Introduction: A quest ‘To sooth the cares’

An extract from my thesis about Wordsworth, ‘Despondency Corrected’

Wordsworth’s despondency; Wordsworth’s happiness

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’.

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

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

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

Bleatarn House, Westmorland, home of the Solitary.

1. Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry 1787–1814 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1964), p. 247; E. P. Thompson, The Romantics: England in a Revolutionary Age (New York: The New Press, 1997), p. 92; Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. 716–17; Kenneth R. Johnston, The Hidden Wordsworth: Poet, Lover, Rebel, Spy (New York: Norton, 1998), p. 465; M. H. Abrams, ‘English Romanticism: The Spirit of the Age’, in Romanticism Reconsidered, ed. by Northrop Frye (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), pp. 26–72 (p. 41).

2. Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry, p. 184.

3. Kenneth R. Johnston, Wordsworth and the Recluse (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984), p. 188; Charles J. Rzepka, The Self as Mind: Vision and Identity in Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 72–73; Nicholas Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 321, 173, 4; Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry, rev. edn (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971), p. 158; Gill, p. 97.

4. Duncan Wu, Wordsworth: An Inner Life (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), p. 83. It is hard to exaggerate how formative Wordsworth’s experiences in France must have been. See David V. Erdman, ‘The Dawn of Universal Patriotism: William Wordsworth Among the British in Revolutionary France’, in The Age of William Wordsworth: Critical Essays on the Romantic Tradition, ed. by Kenneth R. Johnston and Gene W. Ruoff (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987), pp. 3–20 (p. 4).

5. c. 10 September 1799. Earl Leslie Griggs, ed., Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956–71), I, p. 527.

6. Wu, p. 110.

7. Kenneth R. Johnston, ‘Wordsworth and The Recluse’, in The Cambridge Companion to Wordsworth, ed. by Stephen Gill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 70–89 (p. 70).

8. G. Kim Blank, Wordsworth’s Influence on Shelley: A Study of Poetic Authority (London: Macmillan, 1988), p. 45; Beth Lau, ‘Keats’s Reading of Wordsworth: An Essay and Checklist’, Studies in Romanticism, 26, 1 (1987), 105–150 (p. 115). Shelley re-read it in 1815 – see Shelley: Selected Poems, ed. by Kelvin Everest et al. (London: Routledge, 2023), p. 6. In that year he also bought Wordsworth’s collected Poems as soon as they appeared – see Madeleine Callaghan, Shelley’s Living Artistry: Letters, Poems, Plays (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2017), p. 117.

9. See, for example, David Watson and Sara M. Stasik, ‘Examining the Comorbidity Between Depression and the Anxiety Disorders From the Perspective of the Quadripartite Model’, in The Oxford Handbook of Depression and Comorbidity, ed. by C. Steven Richards and Michael W. O’Hara (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 46–65 (p. 47): ‘The “Big Two” dimensions of affect […] Negative Affect is a general dimension of subjective distress and dissatisfaction. It subsumes a broad range of specific negative emotional states, including fear, anger, sadness, guilt, and disgust. […] In parallel fashion, the general Positive Affect dimension reflects important co-occurrences among positive mood states; for instance, an individual who reports feeling happy and joyful also will report feeling interested, excited, confident, and alert.’

10. To John Taylor, 30 January 1818 (Gittings, ed., p. 57).

11. M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971), p. 329; Jean Hall, A Mind that Feeds Upon Infinity: The Deep Self in English Romantic Poetry (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1991), p. 53; James H. Averill, Wordsworth and the Poetry of Human Suffering (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), p. 83.

12. The Excursion, ed. by Sally Bushell et al., the Cornell Wordsworth (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), p. 43. On another occasion, in a letter to George Beaumont, Wordsworth wrote that his doubts about ever finishing ‘The Recluse’ ‘depressed [him] much’ – see Ernest de Selincourt et al., eds., The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, rev. edn, 8 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967–93), I, p. 594.
See the following for examples of the words ‘depression’ and ‘depressed’ being used of this and other periods of Wordsworth’s life: Averill, pp. 84, 158; Hall, p. 52; Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry, p. 267; Johnston, Wordsworth and the Recluse, pp. 55, 119, 192, 264; Adam Nicolson, The Making of Poetry: Coleridge, the Wordsworths and Their Year of Marvels (London: William Collins, 2019), p. 29; Morris Dickstein, ‘“The Very Culture of the Feelings”: Wordsworth and Solitude’, in The Age of William Wordsworth: Critical Essays on the Romantic Tradition, ed. by Kenneth R. Johnston and Gene W. Ruoff (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987), pp. 315–43 (p. 329); Gill, p. 297.

13. Nick Spencer, ‘Happiness’, in The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 4th edn, ed. by Andrew Louth (2022) <https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780199642465.001.0001/acref-9780199642465-e-3217> [accessed 23 February 2025] (para. 1 of 4).

14. Seamus Perry, ed., Coleridge’s Notebooks: A Selection (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 57.

15. Walter Pater, ‘Wordsworth’, in Bloom’s Classic Critical Views: William Wordsworth, ed. by Harold Bloom (New York: Bloom’s Literary Criticism, 2009), pp. 177.

16. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, p. 439.

17. ‘In drear nighted December’ (2, 10), ‘Song of Four Fairies: Fire, Air, Earth, and Water’ (2, 5), ‘Ode to Psyche’ (22), and ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ (21, 25). Yeats was right in ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’ (53–58) to refer to the ‘deliberate happiness’ of Keats’s poetry – ‘His art is happy’ – but to state that he died ‘unsatisfied’ (Richard J. Finneran, ed., The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats [New York: Macmillan, 1989], p. 161).

18. David Masson, ed., The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, 14 vols (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1890), III, p. 399.

19. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, p. 278.

20. Stuart M. Sperry, Keats the Poet (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 100.

21. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, p. 429.

22. Jonathan Bate et al., eds., Stressed, Unstressed: Classic Poems to Ease the Mind (London: William Collins, 2016), p. 4. The Bibliotherapy Foundation is now known as the ReLit Foundation. For a theory of ways of knowing beyond the propositional – ‘procedural knowing […] perspectival knowing […] [and] participatory knowing’ – see John Vervaeke and Christopher Mastropietro, with Madlene Abramian, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis: Book One: Origins (Nashville, TN: Story Grid, 2024).

23. ‘There is some uncertainty over the exact date of the poem’s publication.’ See Bushell et al., eds., p. 19.

24. Robert Woof, ed., William Wordsworth: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 389, 397–98. For briefer summaries see also Judson Stanley Lyon, The Excursion: A Study (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1950), pp. 2–6, 141–42.

25. Woof, ed., pp. 365–516.

26. Woof, ed., pp. 368, 370.

27. 4 January 1815.

28. 31 December 1814.

29. Woof, ed., pp. 976, 499.

30. Bushell et al., eds., p. 19.

31. Matthew Arnold, ed., Poems of Wordsworth (London: Macmillan, 1879).

32. Bushell et al., eds., pp. 3, 23–24.

33. Kenneth R. Johnston and Gene W. Ruoff, eds., The Age of William Wordsworth: Critical Essays on the Romantic Tradition (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987), p. xi.

34. Lyon, p. vii.

35. Galperin uses the alternative phrase ‘romantic reassessment’: William Galperin, Revision and Authority in Wordsworth: The Interpretation of a Career (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), p. 3.

36. Geoffrey H. Hartman, ‘Romanticism and “Anti-Self-Consciousness”’, The Centennial Review, 6, 4 (1962), 553–65 (pp. 553–54, 561).

37. Northrop Frye, ed., Romanticism Reconsidered (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), p. 12. See also Fry who states that ‘The great romanticists of the “Yale School” have stressed Wordsworth’s […] transfer to the psyche of what Milton did for the Christian covenant’: Paul H. Fry, Wordsworth and the Poetry of What We Are (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 19.

38. Harold Bloom, ed., Bloom’s Period Studies: English Romantic Poetry (New York: Chelsea House, 2004), p. vii.

39. Harold Bloom, ‘The Internalization of Quest-Romance’, in Romanticism and Consciousness: Essays in Criticism, ed. by Harold Bloom (New York: Norton, 1970), pp. 3–24 (p. 10). Bloom also refers to ‘that internalization of quest-romance that is or became what we call Romanticism’ (A Map of Misreading, 2nd edn [New York: Oxford University Press, 2003], p. 129).

40. Bloom, ‘The Internalization of Quest-Romance’, p. 3.

41. Bloom, ‘The Internalization of Quest-Romance’, pp. 3, 5.

42. Bloom, ‘The Internalization of Quest-Romance’, p. 11.

43. Bloom, ‘The Internalization of Quest-Romance’, p. 6.

44. Bloom, ‘The Internalization of Quest-Romance’, pp. 11–12. Bloom takes these phrases respectively from ‘Adonais’ (l. 384), ‘Tintern Abbey’ (l. 61), ‘Resolution and Independence’ (l. 120), and Keats’s ‘poetical Character’ letter: Selected Letters, ed. by Robert Gittings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 147.

45. Bloom, ‘The Internalization of Quest-Romance’, pp. 7–8.

46. David Perkins, The Quest for Permanence: The Symbolism of Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), p. 116. See also Bevis: ‘Often in Wordsworth there is a hope that gratifications will become relational and communal, but everywhere in him there is an insistence that whatever else they are, our pleasures must be our own’ (Matthew Bevis, Wordsworth’s Fun [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019], p. 4).

47. Johnston, ‘Wordsworth and The Recluse’, pp. 84–85. Elsewhere, Johnston glosses ‘Human Life’ as encompassing ‘topics [Wordsworth] wants to address but doesn’t know how to—history and politics’ (Wordsworth and The Recluse, p. 324). He also says that ‘The key terms of The Recluse […] are clearly present in the [Lyrical Ballads] preface’s central formulations, when Wordsworth refers to […] [“]the great and universal passions of men [Man], the most general and interesting of their occupations [Society], and the entire world of nature [Nature].”’ (The Hidden Wordsworth, p. 738) (the square brackets are Johnston’s). Gill (p. 183) agrees that Wordsworth ‘knew he could write, and write well, about the first two [man and nature] of those dauntingly vague and massive topics.’ See also Dickstein: ‘Wordsworth’s whole body of work can be seen as an effort to reconcile nature with community, solitary introspection with human sympathy’ (‘Wordsworth and Solitude’, p. 332).

48. Fry, pp. 1, 6.

49. Fry, pp. x, 19, 4.

50. Quoted in Johnston and Ruoff, eds., p. 3.

51. Fry, p. 141.

52. Fry, p. 89.

53. Dickstein, ‘Wordsworth and Solitude’, pp. 331, 342.

54. Bloom, ‘The Internalization of Quest-Romance’, p. 21.

55. Bloom, ‘The Internalization of Quest-Romance’, p. 10.

56. Bloom, English Romantic Poetry, p. vii.

57. Signalling his broad agreement with Bloom’s statements about the influence of The Excursion, in his contribution to Romanticism Reconsidered Abrams writes, ‘The great Romantic poems were written not in the mood of revolutionary exaltation but in the later mood of revolutionary disillusionment or despair. […] the recurrent emotional pattern is that of the key books of The Excursion, labeled “Despondency” and “Despondency Corrected[”]’ (pp. 53–55). Abrams’s essay, ‘English Romanticism: The Spirit of the Age’ was republished in Romanticism and Consciousness, edited by Bloom. Jon Klancher says, ‘it may have been [this paper] that most firmly grounded English Romanticism as an historical moment capable of becoming paradigmatic for a new generation of readers’ (‘English Romanticism and Cultural Production’, in The New Historicism, ed. by H. Aram Veeser [London: Routledge, 1989], pp. 77–88 [pp. 78–79]). It is also worth noting, in Abrams’s later formulation Natural Supernaturalism, the ‘naturalising’ of the religious is analogous to Bloom’s claim about the ‘internalising’ of the quest theme of romance.

58. Bloom, The Visionary Company, pp. 239, 285, 371.

59. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, p. 429.

60. Tilottama Rajan, Dark Interpreter: The Discourse of Romanticism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), p. 266.

61. Johnston and Ruoff, p. ix. In the same volume (‘Wordsworth and Solitude’, p. 316) Dickstein suggests a slightly earlier date, referring to ‘the remarkable Wordsworth revival that began in the 1950s’.

62. Bloom, The Visionary Company, p. 462.

63. Bloom, ‘The Internalization of Quest-Romance’, pp. 24, 3.

64. Willard Spiegelman, ‘Romanticism and the “New” Critics’, Salmagundi, 76–77 (1987–88), p. 260.

65. Harold Bloom, The Epic (New York: Chelsea House, 2005), p. 73; Bloom, The Visionary Company, p. xvii.

66. Despite their differences, Bloom’s bêtes noires – ‘Old Formalists and New Resenters’ (Hamlet, p. xiii) – can appear as mirror images. He refers approvingly to ‘a spirituality in no way dependent on belief or ideology’, and would likely have charged New Critics and New Historicists with having too much respectively of each (The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages [New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994], p. 459). There is also his focus on poetic influence. Bloom liked to zoom out for the widest diachronic shot, hence his rejection of a ‘words on the page’ close-up. But if there was a deficiency in New Criticism of comparison per se, in New Historicism there was much comparison of the wrong kind – namely, synchronic comparison, which compared the ‘literary’ text with every other text and circumstance that existed at the time of its creation.

67. David Simpson, ‘New Historicism’, in A Companion to Romanticism, ed. by Duncan Wu (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 435–43 (p. 441).

68. Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 1, 3. I am torn between outrage at poems as ‘ideological products’ and saying that the idea is no great advance on Orwell’s statement that ‘All art is propaganda’ (Peter Davison et al., eds., The Complete Works of George Orwell, 20 vols [London: Secker and Warburg, 1998], XII, p. 47). Orwell did distinguish between ‘message’ and ‘literary qualities’.

69. Simpson, ‘New Historicism’, p. 440. Abrams too, writing in 1971, suggests that, even then, this critique of Romanticism was not a new one: ‘In the folklore which has accumulated around Romantic literature, it has been a frequent claim that Romantic writers evaded the political and social crises of their era by ignoring them, or by escaping into a fantasy world.’ ‘More puzzling […] is the charge that […] The Romantic poets were not complete poets, in that they represent little of the social dimension of human experience; for although they insist on the importance of community, they express this matter largely as a profound need of the individual consciousness. The fact is, however, that these poets were almost obsessively occupied with the reality and rationale of the agonies of the human condition’ (Natural Supernaturalism, pp. 357, 443).

70. McGann, The Romantic Ideology, p. 91. See also Liu on the ‘displaced stance’ Wordsworth ‘took toward political and social history when, in the aftermath of the French Revolution, he learned to digress into his own mind’ (Alan Liu, Wordsworth: The Sense of History [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989], p. 216).

71. Jerome McGann, ‘Keats and the Historical Method in Literary Criticism’, MLN, 94, 5 (1979), 988–1032 (p. 1020).

72. Emma Mason, The Cambridge Introduction to William Wordsworth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 106. For McGann, even Keats was a backslider: he was ‘especially typical’ of the ‘patterns of “internalization”’, and the Lamia volume, which contains the great odes and ‘Hyperion: A Fragment’, is a ‘(politically) reactionary book’ (‘Keats and the Historical Method’, p. 1017).

73. ‘Shelley’s late-1815 representations of Wordsworth in the Alastor volume [were] the decisive beginning of the Wordsworth legend’ (James K. Chandler, ‘“Wordsworth” after Waterloo’, in The Age of William Wordsworth: Critical Essays on the Romantic Tradition, ed. by Kenneth R. Johnston and Gene W. Ruoff [New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987], pp. 84–111 [p. 92]).

74. McGann, The Romantic Ideology, p. 2.

75. As David Bromwich says, ‘if, as with Wordsworth at Tintern Abbey, the dispute relates […] to what the poet overlooks or “elides,” it only means that the poet has told one story and the critic knows of another he might have told’ (David Bromwich, Disowned By Memory: Wordsworth’s Poetry of the 1790s [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998], p. 75). Klancher admits as much when he says that some New Historicism is about ‘what the poem should have shown’ (p. 81).

76. Robert Mighall, ed., The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 3.

77. Terence Allan Hoagwood, ‘Fictions and Freedom: Wordsworth and the Ideology of Romanticism’, in New Historical Literary Study: Essays on Reproducing Texts, Representing History, ed. by Jeffrey N. Cox and Larry J. Reynolds (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 178–97 (pp. 178, 180).

78. Hoagwood, pp. 191–93.

79. McGann, The Romantic Ideology, p. 119.

80. Jeffrey N. Cox, Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt and their Circle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 50. This links Cox’s to another important book of the same period, Nicholas Roe’s John Keats and the Culture of Dissent (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997): ‘‘“sociality” was a healthy antidote to Wordsworth’s rural solitude, and—by implication—to […] Tory politics’ (p. 118).

81. Cox, Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School, p. 104. However, also like McGann, he ultimately finds Keats to be a backslider when compared with Shelley. See ‘Final reckonings: Keats and Shelley on the wealth of the imagination’ (pp. 187–225). ‘Shelley, confronted with Keats’s espousal of the Mammon of formalism and the turn to the self, might have agreed with Jerome McGann that Keats’s 1820 volume was a “great and (politically) reactionary book”’ (p. 216).

82. Robert M. Ryan, review of Jeffrey N. Cox, Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School (1998), The Wordsworth Circle, 30, 4 (1999), 213–18 (p. 214). Moreover, the Wordsworths were not unsociable. On 17 October 1802, at Dove Cottage, they had thirteen neighbours to tea. Many years later, when Keats visited the Lakes, he wrote that ‘Lord Wordsworth, instead of being in retirement, has himself and his house full in the thick of fashionable visitors’ (Gittings, ed., pp. 95–96). Dickstein notes that for Keats ‘This [was] also new evidence of Wordsworth’s egotism’ (Keats and His Poetry, p. 165), which rather suggests Wordsworth could not win either way.

83. Cox, Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School, p. 122.

84. Cox, Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School, pp. 106, 114.

85. Jeffrey N. Cox, William Wordsworth, Second-Generation Romantic: Contesting Poetry after Waterloo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), pp. 42, 14, 23. Johnston notes that Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads ‘were called both Jacobin and anti-Jacobin’ (The Hidden Wordsworth, p. 571), suggesting that they have been defying the pigeonholes of left and right ever since that French terminology was minted. Moreover, Rzepka notes that Keats’s poetry offered less of ‘a challenge, even affront, to the tastes of his age [than] Wordsworth’s’ (The Self as Mind, p. 185). See also Gill: ‘[Wordsworth’s] linguistic radicalism [Francis] Jeffrey claims, subverts social order’ (p. 248). Finally, see Abrams: ‘The early Wordsworth was indeed, in genre, subjects, and style, the poetical Jacobin of his generation; more radical, in this important aspect, than Shelley or even Blake’ (Natural Supernaturalism, p. 396).

86. The biographies I take as standards were published in order of the poets’ seniority: Stephen Gill’s William Wordsworth (1989, 2020); James Bieri, Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Biography (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); and Roe’s John Keats (2012).

87. ‘A Defence of Poetry’ – The Major Works, ed. by Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 687.

88. Gittings, ed., pp. 89–90.

89. Vignette character assassinations of unlovable Wordsworth can be multiplied to entertaining effect. Bromwich (p. 1) states that ‘Wordsworth was a disagreeable man’; Dickstein (‘Wordsworth and Solitude’, p. 318) refers to ‘His bottomless self-regard, his inexhaustible attention to the movements of his mind’, though does say that these ‘helped make Byron and Shelley possible’; and Fry (p. 201) says, ‘in person Wordsworth was undoubtedly an egotist who left everyone outside his immediate circle wondering whether anything like the give and take of conversation was possible’. Henry Crabb Robinson defends his friend against assessments of this kind, saying that ‘there is absolutely no pretence for what was always an exaggerated charge against him, that he could talk only of his own poetry, and loves only his own works’ (Thomas Sadler, ed., Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson, 3 vols (London: Macmillan, 1869), II, pp. 163–64).

90. Gittings, ed., p. 95.

91. David Simpson, Wordsworth’s Historical Imagination: The Poetry of Displacement (New York: Methuen, 1987), p. 186; Galperin, Revision and Authority in Wordsworth, p. 29.

92. Alison Hickey, Impure Conceits: Rhetoric and Ideology in Wordsworth’s Excursion (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 14.

93. Hickey, Impure Conceits, pp. 9, 24.

94. Hickey, Impure Conceits, p. 14.

95. Cox, Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School, p. 83.

96. Fry, p. 3. Cf. Stillinger: ‘Scholars for a long time seem not to have noticed that by 1805 Wordsworth had already arrived at practically all his “later” ideas’ (Jack Stillinger, Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991], p. 90).

97. This extends to twentieth-century critics’ preference for the first four books, the ‘golden decade’, as it were, of The Excursion. In this one sense, with my interest in the Solitary, I suppose I perpetuate the association of ‘good’ and ‘early’. The Pastor in Books V–VIII would be a fit subject for any study but is mostly beyond the terms of this one.

98. Alison Hickey, ‘“Impure Conceits”: Figuration in Wordsworth’s Excursion’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Yale University, 1991), p. 3. Hickey’s doctoral thesis was supervised by Paul H. Fry at Yale.

99. Hickey, Impure Conceits, p. 8.

100. Hickey, pp. 12–13.

101. Sally Bushell, Re-Reading The Excursion: Narrative, Response and the Wordsworthian Dramatic Voice (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2002), p. 46.

102. Bushell, Re-Reading The Excursion, p. 243.

103. Sally Bushell, ‘Re-Reading The Excursion: A Study of Narrative, Response and the Wordsworthian Dramatic Voice’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Cambridge, 1999), p. 11. Her thesis was supervised by Nigel Leask at Cambridge. The other editors of the Cornell edition of The Excursion are James A. Butler, an associate editor of the Cornell Wordsworth, and editor of the ‘Ruined Cottage’ and co-editor of the Lyrical Ballads volumes; and Michael C. Jaye, author with Jonathan Wordsworth and Robert Woof of William Wordsworth and the Age of English Romanticism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987). The edition was edited with the assistance of David García, professor of English at Carthage College, WI.

104. Bushell et al., eds., p. xiii.

105. Alison Hickey, ‘Wordsworth’s The Prelude and The Excursion’, in The Cambridge History of English Poetry, ed. by Michael O’Neill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 470–86 (p. 472). Cf. Fry (p. 146) in 2008: ‘Because a decent amount of insightful criticism has lately been written about The Excursion, it may no longer seem necessary for anyone taking it seriously to announce the rescue of Wordsworth’s drowsy, frowsy poem from oblivion. The Excursion has by now earned what it should never have lost: entitlement to careful reading.’ However, ‘there is still much to be said about what motivates [it]’.

106. Thomas Duggett and Jacob Risinger, eds., ‘The Excursion: A Bicentenary Celebration’. With regard to this thesis, other major works of scholarship published during this period include the Oxford Handbooks of Shelley (2013) and Wordsworth (2015). There is no sign yet of ‘The Oxford Handbook of John Keats’.

107. Sally Bushell, ‘From “The Ruined Cottage” to The Excursion’, The Wordsworth Circle, 45, 2 (2014), 75–83 (pp. 75, 81, 82).

108. Michael O’Neill, ‘Ebb and Flow in The Excursion’, The Wordsworth Circle, 45, 2 (2014), 93–98 (pp. 93, 94).

109. Kenneth R. Johnston, ‘Wordsworth’s Excursion: Route and Destination’, The Wordsworth Circle, 45, 2 (2014), 106–13 (pp. 108, 110). Neither Johnston nor Hickey mentions it, but apparently the first critic deftly to redeploy Blake in this way was Francis Ferguson in Wordsworth: Language as Counter-Spirit (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977), p. 210.

110. William Galperin, ‘The Essential Reality of The Excursion’, The Wordsworth Circle, 45, 2 (2014), 114–18 (pp. 114, 116).

111. Marilyn Gaull, ‘The Excursion: Greetings’, The Wordsworth Circle, 45, 2 (2014), 74 (p. 74). As I quote him in Chapter 2, the Poet also uses the phrase ‘breathing world’ (II. 383), and the Solitary does again at V. 258. I assume it is an allusion to Shakespeare’s solitary Richard III, who complains of being thrown ‘Into this breathing world, scarce half made up’ (I. i. 21).

112. Gaull, p. 74.

113. Galperin, ‘The Essential Reality of The Excursion’, p. 114.

114. Gaull, p. 74.

115. Bloom, ‘The Internalization of Quest-Romance’, p. 11.

116. Brittany Pladek, The Poetics of Palliation: Romantic Literary Therapy, 1790–1850 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019), p. 127; Johnston, ‘Wordsworth and The Recluse’, p. 84.

117. McGann, ‘Keats and the Historical Method’, p. 1020.

118. ‘Philosophy as a “system” is replaced by an interactive process leading to internalized understanding of the value of a certain way of thinking’ (Bushell, ‘Re-reading The Excursion’, pp. 42–43).

119. The School of Resentment believes that ‘what is called aesthetic value emanates from class struggle’, ‘insist[ing] that an aesthetic stance is itself an ideology’ (The Western Canon, pp. 23, 527).

120. Penelope Laurans, ed., ‘Harold Bloom (Special Tribute)’, Faculty Retirement Tributes (2020) <https://fas.yale.edu/book/faculty-retirement-tributes-2020/harold-bloom-special-tribute> [accessed 25 September 2024] (para. 1 of 4).

121. Bloom, The Visionary Company, pp. 461–62.

122. Bloom, The Visionary Company, p. 239.

123. Bloom, ‘The Internalization of Quest-Romance’, pp. 7, 15–16.

124. Harold Bloom, Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 70: ‘Wordsworth alters the tradition permanently, making the quest a voyage through self-consciousness in search of a capable imagination, purged of the despair of self.’ Examples can be multiplied: ‘the reward of success is only to have written the poem’ (The Ringers in the Tower: Studies in Romantic Tradition [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971], p. 326); ‘an internalized search to re-beget the individual self’ (Bloom’s Literary Themes: The Grotesque [New York: Chelsea House, 2009], p. xv).

125. Bloom, ‘The Internalization of Quest-Romance’, p. 5.

126. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 64.

127. Bloom, A Map of Misreading, p. 152. One thinks of hyper-internalised novels in which the writer, playfully disingenuous, insists that he is not even trying to write literature, e.g. Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, trans. by Richard Zenith (London: Penguin, 2001); Mircea Cărtărescu, Solenoid, trans. by Sean Cotter (Dallas, TX: Deep Vellum, 2022).

128. Bloom, A Map of Misreading, pp. 18–19, 57, 59.

129. Christopher Ricks, Allusion to the Poets (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 110, 164, 159.

130. Bevis, p. 14.

131. Bloom, A Map of Misreading, p. 38.

132. To the George Keatses, 14–31 October 1818 (Gittings, ed., p. 151).

133. To James Rice, 24 March 1818 (Gittings, ed., p. 74).

134. Bloom, ‘The Internalization of Quest-Romance’, p. 3.

135. Pladek, pp. 98, 21. Though I agree with Pladek about Bloom’s ‘holism’, her claim that ‘The Visionary Company aligns Wordsworth’s therapy with the unifying healing Wordsworth himself found in nature’ is belied by statements, such as the one quoted above, in which Bloom preferences (a capable) imagination over nature.

136. For example, ‘our quest’ (II. 833), ‘afflicted quest’ (V. 938), ‘the proud quest of Chivalry’ (VIII. 83), ‘in quest of other scenes’ (IX. 547).

137. In his introduction to The Ringers in the Tower, Bloom himself admits more in this direction, saying ‘The Freudian rationalism, wisely refusing heroic failure, insists that less than all had better content man’ (p. 11).

138. Poems, in Two Volumes, and Other Poems, 1800–1807, ed. by Jared Curtis, the Cornell Wordsworth (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), p. 527.

139. Bushell et al. (p. 7) state that the ‘The Prospectus was probably written between spring 1800 and 1802, earlier than most of the writing for Exc.’.

140. Lyrical Ballads, and Other Poems, 1797–1800, ed. by James Butler and Karen Green, the Cornell Wordsworth (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), pp. 741, 752.

141. To John Taylor, 30 January 1818 (Gittings, ed., p. 57).

142. Masson, ed., III, p. 399. First published in the London Magazine (October 1821), p. 364. De Quincey’s use of ‘Eudæmonist’ predates by over a decade the earliest example in the OED’s (unupdated) entry, which is a pejorative reference by Coleridge to the circular arguments of ‘the eudæmonists’. The OED has the phrase ‘greatest happiness principle’ originating in Bentham’s ‘Codification Proposal’ of 1822.

143. Harold Orel, ed., William Wordsworth: Interviews and Recollections (Houndmills, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 174; John M. Robson et al., eds., Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, 33 vols (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963–91), I, pp. 151–53.

144. Dickstein, ‘Wordsworth and Solitude’, p. 321.

145. Jonathan Bate, Radical Wordsworth: The Poet Who Changed the World (London: William Collins, 2020), p. 330.

146. Mason, p. 102.

147. Fry, p. 168.

148. Happy the man whose ‘life, / Sweet to himself, was exercised in good’ (V. 44–45).

149. Wu, pp. 116, 142.

150. Cleanth Brooks, ‘Wordsworth and Human Suffering: Notes on Two Early Poems’, in From Sensibility to Romanticism: Essays Presented to Frederick A. Pottle, ed. by Frederick W. Hilles and Harold Bloom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), pp. 373–87 (p. 387).

151. Johnston, ‘Wordsworth’s Excursion’, p. 106.

152. Anthony John Harding, ‘The Excursion: Life, Lives, and Writing’, The Wordsworth Circle, 46, 2 (2015), 87–92 (p. 87).

153. Bloom, ‘The Internalization of Quest-Romance’, p. 24.

154. Bloom, The Ringers in the Tower, p. 337.

155. The essay is called ‘“To Reason with a Later Reason”: Romanticism and the Rational’. The Ringers in the Tower states that it was written in 1966 and first published in Midway (1970). Pladek includes it in the bibliography of her doctoral thesis, but substitutes it for ‘The Internalization of Quest-Romance’ in the book that followed, in which she aligns Bloom’s Wordsworth with ‘holism’, as quoted above. In Natural Supernaturalism (1971) Abrams too refers to Wordsworth’s poetry being about ‘“the Mind of Man” in the act of finding what will suffice’, and notes that the phrase ‘what will suffice’ originates in Wallace Stevens’s poem ‘Of Modern Poetry’ (pp. 69, 121).

156. Harold Bloom, ‘Centenary Introduction’, in The Complete Poems of Hart Crane, ed. by Marc Simon (New York: Liveright, 2001), p. xv. Bloom was something of a dualist in thinking of the poet and person separately in this way. He wrote of Milton, ‘As man, evidently he was Christian […] but as poet he was a fierce Miltonist, and as much a son of himself as of God’ (A Map of Misreading, p. 67).

157. The Major Works, ed. by Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 659.

158. Graham Allison and Niall Ferguson, ‘Applied History Manifesto’, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, October 2016 <https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/applied-history-manifesto> [accessed 15 July 2023] (para. 1 of 35).

159. Bloom, pp. 21, 8.

160. Charlie Rose, PBS, 11 July 2000.

161. Lionel Trilling, ‘The Fate of Pleasure: From Wordsworth to Dostoevsky’, in Romanticism Reconsidered, ed. by Northrop Frye (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), pp. 73–106 (p. 85).

162. Elizabeth Knowles, ed., Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotations, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 339.

163. de Selincourt et al., eds., I, p. 125.

164. Johnston and Ruoff, p. viii.

165. Bloom, ‘The Internalization of Quest-Romance’, p. 8.

166. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. by Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Washington Square, 1992), p. 439.

167. Dickstein, ‘Wordsworth and Solitude’, pp. 325–26.

168. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 5; Harold Bloom, Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles: The Power of the Reader’s Mind Over a Universe of Death (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020), p. 82.