Wordsworth's Unremembered Pleasure 9780192599049, 9780198856986

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Wordsworth’s Unremembered Pleasure

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Wordsworth’s Unremembered Pleasure ALEXANDER FREER

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Alexander Freer 2020 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2020 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2020935088 ISBN 978–0–19–885698–6 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198856986.001.0001 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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To my parents

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Preface The notion of unremembered pleasure presents a challenge. It presses us to imagine satisfaction dislocated from the person who might feel it, and to ask what it might mean for sensation to be neither recollected nor repressed. Beginning from Wordsworth’s formulation of unremembered pleasure, this book explores a broad spectrum of unfelt, unnoticed, and unconscious pleasures in his poetry and prose. By definition, they are marginal and overlooked, yet these forms—and the challenge of disclosing them—shape the aims, technique, and ultimately the whole affective economy of Wordsworth’s writing. At its most persuasive, the claim of unremembered pleasure is that joys might be lost and yet acknowledged, overlooked and then recognized, but never definitively possessed. If it can name pleasures that were not felt, and mourn those that can be felt no more, Wordsworth’s poetry does not express pleasurable experience so much as trace pleasure’s trajectories and forms. A persistent view of his work, sometimes extended to romantic lyric at large, sees it as a private form of subjective expression, if not solipsistic withdrawal. This seems to be corroborated by the poet’s tireless interest in emotional life and personal recollection. Yet over and over, Wordsworth encounters pleasures that cannot be recollected as determinate acts and events, and can only be understood as aspects of life with others. If these vital pleasures are neither remembered nor, strictly speaking, personal, any attempt to account for them must think about lyric differently. Not as a representation of private experience, but a confrontation with its limits. Accommodating unremembered pleasure means thinking of affects unmoored from individual subjects.¹ This line of inquiry moves from the centre of poetic attention and articulation to the margins, from what is seen, known, and desired, towards cases of omission, forgetfulness, and surprise. It is shaped and informed by ¹ For an important account of emotion without subjectivity, see Rei Terada, Feeling in Theory: Emotion after the ‘Death of the Subject’ (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2001). See also Michael Snediker’s suggestive notion of lyric personhood without subjectivity. Michael D. Snediker, Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood and Other Felicitous Persuasions (Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2009), 3.

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growing critical interest in romanticism’s minimal registers: its eye for ‘distinctions that are easy to overlook’ and its ear for ‘unvoiced or unclaimed language’ which is neither ‘structured as communication’ nor ‘a denied, unconscious or evasive affirmative’.² This shift in romantic studies can be understood as a response to the limitations of both the conception of romanticism as a general philosophical programme, and ‘the various historicisms that have transformed romanticism into what looks more and more like a burnt-over interval’.³ A tight focus on smaller and more marginal details disrupts the big picture in which they ostensibly feature. Rather than representing an intellectual and scholarly retreat, these forms of inquiry resist a homogeneous, metaphysical, capital-R account of romanticism while preserving its distinctive commitment to the ethical and aesthetic value of particular objects, events, and acts, however minimal or mundane they might appear.⁴ If romanticism looks smaller than it used to, we can for this reason move past ‘the traditional theories of identity and agency we have erroneously ascribed to the romantic subject’ and become more closely attuned to its wide range of marginal yet distinct forms of thinking about personhood and the claims poetry might make on it.⁵ Focusing on lost affects means challenging Wordsworth’s traditional status as the poet of memory. It entails understanding his composition as something other than the work of memory, and even resisting a conception of literary criticism as the virtuosic exercise of memory. Textual scholarship, biography, and editorial work require memorial labour, and all modern readers are indebted to it. But memory’s role in criticism has been qualitatively different. ‘Memory feeds on what structurally evades it’, Rebecca Comay writes; ‘our drive to remember is directed towards memories that essentially are not our own to remember . . . we perpetually seek our memories elsewhere—in objects, in places, even in a frenzied theorizing about

² William Galperin, The History of Missed Opportunities: British Romanticism and the Emergence of the Everyday (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2017), 23; Anne-Lise François, Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2008), 13. ³ Galperin, History of Missed Opportunities, 23. ⁴ See the explorations of romanticism’s ‘fragmentary minimum’ and ‘visionary minimalism’ in David L. Clark and Jacques Khalip, ‘Too Much, Too Little: Of Brevity’ Minimal Romanticism eds David Clark and Jacques Khalip. (May 2016) Romantic Circles Praxis https://romanticcircles.org/praxis/brevity/praxis.2016.brevity.intro.html; and Anahid Nersessian, Utopia, Limited: Romanticism and Adjustment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2015), 17. ⁵ Jacques Khalip, Anonymous Life: Romanticism and Dispossession (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2009), 9.

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memory’.⁶ The New Historicist approach, Jacques Khalip suggests, was founded on a critical drive to remember; its subject was ‘a personalized self that can only be redeemed or saved if it is coerced into recalling its past’.⁷ Far beyond nominally psychoanalytic criticism, the concept of repression has suggested that what literary works represent and what they elide can be remembered after the fact, and ultimately recuperated as narrative. And memory is the central figure of a broader tendency to transform articulations of affect into representational content. Where we treat moments of pleasure and pain only as records of experience happening elsewhere, we close off the possibility that writing might occasion, induce, or otherwise provoke all the states we know it can: satisfaction, longing, intimacy, estrangement, filiation, and solitude. The consequence is a familiar economy of pleasure in which artworks either represent the world faithfully, or else find satisfaction in the realm of fantasy; an economy in which poetry’s own pleasures are its supreme fiction. If poetry can articulate real yet heretofore unnoticed joy, the satisfactions of composing and reading can be understood as modes of affective, and even reparative, engagement. Not withdrawing from the world but finding ways of coping with it. Attending to unremembered pleasure requires rethinking the remarkably durable relationship between romanticism and psychoanalysis (and especially between Wordsworth and Freud). Unremembered pleasure poses a special problem because psychoanalysis understands unconsciousness as the result of painful repression, and thus takes all elided experience to be negatively charged. The intimate bond between Wordsworth’s poetry and psychoanalytic trauma theory provided a sophisticated vocabulary for lost pain, yet its remarkable success also rendered the potentially disruptive force of unremembered pleasure almost unthinkable. This book re-stages the critical encounter by returning to key texts which have shaped the reading of Wordsworth. Along the way, it contests the role of psychoanalytic concepts such repression, mourning, wish-fulfilment, and sublimation, which have been enormously productive for literary criticism, but also risk in their very success becoming reflexive critical shortcuts. Approached in this way, Wordsworth’s unremembered pleasure unworks psychoanalysis and calls into question assumptions that are so widely dispersed we no longer think of them as explicitly psychoanalytic. Leo Bersani has long ⁶ Rebecca Comay, ‘The Sickness of Tradition: Between Melancholia and Fetishism’ in Walter Benjamin and History ed. Andrew Benjamin (London: Continuum, 2005), 88–101, 91. ⁷ Khalip, Anonymous Life, 12.

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argued that psychoanalysis discloses its most important insights precisely where its theoretical edifices start to break down. By the same token, psychoanalysis might be most available to literary criticism precisely where neither offers a clear answer to the other, but only mutual provocation and resistance. Unremembered pleasure emerges not as a theory or doctrine for Wordsworth but through a series of attempts—of varying success—to understand and disclose lost joy in verse. By the same token, Wordsworth’s Unremembered Pleasure thinks through a series of close encounters with pleasure’s life in writing. Rather than grounding Wordsworth in a determinate philosophical or psychological context, it explores the ways in which pleasure can expand, disrupt, and expose the limitations of what we think we know. It approaches lyric not as a settled account of interiority so much as ‘an effort to disrupt the forms of mastery with which we’ve made sense of our own and others’ desires’.⁸ The hope is that sustained reading will always unsettle our claims to know poems, and poems will always unsettle our assumptions that we already understand persons. By focusing on forms of pleasure which are antithetical to self-knowledge and self-possession, it traces the ways in which joy might yet surprise. There are many people without whom this book would not have been possible. I am indebted to the intellectual generosity and rigour of those who taught and advised me at Warwick and Cambridge: Ruth Abbott, Phil Connell, John Fletcher, Simon Jarvis, Louise Joy, Neil Lazarus, Emma Mason, Jon Mee, Corinna Russell, and Stefan Uhlig. Ruth Abbott and Andrew Bennett were scrupulous and generous doctoral examiners. I’m grateful to the AHRC and to Trinity College, Cambridge for supporting the doctoral and post-doctoral research which allowed me to write this book. The School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell was an education and a joy, and I learned a great deal from Annelise Riles’s seminar on the gift. At the University of East Anglia, Peter Kitson kindly offered me the use of his office and personal library for the year, and David Nowell Smith, Cath Sharrock, ⁸ Tim Dean, ‘Art as symptom: Žižek and the ethics of psychoanalytic criticism’ diacritics 32 (2) (2002): 21–41, 36. In framing the question in this way, my aim is not to revise or contest an abstract conception of lyric but to show how Wordsworth’s tracings of pleasure in verse undercut the presumption of a singular, private, lyric interiority. For this reason, my engagement with the category of lyric is not systematic and general but local and practical. For recent debates, see Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins, The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology, ed. Jackson and Prins (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2014), 89–90; Stephen Burt, ‘What Is This Thing Called Lyric?’ Modern Philology 113 (3) (2016): 422–40; Alexander Freer, ‘Percy Shelley’s Touch; or, Lyric Depersonalization’ Modern Philology 117 (1) (2019): 91–114.

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and Bharat Tandon were inspirational colleagues. I thank the anonymous readers for the Press for their incisive comments and nuanced suggestions, and Jacqueline Norton and Matthew Williams for their insight and guidance. Above all, I’m deeply grateful for, and moved by, the intellectual companionship and joyful enthusiasm of friends and colleagues. In addition to those already named, I thank Erica McAlpine, Nicolas Bell, Anna Berman, Pete de Bolla, Michaela Brangan, Ardis Butterfield, Alex Campbell, Erik Clark, Parwana Fayyaz, Matt ffytche, Cassie Gorman, Aline Guillermet, Anna-Maria Hartmann, Tom Jones, Aaron Kachuck, Jean Khalfa, Sarah Kolopp, Micha Lazarus, Diana Leca, Angela Leighton, Annabella Massey, Joe Moshenska, Allison Neal, Adrian Poole, Joel Robbins, Bernhard Salow, Parth Shil, Anne Toner, Clare Walker Gore, Tessa Webber, and Lucy Whelan. Special thanks in addition to the above are due to Stacey McDowell, Tom Hamilton, Tim Heimlich, Ewan Jones, Aleks Reinhardt, Danny Smith, Claire Wilkinson, and Ross Wilson for reading portions of this work at various stages during its development. Some material in Chapter 2 appears in an earlier form as ‘Wordsworth and the Infancy of Affection’, copyright ©2015 Trustees of Boston University. This article first appeared in Studies in Romanticism 54 (1) (2015): 60–83. Published with permission by Johns Hopkins University Press. Quotation of ‘The Field Pansy’ from The Collected Poems of Amy Clampitt by Amy Clampitt, copyright ©1997 by the Estate of Amy Clampitt. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

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Contents List of Abbreviations

Introduction: Wordsworth after Freud

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1. Unremembered Pleasure

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2. The Infancy of Affection

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3. Metrical Pleasures

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4. Sustaining Elegy

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5. Happiness in Time

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Conclusion Bibliography Index

211 225 241

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List of Abbreviations 1799 1805a–b 1850 DS E EP HG LB LP P2V RC SP

William Wordsworth, The Prelude, 1798–1799 ed. Stephen Maxfield Parrish (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977). William Wordsworth, The Thirteen Book Prelude (2 vols) ed. Mark L. Reed (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991). William Wordsworth, The Fourteen-Book Prelude ed. W.J.B. Owen (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985). William Wordsworth, Descriptive Sketches ed. Eric Birdsall (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1984). William Wordsworth, The Excursion eds Sally Bushell, James A. Butler, Michael C. Jaye and David García (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2007). William Wordsworth, Early Poems and Fragments, 1785–1797 eds Carol Landon and Jared Curtis (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1997). William Wordsworth, Home at Grasmere ed. Beth Darlington (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977). William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, and Other Poems, 1797–1800 eds James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1992). William Wordsworth, Last Poems, 1821–1850 ed. Jared Curtis (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1999). William Wordsworth, Poems, in Two Volumes, and Other Poems, 1800–1807 ed. Jared Curtis (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1983). William Wordsworth, The Ruined Cottage and The Pedlar ed. James Butler (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1979). William Wordsworth, Shorter Poems, 1807–1820 ed. Carl H. Ketcham (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1989).

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a gathering, a proliferation on a scale that, for all its unobtrusiveness, seems to be worldwide, of what I don’t know how to read except as an urge to give pleasure Amy Clampitt, ‘The Field Pansy’

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Introduction Wordsworth after Freud

Freud encountered Wordsworth almost without knowing it. He was unfamiliar with the poet’s work, and possessed none of it amongst his collection of English poetry.¹ Yet in 1913 he summarized ‘The Claims of Psycho-Analysis to Scientific Interest’ by explaining that: Psycho-analysis has been obliged to derive the mental life of adults from that of children, and has had to take seriously the old saying that the child is father to the man [Die Psychoanalyse ist genötigt worden, das Seelenleben des Erwachsenen aus dem des Kindes abzuleiten, Ernst zu machen mit dem Satze: das Kind ist der Vater des Mannes].²

The central developmental claim made by psychoanalysis, on which its whole theory of sexuality stands, is summarized with a line of Wordsworth’s. Characteristically, Freud positions psychoanalysis as a rigorous account of an old insight. The quotation from ‘My heart leaps up’ is obscured somewhat by James Strachey’s English translation: it is not an ‘old saying’ but only a ‘sentence’ in the German, and Freud’s version could appropriately be translated with Wordsworth’s exact words: the child is father of the man. Given Freud’s inclination to express relations of influence in terms of fatherhood (the father of his country, the father of history, the father of all things) it is understandable that he would seize on this Wordsworthian

¹ For instance, the complete works of Byron and editions of Swinburne and Milton. See Keith J. Davies, and Gerhard Fichtner (eds) Freud’s Library: A Comprehensive Catalogue (Edition Diskord and The Freud Museum: Tübingen and London, 2006), entries 433, 2470, 3511. See also Hugh Sykes Davies, Wordsworth and the Worth of Words, eds John Kerrigan and Jonathan Wordsworth (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986), 139. ² Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 20 vols, ed. James Strachey (London: Vintage, 2001), 13:183. Wordsworth’s Unremembered Pleasure. Alexander Freer, Oxford University Press (2020). © Alexander Freer. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198856986.001.0001

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formulation, yet the evidence suggests that he did so unknowingly.³ In the unfinished ‘Outline of Psycho-Analysis’, we find a similar formulation raised to the level of scientific axiom: ‘[a]nalytic experience has convinced us of the complete truth of the assertion so often to be heard that the child is psychologically father to the adult [das Kind sei psychologisch der Vater des Erwachsenen]’.⁴ The citation is emblematic of a missed encounter between Wordsworth and Freud. It is true that some weak connections can be established. Wordsworth’s ‘old saying’ circulated in nineteenth-century German discourse as ‘a brilliant English proverb’, sometimes erroneously attributed to George Henry Lewes, whose Life and Works of Goethe, translated into German in 1873, takes it as a chapter subtitle.⁵ And in 1880, Freud encountered Wordsworth in one of the essays he was commissioned to translate for Theodor Gomperz’s German edition of John Stuart Mill.⁶ Mill’s essay on Grote’s Plato cites Wordsworth’s ‘Ode’ (‘There was a time’), a poem which, Matt ffytche has observed, ‘imitates on English terrain the kind of principled unconsciousness so important for Schelling and Schubert’.⁷ Yet it has often seemed to readers of both poet and psychoanalyst that their bond is more substantial: that Wordsworth’s impressions and omissions of life anticipate psychoanalytic accounts of memory and repression, and that Freud’s research into childhood experience recapitulates the poet’s investment in early life. Historically speaking, the connection is not unexpected. It is one thread in a familiar story about ‘the part that Freudian psychoanalysis played, between about 1900 and 1920, in summarising and reformulating a great many nineteenth-century articulations of the idea that the core of an individual’s

³ Freud, Standard Edition, 15:159; 23:27; 16:245. Lacan, however, briefly acknowledges the Wordsworthian connection in Seminar VII. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 7: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis trans. Dennis Porter (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008), 28. ⁴ Freud, Standard Edition, 23:187. ⁵ Diakonus Klein, ‘Das Sakrament der Wiedergeburt’ Zeitschrift für die gesammte lutherische Theologie und Kirche (1869): 416–31, 422; G.H. Lewes, Goethe’s Leben und Werke Vol. 1, trans. Julius Frese (Berlin: Franz Dunder, 1873). The English version uses ‘The child is father to the man’ as a subtitle in chapter IV. See the misattribution in, for example, Livius Fürst, Das Kind und seine Pflege (Leipzig, 1876), 213. ⁶ See Elizabeth Roudinesco, Freud: In His Time and Ours trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2016), 31–2. For the relevant passage see John Stuart Mill, Essays on Philosophy and the Classics ed. J.M. Robson (London: Routledge, 1978), 421–3 and J.S. Mill, Gesammelte Werke ed. Theodor Gomperz vol. 12 trans. Sigmund Freud (Leipzig: Fues, 1880), 86–8. ⁷ Matt ffytche, The Foundation of the Unconscious: Schelling, Freud and the Birth of the Modern Psyche (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012), 233.

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psychic identity was his or her own lost past, or childhood’.⁸ Only Rousseau and Goethe have a comparable role to Wordsworth in writing the childhood romance that Freud would render as science. The connection is made and remade through Freud’s own attempts to absorb and outstrip the wisdom of the poets; as Thomas Pfau has remarked, he ‘never tired of stressing’ his debt to the romantics.⁹ The other way to formulate this kind of debt, as Freud well knew, is inheritance. Literary readers have long approached psychoanalysis in these terms. Thomas Mann wrote in 1929 that Freud’s theory of the libido is ‘nothing but natural science divested of mysticism and become romanticism’.¹⁰ And introducing Friedrich Kittler’s ambitious study, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, David Wellbery offers a striking contemporary formulation of this thought when he states that ‘[p]sychoanalysis, with its insistence on the Mother as a primary interpretive datum, remains immanent within the Romantic discourse system, remains, let us say, applied Romanticism’.¹¹ This book argues that these are equivalences we should resist. I begin with this backward glance from Freud to Wordsworth in order to introduce the book’s two intertwined topics: Wordsworth’s sustained interest in unfelt and unrecorded forms of pleasure, and the mediation of Wordsworth through Freud, which has made psychoanalysis appear romantic in certain respects and romanticism psychoanalytic. They must be approached together, I will argue, because psychoanalytic assumptions— held by many more than just the professed Freudians—are precisely what have made unremembered pleasure so difficult to detect. In trying to tease romanticism and psychoanalysis apart, I focus primarily on Freud for two reasons. Firstly, Freud’s writing has had by far the most influence on the reception of Wordsworth, not least because Freud was read far beyond the domain of psychoanalysis. Secondly, going back to Freud allows us to reassess the supposed continuity at its central link. At the same time, my approach is ecumenical, and I will draw on other psychoanalytic writers, including Jacques Lacan, Didier Anzieu, and Donald Winnicott—who

⁸ Carolyn Steedman, Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority, 1780–1930 (London: Virago, 1995), 4. ⁹ Thomas Pfau, Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, and Melancholy, 1790–1840 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2005), 19. ¹⁰ Thomas Mann, Past Masters and Other Papers trans. H.T. Lowe-Porter (London: Martin Secker, 1933), 196. ¹¹ Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900 trans. Michael Metteer, with Chris Cullens (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990), xxii.

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crucially for this book was himself a reader of Wordsworth—as well as a range of responses to Freud from within feminist, queer, and affect theory. The posited continuity between poet and psychoanalyst has concealed Wordsworth’s sustained interest in, and commitments to, ideas of unnoticed but persistent pleasure—ideas which are thematically related to, but have no place in, psychoanalysis. Addressing these ideas means resisting what Pfau calls ‘the typological story of how Western literature supposedly scatters the seeds for the eventual rise of psychoanalysis’, and seizing on moments in which this genealogical relation is short-circuited by moments of conceptual resonance and resistance.¹² I aim to reconstruct Wordsworth’s own interest in unconsciousness against a set of psychoanalytic assumptions, exploring their differences and divergences as well as the links which have long drawn readers of Wordsworth to Freud. Wordsworth’s unremembered pleasure needs to be understood as one of the numerous and diverse prepsychoanalytic articulations of unconsciousness; not a precursor to Freud’s account of the mind, but an alternative path.¹³ While the general subject of Wordsworthian affect will require us to revisit some established critical questions, my aim here is not to have the final word on old debates, nor to interpret pleasure by revealing some original cause or underlying logic.¹⁴ By following pleasures that are marginal and elusive, yet persistent and significant, we might go beyond the familiar logic of lack and fulfilment—and the restrictive and repressive forms of desire to which that logic so frequently gives rise. To take positive yet marginal sensations seriously is to ask what forms of attachment might be available beyond affirmation and evasion.¹⁵ The focus is on an affective grammar in which pleasure is subject and not object; sensations that we do not have so much as they have us. It requires an

¹² Pfau, Romantic Moods, 192. ¹³ For a good overview see Angus Nicholls and Liebscher Martin (eds), Thinking the Unconscious: Nineteenth-Century German Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010); ffytche, The Foundation of the Unconscious. ¹⁴ In other words, I am consciously stepping away from conceptions of the person in which ‘we have had to work to find the secrets of our desires’. Leo Bersani, Receptive Bodies (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2018), 21. ¹⁵ I am thinking, for instance, of the forms of complex and ambivalent attachment Snediker draws from Winnicott, for whom aggression, destructiveness, and loss are not inimical to attachment but necessary components. In a related way I am interested in relationships to pleasure which recognize its value yet go beyond the wish to accumulate and retain it. See Michael D. Snediker, Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood and Other Felicitous Persuasions (Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2009), 8–15, Donald Winnicott, Playing and Reality (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005), 115–27.

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openness of reading equal to the openness of writing needed to articulate them. Wordsworth’s remarkable conviction that our knowledge of others and of the world is dependent on pleasure alone presses us to think rigorously about the varieties of pleasurable experience.¹⁶ For Wordsworth, poetry’s knowledge is inescapably tied to its claims to articulate, induce, and even be a species of, feeling. Yet what saves the whole project from a kind of solipsistic withdrawal is the clear sense that so much pleasure does not occur, or persist, as private, subjective experience; it is overlooked, gets lost, or slips silently by. This introductory chapter situates these general problems within Wordsworth’s modern critical reception, traces some important keywords from their romantic usage to their migration into psychoanalysis, and offers an initial sketch of some ways in which Wordsworth’s poetry finds itself confronting, recognizing, and anticipating lost and undisclosed pleasure.

Wordsworth Contra Psychoanalysis Albert Mordell’s 1919 study of The Erotic Motive in Literature enraged reviewers by reading Wordsworth’s nature poetry as the unconscious expression of his ‘unsatisfied love cravings’.¹⁷ It was the kind of reductive, symptomatic reading which Lionel Trilling had in mind when in 1950 he dismissed the ‘early Freudian biographers’ who focused on ‘exposing the secret shame of the writer’.¹⁸ Distinguishing his own method from psychobiography, Trilling makes a similar claim of equivalence to Thomas Mann’s. In ‘Freud and Literature’, he asserts that ‘psychoanalysis is one of the culminations of the Romanticist literature of the nineteenth century’, which ‘despite its avowals, was itself scientific in at least the sense of being passionately devoted to a research into the self ’. Trilling, like Geoffrey Hartman after him, liked to use Freud’s half-modest claim that ‘[t]he poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious’ to suggestively blur the boundaries between Wordsworth and psychoanalytic ¹⁶ ‘We have no sympathy but what is propagated by pleasure . . . We have no knowledge, that is, no general principles drawn from the contemplation of particular facts, but what has been built up by pleasure, and exists in us by pleasure alone’ (LB, 752). ¹⁷ Albert Mordell, The Erotic Motive in Literature (New York: Boni and Liverwright, 1919), 165. ¹⁸ Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination (New York: New York Review of Books, 2008), 39.

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thought.¹⁹ In this way, Wordsworth’s ‘grand elementary principle of pleasure’ is for Trilling the Freudian triebe avant la lettre.²⁰ In equating Wordsworthian pleasure and Freudian drive, Trilling echoes Freud’s own suggestion in Beyond the Pleasure Principle that ‘the libido of our sexual instincts [Sexualtriebe] would coincide with the Eros of the poets and philosophers which holds all living things together’.²¹ Psychoanalytic criticism moved beyond biography by equating poetry with theory. Psychobiographical studies of Wordsworth continued to be written, but since Trilling attention has focused more on attempts to locate psychoanalytic ideas in Wordsworth’s poetry.²² Some critics remain invested in the genealogical connection, positioning romanticism as an anticipation or early form of psychoanalysis. In David Collings’ study of Wordsworthian Errancies, ‘Wordsworth is an especially perverse psychologist’, whose poetry ‘poses as a form of protopsychoanalysis’. Likewise, Joel Faflak speaks of ‘the emergence of psychoanalysis in Romanticism’.²³ For both, romantic poetry encounters certain problems in psychology, particularly around sexuality and trauma, which it attempts to solve through language; ‘poetry’s anxiety about articulating a language of the psyche that resists articulation . . . in turn demands psychoanalysis’ in verse.²⁴ The genealogical link from romanticism to psychoanalysis is by no means contrived; it is after all Samuel Taylor Coleridge who first speaks of ‘psycho-analytical understanding’, albeit in adjectival form.²⁵ Yet it is equally clear that the context and content of these

¹⁹ Trilling, The Liberal Imagination, 34–5. ²⁰ Lionel Trilling, The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent Ed. Leon Weiseltier (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), 429. ²¹ Freud, Standard Edition, 18:50. ²² For subsequent psychobiographical accounts, see Richard Onorato, The Character of the Poet: Wordsworth in The Prelude (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971); Eugene Stelzig, All Shades of Consciousness: Wordsworth’s Poetry and the Self in Time (The Hague: Mouton, 1975); David Ellis, Wordsworth, Freud and the Spots of Time (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985); Leon Waldoff, Wordsworth in His Major Lyrics: The Art and Psychology of Self-Representation (Columbia, MI: U of Missouri P, 2001); Keith Hanley, Wordsworth: A Poet’s History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001). ²³ David Collings, Wordsworthian Errancies: The Poetics of Cultural Dismemberment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994), 79, 94. Joel Faflak, Romantic Psychoanalysis: The Burden of the Mystery (New York: SUNY Press, 2007), 5. ²⁴ Faflak, Romantic Psychoanalysis, 6. See also David Sigler, Sexual Enjoyment and British Romanticism: Gender and Psychoanalysis 1753–1835 (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2015). ²⁵ See Faflak, Romantic Psychoanalysis, 31–8.

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intellectual projects have important political, scientific, and religious differences.²⁶ The parallels between romantic and psychoanalytic projects of selfinvestigation suggested by Collings and Faflak go some way to explaining the remarkable proliferation of psychoanalytic concepts and vocabulary in romantic criticism at large.²⁷ Since the 1970s they have been employed to analyse influence and intergenerational conflict (Harold Bloom); trauma (Cathy Caruth, Geoffrey Hartman); gender and sexual difference (Mary Jacobus); a psychoanalytically-inflected sublime (Theresa Kelley, Thomas Weiskel); perversion (David Collings); melancholy and paranoia (Thomas Pfau). The shift from so-called ‘High Theory’ to romantic New Historicism is often considered a repudiation: what a tradition from M.H. Abrams to Paul de Man celebrated as romanticism’s philosophical aesthetics, the new generation would indict as its ideology. Yet what persists between Bloom’s Poetry and Repression (1976) and the work of Jerome McGann and Marjorie Levinson in the following decade is the notion of repression as ego-saving concealment. In its historical turn, Wordsworth criticism witnessed not a retreat from psychoanalysis so much as the decoupling of its central concepts from psychoanalysis proper. By rejecting the ontology and biology that had become embarrassing to those trained in critical theory, but retaining generalized concepts of repression, transference, disavowal and, above all, trauma, so-called ‘suspicious’ reading refined psychoanalysis into a form of hermeneutics, transforming it from clinical theory into critical method. From this period to the present there has been no shortage of trauma in Wordsworth.²⁸ Indeed, the concept of trauma has proven so elastic that it may be the greatest single element of methodological consensus between Wordsworth’s biographical interpreters, historicists new and old, ‘high’ theorists, and contemporary critics.

²⁶ In intellectual-historical terms, one crucial distinction is that while they lived to see a world post-Kant, Wordsworth and Coleridge never inhabited a post-Kantian world (that is, the world of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche) as Freud would. ²⁷ An important historical consideration is the re-reading of psychoanalysis, in the United States especially, as literary theory, combined with ‘the vexed but palpable affinity between “high theory” and “romanticism” in the American academy’ in the period from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s. Marc Redfield, Theory at Yale: The Strange Case of Deconstruction in America (New York: Fordham UP, 2016), 41. ²⁸ To give only a few examples, see Onorato, The Character of the Poet, 64; Faflak, Romantic Psychoanalysis, 111; Kevis Goodman, Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004), 124 ff.; Pfau, Romantic Moods 191–306; Collings, Wordsworthian Errancies, 9 ff.; Geoffrey Hartman, ‘Poetry and Trauma: Wordsworth’s Understanding of Early Development’ Essays in Romanticism 22 (2) (2015): 119–31.

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 ’   

Literary criticism’s invocation of trauma was always more than a metaphor or psychological loan-word; thanks in particular to Caruth and Hartman, it became a sophisticated and variegated idea in and beyond romantic criticism. It is employed in a capacious way by Collings, for example, to capture the damage done by war not only to individuals but to culture as such.²⁹ But the reason for its vast—perhaps limitless—reach is also its central drawback for literary and cultural analysis. Trauma is repressed damage, and since it is repressed, we can never say with certainty where it ends. As Anne-Lise François writes: The virtue of the method of ‘denied positivism’ (according to which every blank may be supposed to hide an erased plenitude and vice versa) adopted by Romantic new historicism is that it would seem to be better able to take into account the lasting scars inflicted by such ‘merely’ hypothetical violence . . . The difficulty here, as with the psychoanalytic theorization of trauma as an event, the missing of which is fundamental to its occurrence, is that the possibility of accepting as real the escape from violence . . . disappears somewhere between the impatient critique of the Romantic poet for ‘getting away apparently unharmed,’ without paying the price of historical suffering, and the patient unravelling of this elided agon as a merely illusory escape.³⁰

Neither evidence nor its absence can establish the end of trauma, and to read for what cannot be written risks what Pfau calls ‘the circular epistemology of psychoanalytic reading’.³¹ This objection is common to many forms of suspicious critique, but as trauma propagates it also flattens out the affective spectrum. As Lauren Berlant notes, trauma ‘best describes one or two styles among many for managing being overwhelmed’.³² Similarly to how the sublime tends to displace more minor aesthetic categories, because it is structurally as well as descriptively powerful, trauma theory crowds out our thinking about a whole range of less forceful affective states.³³ Since it ²⁹ Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996); Geoffrey Hartman, The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1996); Collings, Wordsworthian Errancies, 9. ³⁰ Anne-Lise François, Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2008), 167–8. ³¹ Pfau, Romantic Moods, 192. ³² Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke UP, 2011), 81. ³³ For an exemplary recovery of those minor modes, see Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2012).

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deals with the most searing and pungent forms of experience, it tends to overlook registers between being fully attentive and utterly unconscious, leaving out what is registered yet unnoticed: things in the corner of your eye or the back of your mind, things that Wordsworth might call ‘halfconscious’ and contemporary readers ‘underperformed experience’.³⁴ Finally, and most pertinently for this study, the unparalleled theoretical success of trauma suggests a critical preference both for great over small (intolerable pain, jouissance, and their siblings in the affective high sublime) and for negative affects over other kinds. For as long as criticism relies on trauma and its explanatory logic it will overlook Wordsworth’s insistence on the importance of forgotten joy—and most significantly lost ‘childish’ joy. As John Forrester has observed, ‘[p]sychoanalysts . . . seek out the bad experiences of a person’s remembered childhood . . . if you are seeking out bad infantile experiences because you have at the back of your mind an ideal of an innocent childhood, which can be restored, you are moving in the opposite direction from psychoanalysis’.³⁵ One of the aims of this book is to connect Wordsworth’s ambitious thinking about unrecorded, ‘unremembered’, and otherwise unnoticed life to a whole range of neutral to positive affective states: surprise, tranquillity, happiness, the gentle shock of recognition, the transport of joy. The legacy of psychoanalytic reading has obscured important parts of Wordsworth’s thinking and writing. Yet there is a strong case against abandoning or suppressing analytic ideas (aside from the fact that, for the analysts, such a disavowal would neatly prove the psychoanalytic point). Rather, poetry might be read against psychoanalysis, in order to put the inevitable tension to good use. In Isolated Cases, Nancy Yousef engages with the Freudian tradition while insisting on the differences from her objects: While Freud and his followers have accustomed us to thinking about the persistence of childhood anxieties in later life, this order is in some measure reversed in the texts that are the focus of this book. It is not so much the fact that we were once weak and dependent that is troublesome and that provokes fantasies of original autonomy, but a present and

³⁴ Jacques Khalip, ‘Kant’s peace, Wordsworth’s slumber’ in Romanticism and the Emotions ed. Joel Faflak and Richard Sha (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2014), 192–214, 196. ³⁵ John Forrester, Dispatches from the Freud Wars: Psychoanalysis and Its Passions. (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997), 240.

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 ’    uncomfortable sense of vulnerability for which the figure of infantile need may well be an emblematic reminder.³⁶

This move is not a refusal of the psychoanalytic position: by distinguishing Locke, Rousseau, and Wordsworth’s visions of infant isolation from the Freudian child, Yousef suggests that all these accounts will be laden with fears and desires, nascent social theory and political philosophy, fantasies of what subjectivity is or could yet be: in short, everything psychoanalysis likes to ascribe to the life-world of real infants. In this way, the Freudian tradition can illustrate the social and political significance of these scenes of origin without purporting to explain them in its own terms. Elsewhere, Yousef notes that ‘psychoanalytic writing also attends to the nonreciprocal, elusive, and at times strange forms of intimacy that are characteristic of romanticism’ without ever equating the two.³⁷ Rather, the homology allows psychoanalysis to function as an evocative but distinct partner. If romanticism is psychoanalytic, then Wordsworth can only demonstrate what Freud already knows.³⁸ A productive encounter must preserve what Charles Alteri has called the capacity of poetry ‘to develop a psychic economy different from Freud’s version of interior life’.³⁹ Yet the remarkable persistence of psychoanalytic concepts in Wordsworth criticism suggests not only that they capture something of importance, but that because our ideas of consciousness and unconscious experience, memory and forgetfulness (among many others) are so tenaciously mediated by psychoanalysis we will need to work though psychoanalysis in order to approach romanticism’s own articulations of psychic life. Likewise, although a full assessment is beyond the scope of this book, the same kind of attention will highlight moments when romanticism, and especially Wordsworthian strains of it, have mediated Anglophone readings of Freud. In short, psychoanalysis needs to be kept visible precisely so that we appreciate what is distinctive about Wordsworth’s attention to forgotten and ‘unrememberable’

³⁶ Nancy Yousef, Isolated Cases: The Anxieties of Autonomy in Enlightenment Philosophy and Romantic Literature (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2004), 23. ³⁷ Nancy Yousef, Romantic Intimacy (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2013), 137 ³⁸ The problem is, as Albrecht neatly puts it, that ‘knowledge is imposed onto artworks, and artworks (and artists) are in turn “subsumed” by established concepts and paradigms’. Thomas Albrecht, ‘Subject and object in psychoanalytic criticism: on the interpretative method of Freud’s “The Moses of Michelangelo” ’ Textual Practice 28 (5) (2014): 783–806, 791. ³⁹ Charles Altieri, ‘Wordsworth’s Poetics of Eloquence: A Challenge to Contemporary Theory’ in Romantic Revolutions: Criticism and Theory ed. Kenneth Johnston et al. (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990), 371–407, 402.

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experience and affects. So that we might read ‘theory’ (if that is what psychoanalytic writing has become) ‘in ways that let theory gain from Wordsworth’.⁴⁰ In this way, we can re-read the entwined lives of romanticism and psychoanalysis over the past century neither as two moments in the same story, nor as mere noise or theoretical interference, but through what Wai Chee Dimock has called resonance: ‘frequencies received and amplified across time, moving farther and farther from their points of origin, causing unexpected vibrations in unexpected places’.⁴¹ My aim is to open space for a broader range of unconscious, unnoticed, and unrecognized experiences. Tracing his familiar childhood paths, and their dense evocative power, Proust’s narrator reflects on their links to ‘so many of the little events of that life which, of all the various lives we lead concurrently, is the most abundant in sudden reversals of fortune, the richest in episodes’: intellectual life. Rather than bending to the will, or growing like height or age, it ‘progresses within us imperceptibly, and the truths that have changed its meaning and its appearance for us, that have opened new paths to us, we had been preparing to discover for a long time; but we did so without knowing it; and for us they date only from the day, from the minute in which they became visible’.⁴² To see intellectual life as unanticipated event or episode is to undermine any sense that it is a kind of self-directed project. It is to acknowledge thought’s debt to the places and moments which occasion, but do not determine, our discoveries. In a related way, Wordsworth’s unremembered pleasure emerges through moments of acknowledgement and recognition that blur the distinction between affect and thought. They stand in pointed contrast to memories, which are sometimes understood, like a family album or professional portfolio, as aesthetic or intellectual possessions, that might be consciously collected and employed. But picturing poetry’s pleasure in this way is harder than it may first appear. While we are unlikely to treat Wordsworth’s retrospection in verse as the straightforward recovery of historical fact, it is more difficult to resist the reflex to read it as fantasy or wish-fulfilment. There is a familiar view of art— especially of ‘high’ art—which imagines it to salvage or redeem the world. This culture of redemption, Leo Bersani argues, repairs the world only by gesturing beyond it; ‘sublimation is disguised as transcendence’.⁴³ As ⁴⁰ Fred Hoerner, ‘Nostalgia’s Freight in Wordsworth’s Intimations Ode’ ELH 62 (3) (1995): 631–61, 632. ⁴¹ Wai Chee Dimock, ‘A Theory of Resonance’ PMLA 112 (5) (1997): 1060–71, 1061. ⁴² Marcel Proust, The Way by Swann’s trans. Lydia Davis (London: Penguin, 2003), 184. ⁴³ Leo Bersani, The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1990), 21.

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 ’   

Bersani demonstrates, this logic runs not only through modern literature from Proust to Joyce, but through literary criticism; it is as seductive to readers as to writers. Moreover, we don’t even need to believe that art’s redemptive power can ever succeed to share in the assumption that artistic satisfaction will always take the form of diversion or escape. This is what makes it so hard to read articulations of pleasure or satisfaction as anything other than escapist fantasy. If trauma doesn’t constrain our reading, it is likely that that sublimation will. In attempting to imagine past pleasure neither as recovery nor sublimated wishfulness, I am particularly interested in what Christopher Miller has called Wordsworth’s ‘anatomies of surprise’. Surprise, he notes, is at the crossroads of lyric and narrative; it is ‘both an emotion and an event . . . both an affect and its cause’.⁴⁴ It comes on the scene as an answer whose question has yet to be posed. Crucially, surprise is a form in which pleasure can be something other than the satisfaction of an already-existing lack or wish. Tracing such a form means reading with the expectation of being caught out. It requires a move from ‘strong theory’ to the kind ‘that comes unstuck from its own line of thought to follow the objects it encounters, or becomes undone by its attention to things which don’t add up but take on a life of their own as problems for thought’.⁴⁵ This book is not a systematic study of Wordsworth’s psychology, nor does it carve out a place for Wordsworth in the history of the science. Like sensation in Orrin Wang’s Romantic Sobriety, I take unconscious pleasure as neither ‘psychological nor empirical phenomenon’ but rather as a structuring concept, as well as an aesthetically and affectively important figure, for Wordsworth’s poetry and prose.⁴⁶ In reading for ‘resonance’ and ‘dissonance’ (to suggest an equivalent term for conceptual resistance), I am indebted to what Anahid Nersessian has called a tradition of ‘idiosyncratic interpretation’, which places Wordsworth beyond any totalizing explanatory scheme, be it historical, philosophical, or theoretical.⁴⁷ The project also owes much to idiosyncratic and provocative readers of Freud, especially those ⁴⁴ Christopher Miller, ‘Wordsworth’s Anatomies of Surprise’ Studies in Romanticism 46 (4) (2007): 409–31, 413. ⁴⁵ Kathleen Stewart, ‘Weak Theory in an Unfinished World’ Journal of Folklore Research 45 (1) (2008): 71–82, 72. The crucial distinction is drawn in Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling (Durham: Duke UP, 2003), 123–51. ⁴⁶ Orrin Wang, Romantic Sobriety: Sensation, Revolution, Commodification, History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2011), 2. ⁴⁷ Anahid Nersessian, Utopia, Limited: Romanticism and Adjustment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2015), 5. Nersessian cites Kevis Goodman, William Galperin, Jacques Khalip, and Anne-Lise François; one might also include the work of Paul Fry, Nancy Yousef, Orrin Wang, and Forest Pyle.

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who combine psychoanalytic commitments with those of feminist and queer theory: Elizabeth Grosz, Tim Dean, Lee Edelman, and above all Leo Bersani, whose capacity to stretch Freud to breaking point without ever abandoning him is exemplary. To borrow Yousef ’s phrase, this book responds to Wordsworth and Freud’s ‘nonreciprocal, elusive, and at times strange forms of intimacy’.⁴⁸ And it has been influenced by the precision, care, and vitality of writerly engagements with affect theory, especially those of Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick, Rei Terada, and Kathleen Stewart. It is no coincidence that the turn to affect came hand-in-hand with an interest in forms of theory which do not totalize. Unremembered pleasure is not the only (or, much of the time, the controlling) concern in Wordsworth’s writing, nor does it represent a comprehensive theory. But even while it remains at the margins, the idea of unnoticed and unrecorded pleasure animates, unsettles, and connects aspects which are themselves central: composition, retrospection, mourning, and happiness. The method I have sketched here attends to psychoanalysis, but it is not psychoanalytic. At the same time, nor is it an anti-psychoanalytic project, cutting away at the links to romanticism in the name of hermeneutic hygiene. Indeed, there are good psychoanalytic reasons to insist on the tension and ambivalence between the two. The shortcuts between literature and biography which are still occasionally drawn in the name of repression only bring into relief the problem with what Jean Laplanche called ‘the current Vulgate concerning the unconscious’: that ‘it is a question of a hidden meaning, whether universal or trans-individual, which one can access without too much effort, other than being a little informed’.⁴⁹ For Laplanche, there is something necessarily enigmatic about unconsciousness; to take it seriously is precisely to stop assuming that mental life is intelligible. This means valuing psychoanalysis not because it has the answers, but because it has patience with not knowing. The stance is not so much a position of theoretical modesty as an acknowledgement of the continual risk that, like those of any ‘strong’ theory, psychoanalytic explanations will become brittle with overuse. Cherished moments of insight ossify into interpretive clichés, each forming what Rebecca Comay calls ‘a recognizable

⁴⁸ Yousef, Romantic Intimacy, 137. ⁴⁹ Jean Laplanche, Freud and the Sexual: Essays 2000–2006. ed. John Fletcher (New York: International Psychoanalytic Books, 2011), 219.

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 ’   

“Freudian” trope, the grammatical equivalent of a cigar in a dream . . . a piece of frozen theoretical (mis)-information’.⁵⁰ Disentangling Wordsworth and Freud might make them available to one another in new ways. In a late essay titled ‘Lituraterre’, Lacan remarks that ‘[i]f literary criticism could effectively renew itself . . . it would be because psychoanalysis is there for the texts to measure themselves against it, the enigma being on its side’.⁵¹ Literary criticism benefits, on Lacan’s account, when psychoanalysis comes on the scene not as the reader-supposed-toknow but as a discourse which criticism can be set against. We can think of the typical relation posed between literature and psychoanalysis as one of verticality: psychoanalysis reveals what is ‘beneath’ or ‘behind’ the text, and does so by seeing through or past the surface. By contrast, the relation suggested by Lacan’s remarks is horizontal; the term against encompasses opposition and support, as when you lean against a tree.⁵² In this spirit, I want to risk the idea that psychoanalysis and poetry might have the most to offer when they can’t quite understand each other: when an explanation misfires or comes up short, in what Bersani memorably identified as ‘moments of theoretical collapse’.⁵³

Father of the Man Having outlined the general method, we might start again from the same line: The Child is Father of the Man. In its original context, the line encapsulates how childhood feeling is for Wordsworth both an index of what has been lost in adult life and a persistent source of inspiration. Much of the force and significance of childhood experience emerges from the standpoint of its fading and disappearance. And childhood pleasure persists as a looping, retroactive force, quite unlike psychoanalytic repression: My heart leaps up when I behold A Rainbow in the sky: ⁵⁰ Rebecca Comay, ‘Resistance and repetition in Freud and Hegel’ Research in Phenomenology 45 (2015): 237–66, 252. ⁵¹ Jacques Lacan, ‘Lituraterre’ trans. Dany Nobus Continental Philosophy Review 46 (2) (2013): 327–34, 329. ⁵² I make a longer argument to this effect in Alexander Freer, ‘Poetics contra psychoanalysis’ Poetics Today 40 (4) (2019): 619–43. ⁵³ Leo Bersani, The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (New York: Columbia UP, 1986), 10.

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So was it when my life began; So is it now I am a Man; So be it when I shall grow old, Or let me die! The Child is Father of the Man; And I could wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural piety.⁵⁴

This is a kind of compound perception, in which something childlike remains in the adult’s vision of a rainbow, but remains under continual threat of loss. The poem’s present, ‘adult’ pleasure is premised on past enjoyment, and is experienced as a recapitulation of an original pleasure ‘when my life began’. ‘So was it’, ‘[s]o is it’ and ‘[s]o be it’ in the future: just as the third, fourth, and fifth lines repeat the same formula, deviating only by tense, the rainbow provides a figure of continuity between past and present, a figure for the wish that such continuity can be preserved. At the same time, ‘Or let me die’ breaks the syntactic parallelism of the preceding lines, and by introducing a second option (leaping hearts or death) hints that this is not a command but a shaky bargain. Here the tone of what Eric Lindstrom has called Wordsworth’s ‘useless fiat’ is hard to determine: is it serious or hyperbolic?⁵⁵ The jussive encompasses both the laughable—gloominess that rainbows now seem boring—and the grave: a life of slackening observational power, and debilitated sensation. With so much equivocation resting on it, the poem’s opening declaration is at once a sensation turned into an event, and the signal of a far wider web of conditionality. The rainbow covenant offers one more articulation of a promise Wordsworth frequently stakes against his ruin: an individual will be tutored by the natural world and like a child he will remain vividly impressionable. In its confident form, this promise amounts to a claim of artistic education; in its tragic or unfulfilled form, it becomes a fear of aesthetic enfeeblement whose wider causes extend to old age, formal education, instrumental reason, wage labour, urbanization, and mass transit. His attempts to balance such large questions on the kind of small observations we are inclined to treat as merely personal satisfactions help to explain why some readers find such promises so disagreeable. In this case, it might seem that either the ⁵⁴ P2V, 206. ⁵⁵ Eric Lindstrom, Romantic Fiat: Demystification and Enchantment in Lyric Poetry. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 89–112.

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 ’   

poem is sincere and optimistic, in which case it is cloying and sentimental, or else it is tragic in tone, in which case it is a nostalgic ruse employed to disguise an adult’s dissatisfaction as a child’s fragile experience—how few and gifted the real children must be who already worry over the loss of their childhood as they live it. Yet here as elsewhere, neither the sentimental nor cynical reading fully account for the dense imbrication of sensations and their privation (in another idiom, neither fantasy nor repression quite capture the workings of the poem). This leap is not in any straightforward sense a recovery. The adult finds continuity with his past in the vision of the rainbow, but precisely because the rainbow promises that continuity, it now appears as the one persistent feature in a forgetful sky; the adult loves the rainbow as if a child, but what he loves most about it is unintelligible from the perspective of childhood itself. Strictly speaking, the joy belongs neither to the child nor the man whose father he is said to be. In a hushed reading of ‘A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal’, Khalip concludes that, rather than in the registration of loss, ‘the lure of the affect lies in the evanescent yet no less searching mode of adaptation to a present that is not at home with itself ’.⁵⁶ The poem quivers between claiming feeling and registering an incapacity to feel; it traces sensation on the threshold of attribution. Different in many other ways, ‘My heart leaps up’ shares this equivocation over precisely where its affect resides, or if residence is even the right term. In these comparatively simple cases, we might say that the pleasurable recognition of the rainbow, or the tranquilizing sorrow of ‘A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal’, come into consciousness only as an echo of something already elapsed. In a more overdetermined and yet more literal fashion, the famous crossing of the Alps sequence in book six of The Prelude provides another figure of retrospective recognition. After stopping for lunch at an inn and falling behind the group of travellers they were following, Wordsworth and his walking partner Robert Jones lose their way, taking what seemed like the only path, which leads them high up a mountain and then far, far down into a streambed, where at last they learn that their aim had been achieved. They had already crossed the Alps. The moment of anticipated intensity passes by silently and is only acknowledged after the fact. It is therefore neither straightforwardly an achievement nor a

⁵⁶ Khalip, ‘Kant’s peace, Wordsworth’s slumber’, 210.

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failure; it is brought into consciousness by the knowledge that it had eluded notice.⁵⁷ In the crossing of the Alps, as in numerous other cases, I will suggest, the moment of emotional and cognitive inflection emerges as a delayed response to—or retroactive cognition of—something that had been present but unrealized from the beginning. In these moments, we might say, ‘thinking . . . knows itself and is aware of itself as surprise’.⁵⁸ A major concern in the first half of the book will be to resist the idea that these lost and discontinuous feelings are simply aspects, or corruptions, of memory. Suspicions about Wordsworthian memory are much older than suspicious reading, of course. In a 1942 sermon entitled ‘The Weight of Glory’, C.S. Lewis remarked: Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it [‘glory’] with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing.⁵⁹

Lewis’s objection appeals both to common sense—memories are not facsimiles of experience, but partial recollections—and to a highly imaginative scenario: Wordsworth somehow returning to moments in the past in order to verify them. Memory is a ‘cheat’ because the ‘reminder’ does not match the original experience; the accounts don’t add up. It isn’t hard to think of cases in which this kind of objection misses the mark: I might think very positively about a sporting achievement without any desire to go through the whole ordeal again. More important, however, is the structure of Lewis’s complaint: he expects retrospection to be an exercise in memory alone, and so deviation necessarily appears duplicitous. Wordsworth’s ‘cheat’ arises

⁵⁷ The question of precisely what is learned and when it is learned is complicated by the poem’s compositional history and revisions. See Robert A. Brinkley, ‘The Incident in the Simplon Pass: A Note on Wordsworth’s Revisions’ The Wordsworth Circle 12 (2) (1981): 122–5. ⁵⁸ Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000), 172. ⁵⁹ C.S. Lewis, ‘The Weight of Glory’ Theology 43 (257) (1941): 263–74, 265–6.

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 ’   

from the same structure that Thomas Noon Talfourd judged to offer ‘grace’: ‘the mingling of imagination with memory’.⁶⁰ More recent criticism has generally avoided the temptation to see memory as simple truth or falsehood, but the essential antagonism is not so easily dissolved. While allowing for a more complex account of recollection, a critical tradition including Hugh Sykes Davies, Eugene Stelzig, and Stuart Sperry, has broadened the definition of memory in Wordsworth to encompass what I will suggest are the nuances and complications of lost feeling. Of those who consider Wordsworth ‘pre-eminently the poet of memory’, Sykes Davies is among the most subtle; he remarks that the sources of Wordsworth’s poetry ‘were never literal records, printed on the mind once and for all in their original lineaments. In their deep hiding-places, and on their successive revivals in tranquillity, they underwent a continuous process of transformation.’⁶¹ This avoids the reductively empiricist, and sometimes rather literalist, impulses which continue to stalk some accounts of poetic memory.⁶² Yet there is something counterintuitive, at the very least, about memories which continuously change. Sykes Davies has no patience for criticism ‘which laboriously proves the literal fact of some poem of his to have been inaccurate’, and insists that the particulars of poetry ‘must not, of course, be confused with literal facts. On the contrary, they demand of their user the most carefully selective and imaginative activity.’⁶³ But however careful one is, the mingling of memory with other terms will remain contentious. Memory does not suffer adjectives gladly; certainly, selective and imaginative memories do not inspire much confidence. In sum, the word cannot avoid raising expectations of some original account with respect to which recollection can be either accurate or erroneous, honest or fraudulent. Most significantly for this investigation, the prospect of retrospective pleasure will, when constrained to memory, always look like nostalgia or sheer wishful thinking. There never was a prospect of going back to the past as it originally was, nor was Wordsworth attempting to do so. As Hartman remarks, ‘there is a ⁶⁰ T.N. Talfourd, ‘An Attempt to Estimate the Poetical Talent of the Present Age, Including a Sketch of the History of Poetry, and Characters of Southey, Crabbe, Scott, Moore, Lord Byron, Campbell, Lamb, Coleridge, and Wordsworth’ [1815] rprt. in Wordsworth: The Critical Heritage vol. 1 ed. Robert Woof (London: Routledge, 2001), 848. ⁶¹ Sykes Davies, Wordsworth and the Worth of Words, 8. ⁶² For an overview see Beth Lau, ‘Wordsworth and Current Memory Research’ Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 42 (4) (2002): 675–92; Alan Richardson, ‘Defaulting to Fiction: Neuroscience Rediscovers the Romantic Imagination’ Poetics Today 32 (4) (2011): 663–92. ⁶³ Sykes Davies, Wordsworth and the Worth of Words, 8.

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necessary violation of nature or of a previous state of being. Yet Wordsworth keeps his faith in the possibility of an unviolent passage from childhood to maturity or even from nature to eternity.’⁶⁴ The tense juxtaposition of an ‘unviolent’ violation speaks to the poet’s deep ambivalence towards the past, which is never recovered in its original form, and whose transformation is never straightforwardly a loss nor a gain, but a tightly knotted combination of the two. In which the work of composition itself may, at any point, ‘Confound my present feelings with the past’.⁶⁵ In the story Wordsworth tells, the adult can never recover childhood as it was, but by his loss he learns that there was more to childhood than a child could have grasped. What is at stake is not the veracity of a person’s claims on their own past, but the possibility that a recognition of what was missed, misunderstood, or unknowingly declined could be itself a species of knowledge. Were such a thing possible, retrospection could not be reduced to the sum of ‘[w]hat then I was’ nor wholly accounted for by conscious invention or wilful creativity.⁶⁶ Wordsworth’s compositional method, I will argue in Chapter 3, is premised on just such a possibility: that the time elapsed, and pleasure found, in retrospection does not weaken poetry’s claim on the past but allows previously unnoticed and unrecognized detail to be registered in writing. Once their possibility is granted, lost sensations and affects are not hard to find. Often it is the sheer asymmetry between infant and adult experience—between unarticulated sensation and retrospective words— that occasions the transformation or disappearance of affective states. In this scene from the second part of the 1798–99 Prelude, a starry night gives way to an aside: When all the ground was dark, and the huge clouds Were edged with twinkling stars, to bed we went With weary joints and with a beating mind. Ah! is there one who ever has been young And needs a monitory voice to tame The pride of virtue and of intellect, And is there one, the wisest and the best Of all mankind, who does not sometimes wish

⁶⁴ Geoffrey Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry 1787–1814 (New Haven: Yale UP, 1971), 50. ⁶⁵ LB, 220. ⁶⁶ LB, 118.

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 ’    For things which cannot be, who would not give, If so he might, to duty and to truth The eagerness of infantine desire?⁶⁷

From the infinities of the night sky to a mind racing like the pulse of a breathless child, the young Wordsworth of this passage lacks the patience which, the mature poet suggests, comes with age. In contrast, the adult is made tame; ‘the pride of virtue and of intellect’ in him is tempered. But he cannot deny the appeal of that early immodesty and excess. Thus, the adult’s impossible wish: that the mature virtues of duty and truth might be augmented with precisely the power they cannot have, ‘the eagerness of infantine desire’. Just as there is no youth who is not in want of ‘a monitory voice’, no person acquainted with duty and truth can lend them such untamed energy. Duty and truth require the loss or suppression of that ‘eagerness’ which would too quickly turn from the task at hand to some other enjoyment. Eagerness is not so much a disposition one can adopt as a mood which, in spite of its intensity, is now scarcely tangible. What is lost to the adult, Wordsworth will say elsewhere, is not one particular moment or idea but a certain disposition towards the world, a ‘hunger’ or ‘joy’ which is detained at the borders of childhood. In confronting these scenes of unconstrained feeling, it is not memories that fixate Wordsworth; he senses something tangled amongst the memories of early life which, being contained by none of them, cannot fully be grasped. Mary Jacobus captures this receptivity by calling Wordsworth ‘the negative phenomenologist of Romantic thingness’.⁶⁸ In moments such as this we can even go beyond thinghood: there are moods, affects, and registers of attention which can be articulated for the first time in poetry, but only as absence and foreclosure. You might ask: why focus above all on undisclosed pleasure? Wordsworth is not the first writer of voluptuous pleasure that springs to mind, and his pleasures can seem thin and restricted in contrast to Keats’s blushing ecstasies, for instance.⁶⁹ But Wordsworthian pleasure is remarkably disruptive precisely because his writing can’t get a grip on it. Wordsworth’s claims for sober pleasure are made not in an effort to replace childish joy but to preserve without killing it. Yet such claims only expose a dependence on a

⁶⁷ 1799, II.14–24. ⁶⁸ Mary Jacobus, Romantic Things: a Tree, a Rock, a Cloud (Chicago: Chicago UP, 2012), 129. ⁶⁹ See Christopher Ricks, Keats and Embarrassment (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 19–49; Wang, Romantic Sobriety, 281–8.

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much more elusive, eager, earlier sentiment. If all adult pleasure bears the mark of ‘infantine desire’, then the embarrassment—and sublimity—of Wordsworthian pleasure is found not in its mere excess, but in its essentially infantile character. It may be more comfortable to view this as misdirection or sentimentality rather than a credible account of pleasure: to discount Wordsworth’s infantile streak, like Keats’s vulgarity or Landon’s egotism, as a kind of inebriation at the cup of romantic interiority. But all three labels are insufficient at best. Freud gave to psychology what we might call a long history of infancy, ‘a history with discontinuities, in which the moments of burial and resurgence are the most important of all; a history, it might be said, of repression’.⁷⁰ Wordsworth suggests a rather different account of personal history. A history of the individual whose most crucial discoveries are not won by force of will but glimpsed in moments of almost involuntary enjoyment. Its best pleasures, being neither calculated nor wished for, resist the habitual opposition between duty and inclination, between reality and self-deluding play. Knowledge, on this account, exists not apart from pleasure but in it and through it. This is why infants know more than they can say, and why isolated scholarship is, for Wordsworth, an inadequate substitute for that cultivated and vulnerable openness to the world we might as shorthand call ‘our learnings and our loves’.⁷¹ Pleasure is at the crux of the underacknowledged but crucial difference between Wordsworth’s thinking and psychoanalytic accounts of mental life. Already in his translation of Mill, Freud renders ‘pleasure’ as Lust rather than Freude, introducing a sense of desirous lack in place of the more stable, intransitive affect of utilitarian thought. As Aaron Schuster has recently demonstrated, there is a ‘trouble with pleasure’ throughout Freud’s oeuvre.⁷² Putting a similar point more forcefully in his virtuosic reading of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Bersani contends that ‘psychoanalysis really doesn’t know what pleasure is’, and ‘[e]ach step . . . repudiates the pleasure principle while adhering to it; it abolishes pleasure in . . . an annihilating replication of it’.⁷³ The challenge of handling pleasure—imaginative as much as theoretical—goes to the heart of the entanglement of romanticism and psychoanalysis, and provides the surest grounds for recovering their differences. ⁷⁰ Jean Laplanche, Essays on Otherness ed. John Fletcher et al. (London: Routledge, 1999), 150. ⁷¹ 1805a, V.258. ⁷² Aaron Schuster, The Trouble with Pleasure: Deleuze and Psychoanalysis (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2016). ⁷³ Bersani, The Freudian Body, 55–65.

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 ’   

Terminologies Wordsworth has a range of idiosyncratic terms for states and forms of attention other than conscious, notably half-consciousness and underconsciousness, as well the negative terms unremembered and unrememberable. As I discuss in Chapter 2, this last term appears in DC MS. 19, in draft material which can be traced to the poem we now know as The Prelude. The word itself does not make it into subsequent iterations of the long autobiographical poem, but the draft establishes ‘unrememberable’ as part of Wordsworth’s lexicon before the turn of the nineteenth century, and prior to the first usage recorded in the OED.⁷⁴ His use of the term unremembered both signals and contributes to his broader account of lost and overlooked sensation. It is a characteristically slim distinction, just shy of a simple negation of what was remembered. Unremembered and forgotten are ‘synonymous, or very nearly so, in common chat’, Hester Thrale remarks in her 1794 British Synonymy, before going on to distinguish more strictly between thoughts that may ‘possibly be recollected’ and those ‘totally, hopelessly, and completely’ forgotten.⁷⁵ At times, unremembered performs a similar function for Wordsworth, holding open a space between things merely out of mind and things utterly destroyed. But it operates in conjunction with a broad range of related terms, each supporting and modifying the last without supposing a unified theory. I want to offer a rationale at this stage for invoking one of the more contentious of these terms, unconscious. My motivation in speaking of a Wordsworthian unconsciousness is both to articulate one among many diverse meanings invested in the term over the long nineteenth century, and to afford Wordsworth’s other related terms the same conceptual gravity sometimes reserved for the technical language that would be formalized by Freud. Indeed, there has sometimes been a tendency—among psychoanalysts but also their critics—to treat the concept of the unconscious as a Freudian invention, with some dignified forebears amongst the ancient philosophers and the poets, and to restrict the word itself to the discussion of psychoanalysis. For its advocates, this preserves the theoretical rigour of

⁷⁴ As of the most recent update (OED third edition, December 2014), the earliest example is quoted from an 1803 issue of the Annual Review: ‘The topography of a country wherein every place has an unrememberable name.’ ⁷⁵ Hester Lynch Piozzi, British Synonymy; or, An Attempt at Regulating the Choice of Words in Familiar Conversation vol. 2 (London: G.G. and J. Robinson, 1794), 344.

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the field; for its detractors, it limits the proliferation of a dangerously pseudoscientific lexicon. But any lingering concern that unconsciousness is a psychoanalytic term, whose use beyond its borders can only invite anachronism, can be assuaged by recent scholarship demonstrating the ‘broader nineteenth-century interest in the unconscious for which there is no single logic and no single history’.⁷⁶ The limitation has been greater in Anglophone scholarship because many of the best-established figures in the nineteenth-century history of the unconscious—Schelling, C.G. Carus, Gustav Fechner, and Eduard von Hartmann for instance—are more familiar to students of German romanticism. But literary critics have also begun to reconstruct a specifically British romantic tradition, beginning with Coleridge and Thomas de Quincey.⁷⁷ These writers all participate in what should be understood as a philosophically, psychologically, and aesthetically diverse turn towards unconsciousness.⁷⁸ The anxiety over the term unconscious—especially the perceived risk of anachronism—also allows us to articulate a broader tension between romanticism and psychoanalysis. On the one hand, unconscious and its cognates are used in the romantic period in new and challenging ways. ‘The Romantics didn’t invent the unconscious, but they did christen it’, Matthew Bevis remarks.⁷⁹ On the other hand, so influential has the psychoanalytic project been that even the question of romantic unconsciousness now appears to invoke psychoanalysis. Unconscious has unparalleled conceptual heft; it is harder to treat as ‘merely’ literary or mystical, as one might Wordsworth’s underconsciousness, or Coleridge and De Quincey’s subconscious. But that heft is due in large part to Freud’s attempt to separate it from the literary, through strenuous policing of terminology. To use the word in a counter-psychoanalytic way is to restore some of its conceptual range. Although he himself used the term subconscious (both le subconscient and Unterbewusst) in the early 1890s, by the time he was writing the Introductory Lectures, Freud would pride himself on terminological precision: ‘I should like to hear you admit that our terms, “unconscious”, “preconscious” and “conscious”, prejudge things far less and are far easier to justify than ⁷⁶ ffytche, The Foundation of the Unconscious, 7. ⁷⁷ See Alan Richardson, ‘Coleridge and the new unconscious’ in British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001), 39–65; Markus Iseli, Thomas De Quincey and the Cognitive Unconscious (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). ⁷⁸ See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge, 2002), 326; Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience trans. Liz Heron (London: Verso, 1993), 40. ⁷⁹ Matthew Bevis, Wordsworth’s Fun (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2019), 108.

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 ’   

others which have been proposed or are in use, such as “subconscious”, “paraconscious”, “intraconscious” and the like.’⁸⁰ And in Freud’s dialogue on the tense subject of quackery—‘The Question of Lay Analysis’—we find this rejoinder from the psychoanalysts to the ‘Impartial Person’ who equates the Freudian jargon to ‘the so-called subconscious that people talk about so much nowadays’: The other names are of no use. And do not try to give me literature instead of science. If someone talks of subconsciousness, I cannot tell whether he means the term topographically—to indicate something lying in the mind beneath consciousness—or qualitatively—to indicate another consciousness, a subterranean one, as it were. He is probably not clear about any of it. The only trustworthy antithesis is between conscious and unconscious.⁸¹

Freud figures the difference between good terminology and bad as a distinction between literature and science: psychoanalysis has its term of art, which correspond to a systematic account of the mind; they ought not to be confused with merely artistic terms that are fashionable, literary, and unserious. While Freud often claims to inherit the wisdom—and implicitly the prestige and cultural authority—of the poets, moments such as this demonstrate that he is equally determined to legitimate his project scientifically by casting off the literary. The bind, Adam Phillips notes, is that ‘psychoanalysts might sometimes need poetry, in ways that poetry might not need psychoanalysis’.⁸² On the one hand, it relies on a belief in the creative, revelatory, and curative powers of language whose exemplary cases are literary; on the other hand, psychoanalysis must not stretch to being literature, lest it admit what its critics have always said: that it is not legitimate science. Freud’s tendency to equate charges of pseudoscience with poetry can be traced back to a remark in a 1908 letter to Jung, concerning some critics of Jung’s work on Dementia praecox: I believe that if they were analysed it would turn out that they are still waiting for the discovery of the bacillus or protozoon of hysteria as for the

⁸⁰ Freud, Standard Edition, 16:296. ⁸¹ Freud, Standard Edition, 20:197–8, my emphasis. ⁸² Adam Phillips, Promises, Promises (London: Faber & Faber, 2000), 30.

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messiah who must after all come some day to all true believers. When that happens a differential diagnosis from Dem. pr. [Dementia praecox] ought to be a simple matter, since the hysteria parasite will no doubt have only one stiff whiplike appendage, while that of Dem. pr. will regularly show two and also take a different stain. Then we shall be able to leave psychology to the poets!⁸³

The joke is that Jung’s critics—Ernst Meyer and others—are victims of their excessive, unconscious faith in laboratory techniques. The imaginary hysteria parasite, which could be observed under the microscope, would settle the question of hysteria’s relation to Dementia praecox, and then with the real science finished, the merely subjective experience of these diseases might be left to poetry. The positivist fantasy that would ‘solve’ mental illness with a blood test or microscope slide hangs over the scientist like the messiah whom ‘true believers’ still await. The sceptical laboratory scientist is revealed to be the one who is duped—and, Freud implies, still swayed by Jewish faith in a way that he is not. Fittingly for a psychoanalytic joke, this reveals more than intended. It redirects the charge of pseudoscientific faith towards its opponents, but the irreverent image of the hysterogenic bacillus as Jewish messiah introduces the secondary implication that Meyer’s work is ‘too Jewish’, or even that it errs because it is Jewish, redirecting attacks by antiSemitic critics on Freud’s own ‘Jewish science’ (never mind that this is a letter to Jung). Finally, the punchline that one might ‘leave psychology to the poets’ suggests Freud’s concern about how much of psychoanalysis is only recycled poetry: Sophocles, Shakespeare, Goethe, Jensen and, we might add, Wordsworth. Those who oppose any talk of romantic unconsciousness as anachronistic ‘psychoanalytic reading’ because they are rightly wary of conflating psychoanalytic ideas with literary ones are, nevertheless, taking a thoroughly Freudian position. ‘Unconsciousness’, Hartman remarks, ‘remains an ambiguous term in the Romantic and Victorian periods, referring to a state distinctly other than consciousness or simply to unselfconsciousness.’⁸⁴ In some cases, the term clearly retains its common meaning prior to the nineteenth century: not conscious, or unaware, as in these lines by Charlotte Smith:

⁸³ Sigmund Freud, The Freud/Jung Letters: The Correspondence Between Sigmund Freud and C G. Jung, ed. William McGuire (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1974), 115–16. ⁸⁴ Geoffrey Hartman, Beyond Formalism (New Haven: Yale UP, 1970), 309.

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 ’    Her innocent children, unconscious of sorrow, To seek the gloss’d shell, or the crimson weed stray; Amused with the present, they heed not to-morrow, Nor think of the storm that is gathering to day.⁸⁵

These children are unconscious of the future because they are absorbed by the present: their play amongst the weeds and shells is uncoloured by consciousness of future strife. By calling them unconscious, the poet signals a limitation, a lack of foresight; ‘unconscious’ is thus the antithesis to vigilant here. ‘Smith’s exiles’, Mary Favret notes, ‘are lost between past and future; rushing and wandering, they live between hope and dread’.⁸⁶ Unlike the ‘innocent children’, their mother possesses (and suffers from) a split attention: she worries about the fate of a real ship while the children play with a toy vessel. Her suffering takes the form of a consciousness which is all too clear; unconsciousness is worlds of trouble not realized. Wordsworth uses the term in this way on occasions, as when relating a story of a bereavement in The Excursion with a similar formulation: ‘The youngest of three sons, was yet a babe, / A little One—unconscious of their loss’ (E, I.117–18). More frequently, however, Wordsworth’s uses of the term unconscious tend to bind people to their circumstances and experiences rather than cut them loose. For instance: How Fancy, in a season when she wove Those slender cords, to guide the unconscious Boy For the Man’s sake, could feed at Nature’s call (1850, VIII.454–6)

The ‘unconscious Boy’, unlike Smith’s exile’s children, is unaware but not unmarked by his environment. There are threads being woven which will hold fast when their time comes, but in ways he cannot yet apprehend. The poet’s claim to knowledge here is premised on some form of genuine but unnoticed education having taken place; the poem comes to see what the Boy didn’t know he was learning. Similarly, Wordsworth suggests delayed recognition rather than simple inattention when he writes:

⁸⁵ Charlotte Smith, The Poems of Charlotte Smith, ed. Stuart Curran (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993), 98. ⁸⁶ Mary Favret, War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2009), 78.

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even then, A Child, I held unconscious intercourse With the eternal Beauty (1805a, I.589–91)

The tension between temporal restriction and eternity suggests that if Beauty is eternal, it is not experienced as such. An ‘unconscious intercourse’, like a slender cord, ties the child to the environment in ways which are neither noticeable nor immediately consequential. By the same token, to become aware of this silent dialogue with the world is necessarily to alter it. If one were to read ‘unconscious’ as simply not conscious, this might look like a concession to the ignorance or narrowmindedness of youth, but this is far from persuasive. On the contrary, the unconscious child is in some respects the more open to the world. And by contrast, it is as a mature poet (I will suggest in Chapter 5) that Wordsworth risks losing his capacity for aesthetic experience by continually trying to preserve, clarify, and formalize the kinds of beauty he would once have barely registered. As these examples suggest, Wordsworth does not use the term unconscious systematically, and it should be understood in the context of his other cognate terms, as well as his particular taste for words with the un- prefix— unknown, unthought of, unapprehensive—and a lifelong habit of negating these words in order to create a minimal perceptive state in which sensation, desire, or articulation is neither fully available to consciousness nor wholly lost: not unnoticed, not unrecorded, not unwilling, not unproclaimed. For Oliver Clarkson, Wordsworth’s negations have ‘a distinct imaginative trajectory’ that variously frustrates and charms his readers; the negative ‘retreats in the moment it seizes, fails as it achieves, casts its shadow as it projects light’.⁸⁷ Such cancelling can also clarify rather than cloud a line of thought. The ‘not un-’ formulations allow a kind of semantic tuning; each negation undermines the prima facie meaning of the adjective, and yet opens up a subtler space adjacent to it, refining the description to an almost inarticulate level of precision. The same technique can articulate liminal mental states (‘not unbeguiled’, ‘not unconsoled, I wait—in hope’) as well as the not-fully-conscious effects of pleasure (‘the mind / Not undisturbed by the deep joy it feels’) because it provides an analogous semantic space

⁸⁷ Oliver Clarkson, ‘Wordsworth’s Negative Way’ Essays in Criticism 67 (2) (2017): 116–35, 120.

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 ’   

between the fullness of feeling and its total absence.⁸⁸ In short, this technique goes to the heart of Wordsworth’s method of writing unconsciousness. Beyond the usage of particular words, Wordsworth makes a unique contribution to thinking about the persistence of past feeling, comparable to Freud’s Nachträglichkeit, Proust’s mémoire involuntaire, and Benjamin’s optical unconscious. Wordsworth’s unremembered pleasure, combined with his lexicon for the aftershocks of pain and joy, offer a distinctive way to evoke and theorize the afterlife of affects which reaches beyond his own writing. There is, for example, something distinctly Wordsworthian about the delayed recognition captured by a line in Kathleen Stewart’s radiant and unyielding analysis of Ordinary Affects. ‘For years now her early childhood has been coming back to her as shocks of beauty, or beautiful shocks.’⁸⁹ This is neither a traumatic nor a nostalgic story. It is densely evocative of, but not reducible to, the abstract social, political, and economic forces that shape it. ‘None of this is simply ‘good’ or ‘bad’ but always, first, both powerful and mixed.’⁹⁰ Wordsworth provides a language for this kind of unremembered past that is dynamic, indeterminate, and ceaselessly unfolding.

Temporalities Orrin Wang calls Wordsworth ‘the poet of Nachträglichkeit and the past’ for understandable reasons; Nachträglichkeit (deferred action or ‘afterwardsness’) is suggestively analogous to the temporal loops, short circuits, and delays which give Wordsworth’s poems their shimmering recollections and sudden reversals of fortune and thought.⁹¹ Slavoj Žižek has given a compelling account of how, for psychoanalysis, a symptom can precede its cause.⁹² The symptom’s cause—the traumatic event—could not be experienced in the first instance, and only comes to appear at the point of its compulsive repetition: the event comes into existence as symptom, and that symptom articulates the original experience qua experience for the first time. Like Freud’s case studies, Wordsworth’s poetry is filled with moments of delayed, altered, and retrospective cognition, although their forms and

⁸⁸ ⁸⁹ ⁹⁰ ⁹²

LP, 257; E, IV.311; LB, 277. Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects (Durham: Duke UP, 2007), 17. Stewart, Ordinary Affects, 11. ⁹¹ Wang, Romantic Sobriety, 186. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 56–7.

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consequences are quite distinct. We have already touched on the ways in which Wordsworth’s articulations of unconsciousness tend to throw forward the moment of recognition, so that a formative period or event in the narrated past is named only in the poetic present. Another important figure of retrospection and anticipation can be seen in a lyric which is in some respects rather frustrating, ‘To A Butterfly’ (‘I’ve watch’d you now’).⁹³ The titular butterfly resists understanding because it appears to live in a totally different temporality: I’ve watch’d you now a full half hour, Self-pois’d upon that yellow flower; And, little Butterfly! indeed I know not if you sleep, or feed. How motionless! not frozen seas More motionless! (1–6)

Was observation ever less successful? It seems almost inconceivable that one would study, learn nothing, and continue to study, for a ‘full’ half hour. Yet this study is less empirical than meditative; that the butterfly lacks movement or obvious aim might in fact assist. Zhuang Zhou dreamt he was a butterfly, and later wondered if Zhuang Zhou was really a butterfly dreaming. The motionless object is matched by slack, even redundant lines (can one unmoving thing be more motionless than another, outside of particle physics?) Like a butterfly flickering into flight, though, description gives way to lively speculation: and then What joy awaits you, when the breeze Hath found you out among the trees, And calls you forth again! (6–9)

There is blessing in the imagined breeze. This speculative insect joy foreshadows the domestic portrait which comprises the remainder of the poem:

⁹³ P2V 215–16.

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 ’    This plot of Orchard-ground is ours; My trees they are, my Sister’s flowers; Stop here whenever you are weary, And rest as in a sanctuary! Come often to us, fear no wrong; Sit near us on the bough! We’ll talk of sunshine and of song; And summer days, when we were young, Sweet childish days, that were as long As twenty days are now! (10–19)

The syntactical looseness (and the tendency to prioritize rhyme over semantic precision) may explain why this piece is deemed one of Wordsworth’s more minor poems. But the poem also exemplifies a form of attention that will be important throughout this book. In the future, we will look back; the past is going to appear sweet, its days ‘as long / As twenty days are now!’ This mode is both retrospective and anticipatory. It is closely related to the characteristically romantic mode identified by Emily Rohrbach as future anterior: ‘a thinking, with all the uncertainty attending such thoughts, of what will have been . . . always conditional, based on the uncertainties of how it actually will unfold’.⁹⁴ As Mark Salber Phillips has demonstrated, diverse modes of historical thought and writing flourished in the eighteenth century, thanks in no small part to the literary innovations which were taking place.⁹⁵ In this context, Rohrbach shows how the romantic use of future anteriority ‘elicits an imagining of the present as a historical age whose apparent trajectory might be disrupted by some dark, unpredictable futurity’. Its uncertainty forecloses faith in historical progress (and schematic philosophical history) but holds open in its stead ‘the capacity for historical surprise’.⁹⁶ Anticipated retrospection might serve as an active counterpart to more determinist ways of theorizing events (as ineluctable consequence, as fate). While I am working at a smaller, more intimate scale to Rohrbach, the appeal of the future anterior is still the intellectual and literary possibility it affords. Trauma is a determinist theory of the past: it asserts that even ⁹⁴ Emily Rohrbach, Modernity’s Mist: British Romanticism and the Poetics of Anticipation (New York: Fordham UP, 2016), 2. ⁹⁵ Mark Salber Phillips, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–1820 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000). ⁹⁶ Rohrbach, Modernity’s Mist, 13, 78.

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though you never could have known, the future would always have been subject to its logic. If the logic of trauma uses a symptom in the present to glimpse the truth of the past, the future anterior allows the uncertainty of the present to articulate the indeterminacy of the past. Anticipation makes claims on the world which hold judgement in abeyance. A particularly striking example forms the backbone of Vivasvan Soni’s remarkable exploration of Solon’s philosophy of happiness and its fate in the eighteenth century. Solon’s injunction is to call no person happy until their death. Consequently, ‘[e]ach person’s happiness must be suspended on the paradoxical temporality of a future perfect: “I will have been (un)happy” ’.⁹⁷ Wordsworth’s poetry, I will suggest, engages in precisely this mode of underdetermined retrospection, a mode in which the variability of the past makes it possible to reimagine the present. I will return in detail to the complex problem of happiness and the grounds for its evaluation in my final chapter. For now, I conclude with a final temporal figure, illustrated by a parenthetical aside made by Leo Bersani in response to an experience familiar to many writers: the realization that his recent work was expanding and exploring a distinction he had drawn long ago, before he could have known the drift of his current thinking. This anticipatory re-categorizing of an idea long before I had the idea is further evidence of a more general argument about thinking that I have recently been developing, an argument that in positing the futurity of our past thinking, breaks down the temporality we usually assign to mental life and points to the oneness, the persisting presentness, of all thought.⁹⁸

In these cases of retrospective recognition, thinking is not linear; only when we reach the conclusion can we see what was already in motion long before. It follows that, at least some of the time, thinking is not under our direction. Not because some other agency conceals or perverts it, but because the first tracings of our ideas anticipate but do not determine what they will ultimately become, and they pass by without notice until they subsequently crystallize into concepts. This suggests why certain ideas, like certain people, first appear to us at once novel and familiar, as if we had long been waiting

⁹⁷ Vivasvan Soni, Mourning Happiness: Narrative and the Politics of Modernity (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2010), 73. ⁹⁸ Leo Bersani, ‘Re-perusal, Registered’ The Henry James Review 32 (3) (2011): 274–80, 274–5.

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 ’   

for them without ever realizing it. In ‘To A Butterfly’, a creature with a notoriously short life becomes an audience for the siblings’ anticipated recollections, and in a strange way its fragility seems to prompt and even authorize them. More broadly, the figure of thought’s return reveals the way in which seemingly trivial or unnoticed elements of mental life come to hold cognitive, as well as aesthetic, significance throughout Wordsworth’s poetry. I will suggest two possible routes through this book, either taking the chapters in order, or starting at the middle and working outwards. Readers principally interested in the account of Wordsworth’s sustained attention to unconscious and unremembered life would be served best by reading at least Chapters 1 and 2 in order. The first two chapters chart the development of Wordsworth’s account of unremembered pleasure in his verse, principally from the Descriptive Sketches through to the ‘Ode’ of 1807. Chapter 1 begins from Wordsworth’s own discontent with memory while walking in the Swiss Alps, before considering the ways in which poetry works through problems of perception, retention, and representation. Reading Wordsworth against a long tradition which positions him as a poet—perhaps the poet—of memory, it traces a persistent interest in lost and unnoticed images and affects, which are neither consciously experienced nor traumatically repressed. Turning to anthropological theory, I sketch a model of lost experience, and above all lost pleasure, as a form of gift. Chapter 2 turns to Wordsworth’s accounts of very early life and its passions, moving from early work on material for The Prelude to the ‘Ode’ (‘There was a time’), commonly called the ‘Intimations’ ode. I read Wordsworth’s poems as ambivalent narratives of development that encounter problems of genesis and individuation. The chapter puts Wordsworth in dialogue with Didier Anzieu’s tactile account of The Skin Ego and Mutlu Konik Blasing’s developmental theorization of lyric. Refusing to conceive of development in normative terms, these poems nonetheless testify to a kind of early pleasure spread so widely that it becomes an inseparable element of perception itself, suggesting a formative role comparable to (but pointedly at odds with) psychoanalytic accounts of an ‘original’ trauma. Readers more interested in poetry or criticism at large may prefer to start with Chapter 3, the book’s theoretical centre, which reads Wordsworth’s poetic theory as a far-reaching account of compositional pleasure and as an opportunity to rethink the remarkably persistent problem of sublimation. Wordsworth’s insistence that poetry’s truth depends on its capacity for pleasure is highly contentious. In the ‘Preface’ to the Lyrical Ballads, poetry’s continual need for pleasure seems the surest way to compromise its claims

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on ‘real events’. Yet the attempt to understand pleasure, even at its most artificial and ‘mechanical’, as a way to comprehend the world offers a compelling a challenge to the idea of sublimation, in which art’s joys are only ever substitute satisfactions. Wordsworth’s poetics, I suggest, are staked on the possibility that art might find pleasure in the world without recoiling into fantasy. To take such claims seriously is to call into question the logic of sublimation—and even pleasure itself—which reaches far beyond nominally psychoanalytic reading. From the midpoint, it is equally possible to continue through the chapters in order, as they trace questions of unremembered pleasure through Wordsworth’s later poetry, or to read the remaining chapters as a series of freestanding critical engagements, proceeding either to the critique of elegy in Chapter 4 and the exploration of happiness and limitation in Chapter 5, or by turning back to the engagement with gift theory and world-making in Chapter 1 and the account of lyric and developmental theory in Chapter 2. Chapter 4 uses Wordsworth’s poems and drafts related to the death of his brother John in February 1805 to challenge prevailing accounts of elegy, suggesting alternatives to their broadly psychoanalytic logic. I consider how Freud’s model of libidinal economics in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ represses the possibility of attachment to the dead, figuring mourning as a problem of recognizing the ‘reality’ of their disappearance. While this model has been highly generative for genre theory, it also forecloses our capacity to imagine what we might think of as elegiac surprise. At times Wordsworth’s grief poems do not abandon or even memorialize John, but uncover in verse fresh traces of a lost brother. Wordsworth reimagines the metapsychology of the elegy and the life of his late brother in the same gesture. The final chapter considers the broader significance of unremembered pleasure across Wordsworth’s authorship by reassessing the commonly observed decline and dissatisfaction of the ‘late’ Wordsworth. From the 1817 odes to some of Wordsworth’s last poems, I explore the resources in Wordsworthian lyric for non-narrative ways to understand lateness, and hence to see the pleasures of youth as something other than a rival to satisfaction in old age. These poems add up to an ambitious attempt to rethink happiness itself, an attempt that depends on the possibility of separating the significance of pleasure from the satisfaction of possessing it. Drawing on Anahid Nersessian’s work on minimal or ‘adjusted’ utopian thinking, I show how at its most quietly ambitious moments, Wordsworth’s writing on happiness delaminates pleasure from the exhausting drive to have and retain it, so that pleasure might survive memory.

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 ’   

The book concludes with a short reflection on the legacy of romanticism and psychoanalysis. Here, as throughout, I aim to keep Wordsworth’s writing in view of, yet separate from, ideas which have animated and shaped its modern reception, so that it might continue to be a productive and challenging corpus to think with, while resisting assimilation to any determinate account of subjectivity. In this respect, I am not concerned with trying to characterize Wordsworth’s position on established debates in psychology or philosophy of mind; what matters more is the way that thinking is routed through a series of memorable but often mundane particulars: a daisy, a stone, a scattered ray of light. Wordsworth’s unyielding attention to such things is, in the best cases, a form of attachment without possession: neither a strict determination of experience nor a sentimental flight from it, but a purposive openness to sensation and significance as yet unrealized.

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1 Unremembered Pleasure Memory is more than a static record of events; it is a resource that can be cultivated and drawn upon, so that words and days might become a source of future restoration. On this point, readers have generally agreed, Wordsworth is confident.¹ But this view has its limitations: if memory is understood to preserve otherwise fleeting value, there is a risk that experience is evaluated primarily in terms of persistence—as if life itself might only be stockpiled or else wasted. It is in response to such an antagonism, this chapter argues, that Wordsworth turns to the prospect of unremembered pleasure. While initially aiming to capture, preserve, and exhibit scenes of experience and observation, Wordsworth’s loco-descriptive writing encounters and confronts the constraints of memory. Of particular importance is the poem in which unremembered pleasure is named as such, ‘Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798’.² ‘Tintern Abbey’, I will suggest, produces through its frustrations and equivocations a critique of Wordsworth’s earlier overreliance on memory, and of the underlying belief that experiences are forms of possession. One aim here is to open a space for the small, unnamed, and unremembered acts and sentiments which ‘Tintern Abbey’ identifies, and which should be understood in opposition to what in The Prelude Wordsworth would call ‘rememberable things’.³ A broader aim is to develop an account of how unremembered pleasure might be understood in positive terms: not merely as lost or elided experience but as a kind of unexpected and undemanded good—which is to say, as a gift. To view something you don’t possess as a gift requires a fairly expansive definition. Yet the prospect of

¹ With respect to ‘Tintern Abbey’, which this chapter considers in detail, the only argument questioning Wordsworth’s faith in memory of which I am aware is Michael Vander Weele’s, which contextualizes the poet in ‘a mediating tradition of reflection on memory’ and recognizes that he ‘questions its effectiveness not once but three times during the course of the poem’. ‘The Contest of Memory in “Tintern Abbey” ’ Nineteenth-Century Literature 50 (1) (1995): 6–26, 17–20. ² All citations from LB, 116–20. ³ 1799, I.420. Wordsworth’s Unremembered Pleasure. Alexander Freer, Oxford University Press (2020). © Alexander Freer. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198856986.001.0001

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 ’   

an experience that becomes available only as a gift recalibrates Wordsworth’s broader thinking about ‘the world’, both as an organizing concept in ‘Tintern Abbey’, and as a key term for subsequent writing. Anticipating in certain respects Donald Winnicott’s interest in environmental sufficiency, Wordsworth’s unremembered pleasure re-makes the world as something which need not be dominated or furiously analysed in order to be tolerated and inhabited—so long as the wish of owning and securing its joys can be relinquished.

Beyond Memory In September 1790, during his European walking tour with Robert Jones that would culminate in their missed crossing of the Alps, Wordsworth composed a letter to his sister Dorothy from Kesswil, in Switzerland, detailing the following regret: I have looked upon and as it were conversed with the objects which this country has presented to my view for so long, and with such encreasing [sic] pleasure, that the idea of parting from them oppresses me with a sadness similar to what I have always felt in quitting a beloved friend. . . . Ten thousand times in the course of this tour have I regretted the inability of my memory to retain a more strong impression of the beautiful forms before me, and again and again in quitting a fortunate station I have returned to it with the most eager avidity, with the hope of bearing away a more lively picture.⁴

The beauty of the Swiss countryside was marked, and seemingly intensified, by the way it melted away in the mind. In these Alpine walks, pleasure took a melancholy form, where every vivifying scene also acted as a reminder of its potential loss. The problem, according to the letter, is that observations ran beyond the powers of recollection; memory fell short of the task of storing and preserving the impression, and Wordsworth was driven back to the spot in question to repeat the process. Yet the problem only recurs; pleasure will

⁴ William Wordsworth and Dorothy Wordsworth, The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, 7 vols, second edn., rev. Chester L. Shaver. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1967), 1:35–6.

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be tempered by regret, as if the possibility of repetition only makes it worse.⁵ It is not the images themselves that are lost, but some sensuous quality they originally possessed.⁶ This is not the canonical problem with beauty— getting people to agree on it—but a temporal difficulty: representing an image to himself adequately over time; retaining a sufficiently ‘strong impression’, as if Switzerland is the brass and he is the wax.⁷ The repetition of experience, recollection, and disappointment signals a more general difficulty acknowledged in eighteenth-century aesthetic theory and practice. On Burke’s account, sublimity requires a measure of novelty. ‘The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror.’⁸ As Frances Ferguson has observed, this presents a theoretical problem of supply, a problem made actual by the growth of aesthetic tourism in the period: ‘[t]he sublimity of Mont Blanc becomes in some sense factitious once Mont Blanc becomes an obligatory step on every gentleman’s grand tour, and it obviously suffers even more greatly from daily exposure’.⁹ Sublime peaks erode aesthetically as well as physically. Wordsworth’s letter suggests a more general touristic problem, recognizable today on the faces of visitors to Paris who, having been saturated in its ⁵ Terada observes a related problem, recorded in the Guide to the Lakes, in which Wordsworth’s memory of Lyulph’s Tower’s location forecloses the possibility of a pleasing illusion in the lake: ‘I could not but regret that my previous knowledge of the place enabled me to account for the appearance.’ William Wordsworth, The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, 3 vols eds W.J.B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1974), 2:237. ‘Wordsworth “regret[s]” his previous knowledge of the pleasure-house, imagining what he assumes to be the intenser feelings that would be aroused by a truly “inexplicable” appearance; but he regretfully regrets it, in a double negative (“could not but regret”) that remains within the secular while playing at departing from it.’ Rei Terada, Looking Away: Phenomenality and Dissatisfaction, Kant to Adorno (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2009), 64–5. Terada suggests that Wordsworth effectively has it both ways; I wonder if some of the dissatisfaction here follows from that fact that having experienced the illusion, and the subsequent demystification, Wordsworth is now deprived of a possibility the scene generously gave him twice: aesthetic surprise. ⁶ In this respect Wordsworth is encountering a more general problem. Recalling a memory in the sonnet ‘Written in Farm Wood, South Downs, in May 1784’, Charlotte Smith presents a similar concern: ‘what to me can those dear days restore, / When scenes could charm that now I taste no more!’ Charlotte Smith, The Poems of Charlotte Smith ed. Stuart Curran (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993), 34. ⁷ Wordsworth’s problem is the opposite of the limitation Burke identifies with the sublime: that terror must not ‘press too close’. Edmund Burke, The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, Vol. 1: The Early Writings eds T.O. McLoughlin, James T. Boulton, and William B. Todd (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997), 222. ⁸ Burke, Writings and Speeches, 230. ⁹ Frances Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime (London: Routledge, 1992), 46.

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likeness for years, find the Mona Lisa small and unbeguiling, and turn slackly away. Yet his pessimism is balanced by a more optimistic speculation: At this moment when many of these landscapes are floating before my mind, I feel a high [enjoyment] in reflecting that perhaps scarce a day of my life will pass [in] which I shall not derive some happiness from these images.¹⁰

Here a more salutary form of elision is suggested: some scenes might be impressed so deeply that their pleasures persist indefinitely; in effect, they will cease to be objects that can be retained or lost, and will instead be forms of life. Wordsworth’s perhaps measures the distance between the simple loss of images and a much more encompassing mode of engagement, in which what floats in the mind is not life’s daily content, but the conditions for living at all. This is how losing an image can be like ‘quitting a beloved friend’: with her departure you lose the world as you experienced it with and through her; you lose the part of yourself she gave to you. The letter articulates a touristic mode of engagement, in which images must be preserved like physical souvenirs, and retained for future profit. Yet it also acknowledges the limits of that mode, and looks beyond it, aware that memory’s links to past pleasure are not investment-grade bonds. Three years later, in the year Wordsworth would visit the Wye Valley and set the scene for ‘Tintern Abbey’, Joseph Johnson published a poem of his on the subject of the 1790 tour, composed in the intervening years, and titled Descriptive Sketches.¹¹ One of the more generous reviews (published in Johnson’s own Analytical Review) praised ‘[t]he diversified pictures of nature which are sketched in this poem’, attributing them to ‘a lively imagination, furnished by actual and attentive observation with an abundant store of materials’.¹² Indeed, the poem lays on picture after picture; there are ‘bending rocks’ and ‘mountain-shades’, ‘blazing forests’ and ‘enchanted woods’ (88–134). At times its additive mode and lexical and visual repetition approximate a holiday album whose images are individually significant to the person who captured them but not to his increasingly fatigued audience.

¹⁰ Wordsworth, The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, 1:36. ¹¹ All quotation cited by line number from 1793 Edition, DS, 32–118. ¹² Unsigned review, Analytical Review, March 1793, rprt in Robert Woof (ed.) William Wordsworth: The Critical Heritage vol.1: 1793–1820 (London: Routledge, 2001), 19.

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Beyond its visual display, however, the poem anticipates Wordsworth’s subsequent interest in perception’s temporal and observational limits; Descriptive Sketches is also a sketch of what description can and cannot accomplish. It intertwines a narrative composed of sights and sounds with a narrative of the person who witnessed them, testing perception against presentation. The eighteenth-century tradition of loco-descriptive poetry is more dynamic than is sometimes supposed. As Jonathan Kramnick has demonstrated, such poetry is informed by theories of perception in the period, but it is not uniform or passive in its engagement. The dominant tradition, which includes Hobbes, Locke, and Hume, views perception as an internal representation of an external object—a mental facsimile. But a countertradition in both philosophy and poetry understands perception as active and skilled.¹³ Visual perception (which remains the primary domain) is, on this account, closer to the observational work of a painter or photographer. Understood in this way, Kramnick argues, James Thomson’s construction of both landscape and viewer in The Seasons is not an attempt to mislead but a range of carefully and necessarily crafted ways of looking. Reading Descriptive Sketches along these lines, Wordsworth’s sunsets can be understood not as strictly visual set pieces but as temporal figures; they connect the moment-by-moment unfolding of a singular image to the ceaseless, diurnal logic of a place which long preceded its visitor and will long outlive him: Where needle peaks of granite shooting bare Tremble in ever-varying tints of air, Great joy by horror tam’d dilates his heart, And the near heav’ns their own delights impart. —When the Sun bids the gorgeous scene farewell, Alps overlooking Alps their state upswell; (558–62)

The sun is both as an aesthetic salve—golden light pacifying the looming peaks—and a temporal gear-change, from ‘ever-varying’ seconds to the endless passage of days. Sunsets also function, like a photographic zoom,

¹³ Jonathan Kramnick, ‘An aesthetics and ecology of presence’ European Romantic Review 26 (3) (2015): 315–27.

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 ’   

to move between individuals and groups, the particularity of a single person and the contours of a general way of life: If the sad grave of human ignorance bear One flower of hope—Oh pass and leave it there. —The tall Sun, tiptoe on an Alpine spire, Flings o’er the desert blood-red streams of fire. At such an hour there are who love to stray, And meet the gladdening pilgrims on their way. (660–65) Finally, Mont Blanc at twilight occasions a shift in temporal scale as striking as those achieved by the remarkable ‘temporal drama’ of Charlotte Smith’s Beachy Head, telescoping from the length of a day to the age of the world (as Wordsworth supposed it to be).¹⁴ He writes: —Red stream the cottage lights; the landscape fades, Erroneous wavering mid the twilight shades. Alone ascends that mountain nam’d of white, That dallies with the Sun the summer night. Six thousand years amid his lonely bounds The voice of Ruin, day and night, resounds. (688–93)

Such changes of scale and depth perception are both presentational devices and ways of articulating perceptual experience. The play of light will remain an important signal of reflection and retrospection throughout Wordsworth’s writing, especially as the contrast between morning light and day’s end is translated back into a metaphor for the life course. For now, I will mention one other important aspect of the poem: its articulation of perceptual limits and blind spots. In his far-reaching study of Wordsworth’s travel writing, Mark Offord argues that travel was a way to find concrete foundations for philosophy. ‘Normative thought is empty unless it can describe the contexts from which it arises with its own necessity. . . . Travel was the search for such pictures.’¹⁵ Often, those pictures are not valuable as empirical data, used to verify personal beliefs, but as an index of our own imbrication in the world, replete

¹⁴ Jonathan Sachs, ‘Slow time’ PMLA 134 (2) (2019): 315–31, 323. ¹⁵ Mark Offord, Wordsworth and the Art of Philosophical Travel (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2016), 10.

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with mistakes, illusions, and surprises. ‘Such experiences, so private and illusory and dream-like, yet of “widest commonalty”, might even be the truest of all, what is most real and definitive of the self—precisely insofar as they exceed the subjective intentionality that they disturb.’¹⁶ More broadly, loco-descriptive poetry’s philosophical reach might depend on its failure to be strictly and mechanically representational, whether by deliberate contrivance or personal idiosyncrasy. One particular word in Descriptive Sketches captures a persistent descriptive limitation: The viewless lingerer hence, at evening, sees (92) On viewless fingers counts the valley-clock (227) To viewless realms his Spirit towers amain (548)

The repetition of viewless (together with moveless) was regarded as a juvenile fault, both by Wordsworth and by one of his most important readers, who pointed it out to him.¹⁷ As in its use in An Evening Walk, none of these instances of viewless survive Wordsworth’s revisions.¹⁸ The -less suffix is a less successful alternative to the more persistent un- prefix (equally prominent in this poem).¹⁹ While the lexical repetition may be grating, the conceptual range is broad: viewless means by turns lacking a view, unseen (because metaphorical), and intangible (because otherworldly). In these instances, sight represents to itself things which cannot be seen. Descriptive Sketches is made of ‘Alps overlooking Alps’ in two senses: the rolling vistas which provide the poem’s scenes, and the overlooked, recessive, and unviewable elements which puncture and punctuate them. As well as anticipating visual and textual constructions familiar in Wordsworth’s later work, Descriptive Sketches questions what perception ¹⁶ Offord, Wordsworth and the Art of Philosophical Travel, 15. ¹⁷ Dorothy Wordsworth to Jane Pollard, 16 February 1793, regarding Descriptive Sketches and An Evening Walk: ‘The word viewless . . . is introduced far too often . . . I regret exceedingly that he did not submit the works to the inspection of some Friend before their Publication, and he [William] also joins with me in this Regret. Their Faults are such as a young Poet was most likely to fall into and least likely to discover.’ Wordsworth: The Critical Heritage, 17. ¹⁸ EW, 48. ¹⁹ To give a cluster of three among numerous examples: unlisten’d (l. 119), unquiet (153), unsleeping (162).

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 ’   

can hope to capture, and how poetry might best handle experience which includes absences as well as positive forms. It even contains his characteristic multiple negation of pleasure: Think not, suspended from the cliff on high He looks below with undelighted eye. —No vulgar joy is his (510–12)

As in ‘Tintern Abbey’, these lines stop short of determining affect, but set some outer bounds for a mood or sentiment which might be too subtle or variable to be captured by any singular positive description. In sum, the Sketches are as much about description as they are straightforwardly descriptive in function. Offord suggestively argues that the poem offers ‘an understanding of perception as a form of reading’, adding that however imperfectly, ‘what takes subtler forms in the mature Wordsworth is here given its first articulation: an independent power that is not expressed through domination but inaccessibly held in reserve’.²⁰ If such observation is a form of reading, it is of a very particular kind, less concerned with accumulating images than tracing their edges and vertices. I will return in Chapter 3 to the question of composition as a form of observational reading, but for now I want to continue to think about the temporal complexity of apparently straightforward description as we turn to ‘Tintern Abbey’.

Unremembered Acts The poem opens in a flurry of local detail: ‘these plots of cottage ground’, ‘these hedgerows’, ‘these pastoral farms / Green to the very door’ (10–18). Here, David Miall suggests, an ‘earlier, predominantly picturesque mode of perception can still be traced’.²¹ As we have seen, the ‘viewless’ Descriptive Sketches can’t adequately be summarized as ‘predominantly picturesque’, but Miall is right to contrast the initial descriptive passages with the less visual, more explicitly recollective mode that follows:

²⁰ Offord, Wordsworth and the Art of Philosophical Travel, 40. ²¹ David Miall, ‘Locating Wordsworth: “Tintern Abbey” and the Community with Nature’ Romanticism on the Net 20 (2000): 8.

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Though absent long, These forms of beauty have not been to me, As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye: But oft, in lonely rooms, and mid the din Of towns and cities, I have owed to them, In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart, And passing even into my purer mind With tranquil restoration (23–31)

These ‘forms of beauty’, which recall the ‘beautiful forms’ recorded in the letter to Dorothy, are said to have made a permanent impression. But for that same reason, they are not reproductions of earlier scenes. They are not straightforwardly memories. Previously, natural objects were reduced to the substance of ocular consumption, ‘an appetite’ (81), or negated through violence or repulsion. What is experienced this time around is not purely visual enjoyment, nor a frozen image, like a blind man’s recollection of sight. Likewise, what is felt ‘with tranquil restoration’ cannot be the same as the animal spirits of youth, as they have been softened into something different. This story is familiar: Wordsworth returns to the Wye Valley and sees things differently; by articulating the difference, the poem draws ‘the distinction between careless vision and mature poetic insight’.²² For many readers, what creates the distinction—and in fact Wordsworth himself as a ‘mature’ poet—is the exercise of memory. This was, for Harold Bloom, the ‘myth’ or ‘utilization’ of memory.²³ It was echoed in psychoanalytic accounts, such as Thomas Weiskel’s, and in major New Historicist readings.²⁴ And it remains central to more recent accounts of the poem’s psychological method.²⁵ Personal memory (whether understood as a ²² Eric Gidal, ‘Wordsworth’s Art of Memory’Studies in Romanticism 37 (3) (1998): 445–75, 448. ²³ Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1971), 132; Harold Bloom, Poetry and Repression (New Haven: Yale UP, 1976), 79. ²⁴ Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976), 143; Marjorie Levinson, Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986), 23; Alan Liu, Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1989), 56. Cf. McGann’s complaint that the poem does not remember enough. Jerome J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983), 88. ²⁵ See for example Gidal, ‘Wordsworth’s Art of Memory’; Frances Ferguson, ‘Romantic Memory’ in The Wordsworthian Enlightenment: Romantic Poetry and the Ecology of Reading

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 ’   

psychological resource, poetic figure, or ideological myth) is thought both to connect present to past and to undergird any claim to self-creation in the intervening years. It will come as no surprise that I think this misses something important. There are some simple reasons of timing. The feelings ‘in lonely rooms’ come after the first visit to the Wye, but not five years after. Hence the basic process (getting new feelings from old experiences) must be possible without going back to the Wye, and cannot be entirely a question of re-familiarization and recovery, as Fairer has suggested. Nor is Wordsworth exactly ‘using memory’, as Ferguson puts it: the grammar itself suggests otherwise.²⁶ ‘I have owed to them’: they did something to (and for) me; the agency is the other way around. Most important, though, are those aspects located explicitly outside rememberable life: feelings too Of unremembered pleasure; such, perhaps, As may have had no trivial influence On that best portion of a good man’s life; His little, nameless, unremembered acts Of kindness and of love. (31–6)

This is the simplest objection to the totalizing claims made on behalf of ‘romantic memory’: the poem’s retrospective mode is not limited to the remembered past. Feelings both remembered and unremembered influence present life, even down to the quotidian, customary acts which constitute character. Despite being a clear and, I think, attractive proposition, the value of ‘little, nameless, unremembered acts’ has been downplayed by readers, who have regarded them as pessimistic, quietist, or simply meaningless.²⁷ Yet they are not without literary forebears.²⁸ So why would the minimal and eds Helen Regueiro Elam and Frances Ferguson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2005), 71–93; Laura Quinney, ‘Swerving Neo-Platonists’ The Wordsworth Circle 37 (1) (2006): 31–8; David Fairer, ‘Revisiting “Tintern Abbey”: The Challenge of the Familiar’ Romanticism 19 (2) (2013): 179–87. ²⁶ Fairer, ‘Revisiting’ 180–1, Ferguson, ‘Romantic Memory’, 85, my emphasis. ²⁷ See, respectively, Laura Quinney, ‘ “Tintern Abbey,” Sensibility, and the Self-Disenchanted Self ’ ELH 64 (1) (1997): 131–56, 143; Kenneth Johnston, The Hidden Wordsworth: Poet, Lover, Rebel, Spy (New York: Norton, 1998), 595; Thomas Pfau, Wordsworth’s Profession: Form, Class, and the Logic of Early Romantic Cultural Production (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997), 134–5. ²⁸ Frances Burney describes ‘a thousand nameless attentions’ offered to the titular character by Lord Orville in Evelina, and Mary Wollstonecraft speaks of ‘a thousand nameless decencies

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indistinguishable gestures of interpersonal benevolence not be important? They are small, yet so often the strenuous work of care consists ‘in minimal movements, in episodic signs and gestures that are simple but not necessarily eloquent’.²⁹ They may not be formally recorded, yet ‘unremembered’ does not mean cancelled or false. This mute and even thoughtless labour might, in the long run, be of greater significance than any grand or calculated gesture. To write such moments off is to assume that there is only the past as memorial possession and the past as sheer loss. One reason for the elision of these unremembered acts has been the influence of ideas about memory drawn from John Locke. In Ferguson’s account, to give only one example, memory ‘provided two very palpable services’; it ‘introduced [people] . . . to a vision of their own possible progress and development’ and it ‘provided a theater . . . to compete with the theater of immediate experience’.³⁰ In Ferguson’s theatre metaphor, which perhaps alludes to Giulio Camillo’s mnemonic theatre of memory, we are both the audience in the theatre and the stage-hands running the show. The promise of Lockean memory is a self-reflexive, self-authoring mental structure: a memory is made by the self and the making of that self. Like a self-conscious poet, it can ‘turn the accidents of experience into a meaningful narrative’.³¹ In its most expansive understanding, memory ‘stands less for the ability to know that certain events happened or even that one was there to witness them than for the possibility of reflexiveness itself ’.³² In this maximal account, the self-recollecting individual more or less remembers himself into existence. Here and more generally, accounts of the self grounded in reflective recollection run into the problem of circularity.³³

which good sense gives rise to’ in Thoughts on the Education of Daughters. Frances Burney, Evelina ed. Edward Bloom (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002), 296; Mary Wollstonecraft, The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft vol. 4 eds Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1989), 32. ²⁹ Carlo Caduff, ‘Hot Chocolate’ Critical Inquiry 45 (3) (2019): 787–803, 788. ³⁰ Ferguson, ‘Romantic Memory’, 72. Cf. also Gidal, ‘Wordsworth’s Art of Memory’, 460; Fairer, ‘Revisiting “Tintern Abbey” ’, 181; Stuart Sperry, ‘From “Tintern Abbey” to the “Intimations Ode”: Wordsworth and the Function of Memory’ The Wordsworth Circle 1 (2) (1970): 40–9, 41. ³¹ Ashton Nichols, The Revolutionary ‘I’: Wordsworth and the Politics of Self-Presentation (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), 4. ³² Ferguson, ‘Romantic Memory’, 75. ³³ The problem is this: reflection is said to underwrite self-consciousness, yet some kind of self is required to do the reflecting in the first place. In Fairer’s version, ‘[a]s we become conscious of an identity that persists through any number of temporal and spatial relocations, we acknowledge it and assume responsibility for it. In that way Locke’s concept of personal

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 ’   

The problem of (illusory) self-authoring is familiar to romanticists, and bears analogously on Locke. Readers are accustomed to thinking of Locke as ‘the preeminent theoretician of modern individualism’, Yousef notes, yet she shows how the Essay Concerning Human Understanding is marked by ‘epistemological vulnerabilities’ which stem from its ‘failure to distinguish between persons and things . . . an oversight which can, in its turn, be traced to the Essay’s occlusion of the role of other persons in the formation of subjectivity’.³⁴ By treating the world of objects and the actions of others as essentially interchangeable ‘impressions’ to be received and processed (as he pointedly does not do in Some Thoughts Concerning Education), Locke presents ‘the original condition’ as a state of epistemic autonomy in the Essay, in which understanding is achieved singularly and ‘in alone-ness’. And yet the Essay is also marked by ‘passionate attachment’ to others: a dependence which it can neither relinquish nor openly admit.³⁵ Lockean autonomy—and by extension, theories of romantic individualism—were unstable from the outset. Wordsworth, I will argue in this chapter and the next, is not at all committed to this reflective account of ‘modern individualism’—in fact, Wordsworth’s retrospection reveals the limits of romantic claims to self-possession or self-creation. One final detail to note is that Locke’s account of selfhood imposes a condition which is not always acknowledged by literary critics. A person is a thinking intelligent Being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider it self as it self, the same thinking thing in different times and places; which it does only by that consciousness, which is inseparable from thinking, and as it seems to me essential to it: It being impossible for any one to perceive, without perceiving, that he does perceive. When we see, hear, smell, taste, feel, meditate, or will any thing, we know that we do so.³⁶

identity involves an appropriation of the self, literally a making-your-own.’ But if ‘it’ is our own persistent identities, who is the ‘we’ who stands by to acknowledge and appropriate it? Fairer, ‘Revisiting “Tintern Abbey” ’, 181. For a good summary of the circularity problem, see Dieter Henrich, ‘Self-consciousness, a critical introduction to a theory’ Man and World 4 (1) (1971): 3–28, 9–12. ³⁴ Nancy Yousef, Isolated Cases: The Anxieties of Autonomy in Enlightenment Philosophy and Romantic Literature (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2004), 26–7. ³⁵ Yousef, Isolated Cases, 30–8. ³⁶ John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. ed. P.H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1979), 335, my emphasis.

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Thought’s reflexivity comes from noticing what you are perceiving, and to overlook something is not to perceive it at all. By the same token, anything lapsed or forgotten is no longer your own. Strictly speaking, it is not memory that secures the self for Locke, but consciousness. ‘Personality extends it self beyond present Existence to what is past, only by consciousness.’³⁷ This explains why Locke gets into such trouble with the question of dreaming—as experience without consciousness—and signals the remarkable fragility of the Lockean subject: anything which fades from recollection, or was not consciously experienced in the first place, is obliterated, and with it, a bit of the personhood of the unobservant person. The Lockean subject must continually keep his eyes and ears open, lest he fade and die: the Ideas, as well as Children, of our Youth, often die before us: And our Minds represent to us those Tombs, to which we are approaching; where, though the Brass and Marble remain, yet the Inscriptions are effaced by time, and the Imagery moulders away.³⁸

In a surprising turn, memory becomes the repository of forgetting, and so the representative of death. The friction of daily life smooths out, little by little, the contours of the people we once were. This recalls the quandary of Wordsworth the Swiss tourist, wishing for a sufficiently powerful memory that the beautiful scenes, and his attendant joy, might be stored permanently. Yet this is not at all the world of Wordsworth’s poetry. Even the passages most suggestive of agency in ‘Tintern Abbey’ do not imply self-making: How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee O sylvan Wye! Thou wanderer through the woods, How often has my spirit turned to thee! (56–8)

Perhaps this is where ideas of ‘using memory’ derive from, but in the context of the preceding lines, this ‘turning’ resembles an invocation rather than a ³⁷ Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 346. See also Gideon Yaffe, ‘Locke on Ideas of Identity and Diversity’ in The Cambridge Companion to ‘Locke’s ‘Essay Concerning Human Understanding’ ed. Lex Newman. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007). 192–230, 220. ³⁸ Locke Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 151–2. This passage was brought to my attention by Ross Wilson’s compelling discussion in Shelley and the Apprehension of Life (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013), 46–7.

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calculated plan, and nobody who believes in their power would attempt to ‘deploy’ the Muses. Nor does the poem turn back to the river like the Wordsworth of the letter returning to an earlier view, in order to recapture what he had. It should not be surprising in a poem about returning to a rural location that the meaning of those earlier impressions changed with time. On the most banal level, if Wordsworth had never left natural beauty for towns and cities, the Wye would not have come to mean what it did. ‘Country life had its meanings, but these changed in themselves and in relation to others.’³⁹ In a broader way, political change in France altered what it meant to enjoy a landscape in Britain.⁴⁰ At a structural level, the poem is not a single kind of recollection. At the very least, there is a narrative account of past life, and an anti-narrative account in which past perceptions change: things get lost, come to look different, or become visible for the first time.⁴¹ These are possibilities a Lockean account would rule out. What allows ‘Tintern Abbey’ to make a claim against an earlier mode of perception is its renunciation of a world in which consciousness is all, and vigilance is identical to life itself. To take unremembered feelings and acts seriously is allow that we can’t know the full measure of an experience, action, or sensation as it occurs, or plot back from the present in order to assign every feeling a determinate cause. This has been said before. ‘Who knows the individual hour in which / His habits were first sown, even as a seed’?⁴² But if unremembered pleasure is worth having, it is because past experience can be more than the sum of the particular and determinate images and sounds we consciously retain. Indeed, it might speak to an otherwise inaccessible idea of affective plenitude: little acts go unremembered because they are so ordinary that no single one stands out as an event, and yet taken together they are indistinguishable from good life. ‘He who has once begun to open the fan of memory never comes to the end of its segments. No image satisfies him, for he has seen that it can be unfolded, and only in its folds does the truth reside’, Benjamin

³⁹ Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1973), 4–5. ⁴⁰ See Pfau, Wordsworth’s Profession, 31–2. ⁴¹ It is symptomatic that several readers who focus on memory in the poem end up positing two kinds of memory in order to account for this difference. For Sperry there is ‘memory as an active faculty’, and memory in its ‘negative’ form. ‘From “Tintern Abbey” to the “Intimations Ode” ’, 45. See also Ferguson, ‘Romantic Memory’, 86; Eugene Stelzig, All Shades of Consciousness: Wordsworth’s Poetry and the Self in Time (The Hague: Mouton, 1975), 58. ⁴² 1805a, I.211–12.

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writes.⁴³ The days contain a mood or under-sense, invisible to the child who inhabited them because it was irreducible to any single one. To recognize feelings of unremembered pleasure as a kind of education (performed through nameless acts of love) is to put to rest any suggestion that remembering the past is the only respect we could pay to it and the only learning we could receive.

World Enough The psychoanalytic vocabulary of repression and projection necessarily excludes Wordsworth’s interest in unremembered positive affects. Nevertheless, it is useful to rehearse a psychoanalytic account briefly in order to tease out some differences. An influential version of the psychoanalytic story can be traced back to one of Freud’s numerous efforts to extend and oversee the circulation of his ideas, the ‘Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis’. At the beginning of lecture thirteen, Freud speaks of the remarkable amnesia of childhood. I mean the fact that the earliest years of life, up to the age of five, six or eight, have not left behind them traces in our memory like later experiences. Here and there, it is true, we come upon people who can boast of a continuous memory from the first beginnings to the present day; but the other alternative, of gaps in the memory, is by far the more frequent.⁴⁴

It is part of Freud’s rhetorical strategy in these lectures to introduce his theoretical commitments tentatively (he is yet to introduce the term ‘repression’). He is driving towards an idea of repressed infant experience, but here he limits himself to sketching the unusual character of adults’ memories of their childhood: Our memory . . . retains what is of any importance and drops what is unimportant. But this is not true of the childhood memories. . . . They are

⁴³ Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 2 1927–34. eds Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999), 597. ⁴⁴ Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols, ed. James Strachey (London: Vintage, 2001), 15:199–200.

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 ’    often so commonplace and insignificant that we can only ask ourselves in astonishment why this particular detail has escaped oblivion.⁴⁵

The ‘commonplace’ and yet ‘particular’ details of childhood are crucial to Wordsworth’s account of maturation. Childhood’s purchase on mere particularity, we might say, is what fades into common day; adults are blunted and incapable of fixating on singular things, or else such fixation is only available as a kind of madness. But Freud’s is the opposite conclusion: children’s memories are suspect because they do not appear to be preserved in order of significance. For that reason, there must be another, more significant version, beyond what has been remembered. This other version of events, of course, has been curtailed by repression and amnesia; the most consequential scenes have been screened out or censored from memory. Even from these introductory lectures, it is clear that Freud’s posture towards recollection differs from Wordsworth’s in important ways. On Freud’s account, our failure to remember implies psychological damage. Psychoanalysis aims to ‘lift the veil of amnesia which hides the earliest years of childhood’, Freud says in another lecture, in order to reveal ‘painful impressions of anxiety, prohibition, disappointment and punishment’.⁴⁶ Early experiences go missing because they are painful; the mind preserves itself by disowning what it cannot tolerate. Children’s desires, and particularly their monopolistic desires for love, go unmet but not unpunished, and so with the inevitable disciplining of desire comes the unavoidable amnesia. As with Lockean readings, the problem is not so much that Wordsworth and Freud disagree, rather that some who read Wordsworth and Freud together have been inclined to assume their likeness.⁴⁷ There have been valuable comparative accounts which do not collapse the two, of course. In this respect as in others, Geoffrey Hartman’s work remains exemplary. ‘Hartman’s interpretation’, Pieter Vermeulen notes, ‘combines a remarkable trust in the unhindered continuity of nature and mind with a particular investment in the rhetoric of trauma, shock, negativity, and death.’⁴⁸ Poetry’s therapeutic or ‘anti-traumatic effect’ is elevated by Hartman precisely to counterbalance poetry’s (and his own) sensitivity and alertness

⁴⁵ Freud, Standard Edition, 15:199–200. ⁴⁶ Freud, Standard Edition, 22:28. ⁴⁷ See for example Hugh Sykes Davies, Wordsworth and the Worth of Words eds John Kerrigan and Jonathan Wordsworth (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986), 130. ⁴⁸ Pieter Vermeulen, Geoffrey Hartman: Romanticism after the Holocaust (London: Continuum, 2010), 32.

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to traumatic events.⁴⁹ Quite what poetry can disclose—and repair—of suffering, and what will remain permanent, obscure, and dark, doubtlessly remains a vital issue for literary criticism and theory. But at the same time, ‘Tintern Abbey’ describes a different kind of oversight very plainly: not a traumatic injury, nor strategic self-deception, but a basic failure to notice pleasure the first time around. This is a counter-psychoanalytic idea: a delayed, unrecognized, even unfelt joy, which can only be acknowledged after the fact, and cannot be remembered but only discovered. One reason why pleasure might go unnoticed is that the younger Wordsworth was bound to the environment in a way that made distinctions between subject and object, desire and its satisfaction, practically redundant. In earlier ‘animal movements’, he would bound ‘like a roe . . . wherever nature led’ (68–71). It is as if the landscape and the child within it were parts of the same. His desires mingled with the urges of the world; ‘the sounding cataract / Haunted [him] like a passion’ (77–8). ‘I cannot paint / What then I was’, he contends, yet he can depict a boy coursing through streams and over hills. Perhaps all that can be painted is ‘what then I did’, because the boy was pure activity and becoming, and the self-identity couched in the present speaker’s ‘I’ was always on the verge of disappearance. The ‘sounding cataract’, like the ‘mountain torrent’ of the ‘Boy of Winander’ lyric, might have ‘carried far into his heart’.⁵⁰ Nature for the younger Wordsworth is plentiful and easy to consume, but the enjoyment exists purely in the possessing and eating. Even the possibility of fullness brings ‘aching joys’ (85). One way to think about the transience of pleasure in this dizzy and aching position is by comparison to the figure of self-consciousness in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Self-consciousness affirms its own identity merely by consuming and discarding the objects it encounters; ‘it destroys the independent object and thereby gives itself the certainty of itself as a true certainty’.⁵¹ It knows itself, in other words, purely through the negation of objects. Such methods work, on Hegel’s account, but they are transient in the extreme: each act of destruction demands another, because no amount of self-affirmation will ever translate into the longed-for recognition of another. There is no abstraction of pleasure ⁴⁹ Geoffrey Hartman, ‘Wordsworth and Metapsychology’ in Wordsworth’s Poetic Theory: Knowledge, Language, Experience eds Alexander Regier and Stefan Uhlig (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 195–211, 203. ⁵⁰ LB, 140. ⁵¹ G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 109.

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 ’   

because sensation remains bound up with the particular and transient objects from which it is derived. The first scene of reflection on childhood’s coarser pleasures in the poem takes place in an urban environment which stands in analogy to book seven of The Prelude. In his ‘lonely rooms’ the poem’s speaker is at once surrounded by the world (he is ‘mid the din’) and alone. Here ‘evil tongues’, selfishness, and ‘greetings where no kindness is’ take the place of ‘unremembered acts / Of kindness and of love’ (129–31; 35–6). Insofar as ‘Tintern Abbey’ inherits and registers the problems of eighteenth-century aesthetics, this turn to urban sociability also signals the other half of a familiar problem: not theorizing and representing an individual experience of the beautiful, but securing anything close to social agreement on the topic. Having left behind boyish days (and elided a certain amount in between), adult life in London presents a second and more emphatic moment of alienation. The difference between country and town isn’t quite the comparison of innocent to experienced—or naïve to sentimental—that readers sometimes think, because the frustrations of urban life repeat and compound the problems of transience and repetitious consumption found in the natural object world. Hence, ‘the weary weight / Of all this unintelligible world’ performs a double task (40–1). ‘World’ at once captures the frustrations of social relations under urban capitalism (weary labour, meaningless greetings, the misery of unprofitable days) and the earlier, negative relation to the natural world, unintelligible in its own ways. This ‘weary’ and ‘unintelligible’ world chimes with both the ‘jarring world’ in Home at Grasmere (a world we might hope to forget—and a hope we must recognize as fantasy) and the ‘world / Where want and sorrow were’ in ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’ (a poem about a man whose very body records the gross miseries and small mercies of that world).⁵² Drawing a contrast with Kant’s account of the world as totality, Khalip invites us to think about ‘the unfinished world’: a world without end, or better still, world without pronoun, ‘a last, messy, unfinished world that may be nowhere at all’.⁵³ If Wordsworth is inclined at times to think of world as community (‘the world / Of all of us’) he also risks presenting the problems of that community as a totality (the world that is ‘too much with us’).⁵⁴ To

⁵² HG, 92; LB, 232. ⁵³ Jacques Khalip, Last Things: Disastrous Form from Kant to Hujar (New York: Fordham UP, 2018), 31. ⁵⁴ 1805a, X.726; P2V, 150.

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speak of an ‘unintelligible world’ is to raise unintelligibility to the level of existential totality, and the palliative gesture of ‘Tintern Abbey’ is to offer a route out. Wordsworth’s capacity to focus more closely on his immediate surroundings, and in so doing defer or displace the world as a whole, has not gone unremarked, especially by those who have seen his poems ‘eliding, deleting, or obscuring their relation to context and history’.⁵⁵ But if the idea of the world conscripts us into forms of thinking which leap from particular environmental concerns to an insurmountably general problem, the comparatively limited viewpoint of a poem seem less like a retreat and more like the grounds for surviving it. The world or worlds of ‘Tintern Abbey’ begin to look different in the context of growth and maturation this chapter has been considering. Khalip is interested in what it might mean no longer to ‘have’ a world: to recognize that our finitude represents a fissure in any perceived totality, and to confront the possibility of letting go. I am equally concerned with the question of how a person comes to believe themselves to live in any world at all. ‘Tintern Abbey’ is, after all, a creation myth of sorts (the creation of a poet, but more captivatingly, the recognition of a certain kind of joy). To speak of an ‘external world’ in contrast to an individual ego, as Freud sometimes does, can seem to present the problem of totality (that ‘external stimulus’ is the entire world beating down on you) and betray an essential hatred of it (that what we have of a self is always a form of defence against that world). More productive in this context might be Winnicott’s interest in children’s attempts to construct a world around them. Such a world is speculative, provisional, heuristic, and improvised. It requires a confidence in objects—that they can be tolerated and used, rather than consumed and destroyed—and a confidence in persons—that they won’t disappear when they let themselves out of your sight.⁵⁶ To be alone in the world, and to survive the experience of being alone, is for Winnicott not an embrace of solitude but an achievement made possible by the basic reliability of others. People who, he would say, are good enough. To live in this world, even merely to be at rest in it, is already to cope with it. It is in this spirit that Jonathan Lear writes:

⁵⁵ Khalip, Last Things, 44. ⁵⁶ See Donald Winnicott, The Family and Individual Development (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), 1–19.

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 ’    As the infant grows into a child, an adolescent and an adult, his world will, in healthy circumstances, tend to expand and deepen. But it would seem that for this expansion to take place, the world itself must maintain a certain responsiveness to and reflection of the emerging person. It must respond to his emerging curiosity and interests and, in so responding, reflect them. We seem then to need the concept of a good-enough world.⁵⁷

If the world is not ‘good enough’ to bear, we will recoil from it in pain and illness. If we are to know the world at all, it will be because it already appears with a minimal level of coherence. From this point of view, the very possibility of a world, with all its defects and violence, is only comprehensible against a background of basic coping. One way to articulate the thought of a good-enough world would be this: ‘Nature never did betray / The heart that loved her’ (123–4). A minimally lovable world is not a discrete quality of the environment so much as a condition for perception. Indeed, I will suggest in the next chapter that this is precisely how Wordsworth comes to understand human care in The Prelude: as an aspect of life so vital that it comes to underwrite all possible perception, and for that reason appears at once everywhere and nowhere, indistinguishable from the world it makes comprehensible. What Lear calls ‘healthy circumstances’ can also be understood as care, the kind of care that gives us the world, and for which our gratitude can be at best only good enough. ‘Tintern Abbey’ does not get to its falteringly optimistic conclusion by discovering what Charles Altieri elsewhere identifies as ‘the empirical structures which make experience significant and loss bearable’ but rather by hewing out a new way of relating to the world.⁵⁸ Both the appetitive, childhood relation and the adult ‘getting and spending’ imply alienation from objects; mere consumption leaves one ‘rich one moment to be poor for ever, [ . . . ] as if the mind / Itself were nothing, a mean pensioner / On outward forms’.⁵⁹ For the same reason, readings of the poem which equate memories to possessions risk repeating the problem at the heart of the poem, a problem shared by Wordsworth the Swiss tourist, always trying to secure the next memory. More promising is Hartman’s venerable description of

⁵⁷ Jonathan Lear, Love and its Place in Nature (New Haven: Yale UP, 1999), 154. ⁵⁸ Charles Altieri, ‘Wordsworth’s “Preface” as literary theory’ Criticism 18 (2) (1976): 122–46, 137. ⁵⁹ 1805a VI.665–8.

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nature not as ‘an object’ but as ‘a motion and a spirit; not something to be worshiped and consumed, but always a guide leading beyond itself ’.⁶⁰ But I want to resist the soft transcendence in this formulation, and propose instead a model of retrospective satisfaction: that there is no going beyond, only mute surprise at something that had been there all along.

Return of the Gift Rather than a memory, we might understand past pleasure in ‘Tintern Abbey’ as a kind of unexpected gift. This has the obvious advantage for my argument of displacing the active, self-authoring subject: you might make your own memories, at least some of the time, but only another can give you a gift. Yet a gift can also imply a giver with his or her own agenda and expectations. In thinking of unremembered, unbidden sensation as gift, I am drawing on the idea of an unhoped-for gift that François locates in Benjamin and Pascal, and on the suggestive notion that experience in the ‘Boy of Winander’ lyric ‘makes a gift of the very loss of the ability to take.’⁶¹ Pleasure you did not possess, and never even noticed, might come to be felt as an undemanded, undeserved satisfaction, and for that reason be more significant than any reciprocated wish. Like the Girardian sacrifice, which Collings traces through Wordsworth’s ‘dismemberment of culture’—and like Lacan’s excremental gift, for that matter—the undemanded gift is not a transaction; it signals the limits of transactional thinking.⁶² But unlike the other two, it is not abject, repulsive, or traumatic. Its disruption is both milder and more disarming, because its indifference to your wishes entails no violence. This is the gift as sensation you can receive but never take, that you did not possess but might yet come to acknowledge. How might so abstract a gift be understood? Here is a helpful passage from The Prelude: it is shaken off, As by miraculous gift ’tis shaken off, ⁶⁰ Geoffrey Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry 1787–1814 (New Haven: Yale UP, 1971), 42. ⁶¹ Anne-Lise François, Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2008), 129–30; 201. ⁶² David Collings, Wordsworthian Errancies: The Poetics of Cultural Dismemberment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994), 33. Gerald Moore, Politics of the Gift: Exchanges in Poststructuralism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2011), 32–72.

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 ’    That burthen of my own unnatural self, The heavy weight of many a weary day Not mine, and such as were not made for me. (1805a I.21–5)

The unnatural days are shaken off as if by miraculous gift. Yet it is also implied by the preceding lines that what mimics salvation is strenuous and busy mental work: ‘Trances of thought and mountings of the mind / Come fast upon me: it is shaken off . . . ’) (1805a I.20–1). As John Beer has noted, there is a sustained interest in trance states in Wordsworth’s writing, which draws on their revelatory function in Methodist accounts of conversion.⁶³ Thus one kind of daze lifts another; the ‘heavy weight of many a weary day’ bears on the spirit, but the mind falls into a state of chaotic involvement that carries away both burden and control. There are clear lexical similarities between this passage and ‘Tintern Abbey’, although in this case the giftrelation is tinged with egotistical sublimity (if these days ‘were not made for me’, presumably the metaphorical gift which shakes them off was made especially for me). In both the figures of trance and gift, the burden is attenuated by relinquishing conscious control. In ‘Tintern Abbey’, the gifts are more than hypothetical, but they are equally indirect because they appear belatedly. The delay occurs because, syntactically, these gifts are only announced as gifts after the fact: ‘other gifts’, ‘another gift’, these phrases retroactively transform the preceding objects into gifts already received. This occurs twice. Firstly, we find that the ‘sensations sweet’, bequeathed by ‘beauteous forms’ and by ‘feelings . . . of unremembered pleasure’ are taken as gifts, along with ‘that blessed mood’ which almost suspends human life. Secondly, regarding the loss of childhood exhilaration: Not for this Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur: other gifts Have followed, for such loss, I would believe, Abundant recompence. (86–9)

⁶³ John Beer, ‘Coleridge, the Wordsworths, and the State of Trance’ The Wordsworth Circle 8 (2) (1977): 121–38.

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Earlier sensations are recognized as gifts belatedly because they were, at the time, a purely sensory affair, with ‘no need of a remoter charm, / By thought supplied, or any interest / Unborrowed from the eye’ (82–4). Childhood’s gifts of feeling appear through the force of that later scene of recognition: a sensation of deferred gratitude, the feeling of a gift. This temporal loop suggests that both mature enjoyment, and the category of the gift itself in the poem, depend on ‘the unconscious efficacy of the original impressions’.⁶⁴ The category of the gift has proven fertile ground for anthropological theory, and although the arguments are now familiar throughout writing in the humanities, I hope the chance of disclosing a Wordsworthian intervention will justify the detour. The central question, since Marcel Mauss’s seminal Essai sur le don, has been the relation of gift to exchange. For Claude Lévi-Strauss, Mauss’s insight that there is no free gift (that is, no gift which is not implicated in a relation of reciprocity) provided the opportunity for a programme of structural anthropology which teased out the social ‘laws’ of gift conduct. The difficulty of separating gifts from mere exchange has proved a persistent problem, even if, as Jonathan Parry has shown, ‘the ideology of a disinterested gift emerges in parallel with an ideology of a purely interested exchange’.⁶⁵ In other words, the anthropological problem with separating gift and exchange comes about through our conviction that they ought to be distinct spheres. Along these lines, Jarvis has argued that, for Wordsworth, the idea of a total separation between disinterested gifts and interested exchanges is just the condition he wishes to diagnose . . . Wordsworth’s gift of nature and gift to nature is the ‘more’ which would prevent this separation between gifts and exchange—between ‘ought’ and ‘is’—from becoming totalized.⁶⁶

By way of example, in ‘Stray Pleasures’ Jarvis locates ‘an unconscious reciprocity of excess’ whose origin is not in economic calculus, nor in purely disinterested charity, but in the very nature of pleasure.⁶⁷ This sense of the gift as a liminal category is extended by Yousef ’s discussion of

⁶⁴ Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime, 142. ⁶⁵ Jonathan Parry, ‘The Gift, the Indian Gift and the “Indian Gift” ’ Man, New Series, 21 (3) (1986): 453–73, 458. ⁶⁶ Simon Jarvis, Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006), 106–7. ⁶⁷ Jarvis, Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song, 106.

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 ’   

Wordsworth’s ambivalent employment of the sympathy of eighteenthcentury sentimentalism. Her account identifies: The unsettling shifting of the grounds of preromantic conceptions of sympathy in Wordsworth’s poetry . . . his refusal to take love as a ‘gift of vulgar nature’ and his unwillingness to cede sentimentalist aspirations altogether[.]⁶⁸

Earlier assessments of Wordsworth’s thinking about the gift tended to take the antagonistic opposition between gift and exchange for granted.⁶⁹ More recent accounts stress an aspect of the gift that has proven so productive for anthropology: its capacity to disrupt categories such as giver and receiver. In taking up the question of gift theory, my interest is in the perceived link between an intention to give and receive, and the concept of the gift as such. For Derrida, the gift relation, insofar as it is something other than an interested exchange, is impossible to sustain. Specifically, the recognition of the gift (as a social fact which makes me indebted, and therefore obliges me to reciprocate) reduces the gift that is freely given into what is merely a delayed exchange: It suffices . . . for the other to perceive the gift . . . to perceive its nature of gift, the meaning or intention, the intentional meaning of the gift, in order for this simple recognition of the gift as gift, as such, to annul the gift as gift even before recognition becomes gratitude.⁷⁰

The gift is undermined in the moment that it is understood to be a gift. To recognize something as freely given is to recognize the unfreedom it heralds. There seems no way out, because Derrida has defined a gift as an act outside of reciprocity, and has defined its recognition in terms of debt, obligation, contract, relation. People are bound through gifts, but for this reason gifts cannot really be gifts because they are forms of binding. For this paradox to hold, Derrida must suppose that intention is inescapable: ⁶⁸ Nancy Yousef, Romantic Intimacy (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2013), 73. ⁶⁹ See Charles Rzepka, ‘A Gift That Complicates Employ: Poetry and Poverty in “Resolution and Independence” ’ Studies in Romanticism, 28 (2) (1989): 225–47; Mark Jones, ‘Spiritual Capitalism: Wordsworth and Usury’ The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 92 (1) (1993): 37–56; Raimonda Modiano, ‘Blood Sacrifice, Gift Economy and the Edenic World: Wordsworth’s “Home at Grasmere” ’ Studies in Romanticism 32 (4) (1993): 481–521. ⁷⁰ Jacques Derrida, Given Time I: Counterfeit Money. trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992), 13–14.

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For there to be gift, not only must the donor or donee not perceive or receive the gift as such, have no consciousness of it, no memory, no recognition; he or she must also forget it right away and moreover this forgetting must be so radical that it exceeds even the psychoanalytic categoriality of forgetting.⁷¹

Even a repressed recognition of a gift, on this account, cannot be truly a gift, because it was, at some point, understood as a debt. Wordsworth’s ‘unremembered pleasure’, retrospectively understood as a gift, is ruled out twice over by Derrida’s argument, lacking both intention and recollection. How must the concept of the gift be altered if we are to accommodate the unconscious, entrancing, and retrospective gifts of ‘Tintern Abbey’? In a critique of the tendency of structural anthropology to take the laws it formulates as a practical reality, Pierre Bourdieu comments that ‘the theoretical construction which retrospectively projects the counter-gift . . . [has] the effect of making mechanical sequences of obligatory acts out of the risky and but [sic] necessary improvisation of everyday strategies’. In practice, he suggests, gift exchange is ‘defined, at least in the eyes of the agents, as irreversible oriented sequences of relatively unpredictable acts’, and it is only from the external observer’s position that ‘laws’ and ‘cycles’ of reciprocity emerge.⁷² It is not that only anthropologists are able to see the rules, and everyone else supposes themselves to be acting more or less randomly, but rather that, for the actors, acting as if one were not conscious of the rules is one of the rules. By way of illustration, Bourdieu offers the case of Little presents, which . . . must be of modest value and hence easy to give and easy to match (‘it’s nothing,’ as we say); but they must be frequent and in a sense continuous, which implies that they must function within the logic of ‘surprises’ or ‘kind thoughts’ rather than according to the mechanisms of ritual. . . . so frequent and so closely woven into the fabric of exchange that they pass unnoticed.⁷³

In daily life, little gifts are not transactions but an indivisible aspect of good relations. Indeed, if such gifts were given in such a way as to mark them out

⁷¹ Derrida, Given Time, 16. ⁷² Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice trans. Richard Nice (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990), 112; 98. ⁷³ Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, 99.

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 ’   

as ritualized gifts, they would not work correctly. Little gifts are underagents of life with others, and to isolate and analyse them as if they were ritual gifts of religious and political ceremony is, for Bourdieu, to misunderstand their role. They function not as entries in some ledger of good relations, but as unnamed and indeterminate gestures which constitute a good relation in the first place. The subjects who give and receive are, for Derrida, effectively incompatible with their gifts; his account has already presupposed the conclusion that he draws: that the gift always binds the subject in a way which undermines that subject’s intention to freely give and receive.⁷⁴ Moreover, gift and subject are incompatible because the structural viewpoint of gift laws and the analysis of individual intention are themselves incompatible. For Bourdieu, the way in which gift givers and receivers overlook the ‘objective’ structure of the gift (that a gift is ‘really’ a delayed exchange) is part of the structure itself. When Derrida begins with the individual subject’s intention and the social facts of exchange in her society, with the gift placed in between to explicate their relation, he has knowingly placed the gift in an impossible position. Appealing to a thought which has been present in the study of the gift from the very beginning, we might instead see the gift as a way to think about how people relate to one another, and to the world in general, without resorting immediately to the categories of individual and society, or intention and law. In this way we are freed to see the gifts in ‘Tintern Abbey’ as articulations of the ways in which relations between persons and their environment might best work, rather than determinate claims about the transactions between parties whose identities are already fixed. And like the ‘little presents’ which ‘pass unnoticed’ in Bourdieu’s analysis, the ‘little, nameless, unremembered acts’ are only subsequently recognized as a gift. If such deeds cannot be named or demanded but only received, they might be understood as a kind of indeterminate but uncontrived joy. The temporal position of gifts in ‘Tintern Abbey’ suggests a Wordsworthian response to Derrida. In Derrida’s decidedly prospective analysis (‘an intention-to-give’, ‘the condition for a gift to be given’), the gift, if it is ever to be a gift, must begin as one.⁷⁵ Thus, the gift gives time because it demands a delayed response—a counter-gift which, if it were given immediately, would be merely the other half of a simple exchange. But what if it is not the gift that gives time, but rather time which gives the gift?

⁷⁴ Derrida, Given Time, 24.

⁷⁵ Derrida, Given Time, 11, 23, my emphasis.

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‘Tintern Abbey’ offers the thought that there are in life unnoticed, unconscious and diurnal gifts, whose material substrate is primrose tufts and nameless acts, but by a moment of retrospection, might become gifts. This is not ownership of the past, but its unbidden return, ‘changed, no doubt’. From a moment already experienced, and even thought to be ‘consumed’, ‘Other gifts / Have followed.’ Hence, we can offer an answer to Derrida’s question: After all, what would be a gift that fulfils the condition of the gift, namely, that it not appear as gift. . . . A gift without wanting, without wanting-tosay, an insignificant gift, a gift without intention to give? Why would we still call that a gift?⁷⁶

Well, we might counter, what if we don’t always know our intentions in advance? Another term for Derrida’s ‘insignificant gift’ would be the giftyet-to-be, the gift whose gift-ness only becomes apparent retrospectively. Not only the gift you hadn’t hoped for, but the gift you had not knowingly received. The poet’s recompense for lost childhood sensation is not a matter of debt and repayment, because nothing is excised or replaced. What Wordsworth comes to recognize as gifts are the unremembered and reciprocal tokens of ongoing, requited love, whose very plenitude had obscured individual acts and moments from the memory. It is precisely because they were not remembered or individuated that such acts cannot be reduced to a calculus of favour and reward, and the whole poem reduced to a drama of spiritual accountancy. This is ‘the consecration, the promise of poetry as a sacrament, a gift efficacious beyond the moment’.⁷⁷ Rather than being divine rewards, such gifts might be nothing more than good moments returning, freed of any illusion that they were ever possessions to be stockpiled or traded. There is no space for an autonomous subject, shuffling his deck of memories, yet these conditions are not repressive constraints so much as an openness to being affected by things beyond one’s control.⁷⁸ The gift does not balance a determinate economy of the subject, but signals things far ⁷⁶ Derrida, Given Time, 27. ⁷⁷ Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry, 33–4. ⁷⁸ This is one of the central points of Ingolf Dalferth’s penetrating analysis of the gift. ‘One becomes a recipient completely passively by getting something. This changes the recipient, who now confronts the unavoidable decision as to how to respond—by accepting or refusing it. But it changes him positively, since he gets opportunities and possibilities that he would not have had of his own accord.’ I’m grateful to Joel Robbins for bringing this material to my attention. Ingolf Dalferth, Creatures of Possibility: The Theological Basis of Human Freedom trans. Jo Bennett (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2016), 95.

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 ’   

more deeply interfused: forms of good life which exist outside any arithmetic of the day’s vigour and lassitude. There is one final gift articulated by the poem. In The Prelude, Wordsworth recalls ‘that sole Sister’, Now, after separation desolate Restor’d to me—such absence that she seem’d A gift then first bestow’d. (1805a, VI.214–18)

There has been considerable discussion of the role Dorothy is asked to play (or asked only to witness) in ‘Tintern Abbey’.⁷⁹ Rather than returning to a crowded debate, I want to consider how the address to Dorothy interacts with the poem’s thinking about the possibilities of the gift. Consider the mood that characterizes Dorothy’s return: ‘after separation desolate’, it seemed ‘[a] gift then first bestow’d’; a return with the qualities of something happening for the first time. To understand a person as gift means, in this case, to deflate a poetic address into something more like a confession or plea. The following verse paragraph begins in the conditional, as if the entire poem to this point had found no purchase: Nor, perchance, If I were not thus taught, should I the more Suffer my genial spirits to decay: For thou art with me, here (112–15, my emphasis)

If nature did not bring me joy, if I failed in my vocation, I would still have you. We can read this as a hedged bet against displeasure, or the celebration of a familial guarantee. Unlike Coleridge’s ‘Frost at Midnight’ and ‘The ⁷⁹ For the critique, see Margaret Homans, ‘Eliot, Wordsworth, and the Scenes of the Sisters’ Instruction’ Critical Inquiry 8 (2) (1981): 223–41; Marjorie Levinson, Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986), 38; Mary Jacobus, Romanticism, Writing and Sexual Difference (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1989), 181–2. For the case for the defence, see Helen Vendler, ‘Tintern Abbey: Two Assaults’ in Wordsworth in Context ed. John Murphy and Pauline Fletcher (London: Associated University Presses, 1992), 173–90; James Soderholm, ‘Dorothy Wordsworth’s Return to Tintern Abbey’ New Literary History 26 (2) (1995): 309–22; Adam Potkay, Wordsworth’s Ethics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2012), 132ff. For arguments to put the debate aside, see Eric Lindstrom, Romantic Fiat: Demystification and Enchantment in Lyric Poetry (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 75; Stuart Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986), 77.

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Aeolian Harp’, which ‘begin with the fact of propinquity’, there is no intimacy until the final third of ‘Tintern Abbey’.⁸⁰ This micro-Prelude moves in the opposite direction to its longer cousins: not from parental love to love of nature, but from nature back to filial bond, a bond which seems to have silently underwritten the whole gambit. ‘I am so immensely glad that you are giving me the gift of the Other, a critic and reader—and one of your quality at that. I cannot write entirely without an audience, but do not at all mind writing only for you.’ So wrote Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, in May 1898.⁸¹ But just as gifts can be both offerings and demands, one can have all kinds of antagonism towards a reader in spite of, or even because of, one’s debts to her or him—as Freud would demonstrate with Fliess in dramatic fashion by 1900. Likewise, a demand can express power and enfeeblement, the capacity to ask and the necessity of doing so. In ‘Tintern Abbey’, Dorothy is asked to verify the whole process of nature soothing the mind through the affections: by repeating it and thereby rescuing the project from its own late doubt. That which takes the form of a prediction of what ‘shall’ happen is also a hopeful recapitulation of the poem’s central gesture, its transformation of the immediate but shallow joy of the past into recollected and transformed pleasure: these wild ecstasies shall be matured Into a sober pleasure, when thy mind Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms, Thy memory be as a dwelling-place For all sweet sounds and harmonies (139–43)

The whole verse paragraph is beholden to that wobbly ‘if ’: ‘if I were not thus taught’. This is a poem ‘always in danger of coming to a dangerous halt’.⁸² As David Bromwich notes: Wordsworth was never so sure as we suppose in retrospect that his kind of internalization or sublimation would succeed. . . . At the end of ‘Tintern

⁸⁰ Mark Foster, ‘ “Tintern Abbey” and Wordsworth’s Scene of Writing’ Studies in Romanticism, 25 (1) (1986): 75–95, 79. ⁸¹ Sigmund Freud, The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904 ed. J.M. Masson (Cambridge: Belknap P/Harvard UP, 1986), 313. ⁸² Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime, 29.

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 ’    Abbey,’ he makes himself necessary to Dorothy, without being asked to, under a pretence of showing why she is necessary to him.⁸³

Were ‘Tintern Abbey’ concerned only with a poet’s interiority, no measure of external reassurance could be of comfort. However self-interested it may be, this is also a claim on a future which must include Dorothy and may be hers alone: Oh! then, If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief, Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts Of tender joy wilt thou remember me, And these my exhortations! (143–7)

The hedged bet is that a future world is lovable, which is to say that what appears as a gift will have been proven something other than William’s own wishful thinking. The lovable world which ‘Tintern Abbey’ discovers—and simultaneously doubts—is staked on its addressee’s agreement. I think the sentiment is something like this: I love you, and I depend on you. Since my dependence makes me anxious about losing your love, I wish that you might love me so fiercely that you are dependent on me too, so that my dependence need not be vulnerability, but a relation we might share. This is certainly a demand, and perhaps a rather selfish one, but it is a demand formulated in such a way that its addressee cannot possibly be coerced, since the merest hint of coercion would foreclose precisely what its speaker seeks. A gift isn’t a gift if it is compelled. And what the poet offers is ultimately his doubt that he has anything to give. I will return to the question of how for Wordsworth poetry might articulate a world worth having, but a provisional conclusion is that a good-enough world would be a world in which gifts are thinkable. Not because (as Jean-Luc Marion has argued) all phenomena are given, and in that sense, everything is gift.⁸⁴ Rather, because the possibility of the gift is nothing other than the possibility of favourable surprise. It is the possibility

⁸³ David Bromwich, Disowned by Memory: Wordsworth’s Poetry of the 1790s (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998), 91. ⁸⁴ Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002).

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to experience as salutary ‘the fact that the flow of life is interrupted by something that comes our way from somewhere entirely other, the fact that we are being determined by something that we are not giving to ourselves but that we come by’.⁸⁵ This shift from transaction to gift has some broader implications for what we might term retrospection’s affective economy. Looking back at the poem in light of Wordsworth’s later work, one relatively unimportant aspect to which we can attribute increased significance is the poem’s detection of a gleam. At the opening of the fourth verse-paragraph, the speaker recalls ‘with leams of half-extinguish’d thought’ (59). The term ‘gleam’ appears twice in the poem, here and in ‘these gleams / Of past existence’ in Dorothy’s eyes, in the closing address (149), in both cases identifying as glittering light something on the verge of disappearance. Reading the poem retrospectively—that is, against the chronology—we might also think of the passing ‘visionary gleam’ of the ‘Intimations’ ode and connect the line about Dorothy’s eyes to ‘that happy gleam of vernal eyes’ in ‘The Gleaner’.⁸⁶ Looking in the other direction, Quinney draws our attention to Coleridge’s favourite poem by William Lisle Bowles, the sonnet ‘To the River Itchin’, noting that it is an obvious predecessor to Wordsworth’s poem. The octet provides a blunt registration of loss: Itchin, when I behold thy banks again, Thy crumbling margin, and thy silver breast, On which the self-same tints still seem to rest, Why feels my heart the shiv’ring sense of pain? Is it, that many a summer’s day has past Since, in life’s morn, I carol’d at thy side? Is it, that oft, since then, my heart has sigh’d, As Youth, and Hope’s delusive gleams, flew fast?⁸⁷

While there is a familiar tension between past and present experience in Bowles’s poem, it is a good deal simpler than in Wordsworth because the speaker writes off the incommensurable feelings of youth with a single word: ‘delusive’. There is a note of ambivalence in the visual combination of a bank that is ‘crumbling’ and the constancy of the silver water, presumably still shining. But the negative balance is not in question. ‘Though these poems ⁸⁵ Dalferth, Creatures of Possibility, 96–7. ⁸⁷ Quinney, ‘Sensibility’, 135–6.

⁸⁶ P2V, 272; LP, 103.

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may seem to portray disappointment with the external world and its fading glories, these losses fundamentally compromise the self ’s relation to itself ’, Quinney remarks.⁸⁸ If the ‘self ’s relation to itself ’ is marked by internal difference then we have come full circle from the ostensibly Lockean account in which the continuity between the present and remembered past constitute the identity of the subject. Yet we should be cautious about thinking of any economy of the self in which gains can be objectively compared. ‘Though “Tintern Abbey” and the “Immortality Ode” contain deep recognition of the structure of loss, they also contain deep emotional, if not always logical, compensation for that loss’, Thomas McFarland writes. Likewise, Paul Fry detects ‘some form of compensation for . . . the loss of glad animal movement and the haunting passion that succeeds it in “Tintern Abbey” ’.⁸⁹ To lose ‘aching joys’ and receive abundant recompense, as ‘Tintern Abbey’ announces, seems to leave no room for doubt. Yet it seems to me that abundance is best understood here to cancel any sense of quantity, leaving no possibility that two moments of life might be weighed, melted down into their raw materials, and comparatively priced. Unlike in Bowles’s sonnet, which approaches a case of sour grapes, what is lost of the past is not abandoned. Wordsworth does not, in other words, discover that in the end, growing up is painful but worth it; ‘Tintern Abbey’ does not buy present satisfaction by talking down the goodness of the past. Yet it is equally misleading to say that memory preserves the past for present ‘use’. It is by giving ground to experience at the very limits of memory that Wordsworth discovers a tentative way to bear (rather than blindly affirm or ignore) the world as it now appears. What mattered most was never his to hold and never his to lose. It is tentative, of course, because the poem remains so uncertain up to its last lines. And there is little articulation of how and why unremembered acts and feelings should hold the significance that they do. These questions return in Wordsworth’s ‘Ode’, which pursues the prospect of unremembered experience to its scenes of origination, shifting our focus to Wordsworth’s writing of very early infancy.

⁸⁸ Quinney, ‘Sensibility’, 141. ⁸⁹ Thomas McFarland, Wordsworth: Intensity and Achievement (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1992), 73; Paul Fry, Wordsworth and the Poetry of What We Are (New Haven: Yale UP, 2008), 177.

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2 The Infancy of Affection Why should unremembered pleasure be missed, elided, or simply go unrecorded? And why would such a thing return to be counted in poetry? To propose some answers, this chapter traces Wordsworth’s interest in unrememberable things through some draft material associated with the poem that would become The Prelude, before focusing on Wordsworth’s ‘Ode’ (‘There was a time’). Wordsworth’s so-called ‘Great’ or ‘Intimations’ ode, I argue, was a way of responding to, and extending, the questions generated in these earlier materials. Crucially, the poem understands lost infant experience as a necessary prelude to composition. Poetry traces its way back to the border of language, but cannot reconstruct infant experience. Wordsworth senses, as Burke did before him, the intensity of the first affections, felt in ‘the morning of our days, when the senses are unworn and tender, when the whole man is awake in every part, and the gloss of novelty fresh upon all the objects that surround us’. But he will not concede so easily to the caveat Burke imposes: that when the sensations are most lively, the judgements are ‘false and inaccurate’.¹ The ‘Ode’ is both a meditation on the value of early sensations and a speculative account of their afterlife. By returning our attention to those non-linguistic features of language which are, during language acquisition, a constant physical concern, poetry invokes and mourns a register of early sensation which it can neither capture nor evade. In this way it suggests poetry’s necessary attachment to its unremembered infancy.

The World Which I Had Been The notebook DC MS. 19 contains various fragments written by Wordsworth in Germany during the winter of 1798–9, several of which reappear in the first part of 1799 draft of The Prelude. Page Z recto contains ¹ Edmund Burke, The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, Vol. 1: The Early Writings eds T.O. McLoughlin, James T. Boulton, and William B. Todd (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997), 208. Wordsworth’s Unremembered Pleasure. Alexander Freer, Oxford University Press (2020). © Alexander Freer. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198856986.001.0001

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 ’   

familiar lines, which survive unaltered in the opening of the subsequent poem: ‘Was it for this / That one, the fairest of all rivers . . . ’ Shortly after, however, there are several lines which are not preserved in later compositions. They read: Was it for this & now I speak of things That have been & that are no gentle dreams Complacent fashioned fondly to adorn years

The time of unrememberable being²

In contrast to the unremembered acts and feelings of ‘Tintern Abbey’, which seem to depend on circumstance, these lines insist on memory’s limitation in more assertive, even ontological terms. We move from a simple negation of memory to a ‘time’ that forecloses it entirely, in a striking instance of what Frances Ferguson has called ‘the temporal untranslatability of origins’.³ How can such a time be accommodated in speech, rather than experienced as a mental limitation or creative block? Not, the struck-out line suggests, by draping ‘gentle dreams’ over the unknowable. Respecting the deletion, on the other hand, yields precisely what is feared: ‘I speak of things / Complacent fashioned fondly to adorn . . . ’ A poem of human life will be a pleasing distraction or myth, written to take the place of a moment which might as well be a void. Here subject and object add up to less than one person. In related lines preserved in the longer 1799 draft, ‘a dim and undetermined sense / Of unknown modes of being’ rebounds from the stolen boat episode. ‘There was a darkness, call it solitude / Or blank desertion’ (1799, I.121–4). In this case, there is nothing to desert. By offering a complacent dream as the alternative to a kind of dreamless and inscrutable sleep, these lines are caught between their descriptive failure and an acknowledged lure of easy sentimentality. The terms fashioned and adornment suggest a prop—or perhaps a garment—whose superficial detail distracts from the otherwise irresistible negativity. But even when retaining the struck-out line, we are left with ‘things’ which, while refusing to be ‘gentle dreams’, have no positive content: no extension, no colour, no sound. Overleaf from these lines (on page Z verso) there is a related passage concerned with the failure of memory, though here transposed from a problem of speaking into a problem of hearing: ² Quoted from transcription of DC MS. 19 in 1799, 115. ³ Frances Ferguson, Wordsworth: Language as Counter Spirit (New Haven: Yale UP, 1977), 6.

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what there is Of subtler feeling of remembered joy Of soul & spirit in departed sound That can not be remembered.⁴

There are some syntactical difficulties here. Specifically, do the ‘of ’ clauses each independently refer to the ‘departed sound / That can not be remembered’, or is it that all of these elements—subtler feeling, remembered joy, departed sound’s soul and spirit—cannot be remembered? The ambiguity suggests in the former case an unrememberable sound that once contained these things, and in departing rescinds each one. In the latter case the poem presents departed sound as one entry in a series of marginal cases, each neither remembered nor utterly destroyed. J. Mark Smith comments: Wordsworth’s object as poet was not the sudden and involuntary blooming of memory explored by Proust. He was more interested in some unrememberable essence distilled from forgetting. Sound (and not taste or smell) was the mnemonic sense for Wordsworth, and yet to say that is to use ‘mnemonic’ in a special sense. ‘Departed sound / That can not be remembered . . . ’ on the one hand; on the other, subtler feeling (joy) that can be.⁵

There are reasons to be cautious about privileging a single sense here: something comparably ‘mnemonic’ clearly occurs in the visual register for Wordsworth, marked by flashing and gleaming light. Equally, even if we follow Smith’s reading of the passage in which the line-breaks are also the primary semantic breaks (giving ‘subtler feeling of remembered joy’ as one semantic unit and ‘soul & spirit in departed sound’ as another), it is still not clear that a ‘subtler feeling of remembered joy’ rules out some forgotten counterpart. Nevertheless, Smith captures the inherent tension in the category of absent, unremembered sounds in Wordsworth’s poetry more broadly. Music seemed more superficial than painting or poetry to Kant because it vanishes the moment after it has been produced. For Wordsworth, the problem is not far from the reverse: the significance of a sound seems to persist when the sonic phenomenon has vanished, or perhaps was never encountered at all. As Smith observes, the poet and his ⁴ 1799, 117. ⁵ J. Mark Smith, ‘ “Unrememberable” Sound in Wordsworth’s 1799 “Prelude” ’ Studies in Romanticism 42 (4) (2003): 501–18, 507.

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readers might find themselves attributing meaning to even an unvoiced sound, such as that carried far into the heart of that gentlest of listeners, the Boy of Winander.⁶ Speaking more generally, Bevis suggests that ‘lyrics are invitations to listen to sounds we can’t quite know’.⁷ In this case, the important distinction is between the hum of words, active and efficient, and the possibility of departed sound that it may evoke but cannot reconstitute. Reading the unremembered in Wordsworth means bearing these moments of visual and sonic blankness without converting them into something more readily paraphrasable, even while allowing that this temptation is registered in the very lines in question. The term ‘unrememberable’ does not appear in the later Prelude drafts and iterations; these visions of unrememberable time are displaced by clearer memories. ‘I remember’, ‘I recollect’ becomes the poem’s insistent refrain. Yet unrememberable time is not effaced. One striking passage, in the 1799 text, suspends the soul between memory and its negation in a similar manner: the soul Remembering how she felt, but what she felt Remembering not, retains an obscure sense Of possible sublimity (1799, II.364–7)

To remember how, but not what, suggests a form of partial or insubstantial awareness, a register of unattended consciousness suggestive of what Wordsworth elsewhere terms the ‘Under-Powers’ of the mind (1805a, I.164). Something is remembered, even when its positive content has become clouded and dim. This unremembered but minimally registered feeling persists too in the account of infant experience: Thus, often in those fits of vulgar joy Which through all seasons on a child’s pursuits Are prompt attendants, ’mid that giddy bliss Which like a tempest works along the blood And is forgotten, even then I felt

⁶ Smith, ‘ “Unrememberable” Sound’, 508ff. ⁷ Matthew Bevis, ‘Unknowing Lyric’ Poetry March 2017, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/ poetrymagazine/articles/92372/unknowing-lyric

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Gleams like the flashing of a shield; the earth And common face of Nature spake to me Rememberable things (1799, I.413–20)

Giddy bliss is figured as a storm, but a storm which rages out at sea and leaves no mark; the water is as calm afterwards as it was before. ‘Rememberable things’ come on the scene in opposition to a joy which may be vulgar in the sense of crude and unsophisticated, but from the adult’s perspective cannot be vulgar in the sense of being common or general, because it is being further marginalized by every line. Throughout the 1799 Prelude, gleams are associated with remembered moments of formative importance. In the passage just quoted, the gleams hover between a forgotten storm and rememberable things, as if undecided on which side of the equation they fall. Some gleams do appear graspable: there are gleams of starlight on ice, ‘gleams of moonlight’ and ‘gleams of water through the trees’ that puncture descriptive passages.⁸ In the second part of the poem, the speaker reiterates a promise: Fair scenes! that dying I would think on you, My soul would send a longing look to you: Even as that setting sun while all the vale Could nowhere catch one faint memorial gleam Yet with the last remains of his last light Still lingered, and a farewell lustre threw On the dear mountain-tops where first he rose. (1799 II.168–74)

Here the ‘memorial gleam’ is more clearly the sign of memory’s limit, on which the pathos of the address hangs. The setting sun casts only long shadows and a ‘lustre’ of ‘last light’; the day ends with a faint imitation of its early brightness. The conceit in this passage aligning the speaker’s (envisaged) death with fading light, and early life with bright sunshine, anticipates similar figures in the ‘Intimations’ ode, to which I will turn shortly, and in the two later odes ‘To Lycoris’, and in the ‘Ode, Composed upon an Evening of Extraordinary Splendour and Beauty’, which I examine

⁸ 1799, I.174, II.138, II.199.

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in detail in Chapter 5. In The Prelude, it is the ‘common face of Nature’ which proffers ‘rememberable things’; in the ‘Intimations’ ode, the passing of ‘the visionary gleam’ occurs while ‘earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own’.⁹ On its face, the Prelude material undergoes a transformation from ‘unrememberable time’ to ‘rememberable things’, and from a speculative but unwritable story to a clearer developmental narrative. Yet what is described with remarkable precision a few lines later in the 1799 text is a process of retaining earlier kinds of experience through their loss: ——And if the vulgar joy by its own weight Wearied itself out of memory, The scenes which were witness of that joy Remained, in their substantial lineaments Depicted on the brain, and to the eye Were visible, a daily sight: and thus By the impressive agency of fear, By pleasure, and repeated happiness, So frequently repeated, and by force Of obscure feelings representative Of joys that were forgotten, these same scenes, So beauteous and majestic in themselves, Though yet the day was distant, did at length Become habitually dear, and all Their hues and forms were by invisible links Allied to the affections. (1799, I.427–42)

Infant joy, by its sheer energy, erases itself, as when a statue or inscription is, by the repeated touch of those who pass it, worn away to shining blankness. Wordsworth’s language simultaneously suggests a materialist understanding (the repeated sense-impressions of each ‘daily sight’ are what score these scenes into consciousness; habit and association preserve the original feeling) and yet encompasses exceptions which undermine a strictly empirical account. There are kinds of experience which can weary themselves out of memory. The process depends on a series of sensations which cannot be rightly termed impressions: ‘obscure feelings representative / Of joys that

⁹ P2V, 269–77.

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were forgotten’, and rather than palpable associations the sentiments are bound together ‘by invisible links’. Like the little gifts and unremembered acts of ‘Tintern Abbey’, ‘Repeated happiness / So frequently repeated’ suggests a form of happiness so richly ordinary that the particular objects of satisfaction recede and vanish from the mind before the plenitude of positive affect, so that the feeling no longer resides at its origin but spreads far and wide. The ‘impressive agency of fear’ (subsequently ‘discipline of fear’) is familiar critical territory (the site of the hanged man, for instance, being central to readings of trauma in the poem), but here Wordsworth provides a substantial account of the developmental power of unremembered joy. In Adam Potkay’s elegant ‘cultural philology’ of joy, the affective state is often invoked as a form of narrative completion, like shutting a book or closing a musical phrase. ‘Joy is the surprise that satisfies and completes.’¹⁰ From Reformation theology to Enlightenment ethics, and throughout the romantic period, Potkay argues, joy binds itself to narratives—it tells stories about the world. But unlike the patient determinations of judgement, joy is a kind of involuntary affirmation, whose authority lies in its sudden and unwilled emergence. One of the strengths of this argument is its capacity to unite sensuous and intellectual pleasures, public and private experience, spanning personal satisfaction and the ethical joy of Aquinas’s moral philosophy. Potkay also understands joy as a binding force within individual lives: If the adult experience of joy is psychologically indebted to the infantile model, then the past that erupts into present joy is a past (adult relations) with a past (infant-object relations) with a past (infant memory of blissful totality). Memories at three removes are, perhaps, what accounts for the experiential density of joy.¹¹

If joy recalls joy, it is difficult to say whether it is truly the substance of the good life, or the connective tissue between its otherwise fragmentary elements. This conceptual inclusivity may also be its great appeal: joys do not seem to tussle with one another, or to deny each other, in the way that pleasures might seem to compete. At least when understood in this way—

¹⁰ Adam Potkay, The Story of Joy: From the Bible to Late Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007), viii, 10. ¹¹ Potkay, The Story of Joy, 16.

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distinct from seductive, continental joie—joy is affirmational, non-exclusive, and extensible in nature. I want to retain this sense of joy’s power to bind and affirm, while allowing that for Wordsworth joy is less psychologically stable and less conceptually smooth than that power may suggest: joys can be vulgar or tender, fragile or durable, gone even before they can be registered, or so frequently repeated that they blend one into the next like the days. More practically, joy is not so cleanly separable from pleasure, because for Wordsworth both terms operate as determinate sensations and indeterminate categories, feelings singular and plural. The ‘experiential density’, as Potkay aptly terms it, comes in this case not only from joy remembering past joy, but also joy forgetting itself—joys ‘wearied . . . out of memory’. Wordsworth ‘suggests that a given scene’s ability to exceed his interpretive capacity is a sign of its privilege, its proximity to an affect too early and dense for him to decipher’.¹² The loss of affects is a token of their gravity; their density is more enigmatic than straightforwardly evocative. At the same time—and this is what makes the question more than a frustration—their loss is not absolute. There are sensations ‘that throw back our life / And make our infancy a visible scene / On which that sun is shining’ (1799 I.462–4). It is only because affects can get lost that they can be discovered, and this allows retrospection to be something other than strict reportage or sheer invention. In sum, joy can be an affirmative conclusion, as Potkay shows it has often been throughout English literary history, but also a premise, supposition, or hope: a reason to revisit otherwise difficult, intransigent, or dreary scenes.

The Progress of Our Being In contrast to the stimulating flashes of recall and absence in The Prelude, the ‘Ode’ devotes sustained attention to a ‘celestial light’ so bright that it is both unavoidable and blinding, a light which disappears but leaves behind an after-image like a scar.¹³ Here too, absence persists; infant joy is both unrememberable and unforgettable. The poem, Jarvis writes, ‘stands at

¹² David Collings, ‘Emotion without content: Primary affect and pure potentiality in Wordsworth’ in Romanticism and the Emotions ed. Joel Faflak and Richard Sha (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2014), 171–91, 177. ¹³ All quotation from P2V, 269–77.

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once as the hymn to bliss and the elegy for its loss’.¹⁴ By its careful working through of the relations between feeling and recollection, and between immediacy and mediation (or alienation), the poem represents Wordsworth’s most sustained investigation into the strained link between infant and adult experience. In the ‘Ode’, as in The Prelude drafts, early sensations are worn away and lost. But without the supporting skeleton of a long narrative poem, the effect is intensified; Wordsworth’s failure to reconstruct past experience, and his lack of language to adequately describe it, are compounded. In this more concentrated form, infant experience is shown to be an impossible subject to write about, and yet the only possible subject for a poem about the human origins and growth: impossible because the representation of infant experience is undermined even at the level of the sentence; necessary because this experience of loss—a loss of beginnings—is an immovable and persistent aspect of life. The loss which the poem maps is not only of bliss, but also of the time which occasioned it. ‘There was a time’; the past is another world, and adulthood is in part constituted by the loss of that more lively existence. The person I was becomes a stranger to me, but a stranger who follows like a shadow. The poem returns to the questions of unremembered experience posed by ‘Tintern Abbey’, but, as in The Prelude fragments, the stakes are elevated; loss is no longer contingent and incidental; it is ineluctable. At the same time, the possibility that Wordsworth’s great poem of infant joy can be written at all (by an adult) demonstrates the lingering of that joy; the poem asserts that there is some minimal continuity. Many readers have understood the poem to be arguing for the superiority of one side or the other—infant sensation or adult wisdom.¹⁵ I take the ‘Ode’ to be investigative rather than rhetorical—that is, a way of thinking about ¹⁴ Simon Jarvis, Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006), 198. ¹⁵ There is an established tradition of reading the poem as an endorsement of intellectual and emotional maturity. In spite of its initial equivocation, this is the thrust of Lionel Trilling’s landmark essay on the ‘Ode’. Likewise, John Beer suggests that Wordsworth achieves ‘adult stability’ and James Chandler reads the text as a ‘progress poem’. Daniel Ross goes so far as to speak of ‘Wordsworth’s carefully rationalized conclusion that the “philosophic mind” is worth surrendering the powers of childhood for.’ For the more theologically-minded tradition, which favours infancy, see Taylor for a good summary. Vendler’s response to Trilling remains particularly instructive. Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination (New York: New York Review of Books, 2008), 129–53; John Beer, Wordsworth in Time (London: Faber & Faber, 1979), 111; James Chandler, ‘Wordsworth’s great Ode: Romanticism and the progress of poetry’ in The Cambridge Companion to British Romantic Poetry eds James Chandler and Maureen N. McLane (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008), 136–54; Daniel W. Ross, ‘Seeking a Way Home: The Uncanny in Wordsworth’s “Immortality Ode” ’ Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 32 (4) (1992): 625–43, 625; Anya Taylor ‘Religious Readings of the Immortality Ode’ Studies in

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sensations felt and lost, rather than a way to urge its readers towards a particular conclusion about them; ‘the poem is not about knowing whether childhood, adulthood, or yet a third state of complete disembodiment is best’.¹⁶ Rather than supposing the poem to favour adulthood, and function as a consolation of philosophy, or to favour infancy, and tend towards elegy, I follow the readers who acknowledge Wordsworth’s productive ambivalence between the two states.¹⁷ In this way, the ‘Ode’ can be understood as a speculative piece of work—an exploration of infancy, as well as an elegy or paean for it. As Yousef has shown, descriptions of infancy are a central way for romanticism, as well as psychoanalysis, to theorize human social life more generally. Her virtuosic account of Rousseau, Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, and J.S. Mill shows how the needs and limitations of infant life undercut claims to independence ‘as minds, as political or moral subjects, as protagonists of a life history’.¹⁸ One reason why infancy can serve this function is that the category very readily stands in for larger concerns without generating much resistance. ‘Infants’, Adam Phillips writes, ‘have always been useful in psychoanalysis to attribute things to because they don’t answer back.’¹⁹ The ‘Ode’ traces what it calls ‘early childhood’ all the way back to ‘our birth’, and I am especially interested in that earliest portion. Wordsworth’s ‘Ode’ demands a great deal of infancy; it does not hesitate to extend life back to a metaphysical, indeed a theological origin. Yet it is also scrupulous in acknowledging the differences between two distinct forms of life, differences which make normative comparisons between ‘early’ and ‘late’ difficult if not actively misleading. The most significant of these differences, I will suggest, is the minimal coherence of self implicit in, and required by, the acquisition of language. For those who expect a debate, the poem’s central question is premised on the idea of an adult recognizing either that adulthood is superior (cognitively richer) or inferior (spiritually poorer) to childhood. Their expectations are English Literature, 1500–1900, 26 (4) (1986): 633–54; Helen Vendler, ‘Lionel Trilling and the Immortality Ode’ Salmagundi 41 (1978): 66–86. ¹⁶ Paul Fry, The Poet’s Calling in the English Ode (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1980), 143. ¹⁷ I am thinking principally of Stuart M. Sperry, ‘From “Tintern Abbey” to the “Intimations Ode”: Wordsworth and the Function of Memory’ The Wordsworth Circle 1 (2) (1970): 40–9; and Kenneth Johnston, ‘Recollecting Forgetting: Forcing Paradox to the Limit in the “Intimations Ode” ’ The Wordsworth Circle 2 (2) (1971): 59–64, but see also Fred Hoerner, ‘Nostalgia’s Freight in Wordsworth’s Intimations Ode’ ELH 62 (3) (1995): 631–61 635. ¹⁸ Nancy Yousef, Isolated Cases: The Anxieties of Autonomy in Enlightenment Philosophy and Romantic Literature (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2004), 2. ¹⁹ Adam Phillips, On Flirtation (London: Faber & Faber, 1995), 19.

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fed by Wordsworth’s decision to place at the poem’s head firstly the Virgillian motto paulò majora canamus, and then in 1815 his own lines from ‘My heart leaps up’, suggestive in a rather different way.²⁰ Rather than being so from the start, the child of the ‘Ode’ comes to be called father of the man, suggesting some room for rhetorical manoeuvre. Yet there is insufficient evidence to come to a stable judgement, even if one wished. So much of the poem is dedicated to tracing the ways in which one mode of experience has become illegible from the standpoint of the other. At one point, ‘meadow, grove, and stream, . . . To me did seem / Apparell’d in celestial light’, but this can no longer be observed (1–4). While the poem attempts to account for the intensity of earliest life, it also recognizes it as a time of unrememberable being. A phenomenology of infancy can only gesture to the possibility of pre-linguistic sensation. If infancy contains sights adults cannot see, we can hardly expect an adult poet to tell us what those things are, and by the same token, any knowledge gained by wealth of years is unlikely to take a form that an infant would recognize. By maintaining both adulthood and infancy as credible forms of life—refusing to see one as an unfinished or decayed form of the other—Wordsworth finds an antagonism well suited to the irregular Pindaric form he inherits from Cowley. In both formal and referential terms, the ‘Ode’ is ‘a work with open dramatic tensions that it can encompass without collapsing.’²¹ This antagonism has implications beyond the writing and reading of an individual poem because infancy is bound up with the very possibility of lyric poetry, with its characteristic first-person utterance. The capacity to say ‘I’ is a marker of both linguistic and psychological difference between infant and non-infant life. An ‘I’ assumes (or, if you like, posits) a self with some difference from the world beyond it; the logic of self and non-self that is implicit in the use of ‘I’ is the price of admission. In this sense, all poems which speak as an ‘I’ rehearse the history of coming into language in their first moments. ‘The “I” in the poem (Janus-like) looks back toward an undifferentiated selfhood which it prevents and has not wholly forgotten, and forward toward a differentiated selfhood which it enables and has not wholly acknowledged.’²² By scrutinizing earliest life through lyric speech, the ‘Ode’ brings this tension into direct view. Something has been lost of life’s ²⁰ See Peter J. Manning, ‘Wordsworth’s Intimations Ode and Its Epigraphs’ The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 82 (4) (1983): 526–40. ²¹ Stuart Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986), 78. ²² Allen Grossman, ‘Summa Lyrica’ in The Sighted Singer: Two Works on Poetry for Readers and Writers (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992), 205–375, 262.

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earliest sensations, yet what has been lost is impossible to represent in the form of ‘I sensed x’, because a precondition of using the ‘I’ is the minimal but ineluctable separation of speaker from world, as subject from object. From this perspective, the poem’s central gesture is to make claims on a time and form of life which it acknowledges cannot be remembered, grasped, or owned; to acknowledge an irreversible loss and yet maintain what Sperry calls ‘an almost physical sense of continuity through time’.²³ In this spirit, I want to think through the question of what the ‘Ode’ might capture and lose of life by placing it alongside contrasting accounts of development and growth. Mutlu Konuk Blasing’s Lyric Poetry is an evocative study of poetry and poetics that connects the aesthetics of poetic language to every language user’s affectively-charged history of language acquisition. She writes: We need to consider the special status of the mother tongue and the lived history of the transformation of random muscular and sonic phenomena into recognizable elements of a sign system. This first stage of language acquisition makes for an individuating emotional history in language . . . poetry returns to that history of seduction and discipline into language.²⁴

The words of poets are, for Blasing, like the scenes of childhood for Wordsworth in The Prelude, marked by the intensity and strife they conjured when first encountered. To become a competent user of language is to discipline the body. Learning to speak fluently and naturally means forgetting the initial struggle to articulate. ‘The institution of the symbolic function rests on infantile amnesia.’²⁵ For this reason, Lyric Poetry is a trauma narrative (insofar as it traces a kind of pain which cannot be recovered) and an elegy (insofar as it gestures to an originary state which is no longer inhabitable or thinkable). At the same time, because natural languages never shed their non-semantic elements, forgetfulness of a time when language was a purely physical challenge can never equate to total separation from language’s somatic, non-semantic aspects. Words have a special power over us precisely because they had to be painfully acquired, and since poetry subjects language to special attention, Blasing’s argument goes, it cannot

²³ Sperry, ‘From “Tintern Abbey” to the “Intimations Ode” ’, 41. ²⁴ Mutlu Konuk Blasing, Lyric Poetry: The Pain and the Pleasure of Words (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2008), 46–7. ²⁵ Blasing, Lyric Poetry, 47.

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avoid bringing an older, more intense relationship to words back into the frame. ‘In poetry, there is an uncanny return of the “forgotten,” personally charged material body of language as something at once more strange and more familiar than sense.’²⁶ This is a familiar neither/nor structure: not remembered, nor wholly erased; disowned and yet not truly left behind. In the acquisition of language, Adam Phillips writes, the child ‘has to give up on what she can never in fact relinquish—her inarticulate self, the self before language’.²⁷ At this point one reason for the internal tensions of the ‘Ode’ is clear. A poem concerned with the difference between early childhood and later life will find language itself to be part of the answer—and will find itself enacting, rather than merely observing, the difference at stake. Already this argument resonates with more traditional psychoanalytic accounts. Our capacity to communicate conceptually (to access what Kristeva and Lacan call the symbolic) comes at the cost of overlooking all the physical weightings and determinations that we constantly make in order to exist as speaking subjects. And to analyse our use of language, for psychoanalysis, means finding cracks and failures in that assumed ease. Blasing distances her study from Freud perhaps partly because her own themes can sound distinctly Freudian at times: the formative power of infant experience is set against the repression of early pain.²⁸ Yet it is different in an important respect: Blasing’s model of personal history begins with the infant’s acquisition of language (or rather some putative point of nonlanguage immediately before). By contrast, Freud’s ‘I’ (or ‘ego’, in the Latinized jargon of James Strachey) is not—despite being labelled by a pronoun, Ich—a fundamentally and originally linguistic structure. For Blasing, lyric traces a particularizing, personal history. ‘If an “I” comes ²⁶ Blasing, Lyric Poetry, 48. ²⁷ Adam Phillips, The Beast in the Nursery (London: Faber and Faber, 1998), 39. ²⁸ Blasing distinguishes her own approach from psychoanalysis by positioning language as independently traumatic—apart from the trauma of what Freud called infantile sexuality. Hence, she suggests that ‘we could see Freudian theory as a kind of hysterical displacement of the trauma of language onto the sexual inscription of the body—a theoretical somatizing, so to speak’. ‘What Freudian theory represses’, she remarks later, ‘is the history of the transformation of animal sounds to symbolic language’. Psychoanalysis has hardly been uninterested in the breakdown of symbolic language. Blasing’s objection, I take it, is a variation on an old complaint: in spite of its linguistic interest, psychoanalysis reduces everything to sexuality, however broadly sexuality is conceived. Blasing, Lyric Poetry, 24, 62. The psychoanalyst’s rejoinder might be to ask why language acquisition is traumatic, if not because it presents a conflict between an infant, his or her body, and one or more persons who make demands upon it in the name of education. My suspicion is that psychoanalysis might have more to offer a project like Blasing’s than she allows. See for example Jean-Claude Milner, For the Love of Language trans. Ann Banfield (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990).

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into being in “forgetting” the archaic bodily language, the lyric looks back, as in a dream, to that passage into conceptual language.’²⁹ From the more traditionally psychoanalytic standpoint, this is not looking back far enough. There is a necessary (prior) condition for language: an internal conception of an ‘I’ that must be in place before one can coherently speak as an ‘I’, since, like all indexicals, it is semantically empty without a referent. Without a notional self, all speech is phatic at most. To be clear, this is not a deficiency of Blasing’s project on its own terms. But we might usefully extend Blasing’s compelling somatic history of the ‘lyric I’ by asking how one might come to identify as an ‘I’ at all. In the 1914 paper ‘On Narcissism’, Freud encounters a problem of origins when trying to determine the beginning of narcissistic pleasure. An investigation into self-pleasure reveals the instability of the self in question. Specifically, if narcissism resides in self-pleasure (ego-pleasure, we might say), how does it begin? It cannot be the default position; just as the ‘raw’ can only follow the ‘cooked’, self-pleasure only emerges in contrast to objectpleasure. Narcissism assumes a self/world distinction in which there exist object choices, among which is oneself. In Freud’s ‘economic’ terms, narcissism is the libidinal investment of the ego as an object; it is a self-binding of libido (versus an external investment). Freud realizes that narcissism should thus be differentiated from unbound pleasure—that is, unstructured autoeroticism. What the distinction implies is the falsehood of assuming the ‘I’ or ego to be a natural feature or spontaneous development of a young human: We are bound to suppose that a unity comparable to the ego cannot exist in the individual from the start; the ego has to be developed. The auto-erotic instincts, however, are there from the very first; so there must be something added to auto-eroticism—a new psychical action—in order to bring about narcissism.³⁰

The ‘new psychical action’ is not defined by Freud, although many theorists have proposed solutions. What is at stake, as Elizabeth Grosz notes, is ‘the relative stabilization of the circulation of libido in the child’s body, so that the division between subject and object (even the subject’s capacity to take

²⁹ Blasing, Lyric Poetry, 47. ³⁰ Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols, ed. James Strachey (London: Vintage, 2001), 14:76–7, my emphases.

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itself as an object) becomes possible for the first time’.³¹ The acquisition of the linguistic ‘I’, while a vast step, must be preceded by a more fundamental adaptation: the basic self/other distinction—a psychogenesis of self. An infant with no psychological sense of self would experience pleasure in its unbound immediacy. It is misleading to speak of ‘engagement’ with the world, not because the infant is a monad, but quite the opposite: because he has no sense of ‘self ’ to distinguish from the world; there only is excitation. Freud frames selfhood here as the difference between taking pleasure and taking pleasure in oneself. (We might say it is the difference between stray pleasures and self-conscious enjoyment.) The ‘new psychical action’ standing between the two in Freud’s essay implies experience prior to subject and object: the immediate, affective experiences of pleasure and pain, felt indiscriminately across the whole sensorium. Aspects of the narcissism essay frustrate some readers, not least its tendency to speak of the affections in the language of finance capitalism, as if practising ‘a mean double-entry bookkeeping of the spirit’.³² Yet one aspect I find deeply moving is its attempt to conceive of selfhood not as a purely defensive structure—a shield against an excessively stimulating world—but as a form built up by pleasure. Self-love follows from object love; the glow of the object falls upon the ego. This is not to discount the way in which the essay proposes—and to some degree naturalizes—the idea that healthy egos are inherently self-interested. Even if Freud is not exactly the Bernard Mandeville of psychic life, so long as libido is a scarce commodity, and the affective economy zero-sum, an economized account of human relations is hard to resist. But for a moment, at least, what situates the infant in the world is merely its capacity to receive pleasure from something in it. Pleasure remains a theoretical problem throughout the Freudian corpus, and will be considered at greater length in Chapter 3, but for the time being, the way in which Freud’s essay connects selfhood to the unruly varieties of pleasure presents a useful bridge back to Wordsworth. At times (most clearly in the ‘Preface’ to the Lyrical Ballads), Wordsworth thinks of pleasure as a function of regularity, as in the metrical arrangement of language. The pleasure that good poems impart to readers is relatively stable, thanks to the relative stability of metrical language itself. Yet this

³¹ Elisabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994), 32. ³² Mark Edmundson, ‘Freudian Mythmaking: The Case of Narcissus’ The Kenyon Review 10 (2) (1988): 17–37, 20.

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‘earthly’ pleasure is shadowed by more a heavenly joy which is far more difficult to constrain. The latter is a ‘giddy bliss’, a tempest associated largely, but not exclusively, with early childhood.³³ Such difficult, possibly unbearable, joy stands in opposition to an economic conception of pleasure in which more would always be better, just as, on Freud’s account, it is only once the immediacy of ‘oceanic’ pleasure has been somewhat regulated that one can treat that pleasure as external, and thus conceivably want more or less of it. Joy in the ‘Ode’ is primarily, but not exclusively, the joy of others (birds, children). The speaker makes a series of approaches towards infant joy, but never quite claims it for himself. ‘I have heard the call / Ye to each other make’, he says (36–7). What appears for one line to be a successful address to an interlocutor is, after the line-break, suddenly transformed into a question of something overheard. Similarly, he recognizes the ‘jubilee’ of the ‘blessed Creatures’, and his exclusion from it (36–8). These approaches the speaker makes towards bliss are like asymptotes; they draw near what they crave but there is an infinite remainder that keeps them apart. Line 41 takes him within a hair’s breadth: ‘The fullness of your bliss, I feel—I feel it all.’ Only the pronouns stand between the speaker and the joy which is forever infant. I feel your bliss: a construction whose internal division cannot be quite denied by the repeated cry of ‘I feel.’ In Feeling in Theory, Rei Terada shows how theories of emotion tend to produce dissatisfaction with the category of subject, not only in poststructuralist accounts, but in more traditional theories stretching back to Descartes. Feeling—to put a complex argument rather too simply—exposes the self-difference of the subject, the difference between her thought and her being, which a ‘classical’ account of subjectivity would tend to cover over.³⁴ We can see a similar dynamic at work in lyric between the articulation of an ‘I’ and the moods or affects that would ostensibly belong to the speaker figured by that ‘I’. Notwithstanding Jonathan Culler’s cautions against ‘assimilating poetry to fictional narrative and fictional worlds’, we must attribute some minimal intentionality (and thus personhood or character) to the lyric ‘I’ in order to make poems intelligible.³⁵ But this is also why we can read the moods, affects, emotions, and wishes expressed by a poem

³³ See Jarvis, Wordsworth’s Philosophical Song, 198. ³⁴ Rei Terada, Feeling in Theory: Emotion after the ‘Death of the Subject’ (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2001), 23ff. ³⁵ Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2015), 108.

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against a maximal account of subjectivity. In other words, what distinguishes lyric from other forms and discourses is that it produces highly personal and affectively charged articulations which nevertheless cannot be ascribed to any existing person (or psychologically realistic character). In the case of the ‘Ode’, there is reason to doubt that bliss truly belongs to the children and birds. Rather, the poem identifies, as Wordsworth does elsewhere, a kind of pleasure which cannot be owned at all. Bliss might be impossible to hold because possession is out of the question. Consider the sensation which ‘works along the blood’ (in The Prelude) or which is ‘felt in the blood, and felt along the heart’ (in ‘Tintern Abbey’); one could hold these no more than electricity.³⁶ It is bliss which ‘holds’ and then releases its subject, not the other way around. In such cases we could say that its vanishing or ungraspable nature is a constitutive part of such bliss. The claim to locate the bliss of one or another subject would be a kind of lyrical oversight. In one of many dialectical ironies in the ‘Ode’, the speaker’s use of pronouns might disclose his own fallen quality: part of being inscribed into language is to be scarcely able to articulate pleasure except as a determinate quantity, something that you have or do not, that is yours to share or withhold. The poem’s concern with infancy and loss certainly resonates with psychoanalytic accounts of infant life and development in some ways, but the story it tells is not limited to earthly life: Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star, Hath had elsewhere it’s setting, And cometh from afar: Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy! (58–66)

The weight of these lines rests on the initial rupture more than the subsequent amnesia. It is not merely the presence of an almost-remembered

³⁶ 1805a, I.613; LB, 117.

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dream, like an unreachable itch, that is important, but that this almostmemory is glorious. Birth is, to collapse several lines, ‘a forgetting . . . not in entire forgetfulness’; there is continuity between the ‘heavenly’ setting of the soul before birth, and infancy, and for this reason birth and infancy are the diminished recapitulation of creation itself, just as later life is the shadow of those first moments of bodily life. The infant is in this way like the soul depicted in The Prelude, remembering how it was, but remembering not what it was, to live in that now-uncertain heaven. But such things are relative: the infant’s perception is still brighter and richer than that of the adult poet. And his concerns lie here on earth, with meadows and groves, weddings and funerals, not the lost palace of heaven. Infant vision is lit by ‘celestial light’ and unmisted by tears shed for any earlier state (4). Rather than a lost physical substance or determinate object, the change in the light suggests that between infant and adult a way of seeing has ceased. In each object the speaker observes (in the second verse paragraph) there is something insufficient; in the face of everything deemed lovely, beautiful and fair, there is a missing glory. ‘The Rainbow comes and goes’, and in the ensuing list each object suggests a moment of particular aesthetic finery (10). The effect of putting side-by-side each lovely vision, however, is to reduce all of them; the experience of reading the lines is to depart too soon from every particular moment to get a sense of it, so that all ‘speak of something that is gone’ (53). In some ways, this loss is a consequence of language: with grammar comes a range of mechanics for distancing objects from ourselves: negation, the conditional, and indeed tenses other than the present.³⁷ To think conceptually is to invite abstraction and negation. ‘My thought thinks itself as an operation of loss’, as Bersani writes.³⁸ With that distance, what was once intimate and unspeakable becomes comparable, and comparisons are odious. But if Freud’s notion of an ‘I’ as pre- or extra-linguistic psychological form has any relevance here, this loss must exceed the question of writing. Here we might compare one more account of the sedimentation, or composition, of an initial sense of self. Lacan’s theory of the ‘mirror stage’ famously offers an explanation in the visual register, providing a quasiHegelian account in which infants (mis-) identify with their mirror images, and then with themselves as individuals through the individuated ‘imago’.

³⁷ Thus for Bennett, in the poem’s ‘fugitive experience’, ‘language itself is fugitive’. Andrew Bennett, Wordsworth Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007), 165. ³⁸ Leo Bersani, The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (New York: Columbia UP, 1986), 65.

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But with a view to the importance of sensuous experience in this discussion, I turn instead to Didier Anzieu’s concept of the ‘skin ego’.³⁹ The skin ego, Anzieu suggests, is an ur-ego: an early psychical appreciation of oneself as a bounded object, which rests on an infant’s growing physical awareness of the skin as envelope or container. The skin as physical envelope is, of course, ‘there from the start’ in healthy newborns, but the psychical equivalent must be developed. ‘As Freud allusively remarks, touch is the only one of the five external senses which possesses a reflexive structure’, and for this reason the skin is especially disposed to suggest a psychic ‘inside’ and ‘outside’.⁴⁰ In other words, the skin is the organic substrate on which an idea of self can first rest. Thus: [T]he baby is . . . held in the mother’s arms and pressed against her body, whose warmth, smell and movements it feels; it is picked up, manipulated, rubbed, washed and caressed, all this usually amidst a flood of words and humming. . . . These activities lead the child progressively to differentiate a surface which has both an inner and an outer face, in other words an interface, permitting a distinction between inside and outside.⁴¹

For Anzieu, the self is a border or barrier. ‘To have an Ego is to be able to withdraw into oneself.’ The relationship with the caring adult thus takes a tragic form: it is love, expressed in touching, stroking, swaddling and holding, which both grants the infant his or her selfhood, and separates the infant from the world. Touch connects the adult and infant even as it confirms their ultimate disunity. ‘The recognition that each has his or her own skin, his or her own ego . . . does not come about without resistance and pain.’⁴² So the positing of the self is the first alienation from the world; there can be no world proper until one regards one’s body as bordered and separable from it, and ‘the object, like the word, is born out of the distance from us that we have to resign ourselves to allow it to assume’.⁴³ If it seems

³⁹ Didier Anzieu, The Skin Ego trans. Chris Turner (New Haven: Yale UP, 1989). Readers of Anzieu will also be aware of his compelling work on infant relations through sound, which I do not have space to discuss here, but which also promises much for readers of poetry. Anziu, ‘The Sound Image of the Self ’ trans. Monique Meloche International Review of Psycho-Analysis 6 (1979): 23–36. ⁴⁰ Anzieu, The Skin Ego, 61. ⁴¹ Anzieu, The Skin Ego, 36–7. ⁴² Anzieu, The Skin Ego, 62–3. ⁴³ Jacques André, ‘The Misunderstanding (Le Malentendu)’ trans. Richard Simpson. Psychoanalytic Quarterly 75 (2006): 557–81, 571.

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 ’   

that we have returned to the question of self-positing posed by Locke, the most important difference is that what appears to be most primary—the self as identity and individuation—is only possible thanks to the actions of another.

Two Origins Psychoanalytic accounts of ego, unlike the Cartesian cogito or the Kantian transcendental subject, to pick only two from many examples, do not suppose that their subject is guaranteed from the start. If the grounds for the self are also the grounds for doing philosophy, then philosophy’s limits are also coterminous with the limits of the individual subject from whose standpoint philosophy gets done. The psychoanalytic objection—which is also found in feminist critique—is that the nobody gets to this ‘initial’ position without the care and support of others, without education, without a whole spectrum of developmental interactions which undermine any belief in purely self-grounded subjectivity. Rather than bracketing childhood as the domain of human biologists or educationalists, psychoanalysis suggests that mature thought is not only indebted to early childhood, but that, for better and worse, mature subjects are indebted to all the people who gave their childhood its contours. For the same reason, however independent one learns to be, personhood cannot be a private fiefdom of sensation and cognition. Secondly, while I have been tracing a similar thought through Wordsworth’s writing, one crucial difference is the prospect that a self may be fashioned and built up at least in part by pleasure, rather than through the instantiating cut of trauma. This is a thought which flickers in psychoanalysis, but which finds in Wordsworth the fullness of attention: pleasure instantiates humans as selves. Not that being oneself is inherently pleasurable—far from it—but that our capacity for pleasure might be first and foundational, and the possibility of personhood depends on the affections of others. Anzieu’s account suggests that the minimal wholeness of an infant is essentially tactile. In the ‘Ode’, ‘the Babe leaps up on his mother’s arm’ (49), and in the lexically related passage in The Prelude which begins ‘Bless’d be the infant Babe’, it is ‘by intercourse of touch / I held mute dialogues with my Mother’s heart’ (1799, II.312–13). These silent transactions have deep formative power, and it is helpful to return to the Prelude texts. In the 1799 draft, the scene is depicted like this:

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Bless’d the infant Babe (For with my best conjectures I would trace The progress of our being) blest the Babe Nursed in his Mother’s arms, the Babe who sleeps Upon his Mother’s breast, who when his soul Claims manifest kindred with an earthly soul Doth gather passion from his Mother’s eye! (1799, II.267–73)

The infant is physically separate from his mother, but his ‘soul’ still ‘claims manifest kindred’. Translating ‘soul’ as ‘psyche’ (or vice versa) is not without precedent, and if we do so there is an obvious comparison to be made with Anzieu. Rather than what Anzieu calls the fantasy of a common skin, we see the ‘manifest kindred’ of souls. The manifestation, it appears, is the passion which one being elicits from another. Wordsworth analyses the scene of infant held by mother further, recognizing that nursing involves two: the fantasy of commonality is not the spontaneous response to being born and nursed, but rather a response to the desire already present in the caring adult, who him- or herself believes in infant ‘glory’—not unlike the speaker of the ‘Ode’. In other words, all the love and fantasy Anzieu ascribes to the infant can also be traced back to its carer: ‘the Babe . . . Doth gather passion from his Mother’s eye!’ Although this takes place in a visual register, as Lacan’s mirror stage does, Wordsworth’s scene requires two: the sleeping infant who is observed, and the mother whose observations of him bring forth passion, and whose passion will rouse in him a love of earthly life.⁴⁴ ‘This passage’, writes Hartman, ‘anticipates a central argument of the entire Prelude: our ability to make a transition from the first (and lost) love object to object love’.⁴⁵ In it we find ‘a theory of the person’, Collings contends, ‘a person who initially emerges in relation, and specifically in relation to the mother’.⁴⁶ In other words, the mother’s love prepares the infant to love the world, but more than that, she makes the world lovable:

⁴⁴ If, as Jessica Benjamin argues, psychoanalytic theory ‘has been tacitly one-sided in its understanding of the parent–child relationship’, we might say that what unites both child and theorist is that both must learn that recognition between persons ‘is essentially mutual’. ‘Recognition and Destruction’ in Relational Psychoanalysis: The Emergence of a Tradition eds Stephen A. Mitchell and Lewis Aron (Abingdon: Routledge, 1999), 181–210, 187–8. ⁴⁵ Geoffrey Hartman, The Unremarkable Wordsworth (London: Methuen/U of Minnesota P, 1987), 21. ⁴⁶ Collings, ‘Emotion without content’, 182.

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 ’    In one beloved presence, nay, and more, In that most apprehensive habitude And those sensations which have been derived From this beloved presence, there exists A virtue which irradiates and exalts All objects through all intercourse of sense. No outcast he, bewildered and depressed: Along his infant veins are interfused The gravitation and the filial bond Of nature that connect him with the world. (1799, II.285–94)

It is not that the infant loves his mother, and then diversifies his interests to other things. Perception itself is enriched by this adoration, which persists and spreads itself across everything, ‘exalts / All objects through intercourse of sense’. ‘One central passion created both the perceptions and a certain security in them’, as Ferguson observes.⁴⁷ Love, too, could not exist from the start, inborn and reflexive; it is the work of another. And if, as Cathy Caruth contends, the scene is ‘governed by the figure of passage’—in which a beloved presence exalts, interfuses, and connects—then work is a process, whose consequences will only solidify into a determinate origin or emergence retrospectively.⁴⁸ Nancy Yousef celebrates these lines as a corrective to Wordsworth’s inclination elsewhere in The Prelude to assert a ‘myth of self-origination’: an ‘alternative story of origins, a story the poem does not tell’.⁴⁹ Wordsworth’s use of the nature-as-parent trope is well-trodden ground: for Hartman and Abrams, nature is the parent; for those less enchanted by nature, it is understood as standing in for the parent, whether that concealment is explained by Wordsworth’s own traumatic early loss of his mother, a male poet’s suppression of female labour, or a narcissistic, antisocial desire for autonomy and isolation. Yousef ’s intervention is to read two accounts in opposition to one another. ‘The figures of the dependent babe and the freegrowing seedling are ultimately irreconcilable insofar as each is designated as the origin of the individual.’⁵⁰ The dependence story serves to critique the

⁴⁷ Ferguson, Language as Counter Spirit, 96. ⁴⁸ Cathy Caruth, ‘Past Recognition: Narrative Origins in Wordsworth and Freud’ MLN 100 (5) (1985): 935–48, 940. ⁴⁹ Yousef, Isolated Cases, 120–2. ⁵⁰ Yousef, Isolated Cases, 141.

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independence story; the poem thinks through the scene of origination twice in a self-correcting gesture. At the same time, the two strands of Wordsworth’s origin narrative can be understood in conversation with one another—although not exactly in harmony—because both versions attend to unconscious and unnoticed experience. Even the most solitary moments in the poem might not give quite so much ground to ‘enlightenment myths of autonomy’ as Yousef suggests, because any freedom from external powers is ultimately a kind of uncomprehending or unremembered receptivity to otherness, rather than a conscious and assertive self-making.⁵¹ The ‘unconscious intercourse / With the eternal beauty’ which Yousef cites as evidence of solitary self-making is, if we take unconscious seriously, not just lacking two knowing participants, but lacking even one (1805a, I.590–1). Equally, the mother/child relation is characterized by a similar incapacity of the child—even when voiced by the adult poet—to comprehend the whole part of what passes between the pair. Ferguson observes that ‘[t]he language of the description consistently implies its own inadequacy. How can pronouns like ‘she’ and ‘he’ serve to depict a condition of passion so strong that it was inconceivable that there was any difference between them?’⁵² The poet’s pronouns—or rather the condition of having to use them—demonstrate at a grammatical level the separation which has occurred only subsequently to the moment being depicted. The separation is articulated more clearly in this passage: I was left alone Seeking this visible world, nor knowing why: The props of my affections were removed And yet the building stood as if sustained By its own spirit. (1799, II.322–6)

Insofar as both scenes hinge on a kind of vital but isolating education, which can only properly be disclosed after it has been imparted, the later account can be read as a commentary on, and development of, the earlier. In both cases, the infant cannot anticipate the change he will undergo, and can only see the consequences once they have been carried far into his mind. Wordsworth is clearly aware of the dependence of the child. ‘The building

⁵¹ Yousef, Isolated Cases, 144.

⁵² Ferguson, Language as Counter Spirit, 136–7.

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stood as if sustained / By its own spirit.’ This ‘as if ’ suggests both that the mature affections still have origins and that the house of consciousness is not reducible to its foundations. A fixation on the former leads to mechanistic Freudianism (where all roads lead to Thebes), the latter to naïve assertions of self-origination. Affections have origins, but their source must recede from view if those affections are to be felt as anything other than alienation. The loss entailed by infancy is, among other things, the loss of unimpeded intimacy—a state which, from the perspective of adults, might only exist through conjecture or imaginative writing. And this intimacy is the other half of the asymmetry: the mother in this passage gives more than the infant can ever acknowledge, and the infant for his part receives her love as only an infant might: without reservation. Cathy Caruth’s sensitive psychoanalytic reading draws the two origins together by demonstrating the persistence of ‘nature’ in the later, maternal account. In order for the infant to be represented in the poem, she argues, the maternal breast must be negated; ‘maternal props’ must yield to ‘natural properties’, and thus the babe reconciled with the mist. The child must leave the land of his mother; he must travel from ‘that most apprehensive habitude’ into the world at large. The overcoming of the maternal, on Caruth’s account, requires reducing the mother to mere prop: ‘a totalization of the self by means of metonymical substitution’.⁵³ Yet development here (as in the ‘Ode’) is not exactly a question of creating something from nothing (or, as Caruth sees it, getting something from someone and then trying to forget her). What is depicted is an instantiating break: the diremption of two living things, and their survival as separate beings. What the figures of nature and mother both present in these accounts is not merely a space in which the infant ‘becomes himself ’, but something like a gift that is not—and cannot be—acknowledged fully by the one who receives it. If one supposes that parents and nature have nothing to do with one another, then it may appear that the poet abandons the former in order to claim tutelage under the latter, but there is no such clean division; it is ‘the gravitation and the filial bond / Of nature that connect him with the world’. The world is made available to the infant through his mother’s love, and the bond with nature is no less than the mother’s gift. We might even think of this mediation as Wordsworth’s answer to an Oedipal problem: a limitless desire for maternal love is fractured, but like

⁵³ Caruth, ‘Past Recognition’, 939–41.

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prismatic light, spreads across humanity at large. In Anzieu’s account, an expression of intimacy—touch—ultimately divides the carer/infant couplet. Here is another permutation of that irony: it is maternal plenitude, the fullness of her devotion, which permits the infant to risk strife, ‘[f]or feeling has to him imparted strength’ (1799, II.299). Maternal sustenance is not repressed in Wordsworth’s account in any strict sense, but spread so widely that it eventually becomes an element of perception itself. There is no suggestion that maternal love becomes intolerable when the infant cleaves from its mother; rather Wordsworth grounds all experience in her affections. Caruth is quite right to note the elision and asymmetry in Wordsworth’s writing, and I have no desire to offer special pleading. At the same time, there may be a moment of truth in that very failure to account fully: infant/carer relations are painfully and irremediably asymmetrical. To recall the discussion of gifts in Chapter 1, it’s notable that Bourdieu’s sketch of gift practices includes little gifts, ritual gifts, and a third sort I have not yet mentioned: ‘gratuitous gifts . . . the unrequited gift, “like a mother’s milk” . . . a thing given without recompense’.⁵⁴ Wordsworth diminishes the maternal, but at the same time might also imply that the labour of care is too significant ever to be given its due acknowledgement, its consequences widespread to the point of being everywhere. If nature is understood as a placeholder spirit, covering over or usurping the place of maternal labour, then every line about nature’s tutelage is an exercise in projection. But if nature is understood as a holding environment (to borrow Winnicott’s term) underwritten by a caring adult, it neither displaces nor competes with that care. Rather, it raises the question of how the labours of another might permit one to imagine, and ultimately occupy, a good-enough world. Such world-making care would ‘require a constant calibration of closeness and distance, a mode of improvisation with the possibilities of proximity’. And it would acknowledge the fragility of the whole project. ‘In the scene of care people encounter impossible demands, conflicting ideals, and ambivalent feelings. As a result, care tends to create precarious worlds marked by imprecise solutions: adequate but never perfectly accurate.’⁵⁵ An ‘adequate’ or ‘good-enough’ world begins to look like a serious achievement: both of a carer in creating, and an infant in tolerating, an environment in which life and learning can take place. In this way, the conscious production of nature in Wordsworth can be understood as a ⁵⁴ Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice trans. Richard Nice (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990), 99. ⁵⁵ Carlo Caduff, ‘Hot Chocolate’ Critical Inquiry 45 (3) (2019): 787–803, 790.

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 ’   

pedagogical project, committed to the notion that in a good-enough world, if one can be made, aesthetic education will need only rocks, and trees, and empty air. There are reasons to take such a thought seriously: Hartman’s investment in the idea that Wordsworthian nature might teach was more than sentimental; the great spiritual project of Hartman’s work, implicit but rarely voiced, was to articulate a version of nature which distinguishes Wordsworthian romanticism from the sort that abetted genocide in Europe. Winnicott’s thinking offers two further points for this discussion of origins. Firstly, it suggests that solitude is not a natural state but an achievement of sorts. It is hard to read ‘I was left alone / Seeking this visible world’ without thinking of the early death of Ann Wordsworth at only thirty-one, and her children’s father five years later. But especially in this position in the poem, these lines also raise the question of what Winnicott would call the capacity to be alone. As Winnicott conceives of it, ‘the basis of the capacity to be alone is a paradox; it is the experience of being alone while someone else is present’.⁵⁶ It is only possible through the confidence that the absence of a caring adult is not total abandonment. That departure can be survived. A second point is that the production of some form of initial unity or stabilization (Freud’s narcissism, Anzieu’s skin ego, but also Blasing’s ‘I’) is not straightforwardly a move towards independence, because individuation entails new kinds of vulnerability. ‘This   is a raw moment; the new individual feels infinitely exposed. Only if someone has her arms round the infant at this time can the   moment be endured, or rather, perhaps, risked.’⁵⁷ Solitary speech—and thus lyric as it is frequently characterized— might be understood as a kind of experiment with that risk. Lyric, as an exposition but also an exposure of a singular voice, applies special pressure to the unity of self (whether that unity is supposed to be real, imagined, or a mere formality of language itself). And forms of solitude—including solitary voices—would therefore be ways of testing and imagining a world good enough to support being alone. The ‘Ode’ recapitulates, condenses, and extends these narratives of origin. Some of the descriptive difference can be understood through the differing positions of the speaking voice. In The Prelude, the poet observes ‘the Babe who sleeps / Upon his Mother’s breast’ as if the infant is another person, or

⁵⁶ Donald Winnicott, The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment (London: Karnac, 1990), 30. ⁵⁷ Donald Winnicott, The Family and Individual Development (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), 217–18.

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no particular person at all, before returning to the autobiographical subjectposition: ‘I held mute dialogues . . . ’ (1799, II.270–1; II.313). Moreover, while there is a certain amount of imaginative work going on (the speaker constantly makes judgements that would have been impossible to him at the time the narrative depicts), there is also an effort to recess the ‘I’ whose present moment is the composition of the poem in favour of that other ‘I’, the reoccurring ‘I was’. The speaker of The Prelude is still inclined to editorialize the joys and fears of a younger self, of course, but does so under the pretence of still having access to the experiences of the boy ‘I was’. In the ‘Ode’, the ‘I am’ of the grammatical present exerts greater force. The children in the poem are objects, rather than subjects. There are also poetic differences: the ode is extremely irregular and metrically unstable.⁵⁸ The narrative of The Prelude, by both what Robert Shaw calls ‘the cumulative power of blank verse’, and by its sheer length, amasses thought after thought (so that poetic vision ultimately draws on maternal love and nature and God and solitude and company) while the ‘Ode’, as odes do, thinks through oppositions (infancy versus adulthood, celestial light versus philosophy, freshness versus custom).⁵⁹ Further, there is the related difference in how the ‘Ode’ handles pleasure: rather than balancing painful investigation with pleasure, treating pleasure as a salve, it recklessly pursues the bliss it knows to be dangerous, overwhelming, and indeed impossible to attain. The contrast can be seen by consulting Wordsworth’s handling of pleasure in the ‘Preface’ to the Lyrical Ballads, where the term ‘bliss’ does not appear, and where ‘like the older Freud, Wordsworth seems to have been as much interested in how the mind defends itself against the sublime as he was in the sublime itself ’.⁶⁰ Both the ‘Ode’ and The Prelude give accounts of what the latter terms ‘the history and birth of each / As of a single independent thing’ (1799, II.260–1). I have situated Wordsworth’s verse alongside the alternate but related prose psychodramas of love, loss, speech, and perception written by Blasing, Freud, and Anzieu, suggesting that in each case, the formation of an ‘I’ or ego can be seen as a pivotal moment of loss, as well as a discovery of internal cohesion or identity. Infant life, in Blasing’s terms, leaves behind a ‘history of ⁵⁸ Simon Jarvis, ‘Wordsworth’s Late Melodics’ in Wordsworth’s Poetic Theory: Knowledge, Language, Experience eds Alexander Regier and Stefan Uhlig (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 158–75, 173. ⁵⁹ Robert Shaw, Blank Verse: A Guide to Its History and Use (Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 2007), 26. ⁶⁰ Theresa M. Kelley, Wordsworth’s Revisionary Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988), 10.

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“forgetfulness” ’.⁶¹ And the making of the self requires the actions of another—one who caresses and addresses the infant, but also instructs him through what Wordsworth calls ‘the discipline of love’ (1799, II.283). At the same time, it is important that each account has its own particularities, Blasing’s grounded in linguistic theory, Anzieu’s in a Freudian phenomenology, Wordsworth’s in his own verse practice. The break into life as ‘a single independent thing’ is for Wordsworth a moment of inseparable privation and flourishing.

Something That is Gone We are now in a position to consider the role of lost sensations in the ‘Ode’ more closely. If the initial state of life, ‘when the senses are unworn and tender’, as Burke has it, is understood in the poem as pure sensuous immediacy, this would explain why it is necessarily true that ‘the things which I have seen I now can see no more’. All sense-impressions will, to a person differentiated from the world by a border of words, skin, and selfunderstanding, seem to be missing an intangible quality: 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; The sunshine is a glorious birth; But yet I know, where’er I go, That there hath pass’d away a glory from the earth. (10–18)

The ‘celestial light’ and ‘glory’ of infancy cannot be captured or represented, only their loss registered. The smells and colours and warmth which once overpowered now merely please. Sensation is ‘lost’ in the sense of something foreclosed, rather than misplaced; it is this speaker’s (any speaker’s) being a speaker—being an ‘I’—which prevents any return to infant sensation.

⁶¹ Blasing, Lyric Poetry, 47.

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Hence, ‘the things which I have seen’ in the adult understanding of ‘things’ never existed: a world without object-relations cannot be found by looking for lost objects. After all, it is not the object which escapes, but a way of encountering it. To take the passing of glory in this way—not as a loss or gain of any particular thing, but a change in relatedness to all things— reminds us that infant experience is no less real than mature experience. It is less differentiated and structured, Anzieu for one suggests, but more vivid and present. Yet this passionate attachment to lost oceanic time, time which cannot be remembered or reconstructed, also allows the poem to act as a corrective to a temptation in psychoanalytic theory in and following the later Freud to naturalize the split between subject and object (or ego and world) from the outset, which Laplanche calls ‘the closing-in-on-itself of the Freudian psychical system, its monadological character’.⁶² The poem decisively cuts through any sense of simple nostalgia for original sensation. Whether or not the transition from infancy to adulthood is ‘progress’, as James Chandler’s reading of the poem suggests, the attraction of the adult position from the perspective of the infant is clear and considerable. The ‘Ode’ is not a declaration of belief, but a dynamic, performative inquiry; it initially frames infant development as a ‘seduction’ by the earth, but eventually comes to understand it as a necessary part of adult experience. Indeed, the poem abandons any fantasy of a return to infant wisdom not least because it recognizes that the child strives for development. What we know for certain is that ‘Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own’ and the child pursues it.⁶³ Chandler’s reading captures with admirable precision the energetic motivation of the child’s pursuit of the world of adult custom: ‘a deep expression of dissatisfaction with the merely sensual order of the world’.⁶⁴ Unburdened by nostalgia, the child appreciates what the speaker must come to understand: that mere (infant) sensation is radically insufficient to one who is an ‘I’. This impulse towards ‘earth’ can also be understood as the poem’s corrective to any suggestion that blissful infancy might be a self-contained monad or a satisfying if abyssal idealism. Winnicott characterizes the ‘prison-house’ of maturity as a ‘new enclosure’: not a fall from private satisfaction into the repressive world of others, but a transition between one environment to another, each

⁶² Jean Laplanche, Essays on Otherness ed. John Fletcher et al. (London: Routledge, 1999), 83. ⁶³ This line is further wedded to ‘earth’ (and custom) because, as Fry notes, it alludes to William Collins’ line ‘sallow Autumn fills thy lap with leaves’. Fry, The Poet’s Calling, 146. ⁶⁴ Chandler, ‘Wordsworth’s great Ode’, 150.

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with their supports and restrictions, ‘the changeover from the small child’s living in a subjective world to the older child’s living in a world of shared reality’.⁶⁵ The decisive blow to any nostalgic wish is practical. Any desire to return to early infant pleasure would be thoroughly disappointing if it were magically realized. For the adult who speaks and writes, there is no indication that ‘getting back the object’ of infant experience would be satisfying, even if it were possible. In other words, ‘merely to long for childhood is to ignore what the joys of childhood come from, its separations, its anxieties’.⁶⁶ What the child of the poem knows, and the speaker comes to realize, is that there is no weighing of the options, and no choice involved in development (any more than one chooses atypical development). However glorious it was, there is no going back. ‘Love as recovery—love as restoration of the earlier self, the early mother—is bound to be a furious project; as though sexual development was about waiting for an opportunity to get back everything that one had lost in the process of development.’⁶⁷ An attempt to ‘overcome’ maturation would end in tragedy, or else in farce. The loss which occurs in becoming an ‘I’ cannot be recouped or written off; indeed, it cannot be understood in terms of profitability. Hence, if the ‘I’ necessitates a kind of loss, and lyric foregrounds the speaker as one who has come to say ‘I’, we might understand the ‘Ode’ as an attempt to find solid grounds for saying ‘I’ in the face of that loss. To think about this forward movement from unstructured sensuous experience to a mediated world of objects, it may help to recall the frustrations of sense certainty in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: in pure sensuous certainty, consciousness supposes itself to have the richest and most immediate comprehension of the world, but whenever it tries to represent or declare the contents of its comprehension, they slip away.⁶⁸ Any sensation which is ‘right here’ ceases to be so in the instant the claim is made, and the ‘here’ and ‘now’ reveal themselves to be empty placeholders, ‘the universal Here which is a simple plurality of Heres, just as the day is a simple plurality of Nows’. Without the use of properties, qualities, or other mediating structures, ‘the sensuous This that is meant cannot be reached

⁶⁵ Winnicott, The Family and Individual Development, 50–4. ⁶⁶ Stanley Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988), 74. ⁶⁷ Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips, Intimacies (Chicago: Chicago UP, 2008), 102. ⁶⁸ I am indebted in my reading of the Phenomenology here to Jay Bernstein’s Berkeley lecture series on the text.

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by language’.⁶⁹ There is no experience, however rich, which will fix the structural problem. Because the advocate of sense certainty is, unlike the pre-ego infant, already an ‘I’, it desires to represent its experience (to its future self, to others), which is only to say it desires to form sentences which include the first-person pronoun. And this is precisely what it cannot do using only sense certainty, regardless of how wonderful or striking any particular sensation might be. Being an ‘I’, the world of sensuous immediacy is always already lost; not because the object goes anywhere, but because from the standpoint of an ‘I’ immediate experience is fleeting. But while there is similarity between the dissatisfaction experienced by the child of Wordsworth’s ‘Ode’ and the frustrations of Sense Certainty, the path from infancy to adulthood in Wordsworth’s poem is significantly unlike the transitions in the Phenomenology. Both suggest that the ‘history of an impassioned, individual life carries with it, from one watershed moment to the next, a history of the wished-for states by which that life was propelled’.⁷⁰ But the speaker of the ‘Ode’ is implicated in the childhood he describes in ways that the philosopher of the Phenomenology is not wedded to any figure of consciousness. Fry suggests that the poem becomes, in the end, ‘a song in praise of sublimation’, but the poet cannot rid himself of the fragments of a life that he can no longer have, and thus any such sublimation is partial and incomplete.⁷¹ There is something unshakable about infancy in the poem: not a particular memory, but a sense of loss which the poet cannot condemn any more than he could willingly repudiate bliss. This is why although it is demonstrably not nostalgic, nor is transition from early to late straightforwardly ‘progress’.⁷² After the speaker predicts for the child a weight of custom like heavy frost, that prediction is tempered by this apostrophic turn:

⁶⁹ G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977), 64–6. ⁷⁰ Malcolm Bowie, ‘Psychoanalysis and the Future of Theory’ The Letter 1 (1994): 28–67, 40. ⁷¹ Fry, The Poet’s Calling, 142. See also the discussion of sublimation in Chapter 3. ⁷² Chandler argues that the poem is ‘the story of a poet because the story of this young “philosopher” in stanzas 5–8 of the Ode is a story of poetic activity’. The ‘progress’ from infant to adult is, on this reading, a precondition of poetry, and thus implicitly advocated by the poem’s existence. While Chandler’s case against nostalgic readings is persuasive, taking the child’s ‘ontogenetic development’ to be an account ‘in allegorical form . . . of the progress of poetry’, involves a rhetorical short-circuit, conflating ‘progress’ in the descriptive sense of child development with ‘progress’ in a normative sense derived from the view of literary history found in James Beattie and Thomas Gray. More significantly, Chandler must dismiss large (backward looking) parts of the ‘Ode’ as what he calls ‘false starts’ in order to assert that the poem constitutes ‘sentimental progress’. Chandler, ‘Wordsworth’s great Ode’, 144–52.

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 ’    O joy! that in our embers Is something that doth live, That nature yet remembers What was so fugitive! (132–5)

Joy still smoulders. It is evasive, fugitive, but living feeling. Adult ‘custom’ is not the unequivocally positive substitute for infant ‘glory’ that such a reading implies—as I have been arguing, it is not a substitute at all.⁷³ If the speaker does come to embrace the ‘philosophic mind’, it is not a repudiation of childhood. After all, the transition from ‘best Philosopher’ to ‘philosophic mind’ is equally an assertion of minimal continuity. What the poet has that the infant lacks, rather, is sensitivity to loss. The drama of the ‘Ode’ is the recognition of loss—its necessity, its persistence, most of all its strange presence as an almost-palpable object in its own right. The poem acknowledges the power of infantile perception even as it confirms its loss. Indeed, it hints that it is by sensing loss so intently that poets make their special claim on life—their disposition to be affected more than others, ‘by absent things as if they were present’.⁷⁴ By understanding more fully what has gone, such people retain that ‘first / Poetic spirit of our human life; / By uniform controul of after years / In most, abated or suppress’d’ (1805a II.275–8). In this way, the poem legitimates the inquiry into forgotten and unremembered experience. When that intense, gleaming experience is irresistibly lost (rather than relinquished by preference or inclination) the vanishing itself is raised to equivalent dignity. The world of words and things is genuinely and rightly attractive to the infant, and yet prior experience is invariably lost in the claiming of that world. The opposition can be understood as the poem’s animating difference. The complication is that insofar as it can be articulated, that original position will always be a speculative account, subject to the sad

⁷³ In Wordsworth’s Second Nature, Chandler argues that a Burkean veneration of custom is precisely what allows the poem to reach its conclusion. In order to do so, he must see the poem’s oppositions to custom as effectively ‘mistaken views’ to be corrected by a ‘recovery’ of sorts. But there is more difficulty with the alternative. Reading the ‘custom . . . with a weight’ passage, he remarks: ‘the depth to which custom sinks is what insures some part of ourselves remains out of our own reach, beyond our intellectual tampering’. Thus custom insulates us, in true Burkean style, from our own bright ideas. But this reverses what the poem actually says, reading as if life is deep almost as custom. It is not; life lives on because custom does not sink into its very heart. James Chandler, Wordsworth’s Second Nature (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1984), 79–81. ⁷⁴ LB, 751.

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incompetence of human speech. And it will, from a certain point of view, appear as nothing but the ghosting of language itself: The idea of infancy as a pre-subjective ‘psychic substance’ is . . . as mythical as a pre-linguistic subject, with infancy and language seeming to refer back to one another in a circle in which infancy is the origin of language and language the origin of infancy.⁷⁵

The objection here is that all talk about pre-linguistic experience is diversionary at best and misleading at worst; what we are really talking about is our theory of language, and its limitations, which we might transpose on to those who cannot speak. Such a worry is not misplaced: as Yousef ’s Isolated Cases shows, theories of infancy are invariably shaped by adult anxieties. At the same time, we are missing something if we suppose that just because a form of life is not available to us, all thinking about it is erroneous. Walter Benjamin writes: One might, for example, speak of an unforgettable life or moment even if all men had forgotten it. If the nature of such a life or moment required that it be unforgotten, that predicate would imply not a falsehood but merely a claim not fulfilled by men, and probably also a reference to a realm in which it is fulfilled: God’s remembrance.⁷⁶

Along the lines of Benjamin’s suggestion, what is lost would not be strictly anterior to the one who loses, but would rather occupy an alternate time, a time discontinuous with the present, whose resistance to representation would indicate loss rather than falsity. The objects of infancy are always already lost, because objecthood is a projection of a very different form of consciousness. A similar structural elision occurs due to the ‘adult’ assumption that affection cannot be intransitive—that a feeling always requires an object. The poem’s ‘first affections’ are ‘shadowy’ not because of repression (at least, not in the dynamic Freudian sense properly due to the term), but because at the very beginning, affection as such has no fealty to the object world. There is always a risk in styles of reading which rely on something prior to the semantic—whether that is language acquisition, cognition, personal or ⁷⁵ Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience trans. Liz Heron (London: Verso, 1993), 48. ⁷⁶ Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 1: 1913–1926. eds Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1996), 254.

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historical trauma, or unremembered pleasure. Reading itself might become procedurally self-defeating: any attempt to find (and speak about) the residue of pre-language will end in performative contradiction; either you don’t find what you were looking for, or worse, you do and thus you know that the true object has been missed entirely. A poem speaks, but because it does, it cannot speak of how it ever came to do so. In particular, any notion of unconsciousness (be it formed through Freudian repression or Wordsworthian ‘sleep and forgetting’) poses a problem for comprehending psychological causality. Wordsworth makes the point himself: ‘Who that shall point as with a wand and say, / This portion of the river of my mind / Came from yon fountain?’ (1799 II.247–9). Just before The Prelude begins to trace the infant Babe’s origins with ‘best conjectures’, the speaker cautions that it is a: Hard task to analyse a soul in which Not only general habits and desires But each most obvious and particular thought, Not in a mystical and idle sense But in the words of reason deeply weighed, Hath no beginning. (1799, II.262–7)

There is ‘no beginning’, the line about ‘the river of my mind’ suggests, in the sense of specific origins. There is the scene of mother and infant, wordless, affective and complex, and with obvious, definite origins, but not ones to which we could ‘point as with a wand’. And if we take the ‘Ode’ at its word, the soul too has no earthly beginning, it ‘cometh from afar’. Nevertheless, Wordsworth’s intimations of the unrememberable suggest something other than traumatic repression. In the ‘Ode’, what lies beyond ‘the words of reason’ is rather a lost affective plenitude. In contrast to Blasing’s reading of Sexton’s self-effacement, where ‘the unconscious and the “soul” are being redefined . . . as residual effects of the material medium training the body to its tune’, for Wordsworth they are no epiphenomena of language; the unconscious, spirit, soul, these terms describe what in Wordsworth stretches back before words, before the division of feelings and objects.⁷⁷ If there is a

⁷⁷ Blasing, Lyric Poetry, 190.

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‘residual effect’ in this case, it is that the soul has been shaped by, and oriented towards, affection, even as the origins of those first affections recede. If we think of unconsciousness as Wordsworth does—as absences and vanishings, things carried silently out of mind, altered by the passage of years, and simply overlooked—rather than as unprocessed yet ineliminable damage, then what constrains consciousness is not a lack of data (where some files have been redacted, some doors in the archive chained shut) but an excess. There is more, far more, than consciousness can claim. Poetry might lead us back to unconscious experience not because it exposes a general failure to signify, but because it can keep more in mind than we can at any given time. It holds multiple (and antagonistic) meanings together—it connects present and absent things. The poem, like the infant, is ‘forever crossing and recrossing the borders of articulation’.⁷⁸ Temporal and visual breaks invite our anticipation; lines murmur tonal and rhythmic imitations of one another; a syllable’s multiple suggestions hang in the air. To take an example from a later couplet from the ‘Ode’, there are multiple layers of interpretation for a single syllable: And oh ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves, Think not of any severing of our loves! (190–1)

The ‘oh’ is a demand, a little prayer. It suggests the speaker’s unease with his previous insistence that ‘we will grieve not’, as he requests continued love. The cry functions as an invocation to nature, and to poetic tradition more generally. ‘Devoid of semantic reference’, Jonathan Culler notes, ‘the O of apostrophe refers to other apostrophes and thus to the lineage and conventions of sublime poetry’, but also as ‘an act of will’, the figure implies ‘something to be accomplished poetically in the act of apostrophizing’.⁷⁹ Metrically, in combination with the ‘and’, the ‘oh’ ensures the line scans as five iambs, and aligns it with the previous pentameter. It is also a kind of spoken caesura, the kind of break one might make if surprised and interrupted by a vision of the fountains and meadows. Not fountains and meadows as mere scenery, but as part of existence, an existence which now seems more and more independent (and lonely) with age, save for in ⁷⁸ Phillips, The Beast in the Nursery, 45–6. ⁷⁹ Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs (London: Routledge/Kegan Paul, 1981), 143.

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 ’   

occasional, glorious moments when nature still appears speechlessly wonderful: moments which might, like a Jamesian emotion or Pavlov’s salivating dogs, become clear to us because we act involuntarily, not saying so much as releasing an ‘oh!’ Wordsworth ‘will not acknowledge that the bond with nature—more psychic than epistemic—is broken’, Hartman writes.⁸⁰ The ‘oh’ makes a temporal break before the fountains, but also reinforces the psychological break which has occurred: just as the mother’s touch is only conceivable because of the child’s estrangement, the line itself is premised on its own alienation from nature. It speaks to the severance it is pleading against. There is a tragic sense that loss has already occurred, and every poetic effort at prevention only makes it worse. Insofar as these lines protest against the immovable, they recall the aggrieved mother in ‘The Thorn’, Martha Ray, whose repeated cry Peter McDonald calls ‘the poem’s most secure fact’: ‘Oh misery! oh misery / Oh woe is me! oh misery!’⁸¹ The poem speaks to both the impossibility of reading origins with any sense of finality, and the necessity of doing so nevertheless, for in that ‘oh’ remains the intimation of bliss, the ‘shadowy’ affection ‘which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour, / Nor Man nor Boy, / Nor all that is at enmity with joy, / Can utterly abolish or destroy!’ (160–3). Origins always slip away from us in the last analysis because part of what it is to think about origins is to acknowledge their disappearance. The poem suggests once more that a Wordsworthian unconscious of ‘sleep and forgetting’ is composed not of traumatic, repressed representations, but lost affects. If the lost object of infant experience confirms our estrangement from our past, its gentle or forceful after-shocks confirm the incomplete severance. Sperry’s ‘almost physical sense of continuity’ is found not in memories (nor the Freudian ‘memory trace’ prized by Derrida for its capacity to turn psychoanalysis into a writing system). Continuity for Wordsworth is found, rather, in the moments of affective intensity where memory lacks explanatory capacity: in disproportionate and unexplainable reactions to particular objects, and in powerful feelings which seem to ‘cometh from afar’. The forgotten, translated, and discontinuous feelings of the present echo the first affections which, although shadowy and incomprehensible, ‘Are yet the fountain light of all our day, / Are yet a master light of all our seeing’ (154–5). ⁸⁰ Hartman, The Unremarkable Wordsworth, 160. ⁸¹ Peter McDonald, Sound Intentions: The Workings of Rhyme in Nineteenth-Century Poetry (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012), 63.

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The Wordsworthian soul, with all its affective intensity, is not, like Sexton’s is for Blasing, a linguistic ghost. Its work, its evidence, if souls can have evidence, is in the singular moments of beauty and shock which recall a time when ‘every common sight, / To me did seem / Apparell’d in celestial light’ (2–4). As the light recedes, the poet flings himself towards its embers. Throughout Wordsworth’s oeuvre, we find these echoes and gleams of lost affective plenitude, as when ‘forms and substances . . . through the turnings intricate of Verse / Present themselves as objects recognis’d, / In flashes, and with a glory scarce their own’ (1805a, V.625–9). As well as in autobiographical accounts, these moments recur in the lives of Wordsworth’s poetic characters, who demonstrate the same excessive or overly-specific perception, becoming fixated or overcome by simple objects. Mark Hewson points to the ‘distinctive gesture that reappears in a number of Wordsworth’s narrative poems . . . the description of an isolated, unremarkable, even dismal object’.⁸² We might think of Martha Ray’s thorn, Simon Lee’s mattock, and the heap of stones in ‘Michael’. So too in the ‘Ode’, objects which ‘should’ seem trivial or straightforward are sometimes overpowering. We encounter what Erik Gray calls ‘the trope of exceptionality’: the act of marking out or excluding a single instance from the common, combining ‘detailed observation of nature and sympathy with natural phenomena (since the solitary poet is implicitly equated with the exceptional bird or beetle or breeze) . . . and imaginative expansion—the mind’s ability, in the absence of sensory information, to figure forth an alternate world’.⁸³ This characteristic act—both celebrating and negating luminous particulars—strikes some readers as ludicrous and embarrassing. Wordsworth in his ‘ecstatic obstinacy’.⁸⁴ And yet this thirst for particularity has sometimes misled readers into a less-than-ecstatic literalism. ‘Scholars who have labored to identify that tree and the “single field,” and to locate the spot where Wordsworth observed the pansy, have followed the poet’s own futile quest’, Jerome McGann remarks, simultaneously capturing the misplaced precision of some overly empirical readers, and implicitly risking the same

⁸² Mark Hewson, ‘The Scene of Meditation in Wordsworth’ The Modern Language Review, 106 (4) (2011): 954–67, 954. ⁸³ Erik Gray, ‘ “Save where . . . ”: The Trope of Exceptionality’ ELH 77 (2010): 645–63, 654. ⁸⁴ Bevis, Wordsworth’s Fun, 194. Bevis points to Henry Crabb Robinson’s desire to omit from his own reading of the poem ‘But there’s a tree, of many one’—‘lest I shd. be rendered ridiculous, being unable to explain precisely what I admired—not that I acknowledged this to be a fair test.’

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by indicting Wordsworth for failing to come up with the goods.⁸⁵ For Trilling too, this is a significant moment of blindness: It is true that Wordsworth, who lived to be eighty, was said in middle life to look much older than his years. Still, thirty-two, his age at the time of writing the first part of the Ode, is an extravagantly early age for a dramatic failure of the senses. . . . Wordsworth never did have the special and perhaps modern sensibility of his sister or of Coleridge, who were so aware of exquisite particularities.⁸⁶

The poem can’t be about the loss of intense sensations because Wordsworth wouldn’t yet have lost them, Trilling suggests, and anyway, he didn’t have many to lose. Such claims are designed to rule out the persistence of infant sensitivity. The alternative—that the poem might really mourn for sensuous life lost—would concede that an exquisite negation might have its own value. A clear influence on the particulars of the ‘Ode’ is Gray’s ‘Ode, on the Pleasure Arising from Vicissitude’, which instructs: See the wretch, that long has tossed On the thorny bed of pain, At length repair his vigour lost, And breathe and walk again: The meanest flowret of the vale, The simplest note that swells the gale, The common sun, the air and skies, To him are opening Paradise.⁸⁷

This is not the celebration of ‘common’ or ‘mean’ pleasures for their own sake, but an instance of small pleasures raised by changing circumstance to high delight. Yet it is this recovery of first things which Wordsworth’s ode rules out. ‘For Wordsworth, the boundaries undergo major revision. . . . Thoughts become a comparable substitute for paradise; perhaps such thoughts are paradise.’⁸⁸

⁸⁵ Jerome J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983), 90. ⁸⁶ Trilling, The Liberal Imagination, 133. ⁸⁷ Thomas Gray, [Ode, on the Pleasure Arising from Vicissitude] in The Poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins, Oliver Goldsmith ed. Roger Lonsdale (London: Longman, 1969), 205–6. ⁸⁸ Michael O’Neill and Paige Tovey, ‘Shelley and the English Tradition’ in The Oxford Handbook to Percy Bysshe Shelley ed. Michael O’Neill and Anthony Howe (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013), 495–512, 506.

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The insistent power of singular objects also helps to explain the Wordsworthian texture of Winnicott’s writing. ‘[F]or Winnicott, particularity is everything’, Martha Nussbaum writes; ‘he is the heir as much of Wordsworth and Emily Brontë as of Freud and Klein.’⁸⁹ Winnicott is sensitive to not only the overwhelming need for a liveable environment, but also the special importance that its seemingly arbitrary details can have for children; he displays ‘utter respect for the child’s world of objects’.⁹⁰ In other words, Winnicott takes from Wordsworth the conviction that both the things in one’s world and the way one relates to them are vital and complex questions, whose apparent simplicity to healthy adults is only a token of those adults’ slackened attention. I will return to Winnicott’s account of how an environment might become good enough, but for now I just want to note that his tendency to believe in the evocative world of infants has appeared to some as a flaw. Nussbaum’s otherwise generous portrait ventures this criticism: ‘Winnicott’s ideas about the True Self sometimes verge on an excessive romanticism—as when he suggests that any communication with the outside world involves a deformation of a True Self that is fundamentally incommunicado.’⁹¹ Winnicott shares Wordsworth’s interest in the constructive ways in which infants come into the world (call it a filial bond or call it attachment). In Winnicott’s displacement of zero-sum libidinal economics, we might sense one possible consequence of a broader romantic alternative to psychoanalytic arithmetic. But if, as Nussbaum claims, Winnicott sees the trueness of the self as an original state, then he isn’t nearly Wordsworthian enough. To characterize the problem as excessively romantic is to take as representative exactly the kind of nostalgic, sentimental vision of infancy that Wordsworth crisply undercuts. Paradise, like infancy, becomes thinkable only from the standpoint of expulsion, and our belatedness is an ineliminable aspect of the concept. The right question is not where all the singular pansies and trees have gone, but why it should be that poems about lost things disclose their particularities with such pleasure.

⁸⁹ Martha Nussbaum, ‘Winnicott on the Surprises of the Self ’ The Massachusetts Review 47 (2) (2006): 375–93, 383. See also Adam Phillips, Winnicott (London: Fontana, 1988), 15. ⁹⁰ Martha Nussbaum in Winnicott, The Family and Individual Development, xviii. ⁹¹ Nussbaum, ‘Winnicott on the Surprises of the Self ’, 390.

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3 Metrical Pleasures The promises made by Wordsworth’s poetic theory are not modest. In the ‘Preface’ to the Lyrical Ballads, poetry is ‘the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge . . . the first and last of all knowledge’, and yet it reveals knowledge to be ‘built up by pleasure’, and to exist ‘by pleasure alone’. It is ‘the real language of men’ modified ‘for a particular purpose, that of giving pleasure’. Most famously, ‘poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’, but ‘takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity’ and ultimately recreated through imagination (LB, 751–7). In each of these cases, the first category is modified (and apparently endangered) by the second. Spontaneity is in fact the result of reflection; ‘real language’ is modified and composed; and perhaps most strikingly, poetry’s privileged access to knowledge is conditional on pleasure, so that pleasure displaces knowledge as the overriding goal. Wordsworth’s modern detractors tend to perceive these tensely balanced claims as outright contradictions, while his advocates are inclined to celebrate one side while forsaking the other (realism or metrical technique; recollection or imagination; pleasure or knowledge). Each of these pairs is interconnected, and cannot be addressed fully in isolation, but this chapter is particularly interested in analysing and substantiating the relation between pleasure and knowledge. Wordsworth’s ambitious claim does not just suggest that poetry is limited in its remit to pleasurable kinds of knowledge. Rather, it entirely reshapes knowledge (and poetry) as themselves inherently pleasurable. Instead of collapsing the categories, and viewing this as ‘knowledge redefined as pleasure’, we might think of a Wordsworthian compound of pleasure and knowledge to be both revealed by and exemplified in good poetry.¹ By yoking knowledge to pleasure, and thereby refusing the opposition of thought versus feeling, or even fact versus normative evaluation, Wordsworth proposes a ‘poetry of pure feeling [which] does not amount to an inversion of the ¹ Andrew Bennett, ‘Wordsworth’s Poetic Ignorance’ in Wordsworth’s Poetic Theory: Knowledge, Language, Experience eds Alexander Regier and Stefan Uhlig (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 19–35, 26. Wordsworth’s Unremembered Pleasure. Alexander Freer, Oxford University Press (2020). © Alexander Freer. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198856986.001.0001

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intellectualism of the Enlightenment and the epistemological project of early modernity, but is instead its distillation and principle’.² Pleasure functions as the aether or life-force of man, ‘by which he knows, and feels, and lives, and moves’ (LB, 752). Wordsworth’s account takes composition as a reparative relation to the world, and pleasure as its principal condition of possibility. A classic essay of Trilling’s—‘The Fate of Pleasure’—remarked in 1963 that Wordsworth’s ‘bold utterance’—his ‘grand elementary principle of pleasure’—‘has not engaged us at all and is scarcely ever cited’.³ The situation has not altogether improved; terms like ‘real language’ and ‘knowledge’ in the ‘Preface’ have continued to exercise critics at the expense of pleasure. In offering a corrective to this tendency, Rowan Boyson identifies ‘a regularly hostile and dismissive reading of pleasure in the “Prefaces” ’ motivated not only by the thematic gloominess of the poems contained in the following pages of the Lyrical Ballads, but also by a critical suspicion that Wordsworth is caught between an empirical, utilitarian tradition he cannot follow to its logical conclusions and ‘the vivid enjoyments of the working class’ he cannot embrace.⁴ Trilling’s attempt to return attention to the ‘radical’ quality of Wordsworthian pleasure did not have widespread success. ‘What Trilling couldn’t quite have known in 1963 was that theory was just around the corner and that in a long second phase pleasure was to be driven even further into retreat.’⁵ While Trilling was writing a hymn for underacknowledged pleasure, philosophers in France were subjecting pleasure to an extensive critique. The translation of that philosophy into (North American) ‘French theory’ in the following decades provided Anglophone criticism with a number of competing terms and concepts—notably desire, enjoyment (jouissance), and the ‘use’ of pleasure—as well as a sustained critique of pleasure from numerous angles: ‘a particularly complicated debate, which may in turn appear as a provocative clash of ideas, a terminological mess, even an odd contest to pick the most radical voluptuous term’.⁶

² James Phillips, ‘Wordsworth and the Fraternity of Joy’ New Literary History 41 (3) (2010): 613–32, 618. ³ Lionel Trilling, The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent ed. Leon Weiseltier (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), 428. ⁴ Rowan Boyson, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment Idea of Pleasure (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012), 102. ⁵ Malcolm Bowie, ‘The Fate of Pleasure: An Update’ German Life and Letters 62 (3) (2009): 252–4, 252. ⁶ Aaron Schuster, The Trouble with Pleasure: Deleuze and Psychoanalysis (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2016), 98. On the transit of French philosophy into American theory, see François Cusset,

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When Trilling spoke of pleasure, and particularly of ‘radical’ pleasure, he contrasted it to the apparently unadventurous term happiness. Since then that same cast of weakness has fallen on pleasure too, and any advocate for pleasure, especially for minimal or unremembered forms of pleasure, is faced with the muscular concepts of infinite lack and desire on the one hand, and near-unbearable, radical jouissance on the other.⁷ ‘If “desire is revolutionary in its essence” ’, Schuster comments, ‘then pleasure constitutes the reformist politics of the body.’⁸ Pleasure has no flashy negativity; it seems by comparison naïve in its friendly relations to presence, affirmation, and sufficiency, not to mention capitalist economics and modest bourgeois sexuality. Jouissance is ‘the virus that deforms pleasure from within’, Tim Dean writes; it’s ‘what you get when you take pleasure beyond the pleasure principle; closer to an antonym than a synonym for pleasure’. Noting the tendency for contemporary philosophers of biopolitics to downplay the role of pleasure in Michel Foucault’s work in favour of pain and injustice, he suggests that for modern Anglophone commentators ‘jouissance betokens someone else’s gratification at my expense. This foreign term—foreign both to Foucault’s thought and to the Anglo-American tradition that has no adequate translation for it—thus helps to account for persistent suspicions that pleasure remains incompatible with either moral virtue or progressive social change.’⁹ To raise the question of what could be intellectually or ethically compelling about pleasure for Wordsworth is necessarily to reassess how our reading of the term has been conditioned in the intervening years. To begin, we can follow the thread of pleasure through Wordsworth’s poetics. ‘A simple word count reveals the extent to which Wordsworth increasingly focused his discussions of poetry around that theme’, Boyson notes, identifying a commensurate conceptual growth by which ‘Wordsworth’s philosophical language of pleasure begins in empirical vein, alluding to “experiments”, “types” and “quantities”, but gradually becomes more grandiose.’¹⁰ Read as a speculative theory of pleasure, the ‘Preface’ in its French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States trans. Jeff Fort. (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2008). ⁷ Consider the distinction between ‘pleasure’ and ‘bliss’/jouissance in Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), 51–2. ‘When jouissance becomes a “general rule,” a “fixed form,” a principle, its image is “strong, muscular, and phallic” ’ notes Jane Gallop, ‘Beyond the Jouissance Principle’ Representations 7 (1984): 110–115, 114. ⁸ Schuster, The Trouble with Pleasure, 118. ⁹ Tim Dean, ‘The Biopolitics of Pleasure’ South Atlantic Quarterly 111 (3) (2012): 477–96, 483. ¹⁰ Boyson, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment Idea of Pleasure, 109–10.

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longer, later form has two main concerns. Firstly, it aims to explain how a poet’s practice and technique can be employed to give pleasure, and by that pleasure yield knowledge. Secondly, it attempts to establish how good poetry is grounded in ‘real’ language and events, and ‘ordinary’ things. From the standpoint of those grandiose claims with which I began, the central question is how poetry might seize pleasure from ‘real events’ without compromising its fidelity to the truth of those events. In this way, the ‘Preface’ centres this book’s ongoing concern with Wordsworth’s handling of past pleasure, but also considerably complicates it. Now the question must also encompass the reflective process of finding pleasure in personal and anecdotal incidents, and the attempt to secure and in a sense perform that pleasure through poetry in order that readers might experience it. Poetry’s pleasure takes us back through the key controversies of Wordsworth’s poetic theory, and foregrounds the psychological implications of that theory. And because pleasure is by no means limited to rememberable things, it also connects Wordsworth’s poetics to a broader project of retrospection. In this chapter I read Wordsworth’s poetic theory—primarily as it is articulated in his critical prose—as an important intellectual project in its own right, rather than as a supplement to his poetry, although I consider some poems nearer the end. I do this in part because the poems can sometimes seem quite at odds with the grand and wide-reaching claims made on their behalf in prose. Often they simply evince different priorities; poems are, for instance, much more willing to risk figures of sublime excess. Equally, Wordsworth’s account of poetry is not ‘just’ a defence or theory of poetic technique, but also an affect theory, a phenomenology of retrospection, a theory of knowledge, a work of Rezeptionsästhetik, and more. Its most ambitious claims are more productively understood as a regulatory ideal than as a description of actually existing artworks. Finally, Wordsworth’s faith in compositional pleasure has implications beyond the reading of his own work. It challenges the assumption that artistic pleasure is always redirected, sublimated desire, and its satisfaction is invariably a repudiation of life.

Real Pleasure We can state the tension in the ‘Preface’ as a trichotomy between the vital categories of pleasure, knowledge, and the real, in which each term seems to

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undermine at least one other: if poetry is always pleasurable, how can it be real (or even realistic)? if poetry is ‘a selection of language really used by men’, how can it contain knowledge so far beyond that of ordinary conversation? and so on (LB, 743). From the outset, there has been sustained opposition to what James Scoggins has called ‘Wordsworth’s heresy’: his rejection of the assumption ‘that the province of poetry is the world of fictions’.¹¹ I will briefly rehearse the standard objection, before suggesting that Wordsworth’s insistence on pleasure poses the greater problem. While the old worry that metrical arrangement betrays poetry’s claims to ‘real language’ is misplaced, at least as the terms are used by Wordsworth, the epistemological and ethical concerns generated by the fusing of poetry’s knowledge to pleasure are substantial and pressing. For a tradition of criticism beginning with Coleridge, the tension or nonequivalence between ‘real language’ and poetry gives the lie to the poetry’s alleged realism or fidelity to naturally occurring language.¹² The processes of ‘selecting’ and ‘fitting’ by which language is made into poetry, in other words, is understood as a kind of error or failure to live up to the claims made on the real. For many modern critics, too, Wordsworth’s project not only displaces the poetic diction of the Augustans with ordinary language, but also attempts an analogous move at the level of theory: ‘problems of diction, problems of figure, problems of order, all are subordinated . . . to problems of what Wordsworth called reality: the literal, sympathetic connection between man and nature, between images, feeling, and thought’.¹³ This gives rise to a compelling account of the risk that words exercise an ‘arbitrary power’ over the things they govern, as well as a sheaf of more general concerns over the seeming contradiction—if not deception—in a project of composing verse from ‘real language’ (and, one objection goes, thereby falsifying it).¹⁴ It is worth remembering that while post-romantic ¹¹ James Scoggins, ‘The Preface to Lyrical Ballads: A Revolution in Dispute’ in Studies in Criticism and Aesthetics 1660–1800, eds Howard Anderson and John S. Shea. (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1966): 380–98, 390. ¹² Coleridge’s criticism of Wordsworth’s ‘Preface’, and the mis-reading he is required to do to sustain it, have been well documented. See Don Bialostosky, ‘Coleridge’s Interpretation of Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads’ PMLA 93 (5) (1978): 912–24; Christine Winberg, ‘Coleridge on Wordsworth’s Preface to “Lyrical Ballads” ’ Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory 62 (1984): 29–43; Pfau, Wordsworth’s Profession, 237ff. ¹³ Josephine Miles, The Primary Language of Poetry in the 1740s and 1840s (Berkeley: U of California P, 1950), 363. ¹⁴ William Keach, Arbitrary Power: Romanticism, Language, Politics (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2004), 1–22. See also Claudia Brodsky, ‘The Poetic Structure of Complexity: Wordsworth’s Sublime and “Something Regular” in Wordsworth’s Poetic Theory: Knowledge, Language,

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critics (as well as many readers today coming to the ‘Preface’ for the first time) object that Wordsworth’s claims to the real are traduced by his account of practical verse-making, those claims were originally scandalous for the opposite reason: that they too readily abandoned much of poetry’s sophisticated technical repertoire as if it were only artifice. As Ferguson puts it, ‘the “real language of men” seemed to grant so much to the contingencies of rustic language that it immediately came to be regarded as merely an exclusionary principle devised to rout eighteenth-century diction or, at best, a reductive image of universality’.¹⁵ The post-romantic complaint is rather that Wordsworth does not go far enough; it is not the scandal of a theory that would marry poetry to the language of rural labourers, but one which stops short of the consummation whereby it becomes one with this more real language. Metre is not poetry’s saving grace, justifying the art form in a prosaic age, but the stain of artifice which exposes its fraudulent claim to authenticity: this would be the most polemical way to put the claim.¹⁶ The debate rolls on partly because of just how close Wordsworth brings the categories of poetry and ordinary or ‘real’ language. They are like two streams that run alongside one another, and mix from time to time, without ever wholly merging. For this reason, however, the objection that poetry fails to be ‘real language’ cannot quite find purchase on the ‘Preface’ itself. Wordsworth’s footnote on the term ‘poetry’ states that ‘the only strict antithesis to Prose is Metre; nor is this, in truth, a strict antithesis; because lines and passages of metre so naturally occur in writing prose’ (LB, 750FN). There are cases, Brennan O’Donnell argues, in which ‘expressive syntax and metrical form . . . are fulfilled by the same speech instance’, so that ‘there is, or can be, a kind of poetry in the sound of everyday speech’.¹⁷ Poetry and ordinary speech are sociologically and linguistically different but, at least some of the time, capable of producing the same lines. In any case, the Experience eds Alexander Regier and Stefan Uhlig (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 81–102, 91; Tim Milnes, Knowledge and Indifference in English Romantic Prose (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003), 91. ¹⁵ Frances Ferguson, Wordsworth: Language as Counter Spirit (New Haven: Yale UP, 1977), 16. ¹⁶ For example, as Susan Wolfson puts it: ‘metrical feet are art, not nature, ideal not familiar, elegant and elevated, not common and pedestrian . . . class difference is the elementary code’. Susan Wolfson, ‘Wordsworth’s Craft’ in The Cambridge Companion to Wordsworth ed. Stephen Gill (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003), 108–24, 116. This is ultimately a category objection: if ‘poeticalness’ is conceived as a supplement to language, then the objection that a poem adds something to ordinary language is inescapable. ¹⁷ Brennan O’Donnell, The Passion of Meter: A Study of Wordsworth’s Metrical Art (Kent: Kent State UP, 1995), 25–6.

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‘Preface’ makes it clear that good poetry is never supposed to be the ‘real language’ of actual people; the phrases ‘real events’ and ‘real life’ occur in the ‘Preface’ exclusively in opposition to poetry.¹⁸ While applauding the ‘plainer and more emphatic language’ of ‘rustic life’, Wordsworth notes that ‘the language . . . of these men has been adopted’, and moreover, adopted ‘purified indeed from what appear to be its real defects, from all lasting and rational causes of dislike or disgust’ (LB, 744). At least on its own terms, the argument of the ‘Preface’ is not compromised by the tension between the categories of metrical arrangement and the real because poetry’s claim to being ‘real language’ is never absolute. The real operates as a regulating and aspirational idea—a shorthand for aesthetic simplicity, moral honesty, and emphatic emotion—rather than a necessary condition for poetry’s efficacy. The claims made for pleasure, on the other hand, are totalizing, and for this reason are much more disruptive. Pleasure’s primacy over ‘real events’ and ‘real language’ can be observed in this description of reflection: insofar as the poet ‘describes and imitates passions, his employment is in some degree mechanical, compared with the freedom and power of real and substantial action and suffering’. This somewhat mechanical process complicates Wordsworth’s supposed role in the ostensible transformation (or ‘lyricization’) of poetry into a restricted genre of private, subjective experience.¹⁹ It is more like a spiritual exercise, one of imitation and prescribed action, which the poet follows and repeats without justification, until the justification emerges. As if taking advice from Pascal, poets stumble through the motions until they feel things, sometimes losing themselves altogether in the process. ‘[I]t will be the wish of the Poet to bring his feelings near to those of the persons whose feelings he describes, nay, for short spaces of time, perhaps, to let himself slip into an entire delusion, and even confound and identify his own feelings with theirs’ (LB, 751). It is delusional, of course, because a poet does not really become another, but nevertheless falls into something like the condition Susan Stewart has called ‘lyric possession’, becoming ‘a subject possessed by an unfathomable and external agency’.²⁰ The experience is not one’s own; composition can be depersonalization.²¹ A poet ¹⁸ As Bialostosky writes, ‘Wordsworth knows that the real language he is trying to write is not common. . . . His enterprise is to make a real language more common’ Bialostosky, ‘Coleridge’s Interpretation’, 918. ¹⁹ See Virginia Jackson, ‘Who Reads Poetry?’ PMLA 123 (1) (2008): 181–7, 183. ²⁰ Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (Chicago: Chicago UP, 2001), 115. ²¹ At the least, Wordsworth is invested in a model which depends on both a poet’s capacity for personal feeling and poetry’s capacity to instantiate feelings not their own. In a related way I have argued elsewhere for a ‘constitutive indeterminacy in lyric between intimacy and

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breathes the air of bereaved mothers and secluded wanderers, and speaks in their idiolects, save for one difference: ‘modifying only the language which is thus suggested to him by a consideration that he describes for a particular purpose, that of giving pleasure’. The key elements are selection and metrical arrangement. What justifies them (but does not warrant so-called poetic diction) is their role in producing and ensuring pleasure. Indeed, pleasure is the ‘one restriction’ standing between ‘the Poet and the image of things’ (LB, 751–2). Poetry is real language made pleasurable. The primacy of pleasure over the real is rarely stressed by readers today. The simplest explanation is that some may find Wordsworth’s stress on pleasure embarrassing, since it subordinates the functions we might want to find and analyse in serious art (representation, cognition, performance, irony, critique: choose as you prefer) to a purpose more suggestive of indulgence and entertainment. Wordsworth’s definition of poetry does not help to frame literary criticism as serious labour, at least for as long as we think of pleasure as unserious. Moreover, as Boyson notes, there has been on the part of his editors an ‘impulse to source-hunt’, and thus to assimilate Wordsworth’s writing on pleasure with the ideas of ‘real’ philosophers, notably Hutcheson, Kames, and Smith, whereas the claims to real language have been viewed as more original to Wordsworth and therefore of greater significance.²² More generally, there is a tendency to see thinking about pleasure as inherently uncritical, and consequently to be rather uncritical about it: to suppose that all claims about pleasure must be essentially claims of liberal, optimistic humanism. Yet at points, Wordsworth anticipates his poststructuralist readers by suggesting that poetry is a machine for generating emotions that don’t belong to you, rather than a medium for depicting the subjective truth of experience.²³ Poetry’s pleasure is in some respects

estrangement, personalization and depersonalization’. Alexander Freer, ‘Percy Shelley’s touch; or, lyric depersonalization’ Modern Philology 117 (1) (2019), 91–114, 92. ²² Boyson, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment Idea of Pleasure, 113. Tim Milnes identifies a ‘cognitive theory’ of pleasure in his lucid discussion of Wordsworth’s prose, but having framed it in the context of Smith and Bentham, Milnes articulates that theory as the proposition ‘that the pleasure of human sympathy is actually a form of knowledge’. By characterizing pleasure as sympathetic and communicative, Milnes captures Wordsworth’s inheritance of earlier English moral philosophy. But if poetry is only ‘the communication of sympathetic pleasure’, it can’t have pleasures of its own. On this account, pleasure is effectively subordinated back to the real, because poetry is a technology of affective communication. Milnes, Knowledge and Indifference, 89, my emphasis. ²³ For a productive account of such a possibility, see Rei Terada, Feeling in Theory: Emotion after the ‘Death of the Subject’ (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2001), 48–89.

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synthetic: it is produced in a way that is to a degree mechanical; it is found in ‘real events’ but also added to them; most importantly, I will suggest, it is inseparable from the work of composition. This is why pleasure is so closely identified with ‘metrical arrangement’. A good poem’s pleasure is new, disruptive, and alien. The priority of pleasure above all else causes considerable difficulties. One is that pleasure throws up questions of ownership. As Celeste Langan has shown, the notion that poems grant readers pleasure allows Wordsworth on the one hand to think of poetry as a kind of common land through which readers might freely wander for enjoyment, and on the other permits him to support the extension of copyright as an assertion of the inviolability of that land.²⁴ And in the difficult forms of romantic intimacy catalogued by Nancy Yousef (‘appreciation, gratitude, awkwardness, frustration, humiliation, and even indifference’) pleasure often plays an unsettling role.²⁵ Consider the pleasure half given to, and half taken from, the little girl of ‘The Pet Lamb’, or the glum conclusion drawn by the speaker of ‘Simon Lee’, who provokes and then seizes on the old man’s satisfaction, yet cannot enjoy it himself. To say that these poems are intended to please is to raise an empirical question (whether or not they do so) but also ethical questions (whether or not we should want them to). Most simply, one might reasonably worry that Wordsworth’s subordination of the real to pleasure risks distorting or obscuring the passions and knowledge which he promises that good poetry can offer its readers, precisely because that pleasure does not belong to real life. The risk of distortion is only underscored by the fact that for Wordsworth, poetry’s pleasure depends in part on ‘continual and regular impulses of pleasurable surprise from the metrical arrangement’, and Wordsworth says this only moments after noting ‘the tendency of metre to divest language in a certain degree of its reality, and thus to throw a sort of half-consciousness of unsubstantial existence over the whole composition’ (LB 755FN). It is a reflection of the preference of modern critics for realism that this is generally interpreted as an admission of poetry’s limitations. Wordsworth’s equivocations cannot help: metre makes language less real to ‘a certain degree’ and the effect is a ‘sort of half-consciousness’ of that nonreality. Half-consciousness, therefore, can easily seem to be a kind of impairment, as if the intoxication of metre is like one drink too many at a

²⁴ Celeste Langan, Romantic Vagrancy: Wordsworth and the Simulation of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995), 127–38. ²⁵ Yousef, Romantic Intimacy, 22.

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Cumbrian pub. Yet what we find ourselves only half-conscious of is the unreality of the composition, so half-consciousness doesn’t mean we are slipping into sleep, but keeping one eye open to the poet’s art. There are only two other instances of the term half-conscious in Wordsworth of which I am aware. They are both in the opening moments of long poems. One is from the opening lines of The Excursion, where the dreaming man Half conscious of the soothing melody, With side-long eye looks out upon the scene, By the power of that impending covert thrown To the finer distance (E I.14–17)

There are too many similarities for us not to treat this as an allusion, conscious or otherwise, to the passage quoted from the ‘Preface’. The dreaming man is presumably half-conscious of the ‘soothing’ music (in fact, a wren’s song) because he is at least half-asleep, and blends its warbles with his dream. Yet he is awake enough to half-notice the scene unfolding around him as the poem murmurs into life. In another echo, what grants vision in both scenes is not light but the shadow ‘thrown’ by ‘brooding clouds’ across a landscape which, under a summer sun, otherwise ‘indistinctly glared’ (I.1–6). As when the senses are dulled by the power of harmony in ‘Tintern Abbey’, what cuts into consciousness is not violence but calming music; consciousness halved is also consciousness calmed, healed, and in that sense restored. The other instance of ‘half conscious’ is, of course, from the opening of the longer 1805 text of The Prelude: Oh there is a blessing in this gentle breeze That blows from the green fields and from the clouds And from the sky: it beats against my cheek And seems half conscious of the joy it gives. (1805a I.1–4)

Here it is the singer and not the listener who is half conscious; like the River Derwent, whose structural position it has taken by 1805, the gentle breeze is not wholly stripped of animistic spirit, but neither is it wholly enchanted. Half-consciousness is tied, once more, to the theme of music easing human woe (here the beating of the breeze taking over from the murmured song of

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the river). Rather than obscuring experience, these examples suggest that metrical language might possess a regulating effect that, at the least, does not simply limit perception. Even if half-consciousness can be understood as therapeutic, however, this does not solve the central antagonism. Whether metre’s power to ameliorate the distressing effects of real and ‘powerful feeling’ comes from its tendency to ‘divest language in a certain degree of its reality’, or it comes in addition, metrical pleasure seems to impede clear-eyed perception.²⁶ This association is only reinforced by the claim that metre can effectively upregulate responses to boring poems and downregulate poems in which ‘the excitement may be carried beyond its proper bounds’ (LB, 755). In sum, critics generally take this mediating effect of metre on ‘real events’ and ‘real language’ to be negative. Here is one of the most interesting objections: As the ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads explains, the disciplinary effects of, say, meter are useful when it comes to ‘tempering the painful feelings, which will always be found intermingled with powerful descriptions of the deeper passions’—a therapeutic alibi for meter as ‘the co-presence of something regular’ that seems to demote order to an ancillary of sensuous aesthetic pleasure. Blake, by contrast, identifies art essentially as a labor of control, contingent upon a formal technology of detaining thought and matter within a set of boundaries that are fixed but elastic, subject to ‘inflexion’ or modularity.²⁷

This description is decidedly suspicious (given an alibi, I want to see the crime), but the essential antagonism is well observed. Wordsworth seems to position metre at least partly in opposition to the other passions of his poems, setting up the kind of form/content opposition which more formalist readers are likely to resent, while compromising the fidelity expected by those more interested in representational content. There is something worryingly

²⁶ Critics sometimes assert that pleasure is responsible for the divesting of reality, although this might be a consequence of the belief that pleasure detracts from reality, rather than evidence for it. For Perkins, the ‘hedonistic calculus by which the pleasures of metre in itself . . . outweigh[s] the painfulness of the emotion’ works because ‘metre counteracts the illusion’ that a poem is identical to reality. David Perkins, ‘Wordsworth, Hunt, and Romantic Understanding of Meter’ Journal of English and Germanic Philology 93 (1) (1994): 1–17, 15. Compare Wolfson’s ‘derealizing effect’ (‘Wordsworth’s Craft’, 122) and O’Donnell’s notion of ‘aesthetic distance’ (The Passion of Meter, 24). ²⁷ Anahid Nersessian, Utopia, Limited: Romanticism and Adjustment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2015), 15.

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undialectical about Wordsworth’s metrical pleasure, Nersessian’s remarks suggest, since instead of a Blakean modulation of substance and form, freedom and control, Wordsworth’s is ‘an ancillary of sensuous aesthetic pleasure’, an addition to the artwork whose pleasure is strictly surplus. Metre is an artificial sweetener. At worst, it seems like metrical pleasure is intended to be anaesthetic: dulling our experience of the painful aspects of poetry so that we might enjoy artworks as mere entertainment. The category of pleasure in the ‘Preface’ seems poised to disrupt Wordsworth’s commitments both to knowledge and to the real. Doesn’t the ‘necessity of giving immediate pleasure’ imply that either the range of subjects that poetry can address is greatly narrowed, or else everything that is serious and painful must be numbed by the anaesthetic function of metre? Even if we agree that poetry produces pleasure and draws on real language and real events, we might reasonably expect tension between these aims. The necessity of pleasing might be ‘considered as a degradation of the Poet’s art’, Wordsworth notes, evidently conscious that this looks like an abandonment of artistic seriousness (LB, 752). Either we accept that at least one point of the truth–reality–pleasure triangle is compromised, or else we tangle with that seemingly perverse insistence that pleasure is somehow more knowledgeable than knowledge itself—that pleasure is not anaesthetic and peripheral but central to knowing anything at all. You won’t be surprised if I invite you to tangle. As Bennett observes, in Wordsworth’s account, the poet ‘produces passions that both differ from their model, from real passions, and are at the same time more real than those passions’.²⁸ Wordsworth’s gamble here is that producing pleasure is not analogous to fictionalizing; poetry might therefore allow us to think and feel in new ways without betraying the real passions of its real scenes and subjects. And substantiating this latter claim would mean rethinking artistic pleasure as something other than a distraction from the real, or a diversion into wishful dreams.

Some Versions of Pleasure The way that psychoanalytic ideas have been employed is at least partly responsible for the perception of Wordsworth’s project as essentially contradictory. Wordsworth’s commitments to pleasure, by the same token, suggest an alternative account of aesthetic pleasure with implications beyond his ²⁸ Andrew Bennett, Wordsworth Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007), 110.

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own writing. We might briefly return to ‘The Fate of Pleasure’ as an exemplary case of sensitive criticism that nevertheless constrains the ideas it considers. That these constraints still shape the reading of Wordsworth will, I hope, justify returning to a sixty-year-old essay. Trilling takes Wordsworth and Freud, as well as Keats and Bentham, to be exemplary in their handling of pleasure. His essay attempts to capture pleasure in its most august form, the sort of pleasure which might demonstrate the necessity, but also the dignity, of freely pursuing it. It can, in this way, be situated in Trilling’s broader liberal anti-communist project, and equally, the divergent strains of Benthamite rationalism, Freudian pessimism, and romantic sensitivity—if not sensuality—might illustrate some of the tensions implicit in that project. Of course, Trilling is not unaware of the disparities between Bentham, Freud, and the poets, nor that Wordsworth and Keats think rather differently about pleasure, Wordsworth drifting towards philosophical principle, Keats dwelling more comfortably on the lovely particularities of eye and mouth. But having hitched together these poets and philosophers, it is no surprise that Trilling’s wagon does not run straight. It is worth following, however, because Trilling’s approach illustrates a persistent critical stance. Of Wordsworth, he writes: it is precisely pleasure in its primitive or radical aspect that he has in mind. He speaks of ‘the grand elementary principle of pleasure,’ which is to say, pleasure not as a mere charm or amenity but as the object of an instinct, of what Freud, whose complex exposition of the part that pleasure plays in life is of course much in point here, was later to call a ‘drive’.²⁹

Thanks to the subsequent interventions of Lacan and Laplanche, readers of Freud are now far more sensitive to the distinction between Instinkt and Trieb in his writing, and hence far more likely to preserve a commensurate separation between the equivalent English terms instinct and drive.³⁰ Trilling’s willingness to collapse them suggests more than an oversight inherited from the English Standard Edition of Freud, however: by speaking of pleasure as a Wordsworthian instinct, and equating that same force to Freud’s ‘drive’, Trilling suggests an eminently romantic misreading of Freud in which the expanded universe of sexuality is nothing more than the

²⁹ Trilling, The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent, 429. ³⁰ Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: Hogarth Press, 1973), 214–16.

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‘primitive’ pleasure of nature itself. The nature of pleasure can be traced back to the pleasure of nature. For Freud, human sexuality is not an extension of natural hunger so much as a competing interest, sometimes ‘leaning on’ the instincts and sometimes violently smothering them, as when one appetite crowds out another. And Wordsworth’s dialectical story of ‘maturation’, whereby the urges of nature are both preserved and replaced by ‘sober pleasure’ in a moment of ‘elation’ (to use Hartman’s alternate translation for Aufhebung) is not at all the same as Freud’s tale of compromise and repression.³¹ Trilling also makes romanticism psychoanalytic in certain respects. ‘Keats’s intellect was brought into fullest play when the intensity of his affirmation of pleasure was met by the intensity of his scepticism about pleasure. The principle of pleasure is for Keats, as it is for Wordsworth, the principle of reality—by it as Wordsworth said, we know.’³² The term ‘intellect’ may be Trilling’s highest approbation, which Keats earns by giving himself over to pleasure’s pursuit. In another essay, Trilling remarks that for Keats ‘mind came into being when the sensations and emotions were checked by external resistance or by conflict with each other, when, to use the language of Freud, the pleasure principle is confronted by the reality principle. . . . in Keats the reality principle was very strong . . . strong in proportion to the strength of the pleasure principle.’³³ Pleasure in romanticism is, for Trilling, a spiritual victory; it binds us to the earth. But it also binds romanticism to a Freudian antagonism: pleasure versus reality. And from another point of view, this same antagonism exposes a serious flaw in romantic poetics: one need only substitute ideology for pleasure and history for reality to arrive at the New Historicist critique. What saves Wordsworth from Keatsian vulgarity on Trilling’s account is that in Wordsworth ‘the eroticism is very highly sublimated’.³⁴ A great deal could be said about the corrosive effects which the concept of sublimation has had on our attitudes towards pleasure in art, and I won’t cover all of it, but sublimation is of central importance because of the ways in which its logic has informed readings of Wordsworth, romanticism, and poetry at large. Sublimation remains psychoanalysis’s greatest unfulfilled promise to criticism. Laplanche and Pontalis politely call it ‘one of the lacunae in ³¹ Geoffrey Hartman, The Unremarkable Wordsworth (London: Methuen/U of Minnesota P, 1987), 182–193. ³² Trilling, The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent, 433. ³³ Trilling, The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent, 245. ³⁴ Trilling, The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent, 430.

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psychoanalytic thought’; during a seminar Lacan speaks more bluntly of the ‘virtually absurd difficulties’ facing anyone using the term.³⁵ It is an apt figure for the missed encounter between psychoanalysis and poetics: on the one hand, it is a term applied to art most enthusiastically, although not exclusively, by psychoanalytic critics, and it is responsible for a great deal of psychoanalysts’ interest in art; on the other hand, as Donald Kaplan has noted, ‘whatever is sublimated in mental life escapes a certain technical authority of the psychoanalyst’, since its logic is artistic and not clinical. Sublimation brings psychoanalysts to the door of poetics, but it does not beckon them in. In fact, one reason that the concept has ‘not advanced significantly beyond the point Freud took it’, Kaplan suggests, is because sublimation is by definition an achievement won against the constraints and neuroses that clinical psychoanalysis concerns itself with.³⁶ For this reason, most psychoanalytic readings of artworks that speak of sublimation are in practice interested in failed sublimation or in desublimation: they attend to the points where the escape from neurotic or traumatic constraint has not succeeded, and thus the clinical concepts of repression, transference, screen memories, and so on remain relevant. If Wordsworth’s eroticism genuinely is ‘very highly sublimated’, the erotics of art must be something other than the logic of psychoanalytic psychology. Sublimation ought to be the moment at which psychological questions, problems, and satisfactions yield to artistic ones. But in order to acknowledge that transformation, psychoanalysis would need to give up some authority on the erotic to art theory. Freud recognized well enough that ‘there is a stage in sublimation that thereafter becomes opaque to the psychoanalytic method’, even if he was averse to adopting other methods in order to keep the analysis going.³⁷ To remain in control, psychoanalysis must see artistic satisfaction as a substitution for a kind of enjoyment that it can diagnose. When Andrew Bennett rejects the view of Wordsworth’s professedly Freudian readers that composition, like psychotherapy, ‘involves the release of repressed emotions’, he is closing down an essentially misleading shortcut through which poems are read as if they were a patient’s speech, as if art

³⁵ Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, 433; Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 7: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis trans. Dennis Porter (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008), 177. ³⁶ Donald Kaplan, ‘What is Sublimated in Sublimation?’ Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 41 (2) (1993): 549–70, 549–51. ³⁷ Kaplan, ‘What is Sublimated in Sublimation?’, 558.

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were not a sublimation but a translation of clinical symptoms.³⁸ For symptomatic reading, the artist’s repertoire of technique can only be understood as a kind of ego-defence, achieving frustrated, repressed, or otherwise unacceptable wishes by other means. The blind spot of the desublimatory posture is that it cannot conceive of technique except in terms of limitation, damage, and compromise.³⁹ Any ‘surplus’ pleasure, not derived from an individual’s or collective unconscious desires, but from art itself, must in turn be repressed; there can be no pure organic pleasure from the lines. In other words, psychoanalysis cannot imagine art to have pleasures of its own without risking its monopoly on the theory of pleasure. For an adequate account of sublimation, we need to ask not what psychoanalysis can do for poetics but what poetics can do for psychoanalysis. It is testament to the persuasive force of desublimation—its frisson of revelation, its own erotics—that it is very difficult even to describe a theory of poetic pleasure like Wordsworth’s without falling back into some model of art as (imaginative or fraudulent) compensation, and hence to see poetry’s pleasure as a haven from the real. I want to trace the problem in Freud, making particular reference to Aaron Schuster’s insightful recent study, The Trouble with Pleasure. Using Deleuze’s critique of psychoanalysis as a lever, Schuster opens Freud up to a series of probing questions about pleasure and its discontents. Deleuze’s insight, Schuster writes, is that the problem ‘lies neither in the pleasure principle per se nor in another power that would oppose it, but in how the pleasure principle is stitched onto the empirical field, how it comes to regulate the manifold currents of psychic life’.⁴⁰ In Freud’s metapsychology, the pleasure principle is invoked to explain or analyse people’s behaviour in the face of unpleasure. It comes onto the scene, Laplanche and Pontalis remind us, as the ‘unpleasure principle’, and in a sense it remains an unpleasure principle, concerned primarily with the avoidance and regulation of displeasure even in Freud’s late work.⁴¹ People are pleasure seeking, on Freud’s account, primarily in the sense that they seek relief from unpleasurable tension, and pleasure is often conceptualized as nothing more than this decrease in tension. Even Beyond ³⁸ Bennett, Wordsworth Writing, 149. ³⁹ One consequence is that form itself is reduced to repressive machinery. Another way to state the problem, therefore, is to ask what pleasures (as well as strictures and limitations) a given artistic form might afford, rather than reading all technical investments as ways to divert, disguise, or imaginatively fulfil pre-existing desires. On form’s affordance, see Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2017). ⁴⁰ Schuster, The Trouble with Pleasure, 50. ⁴¹ Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, 322.

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the Pleasure Principle can be understood as a reassertion of pleasure’s negative side, the unpleasure principle that was present from the outset. For Schuster, the evidence seems to support Deleuze’s objection that psychoanalysis cannot even conceive of pleasure except negatively: ‘Freud does indeed, over and over again, define pleasure in a negative manner, as the lowering or discharge of psychic tension. Compared with the imperative character of unpleasure . . . Freud argues that pleasure is a marginal phenomenon, with little intrinsic reality or power.’ At the same time—and this saves his book from simply re-treading the Deleuzian critique—Schuster insists that while Freud ‘never wavers in his view that pleasure consists first and foremost in satisfaction, i.e., the extinction of unpleasurable psychic tension’, he repeatedly identifies positive pleasure during discussions of sexuality, sublimation, tragedy, and jokes.⁴² The limitation of Freud’s articulations of pleasure becomes especially clear in his account of sublimation, which should hypothetically furnish him with a clear instance of positive pleasure. In Civilization and its Discontents Freud identifies the ‘special quality’ of ‘an artist’s joy in creating . . . or a scientist’s in solving problems or discovering truths’, pleasures which he admits he cannot define, yet insists ‘we shall certainly one day be able to characterize in metapsychological terms’.⁴³ All the evidence suggests that Freud would prefer not to: he insists that sublimated artistic pleasure is available only to a few gifted people, and the ‘mild narcosis’ that their works engender in the rest of us ‘is not strong enough to make us forget real misery’.⁴⁴ This might be rhetorically necessary if Civilization and its Discontents is not to become a defence of poetry (although doesn’t the logic of sublimation point to exactly this conclusion?) The avoidance of artistic form and technique is a persistent theme in Freud’s work. In the opening of The Moses of Michelangelo, he remarks: ‘I have often observed that the subject-matter of works of art has a stronger attraction for me than their formal and technical qualities, though to the artist their value lies first and foremost in these latter.’ And in the Autobiographical Study of 1925, he cautions a disappointed layperson that analysis ‘can do nothing towards elucidating the nature of the artistic gift, nor can it explain the means by

⁴² Schuster, The Trouble with Pleasure, 99. ⁴³ Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols, ed. James Strachey (London: Vintage, 2001), 21:79; Schuster, The Trouble with Pleasure, 121. ⁴⁴ Freud, Standard Edition, 21:81.

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which the artist works—artistic technique’.⁴⁵ Freud’s resistance to sublimation is ultimately a resistance to the pleasures of form. In his most extensive exploration of the topic, ‘Creative Writers and DayDreaming’, Freud uses the model established in The Interpretation of Dreams to suggest that ‘creative writing’ is a kind of pleasurable wishfulfilment. Here too, Freud moves to suppress literary technique by excluding ‘the writers most highly esteemed by the critics’ in favour of ‘the less pretentious authors of novels, romances and short stories’. As he would later remark, ‘I speak more of fantasies than of poets, but I hope to make up for it another time.’⁴⁶ From the perspective of literary criticism, it is frustrating that Freud rules out the kind of writing that could best resist his tendency to reduce creative writing to partly concealed narcissism. Yet it is precisely in the act of excluding ‘literary’ enjoyment from his analysis that Freud stumbles on a strictly positive form of pleasure. Having excluded self-consciously literary writing, he still must explain why even popular romances and other kinds of genre literature are not exactly equivalent to day-dreams. Freud’s proposal is that ‘[t]he writer softens the character of his egoistic daydreams by altering and disguising it, and he bribes us by the purely formal—that is, aesthetic—yield of pleasure which he offers us in the presentation of his phantasies’.⁴⁷ So little can Freud accept the ‘formal pleasure’ of writing that he takes it to be a feint, a dodge by which writers get readers to accept their ‘egoistic daydream’. Yet while Freud might label it as one more form of defence, ‘purely formal’ pleasure is the ‘surplus’ pleasure that cannot be explained as the wishful fulfilment of pre-existing desires. Freud means ‘formal’ almost as if literary pleasure were merely a formality—unavoidable but ultimately insignificant. Of course the book is enjoyable, but let’s get to the meaning . . . Yet in making the exclusion he finds himself articulating, seemingly in spite of himself, the pleasures of form: enjoyment derived not from existing desires but from the work of poesis itself—an artist’s joy in creating. And so, by putting literary writing and ‘purely formal pleasure’ to one side, Freud implicitly locates the material which would be needed to make the theory of sublimation more than a theory of diverted and concealed narcissism.⁴⁸

⁴⁵ Freud, Standard Edition, 13:211; 20:65. ⁴⁶ Freud, Standard Edition, 9:149, Sigmund Freud, The Freud/Jung Letters: The Correspondence Between Sigmund Freud and C.G. Jung, ed. William McGuire (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1974), 102–3. ⁴⁷ Freud, Standard Edition, 9:153. ⁴⁸ This strain of ‘negative’ aesthetics in Freud’s work is explored in greater detail in Alexander Freer, ‘The Poetics of Dreams’ Critical Quarterly 62 (2) (2019): 77–104, 94–6.

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The moments of positive pleasure in Freud’s aesthetics are pinpricks in the architecture of psychoanalysis which might also be exit points; the person who could experience pleasure as something other than repetition of her lack would be the person who no longer needed psychoanalysis. From a purely psychoanalytic perspective, these points of positive pleasure are simply not part of the symptomatic economy, which perhaps explains why Freud is so good at overlooking them. ‘Purely formal’ literary pleasure would therefore be a kind of limit point, at which psychoanalysis meets poetics but cannot touch it—if that pleasure is to remain thinkable. This is not to say that you can’t psychoanalyse art (evidently, people do), but that what psychoanalysis will yield is all the infelicities and struggles that remain in a piece of work—the half-buried indulgences, as well as the scars of egodefence, the enigmas of desire, and so on—but never the ‘purely formal’ pleasure it might strain towards. Yet anyone who has found even modest satisfaction in writing or painting or music or dance, or for that matter in a mechanical or scientific problem, or a whole night’s conversation, will be aware of the special quality of sublimated pleasure, its unique existential and temporal logic: it takes the form of a surplus that is not ‘wanted’—no preceding desire corresponds to its arrival—yet it is nevertheless enjoyed. . . . The strangeness of this experience is such that one tends to resolve its incongruity by reinscribing it into the standard logic of lack and fulfilment.⁴⁹

There is a kind of satisfaction in creating that cannot be determined in advance by the creator and seems almost to be determined by the medium. The clay moves the sculptor’s hands, words move the poet; their employment is to some degree mechanical. Genuine sublimation arises as a satisfaction you cannot even imagine until it confronts you. You act as if directed by someone else, and make something you couldn’t have planned for; sublimated pleasure contains the surprise of otherness. The investigative reflex of seeking a prior cause for any given satisfaction is the death of sublimation, and makes positive pleasure inconceivable. And in slipping its own theoretical bonds, the idea of successful sublimation is, conversely, the sweetest instance of ‘psychoanalytic thought refining itself out of existence’.⁵⁰

⁴⁹ Schuster, The Trouble with Pleasure, 122. ⁵⁰ Leo Bersani, Is the Rectum a Grave? And Other Essays (Chicago: Chicago UP, 2009), 177.

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To think of sublimation as genuinely creative is to put aside the binary of desiring subjects on the one hand, and all the passive objects of their desire on the other. It means acknowledging the capacities of the things which make sublimation possible—books, musical instruments, recipes, conversations, and so on—not to satisfy existing desires by other means, nor ‘to impede or block the will and designs of humans but . . . to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own’.⁵¹ From this point of view, formal pleasure is possible because the complexities of making undermine any simple distinction between the agency of persons and the passivity of their materials. The will of the maker and the propensities of the medium cannot be disentangled, not because of their mutual resistance, but because each only exists in and through the other. These tussles with aesthetic pleasure signal the difficulty of tolerating its independent existence. One reason would be that such pleasure does not conform to expectation or desire; it does not belong to us and it does not make that most seductive of promises: to tell us something about ourselves, to prove something we think we know about others. In the ‘Creative Writers’ essay, Freud’s word for writing’s ‘purely formal’ pleasure is fore-pleasure (Vorlust), which is ‘a yield of pleasure offered to us so as to make possible the release of still greater pleasure arising from deeper psychical sources’.⁵² This is not so different from how some critics still consider the pleasure and pain of form: a surface detail to be appreciated, but then put to one side in favour of depth. Lively debates over ‘surface reading’ have brought this stance to our attention but have by no means halted it.⁵³ Avoiding the dismissive model of fore-pleasure, though, risks falling instead into a model of endpleasure (Endlust), in which pleasure is understood as the discharge of tension (and hence as ineradicably end- or goal-oriented). To explain formal pleasure in terms of satisfied desires is to return to that strictly negative model, and subject poetry to ‘that most dreadful enemy to our pleasures, our own pre-established codes of decision’ (LB, 739).⁵⁴ Freud’s great cultural works—Civilization and its Discontents, Moses and Monotheism, and Totem and Taboo—tell a familiar story of desire’s domestication and constraint. The modest cultural achievement of Herbert Graf (‘Little Hans’) was to ⁵¹ Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke UP, 2010), viii. ⁵² Freud, Standard Edition, 9:153, my emphasis. ⁵³ See the special issue of Representations 108 (1) (2009). ⁵⁴ The deep relationship between ‘pre-established codes’ and the free play of ‘fun’ in Wordsworth’s poetics is deftly explored in Matthew Bevis, Wordsworth’s Fun (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2019), 4 and throughout.

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devise a rhythmical game which allowed him to be alone. But to make cultural production nothing more than a displacement activity is to commit to an account of compensatory aesthetics whose modest form is an individual artwork conceived as affective or libidinal substitution, and whose most grandiose articulation is a whole ‘culture of redemption’.

A Complex Feeling of Delight Having addressed some problems in Freud’s handling of pleasure, we are in a better position to see why psychoanalysis has not aided readers of Wordsworth very much in assessing the pleasures of ‘words metrically arranged’. Yet a person wanting to propose a general theory of sublimation could do far worse than begin with Wordsworth. One of the most compelling if difficult aspects of Wordsworth’s theory is its insistence that poetry’s commitment to the passions and events of real life is made through its intrinsic (that is, formal) pleasures. Here is a skeletal account of composition drawn from the ‘Preface’: it begins with ‘real language’ and ‘real events’. The process of selection removes ‘what would otherwise be painful or disgusting in the passion’, and the practice of metrical arrangement ensures that these words are capable of ‘continual and regular impulses of pleasurable surprise’. If everything has gone to plan, the result will be language devoid of ‘vulgarity and meanness’ and sufficient ‘for the gratification of a rational mind’ (LB, 750–6). Real language—derived at least as much from suffering as from joy—can be adequately constrained by these two processes, so that ‘words themselves become entities which the mind delights in’.⁵⁵ This is how the language of common life, with all its defects and bruises, becomes poetry. Composition produces language that differs, therefore, not from life, but from the unaccommodated pain which poetry cannot admit if it is to please. Poetry is not an imitation of life, but the result of a process of fitting what is said and heard each day and minute to the necessities of providing pleasure. Not because readers of poetry are incorrigible hedonists: this is after all a project to blunt the reading public’s ‘degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation’ (LB, 747). Necessary, rather, because poetry’s pleasure makes its most difficult descriptions and passions legible.

⁵⁵ Ferguson, Language as Counter-Spirit, 16.

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The centrality of pleasure to composition is justified by the remarkable epistemic claims Wordsworth makes on its behalf. ‘We have no knowledge, that is, no general principles drawn from the contemplation of particular facts, but what has been built up by pleasure, and exists in us by pleasure alone.’ As with knowledge, so too sympathy ‘is propagated by pleasure’, and the pain of others can only be acknowledged ‘by subtle combinations with pleasure’ (LB, 752–60). The argument is not that only good news is worth hearing, but that pure, unmoderated pain is strictly unintelligible. What is more, the ‘painful or disgusting’ elements of passion that would overwhelm us have no epistemic content; purging them from real language makes serious (which is to say, painful) subjects more available rather than less. Pain, as Emily Dickinson puts it, ‘has an Element of Blank’, and is no knowledge at all.⁵⁶ In this context, it clear why poetry’s necessary pleasure must be formal—and in this sense artificial—if it is to supplement real language without replacing it, and thereby falling back into a model of fantasy wish-fulfilment. This is why a distinction is needed between the passion of the subject and the passion of the metre.⁵⁷ This supplementary, metrical pleasure is what allows us to look steadily at painful subjects: ‘there can be little doubt but that more pathetic situations and sentiments, that is, those which have a greater proportion of pain connected with them, may be endured in metrical composition, especially in rhyme, than in prose’ (LB 755). Poetry tempers painful feeling not in order to diminish it but to keep us from drowning in it. In a logical turn just shy of paradox, the inherent pleasure of metrical language permits poets to focus on subjects which are not at all pleasant: ‘But why, ungrateful, dwell on idle pain? / To shew her yet some joys to me remain’.⁵⁸ In other words, poetry makes all things bearable by showing none to be utterly estranged from pleasure; it reveals real life to be ‘an infinite complexity of pain and pleasure’, which is to say that it makes the world thinkable (LB, 752). In their infinitely mixed feelings, Wordsworth’s portraits of rural poverty and urban exploitation might be understood not as aestheticized scenes of suffering, but as each ‘an assemblage, a case, fashioned

⁵⁶ Emily Dickinson, The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Variorum Edition ed. R.W. Franklin (Cambridge: Belknap P, 1998), 760. ⁵⁷ See Wordsworth writing to John Thelwall in 1804, William Wordsworth and Dorothy Wordsworth, The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, 7 vols, second edn, rev. Chester L. Shaver (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1967), 1:434–5; O’Donnell, The Passion of Meter, 32. ⁵⁸ EW, 34.

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out of historically divergent materials to create a tone—a tone that makes both affirmation and exploitation audible at once’.⁵⁹ These distinctions should be understood as part of a broader affective economy in which serious thinking is often—and even inherently—painful. In the ‘Preface’, descriptions of the ‘deeper passions’ are always ‘intermingled’ with a ‘painful feeling’ (LB 754–7). While poetry is passion, in the 1815 ‘Essay, Supplementary to the Preface’ Wordsworth modifies that slogan with the caution that passion ‘is derived from a word which signifies suffering’ and ‘the connection which suffering has with effort, with exertion, and action, is immediate and inseparable’. He also extends the idea, implicit in the Lyrical Ballads ‘Preface’, that reflection is itself painful: ‘there is also a meditative, as well as a human, pathos; an enthusiastic, as well as an ordinary sorrow; a sadness that has its seat in the depths of reason . . . to which it must descend by treading the steps of thought’ (SP, 655–6). In this passage we can hear an eerie re-writing of Oswald’s insistence on suffering in The Borderers; the mind might require, and in any case cannot escape, thinking’s melancholic pull. The thought that composition might have a special connection to such sadness is affirmed by a later sonnet that borrows a line from Cowper: ‘There is a pleasure in poetic pains / Which only Poets know’.⁶⁰ Yet Wordsworth is also anxious to separate the necessary enjoyment of verse from the ‘fashionable pleasure’ of readers for whom poetry is merely ‘an occasional recreation’ and ‘a species of luxurious amusement’ (SP, 643). It might be felt that the ‘Essay, Supplementary’ is simply a retreat from earlier, more hyperbolic claims about poetic pleasure when faced with the classic aesthetic problem of other people’s irritating capacity to enjoy bad art. But I think it is more a qualification of the earlier account: poetry’s pleasure is vital but must be understood in relation to the serious discomfort, if not pain, that will be felt by anybody ‘treading the steps of thought’. An unthinking and disengaged ‘leisure’ reader may find ‘luxurious amusement’ while browsing, but passionate readers, stricken by painful reflection, will experience poetry’s pleasure as nothing less than grace. Good poetry is fitted and composed to give an overbalance of pleasure and endowed by that pleasure with a capacity for truth. How can we even contemplate this kind of alchemy as something other than sheer wishfulness? In a characteristically deft move, Sedgwick uses a moment of joyful recognition in Proust to illustrate a blind spot in psychanalytic knowing. In ⁵⁹ Christopher Nealon, ‘The Poetic Case’ Critical Inquiry 33 (4) (2007): 865–86, 886. ⁶⁰ LP, 82.

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‘the paranoid Freudian epistemology’, she writes, ‘it is implausible enough to suppose that truth could be even an accidental occasion of joy; inconceivable to imagine joy as a guarantor of truth’.⁶¹ Thus Proust’s conviction—that the perception of truth can be joyful—can only ever be for Freud a kind of fantasy. Drawing out the broader significance from Sedgwick’s commentary, Snediker remarks: ‘I’m riveted by the idea that joy could be a guarantor of truth—differently put, that joy could be persuasive.’⁶² Joy might accompany and sustain comprehension; better yet, it might be comprehension’s sensuous form. Not that a thirst for pleasure blunts or diverts thinking, but that a gentle shock alerts us, before anything else could, to a truth we are only just reaching. Another relevant Wordsworthian model can be found in the ‘Essay upon Epitaphs’, which answers concerns about hazy sentimentality with this strident account of the epitaphic mode: It is truth, and of the highest order; for, though doubtless things are not apparent which did exist; yet, the object being looked at through this medium, parts and proportions are brought into distinct view which before had been only imperfectly or unconsciously seen: it is truth hallowed by love—the joint offspring of the worth of the dead and the affections of the living!⁶³

The truth of the epitaph seems suspect because it does not square with recollections of the life. But the epitaphic mode does not invent so much as disclose ‘things not apparent’, things ‘only imperfectly or unconsciously seen’. Epitaph makes such details visible through the comprehensive affection it permits; its object is ‘truth hallowed by love’. The epitaphic mode recalls in turn another form which Sedgwick has helped us to name and grasp, in which attending to an object means finding the good in what might otherwise seem damaged, compromised, insufficient, or simply not good enough: a form we have learned to call reparative reading. By exchanging ‘hypervigilance for attentiveness’ and ‘powerful reduction’ for ‘acts of noticing’, reparative reading trades rhetorical force ⁶¹ Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling (Durham: Duke UP, 2003), 137–8. ⁶² Michael D. Snediker, Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood and Other Felicitous Persuasions (Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2009), 17. One consequence of Snediker’s patience with positive affects is that his account of them is far more critically alive, more able to get purchase on what is ‘complicated, and strange’, than suspicious accounts which would view that joy as a psychosocial sham. Queer Optimism, 30. ⁶³ William Wordsworth, The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, 3 vols eds W.J.B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1974), 2:58.

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 ’   

for breadth of engagement.⁶⁴ Aiming to provide a wider sense of what is valuable, reparable, and above all, lovable, the work of reparative reading is a kind of elegy for the text (and equally, Sedgwick’s own remarkable elegies, such as that for Michael Lynch, are luminous, exemplary acts of reading). While their reading practices can and should be distinguished by social and historical context, by differences of nation, gender, and sexuality, Sedgwick’s work can nevertheless illuminate Wordsworth’s poetic practice insofar as both commit to forms of attention and explication which are inseparable from positive affective engagement. For Wordsworth, poetry, like the epitaph, remains faithful to its object and yet brings forth ‘a gleam of pleasure’, pleasure which is, in the end, itself a form of fidelity.⁶⁵ Such pleasure illuminates without transforming; it affirms the value of an object while insisting on its particularity and locality: ‘the finite nonexportability of its engagements’.⁶⁶ The oppositions I have been tracing—sense and metre, real language and mechanical arrangement, and even pleasure and pain—are reconciled and given a common end in local instances of reading. Every time Wordsworth uses the term complex in the ‘Preface’ a reconciliation takes place: pain and pleasure, ideas and sensations, the passions and excitement. Most boldly, there is the grand union of poetry’s music, its associations, its difficulty, its approximation of ‘real language’, and the artificial metrical arrangement of that language, so that ‘all these imperceptibly make up a complex feeling of delight’ (LB, 757). Likewise, metrical pleasure does not subsist in a certain pattern or arrangement, but in the continual potential for local variability and surprise, felt in ‘minute physical impulses, between the expectation of regular alternation and the widely variable possibilities available for the realization of the pattern’.⁶⁷ Poetry’s pleasure—like its thinking—must take place in situ. ⁶⁴ Heather Love, ‘Truth and Consequences: On Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading’ Criticism 52 (2) (2010): 235–41, 238. Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 123–52. ⁶⁵ Wordsworth, Prose Works 2:67. ⁶⁶ Anne-Lise François, ‘Late Exercises in Minimal Affirmatives’ in Theory Aside ed. Jason Potts (Durham: Duke UP, 2014), 34–55, 46. I am also thinking here of the descriptive fineness of Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journals as an important and allied form of engagement. ⁶⁷ O’Donnell, The Passion of Meter, 35. Perkins contends that ‘the closer diction comes to “the real language of men”, the more meter must surprise by its presence’. But it seems unlikely that metrical language would for this reason continue to surprise readers. As Bialostosky remarks, there is no ‘typical Wordsworthian determination’ of verse; surprise is more likely to arise within the possibility space that metrical indeterminacy provides. Perkins, ‘Wordsworth, Hunt, and Romantic Understanding of Meter’, 12. Don Bialostosky, Making Tales: The Poetics of Wordsworth’s Narrative Experiments (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1984), 87.

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The Ends of Pleasure This chapter has focused on the mechanics of poetry while largely confining its sources to prose. For the remainder of this discussion, I look more directly at verse, mindful of both the inevitable differences between a theory of art and any given artwork, and equally the risk of reducing poems to exemplars of any general account. At the same time, only in artworks can abstract compositional ambitions find themselves through the practical questions and constraints of the medium. One of Wordsworth’s key explanations for why metre pleases is ‘the pleasure which the mind derives from the perception of similitude in dissimilitude’. The principle extends beyond metre to ‘the activity of our minds’, the ‘direction of the sexual appetite, and all the passions connected with it’ and ‘our taste and our moral feelings’.⁶⁸ The formulation might owe something to features of the Lake District landscape, captured in ‘the united pleasing differences and resemblances’ of valleys observed by Wordsworth, and ‘the regularly irregular sound of the dashing waters’ noted by his sister.⁶⁹ Two passages of the 1805 Prelude are instructive in exploring the role of pleasurable dissimilitude. In Book II, this sketch of retrospective happiness unfolds through patterns of slender difference: what happiness to live When every hour brings palpable access Of knowledge, when all knowledge is delight, And sorrow is not there. The seasons came, And every season to my notice brought A store of transitory qualities Which, but for this most watchful power of love Had been neglected, left a register Of permanent relations, else unknown, Hence life, and change, and beauty, solitude More active, even, than ‘best society’,

⁶⁸ LB, 752–6. To state the point more fully, cognitive, erotic, aesthetic, and moral judgement share pleasure as their driving force, from the ‘delicious sensation’ of moral goodness to what Armstrong identifies as the arousing ‘friction of opposition between repression and release’. Wordsworth, Prose Works, 1:104; Isobel Armstrong, ‘Meter and Meaning’ Meter Matters: Verse Cultures of the Long Nineteenth Century ed. Jason Hall (Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 2011), 26–52, 30. ⁶⁹ Wordsworth, Prose Works 2:174; Dorothy Wordsworth, The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals ed. Pamela Woof (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002), 7.

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 ’    Society made sweet as solitude By silent inobtrusive sympathies And gentle agitations of the mind From manifold distinctions, difference Perceived in things where to the common eye No difference is; and hence, from the same source Sublimer joy (1805a, II.304–21)

Every season is transitory, but their residues are permanent and additive. The saving gesture extended towards those otherwise neglected days is a pleasing if convoluted imposition. ‘Which, but for this’ is syntactically awkward—interrupting a qualification in order to qualify it again—though metrically regular. It echoes and goes some way to balancing a crucial question in Book I (‘Was it for this . . . ’), functioning as a long-distance rhyme of sorts. Here, what mediates the disorder of experience is not the soothing cadence of a river but the watchfulness of love. Without describing it, this passage also gestures to cadence as an organizing and ordering force. The longer polysyllabic words that might be expected to disrupt metrical expectations instead tend to support them (‘inobtrusive sympathies’, ‘agitations’), and go some way to ordering one of the most ungainly moments of lineation in the whole poem, where ‘society’ is repeated at the end of one line and the start of the next. Reading rhythmically means making good sense of metrical lines (or, we might say, lines which are metrical enough), whether speaking aloud or silently sounding, so that the ‘gentle agitations of the mind’ are mirrored by an ordered variation of sounds. Reading both for semantic and rhythmical sense requires a more active engagement with the words. Precisely this point is made by these lines, in which two pronunciations of difference are contrasted in something approaching a sounded pun: From manifold distinctions, difference Perceived in things where to the common eye No difference is; and hence, from the same source Sublimer joy

In the first of these lines, a metrical reading would suggest a three-syllable dif-fer-ence; on the second occasion ‘no diff-rence is’. You might explain this in Derek Attridge’s terms: because we expect a five-beat line, rhythmical reading requires that ‘difference’ contains two beats in the first case and one

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in the second; because it is impossible to conceive of one beat immediately following another in English verse, in the first ‘difference’ an offbeat syllable must be sounded, however fleetingly, between them.⁷⁰ In the terms of traditional metrical analysis you might simply say that we need a tenth syllable to make a pentameter, and ‘difference’ is the place a metrical reading ought to place it. In any case, while ‘to the common eye’ (indeed to any eye) there is nothing between the words ‘difference’ and ‘difference’, their metrical contrast demonstrates one of the manifold distinctions which can only be grasped when the line is sounded.⁷¹ That distinctions such as this emerge through reading goes some way to explaining why the passage seems to exist at multiple points in time. It is both a song of completed but unnoticed things (‘careless then / Of what was given me’) and of their subsequent transformation, in the hindsight which may be none other than the standpoint of composition itself.⁷² The salutary power of ‘similitude in dissimilitude’ can be distinguished from mere difference by comparing the previous passage to this section describing the St Bartholomew Fair: An undistinguishable world to men, The slaves unrespited of low pursuits, Living amid the same perpetual flow Of trivial objects, melted and reduced To one identity, by differences That have no law, no meaning, and no end; Oppression under which even highest minds Must labour, whence the strongest are not free! (1805a, VII.700–7)

The fair’s ‘trivial objects’ are insubstantial novelties, constituted only by their immediate appearances: the heaping of shock upon shock; endless ‘perverted things’ (1805a, VII.688). In formal terms, the problem with the entertainment is the lack of structured variation: the ‘wonder’ each performer invokes is

⁷⁰ See Derek Attridge, The Rhythms of English Poetry (London: Longman, 1982). ⁷¹ This stretching of the first ‘difference’ recalls one of the most lengthened examples in Wordsworth’s corpus: ‘But she is in her Grave, and oh! / The difference to me.’ (LB, 163). Bevis notes: ‘ “difference” gets an odd lift from the metrical pattern (in a late manuscript, Wordsworth underlined the first e to indicate that the reader should pronounce all three syllables)’. Wordsworth’s Fun, 66. ⁷² 1805a, XIII.104–5.

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momentary, and they are ‘all jumbled up together’; they exist as pure difference (1805a, VII.680–91). The effect is compounded by the thirtyline list of performers which the reader has just suffered. The exploitative nature of the fair is suggested both by the performers themselves and the oppressive mental labour to which all observers are subject; the ‘purposeless and ceaseless activity oppresses the middle-class poet as much as the urban worker’.⁷³ What appears as dazzling variation is ultimately a form of monotony. Everything is ‘melted and reduced to one identity’, that of the commodity (1805a, VII.703). ‘Individuals in the crowd’, rather than enjoying meaningful social relations, ‘are connected only by reason of occupying the same ground at the same time’.⁷⁴ The fair has its own empty dialectic, whereby each particular has no meaning except as an element of the whole, and the whole is constituted only by the ‘perpetual flow’ of more ‘trivial objects’ (1805a, VII.702–3). It’s tempting when drawing comparisons to look for a commensurate effect in the verse form, as if to validate the rest of the interpretation. In this case, that might involve looking for signs of metrical disquiet to accompany the ‘oppression’ of the fair. Yet save for the odd infelicity (such as the strained, hypermetrical line in which that oppression is named) the meaningless noise of the fair is not accompanied by metrical breakdown. Nor should we expect it: Wordsworth’s account promises that pleasure will be added to pleasing and painful scenes alike. There will be no metrical interventions, because the passion of the metre is not a form of judgement or commentary, to be selectively deployed, nor will it take cases on appeal when a purely semantic reading gets stuck. For Wordsworth, metrical arrangement should provide enough regularity—and pleasure—to keep any good poem from falling apart. On the other hand, what saves poetry from becoming a coercive chant is every reader’s ‘voluntary power to modulate’.⁷⁵ Our metrical pleasures are not the property of a poem, but a consequence of the ways of looking and listening that poetry makes possible. They are best understood—to borrow from Clive Scott—‘as a relationship with a text rather than as an interpretation of it’.⁷⁶

⁷³ Gregory Dart, Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005), 185. ⁷⁴ Susan B. Rosenbaum, Professing Sincerity: Modern Lyric Poetry, Commercial Culture, and the Crisis in Reading Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2007), 37. ⁷⁵ Wordsworth, Prose Works, 3:29–30. ⁷⁶ Clive Scott, The Poetics of French Verse: Studies in Reading (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1998), 94.

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Despite the chaos of the Fair, performing these lines (somewhat) rhythmically is, in a minimal way, making sense of them; reading becomes a way of thinking through the original events. This logic of reparative reappraisal is invoked very shortly afterwards: It is not wholly so to him who looks In steadiness, who hath among least things An under sense of greatest; sees the parts As parts, but with a feeling of the whole. (1805a, VII.710–13)

By alluding to a description of poets in the ‘Preface’, the phrase ‘him who looks / In steadiness’ suggests that poetry itself is a way of seeing more acutely, not by turning away from gross and violent things, but by finding among them an ‘under-sense’ which preserves their differences (‘sees the parts / As parts’) while figuring something greater.⁷⁷ Differences are not ‘melted and reduced’, nor are they hammered home for their own sake; they are arranged into more comprehensible forms. If we allow that poetry’s pleasure is both a question of technique (the only sure satisfaction is in creating and performing the poem itself) and engagement (such pleasure permits a steady and reparative form of attention, bringing things into view for the first time), then there can be no separation between content and form, between the semantics of words and all their musical qualities. But rather than installing two competing registers of sense—the old hermeneutics on one side, and a fortified poetics on the other, now made cognitive, or historical, or both—we would have understood formal organization as poetry’s coping or sense-making: its efforts to find in unembellished life a minimally coherent world.⁷⁸ In this way, the workings of a poem become available to one of the most persistent questions for Wordsworthian poetics: why a poet should suppose, and so many readers should share the sense, that there is knowledge to be found in reading and re-reading so many painful stories of confusion, loss,

⁷⁷ In the terms of the ‘Essay upon Epitaphs’, ‘parts and proportions are brought into distinct view which before had been only imperfectly or unconsciously seen’. Wordsworth, Prose Works, 2:58. ⁷⁸ On world-making, see Eva Zettelmann, ‘Apostrophe, Speaker Projection, and Lyric World Building’, Poetics Today 38 (1) (2017): 189–201. On poetic technique and coping, see Alexander Freer, ‘Rhythm as Coping’ New Literary History 46 (3) (2015): 549–68.

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 ’   

and despondency. This is how one such tale is introduced in The Ruined Cottage: When I stooped to drink, A spider’s web hung to the water’s edge, And on the wet and slimy foot-stone lay The useless fragment of a wooden bowl; It moved my very heart. The day had been When I could never pass this road but she Who lived within these walls, when I appeared, A daughter’s welcome gave me, and I loved her As my own child. (88–96)⁷⁹

These lines introduce Margaret without yet naming her. The wooden fragment—enough to be recognizably a bowl, but too little to be otherwise than ‘useless’—catches the eye just long enough to prompt recollection of a time when she would habitually emerge. Although that recollection is happy, the broken bowl presages a tale of domestic breakdown. Margaret lived with her husband Robert, a man once sober and steady, until they were beset by failed harvests, and Robert, debilitated by fever and miserable with poverty, decided to enlist in the army, leaving his wife and child only the gold he received for doing so. Margaret’s desperate yet unyielding hope for his return left her ‘in unquiet widowhood’, wasting in body and spirit until she died in that ruined home (447). The narrator of the tale, unusually for Wordsworth, is not the poem’s initial speaker, but an old man called Armytage, a pedlar and a friend. His itinerant profession provides some explanation for the choppy temporality of the story, filled in piece by piece as he passes through the area. His delivery gives Margaret’s story a difficult, shifting form, reminiscent of the temporal ellipses in Wordsworth’s shorter lyrics; as Armytage circulates, Margaret falls in and out of narrative time. This narrative distance has struck some readers as a limitation.⁸⁰ Whether we see such distance as narrative contrivance, a pedlar’s professional obligation, or an aspect of Armytage’s character, the way in which he withdraws ⁷⁹ All quotation from MS. D in RC 41–75. ⁸⁰ In a sophisticated account of Margaret’s relation to her literary forebears, the abandoned women stock characters of sensational fiction, Karen Swann argues that if The Ruined Cottage tale diverges from the literature of sensation because its narrator is not directly implicated in the narrative, ‘the peddler’s distance from Margaret must be purchased, and the price . . . is a

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from involvement in the story in order to tell it seems to reroute sympathy— ‘to bypass other people’.⁸¹ Conversely, this story has so many lapses and discontinuities (Armytage’s absences from the scene, Robert’s departure, the couple’s eldest child apprenticed to the parish, Margaret own wandering and wasting) that the narrative distance and inconsistency might be only one more in a story constituted by continual departure. Armytage’s narrative can collect all these temporal fragments precisely because it stands at some remove, in ‘a temporal condition that can simultaneously sustain grief and happiness’.⁸² Such combination of misery and happiness is not without risk: Armytage makes precisely this point when the poem’s speaker begs him to tell the next part of his story: it would be ‘wantonness’ deserving ‘severe reproof ’ if we ‘Could hold vain dalliance with the misery / Even of the dead, contented thence to draw / A momentary pleasure’ (221–5). So how are we to understand the poem’s sad but undeniable pleasure, if not as an indulgent ‘craving for incident’?⁸³ I want to go back to the wooden bowl fragment. Being a fragment, it has no value as a tool. As an object of contemplation, it does not stand on its own; unlike Heidegger’s jug, it cannot contain matter or thought.⁸⁴ It recalls the broken golden bowl of the Book of Ecclesiastes, surrounded by a shattered pitcher, a broken wheel, and a severed cord: symbols of age and death.⁸⁵ But this is no gilded tableau: the piece of bowl lies on the slimy footstone, more likely kicked up by another person crossing the stream than intentionally fished out. In its current location it’s a hazard more than anything else, and by spotting it while stooping to drink, our narrator may have just avoided getting soaked. Unlike the spider’s web, this crafted object has fallen into decay, and for that reason pre-empts both Margaret’s dwelling and her story. By its location in the river and in the poem, the broken bowl prompts a moving, if now useless, gesture of adoption: Armytage recalls a ‘daughter’s welcome’ and his reciprocal, parental love (95). By the sensationalizing of the abandoned woman’. Karen Swann, ‘Suffering and Sensation in The Ruined Cottage’ PMLA 106 (1) (1991): 83–95, 84. ⁸¹ Adam Potkay, ‘Contested Emotions: Pity and Gratitude from the Stoics to Swift and Wordsworth’ PMLA 130 (5) (2015): 1332–46, 1343. ⁸² Sanford Budick, ‘Acts of Meditative Mind in “The Ruined Cottage” ’ Modern Language Quarterly 79 (2) (2018): 145–71, 149. ⁸³ See Brian McGrath, ‘Wordsworth, “Simon Lee,” and the Craving for Incidents’ Studies in Romanticism 48 (4) (2009): 565–82. ⁸⁴ See Martin Heidegger, ‘The Thing’ in Poetry, Language, Thought trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper Colophon, 1971), 161–84. ⁸⁵ Ecc. 12:6.

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 ’   

time that this passage is incorporated into The Excursion, the observation has elongated. The 1814 text reads: As I stooped to drink, Upon the slimy foot-stone I espied The useless fragment of a wooden bowl, Green with the moss of years; a pensive sight That moved my heart!—recalling former days When I could never pass that road but She Who lived within these walls, at my approach, A Daughter’s welcome gave me; and I loved her As my own child. (E, I.523–31)

The previous lineation suggested a flicker of connection, the mind moving from one bright particular to another: ‘a wooden bowl; / It moved my very heart’. Now that end-stop has been softened, there is no sudden switch. ‘Green with the moss of years’ is both an initial trochaic inversion and an invitation to stare longer at the bowl fragment: no longer a glimpse but a pensive sight. The bowl fragment now seems a permanent feature of the landscape, a piece of human work transformed into a substrate for organic regrowth. By 1827, there is more: Green with the moss of years, and subject only To the soft handling of the Elements: There let the relic lie—fond thought—vain words!⁸⁶

The more lines, the more time the poem spends handling the fragment, which is now shown to weather the natural world in a way that its human neighbours could not. Metrically, ‘soft handling’ poses a further complication: a rigidly rhythmical performance could be achieved by reading another initial trochaic inversion and stressing ‘To’, but at least as I find myself reading it, no stress will sound until ‘soft’ (where it is very soft indeed), while the rhythmic beats align with ‘soft’, ‘hand-’, ‘of ’, ‘El-’ and ‘-ments’, meaning that a slight pause (or what Attridge calls a ‘virtual’ offbeat) is needed between ‘soft’ and ‘handling’, so that effectively four beats have elapsed before ‘handling’,

⁸⁶ See variants in E, 63.

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pulling the whole line out of time. I don’t want to equate these effects with the semantic meaning of the bowl fragment’s soft handling, but it is worth noting that all these changes—as well as the simple addition of extra lines— provide ways of holding on to the fragment rather than passing over it. David Bromwich suggests that some of the vices of The Excursion at large can be detected in Wordsworth’s ‘revisions of detail, particularly in moments of still-life contemplation. The Ruined Cottage closes its characteristic views of objects of memory with a mere notation of feeling. As recast in The Excursion, such a scene is liable to be borne down by the gravity of a fade-out and a moralizing gloss.’⁸⁷ I wonder if this revision of the wooden fragment might not signal an increased patience for an apparently useless thing. Like the declaration of adoption, it might be a kind of useless love, with no expectation of transformation. In this sense the broken bowl raises an ecological question: is it possible to care for waste as waste? As Khalip argues of The Ruined Cottage at large, the renewed patience with the bowl ‘suggests new conditions of intelligibility and complex forms of nontriumphal, wasted life’.⁸⁸ The bowl fragment constitutes a ‘relic’ in at least three senses of the word: a remnant, a historical artefact, and a beloved or even holy object. To take it up, or to place it in nature’s soft hands, is to ponder over a gift of feeling (‘That moved my heart!’) that could not be wished for precisely because it is, at least in practical terms, without value. Such a gift is an exercise in holding on to something damaged, in telling a story with no expectation of a rewarding payoff beyond the satisfaction in the telling. This form of handling is what allows the poem to dwell on its various kinds of waste (wasted material things, like bowls and cottages, waste or surplus labour, such as Robert’s undercompensated weaving, wasted lives, whether by solitude or foreign wars). It offers readers a form of steady looking in which ecological and even political questions emerge through mere encounter, rather than in a sentimentalized response with a predetermined intellectual and rhetorical payoff.⁸⁹ Tracing a route between ‘fond thought’ and ‘vain words’—holding onto what is broken as something

⁸⁷ David Bromwich, Disowned by Memory: Wordsworth’s Poetry of the 1790s (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998), 151. ⁸⁸ Jacques Khalip, ‘The Ruin of Things’ Romantic Frictions ed. Theresa M. Kelley, Romantic Circles, September 2011, https://romantic-circles.org/praxis/frictions/HTML/praxis.2011.khalip. html par. 2. ⁸⁹ See Scott Dykstra, ‘Wordsworth’s “Solitaries” and the Problem of Literary Reference’ ELH 63 (4) (1996): 893–928, 911–12 and FN38.

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broken, rather than refusing to accept the loss—is precisely what Margaret cannot do, yet it may be the poem’s signal achievement. What is remarkable about Armytage’s speech, Potkay contends, ‘is that it affirms the happiness that can spring or spring back from suffering and loss, without any clear metaphysical or religious consolation, but with an eye (and ear) fixed on beauty’.⁹⁰ If, as The Ruined Cottage painfully demands, we do not turn a sad tale into sensational entertainment, nor surrender to its misery, its pale happiness might reside in the work of verse-making and taletelling. There can be satisfaction in making a bowl, even if it will break with use; in telling a tale which must end every time in mourning. Saving the bowl shard, or making a tale, might be an act of caring for what is broken that is also a way of paying attention to it. There is little pleasure in any narrative event in The Ruined Cottage, but there is satisfaction in working through it. The more you look and listen, the more the small metrical variations and tensions can be felt. There’s an intimate satisfaction in negotiating them, intimate because the glances and gazes, stumbling speech, and moments of ear-twitching interest by which you come to know these small details are not unlike coming to know a person. But intimate also because they compel you to make continual small decisions about how to handle things. The small, steady pleasures of negotiating metrical arrangement, I’ve tried to suggest by noting some of mine, are ultimately a way of looking steadily at a subject. This intricate involvement offers a way to understand Wordsworth’s recourse in the ‘Preface’ to the word complex to bind apparently divergent categories, most notably the ‘complex feeling of delight’. Such complexity implies that we can’t ultimately separate out discordant elements: when it is successful, a poem shows us a world through intermingled pleasures and pains. Metrical pleasure is not a collection of individual effects, but a ‘hearing that passes under the words or through the words but is not in any word’.⁹¹

Retrospective Thoughts If poetry’s ‘surplus’ pleasure arises from the making and reading of the poem, it is necessarily retrospective. ‘Wordsworth’s steady looking at his ⁹⁰ Potkay, ‘Contested Emotions’, 1343. ⁹¹ Henri Meschonnic, ‘Rhyme and Life’ trans. Gabriella Bedetti Critical Inquiry 15 (1) (1988): 90–107, 95.

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subject’, Frances Ferguson writes, ‘involves a sense that the act of perception is not univocal and that perception over a period of time inevitably gives rise to the multiple forms of “seeing as” which figures attempt to communicate’.⁹² I will close this chapter with one final case of retrospection which pushes poetic pleasure to the limit. Wordsworth’s children Catherine and Thomas died in 1812. Four years later, Robert Southey lost a son, and Wordsworth’s own experience must have contributed to the short but sensitive letter he wrote to his friend. In the second half of the letter, he sounds a note of optimism: Whether I look back or forward I sorrow for you; but I doubt not that in time your retrospective thoughts will be converted into sweet though sad pleasures; and as to your prospective regards in connection with this dear Child, as they will never stop short of another and a more stable world, before them your disappointments will melt away; but they will make themselves felt as they ought to do, since it will be for a salutary purpose.⁹³

Wordsworth raises the prospect of a retrospective discovery of sweetness in sorrow. Suffering is not done away with, but nor is it left as purposeless pain. I mention the death of Wordsworth’s own children to suggest that this is not unfeeling cheer, but evidence that he had discovered a form of working through, or coping, by which painful real events could be taken up and ‘converted into sweet though sad pleasures’. Although there is no explicit mention, this also sounds decidedly like composition. A ‘salutary purpose’ echoes the hope Wordsworth expressed in the note to ‘Simon Lee’: putting his reader ‘in the way of receiving from ordinary moral sensations another and more salutary impression than we are accustomed to receive from them’ (LB, 745–6). The gap in the ‘Preface’ between ‘spontaneous overflow’ and compositional ‘tranquillity’ is sometimes elided by careless readers, and seized by others as proof that Wordsworth undermines his claims to compositional spontaneity (claims he never actually makes, of course). This gap might be understood as the necessary time of working through and working toward salutary impressions, so that the acknowledgement of grief becomes a kind of sweetened sadness. It is not that poetic composition always entails mourning, then, but that bearable mourning has the structure of composition; new pleasure comes to accompany sorrow, and not efface it. ⁹² Ferguson, Language as Counter-Spirit, 22, my emphasis. ⁹³ Wordsworth, The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, 3:306.

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Catherine Wordsworth’s death occasioned the sonnet ‘Surprized by Joy’, a poem whose titular joy is only barely present in the plaintive verse.⁹⁴ ‘The sudden feeling of joy that sparks the sonnet is never traced to a perceptual cause’, Christopher Miller comments.⁹⁵ Rather than connecting cause to effect, the poem’s narrative collapses in on itself. The speaker’s initial surprise prompts an almost-instinctive impulse to relay his joy to the addressee, and then, a beat later, the realization that he had, for a moment, forgotten that she was gone. Just as the addressee melts into a ghostly figure, the joy itself disappears as soon as it is named. We are justified in feeling that both the poem’s instantiating affect and its apostrophe are, at the most straightforward level, mistakes; when the realization comes, the poem’s first words are almost snatched back out of the air. This sudden interruption, logical and syntactical—‘thought’s return’—displaces both joy and loss as the sonnet’s theme; the poem becomes a recollection of recollection’s own tyranny (9). ‘Love, faithful love, recalled thee to my mind—’ and so love becomes the servant of misery, love’s tenacity the guarantor of further mourning (5). However bitter their renunciation of pleasure, at least to me the lines still seem to please. One day I noticed that I was turning the fragment ‘thought’s return’ over and over in my mind, and only in that moment of noticing did I recognize that I was actually ‘impatient as the Wind’, and the recognition was a moment of sudden delight (1). To call this episode an experience of pleasure in remembering a painful scene seems not merely inaccurate but wrongheaded. There is scarcely any pleasure in the poem’s representational content, but there was definite satisfaction in realizing that I had been unconsciously re-treading the poem, involuntarily recalling a poem which turns on involuntary recollection. To my mind, much of its unnerving beauty rests on its capacity to change direction as if weighing nothing at all. Considering the moment of ‘thought’s return’, Susan Stewart writes that ‘[n]o better example could be found of the principle that trauma “exists” in its repetitions’.⁹⁶ It is common enough to see trauma used in this broad, less technical way (it is not trauma in a psychoanalytic sense to forget your pain for ‘the least division of an hour’), but to do so obscures everything between clear-eyed acknowledgement and total repression. This is a poem whose

⁹⁴ Quotation from SP, 112–13. ⁹⁵ Christopher Miller, ‘Wordsworth’s Anatomies of Surprise’ Studies in Romanticism 46 (4) (2007): 409–31, 425. ⁹⁶ Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, 221.

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only possibility for joy lives in its repetition: if the titular joy is a mistake, then to read it once is to banish it forever, and deny the poem its own origin in unanticipated pleasure. To repeat the poem is to make possible a whole series of pleasurable surprises, without ever supposing to alter the final course. Openness to repetition, and some measure of satisfaction in the repeated voicing, is what makes this a poem at all (‘verse will be read a hundred times where the prose is read once’) (LB, 757). It is by virtue of the fact that ‘words metrically arranged’ can satisfy that the poem can be held, and read, and loved as a kind of knowledge about pain, rather than merely a conduit of shock and suffering. (Stewart’s own eloquent reading is proof enough that this poem is an object of knowledge when handled well.) I mean this not to discount its pain, but to suggest that its deep purchase on pain as phenomenological fact is a result of its sweet sad pleasure. Pleasure in the work of making and reading poems is ‘surplus’ in the sense that it operates outside the closed libidinal economy of psychoanalytic negative pleasure. It is not ‘manufactured’ in the sense of being false (although if one is unable to conceive of affective plenitude, even the thought of it cannot appear as anything other than deception). As any reader of Wordsworth’s more dismal verse would affirm, this is not poetry which takes the short road to satisfaction. Rather, poetry might speak ‘with blended might’, its pleasures neither separable from, nor a distortion of, the world in which it is always enmeshed.⁹⁷ It is a way of listening to actually existing language with an ear open for its potential rearrangement; a way of looking which glimpses in painful scenes an under-sense of joy. These are the stakes of the claim that poetic pleasure can be made from real events. That the mechanical agitation of mouths and bodies by ordinary words can delight. For Wordsworth, what prevents this whole enterprise from being simply indulgence or frivolity is that pleasure is poetry’s surest claim to truth. For this reason, poetry’s pleasures are cultivated in and through the painful scenes they make legible. In this sense, his account of composition is an account of mourning. In the next chapter, I address the melancholy partner directly.

⁹⁷ E, 40.

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4 Sustaining Elegy The question of mourning poses a particular problem for the account of retrospective poetics I have developed so far. From a psychoanalytic perspective, the distinction between mourning and melancholia is, at its most basic, a distinction between terminable and interminable debilitation. One should be expected, the other treated. If mourning is the lessening of debilitating grief over a determinate period of time (bear with this basic, if inadequate, definition for now) then it must hold within itself the expectation of its future cessation. If mourning were permanent, it would not be mourning at all. It follows that mourning can only be determined with certainty once it has ceased; mourning as such only appears at the moment of its disappearance. Hence, to recollect mourning is, in a sense, to get it wrong; either one returns once more to powerful grief, which suggests that the mourning never really occurred, or else it must be recollected as if it were never needed. The psychoanalytic problems of mourning bear on criticism at large because Freud’s writing on mourning has shaped major approaches to elegy in modern literary criticism and theory. This chapter considers a number of poems and drafts directly related to the death of Wordsworth’s brother John in February 1805, collected in, or associated with, Poems, in Two Volumes: ‘To the Daisy’ (‘Sweet Flower!’), ‘Distressful gift!’, ‘I only look’d for pain and grief ’, ‘Elegiac Stanzas’ and ‘When first I journey’d hither’. Richard Matlak has written extensively about the context of John Wordsworth’s sailing career in the East India Company, his relation to William, and the voyage which resulted in his death.¹ Rather than revisit this comprehensive analysis, I analyse these poems in relation to some problems of writing and mourning. For instance, how can (or should) an artwork negotiate the conflicted wish to escape unending misery without abandoning the dead? If the loss of a loved one is a source of pain and grief, its erosion of that feeling might suggest that poetry eventually effaces those ¹ Richard Matlak, Deep Distresses: William Wordsworth, John Wordsworth, Sir George Beaumont, 1800–1808 (Newark: U of Delaware P, 2010). Wordsworth’s Unremembered Pleasure. Alexander Freer, Oxford University Press (2020). © Alexander Freer. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198856986.001.0001

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whom it ostensibly commemorates. And mourning itself, at least in the broadly psychoanalytic way I have provisionally characterized it, is implicated by the same logic: if mourning requires that you ‘recover’ love invested in the dead, it seems to imply that unfaithfulness is necessary to health.² Elegiac mourning, as it is generally understood, unworks or disregards our ties to others. It threatens the prospect of a ‘spiritual community binding the living and the dead’, which Kurt Fosso has compellingly traced through Wordsworth’s career.³ And it imagines the elegy as a project of emotional self-preservation and withdrawal, quite unlike the forms of poetic debt, dependence, and depersonalization I have been exploring. I want to reopen the question of whether an elegy can (or even should) mourn in the sense described here, and by doing so, think more broadly about the affects and aesthetics of mourning in Wordsworth. In its most capacious sense, I will suggest, elegy might sustain rather than absolve its losses.

Elegiac Displacement I begin with one of the more straightforward elegies. According to the Cornell editors, ‘To the Daisy’ (‘Sweet Flower!’) was composed towards the middle of 1805, placing it some three to six months after John’s death.⁴ The poem’s internal chronology is quite complicated, encompassing at least three distinct moments. The perspective chronologically latest occurs in the first stanza and in the seventh and eighth, by which point John’s body has been recovered from the sea and buried. Between these bookends is an explicitly diachronic sequence detailing the ‘hopeful, hopeful’ voyage and its ‘hopeful, hopeful’ return to the south coast (8–15), the subsequent spoiling of those hopes, the shipwreck, and finally the moment at which John’s body is recovered. This sequence occupies stanzas two to six, after which point, chronologically speaking, we arrive back where we began. Interrupting it is a third perspective contained in stanza four, which recollects John’s time ashore at some point before the ill-fated voyage. In this buried aside, at ² To put the problem a different way, there is no adequate metalanguage for mourning. ‘One should not be able to say anything about the work of mourning, anything about this subject, since it cannot become a theme, only another experience of mourning that comes to work over the one who intends to speak.’ Jacques Derrida, ‘By Force of Mourning’ trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas Critical Inquiry 22 (2) (1996): 171–92, 172. ³ Kurt Fosso, Buried Communities: Wordsworth and the Bonds of Mourning (New York: SUNY P, 2003), 4–5. ⁴ All quotation from P2V, 608–11.

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almost the mid-point of the poem, the significance of the daisy to the elegy becomes clearer: In more than happy mood To your abodes, Sweet Daisy Flowers! He oft would steal at leisure hours; And lov’d you glittering in the bowers, A starry multitude. (24–8)

The daisy is the custodian of John’s tranquillity. This flower provides the rhyme for the bower, but also its shimmering lining. To address the daisy, therefore, is to call for John’s renewed peace, and to address him, at least indirectly, in a moment of past satisfaction. That John loved the daisies is not an inference—‘(I know / The truth of this, he told me so)’—in contrasts to the self-address which is expressed as a probability (‘belike one day to have / A place upon thy poet’s grave’) (22–3; 1–2). Along these lines, one might treat the poem as two interlocking parts: the threnody of the drowned man, and the address to the daisy, which occupies stanzas one, four, and eight, and which finds sweetness in the flowers that remain. In this case, the daisy would act as the salve to the wound, finding sense in the sadness that surrounds it. Thus, the final stanza represents consolation: That neighbourhood of Wood and Field To him a resting-place should yield, A meek Man and a brave! The Birds shall sing, and Ocean make A mournful murmur for his sake; And Thou sweet Flower! Shalt sleep and wake Upon his senseless Grave. (50–6)

For this consolation to succeed, one must take ‘senseless Grave’ to mean only that the grave and its occupant are without sensation, because death brings John rest. ‘Senseless’ must not suggest ‘meaningless’. And nature, as it is depicted here, rises to the occasion: birdsong and the ocean roar act as expressions of a remorseful (if not consistently benevolent) universe. Understood along these lines, the daisy that will ‘sleep and wake’ over

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John’s grave and William’s connects both men to the earth. The poem integrates John’s drowning into an intelligible world whose symbol and agent is the daisy. For this interpretation to function, however, the entire maritime narrative must be regarded as an interruption, to be overcome and banished towards the end of the poem. For mourning to be enacted unambiguously, readers too must work to disregard over half the poem, and overlook the suggestion in the phrase ‘senseless Grave’ of a meaningless death. Another way to think about the same problem is to ask where the poem’s priority ultimately lies: with a dead brother or with a flower whose capacity to symbolize is pushed to the limit. The daisy is both an intermediary between poet and lost brother, and a sign of their separation. The apostrophe to the daisy makes this clear from the outset: ‘I welcome thee once more’, but he, ‘although he lov’d more silently, / Sleeps’ (1–7). The flower is an offering for more than one, ‘belike one day to have / A place upon thy Poet’s grave’ (1–2). In a forward projection of some other person’s mourning, the poet imagines, and perhaps makes, an elegy for himself. One critic has gone so far as to suggest that all ‘Wordsworth’s elegiac poems are essentially elegies for the self ’.⁵ Here he resists the self-indulgence of actually depicting his own mourners, as he does in the later ‘Inscription, Intended for a stone in the grounds of Rydal Mount’ of 1835, but the effect is still unsettling.⁶ The daisy stands for both the poem’s mourning and a broader reflection on grief and mortality, and if we cannot tolerate ‘the disproportion between the daisy and what the poet makes of it’, we might conclude that the flower is a pretext for the poem to stray from its original purpose.⁷ For Peter Sacks, elegy is necessarily an exercise in displacement. Introducing The English Elegy, Sacks writes: ‘the movement from loss to consolation . . . requires a deflection of desire, with the creation of a trope for both the lost object and for the original character of the desire itself ’.⁸ For Sacks, elegy is an art of turning away, and the consecration of an alternative object is its principal gesture. Apollo’s laurel and Pan’s reed flute ‘are the pieces of their transformed loves and of their own transformed sexual powers, broken or cut, wreathed or sealed’, and they provide ‘an elegiac

⁵ Esther Schor, Bearing the Dead: The British Culture of Mourning from the Enlightenment to Victoria (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994), 127. ⁶ LP, 217. ⁷ Peter Swaab, ‘Wordsworth’s Elegies for John Wordsworth’ The Wordsworth Circle 45 (1) (2014): 30–9, 32. ⁸ Peter Sacks, The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spencer to Yeats (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987), 7.

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token one can recognize in the cut flowers and the (sometimes broken or resigned) pipes of Alexandrian and Elizabethan elegists, or in Milton’s painful plucking and shattering of berries and leaves, no less than in the mounds of broken lilacs in Whitman’s elegy for Lincoln’.⁹ Wordsworth’s daisy might still live while Whitman’s lilacs die, but both poems turn from their loss to a figural substitute. The logic of frustrated and redirected desire present a mirror-image to the theory of sublimation: art is a beautiful substitution. ‘If Sacks is right’, Paul Fry notes, ‘elegy must be in some measure an imitation of a work of mourning, not an actual work of mourning.’¹⁰ There is certainly evidence for reading ‘To the Daisy’ as an exercise in displacement. Not only is attention diverted from man to flower, but John’s death is recast in a way which makes it meaningful—‘Vain service! yet not vainly done / For this’—using the flower as aesthetic justification (43–4). This ugly justification is the underside of mourning: what was lost is disparaged in order to find comfort after having lost it. Loss can be mitigated because the worth of the lost life is degraded into something ‘unmeet’ for the one who lived it. If Wordsworth’s praise for the daisy were to crowd out the seven stanzas of sorrowful acknowledgement, then ‘To the Daisy’ would be only one more point in ‘the series of substitutions and perspectives that mask the personal or communal absence central to Wordsworth’s elegiac poetry’.¹¹ Yet the poem resorts as much to identification as displacement. By imagining both men interred, it presents a fantasy of the poet’s own death and burial, a fantasy which, for Sacks, the turn to a substitute object is supposed to prevent.¹² The daisy marks a general tension between commemoration and melancholic identification. The imagined self-burial, like the poem’s temptations to abandon a comforting narrative and embrace senselessness, evidence an excess of negativity, a remainder which the smooth workings of displacement cannot overcome. A second poem dated to the same period, ‘Distressful gift!’, suggests a similar friction between displacement and stasis.¹³ Its object is a volume of verses, written for John but never delivered. ‘This poor ill-fated Book’ has died its own death (3). Like the daisy, it functions as a mediating object between the two brothers. ‘It is a Tale / Of Thee thyself ’, William tells John, and its words, while belonging to William in the sense that he transcribed ⁹ Sacks, The English Elegy, 7–8. ¹⁰ Paul Fry, ‘Elegy’ in William Wordsworth in Context ed. Andrew Bennett. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2014), 127–35, 128. ¹¹ Mark Sandy, Romanticism, Memory, and Mourning (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 46. ¹² Sacks, The English Elegy, 16–17. ¹³ All quotation from P2V, 617–18.

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them, ‘too surely they are Thine’ (8–14). The ‘solace’ to be found in this book, if any, lies now in ‘a kind of secret chain . . . betwixt us twain / In memory of the past’ (18–21). What made the book a source of such joy was its anticipated delivery, but what might preserve the minimal satisfaction it now grants is for it never to be read by another, and, by remaining ‘secret’, represent a shared private space connecting the living brother to the dead. It is a letter never sent, a textual clearing or space which has become a tomb. For Derrida, writing differentiates itself from speech by its persistence; in Bennington’s neat formulation, ‘it is not necessary for me to be dead for you to be able to read me, but it is necessary for you to be able to read me even if I am dead’.¹⁴ Here Wordsworth makes the opposite gesture: he returns writing to the condition of speech by denying others the opportunity to read the book after the death of its intended recipient. In her compelling account of Wordsworth’s elegies, Mary Jacobus observes that this poem ‘apostrophizes both book and brother . . . as if the two were equally pitiable, equally ill-fated’. The poet’s speech is of ‘the type of elegiac address: one-sided, intimate, posthumous’.¹⁵ Neither book nor brother can reply, but one form of reanimation is possible: the present poem re-enacts the book’s lost music: The sadly-tuneful line, The written words that seem to throng The dismal page, the sound, the song, The murmur, all to thee belong (10–13)

There is a strangely gleeful energy in these words that ‘throng’ and rhyme so strongly (‘throng’ perhaps recalling the joyful birds of the ‘Intimations’ ode). But this book is, strictly speaking, a hopeful rather than distressful gift; its fate could not have been known at the time of creation, and so it does not know its own fate any more than those aboard The Earl of Abergavenny knew theirs. Wordsworth has good reason to refuse this volume a subsequent audience: to others the book would be not an unexpected memorial but a gift which is merely undelivered. This is ‘a drama of hope and its chastening’, and a tale of the ways in which writing can swing dramatically

¹⁴ Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1993), 51. ¹⁵ Mary Jacobus, Romantic Things: a Tree, a Rock, a Cloud (Chicago: Chicago UP, 2012), 95.

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from joy to misery without changing a letter, filtered, as it must be, through ‘the returns and relays of graphological time-past’.¹⁶ In its gesture of mournful censorship, ‘Distressful gift!’ refuses that ‘combination of intimacy and invisibility normally involved in shared reading experiences’ and thereby forecloses the possibility of communication.¹⁷ Writing that was ‘framed with dear intent / To travel with him night and day’ cannot be understood by others, and yet to alter the memorial for the sake of others would only compound the problem (31–2). Locked shut, the book bears comparison to what Nicolas Abraham and Mária Török have called the intrapsychic tomb, where the dead are confined when we are ‘reduced to a radical denial of the loss, to pretending that we had nothing to lose. The words that cannot be uttered, the scenes that cannot be recalled, the tears that cannot be shed—everything will be swallowed along with the trauma that led to the loss.’¹⁸ ‘Distressful gift!’ was never published in Wordsworth’s lifetime, and ‘as Wordsworth’s unintended readers, we occupy . . . [an] impossible subjectposition: the point of view of death’, Jacobus contends.¹⁹ But in its retrospective account of the gift-book, ‘Distressful gift!’ registers its miserable double bind. The book cannot acknowledge, and the poem cannot absolve, its failure to reach its recipient. Rather than sidestep this bind, ‘Distressful gift!’ pleads, in the end, for the preservation of pain: but gracious God, Oh grant that I may never find Worse matter or a heavier mind. For those which yet remain behind Grant this, and let me be resign’d Beneath thy chast’ning rod. (38–43)

The penultimate line rings falsely on two counts. It fails to rhyme with ‘God’, and it fails to end the poem. Further, it completely alters the expected meaning of the preceding line, deforming the ostensible bargain into a prayer on behalf of others. What is left is a poet’s resignation, and that of ¹⁶ Swaab, ‘Wordsworth’s Elegies for John Wordsworth’, 35; Jacobus, Romantic Things, 108. ¹⁷ Stacey McDowell, ‘Reading Together’ Essays in Criticism 64 (4) (2014): 351–72, 352. ¹⁸ Nicolas Abraham and Mária Török, The Shell and the Kernel trans. Nicholas Rand (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1994), 130. ¹⁹ Jacobus, Romantic Things, 110.

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any possible reader, from whom the poem scrupulously withholds its principal object. Wordsworth’s suspicion of poetry’s apparent power to overcome or cancel loss becomes clearer in another poem of 1805, ‘I only look’d for pain and grief ’ (P2V 611–14, ‘Pain and grief ’ hereafter). It too presents a vegetal token in place of the dead man: I only look’d for pain and grief And trembled as I drew near; But God’s unbounded love is here, And I have found relief. The precious Spot is all my own, Save only that this Plant unknown, A little one and lowly sweet, Not surely now without Heaven’s grace, First seen, and seen, too, in this place, Is flowering at my feet. (1–10)

As in ‘To the Daisy’, the plant betokens meaning in the face of suffering. It is less clear at this point whether this is relief from pain and grief (and therefore outright consolation) or relief simply from the trembling—from misery’s immediate debilitations. In its gloomy reworking of familiar Wordsworthian ideas, ‘Pain and grief ’ is an antithesis to the ‘Intimations’ ode. ‘The Shepherd Boy hath disappear’d’ from this empty pastoral, and the flower hear does not catch ‘glory’ but only signals ‘blessedness to come’ (81; 50). Another mediated blessing occurs in these lines: Let me calmly bless the Power That meets me in this unknown Flower, Affecting type of Him I mourn! (35–7)

Wordsworth’s uses of the jussive, Lindstrom contends, ‘mark ambiguously deadened states of recovery’.²⁰ This invocation rests just on the other side of

²⁰ Eric Lindstrom, Romantic Fiat: Demystification and Enchantment in Lyric Poetry (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 54.

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being performative—if only ‘let me calmly bless’ were ‘I calmly bless’, the line would be its own reward, but it is only hopeful prayer. ‘Pain and Grief ’ was published in a revised version in 1842 as ‘Elegiac Verses. In Memory of My Brother, John Wordsworth’ which removed the first two stanzas, and with them, a good deal of the ambiguity in the earlier verses. ‘Perhaps they seemed too confessionally intimate for publication, unlike the more studied and complex “Elegiac Stanzas . . . Peele Castle” ’, Stephen Gill suggests.²¹ For Sacks, this published version exemplifies elegiac success: ‘the poem moves, in short, from a failed urge to summon the powers of a bird’s flight (the power that might have saved John) to the consolatory description of a flower’.²² Yet this supposed consolation takes a strange form. What the poem records is nothing short of disaster: All vanish’d, in a single word, A breath, a sound, and scarcely heard. Sea, Ship, drown’d, shipwreck—so it came, The meek, the brave, the good was gone; He who had been our living John Was nothing but a name. (65–70)

This is how ‘a living man may in a moment be reduced to a proper name’.²³ The name John becomes a broken sign, ‘a breath, a sound’ which only recalls those other monosyllables: ‘Sea, Ship, drown’d’. Words inadequately register the loss they come to signify; like the verses of the ill-fated gift-book, the worst thing about the proper name ‘John’ might be that it functions exactly as before. Language in its glib persistence loses nothing, and so misses everything. Wanting more than nominal consideration, those who are collected in mourning find themselves silent and alone; each ‘into himself descends / For that last thought of parting Friends / That is not to be found’ (42–4). This mistrust of language helps to explain why the poem reaches such an ambivalent conclusion, at once offering itself as ‘a monumental Stone’ (93) and then glossing its stony message thus:

²¹ Stephen Gill, Wordsworth’s Revisitings (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011), 25. ²² Sacks, The English Elegy, 33. ²³ J. Mark Smith, ‘Elegizing John Wordsworth: Commemoration and Lyric’ in Re-Reading Derrida: Perspectives on Mourning and Its Hospitalities, eds Tony Thwaites and Judith Seaboyer (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013): 75–90, 78.

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Oh do not Thou too fondly brood, Although deserving of all good, On any earthly hope, however pure! (98–100)

John is memorialized as a caution against hope. Is it the hope that he might have lived, or the hope that more fond brooding might keep him alive? In either case, it is as if the final stanza admonishes us for loving and longing for the dead, which we, having read the poem up to this point, have inevitably been doing to some degree. But this is more than a caution against the ‘sorrowful pleasure’ and ‘lugubrious intoxication’ of melancholia.²⁴ Taken to its logical conclusion, even the best of the living must not be thought too good, lest they fail or disappear, leaving in their wake ‘the suffering that lies in store when one loves too well’.²⁵ The lesson, at its most reductive, is that we would do better to live in a world where nothing need be loved interminably. The ideal world, on this account, would be the one in which mourning need be little more than forgetting. But there is another possibility, found at the heart of the second stanza in the 1805 version. The poem consists of ten-line stanzas (ten stanzas, reduced to seven in its eventual published form) each rhymed , creating a nested box structure where lines five and six are enclosed by further quatrain enclosures. The encased central couplets often run on from the first quatrain, or into the subsequent one, but there is a striking case where the lines are syntactically independent: Sad register! But this is sure: Peace built on suffering will endure. (15–16)

These lines justify both the poem’s subject and its voice. In the context of the stanza at large, the implication is that grief will last a long time yet. It is possible to say that ‘peace . . . will endure’, but at the cost of affirming the sentence’s sub-unit: ‘suffering will endure’. But if the peace is built on suffering, it seems unlikely that the suffering could ever be expelled. Rather, there might be a relatively peaceful suffering which is suggested by the promise, six stanzas later, of ‘a mild release’ (with ‘release’ joined by ²⁴ Julia Kristeva, ‘On the melancholic imaginary’ new formations 3 (1987): 5–18, 5. ²⁵ Fry, ‘Elegy’, 134.

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rhyme back to ‘peace’). No end to mourning, but an end to its chaotic agitations. Read in this way, the conjunction across lines 38–9 (‘believe, / And grieve’) is suggestive: if suffering and belief can coexist with grief, elegy need not reduce our losses into bounded and named entities, to be remembered in words so that they can be forgotten in life. Elegy might rather be the stabilization of painful feeling, so that it endures without destroying those who bear it.

Mourning Theory Having observed a range of tensions in these elegies, we can now consider the theorization of mourning and elegy more closely. I have tried to highlight both the insights and limitations of Sacks’s theory of elegy, both conceptually, and in its application to Wordsworth. For Freud, it is trivially true that in mourning one must divest libido from the loved object; this is what he takes mourning to be. The conceptually interesting move in Sacks is the claim that elegy enacts mourning (that is, the displacement of the object in favour of a substitute) even as it appears to write about the lost object. The implication is that elegies refuse the one act we expect of them: commemoration. Responding to The English Elegy, Jahan Ramazani rejects ‘Sacks’s model of “healthy” and “successful” mourning’ by ‘arguing that the modern elegist tends not to achieve but to resist consolation, not to override but to sustain anger, not to heal but to reopen the wound of loss’.²⁶ Ramazani’s criticism is helpful, not least because of the way in which, as he puts it, at least some elegists understand the ‘psychiatric norm of “healthy mourning” ’ as ‘the exploitation and betrayal of the dead.’²⁷ This anxiety can certainly be felt in Wordsworth’s elegies. At the same time, this criticism might just shift elegy from mourning to melancholia. While Ramazani is not uncritical towards psychoanalysis, he nevertheless leaves the Freudian dichotomy intact; the basic opposition is preserved between displacement and recovery on one side, and preservation and sickness (or wounding) on the other.²⁸

²⁶ Jahan Ramazani, Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1994), xi. ²⁷ Ramazani, Poetry of Mourning, 7. ²⁸ Ramazani notes that his study ‘perpetuates’ the logic of ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, with the qualification that he will ‘dilute Freud’s overly rigid distinction between “mourning” and “melancholia” to a matter of emphases within mourning’. Poetry of Mourning, 28–9.

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You might chalk the problem up to genre trouble: once we start reading elegies with theories of mourning, we are doomed to confuse the two.²⁹ But of course I want to demur: any approach to elegy today is shaped by our implicit ideas and economies of mourning, and by leaving them unexamined we only constrain our reading in advance. At the beginning of ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (composed 1915, published 1917), his most influential essay on the topic, Freud begins not from the death of a loved one, but from the standpoint of the loved one’s non-existence: Reality-testing has shown that the loved object no longer exists, and it proceeds to demand that all libido shall be withdrawn from its attachments to that object. This demand arouses understandable opposition . . . people never willingly abandon a libidinal position, not even, indeed, when a substitute is already beckoning to them. This opposition can be so intense that a turning away from reality takes place and a clinging to the object through the medium of a hallucinatory wishful psychosis. Normally, respect for reality gains the day.³⁰

Bereavement never comes into it: ‘the loved object no longer exists’. As commentators have noted, Freud eschews the occasion of death itself ‘to such a degree that some theorists . . . have come close to calling it a repression’; ‘for Freud death is unimaginable, psychically unavailable’.³¹ Liran Razinsky remarks that ‘his analysis of mourning has nothing to do with the most difficult thing in it: death itself ’; instead of addressing it, Freud is ‘once again subordinating death to the familiar analytic field’.³² Instead of confronting bereavement, Freud models mourning as an internal conflict between wishfulness and reality. Mourning necessitates the acceptance of loss; melancholia implies its denial—what Catherine Malabou has called ‘an incapacity to abandon phantoms’.³³ On this account, it is impossible to love the dead, and hence, whenever people apparently do, they must believe, by ‘wishful psychosis’, that the dead still live. Crucially, Freud understands the ²⁹ Schor, Bearing the Dead, 12–14. ³⁰ Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols ed. James Strachey (London: Vintage, 2001), 14:244. ³¹ Kathleen Kirby, ‘Resurrection and Murder: An Analysis of Mourning (in memory of my father)’ American Imago 50 (1993): 55–68, 55; Robert Lifton, The Broken Connection: On Death and the Continuity of Life (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 13. ³² Liran Razinsky, Freud, Psychoanalysis and Death (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012), 184. ³³ Catherine Malabou, ‘History and the process of mourning in Hegel and Freud’ Radical Philosophy 106 (2001): 15–20, 19.

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acceptance of loss, and letting go of the lost object, to be the same process. Loving and mourning the dead are mutually exclusive, because love is attachment and mourning is severance. As I suggested at the start of the chapter, this implies that mourning only exists retrospectively. If mourning contains within itself the expectation of its own cessation, what blocks mourning from ending, and so properly becoming mourning, is, for Freud, psychosis. The ‘economic’ explanation of mourning assumes that love is fungible— that the energy, dependence, and devotion heaped on one person can be recovered and reinvested elsewhere—and so on Freud’s account the crucial work of mourning is severance: ‘the object is brought up, born into the psyche, in order to be dismissed, done away with, slain by the subject’.³⁴ It is a notorious problem for Freud that most people are unwilling to dismiss the dead.³⁵ He counters that mourners want severance in the end, but mourning must be ‘carried out bit by bit, at great expense of time’.³⁶ The operation Freud describes is almost epistemic: as if each memory of a previously living and present object must be ‘corrected’ to a memory of a lost object, so that, piecemeal, one’s memories and expectations come to correspond to the world as it is now. Yet a sleight of hand has occurred. The original task was to explain why people continue to love objects they have lost. In place of an answer, we are presented with a question which disavows the previous problem’s existence: given that nobody could love an object which no longer existed, how do people prolong the illusion of its persistence? To this question Freud does have an answer: by wishful thinking, that will either be alleviated by mourning, or will end in psychosis. By framing mourning as the victory of ‘reality’ over ‘bound libido’, Freud effectively sidesteps the painful difficulty of mourning by re-imagining it as a problem of true and false information.³⁷ It is this sense that mourning is about being right or wrong that generates the familiar dichotomies: detachment versus psychosis; reality versus fantasy. These, in turn, drive accounts of elegy towards binary conclusions: forsaking the dead, or becoming consumed by them; seeing phantoms, or only seeing yourself.

³⁴ Mark Edmundson, Towards Reading Freud: Self-creation in Milton, Wordsworth, Emerson, and Sigmund Freud (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990), 144. ³⁵ Laplanche, Essays on Otherness, 254; Razinsky, Freud, Psychoanalysis and Death, 188. ³⁶ Freud, Standard Edition, 14:245. ³⁷ Reality-testing, previously used in Freud’s work to differentiate memory from fantasy in a purely descriptive sense, is now deployed as a normative force or faculty. See Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, 382–5.

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In short, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ radicalizes mourning into two extreme alternatives which are both forms of violence. As Martine Paris has demonstrated from Freud’s sources and earlier work, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ shrinks back from a thought that seemed obvious: ‘normal’ mourning is a deeply ambivalent affair.³⁸ In the 1915 model, ‘Freudian mourning involves less a lament for the passing of a unique other, and more a process geared toward restoring a certain economy of the subject.’³⁹ Because it assumes libido to be fungible, Freud’s model disregards what is particular in our love for any given person; it supposes that all love objects (‘a loved person . . . one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on’) function in the same way from the standpoint of metapsychology.⁴⁰ ‘Freud assumes that the subject’s primary concern is to its own desire and not the objects of this desire, and grounds his account of mourning upon a model of the traditionally unified subject.’⁴¹ The particular other, on whom my love depends right now, drops out, and we are left with a question of onebody psychology. The essay imagines that love objects are essentially separable and interchangeable, which presupposes mourning effectively complete in advance. By supposing the difficult work is already done, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ never accepts the mourner’s loss as real. In a remarkable act of psychical defence, the mourner’s dependence on another is disavowed at the level of metapsychology. While it is by far his most influential essay on the topic, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ dramatically abridges Freud’s thoughts on mourning.⁴² ³⁸ Martine Lussier Paris, ‘ “Mourning and Melancholia”: The Genesis of a Text and of a Concept’ International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 81 (2000): 667–86, 672. Not least among the non-pathological cases of mourning was that of Freud’s own response to his father’s death. Freud had described the death of one’s father as ‘the most important event, the most poignant loss, of a man’s life’. ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, 668. ³⁹ Tammy Clewell, ‘Mourning Beyond Melancholia: Freud’s Psychoanalysis of Loss’ Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 52 (2004): 43–67, 47. ⁴⁰ Freud, Standard Edition, 14:243. ⁴¹ Clewell, ‘Mourning Beyond Melancholia’, 47. ⁴² Paris’s tracing of Freud’s sources for ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ also makes clear his changing view after 1915. By the time of Inhibitions, Symptoms, Anxiety (1926), Freud would call mourning ‘a particularly difficult psychical task’. Writing to Binswanger in April 1929, upon hearing the news of his son’s death, Freud provides a very different definition: ‘We know that the acute mourning resulting from such a loss will come to an end but that we shall remain inconsolable and shall never find a substitute. Whatever occupies this place, even if it does so completely, will always remain something else. And, to tell the truth, it is right that it should be so. It is the only way we have of perpetuating a love we do not wish to give up.’ Paris, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, 671. For Freud’s letter in context, see The Sigmund Freud–Ludwig Binswanger Correspondence 1908–1938 ed. Gerhard Fichtner trans. Arnold J. Pomerans (London: Open Gate Press, 2003), 196. See also Kathleen Woodward, ‘Late Theory, Late Style: Loss and Renewal in Freud and Barthes’ in Aging and Gender in Literature: Studies in Creativity ed. Anne WyattBrown and Janice Rossen (Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1993), 82–101, 86–7.

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I have suggested that Wordsworth’s elegies stage complex and ambivalent forms of mourning. One effect of the logic of ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ is to close down this ambivalence, making displacement the anticipated endpoint and elegy only a special case of sublimation. At times, Wordsworth’s elegies seek to sever bonds of affection, and to translate the lifeless body of the dead into tokens and images. This work tends towards the transcendental. But there is a second impulse to preserve what is lost, which cannot be properly called melancholic in Freud’s sense, for it does not deny loss, or become paralysed by it. It is seen in the figure of a closed book which remains lovely and awful to look upon, and in the quiet refusal to treat poems about the dead as the property of the living. Whatever else it may be, Wordsworth’s mourning is a form of undissuaded love. Despite his rhetoric, at times Wordsworth’s elegies can fondly brood. ‘To the Daisy’, ‘Distressful gift!’, and ‘Pain and Grief ’ are each caught between two impulses: to displace and to abide with loss. I turn now to two poems which establish the widest range of Wordsworth’s elegiac mode.

Unfeeling Armour The poems discussed so far oscillate between commemoration and displacement. ‘Elegiac Stanzas, suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle, in a Storm, painted by Sir George Beaumont’ doesn’t just displace loss but comes perilously close to denying it entirely.⁴³ It does so not by imagining a world without loss, but by asserting that there was no lovable world to lose: I could have fancied that the mighty Deep Was even the gentlest of all gentle Things [ . . . ] So once it would have been,—’tis so no more. (11–12; 33)

The sea’s tranquillity ‘is revealed as a false calm, the calm before a storm’.⁴⁴ The disillusionment—or even disavowal—is contagious, implicating not just ‘this sea in anger’ but everything which once appeared to be part of ‘silent Nature’s breathing life’ (44; 28). More significantly, ‘Elegiac Stanzas’ undercuts the judgements of previous poems; it is ‘unique in its disparagingly

⁴³ All quotation from P2V, 266–8.

⁴⁴ Jacobus, Romantic Things, 135.

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metacritical stance’.⁴⁵ The ‘visionary gleam’ of the ‘Ode’ is refigured as ‘the gleam, / The light that never was’, making this an elegy not only for a brother but for the poet’s own naïveté (14–15, my emphasis). ‘Two Wordsworths are elegized, John and the youthful William’, one drowned, the other now bereft of his ‘capacity for generous error and noble illusion’ and perhaps even ‘imagination itself ’.⁴⁶ The poem has appeared to some readers as a melancholic failure to mourn.⁴⁷ But a poem about a vindictive sea cannot seriously be said to conceal or repress the thought of a drowned brother. Rather than cancelling or obscuring one concern with another, ‘Elegiac Stanzas’ suggests a kind of affective transformation which is, strictly speaking, neither screen nor projection but, like watercolour applied to wet paper, bleeds out from its initial point across the canvas. The poem spreads its sorrow across the whole seascape, so that the memorial to John Wordsworth is the wide and lasting disillusionment with nature: Not for a moment could I now behold A smiling sea and be what I have been: The feeling of my loss will ne’er be old; (37–9)

By refusing to enjoy a ‘smiling sea’, the mourner guarantees the cold memorial. But by presenting his disillusionment not as a disposition to the world but as a true picture of it, the poem also places its readers in the same position. In his remarkable reading of Keats’s ‘This living hand’, Forest Pyle shows how the poem ‘demands to be beheld’, and by presenting itself as ekphrasis, constitutes its reader ‘as a beholder’.⁴⁸ To read the poem, Pyle argues, is ultimately to find oneself implicated as a viewer of Keats’s fleshly

⁴⁵ Lindstrom, Romantic Fiat, 159. ⁴⁶ Karl Kroeber, Romantic Landscape Vision: Constable and Wordsworth (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1975), 46; Geoffrey Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry 1787–1814 (New Haven: Yale UP, 1971), 285; Fosso, Buried Communities, 202. ⁴⁷ For Robert Pack, ‘Wordsworth’s disillusionment in his earlier belief in the benevolence of nature’ is ultimately ‘a form of denial, a screen concealing emotions that the speaker is not yet ready to confront. This screen, blocking him from his own emotions, limits the speaker’s capacity to mourn and thus to exorcise his repressed grief.’ Robert Pack, ‘The Idea in the Mirror: Reflections on the Consciousness of Consciousness’ The Kenyon Review 9 (4) (1987): 51–64, 52–3. ⁴⁸ Forest Pyle, Art’s Undoing: In the Wake of a Radical Aestheticism (New York: Fordham UP, 2014), 91–2.

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articulations. In a rather different way, ‘Elegiac Stanzas’ also wants to be seen, rather than read. And it rethinks past poems as visual compositions: Ah! , if mine had been the Painter’s hand, To express what then I saw; (13–14)

Had this painting been executed, we are to believe, it would share the faults of those gleaming but erroneous poems. The true painting (being both actual and accurate) is the one named in the title: Beaumont’s. By adjudicating between multiple, seemingly conflicting frames of reference (a real painting and hypothetical ones; past poems and a present poem; past and present vision), as if between youthful mistakes and mature wisdom, ‘Elegiac Stanzas’ suggests that aesthetic differences are ultimately differences in truthfulness. Perhaps, Wordsworth seems to worry, his talent had been a capacity to raise inconsequential objects or occasions to gleaming particularity, at the cost of obscuring what is violent, damaged, or trivial about them under a thick gloss. A section of his readers has always thought so. But Wordsworth’s objection to fond illusion in this poem wilfully misses the point. In order to cast earlier poems as deluded, ‘Elegiac Stanzas’ re-imagines them as primarily mimetic works; the difference between a ‘smiling sea’ and the ‘mighty Deep’ is treated as a distinction between true and false information.⁴⁹ The gesture trivializes, rather than seriously revising, past poems; ‘“Peele Castle” aggressively supposes the former pleasures to be merely naïve’ and ‘stabilizes a false story about the past in order to knock it down’.⁵⁰ By denouncing ‘the gleam, / The light that never was’, this elegy refuses a duty Wordsworth would subsequently ascribe to the epitaphic mode, as he had ascribed to metrical verse: to ‘strike with a gleam of pleasure’.⁵¹ The disagreement points to a much broader aesthetic quandary that’s worth pausing over. Both the word gleam and the shining or sparkling form represent an artistic risk for Wordsworth. With the glittering flowers of ‘To the Daisy’ he might seem to gild the lily. The same could be said of the ⁴⁹ Wordsworth’s position here does become less blunt through revision. See John Turner, ‘ “Hauntings from the Infirmity of Love”: Wordsworth and the Illusion of Pastoral’ Studies in Romanticism 43 (4) (2004): 623–51, 624–5. ⁵⁰ Lindstrom, Romantic Fiat, 160. ⁵¹ William Wordsworth, The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, 3 vols eds W.J.B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1974), 2:67.

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fluttering daffodils of ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’, which ‘Outdid the sparkling waves’ (P2V, 208).⁵² Gleams have been central to much of the discussion so far: in ‘Tintern Abbey’, I suggested, the half-trusted hope that nature’s gleams are real animates much of the poem’s doubt; in The Prelude, gleams are indicative of formative experiences which both shape and evade consciousness; in the ‘Intimations’ ode, the gleams of infant experience are vital, unknowable articles of faith. We are caught between the gleam as a sign of certainty—a flash of recognition—and as a sign of distraction or illusion: ‘a thin veil of glittering haze’ that is merely ‘an aesthetic sheen’.⁵³ The challenge posed by the gleaming image is a visual paradox: the brilliant, shining particular is artistic representation at its most absorbing and expressive, yet also a kind of aesthetic limit, where maximal visual information becomes a form of blankness. The gleam heightens a general tension in aesthetics; as Marian Hobson puts it: ‘we are involved in art— sometimes to the point of a mistake—and we are aware of the art’. This tension, Hobson has shown, came to be understood in the eighteenth century through the double-sided concept of ‘illusion’: art’s capacity to simulate and to dissimulate.⁵⁴ It can be seen in the almost-blinding complexity of Rococo painting, where ‘the filigree of irritation created by formal or interpretive complexity implies a to-and-fro movement. This type of intricacy is called by the critics papillotage . . . it expresses both the gaze, and the acceptance of the object seen, and the blink which cuts off the eye from contact with the world and, in doing so, brings the self back to self.’⁵⁵ Papillotage—which was not a compliment—suggests that the weight of detail overpowers its viewers with glittering excess and leaves them blinking and rubbing their eyes; it is a visual analogue to narrative interruption. Equally, the way that a painting can hold or sustain a single gleam can be understood as a distinctive achievement. In his Aesthetics, Hegel speaks of romantic painters’ desire to capture ‘the lustre of metal, the shimmer of a bunch of grapes by candlelight, a vanishing glimpse of the moon or the sun, a smile, the expression of a swiftly passing emotion, ludicrous movements,

⁵² Bevis shows how these flowers both laugh and ‘flirt with the laughable’, tracing ‘the root of the Greek word for laughter ( gel- ), which connects it to ideas of brightness or gleaming light’ and noting that ‘elsewhere, Wordsworth speaks of the “Bright Star! with laughter on her banners” and of a face “bright with laughter” ’. Wordsworth’s Fun, 26. ⁵³ LB, 249; Bevis, Wordsworth’s Fun, 118. ⁵⁴ Marian Hobson, The Object of Art: The Theory of Illusion in Eighteenth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1982), 43. ⁵⁵ Hobson, The Object of Art, 52. I’m grateful to Lucy Whelan for suggesting this parallel.

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postures, facial expressions . . . this most transitory and fugitive material’.⁵⁶ For Hegel, what makes these vanishings important is that they are depicted only indirectly: If we look closely at the play of colour, which glints like gold and glitters like braid under the light, we see perhaps only white or yellow strokes, points of colour, coloured surfaces; the single colour as such does not have this gleam which it produces; it is the juxtaposition alone which makes this glistening and gleaming.⁵⁷

The paint does not have this gleam which it produces; the gleam is a ‘display of negative virtuosity’, a visual cut or break in representation which nevertheless adds something.⁵⁸ From a certain point of view, gleaming implies trickery: a trick of the light (or here a trick of simulating light) but also perceptual trickery, by which we are captured and absorbed, sold a brilliant blindness in place of sight.⁵⁹ Yet it is also a representational gift—allowing us to see the things which would otherwise prove so ‘transitory and fugitive’. The gleaming painting gives us something it doesn’t have in order to simulate something we would, in ordinary perception, already have lost. Aesthetic absorption has its risks. The pathological potential of the gleam is captured in Wordsworth’s draft found facing The Ruined Cottage MS. A, ‘Incipient Madness’.⁶⁰ Here is the central shard of glittering negativity: Only within the ruin I beheld At a small distance, on the dusky ground, A broken pane which glitter’d in the moon And seemed akin to life. There is a mood, A settled temper of the heart, when grief, Become an instinct, and fastening on all things That promise food, doth like a sucking babe Create it where it is not. (4–11) ⁵⁶ G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art vol.1 trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1975), 599. ⁵⁷ Hegel, Aesthetics, 600. ⁵⁸ Benjamin Rutter, Hegel on the Modern Arts (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010), 129. ⁵⁹ See for instance Sven Lütticken’s commentary on the ‘polished, shiny objects’ of 1980s commodity art, typified by Jeff Koons’ Rabbit (1986). Lütticken, ‘Shine and Schein’, e-flux 61 (2015): 1–15. ⁶⁰ All quotation from RC, 468–9.

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The speck of glass is the pathological, gothic inversion of the broken bowl in The Ruined Cottage. It is dead but sparkles with life. It suggests nourishment but offers no food. The fragment suggests ‘a fixation on aberrant and traumatic empirical phenomena’, Faflak writes. Rather than heal or repress mental damage, these lines make of it a fetish, and thereby constitute the ‘traumatic core’ of The Ruined Cottage, he argues.⁶¹ Like the babe sucking to no avail, the glittering speck gives up nothing. The passage hangs on the cusp of rhyme (moon/mood/food, life/grief), and it’s hard to avoid the thought that as readers we might sometimes get caught on verse or song in the same way. Unlike the many salutary, natural gleams in Wordsworth— so often the sun striking water or some organic thing—here the glittering object seems akin to life but only simulates it; its unnatural animation seems to be part of the problem. For Collings, ‘the piece of glass is, as it were, a shard of the self ’.⁶² He has in mind the strange story Lacan tells about a time when he is all at sea, aboard a small Breton fishing vessel and caught by the gaze of another piece of shiny refuse, a sardine can glittering in the sun.⁶³ The gendered conscription of the gaze, famously traced through the cinematic register by Laura Mulvey, is connected back to the question of brilliant light in Anne Anlin Cheng’s essay on the actress Anna May Wong.⁶⁴ A scene in the 1929 film Piccadilly, in which ‘the rapturous and promiscuous spill of cinematic light’ falls across every surface including Wong’s ‘incandescent body’, underpins Cheng’s case for ‘reading Wong, playing the scullery maid turned star, as the quintessentially fetishized object and for understanding the lure of shine in this scene as its symptom’.⁶⁵ The shine of the fetish in Marx and Freud—the gleam of the commodity and the shining object of scopophilic enjoyment— are for Cheng united in the gleaming, orientalized glamour of Wong’s cinematic presentation. Insofar as this gendered and racialized form of gleam is a fetish, one insidious quality is the highly restricted aesthetic range, which confines its object to a mode which is already a cliché: Wong is predictably different. The satisfaction found in fetishes, after all, is predictability masquerading as something unusual. (One only need think of the

⁶¹ Faflak, Romantic Psychoanalysis, 80. ⁶² David Collings, Wordsworthian Errancies: The Poetics of Cultural Dismemberment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994), 72. ⁶³ Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (London: Karnac, 2004), 95. ⁶⁴ Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ Screen 16 (3) (1975): 6–18. ⁶⁵ Anne Anlin Cheng, ‘Shine: On Race, Glamour, and the Modern’ PMLA 126 (4) (2011) 1022–41, 1026–7.

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near-universal feeling expressed by readers of Sade: not shock but boredom.) And in a rather different way, the gleam in ‘Incipient Madness’ offers bleak constancy: ‘Still undisturb’d and glittering in its place / That speck of glass was more precious to my soul / Than was the moon in heaven’ (22–4). It may be madness to value the speck of glass so highly—never mind to value a reflective object above its light source—but this attraction might lie in the speck’s unwavering, undead quality. Unlike a broken bowl, it will neither rot nor gather moss. What it offers is its inert and reliable presence. The delicate challenge for thinking with Wordsworth, and for aesthetics much more broadly, is to distinguish between the kinds of gleam that might animate, challenge, and enliven us, and the kinds that, like a fetish or a bit of broken glass, trap us in a constancy which is comfortable but ultimately corrosive——to tell shine from Schein, so to speak.⁶⁶ In Anna May Wong’s case, Cheng argues, light does more than simply imprison; ‘the shimmering life of things’ in Piccadilly takes her and viewers beyond the film’s narrative constraints, and even the boundaries of the screen.⁶⁷ Elsewhere Cheng identifies ‘alternative workings and effects of shine . . . [as] the very medium or agent through which the visual and the sensorial merge’. In this case her example is literary: ‘we might turn to someone like Proust, for whom glimmers of light often signal moments of intense, ineffable aesthetic encounters that resist translation or redemption, and dislocate the subject’.⁶⁸ The Proustian glimmer, like the Wordsworthian gleam, raises one further connection: the flash of affect: a momentary pang of sadness or delight, excitement like a shiver. Affects can be analysed in terms of their half-lives, from the crackle of bliss to the slow train of mild or heavy gloom. Equally, we can think about gleams in terms of their consistency: the dizzying variation of papillotage and the fixity of the fetish. What distinguishes the glittering speck of ‘Incipient Madness’ from the vanishing

⁶⁶ Lütticken, ‘Shine and Schein’ develops the opposition. Terada employs a similar scheme: ‘Schein designates a sensory or cognitive aberrance, a wayward experience that really is an epistemological dead end.’ One important aspect of her project in Looking Away is to distinguish between Schein and Erscheinung, the former art’s deceptive potential, the latter ‘a temporary phenomenological event and rhetorical effect’ which does not imply loss of reality. Looking Away, 19–21. ⁶⁷ ‘When the superluminous moments when light seems to exceed the frames of the film, the viewer is moved furthest from the plot and transported, along with Shosho, into another realm of seeing, hearing, and feeling.’ Cheng, ‘Shine’, 1033. ⁶⁸ Anne Anlin Cheng and Tom Holert, ‘Do You See It? Well, It Doesn’t See You!’ in Supercommunity: Diabolical Togetherness Beyond Contemporary Art eds Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, and Anton Vidokle (London: Verso, 2017), 143–9, 145.

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gleams of ‘Tintern Abbey’ might be their principle viewer’s capacity to bear what is temporary, volatile, and eminently losable. In the summer of 2017, the List Visual Arts Center at MIT showed an exhibition entitled An Inventory of Shimmers. One of its installations was Lisa Tan’s Waves, a nineteen-minute video combining gallery footage with its representation on Google Maps in Tan’s Stockholm studio, and real waves with Gustave Courbet’s The Waves. The video articulates a highly abstract kind of distance, flickering between the real gallery and its simulacra, represented waves and the sea which, Tan’s narration notes, is used to cool Google’s data centres that make these connections possible. The whole effect is at once alienating—as a viewer you are mediated by the technology which is itself subjected to scrutiny—and strangely intimate (Tan discusses transatlantic Skype calls to friends; a narrated video installation is at least somewhat analogous). In Waves, the sea is many things at once: intimate and distant, powerful and fragile. This variability and ambivalence is precisely what ‘Elegiac Stanzas’ can’t stomach. Its response is to look away, to shift its affections from the once-calm sea onto something unchangeable: the ‘huge Castle’ with its ‘unfeeling armour’ (49–51). What the poem gives up, Fosso writes, is the power to bear grief, to linger upon its shadowy absences and demands and to impart one’s own mourning to others. . . . The elegist steels himself to grief, and hence, like Prince Hamlet, defers or quells his indebtedness, prodigally, ‘like a guilty Thing’, to the ghostly dead.⁶⁹

If he does not deny the dead, Wordsworth at least forsakes their claims on the living. The result is certainly solitary, and critics often call Wordsworth’s position stoicism.⁷⁰ Yet he has not cast aside all emotion. The celebrated painting is, after all, a ‘passionate Work!’, a ‘pageantry of fear’ (45; 48). Nor is grief wholly expunged. Rather, what the poem cannot bear is lost joy. Rather than grieve, the poem denounces what was lost. When measured by the number of lines it devotes to the subject, ‘Elegiac Stanzas’ is largely about past pleasure, and yet directs all its rhetorical energy towards dispelling it. The poem doesn’t refuse grief so much as it denies the possibility that real pleasure had been lost. ⁶⁹ Fosso, Buried Communities, 202–3. ⁷⁰ Fosso Buried Communities, 194–200; Turner, ‘Hauntings from the Infirmity of Love’, 633; Thomas McFarland, Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1981), 162;

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In both ‘Elegiac Stanzas’ and ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, past attachment to the world is reimagined as a false belief about it. Rather than accept mourning as a genuine problem, both pit the bonds of love against a ‘reality’ in which they never existed. The normative move in each case is from fond delusion to calm acceptance. Jacobus remarks that ‘poet and ruin acquire or require “the unfeeling armour of old time” if they are to survive what temporality and disaster bring’.⁷¹ But I am not convinced that the poem’s ‘endurance’ is so successful, even on its own terms. The ruined castle cannot quite be cased ‘in the unfeeling armour of old time’, because the stony armour is all that remains of Peele Castle (51). The castle is no more than the sum of its broken armour, and thus neither acquires it, as such, nor truly requires it, since there is nothing to protect within the rugged Pile but ruination itself. If the poem does provide a defence, it is only by conceding precisely what needed defending. ‘What tightens into survival is already inert’, as Rilke writes.⁷² One of the poem’s boasts is to ‘welcome . . . frequent sights of what is to be borne!’ (57–8). In a typically Wordsworthian double negation, it is ‘Not without hope’ that the poet waits (60). Prior to a correction in 1827, however, what was printed in the antepenultimate line was ‘frequent sights of what is to be born!’⁷³ This error might alert us to how little the poem says about future change. The stony outlook fixes both past and future into static endurance.

Native Hills By the end of August 1800, prompted by his brother John’s visit to Dove Cottage, Wordsworth had composed a short draft beginning ‘When first I journey’d hither’, which would eventually be published in 1815, following revision, as ‘When, to the attractions of the busy World’.⁷⁴ This poem presents a striking counterpart to ‘Elegiac Stanzas’. Not only is past pleasure tolerated, absence and love prove entirely compatible. Fry captures the poem’s remarkable capacity to bear absence:

⁷¹ Jacobus, Romantic Things, 136. ⁷² Rainer Maria Rilke, Ahead of all Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke. ed. and trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Modern Library, 1995), 485. ⁷³ P2V, 268. ⁷⁴ All quotation from P2V, 563–70.

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The little girl of ‘We Are Seven’ sees no important difference between the absence of two siblings underground and the absence of two siblings overseas . . . for her, the presence or absence of bodies constitutes their family resemblance far more than their life or death. It is indeed from her perspective that we can read ‘When, to the Attractions of the Busy World’ as an elegy for John before the fact; so little difference is there, in that poem, between absence and death.⁷⁵

The minimal difference ‘between absence and death’ in some of Wordsworth’s poetry provides an opportunity to reconsider the question of elegy not as a question of true and false representation of loss but as a broader matter of handling absence in lyric. The poem’s earlier form, ‘When first I journey’d hither’, suggests how absence might be observed, and even cherished, without lapsing into delusion, or else renouncing pleasure. The poem recollects the poet’s first journey ‘to a home / And dwelling of my own’, in storms and snow (1–2). To the newcomer the paths and surrounding woodland are unmapped and unreadable. To him it seems like no human could ever navigate these dense woods. Birds approach him, and he is not ‘loth / To sympathize’, yet their ‘house / Of nature and love’ excludes humans so successfully that although even ‘an unbreech’d Boy’ could reach to disturb the nests, none has (13–22). Unable to find a clearing, the poet cannot make this grove his bower: the trees Had by the planter been so crowded each Upon the other, and withal had thriven In such perplex’d array that I in vain Between their stems endeavour’d to find out A length of open space where I might walk Backwards and forwards long as I had liking In easy and mechanic thoughtlessness. (31–8)

These lines reimagine the scene of ‘Nutting’, where a boy seeks violent pleasure from the woods. Here there is no intrusion; he cannot pass the ‘perplex’d array’, but he loves it all the more (39). At this point, without prior

⁷⁵ Fry, ‘Elegy’ 129.

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introduction, the solitude and the verse-paragraph are broken by an entrance which is already an exit: I have a Brother:— (41)

This is the extent of John’s first appearance: two beats, five syllables, and a formulation not dissimilar to ‘there was a Boy’, the phrase which announces the appearance of the Boy of Winander and is already his untimely disappearance.⁷⁶ John’s entrance yields quickly to a narrative of time the brothers spent apart: both the fourteen years prior to John’s visit, and the time immediately after. A brother is come and gone across lines 48–53, yet his visit opens up a path in the previously unwalkable grove. While William is in ‘other haunts’ (reversing the presence/absence relation), John had entered the grove and intuitively found ‘a natural opening’ to a clearing (59). Typical of the missed encounters which abound in the poem, the speaker only discovers John’s presence in the grove once he has left, but his brother has rendered the way ‘now so obvious’ that the poet can hardly believe his ignorance. Having left, John’s presence is encoded into the very soil: With a sense Of lively joy did I behold this path Beneath the fir-trees, for at once I knew That by my Brother’s steps it had been trac’d. [...] hither he had brought a finer eye, A heart more wakeful: that more loth to part From place so lovely he had worn the track, One of his own deep paths! (62–70)

William’s first experience of this space is a re-tracing of John’s footsteps; his delight is a recognition of his brother’s presence trod into the ground. Difficult though it was to see into, this enclosure does not close out the external world; the hillside of Silver How and the surface of Grasmere lake

⁷⁶ LB, 139.

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‘gleam between the stems / Of the close firs’ (99–100). In Dorothy’s Grasmere Journal, it is clear that the forest canopy is open overhead: ‘The moon came out suddenly when we were at Johns Grove & “a star or two beside”.’⁷⁷ Like a poem, the grove is a contained space, a formal guide and constraint, where one might walk in ‘easy and mechanic thoughtlessness’, and yet find as one does that the world comes through in flashes. This is a poem about separation and the varieties of re-encounter. It is also implicitly concerned with the two boys’ shared childhood: a prior bond which determines the context of these subsequent re-crossings. The adult brothers are less connected even when in one another’s presence; there is a persistent gap between speaker and his sometimes third-person subject, sometimes second-person addressee. In a sense, the poem’s reunion is itself a missed encounter; shared childhoods contrast with divergent adult lives: we two Conversing not, knew little in what mold Each other’s minds were fashioned, and at length When once again we met in Grasmere Vale Between us there was little other bond Than common feelings of fraternal love. (78–83)

The brothers’ intimacy depends not so much on fresh contact but on the ‘common feelings’ formed in childhood and youth. That earlier, shared life hangs over the poem like mist. They were boys, Wordsworth suggests elsewhere, ‘bandied up and down by love and hate; / Not unresentful where self-justified; Fierce, moody, patient, venturous, modest, shy’, wheeling and bounding ‘like withered leaves in winds’ (1805a V.438–40). What might ground the ‘common feelings of fraternal love’ are past fits of affection and repulsion; ‘the passionate, and passionately shifting, object-relations of our childhood’.⁷⁸ John’s path-finding is crucial for two reasons. His sensitivity to the grove proves a claim that is otherwise only rhetorical: that John ‘to the Sea hadst ⁷⁷ Dorothy also references Coleridge here by her quotation, and so at least on ‘wild’ nights, where there is a ‘peculiar sort of light’ streaming through the branches, there are now four palpable figures: William and Dorothy in the flesh, John and Coleridge palpable at least as shadows. Dorothy Wordsworth, The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals ed. Pamela Woof (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002), 64–5. ⁷⁸ Leo Bersani, The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (New York: Columbia UP, 1986), 100.

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carried / Undying recollections, Nature there / Was with thee’ (84–6). The brother is given a similar gift-giving and -receiving role to Dorothy in ‘Tintern Abbey’. Further, William’s discovery of his brother’s footprints— after the fact—shows that their physical separation does not rule out new connections, and may even permit William a kind of passionate contact which his adult reserve ordinarily does not. The deep path John has made allows William to love the grove more perfectly; John’s modification of it is a condition of William’s unrestricted enjoyment, and with each pace, one brother commemorates and replicates the actions of the other. The poet’s frequent walks represent ‘a deliberate gesture of commemoration’, Christopher Miller remarks.⁷⁹ What remains behind is a ritual re-tracing, in which one brother takes the place of the other, and by which his absence is memorialized. That John can still teach William is evidence that, in a meaningful sense, the two are still brothers. Miller includes the poem in his study of ‘evening voluntaries’, the dusk poems in which, he shows, Wordsworth is acutely interested in the measurement and experience of time. In this case, he observes a synchronization of time between the brothers: a ‘simultaneous perception at sunset’ brought about by a ‘literal act of sympathetic imagination’. Secondly, there are the ‘lost hours’ spent by the poet awaiting reunion: ‘the habitual marking of time while the poet waits for his brother to make his own more circuitous and less certain path toward home’.⁸⁰ Miller’s analysis brilliantly captures the poem’s multiple temporal layers, which are not just the setting for, but constitutive of, the relationship it stages. Yet what Miller calls ‘simultaneous perception’ is only possible after John has departed. Their connection in the poem relies on a moment of recognition: John’s past is thrown forwards into William’s present, and only then does time click joyously into joint. Theirs is a form of highly mediated, intimate, yet asynchronous contact. A further retroactive change follows after 1805. At the moment of John Wordsworth’s death, the re-tracing of John’s steps in the poem ceases to be mnemonic perambulation and becomes commemoration. While this cannot have been apparent at the time of composition, the poem is sufficiently plastic in its handling of past experience and future hopes that it is transformed by John’s death not into an ‘ill-fated book’ but an elegy. Of the ‘Boy of Winander’, Paul de Man famously remarks: ‘the structure of the poem, ⁷⁹ Christopher Miller, The Invention of Evening: Perception and Time in Romantic Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006), 92. ⁸⁰ Miller, Invention of Evening, 93–5.

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although it seems retrospective, is in fact proleptic’.⁸¹ It might be both: Wordsworth’s lyric mode anticipates its own retrospection. As in Rohrbach’s ‘future anterior’, looking back is built into looking forward.⁸² Although ‘When first I journey’d hither’ is not knowingly proleptic, absence is so close to death that it shares a sense of anticipatory mourning. The sailor’s ‘short domain’ signifies a distance (of the deck), yet it also comes to suggest a life foreshortened. Likewise, musing on John’s choice of the nautical life (‘I think on thee / My Brother, and on all which thou hast lost’) becomes a figure for his death (103–4). By the time the same line appeared in ‘When, to the attractions of the busy World’ in Poems, 1815, the elegiac reading would have been unavoidable. As he is constituted in this poem, John is a sibling to Lucy; this poem too ‘marks the closure of a life that has never opened up’.⁸³ John Wordsworth, that is to say, ‘could have no end, because he also had no beginning’.⁸⁴ In this split and redoubled encounter, a different conception of mourning emerges. In Camera Lucida, Barthes writes: It is said that mourning, by its gradual labor, slowly erases pain; I could not, I cannot believe this; because for me, Time eliminates the emotion of loss (I do not weep), that is all. For the rest, everything has remained motionless.⁸⁵

Everything has remained motionless. No motion has she now. The work of mourning does not avert or redirect the gaze; it is a form of steady looking whose slow work gradually brings its object into focus. By visiting and revisiting places of shared significance, a brother’s loss can be appreciated and preserved, not as sickness or falsehood but as settlement. Like the churchyard where the little maid plays in ‘We Are Seven’, this grove receives, through the re-treading of the path, ‘a store / Of indistinguishable sympathies’ (113–14). It suggests a model of mourning quite unlike Freud’s 1915 essay. A model in which the dead persist and can, at the very best of times,

⁸¹ Paul de Man, ‘Time and History in Wordsworth’ Diacritics 17 (4) (1987): 4–17, 9. ⁸² Emily Rohrbach, Modernity’s Mist: British Romanticism and the Poetics of Anticipation (New York: Fordham UP, 2016), 1–27. ⁸³ Geoffrey Hartman, The Unremarkable Wordsworth (London: Methuen/U of Minnesota P, 1987), 188. ⁸⁴ Alan Liu, ‘New Historicism and the Work of Mourning’ Studies in Romanticism 35 (4) (1996): 553–62, 555. ⁸⁵ Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography trans. Richard Howard (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981), 75.

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persist through pleasurable surprise. As the girl eats her supper with her absent siblings, a solitary brother can return to the site of a missed encounter and find that even as an adult he is bound to his missing sibling in ways he couldn’t have known. The poem mingles absences and missed encounters with a poetics of re-encounter and re-evaluation, undermining any sense that mourning requires severance. While ‘Elegiac Stanzas’ conscripts readers into disavowing past pleasure, ‘When first I journey’d hither’, asks readers to repeat its memorial task, tracing the furrows of re-encounter over and over. Perhaps an elegy like this could only be written unconsciously—written from a position in which its operation as elegy could not yet be perceived. Whatever its author’s expectations, the poem demonstrates that elegy can be more than the ‘one-sided agreement that chains the living to the dead’ suggested by some of Wordsworth’s compositions.⁸⁶ Wordsworth’s elegies for John suggest that a kind of mourning which might look nominally successful can nevertheless be emotionally impoverished, while fidelity to the dead need not be pathological. Psychoanalysis is inclined to present past experience as something to be shaken off, or at least endured. By tracing the possibilities of asynchronous intimacy, Wordsworth suggests that the shared pleasures, as well as the wounds of bereavement, persist beyond memory.

⁸⁶ Jacobus, Romantic Things 98.

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5 Happiness in Time The claims Wordsworth makes on lost things—forgotten sensations, unconscious acts, unremembered pleasure—depend on the belief that their loss is something other than their destruction, their value independent of their presence. These beliefs are painfully tested by Wordsworth’s later odes. While it is sometimes treated as a straightforwardly descriptive term, the ‘late’ Wordsworth, and his idea of lateness, are as complex and unstable as the ‘early’ words and sensations we have considered. Lateness proves important in this case because these odes consider themselves explicitly as late, and risk the thought that what has been lost is the best part of life itself. More broadly, this chapter interrogates Wordsworth’s attempts to evaluate pleasure, and considers how that evaluation risks diluting or diffusing it beyond recognition. For this reason, it is directly concerned with the question of happiness, a question that can be posed at any time in life, but in Wordsworth’s later work takes on a more apprehensive, rather than prospective, quality. The later odes both appreciate and contest the pleasures and accomplishments of earlier poems. By the same token, the idea of lateness is coloured by an increasing worry that past losses are unrecoverable, and time is running out to balance the books. (Indeed, one problem with happiness in its evaluative form is its tendency to solicit this kind of affective accountancy.) Questions about happiness bring into immediate view some of the temporal antagonisms I have been tracing throughout this book. The odes ‘To Lycoris’, ‘To the Same’, and the ‘Ode, Composed Upon an Evening of Extraordinary Splendor and Beauty’ all consider what we might call the fragility of past pleasure. Their temptations towards predictable, nostalgic recollection threaten to crowd out the disruptive, unanticipated, unremembered kinds of pleasure which animate so much of Wordsworth’s earlier work. The risk is that with little prospect that future enjoyment will measure up to what has passed, pleasure itself becomes a source of reactionary pessimism, and the past a place of retreat for a poet with no prospect of improving on it. Yet this risk in the later Wordsworth is often overstated,

Wordsworth’s Unremembered Pleasure. Alexander Freer, Oxford University Press (2020). © Alexander Freer. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198856986.001.0001

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or at least over-generalized: the nostalgic, reactionary position is never solidified because the temporality of happiness is never settled. Other forms of happiness are at work in Wordsworth’s writing, even in his final years. More generally, happiness prompts a variety of critical concerns. For a strain of thought I’ll follow from Kant to Freud, happiness might ultimately be a kind of lethargy or exhaustion, as if the cost of satisfaction is surrendering all the desirous energy summoned in getting to that point. From a more sociological viewpoint, there’s a fear that happiness might require or engender complacency about the suffering of ourselves and others—that satisfaction or the desperate hope of reaching it might blind us to acute material concerns. One worry is over the loss of work ethic, the other over the loss of sensitivity required for us to work ethically, but they share the suspicion that happiness might be a constraint on thinking. Yet Wordsworth’s thinking about happiness is, at least at certain moments, the crystallization of years spent noticing, and attempting to accommodate, unremembered pleasure. Following Nersessian’s account of ‘adjusted’ or ‘limited’ utopian thinking in romantic writing, I want to risk the possibility that Wordsworth’s later odes might, in positing a minimal and non-possessive form of satisfaction, reimagine happiness not as an evaluative claim but a modestly utopian form of thought. Any utopia, however limited, needs to be tested against what Berlant calls ‘stupid optimism’: ‘the faith that adjustment to certain forms or practices of living and thinking—for example, the prospect of class mobility, the romantic narrative, normalcy, nationality, or a better sexual identity—will secure one’s happiness’.¹ The thought of happiness, Berlant suggests, has a habit of negating and overlooking forms of injustice in the present by framing them as mere conditions for the delivery of a promised but perpetually deferred moment of resolution. The bind of cruel optimism is not dissimilar to the problem that Soni identifies with a distinctly modern conception of happiness. This form, typified in the psychological individualism of the eighteenth-century novel, uses the splendour of narrative resolution to justify any number of trials along the way. In Richardson’s Pamela, Soni’s archetypal case, ‘[t]he narrative assumes that this bracketed time of life does not matter, that it can be sacrificed for the sake of answering the question of the test. Only in this way can the existential injustice operative in the narrative be masked’, and readers taught to interpret unhappiness as virtue

¹ Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke UP, 2011), 126.

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(whose reward will cancel any past suffering).² Soni’s wider point is that modern happiness is privatized and sentimentalized, so that rather than seeing it as the clearest indication of our and other people’s wellbeing, we ‘wonder whether happiness itself is a trivial concern, even when it seems to be the reason for all our actions’.³ One great virtue of Soni’s book is that it presents a clear account of the pernicious aspects of happiness and demonstrates the urgent need to rethink it in more socially productive forms. It does not naïvely suppose that personal satisfaction can be understood independently of social and political equity, yet it resists the temptation to equate happiness with cognitive impairment, a temptation to link Wordsworth’s merry ‘idiot boy’ to Berlant’s stupid optimist, and whose fatuous form is the equation of intelligence itself with a ‘certain chic bitterness’.⁴ Towards the end of the chapter I address some differences between my account of Wordsworth and the version of utopia presented by Nersessian, but the chapter as a whole nonetheless builds on her insight that romantic utopianism can include, and may even take the form of, renunciation and moderation. In their most pessimistic moments, these odes suggest that pleasure and happiness are not at all related; that no amount of pleasure can make us happy, and indeed the chase itself might result in damage and discontent. At their happiest, though, they risk thinking of satisfaction as nothing less than liberation from a world in which pleasure and pain are possessions one might retain or lose.

Lodged in Memory To speak of a ‘late’ Wordsworth, or a Wordsworthian lateness, is to invoke overlapping but distinct concepts. There is the bibliographic sense that some works come after others. There are the biographical clichés of the early, radical Wordsworth and late, Tory Anglican (as James Chandler demonstrated in Wordsworth’s Second Nature, this is no clean distinction.) There is the intellectual tension throughout Wordsworth’s writing between early and late as competing registers of value and limitation, infant insight and mature wisdom. The practice of ‘selecting’ and ‘fitting’ of past scenes and words into ² Vivasvan Soni, Mourning Happiness: Narrative and the Politics of Modernity (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2010), 194. ³ Soni, Mourning Happiness, 8. ⁴ See Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason trans. Michael Eldred (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988), 5.

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poetry, I suggested in Chapter 3, suggests that for Wordsworth all good poems rely on a form of compositional lateness, by which spontaneous words and feelings are revised and revealed. Finally, there is a physiological sense of lateness captured by Wordsworth’s numerous studies of old men who, as Willard Spiegelman has observed, embody both a hope of ‘final eminence’ and a fear of being left ‘forlorn, doddering, helpless, and comic’.⁵ I explore some general accounts of old age and late work being before making a case for the diversity of Wordsworth’s ‘late’ work. For Adorno, late works do not have the maturity ‘one finds in fruit’; they are ‘not round, but furrowed, even ravaged. Devoid of sweetness, bitter and spiny’, less blackberry bush than bare hedgerow.⁶ There is plenty of late, furrowed work to be found in Wordsworth’s writing, especially among the poems collected by the Cornell editors as Last Poems, 1821–1850 (a vast chronological range, which covers more than a third of Wordsworth’s lifetime, and almost half his writing career). Equally, there are poems which complicate the distinction. Aside from the 1817 odes, two important cases are ‘To an Octogenarian’, considered in this chapter, and the rarely discussed late lyric, ‘Glad sight wherever new with old’, addressed in my Conclusion. It may be the case, Helen Small suggests in her wide-ranging study of old age, that narrative cannot avoid imposing norms and value-judgements on aging (most obviously through structuring ‘stages’ of, for example, immaturity, primacy, and decline). ‘It is difficult to think of a literary work about old age that could not be taken to illustrate the strengths or the limitations of a narrative view of lives’, she writes. ‘Perhaps only certain forms of poetry, principally lyric, escape narrative’s very broad net.’⁷ I will return to the possibility that lyric offers a way out of this bind, but for now I want to flesh out the problem with narratives of the life course: even without intending to, the shape of a narrative measures one part of a life against another, drawing an arc of satisfaction or tragedy, culmination or decline. As Small shows, the mere comparison of age to youth produces uncharitable, even damning conclusions. Here is Aristotle’s Rhetoric: Elderly men . . . are cynical; that is, they tend to put the worst construction on everything. . . . They are small-minded because they have been humbled

⁵ Willard Spiegelman, Wordsworth’s Heroes (Berkeley: U of California P, 1985), 84. ⁶ Theodor Adorno, Essays on Music trans. Susan H. Gillespie (Berkeley: U of California P, 2002), 564. ⁷ Helen Small, The Long Life (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007), 105.

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by life. . . . They live by memory rather than by hope; for what is left to them of life is but little as compared with the long past; and hope is of the future, memory of the past. This, again, is the cause of their loquacity; they are continually talking of the past, because they enjoy remembering it.⁸

Not only are the aged less virtuous, on this account their age itself is the primary cause. Past frustrations accumulate in them, making present thought increasingly shallow. They hate the future because they have comparatively little of it. At the heart of their affliction is the domineering role of memory, which occupies more and more their words and thoughts. Memories are hoarded like wealth, as if they still contain the time which produced them. The cruelty of Aristotle’s description comes not only from its unrelenting criticism (of which I have quoted only a fraction) but also from the identification of these character flaws with oldness itself. If this account captures the failings most specific to the old, it also betrays a younger person’s impatience with them.⁹ Most significantly for this discussion, it exemplifies a persistent gesture to explain character traits and dispositions through an economy of lifespan: youth versus experience, potential versus accumulated life. Memory is prominent in Aristotle’s account because it promises to turn lost time into accumulated wealth. Closer to Wordsworth’s time, a similar logic operates in Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. Old age gains ‘gravity and sedateness’ from ‘its infirmities, its long experience, and its worn-out sensibility’, youth ‘gaiety and sprightly vivacity’ commensurate with its ‘tender and unpractised senses’, but each age ‘may easily have too much of the peculiarities which belong to it’.¹⁰ The disparity between what is ‘worn-out’ and what is only ‘unpractised’ suggests why these schemes seem so unbalanced: only youth’s problems are temporary. The same asymmetry accounts for the patience that is granted more easily to one than to the other. Yet Smith both acknowledges and censures this easy prejudice with an awful comparison: ⁸ Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1389b–1390a in The Works of Aristotle ed. W.D. Ross vol. IX trans. W. Rhys Roberts, E.S. Forster, and Ingram Bywater (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1924); Small, The Long Life, 61–2. ⁹ Thankfully, in the context of the Rhetoric, this passage is less bruising than it might appear: the description is of a character type and, like the ‘youthful character’ it follows, illustrates a rhetorical posture rather than describing empirical people. Aristotle exaggerates and isolates certain characteristics, in order to position ‘men in their prime’ between the exaggerated differences of youth and age. ¹⁰ Adam Smith, The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, Vol. 1: The Theory of Moral Sentiments eds D.D. Raphael and A.L. Macfie (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1976), 201–2.

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‘[t]he weakness of childhood interests the affections of the most brutal and hard-hearted. It is only to the virtuous and humane, that the infirmities of old age are not the objects of contempt and aversion. In ordinary cases, an old man dies without being much regretted by any body.’¹¹ These generalizations of youth and age tend to diminish what is late, not because of their authors’ moral character, but due to the runaway logic of lost and accumulated time.¹² Before turning to the thought of escaping this logic, it is worth situating discussions of Wordsworth’s own lateness. In his later work, Tim Fulford writes, Wordsworth is ‘forced to revise his commitments and repertoires under the new, uncomfortable circumstances that come with age’. These circumstances encompass both his aging and the changing market for poetry and audience taste across the first half of the nineteenth century. The result is ‘a retreat from the consequences of vision’: Wordsworth moves from perverse incident and egotistical sublimity to more accessible accounts of place (less local, more touristic) and morality (fewer ethical ambiguities, more ‘conventional pieties’).¹³ In a parallel way, Peter Larkin argues that the slackening in power he detects in Wordsworth’s later work is ultimately a form of deference to the great decade. ‘As the later poetry comes to be written . . . Wordsworth finds the blur between acknowledging a power of restoration and reactivating (and therefore rivalling) its already recorded source embarrassing.’¹⁴ Both of these accounts capture something important, and avoid the clichéd explanation of mere nostalgia or changing temperament, but both nevertheless measure late against early in a way that makes change legible as negation: a retreat from, or rivalry with, what is early. The question of lost pleasure is redoubled: not only does original joy go astray, but so does the ‘early’, vigorous attempt to articulate it in writing. To be late, in this sense, is to cede priority to earlier works and days, and in its most pessimistic form, even to renounce access to those earlier things. Wordsworth, it is true, is no stranger to this kind of late gloom. It is presented in striking

¹¹ Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 219. ¹² Kant is among the worst offenders for this kind of lifetime arithmetic: ‘the reason why old people should be honored, as long as no shame has stained their lives’ is not a matter of their physical condition nor their wisdom (their needs nor their abilities), but ‘simply because they have preserved their lives so long’. Immanuel Kant, Religion and Rational Theology eds Allen Wood and George Di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996), 315. ¹³ Tim Fulford, The Late Poetry of the Lake Poets: Romanticism Revised (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013), 203, 227–8. ¹⁴ Peter Larkin, Wordsworth and Coleridge: Promising Losses (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 12.

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fashion by a passage in The Excursion, which functions as both a conversational aside and a form of metanarrative commentary: ‘The Fire, that burned so brightly to our wish, Where is it now? Deserted on the beach It seems extinct; nor shall the fanning breeze Revive its ashes. What care we for this, Whose ends are gained? Behold an emblem here Of one day’s pleasure, and all mortal joys! And, in this unpremeditated slight Of that which is no longer needed, see The common course of human gratitude!’ (E, IX.550–8)

As a fire burns from gold to white and charcoal ash, pleasure sputters out and disappears. The burnt embers are the day’s residues in carbonized form. But rather than it persisting as a recollection or simply a remainder, this fire is understood as waste. If not definitely extinct (‘Dying, or dead!’ in a subsequent revision), it is at least exhausted beyond any further use or rekindling.¹⁵ For the Solitary, who is speaking here, joys are as short-lived as a mayfly. The resting place of pleasure and of all ‘human gratitude’ is the pyre, and once burned out these things will offer no warmth. But while this line of argument might seem to write off even poetry itself (at least the sorts that exist by pleasure alone), it is also undercut by its delivery. For one thing, it is articulated by the poem’s chief antagonist. The Solitary’s speech converts a physical object (the fire the party has just left behind) into an object whose force is chiefly metaphorical (‘Behold an emblem here’). This might be understood as a symptom of his general affliction: the impulse to abstract ideas from the physical world to the detriment of both. More practically, his exhortations have little effect: the party walks on undisturbed.¹⁶ While Wordsworth adopts voices and positions of lateness, at least some of the time his purpose is to test their limits, rather than sink into their comfortable woe. A striking thought of late despair articulated in a short 1819 lyric of Shelley’s helps demonstrate the difference at stake:

¹⁵ E, 291. ¹⁶ See also the discussion of this passage in Rowan Boyson, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment Idea of Pleasure (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012), 181.

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 ’    Wilt thou forget the happy hours Which we buried in Love’s sweet bowers, Heaping over their corpses cold Blossoms and leaves instead of mould? Blossoms which were the joys that fell, And leaves, the hopes that yet remain. Forget the dead, the past? o yet These are ghosts that may take revenge for it, Memories that make the heart a tomb, Regrets which glide through the spirit’s gloom And with ghastly whispers tell That joy, once lost, is pain.¹⁷

The more painful threat to these ‘happy hours’ is not total forgetfulness, but a melancholic form of retention; memories that make the heart a tomb. The distance between the ‘we’ of recollection and the ‘thou’ of the poem’s address suggests the waning of intimacy as well as time. Sweet hours are now corpses, and the only question of their fate is whether they will infect the tomb that houses them. By the second stanza, the poem is not only bitter, like Adorno’s spiny, late fruit, but ‘communicates itself, like a cipher, only through the blank spaces from which it has disengaged itself.’¹⁸ To let the past die like this—even by committing it to memory—is not to free yourself from it but to bolt the graveyard from inside. The ending line, as elegant as it is devastating, suggests a total affective inversion which retroactively unsettles even the ‘happy hours’ of the opening. The poem captures a form of lateness bleaker and more claustrophobic than mere forgetfulness, when not only the events themselves but their original goodness has vanished from sight. What seems most objectionable here is the impulse to make past pleasure an enemy of present contentment. While it may seem hyperbolic, ‘Wilt thou forget the happy hours’ nevertheless demonstrates the problem implicit in all evaluative comparisons of late and soon: the value of the past becomes a rival if not enemy of the present, that final satisfaction must be bought with the disparagement of earlier years, and past pleasure becomes an enemy of future contentment.

¹⁷ Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Poems of Shelley ed. Kelvin Everest and Geoffrey Matthews vol. 2 (London: Longman, 2000), 710–11. ¹⁸ Adorno, Essays on Music, 566.

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The contrast between Shelley’s lyric and a very late sonnet of Wordsworth’s is instructive. ‘To an Octogenarian’ begins with the same possibility Shelley’s poem fears, but works through it in a very different manner. Although the frequent syntactic breaks and rhetorical shifts suggest a rapid but rapidly shifting mind, what ultimately emerges is an austere clarity: A lose their object; Time brings forth No successors; and, lodged in memory, If love exist no longer, it must die,— Wanting accustomed food, must pass from earth, Or never hope to reach a second birth. This sad belief, the happiest that is left To thousands, share not Thou; howe’er bereft, Scorned, or neglected, fear not such a dearth. Though poor and destitute of friends thou art, Perhaps the sole survivor of thy race, One to whom Heaven assigns that mournful part The utmost solitude of age to face, Still shall be left some corner of the heart Where Love for living Thing can find a place.¹⁹

Memory cannot save the octogenarian. Love is ‘lodged in memory’ and yet perishes; it dies because friends and lovers have died. Although this octogenarian is not explicitly gendered, much of the language is evocative of Wordsworth’s portraits of aged men: the Old Cumberland Beggar, the Leech Gatherer, and that other sole survivor, Simon Lee. The cruelty of age in this case is not primarily incapacity or poverty (though poverty is certainly implied), but loneliness—‘utmost solitude’. While the addressee of ‘Wilt thou forget the happy hours’ has lost a single loving union, the octogenarian has lost everyone. The poem exemplifies Wordsworth’s unsettling ambivalence towards the suffering of the old (who are victims of misfortune, yet in aesthetic and even economic terms appear as a necessary part of the landscape). Like ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’, this is a cold pastoral in Empson’s sense: the poem naturalizes its inhabitants and their material situation. The breaks in the sonnet come in all the wrong places. Syntactic segmentation occurs in the middles of lines; the first sentence terminates in line five,

¹⁹ LP, 400–1.

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overriding the more conventional semantic break at the quatrain. The crucial rhetorical reversal comes buried in the centre of line seven: ‘share not Thou’. This is effectively a demand to throw out half the poem, and only adds to the sense of isolation that follows. Not only has the octogenarian no friends or children, he or she is even excluded from the union of ‘sad belief ’ held by ‘thousands’. Yet this injunction not to share is also the poem’s last, best hope: that lost affections do not die. This is a brittle, difficult poem that judders from one leg to the other, always at risk of losing its footing. It is all the more remarkable that this very late re-staging of the ‘Intimations’ ode (Wordsworth himself at seventy-five is not so far from his addressee) levers itself up out of ‘utmost solitude’ in order to demand, though not affirm, some affectionate bond with present things. Spiegelman objects that if love ‘cannot exist in memory alone’ the poem ‘offers no alternative to bring fulfilment’.²⁰ But if the poem discounts memory as sufficient home for love, it holds open the possibility that love for ‘living Thing’ might persist. ‘The future prophesied in “To an Octogenarian” is potentially bleak, but it remains a future’, as Peter Manning notes.²¹ It is only the poet’s ‘shall’ in the penultimate line that prophesies continuity, and saves poem and recipient from the cynicism of those who live ‘by memory rather than by hope’. Affections are impermanent when they are tilted purely towards dead objects, and saved—if they can be—by finding purchase on living forms. As in ‘Wilt thou forget the happy hours’, the pain of lateness lies not in forgetfulness but a kind of stultifying preservation. When it is ‘lodged in memory’, old joy decays and ultimately rots. Yet as Shelley’s poem suggests, this sickness is only contingently related to age; a young but bitter lover can equally fall victim. An octogenarian might have most cause to retreat into recollection, but even he need not. Aristotle’s portrait of age is only one possible mode of lateness, and one of my implicit arguments throughout this book has been that another sort is operative in Wordsworth. If there are such things as unremembered pleasures, then whatever our age or experience we will always be late in our apprehension of them. Such forms would be intrinsically late because having lost them is a necessary element of knowing them at all. Yet vanishing pleasures are not something to renounce or dismiss because their vanishing is all we ever have of them. Wordsworth complicates any straightforward

²⁰ Spiegelman, Wordsworth’s Heroes, 234 FN10. ²¹ Peter Manning, ‘Wordsworth in Youth and Age’ European Romantic Review 25 (3) (2014), 385–96, 395.

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sense of lateness with the thought that lost things can be at once out of our reach and yet able to confront and surprise us, as if dropping from the sky. Insofar as past events really matter, their efficacy lies ahead as much as it trails behind. This, I suggested in Chapter 4, is the animating discovery of ‘When first I journey’d hither’. Its circular logic, in which we are always already late, and yet we are never entirely too late, might even stand for the promise of romanticism at large. Only adults fully appreciate the restless sublimity of childhood, but they never quite cease to be children. By the same token, if we come to doubt that the intellectual and material profits of enlightenment outweigh the new forms of damage and disenchantment it brings—if ‘calculations have outrun conception’, as Shelley says—one of romanticism’s reparative gestures is to assert that what was lost in that process has not been utterly destroyed.²² Lateness might then be understood as a resolute if vulnerable effort to value rather than disparage our unsophisticated days, even though the knowledge we have subsequently won deprives us of full belief or participation in them. To be late like this is to risk tarrying with forms of attachment to past life which will always appear to some as stupid or fetishistic: as if the adult who longs for infant wisdom must desire its ignorant and ‘narcissistic certitude’, must believe that ‘stupidity contains a sacred element’.²³ But read more generously, it might be our fidelity to lost pleasure in spite of its loss—‘love’s faithfulness to its past loves’.²⁴

Ebbing Time The 1817 odes contain these multiple senses of lateness I have been tracing. I purposefully refer to them as later because, with respect to compositional dates, 1817 is not late at all. If one were to divide Wordsworth’s life into thirds, they would fall squarely in the middle period. Lateness is not the same as oldness; all lives have an earlier and later part, but not everyone gets to become old.²⁵ The lateness of the odes is important, however, because they self-consciously articulate a belated relation to the earlier, ‘greater’ ²² Percy Bysshe Shelley, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose ed. Donald Reiman and Neil Fraistat (New York: Norton, 2002), 530. ²³ Avital Ronnell, Stupidity (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2003), 44. ²⁴ Jonathan Lear, Love and its Place in Nature (New Haven: Yale UP, 1999), 196. ²⁵ As a simple comparison, consider the idea of the late Rimbaud. The category seems nonsensical for a poet who died young and gave up writing far younger, yet Les Illuminations are assembled by Rimbaud at the end of his writing career, and equally ‘late’ in his short life at twenty-one as Wordsworth was in 1817, by then forty-seven.

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‘Ode’ (‘There was a time’, or the ‘Intimations’ ode). They are successor poems in terms of mood and outlook. But the lateness of these poems is something consciously produced, and operates in multiple registers, measured and perceived time, historical circumstance and rhetorical posture. Insofar as the 1817 odes are late, theirs is a performative kind. The ‘Ode to Lycoris’ explicitly orients itself towards its progenitor in a gesture of recollection.²⁶ The poem’s opening declaration echoes the opening statement of belatedness in the earlier ‘Ode’. Both understand the past as a moment discontinuous with the present. The ‘age’ in this case refers not to an individual life but to a community of ‘Mortals’, who lived in a world of ‘lustre too intense / To be sustain’d’ (2–3). The transformation is at once intellectual, religious, and aesthetic, and the lost gleam of that time—the unsustainable lustre—stands both for pagan belief and classical art. But the ‘Ode to Lycoris’ transgresses its own boundary between early and late in a far more direct way. Dian and Cupid are initially figured as part of that past age, but when the figures of enchantment return in the second half of the first stanza, and thus in the poem’s present, the anachronism is wilful. In an act of conscious mythologizing, the poem transforms ‘swan-like specks of mountain snow’ into the pair of swans guiding Venus (16–18). The risk is that this gesture frames its own aesthetic content—and perhaps even pleasure itself—as a kind of error. Speaking to Isabella Fenwick, Wordsworth noted that this figure in ‘the last four lines of the first stanza’ was the first portion to be composed. He goes on to defend his use of ‘mythology & classical allusion’ like so: But surely one who has written so much in verse as I have done may be allowed to retrace his steps into the regions of fancy which delighted him in his boyhood, when he first became acquainted with the Greek & Roman Poets.²⁷

To go back to the old gods is to return to boyhood and its pleasures. Yet the childhoods of poet and society do not quite coincide: ‘mythology & classical allusion’ motion towards Wordsworth’s own childhood, yet the very designation of the tales as myth acknowledges Cupid and Diana as, even then, departed gods. The adult registers the loss of childhood delight, but turning

²⁶ All quotation from SP, 243–4. ²⁷ William Wordsworth, The Fenwick Notes of William Wordsworth ed. Jared Curtis (Penrith: Humanities-Ebooks, 2007), 121.

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back to what delighted the child, we can see that there was no original moment of presence; perhaps a young child could once have mistaken fanciful tales for the poetry of real life, but the ‘Greek & Roman’ gods were to him always fugitive inhabitants of myth. This return to myth, at least as it is recollected to Isabella Fenwick, can’t evade the suggestion that the appeal lies in a pleasurable error. That thought recalls the sonnet ‘The World is Too Much With Us’: ‘I’d rather be / A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn’.²⁸ Here too, fancy is at once attractive and obsolete. The framing of the Venus simile underscores the contrast: —Enough for one soft vernal day, If I, a Bard of ebbing time And nurtur’d in a fickle clime, May haunt this horned bay; (9–12)

The possibility ‘enough’ is articulated in the conditional, and the conditions are uncertain. ‘Ebbing time’ also reiterates the justification Wordsworth gives for his classical gods—a plea for indulgence in old age—even as ‘haunt’ suggests life not just aged but almost departed. What is more, ‘ebbing’ is a revision in the manuscript; the earlier term was ‘erring’.²⁹ To live in an ‘erring time’ might suggest a deluded society, but it equally implicates the poet, deserving of indulgence because he is now slipping into misjudgement. Yet this thought would undermine the whole poem, and must itself be struck out. Embrace a childhood pleasure, in the knowledge that it is now doubly anachronistic, or else resist temptation and forsake it: either way, enjoyment is confined to the past. If this seems an essentially nostalgic problem, the second and third stanzas between them suggest a compromise of sorts: ‘to balance and supply’, we ought to spend happy youth with darksome Autumn, and in age’s decline focus on the joy of Spring. On its face, the comparison recalls Smith’s handling of archetypes in the Theory of Moral Sentiments: each age has its needs and excesses, and requires a particular kind of sympathy. But the proposed solution is more complex than it initially appears. Autumn’s ‘sad fancies’ are not wholly sad; the harvest is pictured as ‘ripeness to the feeding gaze’, akin to the giddy hunger of

²⁸ P2V, 150.

²⁹ SP, 243.

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‘Tintern Abbey’. It is good for the young, the poem suggests, because they are not yet worried about their own shortening days, and so can tolerate the sad scenes. But the ‘year’s decline’ might only appear sad from the standpoint of ‘our own decay’, and the spring grass only greener from the other side (29–34). Just as the infant and adult of the ‘Intimations’ ode relate to the world in fundamentally different ways, the moods of the seasons here seems to depend more on viewpoint than any objective property. Fry notes that the poem’s recapturing of an early ‘gleam’ through myth allows it to correct the gloom of ‘Elegiac Stanzas’. The ode ‘not only restores this gleam but also diffuses it, a joy in widest commonality spread, indicating that the throes of grief are as unjust to seasonal variety as the exotic tastes of youth’.³⁰ If joy is spread widely, it is also rather thin in places. The hope is for an affective and intellectual middle position where ‘the Before and After premise that seems to shape all these odes no longer weighs in the balance’. Fry’s virtuosic account of the broader continuity and interplay between 1802 and 1817, his own ‘critic’s Intimations Ode’, is a pleasure to behold.³¹ But it is worth applying a little pressure to the basic antagonism in this case. Here is the rationale for youthful preference for twilight, crucial to the poem’s great balancing gesture: Sad fancies do we then affect, In luxury of disrespect To our own prodigal excess Of too familiar happiness. (23–6)

We have come a long way from the bliss ‘in that dawn to be alive’. The tone suggests an older speaker’s resentment: the youth has excess happiness and wastes his time indulgently concentrating on evenings, endings, and sadness. ‘Sad fancies do we then affect’: sadness is luxurious indulgence. On Fry’s account, the poem’s ‘chiastic theme’ is assembled ‘more for the simple symmetry of the thing than for any other reason’.³² But there is a certain bureaucratic logic that emerges when doing things this way: one might aim to ‘balance and supply’ by introducing more joy into old age, but the poem

³⁰ Paul Fry, Wordsworth and the Poetry of What We Are (New Haven: Yale UP, 2008), 193. Similarly, Larkin speaks of ‘a poetic of sufficiency and mutuality’. Wordsworth and Coleridge, 21. ³¹ Fry, Wordsworth and the Poetry of What We Are, 194–7. ³² Fry, Wordsworth and the Poetry of What We Are, 192–3.

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can achieve the same result with less investment by diminishing early enjoyment. By clamping down on demand side, the poem can blunt the decline from youth to age at no additional expense in optimism. It is as if, even in an imaginative work, ‘soon flies the little joy to man allow’d’, and the best we can do is shuffle it around.³³ In this way the ode shares with ‘Elegiac Stanzas’ a desire to limit past satisfaction which threatens to undermine a subsequent defensive position. If we read only the second and third stanzas, with their apparently interlocking pairs, the balancing act might succeed, save that in order to do so we must suppress, or even repress, everything that has occurred in the first stanza. If we do not, both youth’s ‘too familiar happiness’, studded with ‘sad fancies’, and age’s compensatory spring blossoms seem meagre in comparison to the gleam and lustre of the first stanza. The poem’s capacity for affective plenitude— its most credible articulation of happiness—is foreclosed the moment it repudiates its instantiating gesture. The poem relies on the separation of the ‘before’ and ‘after’ positions in order to justify handling them so differently. But, strictly speaking, there are at least four inter-related pairs in play: spring and autumn; youth and age; ‘early’ and ‘late’ society; the (pagan) gods who walk the earth and a world of deus absconditus. The stanzaic structure creates a layering effect, whereby the material in equivalent structural positions (society’s earlier ‘age’ in lines 1–4 and human youth in lines 19–22, for instance) appears rhetorically equivalent. Indeed, there are multiple analogies operating between the pairs. Yet to read the poem as a grid of equivalences would be to abandon a great deal of what actually happens in it. Ultimately, the ‘Ode to Lycoris’ demonstrates the difficulty of manipulating joys in this way. It is as if the poem knows that there must be, in theory, a way to harness the energy of the ‘early’ (pagan religion, childhood, Wordsworth’s own previous compositions) but it cannot, in practice, make it work. Yet we need look only as far as the ‘swan-like specks of mountain snow’ to see that it had already happened, in a moment of gleaming, short-circuiting of new and old. The second and final stanzas, attempting a balancing act, overlook the fact that the poem’s pleasure and aesthetic commitments stem from the transgression of a linear, narrative lifecourse; at the heart of the poem is a ‘fond delusion’ that pleasures past are not pleasures lost. The very attempt to fix a stable, ³³ The line is Wordsworth’s; his allusion in the Descriptive Sketches to Virgil’s Georgics offer a remarkable through-line from Wordsworth’s 1793 work, through the 1807 ode, to the odes of 1817: ‘In youth alone, unhappy mortals live; / But, ah! the mighty bliss is fugitive’. DS, 100.

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balanced position—between pagan sublimity and modern disenchantment, or between giddy infant bliss and ‘our own decay’—ensures that it slips away.

Happiness, in Theory Happiness is in some measure evaluative; it allows, and even compels, us to understand pleasure as something other than an immediate and transient phenomenon. That evaluation cannot take place purely abstractly: a spreadsheet of Gross National Happiness will always miss the role of happiness as a mood in and through time, irreducible to a series of survey datapoints. Equally, narrative literary evaluation can lead to perverse results, by prioritizing a retrospective trendline over lived experience. Nowhere is this clearer than in writing about late life. Helen Small, I noted, suggests that lyric may be the one literary form to escape this impulse, although this point is not developed. One possible reason is that lyric favours particularity over generality, detail over comprehensive scope, and sustained notice over dynamic analysis. It is more inclined to think through subtle observations of mood or tone rather than ordered events—texture over shape, collocation over causality. ‘Often, we are alerted to a potential mood in a text by the irritation and fascination provoked by a single word or small detail—the hint of a different tone or rhythm.’³⁴ A lyric articulation of happiness offers a way to think about lateness as something other than a decline (or indeed ascent) over a lifetime. This makes happiness less calculating, but no less complicated. The ‘Anecdote for Fathers’ suggests that happiness might numb misery, and at its most concentrated function as an anaesthetic.³⁵ The ‘Ode to Lycoris’ entertains the idea that even when the conditions are perfect, we might simply get bored of the happiness we have. Perhaps worst of all, there is an apparent antagonism between happiness and thought: thinking about happiness is the easiest way to sabotage it, and conversely, we might worry that happiness is only the feeling of not thinking too much. It’s not easy to treat happiness critically yet generously. The work that might have been Freud’s great book about happiness, Unhappiness in Civilization (as its original title might have been translated), approaches it in a rather limited way. Much of the analysis is thinly biological: ‘happiness ³⁴ Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Atmosphere, Mood, Stimmung: On a Hidden Potential in Literature trans. Erik Butler (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2012), 17. ³⁵ LB, 71–3.

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in the strictest sense’ is the release of dammed up unpleasurable tension, and so ‘only possible as an episodic phenomenon’. For this reason, ‘our possibilities of happiness are already restricted by our constitution’.³⁶ Understood as a configuration of pleasure, happiness is for the most part conceptually subordinated to the economic problems of pleasure I discuss in Chapter 3.³⁷ Freud’s tendency to think of happiness as a problem of resource allocation is perhaps clearest in his advice to an unhappy friend that he simply look for happiness somewhere else.³⁸ Rather than start our excursion into the critique of happiness here, I start with Kant, who is, like Wordsworth, acutely concerned with the apparent opposition between happiness and thought. He will lead us to some nineteenth-century problems of happiness, before we arrive, in the end, back with psychoanalysis. In a relatively early (precritical) work, The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God, Kant works to insulate philosophy from the practicalities of happiness. Providence does not require, he argues, that ‘the insights so necessary to our happiness should depend on the sophistry of subtle inferences’. ‘Nonetheless’, Kant concedes, ‘one cannot refrain from searching for this demonstration, in the hope that it may present itself somewhere.’³⁹ These divergent statements position philosophy carefully next to theology (you don’t need a metaphysical proof in order to have faith, but the faithful might still hope for one). On the one hand, they distinguish Kant’s project from the ‘Physico-theology’ which appeals to the happy order of nature as evidence for God, and they free him from the supposition that philosophy is necessary to happiness.⁴⁰ On the other hand, why secure a proof for Providence if you don’t need one? Perhaps there is a double temptation here: it’s tempting to hope that

³⁶ Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols ed. James Strachey (London: Vintage, 2001), 21:76–7. ³⁷ A notable exception is Freud’s suggestion that a form of withdrawal from a life of the drives may be possible, and with it, ‘the happiness of quietness’. Freud associates such life with ‘the worldly wisdom of the East’, and it is difficult not to see this, like Marx’s so-called Asiatic mode of production, as a way of insulating the theory by Orientalizing the exception. Standard Edition, 21:77. ³⁸ See Freud’s letter to Gizella Pálos of 17 December, 1911. Sigmund Freud, The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi Volume 1, 1908–1914 trans. Peter T. Hoffer (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1971), 319–21. ³⁹ Immanuel Kant, Theoretical Philosophy, 1755–1770 ed. David Walford (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003), 111. ⁴⁰ See Frederick Beiser, ‘Kant’s intellectual development: 1746–1781’ in The Cambridge Companion to Kant ed. Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992), 26–61, 46.

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philosophy may yet prove this world good enough for our happiness, and tempting to search for happiness in the work of metaphysics.⁴¹ A similar move to insulate philosophy from happiness recurs some twenty years later, in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Here the point is to separate the dignity of the moral law from the contingency of empirical satisfaction, and thus separate the Groundwork from utilitarianism. It leads Kant to this distinction: all the elements that belong to the concept of happiness are, without exception, empirical, that is, they must be borrowed from experience, and nevertheless for the idea of happiness, there is required an absolute whole, a maximum of well-being in my present condition and in every future condition.⁴²

We find our happiness in experience alone. At the same time, whatever empirical happiness we find contrasts with the idea of happiness, an idea so wide in scope that it seems to block out any hope of its practical satisfaction. The idea is a totality—‘the sum of all our inclinations’—yet its contents are always particulars.⁴³ Happiness does not have philosophical content; it is ‘not an ideal of reason but of imagination’.⁴⁴ In fact, philosophy may well be its antithesis. The more that reason grapples ‘with the enjoyment of life and with happiness’, Kant remarks ‘so much the further does one get away from true satisfaction’. The problem with intellectuals, he more or less says, is that their deliberations ‘have in fact only brought more trouble upon themselves instead of gaining happiness’ which is why they come to envy those ‘closer to the guidance of mere natural instinct’.⁴⁵ Kant’s broader aim is to divide the good from the felicific, and thus separate duty from inclination. Happiness is more like beauty, in that neither can be determined by a priori rules or maxims. Yet unlike beauty, there is no hope of asserting it universally; happiness ‘can and must be very different in different subjects’ and is, in this sense, always a matter of personal taste.⁴⁶ Reduced to pure contingency, ⁴¹ On the temptations of metaphysics, see Small, The Long Life, 178–208. ⁴² Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals ed. and trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997), 28, my emphases. ⁴³ See Alison Hills, ‘Kant on Happiness and Reason’ History of Philosophy Quarterly, 23 (3) (2006): 243–61. ⁴⁴ Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 29. ⁴⁵ Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 9. ⁴⁶ Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997), 23.

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it can only be described rather than explained; conversely, the idea of happiness—as the sum of all inclinations—comes to look orthogonal to ethical life. Happiness will not make us wise or good, then. But an even more cutting suggestion emerges in fragments written around the publication of the Groundwork, where Kant posits that ‘we cannot conceive of any happiness except in the effort to work through obstacles and hazards in the attempt at it’ and wonders whether happiness is even desirable, since it requires that we ‘desire, i.e., lack something, in order to attain it’.⁴⁷ These more aphoristic worries lead beyond Kant’s system, to a general anxiety that extends well into the nineteenth century: if happiness exhausts our desire, and teaches us nothing, then it might be a kind of stasis. ‘Happy the people whose annals are tiresome’, Thomas Carlyle writes, citing Montesquieu, before going on to offer a further aphorism, ‘mad as it looks’: ‘happy the people whose annals are vacant’.⁴⁸ George Eliot, in a similar vein, remarks that ‘the happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history’.⁴⁹ And in Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, Hegel offers a systematic formulation of the historical problem: It is possible to consider history from the point of view of happiness, but history is not the soil in which happiness grows. The periods of happiness in it are the blank pages of history. . . . All ends of importance in world history must be secured by means of abstract volition and energy.⁵⁰

Too familiar happiness; the blank pages of history: happiness makes nothing happen. For Soni, this worry that happiness is a historical non-event can be explained by the privatization of happiness during the eighteenth century: once happiness is thought to be an interior state, rather than an evaluation of external events, it becomes a strictly subjective and indeterminate matter. In excluding concerns over happiness from moral duty, Kant is only articulating ‘the most conceptually rigorous version of the modern liberal state’, a state which upholds freedom but refuses to define the good life, and in which

⁴⁷ Immanuel Kant, Notes and Fragments. ed. and trans. Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010), 331–2. ⁴⁸ Thomas Carlyle, The Works of Thomas Carlyle Vol. 2: The French Revolution: A History ed. Henry Duff Traill (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010), 27. ⁴⁹ George Eliot, Mill on the Floss ed. Gordon S. Haight (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2015), 355. ⁵⁰ G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, Introduction trans. H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1975), 78–9.

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there can be no right to happiness.⁵¹ The eighteenth century’s philosophy, like its novels, depoliticizes and abstracts happiness by framing it as an inward calculation (in which almost any indignity can be mitigated by the right reward) rather than a motivating factor which might be shared among people. Soni’s account, traced chiefly through narrative prose, captures an important part of the fate of happiness, but I want to highlight a second thread, perhaps clearer in the workings of lyric than narrative, by focusing on the indifference happiness shows to reason. We can’t be reasoned into happiness, and other people’s happiness often seems unreasonable or reasonless (think of the surprising objects of children’s happiness, like a weather-cock). Kant’s suspicion of happiness turns on its refusal to be bound by reason. Romanticism’s ambivalence about reason is coupled to its equally ambivalent longing for happiness (as an aesthetic end, but also a way to understand non-reason as something other than irrationality), stretching from Rousseauian reverie to the late romantic refrain of the early Lukács, in which happiness is both the absence and apotheosis of philosophy. ‘Philosophy is really homesickness’, he writes, citing Novalis. ‘That is why the happy ages have no philosophy, or why (it comes to the same thing) all men in such ages are philosophers, sharing the utopian aim of every philosophy.’⁵² Happiness is coming home, and home is where the owl of Minerva goes to roost. Where philosophy is at once suspended and completed. The thought lingers on—you might say that romanticism lingers on—in this ambivalence. In Potkay’s study of joy, happiness ‘has no story to tell’.⁵³ And psychoanalysis, of course, excels in its appetite for people’s ambivalent resistance to happiness.⁵⁴ For Soni, the eighteenth-century novel instantiates a hermeneutic of happiness: a model in which all the trials involved in finding happiness can be said to have ‘meant something’. But for Kant, and in a different way for psychoanalysis, what makes happiness troublesome is precisely the difficulty of knowing what, if anything, it means. If acting in accordance with duty can make you happy, then are you really dutiful at all? If happiness is a concentrated satisfaction of desire, can it be anything more than a pause in the tumultuous life of the drives? In a short, brilliant essay on ‘Using ⁵¹ Soni, Mourning Happiness, 368. On the ‘right’ to happiness see 1–18. ⁵² Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1974), 29. ⁵³ Potkay, Joy, 20. ⁵⁴ See Adam Phillips, ‘The Value of Frustration’ world picture 3 (2009): 1–14.

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People’, Barbara Johnson draws a deeper analogy. For it to work, Kant’s moral law must draw its authority from reason alone: it can’t depend on coercion or appeals to our self-interest. If these conditions hold, we didn’t have the moral law foisted on us, but nor did we ever have a personal reason to seek it out. We just found ourselves using it. This, Johnson argues, is the logic of Winnicott’s transitional object: an early, beloved possession that is ‘neither “internal” to the baby (that is, hallucinatory, like, at first, the mother’s breast) nor “external,” like reality, of which at first the baby has no knowledge, but something in between’.⁵⁵ The transitional object is neither discovered nor created (that is, neither of those labels adequately capture its value). As the first ‘not-me’ object, it helps the infant map out a relation between self and world—‘to open a space for experience’. Both cases require that we tolerate a ‘paradox of unlocatability’.⁵⁶ To understand an object is to tolerate the possibility of losing it. And what Winnicott offers psychoanalysis, we might say, is a way of tolerating the possibility of losing control of some cherished ideas—in other words, a way of tolerating the remarkable inventiveness of even its youngest patients. Psychoanalysis might best understand the possibility of happiness when it is not a state that is achieved but a world which is made. To put all these pieces together, we might ask: what it would look like if happiness was understood as ‘a space for experience’? The thought seems to have crossed Kant’s mind sometime in the 1780s, and appears in this fragment found on a loose sheet collected in the Duisburgsche Nachlaß: (Happiness is not something felt but thought. It is also not a thought that can be taken from experience but one which first of all makes experience possible. But not as if one could in this way know happiness in all of its elements, rather the a priori condition under which alone one can be capable of happiness. All of our actions that are aimed at empirical happiness must be in accord with this rule, otherwise there will be no unity in them, which [breaks off ])⁵⁷

Rather than representing an impossible metric, against which the empirical world will never measure up, happiness would be what makes any possible ⁵⁵ Barbara Johnson, ‘Using People: Kant with Winnicott’ in The Barbara Johnson Reader: The Surprise of Otherness eds Melissa Feuerstein, Bill Johnson González, Lili Porten, et al. (Durham: Duke UP, 2014), 262–74, 263. ⁵⁶ Johnson, ‘Using People’, 265. ⁵⁷ Kant, Notes and Fragments, 467.

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satisfaction thinkable in the first place. The thought of happiness would be a necessary, if formally empty, precondition for making sense of the empirical world. Rather than prescribing certain goods, it would risk hoping for satisfaction without knowing the form it might take.⁵⁸ These discussions offer some new vocabulary to articulate the antagonisms in Wordsworth’s ‘Ode to Lycoris’. The poem understands happiness as a matter of the relation between early and late life. The young can dwell in sadness but the old need happiness to compensate for their decay: this is its rhetorical position. Yet the stated aim to ‘balance’ these states falls short of satisfying. The poet seems determined to stake out in advance the joy he will need, as if past experience allows him to accurately predict his future. He proceeds according to rules when the poem’s instantiating moment of pleasure was, as Wordsworth admitted to Isabella Fenwick, a knowing transgression. If we follow the logic of the poem, rather than the rhetoric of its speaker, the poem’s genuine enjoyment comes from the unexpected return of something ‘early’ which does not belong: the Classical gods of childhood reading. According to the Fenwick note, this surprise return is not only found in the four lines of verse with which the composition began, but also in the poem’s visual register. Wordsworth recounts that: These specks of snow reflected in the lake, & so transferred, as it were, to the subaqueous sky, reminded me of the Swans which the fancy of the ancient classic poets yoked to the car of Venus.⁵⁹

This is a triple reflection: the mountain glint is reflected onto the surface of this steady lake, and so too is the image of the sky, so that three superimposed images of water, sky, and peak emerge as a triply compound vision (mountain snow/swimming/in the sky) which brought to Wordsworth’s mind the image of Venus’ swan-drawn chariot. All this occurred, it seems, with no summoning or conscious art, only the overlaid images of the water and the overlaid images in the memory. It was free association, not the kind of organized enjoyment the poem subsequently advocates. Where the ⁵⁸ In such a thought I see (admittedly, rather hopefully) a possibility to situate what Jonathan Lear has called the ‘imaginative excellence’ of finding new forms of hope. Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2006), 117. This indeterminacy would leave the wish for happiness forever vulnerable to conscription into other cultural logics (this is the real cruelty of Berlant’s ‘cruel optimism’) but crucially leaves open the possibility that what satisfies us might in the first instance unsettle or utterly surprise us (a thought which brings us closer to Snediker’s ‘queer optimism’). ⁵⁹ Wordsworth, The Fenwick Notes, 120–1.

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gleams of earth and sky overlap, present and past feeling intersect.⁶⁰ The snowy specks in the sky, Wordsworth says, reminded him of ‘the fancy of the ancient classic poets’, and by extension, his childhood’s imagination in which the classical gods were free to roam. In this way, a thought from long ago made happiness possible when it was answered, if only for a moment, by the gleaming lake. The god reveals herself when the poet is not looking, and indeed had long ceased to look. Beyond any possibility of calculation and supply, satisfaction here is, from the moment it can be felt, already late. This happy anachronism is compromised by the poem’s a strictly temporalized model of pleasure, and like a speck of snow, it noiselessly melts.

Communion Repeated As a prospect, happiness tends to look like a problem: we can’t predict it, only hope for it, and that hope can lead to our distraction, exploitation, or simple discontent. In these cases, as in Keston Sutherland’s essay ‘Happiness in Writing’, what emerges is Wordsworth’s ‘idea of happiness but more importantly still his activity of straining after it in writing through the passionate trial of enduring and ineliminable doubt’.⁶¹ Understood retrospectively, on the other hand, happiness might be a thought whose claims on the empirical world can only be appreciated after the fact, when something turns out to have allowed happiness. A thought whose low utopian gesture is to posit a world in which satisfaction is possible.⁶² Another of Wordsworth’s later odes provides a third vantage: it is written from the point of experiencing, not searching for, a moment of pleasure. This is another consciously late poem, and perhaps even ‘Wordsworth’s last great visionary poem’.⁶³ The central prospect of the ‘Ode, Composed upon an Evening of Extraordinary Splendor and Beauty’ is a harmonious sunset.⁶⁴ Evening light blends with all ⁶⁰ The combined pleasures and illusions here are strongly reminiscent of his recollection of Lyulph’s Tower, discussed in Chapter 1. ‘Wordsworth can know that Lyulph’s pleasure-house is there and pretend he doesn’t; he can frame the reflection as a normal appearance and pretend that it is an extraordinary illusion.’ Rei Terada, Looking Away: Phenomenality and Dissatisfaction, Kant to Adorno (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2009), 65. ⁶¹ Keston Sutherland, ‘Happiness in Writing’ world picture 3 (2009): 1–13, 12. ⁶² On ‘low’ utopia, see Anahid Nersessian, Utopia, Limited: Romanticism and Adjustment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2015), 21. ⁶³ Stephen Gill, ‘ “Affinities Preserved”: Poetic Self-Reference in Wordsworth’ Studies in Romanticism 24 (4) (1985): 531–49, 545. Cf. Lawrence Kramer, ‘The “Intimations” Ode and Victorian Romanticism’ Victorian Poetry 18 (4) (1980): 315–35, 315. ⁶⁴ All quotation from ‘reading text 1’, SP 255–60.

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the objects it ‘strikes with gem-like hues’ (28). Light gilds and brightens the animals on the slopes, recalling the ordinary objects ‘apparelled in celestial light’ in its predecessor ‘Ode’. Indeed, allusions to the earlier poem are everywhere.⁶⁵ In this ode as in its ‘Great’ forebear, the light offers extraordinary powers of perception. But in a clear revision to the ‘Intimations’ ode and the ‘Ode to Lycoris’, this poem suggests that happiness might lie right here before us—not as an unmediated infant vision, but as a return to clarity in the present, like a camera drifting back into focus on its original subject. The beauty of the visionary moment is so great that it could challenge angelic music: Ye Sons of light, If such communion were repeated now Nor harp nor Seraph’s voice could move Sublimer rapture, holier love, Than doth this silent spectacle (15–19)

As the allusion to the earlier ode that begins in line nine makes clear, the Seraph’s song is the music of infancy. The comparison is curious, since the song belongs to a time already lost (‘when field and watry cove / With modulated echoes rang’ (9–10)) yet for the purpose of the comparison, it must be, in some way, comparable to the present visual spectacle. The music cannot be brought back, but even if it could, it wouldn’t exceed what I can see now. This comparison may surprise a reader more familiar with the ‘Great’ ode, not least because so much infant pleasure in the earlier poem is figured as light and vision. That light is reclaimed on behalf of the present evening, which breaks forth luminous and self-sufficient. It might be possible to leave infancy to care for itself and to enjoy the present on its own terms. The familiar antagonism between earlier pleasure and later ‘competing’ pleasure is mitigated here by expressing one in the visual register, the other aural. At the same time, this is not a perfect solution; the erroneous, or at least difficult, comparison between a vision and a song stands for the greater difficulty of comparing early life to late, and comparing lost feeling to

⁶⁵ For direct allusions, compare ‘Splendor and Beauty’ lines 9–14 to ‘Ode’ 1–4; 38 to 199; 54 to 126. More general similarities, such as the idea of a morning of infancy, the songs of glory, the use of light, the sudden clarity of vision, and so on, occupy almost the whole poem.

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the experience at hand—categories which, I have suggested, are ultimately incommensurable. While the poem can separate present pleasure from earlier pleasure (and thus, separate itself from the previous ode), this separation is not stable or permanent. By the beginning of the third stanza, the question of this pleasure’s source is raised, and even here Wordsworth does not evade the thought that all pleasure might be a kind of recollection. What sets this ode apart is its duration.⁶⁶ The translation of glory from song into sight is also a translation from the diachronic to the synchronic; music extends over time, but this rapture unfurls across the sky. Miller’s study of the ‘invention of evening’ treats poetic handling of dusk as ‘a small lyric quantum of history’ which registers broader reflections of temporality and history.⁶⁷ This method is used to considerable effect in the case of ‘Splendor and Beauty’: In light of Wordsworth’s earlier lyrics, this temporal frame is notably Coleridgian in its lyric immediacy. Where once he represented the course of his life in abstract phases from morning to evening, Wordsworth now lingers in the present moment. . . . Whereas the lost gleam of the Immortality Ode seemed to be entirely suprasensual, the gleam of the later Evening Ode appears visibly in the sky, as if the metaphorical ‘sober colouring’ of adulthood had been reinterpreted as a momentary spectacle[.]⁶⁸

That the ode resists a model of life as ‘abstract phases’ in favour of ‘lyric immediacy’ might be one reason why it appears able to accept the presence of something genuinely pleasurable. This also suggests that lyric might think about lateness otherwise than as a far point along a linear scale—as a mood or attunement to sensation. The scene is short enough to be limited only to the evening in question; the poem posits its own enjoyment as a form of ‘lyric immediacy’. If this is the case, however, enjoyment is always stalked by the risk of its possible mediation. Like the other later odes, ‘Splendor and Beauty’ operates through a finelyweighted opposition. Enjoyment of the incandescent sky depends on it being

⁶⁶ As Kelley notes, ‘the duration of the scene implicitly challenges the transience (“fallings from us, vanishings”) which is the double focus of loss and recompense in the “Intimations Ode” ’. Theresa M. Kelley, Wordsworth’s Revisionary Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988), 168. ⁶⁷ Christopher Miller, The Invention of Evening: Perception and Time in Romantic Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006), 10. ⁶⁸ Miller, Invention of Evening, 109–10.

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experienced as independent and non-referential; in a long, central passage, this is exactly what happens, yet at the poem’s extremities, it that same experience becomes referential and thin. ‘This effulgence’ becomes not ‘what is’, but ‘what can be’ (1–8). Towards the end of the second stanza, the poet expresses doubt that the vision before him is purely natural in origin, diverting attention from the present moment to the heaven which is at once an unreachable past and a hoped-for afterlife. By the time we reach the final stanza, evening’s delight has been re-understood as morning’s glory renewed, even though it seemed lost. A sure sign of happiness is converted into a promissory note: O let thy grace remind me of the light, Full early lost and fruitlessly deplored, Which, at this moment, on my waking sight Appears to shine, by miracle restored. My Soul though yet confined to earth Rejoices in a second birth! (53–8)

The role of ‘let’ in line 53 is, ultimately, the reverse of its conventional function. As an invocation, the line asks for something it already has (the recognition of ‘light / Full early lost’) or else something it cannot have (the ‘early’ light itself). The effect of this request is to unsettle the very thing on which the thoughts of grace depend. In a recapitulation of the aesthetic problem we have seen in Wordsworth’s gleams, the object of enjoyment now risks becoming an appearance in the negative or deceptive sense (‘mere appearance’). Lost light now appears to shine, as if miracle were possibility. We are prompted to doubt that this ‘waking sight’ is truly visible, or else that the poet is truly awake. Either the present vision is a poor replica of the earlier scene, or else the poem crosses noiselessly into a dream. We are left with two notions of satisfaction, one as recapitulation of the past, the other as overcoming, even indifference to, past and future wishes. As Benjamin says of Proust, ‘[t]here is a dual will to happiness, a dialectics of happiness: a hymnic and an elegiac form. The one is the unheard-of, the unprecedented, the height of bliss; the other, the eternal repetition, the eternal restoration of the original, the first happiness.’⁶⁹ By the end of the ⁶⁹ Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 2 1927–1934. eds Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999), 239.

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poem, the former notion will close down the latter by diminishing lost earthly pleasure in favour of the anticipated ‘second birth’. The poem’s jussive act does not free but restricts, and the poem’s present pleasure becomes a station on the path to an afterlife, its joy hardly more than a tacit wish for death. The poem’s published version of 1820 hammers home this turn by means of a heavenly staircase which appears in the third stanza. At the same time, the 1820 version appears to take an epitextual swipe at the very notion of divine presence, by means of a prose postscript declaring Jacob’s ladder to be ‘produced either by watery vapours, or sunny haze’.⁷⁰ Depending on your point of view, this either undercuts the effort to typologize pleasure, moderating the poem’s tendency to diminish its own joy, or else it makes the situation twice as bad: pleasure is turned into a sign, but not even an authentic sign. In either case, nothing persists; ‘the visionary splendor fades’ as the sun sets (59). The poem encounters its own hermeneutic problem with happiness: in order for the evening’s effulgence to be appreciated, it must not be understood to signify anything, for the moment at which the scene becomes a divine reminder, the impulse to interpret drains its aesthetic and affective power. We are led to the conclusion that its happiness must be meaningless, or else it will be instrumentalized by one or another system. Yet if happiness means nothing, it might amount to the euthanasia of reason: ‘Thought was not; in enjoyment it expired.’⁷¹ Quite unlike this radiant and receding sky is Wordsworth’s second ode to Lycoris, entitled ‘To the Same’.⁷² I have placed it last in my discussion because, as I read it, this is the poem which gets closest to, yet ends furthest from, satisfaction, and therefore knits together most tightly the questions of happiness, lateness, and age. In particular, some of the draft material which precedes the published versions of ‘To the Same’ imagines a form in which happiness no longer requires the immediacy of satisfaction. In the published version of 1820, this compelling but delicate proposition has been eroded, and so my method here will be to trace that arc of happiness from draft to publication. The poem’s origin is bound up with that of ‘Nutting’. Fragments anticipating both poems appear on the double spread 63v–64r of DC MS. 15, ⁷⁰ SP, 260. ⁷¹ E, 55. Without any suggestion of sublime self-shattering, Wordsworth might be understood here to imply a model in which satisfaction is inherently beyond explanation, because finding a reason for an enjoyment is the surest way of sabotaging it, and so for enjoyment to persist it would in turn need to snuff out the restless operation of reason. For a different but relevant model see Joan Copjec, ‘Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason’ in Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 201–37. ⁷² Quotation from SP, 251–5.

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in a draft not easily reducible to either subsequent poem. What I present here is a series of snapshots intended to illustrate the shifting relation between presence and pleasure. I start with an earlier draft of the poem entitled ‘Travelling’, which shares several lines with ‘To the Same’, and is reproduced by the Cornell editors of the Lyrical Ballads from Sara Hutchinson’s transcription in DC MS. 41.⁷³ It begins: This is the spot:—how mildly does the Sun Shine in between the fading leaves! the air In the habitual silence of this wood Is more than silent: and this bed of heath Where shall we find so sweet a resting-place! (1–5)

The passage bears some resemblance to ‘When first I journey’d hither’. In both poems, the shaded bower offers an ideal dwelling. In her journal, Dorothy draws attention to the opening affirmation when she recounts rereading the poem to William as he lay in bed. ‘[H]e was soothed & I left him. “This is the Spot” over & over again.’⁷⁴ The declaration is anti-comparative: this is the spot, and we can stop looking. I can’t help but hear in these lines a late but satisfying reply to the opening lines of Descriptive Sketches: ‘Were there, below, a spot of holy ground’. Descriptive Sketches savoured a similar thought in the conditional; its opening subject, according to the poem’s evocatively tortuous summary, is ‘Happiness (if she had been to be found on Earth)’.⁷⁵ When ‘Travelling’ quietly locates an actual spot on earth, it might seem to anticipate in its ‘more than silent’ stillness the silent vision of ‘Splendor and Beauty’. Two differences are crucial for its subsequent development. Firstly, this pleasure is not a singular apprehension but a shared experience. Secondly, its time has already passed: Come!—let me see thee sink into a dream Of quiet thoughts,—protracted till thine eye Be calm as water, when the winds are gone

⁷³ Quotation from LB, 307. ⁷⁴ Dorothy Wordsworth, The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals ed. Pamela Woof (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002), 96. ⁷⁵ DS, 36–8.

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And no one can tell whither.—My sweet Friend! We two have had such happy hours together That my heart melts in me to think of it. (6–11)

In this case—unlike in the ‘Ode to Lycoris’—it does not seem to matter that the pleasure at the poem’s heart has already occurred. Those ‘happy hours together’ seems to be enough. In practical terms, this is an address to the other who also experienced them; once again, a sister’s continued presence underwrites the poem’s faith in its own future.⁷⁶ The fact that this is shared pleasure (and thus never wholly private) suggests one reason why these lines remain reflective rather than analytic. The affective economy has been transformed, and the imperative to ‘balance and supply’ rendered unnecessary. Happiness elsewhere does not undercut but affirm satisfaction in the present. The poem is a lullaby, but its calm sleep is not so far from the restfulness Hartman finds in the Lucy lyrics: ‘the seductive image of an “easeful death” ’.⁷⁷ The poem forces an interpretive decision which gauges our own resistance to happiness: if we doubt that there are desireless states other than depression and death—if we believe that frustration and resistance are necessary to health—then it may well seem that this poem slips gently into oblivion. On the other hand, if the poem moves us to believe it, we might accept a more deflationary account of happiness: not that it means having all the pleasure we want (which may indeed be ‘too familiar’) but that happiness might be merely a position from which we do not succeed in sabotaging our enjoyment. That is, happiness might be nothing more than a state in which pleasure can remain pleasurable when it is no longer present. This is a

⁷⁶ Equally notable is the singular case amongst the drafts (a variant of ‘Nutting’ in DC MS. 24) in which the invitation itself is plural and inclusive: ‘Come, let us sink’. As Eric Walker points out, in a cluster of poems so closely associated with Dorothy (and premised on the siblings’ shared joy) it is especially significant that in this case the address effectively collapses the poet/observer relationship of ‘Tintern Abbey’ into a position of mutuality, and that the subsequent revision ‘duplicates and reverses the proxy structure’ of the more famous address. LB, 305; Eric C. Walker, Marriage, Writing, and Romanticism: Wordsworth and Austen After War (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2009), 116. Lucy Newlyn evocatively locates the poem within a long relationship of shared reading and writing. Lucy Newlyn, William and Dorothy Wordsworth: ‘All in Each Other’ (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013), 303–4. ⁷⁷ Geoffrey Hartman, ‘Wordsworth and Metapsychology’ in Wordsworth’s Poetic Theory: Knowledge, Language, Experience eds Alexander Regier and Stefan Uhlig (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 195–211, 204.

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question worth holding in mind while we continue to analyse the poem’s development. The closing sentence of ‘Travelling’, split over the final two lines, ends the poem on a note of deep contentment. The recognition of past pleasure might have led to an expression of present sadness, echoing the parting shot of ‘Simon Lee’.⁷⁸ The difference is the continuity of persons: whether read as a brother’s note to a sister, or as a draft on its way to the more highly mediated and depersonalized lyric which emerges through revision, this is a poem which believes in the possibility for mutual pleasure, and in a mutuality which can outlive the pleasure that created it. Perhaps most importantly, happiness is not considered a finite resource—having a great deal yesterday does not reduce its possibility today. In this poem the tension is not between happiness and lack, but between an articulation of affective plenitude and the risk of an enervating, even deathly, satisfaction. In a later, expanded version of ‘Travelling’, found in DC MS. 86, the satisfaction suggested by the earlier draft is preserved, but the poem’s conclusion is more complicated.⁷⁹ The closing sentences beginning ‘My sweet Friend!’ are expanded into this passage: Dearest Friend! We two have had such blissful hours together That were power granted to replace them (fetched From out the pensive shadows where they lie) In the first warmth of their original sunshine, Loth should I be to use it. Passing sweet Are the domains of tender memory! (12–18)

The ‘happy hours’ have deepened into ‘blissful hours’, and an understanding of past pleasure as a co-presence (not as the present’s jealous rival) is further elaborated. ‘Wordsworth does not forswear the object of memory . . . but the immediacy (“first warmth”) of remembered experience.’⁸⁰ Pleasure’s immediacy is not a necessary component of satisfaction, and so there is no desire to return to the ‘original sunshine’. ‘Passing sweet’ then, can be understood as ‘exceedingly sweet’, but not without raising the possibility of sweet

⁷⁸ LB, 64–7. ⁷⁹ Quotation from SP 251–2. ⁸⁰ Douglass H. Thomson, ‘ “Sport of Transmutations”: The Evolution of Wordsworth’s “To Lycoris” ’ Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 27 (4) (1987): 581–93, 591.

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passing—the satisfaction that persists when those ‘domains of tender memory’ pass silently out of mind. The memory of having had pleasure might stand independently of any wish to restore those hours through memory. This draft of ‘Travelling’ suggests another conception of the thought of happiness. Rather than the a priori thought which, for Kant, anticipates happiness and makes it possible, but never touches it, the poem suggests a thought that is cast by joy and persists when joy subsides—the happy hour’s pensive shadow. Once we relinquish the idea that the past exists only through memory, it becomes clear that for Wordsworth forgetfulness does not entail destruction, nor absence and loss the end of joy. Here the proposal is articulated almost as a whisper, yet goes even further: satisfaction might lie in the mere recognition that happiness occurred. In the thoughts that happiness makes thinkable. This is a form of lateness beyond any possible balancing of accounts. Past pleasure is required by present thought, but there is no question of rivalry because they are two forms of the same. Elapsed satisfaction is worth holding fast. ‘Travelling’ is a poem in which no actual travelling occurs. The spatial metaphors employed in this draft (memory’s ‘domains’, ‘widespread landscape’ opposed to ‘the internal wealth / Of quiet thought’) evince no desire to cross boundaries, geographic or mental. The poem remains antitopographical, so to speak. The situating declaration of the shorter DC MS. 41 version of ‘Travelling’ has evolved from ‘this is the spot’ into ‘here let us rest’. But as in the earlier draft, there is a remarkable immanence of pleasure. The absolute refusal to believe that satisfaction depends on some other place or time recalls, in a quiet way, the great optimism of the French revolutionary moment: Not in Utopia, subterraneous fields, Or some secreted Island Heaven knows where; But in the very world which is the world Of all of us, the place on which in the end We find our happiness, or not at all. (1805a, X.723–7)

The ‘world’ of happiness is at once vast enough to be completely inclusive (a world that, if it will admit any of us, will admit us all) and sufficiently singular (‘the place’) to suggest that happiness is the opposite of separation or withdrawal. For Christopher Ricks, these lines are stubbornly tautological,

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as if they closed themselves up in self-referential satisfaction.⁸¹ This sense that Wordsworth’s line contains an illegitimate proof might also explain Shelley’s curious objection, in which he takes the implication to be that whatever the woes of this world, the next will be immeasurably worse.⁸² But I find it hard to take this passage, with its heavy redundancies and parallel negations (‘Not in Utopia . . . not at all) to express such unity. More convincing to me are the readings in which the words, and the hopes they breathe, are unfinished and imperfect. Khalip suggests that the final clause ‘recursively depletes the thought that precedes it’, quietly introducing a doubt ‘whether happiness bears any kind of empirical value for assessing the evidence of a world’.⁸³ This same tension between asserting and doubting a bearable world is beautifully illustrated by Sutherland’s reading of the preceding line, ‘a line whose hypermetricality, however dubious, outweighs in “affective involvement” or Besitzung the potential alternative benefit of correctness’.⁸⁴ To locate happiness in that tangle of prepositions (‘in the world’ which is the world ‘on which’) is to think of the world not as a totality that is over our heads— literally and metaphorically—but as a shared foundation. Its happiness is neither transcendentally achieved nor individually cultivated (neither ‘the next world’ nor ‘a world of one’s own’). All of us, or not at all. Wordsworth’s imagined satisfaction, so often ascribed to the intimate connections between no more than a handful of people, becomes in these lines an unequivocally inclusive form of world-making, even if the world it attempts to make remains obdurately incomplete.⁸⁵ That Wordsworth gestures towards happiness here not by invoking the high sublime but what is already beneath him—not the starry sky but the familiar damp earth—suggests that happiness isn’t going to take us anywhere new. This is a distinctly lower-case variety of utopian thinking. I have suggested that Wordsworth’s thought of happiness is, at its most promising, a way of conceiving of a good-enough world. Nersessian’s vocabulary of utopian restraint and limitation locates in romantic poetics a stance toward ⁸¹ Christopher Ricks, The Force of Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1984), 108. ⁸² See Shelley’s letter to John Gisborne, 10 April 1822. The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Vol. 2: Shelley in Italy ed. Frederick L. Jones (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1964), 406–10. ⁸³ Jacques Khalip, Last Things: Disastrous Form from Kant to Hujar (New York: Fordham UP, 2018), 23. ⁸⁴ Sutherland, ‘Happiness in Writing’, 6. ⁸⁵ Without invoking the decidedly non-Wordsworthian position that poetry makes fictional worlds, in speaking of the prospect of world-making I am drawing on the ideas of Werner Wolf, Eva Zettelmann, and others in the Konstanz tradition. See Eva Zettelmann, ‘Apostrophe, Speaker Projection, and Lyric World Building’, Poetics Today 38 (1) (2017): 189–201. On the world as unfinished, see Khalip, Last Things, 31.

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the world in between passive indifference and relentless maximization; this immanent strain of happiness might be Wordsworth’s best chance of participating in it. Rather than requiring a maximal expenditure of pleasure, such happiness might consist in ‘making a world lightened of the burden of furnishing abundance’.⁸⁶ Helpfully for this discussion of Wordsworth’s experiments in non-pathological stasis, Nersessian also ventures the thought that a certain form of romanticism might be going nowhere. She draws our attention to Stanley Cavell’s definition of marriage as the scene in which the chance for happiness is shown as the mutual acknowledgement of separateness, in which the prospect is not for the passing of years (until death parts us) but for the willing repetition of days, willingness for the everyday[.]⁸⁷

In this definition, happiness is a way to rethink the passing of time: not as narrative duration (measured by its termination) or utilitarian accumulation (with some final audit of accounts) but as indeterminate, repeatable moments. In context, the medium is Hollywood comedies of the 1940s and 1950s, but you might also hear in ‘the willing repetition of days’ something closer to the iterable, discursive time which Culler attributes to lyric.⁸⁸ Cavell invokes marriage as well as friendship, Emily Sun notes in her lucid essay on his engagement with Coleridge, as ‘conditioned forms of intimacy that complicate one’s participation in the life of the many, one’s membership in the all and each’.⁸⁹ In Chapter 1 I suggested that the unremembered pleasure of ‘Tintern Abbey’ might be understood not as destroyed or discarded enjoyment but as little acts too ordinary, too frequently repeated, to be remembered or represented as individual events. I discussed critical concerns over the singularity and solitude of the poem, and in particular, its address to Dorothy. Cavell’s definition could allow us to see the quiet, highly uncertain, yet certainly possible happiness of ‘Tintern Abbey’ (which is by the end a necessarily shared happiness) as an articulation of social relations outside of determinate events, acts, or dialogue: as a ⁸⁶ Anahid Nersessian, Utopia, Limited: Romanticism and Adjustment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2015), 25. ⁸⁷ Nersessian, Utopia, Limited, 29; Stanley Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988), 178. ⁸⁸ Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2015), 226. ⁸⁹ Emily Sun, ‘Your Friends and Lovers: Perfectionism’s Recounting of Romanticism’ Stanley Cavell and the Event of Romanticism ed. Eric Lindstrom (July 2014) par. 19. Romantic Circles Praxis https://romantic-circles.org/praxis/cavell/praxis.cavell.2014.sun.html

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conditioned form of iterable, intimate life. In the ‘Travelling’ drafts, too, shared happiness (once again between these two siblings) is the alternative to private and eminently losable kinds. ‘Happy hours’ might be glossed with another formulation of Cavell’s from the same passage: ‘the taking of mutual pleasure without a concept’.⁹⁰ Where my inquiry diverges from Nersessian is in the handling of Wordsworth’s losses, which she sees as precisely an attempt to eclipse the commonplace. ‘Perhaps nowhere in Romantic poetry is the need to recuperate “something greater” within the ordinary made more explicit than in Wordsworth’s “Ode” (“There was a time”)’, she writes.⁹¹ The logic is clear; after all, Wordsworth’s initial epigraph calls for (slightly) greater things. But throughout this book, I have suggested that Wordsworth finds a mode of retrospection distinct from attempted recovery. At his most compelling, he does not invoke memory as a recuperation of the past, or a way of profiting by it. Rather, he comes to understand ‘early’ experience as an unrecoverable yet unperishable part of what is to be ‘late’ (which, I take it, is precisely what is at stake between the first and second epigraphs of the ‘Ode’). And the same capacity to acknowledge without possessing is what makes happiness thinkable in ‘Travelling’. From this perspective, what closes down the thought of happiness is aversion to loss. It can be sensed in the series of revisions to ‘Travelling’, which sharpen the poem’s geographic specificity and yet wear away its capacity to be present in that place. In the published 1820 version, which appears under the title ‘To the Same’, the final nine lines are mostly intact, but new material (some fifty per cent more) at the start of the poem lessens the force of the conclusion.⁹² The opening passage situates the poem some way up a mountain, its speaker apparently regretting his undertaking. Similarly, in the expanded poem the majority of reading time is spent looking, from afar and close by, for a particular place rather than finding it. And what is found in the end is not a mere spot, but a ‘dim Egerian grotto’, where listeners are commanded to ‘enter without further aim’ (18–20). This is less an invitation to sleep than to a burial. In the subsequent

⁹⁰ Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary, 178. To offer one last connection to Cavell, here is a possible reformulation of the argument I made in Chapter 3: if Wordsworth’s care for ‘real language’ and ‘real events’ amounts to anything, it is the proposition that ordinary words and figures can, in the right circumstances, be enough. That human needs—including the ethical and aesthetic kinds— might find more-or-less dependable correspondents from within everyday life. ⁹¹ Nersessian, Utopia, Limited, 61. ⁹² Quotation from SP, 252–3.

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1827 version, the blank verse passage has grown by half as much again.⁹³ The poem builds a form of shelter: a ‘dim cave’ that will ‘[p]rotect us, there deciphering as we may / Diluvian records’ (32–4). In contrast to the halfsuspended, dream-like consciousness of ‘Travelling’, the late ‘To the Same’ is acutely concerned with measurement of time. By its diluvian marks and the constant drip of water, the dim cave registers both deep, geological time and the steady passage of minutes.⁹⁴ In spatial terms, too, the long ascent extends the poem’s focal distance from the close-up form of ‘this is the spot’ to the long view down the mountain. Yet the value of the cave is primarily in its separation from, and resistance to, the external world. It is a way of ‘shutting up thyself within thyself ’; not a spot for satisfaction so much as withdrawal from an unkind life (41). The closing up of ‘To the Same’ might seem to exemplify the kind of solipsistic withdrawal which has been a perennial complaint about Wordsworthian lyric. Yet a remarkably similar figure emerges in that most civic-minded of his poems, The Excursion. In the opening speech of its last book, the Wanderer offers this sketch of old age: Rightly is it said That Man descends into the V of years; Yet have I thought that we might also speak, And not presumptuously, I trust, of Age, As of a final E, though bare In aspect and forbidding, yet a Point On which ’tis not impossible to sit In awful sovereignty—a place of power— A throne, that may be likened unto his, Who, in some placid day of summer, looks Down from a mountain-top (E, IX.49–59)

In a deft reversal, these lines cast age not as decline but ascent, and thus literalize the eminence of years. Beyond the indulgence of making age into a throne, the consequence of this shift in elevation is to blur and reduce the particularities of life below. Consequently, ‘the gross and visible frame of ⁹³ Quotation from SP, 253–4. ⁹⁴ On the role of contemporary geological theories, see John Wyatt, Wordsworth and The Geologists (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995), 39–40.

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things / Relinquishes its hold upon the sense’ and forest and field are ‘unsubstantialized’; sight is exchanged for sound (E, IX.64–7). Nigel Alderman observes that this speech provides a prospective and outwardfacing model of subjectivity, comparing the passage to Anthony Giddens’s notion of life-planning: ‘a specific mode of organising time’ in which ‘selfidentity depends as much on preparing for the future as on interpreting the past’.⁹⁵ His broader claim is that the poem’s retreat from possible sublimity, observed by Hartman and others, is a consequence of Wordsworth’s attempt to think ‘in public and social terms’ rather than ‘private and personal ones’.⁹⁶ Yet this portrait of old age puts this distinction under some pressure. Although it is presented by the Wanderer to his audience as an exemplar— which ‘’tis not impossible’ to practically achieve—this speech is less a piece of social policy than a withdrawal settlement. The Wanderer’s aim is to show that, in the best cases, a life can remain undivided from the natural world, and able to fulfil ‘the old hereditary wish’ (IX.276). But it is premised on blotting out so much of the world that might otherwise appear lost. Whether by conviction, or rhetorical calculation, or to obscure fears of decrepitude, he presents age as a form of elevated sovereignty. Inverting the ‘vale of years’ into a spiritual and almost literal summit, the Wanderer suggests that the ‘sweet air of futurity’ is a cool breeze indeed, like those which confront a climber who, having made the ascent, is ‘disencumbered from the press / Of near obstructions, and is privileged / To breathe in solitude’ (IX.25; 71–3). From such elevation, ‘Faint, and diminished to the gazing eye, / Forest and field, and hill and dale appear’ (IX.61–2). By analogy, he asks, may it not be hoped, that, placed by Age In like removal tranquil though severe, We are not removed for utter loss; But for some favour, suited to our need? What more than this, that we thereby should gain Fresh power to commune with the invisible world (E, XI.82–7)

⁹⁵ Nigel Alderman, ‘Unity Sublime: The Excursion’s Social Self ’ The Yale Journal of Criticism 18 (1) (2005): 21–43, 31. ⁹⁶ Geoffrey Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry 1787–1814 (New Haven: Yale UP, 1971), 292; Alderman, ‘Unity Sublime’, 22.

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The ‘invisible world’ is inaudible to the ‘multitude’ whose fate it is to chase ‘vain delight’ or else ‘fret and labour’ far below (IX.92–3). It is, at best, conjectural (‘may it not be hoped’) and, at worst, a way to forsake the actual in the name of a world that is not yet with us. As if an assertion of sovereignty could be worth the voluntary rejection of everything that is changeable and subject to loss. The passage suggests a form of withdrawal comparable to the late drafts of ‘To the Same’, and the same objections could be voiced here. Moreover, in framing its renunciation as a liberation from encumbrance, the Wanderer seems at times to entertain the same pathological position that Wordsworth elsewhere cautions the octogenarian against.⁹⁷ Retirement becomes a kind of insulating severance which only guarantees the outcome it is supposed to guard against. Affections lose their objects. In contrast to both the consciously ‘late’ figure of satisfaction as withdrawal, and the forms of ‘early’ pleasure which tend towards sublimity, the earlier drafts of ‘To the Same’ attempt to conceive of happiness otherwise than as a successful recovery of (or stony resistance to) loss. ‘This is the spot’ is certainly less forceful than longing for ‘something evermore about to be’, and less triumphal than ‘a final eminence’.⁹⁸ Yet ‘Travelling’ is Wordsworth’s unrealized ode to happiness: a poem which, by the point that it was redrafted as an ode, could no longer handle its own satisfaction. What the poem offers is a fragile utopia, as difficult to accept as it is to live outside, in which there is no full possession or utter loss of pleasure, because the present is thinkable only through the totality of all the blissful hours that have elapsed. There is no chance of choosing and organizing our satisfaction in advance, no possibility to ‘balance and supply’; yet forgetfulness and loss pose no risk because a whole history of sensation is contained in the apprehension of the present. ‘Our thoughts . . . are indeed the representatives of all our past feelings.’⁹⁹ If there is no expectation of presence, there is no need for memory to be venerated as the sole possibility for recuperating lost things. It would be enough for pleasure simply to have existed.

⁹⁷ Compare for instance his observations on ‘Wintry age’ beginning ‘Possessions vanish, and Opinions change, / And Passions hold a fluctuating seat’ to the opening section of ‘To an Octogenarian’. E, IV.54–70. ⁹⁸ 1805a, VI.542; E, IX.53. ⁹⁹ LB, 745, my emphasis. Put another way, ‘our sense of the present always involves the activity of a ceaseless recategorizing of what we conveniently but somewhat inaccurately call the past’. Leo Bersani, Receptive Bodies (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2018), 35–6.

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In terms of the broader problem this chapter has been working though, Wordsworth’s later odes suggest that what we should rightly guard against is the notion of happiness as the guaranteed presence or ownership of pleasure, a notion which all too easily props up other fantasies of accumulation and withdrawal. Hartman said that everything works against trauma in Wordsworth.¹⁰⁰ Poetry’s gift is not to block out or neutralize pain but to make it legible by making it something other than absolute. Along these lines, happiness, if it were to be found, would be a world good enough to all its members that their losses could be endured rather than renounced.

¹⁰⁰ Cathy Caruth and Geoffrey Hartman, ‘An Interview with Geoffrey Hartman’ Studies in Romanticism 35 (4) (1996): 630–52, 638.

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Conclusion This book began by asking how the intertwined histories of reading Freud and Wordsworth had shaped one another. Looking prospectively as well as retrospectively, these concluding remarks reflect briefly on the legacy of Wordsworthian romanticism and psychoanalysis. At the height of the deconstructive moment, in ‘The Rhetoric of Temporality’, Paul de Man raised the question of whether romanticism is ‘a subjective idealism, open to all the attacks of solipsism’ that have occurred from its outset, or else ‘a return to a certain form of naturalism after the forced abstraction of the Enlightenment . . . which our urban and alienated world can conceive of only as a nostalgic and unreachable past’.¹ The question translates into temporal and rhetorical terms a problem familiar to romanticists of de Man’s generation and yet general enough to encompass a broad tradition of modern European philosophy: how can the mind be reconciled with an external world? Since that time, we have become less inclined to approach romanticism as a series of general metaphysical problems, and more alert to the broad range of writers, texts, and contexts important to romanticism both as a notional period and as an intellectual tradition not reducible to that period.² But de Man’s question remains useful because it captures some of romanticism’s persistent anxieties, be it in the nearness of reflective selfconsciousness to solipsism in Wordsworth or other alleged egotists (such as John Keats or Letitia Landon) or in the sentimental resistance to modernity, from John Clare’s investment in antiquated forms of rural leisure to Amy

¹ Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism second edn (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983), 198. ² For a salutary account, see Anahid Nersessian, ‘Romantic Difficulty’ New Literary History 49 (4) (2018): 451–66. For one version of post-romanticism, see Jerome Rothenberg and Jeffrey C. Robinson (eds) Poems for the Millennium volume three: The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic poetry (Berkeley: U of California P, 2009). On the uneasy relation of period to conceptual content, see Clifford Siskin, ‘The problem of periodization: Enlightenment, Romanticism and the fate of system’ in The Cambridge History of English Romantic Literature ed. James Chandler (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009), 101–26; Eric Hayot, ‘Against Periodization; or, On Institutional Time’ New Literary History 42 (4) (2011): 739–56. Wordsworth’s Unremembered Pleasure. Alexander Freer, Oxford University Press (2020). © Alexander Freer. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198856986.001.0001

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Clampitt’s misgivings about central heating.³ In all these cases, as in those I have discussed in these chapters, a crucial issue is attachment. Romantic attachments risk being excessively personal and yet naïvely abstract, particular to the point of being parochial, overly sentimental (in their sense and ours), self-serious and yet genuinely silly. At the same time, I have suggested, Wordsworth remains a challenging and enlivening poet to think with because his writing risks getting attached to things that are vanishing and momentary, or else mundane, broken, or seemingly trivial. Poetry whose highest registers of praise are reserved for things it can’t have and things apparently not worth having. In this way, it labours to think about attachment otherwise than as possession. Attachment without possession is one way to characterize Wordsworth’s scrupulous attention to pleasures not realized. At the level of attachment to individual persons and days, this is a species of coping: a capacity to bear loss—and to bear with it—rather than resorting to disavowal, scepticism, or withdrawal. On a more general level, the possibility of understanding lost and unremembered pleasure as real (rather than fraudulent, wasted, or pointlessly transient) becomes a way of positing a world that is not irremediably divided between investment and abandonment. For Wordsworth, I have been arguing, seemingly ‘early’ and ‘late’ pleasures and forms are much more entangled than they first appear. So much depends on childhood: its pleasures are both alien and ineluctable. If it is a misunderstanding in later life to imagine returning to childhood, so too is the belief that its residual yet uninhabitable forms have become nothing more than error. Celebrating these earliest forms of life—as if everything of knowledge and sense you subsequently learned only proved the primacy of those most unlearned moments—necessarily opens you up to the charge of harbouring ‘nostalgia for an original presence’.⁴ This is why de Man’s question still bites. At the same time, Wordsworth’s patience for unremembered pleasures can be understood as a form of praise: ‘it reveals, augments, and at the same time creates surpluses in excess of what it discloses’.⁵ More than simple appreciation, it is a capacity for attachment. It is the way his writing binds itself to a world it cannot wholly determine. I take this combination of recognition and attachment to be at stake in what Peter de ³ See Theresa Adams, ‘Representing Rural Leisure: John Clare and the Politics of Popular Culture’ Studies in Romanticism 47 (3) (2008): 371–92; Amy Clampitt, ‘On the disadvantages of central heating’ in The Kingfisher (London: Faber, 1979), 30. ⁴ De Man, Blindness and Insight, 133. ⁵ Susan Stewart, ‘What Praise Poems Are For’ PMLA 120 (1) (2005): 235–45, 236.

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Bolla calls ‘Wordsworth’s adoption of the tone of praise’: a tone which might be at once a method and consequence of attachment; ‘the tone one needs to adopt if one is to fully understand what it might be to open (to) the world’.⁶ One way to disambiguate the openness of praise from the constraint of nostalgia is to apply some pressure to the latter. ‘Nostalgia is sadness without an object’, Susan Stewart writes in her compelling study On Longing. Nostalgic longing is ‘inauthentic because it does not take part in lived experience . . . it remains behind and before that experience’ and ‘longing for an impossibly pure context of lived experience at a place of origin’.⁷ What the nostalgic longs for, in other words, is a fiction—a gleam that never was. But this tight formulation elides some internal ambiguities. Svetlana Boym distinguishes between reflective and restorative nostalgia, one a wistful, ironic, impossible thought of homecoming, the other a longing to reconstruct a cultural or national past it believes really to have existed. Her broader argument, explored through the affects and aesthetics of postcommunist cities, is that nostalgia is highly variegated; in its more reflective form, nostalgic longing and critical thinking are not necessarily incompatible, nor does recollection suspend compassion, judgement, or serious reflection.⁸ The remarkable conceptual range of the term can also be seen in Kevis Goodman’s work connecting nostalgia’s origins as the ‘Swiss sickness’, a wasting disease held to be caused by geographic displacement, and caused specifically by European emigration, exploration, and warfare, to later romantic conceptions of nostalgic longing.⁹ In its earlier, somatic form, there was no temporal dimension, no rose-tinted recollection; ‘hard as this fact may be for us to keep in mind, the word “nostalgia” did not describe a feature of memory at all’.¹⁰ The aesthetic and psychological version of nostalgia diverges from medical science by translating a concept of physical displacement into mental displacement, and from space into time. Goodman locates a productive example of nostalgia’s complexities in book four of The Prelude. An extended metaphor details a boatman, gazing into water, who:

⁶ Peter de Bolla, ‘The Tone of Praise’ in Constellations of a Contemporary Romanticism eds Jacques Khalip and Forest Pyle (New York: Fordham UP, 2016), 122–41, 129, 139. ⁷ Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham: Duke UP, 1993), 23. ⁸ Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), xviii, 49–51. ⁹ Kevis Goodman, ‘ “Uncertain Disease”: Nostalgia, Pathologies of Motion, Practices of Reading’ Studies in Romanticism 49 (2) (2010): 197–227, 204–6. ¹⁰ Goodman, ‘Uncertain Disease’, 199.

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 ’    Sees many beauteous sights, weeds, fishes, flowers, Grots, pebbles, roots of trees, and fancies more, Yet often is perplex’d, and cannot part The shadow from the substance, rocks and sky, Mountains and clouds, from that which is indeed The region, and the things which there abide In their true dwelling; now is cross’d by gleam Of his own image, by a sun-beam now, And motions that are sent he knows not whence, Impediments that make his task more sweet; —Such pleasant office have we long pursued Incumbent o’er the surface of past time With like success. (1805a, IV.252–64)

The boatman’s gaze, ‘perplex’d’ by the half-mirrored surface of the water, becomes the poet’s pleasant task: looking into the past, as if it too were a mirrored and inscrutable surface. This scene of multiple reflective and reflecting images anticipates the compound vision of the lake at the heart of the ode ‘To Lycoris’, which similarly overlays earth and sky, immediate objects and far-off sights. In this image of pleasing but frustrated retrospection, Goodman contends, the ‘former disease of mobility . . . is turned into a figure of speech’.¹¹ As she demonstrates, this kind of transformation is crucial to understanding the conceptual history of nostalgia, ‘the movement whereby a waning medical discourse waxes as a nascent aesthetic one’.¹² In this passage I am, predictably, drawn to the unexpected ‘motions that are sent he knows not whence’. These are unlocatable and yet pleasurable intrusions, which impede vision without frustrating the looker. Neither an ocular pathology, nor sheer fantasy, they suggest a kind of retrospection which looks clearly at the past, but finds itself gently but persistently unbalanced and caught out by a series of impediments in the object itself. For this reason, it seems to me that this example resists, at least as much as it anticipates, the prevalent modern sense of nostalgia. Stewart, as I noted, contends that nostalgia desires something ‘impossibly pure’; it is in this

¹¹ Kevis Goodman, ‘Romantic poetry and the science of nostalgia’ in The Cambridge Companion to British Romantic Poetry eds James Chandler and Maureen M. McLane (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008), 195–216, 212. ¹² Goodman, ‘Romantic poetry and the science of nostalgia’, 213–14.

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sense a mode of looking that is too clear: its narratives are idealistic and uncomplicated by actual experience. Yet Wordsworth will not concede that retrospection must be confined to diligently observed and remembered ‘lived experience’. The figure of the boatman—like Wordsworth’s retrospection more generally—has little in common with Stewart’s inauthentic sadness, or Boym’s restorative nostalgia. It does not diagnose a somatic disease, but nor does it imply a straightforward (or even straightforwardly deceptive) vision. The value of retrospection for Wordsworth so often emerges in moments of intrusion and surprise: when the backward glance is interrupted by an unexpected detail whose origin is impossible to pin down. The real problem with nostalgia, from this point of view, is that it forecloses the possibility of surprise: it looks back having already determined who and what it will venerate and blame. And by the same token, an adequate account of surprise undercuts any notion of retrospection—or even thought itself—as the product of autonomous and self-directed agents.¹³ Boym contends that by the end of the nineteenth century ‘there was little space for a syncretic concept of nostalgia’. ‘Public discourse was about progress, community and heritage, but configured differently than it had been earlier. Private discourse was about psychology, where doctors focus on hysteria, neurosis and paranoia.’¹⁴ While psychoanalysis may have privatized some of the intellectual space to discuss people’s longings, it certainly didn’t quell anxieties that emotionally-charged retrospection might produce misleading narratives. One prominent example was the ‘false memory’ controversy, which both fed on, and radically extended, tensions between memory and fantasy in psychoanalytic practice.¹⁵ We might say that the false memory problem is one of nostalgia in reverse: practices of discussing and articulating the past might suggest—or even generate—traumatic

¹³ An adequate account, in other words, needs to grapple with the way in which mental life continually catches out and runs ahead of the person who ostensibly steers it. The attempt to capture that continual slippage of thought from thinker might look like this: ‘Thinking the leap can only be accomplished by a leap of thought—by thought as a leap, as the leap that it knows and is aware of being, necessarily. But it knows itself and is aware of itself as surprise (surprise in its knowledge and awareness, surprise as knowledge and awareness) . . . But this is not a surprise for a subject. No one is surprised, just as no one leapt. The surprise—the event—does not belong to the order of representation. The surprise is that the leap—or better the “it,” the “someone” who occurs in the leap and, in short, occurs as the leap “itself ”—surprises itself.’ Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000), 172–3. ¹⁴ Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, 16. ¹⁵ For a good summary see Ian Hacking, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1995), 113–26.

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narratives to suit therapeutic, ideological, and personal expectations. As nostalgia can imply a restrictive dichotomy between lived experience and ideological fantasy, the false memory controversy opposed notions of ‘recovered’ and ‘false’ memories. At the level of psychoanalytic theory, the equivalent opposition is between analytic determinism and hermeneutics. In Laplanche’s critique of the debate, he notes that it is a binary opposition between psychoanalytic reconstruction and construction.¹⁶ Refusing the dichotomy, Laplanche pries open a gap ‘between determinism and hermeneutics’ by arguing that psychoanalysis does not produce an intelligible (narrative) account of the past, nor merely an interpretation of it, but rather discloses the intransigently unintelligible aspect of all intimate experience: its enigmatic qualities. ‘With the enigma Laplanche moves beyond the polarized terms that structure the “recovered” and “false” memory debate in order to assert that even the most everyday procedures of caring for and relating to the infant are not finally reducible to their purely material reality, infiltrated as they are by a traumatic (unassimilable) content’, Nicholas Ray remarks.¹⁷ Trauma can neither be fully recovered as, nor ‘interpreted’ into, narrative; what analysis produces in Laplanche’s account is an understanding of human relations as necessarily and continually disrupted by enigmatic elements, which can be exposed but never resolved. In other words, in the case of false memories, as in the case of nostalgia, what limits inquiry is ultimately the expectation that attachments to the past could ever fully be disentangled, as if we could divide memory from fantasy or history from ideology when in each case one is structured by the other. Nostalgia’s complicated history and referential range make its use as a straightforwardly descriptive term inherently misleading. In fact, the suggestion that the concept permits a clean distinction between authentic and inauthentic claims on the past may be nostalgia’s most ideological facet. But this is certainly not to say that Wordsworth does not idealize the past. An 1821 sonnet, ‘Decay of Piety’, laments declining church attendance. Recalling a time of orderly and attentive religious practice, it asks: I see the places where they once were known, And ask, surrounded even by kneeling crowds, Is ancient Piety for ever flown?

¹⁶ Jean Laplanche, Essays on Otherness ed. John Fletcher et al. (London: Routledge, 1999), 141. ¹⁷ Nicholas Ray, Tragedy and Otherness: Sophocles, Shakespeare, Psychoanalysis (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009), 34.

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Alas! even then they seemed like fleecy clouds That, struggling through the western sky, have won Their pensive light from a departed sun!¹⁸

There may be some room for manoeuvre in the space between church attendance and ‘ancient Piety’ (although in this poem a strongly institutionalist reading in which they are one and the same is hard to utterly resist). In any case, the final three lines close down the meaning of piety using a series of metaphorical replacements. A venerable bird is refigured as the dying rays of a setting sun, and as surely as the sun will set, piety will decay. By naturalizing social change into the shape of a day, the poem seals itself into pessimism, leaving as a positive example only the implicit memory of daybreak. A similar solar figure occurs in a poem from the following year, written to Lady Fleming, which sketches another lamentable figure, ‘whose sole delights / Are trivial pomp and city noise’, who in his ignorance could ‘take the radiance from the clouds / In which the Sun his setting shrouds’.¹⁹ It may well seem from examples like these that Wordsworth is, by the early 1820s, already drawn to the reactionary contempt he would by 1844 call ‘the passion of a just disdain’.²⁰ Such passion might be traced from the fantasy of withdrawal seen in the later drafts of the ode ‘To the Same’ to very late verse such as ‘Proud were ye, Mountains, when, in times of old’, where this formulation appears. It is all the more striking, then, to read a poem of 1842–3, ‘Glad sight wherever new with old’, which shares none of the disdain. It is a little-read poem, but as deft and compressed as some of the most celebrated lyrics: G sight wherever new with old Is joined through some dear homeborn tie; The life of all that we behold Depends upon that mystery. Vain is the glory of the sky, The beauty vain of field and grove Unless, while with admiring eye We gaze, we also learn to love.²¹

It is not that familiar sights are best, but ‘new with old’ that gladdens. ‘Sight’ is joined with ‘life’ by assonance as well as by parallelism in the verse ¹⁸ LP, 21–2.

¹⁹ LP, 30.

²⁰ LP, 390.

²¹ LP, 373.

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structure, both being the second of two monosyllables. It is only where new is joined to old, the poem suggests, that what we see can live. Likewise, ‘behold’ has ties not only to ‘old’, its equivalent endstopped rhyme, visually and aurally repeated in the second syllable of ‘behold’, but also to ‘homeborn’, whose consonants it inverts. These lines can be read as anticipating new sights (dear when tied to the old) but also commenting on old sights (themselves made glad wherever something new returns us to them). The poem is divided down the centre by the turn of its syntax and logic. The second sentence is a logical inversion of the first: sight is glad, only under these conditions/these sights have no glory, except in these cases. In the equivalent place of the mystery of line four is the condition that beauty depends on learning to love. If beauty is vain, we will not know it by our eyes alone. The lines open a gap between admiration and love: beauty will only die away before our eyes, unless it can link old and new. ‘Glad sight wherever new with old’ recapitulates a thought formulated some four decades prior: ‘Pleasures newly found are sweet’.²² But it complicates that thought by embedding it in a far broader temporal horizon. It is a deeply conservative poem in some respects, and yet makes conservatism impossible by staking the value of the past on a present that is—and must be, if it is to be worth having—subject to change. Nostalgia is the equal and opposite ‘worldfeel’ to the thrill of historical progress; both depend on (while trying in different ways to imaginatively outrun) linear, unrepeatable, irreversible time.²³ But there is a wide horizon between the two (and there must be if we are to overcome the most limited philosophies of history). ‘Glad sight wherever new with old’ prizes the past, but it cannot be reduced to a nostalgia which would long only for more of it. It is in a continuing present that we must learn to love. In this phrase we might also hear an echo of ‘the discipline of love’ by which the infant is taught in The Prelude.²⁴ Such education, this poem suggests, occurs by a kind of unexpected and unpredictable recognition. This might occur through explicit repetitions (such as the way in which ‘The beauty vain of field and grove’ gestures towards the final stanza of ‘To the Daisy (Sweet Flower!)’).²⁵ But I would also identify its pedagogical mode with the Prelude passage that Cathy Caruth movingly terms Wordsworth’s ‘double eulogy’ for his mother,

²² The opening line of ‘To the Same Flower [To the Small Celandine]’, P2V, 82. ²³ Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, 13. On ‘worldfeel’ see Anahid Nersessian, Utopia, Limited: Romanticism and Adjustment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2015), 43–74. ²⁴ 1799, II.281. ²⁵ P2V, 608–11.

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‘My honour’d Mother; she who was the heart / And hinge of all our learnings and our loves’.²⁶ Past scenes of intimacy and dependence are worth holding on to, in spite of the work of mourning they occasion, because they continue to teach us. This is how retrospection is saved from being a purely elegiac mode. Psychoanalysis too insists that love is something we have to learn by imperfect imitation of others, who are themselves never fully fluent.²⁷ Jacques André writes: ‘analysis has taught me that it can all be learned— not only learning to love and to hate, but also learning to speak, to walk (of course), and also to eat, to excrete, to breathe, to sleep . . . ’²⁸ The most basic social rules of loving are, in psychoanalysis, termed the Oedipus configuration. Yet that bluntest of lessons is, in the hands of some of Freud’s most compelling readers, the name for a certain failure of understanding, an enigma which psychoanalysis draws out from life in spite of its own thirst for positive descriptions.²⁹ In other words, there is a case for understanding even this ‘learning’ as perpetually intransitive and unfinished: the work of disclosing the limits of our knowledge rather than overcoming them; ‘the ways we try and get round our Oedipus complex is our Oedipus complex’.³⁰ In this vein, Barbara Johnson writes: The ‘primal scene’ is not a scene but an interpretative infelicity whose result was to situate the interpreter in an intolerable position. And psychoanalysis is the reconstruction of that interpretative infelicity not as its interpretation, but as its first and last act. Psychoanalysis has content only insofar as it repeats the dis-content of what never took place.³¹

Alan Bewell offers the famous episode of Wordsworth’s encounter with an old gibbet, later depicted as the site of a murderer’s execution in the 1798–99 Prelude, as an instance of ‘a now almost hidden, yet still controlling, story of

²⁶ Cathy Caruth, ‘Past Recognition: Narrative Origins in Wordsworth and Freud’ MLN 100 (5) (1985): 935–48, 946; 1805a, V.257–8. ²⁷ Leo Bersani, The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (New York: Columbia UP, 1986), 100–1. ²⁸ Jacques André, ‘The Misunderstanding (Le Malentendu)’ trans. Richard Simpson Psychoanalytic Quarterly 75 (2006): 557–81, 581 ²⁹ See Barbara Johnson, ‘The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida’ Yale French Studies 55–6 (1977): 457–505, 499; Bersani, The Freudian Body 101, Laplanche, Essays on Otherness 194 ³⁰ Adam Phillips, On Flirtation (London: Faber & Faber, 1995), xxv. ³¹ Johnson, ‘The Frame of Reference’, 499.

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memory’s violent origins’.³² I am more disposed to see interpretive blockage as a problem of surface complexity rather than hermeneutic depth. Nevertheless, one cannot blame readers for sensing that there is more at stake in images like these than what is visible, encouraged by the poet’s commentary of the episode: It was in truth An ordinary sight but I should need Colours and words that are unknown to man To paint the visionary dreariness (1799, I.319–22)

I have tried to hold on to these blockages and failures to recollect—as interpretative infelicity, or enigmatic content—on the grounds that such limitations are themselves part of the complicated texture of retrospection. For the same reason, I have traced Wordsworth’s knack of getting attached to small details and fragments, ‘weeds, fishes, flowers, / Grots, pebbles, roots of trees, and fancies more’, a knack which is not the symptom but the substance of a continual effort to articulate a world worth knowing. In the sun-comprehending lake, both trivial objects and the image of the heavens are visible on the same flat yet shimmering surface. This might be itself a kind of latent aesthetic commentary. ‘In the shaken profusion of things throwing together, flourishing, or collapsing, it is not a determinate structure or an order of representations that matters, but, first, the minor composition of a note struck, an image synesthetically remembered, a skin floating on the water as scum.’³³ My preference for the local and particular has kept the concept of trauma at arm’s length. Trauma theory ‘stays longer in the negative and allows disturbances of language and mind the quality of time we give to literature’.³⁴ Its proponents have taught us more than anyone how to articulate literature’s forms of damage and loss. But for as long as trauma theory involves a metapsychological account of negation and disturbance, it will always overdetermine the meaning of the negative spaces in writing and in life it

³² 1799, I.296–329; Alan Bewell, ‘Wordsworth’s Primal Scene: Retrospective Tales of Idiots, Wild Children, and Savages’ ELH 50 (2) (1983): 321–46, 322. ³³ Kathleen Stewart, ‘The Point of Precision’ Representations 135 (1) (2016): 31–44, 33. ³⁴ Geoffrey Hartman, ‘On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies’ New Literary History 26 (3) (1995): 537–63, 547.

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so patiently detects.³⁵ One later poem of lunar observation, ‘Once I could hail (howe’er serene the sky)’, describes: thoughts too eager to advance While I salute my joys, thoughts sad or stern; Shades of past bliss, or phantoms that to gain Their fill of promised lustre wait in vain.³⁶

What are these ‘shades of past bliss’, these phantoms of delight, except the intimations of unremembered pleasure? To convert such things into screen memories or other forms of defence is simply rule out in advance the prospect of unremembered pleasure. Behind these critical instincts is a theory so deft at teasing out ambivalences that it can overlook its own ambivalent relation to pleasure. As if pleasure is only the mere absence of tension, or as a series of deflections from a reality whose truth and pains are one. Psychoanalysis attunes itself so acutely and subtly to the life of negative affects that it risks obscuring Wordsworth’s variations on the theme of ‘momentous but uneasy bliss’.³⁷ Making these looping departures into psychoanalysis and related writing, I have supposed from the outset that psychoanalysis does not explain Wordsworth any more than Wordsworth psychoanalysis. Wordsworth can value unconsciousness without being an analyst, and Freud the poetics of childhood without being a poet. What is valuable, I have tried to show, is that psychoanalysis provides a conceptual language for, and simply has enough patience with, the parts of a person’s experience which are forgotten, mistaken, or repressed: the margins of experience. It assists our reading of Wordsworth where it directs us towards questions of what memory loses of life, and what, by registering that loss, poetry can disclose for the first time. Psychoanalysis is willing to take seriously what it doesn’t know, and what it can’t know. This commits it to a path of conceptual overreach in which speculative fantasies and ‘moments of theoretical collapse’ may well be inevitable.³⁸ Yet this characteristic tendency to overstep its own limits of knowledge also grants psychoanalysis its insistent ear and eye for ‘things ³⁵ Trauma theory, in its capacity to disclose otherwise unarticulated pain, offers a determinate resolution which may, in its reassuring diagnostic confidence, ultimately be a kind of critical defence against (or even disavowal of) uncertainty. This question is broader than I can justly address here, but for a nuanced engagement see Anne Anlin Cheng, ‘Psychoanalysis without Symptoms’ differences 20 (1) (2009): 87–101. ³⁶ LP, 77. ³⁷ 1805a, 253. ³⁸ Bersani, The Freudian Body, 10.

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 ’   

silently gone out of mind and things violently destroyed’.³⁹ It is why for those who find it clinically or intellectually productive it will remain a provocative and enigmatic partner. Retrospectively, we might find a precursor formulation for ‘Glad sight wherever new with old’ in book eight of The Prelude: this faith Never forsaken, that by acting well And understanding I should learn to love The end of life and every thing we know. (1805a, VIII.674–7)

The phrase ‘learn to love’ is in a less syntactically commanding position here. Nor is learning to love a condition in this case but a consequence (of ‘acting well / And understanding’), which is in turn an article of faith. Learning to love, when used transitively, is less obviously positive: one might learn to love something noxious, after all. In this passage, learning is emptied out, becoming a conduit between good actions and comprehension and ‘the end of life’ (or on sadder days, perhaps ‘life’s dark goal’).⁴⁰ A more striking precursor occurs in book five of the same poem, when Wordsworth considers how it is that, as children, ‘we learn to live’. The line appears in a passage which tells how the infant is accommodated to the world. As in the ‘Intimations’ ode, something must be given up. Here it is less a question of knowledge or pleasure (or some fusion of the two) but of capacity; in time ‘we learn to live / In reconcilement with our stinted powers’.⁴¹ ‘[A]s the mind grows serious from the weight of life, the range of its passions is contracted accordingly; and its sympathies become so exclusive, that many species of high excellence wholly escape, or but languidly excite, its notice’, Wordsworth writes elsewhere.⁴² In the relation between the ‘weight of life’ and diminished passions we can hear the whole drama of the ‘Intimations’ ode. The psychoanalytic explanation for how we get from the vulgar curiosities of childhood to the acceptable pleasures of ‘civilization’ is, of course, sublimation. But as psychoanalysts are the first to point out, it rarely works so smoothly. Desire loses its way, gets stuck, or burns out in its new accommodation. And it’s a one-way street: to be a child is to be immoderate, and to enter adult sociality is to forget how

³⁹ LB, 753.

⁴⁰ SP, 244.

⁴¹ 1805a, V.540–1.

⁴² SP, 644.

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one renounced that immoderate behaviour. In its rueful or hearty respect for the intensity of childhood wishing, psychoanalytic writing might be at its most Wordsworthian. While adults are expected to submit to their own limitation, the child is unreconciled with the difference between wish and reality, ‘[u]nwilling to forego, confess, submit, / Uneasy and unsettled . . . not yet tam’d / And humbled down’.⁴³ This is childhood at its most speculative, its most committed to energetic world-making. Even while signalling their temporary status, Wordsworth refuses to condemn the soaring hungers of childhood. The passage occupies a threshold position in book five of The Prelude: the undiminished powers of childhood imagination have been invoked to explain the attraction of the young to tales of adventure. The appeal of such stories is directly linked to the nature of childhood, and so the tendency to outgrow fables recapitulates the larger movement from childhood to adult life: When cravings for the marvellous relent, And we begin to love what we have seen; And sober truth, experience, sympathy, Take stronger hold of us; and words themselves Move us with conscious pleasure. (1805a, V.564–8)

The structure of the dual commentary on books and childhood suggests that if the unchecked thoughts of youth are suited to fantastic tales, part of maturation is the shift in taste towards the world of experience, from unconscious growth to conscious pleasure. But this is not the whole story. We might recall the moment of childhood vision which resurges in the ‘Ode, To Lycoris’: the gleam of mountain snow, reflected on the surface of the lake, joins new with old, present experience with past pleasure, and the ‘sober truth’ of landscape with the ‘marvellous’ tales of pagan gods. In that poem, the pleasures of childhood are not quite tamed; the fantastic is not smoothly sublimated into adult aesthetic sensibility. Lost joy persists. Here, we see an insinuation of the same; while Wordsworth declares that cravings for the marvellous relent, he does so in the context of this declaration a few lines prior: Dumb yearnings, hidden appetites are ours, And they must have their food; our childhood sits, ⁴³ 1805a, V.543–6.

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 ’    Our simple childhood sits upon a throne That hath more power than all the elements. (1805a, V.530–3)

We learn to live with stinted powers, indeed, but ‘dumb’ and inarticulate wishes do not die. What is forgotten and unremembered in Wordsworth’s poetry is not destroyed, but returns over and over, as phantom, gleam, and recognition. Beyond the limits of memory lies everything unremembered but not effaced, the past not a path behind us or a possession that slips like water from clenched hands, but what appears like a Heaven fill’d up with Northern lights, Here, nowhere, there, and everywhere at once. (1805a, V.556–7)

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Index For the benefit of digital users, table entries that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. Adorno, Theodor 176, 180 Anzieu, Didier 85–7 Appetite 20, 43, 51–2, 118–19, 131, 163, 185–6 Aristotle 176–7, 182–3 Attachment 4 n.15, 33–4, 94–5, 105, 155–6, 166, 182–3, 211–13 Attention 10–12, 20, 22, 30, 39, 74–5, 86, 105, 129–30, 134–5, 139–41, 143, 171–2, 211–12, 214–15 Attridge, Derek 132–3, 138–9 Barthes, Roland 108 n.7, 171–2 Beer, John 56, 75 n.15 Benjamin, Walter 28, 48–9, 99, 198–9 Berlant, Lauren 8–9, 174–5, 194 n.58 Bersani, Leo 4–5, 11–14, 21, 30–2, 84–5, 124 Bevis, Matthew 23, 69–70 Birth 75–6, 83–4, 94–5, 198–9 Blasing, Mutlu Konuk 78–80 Bloom, Harold 7, 43–4 Bourdieu, Pierre 59–60, 90–1 Bowles, William Lisle 65–6 Bromwich, David 63–4, 139–40 Burke, Edmund 37–8, 67 Burney, Frances 44 n.28 Care 44–5, 86, 90–2, 139–40, 206 n.90 Cavell, Stanley 96 n.66, 204–6 Caruth, Cathy 7–8, 88, 90–1, 218–19 Chandler, James 75 n.15, 95–6, 97, 175–6 Cheng, Anne Anlin 163–5, 221 n.35 Childhood 8–9, 14–16, 18–19, 26–7, 48–9, 51–4, 56–7, 78–81, 89–92, 95–6, 105, 184–5, 222–4 Clare, John 211–12 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 6–7, 62–3, 110–11, 169 n.77 Collings, David 6–8, 55, 87, 163–4

Coping 53–4, 66, 135 n.78, 141, 153–4, 164–7, 211–12 Culler, Jonathan 82–3, 101–2, 205–6 Cynicism 15–16, 174–7, 181–2 De Man, Paul 7, 170–1, 211–13 Deleuze, Giles 121–2 Derrida, Jacques 58–62, 145 n.2, 148–9 Dickinson, Emily 127–8 Ecology 35–6, 39–40, 52–3, 60, 91–2, 125, 139–40, see also Nature Ego 53, 79–81, 84–6, 92–4, 96–7 Egotism 20–1, 56, 123, 178–9 Elegy 75–6, 129–30, 144–72 Faflak, Joel 6–7, 163 François, Anne-Lise 8, 55, 130 n.66 Ferguson, Frances 37–8, 43–5, 68, 88–9, 110–11, 140–1 Fidelity 108–11, 129–30, 142, 172, 182–3 Forgetting 8–9, 72–3, 78–9, 99, 142, 153–4, 221–2, 224 Form 116–17, 120–6, 128–9, 135, 174, 188, formal pleasure 123, 125–6 Freud, Sigmund 1–5, 23–5, 219 Beyond the Pleasure Principle 121–2 Civilization and its Discontents 122–3, 188–9 ‘Creative Writers and DayDreaming’ 116–17, 125–6 ‘Introductory Lectures on PsychoAnalysis’ 23–4, 49–51 ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ 155–8, 171–2 ‘On Narcissism’ 80–1 ‘Outline of Psycho-Analysis’ 1–2 ‘The Question of Lay Analysis’ 23–4 Translation of Mill 2, 21 Fry, Paul 66, 96–7, 147–8, 167, 186–7

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Metre 81–2, 109–17, 126–8, 130–5, 140, 160 Miller, Christopher 11–12, 142, 169–70, 197 Modernity 182–3, 211–12 Mourning 140–72 Music 69–70, 115–16, 124, 130, 149–50, 196–7

Happiness 30–1, 38, 72–3, 108, 131, 136–7, 140–1, 173–210 Hartman, Geoffrey 7–8, 18–19, 25, 50–1, 54–5, 87, 91–2, 101–2, 118–19, 201–2, 210 Hegel, G.W.F. 51–2, 96–7, 161–2, 191 Hope 36, 40, 52, 65, 74, 136, 141, 153, 160–1, 166, 174, 181–2, 189–91, 194 n.58, 195–6

Nachträglichkeit 28–9 Narcissism 80, 88–9, 123, 182–3 Nature 37–9, 50–2, 54–5, 57–8, 62–3, 88–92, 101–2, 118–19, 146–7, 158–60, 167, 169–70, 222–3 see also Ecology Nancy, Jean-Luc 17 n.58, 215 n.13 Nersessian, Anahid 12–13, 116–17, 174–5, 195 n.62, 204–6, 211 n.2, 218 n.23 Nostalgia 18, 95–6, 178–9, 212–19

Ignorance 27, 40, 168, 182–3, 217 Infancy 10, 19–21, 67–105, 196–7, 215–16, 222–3 Intimacy 12–13, 62–3, 89–91, 114, 150, 169, 180, 205–6, 218–19 asynchronous 172 Jacobus, Mary 7, 20, 149–50, 166 Johnson, Barbara 192–3, 219 Johnson, Joseph 38–9 Jouissance 8–9, 107–8 Joy 8–9, 20–1, 53, 61, 69–74, 81–2, 97–8, 122–3, 128–9, 142–3, 165, 178–9, 181–2, 186, 203, 223 Kant, Immanuel 52–3, 69–70, 178 n.12, 189–94, 203 Keats, John 20–1, 117–20, 159–60, 211–12 Khalip, Jacques 15–16, 52–3, 139–40, 203–4 Laplanche, Jean 13–14, 94–5, 121–2, 215–16 Lacan, Jacques 2 n.3, 14, 55, 79–80, 118–20, 163–4 Lateness 75–6, 97, 173, 175–84, 194–7, 206, 209, 212–13 Lear, Jonathan 54, 183 n.24, 194 n.58 Levinson, Marjorie 7, 43 n.24, 62 n.79 Lewes, George Henry 2 Locke, John 39, 45–7, 85–6 Longing 17, 153, 182–3, 192, 209, 213 Lyric 11–12, 77–80, 82–3, 92, 96, 112–13, 167, 170–1, 176, 188, 197, 205–7 McGann, Jerome 7, 43 n.24, 103–4 Memory 17–18, 36–8, 43–50, 66, 68, 71–3, 156, 176–7, 181–2, 202–3, 215–16

Ordinariness 48–9, 72–3, 108–12, 143, 162, 195–6, 205–6 Pain 50–1, 54, 85–6, 116–17, 126–8, 135–6, 141–3, 150–1, 153–4, 156, 171–2, 174–5, 210 Painting 69–70, 124, 159–62 Particularity 48–50, 72–3, 84–5, 94–7, 102, 138, 157, 161–2, 220–1 Pfau, Thomas 2–5, 7–9 Phillips, Adam 24, 75–6, 78–9 Plenitude 48–9, 61–2, 73, 90–1, 100–1, 103, 143, 186–7, 201–2 Potkay, Adam 62 n.79, 73–4, 140, 192 Proust, Marcel 11, 28, 128–9, 164–5, 198–9 Psychoanalysis 2–11, 13–14, 23, 86, 119–22, 124, 215–16, 219, 221–2 Repression 7, 13–14, 50, 119–20, 142–3, 155–6, 159 Redemption 11–12, 125–6 Retrospection 11–12, 14–19, 28–32, 40, 44–6, 56, 65, 108–9, 140–1, 150, 169–71, 182–3, 195–6, 206, 214–16, 218–20 Rohrbach, Emily 30–1, 170–1 Romanticism 2–4, 6–7, 10–11, 22–3, 75–6, 91–2, 105, 119, 182–3, 192, 204–5, 211–12 Schuster, Aaron 21, 108, 121–4 Sedgwick, Eve Kosovsky 12–13, 128–30 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 179–80, 182–3, 203–4 Smith, Adam 113–14, 177–8, 185–6 Smith, Charlotte 26, 37 n.6, 40 Snediker, Michael 4 n.15, 128–9, 194 n.58

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Vulnerability 9–10, 20–1, 64–5, 92, 182–3, 194 n.58

Wollstonecraft, Mary 44 n.28 Wordsworth, Dorothy 36–7, 41, 62–5, 130 n.66, 131, 168–9, 200–1 Wordsworth, John 144–54, 158–60, 166–72 Wordsworth, William ‘Anecdote for Fathers’ 188, 192 The Borderers 128 ‘Boy of Winander’ 55, 69–70, 168, 170–1 ‘Decay of Piety’ 216–17 Descriptive Sketches 38–42, 200 ‘Distressful gift!’ 148–52 ‘Elegiac Stanzas’ 158–66, 186 ‘Essays on Epitaphs’ 128–9 The Excursion 114–15, 137–40, 178–9, 207–9 ‘Glad sight wherever new with old’ 217–18 Home at Grasmere 52 ‘I only look’d for pain and grief ’ 151–4 ‘Incipient Madness’ 162–5 ‘Intimations’ ode, see ‘Ode’ (‘There was a time’) ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads 5, 106, 109–17, 126–30 The Prelude 16–17, 19–20, 26–7, 52, 55–6, 62, 67–73, 86–94, 115–16, 131–5, 203–4, 213–15, 218–20, 222–4 ‘My heart leaps up’ 1–2, 14–16, 76–7 ‘Ode, Composed upon an Evening of Extraordinary Splendor and Beauty’ 195–9 ‘Ode to Lycoris’ 184–8, 194–5, see also ‘To the Same’ ‘Ode’ (‘There was a time’) 2, 65, 67, 74–9, 81–5, 92–8, 100–4, 158–9, 183–4, 195–6, 206, 222–3 ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’ 52, 181 ‘Once I could hail (howe’er serene the sky)’ 220–1 The Ruined Cottage 135–40, 162–3 ‘Surprized by Joy’ 142–3 ‘Tintern Abbey’ 42–57, 60–6, 72–3, 115, 160–1 ‘To a Butterfly’ 28–32 ‘To the Daisy’ (‘Sweet Flower’) 145–8, 218–19 ‘To the Same’ 199–200, 206–7, 209, 217 ‘To an Octogenarian’ 181–2, 209 ‘Travelling’ 199–203, 206–7 ‘When first I journey’d hither’ 166–71, 200

Winnicott, Donald 4 n.15, 53, 91–2, 95–6, 105, 192–3

Yousef, Nancy 9–10, 12–13, 46, 57–8, 75–6, 88–9, 99, 114

Solitude 89, 92–3, 131, 140, 165, 167–8, 171–2, 181–2, 205–9 Soni, Vivasvan 30–1, 174–5, 191–3 Song 115–16, 163, 196–7 Stewart, Kathleen 12–13, 28, 220 Stewart, Susan 112–13, 142–3, 212 n.5, 213–15 Satisfaction 11–12, 51, 54–5, 66, 72–3, 109, 114, 119–24, 135, 139–40, 142–3, 146, 163–4, 174–5, 180, 190–6, 198–9, 201–3, 209–10 Sublimation 11–12, 96–7, 119–25, 147–8, 158, 222–3 Sublimity 7–9, 20–1, 37–8, 56, 70, 92–3, 101–2, 109, 178–9, 182–3, 187–8, 207–9 Surprise 11–12, 16–17, 30, 37 n.5, 64–5, 73, 114–15, 124, 130 n.67, 142–3, 171–2, 182–3, 194 n.58, 214–15 Tan, Lisa 165 Terada, Rei 12–13, 37 n.5, 82–3, 164 n.66, 195 n.60 Touch 72–3, 85–7, 90–1, 101–2 Trauma 7–9, 30–1, 50–1, 72, 88–9, 142–3, 150, 163, 210, 215–16, 220–1 Theory aesthetic 37–8, 119–20, 131 anthropological 57 cognitive 23 n.77, 113 n.22 of emotion 82–3 feminist 12–13, 86, 90–2 French 107–8 of the gift, see Gifts linguistic 93–4 of the lyric, see Lyric of the person 87 poetic 106–9f psychoanalytic, see Psychoanalysis queer 12–13 weak 11–14 Thomson, James 39 Trilling, Lionel 5–7, 75 n.15, 104, 107–8, 117–20 Unconscious 2, 4–5, 13–14, 22–5, 27–9, 89, 99–101, 129, 221–2 Unrememberable 22, 67–71, 74–5, 100–1

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