Power, Plain English, and the Rise of Modern Poetry 9780300129489

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Power, Plain English, and the Rise of Modern Poetry

Power, Plain English, and the Rise of Modern Poetry

David Rosen

Yale University Press New Haven & London

The first third of chapter 4 originally appeared as “T. S. Eliot and the Lost Youth of Modern Poetry,” Modern Language Quarterly . (December, ). “A Prayer for My Daughter,” reprinted with the permission of Scribner, an imprint of Simon and Schuster Adult Publishing Group, from The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume I: The Poems, revised, edited by Richard J. Finneran. Copyright ©  by The Macmillan Company; copyright renewed ©  by Bertha Georgie Yeats. Excerpts from “Coole and Ballylee, ,” and “A Dialogue of Self and Soul,” reprinted with the permission of Scribner, an imprint of Simon and Schuster Adult Publishing Group, from The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume I: The Poems, revised, edited by Richard J. Finneran. Copyright ©  by The Macmillan Company; copyright renewed ©  by Bertha Georgie Yeats. “Under Ben Bulben” and “Man and the Echo,” reprinted with the permission of Scribner, an imprint of Simon and Schuster Adult Publishing Group, from The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume I: The Poems, revised, edited by Richard J. Finneran. Copyright ©  by Georgie Yeats; copyright renewed ©  by Bertha Georgie Yeats, Michael Butler Yeats, and Anne Yeats. Excerpts from the manuscript of Yeats’s “A Prayer for My Daughter” are reprinted by permission of the Cornell University Press. Excerpts from “At Graduation ” from Poems Written in Early Youth by T. S. Eliot. Copyright © , renewed  by Valerie Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. “Convictions” and excerpts from “Embarquement pour Cythère,” “Silence,” and “First Caprice in North Cambridge” in Inventions of the March Hare: Poems  ‒ by T. S. Eliot, text copyright ©  by Valerie Eliot, by Christopher Ricks, reprinted by permission of Harcourt, Inc. “The Watershed,” copyright  and renewed  by W. H. Auden; “Homage to Clio,” copyright ©  by Edward Mendelson, William Meredith, and Monroe K. Spears, Executors of the Estate of W. H. Auden; “,” copyright  and renewed  by W. H. Auden; “New Year Letter,” copyright  and renewed  by W. H. Auden; “September , ,” copyright  and renewed  by W. H. Auden, from Collected Poems by W. H. Auden. Used by permission of Random House, Inc. Excerpts from Auden’s Juvenilia are reprinted by kind permission of Edward Mendelson, for the Estate of W. H. Auden. European rights to reprint “A Prayer for My Daughter” and “Man and the Echo” are granted by A P Watt Ltd on behalf of Michael B. Yeats. British rights to reprint “The Watershed,” “” (parts II and IV), “New Year Letter,” and “September , ” from Collected Poems by W. H. Auden and “Convictions” from Inventions of the March Hare by T. S. Eliot are granted by Faber and Faber Ltd.

Copyright ©  by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections  and  of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data may be found at the end of this book. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. 

        

For Helen Rosen and Joel Rosen

Hic. Why should you leave the lamp Burning alone beside an open book, And trace these characters upon the sands? A style is found by sedentary toil And by the imitation of great masters. Ille. Because I seek an image, not a book. Those men that in their writings are most wise Own nothing but their blind, stupefied hearts. —W. B. Yeats, “Ego Dominus Tuus”

Contents

Acknowledgments, ix Introduction,  1

Prologue: The Secret Reference of John Locke, 

2

Wordsworth’s Empirical Imagination, 

3

Certain Good: W. B. Yeats and the Language of Autobiography, 

4

The Lost Youth of Modern Poetry: T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden,  Notes,  Index, 

Acknowledgments

My first thanks must go to Robert Belknap, who is not an acquaintance, with whom I have never conversed, and who has not, to my knowledge, affected or contributed to this book in any way. He has, however, recently published, with the same press, a fascinating monograph on the meanings of lists in Western literature. An “acknowledgments” section, finally, is but a list, an imperfect way to tally one’s debts to the countless people who have contributed to one’s work over the years. Mr. Belknap reminds us, however, that lists are often more than they seem at first glance; with some prodding, they turn into narratives, confessions (intentional or otherwise), ways of seeing the world. So here. This book would not exist at all were it not for the aid and encouragement of three persons in particular. John Kulka, my editor at Yale University Press, has supported this project with unfailing enthusiasm and good sense. Before that I was fortunate to write my dissertation under the direction of David Bromwich and Langdon Hammer. In conversation, in seminar, and in comments on my work (often produced under considerable time pressure), they provided the intellecix

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tual sympathy necessary to sustain long years of writing. I owe my ideas about how to conduct a life in the academy largely to them. Annabel Patterson read chapters  and  and improved them with precise and incisive comments. At all points I have been lucky to have peers with whom I could share my work and whose own work stimulated mine. Dy Tran offered a helpful skeptical critique of chapter . Charles Baraw, Andrew Dimock, Jennifer Kennedy, Sean O’Sullivan, and Aidan Wasley read all (or most) of the manuscript and, in addition to offering invaluable moral support, significantly affected my understanding of the project as it developed. For help in the task of turning the manuscript into a book, Aaron Santesso has my deepest gratitude: both for seeing the outlines of a book where I wasn’t always able to, and for arguing about what needed to be preserved, despite my desire sometimes to tear everything down. David and Francis Randall, historians both, read the final draft in its entirety and added many important details of nuance and fact. I would like also to recognize the numerous persons who read the manuscript in an official or semiofficial capacity. Paul Fry, John Hollander, and Christopher Miller offered pointed but encouraging early critiques. Marshall Brown, the editor of Modern Language Quarterly, as well as two readers, drastically improved my account of T. S. Eliot with their recommendations. Two anonymous readers for Yale University Press are as responsible for this book’s final form as anyone. One reader, in particular, practically explained my project to me—or at least better articulated what was at stake in my argument than I could myself. At the Press I benefited greatly from the editorial expertise of Marie Blanchard and Jessie Hunnicutt. Randi Saloman read proofs with careful attention and prevented numerous embarrassments from seeing the light of day. As with any undertaking that requires a long time to complete, this one owes its shape (and maybe its existence) to a series of chances. A passing remark by Richard Locke in an undergraduate seminar gave me the first inklings of my topic. More proximately, the project grew out of a graduate paper written for Fred C. Robinson. Work was funded, at various stages, by Mellon and Robert Leylan fellowships. I have benefited always from the conversation of friends and colleagues; Isaac Cates, Daniel Israel at every stage of the process, and of late my colleagues at Trinity College. Anything I might write about the debt I owe my parents would be inadequate. This book is dedicated to them.

Introduction

In “The Song of the Happy Shepherd,” the poem Yeats chose to print first in his Collected Poems, he shows a striking faith in the basic authority of language: “words alone,” he twice intones, “are certain good.”1 This epigram, asserting not just the power in language—diction, to be more precise—but the power to be had in wielding it, has implications reaching far beyond literature. A great many poets, however, beginning as early as Wordsworth, have made similar claims. In this book, I pursue two distinct but tightly intertwined arguments about language and force. It is, first and foremost, an account of the rise of Modern poetry with a prelude in the Romantic period: I look at the way poets from Wordsworth to Auden try to present themselves simultaneously as persons of power and as participating members of their communities, able to speak on public issues. In my account, the modern lyric derives its complexity—psychological, ethical, formal— from the extraordinary difficulty, perhaps the futility, of this effort. The low register of our language, which I also call “plain English,” is deeply implicated in this story. Each of the poets I deal with makes use of the low register’s power, as well as its peculiar and seemingly 1

2

Introduction

groundless reputation for truthfulness. I take for my second project the history of this linguistic and cultural prejudice. To understand what I mean by “plain English,” consider the following lines from King Lear: “Thou wert better in a grave than to answer with thy uncover’d body this extremity of the skies. Is man no more than this? Consider him well. Thou ow’st the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume. Ha? here’s three on’s are sophisticated. Thou art the thing itself: unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, fork’d animal as thou art” (III.iv. –).2 This is a dramatic situation that we will be revisiting frequently in the chapters that follow: a stormblasted landscape, and a speaker whose frame of mind is scarcely less troubled. Here, Lear, having been led to shelter by Kent, has just encountered Edgar, whom he takes to be a deranged beggar. Where his heightened language in previous scenes had vividly reflected his own maddened state— You sulphr’ous and thought-executing fires, Vaunt-couriers of oak-cleaving thunderbolts, Singe my white head! (III.ii.–)

—his speech here is plain and bitter. Most of the few, scattered polysyllables gesture toward either the storm outside (“extremity of the skies”) or, with acrid irony, his own wretched company: the three “sophisticated [on’s]” are Kent, the Fool, and himself. Edgar, by contrast, is dispatched in five blunt words: “Thou art the thing itself.” The variety of register we observe even in a passage this brief is made possible by the unique lexical structure of English, in which words for abstractions are largely borrowed, and substantives usually native. This layered arrangement is a legacy of the Norman conquest, which replaced the more cultivated vocabulary of Old English with the victors’ French, while leaving plainer, practical speech to the native underclass. When Lear suddenly shifts registers to describe Edgar, Shakespeare is following a linguistic convention well described more than a century later by Lord Kames: “As words are intimately connected with the ideas they represent, the emotions raised by the sound and the sense ought to be concordant. An elevated subject requires an elevated style; what is familiar ought to be familiarly expressed.”3 To put it another way: while the high pathos of a fallen king berating the elements requires (and receives) the grandest style, low subject matter (a deranged beggar) merits a low register: “poor, bare, fork’d.” Convention can hardly explain, however, the utter power of this passage, especially Lear’s assertion that Edgar is “the thing itself.” After his ranting at the tempest,

Introduction

Lear’s mind seems, abruptly, to clear; in Edgar he seems to perceive, in a most direct way, what Yeats would later call the desolation of reality. One almost senses in Shakespeare’s shift an intuition, far transcending literary etiquette, of the low register’s special ability to signify the actual world. I will suggest shortly why this conclusion is anachronistic—or, at all events, why Lear’s comments reflect neither the linguistic fashions of Shakespeare’s time nor Shakespeare’s usual practices as a writer. Nevertheless, one can see why an idiom consisting mainly of short, concrete, native words, purged of abstractions and low on foreign borrowings, deployed in simple syntax, would have such an appeal to writers of a later era: the power this idiom has to command belief, assent, lies somehow beneath reason or even ordinary awareness. Because poets beginning with Wordsworth seized so consciously on the low register—as an expression of their desires for both vatic authority and social participation—the history of plain English is also, in part, the history of post-Romantic (especially modern) poetry. At the very least, the low register can be a thread through the labyrinth of Modernism or, to pick a slightly different metaphor, a way of diagnosing the hidden motives and justifications of Modernism, exploring the courses the poetry took, and the choices the poets made. Before going any further, I should offer a clarification. It is part of my claim that the association of plain English with truthfulness is largely an invention of Romanticism, even though it has an important pre-history in the Tudor-Stuart and Augustan periods. Theories of “the plain style,” however, something quite different from what I am calling “plain English,” had existed in the culture for some time. These grew out an argument between philosophy and rhetoric dating back to Greece and Rome. As recounted by George Williamson, Wesley Trimpi, and others, Renaissance humanists, debating how a proper vernacular should behave, looked back to classical models: on the one hand, an ornate rhetoric exemplified by Cicero, and on the other, the more austere, “philosophical” periods of Seneca, Tacitus, and Quintillian.4 Where the former privileged dazzling verbal dexterity over content, the latter aimed at clarity and unadorned presentation. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Senecan “plain style” enjoyed a significant and widespread boost in prestige: this came from playwrights like Jonson, low-church divines (who equated ornate persuasion with deceit), and above all, scientists.5 Francis Bacon was particularly effective in associating Senecan plainness with the aims of empiricism and inductive method: the new science demanded a prose in which as few words as possible

3

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Introduction

interfered with the presentation of object reality. From Bacon, the line of plain stylists descended to the scientists of the Royal Society (Wilkins, Boyle, with Thomas Sprat reporting), and philosophers like Hobbes and John Locke. The histories of the plain English and “the plain style” intersect at points; indeed, as we shall see, the low register owes its reputation for truthfulness in part to Locke (who would be appalled by this conclusion). In most important respects, however, the two traditions are very different. The low register is, above all, a native phenomenon, a product of the uniquely striated English lexicon. Arguments about the plain style, on the other hand, occurred across Renaissance Europe; indeed, Williamson credits Erasmus for resurrecting the debate in his strongly antirhetorical Ciceronianus.6 Still more to the point, the two differ in their basic unit of analysis: for controversialists on both sides of the stylistic debate, everything finally came down to syntax, to the sentence as a conveyor of meaning. As it happens, even the most vehement seventeenth-century proponents of the plain style favored a Latinate vocabulary and classical hypotaxis. In the low register, however, words alone are certain good. Over the course of the period I study, this distinction slips somewhat, for reasons I explore at length; but (especially) when the low register first rises to prominence, diction comes to have a peculiar resonance, a special connotative value almost independent of syntax, and possibly independent of meaning. This sounds perilously close to mysticism; but how else to explain the seemingly baseless credence its adherents attach to plain English? Consider one of the more famous statements of the case, the rules for proper usage George Orwell offers in his  essay “Politics and the English Language”: (i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. (ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do. (iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. (iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active. (v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

Orwell is not concerned merely with good style. Rather, his essay argues that certain kinds of English usage are particularly truthful, while others are less so. Follow these rules, he concludes, and you will find it hard to deceive either yourself or others: “[I have been considering] language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought. . . . If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. . . . When you make a stupid

Introduction

remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself ” (italics mine).7 The bias for plain English enjoys a robust and largely unchallenged existence to this day, especially in contemporary political discourse and advertising copy.8 To suggest its persistence in contemporary literary discourse, consider briefly a second poet, writing almost four hundred years after King Lear, but strangely reminiscent of Lear on the heath. When the rain came it came in a quick moving squall moving across the island murmuring from afar then drumming on the roof then marching fading away. And sometimes one mistook the weary tramp of feet as the men came shuffling from the quarry white-dust-filmed and shambling for the rain that came and drummed and marched away.9

Once again, this is man in extremis: this time, the Zimbabwean poet/activist Dennis Brutus recalling his imprisonment on Robben Island for activities against apartheid. The plainness of idiom is not quite Shakespeare’s: more reliant on metaphor and personification, perhaps less reliant on image than tone of voice to convey its effect. As we will see, these differences are representative of changes the poetic use of plain English underwent in the twentieth century. It says much, however, for the low register’s tenacity that a poet otherwise opposed to the British colonial legacy would draw on this idiom to convey the truth of his experiences. This book will track and account for the changes in plain English over the last two hundred years; and it will also suggest why, for poets, plain English has remained so seductive. As the sequence of chapters suggests, my argument hinges on an account of the relation between Romantic and Modern poetry. This relation has been a matter of bitter debate since the time of Yeats and Eliot, a debate that has, if anything, intensified in recent decades. The mutually hostile camps into which most critics have placed themselves are implied concisely by the title question of Marjorie Perloff’s essay “Pound/Stevens: whose era?”10 Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens, that is, are seen by each camp as expressing the qualities most essential

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Introduction

to Modern poetry; the two iconic poets, in turn, are sufficiently different in their goals and methods that each is usually dismissed or ignored by the other’s followers. Both camps, it might be said, take their cue from the last stanza of Yeats’s “Coole and Ballylee, ”: We were the last romantics—chose for theme .................................... whatever most can bless The mind of man or elevate a rhyme; But all is changed, that high horse riderless, Though mounted in that saddle Homer rode Where the swan drifts upon a darkening flood. (, –)

In these lines, Yeats is discerning a sharp break between his own generation, the poets who came of age during the s, and the writers who emerged after . One camp of critics, those partial to Stevens, could not disagree more. As Randall Jarrell put it, “‘Modern’ poetry is, essentially, an extension of romanticism”; the concerns and practices of the two periods are continuous. These include an interest in the poet’s own gift, apocalyptic to the point of annihilating the outside world. “Wordsworth,” claims Harold Bloom, “had no true subject except his own subjective nature.” Such poetry, Perloff adds, inevitably privileges content over structure, the poet’s own imagination his obsessive recurring topic. The form most conducive for this kind of writing—narcissistic and limited to brief moments when the imagination is stirred—is lyric.11 Reading Modernism this way has an obvious appeal for critics who, like Bloom, approach poetry as a species of (or substitute for) religion. It is also an interpretation common among critics who locate the apocalyptic conflict of subject and world in the problem, inherent in all language, of reference.12 To call Modernism late-Romanticism, however, has its disadvantages. Most obvious are a habit of ignoring the historical contingencies of each period, and a tendency to devalue Modernists, like Frost, Moore, Eliot, or indeed Pound, who do not clearly fit the Shelleyan mold. In a more subtle way, modern poetry itself tends to be devalued: old themes are seen to be repeated, but in a “hypertrophied state,” lacking their former originality, power, or completeness. Late Romanticism is lesser Romanticism. Thus Bloom: “The whole tradition of the post-Enlightenment, which is Romanticism, shows a further decline in its Modernist . . . heirs. . . . Poetry in our tradition, when it [dies], will be self-slain, murdered by its own past strength.”13 Of most consequence to my argument, these accounts of Modernism rely on an understanding of the Romantic period itself,

Introduction

and of Wordsworth specifically, that I believe to be unsupported either by the poetry or by the conspicuous beliefs of the poets in question. Even those Modernists who find favor do so for the wrong reasons. This questionable understanding of Romanticism (which I will expand on shortly) is visible also in the second school of critics, those whose only response to the last stanza of “Coole and Ballylee” might be to add some exclamation points for emphasis. Unlike the first school, which was consolidated at least two decades after the fact, this second line, which includes Perloff, Eva Hesse, and Hugh Kenner, begins with the Modernists themselves.14 Eliot’s well-known essay “The Metaphysical Poets” sets the tone: “The sentimental age began early in the eighteenth century, and continued. The poets revolted against the ratiocinative, the descriptive; they thought and felt by fits, unbalanced; they reflected.” Modernism positions itself against Romantic sentimentality and “rumination”; Modernism is indeed anti-Romanticism. As one might expect, Pound echoes Eliot’s point without Eliot’s sobriety. An appraisal of Wordsworth: “He was a silly old sheep with a genius, an unquestionable genius, for imagisme, for a presentation of natural detail, wild-fowl bathing in a hole in the ice, etc., and this talent, or the fruits of this talent, he buried in a desert of bleatings.” Modern poetry replaces Wordsworthian “bleatings” (the very meditativeness and self-pondering appreciated by camp one) with impersonality, a hard attention to details untainted by reflection. In Perloff’s account, the advent of Modernism coincides with a breakdown of lyric: the brief gnomic poem, enshrining moments of Being, is replaced by more open forms, such as collage, which subordinate the poet’s personality to a wide range of stimuli, and which express, in their refusal of closure, an ideology of action and process.15 The way is paved for constructivist sensibilities like Zukofsky and Olson, and language poets like Palmer, Bernstein, and Hejinian. But Stevens and Crane, arch-lyricists both, find as little welcome under this tent as Pound had under the other. My own assessment of modern poetry takes issue with both of these camps. The late-Romantic school could only have crystallized after Modernism had passed: it was comprised of critics whose first allegiances were to Romanticism (or a certain view of Romanticism), and whose purpose was to pearl a grain of sand. In retrospect, the irritant had really been normal and consistent with the main current of literary history. To view Modernism as anti-Romantic, however, as a clean break from the recent past, was a polemic perhaps necessary emotionally for the Modernists themselves, but precisely the kind of claim critics accept at their own risk. My own view is that the poetry of Yeats, Eliot, Auden, Pound, and Stevens was—what it was literally—post-Romantic: distinct from

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Introduction

Romanticism, yet emerging from questions posed by the earlier period. In essence, the model I am offering of literary historical process is not filial: the Modernists were neither faithful nor rebellious children. Rather, they picked up on implications left by the Romantics that their immediate predecessors had successfully ignored, or at least evaded. Above all, my reading is predicated on a view of Romantic poetry different from the visionary hermeticism accepted by Poundians and Stevensians alike. At the center of this reading is the poetry of Wordsworth. In my reading of his career, I propose that plain English is itself the locus for several competing and probably incompatible ambitions that Wordsworth has for his work: to record the natural world faithfully, to speak with authority on national issues, to convey moments of uncanny but possibly meaningless power. Wordsworth discovers the imagination—and the force of plain English—at a moment of deep personal and professional doubt, a moment annihilating to the everyday self. The “great decade” (–) that follows is spent negotiating between his desire on the one hand to preserve this power, and on the other to reestablish himself as a healthy adult in a larger community. Far from the “solitary singer” (and thus, one might add, “dehistoricized singer”) offered by both Bloom and Perloff, his driving motives are social. His chief strategy of selfpreservation in these years is an autobiographical, psychological myth that locates (or quarantines) his direct, obliterating encounters with nature in the deep past, the world of his childhood, while leaving his adult self intact. Language, the low register, is used to conceal the space between these periods; indeed, his argument for the truthfulness of plain English grows out of, and is inseparable from, his work in autobiography. Wordsworth owes his reception as a “visionary” poet to an unhappy fortuity. He does not begin thinking of his imagination in such terms—as an internal, reality-creating capacity—until the end of his major decade. By , the strain on his autobiographical myth, and on language, to hold together his imaginative and social selves, is too great; a gap opens in his history. Instead, however, of recognizing this vacancy (properly) as a kind of amnesia, he insists on detecting in it the intimations of a higher reality, the sublime. His conceit—at once an act of self-preservation and self-forgetting, a fiction that allows him to assert power, even as it means losing part of himself—in fact produces very little important work before his precipitous decline. Because, however, of superficial similarities to Blake (an authentic visionary), Coleridge (indebted, unlike Wordsworth, to German idealism), and Shelley (who from the start asserts his oracu-

Introduction

lar gift), Wordsworth has been placed at the head of a group, a visionary company ancestral to such modern prophets as Yeats and Stevens. From Wordsworth, I then indeed move to the Modern period, and Yeats. But this of course begs the question: what of the eighty years between “The Solitary Reaper” and “The Song of the Happy Shepherd”? What of the important poets— second-generation Romantic, High Victorian, Pre-Raphaelite, Decadent—who wrote during these years? The answer, I believe, speaks to the underlying mechanics of long-term literary change. To put it bluntly: in literature, a revolution can occur without anyone quite noticing for a very long time. The Kuhnian notion of paradigm-shifting in the sciences is suggestive, but finally of limited value. Thomas Kuhn, that is, draws a distinction between “normal science” and revolutionary change. During periods of “normal science,” which are typically of long duration, scientific work proceeds according to certain universally accepted rules. These “paradigms” are accepted universally precisely because they make normal science possible. Over time, however, experimental data contradicting the paradigm builds up, and in a rapid shift, a new paradigm replaces the old. Thus Ptolemaic epicycles yield to Copernican heliocentrism; thus Einstein’s relativity supplants the static Newtonian universe. Kuhn’s summary: “Each [revolution] necessitated the community’s rejection of one time-honored scientific theory in favor of another incompatible with it. Each produced a consequent shift in the problems available for scientific scrutiny and in the standards by which the profession determined what should count as an admissible problem or as a legitimate problem-solution. And each transformed the scientific imagination in ways that we shall ultimately need to describe as a transformation of the world within which scientific work was done.” Scientific revolutions occur quickly because paradigm shifts always address fundamental premises; more important, they are recognized as doing so. Once the new premises are accepted, wide consensus follows.16 This is clearly not the way paradigms shift (to use the available metaphor) in literary history. Almost always, when examining a revolution in literature, one can draw a distinction between, on the one hand, new fundamental premises and, on the other, their overt manifestations (practices, artifacts). In Wordsworth’s case, a radically new understanding of poetic psychology, his new way of claiming authority as a poet, produced equally innovative ideas about style and subject matter. It is only to be expected, furthermore, that the poets immediately following him would respond vehemently to the latter (for or against), without entirely grasping the more consequential shift in position. A young poet searching for his or her own voice is far less likely to be influenced by an older poet’s

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worldview than by his (or her) subject matter, or the way she (or he) turns a phrase.17 This state of incomplete assimilation can last a very long time, as subsequent generations of poets continue to build on the surface innovations of the revolutionary poet, without accepting, or even understanding the change itself—while, indeed, adhering to notions of poetic selfhood that the revolutionary poet, in effect, supplanted. It is perfectly common for artifacts from an earlier dispensation to persist in lively, unacknowledged contradiction to the new, even when the new dispensation has fully taken hold; indeed, over the course of the history I trace, this is exactly the position often occupied by plain English, and one of the reasons my argument relies heavily on close reading. During these periods, finally, of lively contradiction, the revolutionary change of premises continues to exert an unseen influence on poetic practice; but full acknowledgment of the change may not happen for decades. In my view, the Moderns were the first fully to grasp the implications of Wordsworth’s psychology, and to offer strategic responses to it; not, it happens, Modernists like Frost and Hardy, who resembled Wordsworth in using the low register, but Yeats and Eliot, whose grasp of plain English showed a more subtle (and more hostile) understanding of Wordsworth’s innovations. At all events, this is why I largely leave aside the Victorians, and also, with one exception, the second generation of Romantic poets. That exception is John Keats. Alone among his contemporaries, Keats grasps the bad faith in Wordsworth’s psychology—the locating of extraordinary personal claims in a failure of memory—and attempts to articulate a theory of poetry not grounded in biography or visionary experience. It is not my purpose to replace one genealogy with another, Keats supplanting Shelley as the Moderns’ most important direct “influence.” Rather, I suggest a kind of parallel evolution, in which the strategy of Keats is repeated ninety years later by Yeats, Eliot, and company. Specifically: the Shelleyan imaginative tradition, which built on Wordsworth’s visionary pose without acknowledging his psychology, collapses during the s, under pressure from a series of external and internal crises. The latter are easiest seen in the career of Yeats, who begins as a Shelleyan Romantic, but who, after suffering a loss of purpose at the turn of the century, finds the uncomplicated peremptory assertion of poetic power impossible to sustain or believe. He is thus confronted with a question that will haunt subsequent Modernists: how, after Romanticism, can he retain the old poetic claim to exceptionalism—to being, because of a special endowment, different from and better than other people? This question is further complicated by his utter antipathy to psychology, an attitude that he shares with most of his fellow Modernists, and which, I suggest in chapters  and , has both social and personal origins.

Introduction

Chapter  traces Yeats’s attempts to salvage a visionary authority, without basing his claims on personal history. The chapter is thus, like its predecessor on Wordsworth, a study in autobiography, or autobiography evaded. But to Perloff’s question “Pound/Stevens: whose era?” my more general answer is: Eliot. T. S. Eliot, I suggest in the first part of chapter , formulates the most influential response to the nineteenth-century crisis of vision, and in so doing initiates a revolution of his own. Unlike Yeats, who tries to recoup the loss, Eliot supplies a new term for the special aptitude with which poets are endowed: not “imagination,” but “consciousness.” As with Keats, a sensibility heightened and refined almost to the point of affliction, not originating in the personal past, nor, in any usual sense of the word, “creative,” is what sets poets apart.18 I do not wish to overdetermine the case, but Eliot, with his peculiar mixed nationality, is perfectly positioned to initiate this change. T. J. Clark is half right when he characterizes modernity as a “social order which [turned] from the worship of ancestors and past authorities to the pursuit of a projected future,” resulting in “a great emptying . . . of the imagination.” While this is a compelling description of early-twentieth-century Europe, it hardly fits the United States, in which “past authorities” are rarely “worshipped” and the “pursuit of a projected future” is part of the national mythos. Eliot, exactly between the cultures, could appreciate the crisis of modernity in the terms Clark describes, without desiring, like Yeats, to recover the lyric imagination.19 In general, American poets were faster than the British to follow Eliot into a poetry of consciousness—though, as a whole, they were less attuned than he to the underlying pathos of this gesture. In this light, I believe, both Pound and Stevens, may be understood as poets of consciousness, extending, albeit in very different ways, the Eliotic model. In Stevens and his descendants, we see a consciousness that takes the imagination as its primary (perhaps only) subject; in the Pound of the Cantos and his followers, we see the consciousness as an arranger of experience. My last chapter, instead of focusing on either of these poets, returns to England and W. H. Auden, who offers a third and to my mind more compelling possibility: the poet of consciousness as propagandist. A poetry of consciousness, lacking a strong inner reason for being, is particularly susceptible to the seductions of external Authority. The tensions between power and meaning (the overwhelming gift versus the desire to be a normal social being), which rend the work of Wordsworth, Yeats, and even Eliot, find some (as we shall see, rather ambivalent) resolution in Auden. With Auden, too, my history of plain English is brought to a close. If Wordsworth’s legacy to the twentieth century is a low register with a reputation for truthfulness in signifying object reality, modern

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poets beginning with Yeats use this reputation for their own devious purposes. One result is a change in the nature of plain English itself. Once valued as an accurate signifier of the world, plain English, by the middle of the twentieth century, has become a counter in a language game: an indicator of honest intentions. Whereas my discussion of the low register begins, however, with an examination of John Locke, it does not conclude with Philosophical Investigations.20 Wordsworth is drawing explicitly on Lockean empiricism when he articulates his theory of language; but if poets’ subsequent use of register echoes twentieth-century language philosophies, I am inclined to suspect convergence, or the spirit of the age. Indeed, questions of language as such move ever more to the background over the course of this study; and this is itself a symptom of the ever more covert role the low register plays in the twentieth century. The history I narrate is increasingly poetry-specific; in Yeats, and especially Auden, plain English is used to cast an aura of sincerity and good sense over otherwise tendentious views.21 A brief word about method. Chapter  stands apart somewhat from the others: as I just suggested, my account of plain English begins with a work not of literature but philosophy. And while Locke’s Essay can be read fruitfully as a literary text, my analysis focuses on his arguments; it is these arguments, both linguistic and epistemic, that later influence Wordsworth.22 I then approach each of the four central poets from a variety of perspectives—psychological, historical, rhetorical, and so on. My readings take me into areas where the borders between these approaches begin anyway to blur. A problem, for example, that I revisit in every chapter—the way powerful poetic language often effaces any recoverable meaning—may well recall deconstructive criticism. But where de Man would treat this problem as an atemporal failure of all language, I read the problem historically. Rather than aim at an overarching truth about the nature of discourse, I try to show the ways a series of poets dealt with the problem differently, and the ways their motives and solutions, because of changing personal, social, or historical conditions, changed over time. Because these changes often occurred slowly over the poets’ lives, I draw on their biographies, and proceed at the pace biographical readings require. My larger emphasis could be considered psychological—yet the meaning of the word psychology itself shifts from chapter to chapter. Wordsworth, in my account, is an intuitive psychologist, the inventor of a way to understand personal history. Yeats and Eliot are both loud despisers of psychology in its modern therapeutic guise, yet both finally resemble Wordsworth in the structure of their poetry. Along with H.D., Auden is perhaps

Introduction

the first poet in English fully comfortable with modern psychology, writing a lengthy elegy for Freud and incorporating Freudian argot into his verse; yet his poetry lacks, perhaps because of this very comfort, his predecessors’ psychological complexity. The tendency of contemporary theory I am most ambivalent about, ironically, is the one most prevalent in the study of Modernism today. Modernist studies has prospered, in the last two decades especially, from an alliance with cultural theories.23 Perhaps the most influential recent accounts of the period have been offered from this angle. These include Fredric Jameson, Andreas Huyssen, and John Carey’s depiction of “High” Modernism as a reaction by intellectual and social elites against an insurgent mass culture. Less fraught accounts have questioned the validity of such categories as high and low modernism. Yet apart from the study of ideology—Yeats’s self-positioning in Irish politics, Eliot’s anti-Semitism—cultural theory has had little to say about modern poetry.24 This lack is most likely attributable to the way culture itself is usually conceived: as something larger than the individual, as large as the whole society, but which operates through (or more darkly, colonizes) individual minds. In Hugh Underhill’s paraphrase, “there is no identity which is not socio-historical, which is other than a cultural construction.”25 A particularly dark statement of the case from one of the founders of the discipline: Neutralized and ready-made, traditional culture has become worthless today. . . . And the hucksters of mass culture can point to it with a grin, for they treat it as [trash]. The more total society becomes, the greater the reification of the mind and the more paradoxical its effort to escape reification on its own. Even the most extreme consciousness of doom threatens to degenerate into idle chatter. Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today. Absolute reification, which presupposed intellectual progress as one of its elements, is now preparing to absorb the mind entirely. Critical intelligence cannot be equal to this challenge as long as it confines itself to self-satisfied contemplation.26

It is not necessarily barbaric (as Adorno has sometimes been read to be saying) to write novels or to paint pictures after Auschwitz. Indeed, the modern novel, or prose in general, might well be perceived a natural ally, mimetically reproducing the conditions of study or, through techniques of abstraction and experiment, echoing the critic’s own subversive labor. One need only recall Joyce’s Gerty MacDowell, the helpless product of all the advertising copy and women’s magazines she reads, or of Bloom the ad-man, both victim of and participant in

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the consciousness industry. Poetry, however, with its delusions of autonomy, is for that very reason a particularly susceptible and unwitting servant of the larger culture. Adorno’s position, I believe, is far too stark and pessimistic to represent the field; nonetheless, I would argue that he anticipates much subsequent cultural theory in not taking seriously the poetic claim to a unique and independent subjectivity. That claim is very much the topic of this study. If a single conviction holds my project together, it is my sense that the study of poetry is, almost in the medieval sense of the word, a discipline. That is to say, poetry offers, and the study of poetry, poetic language in particular, can bring, a unique kind of knowledge. My starting point is poetry’s singular burden among the literary genres of always needing to justify its own existence. Indeed, the revolutionary shifts in dispensation that I trace stem from the failure of old justifications, and the need to produce new ones, a process that is unlikely to cease. Considered with cruel detachment, the basic lyric gesture, the naked and subjective utterance, is perhaps inherently absurd. It is thus a task of poetry, especially after Wordsworth, to provide grounds for the poet’s authority, the poet’s right to speak. These grounds are often tangled in self-deception; yet it is precisely poetry’s embrace of the fruitful mistake that leads to a kind of self-knowledge unavailable to philosophy. “It . . . may serve much to the quieting of disputes [if ] we confine our thoughts within the contemplation of those things that are within the reach of our understandings, and launch not out into that abyss of darkness (where we have not eyes to see, nor faculties to perceive any thing), out of a presumption that nothing is beyond our comprehension.”27 Although the author of these comments could never have been a poet, the poetry we will read originates in (a not always disagreeing) response to his position. It is thus with Locke, with his ideas of truth and language, that we also start.

Chapter 1 Prologue

The Secret Reference of John Locke

LANGUAGE DEBATES BEFORE LOCKE

Thou art the thing itself: unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, fork’d animal as thou art.

I begin my discussion of the low register and its history by returning to Lear on the heath. In Lear’s description of Edgar, we saw, Shakespeare seems to intuit the low register’s special ability to signify the actual world. To draw such a conclusion, I also suggested, would be anachronistic. Or rather, if Shakespeare has such an intuition, it in no way reflects—as it will, almost two centuries later, in William Wordsworth— either his wider practices as a writer or a systematic understanding of language on his part. As Albert Baugh observes, his vocabulary is by far the largest of any major English writer, and if anything, his deepest commitments are to the Latinate.1 Only a few scenes before this, Kent has railed against “plain knave[s]” who beguile in a “plain accent” (II.ii.–). Most to the point, the scene we examined is too rife with dramatic ironies to support any firm inferences. Lear is not merely insane (the next thing he does is tear off his clothes), but wrong: Edgar, 15

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neither deranged nor poor, is only a “thing itself”—manqué. Although living in a time of intense debate about the English language, Shakespeare plays only a peripheral role in the history I wish now to examine. As we will see, he anticipates much later developments, but speaks little to his own time. To be precise, the history of plain English divides into two very different historical periods, the first lasting roughly from  to  (and thus including Shakespeare), the second beginning with Wordsworth and continuing into the present. The  years between these periods witnessed a general hostility, in poetry especially, toward the low register, the restoration of Charles II bringing with it French and classical canons of literary taste. When Wordsworth reestablished claims for native diction, he did so on grounds quite dissimilar to those claimed by his seventeenth-century forerunners. The last three chapters of this study examine the nature and consequences of Wordsworth’s revolution, especially his legacy to modern poetry. Most of the present chapter is devoted to the figure who, unwittingly, lay the groundwork for Wordsworth: John Locke. To understand the originality of Wordsworth’s departure, however, we must first examine—albeit, with brevity—the earliest arguments for plain English. As recounted by J. L. Moore and (preeminently) Richard Foster Jones, the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries witnessed a furious pamphlet war about the future of English. The Renaissance revival of learning (in the sciences, humanities, and so on) had exposed a deficiency in the language, namely, a vocabulary ill-equipped to meet a rapidly expanding body of knowledge. Should English replenish itself, the question was mooted, from within, from native resources, as common in the other Germanic tongues, or by borrowing from French, Greek, and Latin? Shakespeare, who of course did not participate explicitly in this debate, was clearly of the latter camp; according to Baugh, such now-common words as frugal, misanthrope, dislocate, and obscene make their first appearance in his work.2 Among the nativists, meanwhile, linguistic reform was above all a nationalistic affair: xenophobia, against the French mainly, mingled with a sentimental celebration of homebred virtues. Thomas Wilson, whose Art of Rhetorique () was an important early salvo in this campaign, typically decried foreign borrowings (or “inkhorn words”) as pretentious: “Some seke so farre for outlandish Englishe, that thei forget altogether their mothers language. And I dare swere this, if some of their mothers were alive, thei were not able to tell, what thei say, & yet these fine Englishe clerkes, wil saie thei speake in their mother tongue. . . . Some farre iorneid ientlemen at their returne home, like as thei love to go in forrein apparell, so thei wil pouder their talke with oversea language. He that cometh lately out of France, wil talke Frenche English, & never

Prologue

blushe at the matter.” Hotter heads saw language reform as but one front in a sweeping removal of French influence from the island. Such extremities prompted Jones, in a perhaps hyperbolic moment, to deem the movement “slightly prophetic of the Nazis.” Writing in , John Hare asked, “Is it then suitable to the dignity, or tolerable to the Spirit of this our Nation, that after so noble an extraction and descent . . . wee should have our Spirits so broken and un-Teutonized by one unfortunate Battaile [that is, Hastings], as for above  yeares together and even for eternity, not only to remaine, but contentedly to rest under the disgraceful title of a Conquered Nation, and in captivity and vassalage to a forraigne power? . . . If wee survey our Language, we there meet with so much tincture of Normanisme, that some have esteemed it a dialect of the Gallick.”3 Not all of the nationalists were this vehement, nor did all define their position negatively. The writings of Sir John Cheke, for example, are less concerned with condemning the foreign than with praising the domestic: “I am of this opinion that our own tung shold be written cleane and pure, unmixt and unmangeled with borowing of other tunges. . . . For . . . our tung [doth] naturallie and praisablie utter her meaning, when she bouroweth no counterfeitness of other tunges to attire her self withall, but useth plainlie her own with such shift, as nature craft, experiens, and folowing of other excellent doth lead her unto.” One detects in Cheke’s comments a feel for the distinctive character, or personality, of English writing: plain and natural. Since the sixteenth century, writers have, not surprisingly, identified this character with the rustic, with a class of people far removed from the fast-developing world of London. Today, the bestknown document from this discussion is surely E. K.’s “Epistle” to the Shepheardes Calender. Spenser’s pastoral language, he notes, brings “great grace and, as one would say, auctoritie to the verse” (). “In my opinion it is one special prayse, of many whych are dew to this Poete, that he hath laboured to restore, as to their rightfull heritage such good and naturall English words, as have ben long time out of use and almost cleare disherited” (). This last comment barely conceals, finally, the political implications of plain English. From the beginnings of the debate, the low register has been embraced by both ends of the social spectrum. On the left, often the religious left, critics have routinely viewed Latinate English as reinforcing social barriers; as early as the s, William Tyndale vowed to make the Bible “plain reading for the ploughman.”4 The aristocracy, on the other hand, has just as eagerly seized on plain English as a mark of authenticity, over against an insurgent and affected middle class. Both strands have long survived their Tudor origins; indeed, we will have occasion to revisit them

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in the chapters that follow, when examining W. H. Auden and, above all, W. B. Yeats. Amidst the variety of positions staked out in the Renaissance language wars, one can easily overlook the near absence of truly philosophical claims for plain English. That is, the Tudor-Stuart authors and their successors based their judgments of the low register on its various social implications—national, economic, political, religious—without making any assertions for the idiom as such, as a mode of communication inherently superior to any other. To be sure, one finds the implication in some writers that native discourse, because more familiar, is also more effective than the borrowed. Thus Wilson: The misticall wise menne, and Poeticall Clerkes, will speake nothyng but quaint prouerbes, and blynd allegories, delityng muche in their awne darkenesse, especially, when none can tell what thei dooe saie. The unlearned or foolishe phantasticall . . . will so latine their tongues, that the simple cannot but wonder at their talke, and thynke surely thei speake by some Revelacion. I know them that thynke Rhetorique, to stande wholy upon darke woordes, and he that can catche an ynke horne terme by the taile, hym thei compt to be a fine Englishe man, and a good Retorician.

Such also seems the conclusion drawn, in the seventeenth century, by the Royal Society, a powerful influence on Locke, when they codified their rules for proper composition. Thomas Sprat, writing in , reports: [They have resolved] to reject all . . . amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style: to return back to the primitive purity, and shortness, when men deliver’d so many things, almost in an equal number of words. They have exacted from all their members, a close, naked, natural way of speaking; positive expressions, clear senses, a native easiness: bringing all things as near the Mathematical plainness, as they can: and preferring the language of Artizans, Countrymen, and Merchants, before that, of Wits, and Scholars.5

Powerful an anticipation of Locke (and Wordsworth) as this is, Sprat’s report still more resembles, in its evocation of “primitive purity,” a school of thought Locke would take it upon himself to refute. The exiled recusant Richard Verstegan is probably best remembered today for his wayward attempts to prove the great antiquity of Old English. Our tongue, we know, was spoken at the Tower of Babel, because the word babble, to talk incoherently, survives in the lexicon; more creative etymologies follow. “If Teutonic bee not taken for the first language of the world, it cannot bee denied to bee one of the most ancientest of the world.” Eccentricities aside, Verstegan discerns a suggestive alliance between English monosyllables and God’s creation, the former seeming an exact fit for

Prologue

the latter: “This our ancient language consisted moste at the first of woords of monosillable, each having his own proper signification, as by instinct of God and nature they first were receaved and understood, but heerof grew this benefit, that by apt ioyning together of two or three of these woords of one sillable, new woords of more diversitie of sence and signification were stil made and composed, according as the use of them for the more ful and perfect expressing of the composers meanings did require.” Verstegan thus perceives a special ability of native nouns, “each having his own proper signification,” to communicate the world of things. Transparent compounds are also ideally clear. English, like the language spoken in Eden by Adam, is a “natural” discourse. As a religious writer, Verstegan detects the divine will behind this flawlessness.6 It is ironic perhaps that Adamist doctrine, the line of thought to which Locke was most hostile, offered the nearest approximation to a seventeenth-century theoretical defense of the low register. Ultimately, however, neither Verstegan nor his secular contemporaries articulated clear systematic or (without distorting the term) philosophical grounds for plain English as a language of truth. Nor, for very different reasons, did Locke. By offering, however, a fully worked-out account of language and the world, he paved the way for these developments. It is to this theory of language that we now turn. AN ESSAY CONCERNING HUMAN UNDERSTANDING, BOOK III

As Locke admits at the end of Book II, where he develops the greater part of his epistemology, the study of language played no role in his original plan for the Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Book III became necessary as, during the composition, he discerned the “close . . . connection between ideas and words” (Essay, II..).7 He came to see, in fact, that words and ideas can often be virtually indistinguishable from each other. To take a relatively banal example: because the mind receives far more stimuli than it can possibly name, it relies heavily on abstraction. We look at a tomato one moment and receive an impression; we look again and receive another. Over the course of the day we see blood, a ruby, a glass of cranberry juice, a person blushing. Rather than assign a different name to each color, we think “red” each time. Locke describes this process: If every particular idea that we take in should have a distinct name, names must be endless. To prevent this, the mind makes the particular ideas, received from particular objects, to become general; which is done by considering them as they are in the

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mind such appearances separate from all other existences, and the circumstances of real existence, as time, place, or any other concomitant ideas. This is called ‘abstraction,’ whereby ideas taken from particular beings become general representatives of all the same kind; and their names, general names, applicable to whatever exists conformable to such abstract ideas. (II..)

In other words, when we recognize the cranberry juice as red, we may be perceiving nothing in the liquid itself besides an imperfect conformity to a preexisting idea, an idea quite possibly held together by nothing more the word red itself.8 When one considers that “red” is one of the more rudimentary ideas we can have (compare “edifice,” “mountain goat,” or “anomie”), the problem for philosophy—the often tenuous, but also interdependent relation between words, ideas, and things—is all too obvious. Accordingly, Locke undertakes in Book III to give a philosophically consistent account of how language works. He begins with two propositions that seem, in themselves, neither controversial nor particularly relevant to the revival of plain English at the end of the eighteenth century. As generations of commentators have noted, however, these first two paragraphs, which form the kernel of his language theory, apparently contradict each other when read in the context of his epistemology. . Man fitted to form articulate sounds.—God, having designed man for a sociable creature, made him not only with an inclination and under a necessity to have fellowship with those of his own kind, but furnished him also with language, which was to be the great instrument and common tie of society. Man therefore had by nature his organs so fashioned as to be fit to frame articulate sounds, which we call “words.” But this was not enough to produce language; for parrots and several other birds will be taught to make articulate sounds distinct enough, which yet by no means are capable of language. . To make them signs of ideas.—Besides articulate sounds, therefore, it was farther necessary that he should be able to use these sounds as signs of internal conceptions, and to make them stand as marks for the ideas within his own mind; whereby they might be made known to others, and the thoughts of men’s minds be conveyed from one to another. (III..–)

The problem is simple: if language, as “the common tie of society,” indeed facilitates communication, then it should be relied on to signify things in the world. This confidence is undermined by the second paragraph, the gist of which Locke restates later with force and brevity: “words in their primary or immediate signification stand for nothing but ideas in the mind of him that uses them” (III.., italics mine). Since ideas about the world often differ wildly from per-

Prologue

son to person (is your “red” my “red”?), these passages seem to beg the question: how is any communication possible when our words inevitably refer to private experience? To make matters worse, Locke is unwavering in his conventionalism: reacting in part against contemporary theories of natural discourse, he insists, with as much conviction as Saussure, that the relation of words to ideas is completely arbitrary. The interest of contemporaries like Verstegan (or Leibniz) in recovering an “Adamic language” strikes Locke as ludicrous.9 Words are “but empty sounds” (I..), conveying in themselves no knowledge of the idea signified, let alone the original object (III..). Locke thus introduces two intertwined problems to the study of language. The first he calls the “double conformity” of ideas: an idea is “something in the mind that exists between the thing that exists, and the name that is given to it” (II.., italics mine). “It is in our ideas that both the rightness of our knowledge, and the propriety or intelligibleness of our speaking, consists. And hence it is that men are so forward to suppose that the abstract ideas they have in their minds, are such as agree to the things existing without them, to which they are referred; and are the same also to which the names they give them do, by the use and propriety of that language, belong. For, without this double conformity of ideas, they find they should both think amiss of things in themselves, and talk of them unintelligibly to others” (II..). Since words signify ideas arbitrarily, and ideas are often the unreliable signs of things, one suspects that Locke is using the word “forward” in this passage disapprovingly. But that brings up his second position: the first proposition of Book III. Despite an epistemology that might be described as solipsistic, with each person locked in his or her own world, Locke expects language to serve adequately and practically the purposes of communication. All too aware of the complex relations between the two dyads word/idea and idea/thing, Locke attempts to salvage a workable theory of language. If his conclusions are not always convincing to his critics, they are of consequence for my larger argument. It is not my purpose to present an extended reading of Locke’s philosophy of language, let alone his epistemology; to do so would be far too tangential to my larger topic. Nevertheless, there are two main ways, both relevant to the subsequent history of plain English, that my approach to Book III differs from most of Locke’s critics; the first is a difference of emphasis, the other is structural. When reading the first two paragraphs of chapter , critics tend either to dismiss them as contradictory or to privilege the second over the first. That is: while Locke’s originality (and one of his claims to philosophical greatness) lies in his

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recognition that words signify ideas not things, his preceding contention, that words facilitate communication, is self-evident and banal. One influential commentator summarizes Locke’s first contribution as “a few commonsensical maxims for the avoidance of ‘jargon’ very much in the spirit of [Francis Bacon].”10 The reasons for this dismissal are plain: the Essay deals with the materials and scope of human knowledge. While Locke’s presentation of “double conformity” fits into that larger scheme, his insistence on practical application seems superfluous and inconsistent. Such readings, however, inevitably overlook the sheer force of his insistence on application. In his “Epistle to the Reader,” Locke associates himself with the goals and methods of the Royal Society.11 After praising Newton and Boyle, he describes himself, rather self-deprecatingly, as “employed as an under-labourer in clearing ground a little, and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge” (“Epistle,” xvi). The rubbish in question has been largely verbal. “Vague and insignificant forms of speech, and abuse of language, have so long passed for mysteries of science; and hard or misapplied words, with little or no meaning, have, by prescription, such a right to be mistaken for deep learning and height of speculation; that it will not be easy to persuade either those who speak or those who hear them, that they are but the covers of ignorance and hinderance of true knowledge. To break in upon the sanctuary of vanity and ignorance will be, I suppose, some service to human understanding” (“Epistle,” xvii). Locke the philosopher of “private language” is barely recognizable here. By the end of Book III, his claims for the importance of language reform, as a way to broaden “the way to knowledge, and perhaps peace too,” have, if anything, swelled (III..). One senses in these (and numerous similar) passages, so oddly anticipatory of Orwell, that Locke’s confidence in the value of language reform stems not merely from an expectation of tangible gains but from an underlying conviction that language was intended to produce such results. Although most systematic critics ignore this aspect of the Essay altogether, Locke’s arguments from purpose are too numerous to dismiss: if something exists, it exists for a reason.12 “Nature,” he writes, “never makes excellent things for mean or no uses” (II..). His very premise in writing the Essay, he explains in his introduction, was “to take a survey of our own understandings, examine our powers, and see to what things they were adapted” (I.., italics mine). Locke’s empiricism is complicated greatly by his positing certain “faculties” (“reason,” “understanding,” “appetite,” and so on), which, as parts of the human machine (a trope to which he resorts often), are assumed to have a normative function, but are otherwise left unexplained.

Prologue

Presumably, there is a correct, intended way for “the discursive faculty” (compare I..) to operate. Let us return, then, to the first paragraph of Book III. “. Man fitted to form articulate sounds.—God, having designed man for a sociable creature, made him not only with an inclination and under a necessity to have fellowship with those of his own kind, but furnished him also with language, which was to be the great instrument and common tie of society” (III..). Critics who summarize this passage simply as “language allows communication” miss the truly ontological resonance of Locke’s rhetoric: it is in the nature of man, a nature perhaps beyond our understanding, to communicate through language. Locke sounds, in this confidence, surprisingly close to the writers whose views of language his Essay supplanted. Although he rejected outright their idea of a natural language, and would doubtless have found the writings of Verstegan contemptible, his rejection of methods does not imply a rejection of aims.13 Attempts were made throughout Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, even among men uninterested in recovering the Adamic tongue, to create a perfectly signifying “philosophical language.” Indeed, we saw the beginnings of such endeavors in Bacon’s idea of a plain philosophical style. At the end of his career, John Wilkins, to the consternation of some associates in the Royal Society and to the endless amusement of Jonathan Swift, endeavored in his Essay Towards a Real Character And a Philosophical Language () to “reduce all things and notions unto such a frame, as [might] express their natural order, dependence, and relations.”14 That a man so committed to the New Science should have undertaken this task says much about the intellectual climate in England when Locke was first conceiving his Essay. It may be useful to read Book III not simply as a repudiation of contemporary language theories but as the work of a man fundamentally in agreement with his predecessors about what language should do, but hostile to their other assumptions. It makes sense, then, to suggest a change of emphasis in reading the opening to Book III. Instead of reading the second paragraph as central, with the first as a desired but probably impossible corollary, I propose the opposite tack. Thus: Locke intends, in Book III, to explain how language may serve communication more effectively than it has in the past; the fact that words signify ideas, not things, is the main hurdle to be negotiated en route to this goal. One notes, on reviewing these paragraphs, that this is precisely how Locke himself frames the problem. Indeed, his attempts to explain the apparent contradiction at the heart of his system are uncharacteristically vague—not because of their obscurity but because their vagueness is almost certainly intentional. Although, he writes,

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words can signify “properly and immediately” only the speaker’s ideas, yet men “in their thoughts give them a secret reference to two other things” (III.., italics mine): “ideas in other men’s minds” and “the reality of things” (III..). The phrase “secret reference” seems purposely evasive; and thus, where some commentators are apt to treat the occasional “imprecision and inconsistency of [Locke’s] theoretical statements” as peripheral to his main argument, we may detect a pattern. Locke is nearly always willing to sacrifice theoretical consistency, and even clarity, to the interests of practical application.15 My second, structural point of departure from much previous criticism concerns the “double conformity” problem itself. Critics interested primarily in Locke’s linguistics, Hans Aarsleff notably, tend to emphasize the importance of the second dyad (word/idea) over the first (idea/thing). Locke’s singularity, they argue, and also his importance for subsequent literature, lies in his recognition that words are the conventional, not the natural signs of ideas. In contrast to natural language theories, in which the word-thing relation is unitary, Locke reveals it to be unsteady and dual. The result is an ultimate (and in Aarsleff’s opinion, a fortunate) breach between language and world. Conventionalism, however, was quite prominent during the Middle Ages: theories of natural language are indeed rare in postclassical times until the Renaissance.16 More important, Aarsleff and others equate, without support, the natural and the unitary, failing to recognize that, if words in fact signified things, their relation to those things, conventional or not, would be unitary. Since Locke himself acknowledges no superiority of natural signs over conventional ones whose meanings are commonly understood, the question to ask is whether, given the circumstances of double conformity, words can ever signify things directly. The answer to this question—with profound consequences for the low register—must lie in the idea/thing dyad: a word’s perspicuity, its effectiveness in signifying the world, must depend on the clarity of the idea it stands for. So: what sort of signs are ideas? The answer varies. Although Locke denies (famously) the existence of ideas prior to experience, he grants the mind considerable leverage in their subsequent creation. The mind receives passively from the senses simple ideas: discreet, particular impressions (for example, red, sharp, loud), which it “can neither make nor destroy” (II..). As the involuntary products of experience, simple ideas are “natural signs,” comprising, in Michael Ayers’s phrase, the “elements in a natural language of thought.” Although we assign them names arbitrarily, these ideas “are linked to what they signify by a natural, causal relation.” Names

Prologue

(words) for simple ideas, it follows, take their place at the high end of a gradient, as perfect, or nearly perfect signs. Other words, in which the idea /thing (and consequently the word-thing) relation is less secure, occupy lower positions. 17 Indeed, even though simple ideas constitute the “material of all our knowledge” (II..), they are useless unless actively operated on—combined, abstracted, compared—by the intellect. Complex ideas—the combination of two or more simple ideas—are of two main varieties: substances and modes. The first: when the mind notices that certain simple ideas constantly go together, it presumes them “to belong to one thing,” and so unites “them in one subject, [under] one name” (II..). That is: we perceive a collection of impressions (yellow, shiny, metallic, malleable, weighty) apparently cohering, and so postulate “some substratum wherein they . . . subsist, and from which they . . . result” (II.., Locke’s italics), the substance “gold.” Our ideas of substances are self-made. In each case, receiving only simple ideas, we know nothing of their “substratum,” or indeed whether that substratum even exists. Words for substances, therefore, occupy a more tenuous place on the gradient than words for simple ideas. Substance words must succeed or fail to the extent that they signify phenomena that have been precisely observed and defined. Concrete particulars must always be more reliable than generalities. Exact signification can be approached, even as the final unknowability of substance prevents certain accuracy.18 Modes, finally, make for the least reliable verbal signs. Generated voluntarily by the mind without reference to nature, they may be simple or mixed. The former are combinations or “variations” of “one simple idea” (II..), and are relatively unproblematic; thus the simple idea “number” yields the modes “a dozen,” “a score,” “three,” and so on. Mixed modes, however, are combinations of more than one simple idea and are often quite intricate and conceptual. Locke offers as examples “gratitude,” “murder,” and “beauty,” but the number of such “notions” (the term he uses for ideas with no basis in reality) is practically limitless. Having no “foundation in nature” (II..), words for mixed modes are inevitably the most resistant to translation (compare II..), and the most vulnerable to semantic drift over time. Although these words are not subject, as those of simple ideas and substances are, to the double conformity problem, there being no idea/thing relation to worry about, the idea/word connection is particularly prone to error. People are most likely to use such words without any sure signification, while, on the other hand, the more complex mixed modes usually exist only by virtue of their names (II..). As Locke, at the end of Book

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II, surveys the consequences of double conformity, the implications of his epistemology for usage are obvious. When the truth of our ideas is judged of by the conformity they have to the ideas which other men have and commonly signify by the same name, they may any of them be false. But yet simple ideas are least of all liable to be so mistaken. . . . It is evident, that the simple ideas [men] call by any name are commonly the same that others have and mean when they use the same names. (II..) Ideas of mixed modes are most liable to be false in this sense.—Complex ideas are much more liable to be false in this respect; and the complex ideas of mixed modes much more than those of substances: because in substances (especially those which the common and unborrowed names of any language are applied to) some remarkable sensible qualities, serving ordinarily to distinguish one sort from another, easily preserve those who take any care in the use of their words from applying them to sorts of substances to which they do not belong. But in mixed modes we are much more uncertain, it being not so easy to determine of several actions whether they are to be called “justice” or “cruelty,” “liberality” or “prodigality.” [In such words] . . . we have no other sensible standard existing anywhere but the name itself. (II.., )

In summary: the double conformity of ideas produces a gradient in which words for simple ideas, particular and general substances, and mixed modes are increasingly unreliable as signs. The conclusions Locke draws from this gradient, though not unexpected given his era, differ considerably from those of his Romantic successors.

LOCKE’S IMPLICATIONS FOR REGISTER

When, toward the end of Book III, Locke turns to prescribing rules for the proper use of language, one half expects him to apply these rules specifically to plain English. The unique layered vocabulary of English, in which most of the words for simple ideas (and many for substances, especially concrete particulars) are native in origin and most words for mixed modes are borrowed, seems a perfect match for his gradient. Where Wilson, Cheke, and Hare can offer only nationalistic or sentimental claims for the low register, Locke’s system seems to offer grounds for their superiority over Latinisms as signs. Of course, Locke draws no such conclusions. His allegiances are to the stylistic canons of his time. Though Book III has revolutionary implications, his purpose is not to disrupt but to supply new foundations for the given. His own diction is highly Latinate, and his syntax, in conformity to classical models, is often suspended and ornate.

Prologue

Indeed, in Book III, chapter , on “Particles,” he offers a theoretical defense of hypotaxis. Besides words that signify ideas, a great many others “signify the connection that the mind gives to ideas or propositions, one with another” (III..). The frequent and balanced use of particles, he concludes, is evidence of a complex and subtle mind. He expands on the “art of well speaking”: “It is in the right use of [particles] that more particularly consists the clearness and beauty of a good style. To think well, it is not enough that a man has ideas clear and distinct in his thoughts, nor that he observes the agreement or disagreement of some of them; but he must think in train, and observe the dependence of his thoughts and reasonings one upon another; and to express well such methodical and rational thoughts, he must have words to show what connection, restriction, distinction, opposition, emphasis, &c., he gives to each respective part of his discourse. To mistake in any of these is to puzzle, instead of informing, his hearer” (III..). Like theorists of the “plain style” following Bacon, Locke’s basic unit of analysis remains the sentence. Proper style finally boils down to syntax, not words. Presumably one could use low diction as easily as Latinisms in suspended discourse, but Locke, living in the golden age of the Latinate periodic sentence, does not consider the possibility. More to the point, his goal is to establish the widest applicability for his theory. As a result, in his rules for good usage, he might as well be describing good Latin or good Kirghiz as good English. His recommendations in the last three chapters of Book III consist, most famously, of a series of practical rules for perspicuity. Four main problems account for the failure of words to communicate clearly. First, the ideas they stand for are very complex, and made up of a great number of ideas put together. Secondly, Where the ideas they stand for have no certain connexion in nature; and so no settled standard any where in nature existing to rectify and adjust them by. Thirdly, where the signification of the word is referred to a standard, which standard is not easy to be known. Fourthly, where the signification of the word, and the real essence of the thing, are not exactly the same. (III..)

Proper speech, then, involves using words with distinct and commonly understood significations. People should “use their words constantly in the same sense, and for none but determined and uniform ideas” (III..). He condemns in particular the willful use of obscure terms, “by either applying old words to new and unusual significations, or introducing new and ambiguous terms without

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defining either; or else putting them so together as may confound their ordinary meaning” (III..). Locke’s notorious polemic against metaphor, which colored so many of the key literary debates through Romanticism, is best read in the light of passages like this one. “Wit,” the faculty involved in assembling “ideas, and putting [them] together with quickness and variety . . . to make up pleasant pictures and agreeable visions in the fancy” (II..), is used legitimately in works of “entertainment and pleasantry” (II..). When employed in rhetoric to persuade, however, “all the artificial and figurative application of words eloquence hath invented, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions, and thereby mislead the judgment; and so indeed are perfect cheats” (III..). Later in the Essay, Locke associates such misuse of language with religious fanatics (IV..–) and tyrants, in “whose interest it is to keep [the citizenry] ignorant” (IV..). In short, the improper exercise of language perplexes “the great concernments of human life and society,” brings “confusion, disorder and uncertainty into the affairs of mankind,” and renders useless “those two great rules, religion and justice” (III..). To conclude, “it is not enough a man uses his words as signs of some ideas; those ideas he annexes them to, if they be simple, must be clear and distinct; if complex, must be determinate; i.e. the precise collection of simple ideas settled in the mind, with that sound annexed to it as the sign of that precise determined collection and no other” (III..). Whether or not Locke actually believes that these recommendations can be followed has been, over the years, a matter of lively debate. His own terminology is notoriously inconsistent; one critic diplomatically calls it “haphazard,” and blames the Essay’s murkiness for generations of misinterpretation.19 Other readers, especially recent ones, have noted Locke’s copious, seemingly incongruous use of metaphor. The mind is alternately a mirror, an “empty cabinet” (I..), a “dark room” (II..), and a “candle within us” (I..). Fading memories leave no more record than “shadows do flying over fields of corn” (II..). References to Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Milton abound. Even as he enjoins us to avoid figurative language, lest we become “lost in the great wood of words” (IV..), he apparently cannot help straying into allegory. Plainly Locke does not follow his own advice. To be sure, he allows for a “tolerable latitude, that may serve for ordinary conversation”(III..), and draws a practical distinction between civil and philosophical discourse. Civil speech, the idiom of “common conversation and commerce about the ordinary affairs and conveniences of life” (III..), can afford to be sloppy, having no great consequences. Philosophical language, however, must “convey the precise notions of things, and . . . express,

Prologue

in general propositions, certain and undoubted truths which the mind may rest upon and be satisfied with, in its search after true knowledge” (III..). By using the term “philosophical language,” Locke recalls the old debate between philosophical and rhetorical style, and aligns his efforts with the attempts of contemporaries like Wilkins to create a perfectly signifying tongue. But if his discussion of double conformity demonstrates anything, it is that such a discourse is impossible. Rather than facing this implication, however, Locke maintains that, in principle at least, even the words for mixed modes and substances may be precisely determined. To illustrate that this is viable, Locke breaks down several complex ideas, of modes as well as substances, into their constituent simple ideas. He also echoes several contemporaries in calling for a picture encyclopedia or dictionary to codify word significations. For the purposes of the present work, it finally matters little whether or not Locke believes such a language feasible. In fact, he probably considers it, as Ayers suggests, a “practical impossibility.”20 The very fact that he envisions such a discourse, however, is telling: by sticking to the ideal of a philosophical language, he both adheres to a paradigm undermined by his own theory and ignores the new paradigm nascent in that theory. As seen, he acknowledges to some extent the gradient generated by the double conformity problem; yet rather than recognizing the superiority as signs of some words over others, and propounding in turn a language strong on concrete terms and low on abstractions, he attempts to recoup all registers of the language and ultimately even to favor the abstract. Despite Locke’s fidelity to the conventions of his own time, later writers, Wordsworth most of all, readily grasped the consequences of Book III for the low register. In the century following Locke, however, his successors essentially repeat his own response to his system: absorbing his empiricism and philosophy of language but refusing to recognize their subversive implications for Augustan habits of style. If anything, the strains on convention grow, as these successors tease out the importance of Locke’s system for such related areas as psychology and literary criticism and (often unwittingly) reach conclusions ever more problematic for contemporary intellectual norms. To put it another way, just as Locke’s third book upends the stylistic conventions he hoped to preserve, so the Essay as a whole subverts Locke’s most cherished habits of thought. In the decades leading up to Wordsworth, which we will now consider briefly, it is increasingly difficult to picture the mind actually working the way Locke tells us it works. This difficulty may finally be expressed by two related terms: meaning and consciousness.

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Continuity of consciousness, Locke explains in Book II, is the most basic test of personal identity. At any given moment we are aware of ourselves receiving a consecutive stream of impressions. It is only by the grace of memory, a memory always challenged by forgetfulness, that we can claim connection to the person (or the consciousness) receiving impressions yesterday or two years ago (II..). If memory is disrupted—by amnesia let us say—the self, the very person, is lost (II..). Following the same logic into the realm of science fiction, Locke admits that a consciousness somehow transmitted between multiple bodies would make a single person. However, he does not try to explain how, though continuity is always under assault (by sleep, by ordinary attrition of memory), our development into fully formed rational beings is possible. That task is left to the associationist psychologists of mid-century, of whom David Hartley is now the best known. In Observations on Man (), Hartley begins, like Locke, with sense impressions. He then traces how, through the process of association, our simple ideas generate more complex (and ever more internalized) concepts like “self-interest,” “sympathy,” “theophany” (“the contemplation of God, and of his Attributes, and of our relation to Him” (I. )), and the moral sense.21 The progress up this pyramid is suspiciously smooth, and shows more confidence than Locke himself does in the reliability of consciousness. In a gesture we should now recognize as characteristic (that is, pragmatic), Locke finally suggests that ultimate questions about this reliability are unanswerable and not worth asking. “Why [our perception of selfhood] may not possibly be without reality of matter of fact . . . will be difficult to conclude from the nature of things. And that it never is so, will by us . . . be best resolved into the goodness of God, who, as far as the happiness or misery of any of his sensible creatures is concerned in it, will not by a fatal error of theirs transfer from one to another that consciousness which draws reward or punishment with it” (II..). We can trust the stability of consciousness, that is, because it is not God’s way to trick us. On rigorous philosophical grounds, later eighteenth-century philosophers like Hume will not grant Locke (or thus Hartley) this proposition. Nor, as we shall see, for very different reasons, does Wordsworth. Associationist psychology, meanwhile, has profound implications for usage. Turning his attention to the development of language, Hartley underscores even more than Locke had the connections between Book III’s empiricism and Adamist doctrine. Since Adam, Hartley reckons, had only a knowledge of the concrete world—simple ideas and substances—his language must have been restricted to the shortest words: “I suppose also, that the Language, which Adam

Prologue

and Eve were possessed of in Paradise, was very narrow, and confined in great measure to visible Things. . . . It might also be monosyllabic in great measure” (I. ). Hartley further speculates that this kind of language is still observable in the speech of children, in the unlettered, and above all in the tongues of primitive peoples: “The Narrowness of the Languages of barbarous nations may add some Light and Evidence here” (I. ). Although harder to come by, such conjectures can also be found in Locke; he submits that most kind terms must have “received their birth and signification from ignorant and illiterate people, who sorted and denominated things by those sensible qualities they found in them; thereby to signify them, when absent, to others, whether they had an occasion to mention a sort or particular thing” (III..). Although, in passages like these, Hartley and Locke seem only steps away from Wordsworth of the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, both are interested finally in recovering the language of their time. However concrete the idiom of “illiterate and contemned mechanic[s]” (III..), monosyllables are not for the cultivated. Nonetheless, the stage has been set for Wordsworth. In his poetry of the late s and early s, disputing the associationist account of consciousness, Wordsworth traces his formation as an adult to an unbridgeable breach of memory. The period preceding this divide, his youth, assumes a privileged place in his myth of development; so, too, does the idiom he correlates with that period. To the discomfort of his Modernist successors, he finally calls that breach “imagination.” The language of Wordsworth’s imagination, in turn, is plain English. Why Wordsworth should locate the imagination in earliest childhood experience is a question we will examine at length in the next chapter. To close this chapter, however, we may again observe that this development is nascent in Locke’s Essay, specifically in his theory of meaning. The periodic sentence embodies for Locke the meaningful use of language; hypotaxis mimics the way the mind balances ideas, draws fine distinctions, works through abstractions, and so on. As should be clear by now, however, Locke’s language model is deeply problematic for meaning: words neither mean nor refer to, but simply stand for ideas.22 The most vivid part of language, signifying ideas received passively from experience, is indeed the least susceptible to meaningful use: when a word for a substance or simple idea is spoken, an image is presented powerfully before the mind—powerfully, yet perhaps independent of meaning. This unintended implication of Book III—that Locke’s epistemology privileges the passively received, forceful image over rational thought—reverberates in the work of Wordsworth’s immediate predecessors. Hugh Blair, Hartley’s slightly younger

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contemporary, whose Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres () is empirical in pedigree, locates the Sublime precisely in the object, forcefully and plainly presented. [It is my purpose] to demonstrate how essential conciseness and simplicity are to Sublime Writing. Simplicity, I place in opposition to studied and profuse ornament, and conciseness, to superfluous expression. The reason why a defect, either in conciseness or simplicity, is hurtful in a peculiar manner to the Sublime, I shall endeavour to explain. The emotion occasioned in the mind by some great or noble object, raises it considerably above its ordinary pitch. A sort of enthusiasm is produced. . . . Now, when an author has brought us, or is attempting to bring us into this state; if he multiplies words unnecessarily, if he decks the Sublime object which he presents to us, round and round, with glittering ornaments; . . . he relaxes the tension of the mind [and] the Sublime is gone.23

Hugh Blair brings us to Wordsworth’s doorstep, without quite crossing the threshold. Although he discerns the ability of simple language to present objects powerfully, his main examples are drawn, astoundingly, from Milton and Virgil. In Blair, we see the old Augustan dispensation stretched to the snapping point by a future impatient for birth. It has been argued persuasively that the ornateness of Augustan poetry was itself a response to Lockean empiricism: as the humane art of verse found itself increasingly challenged as a source of wisdom by the new science, it turned away from Lockean ideas of clarity to embrace greater and greater, Latinate complexity.24 The novel, a genre with fewer pretenses to wisdom and profundity, was better positioned to emulate the stylistic dictates of Locke and Sprat. And yet this very lack of pretension, this absence of a need to justify itself, as well as an unreflecting adherence to inherited syntax, also practically insured that the novel would not seize fully on the low register. It was left to a poet, Wordsworth, finally to leap into plain English, and to make the synthesis: object, low register, childhood, imagination. As we will soon see, this synthesis was not unproblematic; nor was it precisely where the Wordsworthian imagination began. For that we must turn to Salisbury Plain, and an encounter strongly reminiscent of Lear on the heath. In Wordsworth’s poem the speaker is not a fallen king but a vagrant, and her object not a man but a glowworm.

Chapter 2 Wordsworth’s

Empirical Imagination

John Locke often enters discussions of Romantic poetry as a straw man or a specter. Perhaps there is good reason for this. The vital achievement of Romanticism, a prominent line of criticism informs us, was to reclaim for the imagination a world laid desolate by eighteenth-century rationalism. Locke, whose polemic against art we examined in the last chapter, is often made to stand for a set of prejudices supplanted by Wordsworth’s generation. In Basil Willey’s account, “Wordsworth was the kind of poet who could only have appeared at the end of the eighteenth century, when mythologies were exploded. . . . To animise the ‘real’ world, the ‘universe of death’ that the ‘mechanical’ system of philosophy had produced, but to do so without either using an exploded mythology or fabricating a new one, this was the special task and mission of Wordsworth.” Even Hans Aarsleff, who would trace the Wordsworthian imagination back to Locke, is forced, I think, both to misrepresent Wordsworth’s ideas about poetic diction and to filter Locke through French theories of language that Locke himself would scarcely recognize.1 Wordsworth is a far more faithful child of empiricism, however, than any of his contemporaries; if he indeed subverts 33

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Lockean opinions and, despite Willey’s insistence, fabricates new mythologies, he is remarkably canny about doing so in received terms. In this chapter, I propose to reexamine the empirical premises of Wordsworth’s poetry. I read the work he produced between  and  with an eye both to his imaginative development and to the stylistic, linguistic innovations in which that development was manifested. His psychological understanding of character and his pivotal role in the rise to prominence of plain English are both best understood as inheritances, albeit ironic ones, of the eighteenth century. My discussion begins, as promised, with a glowworm. THE EMPIRICAL IMAGINATION: “JUVENILIA XVIA”; “THE OLD CUMBERLAND BEGGAR”

Now fast against my cheek and whistling ears My loose wet hair and tattered bonnet flapped With thought-perplexing noise, that seemed to make The universal darkness that ensued More dark and desolate. Though I had seen Worse storm, no stranger to such nights as these, Yet had I fears from which a life like mine Might long have rested, and remember well That as I floundered on, disheartened sore With the rough element and pelting shower, I saw safe-sheltered by the viewless furze The tiny glow-worm, lowliest child of earth, From his green lodge with undiminished light Shine through the rain, and strange comparison Of Envy linked with pity, touched my heart, And such reproach of heavenly ordonnance As shall not need forgiveness. (ll. –)2

This passage, probably written in early  but published by Ernest de Selincourt only in  (as Juvenilia XVIa), marks a watershed in Wordsworth’s career. Having cast his earliest poems in either couplets or stanzas, he turns here for the first time to blank verse. Not coincidentally, these lines also find Wordsworth first using the plain, low register of English in a way that I take to be characteristic of his mature output. The low register is not in itself new to him: his truly juvenile, initial attempts at verse writing, such as the “Vale of Esthwaite” fragment from , use Saxon words ornamentally to produce, in a

Wordsworth’s Empirical Imagination

manner reminiscent of Robert Blair, ghastly and gothic effects. A typical sequence: Like two wan withered leaves his eyes, His bones looked sable through his skin As the pale moonbeam wan and thin Which through a chink of rock we view On a lone sable blasted eugh. (ll. –)3

Poems written later in the decade under the influence of James Thomson, such as “An Evening Walk” (), also draw heavily on plain English in passages of extended picturesque description. The excerpt with which this discussion began does not differ, for much of its length, from other youthful efforts; it culminates, however, by depicting an experience fundamental to Wordsworth’s remaining important poetry, and does so with a typically Wordsworthian image. We can be certain that Wordsworth himself finds the solitary, oblivious glowworm moving and significant; over the next decade, he returns to it, in various contexts, perhaps six or seven times. In this initial usage, the creature is situated in a landscape common to his poems from the early s: a stormy, nocturnal wasteland. Indeed, the slightly longer fragment from which this passage has been taken is associated in Wordsworth’s manuscripts with both The Borderers and the nexus of poems taking place on Salisbury Plain (“Guilt and Sorrow,” “The Female Vagrant”). The fragment begins as allegory, with the speaker abandoning “the public way,” by the “hope of a shorter path seduced” (ll. –). Like the outcast female vagrant, her wandering suggests a crisis of mind, the “rough element and pelting shower” a “thought-perplexing” inner state as much as foul weather. Yet despite occasional touches of Miltonic rhetoric (“universal darkness”), the speaker is increasingly anchored to the real world by such quotidian details as her “tattered bonnet.” It is hard to say exactly how the sight of a glowworm draws her out of that reality. The syntax, formerly stormy with hard enjambments, becomes measured and calm, and the diction utterly simple. Despite a single, modest metaphor (“child of earth”), we are forced to see the glowworm as nothing but itself. This transfixed concentration on an object, conveyed by clear, hard details (“furze,” “earth,” “green lodge,” “light,” “shine through”) has the eerie effect of suspending thought and feeling. The speaker can respond emotionally only after her attention has withdrawn (we feel the distance in “ordonnance”) from the object. Wordsworth does not need to tell us that such a response must be envious; in fact, unsure perhaps of his powers, he goes so far as to capitalize the word. The

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reaction to a glowworm of a mind overburdened with thought resembles Nietzsche’s response to cattle, who “do not know what is meant by yesterday or today.” Man “cannot help envying them their happiness—what they have, a life neither bored nor painful, is precisely what he wants, yet he cannot have because he refuses to be like an animal.”4 In Wordsworth’s poems of  and early , this last allowance is missing. M. H. Abrams, in order to assimilate Wordsworth to the main line of Romantic theory (as he understands it), tellingly rewrites Wordsworth’s conception of poetry, as stated in the  Preface, as “the overflow, utterance, or projection of the thoughts and feelings of the poet” (italics mine).5 The earliest mature poems, however, usually suggest a desire to be rid of thought, consciousness, subjectivity itself. Although the decrepit old man in “Animal Tranquility and Decay” is said to move “with thought,” his mind has seemingly forgone all human function. His face, step, and gait are capable only of “one expression.”6 A man “by whom all effort seems forgotten,” he apparently lacks both memory and volition: “patience now doth seem a thing of which / He hath no need.” The tone of the poem again is manifestly envious. There is a beauty in the way “little hedgerow birds . . . regard him not.” He feels no pain. In short, He is by nature led To peace so perfect that the young behold With envy, what the Old Man hardly feels. (ll. –)

Wordsworth readers will recognize this strain, or something close to it, in poems from the  Lyrical Ballads that examine idiots, madwomen, children, and dotards—persons, that is, who seemingly embody this state of diminished selfhood. Again, this line of argument is evident in more discursive  lyrics like “Expostulation and Reply,” “The Tables Turned,” and “Lines Written in Early Spring.” Already, however, these last efforts, by celebrating more the beauty and spirit of nature in itself, and disclosing far less the emotional reasons for his attraction to nature, greatly soften the self-annihilating thrust of his earlier work. Why should we thus with an untoward mind, And in the weakness of humanity, From natural wisdom turn our hearts away, To natural comfort shut our eyes and ears, And, feeding on disquiet, thus disturb The calm of Nature with our restless thoughts? (ll.  –)7

Wordsworth’s Empirical Imagination

In this last passage from the “The Ruined Cottage,” we feel the impulse behind Wordsworth’s fascinated attraction to figures of oblivion, and also his attempts through mental concentration to achieve that state himself. In the glowworm episode, Wordsworth seems to suggest a movement of mind described by Martin Buber in I and Thou. The perceiving subject is so riveted by a particular object that the subject/object distinction falls away and the self is lost in relation. Everything belonging to a tree, for example, “its form and structure, its colours and chemical composition . . . are all present in a single whole. The tree is no impression, no play of my imagination, no value depending on my mood; but it is bodied over against me and has to do with me as I with it. . . . I encounter . . . the tree itself.”8 My contention is that Wordsworth’s theory of the imagination comes out of his attraction, suggested frequently in these early works, to this kind of experience. Imagination, in this early phase of Wordsworth’s career, is conceived along Lockean lines. We recall that, for Locke, a mind confronted by a confusion of ideas may bring to bear on them one of two faculties, wit or judgment. Wit lies “most in the assemblage of ideas, and putting those together with quickness and variety wherein can be found any resemblance or congruity, thereby to make up pleasant pictures and agreeable visions in the fancy” (Essay, II..). Locke of course ascribes all works of art, of “entertainment and pleasantry,” to the operations of wit. Poetry, which relies on “metaphor and illusion,” requires “no labour of thought to examine what truth or reason there is in it.” To philosophy, he reserves the higher faculty of judgment, which “lies quite on the other side, in separating one from another ideas wherein can be found the least difference, thereby to avoid being misled by similitude and by affinity to take one thing for another” (II..). If the mind lacked clear impressions of different objects, Locke writes, “it would be capable of very little knowledge” (III..). Wordsworth takes this conclusion to heart, and preserves intact Locke’s wit/ judgment distinction in his own presentation of fancy and imagination. The imagination isolates perceptions; the fancy combines.9 Wordsworth’s interest, as expressed in the  Preface, is in “the discriminating powers of the mind.” His early poems derive their power from the way he looks “steadily at [his] subject[s],” presenting each experience with “little falsehood of description” (). Images, accordingly, are equivalent at this early stage to Locke’s ideas, most often, as in the glowworm passage, to ideas of substances. His verse is typically destitute of both metaphors and the “personifications of abstract ideas” ().

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This revision of Locke distinguishes Wordsworth from his entire generation: where he accepts Locke’s appraisal of wit and judgment, but radically identifies the work of imagination, of poetry, with the latter, his most influential contemporaries, from Burke to Coleridge and Shelley, simply reverse Locke’s appraisal. The mind’s ability to combine impressions is seen by them as more potent, as a source either of pleasure (for Burke) or of truth (for Coleridge and Shelley), than the dry dissections of reason.10 It is my opinion, in opposition to many critics, notably Abrams, who would assimilate Wordsworth to his fellow Romantics, that, for the rest of Wordsworth’s so-called great decade, the primary products of imagination remain the perceptions of worldly facts, rendered in language of jarring immediacy and precision. Two stylistic consequences of this outlook command particular attention. The first, as has been hinted, involves Wordsworth’s turning to blank verse. Meter, he writes in , is superior to prose as a vehicle for the imagination, because of the way it creates an “intertexture of ordinary feeling” and tends “to divest language in a certain degree of its reality” ( Preface, ). Such qualities would indeed seem to dull or obscure his effects; but in fact, Wordsworth explains, they make imaginative expression possible. The end of Poetry is to produce excitement in coexistence with an overbalance of pleasure. Now, by the supposition, excitement is an unusual and irregular state of the mind; ideas and feelings do not in that state succeed each other in accustomed order. But if the words by which this excitement is produced are in themselves powerful, or the images and feelings have an undue proportion of pain connected with them, there is some danger that the excitement may be carried beyond the proper bounds. Now the co-presence of something regular, something to which the mind has been accustomed when in an unexcited or a less excited state, cannot but have great efficacy in tempering and restraining the passion by an intertexture of ordinary feeling. ( Preface, -, italics mine)

Having denied “any essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition” ( Preface, ), Wordsworth discerns in the metrical line a special ability lacking in the normal sentence unit to rivet the attention on imaginative detail. In brief: words and images might lose their precision or individual power amidst the unstructured and cacophonous jumble of prose; this would be carrying their effect “beyond its proper bounds.” Meter abets the imagination in its distinction-making, by suggesting a “half consciousness of unsubstantial existence” ( Preface, ), against which background images are able to stand out in high relief.11 In “Juvenilia XVIa,” one can see Wordsworth discovering the particular fit-

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ness of blank verse for this task. The text is closely associated in Wordsworth’s manuscripts with another fragment (Juvenilia XVIb), which tells roughly the same story but in irregular Spenserian stanzas. Where one passage (XVIa) begins, The road extended o’er a heath Weary and bleak: no cottager had there Won from the waste a rood of ground, no hearth Of Traveller’s half-way house with its turf smoke Scented the air through which the plover wings His solitary flight.

The other opens, No spade for leagues had won a rood of earth From that bleak common, of all covert bare; From traveller’s half-way house no genial hearth Scented with its turf smoke the desart air, Through which the plover wings his lonely course . . .

We need not compare the passages at length. It is enough to note how, in the latter, the exigencies of a rhyme scheme force Wordsworth to elevate his diction, somewhat undermining the spareness of his subject (“covert bare,” “desart air” the latter a crib from Gray’s elegy). Or again, how the logic of stanza writing forces him to shorten “cottager” into the far weaker and less thematic metonym “spade”; the speaker is after all an outcast from human society. Elsewhere, the same logic compels him to add the useless line filler “genial,” which, in addition to (again) elevating the tone, detrimentally loosens the syntax. The two fragments are apparently contemporaneous; yet here one can easily see Wordsworth abandoning the stanzaic narrative of the Salisbury Plain poems for a format better suited to the demands of imaginative language. As it happens, the epiphanic episode with which the first text culminates is missing in the second. We are thus left to consider language itself. Where eighteenth-century prose, however plain, remains a creature of syntax, Wordsworth’s understanding of the metrical line tilts the balance to discrete images and words. One class of words in particular: Wordsworth’s revolutionary contribution to English stylistics, his application of abstract, Lockean standards of language use specifically to the lower register of English, is inseparable from his early theory of imagination. Since images (that is, ideas) are signs of worldly facts, words, as signs of those images, must be optimally clear, precise, and communicable. Where none of his predecessors (Hartley, Lord Kames, Locke himself ) is willing to abandon Lati-

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nate diction, Wordsworth intuits the seemingly inherent ability of plain English to perform this function. Thus a native dialectic collapses, and the low register emerges with an unprecedented claim to truthfulness. But why should this intuition have come to Wordsworth? One is tempted to look for explanations in his biography, or in the social and political climate of the s, even though previous efforts along those lines have rarely been edifying. Olivia Smith, in The Politics of Language –, demonstrates convincingly that in the last decades of the eighteenth century the low register, which had suffered a near total eclipse for over a century after the Stuart restoration, began to reemerge as an important written idiom.12 This reemergence was mainly the work of radicals like Thomas Paine, who set about to challenge the hegemony of aristocratic, Latinate English by demonstrating the viability of “a language that was alleged not to exist, an intellectual vernacular prose” (). Smith is less convincing, however, in her effort to assimilate Wordsworth to this movement. By adopting the language of rustic workers, she argues, Wordsworth asserts “the intellectual capability of the lower and middle classes” and thus “roundly” criticizes “an elitist tradition of literature” (). The Preface offers a “democratic theory of the mind and language” (). Smith’s reading of the Preface, though perhaps conventionally sound, somewhat oversimplifies her subject. The influence of Paine on the young Wordsworth is common knowledge; his regicidal letter of  to the Bishop of Llandaff includes recognizable echoes of Common Sense. But it requires a considerable leap of faith to maintain that Wordsworth in , let alone in , was still an unambivalent radical. His own poetry of the middle s exhibits little overtly political sentiment, and by his own account in The Prelude, his attraction to Godwinism has dampened by . His reticence in this period has allowed critics to argue that, by , he was everything from a confirmed revolutionary to a Burkean conservative to a mixture of both. Smith claims that the lack of manifest political content in the Preface is a defensive “evasion” by Wordsworth in the face of a paranoid British government. Social critique is to be extrapolated from the absence of social critique. Even if we accept this argument, however, it is hard to make out a “democratic theory of mind and language” in the Preface.13 Paine, John Horne Tooke, and others, by working in the low register, are indeed asserting its equality to Latinate English as an intellectual idiom; but by making social and political claims for it, they far more resemble earlier, pre-Restoration proponents like Richard Mulcaster, John Cheke, and Thomas Wilson, than they do Wordsworth, whose criteria are philosophi-

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cal.14 More important, Wordsworth is asserting the superiority of his idiom to that of his predecessors. Equality on that score could not be further from his mind. I am not suggesting that political or social concerns have nothing to do with Wordsworth’s adoption of the low register. However, it might be fruitful to take his reticence on those topics at face value. We know, partly from The Prelude, that he fell victim in  to severe depression. This crisis, he says in Books X and XI ( version), was brought on first by the frustration of his hopes in the revolution, and then by his inability to derive any emotional or ethical sustenance from Godwinian rationalism. I lost All feeling of conviction, and, in fine, Sick, wearied out with contrarieties, Yielded up moral questions in despair. (X. –)15

He was suffering also from personal reversals, not least his continuing separation, because of the war with France, from Annette Vallon and their daughter. It is not perhaps unrealistic to imagine Wordsworth lapsing at this time into quietism, not the “visionary” wise passiveness Abrams associates with his mature lyrics but the quietism of a young man half in love with easeful death. In their unconcealed desire to be through with responsibility, thought, aims—in short, the burdens of selfhood—poems like the glowworm fragment and “Animal Tranquility and Decay” ring true as the work of a deeply disappointed man, at a certain stage of life.16 Wordsworth’s theory of imagination and, by extension, theory of diction may be said to have arisen from political and social concerns, to the extent that in  those concerns affected his mental climate. The low register thus enters Wordsworth’s poetry on uneasy terms. He immediately recognizes and exploits plain English for its power and persuasive force, but equally understands the annihilating source of that power. One need look no further than a catalogue of his works to gauge the extent of this ambivalence: almost to a work, the poems in which he develops his mature style remain unpublished during his life. “Animal Tranquility and Decay” indeed finds its way into the  Lyrical Ballads (as “Old Man Travelling”), but with six lines of biographical material that humanize their subject. To his credit, Wordsworth removes this coda after . “The Ruined Cottage” is not published until , and only then with considerable Christian overlay, as Book I of The Excursion.17 And it is left to de Selincourt, ninety years after Wordsworth’s death, finally to publish, not only the glowworm fragment, but also such similarly minded (and

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suggestively titled) contemporary texts as “Incipient Madness” and “Argument for Suicide.” A last word might be said about the composition history of “Juvenilia XVIa.” To repeat, it first appears in his manuscripts in association with the slightly earlier Salisbury Plain poems, whose protagonists, invariably in extremis, reflect Wordsworth’s own growing troubles. Almost immediately after composing the fragment, however, Wordsworth adopts the glowworm incident to a more equivocal context. From Act I of The Borderers: I’d rather be A stone than what I am.—But two nights gone, The darkness overtook me—wind and rain Beat hard upon my head—and yet I saw A glow-worm, through the covert of the furze, Shine calmly as if nothing ailed the sky: At which I half accused the God in Heaven. (ll. – )

Once again the speaker is a female vagrant. The image is more concentrated here than before, and Wordsworth now lets the speaker’s envy remain unstated, to powerful effect. Alas, she may be lying. She appears as part of the villain’s scheme to dupe the hero of the drama into committing homicide. This intrigue hinges on her being able successfully to accuse an innocent man, the intended victim, of an awful crime. The story, for my purposes, matters little. The important point is that she uses the glowworm image, which has nothing to do with her allegations, to gain the hero’s trust, and largely succeeds. Wordsworth’s almost immediate ambivalence toward the imagistic low register of his own devising is due both to its origin and to its possible uses. He begins trying to resolve these ambivalences in the major published poem of his early period, “The Old Cumberland Beggar.” He fails, and the poem is something of a dead end. Dead ends can be consequential, however, and this one has major implications for the remainder of his career. According to Isabella Fenwick’s notes, dictated by Wordsworth in , the poem has the same occasion as “Animal Tranquility and Decay.”18 Like the main character of that poem, the old beggar is a radically diminished human being. Here, however, Wordsworth would have us believe that his protagonist is important more for his function in the community, as a stimulus to charity, than for the state of being he embodies. Unfortunately, Wordsworth cannot quite believe this himself, and the poem ends up sounding almost like three separate works.

Wordsworth’s Empirical Imagination

“The Old Cumberland Beggar; A Description.” The subtitle is a half-truth, or rather a third-truth; only the first sixty-six lines are truly descriptive. Yet these surely show Wordsworth’s early style at its most uncompromisingly plain. The first verse paragraph: I saw an aged Beggar in my walk, And he was seated by the highway side On a low structure of rude masonry Built at the foot of a huge hill, that they Who lead their horses down the steep rough road May thence remount at ease. The aged man Had placed his staff across the broad smooth stone That overlays the pile, and from a bag All white with flour, the dole of village dames, He drew his scraps and fragments, one by one, And scann’d them with a fix’d and serious look Of idle computation. In the sun, Upon the second step of that small pile, Surrounded by those wild unpeopled hills, He sate, and eat his food in solitude; And ever, scatter’d from his palsied hand That still attempting to prevent the waste Was baffled still, the crumbs in little showers Fell on the ground, and the small mountain birds, Not venturing yet to peck their destin’d meal, Approached within the length of half his staff. (ll. –)

As description, these lines are enormously accomplished. With scarcely a nod toward explanation, the poem sets us in a landscape, a community, a world of practical concerns. Unlike the old man in “Animal Tranquility and Decay,” the beggar is depicted without a trace of sentimentality. He is practically insensate, dirty (at least covered with crumbs and flour), “palsied,” not just abject but disgusting. The diction, which stays consistently plain and objective, turns abstract only at strategic moments. His dwindled alertness, for example, is nicely implied verbally by the vague “fix’d and serious look / Of idle computation.” Later the poet comments, “one little span of earth / Is all his prospect” (ll. – ); the narrowness of his attention could not better be suggested than by the usually grand “prospect.” The first section succeeds less by avoiding than by suggesting and then deferring explanation. The first lines are pure description; yet why does the verse

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inexorably drag us downward—falling from the “highway” to a “low structure” at the “foot of a huge hill,” which riders “lead their horses down”—so that, by the time we reencounter “the aged man” in line six, he seems more a part of the earth than a person? Again, is he a “Beggar” (his identity in the community) or a “man”? The constant alternation between those terms, which begins in these lines, continues through the poem. The precision and specificity of description are finally more puzzling than informative. The beggar “plies his weary journey” with his “eyes for ever on the ground,” seeing still, And never knowing that he sees, some straw, Some scatter’d leaf, or marks which, in one track, The nails of cart or chariot wheel have left . . . . (ll. –)

If the beggar does not understand his perceptions, or even that he is perceiving, why enumerate in such detail those perceptions? And whose perceptions really are they? Do these lines really try to reproduce his perspective, or do they suggest some significance his insensibility might have for an observer? Might this be a moment of doubt on Wordsworth’s own part, representable in such accuracy only through a proxy? The first part of the poem keeps these questions in suspense. Although, by line , we can be certain of the poem’s subject, we should have no idea what it is about. The ensuing section (ll. –), because it clears away these ambiguities so vigorously, has probably attracted the most critical comment. I have little to say about it. As nearly all readers have noted, Wordsworth appears to allege that pauperism is good because it promotes charity. An entire community can thank this “Mendicant” (l. ) for its best habits, from the first “mild touch[es] of sympathy” (l. ), to the highest pious virtues. Wordsworth is thus refuting the narrow utilitarianism of workhouses with a utilitarian argument of his own. Some critics, notably Harold Bloom, have undertaken to dissociate the poem from such “vicious and mad doctrine”; but, in the context of Wordsworth’s early work, the reading not only makes sense, but is rather humane.19 He is as yet unable to see the beggar in human terms, as anything but radically cut off from human experience. In his first attempts to move beyond or, more likely, in his instinctive recoiling from the nihilism of “Juvenilia XVIa” and “Animal Tranquility and Decay,” Wordsworth can only ask whether some human, social benefit can be drawn from such a figure. Might the beggar be useful, not simply an emblem of unconscious existence? The stresses of answering in the affirmative are all too apparent in Word-

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worth’s language, which instantly abandons plain description for overheated and unconvincing rhetoric. But deem not this man useless.—Statesmen! ye Who are so restless in your wisdom, ye Who have a broom still ready in your hands To rid the world of nuisances; ye proud, Heart-swoln, while in your pride ye contemplate Your talents, power, and wisdom, deem him not A burthen of the earth. ’Tis Nature’s law That none, the meanest of created things, Of forms created the most vile and brute, The dullest or most noxious, should exist Divorced from good, a spirit and pulse of good, A life and soul to every mode of being Inseparably link’d. (ll. –)

Prophetic castigation barely coexists with classical anaphora (ye . . . ye . . . ye!). Line  puns uneasily on a parable from Saint Matthew, while casting also an awkward, studious glance back to Milton’s sonnet “When I consider how my light is spent.” The fervent desire to persuade is jolting after the effortlessly convincing opening. How odd, moreover, to base a case for utility on the apparently mystical conviction that nothing exists “divorced from good.” This sounds like a Platonic Good, hardly commensurate with the many smaller social goods with which he would credit the beggar. One senses, throughout this second section, both a disbelief in his own contentions and a faith in the nature of things that has nothing to do with utility. It is left to the last section (ll.  –) for Wordsworth to reveal the nature of this faith, as well as the depth of his disbelief. His language quickly returns to the low register of part one: Long as he can wander, let him breathe The freshness of the vallies, let his blood Struggle with frosty air and winter snows, And let the charter’d wind that sweeps the heath Beat his grey locks against his wither’d face. (ll. –)

The language is practically the same; but clearly Wordsworth has deserted the descriptive evenness of part one for a tone familiar from his first poems in blank verse. As in those works, the brutality of nature is only a measure of the beggar’s oblivion. Again, we hear the poorly concealed envy for a being who lives

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“but for himself alone,” and who does so “Unblam’d, uninjur’d” (ll. –). The pleading quality, however, is new, and suggests the urgency with which Wordsworth would convince us and himself that the beggar’s existence is, in some metaphysical way, redemptive. The last lines bring an end to this project: “As in the eye of Nature he has liv’d, / So in the eye of Nature let him die” (ll. –). The phrase “eye of Nature” is sufficiently vague to support all manner of interpretation. I am less concerned, however, with what this phrase might mean than with what it is, namely a metaphor, almost certainly the first important metaphor of Wordsworth’s career. Important mainly because it desperately does not want to be one. From the opening declaration, “I saw an aged beggar in my walk,” to the “half-reverted” look of a “sauntering horseman” (ll. , ), to the beggar’s own vacant stare, this has been a poem about eyes and seeing. None of these perspectives, Wordsworth’s least of all, has been adequate to see any good in the beggar, except (at most) mere utility. Now, at the end, Wordsworth would represent, as if it really existed, a universal, objective gaze that sees the beggar’s state for what it is, and recognizes that state as Good. Lines that might otherwise seem nonsensical or cruel—“Have round him, whether heard or not, / The pleasant melody of woodland birds” (ll. –, italics mine)—tellingly reflect this desire. Unfortunately “the eye of Nature” is a metaphor, and a difficult one at that, in an inappropriate context. With the “Old Cumberland Beggar,” Wordsworth reaches a conflict of aims: on the one hand he would preserve the power and eloquence of his early blank verse; emerging from his crisis, however, he would also be constructive. The realization is inescapable: as long as he faces the sources of his imagination directly, he will be unable to move convincingly away from nihilism. After the “Old Cumberland Beggar,” he gives up the attempt at such a confrontation.

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MYTH: “TINTERN ABBEY”; “THERE WAS A BOY”; PREFACE TO LYRICAL BALLADS

I cannot paint What then I was.

Power or meaning? Within a few months of completing “The Old Cumberland Beggar,” Wordsworth reveals his solution. Starting with “Tintern Abbey,”

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he begins attributing the experience he had formerly associated with animals and beggars to his own younger self. The same experience, but different as well: now that it has been safely relegated to the past, Wordsworth allows himself to forget, or at least ignore, its annihilating quality, even as it remains the source of his imaginative power. At a stroke, his still recent desire for death, or nothingness, becomes a mature longing for the positive, sustaining, thoughtless immersion in nature he had enjoyed in youth. This solution requires some finesse; only part of the past is really available to him. He remarks that he was once like a “roe” (l. ), an “animal” (l. ); nature was once to him “all in all” (l. ). Though now a meditative adult, he once had “no need of remoter charm, / By thought supplied” (l. –) to fully apprehend the world. But “that time is past” (l. ), and indeed must remain so. While insisting on the positive effects of past experiences, he cannot, for obvious reasons, inquire too closely into the nature of those experiences. “Tintern Abbey” is a poem of “unremembered pleasure” (l. ). In this particularly baffling, oddly circular formulation, neither word stands alone. Only the failure of memory allows him to claim that the past was agreeable; only a present sense of tangible benefits allows him to posit a past beyond memory.20 For many reasons, he writes, “I cannot paint / What then I was.” The speed with which Wordsworth’s autobiographical myth falls into place is matched only by the force of his belief in it. “Tintern Abbey,” composed in July of , follows the completion of “The Old Cumberland Beggar” by perhaps no more than four months. The past plays practically no overt role in his poetry before July, but dominates his major output thereafter. The Prelude is under way by autumn. Perhaps one can see Wordsworth in that work and “Tintern Abbey” doubting his own story. In the former, he evinces some confusion about important dates, notably the origin of his own vocation.21 In “Tintern Abbey” he famously wonders whether his belief is vain (ll.  –). His sister is present to reassure him otherwise. Her “wild ecstasies” (l. ) in a way certify that his own were real. in thy voice I catch The language of my former heart, and read My former pleasures in the shooting lights Of thy wild eyes. (ll. –)

Yet even in his address to Dorothy, one can hear the same pleading cadences, expressive of a desire to believe, that he used at the end of the “Old Cumberland Beggar”:

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let the moon Shine on thee in thy solitary walk; And let the misty mountain winds be free To blow against thee. (ll.  –)

Taken objectively, Wordsworth’s claims about the past are probably, finally, inaccurate. In “Tintern Abbey,” he looks back only five years to . Reading the imitative, thoroughly conventional nature poetry he produced that year (“Descriptive Sketches,” for example), one hardly detects the voice of a man whom “the sounding cataract / Haunted . . . like a passion” (ll. –), for whom nature was all in all. In any case, one cannot doubt the persistence of his conviction after . In some way, Wordsworth trusts “Tintern Abbey,” where he is unable to accept “The Old Cumberland Beggar.” It is commonplace to link the myth of personal development in “Tintern Abbey” with the associational psychology of David Hartley.22 In Observations on Man (), we recall, Hartley traces the ethical and intellectual growth of individuals entirely to sensations received early in life. Wordsworth, in an apparently similar vein, is well pleased to recognize In nature and the language of the sense, The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul Of all my moral being. (ll. –)

Yet even these lines barely conceal the perverse brilliance of Wordsworth’s take on associationism. Where Hartley discerns a smooth, even, rather architectonic development from simple sense impressions to the higher, increasingly internalized concepts of reason and morality, Wordsworth insists on a sharp and total break between original experiences and all subsequent developments based on them. Looking back on his childhood in the  Prelude, he comments, so wide appears The vacancy between me and those days, Which yet have such self-presence in my heart That sometimes when I think of them I seem Two consciousnesses—conscious of myself, And of some other being. (II. – )

To each of these consciousnesses adheres a mode crucial to Wordsworth’s poetry: on one side meaning, morals, thought, the rich development of an adult

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mind; on the other, the wellsprings of imagination, powerful but meaningless experiences, meaningless because they belong to a period before thought. Between these moments, an unbridgeable divide. If each is to retain its credibility and integrity, Wordsworth must insist simultaneously on their separation and hidden linkage. Describing the effect of his mother’s death on his young mind, Wordsworth writes, The props of my affections were removed, And yet the building stood, as if sustained By its own spirit. ( Prelude, II.  –)

The metaphor works well for his output after “Tintern Abbey”: a vast house of significance hovering miraculously in midair over its foundations. The repercussions of this severance for language cannot be overstated. David Hartley’s conclusions about diction are ultimately conservative: like Locke, he correlates the fully developed mind with equally embellished language, the complexities of rational thought finding natural expression in nuanced hypotaxis. Nevertheless, even as he expects high, Latinate diction and syntax from civilized rationalists, he supposes that the first languages, based closely on sense experience, must have been simple. As we saw, he identifies such a plain idiom with both the language spoken by Adam and the tongues of contemporary “barbarous nations.”23 As one might expect, Wordsworth’s radical amendment of associationism extends to language: just as the sources of imagination are cut off from all subsequent development, so the privileged status of the low register, as the special idiom uniquely capable of communicating imaginative experience, is reaffirmed and strengthened. But this begs two interrelated questions. First: how can one represent an experience whose significance is lodged in the irretrievable past? The powerful use of the low register, so fitting in “The Old Cumberland Beggar” and “Juvenilia XVIa,” might seem in bad faith after “Tintern Abbey.” Second: how far can one extend the low register? Wordsworth’s restricted use of plain English in  – confers on it a special claim to facticity and truth; how far can this use be broadened before the claim be lost? Both questions are increasingly pressing in Wordsworth’s work after . If the first of these questions indeed exposes a contradiction in Wordsworth’s usage, his best poems written immediately after “Tintern Abbey” gloriously ignore the difficulty. A noteworthy example:

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There was a boy—ye knew him well, ye rocks And islands of Winander, and ye green Peninsulas of Esthwaite—many a time [ ] when the stars began To move along the edges of the hills, Rising or setting, would he stand alone Beneath the trees or by the glimmering lakes, And through his fingers woven in one close knot Blow mimic hootings to the silent owls, And bid them answer him. And they would shout Across the wat’ry vale, and shout again, Responsive to my call, with tremulous sobs And long halloos, and screams, and echoes loud, Redoubled and redoubled—a wild scene Of mirth and jocund din. And when it chanced That pauses of deep silence mocked my skill, Then often in that silence, while I hung Listening, a sudden shock of mild surprize Would carry far into my heart the voice Of mountain torrents; or the visible scene Would enter unawares into my mind With all its solemn imagery, its rocks, Its woods, and that uncertain heaven, received Into the bosom of the steady lake.

I have reproduced the least-known version of this very famous poem, not because it is the best available, but because it is the first. Written in late  or early , it belongs to the earliest cluster of Prelude materials. Wordsworth nevertheless did not incorporate it in the two-book draft of , instead publishing it a year later, with important revisions, as a free-standing work in the second Lyrical Ballads. It finally appeared in Book V (ll. – ) of the  Prelude, but remained also an autonomous poem. In , it took pride of place as the first of Wordsworth’s “Poems of the Imagination.” In this earliest draft, Wordsworth’s intention seems to be to render as vividly as possible an epiphanic encounter with Nature he had experienced many times as a child. The diction is nearly as low as in “The Old Cumberland Beggar,” with stars, rocks, woods, and the steady lake all strikingly immediate. Readers familiar with later versions, all of which are in the third person, will be most surprised probably that this first effort is autobiographical. Yet even here Wordsworth insinuates himself into the scene slowly, and with seeming reluctance. For the first

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eleven lines, the boy is an anonymous “he,” “him.” The poet reveals himself only after a dozen lines, and only then with a possessive: “they would shout . . . responsive to my call.” The individuating, nominative I enters as late as line , at the poem’s climax. It is as if Wordsworth can recognize himself in the landscape only after nature has done so. Or perhaps he cannot quite bring himself to say I experienced this; he really enters the poem only at the end, to register the effect of the experience. Pronominal peculiarity is nothing compared to the deep strangeness of this closing passage. Geoffrey Hartman aptly calls lines  – a “diminuendo,” as the silence of nature gives way to an inner “shock of mild surprize,” followed quickly by the entry of “the visible scene . . . unawares into my mind.”24 By line , one might legitimately wonder to whose mind exactly Wordsworth is referring. If the central, epiphanic event of the poem occurs at “unawares,” how can Wordsworth possibly be certain that it happened in the first place? And to what point in time does one assign the blankness implied by that word? Has the child had an experience without knowing it? Has the adult forgotten the experience? Is the adult extrapolating an experience from a vague feeling of having had one, and then applying it to a convenient childhood incident? In the poems that follow “Tintern Abbey” we face a persistent question: where, if anywhere, can we distinguish between the experience as it occurred, and the experience, not merely as remembered, but as interpreted through—maybe even as created by—a much later myth of personal development? As Wordsworth puts the poem through successive revisions, these questions do not abate; quite the contrary. The fundamental difficulty of representing the boy’s adventure remains. However, by eliminating the autobiographical element, and thus all extraneous questions about personal growth, about his own memory, Wordsworth is able to make that difficulty seem less pressing. A series of well-known distancing maneuvers produces a much stronger and convincing poem. In addition to removing himself as protagonist, Wordsworth has the boy die before reaching maturity. In a second paragraph, added in , Wordsworth reappears as a ruminative adult. The final version: This boy was taken from his mates, and died In childhood, ere he was full twelve years old. Pre-eminent in beauty is the vale Where he was born and bred: the churchyard hangs Upon a slope above the village-school; And, through that church-yard when my way has led On summer evenings, I believe, that there

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A long half-hour together I have stood Mute—looking at the grave in which he lies!

On the level of narrative, at least, the youth/adulthood problem is solved; the gap between the two is presented as absolute. The excitement of the first paragraph could not contrast more starkly with the clichéd sentiment of the second. Where the boy had been alive to nature, the man sounds like a Baedeker: “Preeminent in beauty is the vale”; where the child hung in suspenseful silence, the adult is mute. Indeed, the reticence of the second paragraph seemingly frees Wordsworth to intensify the fever of the first. In “There Was a Boy,” as in the best poems of this period, the language not only conveys vivid, convincing experiences, but above that, imparts an impalpable sense of wonder. Even in the original version, the confusion of the human with the natural that begins in the first line, with the poet’s addressing “rocks and islands” as “ye,” intensifies during the boy’s conversation with the owls. As he hoots, they respond with human shouts, “halloos,” “screams,” and “sobs.” The language, through alliteration and repetition, picks up the echoing clatter of the dialogue: “tremulous sobs . . . long halloos . . . echoes loud . . . redoubled and redoubled.” In subsequent versions, Wordsworth allows himself more startling effects, like a peculiar modulation at the poem’s climax to the present perfect: “a gentle shock of mild surprise / Has carried far into his heart. . . .” Wordsworth occasionally resorts to this technique in The Prelude, if hardly anywhere else, at points when he would render a moment from the past immediate and present. One also notes a bolder use of enjambment in later versions, and a willingness to suggest religious feeling. And there, with fingers interwoven, both hands Pressed closely palm to palm and to his mouth Uplifted. . . . (ll. –)

Throughout the poem, a quality of astonishment is conveyed without the diction ever forsaking a generally low, descriptive register, or ever really breaking into metaphor. In tracing the source of this quality, it is practically impossible to discern a line between primary experience and the overlay of subsequent thought. The rapid transformation of the low register from an idiom of great vividness to one at once vivid and opaque, disorienting even, suggests an analogous movement during this period on the level of the image. An image, it has been observed, can be one of two things: either a fact or a thing of the mind.25 The dis-

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tinction is crucial. Where the former exists apart from the additions of thought and time, the latter is predicated on both, on the work of memory and mental creativity in general. A writer who works with the former—who believes the former possible—will reject figures of speech, metaphors. A. D. Nuttall, using Erich Auerbach’s terminology, comments, “Since for the figural writer all the significance, all the resonance is located in the object rather than in the fictions of the poet, he will want as far as possible a merely descriptive style.” Writers who use the other type of image will produce a very different kind of poetry. But where to place Wordsworth? Most critics now see Wordsworth as the latter sort, reading him through the perspective of later Romanticism and Modernist criticism, assimilating him to Shelley and Yeats. Such critics, from A. C. Bradley to Hartman, from Abrams to Paul de Man, almost invariably draw their evidence from work Wordsworth produced late in his “great decade,” The Prelude most of all. The far smaller group of critics who read Wordsworth as “figural” tend almost as inevitably to use the earlier output. Nuttall’s chief exhibit, for example, is “The Old Cumberland Beggar.”26 My own take on the matter is that Wordsworth, starting with “Tintern Abbey,” adopts the logically absurd but poetically productive paradox of double signification. That is: the function of a word depends greatly on the nature of the image it signifies. As we saw earlier, Wordsworth’s first images are equivalent to Locke’s ideas. In poems like “Juvenilia XVIa” words signify ideas in the Lockean sense of the term, that is, they stand for them. But when an image is a mental construct, not the perception of a worldly fact, the word takes on an extra, constitutive role. To some extent the image owes its existence to, and is inseparable from, the word. As far as I can tell, Wordsworth, during his great decade never relinquishes his first (and always primary) allegiance to the image as fact; he understands well that his poetic power lies there. However, for reasons that we have seen, in poems like “There Was a Boy” he allows words simultaneously to adopt the second role as well.27 His diction does not disclose the change, nor does his technique, for a while, become notably more metaphorical. At first, he probably does not himself recognize the contradiction in double signification; indeed, the very concreteness of the low register easily masks any contradiction in practice. The importance of understanding Wordsworth’s development accurately in sequence could not better be illustrated than by the fate of his  Preface, which belongs to this period of masked contradiction. His purpose in writing the essay has rarely been misconstrued: though not a “systematic defense of the theory, upon which [his] poems were written” (), it is his most important state-

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ment of poetic beliefs and practices, and certainly the most influential account of his views on language. On this last score, however, most critics, beginning with Coleridge, cannot help noticing the apparent gap between his claims and actual performance. Why, if he indeed intends to use “the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation” (), does he not write in dialect like Burns, or at least use an idiom recognizably rustic? Some solutions to this problem merit more examination than others. A few critics, against all evidence, insist that Wordsworth, for political reasons, really is using peasant language. As seen, Olivia Smith falls into this category. Others seize on Wordsworth’s claim that Lyrical Ballads was “published as an experiment” (); from this, they conclude that “the real language of men” applies only to a handful of ballad poems in the  edition.28 Why Wordsworth, two years later, would expend so much ink to explain and justify an issue of now marginal concern is left a great mystery. More astute readers generally recognize that Wordsworth is attracted to the language of “low and rustic life” () more for its formal than its ornamental characteristics. The fact that the farmer in “The Last of the Flock” sounds like a Cambridge don is beside the point; Wordsworth is drawn to some quality in peasant speech that goes beyond the freaks of local color. This quality is identified most often as an originality in the production of figures of speech; Wordsworth is thus linked to a line of thinking that goes back to Vico earlier in the eighteenth century: language originates in passionate expression through metaphors, that is, Vico would say, as poetry.29 All subsequent language, including the elevated, specialized “poetic diction” of Alexander Pope and Thomas Gray, is dead poetry. To get back to true expression, one must return to the source. So, for Wordsworth, “low and rustic life was generally chosen because in that situation the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language” (). Thus, Abrams concludes, Wordsworth is not concerned with individual words or syntax, but more broadly with figurative utterance. Such a reading will appeal to any critic who views the Wordsworthian image strictly as a thing of the mind. Rustic language becomes a model for the romantic activity of metaphor-making.30 However, if Wordsworth is also concerned with facts, things in the real world, this reading cannot stand. Wordsworth, we find, draws on the rustic idiom also because “in that situation the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature. The language too of these men is adopted . . . because such men hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of language is originally derived” (, italics mine). The work of double signification, of signifying ob-

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jects while also suggesting the operations of mind on those objects, can be accomplished only on the level of the word. It is with this insistence on the triumvirate of object, image (that is, idea), and word that the Preface most clearly reveals its Lockean bent. By twice referring to rustic speech as “philosophical,” Wordsworth aligns himself with both Locke and Wilkins in the great English quest for the perfectly signifying tongue: “Such a language arising out of repeated experience and regular feelings is a more permanent and a far more philosophical language than that which is frequently substituted for it by Poets” (). Just as “ideas are expressed in language fitted to their respective importance” (), so those ideas originate in the natural world: “I have at all times endeavoured to look steadily at my subject, consequently I hope it will be found that there is in these poems little falsehood of description” (). Like Locke, he seems to assume that everyone is built more or less the same way, referring in the essay to “the primary laws of our nature” () and to “certain inherent and indestructible qualities of the human mind” (). Since “the great and permanent objects” of nature act on the mind in “equally inherent and indestructible” ( –) ways, a language rooted in common and vivid perception will have a fair claim to truthfulness.31 No words, he writes, “which [a poet’s] fancy or imagination can suggest, will be to be compared with those which are emanations of reality and truth” (;  version). I do not intend to minimize the extent to which Wordsworth departs from Locke. My point, simply, is that the double function Wordsworth requires words to perform is made possible by Locke’s language model. As Wordsworth explains toward the beginning of the Preface, the poet’s role is not only to describe objects, but, by correlating those objects with emotions, to expand the sensibilities of his readers. Our continued influxes of feeling are modified and directed by our thoughts, which are indeed the representatives of all our past feelings; and as by contemplating the relation of these general representatives to each other, we discover what is really important to men, so by the repetition and continuance of this act feelings connected with important subjects will be nourished, till at length, if we be originally possessed of much organic sensibility, such habits of mind will be produced that by obeying blindly and mechanically the impulses of those habits we shall describe objects and utter sentiments of such a nature and in such connection with each other, that the understanding of the being to whom we address ourselves, if he be in a healthful state of association, must necessarily be in some degree enlightened. (–)

We can recognize buried at the heart of this complex passage a Lockean metaphor: language as a machine for communication. But where Locke would

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expect an object word to convey no more than the knowledge of that object from one mind to another, Wordsworth demands in addition that the word communicate the impalpable halo of meanings that memory, habit, emotion, and the poet’s powers of association have diffused about the object. As Wordsworth allows these powers to flourish, the strain on words, in their first function, to anchor his verse in reality, increases. Thus the second question to emerge from Wordsworth’s revision of Hartley is brought to a head: how far can the low register be extended? How far can its use be broadened before its special claim to facticity is lost, and with it any claim to unique aptness in imaginative expression? In his  revision of the Preface, Wordsworth’s assertion of his own creativity only intensifies; in response to the rhetorical question “What is a Poet?” () he adds a lengthy celebration of his art as “the first and last of all knowledge” (), as the means by which the object world, even the world of science, is made meaningful and human. With new emphasis, he insists that poetic language be “alive with metaphors and figures” (). The gap between  and  is telling; in that period he essentially abandons double signification. With this abandonment, however, the first question to follow from Hartley returns with a vengeance: how can one represent an experience the significance of which is lodged in the irretrievable past? At the turn of the nineteenth century, Wordsworth begins to offer new solutions to both questions. These solutions spell the splitting of the low register.

THE SPLITTING OF REGISTER: “MICHAEL”; “ODE: INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY”

Blank misgivings of a Creature Moving about in worlds not realized . . .

Power or meaning? Within a year or two of “Tintern Abbey,” the question seemingly resolved there presents itself again to Wordsworth with renewed force. After the failure of double signification, plain English—no longer able to perform two functions simultaneously—splits in half and begins to cede its prominence to other registers in the language. Although these trends culminate in the  Prelude, their early development can best be traced in Wordsworth’s shorter poems of . Down from the ceiling, by the chimney’s edge, Which in our ancient uncouth country style Did with a huge projection overbrow

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Large space beneath, as duly as the light Of day grew dim the House-wife hung a lamp . . . The Light was famous in its neighbourhood, And was a public Symbol of the life That thrifty Pair had liv’d. For, as it chanc’d, Their Cottage on a plot of rising ground Stood single, with large prospect North and South, High into Easedale, up to Dunmal-Raise, And Westward to the village near the Lake; And from this constant light so regular And so far seen, the House itself by all Who dwelt within the limits of the vale, Both old and young, was nam’d The Evening Star. (“Michael” ll. –, –)

In the Lyrical Ballads published in  Wordsworth includes in a special section five “Poems on the Naming of Places.” To them he attaches an “Advertisement” expressing his wish to commemorate “rural objects . . . where Incidents have occurred, or feelings been experienced, which will have given to such places a private and peculiar interest” (). Each of these poems, none longer than one hundred lines, begins with the description in blank verse of such a spot, and concludes with a name (“Point Rash-Judgement,” for example) suitable to it. Although “Michael,” a large and complex work also published in , does not belong to this group, the excerpt above is typical of the form. It also is strangely reminiscent of “Juvenilia XVIa.” Once again the language is descriptive and atmospheric; here, Wordsworth uses prefixed words (“uncouth,” “overbrow”) to suggest a Saxon quaintness. Once again, the centerpiece of the passage is a light shining in darkness, now a lamp rather than a worm. Yet how different the poems are in emotional effect! Where the purpose of one is to present a transfixing image, the second starts with an image, then records the way, over time, it has acquired meaning in a community. The name, finally, is an emblem of this meaning. An emblematic name of this sort is the most primitive kind of metaphor, and with these naming poems, Wordsworth heralds the wholesale entry of metaphor into his work. The consequences for language of this development are visible already in the poem. The low register separates into two very different uses: in some places it returns to the powerful, simple description of “The Old Cumberland Beggar”; elsewhere, and far more extensively in other poems than here, it is newly “alive with metaphors and figures.” The unified low idiom of “There Was a Boy” is left

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behind. More important, Wordsworth decides around this time that plain English is not necessary, or even appropriate often, for metaphorical writing. For probably the first time as a mature poet, he starts producing in quantity works in other registers of the language. Latinate, rhymed lyrics of various types appear after . Many of these, with subjects ranging from daisies to celandines, cuckoos to butterflies, are breezy and unambitious. Fittingly, Wordsworth later classifies them as “Poems of the Fancy.” One, it so happens, is about a glowworm. An excerpt: Upon a leaf the Glow-worm did I lay, To bear it with me through the stormy night: And, as before, it shone without dismay; Albeit putting forth a fainter light. (“Among all the lovely things my Love had seen” ll. –)

As a love offering for “Lucy,” this once most troubling of images, though hardly altered, is now shockingly innocuous and pretty, an almost accidental token of the speaker’s affections. Poems of the “Fancy”—according to Wordsworth’s implicit working definition—practically demand a move away from plain English and blank verse. This is not to say that Wordsworth’s leaving the low register is necessarily a mark of lowered ambitions. His first sonnets, which appear almost concurrently with the lighter lyrics, exploit a more elevated and powerful Latinate idiom. The appeal of such writing at this time is easy to understand. We have seen his increasing interest in both his own powers of mind and traditions in the community; he is also ever more concerned with national and cultural politics. The sonnets allow him a freedom with imagery, metaphor, allegory, and symbolism, as well as a depth of historical reference, not only in their often Miltonic cadences but in their very form, unavailable to his earlier work. One has to wonder, however, why his poetry turns now to political commentary, and to what extent this turn is related either to his new experiments in diction, or to his (temporary) dropping of the autobiographical myth as a subject. If the low register is indeed born partly out of political despair and the failure of his early radical ambitions, it hardly seems coincidental that his first expressions of nationalism and political conservatism should coincide with his assuming a high, Latinate voice. It is tempting to detect in these sonnets and poems of the “Fancy” a relaxation of the antisocial pressures that drove him in the first place to plain English. Yet the flowering of Latinate verse after  hardly resolves a basic tension between power and meaning; quite the contrary. With the failure of double sig-

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nification, two modes begin struggling for preeminence in Wordsworth’s verse: here, the plain, descriptive low register; there, the rich development after . In these years, the former is still for Wordsworth central to imaginative vision; the latter, the vehicle for his new social, political, and moral concerns. The ghosts of “Tintern Abbey” continue to walk. No poem expresses the tensions and ambivalences of this period better than “Michael.” Indeed, in terms of register alone it is probably his most virtuosic work. Consider the opening lines: If from the public way you turn your steps Up the tumultuous brook of Green-head Gill, You will suppose that with an upright path Your feet must struggle; in such bold ascent The pastoral Mountains front you, face to face. But, courage! for beside that boisterous Brook The mountains have all open’d out themselves, And made a hidden valley of their own. No habitation there is seen; but such As journey thither find themselves alone With a few sheep, with rocks and stones, and kites That overhead are sailing in the sky. It is in truth an utter solitude, Nor should I have made mention of this Dell But for one object which you might pass by, Might see and notice not. Beside the brook There is a straggling heap of unhewn stones! And to that place a story appertains, Which, though it be ungarnish’d with events, Is not unfit, I deem, for the fire-side, Or for the summer shade. (ll. –)

As in the “Evening Star” passage quoted above, Wordsworth seems haunted here by his earlier work, “Juvenilia XVIa” in particular. That poem also begins with a speaker leaving the “public way” behind, struggling through a vaguely allegorical landscape, and finally encountering in a place of “utter solitude” an object of private significance. One can hardly tell whether Wordsworth had the fragment specifically in mind when he wrote “Michael,” though it seems unlikely. In any event, the similarities in narrative only measure the distance between  and .

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Where the speaker in “Juvenilia XVIa” strays “from the common way,” “seduced” by the “hope of shorter path,” the speaker here invites us to “turn our steps” “from the public way.” The tone is intimate. Allegory is used almost for humor (“courage!”). The Sturm und Drang of the earlier poem is almost tamed, the “tumultuous” and “boisterous” brook perhaps a last remnant of the previous “thought-perplexing noise” and “pelting shower.” More to the point, the basic dichotomy in the first poem between public and private is here reversed. The female vagrant there is irreparably alienated from society, her seduction from common life a disaster. She is in just the psychological state to be transfixed by the glowworm and then to feel envy at its insentience. We, however, the readers of “Michael,” are accustomed to the public way of life and normally would not give a thought to “turning our steps” from it. Unlike the vagrant, we are precisely the sort of people who “might see” a privately significant object “and notice not.” If we came upon a glowworm in a storm, we would react to it, if at all, like the speaker in the pretty quatrained lyric. When Wordsworth refers in his Preface to “a multitude of causes unknown to former times . . . now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor” (), he refers to our situation. As a poet, he will make us notice and appreciate the “one object.” What exactly about the “straggling heap of unhewn stones” is notable? At a glance we can see that Wordsworth’s flair for the riveting image is undiminished. His language is beautifully plain and descriptive, yet something about the stone heap—is it the word “straggling,” which somehow suggests animation; is it the Saxon “unhewn,” which hints at unperformed action?—holds our attention powerfully. If the poem had been written in , it might well end here. But Wordsworth is a socialized adult speaking to socialized adults; so where “Juvenilia XVIa” stops dead, this one continues: “and to that place a story appertains.” The poet’s work is to make the object world meaningful and human. If we are prepared, by sensibility and imaginative experience, we may, perhaps, continue his task “and be [his] second self when [he] is gone” (l. ).32 Accordingly, the rest of the poem tells us about the stone heap. A brutally quick summary: when Michael, a shepherd, is faced with the loss of his land, he tries to raise money by apprenticing his only son Luke to a relative. In the “dissolute city” (l. ), the boy gives himself to “evil courses” (l. ) and has to flee the country. A sheepfold, the symbol of the covenant between father and son, is never completed; only the stones remain. The tale is powerful by itself, but above that, Wordsworth uses his entire new-found complexity of register to make it

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more so. Language in the poem has a curiously layered quality. Most of the work is cast in a strongly Saxon, descriptive low register: the very sound of the words bespeaks a time and place. Whenever the outside world threatens, however, the language grows more Latinate, to sinister effect: the Shepherd had been bound In surety for his Brother’s Son, a man Of an industrious life, and ample means, But unforeseen misfortunes suddenly Had press’d upon him, and old Michael now Was summon’d to discharge the forfeiture, A grievous penalty. (ll.  –, italics mine)

Alongside his own plain idiom, moreover, Wordsworth uses a second low register drawn from biblical English. Michael’s wife Isabel is his “Help-mate” (l. ); Luke is “the Son of [Michael’s] old age” (l. ), and a “promise to [him] ere [his] birth” l. ). This last strain, which derives from the language debates of the late sixteenth century, has tremendous sentimental weight, and lends a typological feel to the poem: we sense that the lives of these shepherds are moments in a repeating, sacrosanct narrative. In each of these three registers we hear a distinct authority: in Wordsworthian plain English, the accent of true description; in the Latinate, the voice of reason and worldly experience; in the biblical, the utterance of sacred history. All three, by the end of the poem, have invested the stone heap with meaning. But to what end? This is a poem in which meaning does not last. Luke sets out on the “public way” (l. ), never to return. Michael and Isabel die; so the importance the countryside has for them dies. Even the Evening Star is razed; so much for names. One can trace the failure of biblical narrative to explain their story. Michael and Isabel start out as types of Abraham and Sarah: Luke is the son of their old age. The “covenant” (l. ) between Michael and Luke to build the sheepfold is staged like Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac. As it nears its end, however, the poem sounds more reminiscent of the Prodigal Son. Luke too falls in with “evil men” (l. ) and wastes his substance with riotous living. The very name Luke probably refers to the gospel; indeed, the brief, hard description of his fate is parablelike. Meantime Luke began To slacken in his duty, and at length He in the dissolute city gave himself

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To evil courses: ignominy and shame Fell on him, so that he was driven at last To seek a hiding-place beyond the seas. (ll. –)

Isaac is sacrificed. The prodigal son does not come home. “Michael” is about the end of such stories. The poem’s main worry, however, is less the failure than the ineffableness of meaning. To return to the sheepfold: when really is it most powerful as an image? Despite the poem’s project, to endow it with human import, one almost has to say when one first sees it. Our first sight of the unhewn stones has a deep, mysterious force, compared to which the poem’s explanations are something of a letdown. Wordsworth’s dramatic pacing seems to express, or recognize, this problem. The work begins with a puzzle and the promise to solve it; yet the answer proper, instead of arriving at story’s end, is almost buried in the middle. In that deep valley, Michael had design’d To build a Sheep-fold, and, before he heard The tidings of his melancholy loss, For this same purpose he had gathered up A heap of stones, which close to the brook side Lay thrown together, ready for the work. (ll.  –)

In an instant we understand the sheepfold, and also recognize that Michael’s tale will end badly. We also sense that the solution is of secondary importance. The effect of this staged anticlimax is to show both the inadequacy of the stone heap as a correlative for the story’s emotional burden and the inability of the story to surmount our first powerful impressions of the stone heap. In the  lines remaining, we watch the last vestiges of meaning pass from the landscape; at the end, we face the image with which we began: Great changes have been wrought In all the neighbourhood, yet the Oak is left That grew beside their Door; and the remains Of the unfinished Sheep-fold may be seen Beside the boisterous brook of Green-head Gill. (ll. – )

Despite the poem’s intentions, the last image is powerful to the extent that it remains, as it was at the start, devoid of, or deeper than, human meaning. “Michael” thus enshrines a moment of crisis in Wordsworth’s career. The tensions between power and meaning, and thus between registers of the language, that here seem beyond resolution arose first out of Wordsworth’s difficulties in depicting his own life. They resolve only with his return to autobiography.

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More precisely, they resolve with his final answer to the first problem posed by “Tintern Abbey”: how can he represent experiences, whose significance is lodged in the irretrievable past? After , he is finally able to admit that he cannot. The effects of this concession on language are swift and momentous. The various competing registers that appear after  are at cross-purposes in “Michael” because, implicitly, each is associated with a different moment in his development. With his revision of this narrative, mainly in The Prelude and the Intimations Ode, each of the registers acquires a distinct rhetorical and biographical identity, distinct from and in harmony with the other registers. Consider the opening of the Ode: There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, The earth, and every common sight, To me did seem Apparelled in celestial light, The glory and the freshness of a dream. It is not now as it hath been of yore;— Turn wheresoe’er I may, By night or day, The things which I have seen I now can see no more. (ll. –)

It is only a slight exaggeration to say that Wordsworth’s diction for the remainder of his career—indeed much of Modernist diction as well—is locked embryonically in this stanza. Look at how the first five lines work psychologically. The first three are cast in the low register, but the effect is barren and generic. Where plain English, from “Juvenilia XVIa” to “There Was a Boy” and “Michael,” was charged with imaginative power, here the register is reduced to bare description: this is what I saw. Not, we note, this is what I felt, this is what it was like, this is why the experience was of lasting importance to me, and so on. Those tasks fall, it would seem, to the high Latinate register in lines  – . Yet what in fact happens? “Apparelled in celestial light,” though grand sounding (and a lift from Milton), is sufficiently obscure to convey nothing of the original experience. The importance of this departure from Wordsworth’s previous practice can hardly be overstated. In earlier autobiographical writings he attempted both to describe his youthful experiences and to communicate their effects in the low register; now, with plain English reduced to mere description, the higher idiom rushes in, not to assume the low register’s old imaginative function but to convey a sense of mental blankness. To put it another way: although high Latinate English sounds visionary, it is more properly a sign of fallenness. The hiatus between past and present is now truly unbridgeable.

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The great project of both The Prelude and the Intimations Ode is to recognize this blankness for what it is, and then almost immediately insist that it is something else. Examine the continuing interplay between plain and Latinate English in the Ode. After the despairing first stanza, the second continues with the voice of debased adulthood: The Rainbow comes and goes, And lovely is the Rose; The Moon doth with delight Look round her when the heavens are bare; Waters on a starry night Are beautiful and fair. . . . (ll.  –)

Immediately we recognize the light Latin idiom from the “Poems of the Fancy.” As with the saddened adult in “There Was a Boy,” we encounter here a speaker whom natural beauty moves only to pretty personification and cliché. When the higher Latinate rhetoric of lines  –  reenters at stanza’s end, however, the effect is unexpected. Although we again perceive a void in the memory, the renewed references to “glory” (or, at the end of stanza , to a “visionary gleam”), now coming after a lighter passage, have a weight and insistence that they formerly lacked. Wordsworth’s purpose in playing the two Latinate idioms off each other becomes clear in stanza . If the lighter register reflects a dimmed mature response to nature, the higher “visionary” one now suggests a transcendence of object reality. The bravado of Wordsworth’s achievement is astonishing: having finally accepted the consequences of “Tintern Abbey,” he admits the gap between his present and past selves. Then, instead of interpreting the ensuing blankness in memory (properly) as a kind of amnesia, he insists on perceiving in it intimations of a higher reality. Not for these [memories of the past] I raise The song of thanks and praise; But for these obstinate questionings Of sense and outward things Fallings from us, vanishings; Blank misgivings of a Creature Moving about in worlds not realized. (ll.  –)

In short, Wordsworth develops after  into a poet of the sublime. Stanza  finishes with a return to the low register, but now one replete with metaphor, and as vatic as the Latinate.

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Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea Which brought us hither, Can in a moment travel thither, And see Children sport upon the shore, And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore. (ll.  –)

In the Ode we witness the evolution of a rhetorical curve common to much of his remaining important work, and fundamental to The Prelude. A verse paragraph typically begins in the low register with the description of some event in the past; the Latinate high register then floods in, usually celebrating the imagination, the soul’s transcendence, or something like that; finally the low register returns, now richly metaphorical, to give a sense of closure and deepened experience.33 Wordsworth’s sublime style has possibly attracted more critical comment in the last forty-five years than any other aspect of his career. Most influential readings of the sublime Wordsworth, starting with A. C. Bradley’s great  essay, have, not surprisingly, focused on his work after . Bradley is perhaps the first reader to reject Matthew Arnold’s view of Wordsworth as a lover of nature, discerning in Wordsworth’s greatest moments a hostility to object reality and to sense itself. In those patches of Latinate blankness, Bradley detects “always some feeling of definite contrast with the sensible world. . . . Sometimes it is a visionary unearthly light resting on a scene or on some strange figure. Sometimes it is the feeling that the scene or figure belongs to the world of dream. Sometimes it is an intimation of boundlessness, contradicting or abolishing the fixed limits of our habitual view. Sometimes it is the obscure sense of ‘unknown modes of being,’ unlike the familiar modes. This kind of experience, further, comes often with a distinct shock, which may bewilder, confuse, or trouble the mind” ().34 Bradley looks for evidence mainly in the Ode, The Prelude, and the short lyric “I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud.” A reading of Wordsworth that locates his most important work here will most likely find a distinct arc in his career as a whole. The trajectory usually goes like this: Wordsworth starts out as a poet concerned with nature (or habit, or society, etc.). Early in the nineteenth century, however, he becomes aware of his own imagination as a force opposed to all of these. At the end of his great decade, he retreats from the apocalyptic (or at least antisocial) implications of imagination, and abandons that element in his work. Geoffrey Hartman, who follows Bradley in seeing the imagination as “intrinsically opposed to nature,” offers a classic statement of the story.

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The poet’s development . . . was essentially a matter of converting apocalypse into akedah, or binding to nature, as a preparatory humanizing, an otherworldly power of imagination. . . . Nature, fearful and beautiful, succeeds first in attaching the child’s thoughts to itself. . . . But as he grows aware of what is within and separates imagination more clearly from nature . . . the child passes from unselfconsciousness to self-consciousness and faces all the dangers of that complex passage. His mind . . . in search of a nature adequate to deep childhood impressions, finds instead itself, and has to acknowledge that nature is no longer its proper subject or home. Despite this recognition, Wordsworth continues to bend back the energy of his mind and of his poem to nature, but not before we have learned the secret behind this fidelity.35

I have offered an alternative reading of the career. Instead of erupting in the middle of Wordsworth’s great decade, the imagination is fundamental to his emergence as an important poet in  –. After , his poetry, without relinquishing its early imaginative power, develops in reaction against the annihilating implications of that power; the autobiographical myth is born. When Wordsworth recognizes the connotations of this myth, a patch of amnesiac blankness opens in his life. The blankness he interprets as an intimation of the sublime, and the faculty with which it is attained, imagination. In this last supposition he is not entirely wrong. Imagination is at the core of these vacancies; yet it is the half-buried imagination of , not the creative, egotistic capability to which he would now give the name. If indeed it were otherwise, one would expect this creative capability to bubble up in all of his poetry; but inevitably, his most powerful moments of obscurity, whether growing out of youthful incidents in The Prelude or “blank misgivings” in the Ode, remain tied to autobiography. Blank misgivings they certainly are: the misgivings of a mind confronted with felt significances, recognitions from the past that never clarify into present understanding. In short, Wordsworth, from “Tintern Abbey” through The Prelude, is a poet not of the sublime, but the uncanny. I use the word in roughly, if not quite, the same sense as Freud in his essay “Das Unheimliche.”36 In that work, he ascribes the feeling of uncanniness to moments when memories from the past return, but only in half-recognizable form. As he puts it, the uncanny is “that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar” (). To put it another way, psychology is the afterlife of empiricism. The terrible implications of imagination, long since suppressed, may well account for the quality of eeriness that almost always characterizes Wordsworth’s great “visionary” episodes. Here, how-

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ever, I must admit to a circularity of argument in invoking Freud. The myth of personal development that Wordsworth elaborates in “Tintern Abbey” (childhood experience / amnesia / adulthood) is of course Freud’s as well. Freud even sounds rather like Wordsworth when he speculates that uncanny feelings probably date to “a time when the ego was not yet sharply differentiated from the external world” (). Be that as it may, I do not wish to overstate the concurrences. Where the Freudian career is spent retracing the links between maturity and childhood, Wordsworth’s is dependent, to some extent, on effacing those links. More to the point: Freud embraces the developmental myth for its basic explanatory value as a key to mental phenomena. Wordsworth, while no doubt believing in the myth as fervently as Freud does, nevertheless assumes it as a kind of shield against phenomena. If we look through “Tintern Abbey,” we see the traumas not of youth but of early adulthood.

WORDSWORTH’S LEGACY FOR USAGE

My survey of Wordsworth’s diction almost ends here. Looking back to , it is tempting to discern in Wordsworth’s first use of plain English the inevitability of that idiom’s dissolution in his poetry. In retrospect, the very moment of nihilistic doubt in which Wordsworth discovers his imaginative capability seems almost to necessitate a recoil into something else, be it an embrace of community, psychological autobiography, the apocalyptic imagination, or all three. If that first moment, with its fixation on object reality, indeed finds apt expression in the low register, such diction is increasingly inessential, even undesirable, as Wordsworth’s concerns change after . The Prelude and Ode mark the final development of Wordsworth’s plain style. In those poems the low register works with other, Latinate strains of the language to suggest visionary episodes; the power of those episodes derives, however, less from a new creative capacity than from the lingering presence of . As long as he continues to write about his past, the plain idiom remains important in Wordsworth’s output; after he completes the  Prelude and drops autobiography as a subject, plain English, at least as it is used in his most characteristic work, gradually fades from his poetry, then disappears altogether. It remains for us only to trace briefly the course of this disappearance, and to sketch Wordsworth’s influence on nineteenth-century usage. Is, then, the relation between Wordsworth’s adopting a visionary mode and his subsequent abandonment of the low register as causal and inevitable as hindsight makes it seem? A small group of poems produced at mid-decade, perhaps

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his last truly great short lyrics, suggest otherwise. As we observed, Wordsworth’s claims to the sublime are undercut by the uncanny presence of the past in his greatest moments of obscurity; if the imagination is indeed a capacity “intrinsically opposed to nature,” we should expect such moments to appear in poems having nothing to do with autobiography. We should expect the imagination to be self-renewing, constantly transforming the materials of fresh perception into sublime song. In these later poems, notably “The Solitary Reaper,” “To a Highland Girl,” and “I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud,” the temporal structure of the Ode and Prelude is still recognizable, but radically truncated. If the most powerful passages in the Ode derive their force from the vast and opaque gap between past experience and present vision, these later lyrics collapse the distance from decades to days. In the  Prelude draft, the “spots of time” which “retain a fructifying virtue” (I. ) in adult life, “chiefly seem to have their date / in our first childhood” (ll. –). Here, Wordsworth leaves the highland girl assured that in going hence [He bears away his] recompense. In spots like these it is we prize Our Memory. (ll. – )

The other two poems end on a similar note; in them Wordsworth indeed seems to break free from the constraints of autobiography, and to be writing imaginative poetry as he conceives of the term after . The gain is also a loss. One would hardly call these lyrics apocalyptic. They express a becalmed wonder, a relief in the promise of future memories and the “bliss of solitude.” The terror, power, and disorientation of Wordsworth’s greatest passages are gone; as one might expect, the diction of these poems fully registers the absence. Consider the opening of “I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud”: I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o’er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze. (ll. –)

The poem is written in an idiom familiar from the Ode, namely, the highly metaphorical low register Wordsworth develops there to express the mind’s active role in perception.37 Not only do the lines lack the purely descriptive diction used from “Juvenilia XVIa” through The Prelude, but, more important,

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Wordsworth abandons here the ontological reason for having adopted plain English in the first place: the interest of this poem lies solely in the mind’s transformation of worldly objects, not at all in the attempt to rivet attention on the objects themselves. Besides drastically foreshortening the lapse between stimulus and imaginative response, Wordsworth allows the two to bleed together, forgetting his old compulsion to present the stimulus (that is, the fact in the world) accurately. In short, there is no pressing reason, except perhaps the desire to create an ambience of real experience, why “I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud” should have been written in the low register. In short, these late lyrics continue to exploit the techniques of Wordsworth’s earlier writing after the first rationale for those techniques has faded. Nevertheless, we should not fall into the seductive fallacy of supposing either that Wordsworth was fated to forswear the low register, or that these poems belong to an inevitable downward curve in his career. They exemplify, tantalizingly, a type of imaginative poetry in plain English that Wordsworth might have continued writing for decades, but did not. Perhaps these later lyrics do represent a crisis of faith: with no psychological basis for his style, the style collapses. Perhaps, as some critics have submitted, his poetic aims change after the death of his brother in ; vision comes to seem less important than meditative piety.38 Wordsworth himself seems to imply as much the following year, in his “Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle”: “A power is gone, which nothing can restore; / A deep distress hath humanized my Soul” (ll. – ). In any event, after –, his poetry is written mostly in the heterogeneous, usually elevated idiom that he calls, in his first “Essay upon Epitaphs” (), the “general language of humanity” ().39 The tendency of such language, he explains, is idealizing, presenting its subject matter like “a tree [as seen] through a tender haze or a luminous mist, that spiritualizes and beautifies it; that takes away, indeed, but only to the end that the parts which are not abstracted may appear more dignified and lovely; may impress and affect the more. Shall we say, then, that this is not truth, not a faithful image . . . ? It is truth, and of the highest order” (). “The tree itself,” as Wordsworth might have understood the phrase in , is no longer a concern, nor is “truth,” as he uses the word in the  Preface. Be that as it may, his reception in the nineteenth century is shaped largely by this later writing. Or perhaps his later writing is shaped by that reception. The voice we hear in the first “Essay upon Epitaphs” should remind us less of earlier Wordsworth than of contemporary Coleridge. As Coleridge writes in , Wordsworth at his best possesses “above all the original gift of spreading the tone, the atmosphere, and

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with it the depth and height of the ideal world around forms, incidents, and situations, of which, for the common view, custom had bedimmed all the luster, had dried up the sparkle and the dewdrops” (Biographia Literaria ). The tendency of both passages is unmistakable: by the second decade of the nineteenth century, poetic imagination is understood exclusively as the transformation of everyday reality by mind. The second wave of Romantic poets, with Shelley at the fore, seals the deal. This consensus, in turn, which Wordsworth himself plays a crucial role in forging, diminishes much of his work written before . The contemporary evaluation of Wordsworth as an imaginative writer thus falls into two broad categories. Some readers simply deny him the title. Shelley writes that he “had as much imagination /as a pint-pot” (“Peter Bell the Third”  –); Mill, even more crushingly, admires his poetry as “the richest harvest ever brought forth by soil of so little depth.”40 Others, notably Coleridge, recoup Wordsworth as an imaginative writer by denying his most characteristic tendencies. Consider his famous attack on Wordsworth’s emulation of peasants: The rustic, from the more imperfect development of his faculties, and from the lower state of their cultivation, aims solely to convey insulated facts, . . . while the educated man chiefly seeks to discover and express those connections of things, . . . from which some more or less general law is deducible. For facts are valuable to a wise man, chiefly as they lead to the discovery of the indwelling law, which is the true being of things, and sole solution of their modes of existence, and in the knowledge of which consists our dignity and our power. As little can I agree with the assertion, that from the objects with which the rustic communicates, the best part of language is formed. For first, if to communicate with an object implies such an acquaintance with it, as renders it capable of being discriminately reflected on; the distinct knowledge of an uneducated rustic would furnish a very scanty vocabulary. ()

“Object,” for Coleridge, can only mean an object of reflection; “object,” in Wordsworth’s greatest poems, can only mean the object independent of reflection. Coleridge is a poet of meaning, and would understand Wordsworth as such; the Wordsworthian imagination operates prior to meaning. The most influential critic of Wordsworth’s diction, however, not only in his own time but even today, is Francis Jeffrey. The very narrowness of Jeffrey’s attacks, published over two decades in the Edinburgh Review, effectively narrowed the parameters within which Wordsworth’s poetry could be defended. To Jeffrey’s basic assertion, that Wordsworth’s “affectation of great simplicity and familiarity of language” led to a “debasement of all those feelings which poetry is designed to communicate,” two responses were possible. The first was Cole-

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ridge’s, namely, to accept Jeffrey’s argument about class but deny its applicability to Wordsworth. Typically, Coleridge defends Wordsworth’s diction at the expense of ignoring its originality. The language of Wordsworth’s best poems, Coleridge argues, is in fact the “lingua communis” (), the generally high, heterogeneous, educated idiom detectable in most literature of worth. De Quincey follows Coleridge by identifying Wordsworth’s diction with that of “Spenser, Shakespeare, the Bible of  and Milton.”41 This assimilation of Wordsworth to the great tradition of English poetry of course disregards the truly new, revolutionary character of the low register. The second response to Jeffrey makes no such mistake; rather than denying the class aspect of Wordsworth’s diction, some critics, beginning with William Hazlitt, eagerly embrace it. Wordsworth’s muse, Hazlitt comments in The Spirit of the Age, is “a levelling one”: “his style is vernacular; he offers household truths”; his poetry only admits the “absolute essence of truth and feeling.” Again, there is a trade-off; indeed, Hazlitt’s reading of Wordsworth is practically the converse of Coleridge’s account. Hazlitt recognizes both the revolutionary nature of Wordsworth’s early lyrics and the uniqueness of Wordsworth’s idiom in those poems. At the same time, he dismisses Wordsworth as an imaginative writer. As he puts it, Wordsworth “cannot form a whole. He lacks the constructive faculty. He can give only the fine tones of thought, drawn from his mind by accident or nature, like the sounds drawn from the Aeolian harp by the wandering gale.”42 The fate of plain English in the nineteenth century is nicely encapsulated in these lines. Even as Wordsworth’s low register is denied an imaginative function in the Coleridgian or Shelleyan sense, it is accepted as both natural and truthful. The universality of this acceptance is nowhere more evident than in Matthew Arnold’s appreciation of Wordsworth, written thirty years after the poet’s death. In a remarkable passage, Arnold asserts that Wordsworth “has no style.”43 I take this to mean that, by , plain English is perceived as transparently truthful, so much so that a reader as sensitive as Arnold can no longer perceive it as individual or idiosyncratic. “Still,” Arnold continues, Wordsworth’s use of [a style of perfect plainness] has something unique and unmatchable. Nature herself seems . . . to take the pen out of his hand, and to write for him. This arises from two causes; from the profound sincerity with which Wordsworth feels his subject, and also from the profoundly sincere and natural character of the subject itself. He can and will treat such a subject with nothing but the most plain, firsthand, almost austere naturalness. . . . Wherever we meet with the successful balance, in Wordsworth, of profound truth of subject with profound truth of execution, he is unique. (, italics mine)

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Where Coleridge admires the high, philosophical Wordsworth of The Prelude, and somewhat despises the short lyrics on rustic subjects, Hazlitt and Arnold have practically the opposite opinion. Wordsworth’s legacy to nineteenth-century usage is thus divided along predictable lines. On the one hand, he plays an important role, as both critic and exemplar, in producing (or preserving) the prejudice that poetic subject matter requires an elevated idiom. Most prominent English poets of the nineteenth century follow his lead in this regard. At the same time, he bequeaths to his age a plain idiom whose reputation for truthfulness and sincerity only grows with the decades, but whose uses are thought not to extend legitimately to imaginative writing. With this bifurcation in English diction, the matter of this chapter ends. The two strains are not reunited until the modern period; and when this happens, it is without Wordsworth’s early confidence that they belong together.

Chapter 3 Certain Good

W. B. Yeats and the Language of Autobiography

In January of , Yeats, forty-three years old, unmarried, and estranged from Irish politics, wrote a short poem expressive of his frustrations; he called it “Words.” I had this thought a while ago, “My darling cannot understand What I have done, or what would do In this blind, bitter land.” And I grew weary of the sun Until my thoughts cleared up again, Remembering that the best I have done Was done to make it plain; That every year I have cried, “At length My darling understands it all, Because I have come into my strength, And words obey my call”; That she had done so who can say What would have shaken from the sieve? I might have thrown poor words away And been content to live.1 73

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The poem belongs to a cluster of brief lyrics occasioned by Yeats’s discomfort with Maud Gonne’s increasingly violent politics, and by his suspicion, recorded also in his journals, that she never understood or sympathized with his own national and artistic aims.2 Some of these lyrics express mainly his disappointment in love (“Reconciliation,” “A Woman Homer Sung”), while others dwell more on Gonne’s extremism (“No Second Troy”). In “Words,” Yeats’s distress might best be described as professional. Although he recognizes his own talents as a poet, he cannot say what good those talents have done either himself or his “blind, bitter land”; if words obey his call, they are apparently alone in doing so. We detect, at the poem’s heart, a disenchantment with language: where Yeats once thought that literature—art rather than militant action—might remake society, words now seem almost opposed to normal, healthy living. Like most of its companions in The Green Helmet and Other Poems (), “Words” is quite plain. The only metaphor (fate as a sieve) is homely and simple. The tone is self-effacingly modest. In short, the poem participates in a change in Yeats’s style that many of his readers have observed occurring shortly after the turn of the century. Randall Jarrell, writing just after Yeats’s death, notes that the poems finished before – differ sharply in vocabulary from those written after. Swinburnian dreaminess (“rose, heart, lonely, wandering”) gives way to harsh materiality: “bone, blood, stone,” and so on. Jarrell’s account of this change is representative: “The dreams that had made up [Yeats’s] life were going to pieces, and the poetry changed with their ruin. . . . Both his private life and his political life, from year to year, grew more and more hopeless. . . . Reality had crushed Yeats’s picture of [the world], his plans for it; the real world— and the real Yeats who lived in that world—began to force their way into the poetry that had for so long been innocent of either.”3 In some ways, Yeats’s adoption of the low register resembles Wordsworth’s: a moment of crisis, a fixation on “the real world,” and simultaneous discovery of plain diction. Yet Yeats’s crisis occurs at mid-career, and is unaccompanied by any sense of gain. The eerie power of Wordsworth’s early nature poetry is missing utterly in Yeats’s sad, rather drab lyrics. Nevertheless, in the decades following the publication of his essay, most critics have joined Jarrell in reading the poetry of this period as the first to speak in Yeats’s mature voice. Part of my aim in this chapter is to dispute this consensus and the argument it implies about Yeats’s crucial if idiosyncratic role in British Modernism. Although the poems of – indeed record an emergency in Yeats’s career, they suggest little of the figure most familiar to readers of modern poetry: the apocalyptic visionary; the elegist of Anglo-Irish ascendancy; the virtuoso of linguistic reg-

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ister; the wearer of masks. This Yeats emerges in full only after his crisis of confidence has subsided; more precisely, he forges his mature persona in the very attempt to escape his crisis. This chapter is thus, like the last, a study in the motives, strategies, and finally the costs of poetic self-creation. After looking briefly at The Green Helmet and its precursors, I examine at length Yeats’s work in autobiography: in his next collection of poems, Responsibilities (), and in his memoirs, written at roughly the same time. Finally I trace the long-term consequences, in his late period, of Yeats’s autobiographical project. As in the last chapter, my approach to the subject is syncretic: Yeats’s turn to rightist politics, his experiments in voice, and his transformation into a visionary poet cannot be understood apart from each other. Nor can any of these questions be addressed without careful attention to his language, and in particular his use of the low register. We begin, then, with words. As the poem of that name suggests, Yeats’s use of plain English and his awareness of the futility of language are closely connected. The origins of this connection may be found in his early thoughts on literature.

THE FAILURE OF WORDS: IN THE SEVEN WOODS; THE GREEN HELMET; “ADAM’S CURSE”

As Yeats critics have recognized from the start, his earliest literary opinions are inherited from the English Romantics, Shelley most of all, by way of Pater and aestheticism. It is a familiar story: Yeats, in his Autobiographies, dates his attachment to Shelley from an early, uncritical admiration for “Alastor.”4 He also recollects his youthful conviction that “whatever the greatest poets had affirmed in their finest moments was the nearest that we could come to an authoritative religion, and that their mythology, their spirits of water and wind, were but literal truth” (Autobiographies [AB] ). In his criticism of the s, Yeats recapitulates Shelley’s main arguments in the Defence of Poetry. Poets create the metaphors by which (or through which) we understand the world; even our emotions do not “exist, or . . . become perceptible and active among us” until they have “found . . . expression in colour or in sound or in form.” All things “that seem useful or strong,” like “armies, moving wheels, modes of architecture, [and] modes of government,” have their first motion in “moments of contemplation” by “solitary men” (Essays and Introductions [E&I ] –).5 Only those things, “which seem useless or very feeble,” Yeats concludes, “have any power,” and thus—he echoes both the last sentence of the Defence and Pater’s “Conclusion”—“poets . . . are continually making and unmaking mankind” (E&I ).

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The poetic image, we recall, can be one of two things: either a fact (something existing in the world) or a thing of the mind. While the former stands apart from the accretions of thought and time, the latter is predicated on both, on the work of memory and reflection. Wordsworth, in the early part of his career, follows Locke in believing that the former kind of image is possible: words signify objects, or sensations of objects, as Locke would understand the term; that is, they stand for them. When an image is a mental construct, however, and not the perception of a fact, the word takes on a constitutive role: the image owes its existence to, and is inseparable from, the word.6 Yeats, in the early phase of his career, follows Shelley and Coleridge in holding this latter view of language. Great poetry is “but literal truth,” or, as he writes in “The Song of the Happy Shepherd,” “words alone are certain good.” His choice of this lyric, written in , to begin his Collected Poems is no accident; to a considerable extent, the first ten lines announce the course of his verse for the next eighteen years. The woods of Arcady are dead, And over is their antique joy; Of old the world on dreaming fed; Grey Truth is now her painted toy; Yet still she turns her restless head: But O, sick children of the world, Of all the many changing things In dreary dancing past us whirled, To the cracked tune that Chronos sings, Words alone are certain good. (ll. –)

If words rather than “Grey Truth” are certain good, the poet is under no obligation to represent the world accurately; “art is art,” he will explain in a letter, “because it is not nature.” Nature changes with time. The object of poetry must be then to “get out of form, to get to some kind of disembodied beauty,” more permanent than quotidian reality.7 In this first poem, Yeats associates that beauty with dream states: Dream thou! For fair are poppies on the brow: Dream, dream, for this is also sooth. (ll.  –)

A poetry so concerned with the internal, he reasons, will necessarily be vague; subjective states will be represented by images of purely private significance. “The Song of the Happy Shepherd” is reasonably clear, but in his collections of

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the nineties, The Rose () and The Wind Among the Reeds (), Yeats develops a symbolic vocabulary in which, as Richard Ellmann puts it, “no word has any explicit meaning.”8 Although “The Song of the Happy Shepherd,” as an early work, anticipates his poetry of the nineties, it seems also to recognize the failings implicit in Yeats’s ornate style. From the second verse paragraph: Seek, then, No learning from the starry men, Who follow with the optic glass The whirling ways of stars that pass— Seek, then, for this is also sooth, No word of theirs—the cold star-bane Has cloven and rent their hearts in twain, And dead is all their human truth. Go gather by the humming sea Some twisted, echo-harbouring shell, And to its lips thy story tell, And they thy comforters will be, Rewarding in melodious guile Thy fretful words a little while, Till they shall singing fade in ruth And die a pearly brotherhood. (ll.  –)

Looking at nature objectively, astronomers have lost their “human truth”; yet even as Yeats attacks science, we hear in the Miltonic allusion “optic glass” the echoes of a visionary poetry not in conflict with scientific enterprise or objectivity. The shell, moreover, is a common symbol for poetic utterance; but where shells in Shelley and Wordsworth (Book V of The Prelude, for example) speak, Yeats’s returns only the speaker’s own voice in wordless, “melodious guile.” Poetry, it would seem, is the expression of private discomfort (“fretful words”) in a mode understandable by no one, whose very attractiveness is, in a way, deceitful. Since poets are “continually making and unmaking mankind,” Yeats uses highly ornate and artificial diction; yet this idiom, in practice, is private to the point of solipsism. His image of poetic creativity is literally a man talking to himself. He speculates, finally, that The wandering earth herself may be Only a sudden flaming word, In clanging space a moment heard, Troubling the endless reverie. (ll. –)

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Even if language creates reality, that reality may only be a flashing moment in the ontic nothingness. Yeats adopts the high register with a flourish, but also, perhaps, with presentiments of the coming crisis. As one might expect, Yeats’s criticism during this period is outspoken on the subject of poetic diction. Curiously, he pays little attention to the low register, reserving more bile for the work of his Victorian predecessors, notably Tennyson. Recall Wordsworth’s twofold legacy to nineteenth-century usage: on the one hand, a low register with a reputation for sincerity and accuracy in depicting the world, but whose uses were not thought to extend legitimately to imaginative writing. The poetic image, Wordsworth at last would come to agree with Coleridge, is a product of the mind’s reflection on reality. For such work, the elevated, but clear and conventional idiom that Coleridge called the lingua communis was more appropriate. Yeats inherits and accepts this bifurcation in the language. The low register is, as it were, beneath his notice; but as Linda Dowling and others have shown, he also shares Pater’s conviction that the lingua communis has exhausted itself. His symbolic technique demands high obscurity; the lingua communis, though heightened, suffers from, in Yeats’s formulation, “triviality of emotion, . . . poverty of ideas, [and an] imperfect sense of beauty” (E&I ). In his early story “The Adoration of the Magi,” the narrator’s “sincere and careful English” marks him as a man of limited imagination. Good poetry, Yeats writes, is “strange and obscure, and unreal to all who have not understanding. . . . [Instead] of that manifest logic, that clear rhetoric of . . . ‘popular poetry’ [Tennyson, Burns, etc.], [it glimmers] with thoughts and images whose ‘ancestors were stout and wise,’ ‘anigh to Paradise’ ‘ere yet men knew the gift of corn’” (E&I ). Yeats’s quarrel with high “Victorian rhetoric” (AB ) is thus that it is not high enough; an assemblage of empty and shopworn gestures, it is as contemptible as the equally hollow boilerplate of contemporary journalism.9 Amidst this quarrel, the low register is almost, but not quite, ignored. In an  essay with which Yeats was surely familiar, Walter Pater shows a perhaps surprising appreciation for plain English. He praises the poetry of Wordsworth’s major period in terms Wordsworth himself would acknowledge. He admires the “direct expression of passion [in] humble words” and recognizes the low register’s ability to render worldly facts. Wordsworth’s plain style, he writes, “belonged to [his] higher, . . . imaginative mood, and [it] was the pledge of its reality, to bring appropriate language with it. In him, when the really poetical motive worked at all, it united, with absolute justice, the word and the idea; each, in the imaginative flame, becoming inseparably one with the other, by that fusion of matter and form, which is the characteristic of the highest poetical expression.

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His words are themselves thought and feeling; not eloquent or musical words merely, but that sort of creative language which carries the reality of what it depicts, directly, to the consciousness.”10 Yeats, in the nineties, has little use for such an idiom. Nevertheless, if his poetry of the following decade is any indication, he has absorbed Pater’s observations. If he does not discern, as Pater does, any imaginative, “poetical expression” in plain English, he assents all the same to its factuality. In his symbolist work, at rare moments when he wishes to depict drab, everyday life, he will shift to the low register. Despite a lingering poeticism, an inversion of syntax, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” is representative: I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey, I hear it in the deep heart’s core. (ll. –, italics mine)

Such moments predominate in his work after . Yeats’s turn to the low register in The Green Helmet is thus, like Wordsworth’s, a gesture of despair; but where Wordsworth, in fixing his attention on the natural world, discovers the imaginative power of plain English, Yeats resorts to the idiom, as it were, by default. He accepts plain English as the nineteenth century left it to him. A register in which words signify things, it betokens the end of imagination. Writing at this time in his diary, he dismisses his early ideals as illusory, and fears that their loss may be fatal to him as an artist: “All civilization is held together by the suggestions of an invisible hypnotist—by artificially created illusions. The knowledge of reality is always in some measure a secret knowledge. It is a kind of death” (AB ). These thoughts, however, which stay with him for the rest of his career, and which are echoed, with important differences, in his late poem “Meru,” carry also an obscure promise: that disappointment will bring with it a kind of deepened consciousness. His poems during this period hint vaguely but persistently at such recompense. “The Coming of Wisdom with Time”: Though leaves are many, the root is one; Through all the lying days of my youth I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun; Now I may wither into the truth. (italics mine)

In The Green Helmet, the “secret knowledge” remains a secret, and “the truth,” though anticipated, is not secured. Rather, Yeats’s main discovery is stylistic. Al-

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though he takes up the low register unwillingly, he comes quickly to appreciate its persuasiveness. If plain English is useless for imaginative purposes, it nevertheless suggests wisdom and authority, the voice of chastened experience. The voice, above all: where Wordsworth’s plainness rests on the vividness of individual words, Yeats, benefiting from a century-long association of plain speech with sincere intentions, is far more reliant on overall tone. “Now I may wither into the truth”: in this collection, Yeats masters the convincing, because deadened, ending, the final lines that stumble to concrete and prosaic, metrically awkward conclusions: “and been content to live”; “My barren thoughts have chilled me to the bone”; “Colder and dumber and deafer than a fish.” “The truth,” for the time being, is deferred—for Yeats, we suspect, as well as for us. Nevertheless, the voice of these lines is disarmingly forthright. Yeats’s “strategic” low register, which in his later verse, especially in combination with other registers, confers on his poems a quality of honesty and depth, begins here. We are left, however, with an open question: in what way does Yeats really change as an artist between  and ? His style indeed changes. And the mood of his poetry goes from confident to despondent. But the critical consensus, that he becomes a significantly different writer after –, that, to paraphrase Jarrell, the real world forces its way into his verse as never before, that, to put it yet another way, Yeats’s disillusionment is a baptism into Modernism, seems overstated. The changing surface texture of his poems reveals—as yet— no fundamental change in premises: his work in the first decade after  is a poetry of suspense rather than arrival. We sat together at one summer’s end, That beautiful mild woman, your close friend, And you and I, and talked of poetry. I said, “A line will take us hours maybe; Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought, Our stitching and unstitching has been naught. Better go down upon your marrow-bones And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather; For to articulate sweet sounds together Is to work harder than all these, and yet Be thought an idler by the noisy set Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen The martyrs call the world.” (ll. –)

“Adam’s Curse,” which appears in In the Seven Woods (), the volume pre-

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ceding The Green Helmet, is often taken to be an early announcement of Yeats’s new period. In Ellmann’s account, the poem’s “verisimilitude is a new development for Yeats in lyrical verse. He is remarkably successful in reproducing for the first time ordinary conversation in selected, heightened form; words like ‘marrow-bones,’ ‘kitchen pavement,’ ‘bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen,’ which he would once have rigorously excluded, do not undermine the tone because of the tight, formal syntax in which they are contained.”11 Ellmann later points to Yeats’s “loosening of rhythm” and “imperfect rhymes” as departures from his “earlier method.” These observations are surely right; the metaphors here (“stitching and unstitching”) have the same homeliness and modesty that we saw in “Words.” Besides his use of plain English, we see him admitting, to pungent effect, the debased idiom he once left to newspapers: “an idler by the noisy set.” The poem only restates, however, his older ideas on the place of art in the world. The connection he once drew between poetry and dreaming is replaced by a new insistence on craftsmanship and labor; yet he is left as distant from everyday life as before. Indeed, more so: his old contempt for the workaday world—“O, sick children of the world . . . / Words alone are certain good”—gives way to feelings of persecution (being thought an idler) and martyrdom. Yeats’s most equivocal and interesting gesture comes at the end of the poem. We sat grown quiet at the name of love; We saw the last embers of daylight die, And in the trembling blue-green of the sky A moon, worn as if it had been a shell Washed by time’s waters as they rose and fell About the stars and broke in days and years. I had a thought for no one’s but your ears: That you were beautiful, and that I strove To love you in the old high way of love; That it had all seemed happy, and yet we’d grown As weary-hearted as that hollow moon. (ll. – )

His use of the moon is symbolic in the manner of his earlier collections; but where he once represented subjective states with vague images of purely personal import (the rose on the rood of time, shadowy horses), he attempts here to use a natural object in the same capacity. As he explains in a letter written shortly before the poem, the imagination now “deals with spiritual things symbolized by natural things. . . . The phantasy has its place in poetry but it has a subordi-

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nate place.”12 One can hear in this letter a conflict of motives: on the one hand, a recognition that his symbolic technique has failed, and that a turn to the natural world is necessary; on the other hand, a hope that his turn to the natural world can salvage his symbolic technique. Might not the plain style, which emerged from the collapse of his imaginative project, through its very persuasiveness, infuse that project with new credibility? In “Adam’s Curse,” Yeats seems to use the low register to cloak his continued work in symbolism. The conversational tone of the opening normalizes, so to speak, his use of the moon at the end. The experiment works—it is a powerful, moving poem—but Yeats does not repeat it in The Green Helmet. He abandons it, most likely, for ontological reasons. His symbolic method and the low register rest on two different visions of reality: here, a product of the imagination, there, desolate of imagination. After “Adam’s Curse,” he seems to recognize the problem of representing inner states in discourse usually taken to signify facts. He does not return to this technique until the teens, when he has found new shorings to support it. His technical difficulty in  suggests a deeper loss of purpose. Having understood himself once as a symbolist, a romantic nationalist, a young lover, a legislator of the world, he finds himself unable to say precisely what he is, or why he should be a poet. The low register is purely negative: it only connotes what he has ceased to be, while suggesting nothing of what he should become. It suggests no new understanding of imagination to replace the old. His voice, in both “Adam’s Curse” and The Green Helmet, is not that of a man who has fallen from idealism to disillusioned middle age; rather, it is the accent of superannuated youth: “we’d grown / as wearyhearted as that hollow moon.” The Green Helmet marks less a new phase in Yeats’s career than the last, depleted extension of his first. He is thus faced in his fifth decade, like Wordsworth as a young man, with a crisis of identity. As with Wordsworth, the pressures of self-definition drive Yeats to autobiography.

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MOMENT: RESPONSIBILITIES; AUTOBIOGRAPHIES

Pardon, old fathers, if you still remain Somewhere in ear-shot for the story’s end, Old Dublin merchant “free of the ten and four” Or trading out of Galway into Spain; Old country scholar, Robert Emmet’s friend, A hundred-year-old memory to the poor;

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Merchant and scholar who have left me blood That has not passed through any huckster’s loin, Soldiers that gave, whatever die was cast: A Butler or an Armstrong that withstood Beside the brackish waters of the Boyne James and his Irish when the Dutchman crossed; Old merchant skipper that leaped overboard After a ragged hat in Biscay Bay; You most of all, silent and fierce old man, Because the daily spectacle that stirred My fancy, and set my boyish lips to say, “Only the wasteful virtues earn the sun”; Pardon that for a barren passion’s sake, Although I have come close on forty-nine, I have no child, I have nothing but a book, Nothing but that to prove your blood and mine.

Yeats takes up the project of autobiography in two closely related volumes: his memoirs, which he begins writing in , and the collection Responsibilities (), for which this dedicatory lyric is essentially a statement of purposes. “Pardon,” Yeats asks his ancestors, for a life misspent. As the title of the volume suggests, he will, in the poems that follow, face his responsibilities and try to explain how, “for a barren passion’s sake,” he fell into the crisis described so vividly in The Green Helmet. We hardly think it problematic that, with the exception of this sole allusion to Maud Gonne, Yeats does not refer to his own life, recalling instead those of forebears long dead. Nor, perhaps, do we wonder that he seems to feel more accountable to the dead than the living for his failures. We should wonder. The poem suggests an approach to autobiography as curious for what it includes as what it omits, and a peculiar understanding of self in relation to the past. The manuscript history of Yeats’s autobiographies is remarkably tortuous. The first volume, Reveries over Childhood and Youth, is begun in January of  and finished on Christmas Day; Yeats publishes it two years later. Although he vows upon finishing it not to write of more recent events, because “there would be too many living people to consider,” he resumes work almost immediately, completing the draft, Denis Donoghue tells us, in late  or early .13 This draft, which covers his life up to , is then suppressed. When Yeats returns to the subject in the early twenties, he writes substantially new accounts of his life. The Trembling of the Veil, which brings the story up to , is published in ,

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and Dramatis Personae, published in , ends shortly before Gonne’s marriage in . These volumes, with the exception of the draft, are collected shortly before Yeats’s death and, along with two excerpts from a journal kept during  – , are published as his Autobiography (). The abandoned draft, which Donoghue has published under the title Memoirs, is perhaps the closest Yeats ever comes to writing a conventional autobiography. In it, he is more honest about his class origins than at any other time in his life. “No matter how rich we grew,” he writes about his family, “we could never be ‘county,’ nor indeed had we any desire to be so” (Mem ). More important, he recounts his early years in frankly psychological terms: he is remarkably open, even explicit, in describing his sexual development. His affair with Olivia Shakespear (“Diana Vernon”), left out of the published version, is given a long account. He analyzes his infatuation with Maud Gonne at far greater length and with more subtlety than in his later work: “It had come to seem as if the intimacy of our minds could not be greater, and I explained the fact that marriage seemed to have slipped further away by my own immaturity and lack of achievement. . . . She was complete; I was not” (Mem ). The self-criticism that he is willing to show here, as well as an unsparing view of Gonne’s personality, both vanish, for all intents and purposes, in the Autobiography. Incidents that he is later at pains to conceal, like the death of Gonne’s illegitimate son, are recalled here in detail. Most tellingly, perhaps, the draft follows closely Yeats’s difficult relationship with his father. Indeed, the manuscript begins with a scene emblematic of their life together. An intellectual dispute escalates into violence: I began to read Ruskin’s Unto This Last, and this, when added to my interest in psychical research and mysticism, enraged my father, who was a disciple of John Stuart Mill’s. One night a quarrel over Ruskin came to such a height that in putting me out of the room he broke the glass in a picture with the back of my head. Another night when we had been in an argument over Ruskin or mysticism, I cannot now remember what theme, he followed me upstairs to the room I shared with my brother. He squared up at me and wanted to box, and when I said I could not fight my own father replied, “I don’t see why you should not.” (Mem )

The scene sets the tone for Yeats’s draft: an account of his early life with close attention paid to his emotional growth, often in conflict with those nearest him. Curiously, almost none of this material finds its way into the Autobiography. Rather, Yeats takes an approach to character anticipated in his dedicatory lyric: “Old Merchant skipper that leaped overboard / After a ragged hat in Biscay Bay”; “Old Dublin merchant, ‘free of the ten and four.’” Persons important in

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his life are glimpsed, like his dead ancestors, in emblematic poses. He explains, in The Trembling of the Veil, that, at moments of crisis, the trivia of our daily lives are stripped away and we are each revealed as performing essential and, it will be seen, largely preordained, roles, as in a drama. The study of character, it follows, takes no account of personal development. The self is not a quarry of experiences to be excavated; instead, the biographer captures his subjects in iconic, typical moments. As a result, “The Tragic Generation” (part of The Trembling of the Veil ) and the aptly named Dramatis Personae feel oddly like works of romance. William Morris and Lionel Johnson, as depicted by Yeats, are practically allegorical figures (“Prelapsarian Idealism” and “Repressed Dissipation,” respectively); the same could be said for Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons, or, most to the point, Yeats himself. On the very first page of Reveries over Childhood and Youth, he warns that his will not be a typical autobiography. “One day at dinner my great-uncle, William Middleton, says, ‘We should not make light of the troubles of children. They are worse than ours, because we can see the end of our trouble and they can never see any end,’ and I feel grateful, for I know that I am very unhappy and have often said to myself, ‘When you are grown up, never talk as grown-up people do of the happiness of childhood’” (AB – ). The Wordsworthian project of tracing one’s identity to inviolable moments of childhood is thus abolished at the outset. Instead, the young Yeats, here no more than five or six, seems precociously mature, and suspiciously aware that, some day, he may be writing a memoir. In general, Yeats depicts the main preoccupations of his adulthood—his concerns with class, his interest in the supernatural—as already present during his earliest youth. His method as a memoirist is gnostic: instead of following the evolution of a self, he locates and records moments in which the self is uncovered. This gnosticism is of tremendous value to Yeats in emerging from his turnof-the-century crisis; it allows him to insist that he has broken completely from his past. Such a claim might well seem out of place in a work of autobiography; yet Yeats’s indifference to his own maturation makes such an assertion not only possible but inevitable. Let us return to the first poem of Responsibilities: “Pardon, old fathers, if you still remain / Somewhere in ear-shot for the story’s end.” The story in question is his life up to this point. Rather than seeing himself as the product of forty-nine years of confusion, Yeats can simply say that story is over. Hitherto I have understood myself imperfectly; the confusion from which I have emerged was the work of incomplete understanding, but of nothing intrinsic to me. It is perhaps insufficiently recognized how utterly this dedicatory lyric reinterprets his life. He asks pardon, for example,

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that for a barren passion’s sake, Although I have come close on forty-nine, I have no child, I have nothing but a book, Nothing but that to prove your blood and mine.

It looks like the old story, his fruitless attachment to Maud Gonne. In fact, he is rewriting her role in his life. His barren passion has indeed left him childless, but only childless. Where his feelings for Gonne were intrinsic to his verse of the nineties (Yeats as young lover) and a major cause of his crisis thereafter (his lyrics of frustration), she is here seen as the source of a private distress fundamentally separate from his identity as a poet: “I have nothing but a book.” Metaphorically, he is also reclaiming his identity as a man. The poem is patrilineal: he invokes his “old fathers,” boasts that the blood he has from them “has not passed through any huckster’s loin,” and then offers his book, in lieu of a son, as the next term in the sequence. His passion has been “barren,” not “impotent”; in other words, feminine. In letters written during his crisis, he dismisses his earlier verse for “an exaggeration of sentiment and sentimental beauty I have come to think unmanly. . . . [I] have only just got it under foot in my own heart—it is sentiment and sentimental sadness, a womanish introspection. . . . I [can no longer] be quite just to any poetry that speaks to me with the sweet insinuating feminine voice of the dwellers in that country of shadows and hollow images.”14 The old Yeats, the lover of Maud Gonne and the poet whose work reflected that love, is disowned as, for all intents and purposes, another person. The dedicatory lyric announces the emergence of a new man, full grown. But from whose head (or loin) precisely? Yeats’s most remarkable revision of his past comes shortly before the end of the poem. You, most of all, silent and fierce old man, Because the daily spectacle that stirred My fancy, and set my boyish lips to say “Only the wasteful virtues earn the sun” . . . .

On the face of it, these lines are simply untrue. “The wasteful virtues” is somewhat opaque, but one guesses that Yeats means by it those expressions of personality, like leaping overboard “after a ragged hat in Biscay Bay,” that reveal the essential self, but serve no practical end. Yeats’s schooling in the wasteful virtues came from his father, a lawyer, who, much to the consternation of his wife’s family, left his practice to pursue an unsuccessful career in London as a painter. As

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Yeats’s biographers relate, and as his unpublished memoir suggests, his artistic personality was forged in the bohemian company his father kept.15 Yeats in the eighties and nineties defined himself artistically—as a mystic, an aesthete, a follower of Ruskin—over against his father’s equally firm views. The “silent and fierce old man” in these lines, however, is his maternal grandfather, William Pollexfen, a grim and practical merchant who disapproved of his son-in-law’s career. A curious person to have stirred the young Yeats’s fancy; yet, in both Responsibilities and the Autobiography, Pollexfen replaces John Yeats as the founding figure of his grandson’s imagination. The passages Yeats devotes to his father in the draft are largely removed. Pollexfen dominates the scene in Reveries over Childhood and Youth. The narrative begins with a description of the old man (“I think I confused my Grandfather with God” (AB )), and concludes with his death. In some way, Pollexfen is a more appropriate ancestor for the new Yeats than his father. Just before taking up autobiography, Yeats writes to the latter that lecturing “has made me realize with some surprise how fully my philosophy of life has been inherited from you in all but its details and applications.” Biographers who, with Ellmann, see Yeats as newly respectful of his father in the teens miss the sense of distance that goes with that respect.16 The admiration he shows in their later correspondence is made possible, in part, by seeing his father also as separate from his poetic career. In repudiating his work of the nineties, he disassociates his poetic identity from the two people, Maud Gonne and John Yeats, central to his earlier style. Responsibilities is consequently a peculiar title for this collection. Yeats takes none for his own life, nor for his relations with those closest to him. The only responsibility he acknowledges is to the deep past, and to the archetypal ancestors whose “wasteful virtues” his own poetry will now reflect. The autobiographical impulse begins usually with a feeling of power. Wordsworth was driven to psychology by the apparent contradiction between his crisis of the mid-s and the resources he still felt within himself after it had passed. “Tintern Abbey” is his attempt to trace present feelings of power to sources in the self, sources located, he would have us believe, in youth. Yeats in  can only see himself as powerless, a failure; thus the odd shape his autobiography takes.17 On the one hand, he feels the necessity of understanding himself in the context of a past; at the same time, he lacks any incentive to appreciate that self in psychological terms. A successful art will depend not on acknowledging but on denying his first fifty years of development. During his crisis he begins fulminating against “that modish curiosity, psychology” (E&I ). His

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innovations in the decade that follows are best understood as anti-psychological in motive. To be precise, Yeats’s poetry takes two apparently dissimilar turns after . We have seen something of the first: his immersion in race, class, and tradition. His own origins are middle class; yet, as critics of his politics observe, his later work celebrates “the peasant and the aristocrat, kindred in spirit but not in class, united in . . . battle against the industrial and utilitarian [and thus, one should add, bourgeois] ethic.”18 Some scholars trace his antipathy for the middle class (and, by extension, the urban poor) to his early years; but his contempt during this period is more likely a badge of membership in the avant-garde than a conviction deeply held. “The general public,” he writes in , “will always hate literature and the arts because it will always shrink from the laborious or exhausting ecstasy in which literature and the arts are understood.”19 Such sentiments might not be out of keeping with Pater or, in different words, Matthew Arnold. Casual contempt turns to hatred only with his crisis in –. We first hear the intentional crudeness of “Biddy” and “Paudeen,” “the greasy till” and “the pack,” as well as the boast that no blood of his has “passed through any huckster’s loin.” The reason for this sudden virulence in tone is that the nature of his complaint against the bourgeoisie has changed. “The counting house,” he observes, has “created a new class and a new art without breeding and without ancestry, and set this art and this class between the hut and the castle” (E&I , italics mine). If we cut through his rhetoric, we can see that his hostility is tied closely to questions of selfhood. Aristocrats and peasants, to some extent, have no reason to worry about identity: it is established already, in the one case by lineage, by the portraits in the gallery, and in the other by an association with the land and a continuous folk memory. When one belongs, however, to a class “without ancestry,” the burden of identity is thrown back entirely on the self. Psychology, which Yeats is so concerned to avoid, is essentially a middle-class endeavor, far more dangerous and far less easy to dismiss than mere philistinism. The moment of this recognition is nowhere more evident than in the title poem to the first collection of his crisis period, In the Seven Woods. I have forgot awhile Tara uprooted, and new commonness Upon the throne and crying about the streets And hanging its paper flowers from post to post Because it is alone of all things happy. . . . (ll. –)

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In these lines, before our very eyes, a spatial metaphor turns into a temporal one. In his poetry before the crisis, Yeats contrasted two simultaneous, present realities: the drab, everyday world and the higher world of art, which he associated with dreams and myth. Now he sees the former reality replacing the latter. Tara, once a favorite symbol for the poetic imagination, is relegated to the past and invested with an explicitly social significance. It could be any Protestant Big House, or perhaps folk culture itself, under siege by a new, urban commonness with allegiances to neither. Organic and ancient (large plants are “uprooted”), it is threatened by a culture with no history, whose very flowers are paper. Yeats’s adoption of aristocratic mannerisms, the occasion for so much drollery on the part of his critics, is driven primarily by his desire for a ready-made identity. As his biographers note, Yeats returns from a tour of Italy in  much taken with the idea of princely patronage, and begins to see his relation to Augusta Gregory in similar terms. The Seven Woods are part of the Gregory estate, Coole Park. Responsibilities sees his first poems celebrating the Renaissance, the Medicis, and their kind. In response to a wealthy man who promises to support only “what the blind and ignorant town / Imagines best to make it thrive,” Yeats asks, What cared Duke Ercole, that bid His mummers to the market-place, What th’onion-sellers thought or did So that his Plautus set the pace For the Italian comedies? And Guidobaldo, when he made That grammar school of courtesies Where wit and beauty learned their trade Upon Urbino’s windy hill, Had sent no runners to and fro That he might learn the shepherds’ will. (“To a Wealthy Man who promised a second Subscription to the Dublin Municipal Gallery if it were proved the People wanted Pictures” ll. –)

In the same collection, Yeats begins also to see himself as writing of and for the peasantry. Like his ancestor the “old country scholar,” he would be “a hundredyear-old memory to the poor.” The two impulses are essentially the same: where he once saw the artist as “continually making and unmaking mankind,” he now prefers to see art as adjunct, if not necessarily subordinate, to an ongoing tradition. He insists with increasing frequency that poetry is a craft; “wit and beauty” are a “trade.” William Pollexfen, a tradesman with strong roots in local Irish cul-

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ture, is more plausible a model than John Yeats, bohemian painter, for the poet’s labors. The topos Yeats draws on here, the sentimental attachment of aristocrat and peasant over against an arriviste middle class, is nothing new. But where this attachment is usually evoked by the privileged in defense of privilege, Yeats escapes to it from himself.20 This anti-psychological movement may be seen more distinctly in a second, more radical and original course his poetry takes after . Curiously, where his traditionalism emerges only during his crisis, this second course is nascent in his earlier period. Yeats begins his essay “Magic” () with a statement of beliefs. These doctrines are— () That the borders of our mind are ever shifting, and that many minds can flow into one another, as it were, and create or reveal a single mind, a single energy. () That the borders of our memories are as shifting, and that our memories are part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself. () That this great mind and great memory can be evoked by symbols. (E&I )

As the last of these “doctrines” suggests, Yeats is drawn to magic, in part by the problem we saw to be inherent in his symbolic technique, namely, the apparent contradiction between his insistence that poets make and unmake mankind and the extreme, sometimes hermetic obscurity of his verse. Here, he seems to suggest that the mere act of thinking in symbols—not even using them in poetry— is enough to influence other minds.21 The apparent inaction of “solitary men” is actual power, and a deep connectedness with other people. Yeats abandons this line of argument with the general collapse of his early style. It reemerges, however, with new ontological underpinnings, in his work after . Specifically, he begins to claim that “the great memory,” which he calls also the “Anima Mundi” or “Spiritus Mundi,” is an a priori constituent of the human soul. To put it another way, he internalizes his symbolic technique. The great memory sends us images, glimpsed in moments of vision, which, like the imperatives of instinct or the forms “described by Platonic philosophers” (AB ), are already part of us, but known imperfectly. In the Autobiography, Yeats explains this development in his thinking. He begins by arguing, against Locke, that the mind at birth is not a blank slate: “When Locke’s French translator Coste asked him how, if there were no ‘innate ideas,’ he could explain the skill shown by a bird in making its nest, Locke replied, ‘I did not write to explain the actions of dumb creatures.’ . . . Henry More, upon the other hand, considered that the bird’s instinct proved the existence of the Anima Mundi,

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with its ideas and memories. Did modern enlightenment think with Coste that Locke had the better logic, because it was not free to think otherwise?” (AB ). Instinct is a kind of knowledge; a bird’s knowing how to build a nest proves the pre-existence of ideas. “When a man writes any work of genius, or invents some creative action,” he then asks, “is it not because some knowledge or power has come into his mind from beyond his mind?” The answer is both yes and no: “I know now that revelation is from the self, but from that age-long memoried self, that shapes the elaborate shell of the mollusc and the child in the womb, that teaches the birds to make their nest; and that genius is a crisis that joins that buried self for certain moments to our trivial daily mind” (AB ). Let us pause for a moment to examine the consequences of Yeats’s answer. Identity is personal only in the most “trivial,” “daily” way; going deeper, we find that individuality is an illusion, that the most essential part of us, paradoxically, is also the part shared with the rest of our race. The images we encounter when in touch with this part “are forms existing in the general vehicle of Anima Mundi, and mirrored in our particular vehicle” (Per Amica Silentia Lunae [PASL] ).22 Human existence is thus divided into two discrete and complementary spheres: the a priori, which is impersonal and universal, and the a posteriori, our existence after birth. Yeats disputes with himself endlessly whether the gap between these spheres is absolute. For our purposes, this question is most interesting in the later stages of his career, though in the early years he sometimes argues that peasant culture shows a particular awareness of the Great Memory. However it may be, neither half of this division brooks the invasions of psychology: the first because it deals with phenomena preceding the self, the second because of—what we have just seen—Yeats’s furious identification of himself with traditional roles. We can hardly help noticing, however, that this division in some ways resembles a psychological model of human development. Wordsworth divides his life into two, similarly discrete periods: his life as a mature adult and the childhood in which, he is certain, the seeds of his present security were sown. Between these two periods, however, lies an unbridgeable gap. His famous remarks in The Prelude: so wide appears The vacancy between me and those days, Which yet have such self-presence in my heart That sometimes when I think of them I seem Two consciousnesses—conscious of myself, And of some other being.23

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His poetry derives much of its richness from his attempts to rediscover, but also obscure, the lines of affinity between these periods and to understand the basis of the identity he feels so keenly. The similar structure of Yeats’s poetic (preexistence / birth (amnesia) / lived experience) allows his work a similar complexity and apparent depth, without his ever needing seriously to interrogate the self. “The general mind,” he will claim somewhat disingenuously, “is scarce separable from what we have begun to call ‘the subconscious’” (PASL ). As one might expect, Yeats conceives of the imagination rather differently after  than before . If the poetic image truly exists a priori, the imagination must be not a creative but a perceptive faculty; it cannot invent, as he thought in his youth, but recover. “It is not permitted to a man who takes up pen or chisel, to seek originality, for passion is his only business” (PASL ): the passionate moment, in which images are perceived and the work of imagination are one. “Though images appear to flow and drift,” he speculates, “it may be that we but change in our relation to them, losing, now finding with the shifting or our minds; and certainly Henry More speaks by the book, in claiming that those images may be hard to the right touch as ‘pillars of crystal’ and as solidly coloured as our own to the right eyes” (PASL ). The mind, in its relation to these images, is—as it was for Wordsworth—entirely passive: “images must be given to us, we cannot choose them deliberately” (AB ). The poetic imagination operates, it follows, through vision; and Responsibilities is the story of Yeats’s transformation into a visionary poet. It begins with the short, dedicatory lyric we looked at, and continues with poems in which he identifies himself with either peasant or aristocratic culture. It concludes and, I think, culminates with two visionary lyrics, “The Cold Heaven” and “The Magi.” The former is perhaps the most revealing poem of his autobiographical moment. Suddenly I saw the cold and rook-delighting heaven That seemed as though ice burned and was but the more ice, And thereupon imagination and heart were driven So wild that every casual thought of that and this Vanished, and left but memories, that should be out of season With the hot blood of youth, of love crossed long ago; And I took all the blame out of all sense and reason, Until I cried and trembled and rocked to and fro, Riddled with light. Ah! when the ghost begins to quicken, Confusion of the death-bed over, is it sent Out naked on the roads, as the books say, and stricken By the injustice of the skies for punishment?

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The consequences of Yeats’s turn to the visionary are perhaps nowhere more evident than in his diction. During his symbolist period, the poetic image is a creation of the mind; his style, consequently, is quite opaque, and his diction ornate. During his crisis, he retreats to the low register, in which words signify things only; his language is plain but desiccated, emptied of any meaning besides mere actuality. In “The Cold Heaven,” we can see these two styles merging. Although the poetic image is, once again, a thing of the mind, it is not mindcreated. As a visitation of the Great Memory, Yeats insists, the image is as real as any worldly fact. Pictures in the mind, he comments in a diary, seem to be “of two kinds”: “We become aware of those of the first kind when some symbol . . . has descended to us, and when we ourselves have passed through a shifting of the threshold consciousness, into a similar state. The second kind, because it has no universal virtue, because it is altogether particular, is related only to the soul whose creation it is.” Visionary poetry deals only with the former kind of image; thus Yeats’s sharp and startling turn, in his visionary work, away from metaphor. A “cold and rook-delighting heaven”; “ice burned and was but the more ice”; these images come upon us “suddenly,” and with such clarity that we can only see them as they are. Yeats’s vehemence is as stark as Wordsworth’s in : in the moment of transfixed concentration, “the earth becomes once more, not in rhetorical metaphor, but in reality, sacred.”24 The gain is also a kind of loss. Yeats’s rejection of metaphor is also, potentially, a rejection of meaning. The images with which “The Cold Heaven” begins are as enigmatic in import as they are clear visually. A result of this ambiguity is the often uncertain relation between Yeats’s images and the contexts in which we find them; he indeed develops a technique of recycling images in different situations, as if searching for the proper fit. “The Magi” begins with a familiar sight: figures appearing and disappearing “in the blue depth of the sky.” The characters in that poem, with their “ancient faces like rain-beaten stones” are recalled, possibly, in the late poem “Lapis Lazuli,” or perhaps look back to the moon in “Adam’s Curse.” The impression in “The Cold Heaven” of circling rooks seems to return in the reeling “shadows of . . . indignant desert birds” in “The Second Coming.” This last poem contains perhaps Yeats’s most famous vision, the “vast image out of Spiritus Mundi,” the sphinxlike shape “somewhere in the sands of the desert.” Apparently, if we follow Yeats’s Autobiography, this image actually dates to the s: “There rose before me mental images that I could not control: a desert and a black Titan raising himself by his two hands from the middle of a heap of ancient ruins” (AB ). As we will see when looking more closely at “The Cold Heaven,” Yeats can use the very evasiveness of his images mean-

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ingfully. Nevertheless, we can draw some conclusions about style. The technique he used in “Adam’s Curse” and then abandoned, combining the methods of symbolism with plain English, returns now with new ontological shorings. The result is a “visionary” low register in which the clearest, most concrete language is also, paradoxically, entirely opaque.25 Responsibilities, indeed, marks a watershed in Yeats’s use of plain English. As he turns to concrete diction in his visionary work, an analogous change is occurring in the rest of his verse as well. The conservative critique of middle-class aspirations has, historically, a strong linguistic component: elaborate diction, which is seen as a pretense, a sign of the upstart’s artificial and unmerited place in the world, is contrasted usually with the plain, rooted speech of aristocrats and peasants. This contrast is evident in the bluff squires and malapropismgushing parvenus of Fielding’s novels, or in Jonathan Swift’s fulminations against jargon. In his “Letter to a Young Clergyman,” Swift complains of the “better sort of vulgar,” using “fine language,” concluding that “a common farmer shall make you understand in three words that his foot is out of joint, or his collar-bone, wherein a surgeon after a hundred terms of art, if you are not a scholar, shall leave you to seek.”26 As Yeats identifies himself ever more closely with the established classes, his verse begins to reflect this critique; his poems in this vein fall increasingly into a “traditional” low register. Where both the tired, plain poetry of The Green Helmet and the visionary low register of “The Cold Heaven” may be traced, albeit tortuously, back to Wordsworth, this traditional idiom returns to the eighteenth century and older notions of plain style. Bypassing Romanticism altogether, it is notable for a certain studied archaism. “The Grey Rock,” the second poem in Responsibilities, begins in this voice. Poets with whom I learned my trade, Companions of the Cheshire Cheese, Here’s an old story I’ve re-made, Imagining ’twould better please Your ears than stories now in fashion.

Again Yeats invokes the dead. Like the “old fathers” of the dedicatory lyric, most of the poets whom he addresses—Lionel Johnson, Oscar Wilde, Ernest Dowson, and John Davidson—are long gone. Again he insists that poetry is a craft. We note the colloquial contractions and the pointedly modest tone: “Here’s an old story I’ve remade.” But we are aware as well of something far more difficult to quantify: perhaps the first truly false notes in Yeats’s poetry. These writers indeed met regularly at a London inn of this name; but there is something ridicu-

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lous about calling such sophisticates as Wilde and Arthur Symons “Companions of the Cheshire Cheese.” Indeed, his very claim that he is an artisan, “the poet William Yeats,” can sound like posturing or playacting. Most of his retrospective works are written in this style, and even the best do not escape entirely from an air of fraudulence. The opening of his elegy to Robert Gregory: Now that we’re almost settled in our house I’ll name the friends that cannot sup with us Beside a fire of turf in th’ancient tower And having talked to some late hour Climb up the narrow winding stair to bed. (italics mine)

We see in these poems the development of a distinctive and perhaps undesired kind of irony. The poetic voice in Yeats’s collections through The Green Helmet is unambiguously Yeats’s own. The Happy Shepherd and Wandering Aengus are naive masks for the author, just as the crisis lyrics of  are works of uncomplicated egotism. With the turn against psychology, the relation between Yeats and the speakers of his poems becomes, necessarily, more complex. We do not see this so much in the visionary works, where questions of identity are brushed aside; but in the poems where he assumes a traditional role, there is surely a gap between an assumed identity and the lingering, if unexamined and unacknowledged, voice of Yeats himself. We feel the tension between emotions expressed and emotions represented.27 Plain English thus emerges from Yeats’s autobiographical project divided and somewhat compromised. It is in fact impossible to speak of a single Yeatsian low register after : the “visionary” idiom is concrete and powerful but enigmatic; the “traditional” register, archaic but artificial. All the while, he retains the drained, plain language of The Green Helmet, drawing sparingly, but strategically, on its quality of hard-won wisdom and honesty. Where the first two are identifiable by their diction—the former imagistic in the Wordsworthian sense, the latter saturated with class-markers— the third is primarily tonal and syntactical. In the two decades left to him, Yeats orchestrates his poems with these registers, each supporting, but also subverting, the others, each gradually losing credibility in the process. Yeats’s work in autobiography is less a crisis solved than a crisis deferred with endless complexity. The best poem in Responsibilities suggests an awareness on Yeats’s part that the questions of  have not been answered. Let us finish, then, by returning to “The Cold Heaven.” The opening, we saw, is Yeats’s account of a visionary episode.

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Suddenly I saw the cold and rook-delighting heaven That seemed as though ice burned and was but the more ice, And thereupon imagination and heart were driven So wild that every casual thought of that and this Vanished, and left but memories, that should be out of season With the hot blood of youth, of love crossed long ago. . . .

As usually interpreted, these lines describe the return of the repressed: in his moment of vision, buried memories “of love crossed long ago” reemerge, leaving Yeats with intense feelings of remorse. Something quite different, in fact, is happening. The first four lines (and the first word of line five) indeed fit his description of a visionary event: in that instant, the unimportant contents of his “trivial daily mind,” his “every casual thought of that and this,” vanish, and he is confronted with a powerful, enigmatic image, the icy sky. The experience itself has no meaning, and this meaninglessness is immediately perceived as a deficiency: neither the trivia of life nor his imaginary capacity have provided him with emotional sustenance. He is thus confronted by regret, not, however, in the form of revived feelings, but in feelings that, he recognizes, have been present all along, but unconfessed. To put it another way, “The Cold Heaven” can be understood as a pendant to the dedicatory lyric. In that poem, he takes up the task of autobiography, which, for him, involves denying his own emotional development, his very selfhood, and rejecting also the people closest to him in his early life. In return, he gains an established identity and emerges a visionary poet. In “The Cold Heaven” he acknowledges the cost of his decision. Having written Maud Gonne out of his story, he now finds his failed love for her, “crossed long ago,” a source of formless melancholy, formless because he has denied himself any context in which he might understand or deal with it. He has removed all “blame,” “sense,” and “reason” from that part of his life. In the last lines, he imagines the afterlife: the ghost is “sent / out naked on the roads,” condemned to relive its mistakes. Yeats elaborates on this idea in his short prose work Per Amica Silentia Lunae. The dead carry with them their “memory, . . . and all passionate moments recur again and again, for passion desires its own recurrence more than any event, and whatever there is of corresponding complacency or remorse is our beginning of judgement” (PASL ). The reliving of one’s life, which Yeats avoids so deftly, cannot finally be escaped, and is finally understood to be a form of “punishment.” In this life, he experiences yet another kind of punishment. Although T. S. Eliot calls him “pre-eminently the poet of middle age,” Yeats never really writes

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as a middle-aged man. He never engages in the self-investigation one might expect, looking at the loss of youth, facing the certainty of death, at this time. By avoiding these questions, Yeats denies himself his middle years; hence the oddity that his poetic voice ages thirty years overnight. Fifty years a youth, he seemingly awakes one day an old man. This transformation is anticipated in such early works as “The Song of Wandering Aengus” and The Wanderings of Oisin, but is most clear here, in the transition from The Green Helmet to Responsibilities. The visionary voice, and thus the visionary low register, is an aged one, “out of season with the hot blood of youth.” The concomitant of imaginative power is early senescence and weakness: “I cried and trembled and rocked to and fro.” Yeats places “The Cold Heaven” near the end of Responsibilities, inviting us to recognize it as the culmination, for good and ill, of his autobiographical period. In fact, it was one of the first poems in the volume to be written; Harold Bloom guesses that its date of composition is no later than .28 I would suggest, to go further, that this poem in fact records the moment of Yeats’s turning to autobiography, a moment in which he glimpses the aftermath of his choice in its full complexity. If Yeats indeed assumes his mature voice with an eye to consequences, then Responsibilities is perhaps an apt title after all. The responsibilities lie in appreciating those consequences, not in setting them to rest. Yeats only begins fully to address the latter task in his late poetry.

THE PUBLIC POET: “EGO DOMINUS TUUS”; KEATS’S “HYPERION”

Did she put on his knowledge with his power . . . ? (“Leda and the Swan” l. 13)

Power or meaning? After , the question is as pressing and consequential for Yeats as it had been for Wordsworth in . Although the two approach this divide from different angles, their situations are analogous. The visionary idiom that both poets discover derives its suggestive power from the way its images resist paraphrase, context, reduction to metaphor—in short, meaning. As an expression of the self, of the identity amassed from lived experience, as a vehicle for political opinions or moral beliefs, the visionary mode is worse than useless: the turn to this mode occurs at a moment annihilating to the ordinary self. Inevitably, the visionary turn is accompanied by an attempt to quarantine it from the rest of the poet’s life; the cost of such poetry is thus a rupture both in the continuity of the life and in the very language of lyric itself. The visionary register

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rests on an understanding of selfhood not merely different from but irreconcilable with the premises behind all other poetic diction. Wordsworth, we saw, appreciated the annihilating implications of visionary power and, in an act of selfpreservation, initiated a rift in his own history, relegating his encounters with that power to episodes in childhood. By insisting that these episodes exercised a hidden influence on his adult life, Wordsworth tried to reconcile power and meaning; his poetry withstood the pressures of this attempt for about a decade, but finally he chose the latter. Yeats, we have just seen, is confronted with a similar decision. Disenchanted with his first five decades, he eagerly disburdens himself of them; where Wordsworth’s autobiographical myth is essentially a defense against the visionary dissolution of self, Yeats’s dissolution of self, his evasion of autobiography, frees him to become a visionary poet. The result is the same: here, personal meaning, there visionary power. Yeats, at least initially, seems as resolutely on one side of the chasm as Wordsworth after  is on the other. By assuming traditional masks—social, political, artistic—Yeats attempts to recoup for himself a substantial, if impersonal and surrogate, identity. In his remaining decades, in a series of exegetic poems, “Ego Dominus Tuus” (), “A Dialogue of Self and Soul” (), “Vacillation” (–), and “Under Ben Bulben” () among them, he articulates the differences between these sides of his persona. “Soul” is his word, most often, for the a priori, visionary aspect of being; for the a posteriori, social aspect he uses a number of terms, “Self” most frequently, but sometimes, as in “Under Ben Bulben,” “race.”29 Many times man lives and dies Between his two eternities, That of race and that of soul. (ll. –)

This distinction seems only to profit Yeats in the years immediately following the publication of Responsibilities. Where The Green Helmet found him at an impasse both personally and politically, the late teens witness his marriage, and the early twenties, his entry into official civic life as a member of the Irish Senate. Only speculation is possible here, but Yeats’s new understanding of the “self” as artificial seems to speed his passage into the world of action; the very perception of social identity as role-playing appears to make social pursuits easier for him. The bizarre events leading up to his marriage, his simultaneous courtship of Georgie Hyde-Lees and Iseult Gonne, suggest that his choice of a wife was far less weighty for him than his determination to become a husband.30 More apposite to our subject, the volumes he published during these years, The Wild

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Swans at Coole () and, to a lesser extent, Michael Robartes and the Dancer (), express a deeper confidence than their successors in the priority of Yeats’s visionary gift. “Ego Dominus Tuus,” the earliest of his exegetical poems, is ostensibly a dialogue between the social (Hic) and visionary (Ille) principles; in fact, the former is the flimsiest of straw men for the latter. Hic indeed resembles Yeats in his more traditional costume. “A style,” he claims, “is found by sedentary toil / And by the imitation of great masters” (ll. –). Ille, however, has no use for tradition. I seek an image, not a book. Those men that in their writings are most wise Own nothing but their blind, stupefied hearts. (ll. –)

Great art originates in blindness and confusion; if Hic believes in a substantial, personal identity (“I would find myself and not an image” [l. ]), Ille knows, like the speaker of “Meru,” that our familiar perceptions, even of selfhood, are but a “common [that is, a universally held] dream” (l. ). Confusion, losing hold of familiar experience, leaves one susceptible to the influx of visionary images. All art that would represent or influence the world is either rhetoric or sentimentalism; images alone are real. Ille. Those that love the world serve it in action, Grow rich, popular, and full of influence, And should they paint or write, still it is action: The struggle of the fly in marmalade. The rhetorician would deceive his neighbours, The sentimentalist himself; while art Is but a vision of reality. (ll. –)

The tenor of these lines, valorizing the visionary over the social, is characteristic of these volumes. We hear it in “Easter, ,” when, in an armed uprising, the “casual comedy” of Dublin life takes on suddenly the “terrible beauty” of high tragedy. We hear it more clearly in a series of poems celebrating impassioned ignorance over learning: “I would be—for no knowledge is worth a straw—/ Ignorant and wanton as the dawn” (“The Dawn” ll.  –). It is possible to mistake the tone of these passages, Ille’s long speech especially, for Yeats’s work during the nineties. Yet although he again draws a contrast between everyday existence and the privileged experience of art, his terms have shifted significantly. The poetic imagination, once an active, creative capacity, is now passive; the Shelleyan legislator of the world, by inventing the metaphors

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through which life is lived, only contributes to the manifold illusion that true visionaries are fated to pierce. More to the point, the lessons of “The Cold Heaven” have not been unlearned. As Ille observes, What portion of the world can the artist have Who has awakened from the common dream But dissipation and despair? (ll.  –)

If Yeats in The Wild Swans at Coole believes himself most intrinsically an artist during his visionary moments, he understands as well their emotional cost. His remaining work is riven by two irreconcilable desires: on the one hand, to write powerful poetry and thereby to insist on the absolute separation of his visionary and social sides; on the other, to readmit social and personal significance into the deepest precincts of his art. Power or meaning? In negotiating his course between these desired goods, he comes to resemble, inevitably perhaps, the Romantic poet most suspicious of both. Hic . . . No one denies to Keats love of the world; Remember his deliberate happiness. Ille. His art is happy, but who knows his mind? I see a schoolboy when I think of him, With face and nose pressed to a sweet-shop window, For certainly he sank into his grave His senses and his heart unsatisfied, And made—being poor, ailing and ignorant, Shut out from all the luxury of the world, The coarse-bred son of a livery-stable keeper— Luxuriant song. (“Ego Dominus Tuus” ll. – )

For critics who would read Yeats as a very late Romantic, two poets in particular suggest themselves as forebears. To quote Harold Bloom, “Yeats was a poet very much in the line of vision; his ancestors in English poetic tradition were primarily Blake and Shelley, and his achievement will at last be judged against theirs.”31 This genealogy, the inheritance from Shelley in particular, looks like wishful thinking when measured against Yeats’s work after ; Yeats ceases to be an imaginative writer in the Shelleyan sense after –. Ille’s account of Keats, on the other hand, despite its condescending tone, is manifestly a portrait of Yeats himself: the poet composes “luxuriant song” in defiance, not celebration, of his circumstances in life. The emotional quality of his verse, be it “de-

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liberate happiness” or utter misery, has no beginning, except perhaps antithetically, in actual feelings. This is another way of saying that both poets fall into a tradition of anti-psychological lyric: Yeats’s grievance against “that modish curiosity, psychology” recapitulates in most important respects Keats’s critique of the egotistical sublime. Among the Romantics, Keats is alone both in appreciating Wordsworth’s psychological originality and in recognizing the slip fundamental to Wordsworth’s visionary style; he certainly is unique in perceiving Wordsworth’s psychology as a threat. Where Coleridge in particular, for reasons that are not hard to guess (philosophical, religious), accepts willingly the visionary Wordsworth of  – , Keats detects bad faith. “Every man,” he comments in a letter to J. H. Reynolds, “has his speculations, but every man does not brood and peacock over them till he makes a false coinage and deceives himself.”32 The self-deception Keats has in mind, though he would not put it in such terms, is Wordsworth’s misidentification of the uncanny as sublime. In the Intimations Ode, Wordsworth finally accepts the implications of his autobiographical myth. Instead, however, of recognizing the void in his history as the uncanny remnant of an originary trauma, he insists on perceiving in it the intimations of a higher reality, and on attributing them to a creative, imaginative capacity within. Keats’s complaint against Wordsworth, however, is not simply that his visionary claims are based on a false account of himself. Rather, his deeper argument is with the autobiographical myth itself and the challenge it poses to personal identity by locating the sources of present strength in parts of the self now inaccessible, now, as it were, unconscious. What, precisely, has this to do with Yeats? We have already seen the connection. Wordsworth’s psychology rests on a leap of faith, that the discontinuities we feel in ourselves are in fact the basis of a strong, rooted personality. Lyric power has its wellspring not in forcefulness of reason or emotion, social standing or divine inspiration, but in an identity mysterious even to the poet, which it becomes, nevertheless, the task of poetry to explore and affirm. It should come as no surprise that, among the second generation of Romantics, Shelley and Byron never respond to this aspect of Wordsworth’s work. Shelley takes on the mantle of visionary poet eagerly enough, but identity, in the sense made so problematic by Wordsworth, is never a pressing concern. The same may be said for Byron. Social class is surely not the only determining factor; nevertheless, identity is still too much a question of inheritance for either to dispute, or even think to dispute, the security of this bond. Keats, Cockney poet, like Yeats, the reluctant bourgeois, cannot as easily ignore the implications of the new psychology.

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I am not, in these observations, offering a revised model of poetic inheritance or influence, Keats replacing Shelley as Yeats’s most formidable “ancestor”; instead, I am pointing to a kind of convergent or parallel evolution. If Keats is alone in perceiving the threat posed by Wordsworth, that recognition is widespread ninety years later; Yeats offers only one of the more ingenious modern responses to the challenge. Why, however, should it have taken so long for poets as a group to come around to Keats’s position? It may, in part, have to do with the processes of long-term literary change that I discuss in my introduction: the slowness with which truly revolutionary shifts of paradigm are grasped by a community of practitioners. Indeed, there was no good reason why Wordsworth’s psychology should, in its time, have been perceived as a threat by most poets: it was, after all, the basis for a claim to poetic exceptionalism. Poetry is always under the singular burden of needing to justify its existence, by rooting the poet’s authority to speak in a special capacity that makes him or her different from ordinary people. And this is precisely what Wordsworth’s psychology does. The nineteenth century, however, saw the triumph of the kind of psychological thinking pioneered by Wordsworth; one can see it everywhere, in fact, but poetry: in social and scientific thought, and above all in the Victorian novel, which practically supplanted poetry as a representative genre during this period. By the end of the century, the very psychology that Wordsworth had developed to explain his own uniqueness had become the property of the European middle class (Freud would be the culmination), and poets could no longer not perceive it as an assault on their autonomy. The main line of Victorian poetry, with its peremptory, Shelleyan assertion of visionary authority (with a bit of Keatsian malaise mixed in), collapsed, and only Yeats, by taking an anti-psychological course, survived.33 Both Keats and Yeats (Yeats after ) spend their careers trying to deny the suggestion, once made by Wordsworth, but later an implication of modern psychology, that poetic power originates entirely in the isolated and cloven self. Yeats never claims any descent from Keats, certainly never with the enthusiasm that marked his early writings on Shelley. And although Keats is an increasingly frequent presence in Yeats’s criticism and letters after , Yeats perhaps feeling the kinship between Keats’s project and his own, these appearances are rarely unambivalent. Although by  he is able to comment, in a letter to his father, that he finds “Keats perhaps greater than Shelley,” his approval is mixed often with the contempt we saw in “Ego Dominus Tuus.”34 He equivocates, most likely, because of the way Keats chooses to counter Wordsworth, and because of the consequences for his poetry that he can readily perceive in (what

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he must surely view as) Keats’s failures. Consider the opening of “Hyperion: A Fragment.” It is Keats’s most developed response to the egotistical sublime, and must have disturbed Yeats considerably: Deep in the shady sadness of a vale Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn, Far from the fiery noon, and eve’s one star, Sat gray-hair’d Saturn, quiet as a stone; Still as the silence round about his lair; Forest on forest hung above his head Like cloud on cloud. No stir of air was there, Not so much life as on a summer’s day Robs not one light seed from the feather’d grass, But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest. A stream went voiceless by, still deadened more By reason of his fallen divinity Spreading a shade: the Naiad ’mid her reeds Press’d her cold finger closer to her lips.35

Keats began his poem late in , intending to write a Miltonic epic; he ceased work in April , a mere  lines into Book III, and would readily have consigned his efforts to oblivion. Briefly, “Hyperion” tells of a change in dispensations: the violent replacement of the Titans, Saturn their leader, by the Olympian gods. The opening of Book I finds Saturn, in the wake of his overthrow, “quiet as a stone,” reduced nearly, that is, to an insentient, mineral state. Paul Fry, noting Keats’s conversancy with contemporary science, is surely right to find a geological quality in Saturn’s setting; the passage has “a somewhat Cuvier-esque sense of alluvial deposits (‘forest on forest,’ etc.), with fossil remains of former worlds.”36 Saturn, it would appear, is buried in both a mythic and a paleontological sense, his catastrophic overthrow somehow the result of natural processes. Though we see him before us, he seems already to have receded into a distant and half-forgotten past. Oceanus, another Titan, explains these impressions. It is “Nature’s law,” he claims in Book II, for old forms to yield to new ones of greater power and beauty. Mark well! As Heaven and Earth are fairer, fairer far Than Chaos and blank Darkness, though once chiefs; And as we show beyond that Heaven and Earth In form and shape compact and beautiful, In will, in action free, companionship,

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And thousand other signs of purer life; So on our heels, a fresh perfection treads, A power more strong in beauty, born of us And fated to excel us, as we pass In glory that old Darkness. . . . (II.  –)

Keats’s myth begs to be read allegorically, and of course has been from the start. Among other things, “Hyperion” is Keats’s attempt to imagine a poetry of power disburdened of the Wordsworthian unconscious. It has been remarked that Saturn, later in the poem, cuts a rather Wordsworthian figure, mourning the loss of his “strong identity” and desiring to “fashion forth / another world, another universe, / to overbear and crumble this to nought” (I. –). As Fry puts it, he “embodies ‘the egotistical sublime’ in wishing to become once again a ‘man of power’ and create a new world.”37 His significance is I think more specific than that. The Wordsworthian conception of self is, so to speak, synchronic: the conscious, social, perceptive part of a person exists simultaneously with the unconscious, powerful part; even if he owes that power to a forgotten past, the whole man consists of the two together. In this respect, Wordsworth’s model anticipates the tension between the Dionysian and Apollonian in Nietzsche, or the familiar dynamics of Freudian belief. Keats would reinterpret this model diachronically, the psychological self displaced onto a series of historical moments. In Saturn, the Wordsworthian unconscious is put out of sight, the “buried self” literally buried and dismissed to an earlier phase of geological time. Its replacement—a “fresh perfection” manifested, indeed, by Apollo—is an enlightened mind, a consciousness unestranged from itself, preserving the force of its predecessor but free from dark or vacant places. Unfortunately, the progressive allegory falters. If Oceanus suggests that the poetry written by such a mind must surpass in power the work of precursors (“for ’tis the eternal law / That first in beauty should be first in might” [II.  – ]), Keats himself never writes such poetry. Indeed, “Hyperion” itself breaks off before depicting either Apollo or the Olympians. The Keats of the letters and poems knows that this hope is unrealistic, that, after Wordsworth, an extraordinary lyrical power must be accompanied (explicitly or not) by extraordinary personal claims, claims that he is unwilling to make. Thus the singular paradox—not irony, because he embraces it—of Keats’s career: his complaint against the “egotistical sublime” is its presumption of an unconscious and the resulting destabilization of self. His attempt, however, to restore the self, and to write poetry as if the unconscious did not exist, yields an oddly unmoored effect: a voice not only of diminished power but without a deep history, with the most

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changing and evanescent of identities. A famous passage from his letters: “As to the poetical Character itself, (I mean that sort of which, if I am any thing, I am a Member . . . ) it is not itself—it has no self—it is everything and nothing— It has no character—it enjoys light and shade. . . . A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity.”38 The lessons of Keats’s career were not lost on Yeats. It is hard to know whether he learned them from reading Keats or from reviewing his own, similar situation after . To the end of his life, his poetry of masks remains Keatsian in pedigree. The conclusion that he reaches within a half-decade of Responsibilities, however, is that a poetry of opinion, of social engagement, emptied of visionary force is mere, ineffectual argument, and that visionary power without a meaningful social expression is the bleakest solipsism. For Keats, the alternative to power and meaning is a poetry of consciousness alone; the next chapter will take up this thread when it reappears in the modern era, notably in the work of T. S. Eliot. For Yeats, however, it becomes necessary to insist on the secret connection of his public and hermetic sides. The life led according to traditional roles, he will argue, conforms also to predestined, cyclical patterns in the Spiritus Mundi; the word he uses, without pejorative connotations, for this conformity is “tragedy.” A Vision, the major prose work of Yeats’s late period, is his most involved attempt to systematize this idea; it marks his endeavor, as he puts it in the Introduction, “to hold in a single thought reality and justice” ().39 Each nuance of human personality, “every possible movement of thought and of life” (), is in fact a “phase” in the operation of an impersonal, a priori, eternally repeating design. In a way, A Vision is the Yeats work most closely resembling “Hyperion”: a psychological understanding of character displaced onto pseudoscience. But where “Hyperion” breaks off, A Vision is elaborated to the last perverse detail. It is perhaps Yeats’s most finished work; and yet it is entirely out of sympathy with his best poetry after .

THE LATE STYLE: “A PRAYER FOR MY DAUGHTER”; “MAN AND THE ECHO”

Yeats’s poetry during these last two decades, not surprisingly, is linguistically his most subtle and complex, as various registers low and high—visionary, traditional, drab and plain, as well as grand and oratorical—are played against each other in extremely intricate ways. His work in these years resembles Wordsworth’s after , after the sweeping entry of Latinate diction into Wordsworth’s vocabulary. The resemblance is not coincidental: the early nineteenth century

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witnessed Wordsworth’s attempts to write public-minded, meaningful poetry while retaining the power of his first major lyrics; the strain of these efforts shows in poems—the political sonnets and, above all, “Michael”—that hold together multiple registers in unstable suspension. Yeats’s endeavors are not very different; after Responsibilities—the Nobel Prize in  does not discourage him— he conceives of himself as a national poet, expected to speak on Irish issues. This change in attitude is itself part of a larger change more germane to our subject: both his radical separation of power and meaning and his privileging of the former over the latter, so useful in extricating himself from his crisis, are of less value to Yeats after he has found success. As he lets the several quarters of his persona coalesce, the strains of language associated with those parts coalesce as well. His work in this period, also not surprisingly, is most often selected by critics who would label him a propagandist. Such hostility is doubtless a response to his politics, which, right-wing to begin with, are colored increasingly by an attraction to Fascism.40 It might be argued, however, that his late style, regardless of ideological shading, is inevitably tendentious. Where the mixing of registers in Wordsworth is an honest mistake, as it were, the Yeats of – is remarkably clear-eyed about violating the separation between his social and visionary sides. Thus, perhaps, our sense, reading even his most neutral work of the period, that Yeats has a palpable design on us. At all events, his style and politics prove well-suited for each other. “A Prayer for My Daughter” () may have the distinction of being Yeats’s most hated major poem. Reactions to it range from the tactful silence of Yeats sympathizers (Ellmann, Norman Jeffares, Elizabeth Cullingford), to the polite contempt of Bloom (“We all have . . . poems we greatly admire but dislike”), to outright excoriation. It offers a laundry list of unpopular views, but has been most attacked for its view of women. In Marjorie Howes’s assessment, it “depicts the Anglo-Irish as . . . a tradition whose continuity is both dependent on and threatened by female sexual choice”; Yeats “offers an obviously sexist prescription for his daughter’s future life and development.”41 These observations are doubtless accurate; but for the moment, I am more interested in how Yeats persuades than in any views he might hold. Since I will be analyzing the poem at length, I give it in its entirety. A Prayer for My Daughter Once more the storm is howling, and half hid Under this cradle-hood and coverlid My child sleeps on. There is no obstacle

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But Gregory’s wood and one bare hill Whereby the haystack- and roof-levelling wind, Bred on the Atlantic, can be stayed; And for an hour I have walked and prayed Because of the great gloom that is in my mind. I have walked and prayed for this young child an hour And heard the sea-wind scream upon the tower, And under the arches of the bridge, and scream In the elms above the flooded stream; Imagining in excited reverie That the future years had come, Dancing to a frenzied drum, Out of the murderous innocence of the sea. May she be granted beauty and yet not Beauty to make a stranger’s eye distraught, Or hers before a looking-glass, for such, Being made beautiful overmuch, Consider beauty a sufficient end, Lose natural kindness and maybe The heart-revealing intimacy That chooses right, and never find a friend. Helen being chosen found life flat and dull And later had much trouble from a fool, While that great Queen, that rose out of the spray, Being fatherless could have her way Yet chose a bandy-leggèd smith for man. It’s certain that fine women eat A crazy salad with their meat Whereby the Horn of Plenty is undone. In courtesy I’d have her chiefly learned; Hearts are not had as a gift but hearts are earned By those that are not entirely beautiful; Yet many, that have played the fool For beauty’s very self, has charm made wise, And many a poor man that has roved, Loved and thought himself beloved, From a glad kindness cannot take his eyes. May she become a flourishing hidden tree That all her thoughts may like the linnet be, And have no business but dispensing round

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Their magnanimities of sound, Nor but in merriment begin a chase, Nor but in merriment a quarrel. O may she live like some green laurel Rooted in one dear perpetual place. My mind, because the minds that I have loved, The sort of beauty that I have approved, Prosper but little, has dried up of late, Yet knows that to be choked with hate May well be of all evil chances chief. If there’s no hatred in a mind Assault and battery of the wind Can never tear the linnet from the leaf. An intellectual hatred is the worst, So let her think opinions are accursed. Have I not seen the loveliest woman born Out of the mouth of Plenty’s horn, Because of her opinionated mind Barter that horn and every good By quiet natures understood For an old bellows full of angry wind? Considering that, all hatred driven hence, The soul recovers radical innocence And learns at last that it is self-delighting, Self-appeasing, self-affrighting, And that its own sweet will is Heaven’s will; She can, though every face should scowl And every windy quarter howl Or every bellows burst, be happy still. And may her bridegroom bring her to a house Where all’s accustomed, ceremonious; For arrogance and hatred are the wares Peddled in the thoroughfares. How but in custom and in ceremony Are innocence and beauty born? Ceremony’s a name for the rich horn, And custom for the spreading laurel tree.

Unlike many of Yeats’s poems in this period, the subject of “A Prayer”—its apparent subject, at any rate—is summarized easily: in a scene strongly remi-

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niscent of Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight,” the poet watches over his infant daughter and tries to imagine the person she will become. He is concerned most of all, as Howes asserts, with the circumstances of her marriage. At the same time, he celebrates traditional, aristocratic practices, which he calls alternately “custom,” “courtesy,” and “ceremony.” The design of the first four stanzas is to render us, as readers, susceptible to this subject. At the outset, the speaker’s anxiety is reflected by an instability in the language. The first stanza is descriptive and stylistically bears a close resemblance to the plain, drained poems of  –. Again we hear the weak rhymes (on unstressed syllables and half-rhymes), again we hear the voice of sad and wearied experience: “because of the great gloom that is in my mind.” It is a voice, free from illusions, that Yeats knows we will trust, and a logical one with which to begin a poem this polemical. Nonetheless, we can hear other voices rumbling beneath the surface: the child, the storm, Gregory’s wood, the future threatened by chaos but protected (tenuously) by traditional values. Our suspicion that this real landscape is also symbolic is confirmed by the second stanza, which indeed concludes with Yeats in full visionary throttle. His image of coming anarchy—the dance “to a frenzied drum”—is one he uses in other apocalyptic poems. All men are dancers and their tread Goes to the barbarous clangour of a gong. (“Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” ll. – )

Most remarkable about this stanza, however, is the utter silence of the shift from plain description to the visionary. The low, bitter register of The Green Helmet and the visionary low register of “The Cold Heaven” are, after all, lexically quite similar. Somewhere in lines –, the shift occurs. The reiteration of the word “scream,” perhaps, or the sudden audibility of Yeats’s rhymes, or, again, the image of a flooded stream; the atmosphere gradually is heightened, as locodescription yields to prophecy. The silence of this transition is strategic. While the concluding line of stanza —“the murderous innocence of the sea”—is tremendously powerful, and tangibly increases the force of Yeats’s argument, it is also rather opaque, and could hardly begin a lyric of persuasion. The first stanza wins our assent—here is a voice that we can believe—and the subsequent movement from one low register to another is so quiet that we never think to take that assent back. The transition is much sharper at the end of stanza , and again for good reasons. With stanza , the “prayer” itself begins: “May she be granted beauty . . . .”

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After the heightening in stanza , the speaker’s tone remains elevated, though still conversational. Perhaps we hear the stilted archaisms (“looking-glass,” “overmuch”) of his traditional registers, and thus a hint of the argument to come. As the prayer gains momentum, however, Yeats waxes oratorical, invoking Helen and Venus, so much so that he risks losing our credence. The strategic low register then rushes back in, its first appearance since the start, to assure us of the speaker’s good sense. We are thereby prepared for the main agenda of the poem, the celebration of courtesy, which begins at once. It’s certain that fine women eat A crazy salad with their meat Whereby the Horn of Plenty is undone. In Courtesy I’d have her chiefly learned.

The technique that I have been observing, common to the poems of Yeats’s late period, might be called lexical modulation. Carefully balancing voices against each other, carefully moving from one to the other, Yeats produces poems of greater persuasive energy—visionary but also socially acute—than he ever might have with a single register. A glance at his draft for the poem confirms the finesse with which he executes this balancing act. The original, fragmentary first stanza: In her three hundred year old cradle, hid By its deep hood & broidered cover lid My month old child is sleeping & today Her laughter proved her heart to be gay While I that have been indifferent long must cast A scrupulous gaze on every quarter And judge what wind has heaven charted What some demigods most foul . . . To level all things, what is bellows blast . . . .42

Yeats wins us over because each register supports—or obscures the motives behind—the others. In the draft, he gets everything wrong. By mentioning the age of his child’s cradle and admiring its broidered coverlid, he advertises that this will be a poem about traditional values. Although the storm is not as prominent in the draft, it now has an explicit, allegorical meaning: it threatens “to level all [established] things.” The sing-song rhymes (today/gay, cast/blast) and high Latinisms (“scrupulous gaze”) diffuse an atmosphere of artifice. In short, Yeats introduces his traditional and visionary registers too early; where the finished

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version succeeds because the first stanza conceals his designs on us, his intentions here are all too evident. The rhetorician would deceive his neighbors, the sentimentalist himself. Yeats in his final two decades, despite his own admonition in “Ego Dominus Tuus,” is, at the very least, a rhetorician. Indeed, he occasionally admits as much: A Vision finds Yeats numbering himself with Dante and Shelley among the men of “phase ,” the partisans and propagandists. His critics, in general, have been slower to understand the implications of his style. One group, defenders who deny Yeats’s own self-diagnosis and exonerate him of writing tendentiously, are numerous and sometimes eloquent.43 Of far greater interest, however, are readers—Yeats haters and believers alike—who, aware of his play of registers, still misconstrue the role of plain English in his work. I reproduce below two accounts of Yeats’s style, the first by an apologist, the second from a detractor. The whole history of Yeats’s style, which from the earliest times . . . he was trying to move towards colloquial uncertainty, reflects [a] regard for reality that will not be reduced. . . . Yeats was deeply committed to his idea of alienation, and his conscious solution of the problems it set was a retreat into myth and the rituals of the occult. . . . What saved him in the end was a confidence basic to the entire European tradition, a confidence in the common language, the vernacular by means of which from day to day we deal with reality as against justice. . . . Yeats, though he entertained the fictions of apocalypse, decadence, renovation, transition, saw the need to compound them with the lingua franca of reality. In the case of Yeats, there must be some kind of connection between his wayward, even tortured style of writing and his rather sinister [that is, fascistic] vision of life. . . . As a rule, [his] artificiality is accepted as Irishism, or Yeats is even credited with simplicity because he uses short words, but in fact, one seldom comes on six consecutive lines of his verse in which there is not an archaism or an affected turn of speech. . . . He is an exception to the rule that poets do not use poetical language.44

Both of our critics are discussing Yeats’s “compound” style; but where Frank Kermode sees the plainest of his registers, “the common language, the vernacular,” as performing a necessary function, rooting Yeats’s verse in “reality,” George Orwell views his “simplicity” as a rare exception to the rule. Yeats’s “artificiality,” far more common, betrays his sinister bent of mind, and is traceable directly to his reactionary politics. A case, one might think, of two critics—one might well take almost any two critics along the apologist/detractor divide—viewing the same phenomenon in opposite ways. Far more telling, however, is a premise shared by both readers, namely, that the low register is a sign of poetic honesty;

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neither critic discerns the violence Yeats has visited on the truth-value of plain English. The nineteenth century left to modernity a low register with a reputation for honesty in representing the world—and as Yeats might wish, neither Orwell nor Kermode questions this reputation. After The Green Helmet, and with increasing momentum in the late teens, Yeats develops a “rhetorical curve” in many ways the opposite of Wordsworth’s after the Intimations Ode. Just as Wordsworth will punctuate passages of plain English with moments of high, Latinate abstraction, to suggest the workings of the imagination, so Yeats, in passages of tremendous emotional power, of either visionary opacity or partisan fulmination, will retreat suddenly and strategically to the drained low register of , to cast over his verse a feeling of sincerity and truthfulness. This “curve” is recognizable in nearly all of his best poems. Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold. . . .

Plain English thus emerges as an idiom of great irrational persuasiveness and, so long as readers are willing to accept it as truthful, as perhaps the least securely truthful of registers. Once again, albeit with some notable exceptions, Yeats is far ahead of even the most incisive critics of his politics in recognizing the links between style and power.45 In A Vision, he discusses demagoguery; almost certainly he is thinking of contemporary Italy. The “Conditional Man,” the “statesman who accepts massacre as a historical necessity,” enjoys usually a singular mastery of rhetoric: “He is strong, full of initiative, full of social intellect. . . . There may be great eloquence, a mastery of all concrete imagery. . . . No man of any other phase can produce the same instant effect upon great crowds; for codes have passed, the universal conscience takes their place. [He makes] little use of argument, which requires a long train of reasons, or many technical terms, for his power rests in certain simplifying convictions. . . . He needs intellect for their expression, not their proof.”46 Yeats is canny enough to realize that the most dangerous rhetorical power, dangerous because it commands an almost unthinking assent, lies not in the high, “tortured style” that Orwell finds so sinister, but in the uses of simplicity. It is perhaps a confirmation of this insight, as well as a sign of his success as a poet, that his readers generally do not draw this lesson from his own work. While his poetry anticipates a trend in twentieth-century usage, he can hardly be accused of directly influencing that trend; if anything, Yeats’s poetry, like Wordsworth’s a century earlier, is a laboratory—or at least a petri dish—for ideas about language that do not become current in the

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larger culture for some time. Two months after Yeats’s death one of his most important and perceptive successors could read his late poetry and declare it, in defiance of Yeats’s own assessment, stylistically “democratic.” There is one field in which the poet is a man of action, the field of language, and it is precisely in this that the greatness of the deceased is most obviously shown. However false or undemocratic his ideas, his diction shows a continuous evolution towards what one might call the true democratic style. The social virtues of a real democracy are brotherhood and intelligence, and the parallel linguistic virtues are strength and clarity, virtues which appear ever more clearly through successive volumes by the deceased.47

This curious point of uniformity in Yeats’s reception, the failure or unwillingness of his successors to perceive the implications Yeats himself discerned in his style, is, in part, the subject of my next chapter. Much of that chapter deals specifically with the author of the passage above, W. H. Auden. My account of Yeats’s part in the history of plain English, for the purposes of practical criticism, ends here. I have not finished, however, examining the tensions of his late period, for, if Yeats finished his career a rhetorician, he also died, in still more interesting ways, a sentimentalist. His work in the years immediately following Responsibilities and the Autobiography celebrate the visionary at the expense of the social; measured against the articulation of pure power, “no knowledge is worth a straw.” Yet, as he grows older, raises a family, becomes more of a public figure, loses his father, experiences life-threatening illness for the first time, his priorities begin to shift. The partisanship of his late work is only one expression of a larger nostalgia for the actual. Without quite abandoning his dichotomy between power and meaning, Yeats begins to recognize more value in the latter. These years produce the earthy “Words for Music Perhaps.” In “A Dialogue of Self and Soul,” as in “Ego Dominus Tuus,” a debate between the active and visionary principles, the former now gets the last word: I am content to live it all again And yet again, if it be life to pitch Into the frog-spawn of a blind man’s ditch. . . . (ll. – )

“Vacillation,” another debate-poem, ends with the same kind of affirmation. In some ways, however, the deepest motives for this shift are most visible in poems that do not thematize it explicitly. Let us return, then, to “A Prayer for My Daughter.” The poem may be said to have two “plots” that run concurrently, one explicit, the other covert. The first, which Howes describes well, and which we have be-

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gun already to examine, concerns his daughter; the second is harder to characterize. Both are present in the first two stanzas’ ambiguities of register. The opening is mostly loco-descriptive, a gesture less trivial than one might think: Yeats, for most of his career, is not known for nature writing. At the end of the teens, however, he begins to experiment with a strange kind of landscape poetry, usually describing the grounds of Lady Gregory’s estate. Lyrics in this vein include “The Wild Swans at Coole,” “Coole Park, ,” and “Coole and Ballylee, .” In these poems his treatment of landscape is almost typological; thus in stanzas  and , the course of nature, though depicted with accuracy, seems also to be the working-through of another reality. The visionary seems almost to seep into the passage of ordinary life. This doubleness is particularly evident at the opening of “Coole and Ballylee, .” Under my window-ledge the waters race . . . Spread to a lake and drop into a hole. What’s water but the generated soul? (ll. , – )

These are not typical nature poems; in most of them Yeats uses the outdoors only to create an uneasiness, which he then resolves in a social environment. “A Prayer for My Daughter”—in its overt plot—is characteristic of this design. As we began to see, the “haystack-and roof-levelling wind” of stanza  evokes both the terrifying force of nature and a still more ominous, apocalyptic threat. In a poem like “The Second Coming,” Yeats might finally give himself over to the latter. With each reappearance of the storm here, however, it is gradually domesticated: in stanza , it is a disquietude of spirit— If there’s no hatred in a mind Assault and battery of the wind Can never tear the linnet from the leaf.

—and by stanza  it is just empty bluster. Have I not seen the loveliest woman born . . . Because of her opinionated mind [barter her natural gifts] For an old bellows full of angry wind?

If the first two stanzas evoke Shelley, the poem is finally Spenserian, the west wind reduced to a blatant beast. In a similar way, Yeats’s initial worry that his daughter will lose “natural kindness” is replaced by a hope that she learn “courtesy.” His final image of happiness, the “green laurel / Rooted in one dear perpetual place,” is no more natural a figure than the “Tara uprooted” of In the Seven Woods. We are supposed to understand the poem backwards: the social evils Yeats

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catalogues at the end—strong opinions (in women), unequal marriage, “arrogance and hatred”—are as dangerous and ill-boding as the visionary tempest of stanza . He concludes by celebrating traditional virtues. How but in custom and ceremony Are innocence and beauty born? Ceremony’s a name for the rich horn, And custom for the spreading laurel tree.

If this were all the poem had to say, it would indeed be merely, as Bloom puts it, “a complete map of Yeats’s social mind, at least of that mind in the act of idealization.”48 Yet even in this resounding final stanza, something sounds off-kilter. One word, to be precise; the same word that unsettles the opening. If any line in the first two stanzas strikes us as particularly problematic, it surely must be the last: “Out of the murderous innocence of the sea.” “Murderous innocence” is more recalcitrant a paradox than it might seem at first glance. Yeats means, one supposes, that the sea, because it is natural, has no moral agency and so is blameless in the death and destruction it causes. But if that were all he meant, why not write “innocent murderousness” (or something equivalent that scanned)? Something about innocence itself is apparently murderous, or at least terribly powerful. The paradox deepens further, into oxymoron, when one considers the etymology of “innocent”: it means, literally, “incapable of harm.” If murder is harmless, what could possibly be harmful? We begin to suspect that the motive behind the poem is a sense of loss: a harm has been done, a harm exceeding even murder, and, as a result, a power is gone. These suspicions can only be encouraged when the word returns at the beginning of stanza : “all hatred driven hence / The soul recovers radical innocence.” It is impossible to believe, after this passage, that the subject of the poem is still Yeats’s daughter; she is, after all, a month old, and, having never lost her innocence, is in no condition to “recover” it. Rather, the object of Yeats’s hopes and meditations in this passage is his own conscience. His mind, he tells us, “has dried up of late”; in the draft, it is sharper, with echoes of the dedicatory lyric to Responsibilities: “my own mind of late / has grown half barren from much hate” (). Writing during the Irish civil war, and observing the now unmistakable decline of his class, he recognizes the personal cost of his own political and “intellectual” animosities. More personal sorrows well up as well: his failure to win Maud Gonne, “the loveliest woman born,” or at least avert her becoming a harridan “full of angry wind.” His deepest regret, however, is a loss of the kind of happiness, born solely from within, that he describes in stanzas  and , and to which he would give the name “innocence.”

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The cause of this deficit is not mentioned, but easy to surmise: “A Prayer for My Daughter” is a spiritual descendant of “The Cold Heaven”; in it, Yeats mourns the sacrifice of his own past that he undertook in his autobiographical project, and which made possible his poetic and personal rebirth. By reading such an undercurrent into the poem, I do not intend to suggest that Yeats’s title is misleading. On the contrary, his daughter is central to the lyric in two ways. Yeats’s work in autobiography involved his betrayal not only of his own history but of the people closest to him during his formative years. His father, one suspects, was easy to shed, Maud Gonne probably less so, though she too was discarded in the end (and hence her presence here). One can well imagine that the birth of a first child might finally cause Yeats both to question the propriety of sacrificing intimate relations to his own poetic ambition, and to face the cost of his earlier decisions. The other, more striking reason for Anne’s presence becomes clear only in the climactic ninth stanza: Considering that, all hatred driven hence, The soul recovers radical innocence And learns at last that it is self-delighting, Self-appeasing, self-affrighting, And that its own sweet will is Heaven’s will; She can, though every face should scowl And every windy corner howl Or every bellows burst, be happy still.

These lines, read together with the first two stanzas, comprise a poem one would not expect Yeats to write, the kind of poem Keats spent his life successfully avoiding. Staring at his daughter, impervious in the storm, Yeats intuits a power, a “radical innocence” in the soul that lives entirely within itself. Following only inborn sympathies, “its own sweet will,” such a soul is also in harmony with “Heaven’s will.” These are beliefs that Yeats could hardly express after  and the willing sacrifice of his inner life. Yet the poem that began in Coleridgian piety climaxes with a moment of pure Wordsworthian egotism; one poem in particular seems to be in his ear. Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep! The river glideth at his own sweet will: Dear God! the very houses seem asleep; And all that mighty heart is lying still!

I suspect that the verbal echoes of the Westminster Bridge sonnet are unconscious; they are not, however, arbitrary. Both are poems of anxiety, and in each case the

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anxiety has much to do with war: here the civil war, Yeats’s storm, and there, just off-stage, but no less present, the threat of invasion from France. Both poets, furthermore, feel implicated, because of old political involvements, in the coming destruction. Both men, in short, are in a frame of mind to be arrested by a sleeping figure—a child, a metropolis of millions—and draw some conclusions about the power of innocence. Yeats, who early in life was relatively ignorant of Wordsworth, undertook in the late teens a systematic reading of the poems. His letters to his father and friends are as disdainful as one would expect; nevertheless, something of Wordsworth’s egotism must have remained with Yeats, perhaps suggesting to him the deficits in his life and work.49 The ventriloquism is not complete. Where Wordsworth can conclude, “N’er [felt] I a calm so deep,” Yeats’s ninth stanza sounds like a man trying to talk himself into belief: “all hatred driven hence, / The soul recovers radical innocence.” The betrayal of self and others can be reversed. Although he returns finally to his daughter, the prayer is for himself. This inference is borne out by the draft. As it stands, the first version of the poem does not end; instead of the familiar final stanza, it continues for some thirty awkward lines, then peters out. Yeats puts these lines through successive revisions before abandoning the attempt and substituting the current ending. One can see why he found the original plan difficult; the fragmentary stanzas: (X) Daughter if you be happy & yet grown Say when you are five & twenty—walk alone Through Coole Domain & visit for my sake The stony edges of the lake, Where evry year I have counted swans, & cry That all is well till all that’s there Spring sounding on to the still air And all is sound between the lake and sky. (XI) Then where what light beech foliage can let through Falls green on ground the ivy has made blue Cry out that all is well but cry it not Too loud for that still spot, And after to the garden on that side . . . (XII)What matters if you be over heard By gardener, labourer or herd? They must that have strange eye-sight meet my shade When the evening light’s begun to fade Amid the scenery it has held most dear Till many a winter has gone by.

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No common man will mock the cry Nor think that being dead I cannot hear For it is certain that I shall appear Standing to think where I have often stood By the lakes edge, in that blue wood On the short path . . . where twenty years or so My friend and I paced to and fro Hurrying thought driven on a vaporous foot.

Yeats’s initial plan, then, was to return to the landscape of Coole Park, the natural world now overtly spiritualized, in contrast to the more ambiguous first stanza. The scene is doubly redemptive. The storm of the present vanished, he can imagine himself returned to the estate after death as a kind of genius loci. A more pleasant afterlife than the penance promised in “The Cold Heaven.” This return, more to the point, is made possible by the healing of memory. The last image he evokes, of himself and his friend (it must be Maud Gonne, though he does not say it) walking through the woods, is prelapsarian. His denial of the past is recognized as a kind of fall, and a revived memory of innocence, he seems to hope, is all the soul needs to “recover” its loss. Anne, finally, is on hand at the age of twenty-five (roughly Yeats’s age when he met Gonne), walking through a restored Eden, confirming his hope: “all is well.” The fantasy does not last. Significantly, it breaks off in the middle of his recollection. Instead, Yeats writes the simultaneously more and less honest tenth stanza that his readers all know. Less honest, because the center of concern shifts back to his daughter, and because his equation of innocence with custom and ceremony, that is, with learned, culturally conditioned practices, with values he embraced “after the fall,” so to speak, is a complete denial of his deeper desires and insights in the poem. More honest too, because it offers a realistic portrait of Yeats in , his biases and hatreds still very much with him—“arrogance and hatred are the wares / Peddled in the thoroughfares”; a Yeats unwilling to part with the gains of , both visionary and social; a Yeats unwilling to face the burdens of memory, and so, willing to believe in the redemptive power of custom and ceremony. Compared to the final version, the draft is indulgent sentimentalism. And yet it suggests an emotional readiness on the part of its author, foreshadowing the turn his work will take only at the very end of his life. In a sense, Yeats’s career has no closure. He did not suffer the convenient misfortune (convenient for critics, that is) of creative burnout; he did not retire or renounce his art. Rather, it is generally agreed, some of his best and most origi-

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nal work dates to the last months of his life. Closure, for Yeats, might well have meant resolving the tensions and contradictions that gave his poems such propulsion; it might have meant renouncing his autobiographical moment altogether. Only on his deathbed does he seem seriously to entertain such thoughts. Let us conclude this study with a screaming rabbit. The unfortunate lagomorph makes an early appearance in Yeats’s Autobiography. In a passage surprisingly candid for the revised version, Yeats tells of a “brawling squireen,” a distant relation by marriage, who terrorized the countryside of his youth: “He himself, with a reeling imagination, knew not where to find a spur for the heavy hours. The first day I came there he gave my cousin a revolver . . . , and to show it off, or his own shooting, he shot a passing chicken; and half an hour later, at the lake’s edge under his castle . . . , he fired at or over an old countryman walking on the far edge of the lake. The next day I heard him settling the matter with the old countryman over a bottle of whiskey, and both were in good humour” (AB ). Yeats’s portrait of this gentleman—reckless, beyond good and evil, yet connected sympathetically to the land and peasantry— is similar in spirit to a number of later poems in his traditionalist vein, like “Under Ben Bulben” or “The Tower,” which contrast the heroic Anglo-Irish overlords of his childhood, “violent bitter . . . powerful [men]” (“Meditations in Time of Civil War” l. ), to the Catholic middle class that replaced them. The vignette would be easily dismissable, as a rather distasteful instance of Yeats’s chauvinism, were it not for the coda he attaches to it; after describing with approval the squireen’s appetite for miscellaneous mayhem, he adds, without comment, the following short paragraph: “I fished for pike at Castle Dargan and shot at birds with a muzzle-loading pistol until somebody shot a rabbit and I heard it squeal. From that on I would kill nothing but the dumb fish” (AB ). In a flash, and perhaps with surprise, we recognize the division in Yeats between the wearer of traditional masks, the celebrator of Ascendancy, and the actual man whose participation in that world was never more than tentative and, though he could hardly say it, ambivalent. We feel surprise, perhaps, because this anecdote appears in the book most responsible for burying that man. Curiously, stricken rabbits are rarely absent from Yeats’s poetry and prose. In his early work, they are often figures of pathos (The Wanderings of Oisin) or ominous foreboding (the Red Hanrahan stories). In his poetry after , however, they acquire a deeper significance and become, I think, a private symbol both for the personal history (and personality) erased in his Autobiography and for the brute, natural reality obscured by, but still existing despite, his fictions. In one such poem he imagines himself staring through “the collar-bone of a hare” at

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“the old bitter world” he has left behind. In another, written as a dialogue between himself and his wife about Maud Gonne, an overheard “scream / From terrified, invisible beast or bird” becomes an image “of poignant recollection.”50 My interest here is in the last occurrence of this topos. “Man and the Echo” (late ) takes as its subject the author’s imminent death, and is written in a mood of violent renunciation. At its opening, we find Yeats in a landscape far removed from Coole Park. Man. In a cleft that’s christened Alt Under broken stone I halt At the bottom of a pit That broad noon has never lit, And shout a secret to the stone. All that I have said and done, Now that I am old and ill Turns into a question till I lie awake night after night And never get the answers right.

If anything, his setting bears a natural, possibly unconscious resemblance to Saturn’s at the beginning of “Hyperion”: deep in the shady sadness of a vale, far from the fiery noon. Like Saturn, the speaker is an old man who has lost everything, on the verge of reverting to mere matter. Though the resemblance is likely unintended by Yeats, one can see why both poets should have imagined such a landscape: just as Saturn embodies a part of the self that Keats would gladly bury, the Wordsworthian unconscious, so the speaker here, similarly buried, can express “a secret” Yeats does not permit himself to utter, or perhaps even think, elsewhere. He doubts the value of everything he has “said and done,” and worries about the probable nothingness of death. The remainder of the lyric is spent ridding himself of his achievements, answered only by the rocky echo of his own voice. All seems evil until I Sleepless would lie down and die. Echo. Lie down and die (ll. –)

The poem is a farewell to the fictions of his autobiographical moment, both to the social identity he invented for himself and to the visionary gift to which he laid claim. Power or meaning? He finally accepts neither. In the first of three verse paragraphs he questions his public accomplishments, his work as a na-

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tional figure. In a way, he is offering a final interrogation of his own rhetoric; he considers both the harmful effects of his persuasive power— Did that play of mine send out Certain men the English shot? Did words of mine put too great strain On that woman’s reeling brain? (ll. –)

—and the uses to which he put that power: “Could my spoken words have checked / That whereby a house lay wrecked?” (ll. –). These questions unanswered, he turns in the second paragraph to the visionary imagination and “the spiritual intellect’s great work.” Body gone he sleeps no more And till his intellect grows sure That all’s arranged in one clear view Pursues the thoughts that I pursue. (ll.  –)

Here Yeats has in mind the vast project of systematizing that he tried to codify in A Vision. The “one clear view” he seeks is of the soul’s state after death, the “dirty slate” of self “cleaned” away. Now he admits that he has no strong confidence in his beliefs. Alluding to Hamlet’s third soliloquy (“There is no release / In a bodkin or disease”), he freely expresses his terror of oblivion. O rocky voice Shall we in that great night rejoice? What do we know but that we face One another in this place? (ll. – )

It is a poem with echoes reaching back through the entirety of his career, but the predecessor it most clearly evokes is “The Song of the Happy Shepherd.” This time the resonance must be conscious and intentional: just as Yeats selects that poem to appear first in his Collected edition, so “Man and the Echo” sounds a distant, final response. In the former Yeats offered a solipsistic model of poetic creativity: Go gather by the humming sea Some twisted, echo-harbouring shell, And to its lips thy story tell, And they thy comforters will be, Rewarding in melodious guile Thy fretful words a little while.

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The echoes now are far from comforting and Yeats’s late idiom is low and spare, but the situation of the poem is precisely the same. “Man and the Echo,” despite its title, is no dialogue; the speaker is well aware of the answers his “rocky voice” will return. If we remember “The Song of the Happy Shepherd,” we recognize in this fatal lyric a similar solipsism and, if not comfort exactly, then perhaps a certain pleasure in the self-punishment language affords. Even as Yeats sloughs off his social and visionary fictions, he holds fast to the idea of poetry with which he began his career. The Happy Shepherd briefly entertained the possibility that The wandering earth herself may be Only a sudden flaming word, In clanging space a moment heard, Troubling the endless reverie.

He concludes, however, in the face of a grim and indifferent nature, “the humming sea,” that words alone are certain good. A career built on the sustaining power of language, over against the actual, is born. “Dream, dream, for this is also sooth.” Only at the end of “Man and the Echo” does he seem to recognize a price in this decision. Not his theories of the imagination, early and late, not his manufacturing of artificial identities, but the very exercise of language has helped estrange him from the world, and perhaps, from himself. In a letter written just before his death—it appears last in Allan Wade’s edition—he comments, “When I try to put all into a phrase I say, ‘Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.’ I must embody it in the completion of my life.”51 In the poem, the last word—or sound, rather—goes to a rabbit: But hush, for I have lost the theme Its joy or night seem but a dream; Up there some hawk or owl has struck Dropping out of sky or rock, A stricken rabbit is crying out And its cry distracts my thought. (ll. – )

A “poignant recollection” or remnant of the Yeats left behind in  or earlier, or perhaps, simply, a reality in the self, or in the natural world, that finally cannot be articulated; the last brutal but also purgative image of “Man and the Echo” does not suggest the kind of poetry Yeats might have written had he lived longer. It does, however, suggest why, though Yeats achieved the most complex and accomplished command of poetic diction in the twentieth century, he left no heirs.

Chapter 4 The Lost Youth of

Modern Poetry T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden

There she was (my Lolita!), hopelessly worn at seventeen . . .

Modern poetry was never young. In  or thereabouts, W. B. Yeats, fifty years a youth, declared himself an old man, and thereupon was recognized as a kindred spirit by Ezra Pound. In that same year, Robert Frost published his first book of verse at the advanced age of thirtynine. Within the next twelve months, T. S. Eliot arrived in England from America, still in his mid-twenties, yet toting a manuscript of poems, many begun much earlier, about fading old ladies and anxious aesthetes. W. H. Auden, finally, who belonged to the next generation of writers and who understood himself as a successor to the first four, started late in  to produce poems like the following, untitled when it first appeared, but after called “The Watershed”: Who stands, the crux left of the watershed, On the wet road between the chafing grass Below him sees dismantled washing-floors, Snatches of tramline running to a wood, An industry already comatose, 123

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Yet sparsely living. A ramshackle engine At Cashwell raises water; for ten years It lay in flooded workings until this, Its latter office, grudgingly performed, And further here and there, though many dead Lie under the poor soil, some acts are chosen, Taken from recent winters; two there were Cleaned out from a damaged shaft by hand, clutching The winch the gale would tear them from; one died During a storm, the fells impassable, Not at his village, but in wooden shape Through long abandoned levels nosed his way And in his final valley went to ground. Go home, now, stranger, proud of your young stock, Stranger, turn back again, frustrate and vexed: This land, cut off, will not communicate, Be no accessory content to one Aimless for faces rather there than here. Beams from your car may cross a bedroom wall, They wake no sleeper; you may hear the wind Arriving driven from the ignorant sea To hurt itself on pane, on bark of elm Where sap unbaffled rises, being Spring; But seldom this. Near you, taller than grass, Ears poise before decision, scenting danger. (Collected Poems [CP] – )1

Because we will examine this poem at length later on, I give it in its entirety; for now, we may observe that the speaking voice is manifestly one of experience or, at least, manifestly wishes to seem experienced. It is a voice whose knowledge of history (“for ten years . . .”) has allowed it insight into the (dark, dark) times ahead (“an industry already comatose”). It uses archaisms syntactic (“fells impassable”) and lexical (“frustrate and vexed”). It evokes, finally, an audience whose ignorance and youth (“proud of your young stock”) only further imply the speaker’s own wisdom and maturity. As it happens, the internal evidence is misleading: when Auden wrote this poem he was barely twenty. That he should have felt it necessary, even desirable, to assume such a tone suggests a deeper problem in the psychology of modern lyric, a problem which, in turn, has broad implications for the fate of plain English in the twentieth century.

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T. S. ELIOT AND THE POETRY OF CONSCIOUSNESS

A reading of Auden’s early work indeed forms the core of this final chapter; this reading, however, is itself rooted in an account—implicit but never fully articulated in the last chapter—of the first generation of modern poets. W. B. Yeats is of great importance in understanding the arc of Auden’s career, yet his role in the history I wish now to delineate is only indirect. As we saw in the second chapter, the Romantics (Wordsworth, mainly) had left to nineteenth-century usage a twofold legacy: on the one hand, a low register with a reputation for honesty and precision in depicting the world, but whose proper uses were not thought to include imaginative writing; on the other, an elevated idiom, expressive of the mind’s active role in reflecting on and shaping reality, that Coleridge called the lingua communis. To each adhered a mode of poetry: to the low register, in the work of Hardy and some of Arnold, a conversational mode with no special visionary claims, a poetry of opinion and sentiment and everyday objects; to the lingua communis, the oracular, imaginative strain descending from Coleridge and later Wordsworth, via Shelley. The former continued to thrive during and after Modernism; indeed, poets of “the Movement,” like Larkin, Amis, and Davie, saw themselves returning to this mode as a corrective to Modernism. The latter strain, however, had spent itself (some late, solitary eruptions like Hart Crane and D. H. Lawrence notwithstanding) by the turn of the century. This dissolution, I argued, resulted from a nexus of internal and external crises, all coming to a head in the s. The external causes are familiar from other histories of the rise of Modernism: the various contemporary social and intellectual developments that both altered the cultural status of literature generally and opened new forms of expression for it to pursue.2 The internal developments were endemic to imaginative lyric alone. “Every man has his speculations, but every man does not brood and peacock over them till he makes a false coinage and deceives himself.” The claims of imaginative poetry after Wordsworth were dependent on a fiction about the self that seemed less and less tenable as Romanticism receded. In the Intimations Ode, Wordsworth had interpreted the voids in his history not, properly, as a kind of amnesia but instead as the signs of a creative or visionary capacity within. The unknowable was in fact powerful and transcendent. If John Keats, the author of the comments above, was alone among his contemporaries in detecting bad faith in Wordsworth’s psychology, such unease was widespread by century’s end.3

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Yeats’s career after  may be understood as an attempt to recoup an oracular loftiness for his poetry, while avoiding altogether a psychological understanding of himself. His adventures in autobiography and the resulting damage to the low register of English, in particular his exploitation and thus subverting of its reputation for truthfulness, were a necessary subject for this study. In the larger context of modern poetry, however, his career was idiosyncratic; even among poets equally hostile to psychology, and equally interested in preserving for poetry a privileged place among the literary genres, Yeats had no followers. Far more, the majority, followed a trail blazed by T. S. Eliot. Consider the following two poems: At Graduation,  Great duties call—the twentieth century More grandly dowered than those which came before, Summons—who knows what time may hold in store, Or what great deeds the distant years may see, What conquest over pain and misery, What heroes greater than were e’er of yore! .................................. As thou to thy departing sons hast been To those that follow may’st thou be no less; A guide to warn them, and a friend to bless Before they leave thy care for lands unseen; And let thy motto be, proud and serene, Still as the years pass by, the word “Progress!” (Poems Written in Early Youth [PEY ] , ) Convictions (Curtain Raiser) Among my marionettes I find The enthusiasm is intense! They see the outlines of their stage Conceived upon a scale immense And even in this later age Await an audience open-mouthed At climax and suspense. Two, in a garden scene Go picking paper roses; Hero and heroine, alone, The monotone

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Of promises and compliments And guesses and supposes. And over there my Paladins Are talking of effect and cause, With “learn to live by nature’s laws!” And “strive for social happiness And contact with your fellow-men In Reason: nothing to excess!” As one leaves off the next begins. And one, a lady with a fan Cries to her waiting-maid discreet “Where shall I ever find the man! One who appreciates my soul; I’d throw my heart beneath his feet. I’d give my life to his control.” (With more that I shall not repeat.) My marionettes (or so they say) Have these keen moments every day. (Inventions of the March Hare [IMH ] )4

Neither of these poems, for obvious reasons, made it into Eliot’s official canon. The first is excerpted from a much longer piece Eliot wrote for his high school graduation (), while the second () appears in a substantial manuscript of early poems, most dating from Eliot’s time at Harvard, finally published in  as Inventions of the March Hare. Together, they describe a change analogous to the one Yeats underwent at roughly the same time: the poet radically rethinking his style and outlook, and rejecting an established kind of lyric in the process. Yeats, of course, was abandoning the symbolist premises that had sustained two decades of impressive work, while Eliot was not yet a formed talent. Nevertheless, Eliot’s transformation was spectacular: a genteel doggerel fit for the magazine and parlor (or in this case, the rostrum); then, only a few years later, an edgy, more self-aware verse bristling with contempt for gentility. Boilerplate stanzas give way to rhymes whose banality is part of the satirical point. Even in the graduation poem, it is clear that Eliot has no plans to stick around St. Louis (“We shall desire to see again the spot / . . . [when] to distant lands we may have gone”); yet, judging by his tone there, the young man seems destined to go west (“Progress!”). In “Convictions,” progress, like most other bourgeois totems (“nature’s laws,” “social happiness,” “Reason”), is shrugged off in an audibly Gallic accent.

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It is not hard to extrapolate from the Harvard lyric the reasons for Eliot’s geographic U-turn. We recognize, above all, a person suddenly perceiving himself as provincial and trying to compensate with a sophistication that does not yet feel genuine. The third and fourth stanzas have a shrillness that Eliot is later able to contain, or use more efficiently. As one might expect, the turn against origins is also a turn against class. His mandarins, empty-headed puppets enacting the clichés of upper-middle-class life, are only slightly better off than their “audience,” an urban proletariat gawking at them “open-mouthed.”5 Eliot, at a further remove, can look down on both. One might infer, finally, a more personal perplexity: where Eliot’s earliest phase included banal romantic verse (“the wild roses in your wreath / Were faded, and the leaves were brown”), he shows now, in his “lady with a fan” and monotonal couple, the first traces of his characteristic misogyny and erotic despair.6 In short, if we correct for differences in age and local color, we may perceive strong similarities between Eliot at twenty-two and the poems of Yeats’s crisis decade. A similar choice of antagonisms: “paper roses,” Eliot’s image for the vulgarity of the nouveaux-riches in this “later age,” recalls a line we encountered in In the Seven Woods: “new commonness . . . hanging its paper flowers from post to post.”7 More fundamentally, we discern a similar rejection of self and of personal memory, implicit in the rejection of origins, that necessitates a reestablishment of poetic identity on new terms. As in The Green Helmet, the purged voice feels unmoored. “Convictions” is a satiric title, yet the speaker offers no obvious alternative to the values he attacks. Both Eliot’s repeated use of the possessive (“my marionettes,” “my Paladins”) and his main conceit (a puppet theater) suggest some control over a situation from which, in all other respects, he seems detached or estranged. The sense of a self is so weak that, for large stretches of the March Hare manuscript, the first-person singular pronoun disappears altogether. In poem after poem, each clearly spoken by a solitary narrator, Eliot resorts to the plural, or to the second person, as if his speakers required the support of imagined companions to be heard at all: “We turn the corner of the street” (“Fourth Caprice in Montparnasse,” IMH ); “We hibernate among the bricks” (“Interlude in London,” IMH ); It’s utterly illogical Our making such a start, indeed And thinking that we must return. . . . (“Embarquement pour Cythère,” IMH )

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It is a tic familiar from his early official work as well: the “Preludes,” “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” the end of “Prufrock.” Indeed, Eliot ventures to use the “I” by itself only in dramatic monologues, like the “Portrait of a Lady,” or (a curiosity we will examine shortly) to describe feelings of terror. The seas of experience That were so broad and deep, So immediate and steep, Are suddenly still. You may say what you will, At such peace I am terrified. There is nothing else beside. (“Silence,” IMH ) And in short, I was afraid. (“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Complete Poems and Plays  – [CPP ] )8

It would be a mistake, however, to read the March Hare manuscript, on the analogy of Yeats, as evidence of a crisis in Eliot’s career. For Yeats, the collapse of his early symbolist style is a disaster, and his late career is forged in the attempt to overcome the despondent mood of –. The March Hare poems, on the other hand, for all their manifest turmoil, have an undeniable vigor, and feel like what they are: a beginning not an end. The curtain, after all, is being raised. A similar situation, very different responses. The distance between two positions is best measured from a third, in this case a book Yeats and Eliot had in common. Arthur Symons’s The Symbolist Movement in Literature () is best known now for introducing French writing of the late nineteenth century to English-speaking audiences. Eliot read the book while at college in , and almost immediately started writing poems like “Convictions.” This encounter is surely the clearest line of demarcation between his Harvard and high school styles. As an introduction to Verlaine, Rimbaud, and company, however, The Symbolist Movement is highly tendentious: dedicated to Yeats, with whom the author consulted closely while writing, it is, as much as anything, a primer in Yeats’s early beliefs. The book’s contempt for modernity, the “age of Science . . . and material things” (SML ), is as typically Yeatsian as the accompanying association of art with the aristocratic and timeless: “To the aristocratic conception of things, nobility of soul is indeed a birthright, and the pride with which this gift of nature is accepted is a pride of exactly the opposite kind to that demo-

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cratic pride to which nobility of soul is a conquest” (SML ).9 More important, Symons’s ontology bears his friend’s imprint. The poetic symbol is understood to belong to a pool of eternal images, existing outside the self and glimpsed only in moments of ecstasy: “Vision, the overpowering vision . . . is the root out of which the flower must grow. . . . It is by symbol alone that the flower can take visible form” (SML ). Yeats’s mysticism, with its radically impersonal view of the imagination, is at all times in evidence. The visionary moment: “The consciousness seems, as it were, to expand and contract at once, into something too wide for the universe, and too narrow for the thought of self to find room within it. Is it that the sense of identity is about to evaporate, annihilating all, or is it that a more profound identity, the identity of the whole sentient universe, has been realized?” (SML ). “Talking of effect and cause”: in the spirit of his Paladins, Eliot might be said to get Symons (intentionally) backwards. He draws freely on Symons for points of style and technique; indeed, many of his March Hare poems, especially those in urban settings, could easily be mistaken for Symons’s own work: A street-piano, garrulous and frail; The yellow evening flung against the panes Of dirty windows: and the distant strains Of children’s voices, ended in a wail. (“Fourth Caprice in Montparnasse,” IMH ) The dim wet pavement lit irregularly With shimmering streaks of gaslight, faint and frayed, Shone luminous green where sheets of glass displayed Long breadths of faded blinds mechanically. (“A Winter Night,” Collected Poems vol. , )10

Symons’ sophistication, his immersion in modern city life, his skills as an observer, and his class snobbery had an inevitable appeal for the young Eliot. More important, he demonstrated that such a poetry could be written without recourse to personal history or emotions. The justification Symons offered for such claims, however, his ontological account of the image, appealed to Eliot not a bit. Thus his salient difference from Yeats: when Yeats could no longer believe in symbolism, he sought and found other grounds on which to write ecstatic and oracular poetry. Eliot, never invested in the symbolist metaphysic, could suffer its downfall with equanimity, drawing on symbolist techniques and writing a poetry with no pretenses to vision.11 Most modern poets, even those who vastly differed from him and each other in other respects, followed his lead.

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From Wordsworth to Yeats, the faculty of mind at work in poetry is best called “imagination”; after Eliot, “consciousness.” Modern poetry after Eliot is a poetry of consciousness. Other critics, meaning something very different, have made similar-sounding declarations, so some clarification may be necessary. In particular, I must dissociate my argument from two influential accounts of the period. The first, in Hugh Underhill’s concise paraphrase: “There is no identity which is not socio-historical, which is other than a cultural construction.” To put it another way, consciousness may be understood as something transpersonal, an aspect of the larger culture, changing as the culture changes, and which operates through individuals, voluntarily or not. The West, in its modern phase, produces a distinctive modern consciousness, and modern artists, in turn, be they poets, painters, or novelists, may be evaluated for the ways their work reflects or measures against this condition. That Eliot’s poetry, which so often claims to speak to the modern plight, should lend itself readily to such evaluation is no surprise. More to the point, many of the critics of culture who offer this idea of consciousness (Raymond Williams notably; more recently Underhill) are themselves operating out of a tradition— going back, via Leavis, to Arnold—in which Eliot himself, as prose writer, is a major figure. As he writes in a late essay, ostensibly about Yeats but clearly also about himself, “There are [poets] whose poetry, though giving equally experience and delight, has a larger historical importance. Yeats was one of the latter: he was one of those few whose history is the history of their own time, who are a part of the consciousness of an age which cannot be understood apart from them” (Selected Prose [SProse] ).12 It is not my purpose to quarrel with this line of thought; my concerns, indeed, may be complementary to it. I am interested in consciousness not as a social construct (which, without contradiction, it may well be) but as an aspect of the individual mind—as, in Eliot’s own phrase, “a mechanism of sensibility” (SProse ) conspicuous in both the subject matter and the substance of much modern writing. Modern writing, I emphasize: where cultural history takes consciousness to be an aspect of society in any period, my interest is in the way modern poets understood it as their own special problem. Here I find myself in more fundamental disagreement with a second influential line of commentary. In accounts of the rise of modernism, it is a commonplace to note the era’s new interest in the solitary working human mind.13 Radical narrative techniques like free indirect discourse and interior monologue, the development of imagism, and the philosophical concern with sub-

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jectivity in Bergson and Husserl are all produced as evidence of this revolution. Within modest boundaries, these claims are inarguable. Michael Levenson, whose A Genealogy of Modernism is probably the most visible history of these ideas, sees the late-nineteenth-century literary interest in consciousness, a “registering temperament which might endow ‘passing events with their true meaning,’” as an outgrowth of mimetic fiction. Conrad, James, and other heirs to the realistic novel could explore the work of perception and motivation without the crude intermediary of an omniscient narrator. In Ford’s tricky phrase, the novelist’s task was to “produce an illusion of reality” by depicting the world as actually perceived; this impressionistic approach, he claimed, was an improvement on third-person description, however photographic or neutral it might seem.14 The history is then complicated by a series of conflicts: aestheticism, expressionism, imagism. While impressionism sank into the slough of solipsism, a point that Ford readily acknowledged, other writers—notably T. E. Hulme and Ezra Pound—pursued the grail of pure objectivity, an art untainted by the personality of its creator. These conflicts grew increasingly intricate, climaxed with High Modernism, and in Levenson’s account, found some resolution in the poetry of T. S. Eliot. That British novelists and poets working between  and  had an interest in consciousness is not at issue; nor is it contentious to observe that Eliot was influenced by Conrad. One need only recall his epigrams, or his numerous passages that sound lifted from The Secret Agent (“streets that follow like a tedious argument / Of insidious intent,” etc.). It is a danger inherent in theories of any period or movement, however, that significant and absolute differences be lost amidst grander generalizations; our “genealogy” turns out to be multiple, and despite sharing the royal name, one line is revealed to descend from the king’s mistress and the court plumber. In Modernism, the absolute difference was generic—poetry and prose—and the sticking point was indeed consciousness. To begin, novelists and poets discovered this “problem” more than a generation apart from each other: by the time Eliot published Prufrock and Other Observations, Henry James was dead and Conrad’s best work was more than a decade behind him. We have seen already the reasons for this hiatus: just when novelists were embracing new psychological techniques as a way to extend and refine realism, influential poets, from Yeats to Symons to Swinburne, were radically turned against both psychological introspection and the representation of everyday life. Eliot in , though an avid reader of English fiction, was, as a poet, heir to these men, and so, when consciousness made its delayed entry into verse, it was for motives vastly different from those behind the earlier prose.

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To be more precise: as we saw, poets after Wordsworth explained their careers by laying claim to an inner capacity that made them different from ordinary people. We have already given this capacity a number of names: vision, imagination, and so on. Although Eliot made no attempt to salvage the visionary tradition after its collapse, he did preserve a sense of poets’ exceptionalism, and had no plans to write merely conversational, “graceful verses” (SProse ). For this reason he could never, like the novelists before him, simply accept consciousness as the basis for a technique, or even as an interesting abstract problem to explore.15 To catch the distinction, one need only consider Ford, who recognized no absolute difference between poetry and prose and who, as a poet, wrote precisely the “graceful verses” Eliot disdained. Ford’s achievement as a poet, Pound recognized, was in fact to bring to verse the rhythms and diction of prose. He also brought a novelist’s modesty. The impressionistic use of consciousness is tremendously effective and memorable in limning a character like John Dowell, yet when Ford writes poetry—in his own voice, as it were—the effect is nearly the opposite. Pound’s assessment: “Mr. Ford brings to his work a prose training . . . and it is absolutely the devil to try to quote snippets from a man whose poems are gracious impressions, leisurely, low-toned.” Where Ford felt that a successful reader-author relation must be empathetic (“According to the measure of [an] artist’s identity with his species, so will be the measure of his own greatness”), Eliot, deeply committed to the special status of poetry but also aware that any high claims were vulnerable to ridicule, seized on consciousness as a badge of authority and distance.16 To read Eliot otherwise would be to make him merely a novelist or philosopher in verse; and this is the trap into which Levenson falls. Discussing The Waste Land, he writes, No single consciousness presides; no single voice dominates. A character appears, looming suddenly into prominence, breaks into speech and then recedes, having bestowed momentary conscious perception on the scene.

And where is Eliot? The self, writes Eliot, “passes from one point of view to another . . .”; no single point of view is sufficient for knowledge; only in multiple perspectives does the world become real. . . . Meaning is no longer identified with presence to an individual consciousness [but rather] is the product of multiple perspectives, “of various presentations to various viewpoints.”17

This distinction between “the self ” and the multiple consciousnesses through which it passes, which are also somehow “presented” to it, is a semantic cloud-

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ing of the issue: it just pushes back, by one term, the locus of poetic identity. It requires that one believe in Eliot’s doctrine of impersonality, his idea of the poet standing magisterially outside his own creation and, conversely, of the artwork unsullied by the poet’s narrow subjectivity, more than Eliot himself, acutely aware of the problems of lyric, ever could.18 As we will see, consciousness could not be, for him, a tool for the subtle investigation of character or of external reality, not even in polyphonic poems like The Waste Land. Rather, it was the faculty that, replacing imagination, made poets unique and justified the otherwise absurd business of poetry writing. Unfortunately, it was a faculty that, unlike the imagination, itself needed justifying. Neither creative nor likely to discover hermetic truths veiled from most mortals, unlikely, indeed, to differ in kind in a bard or a banker, consciousness had no obvious reason-for-being as the stuff and subject of poetry. The question on which Eliot’s writing meditates after  is whether an individual consciousness, conceived in this way, can be a good in itself.19 It is part of my argument that the official, published Eliot differs in no absolute way from the Eliot of the March Hare manuscript: although he becomes a more accomplished poet and gladly allows his earlier poetry to languish, his verse and criticism through the mid-s is largely an attempt to answer this early question in the affirmative. The critical vocabulary he develops will be known to any undergraduate who, taking the modern poetry survey, has been exposed to the series of essays he wrote in these years. To be brief, then: in “The Metaphysical Poets,” Eliot suggests that poets differ from everyone else in the sophistication and sensitivity of their consciousness, that is: they possess a “mechanism of sensibility [able to] devour any experience” (SProse ).20 This difference vindicates a claim, far exceeding those made a century earlier by Keats, the nearest precedent to Eliot, that poets are thereby best fit to represent the consciousness of their society: “our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results” (SProse ). The best-known of Eliot’s essays, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” takes this assertion to its logical extreme: that poets are particularly aware of, and thus able to express, the larger societal consciousness, the “mind of Europe” (SProse ), as it has developed over the ages. “Tradition . . . involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole

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of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. . . . [It is] what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity” (SProse ). I have passed over this much-debated material quickly and with little comment, because it is only background to my main concern: the psychological implications of Eliot’s position. As in philosophy or fiction, the poetic interest in consciousness, after Wordsworth, is tied up with questions of memory and identity, continuity in one being a basic test of the other. Not surprisingly Eliot avoids these questions: the consciousness he describes is a floating awareness, infinitely susceptible, broad enough to include all of Western civilization, but with no place for the personal past. “‘Emotion recollected in tranquility,’” he argues, controverting Wordsworth, “is an inexact formula”: the substance of poetry “is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor without distortion of meaning, tranquility. It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration, of a very great number of experiences which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences at all. . . . These experiences are not ‘recollected,’ and they finally unite in an atmosphere which is ‘tranquil’ only in that it is a passive attending upon the event” (SProse ). The consequence of this denial, this famous “escape from personality” (SProse ), however, is precisely the curiosity we observed at the very start of this chapter: Eliot’s strenuous insistence on his own maturity. His move would be more surprising had we not seen it before, in Yeats: the poet disallowing any developmental understanding of self, and so needing simply to assert with sustained vehemence his own adultness and knowledge. Thus Yeats, suddenly an old man; thus Pound’s declaration at thirty, “I have weathered the storm, / I have beaten out my exile”; thus the even more peculiar spectacle of an undergraduate Eliot trying to sound world-weary.21 In his criticism Eliot is typically sparing of praise, yet undoubtedly his most frequent term of approval, absorbed as if by osmosis by most critics of the period, is “mature.” The Metaphysical poets are “more mature . . . than later poets of certainly not less literary ability” (SProse ). France in  “had already a more mature prose” than England (SProse , Eliot’s italics). “If there is one word,” he opines, that defines the term “‘classic,’ it is the word maturity” (SProse ). As if speaking to his own condition (in a piece on Virgil) he suggests that “maturity of mind, and the maturity of [one’s] age, is exhibited in [an] awareness of history. With maturity of mind I have associated maturity of manners and [an] absence of provinciality” (SProse ). And so on: the stridency of Eliot’s assertions is directly proportional to the absence, in his poems, of psychological

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grounding for those assertions. Almost as a matter of course, the Romantics, with their strong if often tacit psychological tensions, are dismissed as adolescent.22 Shelley, in particular, is merely an “intelligent and enthusiastic schoolboy,” who attracts readers during that “intense period before maturity. . . . But for how many does Shelley remain the companion of age?” (SProse ) The Victorians, in turn, are lesser, superannuated Romantics, who had the misfortune to grow old without growing up. Tennyson, Eliot opines, “reached the end of his spiritual development with In Memoriam” (SProse ). In a similar vein, he declares that “one gets the essential Browning or Swinburne entire in earlier poems; and in the later, one is reminded of the early freshness which they lack, without being made aware of any compensating new qualities . . . maturing as a poet means maturing as a whole man, experiencing new emotions appropriate to one’s age, and with the same intensity as the emotions of youth” (SProse –). Perhaps the line from “Tithonus” to “Prufrock”—or, as we shall see shortly, “Gerontion”—is too direct for comfort; however gravely the Victorians “ruminated” (SProse ), they remained Romantic narcissists and never wrote successfully as older men. In any case, such value judgments lie behind Eliot’s influential writing-off of the early, Shelley-worshipping Yeats, and his otherwise baffling praise of late Yeats as “pre-eminently the poet of middle age” (SProse ). Yeats matches Eliot’s hostility toward “that modish curiosity, psychology.” Nevertheless, he is able, by internalizing his early symbolism, by identifying the impersonal and visionary with the instinctual, to replicate in his later work the psychological structure of Romantic lyric. For this reason, perhaps, he remains formally conservative to the end of his life. With Eliot and the poetry of consciousness, however, we discern the beginning of a new poetic morphology.23 Consider the first verse paragraph of “Gerontion”: Here I am, an old man in a dry month, Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain. I was neither at the hot gates Nor fought in the warm rain Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass, Bitten by flies, fought. My house is a decayed house, And the jew squats on the window sill, the owner, Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp, Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London. The goat coughs at night in the field overhead; Rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron, merds.

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The woman keeps the kitchen, makes tea, Sneezes at evening, poking the peevish gutter. I an old man, A dull head among windy spaces. (CPP )

Where the imagination reflects and creates, or, in moments of vision, perceives, the consciousness is recorded. As Eliot puts it, the mind’s relation to experience is “a passive attending on the event.” Indeed, in this poem, the passivity is so pronounced that a blurring occurs between the speaker and the surrounding world. “Spawned . . . blistered . . . patched and peeled”: as the appositives pile up, it becomes increasingly difficult to determine their referent, the “little old man” of the title or his equally decrepit landlord. Where the imagination imposes on form a hierarchy of objects and occurrences (the moment of vision, reflection on that moment, the wider context, and so on), consciousness merely happens and continues to happen until it stops.24 The Jewish landlord, a coughing goat, the woman who keeps the kitchen: with a peristaltic heave, each phrase seems to begin some place very different from where the last left off, and in no obvious or inevitable sequence. They could go on indefinitely. A gnomic poem like “The Cold Heaven” could hardly outlast its twelve lines: after describing the kernel event and immediate emotional response, the speaker could not continue without diminishing his effect. Consciousness, on the other hand, practically dictates an open form, and thus the reemergent nonnarrative long poem. By the standard of Eliot’s later work, not to mention that of the contemporaries whom he most influenced, from Stevens to Williams to Pound, “Gerontion,” at three pages, is short. It should now be clear, finally, why this study could not end with Eliot. While the poetry of consciousness has far-reaching implications for language generally, it has none specifically for the low register, except perhaps by default. If the low register entered the twentieth century with a reputation for accuracy in depicting the world, Yeats put that reputation to his own uses: in passages requiring a sudden sense of bare, abject reality, faced honestly and sincerely, without illusions, he will turn briefly to plain English. The same technique, the same manipulation of tone, occurs in Eliot; we hear it when the consciousness is most exposed before the terror of existence, when Eliot is left with only a naked I: I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker, And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, And in short, I was afraid. Here I am, an old man. . . . 25

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But tone is as far as it goes. Behind the intuition that short, concrete, native words have a special capacity to signify object reality, lies the familiar, originary desire that language return to a moment before thought, meaning, the miscellaneous clutter of a fully formed mind. In Wordsworth, and later as rediscovered by Yeats, the low register emerges as an idiom of tremendous power, whose images (a glowworm sleeping in a storm; a baby daughter in similar circumstances) nevertheless evade any paraphrasable meaning. With Eliot, the denial of origins and of vision has inevitable consequences for language: no type of discourse is privileged over the others. All are understood ironically, as fallen. We can see, in “Gerontion,” the way this understanding translates, on the one hand, into a prodigious virtuosity and variety of register. In the first verse paragraph alone, Eliot moves from plain speaking (“Here I am”), to a higher, vaguely heroic rhetoric (“deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass”), to a mix of invective and bluster (“Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp”), to a more casual slang (“keeps the kitchen”). Each of these shifts has an effect, yet the cumulative impression, I would argue, is of sameness. A series of discourses with very different sources and normal uses is assimilated to the hum of a more present consciousness, of which all are the object. Thus, when we encounter a catalogue that could have been lifted from early Wordsworth, “Rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron . . . ,” the effect it makes is not Wordsworthian. Despite the short, concrete nouns, we do not perceive objects in the world so much as objects briefly in the mind of the speaker, then just as quickly gone. This is another way of saying that the shift in Eliot’s usage is from diction to syntax: the most important thing in his language is not the word, signifying an object of apprehension, but the larger language system, suggesting a frame of mind. Real things have their place, certainly, but it is subordinate, or more accurately, allegorical. “A tedious argument of insidious intent,” indeed: as objects in the speaker’s consciousness, as objects of his helpless knowledge, the rocks and stonecrop, the landlord and goat imply a consistent system of meanings, albeit one imperfectly understood by us, and possibly incommunicable.26 Can consciousness be a good in itself? In the years that Eliot grappled with this question, his verse had a more qualified answer than his prose. “Gerontion,” which is almost exactly contemporary with “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” is probably the Eliot poem most deeply invested in this problem. The dark view it takes of consciousness is implicit in the first two lines: an old man, being read to by a boy. In Wordsworth, the child is father to the man; here the man is utterly cut off, not mature, not ripe with age and the amassed wisdom of a long life, but rather, moribund, needing to be read to by an obvious and poor

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surrogate for the normal, developed past he lacks.27 Like other Eliot protagonists (Aunt Helen, implicitly the Lady in “Portrait of a Lady”), he is the frayed end of a genteel line: “My house is a decayed house.” As in these and other poems, his tenuous position is accentuated by the presence of ironic, vital underlings (Prufrock’s snickering footman, the obscene servants in “Aunt Helen”). Here, the most threatening figure is the “jewish” owner. I cannot add much to the discussion of Eliot’s anti-Semitism, especially in the wake of Anthony Julius’s still-recent and very thorough study (); but I would suggest that Eliot draws here on a very specific, time-honored topos.28 Jews are horrifying not just because they are international (Antwerp, Brussels, London), animalic (“squats”), and proliferate copiously (“spawned” is more redolent of salmon than people). Much worse, they are timeless, and over the centuries have succeeded materially precisely because of their crude, utterly nonspiritual energy. They are thus a particular insult and threat to Gerontion, who is also an ageless consciousness, who does worry about questions of the spirit (“Signs are taken for wonders. ‘We would see a sign!’”), yet whose mind is a clutter of events and images, mostly opportunities lost, which finally amount to nothing, mere empty knowledge. I have purposely limited my analysis to this first verse paragraph; the remainder of the poem is an elaboration of the problem set out here. “After such knowledge, what forgiveness?”: with effort, the speaker considers ways that consciousness might lead to something transcendent. Aestheticism (“Hakagawa, bowing among the Titians”), Yeatsian spiritualism (“Madame de Tornquist, in the dark room / Shifting the candles”), and finally pure sensuality are considered, only to be dismissed: These with a thousand small deliberations Protract the profit of their chilled delirium, Excite the membrane, when the sense has cooled, With pungent sauces, multiply variety In a wilderness of mirrors.

In Julius’s trenchant phrase, “there is neither revelation nor development, the poem withholding such possibilities.”29 If “Gerontion,” in the end, answers the question “can consciousness be a good in itself ?” affirmatively, it is with the barest adequacy. Neither the intense, unrequited longing at the end of The Waste Land nor the spiritual despair of “The Hollow Men” varies in this answer. “Gerontion” tries to offer a knowledge without illusions. In a manner of speaking, it is sincere: “I would meet you upon this honestly.” The poem aspires, in a spirit of meagerness, to be “part of the consciousness of an age which cannot be

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understood apart from [it].” This is not, however, the kind of affirmation Eliot would wish to sustain. Nor does he, though during the years of his greatest influence on Auden he sustains the attempt. Ironically, in , just as Eliot enters the Anglican Church, offering a final No to that question, Auden publishes “The Watershed,” beginning his official career.

AUDEN: THE SOURCES OF VISION: “THE WATERSHED”; JUVENILIA; “1929”

We thus return to Auden, hopelessly worn at nineteen. That Eliot’s end should be Auden’s beginning is, in a way, surprising: where Auden’s career suggests reasons for the continued reputation of plain English after Modernism, Eliot’s work treats all registers with an equal irony. Auden publishes his first book just as Eliot is lowering the curtain on his own early poetry. Nevertheless, if we turn back to “The Watershed,” an Eliotic pedigree is clear enough. The poem begins by looking down (literally) on a desolate, industrial landscape. Who stands, the crux left of the watershed, On the wet road between the chafing grass Below him sees dismantled washing-floors, Snatches of tramline running to a wood, An industry already comatose, Yet sparsely living.

The feel is not quite Eliotic (we will examine this shortly), but immediately we recognize the poetry of consciousness, with all of its accouterments: an aged voice; an impersonality, evident as soon as the first word, Who, which could stand for the speaker, his listener, or indeed, anyone in the world; most of all, an emphasis on knowledge. In the first verse paragraph, the speaker adopts the manner of a Tour Guide to Unpleasant Places: he has been here, the northern coal-mining country, before, and is familiar with the local tragedies. As in “Gerontion,” however, this knowledge has little apparent useful content: an air of meaningfulness does not yield much clear meaning. The first few lines are a tangle of semantic ambiguities: what exactly are “crux” and “watershed” supposed to suggest? The dictionary is no help in narrowing the possibilities. Although we are offered facts about the neighborhood (“A ramshackle engine / At Cashwell raises water”), Auden offers no clues as to why we should think these facts important.30 In the second verse paragraph, moreover, the tour guide turns against us.

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Go home, now, stranger, proud of your young stock, Stranger, turn back again, frustrate and vexed: This land, cut off, will not communicate, Be no accessory content to one Aimless for faces rather there than here. Beams from your car may cross a bedroom wall, They wake no sleeper.

It is useful to read this rebuke as a distant (and possibly intentional) response to lines we met with two chapters back. Wordsworth’s “Michael” also began in a northern, depressed, mountainous landscape, with a narrator inviting a passing traveler to “turn [his] steps” from “the public way” and attend to a matter of local interest. In that case, it was a “straggling heap of unhewn stones,” which an ordinary person “might pass by, might see and notice not.” “To that place,” however, “a story appertain[ed],” and the narrator’s larger purpose, indeed, was to endow the stone heap with human meaning; hence the long poem that followed. This humanizing function of poetry is precisely what Auden, with a force that might give even Eliot pause, rejects. His listener, now addressed as “Stranger,” is admonished to “go home.” His landscape “will not communicate,” certainly not to the casual tourist, the outsider, for whom it could only comprise the “accessory content” of a photo album or travel journal. “Cut off” as they are, local citizens (“one died during a storm”) reach us only in desultory fragments. In “Michael,” the protagonist’s home life is symbolized by the light of his cottage, cast over a darkened valley. Here, that image is reversed: “Beams from your car may cross a bedroom wall, / They wake no sleeper.” Try as we may to understand it, the content remains alien to us. An Eliotic moral, perhaps, but then there is the feel. Despite, or perhaps because of, the poem’s unremitting bleakness, we can hear places where the “adult” voice breaks. Perhaps the studied archaisms, or even the choice of blank verse, protest too much. Certainly this is the effect of our speaker’s dismissing his listener as juvenile (“proud of your young stock”). His last image of a startled rabbit, straight out of Yeats, has a liveliness, a quality of showing off, that might raise the March Hare’s eyebrows. Hence the curiosity in Auden’s reception. Although, as Clive James puts it, “it was not in Auden’s creative stance ever to admit to being young,” it is precisely on this acid-test of Eliotic Modernism, maturity, that his first readers fault his work through the s. Orwell’s indignant attack on “Spain,” as a poem whose authority has no basis in experience, is perhaps the best known critique: “Suddenly we have got out of the twilight of the gods [read: Eliot] into a sort of Boy Scout atmosphere of bare knees and com-

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munity singing. The typical literary man ceases to be a cultured expatriate, and becomes an eager-minded schoolboy.” But there is also Leavis: “His irony is not the irony of a mature mind.” And Allen Tate: “[Auden seems] to be caught in a juvenile point of view.” And even, in retrospect, his old friend Stephen Spender: “A poet must write the poetry he can write, and I do not believe that psychological immaturity prevents a poet from writing great poetry.”31 Auden’s insistence, in the wake of Eliot, on his own maturity; the unwillingness of many critics, equally under Eliot’s spell, to believe him: we can address this problem more accurately if we turn to Auden’s language. Consider the way he introduces “The Watershed,” laying his details out carefully and deliberately: a crux, dismantled washing floors, snatches of tramline running to the wood. These are doubtless real objects, yet just as clearly Auden is using them as counters in a larger social allegory. Although the crux is rather Bunyanesque, and the tramline seemingly vanishing into the forest could be Spenser for the machine age, it is not an allegory that Auden feels compelled to explain.32 At all events, he is using the same technique we observed in Eliot, the poet’s mind conspicuously mediating—or trying to mediate—between us and the object world. Language is meant to indicate process and the poet’s sensibility, not (or at most secondarily) things. As Samuel Hynes has written, the Auden poems of this period “take their forms to some extent from their conceptual content, rather than from tradition or observed reality.”33 Nothing for an Eliotic critic to complain about. One could hardly say, however, that Auden’s language sounds like Eliot’s. We have noted already that it is highly rhetorical; Randall Jarrell, indeed, identifies no fewer than twenty-six typical idiosyncrasies in Auden’s verse during this period: “underpunctuation, . . . parataxis, . . . ellipsis, [and so on].” These idiosyncrasies are not ironic in intent; quite the opposite. To Jarrell’s remark that the effect of Auden’s idiom is “magical,” one might add “oracular” (“Go home . . . stranger”) or “prophetic” (the poem looks down from a very great height).34 A great distance, in short, from Eliot’s purposely flat and weary discourse. Auden is writing at cross-purposes. Or, to be more precise, he has adopted Eliot’s mannerisms, his technique, without having absorbed the philosophical premises underlying and generating that technique. It is almost an exact reversal of Eliot’s own response to Symons and Symbolism: the poetry of consciousness begins in the rejection of origins, psychology, vision; Eliot’s manner (adult) and language (ironic, allegorical) proceed from that rejection. Auden, in turn, though manifestly indebted to Eliot’s manner and language, just as plainly has a visionary streak. “The Watershed” owes its power as a poem less to its pervasive gloom than

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to Auden’s flair for landscape. The tramline and washing floors, while counters in an obscure narrative, are nevertheless also images in the Wordsworthian or Yeatsian sense of the word: they have a resonance, a sheer visual presence and power, that not only overwhelms but truly contradicts their ostensible use. This is the kind of contradiction critics under the sway of Eliot might easily detect and identify as latent romanticism, “not the work of a mature mind.” The one idiom notably absent in Auden during this early period is the plain, drained low register, emblematic of bare, abject reality, used by Yeats beginning with The Green Helmet and by Eliot strategically all through the teens and twenties. Instead, poems like “The Watershed” echo the visionary use of plain English discovered by Wordsworth and later by Yeats. As Jarrell observes, Auden’s idiom in these lyrics is “a concrete, laconic, and eccentric variant of ordinary English.” Words like “crux,” “wet road,” and “tramline” produce the most powerful effects, even though, as in Wordsworth or Yeats, that power seems to come at the expense of any accessible meaning. This last difficulty makes any critical attempt to account for Auden’s early power sound, itself, dangerously like mysticism (Jarrell’s “magical”). But in the light of Auden’s other work during this period, the suspicion that this particular landscape evokes in him a sense of visionary dreariness hardens into conviction. Another poem, written a little later, begins in the same kind of place as “The Watershed”: Get there if you can and see the land you once were proud to own Though the roads have almost vanished and the expresses never run . . . Head-gears gaunt on grass-grown pit-banks, seams abandoned years ago; Drop a stone and listen for its splash in flooded dark below. Squeeze into the works through broken windows or through damp-sprung doors; See the rotted shafting, see holes gaping in the upper floors; Where the Sunday lads come talking motor-bicycle and girl, Smoking cigarettes in chains until their heads are in a whirl. Far from there we spent the money, thinking we could well afford, While they quietly undersold us with their cheaper trade abroad; At the theatre, playing tennis, driving motor-cars we had, In our continental villas, mixing cocktails for a cad. (untitled poem, The English Auden [EngA] )

By the end of this passage, Auden’s objects are simply marks in an Eliotic social satire; they are meant to feel empty, and succeed. They leave no sharp visual or emotional impression. The beginning, however, once again in a blighted mining country, has just the resonance and power of “The Watershed.” Once again,

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it consists mainly of concrete, unexplained details. This lyric, untitled and not included in Auden’s Collected Poems, is, like the rest of his output between  and , palimpsestic: an overlay of expert Eliotic Modernism (in a Tennysonian meter); but underneath, and appearing at intervals, an imaginative power. The result is a mixed style galling to some critics (Leavis) and exhilarating for others (Jarrell). The roots of this confusion—and the high stakes involved in it—are not necessarily clear in the poems themselves; Auden further clouded the matter by suppressing all poems written before “The Watershed.” Since , however, his Juvenilia have been conveniently available, and that is where we must turn next. The sharp line Auden drew excluding his juvenilia from the official canon has been buttressed by critics perhaps too trusting of his judgment and motives. Although “The Watershed” does mark the beginning of a new style for Auden, the quality and number of poems written before , more than two hundred in fact, makes any such division seem implausible. Broadly speaking, his verse between  and  is itself easily divisible into two periods, the character of which may be inferred from his subsequent work. The two styles that, in poems like “The Watershed” and “Get there if you can,” exist in uneasy tension, first appear in sequence. The second of these phases lasts only a year: in early , at Oxford, Auden encountered Eliot for the first time, and almost immediately started writing dense, allusive, clever, but hopelessly worn lyrics.35 They differ in interesting ways from Eliot’s work but, compared to “The Watershed” (etc.), are still largely unprocessed: I remember Vases like music frozen into marble, Tall nymphs callipygous who taught my soul To lisp small lyrics which may gladden hearts Of mistresses in elementary schools, Limp lilies! I have bottle-fed on Art, Life peptonised to suit a tender stomach, Valleys of dead men’s bones have been my refuge! (“Thomas Prologizes,” Juvenilia [Juv] )36

My main interest, however, is in Auden’s earliest phase. His first efforts are sentimental and conventional, but by  he has made himself an accomplished poet of rural subjects. The main recognizable influences are Hardy, Thomas, and Frost; behind all of these, Wordsworth. Consider “The Old Lead-Mine”:

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This is the place where Man has laid his hand To tear from these dark hills his gold. He found it not, they say, but left his brand Of greed upon the spot for all men to behold. I peered a moment down the open shaft Gloomy and black; I dropped a stone; A distant splash, a whispering, a laugh The icy hands of fear weighed heavy on the bone. I turned and travelled quickly down the track Which grass will cover by and by Down the lonely valley; once I looked back And saw a waste of stones against an angry sky. ( Juv – )

Written in early , “The Old Lead-Mine” is an uneven effort, the first stanza in particular, with its baleful moralizing, betraying the poet’s tender age (sixteen). I have chosen to look at it, however, because of what it is, namely, a spot of time. It may be that Auden has the boat-stealing episode in The Prelude, Book I, specifically in mind.37 In any case, the two narratives have a similar shape: the poet, as a boy, wanders in a spirit of guilty adventure into a desolate landscape. This adventure feels like a violation, with sexual overtones: in Auden’s case the dropping of the stone down the shaft, but, more generally, the activity of the miners. To the boy’s surprise, Nature responds to his shove with a forceful shove of its own, and the episode ends with the boy retreating, haunted by the sense of a looming presence behind him. Auden’s account of the event is laconic, with the central crisis a set of disjointed clauses. Nonetheless, he leaves little doubt as to why mining landscapes, places where the efforts of Man to dominate Nature only disclose a deeper power in things, have such a lasting suggestive hold over him. When he returns to these landscapes in poems like “The Watershed,” the explanatory, autobiographical context has disappeared, but their numinous effect has not. Indeed, we have already seen his powerful re-use of this very incident in “Get there if you can”: “Head-gears gaunt on grass-grown pit-banks, seams abandoned years ago; / Drop a stone and listen for its splash in flooded dark below.” Auden’s juvenilia is full of abandoned mills, gasworks, lead and coal mines; all have an imaginative afterlife in his later work. It is possible to identify, at this stage of Auden’s career, a pair of founding myths. The first is the conviction that we have just seen of a sublime presence in nature. The other, no less Wordsworthian in ancestry, though it goes back (at least) to Beowulf, is humanistic. The interaction of Man and Nature works both

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ways; abandoned mining landscapes are resonant for the traces left behind of human action. When we reach the climax of “The Old Lead-Mine”—“A distant splash, a whispering, a laugh”—we feel the ambiguity: is it Nature laughing at the futility of the miners, and in scorn at the boy’s attempts to plumb the depths, or is it the echoing laughs and whispers of the long-departed miners themselves? Throughout the poems of this period, Auden plays on this ambiguity. Ubi sunt, he asks, in “The Old Colliery”: The iron wheel hangs Above the shaft Rusty and broken Where once men laughed. ( Juv )

And in “Allendale”: The smelting-mill stack is crumbling, no smoke is alive there, Down in the valley the furnace no lead ore of worth burns; Now tombs of decaying industries, not to survive here Many more earth-turns. ( Juv )

And so in perhaps forty like-minded poems. In one of the most developed of these, titled “Lead’s the Best,” we begin in Auden’s familiar landscape, before hearing the actual voices of a few remaining laborers: The fells sweep upward to drag down the sun Those great rocks shadowing a weary land And quiet stone hamlets huddled at their feet; No footstep loiters in the darkening road But light streams out from inn doors left ajar, And with it voices quavering and slow. ‘I worked at Threlkeld granite quarry once, Then coal at Wigan for a year, then back To lead, for lead’s the best.’ ( Juv )

The “light [streaming] out from inn doors left ajar” again recalls “Michael,” but here Auden understands the poet’s task exactly as Wordsworth did: to chronicle and commemorate human light in the darkness of nature. “Here speak the last of them, soon heard no more.” So the poet speaks. If we return now to , we can recognize what seemed to be mainly a technical and stylistic problem (the inexplicable eruption of the sublime, of visionary images in the low register, into an otherwise Eliotic poetry of consciousness), as, in fact, intellectual and moral. To be specific: why did Auden between 

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and  abandon humanism for something nearly the opposite? Secondarily: if his style after  suggests a deeper rejection of the premises behind Wordsworth’s idiom (and, we will see, Eliot’s as well), to what end did he retain the traces of their idioms in his poetry? Part of the answer, a small part, is a now-familiar story: just as Eliot, newly arrived at Harvard and exposed via Symons to the European avant-garde, hastily forsook his genteel style for one more fashionable, so Auden, on first reading Eliot while at Oxford, suddenly perceived the pastoral vernacular as dusty and out-of-date, and modernized accordingly. His departure from Eliot, in turn, was normal maturation, part of a larger generational effort (chronicled comprehensively by Hynes) to distinguish itself from the High Moderns.38 It is insufficient, however, to attribute these changes simply to artistic selfdefinition, or the struggles of a growing artist with literary fashion. Rather, the distance from “The Old Lead-Mine” to “The Watershed” measures a fundamental loss of beliefs. At some point, Auden came to find the founding myths of his earliest period untenable. The change is most evident in the fatalism of his newer poems. His pastoral verse, of course, is influenced by Hardy, and there is much musing over old stones and cold gods. The weir’s music, more ancient than the bird, Which hushes not for rain or wintry days, Sung since Man built on earth, and not to cease Till darkness shroud a ruined world’s decay. (“The Mill, Hempstead,” Juv )

It is not just that the fatalism of these poems is generic (old ruins lead to thoughts of our common end); more to the point, their fatalism is inseparable from their nostalgia. Nothing could be further in spirit from the bitter conviction of Auden’s work after : existence is suffering; suffering is inescapable and necessary; it soon will be far worse. The speaker in “The Watershed,” observing “an industry already comatose,” knows it shortly will be dead. When he calls the “stranger” “proud of your young stock,” the sneer is audible: the pride of youth is an ignorance of coming trouble. His last line, “ears poise before decision, scenting danger,” is his most characteristic. A like tone, ominous, even apocalyptic, sounds throughout the volume: “It is later than you think”; “The game is up for you and for the others”; “Doom is dark and deeper than any sea-dingle.” Where Auden used to look back, he now looks forward; indeed, he looks forward to the exclusion of looking back, his mind so set on necessity that the habits, traditions, and developed human values that once preoccupied him are

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now ignored if not dismissed. In the harshest of these poems, untitled, but later (and, I think, misleadingly) called “Venus Will Now Say a Few Words,” we hear the ironically pararhyming voice of Time itself. We err fundamentally when we imagine ourselves in control of process. Your shutting up the house and taking prow To go into the wilderness to pray, Means that I wish to leave and to pass on, Select another form, perhaps your son; Though he reject you, join opposing team Be late or early at another time, My treatment will not differ—he will be tipped, Found weeping, signed for, made to answer, topped. (CP )

There is no knowing why Auden so suddenly embraced such an implacable, necessitarian outlook. Although a prolific writer on his own and others’ poetry, he is silent on this point. Hynes suggests that, like many of his generation, Auden felt guilt at not having experienced (that is, suffered in) the First World War, and compensated by looking to the future, and the next big disaster. Some of this proleptic Schadenfreude is doubtless part of Auden’s temper, especially the part that ran off to witness wars in Spain and China. Nevertheless, it cannot fully explain the personal edge to Auden’s fatalism. I do not wish to suggest a simple or direct causation; but it seems more telling that the years – saw Auden’s deepening certainty that his homosexuality—in Edward Mendelson’s account, a source of much “guilt and repression”—was intrinsic. Mendelson traces Auden’s attempts to “cure” or “change the character of his sexuality,” culminating in a  – trip to Berlin. All attempts ended in July of that year, when he called off his engagement to a Birmingham nurse.39 His poetry during this period is quiet about these matters, at least on the surface, but that silence is itself indicative. His Juvenilia is, in places, explicitly homoerotic, Auden leaving no doubts that his interest in miners, in “scarred hands lovelier than the rose” ( Juv ), is not just cultural. In addition to Allendale’s crumbling smoke stacks, we might consider “The Mill,” “Which pushed its bulk up at the evening sky / Clear-cut, dark, and rigid” (Juv ). This is still far less direct than “The Tarn,” another spot of time. Two boys were bathing there, splendid of limb, Ruddy and beautiful; while the sun seemed

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As if it glowed within them. Always now The place seems haunted by their laughing voices. Glory is there I had not seen before, Which shall not be revealed a second time. ( Juv )

After , these idylls disappear, and although Auden never conceals his orientation, the sentiment of these early lyrics does not resurface until much later in his career. Such sentiment is possible, it seems likely, because, early on, homosexuality still seems something to experiment with, and possibly to grow out of, not an inescapable part of identity. Yeats could play with such abstractions as fate and recurrence; Eliot could settle into a formless malaise; but for Auden after , necessity and suffering have the immediacy and intimacy of physical facts, lived with every day. Such seems a likely explanation for the force of Auden’s fatalism and his turn against all forms of tradition, even Eliot’s grim conservatism. It explains also his rejection of Wordsworthian psychology: after , the Wordsworthian myth of origins—childhood encounters with nature, spots of time, producing unconsciously a stable and happy adult—could only seem to him hollow. For Auden, then, a poetry of consciousness, justified by a heightened apprehension of fate. The very irrevocability of Auden’s change, however, only raises the stakes on the second question we asked earlier: if his poetry after  declares a fundamental rejection of the premises behind Wordsworth’s verse (and to a lesser extent Eliot’s also), why does he retain the traces of their idioms in his work? Most pressingly: the visionary low register, which he continues to use, has implications (psychological, originary) now wholly alien to his outlook. Unfortunately, “The Watershed” can take us only so far; the conflicts of this period are best expressed in the poem Auden himself regarded as its crowning achievement.40 The sequence he eventually called “” is a redaction of four separate lyrics written in April, May, August, and October of that year, the first two during his stay in Berlin, the others after his return to England. The version we have retains a fourpart structure, but, more to the point, divides into two distinct halves, the Berlin section (parts I and II) marking a moment of intense crisis and conflicted interests, the English section (III and IV) beginning to lay the intellectual groundwork for the rest of his life. I intend to follow this dichotomy: although we will be looking at both halves, the present discussion will concentrate on the first. At the very beginning of part I, we can sense one poetic myth giving way to another. The first verse paragraph:

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It was Easter as I walked in the public gardens Hearing the frogs exhaling from the pond, Watching traffic of magnificent cloud Moving without anxiety on open sky— Season when lovers and writers find An altering speech for altering things, An emphasis on new names, on the arm A fresh hand with fresh power. But thinking so I came at once Where solitary man sat weeping on a bench, Hanging his head down, with his mouth distorted Helpless and ugly as an embryo chicken. (Selected Poems [SP ] )41

Auden could scarcely begin his poem more confusingly, yet the confusion is due not to the story he is telling (a day in the park; clouds in the sky; solitary man on a bench), but to the jarring mix of modes he uses to tell it. The narrative feels almost like dream-vision, the speaker finding his impressions of the Easter season challenged suddenly by a weeping figure. With the omission of an adverb (“I came at once [to a place? to a corner of the park? ] / Where . . .”), he seems to leave everyday reality behind. The weeping figure, moreover, is obviously less a real person than a universal type: “solitary man,” not “a solitary man,” he seems to have wandered in from Piers Plowman. As in dream-work, the actual world is abstracted, held at arm’s length. This is exactly the relation, I would argue, between the first four lines and Auden’s earlier nature poems. As in “The Old LeadMine,” the natural world mocks human preoccupations: in contrast to most people, the clouds move “without anxiety.” Where the early lyric, however, insists on nature’s capacity to leave lasting imprints on the mind, the rhetorical contortions here distance us from any such effects: “traffic of magnificent cloud”; “frogs exhaling from the pond.” This last phrase is a fine instance of willful denaturing: here, the exhaling frogs are comic and grotesque, their sudden appearance throwing the reader off balance. As it happens, Auden draws the image from one of his juvenile poems, where the animals have a more coherent setting: I shall sit here through the evening, Hour when the fisherman at the inn Stares at the window, his boots off, waiting for the lamp; When frogs protrude their muzzles from the pond, Exhale in the dusk. The pond was large till reeds invaded it. . . . ( Juv )

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Awkward perhaps (“muzzles”?), but plausible; in “,” however, the image expresses a thorough estrangement from nature. Throughout the sequence, the realm of animals and things is depicted as unconsciously subject to the dictates of necessity. Because unconscious, animals and things fulfill these dictates “willingly” and “without anxiety.” Humans, on the other hand, when they reach maturity, are cursed with consciousness, and thus with individuation, “solitude,” and a miserable knowledge of fate. Seeing the “solitary man” thus causes Auden to ponder, in the next verse paragraph, his own plight: So I remember all of those whose death Is necessary condition of the season’s putting forth . . . The death by cancer of a once hated master, A friend’s analysis of his own failure. . . .

To be conscious is to act on one’s own; but to act on one’s own is to strive hopelessly against process. So, part I concludes, a sudden shower Fell willing into grass and closed the day, Making choice seem a necessary error.

This rather dismal account of the human condition is by no means new. Nietzsche was already drawing on older Romantic tropes when he opposed Apollo and Dionysus. For Auden, this division can finally be understood developmentally, as the basis of a new psychology to replace his older Wordsworthianism. Such is the task he sets himself in part II, which I quote in full: Coming out of me living is always thinking, Thinking changing and changing living, Am feeling as it was seeing— In city leaning on harbour parapet To watch a colony of duck below Sit, preen, and doze on buttresses Or upright paddle on flickering stream, Casually fishing at a passing straw. Those who find sun’s luxury enough, Shadow know not of homesick foreigner Nor restlessness of intercepted growth. All this time was anxiety at night, Shooting and barricade in the street. Walking home late I listened to a friend

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Talking excitedly of final war Of proletariat against police— That one shot girl of nineteen through the knees, They threw that one down concrete stair— Till I was angry, said I was pleased. Time passes in Hessen, in Gutensberg, With hill-top and evening holds me up, Tiny observer of enormous world. Smoke rises from factory in field, Memory of fire: On all sides heard Vanishing music of isolated larks: From village square voices in hymn, Men’s voices, an old use. And I above standing, saying in thinking: “Is first baby, warm in mother, Before born and is still mother, Time passes and now is other, Is knowledge in him now of other, Cries in cold air, himself no friend. In grown man also, may see in face In his day-thinking and in his night-thinking Is wareness and is fear of other, Alone in flesh, himself no friend. “He say ‘We must forgive and forget,’ Forgetting saying but is unforgiving And unforgiving is in his living; Body reminds in him to loving, Reminds but takes no further part, Perfunctorily affectionate in hired room But takes no part and is unloving But loving death. May see in dead, In face of dead that loving wish, As one returns from Africa to wife And his ancestral property in Wales.” Yet sometimes man look and say good At strict beauty of locomotive, Completeness of gesture or unclouded eye; In me so absolute unity of evening And field and distance was in me for peace, Was over me in feeling without forgetting

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Those ducks’ indifference, that friend’s hysteria, Without wishing and with forgiving, To love my life, not as other, Not as bird’s life, not as child’s, “Cannot,” I said, “being no child now nor a bird.”

To begin at the end: Auden would accuse his earlier, Wordsworthian poetry of sentimentality, of loving his life “as bird’s life . . . as child’s.” It is bogus psychology, at best self-delusion, at worst dishonesty, to identify privileged moments in youth, or in one’s immersion in nature, as the sources of adult strength. According to the alternate myth he constructs in paragraphs  and , maturity requires individuation, “knowledge . . . now of other,” an alienation from one’s unconscious origins. It requires an alienation also from one’s own body. “Alone in flesh, himself no friend,” the adult mind is hitched to a carcass “perfunctorily affectionate,” and “unloving / But loving death”: that is, obedient to the commands of physical necessity to reproduce and decay. With a sweep that Nietzsche might appreciate, Auden consigns vast swathes of humanity to the notyet-fully-conscious. In part I, he contrasts the despair of some friends to the natural contentment of two of his German lovers, happy blond beasts both: The happiness, for instance, of my friend Kurt Groote, Absence of fear in Gerhart Meyer From the sea, the truly strong man.42

More sweeping still are his ideas about community and collective action. The sequence begins with a gesture toward society at large: the Easter holiday, a walk in the public gardens. Elsewhere, however, he sees the group as inhibiting growth. The image with which he begins part II, the “colony of duck” dozing in the sun, suggests not only the “indifference” of the animal world (like the exhaling frogs), but also the smothering bonds of community and family. His long meditation in paragraphs  – is provoked by hearing “from village square voices in hymn / Men’s voices, an old use.” As he makes clear, his insights are possible only because he stands apart from (and “above”) the men, their traditions and habits. The ambiguous anger he shows in paragraph  toward his Communist friend, finally, implies a skepticism (which he will soon lose) about group action of any kind: even so desirable an event as the “final war / Of proletariat against police” might be regressive for the participants.43 It is an unpleasant and seemingly inescapable choice Auden is offering: either the bestial comfort of the group and the child, or the horrible, solitary consciousness of the adult, whose lone satisfaction is knowing how bad things are.

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Yet even as he lays this dichotomy out, we might well wonder where Auden himself fits in. John Fuller notes that “” is one of the few poems of its moment in which the poet himself appears: early Auden is almost as loath as early Eliot to use the first-person singular pronoun. Fuller also suggests on internal and biographical evidence that the poem is covertly a narrative of Auden’s struggles with his sexuality.44 But convincing as these observations are, and whatever the poem’s subtext, we can barely ignore his detached demeanor all through the sequence. In the dreamlike opening, the weeping man feels neither present nor real, certainly not an object of sympathy. At the beginning of II, Auden is only a “Shadow . . . of homesick foreigner,” ignored by the ducks below; still later, a “tiny observer of enormous world,” he has receded to the vanishing point. The conflict inherent in his desire to comment authoritatively on the human condition while also “standing above” that condition is most evident, of all places, in his punctuation. The last three paragraphs of part II are each written in direct discourse in his voice, yet only the first two use quotation marks. The reason for this discrepancy, most likely, is that, while paragraphs  and  offer his pronouncements about humanity (his myth of development), the last expresses a saving wish for himself. Yet sometimes man look and say good At strict beauty of locomotive, Completeness of gesture or unclouded eye. . . .

The experience Auden describes in these lines, a moment of pure receptivity, in which an object, independent of any expressible meaning, nevertheless commands feelings of powerful assent, is quite common in his earliest work. It also is just the kind of experience his new outlook dismisses as dangerous or contemptible sentimentality. It is an experience, despite everything, that he would reserve to himself as a poet and allow himself to communicate. The opening sketch of spring in part I is surely ironic: Season when lovers and writers find An altering speech for altering things, An emphasis on new names, on the arm A fresh hand with fresh power.

Contravening that irony we can just as surely recognize an originary belief: that poets, even in a world of process, can yet find the right words (“new names”) for things. As in the other poems of this period, “” is speckled with gnomic images in the low register (“smoke rises from factory in field”), which, I would ar-

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gue, do not merely violate his new outlook, his new mythmaking, but have also the paradoxical effect of making that mythmaking more believable. At the heart of the question we have been exploring—why Auden, in rejecting the premises behind Wordsworth’s verse, nevertheless retains his visionary low register—we can detect a hidden (and dubious) poetic motive. These lyrics exhibit a rhetorical curve, in which two kinds of discourse, though ontologically at odds, nevertheless are used, for the purposes of argument, to complement each other. Auden’s visionary images, though meaningless in themselves, through sheer power win assent for his otherwise contestable opinions. Conversely, his verse of opinion provides his moments of vision a coherent context. If this arrangement sounds familiar, it is because we have seen it before: in the late s the poet Auden most resembles is W. B. Yeats. Resembles, however, is an imprecise term: Auden’s earliest work sounds like Wordsworth, Hardy, and Thomas; the poems of his next period sound like Eliot. His poetry after  could not be mistaken for Yeats, or indeed anyone other than himself. I do not think it coincidental that, as Katherine Bucknell reports, Auden discovered the later Yeats in the spring of , shortly before writing “The Watershed.”45 On this evidence alone, certainly in the absence of any admission from Auden himself, I would suggest that the poetic encounter most responsible for transforming Auden into his “official” self was this one. From Yeats he garnered neither a style nor a set of beliefs, but rather a strategy for writing poetry both argumentative and suffused with visionary power. This strategy, the subtle modulation of disparate registers, is perhaps inherently tendentious or illicit; a state of affairs Yeats, clear-eyed, could live with for decades. Auden, however, begins to undo this technique almost as soon as he grasps its implications. “” is itself an utterly Yeatsian title; but by the end of part IV, Auden has made his choice.

THE END OF VISION: “1929”; “SEPTEMBER 1, 1939”

Power or meaning? On the one hand, a poetry of enormous suggestive force, yet elusive of paraphrase; on the other, opinions and beliefs, the possibility of moral and political argument, and larger social commitments. Here, a visionary low register; there, no apparent connotations for any part of the language. For Auden the decision is not nearly as fraught as it was for Wordsworth and Yeats, nor does it produce the complexity of response it did in their work. That Auden in the late twenties keeps both possibilities aloft implies only that he has not yet hardened in his fatalism. The layered and ambivalent style with which he is usu-

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ally understood to have begun his career is itself transitional and short-lived. Though traces of it persist in his poetry through the early thirties, one can see it vanishing in “,” between May of that year, when he finishes the poem’s part II, and October, when he completes part IV. Part III, which we will look at only briefly, hints at the change under way, without bringing it to fulfillment. Auden begins on a train, “in month of August to a cottage coming.” In their balance of loss and recompense, this poem and the next recall—purposely, I suspect—“Tintern Abbey”: after his year in Germany, Auden has returned to England, but feels no vital connection to his old haunts. Being alone, the frightened soul Returns to this life of sheep and hay No longer his: he every hour Moves further from this and must so move, As child is weaned from his mother and leaves home But taking the first steps falters, is vexed, Happy only to find home, a place Where no tax is levied for being there.

His description of the countryside, “this life of sheep and hay,” is so generic and banal that Auden does not need to add “no longer his.” By the measure of part II, these feelings of separation are healthy: the grown-up “moves further from this and must so move,” yet the rest of the poem yields to doubts. In a passage where Fuller and Mendelson discern continuing worries about his sexuality, Auden wonders whether he has developed in the right direction: has he matured into an emotionally healthy adult, or has his growth in some way been distorted? The capacity to love, specifically, may either find an external object and thrive, or collapse into regressive narcissism.46 So, insecure, he loves and love Is insecure, gives less than he expects. He knows not if it be seed in time to display Luxuriantly in a wonderful fructification Or whether it be but a degenerate remnant Of something immense in the past but now Surviving only as the infectiousness of disease.

As in part II, Auden expresses his desire for “independent delight.” The tone, however, is tentative, and a final verse paragraph (literally) mocks any such hope. Startled by the violent laugh of a jay I went from wood, from crunch underfoot,

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Air between stems as under water; As I shall leave the summer, see autumn come Focusing stars more sharply in the sky, See frozen buzzard flipped down the weir And carried out to sea, leave autumn, See winter, winter for earth and for us, A forethought of death that we may find ourselves at death Not helplessly strange to the new conditions. (italics mine)

Just as the singular pronoun melts into the plural, so the speaker becomes indistinguishable from the larger cycles of nature and fate. The sharply focused stars, perhaps foreshadowing the “ironic points of light” that look down on “September , ,” suggest a vastness beyond any human problems. The frozen buzzard could be an unfortunate cousin of the ducks in part II, but where Auden then contrasted himself, conscious and alienated from nature, to the animals, indifferent parts of the world around them, he now, though still alienated, is moved to think of his own death, his own inevitable return and loss of self: “winter for earth, winter for us.” It remains for part IV to explain exactly what this return means for him as a poet. Again, I quote the section in full. It is time for the destruction of error. The chairs are being brought in from the garden, The summer talk stopped on that savage coast Before the storms, after the guests and birds: In sanatoriums they laugh less and less, Less certain of cure; and the loud madman Sinks now into a more terrible calm. The falling leaves know it, the children, At play on the fuming alkali-tip Or by the flooded football ground, know it— This is the dragon’s day, the devourer’s: Orders are given to the enemy for a time With underground proliferation of mould, With constant whisper and the casual question, To haunt the poisoned in his shunned house, To destroy the efflorescence of the flesh, To censor the play of the mind, to enforce Conformity with the orthodox bone, With organised fear, the articulated skeleton. You whom I gladly walk with, touch, Or wait for as one certain of good,

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We know it, we know that love Needs more than the admiring excitement of union, More than the abrupt self-confident farewell, The heel on the finishing blade of grass, The self-confidence of the falling root, Needs death, death of the grain, our death, Death of the old gang; would leave them In sullen valley where is made no friend, The old gang to be forgotten in the spring, The hard bitch and the riding-master, Stiff underground; deep in clear lake The lolling bridegroom, beautiful, there.

With a threatening first line, Auden announces that this will be an apocalyptic poem. His imagery moves from domestic-genteel (“the chairs are being brought in”), to institutional (the quiet inmates), to biblical-Yeatsian (“This is the dragon’s day”): all images anticipate “the destruction of error.”47 At the end of part I “choice” had seemed to Auden “a necessary error”; that is, the mere fact of being conscious made volition, an often unhappy straying from the instinctive behavior of animals, seem necessary. Now the separation of consciousness from matter, along with any last hopes for independence from the workings of fate, is dismissed as impossible. Mind obeys the same laws as the flesh; for whatever ails us, there is no hope “of cure.” Finally, this means death. Existentially speaking, “children / At play” are no different from “falling leaves,” and Auden urges us to abandon our fictions of autonomy. Taking on the voice of a kindly autocrat, he recommends that we “censor the play of the mind . . . enforce conformity with the orthodox bone, / With organized fear.” The destruction of error is the destruction of choice. The myth of maturation Auden develops in part II thus finds its complement here: if growing up means individuation, a fall into self-consciousness, the fulfillment of life is a reciprocal, willing identification with process; at the last, a willing return to death, “death of the grain, our death.” Although October of  does not see Auden’s last visionary poems in the low register, part IV does make clear why he finally extinguishes that mode in his work: all that the mind is left with after the destruction of error is a knowledge, or a consciousness, of the necessity of which it is itself a part. While Auden draws heavily on Eliot in his earlier poetry, it is only now, after he has renounced all visionary fictions, that he is left to confront the moral-artistic question faced by Eliot: can consciousness, as the stuff of poetry, be a good in itself ? Eliot’s answer, based as it is on lingering

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notions of poetic exceptionalism, is clearly overstated; nor is Auden receptive to Eliot’s gestures of conservative malaise. Instead, the poet’s role is to “understand the mechanism of the trap”: to express his knowledge of necessity with clarity but also, above all, enthusiastic praise.48 The last verse paragraph is notable for its buoyancy of mood, even as it differs in no substantial way from its predecessors. For Auden, the loss of the power and authority that came with his early style finds ample recompense in a pious and polemical acceptance of larger forces that spell ultimately the destruction of self. If Auden’s optimism in these lines feels forced, it may be because these ideas, which are central to the rest of his career, are presented here so schematically. The earlier parts of “” had worried about love: part II contrasted the mind’s love of other people to the body’s “loving death,” while part III wondered whether, in his case, love had found a proper object. When, in part IV, he calls that object “death” (“love . . . needs death”) we recognize the completion of an abstract, logical progression: mind and body now have the same end. Emotionally, however, the resolution feels abrupt, too easy an answer to questions raised earlier. Conversely, when Auden identifies “love” as the part of us that “needs death,” it smacks of euphemism, as if he were trying to give his fatalism a good name. Just as problematic (and abrupt) is the appearance of a personal “You,” the first in the entire sequence, and a rarity in the Auden of this period. A surprise entrance worthy of Dorothy’s at the end of “Tintern Abbey,” it may serve the same purpose. Perhaps Auden feels the need to make a sociable gesture in an otherwise antisocial poem. Perhaps Auden recognizes “” as a turning point in his career and so conjures an auditor (albeit a nameless and silent one) to confirm all that he has said. A function all the more necessary because the poem trails off, in its final five lines, into obscurity. Few readers agree on the significance of these iconic representatives of “the old gang,” all doomed to die before spring.49 It seems likely to me that, unlike the rest of “,” they are obscure on purpose. The poem sketches the ideological outline for his remaining poetry; it leaves the filling-in of that outline (might there be a better word for necessity than “death”? what are the social implications of his fatalism? how should a poet like Auden relate to other people?) to subsequent years. Critical opinion on Auden’s change has, from the start, been divided into two predictable camps, the admirers and the detractors. Auden himself sets the terms for this debate in a series of essays that begin in the thirties. Looking back to Romanticism, but also to himself after , he offers an ethical justification for his shift: “poets are rarely and only incidentally priests”; their job is not to create

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new realities or to “invent new thoughts or feelings.” A poem like “The Watershed” was persuasive because of the way it mixed argument with meaningless but powerful images. Now Auden sees the irrational appeal of such rhetoric as dangerous: “Orpheus who moved stones is the archetype, not of the poet, but of Goebbels.” He controverts both Shelley and Yeats: “‘The unacknowledged legislators of the world’ describes the secret police, not poets” (The Dyer’s Hand [DH] ).50 It is the poet’s duty, rather, “to make us more aware of ourselves and the world around us” (EngA ) and, “by telling the truth, to disenchant and disintoxicate” (DH ). Many of Auden’s detractors accept his account of the change—as ethical in intent—even as they find its consequences deplorable. In a  review, after noting Auden’s new “accessibility, objectivity and social responsibility,” Randall Jarrell dryly adds, “He has gone in the right direction; and a great deal too far.” For a late-Romantic like Jarrell, Auden’s forswearing his early style (“Poetry is not magic” [DH ]) means abandoning his genius. A sympathizer, we note, derives an opposite conclusion from the same observations: “The moral struggle in Auden was fought out between what was possible to his gift and what he thought allowable to it. . . . His slow change through the ’s [I would date it earlier] entails a renunciation of the art-thrill. . . . For a poet to lose such a talent would have been a misfortune. For a poet to give it up was an act of disciplined renunciation rarely heard of in English.” The best-known defense along these lines is probably Mendelson’s distinction between “civil” and “vatic” poetry, between “poets who write as citizens, whose purpose is to entertain and instruct,” and poets “whose first law is the law of their genius, seers who live in voluntary or psychological exile.” In Mendelson’s account, most High Modern poetry (as well as the Auden of ) was vatic. Auden’s decision to abandon that mode, courting the ire and misunderstanding of critics like Jarrell, was heroic: “He knew that poetry, for all its formal excitement and elaboration, could never adequately be understood in terms of its internal or linguistic order. . . . Knowing this, Auden found himself in the curious position of taking poetry far more seriously than his critics did who regretted his apparent lack of High Seriousness—critics who accepted the vatic principle that art was its own reason for being, and who, therefore, lacked any standard of judgment that could distinguish seriousness of tone from seriousness of meaning.”51 It has been my contention that the change Auden underwent at the end of the twenties should not be understood in moral terms, or even in terms (like civil and vatic) with strong moral overtones. Rather, his transformation was an attempt to achieve emotional equilibrium. His remaining poetry (especially after

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the early thirties) is the product of two substitutions. The first we saw earlier: his poems of  acquire their characteristic fatalism at the same time Auden is concluding that his homosexuality is intrinsic. If my conjecture is right, the conviction of something incurable within and the entry of “necessity” and “suffering” as the leading tropes in his poetry are the same process. Some years later, the second substitution: we can imagine Auden beginning to accept his condition (the return to England, the canceled marriage). Instead of relaxing his fatalism, however, he embarks on a far more radical course, the first stumbling efforts of which were evident at the end of “.” That is: the remaining shifts in his career, I would argue, are each attempts to give necessity and suffering a name, and to call it Good. In the poems of  it had been simply fate, history—“Doom is dark and deeper than any sea-dingle”—but at the end of “” it could perhaps be called “biology”: the fated return of body and mind to matter. Later on, he finds still other terms: Marxism, psychology, and finally God. I do not intend to minimize the differences between these subsequent periods, nor to question the sincerity of his convictions at each step. Nonetheless, in opposition to critics who would draw the line between early and later Auden at  (his emigration to America and reconversion to Christianity), I would locate the real watershed here. It is for this reason that I object to understanding his change ethically: although he passes through (and doubtless believes in) a series of orthodoxies, his selection of these doctrines, each satisfying the same demand, can seem alarmingly arbitrary. These beliefs, moreover, are not in themselves moral: his project to justify suffering is ethically hazardous, and in practice it leads him to write authoritarian-sounding poetry. Part of his job, in explaining (and praising) the ways of fate, is to offer examples of those who resist necessity—and rightly suffer twofold as a result. In the early thirties, under the influence of the American psychologist Homer Lane, Auden briefly believed that illness results mainly from the repression of natural drives.52 His conclusion: spinsters with cancer deserve what they get: Doctor Thomas sat over his dinner, Though his wife was waiting to ring; Rolling his bread into pellets, Said: “Cancer’s a funny thing. “Nobody knows what the cause is, Though some pretend they do; It’s like some hidden assassin Waiting to strike at you.

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“Childless women get it, And men when they retire; It’s as if there had to be some outlet For their foiled creative fire.” (“Miss Gee,” CP –)

As Orwell and others complained, furthermore, the easiest way to justify barbarism is to call it necessary; hence the lines in “Spain” that Orwell famously attacked,53 not at all different from much of Auden’s writing during his closest attraction to Marxism: To-day the deliberate increase in the chances of death, The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder; To-day the expending of powers On the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting. (SP )

Even Auden, in his Christian phase, would come to regret this poem’s last stanza: The stars are dead. The animals will not look. We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, and History to the defeated May say Alas but cannot help nor pardon.

Lines like these suggest a more plenary abandonment of moral relations in Auden’s poetry. To be precise: as in Eliot, the distinction between an observing lyric subject (the poet) and observed objects in the world—the recognition, so central to moral judgment, of things outside of and independent from the self— breaks down. Both subject and object are assimilated to a single idea of necessity, and all externals become equal moments in the poet’s consciousness of process. However, where Eliot is content to be an infinitely sensitive if also jaundiced receptacle for experience, Auden is a partisan. For this reason, it is possible for him to see, with far less irony than is often granted him, the writing of a “flat ephemeral pamphlet” and the participation in a “necessary murder” as more or less the same thing. “Spain,” in particular, is full of such blunt equivalences: Yesterday the installation of dynamos and turbines, The construction of railways in the colonial desert; Yesterday the classic lecture On the origin of Mankind. But to-day the struggle.

The same kind of equivalence, finally, may be seen in Auden’s response to the behavior of other people, in his difficulty in making absolute distinctions be-

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tween different kinds of conduct. Evil, for example: in his poetry of the thirties and forties, the Nazis are alternately “rascals,” or ill, or the latest manifestation of eternal historical violence: “this is the way things happen; for ever and ever.”54All human action, however heinous, can be explained. He writes in “September , ”: Accurate scholarship can Unearth the whole offence From Luther until now That has driven a culture mad, Find what occurred at Linz, What huge imago made A psychopathic god: I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return. (SP )

Although this passage has its ironies, Auden’s point is serious: a behavior is never good or evil per se but rather is the inevitable result of (let us say) societal neurosis, or the enlightened action that comes from seeing things clearly. In short, if his poems are “moral,” it is less in judgment than tone; the worrying one finds in Wordsworth or even Yeats about one’s relations to other people gives way to having the right beliefs and being in the know. It is therefore strange to think of Auden after  as a “civil” poet. The more his poems address society at large, the less they deal with actual people. Richard Ohmann has discussed this oddity, evoking Eliot’s standard: “Auden is the most impersonal of poets. . . . [He sacrifices] not just his feelings, but all particularity of feeling, for Auden’s dedication is to the type, not the individual. Our sufferings are only poetically interesting, he contends, in so far as they are typical of the human condition.”55 One might say that Auden has become a “civil” poet without ever abandoning his deep distrust of the group that we noted in “.” Auden’s fatalism and strong feelings of solitude led to an estrangement from the vast majority of people, happy in their bestial indifference to process; that is, set in their traditions and habits. Now, in the thirties, in his understanding of community, we can recognize the same transference that allowed him to call necessity Good: the society he affirms is not only devoid of recognizable “individuals” but also of the ordinary ties of common life, which he still suspects. “September , ” belongs to a cluster of poems he wrote shortly after emi-

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grating to America. Like its near-namesake a decade back, it is a meditation on the state of the world and his place in it. Consider the last two stanzas. All I have is a voice To undo the folded lie, The romantic lie in the brain Of the sensual man-in-the-street And the lie of Authority Whose buildings grope the sky: There is no such thing as the State And no one exists alone; Hunger allows no choice To the citizen or the police; We must love one another or die. Defenceless under the night Our world in stupor lies; Yet, dotted everywhere, Ironic points of light Flash out wherever the Just Exchange their messages: May I, composed like them Of Eros and of dust, Beleaguered by the same Negation and despair, Show an affirming flame.56

From the context of the poem (Germany invaded Poland on September , ), we might gather that “the folded lie” is a specific reference to the “romantic” myths of statehood that Fascist governments used to inspire unreflecting loyalty.57 The poem’s setting, however, is American (it begins “in one of the dives / On Fifty-Second Street”; the “groping” buildings could only be New York skyscrapers) and, more to the point, the “folded lie” is not a bad description of tradition generally. Auden’s favorite “voice” in his later poetry is the enlightened sage, disenchanting and disintoxicating, bringing “ironic” clarity and a knowledge of necessity to bear on the settled daily habits that allow us to live unthinkingly and which obscure our condition from us. Freedom, he paraphrases Engels, “is a consciousness of necessity,” a necessity that is always changing, moving forward. In a note roughly contemporary with the poem, he writes: “The Now we must accept, our freedom to, is continually changing into the Then we must reject, our freedom from. Choice is our term for expressing the

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continuity of this change. But there is no escape from necessity.”58 “People committing acts in obedience to law or habit,” it follows, “are not being moral. As voluntary action always turns, with repetition, into habit, morality is only possible in a world which is constantly changing and presenting a fresh series of choices” (EngA ). Hard as it is to picture what morality might mean in a world of constant change, shorn of habit and repetition, civil society is all but unfathomable. Bent as he is on the future, Auden ends as distant from “the sensual man-in-the-street” as he is from the State. Despite the poem’s concluding affirmations (“no one exists alone”; “We must love one another or die”), which even Auden would come to think hollow, the vision of community he presents is utterly atomized: “the Just,” as dispersed as the ironic stars, obscurely “exchanging their messages.” This eminently “civil” poem, which begins with Auden sitting alone at a bar (it is not specified, but he must be alone), ends with his solitary voice, and a prayer to no obvious listener. POETIC PSYCHOLOGY/PSYCHOLOGICAL POETRY: NEW YEAR LETTER

Modern poetry was never young. In its old age, Modern poetry would occasionally regret this oversight. In Eliot at twenty, as in Yeats at fifty, the polemical rejection of any developmental or psychological understanding of self required both a forceful insistence on the poet’s own maturity and a concealment of his past. We have examined the reasons for this willing sacrifice and the role it played in the formation of each poet’s characteristic, “modern” style. As we also observed in the last chapter, Yeats came to feel the loss: in late poems like “A Prayer for My Daughter” or “Man and the Echo,” the younger self he essentially obliterated at midcareer reappears in ghostly form. Curiously, Eliot’s career arc is not so different. In the thirties and forties, the erstwhile apostle of impersonality ventures increasingly into reminiscence. In “The Dry Salvages,” he revisits the world of his childhood. More shocking, he dismantles much of the critical apparatus he had developed to explain his earlier work. He disavows the doctrine of impersonality itself, with astounding (though unintended) irony, as immature: I have, in early essays, extolled what I called impersonality in art. . . . It may be that I expressed myself badly, or that I had only an adolescent grasp of that idea . . . but I think now, at least, that the truth of the matter is as follows. There are two forms of impersonality: that which is natural to the mere skilful craftsman, and that which is more and more achieved by the maturing artist. . . . The second impersonality is that

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of the poet who, out of intense personal experience, is able to express a general truth; retaining all the particularity of his personal experience, to make of it a general symbol. (SProse )

And where do these intense personal experiences come from? Eliot, who, we recollect, pointedly took issue with Wordsworth’s formula “emotion recollected in tranquility,” has a ready answer: I suggest that what gives [a great poet’s imagery] such intensity as it has in each case is its saturation . . . but with feelings too obscure for the authors even to know quite what they were. . . . It comes from the whole of his sensitive life since early childhood. Why, for all of us, out of all that have heard, seen, felt, in a lifetime, do certain images recur, charged with emotion, rather than others? [A list of such images follows]: such memories may have symbolic value, but of what we cannot tell, for they come to represent the depths of feeling into which we cannot peer. (SProse )

Intense experiences of childhood, powerfully resonant images, whose meanings are nevertheless veiled from the poet by his distance from their source: late in life, the psychology of poetic power and the nature of the imagination, as understood by Eliot, sound most of all like Wordsworth. It is a shocking reversal, yet wholly understandable: Eliot’s attack on Wordsworth and his turn to a poetry of consciousness were very much the strategies of a young man uncomfortable with his provincial, middle-class origins and eager to demonstrate his sophistication. These strategies served their purpose; but it is entirely natural that, later in life, having achieved success and stature, the same man should wish to—as it were—claim responsibility for his own early success: to recognize the imagination where he once saw only a neutral consciousness, to reclaim the impersonal as personal. In late Eliot, as in later Yeats, childhood experience assumes a place, albeit tentative and often spectral. For both poets, becoming modern meant renouncing the past, a past both poets were later at pains to recover. I mention Yeats and Eliot because Auden’s experience with psychology was nothing like theirs. They had seen psychology as a threat, as a middle-class vulgarity, as an inquiry into origins better left hidden; both treated Freud with distance or contempt. Auden, for whom Freud was part of the native intellectual climate, never shared this aversion. Poems like “The Watershed” were written in an assertively mature voice, in the approved modern manner, even as they retained a vital (and contradictory) connection to the images of Auden’s youth. When Auden renounced his visionary style, one might have expected him to

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follow Eliot against psychology. The opposite is true: in Freud’s narrative of unconscious guilt and inevitable consequences, Auden found one of his best tropes for Fate. In psychoanalysis, Auden found one of his best reasons to call fate Good. He comments in his  essay “Psychology and Art To-day” that “Both Marx and Freud . . . see human behaviour [as] determined, not consciously, but by instinctive needs, hunger and love” (EngA ). Freud is enlisted in Auden’s “Enlightenment” project as one of the great explainers of the forces that determine our lives, as one who drew the shades of memory into “the bright circle of his recognition” (“In Memory of Sigmund Freud” [CP ]).59 Poetry and psychology are recognized as kindred activities: just as Freud told the unhappy Present to recite the Past Like a poetry lesson till sooner Or later it faltered at the line where long ago the accusations had begun, and suddenly knew by whom it had been judged

so, “from the poet’s point of view,” “the ideal response of a reader to his poem is, ‘Why, I knew that all the time, but never realised it till now.’ A good poem, one might say, is like a psychoanalyzed patient: both have become . . . ‘A city that is at unity in itself.”60 In Auden’s metaphor, life is textual, each person’s past a difficult poem, which psychology has taught us to parse. The act of explication, undoing our folded lies of habit and bad faith (our “wardrobe of excuses” and “set mask of rectitude”), frees us from the unnecessary miseries we inflict on ourselves. A good poem has the clarity and awareness of an understood life. Thus the difference from Yeats and Eliot. Where both have an ambivalent relation to their past, allowing it, however, a shadowy presence in their later work, Auden, for the last thirty-five years of his life, writes about his youth, perhaps too much. His willingness to use the new psychology in his poems anticipates much subsequent lyric, especially in a confessional mode. The distinction is often missed, however, in accounts of Auden and others, between psychological poetry and poetic psychology. To clarify: psychology appeals to Auden for its explanatory value, that is, as a hermeneutic. This is quite different from the complex but usually only implicit psychology of power on which poets after Wordsworth would rely to justify their authority. A poem saturated with Freud (or Jung or Homer Lane) need not, in itself, be particularly intricate psychologically. Let us return to a scene we have already visited several times. On this

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occasion, it appears in Auden’s New Year Letter, the long poem he wrote in early , during his first winter in America. Again, I quote a long section in full. This time, the length is itself thematic: No matter where, or whom I meet, Shop-gazing in a Paris street, Bumping through Iceland in a bus, At teas where clubwomen discuss The latest Federation Plan, In Pullman washrooms, man to man, Hearing how circumstance has vexed A broker who is oversexed, In houses where they do not drink, Whenever I begin to think About the human creature we Must nurse to sense and decency, An English area comes to mind, I see the nature of my kind As a locality I love, Those limestone moors that stretch from Brough To Hexham and the Roman Wall, There is my symbol of us all. There, where the Eden leisures through Its sandstone valley, is my view Of green and civil life that dwells Below a cliff of savage fells From which original address Man faulted into consciousness. Along the line of lapse the fire Of life’s impersonal desire Burst through his sedentary rock And, as at Dufton and at Knock, Thrust up between his mind and heart Enormous cones of myth and art. Always my boy of wish returns To those peat-stained deserted burns That feed the Wear and Tyne and Tees, And, turning states to strata, sees How basalt long oppressed broke out In wild revolt at Cauldron Snout, And from the relics of old mines

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Derives his algebraic signs For all in man that mourns and seeks, For all of his renounced techniques, Their tramways overgrown with grass, For lost belief, for all Alas, The derelict lead-smelting mill, Flued to its chimney up the hill, That smokes no answer any more But points, a landmark on Bolts Law, The finger of all questions. There in Rookhope I was first aware Of Self and Not-Self, Death and Dread: Adits were entrances which led Down to the Outlawed, to the Others, The Terrible, the Merciful, the Mothers; Alone in the hot day I knelt Upon the edge of shafts and felt The deep Urmutterfurcht that drives Us into knowledge all our lives, The far interior of our fate To civilise and to create, Das Weibliche that bids us come To find what we’re escaping from. There I dropped pebbles, listened, heard The reservoir of darkness stirred; “O, deine Mutter kehrt dir nicht Wieder. Du selbst bin ich, dein’ Pflicht Und Liebe. Brach sie nun mein Bild.” And I was conscious of my guilt. (CP –)

The spot of time we first encountered in “The Old Lead-Mine” is now a blot: what once required three quatrains is now saddled with sixty-eight lines of apparatus. Most surprising, where Auden once heard an ambiguous “whispering” and “laugh,” he now realizes that, in fact, he was hearing all the way to Germany, where Goethe and Wagner, reports of their deaths greatly exaggerated, were trading epigrams.61 With impressive thoroughness, Auden revisits and desublimates the landscape of his earlier poems, finding history and allegory where once he felt an unutterable, suggestive power. “Tramways overgrown with grass” recalls “snatches of tramline running to the wood”; but where the image was once resonant because unglossed, Auden, now determined to scrub away all such

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obscurities, calls it his “algebraic sign” for “lost belief, for all Alas.” The narrowed and diminished effect is palpable. When he finally returns to his spot of time, it is appropriate, all content aside, that the darkness should speak, where before it only whispered and laughed. His main weapon against the shades is articulation. Landscape is not merely explained but incorporated into the myth of maturation Auden had developed in “.” In “The Old Lead-Mine,” the mythos had been Wordsworthian: powerful childhood experience in nature; lasting effect for the adult. Confusingly, this passage begins sounding a bit like “Tintern Abbey.” In the opening— No matter where, or whom I meet . . . [a series of urban scenes follows] Whenever I begin to think About the human creature we Must nurse to sense and decency, An English area comes to mind

—we can hardly not hear Oft, in lonely rooms, and ’mid the din Of towns and cities, I have owed to [the landscape of the Wye valley] In hours of weariness, sensations sweet.

Yet Auden evokes the ghost only to exorcise it: his old landscape “comes to mind,” not because of its effect on him but because of its convenience as a “symbol for us all.” The new myth is then repeated: man’s “fault into consciousness,” the desires (“myth and art”) that come with individuation, the promise of return. His spot of time then takes pride of place as the scene of his own estrangement from nature and first awareness of “Self and Not-Self.” Having had the same sustaining relation with his environment that an infant has with its mother, he is struck, upon dropping his pebbles, by a sudden, terrifying recognition of his absolute separation from it. This terror, this “primal fear of the mother,” drives him into adult life and specifically into the life of an artist: “to civilise and to create.” At the same time, just as in “,” his desire for a forbidden regression and his sense of inadequacy before the demands of adulthood are sources of uneasy guilt. What began as a Wordsworthian anecdote concludes with a burst of imagery (and philosophical baggage) drawn from the second part of Faust and last act of Siegfried. The most notable aspect of this passage, however, is not that none of

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this material, this relevance, was even implicit in “The Old Lead-Mine,” nor that Auden at thirty-three seems to see this childhood incident in far greater detail than he did at sixteen. Rather, his most audacious move is to attribute his knowledge at thirty-three to his own boyhood self. [Deriving] his algebraic signs For all in man that mourns and seeks . . . For lost belief, for all Alas . . . I was first aware . . . I was conscious of my guilt. . . .

To put it another way: after creating his myth of development in , Auden feels compelled, against the evidence of his earlier poetry, to deny that he was ever unaware of this myth. In poem and essay, the later Auden looks back on a precociously wise childhood. A late fragment: Father at the wars, Mother, tongue-tied with shyness, struggling to tell him the Facts of Life he dared not tell her he knew already. (CP )

The goal of Auden’s autobiographical work is not simply to construct a childhood consistent with the adult he has become but to construct a smaller version of his adult self: knowing, rational, pious, necessitarian. He succeeds, but at a loss. The frightening and deeply puzzling experience recounted in “The OldLead Mine” is not merely denied but put out of mind altogether. Limestone landscapes are rarely absent from his later poetry, yet when he explains their importance, he avoids his juvenilia entirely. In a very late essay, “Phantasy and Reality in Poetry,” he acknowledges that, as a boy, he had felt a sacred awe in such settings, but insists that his response to them, even then, was basically moral. He discusses the industrial detritus that constituted his “private world”: In my case I decided, or rather without conscious decision, I instinctively felt that I must impose . . . restrictions upon my freedom of phantasy. . . . In deciding how my world was to function, I could choose between two practical possibilities—a mine can be drained either by an adit or a pump—but physical impossibilities and magic means were forbidden. When I say forbidden, I mean that I felt, in some obscure way, that they were morally forbidden. Then, there came a day when the moral issue became quite conscious. As I was planning my Platonic Idea of a Concentrating Mill, I

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ran into difficulties. I had to choose between two types of a certain machine for separating the slimes, called a buddle. One type I found more sacred, but the other type was, I knew from my reading, the more efficient. At this point I realized that it was my moral duty to sacrifice my symbolic preference to reality or truth.

Such a sacrifice is hard to detect in any of the poems Auden wrote before ; thus, perhaps, Auden’s most astounding act of self-forgetting, at the end of the same essay: “It was . . . to be many years before I could do anything with my lead-mining world of my childhood. My first attempt was in  [that is, the New Year Letter] when I was ; I tried to describe what I had felt at the age of , when I first saw my sacred landscape with my own eyes” (italics mine). It is one thing to suppress one’s juvenilia and quite another to deny that it ever existed. “Get there if you can” is similarly expunged. Ironically, though Auden is eager to write about his youth where his most prominent predecessors demur, he probably inflicts the most damage on memory. For Yeats and Eliot, the past was finally a special preserve, separate from the adult identities each man created for himself, yet glimpsed fitfully, with only partial comprehension, at telling moments; each finally allowed a complex dynamic to exist between these periods. Auden, however, after , is “a city . . . at unity in itself,” all inner obscurities—and a wealth of presumably genuine experiences—either explained away or extinguished by subsequent psychological myth. As he himself admits, his myth is disingenuous: the boy he “remembers” in the New Year Letter is “a boy of wish.” In a late essay, he observes: “Needless to say, my description of my experiences is, historically a fiction: what I wrote [in the New Year Letter and afterwards] was an interpretation of them, in the light of . . . later reading in Theology and Psycho-analytic literature.”62 Despite this awareness, Auden—on principle, one imagines—never departs from his fiction, nor makes the late Eliotic move to recover what he once concealed. Though Auden before  gives evidence of having once been young, the later Auden was always old. CONCLUSION

My account of the history of plain English ends at this moment in Auden’s career. His replacement of the complex lyric psychology introduced by Wordsworth and confronted by the High Moderns with a simpler but no less encompassing myth of development had broad consequences in language. Some of these consequences were foreseeable: just as the mature adult, by falling into selfconsciousness, is cut off from his original, natural state, so language, which can only exist after this separation, is alienated from the world it is supposed to sig-

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nify. For Auden, as for the Eliot of “Gerontion,” language is postlapsarian: the relation between word and object betrays the distance fallen. Every utterance between two persons is a futile attempt to repair the breach of individuation. In his essay “Writing,” Auden offers a just-so story: At some time or other in human history, when and how we don’t know, man became self-conscious; he began to feel, I am I, and you are not I; we are shut inside ourselves and apart from each other. There is no whole but the self. The more this feeling grew, the more man felt the need to bridge over the gulf, to recover the sense of being as much part of life as the cells in his body are part of him. Before he had lost it, when he was doing things together in a group, such as hunting, when feeling was strongest, as when, say, the quarry was first sighted, the group had made noises, grunts, howls, grimaces. Noise and this feeling he had now lost had gone together; then, if he made this noise, could he not recover the feeling? In some way like this language began. (EngA )

However droll his telling, Auden’s story is in earnest: where poetic diction for Wordsworth involved a relation between word and object (signification), Auden sees language as intentional, indicating first the feelings of the speaker and only secondarily things in the world. While a child looking at the moon may still confuse the word and object—“In his mind the word ‘moon’ is not the name of a sacred object but one of its most important properties and, therefore, numinous”—the writing of poetry is dependent on a realization “that names and things are not identical, and that there cannot be an intelligible sacred language” (DH –). In Eliot’s poetry of consciousness, with its less systematic refusal of origins, no register was privileged over any other. For Auden, the visionary low register is particularly taboo, as a remnant of regressive Romantic desires and because of its “false identification” of words as sacred. Auden’s register of choice, especially after , befits his adopted role as village explainer, as a man speaking to men: a conversational idiom, elevated and consciously artificial in the manner of the Augustan period yet clear and without pretensions to vision, he calls it, in the New Year Letter, the “middle style” (CP ).63 The excerpts from his New Year Letter and Freud elegy show the middle style in action and demonstrate its appropriateness for Auden’s latter-day persona. Just as he hopes to follow Dryden and Pope as a source of wisdom felicitously expressed, so his syntax and diction evoke a moment predating the rise in poetry of plain English. That he should preserve an allegiance to the low register, therefore, is all the more surprising. If gnomic, visionary images are strictly off limits, Auden nevertheless retains a faith in the low register’s truthfulness, and he is perfectly willing to exploit this resonance even though the premises

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that justified it have long since been abandoned. Sounding almost like Wordsworth in the “Preface,” he remarks that “the speech of a peasant is generally better, i.e. more vivid, better able to say what he wants to say, than the speech of the average University graduate” (EngA ). Or again, in the New Year Letter: To say two different things at once, To wage offensives on two fronts, And yet to show complete conviction, Requires the purpler shades of diction And none appreciate as he [that is, a tyrant] Polysyllabic oratory. All vague idealistic art That coddles the uneasy heart Is up his alley . . . He knows the bored will not unmask him But that he’s lost if someone ask him To come the hell in off the links And say exactly what he thinks. To win support of any kind He has to hold before the mind Amorphous shadows it can hate. (CP )

Only after some scrutiny is it clear that Auden’s point in these passages is in no way Wordsworthian: the dishonesty he detects in “polysyllabic oratory” is not factual but tonal. One can obfuscate, “say two different things at once,” in any register. The “purpler shades of diction” are dangerous, however, because of the way they “show complete conviction.” Such language wins “support,” regardless of its content, because the confused and seduced “uneasy heart” (read: the sensual man-in-the-street) does not suspect the speaker of bad faith. It is all the more the poet’s task, then, to avoid the temptation “to wow an audience” by uttering “some resonant lie” (“Ode to Terminus,” CP ); it is all the more his job, “by telling the truth, to disenchant and disintoxicate.” Truth and lie, in Auden’s usage, are not simply synonyms for fact and falsehood: they also map to sincere and insincere (EngA ). To speak truthfully is to have the right information and mean it: to “say exactly what [one] thinks.” It is on these latter grounds that Auden retains—an unseen consequence, perhaps, of his psychology—an unironic acceptance of the truthfulness of plain English. The one register conspicuously absent from early Auden was the plain, weary idiom discovered (as it were) by Yeats and also used strategically by Eliot. Bereft of imaginative power, it never-

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theless sounds forthright. Although it does not displace his “middle style,” this register plays a vital role in Auden’s work after the mid-thirties. That role is especially clear after Auden’s reentry into the church. In God, Auden finds his final and best reason to call suffering Good. As he explains in the New Year Letter, life is a charnel house, yet occasionally An accidental happiness, Catching man off his guard, will blow him Out of his life in time to show him The field of Being where he may, Unconscious of Becoming, play With the Eternal Innocence In unimpeded utterance. (CP )

To paraphrase: Auden remains a poet of process (“Becoming”), yet now recognizes moments, which he interprets religiously, when one is “blown” out of one’s ordinary life and brought into contact with the eternal (“Being”). This sounds like Yeatsian (or Wordsworthian) vision, or High Modern epiphany in general, so Auden quickly adds: But perfect Being has ordained It must be lost to be regained, And in its orchards grow the tree And fruit of human destiny, And man must eat it and depart At once with gay and grateful heart, Obedient, reborn and re-aware. (CP –)

Thus, he corrects his modernist predecessors, Hell is the being of the lie That we become if we deny The laws of consciousness and claim Becoming and Being are the same, Being in time, and man discrete In will, yet free and self-complete; Its fire the pain to which we go If we refuse to suffer, though The one unnecessary grief Is the vain craving for relief. (CP )

As creatures of process, of “consciousness,” it is our place to suffer in time. Though we encounter fleeting moments of “Being,” our attempts to hold these

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moments are futile and lead to the “unnecessary grief” of inevitable failure.64 Poems, it follows, should not bother with vision, nor dream of “unimpeded utterance,” but rather should be ritual acts of faith, whose very repetition offers a momentary escape from our time-bound particularity: “only in rites,” goes a very late poem, “can we renounce our oddities / and be truly entired” (“Archaeology,” CP ). If a great many of the poems Auden wrote after the Second World War sound alike, it is because so many are instances of the same repeated sacral act. A late Auden poem of this kind, all matters of technique and inspiration aside, practically writes itself: after a brief introduction to his topic (anything from a familiar landscape, to modern science, to the act of defecation), he embarks on an erudite and witty discussion of its place in time and history, its wider significance, and so on. The poem climaxes (not necessarily at the end) with a prayer or invocation to the God beyond time and history. An example of this pattern: Auden’s “Homage to Clio” () is a late entry in his ongoing comparison of human and animal intelligence. In “” he had felt almost envious of ducks, “who find the sun’s luxury enough.” Now, more than two decades on, he has achieved greater equanimity: More lives than I perceive Are aware of mine this May morning As I sit reading a book, sharper senses Keep watch on an inedible patch Of unsatisfactory smell, unsafe as So many areas are: to observation My book is dead, and by observations they live In space, as unaware of silence As Provocative Aphrodite or her twin, Virago Artemis, the Tall Sisters Whose subjects they are. That is why, in their Dual Realm, Banalities can be beautiful . . . . . . but we, at haphazard And unseasonably, are brought face to face By ones, Clio, with your silence. . . . Are we so sorry? Woken at sun-up to hear A cock pronouncing himself himself Though all his sons had been castrated and eaten, I was glad I could be unhappy. . . . (CP  –)

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The poem continues in a similar discursive vein, enumerating the benefits of memory, and concludes with a supplication: Muse of Time, but for whose merciful silence Only the first step would count and that Would always be murder, whose kindness never Is taken in, forgive our noises And teach us our recollections . . . . . . Approachable as you seem I dare not ask you if you bless the poets, For you do not look as if you ever read them, Nor can I see a reason why you should. (CP )

In his “Homage,” the link could not be clearer between Auden’s middle style and the relaxing of the tensions that drove his rapid transformation in the late twenties. His myth of individuation is unchanged, but the anguish and uncertainty of “” parts II and III are gone. The fatalism, the polemic, of his earlier political and psychological poetry has eased, with the help of Christianity, into an ironic but also contented acceptance of his condition. “Our recollections” are no longer contested ground. He allows himself the benign gesture of self-deprecation (“an inedible patch / Of unsatisfactory smell”), the brisk learned reference (“Provocative Aphrodite [etc.]”), and the occasional dirty pun. Everything about his style—ornate, yet in no way elevated—says middle. The poem, however, is also a prayer, and at moments when Auden needs to show that, all kidding aside, his sentiments are genuine, a lowering of register is audible: “I was glad I could be unhappy”; “you do not look as if you ever read them, / Nor can I see a reason why you should.” Auden’s preservation of plain English makes an ironic postscript to his critique of Modernism, and to the history of modern poetry in general. The low register first acquires its reputation for truthfulness on Lockean grounds: that is, in Wordsworth’s intuition that it is uniquely accurate in signifying worldly objects. That reputation for truthfulness is very much alive today, and yet I would contend that when we respond with assent to plain English, in contemporary political rhetoric, or advertising copy, or everyday conversation, our credence has little in it of Locke. Instead, we respond precisely to the idiom’s tonal qualities, the message it conveys of honesty and good intentions; in short, truthfulness. This difference indicates an altered relation between the low register and the rest of the language. Wordsworth had identified a special kind of diction; other words, in the other strata of English, suffered in comparison, but funda-

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mentally Wordsworth was not thinking about the way these strata interact. Today, the low register’s reputation is more a function of its place within a larger language system, in which different registers imply different intentional states.65 Although the difference between these positions is considerable, the latter grew out of the former. Indeed, High Modernism in poetry may be understood as the period when the basis of the low register’s claims to truthfulness were in transition or flux. We have observed this flux in the work of Yeats, Eliot, and Auden, but aspects of it, I think, may also be discerned in Frost, Williams, Pound, Stein, and others whom I have not examined.66 This instability, we recognize in retrospect, was implicit in the low register from the start: Wordsworth’s turn to plain English occurred at a moment annihilating to the everyday self, his powerful fixation on object reality obliterating all things meaningful to normal human life. His efforts to move away from this moment, to reclaim a place in society while retaining the force of his early work, finally aided and helped consolidate the Coleridgian and Shelleyan account of imagination as reflective, creative, active. The low register, meanwhile, no longer thought appropriate for imaginative writing, persisted with its reputation for accuracy and truth intact. It reacquired a visionary use in the modern period because of poetry’s singular burden among the literary genres of always needing to justify its own existence. We have now witnessed Yeats’s and Eliot’s attempts to recover the poetic claim to exceptionalism on new terms (an alternate account of vision; a heightened valuation of consciousness), as well as Auden’s abjuring of such pretensions. Yeats, in relocating the visionary, returned to Wordsworth’s first use of plain English: powerful but elusive. Just as important, during his crisis decade he drew increasingly on its tonal qualities. In The Green Helmet and In the Seven Woods, the low register conveys a sense of bare, abject reality, shorn of vision. It also sounds honest, the utterances of a man with nothing left to lose and no reason to lie. If this second quality was originally yoked to the first, it soon silently took on a life of its own. When Yeats returned to visionary form, and also began writing his more sectarian verse, he retained this plain, debased idiom, not, however, for its accuracy but because of the way, when used strategically in combination with other registers, it commands belief. On these grounds plain English would find a role in Eliot’s poetry of consciousness and in Auden’s pietism. In a passage we examined last chapter, Yeats recognizes that, in the hands of the unscrupulous, the most dangerous rhetorical power lies not in the ornate or gnomic but rather, because of its very transparency and the unthinking assent it secures, in the simple. Phase  of A Vision includes the “Conditional Man,” the

The Lost Youth of Modern Poetry

“statesman who accepts massacre as a historical necessity” and who also tends to be the most effective of orators: “He is strong, full of initiative, full of social intellect. . . . There may be great eloquence, a mastery of all concrete imagery. . . . No man of any other phase can produce the same instant effect upon great crowds. . . . [He makes] little use of argument, which requires a long train of reasons, or many technical terms, for his power rests in certain simplifying convictions. . . . He needs intellect for their expression, not their proof.”67 The silent passage of the low register from “truthful signifier” to “bearer of truthful intentions” is perhaps modern poetry’s most dubious bequest to English. Nevertheless, Yeats’s comments, which foreshadow Orwell’s critique of “Spain,” suggest why both Auden and Orwell missed this conclusion. Scolds of Modernism both, Orwell and Auden discerned too obvious a connection between the reactionary elitism of the High Moderns and their usage. Writing of Yeats, in a comment we saw last chapter, Orwell insisted that “there must be some kind of connection between his wayward, even tortured style of writing and his rather sinister [read: fascistic] view of life.” So Auden, in his attempt to make poetry safe for society, that is, his effort to quarantine High Modernism from the larger culture, drew the ready inference that the modern poets’ exclusionary mannerisms (linguistic, personal) were the main manifestations of their distasteful, exclusionary politics. If he was half right, he was blind all the same to the way Modernism operated within the larger culture, especially in its manipulation of the vernacular. Yeats’s diagnosis of the conditional man offers reasons for this obtuseness: Auden, “full of initiative [and] full of social intellect,” was too committed to an idea of community, to an idea of his role in the community, too vulnerable in his own relation to Authority, and too reliant for his own purposes on the low register, to perceive, or wish to perceive, what his predecessors had done to the language. Hence his own otherwise bewildering diagnosis of the later Yeats: “However false or undemocratic his ideas, his diction shows a continuous evolution towards what one might call the true democratic style. The social virtues of a real democracy are brotherhood and intelligence, and the parallel linguistic virtues are strength and clarity, virtues which appear ever more clearly through successive volumes of the deceased.”68 Though Orwell was more suspicious than Auden of ideologies, and not personally invested in the future of poetry, he too, because of political and aesthetic antipathies, participated in the modernist quarantine. The result, evident in his account of Yeats’s style, was a similar inattention to modern poetry’s manipulation and transformation of cultural norms. It was an inattention at his own expense, evident, too, in his rules for proper usage, with which we began this study.

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(i) (ii) (iii) (iv) (v)

Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. Never use a long word where a short one will do. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. Never use the passive where you can use the active. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.69

The pedigree of these remarks can be traced back to Locke’s third book, yet the prejudice they helped to consolidate was, by the time Orwell wrote “Politics and the English Language” (), no longer Lockean. The segregation of modern poetry perpetuated its most equivocal legacy to the language.

Notes

INTRODUCTION

. W. B. Yeats, The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. Richard J. Finneran, nd ed. (New York: Simon and Schuster, ), – . . William Shakespeare, The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, ), . . Albert C. Baugh and Thomas Cable, A History of the English Language, Fourth Edition (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, ), –; Henry Home, Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism, vol.  (Edinburgh, ), –. . Classic histories of the “plain style” include George Williamson, The Senecan Amble: A Study in Prose Form from Bacon to Collier (London: Faber and Faber, ), and Wesley Trimpi, Ben Jonson’s Poems: A Study of the Plain Style (Stanford: Stanford University Press, ). See also Emerson R. Marks, Taming the Chaos: English Poetic Diction Theory since the Renaissance (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, ). . See Trimpi, Ben Jonson’s Poems,  – . . Williamson, Senecan Amble, –. . George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,” A Collection of Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace, ), . . Good histories of the earliest arguments for plain English include J. L. Moore, Tudor-Stuart Views on the Growth, Status, and Destiny of the English Language (Halle, Germany: M. Niemeyer, ), and Richard Foster Jones, The Triumph 181

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Notes to Pages 5–11

. .

.

.

.

.

.

. . .

.

of the English Language (Stanford: Stanford University Press, ). More general social histories of the language (not focusing on register) include Richard W. Bailey, Images of English: A Cultural History of the Language (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, ), and Tony Crowley, ed., Proper English? Readings in Language, History and Cultural Identity (London: Routledge, ). Dennis Brutus, A Simple Lust: Selected Poems (London: Heinemann ), . Marjorie Perloff, “Pound/Stevens: whose era?” The Dance of the Intellect: Studies in the Poetry of the Pound Tradition (New York: Cambridge University Press, ), – . Also, in the same volume, “Postmodernism and the impasse of lyric,” –. A particularly nuanced statement of the case, from which I borrow some terms, is offered by: George Bornstein, Transformations of Romanticism in Yeats, Eliot, and Stevens (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ). Randall Jarrell, “A Note on Poetry,” Kipling, Auden and Co: Essays and Reviews, – (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ), ; Harold Bloom, Agon: Toward a Theory of Revisionism (New York: Oxford University Press, ), ; Perloff, “Postmodernism and the impasse of lyric,” –. For a classic analysis of Romanticism’s privileging of lyric, see: M. H. Abrams, “Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric,” Romanticism and Consciousness, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: W. W. Norton, ), –. Compare Paul de Man, “Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image,” The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, ). Also Frank Kermode, Romantic Image (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, ). Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (London: Oxford University Press, ), ; the comment that modern poetry is often only “hypertrophied” Romanticism is from Jarrell, “A Note on Poetry,” . See Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (London: Faber and Faber, ). One rare critic who analyzes Stevens from within this tradition is Charles Altieri. See: Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), – . T. S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets,” Selected Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ), ; Ezra Pound, “The Rev. G. Crabbe, LL.B.,” Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, ), ; Perloff, “Postmodernism and the impasse of lyric,” –. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), , . Compare Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence. I suspect that younger poets rarely read their predecessors with the same priorities as their best critics. Compare Altieri  –. Altieri is very suggestive about Keats’s rejection of the Wordsworthian imagination; in his view, the malaise suffered by Victorian poets came from following Keats’s example too closely. T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, ), ; compare Richard Poirier, Poetry and Pragmatism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ), –. Although Eliot might be considered an “ancestor worshipper” himself, I follow Poirier in reading Eliot’s concept of “tradition” as an essentially pragmatic gesture, responding to the needs of the present, and relatively uninterested in the recovery of something tangible. I say more about this in chapter .

Notes to Pages 12–17

. Compare Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, ), paragraphs , –. . In some ways this anticipates the rhetorical turn that Mutlu Konuk Blasing defines as the borderline between modern and postmodern poetics. While Blasing’s description of the replacement of organicism by self-aware rhetoric is convincing, I would suggest that—on the level of register if not form—some Modernists are already initiating the shift. See: Politics and Form in Postmodern Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –. . For a more literary approach to Locke, see: Cathy Caruth, Empirical Truths and Critical Fictions: Locke, Wordsworth, Kant, Freud (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ), – . . The two most significant institutional developments of the last decade, for example, are the founding of the Modernist Studies Association and the journal Modernism/Modernity, both of which are largely (not entirely) culturalist in bent. . Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ), especially the chapters “The Hidden Dialectic: Avant-Garde—Technology—Mass Culture” and “Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism’s Other.” Also John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses (London: Faber and Faber, ), and Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ). Along the same lines, but refusing any easy binaries, is: Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, ). See especially the long chapter “The Conquest of Autonomy: The Critical Phase in the Emergence of the Field.” For a consideration of High versus Low Modernism, see Maria DiBattista, introduction, High and Low Moderns: Literature and Culture, –, ed. Maria DiBattista and Lucy McDiarmid (New York: Oxford University Press, ), –. Recent ideologically inflected accounts of modern poetry include Jonathan Allison’s anthology Yeats’s Political Identities: Selected Essays (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, ), and Anthony Julius, T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). . Hugh Underhill, The Problem of Consciousness in Modern Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . . Theodor Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” Prisms (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, ), . . John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, ), – . CHAPTER 1. PROLOGUE

. Albert C. Baugh and Thomas Cable, A History of the English Language, Fourth Edition (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, ), . . Richard Foster Jones, The Triumph of the English Language (Stanford: Stanford University Press, ). Also J. L. Moore, Tudor-Stuart Views on the Growth, Status, and Destiny of the English Language (Halle, Germany: M. Niemeyer, ); Baugh and Cable, History of the English Language, . . Thomas Wilson, The Art of Rhetorique (; Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, ), ; Jones, The Triumph of the English Language, ; John Hare, St. Ed-

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Notes to Pages 17–22

.

.

.

. .

.

.

ward’s Ghost: Or Anti-Normanisme: Being a patheticall Complaint and motion in the behalfe of our English Nation against her grand (yet neglected) Grievance, Normanisme (London, ),  –. Sir John Cheke, “A Letter of Syr J. Cheekes To His loving friend Mayster Thomas Hoby” (). Quoted in Moore, Tudor-Stuart Views, ; E. K., “Epistle to The Shepheardes Calender,” The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, ed. William Oram (New Haven: Yale University Press, ), . Tyndale’s remark is quoted by Moore, without citation, . Wilson, Art of Rhetorique, ; Thomas Sprat, History of the Royal Society (), ed. Jackson I. Cope and Harold Whitmore Jones (St. Louis: Washington University Press, ), . Richard Verstegan, A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence (), English Recusant Literature, vol.  (Ilkley, Yorkshire: Scolar Press, ), –, . See the discussion of Verstegan in Richard W. Bailey, Images of English: A Cultural History of the Language (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, ), – . All internal references to Locke are to An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, ). This last clause is very much in dispute: the question of whether Locke was a full-fledged nominalist remains very much a matter of debate. J. R. Milton and E. J. Ashworth have linked him convincingly to a tradition beginning in England with William of Ockham and including Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes. The nominalist credo is simple: everything that exists is a particular. The general and universal do not belong to real existence, but are creatures of language: words mislead us into supposing the existence of ideal forms and immanent real kinds. See: John R. Milton, “John Locke and the Nominalist Tradition,” John Locke Symposium Wolfenbuttel , ed. Richard Brandt (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter and Co., ),  –. Also: John R. Milton, “The Scholastic Background to Locke’s Thought,” Locke Newsletter  ():  –, and E. J. Ashworth, “‘Do Words Signify Ideas or Things?’: The Scholastic Sources of Locke’s Theory of Language,” Journal of the History of Philosophy  (): – . Some of Locke’s readers see him as accepting real kinds. Thus John Troyer, “Locke on the Names of Substances,” Locke Newsletter  (): –. Others, like Michael Ayers and Wolfgang von Leyden, are as vehement arguing the contrary. See: Wolfgang von Leyden, “What is a nominal essence the essence of?” John Locke: Problems and Perspectives: A Collection of New Essays, ed. John Yolton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ),  –; Michael Ayers, Locke: Epistemology and Ontology (New York: Routledge, ), vol. , –. For an acquittal on the charge of the most extreme forms of nominalism, see George Englebretsen, “Locke’s Language of Proper Names,” Locke Newsletter  ():  –. Englebretsen establishes the priority in Locke of the abstract idea to the general name. For Locke’s Adamist predecessors, see Hans Aarsleff, “Introduction,” From Locke to Saussure: Essays on the Study of Language and Intellectual History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), –. Also: Hans Aarsleff, “An Outline of Language-Origins Theory since the Renaissance,” From Locke to Saussure, –. Norman Kretzmann, “The Main Thesis of Locke’s Semantic Theory,” Philosophical Review  (): .

Notes to Pages 22–24

. For the influence of the Royal Society on Locke, see Aarsleff, “Introduction,” ff. . A notable exception is John W. Yolton, Locke and the Compass of Human Understanding: A Selective Commentary on the Essay (London: Cambridge University Press, ), –. . In addition to Ashworth, “‘Do Words Signify Ideas or Things?’ see also E. J. Ashworth, “Locke on Language,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy . (): –. Also E. J. Ashworth, “The Structure of Mental Language: Some Problems Discussed by Early-Sixteenth-Century Logicians,” Vivarium . ():  – . . John Wilkins, An Essay Towards A Real Character, And A Philosophical Language,  (Yorkshire: Scolar Press, ), . Swift’s most famous satire of language fixers comes in Book III, chapter  of Gulliver’s Travels. See the extensive discussion in James Knowlson, Universal Language Schemes in England and France, – (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, ). . The contemporary discussion of Book III was largely initiated by Norman Kretzmann, whose  article “The Main Thesis of Locke’s Semantic Theory” tries to resolve the apparent contradiction between the first two paragraphs. Norman Kretzmann, “Locke’s Semantic Theory,” Philosophical Review  ():  –. In his view, the two paragraphs are not contradictory; on the contrary, Locke’s two points, that language facilitates communication and that words signify ideas, are part of one argument. In brief, the first paragraph is concerned with reference and the second with meaning. For Kretzmann, the truth of Locke’s contention that “words in their primary or immediate signification stand for nothing but ideas in the mind of him that uses them” (III..) is self-evident. It is patently impossible for someone to use a word meaningfully without its signifying an idea. To apply a word to an idea, in short, is to give that word a meaning; words mean ideas. But since ideas themselves are signs of things in the world, words may, in a secondary way, refer to those things. Kretzmann, noting Locke’s use of the adjective “immediate,” claims that, while words immediately signify (i.e., mean) ideas, they may mediately signify (that is, refer to) objects, and thus effect communication. This distinction between meaning and reference, however, finally fails to account for the relation between ideas and worldly objects. In contending that ideas are signs, “representative ideas,” he seems to assume that ideas are faithful to reality, a highly questionable assumption, as we have seen. If this premise does not hold up, Kretzmann has merely clouded the issue with needless terminology, and hardly acquitted Locke on the count of solipsism. Much subsequent discussion of Book III has been in response to Kretzmann’s article. A brief history of the more recent criticism: Charles Landesman tries to skirt the difficulty of solipsism by claiming that ideas and things are identical. In his  article “Locke’s Theory of Meaning” ( Journal of the History of Philosophy  []: ), Landesman asserts that, in the Essay, ideas are “not mental images or private episodes but rather . . . intentional objects.” Since all we know is the world of our perceptions, he argues, things exist only to the extent that they are thought of. Ideas are “things outside the mind, . . . things conceived and thought of ” (). And yet one might reasonably ask, if ideas are not in the mind, where exactly are they? Landesman is ultimately as unsuccessful as Kretzmann at evading solipsism; his attempts, both to distinguish between actual objects and phantasms, and to establish the ontological status of intentional objects (do they really exist in the world?) collapse. (Compare Ashworth, “‘Do

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Notes to Pages 24–32

Words Signify Ideas or Things?” .) Both Kretzmann and Landesman, as well as Locke himself, come under fire from some modern critics for an assumption all of them presumably share, namely, that words can mean ideas. Douglas Odegaard, “Locke and the Signification of Words,” Locke Newsletter  ():  –, perhaps following William Alston, suggests that relational and ideational theories of meaning are no longer convincing explanations of how language works; as socially determined artifacts, words do not derive their meanings from ideas. . Hans Aarsleff, “Locke’s Influence,” The Cambridge Companion to Locke, ed. Vere Chappell (New York: Cambridge University Press, ),  –. For a history of conventionalism, see Ashworth, “Do Words Signify Ideas or Things?” – . . Ayers, Locke, vol. , . In the interest of speed, I have moved past the intermediate steps in Locke’s argument to get to his conclusion. The case for simple ideas is not, in fact, so clear-cut. First, under the influence of contemporary science and the Royal Society, Locke draws on Boyle’s corpuscular physics: the world consists of colorless, odorless matter in motion. Some of our perceptions therefore must be illusory; or rather, while some perceptions are primary and correspond to the nature of things (e.g., solidity, extension, motion [II..]), others are secondary, and are the result of senses not acute enough to perceive them correctly. Such secondary qualities include “colours, sounds, tastes, &c” (II..). In addition, Locke fully recognizes that the names we assign simple ideas may not represent the same phenomena for any two people. Who is to say that, while you and I both use the word “red,” you are not experiencing what I would call “blue”? Locke’s answers to these questions might best be called pragmatic: they are unanswerable, and are of no consequence for our lives. See IV.. and II..–. On grounds perhaps more pragmatic than epistemic, Locke does not finally doubt the accuracy of our words for simple ideas. See the discussion in Yolton, Compass,  and ; and Ayers’s comments in Locke, vol. , . . Again, this is a reduction of a long and involved argument. Locke is famously vague on the subject of “real kinds.” For differing opinions in the debate, see Yolton, Compass, ; also Paul Guyer, “Locke’s Philosophy of Language,” The Cambridge Companion to Locke, ed. Vere Chappell (New York: Cambridge University Press, ),  –; and Ayers, Locke, vol. ,  –. . Kretzmann, “Main Thesis,” . . See Ayers, Locke, vol. , . An example of Locke’s analytic approach to complex ideas: “Thus the idea which an Englishman signifies by the name ‘swan’ is white colour, long neck, red beak, black legs, and whole feet, and all these a certain size, with a power of swimming in the water, and making a certain kind of noise” (III..). . David Hartley, Observations on Man, vol.  (London, ), . . Ashworth demonstrates convincingly that, during the seventeenth century, the word signify means neither “mean” nor “refer to,” but rather “stand for.” Put plainly, Locke offers no theory of meaning; instead, he offers recommendations for the meaningful use of language. See especially Ashworth, “Locke on Language,” –, –. Also: Guyer, “Locke’s Philosophy of Language,” . . Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, vol.  (), ed. Harold F. Harding (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, ), .

Notes to Pages 32–37

. See the discussion in Emerson R. Marks, Taming the Chaos: English Poetic Diction Theory since the Renaissance (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, ),  –. CHAPTER 2. WORDSWORTH’S EMPIRICAL IMAGINATION

. Basil Willey, The Seventeenth Century Background (London: Chatto and Windus, ), ff. Perhaps the classic account of this shift is offered by M. H. Abrams in The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, ). Hans Aarsleff, From Locke to Saussure (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), – , – . Aarsleff routes Wordsworth’s indebtedness to Locke via Condillac. In Aarsleff’s account, Locke views the relation between signifier (word) and signified (object) as purely fortuitous; Condillac, in turn, sees this contingency as opening a space for creativity, where the artistic mind no longer adheres strictly to object reality. Wordsworth then seizes on the low register as a kind of “rectification,” using plain language to tether the hot-air balloon of imagination to the real world. Both Locke and Wordsworth, in my view, understand the gap of word and object as a problem, inherent in language, to be resisted. See also James McKusick, whose view of Wordsworth’s language-theory accepts Aarsleff’s descent from Locke via Condillac: James McKusick, Coleridge’s Philosophy of Language (New Haven: Yale University Press, ), –. . William Wordsworth, The Salisbury Plain Poems, ed. Stephen Gill (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, ), . One other poem is quoted from this volume: “Juvenilia XVIb.” . William Wordsworth, The Poems: Volume I, ed. John O. Hayden (New York: Penguin Books, ), . Other poems quoted from this volume include The Borderers, the second stanza to “There was a Boy,” “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” “Among all the lovely things my Love had seen,” “To a Highland Girl,” “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” and “Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle.” . Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . . Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, . . William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads: The Text of the  edition, with the additional  Poems and the Prefaces, ed. R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones (London: Routledge, ), – . Other materials quoted from this volume include the  and  prefaces, “The Old Cumberland Beggar,” “Michael,” and “Tintern Abbey.” . William Wordsworth, “The Ruined Cottage,” reproduced in Jonathan Wordsworth, The Music of Humanity: A Critical Study of Wordsworth’s “The Ruined Cottage,” Incorporating Texts from a Manuscript of  – (New York: Harper and Row, ),  –. . Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (New York: Collier Books, ), – . Compare Geoffrey Hartman, The Unremarkable Wordsworth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), . . Although Coleridge is more explicit and systematic than Wordsworth in using these terms, Wordsworth’s treatment of them, in the Preface and elsewhere, is consistent with the distinction I attribute to him. John Locke quotations come from the following edition: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, ), .

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Notes to Pages 38–42

. Compare Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (New York: Oxford University Press, ), ff. Also Percy Bysshe Shelley, “A Defense of Poetry,” Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York: W. W. Norton, ), –. The lines quoted from “Peter Bell the Third” also derive from this edition. . This is not, I recognize, how Wordsworth’s understanding of meter is usually read. He is usually taken to be saying either that meter is something superadded to the composition (and thus ornamental, not intrinsic to the matter of the poem), or that meter and subject matter interact in an organic way, producing the poem’s overall effect. If the first view seems too superficial (or accuses Wordsworth of superficiality), it is at least preferable to the latter, which reads Wordsworth back through Coleridgian theories of organic form. In defending Wordsworth against Coleridge (Coleridge’s famous attack on Wordsworth’s diction in the Biographia Literaria), they reduce Wordsworth to a lesser Coleridge. For typical examples of this view, see: Susan J. Wolfson, “Wordsworth’s Craft,” The Cambridge Companion to Wordsworth, ed. Stephen Gill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ),  –, and Brennan O’Donnell, The Passion of Meter: A Study of Wordsworth’s Metrical Art (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, ), –, – . . Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language, – (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), . . Ibid., , . John O. Hayden points out the connections to Tom Paine in his notes to Wordsworth’s Selected Prose (New York: Penguin, ), . James K. Chandler states the case for Wordsworth’s early conservatism in Wordsworth’s Second Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), xvii–xxi ff. David Bromwich argues that Wordsworth, for a period, was simultaneously a “revolutionary planner” and a “pious communitarian” in A Choice of Inheritance (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ), – . . The Diversions of Purley, with its fanciful etymologies inspired by Locke’s simple ideas, does have an empirical genesis. But calling Horne Tooke “philosophical” would mean stretching the word past any usefulness. See McKusick’s discussion in Coleridge’s Philosophy of Language,  – . . William Wordsworth, The Prelude (New York: W. W. Norton, ), –. Other poems quoted from this edition include the early draft of “There was a Boy” and the  edition of The Prelude. . Compare M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism (New York: W. W. Norton, ), . For a different view of Wordsworth’s reaction to despondency, see A. C. Bradley, “Wordsworth,” Oxford Lectures in Poetry (London: Macmillan, ), . Donald Davie is particularly perceptive on the relation between diction (freed from ordinary syntax) and antisocial feelings. Although his chief evidence is Ezra Pound, the observation applies here as well. Donald Davie, Purity of Diction in English Verse (New York: Schocken Books, ), – . . The complex manuscript history of “The Ruined Cottage” is studied in Jonathan Wordsworth, The Music of Humanity. For Wordsworth’s “Christianization” of the poem, see especially –. . William Wordsworth, “Notes and Illustrations of the Poems,” The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, vol. : Critical and Ethical, ed. Rev. Alexander B. Grosart (London: Edward Moxon, Son and Co., ), .

Notes to Pages 44–65

. Harold Bloom, introduction, William Wordsworth: Modern Critical Views, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, ), . . For a reading of these passages less skeptical about Wordsworth’s autobiographical myth, see Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, ), –. . In “Tintern Abbey” itself, he ascribes some experiences to his youth that he will later relegate more carefully to childhood. The myth is not yet worked through in all details. . The tendency to read Wordsworth as a follower of Hartley begins with Arthur Beatty, William Wordsworth: His Doctrine and Art in their Historical Relations (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, ), ff. For a dissenting view, see John O. Hayden, “Wordsworth, Hartley, and the Revisionists,” Studies in Philology  (): –. Also Martin Kallich, The Association of Ideas and Critical Theory in Eighteenth- Century England (The Hague: Mouton, ), ff. Hayden and Kallich question a direct descent from Hartley, seeing a stronger influence by other associationist psychologists. . David Hartley, Observations on Man, vol.  (London: S. Richardson, ),  –ff. . Geoffrey Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry – (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ), . . For a clear presentation of the case, see Bromwich, A Choice of Inheritance, . . A. D. Nuttall, A Common Sky (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), . Compare Paul de Man, “Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image,” The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, ), – . A more recent representative of this line of thought is Ashton Nichols, The Poetics of Epiphany (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, ), – . A good account of this line of criticism is offered in M. H. Abrams, “Two Roads to Wordsworth,” The Correspondent Breeze: Essays on English Romanticism (New York: W. W. Norton, ), – . . Compare de Man, “Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image,” –. See also Frederick A. Pottle, “The Eye and the Object,” William Wordsworth: Modern Critical Views, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, ), –. . Compare Michael Baron, Language and Relationship in Wordsworth’s Writing (London: Longman, ), –, . See also Marjorie Latta Barstow, Wordsworth’s Theory of Poetic Diction (New Haven: Yale University Press, ), xii–xiv, . J. P. Ward also opines that Wordsworth’s interest in the “real language of men” was confined to a brief period in his career.” See Wordsworth’s Language of Men (Sussex: Harvester Press, ), . . Giambattista Vico, The New Science, trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Frisch (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ), –. See also Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, – . . Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, . See also Barstow, Wordsworth’s Theory of Poetic Diction, –. . Compare Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp,  – . See, in the same text, Abrams’s discussion of Wordsworth’s “uniformitarianism,” . . Compare Bromwich, A Choice of Inheritance,  – . . Compare Hartman’s discussion of Book VI of The Prelude in Wordsworth’s Poetry, ff. Compare also Abrams’s discussion of “greater romantic lyric” in “Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric,” The Correspondent Breeze: Essays on English Romanticism (New York: W. W. Norton, ), –

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Notes to Pages 65–74

. Bradley, “Wordsworth,” . Also consider Abrams, “Two Roads to Wordsworth,” – . . Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry, . For the two block quotations: xiii–iv and . . Sigmund Freud, “Das Unheimliche,” Studies in Parapsychology, trans. Alix Strachey (New York: Collier Books, ),  – . Lengthy accounts of Wordsworth’s anticipation of Freud (differing in approach and emphasis from mine) may be found in: Cathy Caruth, Empirical Truths and Critical Fictions (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ), –; and Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ), –. . This quality of active perception is analyzed elegantly (with a close attention to details of imagery) in Pottle, “The Eye and the Object,” ff. . Compare Geoffrey Hartman, “The Romance of Nature and the Negative Way,” William Wordsworth: Modern Critical Views, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, ). . William Wordsworth, “Essays on Epitaphs,” Selected Prose, ed. John O. Hayden (New York: Penguin, ), . . Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (New York: Oxford University Press, ), ; John Stuart Mill, “Thoughts on Poetry and its Varieties,” Autobiography and Literary Essays, ed. John Robson and Jack Stillinger (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, ), . . Francis Jeffrey, review of Robert Southey’s Thalaba, in Jeffrey’s Criticism: A Selection, ed. Peter F. Morgan (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, ), –; Thomas de Quincey, “On Wordsworth’s Poetry,” De Quincey: The Collected Writings, vol.  , ed. David Masson (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, ), . . William Hazlitt, “Mr. Wordsworth,” Selected Essays, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (New York: Random House, ), –; William Hazlitt, “On the Living Poets,” The Collected Works of William Hazlitt, vol. , ed. A. R. Waller and Arnold Glover (London: J. M. Dent, ), . . Matthew Arnold, “Wordsworth,” Selected Prose, ed. P. J. Keating (New York: Penguin, ), . CHAPTER 3. CERTAIN GOOD

. W. B. Yeats, The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. Richard J. Finneran, nd ed. (New York: Simon and Schuster, ), . All quotations of Yeats’s poetry are from this edition. . Compare W. B. Yeats, Memoirs, ed. and transcribed Denis Donoghue (New York: Macmillan, ), –. Recent biographies have been less reticent than classic accounts by Richard Ellmann and Norman Jeffares about Yeats’s relation to Gonne, the militant nationalist, and (largely unrequited) love of Yeats’s early career. See Brenda Maddox, Yeats’s Ghosts (New York: Harper Collins, ), – , – . Also: R. F. Foster, W. B. Yeats, A Life: Part I: The Apprentice Mage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), – , – . . Randall Jarrell, “The Development of Yeats’s Sense of Reality,” Southern Review  (– ): – . For another version of this account, see Richard Ellmann, The Identity of

Notes to Pages 75–90

Yeats (New York: Oxford University Press, ), –; see also T. R. Henn, “The Green Helmet and Responsibilities,” in An Honoured Guest: New Essays on W. B. Yeats, ed. Denis Donoghue and J. R. Mulryne (New York: St. Martin’s, ), – . . W. B. Yeats, Autobiographies (New York: Macmillan, ), . . W. B. Yeats, Essays and Introductions (New York: Macmillan, ), –. . David Bromwich, A Choice of Inheritance (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ), . Compare Paul de Man, “Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image,” The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, ), –. . W. B. Yeats, letter to Frank Fay,  August , The Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. Allan Wade (New York: Macmillan, ), ; W. B. Yeats, letter to George Russell,  May , Letters, ed. Wade, . . Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks (New York: Macmillan, ), . . W. B. Yeats, “The Adoration of the Magi,” Mythologies (New York: Simon and Schuster, ), . For Yeats’s quarrel with the lingua communis, as well as the language of contemporary journalism, see Linda Dowling, Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siècle (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, ), x–xi,  –, –, . . Walter Pater, “Wordsworth,” Appreciations (New York: Macmillan, ), , . . Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks, –. . W. B. Yeats, letter to George Russell, May , Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. Wade, . . W. B. Yeats, letter to J. B. Yeats,  December , Letters, ed. Wade, ; Denis Donoghue, introduction, Memoirs, by W. B. Yeats (New York: Macmillan, ), . . W. B. Yeats, letter to George Russell, April , Letters, ed. , . For approaches to the misogyny of modernism, see: Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ), especially the chapter “Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism’s Other”; also Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ). . A. Norman Jeffares, W. B. Yeats: Man and Poet (New Haven: Yale University Press, ),  –. See also Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life,  – . . W. B. Yeats, letter to J. B. Yeats,  February , Letters, ed. Wade, . For Yeats’s changing relation to his father, see Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks, –. . Compare Ian Fletcher, “Rhythm and Pattern in Autobiographies,” An Honoured Guest: New Essays on W. B. Yeats, ed. Denis Donoghue and J. R. Mulryne (New York: St. Martin’s, ),  –. . Seamus Deane, “Yeats and the Idea of Revolution,” Yeats’s Political Identities: Selected Essays, ed. Jonathan Allison (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, ), . . W. B. Yeats, letter to the editor of the Daily Chronicle,  January , Letters, ed. Wade, . An influential account of the way the avant-garde sought to establish an autonomous position for itself over against the middle class is offered in: Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, ), –. Bourdieu is looking at France in the mid-nineteenth century, but the mechanisms he describes were adopted (later) by British aesthetes as well. . Yeats’s gesture anticipates, in its motives and consequences, Eliot’s (and Pound’s) doctrine of “impersonality,” which I discuss in the next chapter. . Compare Yeats, Autobiographies, .

191

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Notes to Pages 91–106

. W. B. Yeats, “Per Amica Silentia Lunae,” Mythologies (New York: Simon and Schuster, ), . . William Wordsworth, The Two-Part Prelude of , ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (New York: W. W. Norton, ), . . W. B. Yeats, “Pages from a Diary Written in Nineteen Hundred and Thirty,” Explorations (New York: Macmillan, ), , . . Compare F. O. Matthiessen, “The Crooked Road,” Southern Review  (–): – . . Jonathan Swift, “A Letter to a Young Clergyman” (), Theories of Style, ed. Lane Cooper (New York: Burt Franklin, ), . . Compare Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks, . . T. S. Eliot, “The Poetry of W. B. Yeats,” Southern Review  (– ): ; Harold Bloom, Yeats (New York: Oxford University Press, ), . . Compare Paul de Man’s discussion of self and soul, in “Lyric and Modernity,” Blindness and Insight (New York: Oxford University Press, ),  –. See also Ellmann, The Identity of Yeats,  –. . Maddox, Yeats’s Ghosts, – . . Bloom, Yeats, v. . John Keats, letter to J. H. Reynolds,  February , The Letters of John Keats, ed. Robert Gittings (New York: Oxford University Press, ), . . Charles Altieri is particularly insightful about this aspect of the Victorians’ inheritance from Keats in: Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ),  – . . W. B. Yeats, letter to J. B. Yeats,  March , Letters, ed. Wade, . . John Keats, “Hyperion: A Fragment,” Complete Poems, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ), . Subsequent references are to this edition. . Jack Stillinger, notes, John Keats: Complete Poems (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ), ; Paul Fry, e-mail to the author,  December . . Ibid. . John Keats, letter to Richard Woodhouse,  October , The Letters of John Keats, ed. Gittings, –. . I purposely avoid a long discussion of A Vision. It has little relevance, finally, for the main line of my argument. By reading the work as an elaborate dodge of modern psychology, I am in a long tradition of critics receiving it as a mirror of their own prejudices. Northrop Frye is most interested in its large, mythico-cyclical aspects, dismissing Yeats’s minute classifications of human personality (the aspect of A Vision that most arrests my attention) as incidental. See Northrop Frye, “The Rising of the Moon,” An Honoured Guest: New Essays on W. B. Yeats, ed. Denis Donoghue and J. R. Mulryne (New York: St. Martin’s, ), – . See also characteristic discussions by Helen Vendler, in Yeats’s Vision and the Later Plays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ); and Frank Kermode, in The Sense of an Ending (New York: Oxford University Press), . . Compare R. F. Foster’s account of Yeats’s role as “national poet” in: “Protestant Magic: W. B. Yeats and the Spell of Irish History,” Yeats’s Political Identities: Selected Essays, ed. Jonathan Allison (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, ), –. The debate

Notes to Pages 106–125

over Yeats’s political allegiances and the extent of his attraction to Fascism is well-covered in Allison’s collection. An influential argument for the prosecution is made by Conor Cruise O’Brien, in “Passion and Cunning: An Essay in the Politics of W. B. Yeats,” –  (excerpted by Allison). See also Deane, “Yeats and the Idea of Revolution.” A prominent defender is Elizabeth Cullingford, in “From Democracy to Authority,” –. . Bloom, Yeats, . Marjorie Howes, “Family Values: Gender, Sexuality, and Crisis in Yeats’s Anglo-Irish Ascendancy,” Yeats’s Political Identities: Selected Essays, ed. Allison, . . W. B. Yeats, a draft of “A Prayer for My Daughter,” Michael Robartes and the Dancer: Manuscript Materials, ed. Thomas Parkinson with Anne Brannen (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, ), . Subsequent references are to this edition. . W. B. Yeats, A Vision (New York: Macmillan, ), . Compare Ellmann’s discussion of “phase ” in Yeats: The Man and the Masks, –. An interesting defense of Yeats in this line is offered by R. P. Blackmur in “Between Myth and Philosophy: Fragments of W. B. Yeats,” Southern Review  (–):  – . . First quotation: Kermode, The Sense of an Ending,  –. Second quotation: George Orwell, “W. B. Yeats,” Dickens, Dali and Others: Studies in Popular Culture (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, ), –. . One of the most notable (and early) exceptions is Arthur Mizener. See his incisive critique of Yeats’s simplicity in “The Romanticism of W. B. Yeats,” Southern Review  (–): – . . Yeats, A Vision,  –. . W. H. Auden, “The Public v. the Late Mr. William Butler Yeats,” The English Auden: Poems, Essays, and Dramatic Writings –, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Random House, ), . . Bloom, Yeats, . I do not intend here to misrepresent Bloom’s view of the poem. His reading also takes more into account than Yeats’s social prejudices. . For example, W. B. Yeats, letter to J. B. Yeats,  January , Letters, ed. Wade,  –. . W. B. Yeats, “An Image from a Past Life,” Collected Poems, . For earlier examples of this topos, see Yeats, “The Wanderings of Oisin,” Collected Poems, ; or Mythologies, , . . W. B. Yeats, letter to Lady Elizabeth Pelham,  January , Letters, ed. Wade, . CHAPTER 4. THE LOST YOUTH OF MODERN POETRY

. W. H. Auden, Collected Poems (New York: Vintage Books, ), – . All subsequent references marked CP are to this edition. . On “High” Modernism as a reaction by social and intellectual elites against an insurgent mass culture, see Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ), especially the chapters “The Hidden Dialectic: Avant-Garde—Technology—Mass Culture” and “Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism’s Other.” Also John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia (London: Faber and Faber, ), and Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, ); and Jameson, Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist (Berkeley: University of

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Notes to Pages 125–130

.

.

.

. . .

.

California Press, ), esp. “The Jaundiced Eye” (–). Raymond Williams treats Modernism as a larger cultural phenomenon linked to late-nineteenth-century urbanism, in The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, ), – . Important studies tracing the origins of Modernism in nineteenth-century philosophy include Michael Levenson, A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine  – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ); Judith Ryan, The Vanishing Subject: Early Psychology and Literary Modernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ); and Frank Lentricchia, Modernist Quartet (New York: Cambridge University Press, ). John Keats, letter to J. H. Reynolds,  February , The Letters of John Keats, ed. Robert Gittings (New York: Oxford University Press, ), . Compare: Charles Altieri, Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry: The Contemporaneity of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –. Altieri discusses a late-Victorian “crisis of recommendation,” in which Romantic claims to “radical subjectivity” were inevitably ironized by a counterideal “of intellectual judgement [which required] it to treat all human actions as if they were subjective to exhaustive third person descriptions.” High Modern abstraction, in Altieri’s view, emerged as a strategy for circumventing this subjective-objective bind. For a discussion (contrasting to mine) of modernism’s hostility to psychology, see Martin Jay, “Modernism and the Spectre of Psychologism,” Modernism/ Modernity  ():  –. Where I see the modernists’ hostility emerging from feelings of social vulnerability, Jay detects a philosophical discomfort: psychology, by concentrating on the “historical,” individual mind, was inevitably relativistic. The modernists, in his account, sought refuge in philosophical objectivity. First poem: T. S. Eliot, Poems Written in Early Youth, ed. Valerie Eliot (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ), , . Second poem: T. S. Eliot, Inventions of the March Hare, ed. Christopher Ricks (New York: Harcourt, Brace, ), . All subsequent references marked MH are to this edition. For an account of Eliot’s arrival at Harvard, see Lyndall Gordon, Eliot’s Early Years (New York: Oxford University Press, ), – . See also Robert Crawford, Devolving English Literature, nd ed. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, ),  –. According to Crawford, Eliot’s provincialism was almost wholly beneficial: it allowed him a vantage point simultaneously outside and inside the sophisticated culture of Boston (and later London). The hybrid nature of his poetry, at once “primitive” and “cosmopolitan,” is an outgrowth of this position. Compare Eric Sigg, The American T. S. Eliot: A Study of the Early Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ),  –. T. S. Eliot, “Song,” Poems Written in Early Youth, . W. B. Yeats, The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. Richard J. Finneran, nd ed. (New York: Simon and Schuster, ), . T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Complete Plays and Poems – (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, ), . All subsequent references marked CPP are to this edition. Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (New York: E. P. Dutton, ), , . All subsequent references marked SML are to this edition. For an account of Symons’s influence on the young Eliot, see Gordon, Eliot’s Early Years, – . See also Christopher

Notes to Pages 130–133

. .

.

.

.

.

. .

Ricks, notes, Inventions of the March Hare, by T. S. Eliot (New York: Harcourt, Brace, ), . Arthur Symons, “A Winter Night,” The Collected Works of Arthur Symons, vol.  (London: Martin Secker, ), . Compare Levenson, Genealogy of Modernism, –. I suspect that Eliot’s equanimity before the collapse of symbolism is at least partly a function of his being an American. Though his conservatism is often aligned with that of Yeats, the difference is particularly clear here. Yeats, faced with the end of symbolism, aimed to recover what had been lost; Eliot was able to reestablish poetry on fundamentally new premises, with practically no nostalgia for Romantic vision. See my comments about Clark and Poirier in the introduction. I follow Poirier in reading Eliot’s concept of “tradition” as essentially a pragmatic gesture, geared toward the needs of the present and the future. Perhaps the Eliot of “Progress” was not entirely left behind. See T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, ), ; and Richard Poirier, Poetry and Pragmatism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ),  –. Hugh Underhill, The Problem of Consciousness in Modern Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . Compare Williams’s discussion of modern urban consciousness, pages –. See also Williams, Culture and Society,  – (New York: Columbia University Press, ), esp. “Marxism and Culture,”  –. Eliot’s remarks about Yeats may be found in: T. S. Eliot, “Yeats,” Selected Prose (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ), . All subsequent references marked SProse are to this edition. On several subsequent occasions I note that Eliot, while talking about someone else, is mostly thinking of himself. I take my warrant from Eliot’s comments in “The Music of Poetry”: “The critical writings of poets . . . owe a great deal of their interest to the fact that the poet, at the back of his mind, if not as his ostensible purpose, is always trying to defend the kind of poetry that he is writing, or to formulate the kind that he wants to write” (Selected Prose ). Ryan’s The Vanishing Subject provides a useful history of this interest, tracing the influence of pre-Freudian, experimental psychology (Ernst Mach, William James) on a broad range of modernist techniques, notably interior monologue. The focus is on Continental (Hofmannsthal, Rilke) as well as English and American modernisms. Levenson, Genealogy of Modernism, . Levenson is quoting Joseph Conrad’s preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus (New York: Doubleday, Page, ), vii; Ford Madox Ford, Critical Writings of Ford Madox Ford, ed. Frank MacShane (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, ), . See also Levenson, Genealogy of Modernism,  –. I am purposely avoiding the tendency to read Eliot’s poetry as an extension of his philosophical work, in particular his dissertation on F. H. Bradley. I am doing so not because these linkages do not exist, but because his concerns as a poet can easily be lost in the more abstract intellectual problems of his philosophy. For an account of his relation to Bradley, see Hugh Kenner, “Bradley,” T. S. Eliot: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Hugh Kenner (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, ), – . Ezra Pound, “The Prose Tradition in Verse,” Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, ), –. Ford, Critical Writings, . Levenson, Genealogy of Modernism, , .

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Notes to Pages 134–138

. This is not to say that the belief is not widespread. In different ways, Levenson, Jay, Altieri, and Marjorie Perloff (see note ) accept the claims of Pound and Hulme (and later Olson, the Objectivists and the Language Poets) that such an untainted poetry (objective and abstract) is possible. The very fact that the Modernists believed it with such vehemence, however, might well be a caution for subsequent critics. . J. Hillis Miller gives a clear account, more theological in bent than mine, of how pressing this need to justify consciousness was. See Poets of Reality: Six Twentieth-Century Writers (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ), –. Compare Underhill, The Problem of Consciousness in Modern Poetry, –. Underhill’s discussion of the “inward revolution” begins with D. H. Lawrence’s contention that “consciousness is an end in itself” (Apocalypse [London: Granada, ], ). . Eliot is discussing John Donne, and only reflexively himself. . Ezra Pound, “The Rest,” Selected Poems (New York: New Directions, ),  –. . For a perceptive reading of Eliot in this mood see Richard Poirier, “The Difficulties of Modernism and the Modernism of Difficulty,” Critical Essays on American Modernism, ed. Michael J. Hoffmann and Patrick D. Murphy (New York: Hall, ), –. One suspects that Eliot’s attraction to the poetry of Jules Laforgue could only have been enhanced by Symons’s calling him “the eternally grown up, mature to the point of self-negation” (The Symbolist Movement, – ). Verlaine, a high-Romantic “child” (), would have had less appeal. Levenson notes that certain modern novelists, among them Conrad and (especially) Ford, consciously adopted “childlike” poses to set themselves off from their “earnest” and “adult” Victorian predecessors. Levenson, Genealogy of Modernism, –. . Compare Marjorie Perloff, “Postmodernism and the impasse of lyric,” The Dance of the Intellect: Studies in the Poetry of the Pound Tradition (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, ), –. Where Perloff identifies some of these features as constituting a radical break from Romantic lyric (her central figure is Pound), I see their development in Eliot as continuous with Romantic questions of subjectivity. See also my discussion in the introduction. . The sense of self is weakened. I would not go so far as to claim that the subject disappears entirely. See Ryan (note , above); and Levenson, Genealogy of Modernism, . Compare Kenner, “Bradley,” – , regarding Eliot’s debt here to Bradley. For a classic discussion of the relation between Romantic imagination and lyric form, see: “Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric,” The Correspondent Breeze: Essays on English Romanticism (New York: W. W. Norton, ), –. . Ronald Schuchard discusses the theme of terror in Eliot, in “Eliot and the Horrific Moment,” Southern Review . (October ),  –. . This replacement of diction by syntax is anticipated by Yeats. In his “A General Introduction for my Work,” he comments: “I tried to make the language of poetry coincide with that of passionate, normal speech. [However,] I discovered some twenty years ago that I must seek, not as Wordsworth thought, words in common use, but a powerful and passionate syntax.” W. B. Yeats, Essays and Introductions (New York: Macmillan, ), – . On the question of allegory, see Gordon Teskey, Allegory and Violence (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, ),  –. Teskey is very convincing about the way

Notes to Pages 139–148

a medieval allegorical order is replaced after the Enlightenment by symbolism; the collapse of symbolism, I would add, results in an ironic return to allegory. See also Peter Nicholls, Modernisms: A Literary Guide (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), –. . Compare Anthony Julius’s reading of these details in T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –. . Ibid., –. See also Christopher Ricks’s defense in T. S. Eliot and Prejudice (London: Faber and Faber, ),  –. . Julius, T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form, . . Compare Edward Mendelson’s discussion in Early Auden (New York: Viking Press, ),  – . . Clive James, “Farewelling Auden,” At the Pillars of Hercules (London: Faber and Faber, ), . James is paraphrasing, more felicitously, an observation made by John Bayley in The Romantic Survival (London: Constable and Company, ), ; George Orwell, “Inside the Whale,” A Collection of Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace, ), ; F. R. Leavis, untitled review, W. H. Auden: The Critical Heritage, ed. John Haffenden (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, ), ; Allen Tate, untitled review, W. H. Auden: The Critical Heritage, ed. John Haffenden (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, ), ; Stephen Spender, “W. H. Auden and His Poetry,” Auden: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Monroe K. Spears (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, ), . . Edward Mendelson, introduction, W. H. Auden: Selected Poems (New York: Vintage Books, ), xii. For a very different view of Auden as allegorist, see John G. Blair, The Poetic Art of W. H. Auden (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, ),  –. . Samuel Hynes, The Auden Generation (London: The Bodley Head, ),. Hynes applies this generalization to much of English literature in the late s. . Randall Jarrell, “Changes of Attitude and Rhetoric in Auden’s Poetry,” The Third Book of Criticism (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ), . . Katherine Bucknell, introduction, W. H. Auden: Juvenilia (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, ), xxii. Also compare Mendelson’s account of the shape of Auden’s career in his introduction to The English Auden, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Random House, ), xiii. . W. H. Auden, “Thomas Prologizes,” W. H. Auden: Juvenilia, ed. Katherine Bucknell (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, ), . All subsequent references marked Juv are to this edition. . A connection made by Katherine Bucknell in a note to a related poem, “The Road’s Your Place.” Bucknell, notes, W. H. Auden: Juvenilia (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, ), . . Ibid., –. . Ibid., –; Mendelson, Early Auden, . Auden’s somewhat veiled account of these years is visible in his “Letter to a Wound,” written in , and included in The Orators (English Auden –). See also Bucknell’s account. Katherine Bucknell, introduction, “Fantasy and Reality in Poetry,” by W. H. Auden, In Solitude, for Company: W. H. Auden after , Auden Studies , ed. Katherine Bucknell and Nicholas Jenkins (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), –. Jarrell’s account of the influence of Auden’s sexuality on his poetry is also

197

198

Notes to Pages 149–164

helpful. Randall Jarrell, “Freud to Paul: The Stages of Auden’s Ideology,” The Third Book of Criticism (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ), –. . An inference drawn by Mendelson from Auden’s decision “to make it the centerpiece of the  and  editions of Poems.” Mendelson, Early Auden, . . W. H. Auden, untitled poem, Selected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Vintage Books, ). . The biographical information is supplied by John Fuller in W. H. Auden: A Commentary (London: Faber and Faber, ), . For a more exhaustive account of Auden in Berlin, see Humphrey Carpenter, W. H. Auden: A Biography (London: George Allen and Unwin, ),  –. . As several commentators have noted, when Auden says that he “was pleased” at reports of police atrocities, it is unclear whether he was eagerly anticipating a leftist revolution or angrily distancing himself from his friend’s politics. . Fuller, W. H. Auden: A Commentary, – . . Bucknell, introduction, W. H. Auden: Juvenilia, xxii. . Fuller, W. H. Auden: A Commentary, . . Compare Yeats’s lines in “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen”: “Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare / Rides upon sleep” (Collected Poems, ). . W. H. Auden, “Poetry, Poets and Taste,” The English Auden, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Random House, ), . . Fuller allegorizes them as “pathic figures of confident sexuality” (W. H. Auden: A Commentary, ); Mendelson sees them as figures of “pride” (Early Auden, ). . W. H. Auden, “Squares and Oblongs,” Poets at Work: Essays Based on the Modern Poetry Collection of the Lockwood Memorial Library, University of Buffalo (New York: Harcourt, Brace, ), ; W. H. Auden, “Writing,” The Dyer’s Hand (New York: Random House, ), . All references marked DH are to this edition. . Randall Jarrell, “Poetry in a Dry Season,” Kipling, Auden and Co: Essays and Reviews,  –  (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ), . Originally published in The Partisan Review (March–April, ); James, “Farewelling Auden,” , ; Mendelson, Early Auden, xv, xxiii. . Jarrell, “Freud to Paul,”  –. For Auden’s attraction to Lane’s theories, see: Carpenter, W. H. Auden: A Biography,  – . . George Orwell, “Inside the Whale,” . . The quotations come, respectively, from “Domesday Song” (January ) and “Memorial for the City” (). . Richard Ohmann, “Auden’s Sacred Awe,” Auden: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Monroe K. Spears (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, ), . . “September , ,” Selected Poems, ed. Mendelson,  –. Auden later expunged this poem from his canon. It does not appear in the Collected Poems. The reasons he gave (in a foreword to the first edition of B. C. Bloomfield’s bibliography of his work: “Rereading a poem of mine, st September, , after it had been published, I came to the line ‘We must love one another or die’ and said to myself: ‘That’s a damned lie! We must die anyway.’ So, in the next edition, I altered it to ‘We must love one another and die.’ This didn’t seem to do either, so I cut the stanza. Still no good. The whole poem, I realized, was in-

Notes to Pages 164–180

fected with an incurable dishonesty—and must be scrapped” (quoted in Fuller, W. H. Auden: A Commentary, ). See also Mendelson’s discussion of this revision in “‘We are Changed by What We Change’: The Power Politics of Auden’s Revisions,” Romanic Review . (May ): – . . Fuller suggests that “folded lie” could refer (literally) to a newspaper. Fuller, W. H. Auden: A Commentary, . . W. H. Auden, The Double Man (New York: Random House, ), . . The word “Enlightenment” is Auden’s own, from later in the elegy. For a wider discussion of this element in Auden’s work, see Richard Johnson, “Auden and the Art of Clarification,” Yale Review . (June ):  – . . W. H. Auden, “Phantasy and Reality in Poetry,” In Solitude, for Company: W. H. Auden after , Auden Studies , ed. Katherine Bucknell and Nicholas Jenkins (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), . . Urmutterfurcht: primal fear of the mother. Weibliche: feminine, as in “Das Ewig-Weibliche / Zieht uns hinan” (“The eternal feminine draws us upward”), the last lines of Faust II. The “Mothers” also appear in Faust II, ancient figures shrouded in mystery. The longer German quote is cobbled together from different parts of Siegfried, act : “O, your mother will never return to you. You yourself am I, your love and obligation, though it break my image.” . W. H. Auden, “Phantasy and Reality in Poetry,”  –. . For an admiring account of Auden’s later stylistic changes, see Robert Bloom, “The Humanization of Auden’s Early Style,” PMLA  ():  –. . Compare Bayley, The Romantic Survival,  –. . Although comparisons might be drawn to Wittgenstein’s later philosophy of language, I suspect that the modern poets come to this position on their own. . Each of these figures can be understood as a plain-stylist, though the American tradition they draw on differs in important details from the mainly British arc I have been tracing. . W. B. Yeats, A Vision (New York: Macmillan, ),  –. . George Orwell, “W. B. Yeats,” Dickens, Dali and Others: Studies in Popular Culture (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, ), –; W. H. Auden, “The Public v. the Late Mr. William Butler Yeats,” The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings –, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Random House, ), . . George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,” A Collection of Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace, ), .

199

Index

Aarsleff, Hans, ,  Abrams, M. H., , , ,  Adamic language theories,  –, , , –,  Adorno, Theodor W.,  aestheticism, , ,  allegory, , , , , , ,  Amis, Kingsley,  amnesia, , , , ,  Anglican Church, ,  anti-Semitism, ,  archaisms, , , , ,  aristocracy, , ; art associated with, –; Yeats and, , , , , ,  Arnold, Matthew, , , , , ,  associationism, –, , ,  Auden, W. H., –, –,  –, , ; autobiography and, , –; changes in poetic style of, , ,

 –, –, , ; Christian reconversion of, , ,  –, ; civil vs. vatic poetry and, , , ; community and, , , , ; critical comment on, –, ,  – , , , ; on democratic style, ; early poetry of, –, , ; Eliot and, , , , , , , , , ; emigration to America of, , –, ; emotional equilibrium and, –; fatalism and, , , , , , , ; Freudianism and, , –; guilt and, , ; homosexuality of, , , , , ; humanism and, , –; later poetry of, ; love and, , ; maturity and, –, , –, , , , , ; memory and, , ; middle style of, , , ; moral judgment and, –; necessi201

202

Index

Auden, W. H. (continued ) tarianism and, –, , , – ; plain English and, , , , – , –, –; politics and, , –, ; psychological myth and, ,  –, –,  –, ; psychology and, , , , – , –, –, , , ; suffering and, , , , , ; visionary low register and, , ,  – , ; Wordsworthian poetry and, –, , , , , , , ; Yeats and, , , , , ; works of: “Allendale,” , ; “Archaeology,” ; Dyer’s Hand, The, ; “Get there if you can,” ; “Homage to Clio,”  –; “In Memory of Sigmund Freud,” ; Juvenilia,  –, ; “Lead’s the Best,” ; “Letter to a Wound,” n; “Mill, Hempstead, The,” , ; “Miss Gee,” –; New Year Letter,  –, , , ; “,” –, , , , , ; “Ode to Terminus,” ; “Old Colliery, The,” ; “Old Lead-Mine, The,”  –, , , , ; Orators, The, n; “Phantasy and Reality in Poetry,” –; “Psychology and Art To-day,” ; Selected Prose,  –; “September , ,” , –; “Spain,” –, , ; “Tarn, The,” –; “Thomas Prologizes,” ; untitled poem, –; “Venus Will Now Say a Few Words,” ; “Watershed, The,” –,  –, , , , , ; “Writing,”  Auerbach, Erich,  Augustan style, , , ,  authenticity, –,  autobiographical myth: Auden and, , , –; implications of, ; Wordsworth and, , , , – , , , , , , , – , , , ,

, ; Yeats and, , , – , , , , , , , . See also childhood avant-garde, ,  Ayers, Michael, ,  Bacon, Francis, – , , , , n Baugh, Albert, ,  Being and Becoming, Auden and, –  Bergson, Henri-Louis,  Bernstein, Charles,  Bible, ; plain English and, ,  Blair, Hugh, – ; Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres,  Blair, Robert,  Blake, William, ,  blank verse, ,  –, ,  Bloom, Harold, , , , , , ,  bourgeoisie. See middle class Boyle, Robert, , , n Bradley, A. C., ,  Bradley, F. H., n, n Browning, Robert,  Brutus, Dennis,  Buber, Martin, I and Thou,  Bucknell, Katherine,  Burke, Edmund, ,  Burns, Robert, ,  Carey, John,  Cervantes, Miguel,  Charles II, king of England,  Cheke, Sir John, ,  childhood: associationist psychology and, ; Auden and,  –; Eliot’s revisit to, , ; Wordsworth and, , ,  –, , , , – , , ,  Christianity, , , , ,  Cicero,  civil poetry: Auden and, , ; vatic poetry vs.,  clarity, , , , 

Index

Clark, T. J.,  class. See social class classical model, , , ,  Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, , , ,  – , , , , , , n; Biographia Literaria, ; “Frost at Midnight,” ; lingua communis and, , ,  communication, –, , , – ; reasons for failure in, ,  community, , , ,  Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de, n confessional poetry,  Conrad, Joseph, , n; Secret Agent, The,  consciousness: associationist account of, –; Auden and, , , , , –, , ,  –; cultural theory and, –, ; Eliot and, , , , –, –, , ; Keats and, ; Locke and,  –; Modernism and, –; poetic characteristics of, , , ; post-Wordsworth discussion of, –; propaganda and, –; self vs. multiple, –; as transpersonal, ; visionary moment and, ; Wordsworth and, ,  –, ,  conservatism, , , , , , , n constructivism,  conventionalism,  conversational mode, ,  Coole Park, , , ,  craft, poetry as a, – , ,  Crane, Hart, ,  Cullingford, Elizabeth,  Dante,  Davidson, John, –  Davie, Donald,  deconstruction,  demagoguery, 

de Man, Paul, ,  democratic style, ,  democratic theory, , – De Quincey, Thomas,  dialect,  diction: Auden and, ; class and, ; connotative value of, ; correlation of mature mind with, ; democracy and, , ; Locke and, , ; ornate, – , ; power of, –, ; truthfulness and,  – , , ; Wordsworth and, , , , , , , , , , –, ; Yeats and, , , , , , , – , , . See also plain English; syntax Donoghue, Denis, ,  double signification,  –  Dowling, Linda,  Dowson, Ernest, –  Dryden, John,  egotistical sublime, ,  Eliot, T. S., , , – , –, ; antiSemitism of, , ; as Auden influence, , , , , , , , ; class and, , , ; Conrad as influence on, ; consciousness and, , , , –, –, , ; criticism by, , , , , ; distaste for psychology of, , , , , , ; early vs. later works of, –, ; “emotion recollected in tranquility” concept and, , ; exceptionalism and, , , ; impersonality and, ,  –, , , , , , –; influence of,  –, ; language and, , ; literary revolution and, ; malaise and, , , ; maturity and, ,  –, , ; personal experience and, , –, ; plain English and, , , , , ; poetic transformation of, , ; Symons’s appeal to, , , ;

203

204

Index

Eliot, T. S. (continued ) virtuosity of, ; Wordsworth and, , , , ; on Yeats, , ; works of: “At Graduation, ,” , , ; “Aunt Helen,” ; “Convictions (Curtain Raiser),”  –, ; “Dry Salvages, The,” ; “Embarquement pour Cythère,” ; “Fourth Caprice in Montparnasse,” , ; “Gerontion,” –, ; “Interlude in London,” ; Inventions of the March Hare, , –, , ; “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The,” , , ; “Metaphysical Poets, The,” , ; Poems Written in Early Youth, ; “Portrait of a Lady,” , ; “Preludes,” ; Prufrock and Other Observations, ; “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” ; “Silence,” ; “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” ; Waste Land, The, , , ; “Winter Night, A,”  Ellmann, Richard, , ,  empiricism, – , , ; Locke and, , , , ; psychology and, ; Wordsworth and,  –  Engels, Friedrich,  “Epistle” to the Shepheardes Calender (E. K.),  Erasmus, Desiderius, Ciceronianus,  exceptionalism, , , , , , , ; vatic poetry and,  experience: ideas and,  –, ; immediate vs. later interpretation of, –,  expressionism,  Fascism, , ,  fatalism, , , , , , ,  Fenwick, Isabella,  Fielding, Henry,  figural writing, , , , . See also metaphor first-person voice, 

First World War,  Ford, Ford Madox, , , n foreign borrowings, – foreign phrases, ,  free indirect discourse,  French language, , – French literature, ,  French theories of language,  Freud, Sigmund, , , , , –; “Unheimliche, Das,”  Frost, Robert, , , ,  Fry, Paul, ,  Frye, Northrop, n Fuller, John, ,  Godwinism, ,  Goethe, Johann Wolgang von, ; Faust,  Gonne, Iseult,  Gonne, Maud, , , , , , , , , ,  Gray, Thomas, ,  Gregory, Augusta, Lady, ,  Gregory, Robert,  Hardy, Thomas, , , , ,  Hare, John,  Hartley, David, – , – , , , ; Observations on Man, ,  Hartman, Geoffrey, , , –  Harvard College, , , ,  Hazlitt, William, ; Spirit of the Age, The,  H.D.,  Hejinian, Lyn,  Hesse, Eva,  High Modernism, , , , , ,  –n; truthfulness of plain English and, , ; as vatic poetry,  High Victorian poets, , ,  Hobbes, Thomas, , n homosexuality, , , , ,  honesty. See truthfulness

Index

Howes, Marjorie, , ,  Hulme, T. E.,  humanism, , – humans: Auden’s view of, –, , , , , , ; distortions of language by, ; psychological developmental models and, , – ; unique language ability of, , ; Wordsworth’s view of,  Hume, David,  Husserl, Edmund,  Huyssen, Andreas,  Hyde-Lees, Georgie,  Hynes, Samuel, , ,  hypotaxis, , ,  idealization,  ideas: double conformity of, , ,  – , , ; innate,  – ; words as signifying, –, ,  identity. See consciousness images, –; Auden and, , , , , –, , ; Eliot and, , ; plain English and, ; twofold nature of, – , ; words conveying, , , ; Wordsworth and, , , ,  – , , , , ; Yeats and, – , –, ,  imagination, , , , , , ; childhood and, , ; Locke and, , ; plain English and, ,  –, ,  – ; post-Wordsworthian, –, ; Wordsworth and, , – , –, , ,  –, – , , , ; Yeats and, , –, , ,  –, . See also consciousness imagism, ,  impersonality: Auden and, ; Eliot doctrine of, , , , ; Eliot’s disavowal of, – impressionism, novelistic, ,  individuation, , , ,  inductive method, – 

innocence, , , ,  innovation, – instinct, , ,  interior monologue,  irony: Auden and, , , , , , ; Eliot and, , , , ; Yeats and,  James, Clive,  James, Henry,  Jameson, Fredric,  jargon, , ,  Jarrell, Randall, , , , , , , –n Jeffares, Norman,  Jeffrey, Francis,  – Johnson, Lionel, , –  Jones, Richard Foster, ,  Jonson, Ben,  journalism, language of,  Joyce, James, – judgment, wit and, ,  Julius, Anthony,  Jung, Carl,  Kames, Henry Home, Lord, , –  Keats, John, , ,  –, ; as Eliot precedent, ; “Hyperion: A Fragment,”  –, , ; unknowable and,  Kenner, Hugh,  Kermode, Frank, ,  Kuhn, Thomas, –,  Laforgue, Jules, n landscape poetry. See natural world Lane, Homer, ,  Language Poets, , n language theory: debates on,  –, ; Lockean, –, , , , ,  Larkin, Philip,  Latinate English, , , , , , ; aristocracy and, ; complexity and, ;

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Index

Latinate English (continued ) Wordsworth and, , , , , , , ; Wordsworth’s predecessors and,  –; Yeats and,  Lawrence, D. H.,  Leavis, F. R., , ,  Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm,  Levenson, Michael, Geneaology of Modernism, A, ,  lexical modulation,  lingua communis, , ,  literary revolutions. See revolutionary change Locke, John, , , ,  –, ; double conformity of ideas and, , , –, , ; “Epistle to the Reader,” ; Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ,  – , ; images and, , ; language theory of,  –, , , , , ; metaphor and, , , – ; nominalism and, , n; plain English and, , , , ; Romanticism and, ; wit/judgment distinction of, , ; Wordsworth and, , , ,  – , , ; Yeats’s theory of mind vs., –  low register. See plain English; visionary low register lyrical verse, , , , , ,  Marxism, ,  mass culture,  – maturity, –,  –, , , , –, –, , ; Eliot’s valorization of, – meaning, , , ,  –, ; ineffableness of, ; Locke’s theory of, ; Wordsworth’s theory of, , , – , , ; Wordsworth vs. Coleridge on, . See also power or meaning memory: consciousness and, , , ; Freud on, , ; images and, , ; reinterpretation of, , ; rejection of,

; the uncanny and, , ; voids in, , , , , , , , . See also autobiographical myth; under specific poets Mendelson, Edward, , ,  metaphor, ; distrust of, , ; Locke and, , , –; Orwell on use of, , ; Viconian theories of, ; Wordsworth and, , , , , , , , ; Yeats and Shelley on,  Metaphysical poets,  metrical line,  middle class, , ; Eliot’s view of, , ; Yeats’s view of, , ,  middle style (Auden), , ,  Middleton, William,  Mill, John Stuart, ,  Milton, John, , , , ; “When I consider how my light is spent,”  mind, , , , , ; image as product of, – , , , , ; radical narrative techniques and, –; Yeats vs. Locke on, – . See also consciousness; imagination misogyny,  Modernism, , , –; cultural theories and,  –; Eliot’s influence on, , , , ; individual mind and, –; maturity and, –,  – , , –, –; plain English and, , , , , , –; psychology and, , , –; Romanticism’s relationship with, , , – , ; Wordsworth’s legacy to, , , ; Yeats and, , , –, , , , . See also High Modernism Modernism/Modernity (journal), n Modernist Studies Association, n modernity, ,  modes, , ,  monosyllables,  –,  Moore, J. L.,  Moore, Marianne, 

Index

More, Henry,  –,  Morris, William,  Movement, The,  Mulcaster, Richard,  multiple consciousness,  – mysticism, , ,  naming, –, , , n nationalism,  –,  natural language theories, ,  natural world: Auden and, –, – , ,  –, ; Wordsworth and, , , , – , , , – , , , ; Yeats and, , – , , , . See also rustic language necessitarianism, –, , , –  New Science, – , , ,  Newton, Sir Isaac,  Nietzsche, Friedrich, , ,  nihilism, ,  nineteenth-century usage, ; Wordsworth’s legacy to,  –,  nominalism, , n nostalgia,  novel, , , ,  Nuttall, A. D.,  object, , , , , ; Coleridge’s vs. Wordworth’s meaning of, ,  Objectivists, n objectivity, ,  oblivion, ,  obscurity, –, ,  Ohmann, Richard,  Old English, ,  Olson, Charles, , n origins: Eliot’s rejection of, , , , , , , , ; Wordsworthian myth of,  ornateness, , , ,  Orwell, George, , , , ; on Auden’s “Spain,” –, , ; language

usage rules of, , –; “Politics and the English Language,” ,  Oxford University, ,  Paine, Thomas, Common Sense,  Palmer, Michael,  paradigm shifting, ,  particles,  pastoral language, ,  Pater, Walter, , –,  peasants. See rustic language Perloff, Marjorie, , , ; “Pound/ Stevens: whose era?,” ,  personification, ,  plain English: authenticity and, –, ; biblical English and, , ; broadening of, –; class and, –, , , , , , ; contemporary responses to, , , , ; historical periods and, –, –; Locke and, , , , ; meaning of, ; Modernism and, , , , , , –; nineteenthcentury fate of, , , ; novel and, ; Orwell on, , –; Pater’s appreciation of, –; persuasiveness of, ; plain style vs., ; political writing and, –; power of, –, ; truthfulness of (see under truthfulness); as Wordsworth’s legacy, . See also visionary low register; under specific poets plain style, –,  Platonic philosophy,  poetic psychology, psychological poetry vs., – politics: Auden and, –, ; diction and, , ; language usage and, , ,  – , –; Wordsworth and, , , ; Yeats and, , , , , , , , ,  Pollexfen, William, , –  Pope, Alexander, ,  post-Romanticism, , –. See also Modernism

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208

Index

Pound, Ezra, – , –, , , , , ; Cantos, ; on Modernism, ; pure objectivity and,  power or meaning, , ; Auden and, – , ; Keats and, , ; plain English and, –, ; Wordsworth and, – , , , ; Yeats and, –, , , ,  –,  present perfect,  primitive peoples, ,  primitive purity,  – propaganda, –, ,  pseudoscience,  psychoanalysis,  psychological myth, ,  –, –,  –,  psychological poetry, –,  psychology, –; associationist,  –, ; explanatory value of, ; human development model of, – ; memory and, ; as middle-class pursuit, , ; Modernism and, , , –; poetic exceptionalism and, , , , ; realism and, ; Romanticism and, ; Wordsworth’s vs. Auden’s, , , , . See also under specific poets Quintillian,  rationalism, ,  realistic novel,  reality, ,  religion, , ; Auden and, , ,  – , ; Eliot and, ; plain English and, ,  – Renaissance, , , –, ,  Restoration, ,  revolutionary change, –, , ; consciousness and, –; Wordsworth and, –,  –,  Reynolds, J. H.,  rhetoric: Auden and, , , , ;

philosophy vs., , , ; truthfulness and, , –; Yeats and, , , ,  rhetorical curve, ,  right-wing politics. See conservatism Rimbaud, Arthur,  Romanticism: Auden and, , , ; Eliot’s view of, , n, n; imagination and, , ; Locke and, ; metaphor debates and, ; as prelude to Modernism, , , –, ; secondgeneration, , , , –; twofold legacy of, . See also under specific poets Royal Society, , , ,  rural subjects. See natural world; rustic language Ruskin, John, ; Unto This Last,  rustic language: Auden and, –, ; Wordsworth and, , , , , , ; Yeats and, , , , ,  Saussure, Ferdinand de,  Saxon words, –, , ,  science, , ; paradigm shifts in,  science fiction,  scientific revolutions, – , , ,  second-person speaker,  –,  Second World War,  self. See consciousness Selincourt, Ernest de, , –  Seneca,  sensibility, , , , ,  sentence analysis, ,  sentimentality, , ,  seventeenth-century language, – ,  – ,  Shakespear, Olivia,  Shakespeare, William, , ; Hamlet, ; King Lear, – , ,  –, ; plain English and, – , – Shelley, Percy Bysshe, , –, , , , , , , , ; Defence of Poetry,

Index

; Eliot’s view of, ; imaginative tradition of, , , , ; “Peter Bell the Third,” ; as Yeats influence, , , , , , ,  Smith, Olivia, ; Politics of Language, The,  social class: Eliot and, , , ; identity and, ; monosyllables and, ; plain English and, –, , , , , ; Wordsworth’s diction and, –; Yeats and, , , – , , , , ,  solipsism, ,  Spanish Civil War,  Spender, Stephen,  Spenser, Edmund, , ,  Spenserian stanzas,  Spiritus Mundi (also Anima Mundi),  – , ,  Sprat, Thomas, , ,  Stein, Gertrude,  Stevens, Wallace, – , –, , ,  Stuart period. See Tudor-Stuart period style: Auden’s changes in, –; democratic, ; critical views of Yeats’s, – , ; elevated vs. familiar subject and, – ; politics and, ; power and,  subconscious,  subjectivity, , , –; words-ideas relationship and, – subject/object distinction,  sublime, – ; Auden and, ; egotistical, , ; Keats and, , ; Wordsworth and, , –,  substances, ,  suffering, , , , ,  supernatural, ,  Swift, Jonathan, , ; “Letter to a Young Clergyman,”  Swinburne, Algernon, , ,  symbolism, ; obscurity and, ; Yeats and, , , , , , , , , , , , , 

Symbolist movement, –, –,  Symons, Arthur, ,  –, , , , n; Symbolist Movement, The,  –; “Winter Night, A,”  syntax, , , , ; Eliot and, ; Locke and, , , ; Wordsworth and, ; Yeats and,  Tacitus,  Tate, Allen,  Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, , , ; In Memoriam, ; “Tithonus,”  things, words as signifying,  –, , , ,  third-person description,  Thomas, Dylan, ,  Thomson, James,  thought, , ,  tone, , , , ,  Tooke, John Horne,  Tower of Babel,  tradition: Auden and, ; Yeats and, , , , , , , ,  traditional low register. See plain English tragedy,  transfixed concentration,  Trimpi, Wesley,  truthfulness: diction and, – , , ; English usage and, , –; Locke and, , , ; plain English as language of, , , , , , , , , , , –, , , ,  –, –; rhetoric and, –; Wordsworth and, ; Yeats and, ,  Tudor-Stuart period, , –,  Tyndale, William,  uncanny, , , ,  unconscious, , , , ,  Underhill, Hugh, ,  unknowable,  utilitarianism, 

209

210

Index

Vallon, Annette,  vatic poetry, civil poetry vs., ,  Verlaine, Paul, , n vernacular, ,  Verstegan, Richard,  –, ,  Vico,  Victorian literature, ,  Virgil, ,  visionary low register, , – , , , ; Auden and, , ,  –,  visionary poets, – ,  –, , . See also under specific poets vocabulary. See words voice, , ; active vs. passive, , ; Auden and, , , ; lexical modulation and, ; mature experience of, ,  Wade, Allan,  Wagner, Richard, ; Siegfried,  Wilde, Oscar, ,  – Wilkins, John, , , ; Essay Towards a Real Character And a Philosophical Language,  Willey, Basil, ,  William of Ockham, n Williams, Raymond,  Williams, William Carlos, ,  Williamson, George, ,  Wilson, Thomas, –, , ; Art of Rhetorique,  – wit/judgment distinction, , ,  Wittgenstein, Ludwig, n; Philosophical Investigations,  words, –, ; Adamist doctrine and, –; Auden and, , ; common significations of, , ; conventionalism and, ; human ability to form, ; images and, , , ; Latinate vs. simple, , ; Lockean gradient of, –; mental connections and, , ; for mixed modes, , ; object relationship with, , ; obscure terms and,

–; Orwell on use of, , ; as sacred, ; as signifying ideas vs. things, –, , , , ; Wordsworthian double function of, , ; Yeats and, , ,  Wordsworth, Dorothy,  Wordsworth, William, –, , , ; Auden and, –, , , , , , , , , ; autobiographical myth of (see under autobiographical myth); Blair as predecessor of, – ; career trajectory of, ; critical comment on, , , ,  –; depression of, , ; double signification and,  –; effect of mother’s death on, ; on “emotion recollected in tranquility,” , ; “eye of Nature” phrase of, ; glowworm image of, , , – , , – , , , ; “great decade” and, , , ; identity crisis of, , , ; imagination and (see under imagination); Keats’s view of, , ; legacy of, , ,  –, , ; lingua communis and, ; literary revolution and, –, – , ; Locke and, , , , , , ; memory and, , – , , – , ; multiple registers and, , – , , , –, ; nineteenth-century reception of, – ; Pater’s praise for, –; plain English and, , – , , , , , , , , , – , , – ,  –, – , , , , , , ,  –,  –, , , , , , ; power or meaning and, , , –, , ; psychology and, , –, , , , , , , –, , , , ; Romanticism and, , –, , , ,  –, ; uncanny and, , , , ; as visionary poet, –, , , – , , , ; Yeats and, , , , , , –, –; works of: “Among all the lovely things my Love had seen,”

Index

; “Animal Tranquility and Decay,” , , , , ; “Argument for Suicide,” ; Borderers, The, , ; “Descriptive Sketches,” ; “Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle,” ; “Essays upon Epitaphs,” ; “Evening Walk, An,” ; Excursion, The, ; “Expostulation and Reply,” ; “Female Vagrant, The,” –; “Guilt and Sorrow,” ; “Incipient Madness,” ; “I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud,” , – ; “Juvenilia XVIa,”  –, – , , , , , ,  – , , ; “Juvenilia XVIb,” ; “Last of the Flock, The,” ; “Lines Written in Early Spring,” ; “Lucy,” ; Lyrical Ballads, , , , , , ; “Michael,”  –,  – , , , , ; “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” – , , , , , ; “Old Cumberland Beggar, The,” ,  –, – , , ; “Poems of the Fancy,” , ; “Poems of the Imagination,” ; “Poems on the Naming of Places,” ; “Point Rash-Judgement,” ; Preface (), , , , ,  – , , , ; Prelude, The, , , – , , , , , – , , , , – , ; “Ruined Cottage, The,” – ; Salisbury Plain poems, , , , ; “Solitary Reaper, The,” , ; “Tables Turned, The,” ; “There Was a Boy,” – , , , , ; “Tintern Abbey,” , – , , , , , , , , , , , , ; “To a Highland Girl,” ; “Vale of Esthwaite, The,”  –; Composed upon Westminster Bridge, – Yeats, John (father), , – , , , ,  Yeats, W. B., , , ,  –, ; antipathy to psychology of, , , , – ,

, , , , , , , , , ; Auden and, , , , , ; autobiography and, , , –, , , , , , , ; changes in poetic style of,  –, , , , ; class and, , , , , , , , , ; critical comment on, , , , , ; custom and ceremony and, ; dearth of literary heirs to, , ; denial of middle years by, – , , ; despair and, , ; Eliot and, , , , , ; exceptionalism and, ; family history and, , –, – ; Gonne relationship and, , , , , , , , ; Keats and,  –; last poems of, –; late style of, , –, , ; memory and, – , , ; mid-career crisis of, –,  – , , , , , ; misogyny of, ; Modernism and, , ,  – , , , , ; mysticism and, , ; plain English and, , , , , ,  – , –,  –, , , , , , ; power of words and, , , –; as public poet, –; rabbit image and, –, ; revision of own past by, – , ; rhetorical curve of, ; rightist politics and, , , , ; Romanticism and, – , –, , , ,  –, , ; Spiritus Mundi and, – , , ; supernatural and, , ; Symbolist movement and,  –,  –; three types of low register of, , ; as visionary poet, , , –, , , , , , , ; Wordsworth and, , , , , , –, –; works of: “Adam’s Curse,”  –, , , ; “Adoration of the Magi, The,” ; Autobiography, , , , , , ; “Cold Heaven, The,” –, , , , , ; Collected Poems, , , , , , ; “Coming of Wisdom

211

212

Index

Yeats, W. B. (continued ) with Time, The,” ; “Conditional Man,” , –; “Coole and Ballylee, ,” , , ; “Coole Park,” ; “Dawn, The,” ; “Dialogue of Self and Soul, A,” , ; Dramatis Personae, , ; “Easter, ,” ; “Ego Dominus Tuus,” , , , , , ; “General Introduction for My Work, A,” n; Green Helmet and Other Poems, The, , ,  – , , , , , , , , , ; “Grey Rock, The,” ; In the Seven Woods,  –, –, , ; “Lake Isle of Innisfree, The,” ; “Lapis Lazuli,” ; “Leda and the Swan,” ; “Magi, The,” , ; “Magic,” ; “Man and the Echo,” –, ; “Meditations in Time of Civil War,” ; Memoirs, ; “Meru,” ; Michael Robartes and the Dancer, ; “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,” ; “No Second Troy,” ; Per Amica Silentia Lunae, ; “Prayer for My Daughter, A,”  –,  –, ; “Reconciliation,” ; Responsibili-

ties, , – ,  – , , , –, , , , , , , ; Reveries over Childhood and Youth, , , ; Rose, The, ; “Second Coming, The,” , ; Seven Woods,  –; “Song of the Happy Shepherd, The,” , , –, , ; “Song of Wandering Aengus, The,” ; Spiritus Mundi, ; “To a Wealthy Man who promised a second Subscription to the Dublin Municipal Gallery if it were proved the People wanted Pictures,” ; “Tower, The,” ; “Tragic Generation, The,” ; Trembling of the Veil, The, – , ; “Under Ben Bulben,” , ; “Vacillation,” , ; Vision, A, , , , , –; Wanderings of Oisin, The, , ; “Wild Swans at Coole, The,” ; Wild Swans at Coole, The,  –, ; Wind Among the Reeds, The, ; “Woman Homer Sung, A,” ; “Words,” –; “Words for Music Perhaps,”  Zukofsky, Louis, 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rosen, David, – Power, plain English, and the rise of modern poetry / David Rosen. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.  ---X (alk. paper) . English poetry—th century—History and criticism. . Eliot, T. S. (Thomas Stearns),  –—Criticism and interpretation. . Yeats, W. B. (William Butler),  –—Criticism and interpretation. . Auden, W. H. (Wystan Hugh), – —Criticism and interpretation. . Wordsworth, William,  –—Criticism and interpretation. . English poetry—th century—History and criticism. . Locke, John, –—Influence. . English language—Style. I. Title. PR.R  .—dc 