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’

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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:

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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.

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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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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In his truly fascinating essay ‘Inside the Whale’, George Orwell distinguishes between two schools of literature, one with a political viewpoint and one with

a viewpoint not only individualistic but completely passive—the viewpoint of a man who believes the world-process to be outside his control and who in any case hardly wishes to control it.

The latter is that of ‘a willing Jonah’.1 On the face of it, the writers of Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Prelude embody these respectively and therefore could hardly be less alike. One could even argue that they were able to become great writers only having experienced opposite realisations. William Wordsworth believed in the French Revolution as part of the world-process, was disillusioned when it descended into the Terror, and responded with the literary internalisation we call Romanticism. Orwell, on the other hand, looking back through his work, wrote, ‘it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.’2 However, I will argue that in several areas they are alike in their significance, including with regard to ‘the whale’.

They both dealt in their work with post-Christianity and crises of faith, involved themselves in idealistic revolutions abroad, later evolved deep and influential patriotisms when Britain was threatened with invasion, suffered apostasy from the left for this reason, but then generated, in death, extraordinarily influential cultural legacies. Dying in 1850 and 1950 respectively, they did more to define Englishness in the second half of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries than almost any other figures.

Orwell made very few references to Wordsworth, but those he did make are significant. In a 1944 column for Tribune, he includes a list of English institutions: ‘tea, cricket, Wordsworth, Charlie Chaplin, kindness to animals, Nelson, Cromwell and what-not.’3 (We would now include Orwell himself on this list.)

My subtitle is from Ruskin. He was talking about painters, but I think it applies to Wordsworth and Orwell:

All that the rest can do partially, they can do perfectly. They do it, not only perfectly, but nationally; they are at once the greatest, and the Englishest, of all our school.

The Englishest—and observe also, therefore the greatest: take that for an universal, exceptionless law;—the largest soul of any country is altogether its own.4

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1. Inside the Whale: Of Wanderers and Clergymen

I am not going to focus on The Prelude or Nineteen Eighty-Four, but two of my subjects’ most maligned works, Wordsworth’s epic poem of 1814, The Excursion, which Harold Bloom labelled ‘an aesthetic disaster’, and Orwell’s second novel, A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935), which the author himself later called ‘bollox’.5 Neither of these judgements is anywhere close to being fair.

Jeffrey Meyers argues that Orwell was thinking of A Clergyman’s Daughter when he wrote the passage quoted above about ‘lifeless books’, but it isn’t a lifeless book at all.6 The portrayal of twenty-seven-year-old Dorothy Hare is touching, her experiences of parish life, hop-picking and teaching engage and inform, much as Orwell’s non-fiction does, and the Joycean experiment of Chapter 3, set in Trafalgar Square, was never going to be another Ulysses, but that doesn’t mean it has no merit. I suspect many of the negative assessments that A Clergyman’s Daughter has attracted exist partly because they were licensed by Orwell’s own.

The Excursion has been somewhat neglected since the end of the nineteenth century, but this makes its story of the Solitary and his despondency no less compelling. Moreover, it is widely thought to contain some of Wordsworth’s finest writing in blank verse, so to call it an aesthetic disaster is far too sweeping a statement. And even Bloom – that judgement notwithstanding – credits the poem with enormous influence:

[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.

For this reason, ‘Wordsworth was the inventor of modern poetry’, no less.7

It would be a valid criticism to say that neither The Excursion nor A Clergyman’s Daughter is exactly ‘well-made’, but that need not concern us.

In The Road to Miniluv: George Orwell, the State, and God (1975), Christopher Small says,

By the time he was writing A Clergyman’s Daughter [Orwell] had, on the evidence of his letters, abandoned any religious belief […] but, if only in memory, he was able through Dorothy to say with intense conviction what in one aspect at least it was like. In the same way and with the same conviction he could describe its loss.8

Of Orwell’s religious belief at this time, his biographer Bernard Crick wonders, ‘was he uncertain himself?’ Peter Davison, editor of The Complete Works, refers to Orwell’s ‘religionless Christianity’.9 And in another Tribune column from 1944, Orwell himself had this to say:

Western civilisation, unlike some Oriental civilisations, was founded partly on the belief in individual immortality. […] the modern cult of power-worship is bound up with the modern man’s feeling that life here and now is the only life there is. […] the decay of the belief in personal immortality has been as important as the rise of machine civilisation. […] I do not want the belief in life after death to return, and in any case it is not likely to return. What I do point out is that its disappearance has left a big hole, and that we ought to take notice of that fact. […] Most Socialists are content to point out that once Socialism has been established we shall be happier in a material sense, and to assume that all problems lapse when one’s belly is full. But the truth is the opposite: when one’s belly is empty, one’s only problem is an empty belly. It is when we have got away from drudgery and exploitation that we shall really start wondering about man’s destiny and the reason for his existence. One cannot have any worthwhile picture of the future unless one realises how much we have lost by the decay of Christianity.10

Wordsworth sensed this early. With his famously perceptive hearing, he could discern the melancholy, long, withdrawing roar of the century to come. J. S. Mill said that in Wordsworth’s poetry he ‘seemed to learn what would be the perennial sources of happiness, when all the greater evils of life shall have been removed.’ That is, when we have got away from drudgery and exploitation, but also (therefore?) from religion. Mill said he found Wordsworth’s poems ‘a medicine for [his] state of mind’, i.e. his ‘habitual depression’, which is what afflicts the partly autobiographical figure in The Excursion known as the Solitary.11

In his youth the Solitary showed promise. He became an army chaplain and married, but then it all went wrong, as Wordsworth’s summary of contents puts it:

His domestic felicity—afflictions—dejection—roused by the French Revolution—Disappointment and disgust—Voyage to America—disappointment and disgust pursue him—his return—His languor and depression of mind, from want of faith in the great truths of Religion, and want of confidence in the virtue of Mankind.12

After the deaths of his wife and children his

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                                                                  Soul
Turned inward,—to examine of what stuff
Time’s fetters are composed; and Life was put
To inquisition, long and profitless! (III. 704–07)

In this state the French Revolution appeared as a cause and distraction into which he could throw himself with zeal: ‘To the wide world’s astonishment, appeared / The glorious opening, the unlooked-for dawn’ (II. 223–24):

Thus was I reconverted to the world;
Society became my glittering Bride,
And airy hopes my Children. (III. 742–44)

Another character, the Wanderer – a voice of ‘the great truths of Religion’ – describes the Solitary with a combination of sympathy and Burkean judgement: ‘he was sincere / As vanity and fondness for applause, / And new and shapeless wishes, would allow’ (II. 239–41). But with the Terror came a meaning crisis, and the Solitary eventually ‘sate down by very chance, / Among [the] rugged hills’ of the Lake District (II. 235–36). His ‘bare Dwelling’ (II. 359) can be identified with the real Bleatarn House, between the Langdales, and thinking about it now it reminds me of Barnhill, the isolated house on the Isle of Jura in which Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four. Returning to the period of A Clergyman’s Daughter, Christopher Small’s words could be applied to the Solitary:

[L]oneliness, from the beginning of her story, is Dorothy Hare’s lot; loneliness, it can be inferred, was [Orwell’s] continuing experience […] That this life was deliberately chosen makes no difference: the self-isolation of one who shuts himself away is not therefore less desolating.13

From Wordsworth’s classless Cumbria to Orwell’s class-ridden East Anglia:

It was just half past five, and coldish for an August morning. Dorothy (her name was Dorothy Hare, and she was the only child of the Reverend Charles Hare, Rector of St Athelstan’s, Knype Hill, Suffolk) put on her aged flannelette dressing-gown and felt her way downstairs. There was a chill morning smell of dust, damp plaster, and the fried dabs [fish] from yesterday’s supper, and from either side of the passage on the second floor she could hear the antiphonal snoring of her father and of Ellen, the maid of all work. With care—for the kitchen table had a nasty trick of reaching out of the darkness and banging you on the hip-bone—Dorothy felt her way into the kitchen, lighted the candle on the mantelpiece, and, still aching with fatigue, knelt down and raked the ashes out of the range.14

Chapter 1 describes Dorothy’s self-sacrificing life of holding the parish together and dealing with her selfish, unpastoral father:

Probably no one who had ever spoken to the Rector for as long as ten minutes would have denied that he was a ‘difficult’ kind of man. The secret of his almost unfailing ill humour really lay in the fact that he was an anachronism. He ought never to have been born into the modern world; its whole atmosphere disgusted and infuriated him. A couple of centuries earlier, a happy pluralist writing poems or collecting fossils while curates at £40 a year administered his parishes, he would have been perfectly at home. Even now, if he had been a richer man, he might have consoled himself by shutting the twentieth century out of his consciousness. But to live in past ages is very expensive; you can’t do it on less than two thousand a year. The Rector, tethered by his poverty to the age of Lenin and the Daily Mail, was kept in a state of chronic exasperation which it was only natural that he should work off on the person nearest to him—usually, that is, on Dorothy.15

Her Christian faith is genuine but punitive: ‘She made it a rule, whenever she caught herself not attending to her prayers, to prick her arm hard enough to make blood come.’16 What takes her, with the Solitary, to a ‘want of faith’, is simple if clunky. She experiences an attack of amnesia – a mental breakdown, we infer – and ‘wakes’ in London with no memory of how she got there and eight days unaccounted for. Her excursion takes her to the hop country of Kent, Trafalgar Square, ‘a repellent suburb ten or a dozen miles from London’,17 and finally back to Knype Hill. A longer essay than this one could compare her companion, the tramp Nobby, to Wordsworth’s Wanderer, and Chapter 4, in which she becomes a teacher at a ‘fourth-rate’ private school,18 to Book IX of The Excursion, since both function in effect as treatises on education. But I want to focus on the way in which, though her memory returns, her faith categorically does not, and her response to this. While working at the school, though ‘her faith had vanished’, she attends church and looks forward to it,

For she perceived that in all that happens in a church, however absurd and cowardly its supposed purpose may be, there is something—it is hard to define, but something of decency, of spiritual comeliness—that is not easily found in the world outside. It seemed to her that even though you no longer believe, it is better to go to church than not; better to follow in the ancient ways, than to drift in rootless freedom.19

Aged thirty-six, in Grasmere, Wordsworth returned to being a regular churchgoer, and might have had some of the same thoughts as Dorothy – I don’t know. But she is much more black-or-white than any Wordsworthian figure, even the Solitary. After speaking to her atheist friend Warburton – to whom I will return in a moment – she reflects on her lack of belief. She is back to her selfless parish work, with ‘a big job on hand—costumes for a pageant that the schoolchildren were going to have on St George’s Day, in aid of the organ fund.’ Having put her glue pot on the stove, she considers

the deadly emptiness that she had discovered at the heart of things. […] There was, she saw clearly no possible substitute for faith; no pagan acceptance of life as sufficient to itself, no pantheistic cheer-up stuff, no pseudo-religion of ‘progress’ with visions of glittering Utopias and ant-heaps of steel and concrete. It is all or nothing. […] the solution to her difficulty lay in accepting the fact that there was no solution; that if one gets on with the job that lies to hand, the ultimate purpose of the job fades into insignificance; that faith and no faith are very much the same provided that one is doing what is customary, useful and acceptable.20

There is a stoicism here, but aside from that it is hardly less bleak than the end of Nineteen Eighty-Four, and a total departure from anything one finds in Wordsworth. In thinking about why, it is necessary to say a bit more about the kind of pin-pricking faith that Dorothy has lost. Back in her old life, in Chapter 1, bicycling home from her morning visits, she stops for a few moments’ respite in a meadow full of flowers:

Her heart swelled with sudden joy. It was that mystical joy in the beauty of the earth and the very nature of things that she recognised, perhaps mistakenly, as the love of God. As she knelt there in the heat, the sweet odour and the drowsy hum of insects, it seemed to her that she could momentarily hear the mighty anthem of praise that the earth and all created things send up everlastingly to their maker. All vegetation, leaves, flowers, grass, shining, vibrating, crying out in their joy. Larks also chanting, choirs of larks invisible, dripping music from the sky. All the riches of summer, the warmth of the earth, the song of birds, the fume of cows, the droning of countless bees, mingling and ascending like the smoke of ever-burning altars. Therefore with Angels and Archangels! She began to pray, and for a moment she prayed ardently, blissfully, forgetting herself in the joy of her worship. Then, less than a minute later, she discovered that she was kissing the frond of the fennel that was still against her face.

She checked herself instantly, and drew back. What was she doing? Was it God that she was worshipping, or was it only the earth? The joy ebbed out of her heart, to be succeeded by the cold, uncomfortable feeling that she had been betrayed into a half-pagan ecstasy. She admonished herself. None of that, Dorothy! No Nature-worship, please! Her father had warned her against Nature-worship. […] Dorothy took a thorn of the wild rose, and pricked her arm three times, to remind herself of the Three Persons of the Trinity, before climbing over the gate and remounting her bicycle.21

The term ‘nature-worship’ was actually coined by Coleridge as a criticism of Wordsworth, and, while in theory Wordsworth would repudiate worshipping nature if doing so excluded God, in the practice of his poetry, it doesn’t. He discovers, and uncovers for us, no deadly emptiness at the heart of things, but ‘a bright and breathing World’ (III. 242) in which ‘the Virgilian magic of insects humming’22 is not a distraction from God but a sign of his benignity:

What other spirit can it be, that prompts
The gilded summer Flies to mix and weave
Their sports together in the solar beam,
Or in the gloom of twilight hum their joy? (IV. 447–50)

Nature worship goes with those other P-words of Dorothy’s – ‘pantheism’, ‘paganism’ – but there is an open, ecumenical compatibilism in Wordsworth that means such accusations can sit untroubled next to stoicism (which The Excursion also contains), what we would call Romantic humanism, as well as the soundest Anglicanism. This latter is embodied in the figure of the Pastor.

While Dorothy’s excursion takes her away from her father, an extraordinarily bad rector, the Solitary’s takes him to Grasmere Church, home of ‘a country clergyman of more than ordinary talents’.23 As the Wanderer introduces the Pastor,

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                                              No feudal pomp […]
Nor feudal power is there; but there abides,
In his allotted Home, a genuine Priest,
The Shepherd of his Flock; or, as a King
Is stiled, when most affectionately praised,
The Father of his People. (V. 98–105)

A genuine priest, yet here is the Pastor a few hundred lines later, in full nature worship mode, describing the melting of April snow:

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                                     Go forward, and look back;
On the same circuit of this church-yard ground
Look, from the quarter whence the Lord of light,
Of life, of love, and gladness, doth dispense
His beams[.] (V. 540–44)

Unlike poor Dorothy, when the reader of Wordsworth sees that the lord of light is both God and the sun, she does not need to prick or even check herself.

The Solitary and Dorothy Hare are both semi-autobiographical figures who suffer life-crises and lose their Christian faith, but only the latter’s is presented as being irrecoverable. In the same year as A Clergyman’s Daughter was published Orwell wrote a little poem that begins,

A happy vicar I might have been
Two hundred years ago
To preach upon eternal doom
And watch my walnuts grow;

But born, alas, in an evil time,
I missed that pleasant haven,
For the hair has grown on my upper lip
And the clergy are all clean-shaven.24

He might have been the Pastor, in a sense, exactly as he says of the Reverend Charles Hare: ‘A couple of centuries earlier, a happy pluralist writing poems or collecting fossils while curates at £40 a year administered his parishes, he would have been perfectly at home.’25 Orwell would not even have had to be a rector to be happy, but merely a vicar! Either way, he seems sure that happy vicars and rectors are ‘anachronism[s]’, and there is no ‘genuine Priest’ in A Clergyman’s Daughter. ‘The novel insists’, says Michael Levenson, ‘on the obsolescence of both the Anglican faith and its social / institutional practice.’26 Specifically, Dorothy’s friend Warburton insists on this, and the first part of Chapter 5 is worth reading in full as a very entertaining tour de force from the point of view we would now identify as New Atheist. The wit is more Hitchens than Dawkins:

‘Surely I don’t take you to mean,’ said Mr Warburton, ‘that you actually regret losing your faith, as you call it? One might as well regret losing a goitre. Mind you, I’m speaking, as it were, without the book—as a man who never had very much faith to lose. The little I had passed away quite painlessly at the age of nine. But it’s hardly the kind of thing I should have thought anyone would regret losing. Used you not, if I remember rightly, to do horrible things like getting up at five in the morning to go to Holy Communion on an empty belly? Surely you’re not homesick for that kind of thing?’27

Perhaps, as Valerie Meyers writes, ‘Orwell was more interested in the social effects of dwindling Christian faith than the individual’s sense of loss’, whereas The Excursion is about exactly that.28 It concludes much more open-ended, with the Solitary taking his solitary way back towards Blea Tarn Valley, but not before signalling his willingness to continue his dialogue with the Wanderer:

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                                                     “Another sun,”
Said he, “shall shine upon us, ere we part,—
Another sun, and peradventure more;
If time, with free consent, be yours to give,—
And season favours.” (IX. 778–82)

In A Clergyman’s Daughter and The Excursion we find two responses to the problems posed to – I won’t say Western civilisation, but Anglican civilisation, broadly understood – by the withdrawing of the sea of faith, and they map on to Meyers’s distinction between the individual and ‘social effects’. Warburton is intelligent and selfish, and his atheism comes naturally and works quite well for him, but it can be viewed as a ‘luxury belief’ if one considers the widespread anomie about which we now hear so much, under headings such as ‘the meaning crisis’. Hence Dorothy’s instinct that church retains ‘something of decency, of spiritual comeliness’.

The work of Wordsworth and Orwell continues to do what it does nationally – in Ruskin’s phrase – because it speaks to what still bedevils us. At its least attractive, the choice is between the insufficiencies of scientism – ‘Viewing all objects unremittingly / In disconnection dead and spiritless’ (IV. 957–58), as the Wanderer puts it – and a C of E-themed fudge. It is actually the compatibilist Wordsworth who feels more of the moment, with talk of a ‘quiet revival’ of Christianity, as well as related phenomena such as John Vervaeke’s Awakening From the Meaning Crisis, Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary, and Ted Gioia’s New Romanticism. Wordsworth is as good a guide as these, with, as Paul Fry says of the Wanderer, a ‘sense of his peripatetic vocation as an always-successful quest for significance.’29

But we have been too long ‘inside the whale’. The third of Dorothy’s P-words – after ‘pantheism’ and ‘paganism’ – was ‘progress’. When Wordsworth wrote The Excursion his revolutionary days were behind him, but Orwell wrote A Clergyman’s Daughter before his had even begun. As he explains in ‘Why I Write’, his experiences up to that point had

increased my natural hatred of authority and made me for the first time fully aware of the existence of the working classes […] but […] were not enough to give me an accurate political orientation. […] By the end of 1935 I had still failed to reach a firm decision.

Hence the ‘happy vicar’ poem, which he inserts at this point of the essay. But then, enter political purpose:

The Spanish war and other events in 1936–37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.30

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2. Outside the Whale

Bliss Was It in That Dawn

A lot has been written about Wordsworth’s involvement in the French Revolution, so I will quote only my favourite prose account, the poet’s own and a short one: ‘I went over to Paris […] at the time of the revolution in 1792 or 1793, and so was pretty hot in it’.31 He was on ‘the left side’ – le côté gauche – in the original sense, supporting the revolution against the ancien régime. (Louis XVI was not affectionately praised or styled the father of his people at this time!) Wordsworth’s famous poetic description of this period comes not from The Excursion but The Prelude, and was also published under the title ‘The French Revolution, As it appeared to Enthusiasts at its Commencement’:

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The giant, once well buried, now stirs. When soon he rises, as surely he will, the friendly bonds between us will prove as knots young girls make with the stems of small flowers. Men will burn their neighbours’ houses by night. Hang children from trees at dawn. The rivers will stink with corpses bloated from their days of voyaging.1

This is Wistan, the Saxon warrior in Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2015 novel The Buried Giant, speaking to the elderly Britons, Axl and Beatrice. The story takes place in the fifth century, after the Roman withdrawal and during a period characterised by Ishiguro as one of uneasy peace between Britons and Saxons, following brutal warfare between them and preceding the full-on Saxonisation that followed. But it is a fantasy novel, not a work of history, and Ishiguro says that his inspiration in filling the historical lacuna came from the medieval poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, with its wolves, giants, and wild men of the woods. The novel begins with the narrator saying,

You would have searched a long time for the sort of winding lane or tranquil meadow for which England later became celebrated. There were instead miles of desolate, uncultivated land; here and there rough-hewn paths over craggy hills or bleak moorland. […] I am sorry to paint such a picture of our country at that time, but there you are.2

This is Britain before England; in effect – not in reality, but in the novel – Britain before history. The fantasy element, which will explain Wistan’s reference to the stirring giant, is that everyone in this society has been suffering from a kind of collective amnesia. To put it briefly, after the death of King Arthur, Merlin put a spell on the she-dragon Querig, who lives next to the cairn of the buried giant, so that her breath became a mist of forgetfulness that covered the land. Arthur’s last surviving knight – Sir Gawain himself – says that he is tasked with slaying the dragon, but for some reason has never succeeded in doing so.

There are very few references to the buried giant, but it seems clear to me that he symbolises tribal hatred. The narrator says at one point, ‘it is always possible the giant’s cairn was erected to mark the site of some such tragedy long ago when young innocents were slaughtered in war.’3 Axl refers to ‘this wretched mist’ because it robs him and Beatrice of their memories of loving each other, but the wider purpose of Merlin’s spell is to keep the peace by suppressing trauma and hatred, ‘a barbarous past hopefully gone for ever’, as Axl says.4 Ishiguro explained this in an episode of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy:

A couple want this mist to go away because they want their precious memories back, so at the personal level this mist is a bad thing […] but from the nation’s point of view getting rid of the source of that mist is probably going to restart a terrible cycle of violence, is probably going to bring on a genocide.

It is for this reason, as it turns out, that Sir Gawain has not been trying to slay Querig, but has in fact been protecting her. It is Wistan who has come to slay the dragon and disinter the buried giant. When Axl realises this he pleads with Wistan:

I beg you leave this place, and let Querig do her work a while longer. Another season or two, that’s the most she’ll last. Yet even that may be long enough for old wounds to heal for ever, and an eternal peace to hold among us. Look how she clings to life, sir! Be merciful and leave this place. Leave this country to rest in forgetfulness.

‘Foolishness’, replies Wistan. ‘How can old wounds heal while maggots linger so richly? Or a peace hold for ever built on slaughter and a magician’s trickery?’5 He cuts off Querig’s head and explains more:

My king sent me to destroy this she-dragon not simply to build a monument to kin slain long ago. You begin to see, sir, this dragon died to make ready the way for the coming conquest. […] look across this whole land. In every valley, beside every river, you’ll now find Saxon communities, and each with strong men and growing boys.

This is from the speech with which I began. Wistan goes on,

For you Britons, it’ll be as a ball of fire rolls towards you. You’ll flee or perish. And country by country, this will become a new land, a Saxon land, with no more trace of your people’s time here than a flock or two of sheep wandering the hills untended.6

Our finest living novelist has written a book about the stirrings of tribal hatred, published one year before the shocks of 2016 (just as he published Klara and the Sun one year before the release of ChatGPT). And why is it a dragon that dies to make way for the coming conquest? Because dragons are mythical. Querig’s mist represents the myth of the tribeless society, belief in which waxes and wanes. We could think of the myth as a necessary fiction, a noble lie, an aspiration; or sometimes, when toleration and trust are high, and we’re wishing, with Axl, that peace will hold, as a reality. This is why visions of a golden age tend to look tribeless.

Adam Curtis

[T]he sort of Britain that we wanted to go back to was the old-fashioned Britain, which had Union Jacks, and Empire, and stability, and order, and decency, and all that sort of thing.

This is Colonel Peter Storie-Pugh, who was a prisoner in Colditz during the Second World War. The quotation is from a 1995 series called The Living Dead by the documentary film-maker Adam Curtis. Curtis is fascinated by the myth of the tribeless society but does not believe in it. For over thirty years his films have guided viewers through the mist to the cairns of Britain’s buried giants, in the Middle East, the Caribbean, and in Ireland. He refers to himself as a journalist, though his films are also works of history – the common denominator being that the stories are everything. And his stories are often about when myths of tribelessness do not hold – a nagging sense, the return of things repressed. As Axl says, ‘Our memories aren’t gone for ever, just mislaid’.7 The episode of The Living Dead featuring Colonel Storie-Pugh is called ‘The Attic’, and begins with Curtis’s monologue: ‘Britain is a country haunted by its past. It is possessed by the memory of a golden age, a time long ago when this country was the most powerful on earth.’ Because, of course, his core period is not that of the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain, but of the Cold War. That is, his stories are told not at the beginning but at ‘the end of history’, and behind them lies not a dark-age blank, but everything, the deep pool of English history, which is like the pool in George Orwell’s Coming up for Air:

It was a small pool not more than twenty yards wide, and rather dark because of the boughs that overhung it. But it was very clear water and immensely deep. […] At some time this pool had been connected with the other, and then the stream had dried up and the woods had closed round the small pool and it had just been forgotten.8

The thrill is that you cannot see the bottom, and if you swam down you would pass Pip and Magwitch, and Peter Bell, and the Vicar of Wakefield, and Cobbett and Hogarth, and King Lear and his Fool, and if you kept holding your breath past Chaucer and Malory, you might even meet a real knight, like Sir Gawain.

But I’m becoming mistified. Curtis will not allow the memory of a golden age or the myth of the tribeless society to stand. ‘The Attic’ posits that we are – or at least in 1995 were – in a mist co-created by Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher, and examines ‘parts of Britain’s history that did not fit into [the] dream’, such as the assassination of Airey Neave by the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) in 1979. The thesis of the episode is voiced most clearly not by Curtis but by Patrick Cosgrave, an adviser to Margaret Thatcher: ‘We’re living in her version of Churchill’s version of British history.’ ‘But it’s a dream’, says Curtis from behind the camera, and uses Tony Benn as the countervoice of that form of tribal identity known as class division:

Her vision was of a Great Britain that had always respected authority and discipline. A hierarchical Britain. A Britain where people did what they were told and where the benefit was that you could hold your head up in the world. It is a view of history. It’s not by any means the only one, because it’s a view of history that’s only really been in the interests of a tiny minority of powerful people.

Curtis’s fullest expression of his own view of history is Can’t Get You Out of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World (2021), which might also be his best series about buried giants. He begins in London in the 1950s, with the dismantling of the British Empire: ‘What had […] not gone away was the fear and hatred, inside the minds of many of the British, of the others, the people the British had ruled over, who were now coming to what they had been told was the homeland.’ One who came, in 1957 from Trinidad, was Michael de Freitas, whom Curtis shows in a later interview lamenting the realisation that ‘we weren’t wanted’. De Freitas worked in Notting Hill as an enforcer for the infamous slum landlord Peter Rachman. Rachman was born in Poland and, Curtis explains, found himself in a Siberian labour camp during the war,

where he watched people survive by killing each other and then eating the human flesh. […] he ended up after the war in London, stateless and a complete outsider. That horror meant that Rachman judged nobody. For him, the differences between right and wrong were luxuries for the privileged. […] Rachman’s property empire was a brutal and violent one.

He gave his name to Rachmanism, ‘The exploitation and intimidation of tenants by unscrupulous landlords’ (OED), a term coined, incidentally, by one Harold Wilson, in the Guardian in 1963, the year before he became prime minister. But Curtis’s interest is in the story beneath, which touches on what today get called ‘virtue-signalling’ and ‘luxury beliefs’, though he avoids these terms. ‘De Freitas saw something deeper’, he says. Rachman

was doing something that polite English society completely refused to do. He was giving people on the very margins of society – prostitutes and black immigrants – somewhere to live. His empire shone a harsh light on the hypocrisy of the nice people at the top of English society who would never think of themselves as racist, but wanted nothing to do with the people he was moving into Notting Hill. […] De Freitas decided that there was a fear in England that went far deeper than just the working-class racism, that behind the polite veneer of the middle classes there was a hard ruthlessness and a suspicion of others. De Freitas gave it a name. He called it Englishism. It came, he said, from both an anger and a melancholy at the loss of their empire.

(A highly Ishiguran quality.) Episode One ends with a glimpse of something that will prove important – anti-immigration marches in 1968. In Curtis’s archive footage we can just make out a banner, which protests against Harold Wilson’s Race Relations Acts.

In Episode Two de Freitas is reintroduced as Michael X, saying ‘the people of pale pigmentation are people who are so barbaric’. I need to rely here on some outside explanation from the Dictionary of Caribbean and Afro–Latin American Biography:

Michael’s involvement in radical politics began in 1965, when he heard the African American activist Malcolm X speak in London. Malcolm asked Michael to accompany him to a speaking engagement in Smethwick in the English West Midlands, a community then riven by racial divisions. The local Conservative MP had won an election with the slogan, “If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour.” When Michael was asked his name by a reporter, he responded, “Call me Michael X.” […] Michael X soon founded the Racial Adjustment Action Society (RAAS), the acronym of which is Jamaican slang for “ass.” […] He used his skills as a hustler and his charm with women to procure financial support from many notable patrons, including John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Michael organized the first Notting Hill Carnival with the LFS [London Free School] that year, [and] converted to Islam[.] […] In 1967 [he] became the first nonwhite person charged and imprisoned under the 1965 Race Relations Act. […] He was accused of advocating the killing of white men for touching black women and for stating that white men were soulless[.] […] [In 1970] Michael and some followers were involved in an incident the media referred to as the “slave collar affair.” They lured Marvin Brown, a Jewish businessman, to Black House, where Brown was beaten, tortured, forced to wear a spiked slave collar, and led around by that collar in an extortion attempt. [Michael] and the men involved were arrested. [His] bail was paid by John Lennon[.]9

Curtis describes what I would call the folly – frivolity, even – embodied here in John Lennon. It didn’t matter that de Freitas was (like Malcolm X) a hustler and a pimp:

Many of Michael X’s supporters were the young white radicals who had moved into Notting Hill, into the very houses that he and the gangster Peter Rachman had run ten years before. Because Michael X was an outsider, the white radicals believed that he could see the system for what it really was. Like all revolutionaries before them, they had tried to appeal to the white working class and get them to rise up against the system. But no one seemed to be interested.

On the 1967 imprisonment, Curtis contrasts de Freitas with ‘The MP Enoch Powell [who] had also made a speech at the same time, violently attacking immigrants. He wasn’t charged, and he carried on being an MP.’ This rather elides de Freitas inciting violence with Powell using ‘violent’ rhetoric (a permanently important distinction), but I will return below to Powell. Curtis closes by saying that de Freitas had ‘set out to confront’ his society, ‘and change the structure of power’, but ‘had unleashed violence that was lurking underneath’; that is, in the symbolism I am taking from Ishiguro, had threatened to wake a buried giant.

Jumping now to the final two episodes of Can’t Get You Out of My Head, Curtis presents another ‘imaginary version of England […] One that still haunts the country today.’ This England is older and deeper than the Churchillian idea of empire from The Living Dead, and less concerned with power than with peace. Importantly, however, it is another tribeless society. ‘At its heart’, says Curtis, ‘was a vision of a natural order in the countryside outside the cities.’ He is talking about the British folk revival of the Edwardian era, led by figures such as the collector of folk songs, Cecil Sharp. ‘His aim was to create a new kind of English nationalism […] The innocent rural people and their culture. […] an England where villagers lived in harmony and safety’. At the risk of condensing too much, the pay-off of this comes at the end of the series when Curtis reaches 2016. His thesis on Brexit is that ‘thousands of those who had been marginalised by the new global economy […] came to believe in that Romantic idea of England as a special place’. And he says of Donald Trump during his first term that ‘he was doing nothing to get rid of the corruption’. Curtis closes with the following (remember this was 2021): ‘although Donald Trump is gone, and the Brexit deal done, what they both reveal is that underneath Western societies there are enormous pressures building up that will not go away.’ In other words, in his role as cultural seismograph, Curtis detects post-2016 tremors – the stirrings of the buried giant – even though Brexit and the first Trump presidency did little of what they promised.

The two most important dates in Curtis’s Emotional History of the Modern World are 1968 and 2016. What was the myth of tribelessness – our equivalent of Querig’s mist – that held during this period? Enoch Powell’s speech, referred to above, was of course the ‘Rivers of Blood’, but Powell was fired from the shadow cabinet by Ted Heath and consigned to the back benches. De Freitas might have set out to ‘change the structure of power’ in Britain, but in 1971 he returned to Trinidad, leaving Notting Hill to become rich and cosmopolitan, home eventually to the ‘Notting Hill set’ around David Cameron.

‘The giant, once well buried, now stirs’, says Wistan at the beginning of his own rivers of blood speech. Do you feel this to be the case? Or is talk of tribal hatred inflammatory, hyperbolic, and irrelevant to the ‘modern’ Britain created by Tony Blair? New Labour became associated with the statement of tribelessness, ‘We’re all middle-class now’, the attendant hope being that we’re all post-racial too. But do we go about our days believing in the tribeless society, or just trying to believe in it for the sake of an eternal peace? Do some have the luxury of believing in it and others not? Does the celebration of diversity, tolerance, multiculturalism, and identity politics constitute a helpful panacean mist, or does it actually foreground the potential for tribalism? If we have been in a mist, where did it come from? The third and final part of this essay is about another essay – a forgotten essay, I should say in the Curtis style. It is about the origins of another mythical Britain, not the capital of a powerful empire, or a peaceful village, but having in common with those that it is ostensibly a tribeless Britain, or, as the title of the essay has it, ‘The Classless Society’.

The Classless Society

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