Basket’ resembled the unfortunate Cassandra who was at once loved and hated by

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Apollo” (A, 214). This woman is apparently a prophetess whose prophecies fall on deaf ears. Whereas Wordsworth’s Ruth emerges from madness to reintegrate with nature and sleep “beneath the greenwood tree” (PW, l. 203), Powys’s woman’s madness takes the form of intimacy with nature in the sense of communion with a heavenly body. She explained to me the precise terms of a very close and singular relationship that existed between herself and the sun. … She had a large head, and an enormous figure with a bare throat; and she used, at intervals in our conversation, to point to this bare throat, which was of a livid ashen-grey, explaining the feelings in her nature which her relations with the sun excited. (A, 213–4) The relationship with the sun could stand in for the attraction to a “lovely Youth” that leads Ruth to her downfall by captivating her with exotic images of nature in the New World (PW, l. 31). This woman’s “large head” and “enormous figure,” together with her strangely discolored “bare throat,” apparently inspire a touch of awe instead of mere polite interest. The woman comes across as eccentric rather than mad, especially since Powys says, “All this I took absolutely for gospel truth” (A, 214). Powys takes pains to stress that he is taking the madwoman on her own terms, commenting all too explicitly, “I got comfort, too, from talking to this ‘Woman with the Basket,’ because of the satisfaction it gave to my man-to-man sense, or my manto-woman sense, of the equality of all souls” (A, 214). The ethical payoff from the chance encounters with this larger-than-life figure is so great that it seems to set aside the actual woman. If Powys is offering any reflection on Wordsworth, he may be criticizing the poet’s depictions of madwomen for not fully bringing out that “equality,” even though Powys’s own vacillating treatment of this “Woman with the Basket” bears some resemblance to the way in which the instability of the conclusion of “Ruth” invites criticism of the poetic narrator. The second “madwoman” (A, 570) in the Autobiography is not introduced as such, so that Powys puts his reader in his own position of wondering about her unusual behavior. He encounters this woman when visiting his future home in Sussex for the first time, describing her with mounting drama: I stopped at a labourer’s cottage nearby to ask for the keys. There was no one there but the woman of the cottage who willingly enough came along with me. As we went up the drive, … my companion laid her hand on my arm. “The other way, the other way, the other way!” she cried, and made a bolt for some bushes that grew behind the house. I followed her without difficulty for she was a heavy woman. But it did strike me as

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singular that she should find it necessary to make her way through these bushes on all fours. (A, 250) Like that of the Cassandra-like woman, the woman’s behavior comes across as eccentric rather than mentally unsound, especially when it turns out that she is motivated by the desire to give Powys a better view of the house. Powys milks comedy from the image of the “heavy” woman crawling through the bushes but then abruptly switches tone in the final paragraph of the chapter: But the woman told me her story, before she unlocked the door, and it was not a pretty one. She explained to me quite frankly, using the plain words, that in a day or two she intended to retire to the County Lunatic Asylum. (A, 250) This woman, unlike Wordsworth’s Ruth, chooses to be institutionalized, in what is presumably an act of self-protection or the protection of others. A comment in the next chapter clarifies that this woman, again unlike Wordsworth’s Ruth, has a husband at home, who gets “a person to look after him” since “it was clear that his wife intended to stay in the asylum” (A, 253). The repetition of “intended” draws attention to the woman’s power over her own incarceration, hinting at an intriguing backstory. Whereas she exerts agency in staying in the asylum, Ruth exerts hers in removing herself and remaining homeless: She from her prison fled; But of the Vagrant none took thought, And where it liked her best she sought Her shelter and her bread. (PW, ll. 183–6) Powys expresses his sympathy with the phrase “not a pretty one” but does not reveal any further details of the woman’s “story,” leaving it mysterious (A, 250). Much later in the book, Powys casts his mind back to these two Sussex women, giving them the weight of “emblematic … mystical figures,” and calling them “messengers of the Grail” (A, 569), but in context, neither description partakes of this portentous notion. It is as if the two women take on shades of the “mystical” only in retrospect. The passage in which Powys recalls the two “messengers of the Grail” in Sussex leads into a more elaborate—and more transcendentalizing—revision of a Wordsworth poem about another female figure of (in this case, partially faked) deprivation. This passage, from Powys’s recollections of his time in New York, describes Powys’s repeated encounters with a female beggar in Washington Square, who, unlike the women in Sussex, “was not mad” (A, 570). Powys continues in what amounts to a rewriting of Wordsworth’s “Beggars,” a poem of eight (originally seven) six-line stanzas published in

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1807, based on a real-life encounter of Dorothy Wordsworth with a female mendicant and her family. In the poem, the speaker comes across a majestic beggar woman, gives her money despite not believing her extravagant tale of “woes,” and then leaves her and comes across two “little Boys” who are obviously her sons (PW, ll. 16, 21). The boys “whine” and beg, pretending their mother “is dead,” and, when rebuked by the speaker, run off cheerfully to “some other play” (PW, ll. 38, 41, l48).47 According to Wordsworth, the work is “a poetic exhibition of the power of physical beauty and the charm of health and vigour in childhood even in a state of the greatest moral depravity.”48 The poem itself does not take such a judgmental tone. Powys describes the “mystical” figure he used to encounter in more detail than the preternaturally “tall” woman (PW, l. 1) described by Wordsworth: [T]‌he messenger of the Grail I used to meet in Washington Square was not mad. Nor was she an ordinary beggar. She was an Ideal Beggar. By that I mean that there hung about her that noble air of tattered distinction which you are conscious of in the Choregi of certain Greek plays. Her rags were symbolical, not a mere accompaniment of penury. They were her insignia, her scutcheon, her proud heraldic quarterings. She carried them with a certain furtive hauteur, as if they were a disguise out of which at any moment she might slip. Whenever we met, however, she fixed me with her eye as if she looked at me through her disguise. (A, 570) Powys lifts his “ideal Beggar” onto an elevated trans-historical plane by comparing her with the leaders of the Chorus in ancient Greek drama. Wordsworth had employed a similar strategy by imagining his beggar woman as the racialized “Queen” of the “ancient” Amazons or as the emblematic “wife” of an exotic bandit chief: Her face was of Egyptian brown: Haughty, as if her eye had seen Its own light to a distance thrown, She towered, fit person for a Queen, To head those ancient Amazonian files; Or ruling Bandit’s wife among the Grecian Isles. (PW, ll. 7–12) Both writers use lofty comparisons to elevate the women and glamorize them with a suggestion of foreignness: Powys says that his beggar woman’s “English was terribly broken” (A, 570). But whereas Powys’s “Ideal Beggar” The version that Powys would have read in the Oxford edition had been revised—not for the better—by Wordsworth in accordance with its classification as one of his “Poems of the Imagination.” 48 Quoted in Major Works, ed. Gill, 702. 47

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is dressed in “rags” that he deems “symbolical,” Wordsworth’s beggar woman is dressed in a “mantle, to her very feet” and a cap “white as newfallen snow” (PW, ll. 4, 6), misleadingly connoting purity. Both women exude an air of mystery: Wordsworth’s exotic wanderer is “Haughty” even as she asks for money, while Powys’s more aloof beggar stares at him as if in “disguise.” Wordsworth’s speaker is transfixed and erotically drawn to the beggar woman’s artifice: Advancing, forth she stretched her hand, And begged an alms with doleful plea That ceased not; on our English land Such woes, I knew, could never be; And yet a boon I gave her, for the creature Was beautiful to see—a weed of glorious feature. (PW, ll. 13–18) Although, as if threatened by her, the speaker tries to objectify and diminish her with the word “creature, “ the surprising phrase “a weed of glorious feature”—an allusion to Edmund Spenser’s verse butterfly fable “Muiopotmos” (1591)—lifts her into an idealized literary space at odds with the plain style of most of the poem. This “weed” is “glorious” like the “sunshine” in Wordsworth’s “Ode” (PW, l. 16) and implicitly as transitory. The speaker is fascinated rather than sympathetic, giving money in spite of his skepticism. Powys’s woman, by contrast, does not beg, as if she does not really need help, and this detail is taken as a mark of her mysticism. Powys places her on a more transcendental level than Wordsworth’s beggar woman: She always walked very slowly, and, as she walked, she held in front of her a flat wooden box. I never once saw her soliciting alms. It was as if from that box she could distribute keys to the Invisible, such as the key that Mephistopheles gave to Faust when he called up Helen. Her ancient bonnet used to be gaily trimmed with artificial flowers that varied with the season, but for all that, when her lambent eyes looked at me it was like being hailed by Tisiphone, or Lachesis, or even Medusa. But I was never frightened of her. I felt that though she might be sinister in the eyes of many, she brought nothing but good luck to me. (A, 570) Again, the “Ideal Beggar” is dignified by cultural analogues, although the choice of the Faust legend and “sinister” figures from Greek mythology might cast doubt on the claim, “I was never frightened of her.” The “artificial flowers” on the woman’s “gaily trimmed” bonnet recall the (real) flowers—“the gayest of the land”—worn not on Wordsworth’s beggar woman’s snow-white cap but on the “hat” of one of her sons (PW, ll.

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24, 23). The impression of a slippage over time from the authentic to the imitative is misleading, since the Wordsworth poem is a study of artifice and its allure. The captivating deceptiveness of Wordsworth’s beggars lies behind Powys’s description and energizes it. Powys’s “Ideal Beggar” needs no offspring, “[u]‌nquestionabl[y]” related to their mother (PW, l. 30) to reinforce her mystical power, her connection with “the Invisible.” Powys takes Wordsworth’s vibrant yet uncomfortable poem and transforms it into a glimpse of “the Grail.” Yet he also demystifies the woman’s “keys to the Invisible” by adding that “in one or two of our conversations I gathered that she really could give me a ‘key’ from her mystic tray which would unlock—for a nice-spoken discreet gentleman—enclosed gardens that were much better left closed” (A, 570). Powys’s resistance to such metaphorical “gardens” perhaps helps to preserve the integrity of the woman’s “mystic” identity. Powys intensified his implicit critique of Wordsworth’s insufficient sympathizing when, in May 1957, he again rewrote “Beggars”—this time in letters to Louis Wilkinson—by describing visits from a “beautiful Gypsy with her little boy of four” to his home in Blaenau Ffestiniog (PSNL 75: 29). Powys’s account of the Romani woman’s initial visit—“a most exciting thing”—entangles the attitude of Wordsworth’s speaker with details that recall the madwomen of the Autobiography: “She was very very handsome with a huge Wicker Basket but she refused to accept a penny” (PSNL 75: 29). As if attempting to outdo Wordsworth’s grudging act of charity, Powys welcomes the woman into his house but is “too thrilled by her talk to offer her even a cigarette” (PSNL 75: 30). Although his hospitality falls short, “a lot of buttered scones and things” are served on a subsequent visit and are “refused” by the child, who—sleepy and well-behaved—comes across as a charmingly docile substitute for Wordsworth’s energetic beggar boys (PSNL 75: 31). Unlike Wordsworth’s beggar woman and Powys’s madwomen, Powys’s glamorous visitor is dignified with a name, “Mrs Juanita Berlin,” and is herself “a poet” with whom Powys fittingly discusses “the poetry of Wordsworth” (PSNL 75: 30). Adopting the captivated attitude of the speaker of “Beggars,” Powys describes her with the same sort of exotic comparisons that he and Wordsworth had applied to their beggar women. Powys even brings in his companion Phyllis Playter as a stand-in for Dorothy Wordsworth, the unacknowledged mediator behind Wordsworth’s poem: Juanita’s ear rings were what staggered Phyllis most & pleased me most; so magnificently Babylonian & Assyrian, as you might expect to see in the court of a mistress of Sennagerib! I was so thrilled to have a real live gypsy dressed so fantastically & with rings on her fingers and bells on her toes sitting opposite to me. (PSNL 75: 31)

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The nursery rhyme allusion diminishes the “real live gypsy” even as she is aggrandized not only with Biblical terminology but also via her “enormous basket like a Barge” and with the exclamation “What a Juanita!” (PSNL 75: 30–1). Despite this last objectifying phrase, Powys humanizes Juanita Berlin by providing details of her family history, enmeshing her within his own family by adding that she claimed that her “best friend was [his brother] Theodore!” (PSNL 75: 30). Further surpassing Wordsworth’s offer of a “boon,” Powys proclaims this “real true Gypsy!” to be a “new friend of mine,” with whom he plans to correspond and to whom he “gave one of my latest books” (PSNL 75: 30–2). This domestic vignette at once replays and criticizes the unsettling dynamics of Wordsworth’s “Beggars.”

Re-inventing “The Idiot Boy” Powys’s novelistic treatment of Wordsworthian neurodiversity is both more idealizing and more grotesque (to repeat his own term) than his ostensibly nonfictional revisions of Wordsworth’s stricken homeless strangers and women afflicted with madness. Needless to say, neurodiversity is not to be confused with madness, although historically, the distinction has not always been made.49 Powys depicts intellectually disabled youths in several of his novels, including two of his earliest, Wood and Stone and Ducdame, but his most obvious sympathetic and hostile revisiting of Wordsworth’s “The Idiot Boy” is in The Inmates, published the year he turned eighty.50 Elsewhere, Powys had referred to “The Idiot Boy” as “strangely simple,”51 with the adjective “simple” carrying the double meaning of plain and intellectually disabled, as if the poem’s very readability makes it a little uncanny, while itself disconcertingly resembling Wordsworth’s protagonist, Johnny Foy.52 Wordsworth himself stated in the 1800 Preface to the Lyrical Ballads that “The Idiot Boy” aims to “[trace] the maternal passion through many of its more subtle windings,”53 but in recent criticism, Johnny Foy has loomed larger than his mother Betty Foy, with Johnny being cast as “the ultimate See David Wright, “ ‘Childlike in His Innocence’: Lay Attitudes to ‘Idiots’ and ‘Imbeciles’ in Victorian England,” in From Idiocy to Mental Deficiency: Historical Perspectives on People with Learning Disabilities, ed. David Wright and Anne Digby (New York: Routledge, 2002), 118–33. 50 George Painter wrote of The Inmates: “It is an old man’s novel, but that is one of its special pleasures and powers” (“New Novels,” New Statesman and Nation 44, no. 1113 [July 5, 1952]: 21). The assertion counters the “decline narrative.” 51 Quoted from Elusive America, 134. 52 Stanback sees the style of the poem as reflecting the narrator’s overly “childlike” characterization of Johnny (The Wordsworth-Coleridge Circle and the Aesthetics of Disability, 259). 53 Quoted from Major Works, ed. Gill, 598. 49

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Wordsworthian visionary” and the “exemplary Wordsworthian poet.”54 Critics vary in how much weight they apply to Johnny’s only articulate words, lines that Wordsworth claimed are the key to the poem: “The cocks did crow to-whoo, to-whoo,/And the sun did shine so cold” (PW, ll. 459–60).55 Claire Laville sees the poem as “anticipat[ing]” disability theory’s assumption that the lives of the disabled should be valued, yet she uses a deconstructive approach to question the efficacy of “giving voice,” whether to Johnny or to his devoted mother.56 Many critics have drawn attention to Wordsworth’s defense of his poem in his 1802 letter to John Wilson, in which he asserts that “the conduct of fathers and mothers of the lower classes of society towards Idiots” is “the great triumph of the human heart.”57 Some readers have claimed, however, that the poem’s educative potential is undercut by its comic and parodic elements, while others see the “glee” with which Wordsworth wrote the poem as essential to its success.58 In Powys’s hands, the comedy turns much darker. In contrast with his treatment of neurodiversity in The Inmates, Powys’s depiction of a young lower-class “idiot” in his early novel Ducdame revises “The Idiot Boy” in a direction that is more elevated than comical by invoking another poem from the Lyrical Ballads, “There Was a Boy,” first published in 1800 and later subsumed into The Prelude. The novel’s introduction to the unkindly named Binnory Drool, however, is unsettling: “This child, whose half-articulate utterances and facial distortions would have been horrible in a city, fell naturally into his place among wilting hemlocks and lightning-struck trees and birds eaten by hawks and rabbits eaten by weasels” (D, 36). Despite belonging to this anti-Wordsworthian, postDarwinian rural setting, Binnory echoes Johnny’s “burr, burr, burr” (PW, l. 115) with his “Blub … blub … blub!” and “to-whoo, to-whoo” with his “Tu-whit—tu-who! Tu-whit—tu-who!” (D, 36, 43). The latter line not only borrows from “The Idiot Boy”; it also evokes the ghostly opening of Coleridge’s Gothic-influenced poem “Christabel,” giving a tinge of unreality to Ducdame’s “idiot” (D, 36). The context of Powys’s line also alludes to “There Was a Boy”: Binnory’s parents explain, “’Tis a windle-wandle Duncan Wu, Wordsworth: An Inner Life (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 107; Stanback, The Wordsworth-Coleridge Circle and the Aesthetics of Disability, 266. According to Avital Ronell, the poem enacts neurodiversity: “poetry is the idiot boy” (Stupidity [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002], 276). 55 Wordsworth told Isabella Fenwick that the last stanza “was the foundation of the whole” (quoted in Lyrical Ballads 1798 and 1800, ed. Michael Gamer and Dahlia Porter [Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2008], 485). 56 Claire Laville, “Idiocy and Aberrancy: Disability, Paul de Man, and Wordsworth’s ‘Idiot Boy,’ ” Mosaic 47, no. 2 (2014): 189, 200. 57 Quoted from Major Works, ed. Gill, 623. 58 Wordsworth told Isabella Fenwick, “I never wrote anything with so much glee” (quoted in Lyrical Ballads 1798 and 1800, 485). 54

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innocent; but you should hear’n holler to the hoot owls when sun be down” (D, 37). In “There Was a Boy,” “At evening,” the Boy of Winander blows “mimic hootings to the silent owls,” and, as in Wordsworth’s poem, the owls seem to “answer” (PW, ll. 3, 10, 11): “‘Tu-whit—tu-who! Tu-whit— tu-who!’ came the voice of Binnory, and [the adults] fancied they could hear a long-drawn answering wail from the depths of the … Woods” (D, 43). By conflating Johnny Foy and the nameless, prematurely dead boy of Winander whose callings to the owls produce not only “halloos” but sublime “silence” (PW, ll. 14, 17), Powys dignifies Binnory as well as the sinister natural world with which he is connected.59 In addition, his indulgent attitude to Binnory’s caring parents implicitly expresses approval of Wordsworth’s depiction of Betty Foy, approval nowhere to be found in The Inmates. In The Inmates, Powys extends Wordsworth’s inclusive attitude to the intellectually disabled at the expense of a shockingly bleak depiction of “maternal love” (I, 199) at odds with his appreciative claim that “no poet has written as poignantly as [Wordsworth] has done of the tragic intensity of the maternal passion” (EL, 313–14). The novel is an attempt, according to Powys’s own Preface, “to defend the crazy ideas of mad people” (I, vii).60 Powys’s Preface does not, however, discuss the non-“mad” characters or include Wordsworth among its literary influences, although the novel makes several glancing allusions to “Tintern Abbey” and the “Immortality Ode.” The novel’s characters include the institutionalized Powys-hero John Hush (a hair fetishist) and his love-interest Tenna Sheer (based on Phyllis Playter), along with various eccentric fellow inmates who are mouthpieces for ideas expressed in Powys’s popular philosophical books. The non-institutionalized characters include an “indescribably ugly” dairywoman Nancy Yew, the mother of an “idiot boy” named Seth (I, 183, 202). Powys’s sympathetic treatment of “idiocy” (I, 215) is undercut on various levels, not least of which is the novel’s rewriting of the anxious maternal love of Wordsworth’s Betty Foy as a ferocious possessiveness on the part of Nancy Yew. Seth, who is described as “not entirely ‘there’” (I, 184), embodies “a simple idiocy that was old as the human race. This boy was, in fact, what in ancient races was called an ‘Innocent of God,’” the representative of a “sacred innocence” (I, 215). Hush perceives him sentimentally as an “incarnation of all the traditional simplicities of all the Simple-Simons of the immemorial village-greens of England” (I, 215), a characterization probably sanctioned

In A Glastonbury Romance, another intellectually disabled boy, Elphin Cantle, calls “Toowhit! Too-who! Too-whit! Too-who!” to the “screech-owls” (AGR, 351, 349) in a scene that W. J. Keith links with Wordsworth’s Boy of Winander in “John Cowper Powys’s A Glastonbury Romance: A Reader’s Companion (2010),” 47. Available online: https://www.powys-soci​ety. org/1PDF/Keith-AGR-comp.pdf (accessed December 15, 2023). 60 Krissdóttir tartly observes, “Powys had absolutely no idea of what went on in a lunatic asylum” (DM, 399). 59

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by Powys himself. Despite this idealizing description, Seth, unlike Johnny Foy, is a “sad” and “weary” youth (I, 183–4). Also, unlike Wordsworth’s Johnny, whose looks are not mentioned in the poem,61 Seth is “frail” and has “desperate” eyes and “sad, hollow, elongated, Quixotic cheeks” (I, 183, 188, 212). And unlike Johnny, Seth speaks coherently, although his inner life is similarly opaque. While appearing “polite,” he is dismissively referred to as the “village idiot” (I, 186, 211). As if to further stigmatize his mother, the narrator refers to Seth as a “bastard” (I, 184), another detail that distinguishes him from Johnny Foy. This “unhappy idiot” is irradiated only by his fascination with a pair of “airy-fairy twins” (I, 199, 215). The narrator’s comment is arresting: “Seth’s own long greyish face wore the intense expression, undisturbed by any need for action, which some spellbound onlooker might have worn in a religious picture by El Greco” (I, 186). When such comparisons appear in Wolf Solent, they suggest Wolf’s aggrandizing of his own experience, but here the narrator presents the El Greco parallel as a genuine dignifying of Seth’s capacity for feeling. Through observing Seth, who represents the “insanity of the free outside world,” Hush experiences “terror,” a confusion of the senses, and a feeling that “things had become very queer,” as if he had “slipped down some crack leading into a completely different world” (I, 213–4). Powys thus ascribes an encounter with what might be called the neurodiverse sublime not to the “idiot boy” (I, 215) himself (the possibility of which is left ambiguous in Wordsworth’s poem) but to a sympathetic observer, possibly because in a sense Seth’s very identity is sublime but more likely because Seth’s subjectivity has been drained away by his vampiric mother.62 The equation of Seth’s intellectual disability with “insanity” demands to be questioned, although Powys may be satirizing Hush’s limited point of view. Hush’s elaborate “realisation” as he observes Seth invites further interrogation (I, 214). He sees his feeling of dislocation as arising from the clash between the kind of “derangement” that is treated in the psychiatric hospital and the “natural tradition of world-old rural aberration such as is rooted in the common earth along with rocks and stones and trees” (I, 214). Here, Wordsworth’s phrase “rocks and stones and trees,” so often quoted by Powys, is used to expand neurodiversity beyond the human. As opposed to John’s “insanity of nerves,” Seth represents “what might be called ‘the insanity of nature’”—“a more powerful force” (I, 215). But if nature itself is insane, there is no “outside world.” According to John, Seth’s “idiocy” partakes of a “planetary human derangement … that affected every aspect of the human flesh, every Wordsworth says in his letter to Wilson that he could not “find a place” for a stanza on Johnny’s beauty (quoted from Major Works, ed. Gill, 624). 62 Quayson compares disability with the sublime in that it “elicits language and narrativity even while resisting or frustrating complete comprehension and representation and placing itself on the boundary between the real and the metaphysical” (Aesthetic Nervousness, 22). 61

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member of the human body, every impulse of the human spirit” in a way that is unfathomable to “modern psychiatrists” (I, 215). The novel thus tries to extend Wordsworth’s compassionate treatment of Johnny Foy but in a questionable way in that it paradoxically universalizes neurodiversity and confounds its own distinction between different kinds of “insanity.” Moreover, the novel’s compassionate stance toward its “idiot boy” comes at a high price. The ending of the novel foregrounds its abrogation of ethical responsibility toward the “idiot boy.” In a farcical scene at the end of the book, Powys allows Seth to flee to America along with most of the escaping inmates in a “helicopter,” also carelessly referred to as an “airplane” (I, 311). The fact that the boy is lumped in with people who are supposedly certifiably mad problematically refuses to distinguish between the intellectually disabled and the mentally ill. Moreover, America has just been discredited as a destination by the arrival on the scene of a racist “colonel from the Deep South” (I, 295). Meanwhile, Nancy is “on the rampage”: as if diverting her aggression toward Seth, she physically attacks another woman and is imagined as uttering a “terrible cry” at the prospect of Seth leaving her: “He is my blood, my milk, my bones, my fibres, my flesh, my soul, myself! … he has no right to himself” (I, 287, 293). These are not Nancy’s own words; rather, the hypothetical speech invites extrapolation to obsessive mothers in general.63 As if in retaliation for her metaphorical vampirism, the narrative kills off Nancy, who falls from the aircraft to a gruesome death after trying to prevent her “idiot-boy” from eluding her grasp (I, 311). She is actually killed off twice: the “unlucky woman … struck a twisted, sharp-edged sixfoot iron stanchion fixed among the reeds … and broke her back. The hurt to the cattle-woman’s spine would alone have been fatal, even if her skull had not also been hit, and hit with the sort of crushing blow that kills at a stroke” (I, 311). The novel thus emphatically sanctions the boy’s desire to escape from his mother while extravagantly punishing her for her “maternal possessiveness.” In this text, Powys’s self-interrogation (or “moral dodging”) is blatant: the sentimentalization of neurodiversity is countered, first by the extremely misogynistic rewriting of Wordsworth’s Betty Foy, next by the claim that everyone shares “human derangement”—thus setting aside any need for special acceptance—and then by the dismissive sending off of the “idiot boy” to America. Although the absurdity of the novel’s climax may be an attempt to outdo the wonderfully “grotesque childishness” of

A reference in Powys’s diary to his sister Marian and her only child suggests a biographical source for this attack on maternal obsessiveness: “Marian’s devotion to Peter is an infatuation. It always makes me tremble and shiver with dread. These desperate and passionate loves of mothers for only sons” (1930 Diary, 103). 63

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Wordsworth’s poem, Powys’s celebration of the “insanity of nature” clearly has its limits. I began this chapter with a quotation in which Powys claims that Wordsworth makes human suffering nobler and more “endurable” by juxtaposing it with striking scenes of the natural world. We have seen that Powys, in his rewriting of Wordsworth’s beggars and outcasts, implies on the contrary that their sufferings are insufficiently alleviated, highlighting on occasion the observer’s own reluctance to help and attitude of selfincrimination. Powys himself in some cases prioritizes comic potential over ethical exigency. Moreover, his re-imaginings of Wordsworthian sufferers often cast doubt on the extent to which the characters’ integration with their surroundings heightens the possibility of consolatory payoff. Both Wordsworth’s “Blind Beggar” and Powys’s “face on the Waterloo steps” are cut off from the natural world in the city, and hence unable to be helped—except through figurative transplantation to a rural setting in the case of the “Waterloo-steps face” (WS, 304). Wordsworth’s Leech-Gatherer blends in with the nonhuman world so much that he does not seem to need assistance, while, close to home, Powys’s Leech-Gatherer alter ego “turned along that lane with trees where I once turned before” but is refused “an Alms house room to himself.” Wordsworth’s and Powys’s Discharged Soldier figures resist ennoblement whether encountered in the woods, on the street, or on board ship. Though Wordsworth’s soldier receives some aid, the sufferings of Powys’s gangly tramp with the new briefcase are unredeemed. Wordsworth’s Ruth, a figure of pathos, plays on the hillside while his exotic beggar woman transcends her setting, whether in “field or town” (PW, l. 7), and is rewarded for her pretended “woes.” Powys’s first madwoman in Sussex enjoys super-planetary communion and offers “satisfaction” to her listener but the second one merely crawls through bushes, “not a pretty” story. Yet like both these women, Powys’s “Ideal Beggar,” despite her urban location in Washington Square, New York, points to the “Grail.” Finally, Powys relocates Wordsworth’s “Idiot Boy” from his rural moonlit setting to a strangely placeless “institution” and undercuts his escape from it with truly grotesque violence (I, 13). Powys’s reworkings of Wordsworthian figures of deprivation and disability bring out the nebulous connection between a victim’s environment and the mitigation of their suffering. Nevertheless, Powys’s Wordsworth-inflected ecological vision insists on the centrality of the human insofar as it values what Wordsworth in “Tintern Abbey” calls “acts/Of kindness” (PW, ll. 36–7), with or without a sense of place or a sense of humor.

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4 “Something far more deeply interfused”: Re-envisioning Wordsworthian Transcendence We saw in Chapter 2 that in A Philosophy of Solitude, Powys celebrates Wordsworth as a great soothsayer who advocates “sharing the patience of the Inanimate” (PS, 179). Continuing his discussion of Wordsworth in that book, Powys asserts that communion with the nonhuman world can lead to a transcendental state of awareness: “we learn … from Wordsworth … to concentrate on establishing a mystical relation with the primordial elements, until we get into touch with a Mystery ‘that disturbs us with the joy of elevated thoughts … a sense sublime of Something far more deeply interfused … .’” (PS, 35–6). Replacing “me” with the more inclusive “us,” Powys here offers one of his most familiar quotations from “Tintern Abbey,” Wordsworth’s grand affirmation of “Abundant recompense” for the loss of his youthful enjoyment of nature. Elsewhere in his nonfiction prose, and occasionally in his novels, Powys uses the phrase “Something far more deeply interfused,” often abbreviated to just the capitalized noun “Something,” as a shorthand for mystical feeling.1 In doing so, he projects “fluctuating” layers of transcendental awareness onto the poet (WS, 612). These include an everyday sense of visionariness that is now known as the quotidian sublime;2 a quasi-transcendental contemplation of the vast extent of astronomical space in which material “things” are “all there is” (DS, 27); and, looming even larger, an awestruck recognition of an alternative ontological dimension, “a Beyond-Nature” (PS, 162) that, in his essay on St. Paul, Powys calls “an overpowering sense of ‘Something far more deeply interfused.’”3 In addition, Powys uses Wordsworth to authorize a sort of Showing his investment in the capitalization of the noun, Powys corrected “something yet” to “Something yet” on p. 93 of the galley proofs of Lucifer, held in the Powys Collection, University of Exeter. 2 On the Romantic quotidian sublime, see Markus Poetzsch, Visionary Dreariness: Readings in Romanticism’s Quotidian Sublime (London: Routledge, 2006). 3 John Cowper Powys, The Pleasures of Literature (London: Cassell, 1938), 198. 1

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secular cultural transcendence involving feelings of “the continuity of the human generations” (A, 652) that I call the “generational sublime.” Powys thus treats Wordsworth as the poet of immanence as well as transcendence, exploiting the vagueness of “Something”—and occasionally of the noun “intimations” from the title of the “Immortality Ode” —to facilitate the slippages in his prose between “this material world” (PS, 219) and “some mysterious Beyond-life” (WeS, 388). Insofar as he insists—with the help of Wordsworthian terminology—on the existence of that “Beyond-life,” his work resists accommodation within the critical frameworks explored so far in this book. At times in Powys’s writing, the name Wordsworth itself evokes the very possibility of transcendence. Wordsworth’s reference to “Something far more deeply interfused” in “Tintern Abbey” has often been taken to refer to a pantheistic sense of the divine inhabiting nature, rather than to a separate “Beyond-Nature.” Recent physiology-minded critics, as mentioned in my first chapter, have understood Wordsworth’s notion in materialist terms.4 Yet it has just as commonly been taken to refer to a sort of non-Christian transcendentalism, an acknowledgment of an ontologically distinct layer of reality.5 By contrast, Wordsworth’s “Ode” is more explicitly Christian, invoking “God, who is our home” (PW, l. 65), while also relying on the Platonic doctrine of preexistence as a “point whereon to rest,” as Wordsworth put it.6 Even during Wordsworth’s lifetime, as Stephen Gill has shown, early Victorians diverged over how to understand the poet’s spirituality. According to Gill, “To many readers,” including John Stuart Mill, “Wordsworth’s poetry offered not quite a substitute for religion but an alternative realm in which the religious sensibilities could operate.”7 By contrast, other readers at the time, such as Robert Perceval Graves, promoted the older Wordsworth’s image as a “stalwart Anglican.”8 Such readers downplayed Wordsworth’s apparent pantheism as expressed particularly in “Tintern Abbey.” Later Victorians, including Matthew Arnold, influenced by Wordsworth’s posthumously published Christianized 1850 version of The Prelude, accepted the poet as a spiritual guide, although both Arnold and Pater, among others, not surprisingly found his philosophy “inconsistent.”9 According to Seth Reno, “That ‘sense sublime/Of something far more deeply interfused’ … has more to do with science than with transcendent idealism” (“Rethinking the Romantics’ Love of Nature,” 31). Cf. Robertson, “ ‘Swallowed Up in Impression,’ ” 610. 5 See, for example, Marilyn Gaull, “ ‘Things Forever Speaking’ and ‘Objects of All Thought,’ ” The Wordsworth Circle 39 (2008): 52–5; Crystal B. Lake, “The Life of Things at Tintern Abbey,” Review of English Studies n.s., 63 (2012): 444–65. 6 Quoted from William Wordsworth, Poems, in Two Volumes, and Other Poems, 1800–1807, ed. Jared Curtis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 428. 7 Gill, Wordsworth and the Victorians, 44. 8 Ibid., 67. 9 Ibid., 213. 4

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Reacting against these Victorian precursors, Powys routinely rejected what he saw as Wordsworth’s “conventional piety” and moralizing (PSE, 89), finding instead in Wordsworth his own non-Christian permutations of a “sense sublime.”10 As I mentioned in my Introduction, Powys abjured transcendentalism toward the beginning and then again toward the end of his career, defining his self-styled “‘materialism’” against “Tintern Abbey” (CTB, 60).11 In midcareer, on occasion he continued to treat what he calls the “ultimate First Cause” as equivalent to “this show of things” (DS, 27). Yet he more often invoked “‘something’ behind the whole astronomical cosmos.”12 While, as we saw, his Autobiography ridicules the sublime in the act of embracing it, at the end of that book he proclaimed, “The astronomical world is not all there is. We are in touch with other dimensions, other levels of life. And from among the powers that spring from these other levels there rises up one Power” (A, 652). Although these emphatic statements imply alternative ontological realities, in the same passage, distinguishing this benign “Power” from the “First Cause” that is “both good and evil,” he implies that it inheres in the “long continuity” of human “lives” (A, 652). A self-declared “Polytheist,”13 Powys repeatedly endorsed William James’s conception of “a multiverse” because it “lends itself … to the magical and miraculous” (EL, 343).14 W. J. Keith argues that Powys locates “his narratives in a middle-land Powys lectured on this topic in 1929 to the Women’s Club of Wisconsin: “ ‘The greatest gift a man could give to any woman—a tremendous secret’—he said, ‘is to teach her to read Wordsworth, expurgating the good, that is the piety and sermonizing and orthodoxy and keeping the bad, that is the magic of the earth. That is something older than the revelations of Christianity, of Judaism, of monotheism, even; it is the beginnings of human mysteries before organized religion’ ” (Detroit Free Press, October 30, 1929, 29). 11 W. J. Keith traces Powys’s “spiritual journey” from “Christian faith to heathen pluralism,” with “many wanderings by the way” (Ultimate Things, 108). Keith finds “pantheistic belief” in Powys’s 1902 letters to Llewelyn Powys but “an infuriating jumble of contradictory assertions” in John Cowper’s share of the Confessions (ibid., 110, 112-3). As Keith observes, Powys’s “intimations” are not like Wordsworth’s “of immortality but of the infinite possibilities of other dimensions” (“John Cowper Powys and ‘Other Dimensions’: The Evidence from His Fiction,” The Powys Journal 19 [2009]: 52). Nevertheless, I would suggest, Powys’s use of the Wordsworthian term “intimations” sometimes carries slight connotations of the heavenly “setting” of the soul as recounted in Wordsworth’s “Ode” (PW, l. 60). See, for example, a passage in which Powys claims that “through our mortality, strange intimations of a possible immortality reach us” (AH, 91). 12 Powys, Pleasures of Literature, 241. 13 Quoted in Louis Wilkinson, Seven Friends, 72. 14 On Powys’s use of the term as relating to co-creation of “new life” by way of the “belief” of “a multitude of souls” (quoting A Glastonbury Romance), see Charles Lock, “ ‘Multiverse’ … Language which Makes Language Impossible,” The Powys Review 2, no. 5 (1979): 70–1. Although in his nonfiction writings, Powys sometimes restricts the term “multiverse” to human subjectivities, in his fiction, he repeatedly imagines subhuman creatures and even inanimate objects possessing souls. See, for example, The Owl, the Duck, and – Miss Rowe! Miss Rowe! (Adelaide: Zephyr Books, [1930] 2019), and “Topsy-Turvy,” written in 1959 and published 10

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between ordinary life on earth and the presence of ‘other dimensions’ beyond.”15 I would add that that “middle-land” extends all the way from “the primordial elements” to a “something far more deeply interfused” (EL, xxi) that slides between the earthly and the “beyond.”16 And since even a “Beyond-Nature” can be taken as part of “Life Itself,” in using the Romantics to articulate his distinctive conceptions of the transcendent, Powys expands his own Romantic-inspired ecological vision past the green, gray, and flesh-and-blood-centered areas of his writing to regions “beyond colour!” (AGO, 139). In an essay entitled “Toward an Ecological Sublime,” Christopher Hitt discusses how the aesthetic and literary discourse of the sublime has been viewed with suspicion from an ecological standpoint because it assumes the primacy of the human mind over nature.17 According to the Kantian account of the sublime, the perceiving mind responds to nature with awe, astonishment, and wonder; becomes aware of a “cognitive dissonance, a rift between perception and conception”; and then reasserts its “dominion over the nonhuman world.”18 Arguably, this account corresponds to Wordsworth’s sublime experiences as narrated in “Tintern Abbey” and The Prelude. Hitt proposes, “Ideally, … an ecological sublime would offer a new kind of transcendence which would resist the traditional reinscription of humankind’s supremacy over nature.”19 While Powys’s revisionary forms of transcendence can often be seen to resemble what Keats called the Wordsworthian egotistical sublime, his writings also show exceptional alertness to the power of the sublime to negate the “self” in a more Keatsian fashion. Following Lawrence Buell, Hitt calls for heightened attention to the inevitability of the representation of nature through language.20 I suggest that Powys’s “straining” (A, 544) of the sublime through Wordsworth and other Romantic poets emphasizes the inescapability of mediation, using literary allusion to heighten consciousness of wonder whether at the human, the nonhuman, or a transcendental “Beyond-Nature from Another Dimension!”21 posthumously in Three Fantasies. The latter, with an echo of Wordsworth, imagines that “Rocks and Stones and Chimney-tops” all have anthropomorphic souls (Three Fantasies, 30). 15 Keith, “Other Dimensions,” 41. 16 Steiner calls Powys’s transcendentalism “challenging and exasperating,” yet links him with Milton and Blake as “one of the foremost imaginers and narrators of the transcendent … in the language” (“Life-Size,” 118). 17 Christopher Hitt, “Toward an Ecological Sublime,” New Literary History 30, no. 3 (1999): 603–23. 18 Ibid., 608. 19 Ibid., 609. 20 Ibid., 617. See Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination, especially the chapter on “Representing the Environment.” 21 John Cowper Powys to Littleton Powys, January 22, 1941, Powys Collection, University of Exeter.

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In what follows, I will first briefly examine Powys’s treatment of Wordsworthian transcendentalism in his essay on the poet. I will then turn to Powys’s rewriting of “Something far more deeply interfused” in A Glastonbury Romance and Weymouth Sands. Where these texts are concerned, Powys—like the physiology-minded critics mentioned earlier— treats the “Something” in materialist terms while—unlike those critics—at the same time representing it as existing “beyond Matter!” (AGR, 473). Next, I will turn to Maiden Castle to explore how that novel uses Wordsworth— and Keats—to depict how sense-based nature-worship expands into “the sense-feelings of the generations” (EL, 316), a form of the sublime more tethered to “the still sad music of humanity.” Finally, I will return to Owen Glendower, to show how in that novel Powys revisits Wordsworth yet again, this time to extend the generational sublime beyond the human. We will see that Powys’s versions of an ecological sublime thus accommodate layers of transcendental understanding from the strictly materialist to the defiantly idealist, almost inevitably filtered through Romantic poetry. They thus underline the insufficiency of viewing nature through solely materialist or human-centered lenses, whether focused on the “language of the sense,” inanimate things, distressed bodies, or neurodivergent minds.

The Wordsworthian “Something” We saw in Chapter 1 that in early texts such as his book on Keats and Confessions of Two Brothers, Powys used the Romantics to assert his lack of interest in the transcendental, declaring, “The ‘something far more deeply interfused’ of the Wordsworthian ecstasy leaves me contemptuously frigid” (CTB, 61). We also saw that in his 1938 essay on Wordsworth, Powys rewrites the poet as invested in “sense-impressions.” And as we saw in Chapter 2, the essay aligns Wordsworth with “the subhumanity of rocks and stones and trees” (EL, 314–15). At more length, Powys’s essay on Wordsworth also plays up his “great master” (A, 275) as the poet of “Something far more deeply interfused” (EL, 312). Powys treats Wordsworth as a poet whose “startling intimacy with the voices and the silences of the inanimate … brings us close to the cosmic secret” (EL, 315). Powys does not use the term “pantheism” in his essay, although elsewhere he had referred to Wordsworth’s “feeling for the mysterious Earth-Spirit” as “pantheistic” (MoC, 162).22 Claiming that Wordsworth is capable of taking “us” from the “mere experience of life” to Alan Devoe, however, calling Powys “Wordsworthian,” used the term “profound pantheism” to refer to Powys’s belief in the “communing souls” inhabiting the inanimate (quoted by Dante Thomas, A Bibliography, 171). The first-person narrator of Powys’s posthumously published late fantasy novella You and Me dismisses “this pretentious ‘pantheism’ ” ([London: Village Press, 1975], 14). 22

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a place “beyond” life (EL, 313), Powys continues to rewrite the poet in his own self-image: One might indeed say that the abiding subject of Wordsworth’s poetry is the most difficult of all subjects, as well as the most important; for it is nothing less than an attempt to put into words those obscure feelings of half-physical, half-mystic happiness, that come to all of us in ordinary life, and come from quite casual impressions, and yet when they come sweep us away into strange vistas of unearthly exultation. (EL, 314) The phrases “half-physical” and “half-mystic” chime with the philosophy of “sensationalism” that, as we saw, Powys advocates in his Autobiography: these “obscure feelings” slide from sense-based “impressions” via mystical “sensation-thoughts” to a higher, “unearthly” state of ecstasy.23 Somewhat misleadingly invoking the Bible, he asserts that Wordsworth is the “voice … ‘of what was and is to come’” (EL, 315–16).24

Wordsworth and the Grail Of Powys’s four major Wessex novels, the one most invested in transcendence is A Glastonbury Romance, which features sightings of the Holy Grail, a good and evil First Cause, a suffering Christ, personified astronomical bodies, and paranormal “watchers” (AGR, 314). As we saw in Chapter 2, the novel depicts Wordsworthian stone-like insentience in the scene of John Crow’s visit to Stonehenge. But at first sight, the transcendental entities of A Glastonbury Romance show very little Romantic influence, despite Powys’s avowed saturation with “the poetry of Wordsworth and Keats.”25 Powys’s huge range of literary and cultural sources includes the Bible, Welsh mythology, and Arthurian legends as well as Shakespeare, Milton, and hosts of other British writers.26 There are occasional allusions to Coleridge, Blake,

John Hodgson finds the height of Powys’s interest in ecstatic experience in his mid-career writings (“Chance Groupings — An Anatomy of Ecstasy,” The Powys Journal 7 [1997]: 23). 24 Powys substitutes “what” for “who” in this Biblical quotation (Rev. 1:4) in line with his association of Wordsworth elsewhere in the essay with “the Thing in itself” (EL, 319)—Kant’s unknowable “Ding an sich.” Cf. Paul Fry’s analysis of Wordsworth’s own use of “what” as opposed to “who”: as I discussed in my second chapter, according to Fry, “Wordsworth discovers the revelation of being itself in the nonhumanity that ‘we’ share with the nonhuman universe, and … this revelation is the hiding-place of his power” (What We Are, ix–x). 25 Preface, A Glastonbury Romance (1955), xi. 26 On Powys’s sources, see Morine Krissdóttir, John Cowper Powys and the Magical Quest (London: Macdonald, 1980), 82–96; W. J. Keith, “John Cowper Powys’s A Glastonbury Romance: A Reader’s Companion (2010).” Available online: https://www.powys-soci​ety. org/1PDF/Keith-AGR-comp.pdf (accessed December 15, 2023). 23

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and Shelley, as well as Keats. Coleridge’s “supernatural, or at least romantic” style of poetry, as the poet himself called it,27 aligns more than Wordsworth’s poetry with the genre of romance that Powys deliberately revives in this vast novel. Nevertheless, I contend that Wordsworth is an animating spirit behind the transcendentalism of A Glastonbury Romance. The novel is as much a Romantic as a Modernist text.28 In his retrospective Preface, written for the 1955 edition, Powys focuses on the novel’s mystical elements, describing the book as an attempt to convey “the effect of a particular legend, a special myth, a unique tradition, … upon a particular spot on the surface of this planet.”29 He notes his aspiration “to catch something, however faint, and whether it be Christian or Heathen, of the flavour and fragrance of the Grail itself.”30 The Grail is “much older than Christianity.”31 Powys discusses his attraction to the myth of the Grail for its uniqueness as “a reality touched by the miraculous and as a miracle based on reality.”32 In other words, it exists both on an earthly and an unearthly plane. He ends up stressing the latter more than the former by proclaiming that the Grail “refers us to things beyond itself and to things beyond words.”33 The novel embraces the challenge of articulating the ineffable. As if to evoke a Wordsworthian “sense sublime,” Powys uses the capitalized noun “Something” repeatedly in A Glastonbury Romance, to refer to “things beyond words,” including the Grail. Although it may be strange to find in a novel of approximately 450,000 words the Wordsworthian theme of the “sad incompetence of human speech” (PW, Prelude 6: 593), the vagueness of the term “things” carries with it a consciousness of the limitations of language in the attempt to go “beyond words.” Since the “Wordsworthian ‘Something’” (OC, 167) can stand for immanence and transcendence alike as well as the blurred line between the two, Powys’s allusions to it reinforce his treatment of the Grail as both inside and outside nature. In a masterly essay on A Glastonbury Romance, Ian Duncan addresses its self-conscious revisiting of the nineteenth-century novel as well as Powys’s

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. George Watson (London: Dent, 1984), 168. On A Glastonbury Romance as a Modernist novel, see Lock, “ ‘Multiverse,’ ” 72–3; Katherine Saunders Nash, “Narrative Progression and Receptivity: John Cowper Powys’s A Glastonbury Romance,” Narrative 15, no. 1 (2007): 4–23; Wiseman, Reimagining of Place, 45. For Jed Esty, the novel is at once “high modernist,” “antimodern” and “antimodernist” (A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003], 64). 29 Preface, A Glastonbury Romance (1955), xi. 30 Ibid., xv. 31 Ibid., xiii. As Collins points out, in A Glastonbury Romance, the Grail has Celtic as well as Christian associations (Old Earth-Man, 78). 32 Preface, A Glastonbury Romance (1955), xi. 33 Ibid., xv. 27 28

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“difference” from “his High Modernist contemporaries.”34 Examining the text’s revision of realist fiction, Duncan asserts that “Powys renders the twentieth century as nineteenth-century, only more so.”35 I would add that Powys’s prose renders the twentieth century in terms of early-nineteenthcentury poetry as well as the nineteenth-century novel. Elsewhere, Duncan finds in Porius “Powys’s distinctive development of Wordsworthian lyric, embedded in the narrative.”36 I propose that Powys’s faint Wordsworthian allusions sporadically lyricize the capacious prose narrative of A Glastonbury Romance. Turning to the transcendental aspects of A Glastonbury Romance, Duncan contends that the cosmic scale of the narrative unexpectedly intensifies human “pathos” as well as “agency.”37 More centrally, he argues that “A Glastonbury Romance participates in, and yet stands critically outside, the symbolist modernist aesthetic of romance revival of which the Grail is emblem.”38 He calls the Grail “the figure for figuration which must necessarily occupy a dimension outside figuration.”39 By the same token, I suggest, Wordsworth’s “Something,” in Powys’s hands, becomes a figure for the possibility and impossibility of representing transcendentalism itself. The first use of a capitalized “Something” comes in the build up to the first great transcendental climax of the novel—its scene of a rapturous (and adulterous) sexual encounter between the clergyman’s son Sam Dekker and the unsatisfactorily married Nell Zoyland in the chapter entitled “Consummation.” It might seem counterintuitive for Wordsworth’s “Something” to characterize sexual bliss, but as we have seen, Powys elsewhere associates Wordsworth with eroticism. Moreover, the “Something” in question is linked with “an act of the imaginative will” that is implicitly allied with the power of the Wordsworthian transcendental imagination (AGR, 306). The word comes after a long passage generalizing, in typically Powysian essentialist terms, about men’s love for women and women’s love for men. Nell perceives in Sam “that deep, obstinate, halfmad creative look, the look of the artist, of the saint; the look of Something which the ebb and flow of her woman’s moods would have no power to change; and which nothing in life could change; for it sprang from that Don Quixote element in a man’s spirit which transcends the astronomical Ian Duncan, “Supernatural Narration: A Glastonbury Romance, Modernity, and the Novel,” Western Humanities Review 57, no. 1 (2003): 83. 35 Ibid., 84. 36 Duncan, “Sacred Monsters,” 165. And as we saw, Duncan finds in Owen Glendower a “subWordsworthian lyric” (“Mythology of Escape,” 74). In focusing on the Grail in A Glastonbury Romance, I join other critics “seduced by the Grail-talk,” as Duncan puts it (“Supernatural Narration,” 92). The Grail quest is one thread of a multi-layered narrative. 37 Duncan, “Supernatural Narration,” 86–7. Powys’s historical vantage point gives him a much larger sense of cosmic time and space than Wordsworth’s. 38 Ibid., 88. 39 Ibid., 90. 34

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universe” (AGR, 306–7). The “Something” here represents a specifically masculine “creative” urge that supposedly belongs to a different ontological register. Powys momentarily rewrites Wordsworth as a poet of chivalric romance through the connection to Don Quixote.40 Psychology and genre coalesce in a transcendental “element” that then drives the succeeding scene of erotic “sublime and absolute ecstasy” (AGR, 318). The passage suggests the limitations of the male-centered “I” of the narrator, whose positing of the “Something” in “a man’s spirit” demands interrogation. Charles Lock remarks of Powys’s novels in general, “Powys often does his best not to inspire the reader’s confidence in the narrator.”41 The whole scene is also ironized by Sam’s later decision to be a “saint” rather than stay with Nell and the child who is born of their union. But the episode’s glimpse “beyond all human symbolism” prefigures Sam’s eventual encounter with the Grail (AGR, 319). As many critics have noted, the difference between materialism and mysticism in the novel is dramatized between the opposition between the industrialist Philip Crow and the religious revivalist mayor, John (Johnny) Geard, promoter of a pageant celebrating the legend of the Grail.42 In the context of that opposition, the first time in the novel that the power of the Grail is identified with “Something,” it is undermined. The reference occurs in a scene in which the Glastonbury townsfolk gather to hear Geard speak and instead listen to a pragmatic political speech by Philip Crow. The narrator dubs the event “a Dolorous Blow” to the Grail (AGR, 351): Every person … was conscious that something deep had been stirred up, ready to respond to Geard of Glastonbury’s communication, and that this Something had been suppressed by the malice of superficial human nature, played upon by a practised hand. There was a feeling among them all as they went off as if they had stretched out their arms to grasp a Golden Bough and had been rewarded for their pains with a handful of dust. (AGR, 351) Locating the shared “Something” merely within the hearts and minds of the populace, the episode underlines the vulnerability of the transcendental to what Duncan calls “drastic demystification.”43 The Wordsworthian term is A marker of Wordsworth’s reluctant attraction to romance, Don Quixote lies behind a key episode of The Prelude, the Arab Dream of Book 5. 41 Lock, “ ‘Multiverse,’ ” 72. McGann says of the Powysian narrator, “his omniscience seems itself no more than point of view” and “Powys’s omniscient narrator becomes himself a kind of character” (Scholar’s Art, 179–80). 42 See, for example, Collins, Old Earth-Man, 79; Cavaliero, Novelist, 61–2; Brebner, The Demon Within, 92. 43 Duncan, “Supernatural Narration,” 88. In this scenario, the magical golden bough of Aeneas has been reduced to the title of the 1890 comparative religion study by Sir James Frazer. 40

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later debunked in a more comical vein when it appears in the fanciful speech of an “eiderdown coverlet” apropos of the “soothing words” of a “rich old Procuress”: “Mother has sent away that Something, so much more terrifying than the rain, that was coming after you!” (AGR, 511). The “Something” is here nothing more than an imaginary monster feared by a child—although even that is something. In most future references, the uppercase “Something” will signify ontological difference, as in the scene in which the skeptical John Crow experiences a vision of King Arthur’s sword. John undergoes a “supernatural visitation” from a “supernumerary” offspring of the “First Cause” (AGR, 369). Staring at a dead cat in a mood of “virulent atheistical fury,” he shares “something at once bestial and eternal in the protest against” the suffering inflicted by the “First Cause” (AGR, 368, 371). The “shock” of the supernatural coincides with this curse: But at this second, in the blaze of Something that afterward seemed to him to resemble what he had heard of the so-called Cosmic Rays, he distinctly saw … literally shearing the sun-lit air with a whiteness like milk, like snow, like birch-bark, like maiden’s flesh, like chalk, like paper, like a dead fish’s eye, like Italian marble, … an object, resembling a sword, falling into the mud of the river! … Something it was that quivered and gleamed, as it whirled past him, and vanished in the mud of the Brue! (AGR, 371–2) This supernatural “Something” is the shining “blaze” of a sword yet also “an object, resembling a sword”: Powys’s language, with its ellipses and flurry of similes, strains to capture the “shock” to the senses. Despite Crow’s materialist outlook, he does not “doubt” that the sight is a manifestation of the “supernatural”: “John felt that something had touched him from beyond the limits of the known” (AGR, 372–3). Here, the use of italics draws attention to the portentous Wordsworthian noun. Yet for all its immediate momentousness, this is not a conversion experience: throughout the book, John Crow continues to side with his cousin Philip Crow (whom he despises) in their opposition to belief in the Grail. While the uppercase “Something” that stands for the Grail remains in abeyance, a lowercase “something” carries traces of its mystical associations. Prior to her glimpse of “It,” meaning the light of the Grail, John’s future wife (and cousin) Mary Crow thinks, “something in the foliage of those trees flows forth to greet this sad light, that does not seem like sunlight, just as something in me flows out to greet it” (AGR, 578, 576). Further on,

Duncan reads the scene as Powys’s way of exposing the factitiousness of the “romance revival” by his “Modernist precursors in Grail symbolism” (88).

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a description of Philip Crow’s practical “energy” slides into a meditation on the “double-natured First Cause,” the transcendent force of creation and destruction (AGR, 693). The narrator exclaims, “There is no ultimate mystery!”—a statement that it is tempting to read as free indirect discourse from Philip’s point of view, since the passage goes on to highlight “the obtuse narrowness of Philip’s atheism” (AGR, 693, 696). But even Philip is capable of sensing two different levels of the transcendent, the first involving a “faroff intimation of some fount of energy, kindred to his energy,” the second “an obscure something, hostile to him” (AGR, 696). The “fount of energy” may or may not exist outside matter, as in the notorious first sentence of the novel, which locates the “First Cause” beyond the farthest reaches of “this astronomical universe” (AGR, 1). Existing in a different register, the “obscure something” is equated with Christ and, by extension, the force of good represented by belief in the Grail. If these terms carry any shade of allusion to Wordsworth, then the poet is being used to authorize competing layers of transcendental reality. The novel again takes a mysterious “Something” into an alternative ontological space in a scene that probes the mystery of the “healing qualities” of Glastonbury’s “Grail Spring” and the boundary between life and death (AGR, 933). In this scene, in defiance of rationality, Geard succeeds in bringing a dead child back to life: “along with these sick people Something Else had been carried to the foot of Chalice Hill, Something that now awaited him there” (AGR, 933). The “Something” is the “small dead form” of the child (AGR, 933), but beyond that, it stands for a miracle and for the passage to a different dimension. Although for “sceptics” such as John Crow and his friend Tom Barter, “there is something monstrous and horrible about bringing the dead to life; something that interferes with Nature,” they experience “something very peculiar” that takes them to a different state of mind, feelings like “dogs … sniffing at a new-fallen meteorite!” (AGR, 934). A meteorite, though strange, would not come from another dimension, but the revival of the child confronts the two “sceptics” with “the secret of the universe”: They were both silent then for a while; and during their silence the uttermost mystery of the world, that unspeakable coldness, stiffness, stillness of an organism that has lived and breathed, and now has been changed into something else held them by the throat. “This child,” they both thought, “has been behind life, and if it could only remember what that Something Else ——” (AGR, 935) The “Something Else”—a phrase that Powys will re-use in his essay on Wordsworth—is a different ontological realm, the existence of which is here momentarily authenticated through assent by worldly characters in

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whom, like Philip, there is “‘something’ … that loathed the Grail” (AGR, 780).44 The ontological otherness of the Grail is again reinforced by the transcendental connotations of the term “Something,” which recurs in the climactic scene of Sam Dekker’s sighting of the Grail. It comes in a question: “Is cruelty always triumphant, or is there a hope beyond hope, a Something somewhere hid perhaps in the twisted heart of the cruel First Cause itself and able to break in from outside and smash to atoms this torturing chain of Cause and Effect?” (AGR, 983). Here, the “Something” is a “healing” power symbolized by the fish that Sam sees in the visionary chalice (AGR, 983). John Brebner notes, “The Grail proves to be an ambiguous confirmation [of Christ]: it attests to the existence of ‘something’ behind … reality but it fails to reveal the nature of that ‘something.’”45 Yet Sam arrives at the realization that he must distinguish between the “dead” Jesus and the enduring Christ (AGR, 986). The “something” is not just “outside” but sacred: “There’s something in Nature that has turned against Nature and is escaping from Nature” (AGR, 986–7).46 This scene, as several critics have pointed out,47 is made more complex by its juxtaposition with the excremental scene that follows and with the comical aftermath, in which no one listens to Sam’s story of seeing the Grail. The episode in which Sam helps the aged Abel Twig with an enema is prefigured by the image of a “spear” penetrating Sam’s “bowels” that accompanied the vision of the Grail (AGR, 982). Sam combines the two scenes in his mind: “The two extremes of his experience, the anus of an aged man and the wavering shaft of an Absolute, piercing his own earthly body, mingled and fused together in his consciousness” (AGR, 991). Powys commented in his 1955 Preface on how insight into “our excremental functions in connection with our sexual functions”—as in Rabelais—can take “us” to “things beyond” the symbolism of the Grail and “things beyond words.”48 The enema scene could be termed an example of the excremental

Using the same variant to express the Grail’s origin in “Eternity,” Geard earlier says the Grail is “dropped from Somewhere Else” (AGR, 471–3). Planning this passage, Powys wrote, “Mr Geard must think of the secret of real life beyond this spectacular world. He must think of the Graal [sic] as a symbol of this secret life beyond life. … The Graal is Beyond Life” (1931 Diary, 3). 45 Brebner, The Demon Within, 107. 46 G. Wilson Knight takes a pantheistic view of this scene rather than seeing it in terms of a glimpse of a different ontological reality: he claims that Sam’s Christ becomes “a principle activating all matter” (Saturnian Quest, 37). For him, Sam’s “progress shows a move from orthodoxy through mystic experience to a consummation of Wordsworthian affinities” (38). 47 See, for example, Brebner, The Demon Within, 108–9; Hooker, John Cowper Powys, 51; Robert Caserio, “Politics and Sex in A Glastonbury Romance,” Western Humanities Review 57, no. 1 (2003): 99–100. 48 Preface, A Glastonbury Romance (1955), xv. 44

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sublime, a version of the sublime that sometimes appears in Powys’s diaries involving his own struggles with constipation. While Powys was composing this scene, he called on Romantic poetry to elevate his own farcical experience with constipation into an instance of the excremental sublime. Powys called for the help of a cooling wind: It was as if through my bum-gut I was giving birth to a Cannon-Ball. … O wind I am your worshipper O cool cool cool wind you are my Holy Ghost & you heal all woes & rush over the land in ‘pure oblation round earth’s human shores.’ But there I was with the curtains blowing in this divine wind with a cannon-ball stuck in my arse. I could not make it go out nor could I draw it back. (1931 Diary, 222) The allusion is to the Keats sonnet “Bright Star,” which imagines “The moving waters at their priestlike task/Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores” (ll. 5–6).49 Powys misquotes “ablution” meaning “cleansing” as “oblation” meaning “an offering to the gods,” as if to heighten his worship of the breeze. The passage could also be seen as humorously rewriting Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind.” Powys’s religious ecstasy in the face of “this divine wind” seems intensified by the “cannon-ball stuck in [his] arse.” After recounting his struggle with an enema that eventually resolved the situation, Powys remarks, “Was it not odd that for the last few days in my book I have been writing of an enema & today this happened to me” (1931 Diary, 223). It is as if the sacramental-excremental blending of the scene in the novel fed into this painful and comical re-enactment. Although the Grail/enema episodes constitute the transcendental heart of A Glastonbury Romance, the book ends on a transcendental note driven once again by Geard, performer of miracles and believer in magic and in “Something” equating to “the Blood of the Eternal!” (AGR, 1137). When Geard deliberately drowns himself in a quasi-Biblical flood, the transcendentalism becomes more naturalistic as the narrator alludes to Blake rather than Wordsworth: “He believed that there was a borderland of the miraculous round everything that existed and that ‘everything that lived was holy’” (AGR, 1171). Yet Geard too has seen “the Grail under its fifth shape” (AGR, 1172). Geard then goes where the reader cannot follow, or at least where the narrator, now self-identified as “the writer of this book,” refuses to follow, since he declines to speculate on the immortality of Geard’s “soul” (AGR, 1172). The end of the novel leaves behind the “Something” that is the Grail, switching to a passage in Powys’s grandest manner about the “great goddess Cybele” who exists, in the final words of the book, “Never

Quotations from Keats’s poetry are from John Keats, The Complete Poems, ed. John Barnard (London: Penguin, 1988). 49

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or Always” (AGR, 1172, 1174). It is another name for an “Unknown Dimension” that “in defiance of Matter,” “upholds … the cause … of that which is not, and yet is, against that which is, and yet is not” (AGR, 1174). Duncan comments, “Such a cause may be apprehended in poetry, perhaps, but would certainly seem to fall outside the novel – the province of the possible, the visible, the here and now.”50 Yet Duncan points back to the new art imagined within the novel, “a real movement of imaginative art, at once modern and mystical,” which “embodied … something—a nuance, a tinge, a suspicion—of the new religion of Glastonbury’s Mayor!” (AGR, 965–6). That “authentically primitive” art (AGR, 965) may represent Modernist romance revival as Duncan contends,51 but insofar as this new art is “embodied” by Powys’s text itself, it also carries “something—a nuance, a tinge, a suspicion” of the Romantic transcendentalism of Wordsworth.

Sexual Predation and “Something” in Weymouth Sands Returning to a more realist and often darkly comic and psychologically fraught mode in his next novel, Weymouth Sands, Powys buries Wordsworth’s “Something so ‘deeply interfused’ [sic]” (WeS, 528) mostly in the consciousness of one rather grotesque character, Sylvanus Cobbold. Sylvanus is described simply as “a mystic” in the list of “leading characters,” and a note by the author acknowledges that he is one of two characters— the other being the diffident middle-aged tutor Magnus Muir—“where certain characteristics and peculiarities have been taken from the nature of the author himself” (WeS, 13, 15). As we have seen, Powys is capable of treating his semi-autobiographical characters (including the persona of the Autobiography) in a sometimes comically or even grimly unfavorable light. Since Sylvanus is the character most associated with Wordsworthian transcendental thought in this novel, the question of the attitude that the novel takes to it is bound up with the question of the extent to which sympathy is generated for this eccentric sidewalk preacher despite his sexual “peculiarities.” Singling out his storyline from the loosely connected threads of the novel, I will argue that the narrator’s indulgent treatment of this “born prophet” helps to sanction the possibility of a Wordsworthauthorized “different dimension” (WeS, 20, 349). As in A Glastonbury Romance, in Weymouth Sands, the “Something”—or the “Absolute” with which Sylvanus equates it (WeS, 402)—fluctuates between materialist immanence and idealist transcendence, but unlike in the preceding novel, Duncan, “Supernatural Narration,” 91. Ibid., 91.

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it is not envisioned as existing independent of the human imagination. Nevertheless, the existence of “Something … ‘deeply interfused’” is not ultimately confined to the delusions of one religious fanatic. Various other characters collaboratively project the “Absolute,” whether conceived as immanently inhabiting Blakean “minute particulars” (WeS, 323) or— more often—as “something that is beyond and outside the astronomical world” (WeS, 161). The transcendental “Something” thus extends “beyond the limits” of individual minds (WeS, 436), if not literally “beyond … the astronomical world.” In Chapter 2, I mentioned the only fleetingly Wordsworth-inflected minerality of Weymouth Sands, its use of its coastal Dorset setting to reflect on the boundaries of the human. Critics disagree over the mood of the novel but agree on the centrality of Weymouth and its surroundings.52 The novel’s intense, gray-leaning preoccupation with place coexists with its glimmering investment in “some magnetic causal dimension for which at present we have no name” (WeS, 435). The setting is sometimes explicitly connected with transcendental imaginings. Sylvanus himself lives in Last House—a house “exactly like him” (WeS, 347)—on the isle of Portland, where the promontory of Portland Bill “gave him a feeling as if Nature were returning to God, as if the Relative were returning to the Absolute, as if Life were returning to some mysterious Beyond-life” (WeS, 388). But this direct association of Sylvanus’s “Absolute” with geographical location is unusual. More than with its depiction of its setting, the novel’s treatment of this “Absolute” is overtly bound up with its disquieting treatment of gender and sexuality. Sylvanus, a “platonic nympholept” who entrances young women with his mystical discourse, ends the novel institutionalized in a psychiatric hospital known as “Hell’s Museum, or Once in, Never out!” partly because he is—according to an arch quotation offered by the narrator—“‘more than suspected of the foulest impurities’” (WeS, 402, 396, 504), by implication not “platonic.” The repeated suggestions of pedophilia threaten to paint Sylvanus—and by extension his “Something”—in a heavily ironic light.53 But

On the ambiguous mood, see Janina Nordius, “I am Myself Alone”: Solitude and Transcendence in John Cowper Powys (Gothenburg: Gothenburg Studies in English, 1997), 105. On Weymouth as the main character, see Angelika Reichmann, “In Love with the Abject: John Cowper Powys’s Weymouth Sands,” The Powys Journal 19 (2009): 99. 53 Krissdóttir, in Descents of Memory, and Penny Smith, in “Works without Names: John Cowper Powys’s Early, Unpublished Fiction (Part 1),” The Powys Review 6, no. 2 (number 22) (1988): 20–7, discuss early unpublished fragmentary semi-pornographic pieces of fiction by Powys that feature Powys-heroes pursuing young girls. In one, the Powys-hero aspires to “become … a second Wordsworth” (quoted in DM, 62). In a second piece, the hero sees his “passion” for a “little girl” (DM, 66) as Wordsworthian “Nature worship”: he wants “to grow more and more wedded to the inanimate world of grass and stones” (quoted in Penny Smith, “Works without Names: John Cowper Powys’s Early, Unpublished Fiction (Part 2),” The Powys Review 6, no. 3 (number 23) (1989): 42). 52

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the narrator’s insouciance tends to encourage many critics to view Sylvanus positively and to downplay the novel’s sanctioning of sexual predation.54 The narrator treats Sylvanus and other characters with what Angelika Reichmann calls a “light-hearted indulgence and non-critical tolerance.”55 For the purposes of the present discussion, the narrator can thus be seen as participating in the protection of the novel’s transcendental Wordsworthian “Something.” In the first two scenes in which Sylvanus Cobbold appears, he is described through the reactions of other characters, immediately casting a skeptical light on both his relationships with young women and his mysticism. Early in the novel, he is perceived as attracting the “shameless adoration” of Marret, the daughter of a man who runs a Punch-and-Judy show on the beach (WeS, 20). Marret’s age is not specified,56 but she is the latest in a line of “young girls” (WeS, 322) with whom Sylvanus has been involved. The narrator gives a markedly selective account of Marret’s relationship with Sylvanus. Some days afterward, she is shown visiting her older “rival,” Sylvanus’s former lover Gipsy May (WeS, 148), for a Tarot card reading. By the time Sylvanus next appears, in a scene in the “Weeping Woman” tavern a few weeks later, Marret is living with him, but the narrator glosses over how the situation has come about.57 Sylvanus knows his own version of events will not and For example, Percy Hutchison, who reviewed Weymouth Sands soon after it was published, sees Powys as satirizing the inability of the “authorities” to distinguish between “relations … of the mind” and those of “the body,” implying that the novel is on Sylvanus’s side (“A Tolerant View of Humankind: The New Novel by John Cowper Powys Displays Characteristic Tolerance and Pity for His Characters,” New York Times, February 25, 1934, BR8). Cavaliero, calling Sylvanus “the most touching and human of Powys’s portrait gallery of religious mystics,” refers to his “innocent mania for young girls” (Novelist, 80, 84). Along similar lines, Angus Wilson, in “Weymouth Sands,” in Diversity and Depth in Fiction, ed. Kerry McSweeney (London: Secker and Warburg, 1983), writes sympathetically of Sylvanus’s “chaste lust” (193). In perceiving Sylvanus’s questionable relationships with “many young girls” (WeS, 498) as benign, these and other critics follow the lead of the narrator, who offers conflicting accounts of whether Sylvanus is actually incarcerated for pedophilic behavior. By contrast, Linda Pashka, in “Powys’s Punch and Judy Shows: Weymouth Sands and Misogyny,” la lettre powysienne 12 (Autumn 2006): 30–7, interrogates in detail the novel’s treatment of women. 55 Reichmann, “In Love with the Abject,” 91. Reichmann sees this “tolerance” as “resulting in a polyphonic multiverse of several colliding perspectives filtered through the narrative voice with equal power and ‘truth-value’ ” (91). More contentiously, Fawkner sees the narrator of Weymouth Sands as “partly missing” (Amorous Life, 61). 56 Later in the novel, she is not given a chance to reply to the question, “How old are you, dearie, if a gipsy may ask?” (WeS, 141), or rather the narrator does not record her reply. When planning the novel, Powys imagined giving Sylvanus “a little idiot or sub-normal girl-friend” (quoted in Krissdóttir, “Diaries 1932–33: A Selection on the Writing of Weymouth Sands,” The Powys Journal 2 [1992]: 178). Marret is not “sub-normal” in the novel but she is portrayed as doll-like. 57 Lock sees the way in which “readers are not shown the mechanics of cause and effect” to be part of the novel’s refusal of the norms of realist fiction (“Weymouth Sands and the Matter of Representation,” 28). 54

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assumedly cannot be trusted: “She’d come entirely of her own accord. But, of course, these curst police wouldn’t believe that!” (WeS, 400).58 Marret is supposedly motivated by “religious” fervor: in Christianized anticipation of the much later mention of Sylvanus’s “Something,” she tells Gipsy May, “Mr. Cobbold says Summat New be come into world … and He do say this Summat be the Holy Ghost!” (WeS, 20, 528, 148). Mocking the girl’s naiveté, Gipsy May pours scorn on the notion that Sylvanus’s “real secrets” have anything to do with the “Holy Ghost,” but May’s perceptions of his “sayings” are equally unreliable (WeS, 148). In the richly humorous though unsettling scene in the “Weeping Woman” tavern, Sylvanus, holding forth about his “‘Absolute’” (WeS, 323), is again mostly presented through the eyes of other characters, but their varied reactions to his transcendental message ultimately testify more to its resilience than its fragility. The novel’s heroine Perdita Wane, having heard “scandalous stories about him,” sees him as “a man made up of evil subtlety and vicious hypocrisy,” “captivat[ing] … young girls with … mystical rubbish” (WeS, 321, 324, 322). Meanwhile, despite not comprehending Sylvanus’s “impassioned” words about the “‘Absolute,’” Marret and another young woman, Peg Frampton, “loved him in the real ‘absolute’ sense about which he was talking,” finding his “Absolute … in the smallest ‘minute particulars’ of their own lives” (WeS, 323). With this line, Powys alludes to Blake’s Jerusalem to suggest that for these young female listeners, in contrast with the prophet himself, the infinite lies in the finite. The same quotation has already been used of Perdita’s acceptance of “each ‘minute particular’ as a sort of absolute” (WeS, 163), in contrast with the mildly comical philosopher Richard Gaul’s idealizing “Philosophy of Representation” (WeS, 158). The novel thus identifies Blake with an immanence that is gendered as feminine, implicitly lining up Wordsworth by contrast with masculine transcendence. The scene goes on to develop the opposition between Sylvanus as the believer in a mystical “Absolute” and his cynical brother Jerry Cobbold, “the greatest clown upon the music-hall stage” (WeS, 55). Sylvanus’s mention of “something beyond life and death” (WeS, 328) provokes a rebuke from Jerry that threatens to puncture that “something.” Switching “beyond” to “behind,” Jerry complains, “[I]‌ t makes me angry to hear you deceiving these children. Behind … behind … behind – that’s where you tricky mystics always put the secret, as if life had a rainbow-coloured rump like a pet baboon. … Your

Marret herself later attempts to normalize their relationship when, after telling Sylvanus that her father said “he’d send the police after [her] and prosecute [him] for having me,” she adds, “Father lives with a girl himself!” (WeS, 395). 58

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baboon’s arse may be an Aurora Borealis for all I care, since we shall never see it!” (WeS, 328) Jerry’s scurrilously materialist debunking of Sylvanus’s idealism is rendered untrustworthy by its descent into a rant (WeS, 330). He thus counters one “rhapsodical discourse” with another (WeS, 325). Sylvanus’s reaction transfixes the tavern’s landlady: “She stared at the long, white face of the man which had suddenly become like a narrow window-blind through which two holes had been pierced into a burning outer darkness” (WeS, 331). As Lock points out, “the narrator seldom presumes to investigate what lies beyond” the characters’ outward appearances.59 Exemplifying that technique, this sentence nevertheless dignifies the ridiculous figure of Sylvanus, granting him a soul beyond or behind the “holes” of his eyes that can withstand demystification. The narrator next implicitly sides with Sylvanus by detailing the enraptured response of Peg Frampton. In what amounts to “the reverse of blasphemy,” Peg identifies Sylvanus with the “Holy Ghost,” finding in him “a rebuke, a retort, a defiance, a challenge to Evil, from an armoury of the perverse, the weird, the monstrous, the half-mad; and this—with her loathing of conventional religion—was precisely her own private notion of how the Absolute should go to work, when it broke out” (WeS, 332–3). Sylvanus’s “Absolute” here persists in one individual’s “private notion,” firmly distinguished from “conventional religion.” Sexual enthrallment is apparently distinct from this delusion, if it is one, since Peg is “attracted” to Marret (WeS, 334) and Marret’s “love” for “her prophet” allegedly takes “the form of childish hero-worship” (WeS, 335)—allegedly because, once again, the narrator cannot be trusted any more than the characters can. Questioned by Peg about her sexual relationship with Sylvanus, Marret tells her, “We sleep together, you know, and he presses me to him … but he never does anything” (WeS, 334). The reader to left to consider the connection between Sylvanus’s power over Marret and his espousal of the “Absolute,” a transcendental “Beyond” that continues to elude the novel’s characters. The chapter entitled “Sylvanus Cobbold” gives a compassionate account of this “peculiar” individual suffering a double version of a fall from bliss to a bitter sense of loss (WeS, 386), a fall that reinforces the vulnerability of his “Absolute” but does not destroy it. The episode begins with Sylvanus lying in bed with the “pathetically youthful” Marret, wondering how the “Absolute” he “imagined” can be reconciled with the world’s “atrocious suffering” (WeS, 380). The existence of that “Absolute” is then undermined through the “grotesquerie” of its worshipper: addressing it, Sylvanus calls himself “Caput-anus,” a term he incorporates into “suckfist gibberish”

Lock, “Weymouth Sands and the Matter of Representation,” 32.

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(WeS, 382, 391). Nevertheless, the narrator offers an indulgent description of how Sylvanus chants “a Homeric Litany” to his garden tools (WeS, 386). He also accords Sylvanus a moment of ecstasy at the sight of sunlight on water—an image that Powys will re-use in his Autobiography—a sight that supposedly confirms the “power” of “his strange Absolute,” a “revelation of the Ultimate Being” (WeS, 389, 388, 392). This heightened language proves hollow when Marret leaves, casting Sylvanus into “desolation” (WeS, 402). The “worshipper of the Absolute,” as a “worshipper of young women,” discovers that “the Absolute was to be found in the concrete and not in the abstract,” even if—or so he insists—“in thought first and last” (WeS, 399, 319, 402). Sylvanus here toys with the possibility of an immanent rather than an ontologically distinct higher reality, but then re-embraces the ineffability of “thought.” The second stage of his fall takes a farcical form: his former lover Gipsy May cuts off his Viking-style moustaches while he is asleep.60 In the midst of this “humiliation,” Sylvanus bleakly considers that “the Absolute … was only All there was”—a notion that substitutes a materialist understanding of the transcendental for his earlier more rarefied imaginings (WeS, 412). His earlier “mystic-sensuous contemplations” presumably bridged the two (WeS, 380). When the reader next re-encounters Sylvanus, he has rather surprisingly recovered his sense of the “Absolute,” continuing to find in “‘still unravished brides’ … an unutterable revelation” (WeS, 477, 479). This version of the “Absolute” is more place-specific in inhering “on the beaches and on the sands” (WeS, 477). Nevertheless, the allusion to Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” elevates two young women on Weymouth beach (perceived as “incredibly uninteresting” by Magnus Muir [WeS, 479]) into symbols of eternity. Already on the brink of being institutionalized, Sylvanus tells Muir, “It’s through them I touch God!” (WeS, 482). Within the world of the novel, this conflation of mysticism with pedophilia does not discredit the former as much as one might expect, since not only the narrator but also other characters regard Sylvanus’s “‘friendships’” with tolerance (WeS, 483).61 The powerful penultimate chapter of the novel, describing Sylvanus after he has spent three months at Hell’s Museum, plays with the possibility of extinguishing his “Absolute” once and for all but eventually permits it to revive (WeS, 508). At first Sylvanus’s feelings for Marret seem to have led him to the recognition that the sacredness of the human exceeds even while it complements that of a transcendental other: “it was as if his great Being … had an infinitesimal fragment of his rounded completeness chipped off, leaving a tiny gap, a gap of too-sweet, too-dear Time in the bosom of the Reichmann points out that the act is a “symbolic castration” (“In Love with the Abject,” 100). Muir, for example, merely warns Cobbold that he should have confined his “ ‘friendships’ … to girls of the lower classes” (WeS, 483). In addition, Muir’s landlady’s comment falls short of outrage: “I’m sure the police ought to do something” (WeS, 482). 60 61

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Eternal!” (WeS, 503). However, the chapter then retreats from the implication that human finitude is more precious than a chilly idealism, although other strands of the novel’s storyline may support that notion. The narrator next summarizes how Sylvanus’s interactions with the sinister director of Hell’s Museum, Dr. Brush, have overturned the psychiatrist’s “materialistic” belief in the “Unconscious” (WeS, 505, 506). The implication is that Sylvanus’s “perversities” have the power to blur mind and matter (WeS, 507). Then, while stealing a visit with Marret outside the asylum, Sylvanus experiences a glorious vision of the dawn that, in Wordsworthian fashion, alluding to the “Ode,” fades into the light of “the common day” (WeS, 516). The detail points to the way in which Powys once again revises the Wordsworthian dynamic of emotional loss and recuperation. Enacting that dynamic in miniature and shifting its terms onto an erotic plane, Sylvanus feels a renewed “desolation” (WeS, 519) after the departure of Marret but recovers by kissing the dung-covered prongs of a garden fork. The comic detail substitutes an excremental for a transcendental recompense. There then ensues an “extraordinary duel” between Sylvanus and Dr. Brush, a sexually charged dialogue in the course of which the narrator improbably claims that Sylvanus is “[e]‌ntirely free from the least flicker of erotic perversity” (WeS, 523, 527). The implicitly homophobic narrator is apparently trying to affirm Sylvanus’s heterosexuality while ignoring his pedophilia. This is the scene in which the novel makes its explicit allusion to “Tintern Abbey.” Playing the therapist while Brush plays the patient, Sylvanus struggles to alleviate the doctor’s purported “unhappiness” (WeS, 527): “He paused, feeling confused, how to convey to this man … inspirations that came from Something so ‘deeply interfused’ as was the spiritual Presence he referred to” (WeS, 528). Sylvanus has never been able to communicate his vision of that “Presence” to his young female listeners, but at this point he consciously confronts the limits of his mystical eloquence. The Wordsworthian “Something” and “Presence” are incommunicable. Not only that, but Dr. Brush “gave him the feeling that there were dimensions of sophisticated mentality in the world to which these simple spiritual secrets of his own life were totally inapplicable” (WeS, 529). Sylvanus has apparently met his match, even though the “dimensions of sophisticated mentality” appear to be his own mental projection. When the doctor ridicules him with “a smile that resembled that appalling smile described by William Blake,” Sylvanus feels once again “as though his very Absolute had forsaken him” (WeS, 530). The comparison alludes to Blake’s poem “The Smile,” which imagines a smile that mingles “love” and “deceit.”62 If the “Absolute”—equivalent to Wordsworth’s “Something”—has been lost, it is

Quoted from William Blake, The Complete Poems, ed. W. H. Stevenson (Harlow: Longman, 2007), 603. 62

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as if the “Abundant recompense” of “Tintern Abbey” has been emptied out, a stage beyond any imagined in that poem. After having invoked Blake to undermine Wordsworth’s “Something,” the narrator revives the latter’s authority by bringing up a Wordsworth prose text. These direct references to the Romantic poets by the narrator— he earlier mentions “John Keats” (WeS, 163)—create the illusion that the narrator belongs to the real, bookish world of the implied reader. When Sylvanus utters “gibberish” to lessen his pain, the narrator comments, “This persistent tendency of the man … was a pathological illustration of Wordsworth’s subtle hint that rhyme drugs and stupefies the poignancy of feelings that otherwise could not be borne” (WeS, 531). The reference is to the passage in Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads in which the poet explains the value of poetic meter in “tempering” extremes of feeling: “Now the co-presence of something regular, … cannot but have great efficacy in tempering and restraining the passion” (PW, 940). The narrator quotes selectively, since later in the same paragraph of the Preface, Wordsworth asserts that the regularity of meter can also have the opposite effect of “impart[ing] passion” to the poet’s “words” (PW, 940). The emphasis on the softening of pain rather than the intensifying of emotion hints at the prospect of Sylvanus once again recovering from desolation: the chapter ends with a sardonic reference to a limited form of the “Absolute”—“from the mouth of a Loony”—having the power of “renewing itself from its own ashes” (WeS, 532). The novel thus refuses for one last time to discard Sylvanus’s transcendentalism. The noun “something,” which recurs frequently in the novel, is retrospectively charged with extra significance once the direct allusion to “Tintern Abbey” has been made. As in A Glastonbury Romance, many uses of the word seem calculated to grate against its transcendental associations: Gipsy May exclaims of a hen, “Something’s bit it!” (WeS, 165); a discontented son thinks “something would happen to the old man!” (WeS, 184)—meaning of course the father’s death; Jerry’s restless wife has the “desire ‘to do something’” (WeS, 498). Yet at other moments in the novel, the term is used to expand a belief in a transcendental dimension outside the possibly deluded thoughts of Sylvanus Cobbold. When Perdita’s lover Jobber Skald struggles to explain to her the appeal of Weymouth and its landmarks, “they … became to him something unutterable, something written upon over and over with the hieroglyphs of the spirit … as if they were part of something … as if they were … making something” (WeS, 342–3). In contrast with most of Sylvanus’s conjurations, the Jobber’s stumbling words connect sublimity to the power of place. Despite her resistance to abstraction, Perdita thinks of their love in similarly vague—and conventional—figurative terms: “It’s as if something of him were inside me and something of me inside him” (WeS, 345). Perdita herself has earlier found both “life itself” and a presumably immanent “Absolute” in the piano-playing of Jerry Cobbold (WeS, 211,

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213). And even the materialist Dr. Brush imagines “something belonging to that fluctuating, immeasurable, immaterial mind-circumference, that extends … far beyond the limits” of one person’s mind (WeS, 436). Although these various versions of the transcendental may be “worlds not realized,” in a phrase from Wordsworth’s “Ode” that appears in the novel (WeS, 35), they mesh into a whole greater than the interior “worlds” that project them—“something,” in another Wordsworthian phrase, “half-created and half-discovered” (WeS, 99–100) by the assemblage of Weymouth characters as well as by the untrustworthy narrator.

The Generational Sublime Besides using Wordsworth to articulate “other dimensions,” Powys repeatedly invoked his poetry to authorize one of his favorite themes, a quasi-transcendental idealization of the “long romance of human life upon earth” (PS, 84) registered by the “intimation of immortal race-memories” (EL, 513).63 Once again rewriting the poet in his own image, in his 1938 essay, he claims that Wordsworth supplies us with “vistas of strange feeling, down which, like gossamer galleons charged with the afterthoughts of a thousand generations, the long broodings of our race can drift” (EL, 318). He also refers to “those obscure moods and intimations so feelingly described by Wordsworth … where we come into contact with certain magical earthmemories such as I suspect are the experience of all men” (EL, 170). By seeing Wordsworth’s poetry as a “medium for the primal feelings of life, as such feelings have been repeated for countless centuries,” Powys insists that “the sense-feelings of the generations” have their own visionary power. In an earlier text, he had invoked “Tintern Abbey” to characterize the “murmur of the generations, ‘not harsh nor grating,’” rewording Wordsworth’s reference to the “still sad music of humanity” (PS, 130). Elsewhere, he uses another allusion to a Wordsworth poem, this time “Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle in a Storm” (1807) to suggest a similar kind of historical mysticism: “What matters is one thing only—a long, long, long association with human life upon the earth. ‘The light that never was on land or sea’ [sic] can be thrown upon anything that is so old that we have forgotten its beginning” (ISO, 166).64 Here, “time immemorial” seems

On this theme in Powys, see Hooker, Writers in a Landscape, 110-1. Powys slightly misquotes “The light that never was by sea or land” (PW, l. 15). The line in the poem refers to a transcendental layer that the speaker retrospectively applies in imagination to the sight of the castle in a state of calm. Gill includes this line among “Wordsworth’s formulations” that “became common coin” during the Victorian period (Wordsworth and the Victorians, 5). 63 64

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to offer enough immortality (ISO, 167). These “vistas of strange feeling” constitute the generational sublime. In his diary, Powys says of this “indescribable feeling … it is what the Theologians call ‘immanent’ – it is non-moral – non-spiritual – non-mystical – no it is not mystical at all – nor is it poetical – it is … entirely materialistic & earthy & yet psychic” (DY, 224–5). While Powys insists on the “‘immanent’” and “materialistic” nature of this “feeling,” his adjectives “indescribable” and “psychic” convey the experience of sublimity. He later envisions a “WorldSoul” inspiring an “Immortal String!” of “sensations” (PAD, 308). Like Powys’s other forms of the sublime, this “consciousness” of “historic continuity,” as he puts it in Wolf Solent (WS, 468), pays respect to “life itself,” nonhuman as well as human. Powys evokes the generational sublime in nearly all his novels, but Maiden Castle and Owen Glendower rely most on Romantic poetry in imagining this sort of historical transcendence. The two novels offer variations on the generational sublime: Maiden Castle celebrates its protagonist’s perception of local continuity and grants its healing power, while Owen Glendower, in a more explicitly proto-ecological as well as nationalistic spirit, extends the “indescribable feeling” into the nonhuman world and folds it into the novel’s meditation on the enduring mystique of Wales.

The “life of the generations” in Maiden Castle Powys’s final major Wessex novel, Maiden Castle, written after his return from the United States in 1934 and set in Dorchester, the town in which Powys had lived for several years as a child and in which he and Phyllis Playter lived for eight months before settling in North Wales, is an obvious rewriting of Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), but it is also a rewriting of Wolf Solent, more elaborately connecting a Wordsworthian sense-based “Nature-worship” (MC, 251) with “the sense-feelings of the generations.” Our unheroic hero, fittingly (self-)named Dud No-man, is, like other Powys protagonists, treated satirically yet still comes across as a compelling authorial self-portrait who commands some readerly identification.65 The narrator refers to Dud’s “grand cult of sensations” and calls his sensations “sacred” (MC, 475, 474), with more than a slightly sardonic tone, yet much of the book lingers over those sensations. Most of the last third of the novel is written unexpectedly from the point of view of Wizzie Ravelston, the

Herbert Williams calls Dud No-man an “anti-hero” who “bears too close a resemblance to John Cowper Powys himself for comfort” (John Cowper Powys, 112). 65

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circus performer whom Dud buys—or thinks he buys—to be his “woman,”66 and she critiques Dud’s pursuit of sense-impressions, as when she exclaims sarcastically, “What a good thing you’ve only got your sensations to think of” (MC, 255, 373). Nevertheless, with the help of allusions to Romantic poetry, the novel eventually seems to uphold Dud’s “cult of sensations” and his feelings of connectedness with past generations both against female skepticism and the more supernatural leanings of the sage-like man whom he discovers to be his father, Urien Quirm. Powys draws on Romantic poetry both to endorse and to ironize Dud’s nature-worship. Dud’s “cult” is gendered—and autobiographical—when, defensively addressing Wizzie and their artist friend Thuella Wye, he uses an image of moss on a wall that recalls Powys’s own (alleged) Wordsworthian experience in Cambridge as recorded in the Autobiography: “when … I come on a patch of green moss on a grey wall … I get a sensation that’s more important than what you call love, or anything else—nearer the secret of things too! It is love, in a certain sense, but it’s love of life itself and of something that comes to us through life!” (MC, 360).67 The phrase “life itself” as usual recalls Powys’s favorite line from Wordsworth’s “Michael,” while the word choice “something” hints, as in A Glastonbury Romance, at Wordsworth’s “sense sublime.” The implication is that the two women do not have access to either “life itself” or to transcendental vision.68 Dud’s sensations tend to be bound up with the perception that Dorchester offers special access to the “overtones of the centuries” (MC, 185)—his localized version of the generational sublime. By contrast, Urien, inspired Powys intended the novel “to be a Rival of the Mayor of Casterbridge” (DY, 169). Dud No-man even compares himself to the Mayor of Casterbridge: “only Trenchard sold his woman and I bought mine!” (MC, 255, Powys’s italics). Wizzie herself thinks she was not “bought”; rather, she “decided to use him” (MC, 373). Lock comments, “It is not clear whether ‘Trenchard’ is a slip on Dud’s part, or the narrator’s, or the author’s” (“John Cowper Powys: The Years in Dorchester,” The Powys Journal 7 [1997]: 154, n. 24). (Owen Glendower also (mis)names a character Trenchard after Hardy’s character. See Keith, “Beyond Novel, Beyond Romance,” 22.) The novel also sets a scene at Dorchester’s statue of Hardy (MC, 387–90). These gestures at once intensify the novel’s realism and its fictionality: Maiden Castle is outside Hardy’s text and on a continuum with it. Margaret Moran observes, “Dud’s comparison implies that he and Henchard have an identical ontological status” (quoted in Wiseman, Reimagining of Place, 59). 67 Even more than in Wolf Solent, Powys dilutes such statements by burying them in busy scenes of social interaction. 68 Playter called Maiden Castle a “Hit-Back at the Feminine” (PAD, 193). In gendering access to transcendence, Powys arguably follows Wordsworth, who in “Tintern Abbey” grants his sister future restorative memories but denies her the ability to reach sublimity, according to John Barrell, “The Uses of Dorothy: ‘The Language of the Sense’ in ‘Tintern Abbey,’ ” in Poetry, Language, Politics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 137–67. Cf. Chris Campbell, who, asking to what extent Powys is “complicit” with “processes of gendered and environmental exploitation,” finds in Maiden Castle “implicit” recognition of “the precarious and constricted social position of the female subject” (“Limestone and the Literary Imagination,” 79). 66

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by Welsh mythology, believes that he is a reincarnation of the “old gods” (MC, 226) and in touch with another world. Before addressing the novel’s treatment of sublimity, I will briefly examine how Powys uses other allusions to Romantic poetry in the novel to underscore the sensation-seeking Dud’s distance from “life itself,” but not exclusively in a critical fashion. Powys relies mostly on quotations from Keats to bring out Dud’s own tendency to intensify—and occlude—his sensations with poetic language. Very early in the novel, the incongruous description of Dud’s household fire with a Blake quotation, “his ‘bed of crimson joy’” (MC, 7), begins to establish his non-normative sexuality. But although the phrase from Blake’s poem “The Sick Rose” has sinister sexual connotations, the implicit author takes a sympathetic attitude toward the sexual impotence indicated by Dud’s choice of name.69 Dud’s dead wife, with whom he did not consummate his marriage, is perhaps inevitably referred to with the poetical phrase “his unravished bride” (MC, 12), a literalization of the metaphor representing Keats’s Grecian urn. Other references to Keats are more self-conscious on Dud’s part. Setting out to rescue Wizzie from the circus, Dud feels “like a haggard knight-at-arms … on the verge of his great adventure” (MC, 44). Here the allusion to “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” seems to undermine the quest from the outset, since the “haggard” knight in Keats’s ballad has already met his downfall. With less implicit judgment from the narrator, Dud responds to “the clatter of human feet” by “recalling the famous passages in Keats about this sound,” and he even fancifully refers to the routes taken through Dorchester by the “London Road traffic” as “‘the winding mossy ways’” (MC, 92) of “Ode to a Nightingale.” Further on in the novel, again suggesting detachment from immediate sensation, Dud’s feelings of sexual attraction and repulsion are strained through repeated allusions to Lamia, Keats’s 1820 narrative poem in which a strangely appealing snakelike creature is transformed into a woman, only to bring about the death of the young man whom she desires. Threatened by the bisexual allure of the startlingly thin Thuella, Dud routinely sees her as “the Lamia of Keats’s poem” (MC, 127), especially when she makes advances to Wizzie. Here the novel seems more critical of Dud’s misogyny. During an ambiguous sexual encounter between Thuella and Dud on the edge of a “Scummy Pond,” her “green-and-gold Lamia’s skin” is displaced by the “green slime” and “green weed” to which Dud pays attention, an oblique comment on Dud’s priorities (MC, 203, 194, 203). Soon afterward, By contrast, Wizzie’s “body” at one point disturbingly gives voice to an unfavorable contrast between Dud’s lack of manliness and the virility of “Old Funky,” the grotesque circus owner who raped her and fathered her child, Lovie (MC, 290). Cf. H. W. Fawkner’s insight that “it is possible to briefly intuit a positive connotation of the name ‘No-man,’ ” given the novel’s de-centering of the human (John Cowper Powys and the Elements: A Phenomenological Study of Maiden Castle [Mappowder: The Powys Press, 2015], 104, Fawkner’s italics). 69

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Dud’s “meditations” on Thuella, whom he thinks of homophobically as “a sickness of Nature,” are “‘heavy as frost, and deep almost as life’” (MC, 205), a quotation from Wordsworth’s “Ode” that expresses the souldestroying force of “custom” (PW, l. 130). Momentarily, the narrator seems to sanction Dud’s selective appreciation of “Nature,” if only through the power of Wordsworth’s phrasing. H. W. Fawkner, interpreting the novel’s references to flowers, pursues an anti-transcendental argument that flies in the face of Powys’s later emphasis on the connection between Dud’s responsiveness to nature and his local version of the generational sublime.70 Fawkner does, however, suggest convincingly that sensation in the novel is all the more powerful for being channeled through (Romantic) literary texts. He discusses a passage in which Dud is thrilled by the sight of “the first celandine!” (MC, 117), linking the novel’s mention of this particular flower to Wordsworth’s three poems “To the Small Celandine,” “To the Same Flower,” and “The Small Celandine.” The novel does not directly allude to these three poems, but it is plausible that the references to the flower are inspired by them, given a line by Llewelyn Powys in the book that he co-authored with John Cowper: “I began to feel … a thrill at the sight of the first celandine (for no other reason than that old Wordsworth had delighted in it)” (CTB, 188).71 Llewelyn’s reminiscence clearly acknowledges the literary underpinnings of sensation. The novel captures a similarly layered reaction to the flower: “Even from where [Dud] stood hovering above it, its yellowness was visible through the pale green calyx; and the word ‘aguish’, as applied by the magical poet to the damp chill of water-ditches, rushed through his brain with a delicious pang” (MC, 118). Keats is “the magical poet,” not Wordsworth. The reference is presumably to Keats’s phrase “chill aguish gloom” from Endymion (3: 675), or to the line “daisies on the aguish hills” from his unfinished poem “The Eve of St Mark” (l. 12).72

Fawkner, John Cowper Powys and the Elements, 93–5. While writing Maiden Castle, John Cowper noted that Playter “did so admire the Celandines” (DY, 177). Powys himself wrote a six-stanza poem called “The Celandine,” published posthumously in Horned Poppies: New Poems (North Waltham, Norfolk: Warren House Press, 1986) and notable for its distracting profusion of exclamation points. In his review of Horned Poppies, Keith quotes a stanza from “The Celandine”: “On some Spring evening--I forget / Whence I was journeying / Or whither was my purpose set-- / I came upon this thing” (Review of Horned Poppies, Powys Notes 3, no. 2 [Fall 1987]: 13). Keith comments, “A Parody of Wordsworth? I wish I thought so” (13). Parody or not, the poem instantiates the mediation of the flower through Romantic poetry. 72 Dud’s “delicious pang” is undercut by the careless reaction of his companion, a “worshipper of wireless stations”: “Aye? What is it? A celandine? There are always a lot of them along here—later, you know—much later” (MC, 121, 118). 70 71

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Continuing to augment Dud’s enjoyment of nature, Keats’s adjective “aguish” is repeated in a passage that elevates the sight of the celandine over the sound of a bird: [W]‌ hat No-man had felt as he caught from that faint celandine the aguish pang of its chilly yellow-green … received an almost too jubilant expression in this bird’s challenging song. He was thrilled by it, but he felt in some obscure manner that the poignancy of that immature yellowgreen bud on the ditch’s edge was, so to say, crowded out and fluted down by this brave artist. (MC, 121) The word choice “caught” suggests Dud’s fortuitous glimpse into the embodied, incipiently “sickly” mood (MC, 121) of the faintly anthropomorphized flower, while the hesitant expressions “almost,” “felt in some obscure manner,” and “so to say” draw attention to a busy mind at work somewhat disconcertingly ranking the impact of the bud and the bird, a contest between sight and sound. Discussing this passage, Fawkner argues that flowers offer what he calls “non-frontal” magic rather than “frontal” pleasure, in contrast with birds, who are “on the side of transcendence”: “Nothing could be further from the cool transcendenceindifferent serenity of the lesser celandine.”73 Behind Powys’s lines (and possibly strengthening Fawkner’s point) lie various Romantic poems about birds—Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” for example, which is alluded to several times in Maiden Castle. But countering Fawkner’s privileging of immanence over transcendence, the passage goes on to explore the way that Dud’s “exacting senses” lead him to assign “pathos” to the “day,” whose “inner nature had to be sought out, divined, guessed at through fragile intimations—possibly, heaven knows, even invented—by a mind that already contained within itself the tenuous image of that faint half-birth” (MC, 121). The glancing allusion to Wordsworth with “intimations” and perhaps even the word choice “half,” along with the doubt about the source of the feeling, serve to detach the reader’s as well as Dud’s “mind” from the visceral sickliness of the Keats adjective “aguish” in preparation for “mystic” experience (MC, 187). The repeated word choice “intimations” acts as a hinge between sensation and the generational sublime. In a key scene of flower-appreciation and introspection, Powys uses glancing allusions to Wordsworth to help deepen what turns out to be Dud’s connection between (mediated) responsiveness to the natural world and his mystical sense of “the stream of life flowing down the ages” (MC, 185). In this scene, the “sight of cuckoo-flowers” opens up “intimations” of “the pathos … of the past”: “He stopped in front

Fawkner, John Cowper Powys and the Elements, 111.

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of several of these flowers; and, … he saw the generation of burgesses and artisans, their lads and their maids, their baby-boys and baby-girls, pause transported with delight in the presence of these lavender-tinted tremulous entitites [sic]” (MC, 185–6). As elsewhere in Powys’s fiction, the “continuity of the centuries” is perceived in an idealized light, here accentuated by the sentimental vocabulary used to refer to the former inhabitants of Dorchester (MC, 185). Dud distinguishes “the cuckoo-flowers” from “less striking wayside plants” that “slip sideways … without any shock of surprise” (MC, 187). The phrase “shock of surprise” recalls the Boy of Winander passage in Book 5 of The Prelude, in which “a gentle shock of mild surprise” carries “far into his heart the voice/Of mountain torrents” (PW, Prelude 5: 382–4). The sublime “shock” arrives in the momentary “silence” when owls cease to respond to the boy’s calls (PW, Prelude 5: 381). Powys takes Wordsworth’s auditory image and turns it into a visual one that slides away from visibility into “the mystic greenness of some spiritual dimension just beyond the normal plant-world!” (MC, 187). The implication is that the cuckoo flowers by contrast with other “wayside plants” are a source of the sublime, avoiding overly “rich colours, too emphatic shapes” that “dam up our escape” into a “reality beyond reality” (MC, 188). Moreover, Maiden Castle’s vision of the natural world allowing access to this transcendent “reality” also involves access to “pure springs where each generation washes away” its “brutality” and “blood” (MC, 188). These scenes involving rapt appreciation of plant life and a “reality beyond reality” precede a scene set in Mai-Dun, an ancient earthwork that Urien associates with the spiritual “powers” (MC, 225) that he believes in. This scene emphatically pits Dud’s belief in the quasi-transcendental continuity of the generations against Urien’s more mythology-based brand of transcendentalism. The scene eventually uses attenuated references to Keats’s poetry to articulate a reprised characterization of the generational sublime that builds upon the notion of washing away historical injustice. First, Dud vehemently argues against his father’s belief in “all this business of spirits and powers” (MC, 225), taking an extreme position of skepticism bound up with filial hostility. Nevertheless, he goes on to assert his belief in “another dimension” and in his “power of becoming a medium for the life of the generations” (MC, 235). As if in reaction to resistance to his father, it is the special wind of Mai-Dun that leads Dud to a new revelation about past generations: A feeling began to take possession of him that he had known before, but never quite as intensely as at this moment, as though all the long generations of men who had listened to this mysterious sound had left behind them some abiding residue of their deepest underthoughts, thoughts full of dark rain-swept vistas, sweet and tender and infinitely sad, and yet with a strange hope in them too, a hope that went drifting down

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mossy alleys and away over primrose-sheltering banks and sedgy streams towards cool dark retreats of the fevered spirit, far from human lives, but gathering up all the mortal pity, purged and muted and transformed, of what it had left behind. (MC, 253–4) This passage draws on language that evokes the dreaminess of Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” borrowing word choices from phrases such as “The weariness, the fever, and the fret,” “tender is the night,” “winding mossy ways,” and “Darkling I listen” (ll. 24, 35, 40, 51). The adjective “sedgy” also evokes the ominously “withered” sedge of “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” (l. 3). Blurring the line between the “alleys,” “banks,” and “streams” of the local setting and poetic images, the diction draws Dud and the reader into the seemingly timeless space of Romantic lyric to reinforce the transcendentalizing of sad and hopeful “thoughts.”74 Here, the fantasy is not just of purging history in general of its “guilt” (MC, 188): Dud aspires to make “this green dimness” heal the “soul” of the locally executed Mary Channing, the subject of the historical novel he is writing (MC, 254). This is “the spiritual illumination of Mai-Dun” (MC, 261). Like Wolf Solent, Maiden Castle concludes with a figurative fall: Dud’s book is turned down by a publisher, and Wizzie and Thuella run away together to America. Picking up on the line from “A Slumber” that Powys frequently alludes to elsewhere, Dud is haunted by “the diffusion of [Wizzie’s] desirability through the earth he walked on, through … the rocks and the stones and the trees” (MC, 475). But, countering the trajectory of loss, the last paragraph of the novel refers to Wordsworth’s “Ode” to emphasize once again that Dud’s nature-worship feeds into the power of the generational sublime. At the end of the book, Dud entertains more measured thoughts toward his father, who has died after putting his beliefs in writing: “He could not live, as this dead man had done, in a wild search for the life behind life. One life at a time! But neither would he close one single cranny or crevice of his mind to the intimations of immortality that in this place and at this hour were so thick about him” (MC, 483–4). For Dud, the “intimations of immortality” do not refer to the “God” and “Heaven” (PW, ll. 65–6) of Wordsworth’s poem but to the “overtones of the centuries” evoked particularly by local plants, local weather patterns, and the setting of Dorchester. It is hard to know how much weight to give Dud’s eventual loss of Wizzie—and Thuella—since he vows to “hold fiercely to all those sensations of his!” (MC, 483). The penultimate sentence of the novel has a tone of dogged Later in the novel, just as she is used to debunk Dud’s enjoyment of his sensations, Wizzie voices a point of view that undercuts such reliance on voices from the past: “They’re all the same, these men! They can’t take things as they are. They have to link them up with what other men have done and said and fussed about in the olden days. I’m getting sick of it” (MC, 362–3). 74

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determination: “And he dug his stick into the earth, with his eyes on the ground” (MC, 484). Dud has less of a sense of loss than Wolf Solent at the end of the novel since his “life of sensation” (MC, 475), though now dulled, has always had the capacity to point to “something” beyond itself and will presumably continue to do so.

The “continuity of life” in Owen Glendower In Owen Glendower, the generational sublime takes on more explicitly ecological and nationalistic associations. I mentioned in Chapter 2 that Owen, the aspiring Prince of Wales, differs from other Powys-heroes in that his “exteriorizing” of his soul does not take the form of Wordsworthian natureworship. However, in one memorable scene with Romantic resonances, Owen does commune with nature, contemplating the moon, seaweed, and a seabird called a goosander. Poking his head out of a tower at Harlech Castle (a stance that possibly parodies Romantic scenes of spectatorship), Owen falls into “moon-mad fancies,” a state of “moon-intoxication” (OG, 527), phrases that evoke the state of entrancement depicted in Wordsworth’s “Strange Fits of Passion I Have Known,” a lyrical ballad in which the “moonstruck” speaker follows the moon to his lover’s house only to imagine that she might be “dead!” (PW, l. 28). The allusion gives Owen’s “moon-drugged fancy” a sinister edge (OG, 528). Owen’s thoughts then “mingle” with those of a “great somnolent sea-bird” (OG, 528–9). It is tempting to read any description of a large seabird as a rewriting of Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” in which the killing of an albatross sparks a surreal journey of horror. Owen’s communion with the “white night,” rather than being an end in itself, generates a comparable act of hubris in the form of a plan to send the Maid of Edeyrnion, Tegolin Ferch Lowri, into battle in “golden armour,” her “white … skin” and “white limbs” racializing the “whiteness” of the vision (OG 529–30).75 In this novel, immersion in the natural world on the part of an individual can be bound up with political failure and bad faith. Yet at the same time, in this scene, the generational sublime is radically expanded into the consciousness of the “simple goosander” (OG, 528). Contemplating the sight of Owen’s head protruding from the castle, the bird experiences “race-memories of sea-castles and sea-kings of thousands of years ago” (OG, 528). The notion that “sea-castles and sea-kings” go

Cf. Duncan, who sees Owen’s soul-projection in the goosander chapter as entangled with his “series of grievous compromises”: “The Harlech night sets the scene for an overdetermined romantic sublime, but the full moon hollows itself out to represent the purely negative trajectory of the mythology of escape” (“Mythology of Escape,” 63–4). 75

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back “thousands of years” adds to the illusion of an immemorial continuity encompassing (hierarchical) civilization and living things. The suggestion that the anthropomorphized bird consciously follows a “train of thought” is then scaled back in a sentence that reiterates the same idea without asserting it: “[The goosander] didn’t make any attempt to tell himself that the goosanders and mergansers of the early days of the world had seen just such persons, staring out of stone battlements over moonlit seas; but an indescribable feeling quivered through the roots of his feathers” (OG, 529). The “indescribable” feeling of sublimity is now relocated to the body rather than the mind of the bird, with the continuity stretching back to “the early days of the world.” The generational sublime is soon afterward further expanded with a passing nod to Wordsworth in an emotionally charged scene between three men—Owen’s secretary Rhisiart, Rhisiart’s Lollard friend Walter Brut, and a Franciscan friar known as Mad Huw—in a room at Harlech Castle after a fraught discussion about Owen’s reckless plan. During a silence, the men hear “faint sounds” from outside the “turret window” that coalesce into a mystical feeling: They were casual sounds, drifting sounds, accidental sounds, without order and without cohesion. But they were the music of life. Some came from fishermen drying their nets on the rocks, some from seagulls along the walls of the jetty, some from cattle and sheep in the castle meadows, some from horses and hounds in the castle-yard. They were fainter, more volatile, more ethereal than the living things that uttered them. A cock-crow was less and more than any chanticleer, a lamb’s bleat less and more than any actual lamb, a horse’s neigh, or a rook’s caw, or a seaman’s whistle, was a voice rising from generations of horses, rooks, and fishermen! Fused together, these isolated sounds evoked a sense of the continuity of life by sea and land, a continuity simple, tranquil, universal, detached from individual hunger or desire or pain or joy. (OG, 561) In this passage, the generational sublime offers a peaceful contrast to the anxieties of the immediate military situation, and it extends to animals and birds (as in the goosander episode), whose utterances, like the human sounds, are both “less and more” than their “actual” selves: less because they are mere wisps of auditory experience, and more because “[f]‌used” together—the word choice gestures to “interfused”—they point to a quasisacred “continuity of life by sea and land.” The latter phrase faintly echoes the often-quoted line from Wordsworth’s “Elegiac Stanzas,” “The light that never was by sea or land.” Powys hints at his Wordsworthian inspiration at this point by immediately mentioning that this “awakening” arouses in Brut a feeling of “obscure homesickness” for “the green banks of the Wye”

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(OG, 561–2)—the South Wales setting of “Tintern Abbey.”76 The overall sentiment is Wordsworthian in abjuring the visual, while it is ecological in its subordination of the power of human perception to its valuing of the nonhuman world. The end of the novel blends the generational sublime with other Wordsworthian registers of sublimity to create what could be seen as “abundant recompense” for the death of Owen Glendower and by extension his failure to preserve Wales for the Welsh. I mentioned in Chapter 2 the realization by Owen’s son Meredith: “To force yourself to enjoy endurance—that was the pleasure of life!” (OG, 766). Right after this consolatory thought, Meredith is “awestruck and spellbound” by the sight of a “magnificently-horned stag” against the sunrise (OG, 767). While the stag is more likely to symbolize Merlin than to allude to Wordsworth’s “Hart-Leap Well” or The White Doe of Rylstone, or even the passage about a stag from Scott’s The Lady of the Lake that Powys cited elsewhere (A, 86), the sight sparks “a random crowd of kindred impressions from the misty shores of memory” (OG, 767). They include a “broken grey wall with a solitary mountain ram nibbling the grass beneath it” (OG, 767), an image evoking the “old stone wall” and “single sheep” from the second spot of time in The Prelude (PW, Prelude 12: 319–20), previously reworked, as we saw, by Powys in his Autobiography. Carrying over to Meredith’s situation, mundane objects in Wordsworth’s scene become charged with visionary significance by temporal proximity to the death of the poet’s father, transmuting “anxiety of hope” into a deepening of the spirit (PW, Prelude 12: 313). Meredith’s assemblage of images also includes the “sight of … Snowdon … above a white sea of undulating fog” (OG, 767). Here Powys once again returns to the climactic episode of transcendence from the end of The Prelude, in which Wordsworth ascends Mount Snowdon in fog and emerges above “a silent sea of hoary mist,” stumbling upon a transcendental “vision” (PW, Prelude 14: 42, 64). In Powys’s rendering, the location of transcendent experience is reduced to a far-off sight, one visual image in a list of others that all feed into a nation-based rather than a cosmic sublime. This version of the generational sublime encompasses the land, the Welsh language, and the Welsh “spirit” (OG, 767). Meredith mulls over the power of the images that he recalls, finding them “much more than … a mountain’s summit above the mist”—the “visions of thousands of generations of men living in these hills. … Something stores them up; a spirit that is more than just ourselves” (OG, 768). Given the quasi-transcendental context, the noun “Something,” as in earlier novels, may gesture to “something far more Shakespeare’s version of Owen Glendower prides himself on repelling Henry IV from “the banks of Wye” in Henry IV Part 1 (3.1. 66). Lock, in “Owen Glendower and the Dashing of Expectations,” The Powys Journal 15 (2005): 66–86, discusses how Powys’s novel plays with layers of anachronistic allusion. 76

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deeply interfused.” Powys uses Wordsworth again to advance his theory of race-memories, here anchored to the history of a specific people across a vast span of time.

Resisting and Reconceiving Wordsworthian Sublimity In his later nonfiction texts, Powys returned to Wordsworth to distance himself from the transcendental associations of “something far more deeply interfused.” In The Art of Growing Old, he invokes “Tintern Abbey” to prioritize the “aching joys” and “dizzy raptures” of the poet’s youthful “passion” for nature over the supposedly compensatory “sense sublime” of a “metaphysical ‘presence’” that lends a more “disturbing” joy (AGO, 70). Throwing out sublimity, he also rejects the association between “purest thoughts” and “moral being.” He adds, “What might roughly be called ‘The Sacrament of the Elements’ as I am endeavouring to indicate it here, is totally different from Wordsworth’s religious mysticism” (AGO, 70). Yet somewhat surprisingly, he claims that his non-Wordsworthian “Sacrament” can still lead to “beatific vision” (AGO, 70). Re-addressing—with much use of Wordsworth—his late turn to an anti-transcendental stance in his Obstinate Cymric essay on his updated philosophy, Powys more decisively sets aside the power of the sublime. In this essay, quoting once again from “Tintern Abbey,” Powys begs his “reader” to analyze carefully the difference between the feeling stirred in us by such lines as: ‘wherein the burden of the mystery, wherein the heavy and the weary weight of all this unintelligable [sic] world,’ with the uneasy sense of discomfort we experience when the poet declares he has felt a ‘presence that disturbs him with the joy of elevated thoughts,’ for you will, I feel sure agree with me that there is a mystery ‘in the light of setting suns’ that needs no Something ‘dwelling’ in it to rouse our awe and wonder or to enhance the exquisite enjoyment with which we ‘diffuse’ ourselves into it. (OC, 164–5)77 Here Powys contrasts the powerful “feeling” evoked by Wordsworth’s lines about the worldly “burden of the mystery” with what he alleges to be “the uneasy sense of discomfort” provoked by Wordsworth’s lines about a transcendental “presence” and “Something.” Powys says he is “sure” that his readers will agree that nature—which he represents with Wordsworth’s My quotation does not reproduce Powys’s inconsistent use of single and double quotation marks. 77

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general phrase “the light of setting suns”—does not need to be supplemented by additional “mystery.” Yet, as we have seen, earlier in his career he had frequently relished the sublimity expressed by Wordsworth’s line “something far more deeply interfused.” Here, he replaces “interfused,” a word that underlines the connectedness of nature and “Beyond-Nature,” with “‘diffuse’ ourselves”—which implies that human observers can spread themselves into the “mystery” of nature without perceiving it as transcendental.78 On a later occasion when he privately invoked the “something” line, Powys recaptured the transcendentalism of “Tintern Abbey” while confirming that for him it evades any traditionally religious understanding of transcendence. In the same passage, he brought up its environmental implications. In 1955, he told Ichiro Hara, I think that Wordsworth in ‘Tintern Abbey’ where he talks of a something far more deeply interfused – a motion and a spirit that impels all thinking things all objects of all thought and rolls thro’ all things – has got beyond the Christian God beyond God the Creator – beyond all that the Theologians teach. I think he is feeling the Mystery that no science can possibly explain though it may split the atom & blow us all sky-high and destroy the Earth who is our Mother. (LIH, 46) Powys quotes as prose the lines from “Tintern Abbey” that depict, with typical Wordsworthian vagueness, the location and scope of the transcendental “Something.” By omitting the poet’s punctuation and line-breaks, he rushes through the lines as if taking their content for granted. According to him, Wordsworth’s “something” is not just “beyond the Christian God”; it is “beyond” any form of divinity. Whereas for Wordsworth the sublime mood alleviates the “burthen of the mystery” (PW, l. 39), Powys sees the Wordsworthian sublime as a connection with a “Mystery” inaccessible to “science.” Writing in the Atomic Age, Powys is aware of the threat to planet Earth posed by advances in technology—a recognition that once again marks his historical distance from Wordsworth. But the implication is that Wordsworth’s “something” will outlive human perception, a transcendental form of ecological consolation.

Cf. another late statement by Powys on how his “ideas have changed – I hope for the better & truer!”: “I am ready to believe that my dislike of the whole conception of the Absolute is the result of being so enamoured, as painters are, with – with the colours and forms of the visible world that [I]‌lose myself and forget myself in my enjoyment of them & don’t want anything else than what they are to exist!!” (LIH, 28, 36). In the Preface to Homer and the Aether (London: Macdonald, 1959), his retelling of the Iliad, Powys quotes the passage beginning “something far more deeply interfused” but sets aside such “exalted emotions,” although the story’s narrator, the Aether, sheds a Wordsworthian transcendental “light such as never before was beheld on land or ocean” (15, 296). 78

5 “Cloud on cloud”: Reworking the Keatsian Supernatural I turn now to Powys’s use of the poetry of John Keats to authorize what Powys calls a “bold return to the magical view of life” (A, 626). In its context in Powys’s Autobiography, this phrase refers to the aspiration to preserve the “free life of the individual soul” regardless of social injustice (A, 626). One direction that that “life” takes in Powys’s work is the freedom to believe in magic. Like W. J. Keith, I distinguish between Powys’s investment in, on the one hand, “other dimensions” (A, 652), which as I have already shown was partly inspired by Wordsworth, and, on the other hand, his embrace of the supernatural, earthly and unearthly, which he tended to pursue via the poetry of Keats.1 Powys relies on Keats’s fragmentary epic Hyperion in particular to expand his ecological vision beyond the parameters of the Wordsworthian imagination, whether the latter is concerned with sense-based nature-worship, human continuities with the inanimate, humanitarian sympathies, or encounters with the sublime. In doing so, even more so than with his use of Wordsworth to insist on the possibility of transcendence, Powys exposes the limitations of present-day eco-critical literary interpretation, which typically focuses on the treatment of real-life nature rather than mythic nature.2 We saw in Chapter 1 that Keats as well as Wordsworth not unexpectedly lies behind Powys’s cult of sense-based nature-worship. But unlike with Wordsworth, for Powys, as for Victorian critics of the younger poet, the alleged “sensuous realism” (PoK, 116) of Keats is bound up with “honey-breathing purlieus of enchantment” (MoC, 51). Powys’s version of nature likewise extends via Keats to “margins of See Keith, Ultimate Things; “JCP and Magic,” la lettre powysienne 26 (Autumn 2013): 2–7; and “JCP and Magic Part 2,” la lettre powysienne 27 (Spring 2014): 2–10. 2 Eco-critical readings of Keats include Alan Bewell, “Keats’s Realm of Flora,” Studies in Romanticism 31 (1992): 71–98; Nicholas Roe, “John Keats’s ‘Green World’: Politics, Nature and the Poems,” in The Challenge of Keats: Bicentenary Essays 1795–1995, ed. Allan C. Christensen et al. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), 61–77; and Peter Henning, “Keats, Ecocriticism, and the Poetics of Place,” Studies in Romanticism 18, no. 3 (2018): 407–27. Henning finds an “ecological materiality” in Keats (418). 1

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romance” in the sense not just of the genre of romance but of the “purlieus” of the supernatural (MoC, 51). In this final chapter, I focus on Powys’s rewriting of Hyperion in his early poem Lucifer and—more ambitiously—in Porius, as well as more tangentially in his fantasy novels Morwyn, Atlantis, and The Brazen Head. Powys revises Hyperion to accommodate a “world of marvels” (A, 66) within his all-encompassing ecological celebration of “Life itself” (At, 192). When revisiting Keats, Powys also meditates on his own belatedness as a Romantic writer and believer in magic. Powys himself was preoccupied with the possibility of possessing “supernatural powers” (A, 64). He told one correspondent that “I am a magician who can turn myself into inanimate objects at will” (LNR, 140) and avowed that his “life-illusion” involved the “desire to play the part of a Magician” (A, 6, 7). As these assertions show, he slid back and forth between claiming literal magicianship and “play[ing] the part.” Elaborating on his supposedly literal magic powers, he saw himself as both a “white magician, insisting that all life is holy” (in an unmarked allusion to Blake) and “a black magician, rejoicing in destruction” (A, 557). His use of the Blake phrase—which also appears in A Glastonbury Romance—suggests that his interest in magic feeds into his appreciation of the sacredness of “all life.” Especially during his four years in upstate New York, he indulged his “obsession” with “white magic,” claiming paranormal abilities capable of alleviating other people’s suffering (A, 630).3 He aligned himself with his friend and fellow novelist Theodore Dreiser as “understanding black magic and the ways of black magicians,” but preferring to “practise white magic” (A, 553). Presumably, he feared to use his supposed capacity for “black magic.”4 On one occasion, he allegedly appeared to Dreiser as an “apparition” in an intentional out-of-body experience, materializing in Dreiser’s residence in Manhattan while himself at home in upstate New York.5 Powys’s nephew Peter Powys Grey claimed that Powys had appeared to him as an “apparition” in a hotel in Corwen, North Wales.6 G. Wilson Knight reportedly received “two psychic messages” from Powys after the novelist’s death.7 Powys’s own persona as a practitioner of magic may have influenced One contemporary commented, “I see John Cowper Powys as a supremely great Magician” (quoted by Dante Thomas, A Bibliography, 172). In 1934, Llewelyn Powys, in failing health, wanted John Cowper to live near him, on the grounds that “with such a witch doctor abroad on the downs no great misfortune can come near me” (quoted in DY, 61). 4 Powys’s letters to Louis Wilkinson contain multiple references to the celebrated occultist Aleister Crowley, whom Powys claimed to “fear” (LLW, 286). 5 Knight, Saturnian Quest, 128. W. J. Keith draws attention to an account of the incident by Dreiser himself (“JCP’s ‘Apparition’: Theodore Dreiser’s Version,” PSNL 63 (March 2008): 43–4). 6 John Batten, “No Tea! No Tea! A Memory of Peter Powys Grey,” PSNL 21 (April 1994): 21. 7 Knight, Neglected Powers, 164, n. 1. An article from Psychic News about the first one is reprinted in Powys to Knight: The Letters of John Cowper Powys to G. R. Wilson Knight, ed. Robert Blackmore (London: Cecil Woolf, 1983), 133–6. 3

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his decision to include supernatural entities and paranormal occurrences in some of his fiction, a decision that involves choosing to write in the genre of prose romance rather than realist fiction, not only in A Glastonbury Romance but also in Porius and the later works of fiction discussed in this chapter. In the fantastical novellas that he wrote near the end of his career, Up and Out (1957) and All or Nothing (1960), as well as in some posthumously published fantasies, he gave free rein to his interest in the supernatural, which in those late texts shades into Space Age science fiction. Several of Powys’s critics have discussed how his self-identification as a magician and his pursuit of a “Magical Quest” (A, 67) were bound up with his interest in the myth of Saturn, the Titan god whose fall from power is associated with the loss of a so-called Golden Age in the prehistoric past. In his early verse autobiography, Powys invoked a “Muse … who didst impassive see/The fall of Saturn.”8 Powys’s later “Muse” is less “impassive.” Powys told Louis Wilkinson, “I am, in Homer & Hesiod and Keats, a great devotee of Saturn or Kronos” (LLW, 319). Wilson Knight’s 1964 study of Powys, The Saturnian Quest, uses Powys’s re-imagining of the myth as a framework for understanding the novelist’s entire oeuvre. Timothy Hyman first suggested that Powys’s depiction of Myrddin Wyllt in Porius as Cronos/Saturn can be seen as a replaying of Keats’s depiction of the fallen Titan Saturn.9 David Goodway agrees that Powys’s “preoccupation with Saturn is almost certainly derived from [his] youthful obsession with Keats.”10 Insofar as the magician-figures in Powys’s novels—such as Johnny Geard in A Glastonbury Romance and Urien Quirm in Maiden Castle, along with Owen Glendower—are forerunners of Myrddin Wyllt of Porius, as Morine Krissdóttir suggests,11 these characters can all be seen as recastings of Keats’s Saturn. I will show that Powys reworks Quoted from the transcription held in the Powys Collection, University of Exeter. Hyman, “Porius: ‘Tired Thoughts Like Stones,’” Powys Notes 10, no. 1 (Fall and Winter 1995): 7–8. On Powys’s “Saturnian” vision, see also Hyman, “Modus Vivendi,” 142. 10 Goodway, Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow, 172. Goodway, however, contends that since Keats does not describe the Golden Age, Powys’s source for the idea of a Golden Age is Hesiod (172). As Keith demonstrates, Powys draws on Hesiod in elaborating on the myth (“John Cowper Powys: Porius: A Reader’s Companion (2009),” 16. Available online: https://powyssoci​ety.org/1PDF/Keith-Por​ius-comp.pdf [accessed December 15, 2023]). In 1933, Powys told his brother Littleton, “I am … reading with more delight than almost (no! perhaps without any exceptions) any book, Hesiod’s Theogony” (John Cowper Powys to Littleton Powys, August 4, 1933, Powys Collection, University of Exeter). Humfrey stresses Powys’s debt to Homer’s Iliad (EJCP, 31). Paul Cheshire has traced Powys’s treatment of the figure of Cronos from Wolf Solent to Porius, with attention to his Hesiodic sources. As Cheshire points out, in admiring Cronos, Powys defies Hesiod’s account of the myth (“Powys’ Cronos: Punishment, Rebellion and the Golden Age,” 83). I suggest that since Powys sometimes cites the phrase “ ‘arrowy odours’ ” from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s 1821 love poem Epipsychidion (VR, 170), he may have also been influenced by Shelley’s lines in that poem about an era associated with the Titans “ere crime/Had been invented” (ll. 488–9). Quotations from Shelley’s poetry are from Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald Reiman and Neil Fraistat (New York: Norton, 2002). 11 Krissdóttir, John Cowper Powys and the Magical Quest, 178. 8 9

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Hyperion at the level of plot to offer explicit ecological messages about the value of earthly life in Lucifer and Morwyn, and the renewal of cosmic life in Porius and several later texts. On a more fundamental level, he uses Keats to help extend “nature-as-construct” not into other ontological “dimensions” as with Wordsworth but into enchanted “vistas” where there is no dividing line between natural and supernatural. Keats’s fragmentary epic poem Hyperion, published in 1820, revises the subject matter of Homeric epic by focusing on the overthrow of the Titans and their leader Saturn by the Olympian gods (as recounted originally in Hesiod’s Theogony; Keats also relied on classical dictionaries). As is well known, the poem is also a pagan rewriting of Milton’s 1667 Christian epic Paradise Lost in which the defeated Saturn and his fellow Titans stand in for Milton’s ousted Satan and his followers. Geoffrey Hartman notes, “Hyperion is a strange epic in that it deals only with gods, rather than with gods and men.”12 Like Paradise Lost, the poem begins in medias res, describing the desolate Saturn and his attempt to rouse the other deposed Titans, just as Milton’s epic begins with an account of Satan in hell with the other fallen angels after the war in heaven. Hyperion was apparently intended to narrate the fall of the Titan sun god (who remains undeposed in the fragment as it stands) and celebrate the Olympian new order, but the poem breaks off in its third book after perfunctorily introducing Apollo, the new god of poetry.13 Keats later recast the epic as a dream vision, The Fall of Hyperion, creating a self-reflexive frame for the story told in Hyperion, but he also left this version incomplete.14 In an often-quoted letter, Keats told John Hamilton Reynolds that he had abandoned his attempt to rethink the poem because in it he had adopted an alien “Miltonic” voice (JKL, 2: 167). But he may also have abandoned the poem because of its ambivalent politics; the poem arguably sympathizes with the old order or ancien regime Hartman, “Spectral Symbolism and Authorial Self in Keats’s Hyperion,” in The Fate of Reading and Other Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 60. 13 Keats’s friend Richard Woodhouse claimed that the poem “would have treated the dethronement of Hyperion, the former god of the Sun, by Apollo—and incidentally of those of Oceanus by Neptune, of Saturn by Jupiter, etc., and of the war of the Giants for Saturn’s re-establishment— with other events, of which we have but very dark hints in the mythological poets of Greece and Rome” (quoted in Walter Jackson Bate, John Keats (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1963), 405). In Book 2 of Hyperion, the Titan Enceladus imagines “that second war” between the Giants and the Olympian gods (2: 70). A comment by Keats in a letter to Benjamin Haydon implies that he had intended to make Apollo the hero of his epic poem: “the march of passion and endeavour will be undeviating … the Apollo in Hyperion being a fore-seeing God will shape his actions like one” (JKL, 1: 207). 14 Hyman suggests a connection between Porius and The Fall of Hyperion rather than Hyperion, implying that The Fall’s ambivalence toward dreamer-poets influenced Powys’s self-reflexive commentary on the efficacy of writing (“ ‘Tired Thoughts Like Stones,’” 7–8). In “Remembering Wilson Knight,” The Powys Journal 25 (2015): 213, Hyman again stresses the influence of The Fall of Hyperion on Powys. 12

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(the Titans) and depicts the Olympians as unauthorized usurpers, to such an extent that its narrative of progress runs aground.15 Keats’s Romantic Satanism—his implicit acknowledgment of the charisma of Milton’s Satan via his respectful attitude to Saturn—leaves him with no path forward. Alternatively, in Hyperion, it is as if Milton’s God and his loyal angels had unjustly lost the war in heaven and been cast out, leaving Satan and his supporters in charge: in this reading, Saturn lines up with the Christian God rather than with Satan. Either way, Keats seems to side more with the Titans than with the Olympians. Powys’s revisions of the plot of Hyperion clarify its outcome, with selfevident environmental implications. In his book on Keats, Powys accepts the supposedly progressivist message of Hyperion, exclaiming, “Nor shall the Olympians be the last!” (PoK, 92). However, there and elsewhere, Powys follows Keats in looking backward to “old Saturn under his weight of grief” (VR, 190) rather than celebrating the Olympians. Like Keats, he downplays the violence associated with Cronos/Saturn in the original myth, specifically his castration of his father Uranus and his “devouring of his own children” (Mor, 215), neither act being mentioned by Keats. In Hesiod, Cronos overthrows Uranus so that the Titans can rule in his stead. Later, Cronos eats his own children to prevent them from ousting him and his fellow Titans, until he is thwarted by his wife’s substitution of a stone for his son Zeus. Zeus goes on to imprison the Titans in Tartarus. Keats’s version of Saturn’s father, whom he names Coelus rather than Uranus, is a mere “voice” who sympathizes with the as-yet-unfallen Hyperion (1: 340). Powys does mention the acts of violence and the swallowing of the stone but treats Saturn’s rebellion against Uranus in positive terms and Jupiter’s rebellion against Saturn in negative terms. Like the Titan Prometheus celebrated by Shelley and Byron, Saturn for him is a true hero. In a number of texts, Powys continues the story told in Hyperion by foreseeing the eventual return to power of Cronos/Saturn and the restoration of a Golden Age free from crime and hierarchy (projected to occur after the end of Christianity).16 This On the divided loyalties of the poem, see, for example, Bate, John Keats, 397–8; Paul Sherwin, “Dying Into Life: Keats’s Struggle with Milton in Hyperion,” in John Keats, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1985), 127–46; Alan Bewell, “The Political Implication of Keats’s Classicist Aesthetics,” Studies in Romanticism 25, no. 2 (1986): 223; Susan Wolfson, “Epic and Tragedy,” in John Keats in Context, ed. O’Neill, 259–63. Wolfson points out that Keats’s narrative casts the Titans’ fall as the work of fate rather than sin, and does not explain why the Titans have been dethroned (The Questioning Presence: Wordsworth, Keats, and the Interrogative Mode in Romantic Poetry [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986], 266). 16 Aligning Saturn with Lucifer and Christ, Powys’s poem “Saturn” (1917) plays with the possibility of the return of Saturn but retreats from that hope, although it breaks off with a cryptic “And yet” (Mandragora: Poems [New York: G. Arnold Shaw, 1917], 82). Discussing other poems from the same volume, including “The Saturnian” and “Noon” with its reference to a “dethroned” god (Mandragora, 175), Wilson Knight associates Powys’s term “Saturnian” 15

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narrative invites an obvious environmental application in that the freeing of the Titans will supposedly involve the healing of the earth. The recovery of “the legended ‘Saturnian age’ of peace” (EL, 65) is sometimes projected as a future (or even achieved) end point and sometimes envisaged within a cyclic rather than linear view of mythological history. This vision of the future is at odds with the uncertain future projected by Keats’s poem, following the premature apotheosis of Apollo. Hyperion’s questionable speech by Saturn’s fellow Titan Oceanus on history as progress (“first in beauty should be first in might” [2: 229]) is contradicted by Powys’s notion of the return to a prehistorical Golden Age. But for all Powys’s exaltation of “the earth-born rebels” (Por, 249), his reworkings of Keats’s supernatural epic come with their own ambivalence. One of Powys’s favorite quotations from Hyperion, “Where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest” (1: 10), referring to the stillness of Saturn’s hiding place at the beginning of the poem, is a line that Keats’s critics have taken to register the poet’s self-conscious reworking of Milton’s “dead” voice.17 When Powys refers to the “dead leaf,” it refers in turn to his distance from Keats’s poetic authority. However, dead leaves also represent the revolutionary force of literary expression, as in Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind.” By attempting to re-embody the dead voice, or “leaf,” of Keats, Powys takes on the rather improbable role of Apollo to Keats’s as-yetunfallen Hyperion, the self-aware modern successor to the Romantic voice of negative capability.18 Yet like Keats, he remains invested in the Titans and—far more so than Keats—the promise of renewal that they represent.19

Lucifer and “Life itself ” Before discussing Powys’s prose reworkings of Hyperion, I will look back to the beginning of Powys’s career to consider how his blank verse poem Lucifer with same-sex desire (Neglected Powers, 213). Powys sent another poem called “Saturn” in a letter to his brother Littleton dated August 2, 1928, that by contrast celebrates the return of the Titan (EJCP, 348–9). Powys’s late semi-autobiographical fragmentary poem “The Ridge,” written a year or so after the publication of Porius, begins by invoking “the passing of Cronos” (l. 1), though it explicitly mentions Hesiod as its source of the myth of the Age of Gold (Review of English Literature 4, no. 1 [1963]: 53–8). 17 See, for example, Marjorie Levinson, “ ‘Hyperion’ and ‘The Fall of Hyperion,’ ” in John Keats, ed. Bloom, 110. 18 Apollo can, however, be seen conversely as the negatively capable successor to the representatives of overly self-conscious poetry, depending on one’s interpretation of the politics of Hyperion. For Barnard, “Apollo … embodies Keats’s notions of the ‘poetical character’ which has ‘no self’, no identity” (The Complete Poems, 635). 19 Cf. Mary Jacobus on how the fragmentary “backward vision” of the Hyperion poems gestures to the future (“Negative Cap-abilities: Keats’s Apollonian Afterlives,” in Romantic Dialogues and Afterlives, ed. Monika Coghen and Anna Paluchowska-Messing [Krakow: Jagiellonian University Press, 2020], 34).

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uses the Keatsian supernatural to advocate—counterintuitively, one might think—the life of the senses. Lucifer is a straightforwardly didactic text in that, at a thematic level, it promotes an overt message promoting “Life itself” (L, 61) in limited, earthly terms. But with its reliance on highly derivative poetic diction, it begins Powys’s reflection on his Romantic inheritance and the ability of sensuous poetic language to help constitute “Life itself.” In Chapter 1, I briefly discussed Powys’s early treatment of Keats as the poet of the senses. When Powys refers to Keats as the “magical poet,” like some Victorian commentators he refers not to Keats’s supernatural themes but to his perceived proto-aestheticism. Echoing the late-Victorian aestheticizing of the poet, in his chapter on Keats in Visions and Revisions, Powys calls him the “poet of … Beauty alone” and the poet of “sensuality” (VR, 183–4). From this point of view, Hyperion is “troubled by a thrilling sorcery that Milton never knew” (VR, 187). Similarly, in Enjoyment of Literature, Powys characterizes Keats as the “supreme” practitioner of “magical poetry,” which he nebulously defines as “poetry in its purest quintessence” (EL, 322–3). In his account, the “natural magic”—a phrase he borrows from Matthew Arnold—of Keats’s “descriptions of nature” blends into the language of the mythopoeic: There is a rich vegetative intricately flowing life-sap in the slow cadences of his music. The evening rains soften his rhymes and his words melt into the dew of the morning. They cease to be words. They become odours and touches and tastes. They become presences felt through the pores of the skin and upon the palate of the mouth. The flowing of his syllables conveys the very life of green-growing things, the hush, the in-held breath, the atmosphere around them, the ineffable bloom upon them, the long patience of their “cool-rooted” vigils. The quivering expectancies of his forest trees, “branch-charmed by the earnest stars,” the “embalmed darkness” of his “verdurous glooms” hold a magic that even Shakespeare cannot invoke. (EL, 242) In this passage, which exemplifies Powys’s mediation of nature through the language of Romantic poetry, the “life of green-growing things” turns out to be of a piece with the life of magical things. The phrase “cool-rooted,” one of Powys’s most often-quoted phrases from Keats, is from the fantastical landscape of “Ode to Psyche” (l. 13). And the line “branch-charmed by the earnest stars”—another of Powys’s favorite Keats quotations—is from Hyperion (1: 74), where it refers to imaginary trees inside an epic simile. Similarly, the “verdurous glooms” of “Ode to a Nightingale” cast shade on that poem’s “faery lands forlorn” (ll. 40, 70).20 For Powys, Keats enacts the Many critics of Keats have commented on the brilliant artifice of his nature-descriptions. See, for example, McDowell, “The Senses and Sensation,” on Keats’s “realistic-mythic sensations, involving the granting of sensory immediacy to imagined scenarios” (191). 20

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“mythological way of apprehending Nature” (MoC, 163). Keats, that is to say, helps Powys to blur the line between natural and supernatural.21 Hence, for Powys, “The Eve of St Agnes” is “sensuously unearthly” (VR, 187). Powys wrote Lucifer in six parts, then called The Death of God, in 1905 at the age of thirty-three, but it was not published until 1956, at which point he supplied a prose Preface (dated 1955), which, like Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Defence of Poetry,” could be seen as a sort of literary manifesto.22 Powys called The Death of God “a monstrous epic poem” and claimed that he had left it unfinished (A, 357–8), although the poem is not monstrously long and it comes across as more finished than Hyperion. The poem is a mythological mishmash that blends the Judeo-Christian tradition and Keats-inspired classical mythology, with Buddhism thrown in. In line with his materialist stance early in his career, in the poem, Powys retells the otherworldly story of Paradise Lost via Hyperion, an epic without human characters, to proclaim the superiority of earthly “Life” (L, 127). This poem thus uses the supernatural to make what amounts to, in this case, a blatant environmentalist statement focused on the material world as opposed to the immaterial world of romance. Powys’s depiction of his hero Satan builds primarily on Milton’s Satan, but insofar as Lucifer is a revision of Keats’s Hyperion, the poem also rewrites Keats’s Saturn in the shape of Satan as a rebel rather than a victim. The poem recounts Satan’s mission to destroy God, giving the devil a slightly cynical personality that owes something to the brooding, melancholy character of the Byronic hero.23 Lucifer also allies itself with the more hedonistic figure of Iacchus/Dionysus, “the supreme/Magician” (L, 55)—another variation on a rebellious Satan/Saturn.24 Powys unambiguously exalts the life of the senses, while his obtrusively derivative poetic language celebrates that life via layers of literary allusion.

Another example is in a letter to Frances Gregg, in which Powys playfully compared her with the figure of the Titan goddess Thea in Hyperion, supplying the associations of her nickname, “Twigs”: “For ‘Twigs’ suggest those mossy recesses in a blue-bell-vista’d-coppice, ‘where meeting hazels darken’, ‘and where the dead leaf fell there did it rest’, and ‘where the Naiad mid her reeds presses her cold finger to her lips’ ” (LFG, 2: 173). Powys dignifies the prosaic noun “Twigs” by conjuring up a hypothetical “coppice” visualized through Keats’s reworking of classical mythology in terms of a quotation from Keats’s “Hymn to Pan” and two quotations from Hyperion. 22 Powys changed the title from The Death of God to Lucifer when correcting the galley proofs, now held in the Powys Collection, University of Exeter. 23 Powys, however, claimed to despise Manfred, the 1817 verse drama in which Byron perfected his self-indulgent persona (Suspended Judgments: Essays on Books and Sensations [New York: G. Arnold Shaw, 1916], 297). 24 In a letter dated May 6, 1933, Powys called Dionysus “the god of ECSTASY of any sort : : [sic] but chiefly that cosmic ecstasy, or half-love & half-worship (of Nature)” (PSE, 83). 21

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In his Preface, Powys claims that the poem was “composed solely, wholly, and exclusively under the influence of Milton and Keats and Tennyson and Matthew Arnold” (L, 12). To these four sources Powys’s friend John Redwood Anderson, in an early review of the poem, added Percy Bysshe Shelley, whose portrayal of Jupiter as a tyrant in Prometheus Unbound clearly lies behind Powys’s hostile portrait of the Judeo-Christian God.25 Expressing a long-held allegiance, in the Preface, Powys distinguishes between religion and science, on the one hand, and poetry, on the other, emphatically taking the side of the latter. The Preface thus builds on Wordsworth’s elevation of poetry over science in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads and Shelley’s rapturous celebration of poetry more broadly defined in “A Defence of Poetry.” Powys further divides poetry into a “mythological” art and a “‘poetical’ … response to life” that extends beyond the arts (L, 14, 16). Powys describes this wider notion of the “‘poetical’” using transcendentalizing diction (“world without end” (L, 14)) at odds with the explicit lesson of his poem. Further, at the end of the Preface, he uses slight misquotations from Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale”—“foam of the perilous sea” and “magic casement”—to characterize this backwardand forward-turning “‘poetical’” outlook (L, 21). These phrases from Keats typify the continuity between the Keatsian language of enchantment and the Keatsian language of sensation—languages with which both Tennyson and Arnold were imbued. Herbert Tucker has argued that for Victorian poets inevitably influenced by Keats, the “irreducibly artificial” idiom of “Keatsian embodiment” became “second Nature.”26 Tucker sees the “disenchanted” Keats as himself reflecting on the illusoriness of this “effect of physical presence,”27 an effect unquestioningly reproduced by some Victorian poets and interrogated by others, including Tennyson and Arnold. Powys’s own late-Victorian poems had embraced the inevitability of their saturation with Keatsian phrasing, but in Lucifer, he raises the specter of disenchantment, though merely at the level of theme rather than at the level of questioning the ability of literary language to instantiate the natural world. Lucifer begins by reworking both Milton’s account of the assembly of fallen angels early in Paradise Lost and Keats’s account of the assembly of fallen Titans in Hyperion. In Lucifer, by contrast, at some later date in “cosmogonic” history (L, 12), God convenes his “legions” (L, 29) for their advice. God, who sports a “Saturnian” beard (L, 27), is unfallen but threatened by the prospect of “Man’s unbelief” (L, 32) if not by Satan’s

Anderson claimed that the poem’s “conscious echoes” of other texts emphasize its originality (“John Cowper Powys’s Lucifer, an Appreciation,” The Dublin Magazine 32, no. 2 [July– September 1957]: 41). Powys noted in his Autobiography, “I myself found my Death of God too conventional”; however, he claimed that despite being “extremely imitative,” the poem was “more original” than his previous “verses” (A, 458, 358–9). 26 Herbert F. Tucker, “Tennyson to Wilde,” in John Keats in Context, ed. O’Neill, 282, 285, 281. 27 Ibid., 282. 25

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“impious revolt” (L, 30). The point of view then switches to that of Satan, “on his dread God-murdering quest” (L, 44). Satan visits in turn the “Earthmother” (L, 43), Pan, Dionysus, and the Buddha in search of the “secret spell” (L, 104) that will defeat his enemy. Dionysus’s gift of a weapon, his “Thyrsus,” makes God shake with “fear” (L, 93), aligning God with the “rebel three” Olympian gods in Hyperion who “quake” (1: 146–7) at the sound of Saturn’s voice. But Dionysus dismisses the plots of Paradise Lost and Hyperion alike in addition to the Bible and the classical mythology of which he is a product when he says he does not care if “Satan may vanquish Jahveh, or Saturn Jove” (L, 80). The poem will sidestep both conflicts to advocate a more human perspective. Toward the end of the poem, an incongruous episode involving human political protesters wielding a “red flag” registers the historical belatedness of Powys’s contribution to the stories of God versus Satan and “grey-haired Saturn” versus “Jove” (L, 149, 84). Powys also signals his modernity through God’s and Satan’s separate acknowledgments that they only exist thanks to human invention (L, 30, 138). Satan himself is a figure of disenchantment, standing firm against “sublime transcendence” (L, 76). Buddha, prophet of a “Beyond-life” (L, 103), does not tell Satan what he wants to hear: Satan dismisses the “Prophet of Nothingness!” (L, 105). The mouthpiece for Powys’s explicit message, Satan proclaims that “Life … is worth all shocks” (L, 127), including the prospect of death, a realization he arrives at without the help of his fellow supernatural entities. The poem concludes—or breaks off—cryptically, with Satan asserting, perhaps with typical Satanic self-delusion, “This is my hour” (L, 156). The final lines zoom out from the poem’s earthly setting to point to the continuation of the universe “o’er the heads of gods and giants” (L, 157).28 By looking past both Christian and classical mythology, the poem thus supplies a sort of meta-ending for Paradise Lost and Hyperion that is a retreat from any supernatural framework—thus canceling out, in the case of Hyperion, the possibility of a return to Saturn’s Golden Age. Along the way, Powys uses Lucifer to reflect on his latter-day attempt to rival the voices of dead poets, Keats in particular. This self-reflexive aspect makes the poem a rewriting of The Fall of Hyperion as well as Hyperion. A digression relatively early on in Satan’s quest foregrounds the theme of the power of art and gestures toward Powys’s self-conscious attempt to outdo Keats—just as Keats attempts to outdo previous epic poets by going back to what Ian Duncan calls the “primal poetic foundation” of the Titans rather than the Olympian gods.29 When Satan comes across Pan, playing “stranger music” as he approaches, he listens impatiently at first but then responds

W. J. Keith sees the ending as implying a “cosmic but possibly post-human world” (“More about Lucifer,” PSNL 70 [July 2010]: 38). 29 Duncan, “The Art of Sinking,” Powys Notes 10, no. 1 (Fall and Winter 1995): 9. 28

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with “charmed wonder” and “[r]‌apt vision” (L, 60). As a poet-figure, Pan could stand for Keats as the supreme poet of “[s]trange forms!” (L, 96), but he could also stand for the audacious figure of Powys as the poet of supreme derivativeness. The choice of the character of Pan for this role recalls Keats’s “Hymn to Pan,” which addresses this mythological character with a mixture of sense-based and etherealizing diction. Powys’s description of Pan’s art looks past Keatsian epic by imagining a music superior to that of Apollo, the ostensible deity of Hyperion’s dimly imagined future: Not bright Apollo’s self, when all the gods Through Heaven’s clear ether leant, and left their cups Unlifted, and their golden wine undrunk, Such tranced depths of thrilling music plumbed, Such miracles of sound, grief drowning joy, Joy grief, and beyond both a depth more rare Revealing, such a depth that Life itself Stopped breathless, breathing it, and clasping Death Sank through the perilous sea-floor of the world. (L, 60–1) These lines fancifully imagine a personified “Life itself” embracing “Death” and presumably disappearing, even though “Life itself” is what the poem upholds. The passage does stress the beauty of “Apollo’s … Lyre” as if momentarily to retract its attempted superseding of Keats, but then once again elevates the “Earth-God” Pan above the Olympian god of poetry: But nearer to the Earth than triumph or love, Yea, nearer to the Earth than glory or pride, The liquid sobbing of the Arcadian reed Things unrevealed even to Apollo’s self To the fern-coverts whispered, and told the trees Secrets that older were than any Gods. (L, 61) The line “Things unrevealed even to Apollo’s self” rewords Milton’s epic boast, “Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme,”30 as if Powys’s boast in turn moves past Paradise Lost as well as Hyperion with their focus on “Gods.” Of course, Powys’s own focus on “the Earth” and “Life alone” (L, 106) takes place by way of the voices of other poets who deal with “Gods.” Satan’s entrancement by Pan’s music is described in physical terms, “through his blood” (L, 62), further humanizing Milton’s Satan and Keats’s Saturn. Right afterward, Pan is referred to as “enraptured” by “his own Quoted from John Milton, Paradise Lost, 1: 16, in Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957). 30

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notes” (L, 62), as if to acknowledge the self-reflexiveness of Powys’s poem. Earlier, in the Earth-Mother’s forest hideout, based on the forest-lair of Saturn in Hyperion, Powys plays with the fantasy of a purely natural art, “shade and sun” creating “cirque-checkered fretwork” on the “scales” of “spotted snakes” (L, 43).31 Lucifer is as far as possible from such art, but resembles a Keats poem most in creating the illusion that it wrote itself, paradoxically making Keats’s highly self-conscious inheritor another poet with, as Keats famously put it in a letter, “no Identity … no self” (JKL, 1: 387). In this poem, poetry, and especially Romantic poetry, rather than nature, is emphatically the ground as well as the construct of an earthly version of “Life itself.”

Hyperion in Morwyn Morwyn, or the Vengeance of God, Powys’s 1937 “anti-vivisectionist romance,” as he called it,32 alludes to both the language and plot of Hyperion, using Keats again to reinforce its heavy-handed elevation of a “magical view of life” (EL, 51) over the scientific view (skirting around the inconvenient truth that science too belongs to “life itself” [Mor, 261]). In this fanciful novel, Powys’s first-person narrator (his first until Up and Out), an unnamed retired army captain—perhaps the least captivating Powys-hero— journeys through an unconventional underworld accompanied by his young female love-object Morwyn and his dog (based on Powys’s own canine companion). There they encounter the shades of sundry depraved historical figures. In this netherworld quite far removed from those of Dante, Milton, and Keats, the ghosts of the damned enjoy themselves by watching scenes of animal torture on television screens. Implicitly correcting Keats, Powys tweaks the backward-looking supernatural vision of Hyperion in order to offer glimmers of hope among the gloom. While in passing it harnesses the language of Keats to alleviate the horrors of hell, at the level of plot the novel takes its Keats-authorized Titan myth off in a more Shelleyan direction, in a different way from the later Porius. Both texts follow the Romantic poets back to the story of the Titans to look forward to a better future, not very convincingly in the case of Morwyn. First, in a descent to a hell beneath hell, “the heart of the universe,” a visit to the “Sleeping-Place of Saturn” hints at the eventual return to a Golden Age on earth, even though—unlike in Hyperion—Saturn and his spouse Rhea do not stir from slumber (Mor, 232, 214). The narrator remarks, “I The image recalls the natural “mosaic” of the island-house in Shelley’s Epipsychidion (l. 308), and the “freckled” snake-woman of Keats’s Lamia (1: 14), whose illusory house is “perhaps” sustained only by “haunting music” (2: 122). 32 Quoted by Cavaliero, Novelist, 103. 31

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was so unacquainted with ancient mythology that the name ‘Saturn’ brought little to my mind but the notion of a savage divinity who was accused of devouring his own children” (Mor, 214–15). The implication is that the captain’s “notion” is limited and needs to be enlarged. His term “accused” hints at Powys’s sympathetic attitude to Saturn. Despite the narrator’s allegedly limited knowledge of the fallen Titan, he soon afterward describes the “sleeping-place of Saturn” using, in mid-sentence, the euphonious second and third lines of Hyperion: Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn, Far from the fiery noon and eve’s one star[.]‌(Mor, 229) The (accurate) quotation, indented with its line-breaks preserved, draws attention to the Keatsian origin of this particular version of Saturn. The lines offer a “healthy breath” of solemn poetry in the middle of a comically chaotic scene involving, in the same sentence as the quotation, an “echoing hullabaloo from the throat” of the narrator’s “little black spaniel” (Mor, 229). Further characterizing the “mystery” of the sleeping gods, the narrator borrows the phrase “cloud on cloud” (1: 7), misquoted as “cloud upon cloud” (Mor, 232), from Hyperion without signaling the quotation, as if the grounding in Keats’s poem is automatic. While, unlike in Lucifer, in this text Powys does not reflect on his borrowings from Keats, the promise of a renewed Golden Age claims validity through these echoes of Hyperion, even though Keats’s poem makes no such promise. Further on in the same section of the novel, Powys continues to draw on Keats’s language to add weight to his depiction of the supernatural, while departing again from Keats’s rendering of the Titans-versus-Olympians myth in order to promote “life itself.” Our protagonists encounter Tityos, son of Zeus and the Earth-Mother Gaia, here characterized as a full-fledged Titan. Tityos, like the rebellious Titan Prometheus, is tortured by vultures feeding daily on his liver, but since this is a punishment for rape and murder, he lacks the nobility of Prometheus, especially as characterized by Shelley in Prometheus Unbound.33 Powys imports the character of Tityos from Homer’s Odyssey and, in associating him with Keats’s Hyperion (which does not mention him), changes the outcome of his story for polemical purposes. In Homer, Tityos is unredeemed. Powys’s narrator again quotes from Hyperion in describing the “face” of Tityos, saying that it “was, as the poet says of another of the same primeval brood, ‘large as that of Memphian sphinx, pedestalled haply in a palace-court, when sages looked to Egypt for their lore’” (Mor, 255). Without needing to name “the poet,” and invoking the same passage from early in Keats’s poem, he also refers to Tityos as On Tityos as a “Promethean figure,” see Darrell Emmel, “Morwyn: The Harrowing of Hell,” The Powys Newsletter 5 (1977–8): 14. Emmel argues that Morwyn paves the way to Porius. 33

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a “huge offspring ‘of the infant world’” (Mor, 255). The first of these quotations glamorizes the “gigantic Figure” with Keats’s image of Egyptian antiquities, a jolt of poetic energy even though verse is turned into prose (Mor, 255). The second, more throwaway shorter quotation, a metaphor rather than a comparison, gives Keats’s Titans and this supposed Titan “of the infant world” the same ontological status—equally fictional and equally real. It is as if Powys inserts Tityos’s story, which for him will prove one of “redemption,” into the unfinished Hyperion as another way of indicating how the fragmentary poem should conclude (Mor, 271). The rest of the novel revises Keats at the level of plot. In Powys’s text, Tityos stands trial, although his accuser, Jove/Jehovah cannot appear because he is “half-created” (in Wordsworthian terminology) by “the minds of men” (Mor, 257–8). Morwyn firmly allies itself with this “poor half-witted Titan” on the side of “life” over against a tyrannical Olympian/Judeo-Christian God allied with both “[b]‌loody religion and bloody science” (Mor, 250, 261, 320). The inclusion of the mythological judge Rhadamanthus, a figure of wisdom, offers another twist on Keats’s version of the Titan myth. The release of the “vivisected Titan” from his punishment is a sign that the “System-of-Things” (Mor, 269)—a force above mere “false gods” (Mor, 320)—is tending toward good in the long run: it is “a hint, a glimpse, a wavering intimation … of a redemption for all souls, souls human, sub-human, super-human, to whom the earth in her huge fecundity had given birth!” (Mor, 271). The novel as a whole does not end on quite such an optimistic note, but at this point in the narrative Powys has presented what amounts to a Keatsian rewriting of Shelley’s liberated Titan, Prometheus. The thoroughly supernatural “Tear of Tityos” is, we are asked to believe, “the only material proof” (Mor, 291) that the “System-of-Things” will restore “the Golden Age” (Mor, 321). Perhaps not even the words of Keats can lend credence to the claims of this offputtingly didactic novel, but in Porius we find a more compelling and triumphant rewriting of Hyperion.

Porius as a Completion of Hyperion I return now to Porius, Powys’s most sustained revision of Keats’s Hyperion. My reading of Porius in Chapter 2 focused on the way it combines a reworking of the psychological story told in The Prelude with a Wordsworthian recognition of the leveling of animate and inanimate things. My analysis took some account of the major supernatural characters of the romance, Myrddin Wyllt and the Cewri, the latter having no Keatsian counterpart, although Creiddylad’s father is referred to as a “savage old Titan” (Por, 477) and the giantess herself presses her finger to her lips (Por, 479) like the “Naiad” in Hyperion (1: 13). With its depiction of Myrddin Wyllt as Saturn/

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Cronos, Porius—which Humfrey calls “the Saturn book”34—moves past its re-imagining of Wordsworth to attempt to finish the story told in Keats.35 Powys was originally asked by Norman Denny, a reader for a prospective publisher, to omit certain supernatural aspects of the novel—the Cewri in particular—but he protested vehemently against removing them.36 Denny did not suggest the excision of Myrddin Wyllt, perhaps because Merlin is a more established “mythic Person,” as Powys referred to him.37 Moreover, Myrddin Wyllt’s supernatural identity is initially ambiguous. The chapter entitled “Myrddin Wyllt,” partly written from the prophet’s point of view, goes beyond Keats in giving this Saturn figure a fuller prehistory, memory, and interiority. It also explores the prophet’s own uncertainty about whether he is or is not really a reincarnation of “Cronos the Supreme Mystery” (Por, 62). However, in the book’s final chapter “Chronos,”38 the freeing of Myrddin (already discussed in my second chapter) does affirm the future restoration of Cronos/Saturn, making Powys’s masterpiece his most decisive completion of Hyperion. Although Powys does not allude directly to Shelley, it is as if he turns Hyperion into Prometheus Unbound.39 While, as mentioned earlier, the restoration of the mythic Golden Age has environmental significance in the sense of healing the earth, Powys’s rewriting of Hyperion in Porius elevates that healing to a more otherworldly level akin to the cosmic revolution at the end of Shelley’s lyrical drama. It is also as if, like Keats himself, he turns Hyperion into The Fall of Hyperion—epic into romance.40 On a more existential level, the book fosters an acceptance of the supernatural such that the reader, like the hero Porius, “moves without surprise,” in Humfrey’s phrase, as if in a dream.41

Humfrey, “Introduction,” in EJCP, 26. In Morwyn, Merlin and the sleeping Saturn are separate characters. 36 Their exchange of letters can be found in Michael Ballin, “ ‘A Certain Combination of Realism and Magic’: Notes on the Publishing History of Porius,” Powys Notes 7, no. 2 (Fall and Winter 1992): 11–37. McGann discusses the exchange at some length, seeing the death of the Cewri as symbolizing the dying out of the romance genre (Scholar’s Art, 176–8 and 185–6). He does not address the role of Myrddin Wyllt, but he sees Porius as written to “realize the reality of the marvelous” even in imagining the impossibility of the marvelous (189). For McGann, Powys’s fictions go beyond “a Coleridgean willing suspension of disbelief” to “break the spell of their own fictionality” (186). 37 “The Characters of the Book,” 17. 38 The title of the chapter is spelled “Cronos” in the 1951 and 1994 editions. The misspelling in the 2007 edition (if it is that) emphasizes Myrddin Wyllt’s role as the “Saturnian personification of time” (Richard Maxwell, “Time and Chance in Porius,” Powys Notes 4, no. 2 [Fall 1988]: 22). 39 Duncan sees the “rescue of Myrddin Wyllt” as recalling Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, but he does not elaborate upon the parallel (“Sacred Monsters,” 164). 40 On how The Fall of Hyperion turns epic into romance, see, for example, Harold Bloom, “Keats: Romance Revised,” in John Keats, ed. Bloom, 105–26. 41 Humfrey, “Introduction, in EJCP, 43. Within the novel, the Henog, the chronicler who blurs the boundaries between history and myth, gives Porius “the queer sensation of being himself 34 35

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From the outset, Porius interrogates its reliance on the Keatsian source of its supernatural backstory. Its verbal echoes of Keats are mostly to “To Autumn” rather than to Hyperion—an obvious choice given the romance’s autumnal setting. “To Autumn” has been seen as a non-magical poem,42 but the autumnal landscape of Porius blends a “last autumnal choir of small gnats” and “stubble-fields”—allusions to “To Autumn”—with the “forest piled above forest” and “forests upon forests” surrounding Saturn’s lair in Hyperion (Por, 48, 23, 23, 722). The earthly scenery thus carries a tinge of the unearthly. Even a casual reference to a “stir of air” evokes the preternaturally breathless opening of Hyperion (Por, 411). In the chapter entitled “Myrddin Wyllt,” Powys enlarges on Keats’s sympathetic portrayal of the fallen Saturn even as he questions the supernatural status of the prophet who is supposedly Saturn’s reincarnation. The chapter—which Powys called “my best & most important”43—takes place on “Saturday, Saturn’s Day, or the Day of Cronos” (Por, 251), the day that dominates the novel’s action, taking the reader into the mind of Myrddin Wyllt during an early-morning outing with his young follower Neb ap Digon. Myrddin Wyllt has previously denied being a “magician” and disavowed a “belief in magic” (Por, 125). But his power over animals indicates his supernatural abilities. In passing, he also claims responsibility for the transportation of the stones of Stonehenge from Wales to Salisbury Plain (Por, 266), as if magical powers were involved. Although Neb believes that Myrddin Wyllt is indeed Saturn, and that he will bring about “the next Golden Age,” the prophet inwardly questions the boy’s certainty when he thinks, “the whole thing … may be pure imagination” (Por, 260).44 The narrator echoes this ambivalence, referring to him as “this bearded enemy of heavenly despotism—whether his rebellious incarnations reverted back to crooked counselling Cronos or not” (Por, 262). Maintaining that note of hesitation, the succeeding scene elaborates on Keats’s depiction of the fall of the Titans. Myrddin Wyllt slashes at the air with a “great jagged piece of slate-rock” (Por, 263), an image that replays

a person in one of the Henog’s tales” (Por, 501). Porius here momentarily intuits that he is a fictional character in a romance. 42 Geoffrey Hartman sees “To Autumn” as anti-sublime in that it refuses the quest for epiphanic “revelation” (“Poem and Ideology: A Study of Keats’s ‘To Autumn,’ ” in The Fate of Reading, 127). In his book on Keats, Powys had called “To Autumn” the “Hoc est corpus consecration of the ecstatic senses” (PoK, 95). 43 Quoted in DM, 377. 44 In a letter to Merlin Wolcott, Powys claimed that Myrddin Wyllt “imagines himself a re-incarnation or perhaps even an extremely aged survival of the old heathen god Cronos or Kronos or Saturn” (quoted in Constance D. Harsh, “Letters from John Cowper Powys to Merlin Wolcott at Colgate University,” Powys Notes 10, no. 2 [Fall and Winter 1996]: 36). Unlike the novel itself, in this letter, Powys does not address the possibility that Myrddin Wyllt’s belief might be true.

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the blow with which Cronos had castrated his father Uranus, “the heavenly despot,” and “driven” away betrayers of the Titans, “those monstrous brethren of his own, Cottus and Briareus and Gyes” (Por, 266).45 The image of rock-as-weapon, which pulls together the novel’s investment in minerality and its investment in the supernatural, invokes family rivalries described by Hesiod but unaddressed by the Romantic poet. Keats refers to “Cottus” (2: 49) and “Gyges, and Briareüs” (2: 19) in his roll-call of the fallen Titans, but he does not associate them with divided loyalties. The revision makes Powys’s Saturn, more than Keats’s, a lonely figure of survival haunted by his own acts of violence. A little later, Myrddin Wyllt, alone in a boat on the River Dee, remembers a “misty ridge at the end of the world,” a windy “abyss” and “swirling hieroglyphs,” a mythic landscape that externalizes a nuanced subjectivity alien to the Titans of Keats’s poem (Por, 267–8). He then has a powerful vision of his freeing of “earth from the tyranny of heaven!” through the act of castration but wonders if it is really a memory or “all imagination” (Por, 269, 268). The rest of the chapter continues to humanize its Saturn-figure within its large-scale mythological narrative while it dispels doubts as to his supernatural origin. In my earlier discussion of Porius, I showed that the romance incorporates Wordsworthian “rocks and stones and trees” into an acceptance of earth’s “primeval tragedy,” the inevitability of death (Por, 252, 253). As if in a crisis of identity, Myrddin Wyllt next confronts this inevitability, as Porius will do later in the novel (Por, 269). For him, the threat of an “inescapable doom” comes via a traumatic image of the “faithless … earth-mother” Gaia who had encouraged the dismembering of “the heavenly tyrant” (Uranus) yet betrayed her son Cronos by enabling the tyranny of the Olympians (Por, 269, 267, 282). Nevertheless, Myrddin Wyllt calls on the Earth-Mother to “whisper” the possibility of a new era of freedom, first “thrusting his soul down into the earth,” then “pressing his forehead into the earth” (Por, 283). The image recalls the lines early in Hyperion in which Saturn’s “bowed head seemed listening to the Earth,/His ancient mother, for some comfort yet” (1: 20–1). In a revision of Keats, this contact with the literal rather than mythological earth yields a momentous declaration of hope on his part: the final words of the chapter are “I have heard her whisper. The enormous earth has spoken” (Por, 288). By the end of the chapter, that is to say, the reader has been invited to share young Neb’s belief in Myrddin Wyllt as the actual reincarnation of Saturn who will bring about the new Golden Age. Later in the book, the narrator will refer unquestioningly to Myrddin Wyllt’s “pre-human, million-years experience” (Por, 652). At the On this image as a re-enactment of castration, see Cheshire, “Powys’ Cronos,” 94. Cheshire suggests that this blow can be seen as an attack on the “tyrant Zeus,” since the novel fuses “Uranus and Zeus into the single tyrant sky god in eternal opposition to Cronos the champion of those below” (95, 97). 45

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same time, the “Myrddin Wyllt” chapter has revealed the magician as a vulnerable, self-doubting human being more complex than the exclusively supernatural characters of Hyperion, humanized though they are by the narratorial scaling down to the “accents” of “our feeble tongue” (1: 49–50). The novel’s ending confirms Myrddin Wyllt’s status as the reincarnation of Saturn/Cronos. At the beginning of the final chapter, Porius, convinced that Myrddin Wyllt “was no ordinary magician,” is still wondering whether he “might be … some sort of supernatural being” (Por, 712). Earlier, Porius had imagined Myrddin Wyllt “playing the part of some pre-Olympian creator of cosmic powers” yet concluded that human beings and animals alike “were completely in this mysterious being’s power” (Por, 613–14). Nevertheless, Saturn’s monstrous siblings, “titanic apparitions … like Typhoeus, Cottus, and Gyges, like Briareus,” are dismissed as invented objects of fear, “Hesiodic horrors,” as Porius calls them—since in his world Keats has yet to exist—that he can “rattle off” dismissively (Por, 716). Here, the same names that Keats includes with apparent sympathy in his roll-call of Saturn’s followers are evoked and re-categorized as not only evil but also imaginary. For Powys, unlike Keats, the Titans are differentiated not just morally but also ontologically. Mythical or not, the restoration of the heroic Titans—Prometheus as well as Saturn—is integral to Porius’s climactic understanding of Time as more fundamental than Space, possessing “more of the magic of life in it” (Por, 725). Porius thinks about “the endless procession of Time future, without which that immortal urge to burst out, to break down, to grow, to act, to commit crime, to rescue the perishing, to unbind Prometheus, to free Cronos from the chains of Zeus, would lack the will to take the initial plunge, make the original start, and thus get into motion at all” (Por, 726). The separate liberations of Prometheus and Cronos are included in this otherwise more general list of actions as if they are exemplary events in cosmic history. In this sentence, Powys implicitly critiques the limited notion of progress articulated by Oceanus in Hyperion. If Keats’s Oceanus had his way, there would be no “free[ing]” of Saturn/Cronos from “the chains of Zeus.” (Porius includes a dark twist on Oceanus’s stance when Porius’s father Einion says “Every race has its Golden Age and then— ashes and dust!” [Por, 194].) Despite its sympathy for the Titans, Keats’s poem fails to envisage a future in which the Titans are returned to power—unlike Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, which connects the freeing of its hero with ecological and cosmic renewal. Powys goes beyond Keats not only in insisting on the end of the story—even if it is part of a cycle—but also in providing a quasi-philosophical justification for the very possibility of a story. The final pages of Porius affirm that for Powys, as McGann puts it, “the marvelous is and must be.”46 These pages do not mention the Olympian gods whose triumph is projected in the fragmentary third book of Hyperion; McGann, Scholar’s Art, 189. Cf. Glen Cavaliero, who claims that in Powys’s later works, “the marvellous is the natural” (“John Cowper Powys and the Aether,” The Powys Journal 4 46

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the focus, as I discussed in Chapter 2, is on Porius’s freeing of Myrddin Wyllt from his stone prison on top of Mount Snowdon. After he liberates the “titanic creature,” Porius perceives “the response of innumerable weak and terrified and unbeautiful and unconsidered and unprotected creatures, for whom this first-born and first-betrayed of the wily earth, this ancient accomplice of Time … was still plotting a second Age of Gold” (Por, 750). The Age of Gold, that is, remains a projection, as several critics have noted.47 This open-endedness fits with the mineral- and death-conscious aspects of the text, what Duncan calls “the authentic tropism of Powys’s romance, which is to arrest the flow of narrative, to forget about forward movement and linger with … subhuman raptures.”48 Nevertheless, the immediate aftermath of the liberation, Porius’s magical transplantation from the summit of Snowdon to Harlech on the Welsh coast, compels readers to accept the authentically divine identity of Myrddin Wyllt. Porius’s conclusion that “There are many gods; and I have served a great one,” offers a satisfyingly revisionary completion of a narrative that Hyperion was unable to imagine (Por, 751). While Powys’s romance has human, mineralogical, and ecological dimensions unglimpsed by Keats, its revitalization of the Keatsian supernatural channels the backward-looking energy of Hyperion into the kind of hopeful future envisioned by the Shelleyan supernatural of Prometheus Unbound. Moreover, in taking for granted the existence of the marvelous even as it thematizes the question of the reality of the marvelous, Porius makes Powys’s most daring ecological statement. To return to the phrase that Powys takes from Arnold, the book literalizes the notion of “natural magic.”

Magic in Atlantis Atlantis, another revisiting of the Titan myth with glancing allusions to Hyperion, represents a scaling back of authorial ambition in that it offers a none-too-subtle allegory of the triumph of a “magical view of life” over science. Its treatment of magic is more thoroughgoing but darker than that of Porius. This romance tells the story of Odysseus’s last voyage, which takes the Greek hero to the drowned continent of Atlantis and onward to the New World. The novel is set in a magical past in which insects possess a “philosophic mind” (At, 12) (drastically amending Wordsworth’s “Ode”), inanimate objects communicate, and supernatural beings interact

(1994): 184, emphasis in the original). 47 For example, Maxwell claims that “The Golden Age returns, but only in an uncertain, phantasmal way” (“A Game of Yes and No,” 101). 48 Duncan, “Sacred Monsters,” 165.

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with human beings.49 It thus adjusts Hyperion’s focus on gods rather than people. The story unfolds in the midst of an insurrection of the primordial Titans against their successors, the reigning Olympian gods. Keatsian epic is a shadowy backdrop—and backstory—to the main action. The cosmic upheaval is uneasily aligned with the projected “victory of the Eternal Feminine … over the male” (At, 33). These events provide only a flimsy justification for the quest of the aging Odysseus, whose restlessness recalls that of the Ulysses of Tennyson’s 1842 poem. Zeus has destroyed Atlantis because “some great Atlantean philosopher” has invented an “‘Embryo Stone’ … that can change the sex of an embryo” (At, 260). Odysseus, who himself has “the look of a Titan” (At, 46), is set against the obnoxious Orphic priest Enorches, who has allegedly “mutilated himself so that he can make love to both sexes” (At, 157) and is thus aligned with the bisexual “AtlantisBitch” (At, 442) who rules over Atlantis. With the young Nisos, a would-be prophet, Odysseus makes an underwater visit to the lost continent, where his masculinity prevails in the sense that his anthropomorphized wooden club destroys the monster. This act of violence represents a victory over science. Odysseus’s journey ends on the island of Manhattan, where he and his remaining companions will presumably live out their days among the “Red-Skins” (At, 462). Despite its decisive ending with Odysseus giving the command to “burn our ship!” (At, 462), Atlantis seems no more finished than Hyperion.50 Its revisiting of the story begun in Keats’s fragmentary epic clouds its allegorical exaltation of magic. Odysseus claims that the Titans now rule again and that the sun god is once more “Hyperion, freed forever from the yoke of Apollo” (At, 116), but the matter is not that simple. By the same token, Nisos’s old nurse, the midwife Petraia, claims that men will become mere “breeding animals” as in “the Golden Age under the Rule of Kronos” (At, 142), but her perspective may be unreliable. Unlike in Hyperion, the novel keeps readers waiting to encounter the Titans, and those that appear are fearsome monsters, complicating the allegiances of the novel. None of the Olympian gods appears onstage in Atlantis, whereas in Keats’s poem, at least Apollo makes a truncated appearance before the fragment breaks off. In line with the rumored overthrow of the Olympians, Odysseus’s mentor the Olympian goddess Athena seems to have abandoned him. Although the novel seems on the side of the Titans over the Olympians, the sinister

For Charles Lock, the novel’s animism is “Powys’s grotesque, caricatured display of the workings of novelistic discourse” (“Powys and the Aether: The Homeric Novels,” The Powys Journal 16 [2006]: 30), an observation acknowledging that this novel foregrounds its modernity—though also, I would add, its belatedness as a Romantic text. 50 Maxwell suggests that “At times, this narrative feels like a prelude to Porius, or even like a flashback within it” (“Talk, Detail, and Action: An Introduction to Atlantis,” Powys Notes 6, no. 2 (Fall 1990): 23). 49

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Echidna and Eurybia—“ancestral Titanesses” (At, 387) or “goddesses ‘of an infant world’” in a direct allusion to Hyperion (At, 453)—are perceived as “hideous monsters and wicked antiquities” (At, 391). The Titans also include “the hundred-armed Monsters, Briareos, Kottos, and Gyes” who are devouring the “drowned populations” of Atlantis (At, 247) and, looming larger, the terrifying monster Typhon. By contrast, when these members of the fallen Titans are glancingly mentioned in Hyperion, they are victims of tortured imprisonment (2: 19–28). The destruction of the androgynous ruler of Atlantis—a “god-titan, or goddess-titan” who is “more feminine than human words could convey” (At, 436), picking up on Hyperion’s motif of the inadequacy of language to represent the supernatural—seems politically problematic given that the tyrannical Zeus is cast as threatened by gender and sexual fluidity. Alongside this narratorial ambivalence,51 the novel has a self-conscious note of relativism and diminution. In Hyperion, the taste of impending doom is “poisonous brass and metal sick” (1: 453); when the phrase is quoted in Atlantis it merely characterizes the ineffectual bronze club of the malevolent giant Orion, whom Odysseus and Nisos encounter on their underwater journey. In addition, a talking pillar says that all gods will “perish” (At, 448) when human worship ceases, while a philosophical fly says that it is only “when the tribes of mortal men are sunk into complete oblivion that the real drama of the Cosmos will properly begin” (At, 248). Powys’s wording conflates the “fallen tribe” of the Titans with “us mortal men,” dismissing both from the future.52 Finally, while the events of the story ostensibly seal Nisos’s vocation as a “prophet for putting Science in its place!” (At, 455), Nisos ends up stranded in the New World far from both civilization and the supposed triumph of the Titans. Atlantis also plays with the possibility of disenchantment. Early in the novel, Powys alludes to Keats’s The Fall of Hyperion in his remarkable description of a wild garden—tended by the aged dryad Kleta—as an assemblage of “very small things” (At, 44).53 In The Fall of Hyperion, the dreaming speaker comes across the “refuse” of a past supernatural feast that still offers heaps of “plenty” to inspire his vision of the fallen Titans (Canto 1: 30, 35). Powys’s language in his description of the garden echoes Keats’s phrasing: Kleta’s “scattered fragments” and “bits of small snail-shells” (At,

According to H. P. Collins, “the fantasy runs away with allegorical coherence” (Old EarthMan, 182). John Toft ingeniously reconciles the novel’s mixed messages (“John Cowper Powys’s Atlantis,” The Powys Review 3 [1978]: 38). 52 These quotations are from Hyperion, 2: 100–1. 53 Maxwell intriguingly claims that in this novel, “miniaturization becomes a way of underlining significance rather than a way of denying it” (“Talk, Detail, and Action,” 26). McGann discusses the description of Kleta’s garden in terms of its dissolving of the “Powysian narrator” into his “subject” (Scholar’s Art, 162–3). 51

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44) may allude to Keats’s line, “empty shells were scattered” (Canto 1: 32), while her “bits of stalk” and “strewn remnants” (At, 44) recall the poet’s “grape-stalks half-bare, and remnants more” (Canto 1: 33), itself an echo of the Miltonic “remnants huge” of Hyperion (1: 280). The description is grimly refigured near the end of the novel when the ruler of Atlantis is discovered “on a heap of long-dead, long-decayed, long-rotted, long-dissolved, longdegenerated … horribly-putrefying mass of sea-weeds in accumulated decomposition” (At, 436). Powys here recalls and punctures Wolf Solent’s epiphanic sorting of seaweed. The passage in The Fall is a lead-in to Keats’s questioning of the power of poetry and his thematization of his belatedness as a poet of classical mythology. Powys’s borrowings from the passage nod to the Modernist interest in renewing mythology, but they also register his sense of his own belatedness as a writer in the Romantic tradition. Powys uses Odysseus’s reclusive son Telemachos, priest of the absent Athena, to reflect on his own Romantic-inspired investment in natureworship. Telemachos is a “lonely,” joyless figure who is initially mentioned only in passing (At, 236).54 He makes only one major appearance, when, as his father’s dinner guest, he is allowed to give a speech expounding his philosophy of “embracing” and “re-creating” the “earth-ocean-sun-moonstars” (At, 237). He seems to articulate Powys’s own interest in sinking into the elements, but he refrains from elaborating on his ideas, feeling a weary desire to “escape” from “the things in themselves; yes! from the ancient earth herself” (At, 239). The narrator calls Telemachos’s “philosophizing” “vague and obscure” (At, 238), and another character observes, “He’s invented this philosophy of his to fill a void” (At, 236).55 If the Powys-hero is split between Telemachos and Zeuks, an Ithacan farmer with an “immense zest for life” (At, 131), Powys favors Zeuks’s earthier worship of “Life itself” (At, 192). Yet, although Enorches is despised for his worship of “Nothingness” (At, 369), Zeuks—the life-loving “rebel” against Zeus—disappears into “thin air” (At, 461–2) at the end of the novel. This development seems to destabilize any residual Wordsworthian worship of “this world of colour and form” (At, 183). At this late point in his career, as other critics have noted, Powys seems drawn to the prospect of annihilation. One other scene from early in the novel anticipates this outcome. The sea monster Keto has hair like the “dead leaves” of “autumn” (At, 64), recalling

As in Weymouth Sands, Powys begins his novel with a leisurely pace, then introduces and drops characters (both human and supernatural in this case) with disconcerting abruptness. 55 Wilson Knight calls Telemachos’s speech a “truly tremendous discourse expanding the Wordsworthian doctrine” of the interaction of mind and nature, the “one life” (Saturnian Quest, 97). Cavaliero, however, persuasively claims that Telemachos’s “apologia is half-discredited: it is as if Powys were beginning to tire of his more intense earth-mysticism” (Novelist, 136). Telemachos is also discredited in that he has reputedly had young women put to death for having sex with Penelope’s suitors. 54

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the “dead leaf” of Hyperion that for Keats represents the epic voice of Milton that he hopes to supersede and that for Powys represents the magical voice of Keats that he aspires to re-embody. Powys gives a detailed account of the color of the monster’s hair: It wasn’t a negative colour or the absence of anything. It was a positive colour, and it possessed its own absolutely special metallic gleam. The colour grey, contrasted with what this colour was, would have appeared a friendly and natural if rather a melancholy apparition. But this colour flung forth a metaphysical shock. It possessed a look as if Nothingness itself … had chosen to incarnate itself in visible appearance. (At, 64) Powys here glances back at his own earlier preoccupation with the color gray and then sets it aside to confront the limits of the “natural.” The hair that is the “colour” of “dead leaves” possesses “the colour of the absolute void before there was any world at all” (At 64). In this text, to adopt the voice of the poet of the “sacred senses” (PoK, 38) is a potential dead end.

Marvels in The Brazen Head The “dead leaf” of Hyperion reappears in The Brazen Head, but this “Romance” (LLW, 307) is more like a rewriting of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein than of Hyperion. Powys wrote his fourteenth full-length novel in his early eighties, completing it after settling in his final home in Blaenau Ffestiniog. Set in the year 1272 in an almost unrecognizable Wessex landscape of forests and swamps, the book is based on the mythical story of a talking brass head supposedly invented by the medieval philosopher Roger Bacon.56 Powys told Nicholas Ross, “My romance centres round far the most important figure of the Middle Ages, namely ROGER BACON who succeeded in doing what no other human being has ever done before or since. That is to say Friar Roger Bacon … imitated God and created a living Soul!” (LNR, 127). In the novel, Bacon’s controversial invention, a “thing of brass,” is not exactly a “rational soul” (BH, 82): the “poor old dear” (BH, 339) does not speak until the last page of the book, and its cryptic utterance, “Time was … Time is … And time will—” breaks off when it is “destroyed” (BH, 348).57 Bacon, imprisoned for his allegedly heretical research, uses the Powys told Nicholas Ross that he had deliberately set the novel six hundred years before his own birth (LNR, 127). On the novel’s treatment of history, see Peter G. Christensen, “Wessex 1272: History in John Cowper Powys’s The Brazen Head,” The Powys Review 6, part 1, no. 21 (1987–8): 28–34. 57 The multiple possible sources for this speech include Byron’s Don Juan, which refers to the line “Time is, Time was, Time’s past” as “spoken” by “Friar Bacon’s brazen head” (quoted from 56

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Jewish virgin Ghosta to infuse the head with a spark of life but comes across as more a scientist than a magician. He has created a “being capable … of escaping altogether from the control of its creator,” but perhaps only through the hostile perception of his fellow grey friar, Bonaventura (BH, 188). Bacon’s antagonist Peter Peregrinus, an aspiring “Antichrist,” the inventor of a magnetic lodestone more powerful than the brazen head, like Victor Frankenstein is villainized for aiming to “create a new race of beings altogether” (BH, 275, 243). Possessing more vitality than Bacon, this demonic figure is the true magician of this eccentric romance.58 Since Peregrinus is destroyed at the end of the novel along with both inventions, it might seem as if the book is as much about the limits as the power of magic. Krissdóttir claims that with this text, “The time for playing magician is over” (DM, 412). I suggest by contrast that like Atlantis, this highly selfconscious narrative looks back to Romantic poetry (among many other literary sources) to address how “the whole panorama of experience” (BH, 239) must be seen to encompass even the darker forces of magic. Critics have tended to see The Brazen Head in terms of allegorical oppositions between magic and science, natural and supernatural, (Christian) religion and nihilism.59 While the novel as a whole may be seen as open-ended, I offer a reading of one small thread in seeing the “dead leaf” of Hyperion as representing the persistence of romance and belief in the supernatural. I interpret this late text as a Keats-inspired meditation on the survival of magic—good and evil—intertwined with a possibly Wordsworth-inspired nostalgia for belief in an ontologically distinct transcendental realm. The reference to a dead leaf using the line from Hyperion (“Where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest”) comes at the beginning of a passage that revisits Powys’s belief in the existence of an “invisible Dimension” Byron: The Oxford Authors, ed. Jerome J. McGann [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986], Canto 1: 1734–5). 58 Krissdóttir suggests that Peregrinus is a successor to Geard, Urien, and Myrddin Wyllt (Magical Quest, 178). In a Powys Society reading group discussion on May 21, 2021, it was suggested that Powys identifies with Peregrinus as a magician and master-manipulator: Peregrinus, like the novelist, brings the characters together in the final chapter of the novel and begins “to find that it was easier to bring people together than to manage them when they were brought” (BH, 328). The novel’s major structural discrepancy, its two separate and contradictory introductions of Peter Peregrinus, several chapters apart, invites shrugs over whether this unresolved discontinuity stems from authorial carelessness or narratorial playfulness. 59 Rather than seeing one set of oppositions as winning out over the other, Peter G. Christensen, in his study of the novel’s slippery narrator, stresses its “radical indeterminacy” (“Frustrated Narration in The Brazen Head,” The Powys Journal 12 [2002]: 85). Yet Christensen reads the “indeterminacy” as expressing “pessimism” (100). According to Jonathan Goodwin, the characters themselves become aware that they inhabit “schematic” oppositions in a text of uncertain genre (“Animated Fictions: Characters in The Brazen Head,” The Powys Journal 23 [2013]: 129). For Goodwin, The Brazen Head represents the “quintessence of [Powys’s] literary craft” (134).

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and into which, in this case, flow the “feelings” of “all things,” “not even excluding rocks and stones and earth-mould,” feelings that combine with “the feelings of our Mother the Earth herself” and “what might be called sense-emanations and thought-eidola issuing from all that exists, whether super-human, human, or sub-human, whether organic or inorganic” (BH, 165, 166). With his faint evocation of Wordsworth with “rocks and stones,” Powys characteristically blurs the line between the mineral and the mystical. This “theory” of the lord of the manor Sir Mort is dismissed by his longsuffering wife Lady Val as a “ten-thousand times repeated harangue” even as she wonders if there is “a grain of truth in all this craziness” (BH, 165–7). The seemingly inconsequential “single dead alder-leaf” that happens to float into their fortress seems to validate this “grain of truth” (BH, 164). The “dead alder-leaf” becomes more portentous once it is referred to with the unmarked quotation from Hyperion: Where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest; and it rested on the ground almost mid-way between the comically pretentious young knight and the desperately agitated lady of the house. Whether either of them noticed this wrinkled symbol of the passing generations, as it fell between them, neither of them later would have been able to say. Very likely they both did, but without any reaction capable of being recalled. (BH, 164) As noted earlier, Keats’s dead leaf stands inevitably for the authentic epic voice of Milton. Powys’s leaf, by contrast, is “noticed” yet not “recalled”; the narrator’s refusal of certainty as he begins to track its fate (“Very likely they both did”) is typical of his unreliability, yet he asserts that the leaf is a “wrinkled symbol of the passing generations” as if that goes without question. A few pages later, Lady Val becomes “half-conscious of that alder-leaf on the floor,” but to no effect (BH, 167). The characters’ vague consciousness of the dead leaf could represent the persistence of the “magical view of life” even in an attenuated form. The obtrusive narrator then interjects the unexpected question, “And what, we might wonder, was that alder-leaf’s parent-tree thinking in its nakedness as it bowed before the wind?” (BH, 167). “We” might wonder nothing of the sort; the purpose (if there is one) of the question turns out to be to retract the suggestion that the leaf impinges on the consciousness of the scene’s characters, thus casting doubt on its continuing relevance: “And if no thought of that leaf on the floor crossed the furthest fringe of its parent-tree’s cogitations, you may be sure that neither Sir William nor Lady Val gave the slightest attention to its fate” (BH, 167). The reader may at this point assume that the leaf and what it stands for is lost to history and therefore to literary history. But the story of the leaf does not end there. A servant of the household, Mother Guggery, attempts to dispose of the “patient motionless leaf,” but in the final sentence of the chapter, Sir Mort and Lady Val’s son John saves this “lucky leaf” from

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destruction (BH, 168–9). The episode typifies the way in which the Powysian narrator turns away from what one might expect to be the focus of a scene. Yet the scene narrates the serendipitous survival of an insignificant object that could be taken to stand not just for the magical voice of Keats but the magic of the realm of romance and, by extension, magic itself. The significance of the leaf’s preservation is subsequently underscored. The leaf reappears later in the narrative, figuratively at least, when the line from Keats is reworked as a line in a mysterious “ditty” that emerges from a cave in the forest: “Where leaf do fall—there let leaf rest” (BH, 247). In this new context, the leaf seems to represent a material world in which living can be relished but spirituality is absent: the song starts with the line, “Until I’m dust I’ll enjoy my hour,” and the line about the leaf rhymes with “Where no Grail be there be no quest”—a sentiment that casts aside the premise of A Glastonbury Romance (BH, 247). This “blasphemous” ditty seems to express the nihilistic worldview of Peregrinus, perceived anxiously by Bacon as “Diddym, ‘the ultimate Void’” (BH, 239).60 The song is followed by an ominous “dead silence,” and the men who had heard it pretend that they “had heard nothing!” although the “shock” lingers on (BH, 247–8). The episode hints that Peregrinus and his evil magic will survive their ostensible annihilation at the end of the novel. The dead leaf has been swept up into a different symbolic register but is allowed to “rest” either way. The novel’s treatment of the transcendental—not always Christian despite the English medieval setting—supports this conclusion. The Brazen Head picks up on the word “Something” from Powys’s earlier works, A Glastonbury Romance in particular, by this point almost but not quite shorn of its Wordsworthian associations, as part of its philosophical reflections on why things happen and why they exist. The “Something” that motivates young John to save the “dead leaf” slides between “Chance” and “Fate” (BH, 168). Earlier, the term is applied to an “Eidolon,” a thought that takes on a reality of its own (BH, 71). Later, the term reappears when John ponders the otherness of the Brazen Head: “Its gaze was fixed upon Something. But upon what? … Was this something a completely different world from the one out of whose elements its human creator had fashioned it, a different world in fact from the one with which we are all familiar?” (BH, 198–9). The answer to this question may be no, but the (not necessarily trustworthy) narrator goes on to say that the “‘something’ of which John suddenly became aware was some thought from the Brazen Head” (BH, 205). When Ghosta recalls her activation of the Brazen Head, she sees herself as giving her “being” to “Something” and creating “new life” through “Parthenogenesis” (BH, 211). Wilson Knight sees the song as “sinister” (Saturnian Quest, 107). For Krissdóttir, this “unendurable” glimpse of nature’s dark heart confirms the danger of the “magical power” of the imagination (DM, 412). She sees the skull of a baby giant in the ditty (“Penglog y Baban yr Gawr!”) as the forever unborn offspring of Porius and the dead Creiddylad (DM, 412). 60

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Although these characters can be seen as projecting “this Something” onto the Brazen Head, it enables the blurring of the line between the inanimate “Head of Brass” and “living creation” (BH, 211). On a grander scale, contrasting himself (as he thinks) with Peregrinus, Bacon holds onto “something” that lies “behind all possible, as well as all existing universes” (BH, 239). This version of transcendence supplements the existence of magic. And toward the end of the book, even the nihilistic Peregrinus plays with the possibility of sharing Bacon’s sense of “the thing which the theologians declared to be the vegetative soul of the foetus developing a nutritive soul, which is thus laid open for ‘Something’, we can call it a rational soul, to enter from the limitless Outside when the infant is born” (BH, 330). This sentence slides from a materialist understanding of life to an acceptance of a “limitless Outside.” Here the “‘Something’” would validate the theology of Bacon and the questionable notion that the Brazen Head does contain a “rational soul.” This romance may draw on Keats to make a case for the enduring power of magic (for good and ill, inside and outside the imagination), but it returns to Wordsworthian terminology to acknowledge the equally persistent human need for “intimations” of “something else” (BH, 166, 239).

The Return of the Titans Powys’s late fantasies, written in his eighties, refer to the story of the Titans in ways that play with his earlier allegiances. At the end of his career, Powys published two books of fantasy, Up and Out—containing two tales—and All or Nothing; six other fantasy novellas were published posthumously. In line with Powys’s suspicion of the transcendental toward the end of his career, these comical picaresque narratives sometimes question the existence of alternative ontological dimensions. But they all discard the distinction between natural and supernatural, depicting the wanderings—often through outer space—of a series of improbable (and humorously named) characters, some human and some mythological, with occasional jolts of slapstick violence. The story of the Titans—so central in Porius—appears only in throwaway allusions that vastly diminish its significance, yet carry a weight disproportionate to the space they occupy, when considered in the context of Powys’s career-long engagement with Keats. Up and Out briefly revisits—and deflates—the figure of Cronos, now spelled Kronos. Kronos is one of a succession of unlikely visitors to the survivors of a nuclear explosion journeying through space on a scrap of earth. The perfunctoriness of his appearance seems to undercut the project of Porius, transposing this major mythological figure into a comic mode. The first-person narrator describes the initial arrival of Kronos on the scene—merely represented by his voice—in duly momentous terms that stress supernatural otherness and the Titans’ legacy of violence:

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It was clear at this point that an older, wider, fainter, weirder, remoter, much more mysterious voice intervened, a voice much less allied to the feelings of us mortals … and at the sound of this voice it was evident to me that the ground under my feet shivered a little, as if with the hearing of it some ancient wrong came back, some appalling outrage done to her.61 The piece of “ground” represents the remains of the Earth-Mother, Gaia, and the source of the “ancient wrong” is then squabbled over by Ouranos and Kronos, each reminding the other of their “hideous brutality.”62 As if recalling Myrddin Wyllt’s wielding of a “great jagged piece of slate-rock,” the gesture repeating the primal act of castration, Ouranos pointedly accuses Kronos of “scatter[ing]” his father’s “seed” with a “jagged flint.”63 The exchange could be taken to confirm that the mythological back-story of Porius is alive and well in a post-apocalyptic future. Yet after a retort from Kronos, the short scene is interrupted, and is only referred back to in passing two pages later as a “domestic altercation.”64 The phrase humorously debunks the complex mythological family rivalries that lie behind the portrayal of Kronos/Cronos/ Saturn in Powys’s earlier fiction. The other fantasies offer even more perfunctory references to the “childswallowing Cronos” and his “piece of jagged flint.”65 They give more space to Typhoeus/Typhon, who, as previously mentioned, in Hyperion is just one in a list of unjustly imprisoned Titans (2: 20), along with “Cottus” (2: 49), briefly revived in monstrous form by Powys as Kottos in All or Nothing.66 As we saw, Typhoeus was dismissed as a mythical monster in Porius and reappeared as the all-too-real threatening monster Typhon in Atlantis. In Real Wraiths, Typhoeus is referred to in passing as a monster “destined to rule the Universe” but is defeated by Zeus and reduced to a “volcanic body.”67 The “terrible Titanic creature Typhoeus” has, however, perhaps by switching gender, produced a “monstrous offspring.”68 Yet in Two & Two, Typhoeus is one of the two main characters, who takes the magician Mr. Wat Kums (pun intended by Powys) on a journey outside the universe. Powys’s version of Typhoeus in his late novella overturns his earlier negative portrayals of this Titan, making him an engaging philosophical disputant who has outgrown his earlier conflict with Zeus. A late-stage encounter

Up and Out, 65. Ibid. 63 Ibid. 64 Ibid., 68. 65 Powys, Real Wraiths (London: Village Press, 1974), 62; All or Nothing (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University Press, 1960), 145. 66 All or Nothing, 62. 67 Real Wraiths, 43. 68 Ibid., 76, 77. 61 62

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with Prometheus reveals that “Zeus is far too old to be able to hurt any one of you,” and Jesus gets the last (kind) word.69 In Real Wraiths, allusions to Keats’s “Chapman’s Homer” sonnet rather than Hyperion register the attenuated presence of Romanticism in these late texts.70 By contrast, in You and Me, the first-person narrator encounters “the ghost of Keats” wandering on the far side of the moon.71 This “friendly” ghost accurately quotes the entire penultimate stanza of “Ode to a Nightingale,” as if to insist on the endurance of “Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam/Of perilous seas in faery-lands forlorn.”72 But the narrative shifts those “faerylands” into a comic mode when immediately afterward Keats’s ghost goes on to mention a “highly esteemed” pet worm in his cemetery in Rome.73 The worm is an excuse for an abrupt departure, as if Powys does not know what to do with the ghost of Keats once he has summoned him up. As we have seen, Powys’s vision of the wondrousness of “life itself,” as mediated through Wordsworth in particular, reaches—to quote the narrator of You and Me—“outside this whole bloody Universe; yes, outside all the Universes that were, are or will be.”74 Nevertheless, at different phases of his career, Powys does not always subscribe to the possibility of transcendental dimensions, whether re-imagined through Wordsworth or not. But early and late, Keats is the ideal poet for Powys with whom to expand his “attitude to Nature” to include the existence of the supernatural (LIH, 48), earthly and unearthly. Powys plays up the environmental implications of the story of Hyperion, but more fundamentally he uses Keats, the “magical poet,” to reflect on the ability of literary language—and the genre of romance—to instantiate magic. The “efficacious illusion”—to quote Fry’s phrase again— of the supernatural is as open to “disclosure” as the natural,75 thanks to its mediation through Keats’s poetry. Although along the way, Powys inevitably questions the capacity of the dead leaves of Romantic poetry to suspend disbelief, his thoroughly zany late fantasies fully embrace the reality of the supernatural, with or without the ghost of Keats. As a self-proclaimed “magician” and as an “indurated” inheritor of the Romantics, Powys folds even a “world of marvels” into an ecological vision more capacious than any imagined by the Romantics themselves—or yet imagined by present-day critics of Romanticism.

Powys, Two & Two (London: Village Press, 1974), 77. Real Wraiths, 27. 71 You and Me, 60. 72 Ibid., 60–1. 73 Ibid, 61. 74 Ibid., 3. 75 Fry, What We Are, 203, 202. 69 70

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Conclusion I have focused throughout this book on how Powys relies on Wordsworth and, secondarily, Keats to articulate his boundless ecological vision. Although Powys most powerfully expresses that vision through allusions to these two poets, elsewhere in his work he develops it through his recasting of numerous other writers from the Western tradition, including to a lesser extent Blake, Coleridge, Scott, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, as well as later nineteenth-century poets such as Matthew Arnold and Walt Whitman. Initial reviewers of Powys pointed out his indebtedness not only to Wordsworth and, predictably, Hardy but also to Edmund Spenser, Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Brontë, Dostoevsky, Proust, and even Jane Austen, Anthony Trollope, and Edith Wharton.1 Critics will continue to investigate how Powys pursues his celebration of “Life itself” via other sources and influences, including in dialogue with Modernist writers such as Joyce, Dorothy M. Richardson, and Henry James. Powys’s thoroughly ecological imagination can also be seen as making occasional use of proto-postmodern techniques. More detailed attention to the public and private reception of Powys’s works (and public lectures) in Britain, the United States, and elsewhere will reveal the extent to which audiences (including those reading Powys in translation) have been inspired by his investment in the life of earthly and unearthly things. And, in an ideal future, scholarly editions of Powys’s writings—some of which (including many of his letters and years of his diaries) have never yet been published—will further illuminate their intertextual connections within and beyond Romanticism, and capture more precisely the “deliberately” imprecise prose (and borrowed poetic language) with which Powys creates and perceives human, nonhuman, cosmic, and beyond-cosmic realms. I conclude with a few suggestions of how the readings in this book might be enriched by incorporating other non-Wordsworthian and non-Keatsian aspects of Powys’s fiction. My account of Powys’s Wordsworthian sensebased nature-worship in Chapter 1 could be extended by consideration of See my article, “The Early Reception of Wolf Solent.” On Powys’s connections with his American contemporaries, see Charles Lock, “Not the Lost Generation: John Cowper Powys and American Literature,” The Powys Journal 5 (1995): 178–97. 1

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the grim, post-Darwinian treatment of the nonhuman world in his early novel Rodmoor (in which allusions to Romantic poetry do not alleviate the dark mood). In Chapter 2, addressing the Wordsworthian interdependence of animate and inanimate in Powys, I lingered over human continuities with rocks and stones. My mineral-centered approach in that chapter necessarily gave less attention to vegetation, even though plants and trees loom large in Powys’s fiction. In particular, the recurring symbol of the ash tree in Powys (beginning in his first novel Wood and Stone) has significance far beyond its reference to the ash tree exalted by Wordsworth in Book 3 of The Prelude. In Chapter 3, I concentrated on Powys’s Wordsworthian “outsiders and idiots,” but several less explicitly Wordsworthian figures of disability and deprivation in Powys’s writings belong in any broader appraisal of how his ethical and humanitarian sympathies connect with his environmental leanings. One example is the “half-witted orphan boy,” Larry Zed, in Weymouth Sands, who himself responds to a “ghostly” natural spectacle with “a deep groan of wonder” (WeS, 133, 136) and whose neurodivergent mind is treated respectfully by that novel’s capricious narrator. My discussion in Chapter 4 of Powys’s Wordsworth-inflected transcendentalism could be supplemented by analysis of other non-Wordsworthian passages in his work that envisage other states of being. For instance, in Ducdame, the protagonist Rook Ashover is drawn to “some unearthly Limbo—some Elysian Fourth Dimension”—a space that incorporates “the memory of old defeated, long-forgotten gods” in a glancing allusion to the myth of the fallen Titans (D, 265). In Chapter 5, I examined how Powys uses Keats’s refiguring of the Titan myth to blur the line between natural and supernatural. Ducdame, the plot of which includes several unambiguously preternatural occurrences, further dissolves that line, as do the life-affirming non-Keatsian supernatural characters in Porius—the magic child y Bychan and the owl-maiden Blodeuwedd.2 As I intimated in those final two chapters, Powys’s vastly expansive vision of what counts as nature demands an enlargement of the purview of eco-critical literary interpretation to accommodate otherworldly imaginings.

Richard Maxwell ties the first of these supernatural characters to a “gray” reading of Porius, claiming that the “riddle” of y Bychan instantiates Powys’s “focus on the life of things” and represents “a metamorphosis of writing into stone” (“A Game of Yes and No,” 97, Maxwell’s emphasis). 2

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230

INDEX

affect studies 20, 115–16 Arnold, Matthew 29, 148, 187, 189, 199, 211 Atlantis 25, 182, 199–203, 204, 208 and The Fall of Hyperion 201–2 and Hyperion 199–203 Autobiography 3, 4, 14, 27, 42, 44 Brighton 72 Cambridge 67–9 childhood 63–6 father 63–6, 70, 88 n.32 Lake District 70–2 madwomen 23, 133–9 New York City 74–5 North Wales 70 Powys on 61, 62 schooldays 65, 66–7, 69 sublime experiences 65, 66–7, 67–9, 74–5, 76–7 upstate New York 75–7 Weymouth 69 women 13–14, 72–3, 134 on Wordsworth 28, 29, 36–8, 55, 58–77 Averill, James 114–15 Barrell, John 170 n.68 Berlin, Juanita 139–40 Bewell, Alan 115 n.9, 129 n.40, 133 n.45, 181 n.2, 185 n.15 Birns, Nicholas 42 n.39 Blake, William 4, 7, 9–10, 37, 39, 211 allusions to 159, 161, 163, 166, 171, 182 “A Blank Verse Autobiography” 10, 58, 60–1, 183

The Brazen Head 25, 182, 203–7 allusion to Hyperion 203–6 and transcendence 206–7 Brebner, John 3 n.6, 158 Brontë, Emily 16, 211 Byron, Lord 7, 9, 10, 15, 59, 185 Byronic hero 188 Campbell, Chris 93, 170 n.68 canonicity 5–6, 7, 9 Caserio, Robert 62 n.78, 158 n.47 Cheshire, Paul 16, 37 n.26, 106 n.69, 183 n.10, 197 n.45 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 1, 2, 18, 72, 153, 211 “Christabel” 141 lectures on 8, 9 “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” 176 Collins, H. P. 6 n.19, 17, 41 n.38, 68 n.91, 100 n.63, 202 n.51 Connor, John T. 5 n.15, 94 n.47, 96 n.51, 97 n.53, 104 n.67 Cronos 99, 183, 185, 186 n.16, 195–8, 207–8 (see also Saturn) De Quincey, Thomas 9, 18, 73 n.96 Dickens, Charles 16, 49 n.52 disability studies 7, 20, 23, 24, 116, 141 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 4 n.8, 5, 57, 211 Drabble, Margaret 6 n.17, 32 n.16, 97 n.55 Dreiser, Theodore 182 Duncan, Ian 5, 49 n.52, 75 n.101, 102, 190 on A Glastonbury Romance 153–6, 160

232

INDEX

on Owen Glendower 94, 95 n.50, 95 n.51, 176 n.75 on Porius 17, 97, 106, 108 n.71, 195 n.39, 199 Duncan, Isadora 39 eco-criticism 19–20, 22, 24, 30, 93, 181 embodied cognition 35 embodiment 2, 20, 37 Keatsian embodiment 189 Wordsworthian embodiment 22, 30–1, 38, 73, 77, 119 environmentalism 4, 6, 21, 23 existential environmentalism 23, 100 ethical approach 7, 20, 23, 115 ethical responsiveness 114, 116, 130–2, 134, 144–5 Fawkner, H. W. 5 n.16, 33 n.19, 41 n.37, 162 n.55, 171 n.69, 172–3 Frankenstein 15–16, 203, 204 Fry, Paul 20, 81–3, 90, 98, 99, 110, 152 n.24 Gill, Stephen 11, 13, 28, 63, 115, 148 A Glastonbury Romance 3, 142 n.59, 206 genre 12, 153, 154, 160 jacket blurb 12 and minerality 91–2 1955 Preface 25–6, 158 sources 152–3 transcendence in 92, 151, 152–60 Goodway, David 18 n.71, 27 n.1, 183 Grail 133, 136–7, 139, 206 in A Glastonbury Romance 24, 92, 152, 153, 154–9 Graves, Richard Perceval 8, n.25 Graves, Robert Perceval 148 “gray” criticism 6, 22, 23, 81, 86–92, 109–11 (see also “stone-colored” criticism) Gregg, Frances 4, 11 n.40, 39 n.34, 59 n.72, 84, 188 n.21 Grey, Peter Powys 144 n.63, 182

Hara, Ichiro 1, 13, 78–9, 88 n.32, 109–10, 180 Hardy, Thomas 16, 41, 91, 169– 70, 211 Hartman, Geoffrey 7, 110, 184, 196 n.42 Hazlitt, William 9, 44 Hentschel, Cedric 32 Hesiod 183, 184, 185, 197, 198 Homer 3, 128, 183, 184, 193 Hooker, Jeremy 4, 16 n.63, 62 n.79, 63 n.81, 65 n.86, 99–100 human suffering 2, 5, 90, 113–14, 115, 119 Humfrey, Belinda 18, 41, 53, 57 n.64, 61, 195 Hyman, Timothy 57 n.64, 68 n.91, 183, 184 n.14 Hyperion 10, 24–5, 181–209 allusions to 186, 188 n.21, 193, 201, 205 immanence 17, 110, 148, 153, 163, 173 inanimate nature 4, 5, 19, 81–98, 109 The Inmates 24, 118, 140, 141, 142–5 misogyny in 142, 144 neurodiversity in 142–4 intellectual disability 24, 115, 117, 140–4 Jackson, Noel 30 Jacobus, Mary 20, 22 n.88, 81, 83, 115, 123 James, Henry 16, 97, 98, 211 James, William 24, 149 Joyce, James 5, 11, 16, 211 Kant, Immanuel 49, 82, 150 Keats, John 1, 4, 9, 10, 37, 152 aestheticism 1, 2, 187 “To Autumn” 196 “Bright Star” 159 “The Eve of St Agnes” 39, 45, 188 The Fall of Hyperion 184, 190, 195, 201–2 “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” 209

INDEX

“Hymn to Pan” 191 “Isabella; or The Pot of Basil” 44–5 “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” 171, 175 Lamia 171, 192 n.31 in Maiden Castle 171–3, 175 negative capability 30 n.9, 94, 186 “Ode on a Grecian Urn” 165, 171 “Ode to a Nightingale” 171, 173, 175, 189 “Ode to Psyche” 43, 187 and sensation 2, 27–8, 31–3, 62, 181, 189 and the supernatural 181–209 in Wolf Solent 43, 44–5, 51 Keith, W. J. 9 n.29, 97 n. 53, 142 n. 59, 149, 172 n.71, 181 Klein, Amelia 30 n.9 Knight, G. Wilson 4, 17, 39 n.32, 92, 182, 183 Krissdóttir, Morine 8 n.25, 11, 85, 116, 183, 204 Lamb, Charles 9, 10, 25

233

“Life itself” 5, 21–2, 170, 186–92, 202 Lock, Charles 5, 6 n.19, 50 n.54, 149 n.14, 155, 200 n.49 on Owen Glendower 170 n.66, 178 n.76 on Porius 98 n.57, 99 n.60 on Weymouth Sands 92–3, 162 n.57, 164 on Wolf Solent 57 n.65 Lucifer 10, 25, 182, 184, 186–92 Preface 188, 189 reworking of Keats 10, 186–92 Satan 188, 190–1 self-reflexiveness 190–2 magic 2, 25, 109, 181–209 (see also supernatural) Maiden Castle 3, 24, 58, 151, 169– 76, 183 allusions to Keats 171–3, 175 allusions to Wordsworth 170, 172, 173–5 and the generational sublime 169–76 Marie-Laverrou, Florence 40 n.36

234

INDEX

Maxwell, Richard 17, 97 n.56, 99 n.60, 104 n.65, 212 n.2 McGann, Jerome 5, 97 n.56, 155 n.41, 195 n.36, 198, 201 n.53 McKusick, James 20, 21 n.87 Mill, John Stuart 29, 148 Miller, Henry 9–10, 85 Milton, John 10, 184–9, 191, 203, 205 minerality 22, 81–111, 161, 197 misogyny 21 n.85, 162 n.54, 171 Morton, Timothy 20, 21 n.87, 115–16 multiverse 24, 149 Nash, Katherine Saunders 21 n.85, 39 n.32, 153 n.28 nature-worship 2, 22, 29, 71, 79, 151 neurodiversity 23, 118, 140–5, 212 Oerlemans, Onno 20, 23, 82, 99, 100 ontic unity 83, 98, 102, 110–11 Ottum, Lisa 20, 21 n.87, 115–16 Owen Glendower 3, 17, 183 allusions to Wordsworth 23, 95–6, 176, 177–8 and the generational sublime 24, 58, 151, 169, 176–9 and minerality 23, 94–6 and Welsh nationalism 23, 95, 169, 178–9 pantheism 17–18, 24, 78, 148, 149 n.11, 151 Pater, Walter 9, 28, 30, 83, 115, 148 pathetic fallacy 83, 87 n.29, 88, 90 Playter, Phyllis 15, 37 n.25, 74, 75 n.102, 85, 139 Porius 3, 17, 97–109, 184, 194–9, 207 allusions to Wordsworth 98, 105–9 “cavoseniargizing” 98, 101–2, 104, 107 “The Characters of the Book” 98 n.58, 195 final scene 105–9 genre 97, 99, 154, 183 and Hyperion 25, 183–4, 194–9 and inanimate nature 23, 82, 86, 97–109, 197 psychological growth in 97–109

rewriting of The Prelude 23, 82, 97–109 role of the Cewri 103–4, 105, 194, 195 role of Myrddin Wyllt 99, 100–3, 106–9, 183, 194–9 role of Nineue 101–2, 107–8 and the supernatural 194–9, 208, 212 Potkay, Adam 20, 116, 119, 120, 124, 130 Powys, Charles (John Cowper’s father) 8, 63–6, 70, 88 n.32 Powys, Gertrude 15 n.58, 71 Powys, John Cowper (see also Autobiography) affinity with stone 81–6 After My Fashion 39–41, 42 All or Nothing 183, 207, 208 The Art of Growing Old 12, 36, 179 The Art of Happiness (1923) 27 n.2 The Art of Happiness (1935) 37 n.24, 87–8 bookishness 25–6, 71 Confessions of Two Brothers 33, 58, 151, 172 “cult of the senses” 7, 22, 29, 36, 59, 63 diaries 34–5, 58–9, 62 n.79, 116, 123–33, 159 Ducdame 140, 141–2, 212 ecological vision 5, 24, 31, 102, 150, 181 “Edeyrnion” 3 n.6 encounter with descendants of Wordsworth 15–16 enemas 118, 128–9, 158–9 environmentalism 4, 18, 185, 186, 188, 212 essay on Wordsworth 35–6, 38, 88–90, 114, 124, 151–2 health 117–18 Homer and the Aether 3, 180 n. 78, 183 and humor 2, 62, 70–1, 76–7, 134, 159 on Hyperion 185, 187 In Defence of Sensuality 12, 86–7

INDEX

interest in Romantic poets 1–3, 8–16 on Keats 11, 32–3, 187–8 lectures 8–9, 37, 73 letters to Frances Gregg 11 n.40, 59 n.72, 188 n.21 letters to Ichiro Hara 1, 13, 78–9, 88 n.32, 109–10, 180 letters to Lucy Penny (née Powys) 65 n.86, 99 n. 61 letters to Katie Powys 13, 15, 59 letters to Llewelyn Powys 43 n.43, 44 n.46, 57 letters to Phyllis Playter 37 n.25, 39 n.31, 123 n.32, 124 n.37 as magician 24, 182–3, 209 materialism 22, 31, 33, 99 n.61, 149 The Meaning of Culture 34, 88, 109 and Modernism 3, 5, 11, 16–19, 153, 211 Mortal Strife 33, 88 Morwyn 25, 184, 192–4 Obstinate Cymric 12, 77–8, 179–80 The Owl, the Duck, and—Miss Rowe! Miss Rowe! 149 n.14 “philosophy of life” 3, 28, 39 n.34, 73, 75 A Philosophy of Solitude 87, 90, 113, 147 and physical disability 114, 117–29 poems 10, 60–1, 87, 172 n.71, 185 n.16 (see also Lucifer) “Powys-hero” 39, 41, 94, 142, 192, 202 Real Wraiths 208, 209 religious beliefs 149–50 reviews of 42 n.40, 62, 87 n.29, 140 n.50, 162 n. 54, 211 Rodmoor 16, 39, 212 “sensation-thoughts” 27, 31 n.13, 58, 67, 78, 152 sexuality 13, 37, 59, 72, 73, 103 Suspended Judgments 10 treatment of colors 34–5, 48, 78, 101, 203 Two & Two 208 Up and Out 183, 192, 207–8 Visions and Revisions 10, 32 n.17, 187

235

walking 14, 53, 87 Wood and Stone 39, 91, 104 n.66, 140, 212 on Wordsworth 1–2, 12–16, 33–8, 77–9, 109–10, 149 n.10 (see also essay on Wordsworth) You and Me 151 n.22, 209 Powys, Littleton A. (John Cowper’s son) 85 n.20, 118 Powys, Littleton C. (John Cowper’s brother) 14, 60 n.75, 70 The Joy of It 67 n.90 Still the Joy of It 95 n.49 Powys, Llewelyn 8, 33, 60 n.75, 172, 182 n.3 Powys, Margaret (John Cowper’s wife) 13 Powys, Marian 144 n.63 Powys, Philippa (Katie) 15 n.54 Powys, Theodore Francis 8, 14, 70, 140 Powys, Will 76 The Prelude 12, 28–9, 58–77, 94 n.46, 97–109, 176 Blind Beggar 23, 118–23, 145 Boy of Winander 43, 142, 174 Discharged Soldier 23, 129–33, 145 Mount Snowdon 48, 49, 65, 70, 102, 105–9 Proust, Marcel 5, 16, 66–7, 211 Quayson, Ato 116, 143 n.62 Reichmann, Angelika 161 n.52, 162, 165 n.60 Reno, Seth 20, 21 n.87, 22, 30, 115, 148 n.4 Richardson, Dorothy M. 11, 16, 31 n.13, 36 n.23, 211 Rigby, Kate 38 Robertson, Lisa 30–1, 73 n.97 romance 7, 18, 32, 181–3, 204, 206 (see also A Glastonbury Romance and Porius) Romantic Satanism 185 Saturn 25, 109 n.72, 183–98, 208 (see also Cronos)

236

INDEX

Schuster, Max 12, 43 n.43 Scott, Walter 9, 16, 17, 97, 178, 211 sensation 100 n.63, 169–70, 175–6 Keatsian sensation 27, 31–3, 62, 171–4, 187 n.20, 189 Wordsworthian sensation 22–3, 27–79, 88, 169, 172, 173 sexual predation 59, 93, 160–5 Shakespeare, William 5, 48, 133, 152, 211 Shelley, Mary 15–16, 203 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 1, 2, 7, 10, 35, 59 Adonais 32, 45 n.48, 118 Epipsychidion 183 n.10, 192 n.31 “Ode to the West Wind” 118, 159, 186 Prometheus Unbound 185, 189, 193, 194, 195, 198 Stanback, Emily 23, 116, 119–20, 123, 130, 141 n.54 Steiner, George 4, 6, 84 n.17, 97 n.56, 150 n.16 “stone-colored” criticism 20, 82 (see also “gray” criticism) Stonehenge 91, 92, 196 sublimity 35, 48–9, 65–6, 74, 106, 109 (see also transcendence) ecological 24, 150, 151 excremental 158–9 generational 24, 89, 148, 151, 168–79 material 82, 99, 106, 107, 108 negative 95 n.51, 97 n.53 neurodiverse 143 Wordsworthian 55–6, 69, 91, 101, 147–80 suffering 116, 124 (see also human suffering) supernatural 24–5, 26, 106, 111, 153– 6, 181–209 (see also magic) sympathy 114–8, 125, 127, 136, 139 sympathetic identification 116, 130–1, 132, 134 Tennyson, Alfred 189, 200 transcendence 31, 53, 69–70, 92, 147– 80, 190 (see also sublimity)

Ward, Richard Heron 32 n.17, 83, n.17 Weymouth Sands 3, 92–3, 160–8, 212 and minerality 92–3, 161 role of narrator 59, 161–8 and transcendentalism 24, 160–8 Wilkinson, Louis 49, 139, 182 n.4 Wilkinson, Oliver Marlow 4, 59 n.72, 84, 114 Wilson, Angus 4, n.13, 90 n.35, 162 n.54 Wiseman, Sam 18–19, 34 n.21 Wolf Solent 3, 22, 28, 41–58, 118– 23, 169 advertisement 12 allusions to Keats 43, 44–5, 51 allusions to Wordsworth 29, 42–4, 46, 48–9, 51, 52–6 deleted chapters 43–4, 46, 50 n.55, 51–2, 56 n.63, 122 n.31 ending 52–7 Gothic aspects 43, 44–6 man on the Waterloo steps 46, 118–23, 145 women in 41–2, 43–5, 50 Wolfson, Susan 185 n.15 Wood, Michael 19 Wordsworth, Dorothy 16, 30, 37 n.25, 59 n.72, 137, 139 Wordsworth, Giles 15–16 Wordsworth, William 1–9, 12–19, 21–79, 81–111, 113–45, 147–80 “Beggars” 118, 137–40 “Composed Upon Westminster Bridge” 74–5 and disability 113–31, 140–5 eroticism 36–8, 72–3, 138 humanitarian sympathies 113–45 “The Idiot Boy” 24, 114, 118, 140–5 and the inanimate 4, 18, 81–111, 147, 151 lectures on 8–9, 33, 149 n.10 “Michael” 13 n.47, 36, 63, 87, 91, 96 “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” 8, 13–14, 28–9, 32, 51–6, 64 “The Old Cumberland Beggar” 114, 119