Chapter 2 - “Say, What Is Honour?”

Summary

Addressing a chronology of texts – the Advertisement to Lyrical Ballads, the Preface to its second edition, the ballad Michael, and the “Residence in France” sections of the 1805 Prelude – this chapter reconsiders Wordsworth’s great decade as a struggle between two types of honor: a commercial value of hierarchy that operated within the day’s market for “dignified” literary productions, and a social value of egalitarianism that allowed poetry to appeal to the “native and naked dignity” inherent in all humankind, regardless of economic status. Addressing a legacy of criticism on Wordsworth’s canonicity and self-fashioning, this chapter demonstrates how honor refigures Romantic cultural capital, inasmuch as Wordsworthian honor pits society against commerce. Such a tension between honorable egalitarianism and commercial success reframes the poet’s politics. Addressing claims that Wordsworth became more conservative as his career progressed, this chapter shows how he also stages a classic paradox inherent in liberalism: the conflict between market distinction and social equality.