In the mid-1790s, between his return from revolutionary France and the writing of the poems for which he is known, there is an episode in the life of William Wordsworth that goes by many names. It was a ‘period of dejection’, ‘moral nihilism’, ‘anguished soul-searching’, ‘near breakdown’, ‘mental breakdown’.1 There are also various characterisations of these as ‘crisis years’.2 Wordsworth is said to have experienced crises ‘mental’, ‘emotional’, ‘moral’, and ‘intellectual’; a ‘crisis of dejection’, ‘of despair’, ‘of profession’; a ‘life-crisis’.3 And perhaps, one might add, a meaning crisis. As one critic puts it, Wordsworth had ‘felt emotionally wedded to the destiny of France’4, so his return to London, France’s declaration of war against Britain, and then the Terror, constituted the removal of his source of meaning, the ‘master light’ of all his seeing, to borrow a coinage from the ‘Intimations of Immortality’ ode (155).

Two decades later, in 1814, Wordsworth published The Excursion, Being a Portion of The Recluse, whose central character, the Solitary, is defined by a ‘despondency’ partly drawn from Wordsworth’s own. The Excursion was to be the middle section of a three-part epic called ‘The Recluse’, which Samuel Taylor Coleridge hoped would help ‘those, who, in consequence of the complete failure of the French Revolution, have thrown up all hopes of the amelioration of mankind’.5 One of Wordsworth’s biographers states that ‘[‘The Recluse’] was, in short, to have been no less than the catalyst for the regaining of paradise.’6 Though Wordsworth spent more than half of his long life writing or thinking about writing ‘The Recluse’, it is well known that he did not complete the other parts.7 Nonetheless, The Excursion is his longest poem and his only long poem to be read by the younger Romantics. Unlike The Prelude it was published in time to find fit audience among his contemporaries: Shelley read it within a month or two, and Keats in the autumn of 1816.8 It was a coming-of-age book for both poets – indeed Keats might have read from it on his twenty-first birthday – and there is widespread agreement about its influence on the works that they would go on to write. This thesis will therefore make the argument that the major Romantic poems of the Regency decade can be traced in part to a mental health crisis suffered by an unknown disillusioned revolutionary called William Wordsworth, and to his later attempt to write through despondency and in pursuit of happiness, both for his own sake and on behalf of his generation.

A brief discussion of terminology is necessary, since ‘despondency’ and ‘happiness’ are not the only words used by the poets discussed in this thesis for what modern psychologists would more dryly call ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ affect.9 Wordsworth refers to his ‘two natures […] joy the one / The other melancholy’ (Prelude, X. 868–69). Keats says that the ‘Wherein lies happiness?’ passage of Endymion (I. 777–842), ‘set before [him] the gradations of Happiness even like a kind of Pleasure Thermometer—and [was his] first Step towards the chief Attempt in the Drama—the playing of different Natures with Joy and Sorrow.’10 Already we have multiple synonyms – albeit with differing connotations – even before consulting the critics and learning that ‘“Hope” and “joy,” as against “despair” and “dejection,” was a central and recurrent antithesis in Romantic poetry’, but that ‘the tranquillity Wordsworth celebrates in The Prelude is his master emotion’, which he also ‘calls variously serenity […] or calm’.11 Wanting to avoid producing a thesis on Romantic poetry full of references to negative and positive affect, I refer, in my title and throughout, to despondency and happiness.

I most often use ‘despondency’ – as opposed to ‘melancholy’, ‘sorrow’, ‘despair’, or ‘dejection’ – simply because it is Wordsworth’s word in The Excursion, Books III and IV being ‘Despondency’ and ‘Despondency Corrected’. It is also legitimate to gloss it, and the ‘crisis’ terms above, with the standard, modern word ‘depression’, both on the grounds of critical precedent and because in the ‘Summary of Contents’ Wordsworth himself refers to the Solitary’s ‘depression of mind’.12 The thesis make no claims about what might have been diagnosable as what is now called ‘clinical depression’, and I do not believe that this can finally be distinguished from the more general sense of ‘depression’ – ‘The condition of being depressed in spirits; dejection’ (OED) – except by the judgements involved in diagnosis.

‘Happiness’ is potentially more fraught. As one scholar of religion puts it, ‘The central disagreement is over whether happiness properly refers to an immediate psychological state (akin to cheerfulness or sadness, for example) or whether it is the more sustained sense of a life that is lived well (akin to well-being or flourishing) […] eudaimonia’.13 However, this flexibility is what makes it the best word for the positive good sought by those on a quest to correct despondency, for the despondent seeks to ‘live on earth a life of happiness’, as Margaret in Book I of The Excursion might have done (I. 550), but frequently must settle for something more temporary, as when Wordsworth returned to Esthwaite Water during his summer vacation: ‘If ever happiness hath lodg’d with man, / That day consummate happiness was mine’ (Prelude, IV. 129–30). Just as Coleridge said, using the same metaphor, that despair can enter one’s heart ‘merely as a Lodger’ or ‘as a Tenant for Life’, happiness too can be an immediate psychological state akin to cheerfulness, or a more sustained sense of well-being.14

As we shall see, our three poets had different relationships with these varieties of happiness. Wordsworth was ‘not used to make / A present joy the matter of [his] Song’ (Prelude, I. 55–56), and lived long enough to enjoy the accretion of beneficial memories, ascend steadily from days of happiness towards well-being, and, in perceiving the view, to lend it ‘a sober colouring from an eye / That hath kept watch o’er man’s mortality’ (‘Intimations’, 200–01). In the passage quoted above about his two natures, joy and melancholy, he goes on to say that in spite of the latter he was ‘withal / A happy man’ (X. 869–70). Walter Pater thought that ‘There was in [Wordsworth’s] own character a certain contentment’;15 that is, like Margaret, his ‘temper had been framed, as if to make / A Being—who […] Might live on earth a life of happiness’ (emphasis added) (Excursion, I. 549–50). Meanwhile Shelley, in his mature poetry, places a particular emphasis, in the words of M. H. Abrams, on pursuing ‘social regeneration and happiness’.16 And Keats – notably in ‘To Autumn’ – was used to make the present moment, albeit slowed and extended, the matter of his song. With the word ‘happy’, he often uses the immediate form of repetition known as epizeuxis – ‘happy, happy’ – as if willing himself to be happy in the happiness of the tree and brook ‘In drear nighted December’, glowing fire in ‘Song of Four Fairies’, Psyche, or the Grecian urn.17 But, as I will argue, both Shelley and Keats were, with Wordsworth, eudaemonists in Thomas De Quincey’s sense, ‘hanker[ing] […] after a state of happiness, both for [themselves] and others’.18

Moreover, this state is not a castle in the air but, as Wordsworth says in ‘London, 1802’, the ‘ancient English dower / Of inward happiness’ (5–6). Abrams calls it ‘the great commonplace of the age’, ‘Prominent in Wordsworth’, that ‘unity with himself and his world is the primal and normative state of man, of which the sign is a fullness of shared life and the condition of joy’.19 Wordsworth and the younger poets he influenced wrote intimations of immortality but also intimations of mortal happiness. Their quest was not for permanently sustained cheerfulness, which would misunderstand the distinction quoted above, but to raise the reading given by Keats’s ‘Pleasure Thermometer’ via a continual progress towards and through gradations of happiness. As we shall find in Chapter 2, the Solitary is not cured of his despondency, and so the meaning of Wordsworth’s ‘Corrected’, in practice, partakes of senses such as ‘amended’, ‘advised’, and ‘counteracted’ (OED). Similarly, Chapter 4 argues that even the Keats of Endymion, with its hero’s ‘quest for happiness’,20 implies that what is feasible in this world is the palliation of despondency, ‘the playing of different Natures with Joy and Sorrow’ so as to promote the former. Abrams states,

These writers, whatever their religious creed or lack of creed, were all, in Keats’s term, humanists. They posited the central importance and essential dignity of man (including, Wordsworth especially insisted, the lowly, helpless, and outcast man); they set as the aim of man an abundant life in this world, in which he may give play to all his creative powers; they estimated poetry by the extent to which it contributes toward this aim[.]21

I try to show, throughout the thesis, just how the poems discussed do contribute towards this aim, as both message and medium. The Wanderer delivers propositions against despondency, but, as importantly, to quote the editors of an anthology produced by the Bibliotherapy Foundation, ‘the rhythms of a good poem may be inherently calming and therapeutic’, and thereby combat despondency in non-propositional ways.22 I return to this in my chapter about Keats, and, in the conclusion, specifically poetry’s capacity to reconciles stasis and process. But the story begins with The Excursion, a work whose origins lie in possibly the most ambitious plan in literary history to write poetry that promotes ‘an abundant life in this world, in which [man] may give play to all his creative powers’.

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The original reception of The Excursion

Just as no poetry could quite live up to the idea of ‘The Recluse’, The Excursion when published – in early August 1814 or slightly earlier – was unlikely to live up to its author’s hopes.23 It was a large, expensive book (two guineas) and sold as it had been written and must be read – slowly. It also generated what must be one of the most famous sentences in the tradition of the pan: Francis Jeffrey’s thundering trochaic, ‘This will never do.’ Of course it also elicited plenty of appreciative comment. Even Jeffrey finds ‘considerable force of writing and tenderness of sentiment’ in Book III, the Solitary’s explanation of his own despondency:

Mr Wordsworth delineates only feelings – and all his adventures are of the heart. The narrative […] given by the sufferer himself, is, in our opinion, the most spirited and interesting part of the poem. […] it indicates a fine perception of the secret springs of character and emotion, to choose a being so circumstanced as the most ardent votary of that far-spread enthusiasm [the French Revolution].24

The Critical Heritage captures a dozen reviews and notices published by the end of 1815.25 Hazlitt, for example, was violently ambivalent, as it were praising with fierce damns. In the first sentence of his review he states that ‘in the depth of feeling, at once simple and sublime […] this work has seldom been surpassed’; yet in the pages that follow he levels a series of devastating barbs, the most famous of which is that in The Excursion ‘An intense intellectual egotism swallows up every thing.’26 And there are yet more uncollected responses to find. An unsigned notice in the liberal Morning Chronicle states that ‘the profoundest reasonings are poured forth in the plainest language’.27 Another unsigned notice, in the conservative Morning Post, is both more laudatory and more intriguingly perceptive:

[The Excursion] is written with such spirit and truth, that, next to the gratification of sharing in the excursion itself, must be that of perusing this record of it. But, with all the attractions of vivid and eloquent description, it has still a higher zest: the emotions of the Poet are fruitful in producing a multitude of kindred feelings […] The Excursion, it must be observed, is a distinct portion of a Philosophical Poem embracing […] grand topics […] The conception of such a work is grand, daring, and original: and the execution of it, if we may judge from this finished specimen, will raise the Author to a station unoccupied by any Poet ancient or modern. […] surely there can be no higher style of poetry than that which extends the sphere of contemplation[.]28

Coleridge is not known to have reviewed The Excursion, though he did write frequently for the Post.

The reception of most interest for this thesis is that of Shelley and Keats. The well-known responses that have come down to us suggest that Keats found it a work ‘to rejoice at’, whereas the Shelleys were ‘much disappointed’ with Wordsworth’s apparent apostasy.29 But more important than this seeming polarisation is the ways in which both Shelley and Keats took imaginative receipt of The Excursion and engaged with its central concerns, including solitude and despondency.

The Excursion after The Prelude (1850–1950)

Seven editions of The Excursion were published during Wordsworth’s lifetime – the last was part of the six-volume Poetical Works of 1849–50 – and it is well known that the poem achieved popularity with Victorian readers.30 Its decline began with Matthew Arnold’s 1879 selection of Wordsworth’s poems, with its emphasis on shorter lyrical works, and accelerated towards the end of the century.31 As the Cornell editors put it, this was ‘almost certainly related to the increasing popularity of The Prelude, which has dominated study of Wordsworth’s longer poetry every since.’32

It is also well known that, as Kenneth Johnston and Gene Ruoff put it, Wordsworth ‘was not much in favor with the New Critics […] who favored in general a tight, dry, ironic, “modernist” sensibility of the sort exemplified by T. S. Eliot’. Happily,

since then, Wordsworth’s poetry has been massively reinterpreted by a wide variety of astute and subtle critics until he sometimes seems the very paradigm of another kind of modernism than the New Critics liked to recognize: that is, the sensibility ill at ease with the modern world but striving, against all odds and sometimes even against itself, to make affirmative, forward-looking statements of “something evermore about to be.”33

The post-Prelude century was capped by the publication in 1950 of the first book-length study of The Excursion, by Judson Stanley Lyon, which begins with the words, ‘The Excursion has long been generally neglected’. Lyon notes that ‘Wordsworth criticism for the last twenty-five years has repudiated Arnold’, but by ‘[concerning] itself mainly with The Prelude’.34 In the very broadest terms, as the Cornell editors suggest, this has remained the case for the three-quarters of a century following Lyon. A non-quantitative but striking illustration of this is the downright inaccessibility of the poem. Consider for a moment that William Wordsworth’s major work – on grounds of length, influence and, at least in parts, quality – is unavailable from any of the usual publishers. This of course is not the case for Jerusalem, Biographia Literaria, Don Juan, Prometheus Unbound, or any of Keats’s longer poems. In fact, when one recalls the original two-guinea price tag and that every subsequent edition published in Wordsworth’s lifetime contained at least minor revisions, it might be the case that the 1814 text read by Shelley and Keats has never been accessible as an affordable book. This is a sad irony, given Wordsworth’s democratic hopes that The Excursion would, as I outline at the start of Chapter 2, benefit mankind individually and collectively, and is in part why I quote from the poem extensively in that chapter.

A Romantic revival, the Yale English department, Harold Bloom

Lyon undertook his PhD at Yale University under Frederick A. Pottle, and his book was a Yale Studies in English volume. The year after its publication Harold Bloom arrived at Yale as a graduate student (also with Pottle as his adviser), which in hindsight is symbolic of a new era. A nascent ‘Romantic revival’ was already underway, and the English department at Yale would become its most important locus, including in the work of the so-called ‘Yale school of deconstruction’.35

Bloom’s PhD and first book were on Shelley, but by the late 1950s and early 60s his focus had widened to include Romanticism as a whole and Wordsworth’s place in it. This period gave rise to much new scholarship, the tenor of which is captured in the title of a 1963 volume edited by Northrop Frye: Romanticism Reconsidered. The work of Geoffrey Hartman, for example – like Bloom, Hartman would be a sort of ‘associate member’ of the Yale school – typifies the nature of the reconsideration. His essay ‘Romanticism and “Anti-Self-Consciousness”’ (1962) argues that ‘Like many Romantics, Wordsworth had passed through a depression clearly linked to the ravage of self-consciousness’. Such experiences ‘raise the issue of whether there exist what might be called remedia intellectus: remedies against the corrosive power of analysis and the fixated self-consciousness.’ Therefore, ‘Self-consciousness becomes the subject of poems which qua poetry seek to transmute it.’36 This is Romanticism as ‘internalisation’, an idea that occupied several scholars of this period. Frye, for example, in his contribution to Romanticism Reconsidered, states that ‘Romanticism proper’ involves ‘the internalizing of reality’.37 Bloom’s contribution is central, but apprehending it involves something of a breadcrumb trail.

Perhaps thinking of posterity and his role in the revival-cum-reconsideration, Bloom made following the trail easier than it might have been by carefully recording when he wrote his various contributions. The most important single piece of writing, and the one to which my title alludes, is ‘The Internalization of Quest-Romance’, an essay written in 1968, first published in the Yale Review in 1969, and expanded for Romanticism and Consciousness (1970), a collection edited by Bloom, which also contains essays by Hartman and Frye. Looking back at the essay in 2004, Bloom wrote that ‘after a third of a century, I find it best represents my lifetime thought on the Romantic poets.’38

To internalise is ‘to give an inward or subjective character to; to experience or understand from a mental or spiritual perspective’ (OED). Bloom argues that Romanticism as such can be understood as the internalisation of the hero quest – he even uses ‘Romantic’ and ‘internalized’ as synonyms39 – and the essay begins with Freud, who, Bloom argues, thought that ‘The deepest satisfactions of literature […] come from a release of tensions in the psyche.’ Moreover,

what Blake and Wordsworth do for their readers, or can do, is closely related to what Freud does or can do for his, which is to provide both a map of the mind and a profound faith that the map can be put to a saving use.40

However, Bloom thinks Freud found only ‘part of the truth’ because the ‘internalization of romance, particularly of the quest variety […] [was] made for more than therapeutic purposes’.41

As well as being a student of myth-making, Bloom is a critic with his own mythopoeic tendencies, so it is helpful to range back and forth through the essay in order to extract what is schematic as regards the nature of this quest. He identifies the first stage with Prometheus (bound) and the second, taking a phrase from one of Blake’s letters, with ‘the Real Man, the Imagination’:

Prometheus is the poet-as-hero in the first stage of his quest, marked by a deep involvement in political, social, and literary revolution […] The Real Man, the Imagination, emerges after terrible crises in the major stage of the Romantic quest, which is typified by a relative disengagement from revolutionary activism […] so as to bring the search within the self and its ambiguities. […] The final enemy to overcome is a recalcitrance in the self[.]42

Bloom’s (acknowledged) debt to Hartman is evident in his elucidation of this recalcitrance:

The high cost of Romantic internalization, that is, of finding paradises within a renovated man, tends to manifest itself in the arena of self-consciousness. The quest is to widen consciousness as well as to intensify it, but the quest is shadowed by a spirit that tends to narrow consciousness to an acute preoccupation with the self. This shadow of imagination is solipsism, what Shelley calls the Spirit of Solitude or Alastor[.]43

This spirit – ‘The final enemy to overcome’ – can also be thought of as what Shelley calls

the unwilling dross that checks the spirit’s flight, Wordsworth the sad perplexity or fear that kills or […] the hope that is unwilling to be fed, and Keats, most simply and perhaps most powerfully, the Identity. […] The best single name for the antagonist is Keats’s Identity, but the most traditional is Selfhood, and so I shall use it here.44

Bloom’s template for the internalised quest moves by systole and diastole, outflowing followed by self-filling: social activism, then crisis and disengagement; self-analysis, then a fight against solipsism. Wordsworth instigated this pulsation along with its inherent problematics:

Wordsworth is a crisis-poet […] [he] came […] to heal the division within man, and between man and the world, if never quite between man and man. […] [He] made his kind of poetry out of an extreme urgency, and out of an overfilled inner self […] that nearly choked in an excess of its own delights. This is the Egotistical Sublime of which Keats complained, but Keats knew his debt to Wordsworth[.]45

The idea that Wordsworth tried without quite succeeding to heal the division between man and man has been noted by several critics. David Perkins, for example, says that Wordsworth loved ‘Nature […] as a reality, man as an idea’.46 This distinction forms part of the analysis of Kenneth Johnston, another Wordsworthian trained at Yale:

The ‘Prospectus’ [to The Excursion] begins, ‘On Man, on Nature, and on Human Life’ […] [The phrase] establishes a balance between individual integrity (Man) and social responsibility (Human Life) in the world-as-given (Nature), that constitutes at once the glory and the stumbling block of Wordsworth’s democratic imagination. […] [He] constantly tried, and constantly failed, to integrate a vision of imaginatively redeemed society into The Recluse’s epic mission. […] Almost from the beginning, it has been the criticism of Wordsworth’s egotism and his ‘nature worship’ that they lead him, in Matthew Arnold’s phrase, to turn his eyes ‘from half of human fate’. But the manuscripts of his master-project, largely unpublished until recent times, show that he was determined to turn his vision toward ‘the tribes and fellowships of men’, to give them ‘authentic comment’.47

A word on one more Yale Romanticist to whom we will return in the conclusion. The Yale Studies in English series was revived in 2008 with Paul H. Fry’s Wordsworth and the Poetry of What We Are, a study, in a sense, of what Johnston calls Wordsworth’s democratic imagination, whose thesis is one explanation of why Wordsworth could not fully integrate ‘social responsibility’ into his work. Fry explains that his ‘approach for the most part avoids issues related to history and politics’. This is because,

Equality for Wordsworth (oneness, unity) was never a political idea. Fostered amid rocks and stones and trees, he saw equality in this largely mineral world as the ontic unity of all things, including human things. This was his central and most radical insight[.]48

Fry’s title is an allusion to the ‘Prospectus’ to The Excursion, in which Wordsworth promises to use ‘words / Which speak of nothing more than what we are’ (58–59). ‘Wordsworth discovers the revelation of being itself’, says Fry, ‘in the nonhumanity that “we” share with the nonhuman universe’. ‘Wordsworth is a great leveler’, but ‘Ontologically […] not politically’. On this reading, there was no ‘apostasy’ because ‘Wordsworth was never radically politicized’ in the first place.49 Rather, his levelling, democratic instinct for existential equality found merely a passing means of political expression in the French Revolution, when, as he later said, he ‘went over to Paris’ and ‘was pretty hot in it’.50

Wordsworth’s leveling instinct […] does not arise initially as a philosophy of human society (republican politics) but as a philosophy of nature which in its turn implies, or at first blush in any case implied, a republican politics.51

Fry absolves Wordsworth of apostasy by pointing to a consistency in his ‘leveling instinct’, though of course Wordsworth was aware of others’ disappointment in him for his giving up on republican politics, hence, as Johnston says, he ‘constantly tried’ – ‘was determined to’ – remember ‘society’. Fry believes Wordsworth found a partially successful compromise as early as ‘Tintern Abbey’, and summarises what he believes was Wordsworth’s motivation for writing: ‘I want to write a poem about my hopes for humanity and for myself. These two things no longer seem to me identical, as they once did, yet they are still connected somehow.’52 We might call this Tinternalisation.

All of which is to say that, as this thesis will argue, Shelley and Keats did not have problems with Wordsworth because he straightforwardly rejoiced in the names of solipsism and egotism. They were somewhat Wordsworth-sceptical, but if Bloom and Johnston are right then Wordsworth’s quest contained from the start the elements that have always characterised responses to it. He continuously calibrates himself to his dual context within nature and society, seeking to reconcile individual integrity and social responsibility. The title of Book VIII of The Prelude contains the claim that ‘Love of Nature [leads] to love of Mankind’. It is perhaps of this that the Wordsworth sceptic is most sceptical, but the fuller, implied claim is that the love of nature aids the repair of individual integrity and thereby permits the love of mankind. Morris Dickstein is an example of a critic who is unsceptical about this. He argues that Wordsworth’s poem ‘Lines left upon a Seat in a Yew-tree’, which I address in Chapter 1 (p. 54), ‘introduces the counterpoint to solitude that would occupy him all his life: the sympathetic imagination that arises paradoxically from the solitary experience of nature’; and his poetry in general ‘conveys the drama of the solitary man who was able to integrate his feeling for himself with his feeling for others, to move on, as he always insisted, from love of nature to love of man’ (my emphasis).53

This thesis aims to demonstrate that if Wordsworth ‘constantly tried’ to put ‘feeling for others’ and ‘redeemed society’ into his work, and if this was Shelley’s and Keats’s chosen emphasis too, then they were continuing a poetic project, not overturning one. Bloom partially anticipates this: ‘The fullest development of the Romantic quest, after [Blake and Wordsworth] […] is in Keats’s Endymion and Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound’; and in The Fall of Hyperion there are ‘hints of what the Imagination’s triumph would have been in Keats.’54 Bloom also refers to the ‘purest version’ of ‘internalized romance’ as comprising ‘the poems of symbolic voyaging that move in a continuous tradition from Shelley’s Alastor to Yeats’s The Wanderings of Oisin’,55 which is a reminder of the poem whose conspicuous absence from Bloom’s essay I have not yet addressed, namely The Excursion. It is clear that the Solitary is a sometime Prometheus stuck in the ‘terrible crises [of] the major stage of the Romantic quest’, and yet he is not referred to once. That is, Bloom, a towering figure in the study of literary influence, in ‘The Internalization of Quest-Romance’, the essay that ‘best represents [his] lifetime thought on the Romantic poets’, omitted to mention the main influence on the poetry of internal quests.56

Discovering the Solitary’s proper place in Bloom’s thinking – as a prelude to developing and refining his emphases – requires going back a decade to his major book on the Romantic poets, The Visionary Company, written 1959–60, published in 1961, and dedicated to M. H. Abrams, quoted above, who taught Bloom when Bloom was an undergraduate at Cornell.57 The book contains chapters devoted to each of the six major Romantics, and near the beginning of those on Byron, Shelley, and Keats, Bloom makes a series of categorical statements about the influence of The Excursion:

The quest-theme of romance previously internalized by Blake and Wordsworth appears again in Shelley’s Alastor and Keats’s Endymion under Wordsworth’s influence. Canto III of Childe Harold manifests a more superficial Wordsworthian influence, probably owing both to Byron’s relationship with Shelley in 1816 and to his own reading of The Excursion. The theme of a quest away from alienation and toward an unknown good is recurrent in the Romantics[.]

Alastor is prompted by The Excursion […] It seemed to the young Shelley that Wordsworth and Coleridge had inaugurated a mode, liberated an imaginative impulse, but then had repudiated their own creation.

The influence of Wordsworth’s Excursion is basic in Alastor, as we have seen. The determining influences on the internalized theme of Endymion are the combined ones of Alastor and the Excursion, as both emphasize the destructiveness of an inward-turning and stagnant solitude.58

I quote the chapter on Byron because the statement that the Romantics quested for an ‘unknown’ good is an important point where I depart from Bloom, as set out below, but Byron is not a focus of the thesis, because of what Bloom calls the ‘more superficial Wordsworthian influence’ in his work. The quest to correct despondency presupposes an earnestness in believing that poetry, in the words of Abrams quoted above, ‘contributes toward [the] aim’ of ‘an abundant life in this world’.59 As Tilottama Rajan points out, Childe Harold ‘renounces the sentimental illusions of quest-romance’ as much as (superficially) internalising them.60 Byron will, however, feature briefly in Chapter 3 of this thesis because the renewal of his relationship with Shelley, in 1818, inspired Shelley’s ‘Julian and Maddalo’ in which Julian ‘Argue[s] against despondency’ (48).

Johnston and Ruoff note, no doubt partly with Bloom in mind, that ‘1960 could provide a convenient starting date from which to document Wordsworth’s steady rise to academic preeminence.’61 But it is a mystery to me how the writer of the above statements went on to publish an essay called ‘The Internalization of Quest-Romance’ in which he does not refer to The Excursion except to call it ‘an aesthetic disaster’! It is possible that Bloom re-read The Excursion shortly after writing the ‘Internalization’ essay, because poem and theory only properly come together in his book Yeats, published in 1970. Here Bloom makes further statements, like the one above, about the continuous tradition of poems of symbolic voyaging, but there is now an ur-quest: ‘It is from the figure of the Solitary in The Excursion that the heroes of Alastor, Endymion, and Childe Harold III derive, and from these questers and their followers […] that Yeats takes his Oisin.’

I return to Yeats in Chapter 2 (p. 116) and my analysis of Book IV of The Excursion, but for now the trail of Bloomian breadcrumbs leads to one more essay. The internalisation theory having always been implicit in The Visionary Company, in the revised edition of that book (1971), Bloom returned and, in a new epilogue, inserted the most explicit statement of the theory to date:

[T]he Wordsworth who dominated nineteenth-century poetry from his own time onward was the author of The Excursion […] This Wordsworth, though he overtly preaches against the Solitary’s errors, nevertheless fathered the poetry of his century th[r]ough the figure of the Solitary. The line from the Solitary of The Excursion to the Shelley of Alastor, the Byron of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, the Keats of Endymion is quite clear […] this tradition of the Wordsworthian Solitary and his quest[.]62

My account of Bloom, and indeed Bloom himself, might leave us wondering, ‘The Wordsworthian Solitary and his quest for what?’ In the final paragraph of the ‘Internalization’ essay Bloom states that ‘Whatever else the love that the full Romantic quest aims at may be, it cannot be a therapy.’ Yet this is after having said, in the first paragraph, that Wordsworth provides ‘a map of the mind and a profound faith that the map can be put to a saving use.’63 I return to this below, in the final section of this introduction (p. 31).

New Historicism: New Politicism?

The Romantic revival was in part a response to the perceived undervaluing of Romantic poetry by T. S. Eliot and the New Critics; an ‘upward revaluation [...] in the wake of […] hostilities’.64 They had created what Bloom called ‘The myth of a Metaphysical counter-tradition’, which in the 1960s and 70s he trenchantly advocated overturning in favour of the ‘central’ line, ‘Protestant, radical, and Miltonic-Romantic’.65 He was, as it were, the Prometheus to Eliot’s Jupiter, the purveyor of a personal theory of poetry and criticism, and a cheerful committer of fallacies intentional and affective. Like Wordsworth, however, having begun as a radical, Bloom is remembered more as the conservative he became, because by the late 1970s he was no longer Prometheus to the New Critics, but Jupiter to the New Historicists, to whom David Simpson provides a helpful introduction.66

Looking back […] we may be struck by how much of the discussion of Romanticism and history in the 1980s was carried on by way of a debate about Wordsworth. […] Much of this work carried on the case made by [Jerome] McGann [in The Romantic Ideology (1983)], producing (in [Marjorie] Levinson’s words) ‘demystifications of Romanticist readings as well as of Romantic poems’ […] it was also a longer-view response to Geoffrey Hartman’s Wordsworth’s Poetry, first published in 1964 and principally responsible for the rehabilitation of Wordsworth as a complex literary-theoretical figure[.]67

It is the view of this thesis that the likes of Hartman, and the criticism of the Romantic revival more broadly, are worth revisiting on merit.

McGann’s book is the exemplary New Historicist treatment of Romanticism. He ‘proposes a new, critical view of Romanticism and its literary products’ – these soon become ‘ideological products’ – and he is nothing if not critical.68 Romantic ‘ideology’ was to be demystified, and ‘Wordsworth [was] the chief poetic offender’, explains Simpson, because he wrote ‘poetry that “annihilates” history […] and allows the poet (as Shelley and Browning, too, had suggested) to lose the world in order to gain his own “immortal soul”’.69 As McGann says of the ‘Intimations’ ode, Wordsworth’s poetry enacts ‘the displacement of the problem inwardly’.70 This sounds rather like ‘The Internalization of Quest-Romance’, and indeed in his earlier essay, ‘Keats and the Historical Method in Literary Criticism’, McGann refers to Romanticism’s ‘patterns of “internalization,” as they have been so memorably called’ (though not memorably enough for Bloom to be referenced).71 McGann seems not so much to dispute the theory, but to take exception to Wordsworth and his inward turn. The difference, however, is that whereas Bloom saw the second generation taking up the internalised quest, in McGann they are at odds with the older poet. As Emma Mason puts it, McGann finds Wordsworth ‘politically lacking’, and Shelley is therefore favoured for having perceived the same thing.72 In fact, James Chandler believes that this tradition of Wordsworth as the politically lacking apostate was inaugurated by Shelley himself.73

The question of internalisation or inward displacement might be taken to apply not just to poetry but to criticism and its motivations. Introducing a volume of New Historicist essays, Jeffrey Cox and Larry Reynolds sketch the origins of the approach:

[The] history of the Left has been written from the Left—the 1960s taught us that criticism had to be committed and thus gave rise to a politically, historically aware scholarship—and from the Right—the Left, which lost politically at the end of the 1960s […] retreated to the academy where it could continue its battles by other subversive means.

This second account paints New Historicism itself as the internalisation of left-romance. Political ‘awareness’ – awareness in general – is a good, but not if binary categories such as ‘improvement of social conditions’ and ‘reactionary purposes’ produce foregone conclusions in criticism; or the attempt to comprehend everything that a poem is, open to the benefit which doing so might confer, is reduced to ‘cooptation’.74 The hermeneutic is as suspicious as the Solitary’s. To suspend disbelief willingly is not to be hoodwinked, but to choose the pleasurable co-optation of reading. Moreover, the idea of ‘displacement’ risks introducing a sort of ducking-stool logic, whereby a poem is political because it is, or – as in the case of ‘Tintern Abbey’ or ‘To Autumn’ – because it is not.75 To paraphrase Wilde’s preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, one might say that the New Historicist dislike of Romantic ‘ideology’ is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass; the New Historicist dislike of Romantic ‘displacement’ is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.76

However, the age of New Historicism may be defined as extending to the present moment, and it has not proved materialist or determinist enough to have produced a monolithic account of Wordsworth. It is as capable of bringing him and Shelley together as of forcing them apart, as in an essay in the Cox–Reynolds volume by Terence Hoagwood: ‘Wordsworth and Shelley […] both argue that there is a connection between mental structures and social institutions’; and ‘Shelley’s prose extends relentlessly the imaginative arguments of Wordsworth’s youth’.77 Hoagwood too assimilates the theory of internalisation, but presents it in an entirely different light:

Wordsworth’s poetry characteristically displaces his ideological frame; his poetry transcodes political issues to conceptual levels where minds are enslaved or liberated. […] transposition to a manifest level of ideological preoccupation—that is, treatment of the structures of thought—need not be interpreted as a reactionary retreat into Wordsworth’s private head. Rather than the turncoat politics of toryism, which Shelley and Byron certainly thought it was, this rhetorical transposition may represent a submergence of the discourse of freedom, aimed precisely at preserving and empowering that discourse, rather than effacing it. […] A Romanticism which is a conservative retreat into the privacy of one’s own subjectivity has for too long been permitted to constitute our notion of all British Romanticism. These values and tendencies are not all of Romanticism; they are not even all of Wordsworth, as his own life and work demonstrate amply.78

To return to McGann for a moment, he says that ‘The cave to which Prometheus and Asia retire at the end of Act III [of Prometheus Unbound] is […] a place from which the renovated future will one day spring’.79 Retirement followed by a renovated future could stand for the intention of Wordsworth’s entire ‘Recluse’ project. To take at face value Shelley’s and Byron’s defining themselves as Young Turks against Wordsworth the lost leader and his ‘turncoat politics’ is to be uncritical of their self-presentation.

Another critic whose work is of interest on this front is Cox himself, who in the less partisan atmosphere of the late 1990s published Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Shelley, Keats, Hunt, and their Circle, which argues on a Goldilocks principle that groups and networks of writers are a good level of historical analysis, neither a narrow look at solitary genius, nor too sweeping. Like McGann, Cox contrasts Wordsworth with the second generation, frequently on account of the latter’s ‘doctrine of sociability’.80 For Keats, ‘The function of poetry is not to offer private insight or consolation but to transform a culture of despondency into one devoted to the hopes of a world reformed.’81 This does not seem to allow that private insight might necessarily precede hopes of a world reformed, a renovated future, and at least one reviewer found ‘The ideological divide Cox perceives as separating the first- and second-generation Romantics […] [to be] only one example of his fondness for reductive dichotomies.’82 Strangely, Cox even credits the idea that Wordsworth’s ‘egotistical sublime’ promotes despondency (the ‘remedy’ being more ‘sociability’).83 Nonetheless, the book is of great interest – Chapter 3, especially – as an historicist’s account of Keats’s influences. Cox agrees with Bloom insofar as ‘the [Hunt] group’s engagement with the Excursion […] [led] them to a collective effort to rewrite what was the central poem in their Wordsworth canon’, a poem Cox admits ‘propounds a social vision’.84 He returned to these matters in William Wordsworth, Second-Generation Romantic (2021), which reconfirms that ‘the entire [Hunt] circle took up Wordsworth’s central theme of “despondency”’, and strikes a somewhat more reconciling note than the earlier book, stating that ‘there is a surprising degree of similarity between the terms used to abuse the Lakers and those later used against the Cockneys’, and that ‘While the Cockneys become the Lakers’ other, they might have been their brethren.’85 ‘Cockney’ was coined in the Tory Blackwood’s Magazine and ‘Laker’ in the Whiggish Edinburgh Review. With hindsight we can see that the two schools were doing something new in poetry (what we now call Romanticism) and being attacked for it by conservatives of Tory and Whig factions.

This thesis is more concerned with what in the poetry tells us that they might have been their brethren, than with what in cultural and critical history tells us that they were not. Far from historicising the internal quest to correct despondency, it seeks to show that the concepts involved speak to the concerns of today. Moreover, if New Historicism is sceptical of self-creation, I am interested in that poetic self-creation that does occur in the gap between a non-naive historical awareness and the overdeterminism of some New Historicism. Just as the Cornell Wordsworth is a gift from textual criticism, perhaps the most valuable products of New Historicism, for those who did not live through its heyday, are superbly well-founded biographies such as Nicholas Roe’s John Keats (2012).86

Wordsworth wrote ‘for the sake / Of youthful Poets, who among these Hills / Will be my second self when I am gone’ (‘Michael’, 37–39); Shelley believed in ‘that great poem, which all poets, like the co-operating thoughts of one great mind, have built up since the beginning of the world’;87 and Keats, comparing ‘human life to a large Mansion of Many Apartments’ and ‘dark passages’, thought that Wordsworth’s ‘Genius is explorative of those dark Passages’:

Now if we live, and go on thinking, we too shall explore them. he is a genius and superior [to] us, in so far as he can, more than we, make discoveries, and shed a light in them—Here I must think Wordsworth is deeper than Milton […] [who] did not think into the human heart, as Wordsworth has done[.]88

The youthful poets Shelley and Keats were Wordsworth’s second selves, their thoughts co-operated with his (without being co-opted), and they followed him down dark passages into the human heart. That Wordsworth stubbornly went on living, sometimes behaved unlovably, and became the distributor of stamps for Westmorland does not matter very much.89 It does not even matter very much that a few weeks after writing the ‘Mansion of Many Apartments’ letter, Keats found Wordsworth’s ‘canvassing for the Lowthers’ ‘Sad—sad—sad’ – the second letter does not cancel the first.90 I outline my preferred critical approach in the final section of this introduction.

Turn of the century and the Cornell edition

Still in 1987 Simpson could write ‘The Excursion has been very little studied’; and for William Galperin, two years later, ‘it has become the “tradition” of Wordsworth criticism to enlist the poem as a warning sign of Wordsworth’s decline’.91 But you wait half a century for another monograph on The Excursion to turn up and then two come along in the space of five years: Impure Conceits: Rhetoric and Ideology in Wordsworth’s Excursion (1997) by Alison Hickey and Re-reading The Excursion: Narrative, Response and the Wordsworthian Dramatic Voice (2002) by Sally Bushell. Hickey ‘focuses on The Excursion’s “impure conceits” (2.485), whose gaps and strayings […] are thematized in the poem’s plots of deviation and deferral, usurpation, broken lineages, and unfulfilled promises.’92 The ‘impurity’ of The Excursion is perhaps inversely proportional to the philosophical systematicity Coleridge hoped it would have. Hickey is not concerned, in the New Historicist mode, ‘to make the earlier Wordsworth answerable to the later “conservative” Wordsworth’, in part because this fails to recognise that ‘For [him], the relation of poetry to system (ideology) is an ongoing, irresolvable question’.93 This relates to the issue of whether the ‘voices’ of The Excursion are sufficiently differentiated, which I explore in Chapter 2. Hickey argues, rightly in my view, that

Often the poem’s defects have been ascribed to the presumed fact that Wordsworth’s mind is already made up: the Wanderer is his spokesman, the Solitary his straw man, and the dialogue just a way for him to teach his own philosophy while pretending to be “dialogic.” But […] The Excursion’s characters are not reducible to fixed positions; they are all double in some way.94

The genuinely dialogic nature of the poem is easy to overlook because the reductive idea of Wordsworth’s life of two halves – ‘the “good” early and presumably radical Wordsworth [and] the “bad” increasingly conservative Wordsworth’, as Cox puts it – has always been seductive.95 As Cox’s summary demonstrates, the division bundles politics and poetry: ‘good’ radicalism and high-quality poetry; ‘bad’ conservatism (apostasy) and less good poetry. But of course it is not as simple as that. If Fry is right about ‘Tintern Abbey’, then by the time of its composition Wordsworth had already taken the ‘conservative’ step of distinguishing between his hopes for humanity and his hopes for himself. (Could he have emerged from his depression without doing so?) Fry states that ‘Conventional views on the date of Wordsworth’s apostasy range from 1797 or 1798 to 1806’.96 The early end of this range would reverse the formula rehearsed above, and instead find that the ‘golden decade’ of Wordsworth’s poetry, 1797/8–1807/8, began with his political apostasy.

Tempting as this might be as a foray into the politicisation of Wordsworth, it is not my argument. Rather, returning to Hickey and the dialogic nature of The Excursion, with its double-natured characters, the poem problematises the whole notion of a divide between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Wordsworth, partly because it was written over such a long period. In the title of Chapter 1 I refer to the period 1797–1813, from Wordsworth’s beginning ‘The Ruined Cottage’ to his finishing The Excursion. A text produced over sixteen years that straddle the dating of politics and poetry good and bad can hardly be a ‘warning sign’ of one signified thing, be it decline or anything else. Rather, in its capacious impurity, The Excursion contains all these, and as such – hence my focus on it – is the poetic embodiment of Wordsworth’s career.97 A career whose direction a figure such as Shelley was bound to react against, in the midst of the Regency, the Napoleonic Wars, and his own ongoing crises, but which criticism ought perhaps to make more effort to view in the round. As Hickey says in the doctoral thesis that gave rise to her book,

One of the reasons that it is so difficult for us to stand back from [the] model of decline or betrayal is that we still read The Excursion as filtered through the points of view of the second generation of Romantic poets. [...] It is ironic that the neglect the poem suffers is largely due to those upon whom it exercised the most pervasive influence.98

Following Bloom, and making what I suppose is a pragmatist’s case, I think the ‘pervasive influence’ of The Excursion on what ended up, after deep thought, in Shelley’s and Keats’s poems is of far greater interest than ‘points of view’ expressed in letters or conversation. For this and other reasons it is as true now as when Hickey wrote it that The Excursion is ‘a vast, unexplored space that has yet to be granted its full complexity.’99

The dialogic nature of The Excursion is explored at book length in Sally Bushell’s Re-reading The Excursion: Narrative, Response and the Wordsworthian Dramatic Voice (2002). She relates her work to Hickey’s by saying,

Like her, I view the text as an open-ended, explorative work which questions its own presentation of poetic narrative. However, Hickey is centrally concerned with how ‘poetry intersects with its social and political contexts’ (8) in the poem at a figural level. […] [She] is interested in the failures and limitations of rhetoric – ‘the accidents and errancies of figuration’ (14) – which she sees the poem as exploring. The dialogue between characters is viewed as a ‘web of ambivalently inflected rhetorical perspectives’ (14). In other words, Hickey reads the dramatic structure of the poem – the use of characters, exchange of speech, and telling of stories – as a kind of complex rhetorical device. […] Like Hickey I am opposed to a traditional reading of the poem as ‘monolithic, monologic bombast’ (12) but my opposition to this is expressed in a way almost diametrically opposed to hers. Thus, where she suggests that the text is not to be read dramatically […] I argue for a treatment of the work on the basis of what it actually presents: as a dramatic poem consisting of speakers and listeners. […] There is room for both Hickey’s ‘figurative’ and my ‘conversational’ approach[.]100

Bushell goes on to argue that the poem has been read as a didactic (propositional) work and judged harshly as a consequence (not by Hickey, but in general). Rather, it is a dramatic work peopled by fallible characters whose ‘messages’ need to be inferred with care. To give a straightforward but important example, ‘the reader is encouraged both to sympathise with, and be distanced from, the Solitary at different points’.101 The book ends with Bushell’s stating that ‘The Excursion is to be “re-read” […] as a poem of value in its own right, developing a complex poetics which has at its centre not just the speaking poet but also the attentive reader.’102 I certainly agree with this, but, as is the case when reading Hickey, I think that there is more to say about what the therapeutic poetics of ‘Despondency Corrected’ are intended to do for both speaking poet and attentive reader.

By the time Bushell’s book was published, she was one of the editors working on the Cornell edition of The Excursion, which came out in 2007. I admit to experiencing a literary-critical frisson when I read in her 1999 doctoral thesis, the basis of the book, a reference to ‘the forthcoming Cornell Edition of The Excursion’, of which, unbeknown to her at the time, she would be an editor.103 As Bushell and her fellow editors say in their preface, ‘This volume is the final edition in the Cornell Wordsworth series, a project that began four decades ago.’104 Perhaps surprisingly, it is the first scholarly edition of The Excursion to take as its reading text the 1814 quarto read by Shelley and Keats. For this reason, and because it post-dates all the secondary material I have referred to so far, it is the indispensible edition of the poem.

To return to where I began this section, Hickey in 2010 could look back and say that ‘in recent decades The Excursion has garnered an increased share of scholarly attention, culminating in the magnificent new Cornell edition of the poem.’105 Tentatively, then, by the two hundredth anniversary of the poem’s publication, a modest renaissance in interest was underway, but not one which has yet taken account of its place at the centre of Bloom’s internalisation theory.

The Excursion’s bicentenary to the present

In 2014, The Excursion’s bicentenary, the Wordsworth Circle published an issue devoted to the poem, which allows us to take the temperature of The Excursion and the ‘increased share of scholarly attention’ it is receiving in the early twenty-first century.106 In the first article, Bushell explores the revising and revisioning that took Wordsworth from the original ‘Ruined Cottage’ (1797) to Book I of The Excursion over a decade and a half later – ‘the spatial and temporal dimensions of the return to self’ – and, building on the subject of her book, finds the Wanderer himself ‘a professional re-reader of person and place’. Moreover,

the Wanderer actively and explicitly applies the act of reading into/ reading onto the Solitary himself and his mental outlook in the hopes of effecting change [my emphasis] […] This is more successful than might first appear since, for all his verbal scepticism, misanthropy, and resistance, the entire poem concludes with a re-articulation of the wanderer chronotope [setting, ‘time-place’] in a way that encompasses the Solitary[.]107

In his excellent ‘Ebb and Flow in The Excursion’, Michael O’Neill notes that ‘Hickey (1997) and Bushell (2002), among others, have recognized in the poem a tale that is far from the unreadable monolith of critical tradition.’ I return to this article in Chapter 2 (p. 93), and only note here O’Neill’s judgement that The Excursion is

in many ways the quintessential Romantic long poem, as in their different ways, Shelley and Keats were quick to see. […] Keats responds to the ability of the poem to convey the ebb and flow of feelings as amongst its chief distinctions. […] echoes in Prometheus Unbound suggest that Shelley responded with a similar artistic appreciativeness, whatever his overt polemical views of the poem.108

Johnston too draws on Hickey and Bushell in considering a question to which I return in Chapter 2 (p. 125), namely whether Wordsworth was ‘of the Solitary’s party’. Johnston concludes that he ‘did not develop what one might call the ideologically pure form of the Solitary’s story’, but nevertheless ‘reading the Solitary’s state of mind as being close to Wordsworth’s is not a misreading but a key insight.’109 Galperin refers to the poem’s ‘palliative’ qualities, an idea to which I will return in a moment.110

The introduction to the issue is founding editor Marilyn Gaull’s cheerful and unaffected ‘Greetings’. In telling the story of her first encounter with The Excursion, ‘by accident in a library sale’, and in paying tribute to it, Gaull presents a poem that is as one would want to be on an excursion – not overburdened with baggage:

[T]he messages were empowering: how minds, even mine, were creative, adapted to a “bright and breathing world,” as the Solitary called it, where “origins” did not matter, and the words, “nothing more than what we are,” were enough, the energies, pace, turns of phrase, insights, surprise, and joy everywhere. […] I saw […] the Solitary […] separate but not solitary, and in many ways like us, a student, hardly dejected, genial, gleeful, blithe, as Wordsworth called him[.]111

Gaull lists the approaches covered in the issue as ‘textual […] technical […] analytical and interpretive […] ancient sources […] contemporary contexts […] religious background […] Victorian influence […] and the material book’.112 Of those listed, the approaches I hope to emulate in this thesis are the broad one of ‘analytical and interpretive’, where Gaull places O’Neill, Johnston and Galperin, and ‘contemporary contexts’, which describes two consecutive essays on other major Romantics’ relationships with The Excursion: Jane Stabler’s ‘Byron and The Excursion’ and Seamus Perry’s ‘Coleridge’s Disappointment in The Excursion’. A potentially fruitful approach not present is ‘psychological’. Also missing, of course, are the younger Romantics, and I hope that Chapters 3 and 4 of this thesis serve, in effect, as ‘Shelley and The Excursion’ and ‘Keats and The Excursion’, the former’s disappointment notwithstanding.

What Galperin says of the palliation offered by The Excursion relates to the end of Book I; that is, to the tale of Margaret, which was, in its earliest version, the stand-alone poem called ‘The Ruined Cottage’. I return to the passage in Chapter 1 (p. 53), but in brief the Wanderer, at the end of his story of terrible suffering, gestures and explains to the Poet that ‘the high spear-grass on that wall, / By mist and silent rain-drops silver’d o’er’ conveys to his heart ‘an image of tranquillity’ and, ultimately, ‘happiness’ (I. 973–76, 984). As Galperin says, ‘the spear-grass is explicitly a palliative’.113 Gaull hopes that the issue ‘will inspire more essays fulfilling the possibilities these have initiated’, and it is my contention that if The Excursion is to repay its modestly ‘increased share of scholarly attention’ – more, if it deserves the attention of the reading public that buys paperback classics – this fulfilment might arise from what Galperin points to, the palliative possibilities of the poem.114

It is the intention of this thesis to offer a more psychological approach to The Excursion than those represented in the Wordsworth Circle special edition, and then to apply this to the poem’s influence on Shelley and Keats. The approach arises out of Bloom’s internal quest model, but seeks to demystify phrases such as ‘a recalcitrance in the self’, by drawing out the model’s latent therapeutic implications.115

Despondency palliated, a new approach to Bloom’s internal quest

A recent work of interest is The Poetics of Palliation: Romantic Literary Therapy, 1790–1850 (2019) by Brittany Pladek, which explores some areas already mentioned, though in the case of Wordsworth Pladek focuses on Lyrical Ballads and does not mention The Excursion. She identifies ‘a resurgent interest in the literary community in recuperative forms of reading […] as well as a wider cultural interest in what is called “self-care”.’ Weighing the political implications of this, she in effect defends Wordsworth, stating that ‘even within the liberal-individualist paradigm, [his] model of poetic palliation seeks to close the gap between social consciousness and private therapy’, which again recapitulates Johnston’s idea of a balance sought ‘between individual integrity (Man) and social responsibility (Human Life)’.116

As I set out below, this thesis attempts to take the poetics of palliation to, even draw them out from, Bloom’s work on internal quests, and thereafter, as it were, take the neo-Bloomian package back to Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats. In recent Wordsworth criticism, words such as ‘internalise’ and ‘internalisation’ occur more frequently than do actual references to Bloom’s essay. This might suggest that the theory itself has been internalised in the sense of assimilated, and I have already mentioned McGann’s pointed non-reference to Bloom when discussing Romanticism’s ‘patterns of “internalization,” as they have been so memorably called’.117 In the specific case of Excursion criticism – none of the seventeen pieces in the Wordsworth Circle bicentenary edition refer to ‘The Internalization of Quest-Romance’ – part of the explanation might be that in the well-known essay of that name Bloom does not actually mention the poem he shortly afterwards put at the centre of his theory. I have tried to bring essay and poem together in my section on Bloom above. But when one looks into this, non-reference can begin to seem intentional. Remarkably, though Bushell’s doctoral thesis contains twenty-five uses of ‘internalise’, ‘internalisation’, etc., including one with Bloom’s American -ize spelling, neither the thesis, the book that followed, nor the Cornell edition of The Excursion, contains a single reference to Harold Bloom.118

For many critics of the last half century, if they think of Bloom at all, they think of the ‘Anxiety of Influence’ – discussed below – or (worse) the ‘School of Resentment’,119 not of the ingenious Romanticist who argued that Wordsworth ‘fathered the poetry of his century th[r]ough the figure of the Solitary.’ If there is a renaissance of interest in The Excursion, it seems unwilling to notice that ‘by far the most recognized literary critic of his day’ (according to a tribute from Bloom’s faculty at Yale120) stated in his major work on the Romantics that through ‘the Wordsworthian Solitary and his quest’, ‘Wordsworth was the inventor of modern poetry’.121

We must return, though, to the question: the Wordsworthian Solitary and his quest for what? I have quoted Bloom on Romanticism’s ‘quest away from alienation and toward an unknown good’, and it isn’t that he never attempts to define this unknown good.122 For example, in the ‘Internalization’ essay:

The hero of internalized quest is the poet himself, the antagonists of quest are everything in the self that blocks imaginative work, and the fulfillment is never the poem itself, but the poem beyond that is made possible by the apocalypse of imagination.

And,

The internalization of quest-romance made of the poet-hero a seeker not after nature but after his own mature powers […] The widened consciousness of the poet did not give him intimations of a former union with nature or the Divine, but rather of his former selfless self.123

The ‘poem beyond […] made possible by the apocalypse of imagination’; a ‘selfless self’; ‘a capable imagination’, in a later book about Wallace Stevens:124 what do these ‘goods’ have in common? I stated above (p. 11) that Bloom thought it necessary to move beyond a Freudian understanding of the internal quest because it (the quest) was ‘made for more than therapeutic purposes’. The passage continues: it was ‘made in the name of a humanizing hope that approaches apocalyptic intensity.’125

As well as being an ingenious Romanticist, Bloom was a self-confessed Romantic, and the ‘apocalyptic intensity’ he finds in the poems is a quality shared by some of his criticism, in particular the agonistic theory set out in The Anxiety of Influence (1973), which is that what Bloom calls ‘strong poets’ – ‘the ever-living men and women, the canonical writers’ – overcome said anxiety and win eternal life by ‘strongly […] misreading previous writing’, ‘wrestling with the mighty dead’. The anxiety of influence is acutest among modern (i.e. Romantic) poets, and the internalisation of quest romance is a response to it, hence ‘All quest-romances of the post-Enlightenment, meaning all Romanticisms whatsoever, are quests to re-beget one’s own self, to become one’s own Great Original.’126 Born into an oppressively palimpsestic world, the Romantics as it were went into themselves, hoping to become kings of infinite space. As Bloom puts it in A Map of Misreading (1975) – companion piece to The Anxiety of Influence – ‘Keats is concerned […] with clearing an imaginative space for himself, in the hope of finding a map with blanks that he himself can fill in. But his one resource, like Wordsworth’s, is further internalization’.127

In some ways Bloom states his theory more plainly in A Map of Misreading: ‘Let me reduce my argument to the hopelessly simplistic; poems, I am saying, are neither about “subjects” nor about “themselves.” They are necessarily about other poems’.128 A statement like this makes sense of Bloom’s otherwise surprising associate membership of the ‘Yale school of deconstruction’. Poems, in fact, deconstruct earlier poems. And to what end? ‘[P]oetic immortality (the only eternal happiness that is relevant)’; ‘one’s election to the realm of true Instructors’. Wordsworth understood ‘that a poem is written to escape dying. Literally, poems are refusals of mortality.’ To overcome death twice, by conquering ‘ghostly fathers’ of the past and becoming canon-fit for the future – for Bloom, these are the what and the why of poetry. Writing begins to sound like ‘terror management’, and there is also an unlikely similarity to New Historicism, Bloom’s being a rather power-centred model in which strong poets resist co-optation by their precursors’ work.

Naturally, Bloom’s theory of the anxiety of influence has its critics. Christopher Ricks, for example, instead emphasises gratitude, arguing that the true Wordsworth, ‘my Wordsworth […] has […] the gratitude and generosity of a poet’, and that Keats, in turn, was ‘grateful to Wordsworth’:

What Keats most valued in the English poets, irrespective of anything with which they could furnish his art, was a sense of brother hood with his peers. He declines the invitation to figure in the dark melodrama of The Anxiety of Influence.129

My own ‘misreading’ of Bloom is that his category of internalised quest romance can be defined not only in terms of the past and the future, and death, but also life in the present. The quest ‘to become one’s own Great Original’ might be a case of all against all, but the quest to correct despondency is more collaborative. I argue that the poets under discussion went into themselves with a restorative agenda, hoping to improve the conditions they found, and seeking not only intimations of immortality but also intimations of mortal happiness. As Matthew Bevis puts it of Wordsworth, ‘when things were going well, the young poet couldn’t have cared less about immortality.’130 In a sense, then, the thesis seeks to demystify the Romantics as well as Bloom, and I return to this in the conclusion (p. 289) in a discussion of Bloom’s idea of poems as ‘lie[s]-against time’.131 It is true that Keats said he hoped to abide in ‘the realm of true Instructors’ – ‘I shall be among the English Poets after my death’, as he put it132 – but that is partly because circumstances compelled him to think about death. He also wanted health, not to have to worry about money, and to marry Fanny Brawne, and used poetry to process and palliate the despondency produced by these plights. ‘Oh! for a day and all well!’, as he once wrote to a friend.133

So the thesis draws less on Bloom’s maps of misreading and virgin territory, and more on the Bloom who said that Wordsworth provides his readers with ‘a map of the mind and a profound faith that the map can be put to a saving use.’134 To return to Pladek, a restorative agenda or saving use refer in this thesis to correction as palliation, not cure. Tellingly, in her book’s one reference to Bloom (excluding a footnote), Pladek says that he does not understand Wordsworth in terms of the poetics of palliation, but, contrastingly, of ‘holism’, ‘a treacherously high bar’.135 The word ‘quest’ does occur in The Excursion, but an excursion itself is not a quest for an ultimate or fixed thing, but ‘A journey […] from one’s home […] with the intention of returning […] spec. A journey […] undertaken for the sake of pleasure or health’ (OED).136 The anxiety of influence cannot be palliated, because of its apocalyptic intensity, but ordinary human suffering and ill health can be. The answer to the question ‘The Wordsworthian Solitary and his quest for what?’ is obvious. It is not a quest actually to obtain a new self or new world by means of apocalypse. It is the quest not to be despondent; to be able to return home in a state of non-despondency. And it is for this reason that, seeking to understand The Excursion and the poems it influenced, pace Bloom (though returning to the start of his great essay), in this thesis I consider the extent to which poems of internal quest are made for ‘therapeutic purposes’, and how they can produce ‘a release of tensions in the psyche’, for both writer and reader.137

The first person to do this was Wordsworth himself. Indeed, he had a notable tendency to announce in prefatory matter his interest in the mind and desire to promote its felicity. In the unpublished ‘Advertisement’ intended for Poems, in Two Volumes (1807), he writes,

The short Poems, of which these Volumes consist, were chiefly composed to refresh my mind during the progress of a work of length and labour […] [a] larger work […] They were composed with much pleasure to my own mind, & I build upon that remembrance a hope that they may afford profitable pleasure to many readers.138

The ‘work of length and labour’ was of course ‘The Recluse’, including The Excursion, a poem whose ‘main region’, as Wordsworth puts it in the ‘Prospectus’, is ‘the Mind of Man’ (40–41), and which was intended to afford correspondingly large refreshment and pleasure to said region. Moreover, the ‘Prospectus’ was written during the same period as the Lyrical Ballads ‘Preface’ in which Wordsworth announced his poetic project, in the first paragraph (unchanged between the 1800 and 1802 versions), by saying that he hopes to impart ‘that sort of pleasure and that quantity of pleasure […] which a Poet may rationally endeavour to impart.’139 He goes on to state categorically that ‘The Poet writes under one restriction only, namely, that of the necessity of giving immediate pleasure’.140 That is, of producing a higher reading on Keats’s ‘Pleasure Thermometer’.141

We tend to think of the Romantics as being opposed to utilitarianism, but ‘the necessity of giving immediate pleasure’ is a happiness principle; or, with Freud in mind, a pleasure principle. There is an irony, and perhaps an historical double take, in considering that De Quincey could almost be formulating the ‘greatest happiness principle’ the year before Bentham actually coined the term, when he says, in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, ‘I confess it, as a besetting infirmity of mine, that I am too much of an Eudæmonist: I hanker too much after a state of happiness, both for myself and others’; and I do not think that Wordsworth would have minded answering, in this sense, to the name of eudaemonist, quester after ‘a life of happiness’ (Excursion, I. 550).142

There is precedent among major Wordsworth critics for considering his poetry’s therapeutic purposes, albeit often briefly. Famously, Arnold referred to ‘Wordsworth’s healing power’, and J. S. Mill found his poems ‘a medicine for my state of mind’, i.e. his ‘habitual depression’: ‘They seemed to be the very culture of the feelings, which I was in quest of.’143 Dickstein states that these ‘healing, prescriptive metaphors of Arnold and Mill are not Victorian additions, for they are already implied by Wordsworth’s own diagnosis of the modern world.’144 More recently, Jonathan Bate says Wordsworth’s ‘poetry has been for many, and can still be for some, a medium of solace and an oasis of calm in a noisy and stressful world, even a medicine for mental illness.’145 Hartman’s approach has been linked to ‘“psychoaesthetics” (the power of poetry to repair human grief)’.146 And Fry says of The Excursion, ‘The whole poem puts the question, how can we be happier?’147 How, to paraphrase the Poet, can our lives be sweet to ourselves?148

Discussing ‘The Ruined Cottage’, Duncan Wu says that ‘The real question is not so much what the poetry means as whether it works’, and that ‘Wordsworth wanted to give his reader the same experience as that attributed to the Pedlar in his visionary state.’149 If a poem ‘works’ to give readers an ‘experience’ such as tranquillity, how does it? At the end of his essay on ‘Wordsworth and Human Suffering’, Cleanth Brooks says something similar to Wu, and even more enticing: in The Excursion

the poet has enabled us to know what it “feels like” to hold the Wanderer’s faith. This he has done through his art—through what reveals itself as a most skillful and delicate management of the resources of language. The accomplishment is of the highest importance and it must not be misunderstood: the art is not cosmetic but structural—not a rhetorical presentation of plausible arguments but a poetic creation. But to try to show this in detail would involve a commentary that would far exceed the limits of this paper.150

What it feels like or, as the Pastor’s wife puts it in Book IX, ‘to see / Even as he sees’ (468–69). Making use of the less limited length permitted in a thesis, the methodology of Chapter 2 is to attempt just such a detailed commentary, before returning, in the conclusion, to the ‘skillful and delicate’ management of verse.

In the Wordsworth Circle bicentenary issue Johnston says that ‘The ideological destination of The Excursion, precisely if narrowly conceived, is to cure—“correct” is Wordsworth’s word—the Solitary’s despondency over the failed idealism of the French Revolution’.151 In the only Wordsworth Circle piece since then specifically about The Excursion, Anthony John Harding says that the poem’s agenda at the time was ‘offering troubled readers reasons for reconciling themselves to life after a protracted war.’152 My non-historicist claim is that Johnston’s statement can be contracted – the destination of The Excursion is to palliate despondency – and Harding’s works minus the last four words.

More to the point, acknowledgements of ‘therapeutic purposes’ are there in Bloom himself, in spite of apocalyptic intensity. The claim that ‘Whatever else the love that the full Romantic quest aims at may be, it cannot be a therapy’ comes in the final paragraph of the ‘Internalization’ essay, which was published for the first time in a book of Bloom’s own writing as the opening piece in The Ringers in the Tower: Studies in Romantic Tradition (1971).153 But the final paragraph of that book’s final essay, written earlier, says something quite different:

[T]he mind is the most terrible force in the world, since it alone can defend us against itself. The secret of Romanticism, from Blake and Wordsworth down to the age of Yeats and Stevens, increasingly looks like a therapy in which consciousness heals itself by a complex act of invention. The way between the mental errors of reductiveness and expansiveness is the path of invention, the finding of what will suffice through an act of discovery that is also a making. […] in a bad time […] If we listen to [the Romantic humanist and poet] he will lead us beyond the quarrels of reason and imagination, and help us to live our lives in this bare land of things as they are, alone with the wind and the weather.154

If God’s absence cannot be helped, then the one who can bring amelioration to this mineral, Lear-like landscape is the Romantic poet – note that ‘what will suffice’ sounds more like palliation than what we have so far met in Bloom. One could try to make the statements compatible and say that what the quest aims at is not only a therapy, or say that Bloom changed his mind and wanted to correct his simpler view. If one wanted to preference the ‘therapy in which consciousness heals itself’ essay, it is true to say that it was published after ‘The Internalization of Quest-Romance’, even if written before.155 The ‘Internalization’ essay might not have been as anti-therapeutic if it were not for the peculiar absence from it of The Excursion, since that poem so clearly draws on Wordsworth’s own crisis. But, then again, Bloom was not inclined towards the kind of biographical criticism that has connected the Solitary’s despondency to Wordsworth’s own, so it might not have made a difference. In any case, I think there is something of value to be discovered in taking Bloom where perhaps he did not want to go. He once wrote,

[Kenneth] Burke […] taught me to ask: What is the poet (or critic) trying to do for herself, as a person, by writing her poem or essay? Swerving from the magnificent Burke, I tend to rephrase that as: What is the poet (or critic) trying to do for herself as a poet or critic by composing her poem or essay?156

In turn, I tend from the magnificent Bloom to swerve back. The Romantic internal quest aims at a therapy in which consciousness heals itself, not in the sense of a cure-all, but in the finding of what will suffice, namely good or at least better mental health, a state of non-despondency. The poems under discussion were journeys of self-therapy in the writing and can still be – with, as Wordsworth puts it in ‘Essay, Supplementary to the Preface’, ‘the exertion of a co-operating [not co-opted] power in the mind of the Reader’ – journeys of self-therapy in the reading.157 One might call this ‘applied literary criticism’ in the sense that Niall Ferguson thinks ‘applied history’ should ‘attempt to illuminate current challenges’.158 Even in the ‘Internalization’ essay Bloom talks about Shelley and Keats recovering dreams ‘for the health of life’, and of ‘“A timely utterance gave that thought relief” [being] the Wordsworthian formula for the momentary redemption of the poet’s sanity’.159 Of a later book, How to Read and Why, he said, ‘there is a self-help aspect to it, I’m glad to say.’160

This may all be, as Lionel Trilling believes, rather embarrassing. Referring in Romanticism Reconsidered to Keats’s ‘Sleep and Poetry’, he says:

[T]he great end of poetry, we are told, is “to soothe the cares, and lift the thoughts of man.”

Such doctrine from a great poet puzzles and embarrasses us. It is, we say, the essence of Philistinism.

The conception of the nature and function of poetry which Keats propounds is, of course, by no means unique with him—it can be understood as a statement of the common assumptions about art which prevailed through the Renaissance up to some point in the nineteenth century, when they began to lose their force.161

I do not know whether it is more or less embarrassing now than it was in 1963, this side of theory, post-structuralism, and New Historicism. Perhaps less, given contemporary concerns about mental health, which in some sense are unavoidable concerns. When he was asked for his aim in philosophy, Wittgenstein answered, ‘To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.’162 Or Wordsworth himself: ‘I know that the multitude walk in darkness. I would put into each man’s hand a lantern to guide him’.163 If Keats wished to soothe his own cares and those of his readers, who are we to blush? A question worthy of attention is how the words on the page can soothe. I also submit this from Johnston and Ruoff:

Late in [Wordsworth’s] life, when in England he had finally become famous, an old Romantic among the emerging generation of Victorian sages, he said he would prefer the designation of “teacher” over any other description of his career. Thus he would be heartened by his strong position in the bastions of Anglo-American academia. Yet he would be both troubled and amazed by societies in which academic experience is, on the one hand, available to historically unprecedented portions of the general population and, on the other hand, seems radically cut off from, or discontinuous with, everyday social reality. In the cultural situation of modern literature, college and university English departments must always guard against becoming academic equivalents of those upper-class drawing rooms from which Wordsworth sought to liberate a truly democratic poetry.164

If, in Romantic and post-Romantic culture, quest narratives have been ‘internalised’, then by implication everyone’s inner life is a kind of quest narrative: ‘all men are questers, even the least’, as Bloom says.165 This is a democratic idea that is perhaps both empowering and unnerving – we are ‘condemned to be free’, in Sartre’s phrase.166 The widely discussed notion that there is a ‘mental health crisis’ suggests people’s need for guidance on their solitary inner quests. In the final essay of the Johnston–Ruoff volume, Dickstein presents a Wordsworth well-suited to helping with this contemporary predicament:

Were I to choose one theme that best crystallizes Wordsworth’s emotional style, I would focus on Wordsworth as a poet of solitude. […] Solitude […] is the condition for Wordsworthian sincerity and self-exploration […] One need not look too far to find solitude inscribed everywhere in [his] poetry, for there is hardly a word that appears more frequently, in more pregnant contexts.

Dickstein’s piece, ‘Wordsworth and Solitude’, is germane to my study, except for a strange absence. He notes that ‘A protagonist of The Excursion is called the Solitary’, but then says no more about this central figure.167

To summarise, it is my contention that for the full richness and penetration of ‘The Internalization of Quest-Romance’ to be apparent, three ideas absent from Bloom’s essay must be set alongside it: first, an internal quest is, by definition, in pursuit of a state of mind, which means that one way in which to read these poems is as works of self-therapy; secondly, the poem of this kind that was most influential on the second generation of Romantic poets was The Excursion; and thirdly, one of the inspirations for that poem’s Solitary was Wordsworth’s own depression. I propose to take these absences as my starting point, as I believe they are potentially fertile and mutually reinforcing: therapeutic considerations are legitimated by biographical insights that link mental health to poetry, and vice versa.

Chapter 1 sets out the background and composition of The Excursion with a focus on Wordsworth’s autobiographical depictions of states of mind. Chapter 2 is a study of the Solitary and the Wanderer’s attempt to ‘correct’ or – more realistically, in practice – to palliate his despondency. Chapters 3 and 4 address respectively the solitary and his internal quest in Shelley and Keats, from Alastor and Endymion, via ‘Julian and Maddalo’ and Hyperion: A Fragment, through to Prometheus Unbound and The Fall of Hyperion. The conclusion offers a theory of why poetry specifically can palliate despondency.

Bloom actively disliked The Excursion, and I suppose some people actively dislike Bloom, but what poem and critic have in common is that they are capacious and merit revisiting. Bloom may have wanted to secularise and ‘de-idealize’ literature in response to Anglo-Catholic New Criticism, but he believed that ‘we are all fallen angels’, and was religious in precisely the way that he said the so-called ‘atheist’ Shelley was.168 His response to materialist criticism, which he saw as a reduction of literature, was a project of resacralisation – a climbing of Jacob’s ladder, or Childe Harold’s pilgrimage.

The Poet in The Excursion calls the Solitary’s cottage ‘A nook for self-examination framed’ (III. 480). If The Excursion itself was Wordsworth’s creation of a poetic framework for self-examination then this thesis is about what of practical, palliative use was done within that framework, by him and later by Shelley and Keats.

From ‘Despondency Corrected: The “Internalised Quest Romances” of Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats (1814–22) as Excursions in Pursuit of Happiness’

Share The Rest is Literature

More A-level bangers from The Book Club. ‘Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.’

The Common Reader

An excellent discussion of the enduringly fascinating Gulliver’s Travels. Zena Hitz is the founder of the Catherine Project, which sounds like something I should get involved with and therefore won’t.

The Honest Broker

Also with Zena Hitz.

How I Write

A conversation with Michael Pollan, whose new book is A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness.

The Lit Path

The first episode from Jack Aldane’s new Substack-based project, The Lit Path, also a discussion of Gulliver’s Travels – highly recommended.

The Lit Path

How Gulliver's Travels Drove Me Sane

On this first episode of The Lit Path, TV Writer, Producer and Author John Yorke sits down with the podcast’s host and producer Jack Aldane to explain why Gulliver's Travels redefined the point of reading for him, after he initially rejecting classical literature at a young age…

Listen now

a month ago · 1 like · Jack Aldane

The LRB Podcast

This kind of blue-chip LRB content is usually behind the paywall, but this series, Poetry and the Turning World, is free to listen. This is the most recent episode, about the weather in poetry.

Until next month.

Macbeth

The Porter in Macbeth is often called drunken but it might be more accurate to describe him as hungover, woken by the knocking of Macduff and Lennox, having ‘carous[ed] till the second cock’ (II. iii. 18), that is until 3 a.m. On his way to answer the knocking he plays out a macabre fantasy of himself as porter of the gates of hell, concluding that all types of people ‘go the primrose way to th’everlasting bonfire’ (II. iii. 14). This concise description of the tragedy of the Macbeths is followed fluently, or fluidly, by his famous statement to Macduff of the three things provoked by drink: ‘Marry, sir, nose-painting, sleep and urine. Lechery, sir, it provokes and unprovokes’ (II. iii. 21–22). (John’s got brewer’s droop – he has no spur to provoke the prick of his intent. For Harold Bloom’s speculation that Macbeth is impotent, see The Invention of the Human, p. 528.) Nose-painting is a red nose, sleep in this play, strongly associated with death – ‘The sleeping and the dead’ (II. ii. 63) – is a vulnerability and then an impossibility, and as the son of a leather worker Shakespeare would have known that the piss artist pisseth most.

By the time of the Porter scene the regicide has already occurred, led by Lady Macbeth and lubricated by alcohol. The plan that she initially explains to her husband is that she will knock out Duncan’s chamberlains ‘with wine and wassail’ (I. vii. 70), ‘wassail’ being revelry or carousing, ironic in a play that contains none. Later she implies something stronger, which threatens to poison them, saying ‘I have drugged their possets, / That death and nature do contend about them’ (II. ii. 6–7), a posset being ‘A drink made from hot milk curdled with ale, wine, or other liquor’ (OED).

There is something interesting going on here to do with that whitish fluid antithetical to a play of darkness and death, namely milk. Worrying about her husband’s potency, Lady Macbeth says that he is ‘too full o’th’milk of human kindness’ (I. v. 12), and later in the same scene makes her request to the minsters of hell that they ‘unsex me here […] And take my milk for gall’ (I. v. 39–46). Finally, in her most overt indictment of Macbeth’s manhood, she says,

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

                                  I have given suck, and know
How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me:
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums,
And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn
As you have done to this. (I. vii. 58–63)

In this play milk connotes weakness, would be denied a baby, and is replaced by poison and curdled into alcohol, itself an instrument used by the villains to lubricate their way to the everlasting bonfire.

Hamlet

This last point is also true of Hamlet, in which the Prince introduces a similar vocabulary of drinking and, because he is talking about Claudius, does so with contempt:

Read more

Share The Rest is Literature

Cowley Mill Road, an opportunity to think wistfully of the River Isle of Cowley Mill in Fray’s River:

Join Colne Brook where it splits from the Colne…

…and proceed through a jungle of Japanese knotweed:

Take note, Buckinghamshire Council, of the relevant sections of the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981.

A farm track to the M25:

Here the river walker is exhorted to use a certain ‘footpath’:

The footpath in question, under eight lanes of motorway, is possibly the wackiest I’ve ever seen. The clearance begins a bit below shoulder height and then shrinks like Dead Man’s Walk, the passage in Newgate along which condemned prisoners walked to be hanged:

Some respite, albeit along a nettly path:

If I may paraphrase Alan Partridge, crossing a footbridge over the M25 is always a thrilling experience:

Though on this occasion doing so was futile, since Iver North sewage treatment works are dead on a Sunday – socially and literally a cul-de-sac:

Cool:

Hello, Slough arm of the Grand Union Canal, my old friend:

Sadly not a Lime bike in the river below:

Inhale the heady odours of blossoming cow parsley:

Hello, Great Western main line, my old friend:

Since I was last here, walking the Colne Valley Trail, someone has painted over a rather good depiction of the Mask. It’s such a shame when artistic vandalism gets vandalised:

Someone has tried to block the path next to the Thorney Interchange – shoddy in both senses:

Take note, Buckinghamshire Council, of the relevant sections of the Highways Act 1980.

In lieu of photos of Colnbrook village, facts. ‘The road that now runs from Hyde Park Corner to Piccadilly Circus [viz. Piccadilly] was part of an ancient route known as “the way to Colnbrook”’ (Brewer’s Dictionary of London Phrase and Fable). I think this is because it was on the Bath Road and there were coaching inns there. In 1107 the name was recorded as ‘Colebroc’ – surprisingly nothing to do with Colne Brook, but meaning ‘brook of a man called Cola’ (A Dictionary of British Place Names). Circa 1990 the Coca-Cola Company set up a warehouse and logistics facility in the area. Coincidence?

The path to Berkyn Manor Farm, where Milton lived from 1635 to 38, is partially blocked. This looks like it is also an intentional blocking, probably to discourage old children on motorbikes:

Hello, what’s gone on here?

Before you get to the skip yard, pass a guard horse:

Hence, vain deluding joys,
The brood of folly without father bred. (John Milton, ‘Il Penseroso’)

On this spot occurred a tremendous piece of redneckery:

Without slowing down, the driver made use of the bus stop’s dropped kerb to mount the pavement and thus avoid the speed bump. This is not what Kenneth Clarke envisioned, but life finds a way.

Level crossing at Wraysbury Lakes:

A Lidl trolley at the very least 1.5 miles from home:

Helpful:

In his short story ‘The Waiting Grounds’, the genie of Shepperton, J. G. Ballard, asks the question, ‘where would you like to be when the world ends?’ After thinking about it for seven years, the narrator says that ‘a satisfactory answer contains an acceptable statement of one’s philosophy and beliefs, an adequate discharge of the one moral debt we owe ourselves and the universe’. Perhaps this means that if you knew where you would like to be when the world ends, you would know the meaning of life.

Colne Brook begins in a thicket of Japanese knotweed and ends by a car cemetery, a cursed boneyard just outside the M25. These waiting grounds are the appropriately named Hythe End – ‘hythe’ meaning ‘haven’ – the end of my waterwalks and a haven at the end of the world. I took a photo of the cars but it doesn’t capture the aura, so here instead is a pig seen in the vicinity:

Finally, on your way into Staines – Nominative Determinism-upon-Thames – pass the tempting footpath to the ever-inspiring Staines Moor, and, if you don’t yet know where you would like to be when the world ends, head back out into the watery wilderness of the green belt’s grey zone.

Blindboy talks about autism.

The Book Club

The Book Club continues its appreciation of A-level bangers with an episode on the novel recently named the second best of all time in the Guardian’s list, Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987).

The Booking Club

Without Will Self there would be a Will Self-shaped hole in the culture. Many people recently learned the word ‘fissiparous’ – relating to fission, splitting into pieces – from a widely shared essay in which he says, ‘Britain is now a fissiparous society — fragmented into competing legal, managerial, ethnic, algorithmic and economic jurisdictions’. In this episode of The Booking Club he discusses his new novel, The Quantity Theory of Morality (2026).

Fresh Air

I can’t embed a Spotify link for this, but the episode is ‘David Sedaris wants to be better (at everything)’ (26.5.2026). Sedaris says, ‘I started writing in my diary one day, when I was twenty years old, and I’ve never not done it. […] oh my goodness, the thought of not doing that. Boy, the earth would just spin off of it’s axis.’

Growth Mindset Psychology

This is my favourite recent episode of my friend Sam’s podcast, an interview with Stephen Porges, the psychologist behind polyvagal theory.

My Martin Amis

Jack Aldane speaks to Irish writer and academic Kevin Power about Amis’s 1991 novel, Time’s Arrow.

Novara

I’d label these Novaran insights ‘To be used with some caution’, but I appreciate the way the hosts theorise the bleeding edge, in this case of what they call ‘British weirdness’.

Past Present Future

David Runciman begins a new series on ‘Great Political Fictions’ with Huxley’s Brave New World (1932). Like everyone since Neil Postman, Runciman finds the novel’s prophetic quality to be ageing like fine soma.

Subtext

My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires and more slow.

Until next month.

Our dress changes with the seasons, from long sleeves and gloves in the winter to shorts and vests in the summer. Some of us wear milestone T-shirts bearing the totemic numerals: 25, 50, 100, 250, 500.

8.40 a.m. Bike lock key: check. Barcode key ring: check.

Some of us travel not to our nearest Parkrun but slightly further, to our favourite. We arrive, lock up, maybe do some stretches. We look around for fellow regulars with whom to feed our Saturdaily dialogues.

We gather to hear the run director welcome us – and here we join in, cult-like – to ‘the best Parkrun in the world’. Sometimes we feel for how patient the run director is having to be with murmuring people and barking dogs.

Then we walk to the start line. On one occasion, just before we were going to set off, the director said to everyone, ‘Raise your hand if you think Parkrun is a good idea.’ Everyone dutifully raised their hands. Then he said, ‘Keep your hand raised if it was your idea’, and we all looked around to see a thin smiling man in sunglasses with his hand up – it was Paul Sinton-Hewitt, who founded Parkrun in 2004.

9 a.m. We are told to ‘Keep off the grass!’ and ‘Mind the puddles!’, or, if there are no puddles, ‘Mind the dust!’ Then there’s a countdown. Sometimes ‘Five, four, three, two, one’, whistle. Or my favourite is the charming amateurism of ‘Ready, steady, go!’

Then we’re off, overgrown schoolboys and girls doing cross-country, thundering towards the first left turn on to a tarmac path. Sometimes a trumpeter-volunteer even plays ‘Chariots of Fire’.

The 5K run is waymarked by kilometre posts, and the going to the first is uphill and for some of us decidedly sluggish. But at the top of the hill we get a view of the City and the Shard, which injects some competitive zeal into the stiff-kneed bouncing descent.

Ours is a one-lapper and what a devotee of the turf would call a ‘galloping course’. We turn left, and left again, pass the three-kilometre post in the shade of a wood, and then emerge on to what, for some reason, I think of as the Plains of Sarum, an old name for Salisbury Plain.

At this point regulars are aware of where everyone belongs, and who’s going slow or fast. The final kilometre is also uphill, but less sluggish than the first, as we give everything we’ve got. Parkrun is ‘a run, not a race’, but a run with certain race-like characteristics.

We finish and take our tokens and barcodes to be scanned by the wonderful volunteers.

At this point the runner-autists try to remember that the end of the run is the start of the real point: being sociable. For some it’s a bit like the locals’ response to Bill Bryson when he moved to Yorkshire:

[G]radually, little by little, they find a corner for you in their hearts, and begin to acknowledge you when they drive past with what I call the Malhamdale wave. This is an exciting day in the life of any new arrival. To make the Malhamdale wave, pretend for a moment that you are grasping a steering wheel. Now very slowly extend the index finger of your right hand as if you were having a small involuntary spasm. (Notes from a Small Island [1995])

Similarly, after running with someone for a couple of years, you might exchange the Parkrun nod. To make the Parkrun nod, establish eye contact, smile, and make a brief inclination of the head. If you’re feeling exuberant you can also initiate a conversation.

You might remember the idea of the ‘big society’ and its laudable attempt to create a culture of volunteerism. Well, never in the field of voluntary enterprise has so much been done for so many as by Parkrun. (Wikipedia comes to mind as a comparison.) This is why the first rule about Parkrun is you do talk about Parkrun – to get your friends to come. It’s not really a cult but it does have a culture, which I’ve tried to give a sense of – my little corner of it.

Once we’ve got our breaths back and had a chat, we disperse. Most of us probably go and enjoy a post-Parkrun coffee and feel that life is good. Then we start looking forward to next time: when Saturday comes.

Dedicated to all the Parkrun volunteers
Image credit ©George Hardwick

Cummings was born in Barnstaple where, after leaving school, he was an apprenticed journalist, but his real passion was naturalism, zoology in particular, which took him to London:

He rejected the prospect of a career in local journalism and aimed to gain a position in natural history at the end of his apprenticeship. In pursuit of this ambition he undertook a strenuous programme of self-education […] In 1912 he took up an appointment at the Natural History Museum in South Kensington as one of the five new permanent staff appointed to the insect room, soon to be renamed the department of entomology. These positions carried considerable research and curatorial responsibility; his appointment was a remarkable achievement for one who had no formal training in the subject. (DNB)

He writes of London ‘spread out before me, a vast campagne’, but also calls it ‘a lonely place’: ‘London bewilders me. At times it is a phantasmagoria, an opium dream out of De Quincey.’2 Here is his journal entry from 26 September 1914 – it is representative of the ‘disappointment’ by which he defines himself:

In short, I lead an unfathomably miserable existence in this dark, gray street, in these drab, dirty rooms—miserable in its emptiness of home, love, human society. […] I visit about two houses in London—the Doctor’s and R——’s [a friend’s] Hotel. I walk along the streets and stare in the windows of private houses, hungry for a little society. It creates in me a gnawing, rancorous discontent to be seeing people everywhere in London—millions of them—and then to realise my own ridiculously circumscribed knowledge of them. I am passionately eager to have acquaintances, to possess at least a few friends. If I die to-morrow, how many persons shall I have talked to? or how many men and women shall I have known? A few maiden aunts and one or two old fossils. I am burning to meet real live men, I have masses of mental stuff I am anxious to unload. But I am ignorant of people as of countries and live in celestial isolation.

This, I fear, reads like a wail of self-commiseration. But I am trying to give myself the pleasure of describing myself at this period truthfully, to make a bid at least for some posthumous sympathy.

Harold Bloom said that one of the reasons we read is that ‘we cannot know enough people profoundly enough’,3 and Cummings here shows the corollary, that we write because we cannot be known by enough people profoundly enough. In this spirit, literary criticism can be a sociable sharing of books and persons, which is my hope for this essay. My edition of The Journal is published by Faber Finds – reprints of ‘found’ classics – which feels appropriate.4 Finding and sharing books must be one of the most pleasurable things you can do – ‘with your clothes on’, as someone once said.

So what kind of person is Cummings?

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The Book Club

Dominic and Tabitha have released several episodes this month, and my favourite was this, on Sally Rooney’s Normal People. I liked the novel a lot, perhaps because I read it seven years late, post-hype.

The Booking Club

Two conversations from Jack Aldane, one with Ross Barkan, editor of Substack-based The Metropolitan Review, and the other with Jay McInerney, who wrote Bright Lights, Big City (1984).

The Common Reader

I have no particular interest in Agatha Christie but this was so good I loved it anyway.

The Exchange

New Statesman editor Tom McTague interviews Anthony Seldon about the latter’s book The Path of Light: Walking to Auschwitz.

The Honest Broker

The Godzilla vs. Kong of literary Substacks.

The Long Read

A thoughtful, first-hand exploration of what AI is doing to English teaching.

New Books in Literary Studies

This caught my eye because I attended David Womersley’s lectures on Jonathan Swift in 2011. He has written a new book called Thinking Through Shakespeare, and Womersley’s story of its origin alone is fascinating on Shakespeare’s uniqueness. He recounts what he was told, by the director of a theatre in Munich, about taking productions of Shakespeare around the world: ‘it was clear that there was always some kind of palpable connection between the audience and what was on-stage, and […] that was not true of other things they put on’. Incidentally, the New Books Network recently published its thirty thousandth episode!

The New Society

The title is clickbaited but this is a good episode: Haitian film-maker Raoul Peck on what Orwell means to him.

Past Present Future

And more Orwell. This is the first of a four-part miniseries on ‘Orwell’s War’ from David Runciman. I don’t agree with everything Runciman says – for example, I don’t think there was something ‘clownish’ about Orwell being anti-war up until 1939, even if that turned out to have been a mistaken position. But Runciman is always worth listening to, and I appreciate his treatment of Orwell as still indispensable. (I’ve written about Orwell here.)

Until next month.

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                                               I hate the Moor:
And it is thought abroad that ’twixt my sheets
He has done my office: I know not if’t be true,
But I, for mere suspicion in that kind,
Will do as if for surety. (I. iii. 375–79)

This is the speech Coleridge described as ‘the motive-hunting of a motiveless malignity’. Do you believe in the rumour Iago has heard?

In the next scene Iago witnesses Cassio kiss Emilia – ‘’tis my breeding / That gives me this bold show of courtesy’ (II. i. 109–10) – and responds,

Sir, would she give you so much of her lips
As of her tongue she oft bestows on me,
You would have enough. (II. i. 111–13)

Her ‘tongue’ here could connote kissing, but more overtly suggests that she talks too much. When Desdemona defends Emilia (‘Alas, she has no speech’ [II. i. 114]), Iago goes on:

Marry, before your ladyship, I grant,
She puts her tongue a little in her heart
And chides with thinking. (II. i. 117–19)

He claims – to use the phrase he coined in the first scene of the play – that sometimes she does not wear her heart upon her sleeve. Iago goes on with his sexist comedy about women being ‘pictures out of doors, bells in your parlours’ etc. (II. i. 121–). In this scene it is sort of true that Emilia ‘chides with thinking’, in that she says little in response to her husband’s provocations. Then again, what she does say is to disagree and contradict him: ‘You have little cause to say so’; ‘You shall not write my praise’; ‘How if fair and foolish?’ (II. i. 120, 127, 147).

In Act 3, Scene 1 Emilia unwittingly(?) aids Iago’s plans by helping to arrange for Cassio to speak privately to Desdemona. Then in Act 3, Scene 3 she knowingly gives Iago the handkerchief. Having said that, he doesn’t have much choice in the matter – stage directions in most editions say that he takes/snatches it.

In Act 3, Scene 4 we find that in her cynicism about men Emilia somewhat resembles her husband: ‘They are all but stomachs, and we all but food’ (III. iv. 108). There’s a parallel between this and Act 2, Scene 1, where Iago says what he thinks women are like. Emilia also uses that resonant J-word:

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       jealous souls will not be answered so;
They are not ever jealous for the cause,
But jealous for they’re jealous: it is a monster
Begot upon itself, born on itself. (III. iv. 166–69)

She is referring, in effect, to motiveless jealousy. John Vyvyan has a good line on this: he says, ‘Iago is jealousy, and jealousy is the flaw in Othello’s character.’ But is there something self-fulfilling about Iago’s and Emilia’s cynical expectations that the other (sex) will be cynical? More evidence relating to this comes in Act 4.

In Act 4, Scene 2, Emilia defends Desdemona’s reputation to Othello, then Iago:

I will be hanged if some eternal villain,
Some busy and insinuating rogue,
Some cogging, cozening slave, to get some office,
Have not devised this slander[.] (IV. ii. 146–49)

The slander that Desdemona is a whore, that is. This exchange is obviously heavy with dramatic irony, since the villain, her husband, is standing right next to her. In each production the actress playing Emilia, and the director, can decide whether to imply that she already suspects Iago.

Then we see a contrast between the two women. Desdemona says, ‘If any such there be, heaven pardon him!’, while Emilia responds, ‘A halter pardon him!’ (IV. ii. 151–52), i.e. a hangman’s noose. Mercy and justice; forgiveness and revenge; ‘an eye for an eye’ and ‘turn the other cheek’ (see Matthew 5: 38–39).

Act 4 ends with Emilia’s longest speech, but the build-up is important too. The scene begins with Othello ordering Desdemona to ‘Dismiss your attendant’ (IV. iii. 7–8), which she never does, so the entire scene (including the tender ‘willow song’) is a kind of transgression of the feminine against the masculine. Martin L. Wine:

The so-called willow or bedchamber scene between Desdemona and Emilia [iv iii] is, as Carol Thomas Neely points out, the only scene of genuine friendship in the entire play and is sadly and ironically ‘sandwiched between two exchanges of Iago and Roderigo’[.]

Even if Emilia sometimes ‘puts her tongue a little in her heart’, this scene does not show her doing so with Desdemona, as Iago alleged. She says forthrightly, ‘I wish you had never seen him [Othello]’ (IV. iii. 18).

Some rare frustration breaks out of Desdemona – ‘O, these men, these men!’ – and she asks Emilia a question: ‘Dost thou in conscience think […] That there be women do abuse [deceive] their husbands[?]’ (IV. iii. 63–65). This introduces a fascinating dialogue for understanding Emilia:

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EMILIA   There be some such, no question.
DESDEMONA   Wouldst thou do such a deed for all the world?
EMILIA   Why, would not you?
DESDEMONA   No, by this heavenly light!
EMILIA   Nor I neither by this heavenly light:
I might do’t as well i’th’dark.
DESDEMONA   Wouldst thou do such a deed for all the world?
EMILIA   The world’s a huge thing: it is a great price
For a small vice.
DESDEMONA   In troth, I think thou wouldst not.
EMILIA   In troth, I think I should, and undo’t when I had done. Marry, I would not do such a thing for a joint-ring, nor for measures of lawn, nor for gowns, petticoats, nor caps, nor any petty exhibition: but for all the whole world, why, who would not make her husband a cuckold to make him a monarch? (IV. iii. 67–80)

What was your answer to the earlier question of whether you believed the rumour Iago claims he has heard, that Emilia has slept with Othello? Even if we still do not buy the idea that she has, she says here in terms that she would be willing to cuckold her husband. It is just one example in the play of Iago saying something bad about someone and then – in the Iagoan world of Othello – it turning out to be true: Othello is a threat to Desdemona, Emilia is a would-be cuckold, Cassio is a bit of an arse. My final contrarian take on what Emilia says is that in a way she is being loyal to her Machiavellian (and perhaps sexually weird?) husband. Wouldn’t Iago think it a good deal to be cuckolded if it made him a monarch?

The scene ends with Emilia’s speech. I think of it as being analogous to Shylock’s speech in The Merchant of Venice: ‘Hath not a Jew eyes?’ etc. (III. i. 40–49). Hath not a woman (wandering) eyes? Hath not a woman a stomach? asks Emilia:

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     I do think it is their husbands’ faults
If wives do fall. Say that they slack their duties
And pour our treasures into foreign laps,
Or else break out in peevish jealousies,
Throwing restraint upon us, or say they strike us,
Or scant our former having in despite:
Why, we have galls, and though we have some grace,
Yet have we some revenge. Let husbands know
Their wives have sense like them: they see and smell
And have their palates both for sweet and sour,
As husbands have. What is it that they do
When they change us for others? Is it sport?
I think it is. And doth affection [desire] breed it?
I think it doth. Is’t frailty that thus errs?
It is so too. And have not we affections?
Desires for sport? And frailty, as men have?
Then let them use us well: else let them know,
The ills we do, their ills instruct us so. (IV. iii. 89–106)

If ‘They are all but stomachs’ is a claim of victimisation, this speech is instead a claim of equality. But consider a disturbing thought, namely that in Emilia’s case equality with her husband might be related to complicity in his crimes.

Tony Bromham states,

Emilia’s […] speeches […] suggest that the husband’s treatment of his wife is an encouragement to her to take lovers. […] there is something of Iago’s cynicism about Emilia’s speeches on married life and one can only feel that there is a level of bitterness here which derives from her own experience of being married to him. She believes it is right to respond to hurts done to her by hurting in return[.]

As if Emilia and Iago are locked in a ‘gender war’ of self-fulfilling sexist assumptions.

Emilia experiences ‘a divided duty’, to employ Desdemona’s earlier phrase (I. iii. 197), between Iago and Desdemona. (So often the terms required to analyse Othello are to be found in the play.) When does she definitively shift her loyalty from the former to the latter? In some productions it is in Act 4, Scene 2, during her ‘some eternal villain’ speech, but if not then, it happens unambiguously in the final act. Her bond with her mistress defines her throughout – it is the source of her utility to Iago and ultimately his reason for killing her. In this play only Desdemona deserves her good reputation, hence, as Emilia puts it, it is to ‘belie [slander] her’, as Othello does, to say ‘she was a whore’ (V. ii. 153–54).

Emilia overhears, without quite knowing what she hears, Othello murder Desdemona, and is then told by him, ‘Thy husband knew it all.’ ‘My husband?’, she responds (V. ii. 161–62), and utters these words six times over the course of the scene.

In her last interaction with Iago, like her first, he tells her to be quiet: ‘charm your tongue […] hold your peace’ (V. ii. 209, 248). If Desdemona is something of a sacrifice, Emilia is something of a martyr. For indicting him so vehemently, Iago kills her. ‘O, lay me by my mistress’ side!’, she says, adding to what Lodovico calls ‘the tragic loading of this bed’ (V. ii. 271, 408).

Harold Bloom calls Emilia ‘a figure of intrepid outrage, willing to die for the sake of the murdered Desdemona’s good name.’

Emilia’s heroic victory over Iago is one of Shakespeare’s grandest ironies, and appropriately constitutes the play’s most surprising dramatic moment […] That Emilia should lose her worldly wisdom, and become as free as the north wind, was the only eventuality that Iago could not foresee. And his failure to encompass his wife’s best aspect—her love for and pride in Desdemona—is the one lapse for which he cannot forgive himself.

Emilia truly is Desdemona’s lieutenant and ensign.

Step 1

Lime bikes are not bicycles. They are mopeds.

Step 2

Leaving a large, heavy, ugly lump of plastic wherever you like is not ‘docking’, it’s fly-tipping.

Step 3

Lime bikes are the parakeets of the pavement.

Step 4

My government will proscribe LimeBike, Inc. as a terrorist group.

Step 5

When passing a Lime bike that is blocking the pavement you gotta give it that hawk tuah. Spit on that thang.

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Step 6

Fuck you and the Lime you rode in on.

Step 7

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a Lime bike riding over a human face – forever.

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Roman London was half a square mile, about the size of Hyde Park. In ᴀᴅ 65 it was being rebuilt after the Boudiccan revolt, and a thousand years later Greater London – over six hundred square miles – was established under the government of Harold Wilson. To move between these, imagine an immense systole, which in a second contracts the pools of the Port of London, the chambers of Thamesis, and transports you along twenty-mile tributary-arteries to places that still haven’t quite accepted their swallowing by the metropolis, and beyond to those Home County swathes within the orbit, since the mid-1980s, of the M25.

In search of day trips I have found myself walking the waterways, always Thameswards and listening to an audiobook, through this zone, the grey-green belt, river basin of the Middle Saxons, country of the coal-tax posts, what Orwell called ‘the huge peaceful wilderness of outer London’. This is from the final sentence of Homage to Catalonia, published in 1937. The following year the Green Belt Act was passed, thanks to which, even ninety years on, much of it still isn’t very built-up, hence places like Crews Hill, in Enfield, now being proposed as locations for new towns.

What are these places like? They certainly don’t have the status of Hampstead. There are horses but they’re not horsy. There are England flags, standard of the displaced cockney. The unmaintained infrastructure is what the state thinks such people deserve – blocked paths, few benches, signs for trails and greenways, put up by various authorities, that last for a couple of miles and then disappear. I sometimes wonder how much it would cost to put all this right compared to a few hours of pensions and government procurement. But maybe if they spent a billion getting rid of all the litter and dog shit, it would just come back in a few weeks. They have the quality evoked by the word ‘chase’ in ‘Enfield Chase’ – half-wooded; half-enclosed but half-wild. I like them. I like the angler posing for photos with an enormous mirror carp he’s just taken out of the Basingstoke Canal. And I like the heedless birdsong sung over the dim roar of something, bourdon note of a distant organ. This is the score of the huge peaceful wilderness of outer London’s manorial wastes.

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A road falls away down the hill we must just have climbed. Very worn tarmac, but worn smooth, not pot-holed. A stone at the edge is blanched by the white light of the sun. Deep blue sky, white clouds. The road is between dry-stone walls. Because the sun is off to the left, the wall on that side, broken by a wide farm gate, is shaded black. The other is deeply textured by the shadows of its warm stones. This could be southern Europe. Near the gate, dappled shade is cast on the road by a tree on the other side of the wall.

I try to conjure what the moment must have felt like. Twisting round to take the photo, feet flat on the road, the tubular steel crossbar of my too-big bike.

Wednesday, 5 June 2013

My friend Tom and I are cycling south out of Brecon, the town in which we have grown up. The obvious way to cycle the fifty or so miles to Cardiff is to use the Taff Trail – the obvious way, but not the best.

The Taff Trail comprises, between various points, forestry track and towpath, and my impression is that it’s quite difficult to follow. We are on road bikes with thin tyres, so the challenge was to find an alternative route that also avoided the A470, the main arterial road between North and South Wales. Tom has planned much of the route we’re to follow over the next ten days – clockwise around the Welsh coast – but today’s route is mine.

We do in fact cycle out of Brecon on the canal but only as far as Brynich lock, where we join the B4558, a marvellous cycling road and one we know well. At Talybont we turn off on to the small road that takes us over the Beacons and down to the Valleys below. The high point of the road is Torpantau, once the site of a station on the Brecon and Merthyr Railway. I am as, to quote Herman Melville, ‘a mule carrying a pair of overburdening panniers’. If you’re touring on a heavy old bike, and something going wrong will cause you serious difficulties, you develop a ginger approach to applying force on steep hills – just enough to maintain momentum. But on a hill this steep it’s chain-snapping strain or nothing, so I get off and push to the summit.

We’re keen at all costs to avoid the Heads of the Valleys Road, a tight broiler of a would-be motorway. So we pass under it at Pant, round one of its roundabouts at Dowlais, ride alongside it for a while, and finally pass under it again at the start of the bleak road to Bedlinog. From Bedlinog we ride along the Taff Bargoed Valley to Nelson, and from there climb up a hill between dry-stone walls, over the unfenced common, and down to Senghenydd in the Aber Valley.

After skirting around Caerphilly, we descend into Cardiff down the wooded hill through Rhiwbina (sounds like ‘blue china’), which must be the finest way to enter Wales’s capital – north to south, mountain to coast, farmland to port. The sun has been shining brilliantly all day and my forearms are glowing, pumped full of rays.

Day Two

We make a complacently late start and by lunchtime have got no further than the pretty village of St Hilary in the Vale of Glamorgan, a region of quiet beauty.

This spot has the enclosed, safe feel that’s there in the word ‘vale’. There’s no view ‘over there’; we’re among it – the glowing green of the sun through leaves, and the deep, curious green of a high hedge on the shady side of the road. I place my left foot on the ground and right hand on the saddle, twisting to look at a bench on a green triangle of grass, and to wait for Tom to take the picture. The sunlight glints on the curved surface of my rear mudguard, a day star for Tom to follow. A house to the right is white, though in fact it is probably a light shade of pink.

We go south to the coast at Llantwit Major before joining up for the first time with the National Cycle Network’s Route 4, which runs from London to Fishguard – a cyclist’s A40. We hope to pass through Fishguard in three days’ time, so want a good working relationship with Route 4, but before long we hit a Taff Trailish rocky patch. At Margam Country Park the route turns suddenly into a stone track. We have little choice but to continue. So, like two adulterers down to their last Durex Fetherlite, we put our faith in delicate rubber.

We make it back to the tarmac punctureless, but the road turns out to lead into Port Talbot’s gargantuan steelworks. We double back. We are lost, and with the evening drawing in still have twenty-five miles to go.

A little panicked, we adopt an A-to-B attitude: having identified a route on the A483 and 84, we reach Swansea and climb the monstrous Townhill. Maybe this strikes some of the pedestrians who see us as an unusual thing to do. Our panniers weigh us down and also signal that we are from elsewhere – wanderers. We carry on westwards and, as the sun is setting, cross the river Loughor (rhymes with a guttural ‘sucker’).

After dropping our stuff at the B&B, we slap up at a Hungry Horse. I enjoy the synthetic, aerated-tasting food, but wake in the night with indigestion, an unhungry and dyspeptic horse.

We set off at nine on the Millennium Coastal Path out of Llanelli, a CGI landscape of curving smoothness set out for cyclists, and so unlike the track above the steelworks. The day’s ride takes us through Kidwelly, Carmarthen, St Clears, Saundersfoot, and Tenby. It’s another full day in the saddle but pleasanter for the pleasanter route, beyond the influence of the M4 corridor.

The hostel at Manorbier has it all: friendly staff, an excellent kitchen, and beeches nearby. We talk to a couple of German fellow-hostellers and learn that ‘youth hostel’ comes originally from translating the German ‘jugendherberge’; as in ‘harbourage’, ‘lodging’.

We stand at the edge of the paving around the hostel and look out at Caldey Island, which is home to a small community of perfumer-Trappists. Our shadows grow together towards a vanishing point, because the sun is so low. My shadow wears shorter shorts. We look like characters from a cartoon in which everyone is drawn in an elongated style. I can almost hear us, earnestly praising the hostel.

Manorbier to St David’s

I make a habit of getting sunburnt in unlikely places, such as Pembrokeshire and my ankles.

We don’t ride far as the crow flies, but spend much of the day right by the sea, climbing in and out of beachside villages under a clear sky and a hot sun.

Tom and I are getting on each other’s nerves. One source of unmentioned tension is that my bike is older and heavier than his, so I can’t go as fast as he can. Once we get to the hostel – a couple of miles beyond St David’s – we go off for separate grumpy walks. I see badgers in the woods behind the hostel. Foxes are urban, rabbits complacent, and birds are everywhere. But there is something enchanting about a badger – like we’re not meant to see each other. I climb Carn Llidi for a view of Ramsey Island, which is a bit bigger than Caldey, but is uninhabited except for two RSPB wardens.

In the 5th century St Justinian, a nobleman from Brittany and a friend of St David, became a hermit here (although accompanied by his servants). Like many another hermit, he was much beset by demons, which eventually possessed the bodies of his servants who, thus rendered malevolent, cut off his head. (Brewer’s Britain and Ireland)

Emerging from the twisted, low, spiny scrub where the badgers live is like coming out above the clouds – the air contains the heat and light of the sun, even as it settles beyond the horizon.

Tom tells me that in the middle of last night a new hosteller came into the dorm. He smelt of sweet, oriental spices, wore a brown cape, carried a staff, and left again before I woke up. And, as far as I can ascertain, Tom isn’t joking. We name the unknown randomer Radagast the Brown, after Tolkien’s minor wizard.

Our respective walks last night have done us good and we set off with camaraderie restored.

At a bend in the road there are three gates, three points gathered. The middle gate is face on, square, and the other two make angles towards the sky whose warm blue is lightest at the horizon. Behind the wooden gate on the left is emptiness, a distant prospect, the field falling away out of sight. The middle gate is of thin metal bars, a couple warped so that they bow upwards in the middle. Behind that there looks like an embanked track, shade cast by thorny little trees, which maybe opens up a way along. On the right is another wooden gate, hinged on a chunky stone. The field slopes upwards, defined by a wall that is a pile of stones with bracken and long seed-covered grass stuffed under it. The grass in front of the gates is worn most closest to the road by cars passing. A shoe ground on this bald, dry patch sounds like a peppermill.

We ride in blazing heat, via Fishguard, to Poppit and the youth hostel at Poppit Sands. Despite its having all mod cons and a spectacular view of the sea, we’re the only guests. The warden kindly upgrades us from the twin room we booked to our very own dorm with a sea view.

We walk the couple of miles to the village of St Dogmaels, where we have a pub supper and a couple of pints. St Dogmael was a Welsh monk of the early sixth century. I read that his feast day is 14 June – this Friday – and wonder what species of carnage is planned here in his eponymous village.

After a welcome rest day at Poppit Sands, we ride the length of Cardiganshire: we set off in drizzle for Aberaeron, where we stop for lunch and see, for the first time, the mountains of Snowdonia in the distance; then fast to Aberystwyth on the A487 and slow to Borth on the B4572, dropping down to the seafront village on a one-in-five hill.

Borth is squeezed between its superb beach and the rectilinear River Leri, which in 1863 was canalised by the builders of the Cambrian Railway. It is also – not quite so long ago – where my granny used to come on holiday when she was little. She and her family would catch the train from Birmingham and stay at one of the many guesthouses of what was then a thriving seaside resort. It is no longer thriving in the same way, of course: the hostel feels a little run down compared to those in Pembrokeshire, and we hear rumours that it might be closed.

It is said that Borth was the inspiration for Morrissey’s ‘Every Day is Like Sunday’, though I’ve been unable to find any evidence for this.

Trudging slowly over wet sand
Back to the bench where your clothes were stolen.
This is the coastal town
That they forgot to close down.

One person who apparently did forget about Borth was Richard Beeching. Tom and I visit the unmanned station on the Cambrian line to find that the next train is for New Street, Birmingham. My granny is pleased when I tell her.

Borth itself seems canalised into strips in line with the coast. Strips to the left: seaside-Edwardian houses, narrow front gardens, pavement, parked cars, road, pavement, street lights, verge, paving, slope of the flood defence; then a wide strip that begins at my feet – the path on top of the flood wall – and disappears at a point over there at the base of the headland. Strips to the right: one wide – the beach – and one narrow, almost edged out of frame – the sea. The bench (where your clothes were stolen) is two pebble-dashed lamas looking away from the sea, linked by six stocky lengths of timber, four for sitting and two for leaning back on and inclining towards the sky.

Four estuaries lie between Borth and Criccieth. The first is the River Dovey’s, on which a ferry service once operated. A guidebook from the 1930s informed visitors that ‘a loud halloo will bring the boatman’, and indeed ‘Borth’ is Welsh for ‘(place of the) ferry’, as in ‘port’. Borth may still be ‘place of the train’ but the ferry is long gone, so Tom and I go inland to Machynlleth. Doing so edges us, unexpectedly (and absurdly), into our home ‘county’ of Powys, Wales’s eighty-mile-high amorphous blob of a local authority area. From Machynlleth we go directly back to the coast on the A493, which then goes round the estuary of the Dysynni, before following a picturesque, single-track section of the Cambrian line.

Strangers are more likely to chat to a cyclist. I think this is because a bike makes you safe – with a bike you’re harmless. An example today. We stop for a rest at a lay-by and walk down some steps to a little beach. Leaving Tom by the sea, I walk back up the steps towards our bikes. Halfway up I meet a couple of men on their way down to fish. The first man – quite fat and wearing a Network Rail polo shirt – starts chatting to me about the weather or something like that. And then before I know it he’s telling me that ‘Richard the Lionheart should have finished the job when he was over there killing the fucking Muslims.’ His friend, who I assume has heard the routine once or twice before, doesn’t hang about; and nor does mine when he reaches us on the steps and catches the gist of what is being said. The only other thing I remember my interlocutor saying is that in the 1970s he worked in Hackney for London Transport.

The third estuary can be crossed on the magnificent Barmouth Railway Bridge. Tom and I agree that ‘Barmouth’ sounds like a town in Yorkshire famous for its oatcakes. It is in fact an English corruption of ‘Abermowth’, ‘mouth of the River Mawddach’. We stop briefly at Harlech Castle, which was one of several fortifications built for Edward I to secure his conquest of North Wales.

There’s a road bridge over the fourth and final estuary, to Porthmadog, but when we get to the turning there’s a sign saying that it’s closed. To save us a seven-mile diversion, I convince Tom we should go and have a look – and when we get there the workmen kindly let us across.

The last stretch of the ride is wet and it’s a relief to reach our neat B&B. Criccieth is, apparently, an attractive seaside town, but we can neither confirm nor deny this on account of the view-cloaking weather.

We have supper in a pub and, for the first time since leaving Brecon, I hear Welsh being spoken.

It’s only twenty odd miles to the hostel near Snowdon, so we set off west to extend the ride via the Llŷn Peninsula. In heavy rain we get as far as the coastal village of Porthdinllaen. We stop at the Tŷ Coch Inn, which is only accessible on a path through a golf course (or by boat, I suppose). On its website, the Tŷ Coch calls itself ‘arguably the best pub in Wales’; and the enormous ploughmen’s lunches we enjoy – soft, warm bread and an obscene amount of delicious cheese – argue the point with force.

The last part of the ride is on a magnificent road that runs along the bottom of a steep valley. The landscape reminds me of the Lake District, grander and more sublime (in the Burkean sense) than much of Wales.

High up, the clouds are the colour of smoke from a bonfire of crackling evergreens. The road surface is consistent and unpot-holed, but made of spread crunchy peanut butter, so riding on it creates a rumbling slapping. We’re in the valley of a big half-pipe, mountains scooping off to either side, tumbled scree. Stopped on the left of the road, I am at the right angle of a stretched triangle, one line extending from me, the one on the right growing closer to it and meeting it at a bend in the road way ahead. Beyond that a mountain beneath the bonfire-smoke clouds.

There is a downside to being further north and next to a lake: as we lock our bikes behind the Snowdon Ranger hostel, next to a wringing-wet wall, we’re blitzed by midges.

Rhyd-Ddu, Caernarfonshire to Llanidloes, Montgomeryshire

The first half of the day is grim. Having avoided the A470 on day one, today we spend all morning on it in torrential rain.

The sky is road evaporated. A tree keeps its centre of gravity low and its surface thorny – protection from whatever might come up behind it. The lines and catseyes dividing the lanes mean this is no jolly bummel-ride. We’re not quite part of the modern world, but we’re moving through it. It rushes past us at intervals, always heading towards where the lane lines merge. Is perspective a Renaissance technique imposed on reality, or was it an aspect of reality waiting to be discovered? Against the grainy sky the telegraph poles have no connection.

After lunch in Dolgellau and a little more A-road, we get on to National Cycle Route 8. It takes us through the western moob of mighty Powys – Montgomeryshire – past the Clywedog Reservoir and all the way to Llanidloes.

Much of the last day of our ride is through the Cambrian Mountains, southern Britain’s largest wilderness; an area covering over ten per cent of Wales but with just a few hundred inhabitants.

The highlight for us is National Cycle Route 818, a seven-mile routelet between Llangurig and Cwmystwyth. About halfway along – at a ford over a tributary of the River Ystwyth – the road turns into a track, with just a tarmac strip running up the middle. Perhaps it was once a drove road, though if cattle have ever been driven along it, a Google Street View car has not.

One of the hills nearly gets the better of me. But this desertedness is the kind of thing we cyclists go out for. I loom over my front wheel, which has grown in thickness. My crawling pace means I must avoid any debris on the tarmac strip. Stationary between each downward push, I lack even the momentum to go over a small stone.

My drivetrain makes a high-pressured ticking, which I can feel in my feet as well as hear. But we’re at that stage in the ride when I believe that not one of the old, fallible parts of my bike will in fact fail. It’s not blind faith, it’s induction – they haven’t failed yet.

I look up at intervals, seeing our surroundings as a series of snapshots – a drover’s road through a technical wilderness. Human eyes can see just a sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum, and right now I can see only the grey-green sliver of the sliver. But with the never-still, vibrating variation of light, I shouldn’t say ‘only’.

At the top of the climb the clouds let through a patch of friendly sun, which throws the shadow of some clumpy grass over the left-hand gully, and lightens the strip of tarmac, our thin connection to all the other roads we will ride over the next five years.

Fingers adjust from pulling the dropped handlebars upwards, against the thrusting foot, to squeezing down on the brakes to pinch the suddenly runaway wheels.

From Cwmystwyth we follow the B-road east to the Elan Valley, which was damned and flooded at the end of the nineteenth century to create four reservoirs. The aqueduct goes the same way as the Cambrian line, to Birmingham. The church, chapel, mill, farms, cottages, and fields were submerged, and the Welsh-speaking community dispersed. At the bottom of Garreg-Ddu, the last reservoir we pass before the visitors’ centre, lies Cwm Elan House. This mansion once belonged to cousins of P. B. Shelley, and, holidaying there in the spring of 1812, he wrote ‘The Retrospect’, which has been called his first poem of real imaginative complexity. As in Wordsworth’s more famous ‘Tintern Abbey’ – about fifty miles and fifteen years distant – the poet contrasts how a place seems in the present to how it seemed in the past. Shelley’s memory of the Elan Valley is of ‘coldest solitude’, but that has been converted to ‘peaceful love’ by the companionship of his wife, Harriet. He reflects on how difficult it is to pay enough attention to the present to notice it properly; to hold and analyse experience before it passes;

To trace Duration’s lone career,
To check the chariot of the year
Whose burning wheels forever sweep
The boundaries of oblivion’s deep—
To snatch from Time the monster’s jaw
The children which she just had borne,
And ere entombed within her maw
To drag them to the light of morn
And mark each feature with an eye
Of cold and fearless scrutiny[.]

Even if we cannot control what happens to us, we can affect the quality of our memories by choosing in what form to place experience in the kiln. Shelley is advocating true, high-resolution memories, even if painful, over the shapeless creations of avoidance.

Our final encounter with the A470 is, oddly, a pleasant one. A new section between Newbridge-on-Wye and Builth Wells was opened in 2011, and the abandoned stretch is now set aside for cyclists and walkers.

From Builth we are on the familiar Brecon road over the Epynt, a mountain and upland area owned by the Ministry of Defence and home to a sixteen-thousand-hectare firing range: ‘unexploded shells provide a lethal deterrent to anyone who might wish to enjoy Epynt’s delectable uplands’ (The Welsh Academy Encyclopaedia of Wales).

We manage to avoid the shells.

Up on the Epynt, the sun comes out; and, just before we reach Tom’s house, his mum goes past in the car and toots the horn – an impromptu heroes’ welcome.

So why do I look grumpy in the photo that was taken of us when we got back to Brecon, standing in front of a wall next to the house Tom grew up in? He’s making an effort to smile, raising a glass of champagne. Our bikes are behind us, leaning on the wall, symmetrical, facing each other. Tom’s panniers from Amazon, not waterproof. Mine from my dad’s friend, also not. Why did I take that heavy D-lock all around Wales? We were a pair of profligates, ciphers of time and effort, not fully conscious of what was passing through us as we moved our pedals around and around.

2. Between

I love a public road: few sights there are
That please me more; such object hath had power
O’er my imagination since the dawn
Of childhood, when its disappearing line,
Seen daily afar off, on one bare steep
Beyond the limits which my feet had trod,
Was like a guide into eternity,
At least to things unknown and without bound.

This is Wordsworth’s description of all my favourite of the photos I’ve taken on bike rides with Tom. Ekphrasis is the Greek term: ‘a literary device in which a painting, sculpture, or other work of visual art is described’ (OED). This passage describes a class of experience rather than an example. The important part is the depth of field into which the line disappears afar off. The visible road ahead is known: you can see where you’re going. Its disappearing represents things unknown, which could be anything, including the best that things could be.

The year after Wales we cycled between John o’Groats and Land’s End. I had a new bike and, attached to it, a pair of panniers to make any cyclist feel invincible – black, waterproof, and German.

Saturday, 16 August 2014

‘That’s the wrong way, isn’t it?’

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I really like this series. I’ve thought for a long time that Podcastistan needs more literature, so this feels like it’s being made for me. If the subject I tutor, A-level English literature, isn’t quite dead yet, I like to think Dominic and Tabitha will enthuse a few sixth-formers by showing that novels can be read as novels, rather than unintentional indictments of the author, the period, or both. Another reviewer accused Tabitha of ‘bellowing into the mic’, but that’s all part of the fun for the ‘famous chums of yore’. The only question remaining is why this Goalhanger series is not called The Rest is Literature – perhaps they didn’t think they could compete with yours truly’s Substack.

The Book Club (2)

The Spectator’s books podcast had the name The Book Club first, and in this episode Howard Jacobson discusses his new novel, Howl. He has a sharp sense of dismay and is sharp in expressing it.

The Common Reader

I knew next to nothing about the antiquary and biographer John Aubrey (1626–97), known for his Brief Lives, so this was fascinating. Interview by Substack colossus Henry Oliver…

Conversations with Tyler

…himself interviewed here by Tyler Cowen on what is for my money the best podcast series of them all, in terms of minute-for-minute ‘value’.

The Honest Broker

The Honest Broker, from another Substack colossus, Ted Gioia, now has its own podcast series, presented by Jared Henderson. So far it’s been excellent. In this episode the guest is Naomi Kanakia. Quite a lot of the discussion is about publishing, from the writer’s point of view.

How I Write

Also about publishing but from the publisher’s point of view, namely that of Jon Yaged, CEO of Macmillan.

The London Review Bookshop Podcast

Recording of a live discussion about the British Jewish writer Alexander Baron (1917–99), featuring Iain Sinclair, Susie Thomas, and Ken Worpole. Good if Hackneycentric.

My Martin Amis

Jack Aldane’s My Martin Amis has been going since 2023, and in this episode Aldane welcomes two young New Statesman editors to discuss Amis’s memoir, Experience, one of his best (and most likeable?) books. I’m also looking out for Aldane’s new Substack series The Lit Path.

Novara

I’ve heard the authors of Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed speak in a couple of interviews and this is the more in-depth one.

Subtext

This is only new to me, since a friend put me on to it a few weeks ago. The hosts, Wes Alwan and Erin O’Luanaigh, have built up a fantastic archive of analyses of literature (and film). This is the first one I went to, The Great Gatsby.

Within Reason

Not a literature series, but the second appearance by Adam Aleksic, the ‘Etymology Nerd’, on Alex O’Connor’s Within Reason.

Thinking about it, the first appearance was better: here.

Until next month.

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