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IX. Emerson on Wordsworth

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

John Brooks Moore
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Extract

The relationship between Emerson and Wordsworth, or rather the influence of Wordsworth upon Emerson, needs to be defined. There is a nebulous impression of close kinship between the two, particularly in their views concerning nature. Since Wordsworth's more original and potent verse had been written before 1820, while Emerson's earliest significant address was delivered in 1837 and his earliest significant essay was printed in 1836, we are apt to assume that Wordsworth exerted an important influence upon the young Emerson in the 1830's. The assumption does not appear to be well founded as I shall attempt to demonstrate. During the years that followed his first efforts, Emerson's attitude grew successively friendly, enthusiastic, confident toward the Wordsworth he had formerly found interesting but blundering, admirable in intention but ludicrously incapable. It is not difficult to mark the very year in which the transition from very considerable disapproval to almost unbroken approval was completed.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 41 , Issue 1: American Bibliography for 1925 , March 1926 , pp. 179 - 192
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1926

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References

1 Wordsworth's The Prelude was not published till after his death in 1850; all the rest of his best work was accessible at this time. Emerson's The American Scholar was delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, at Cambridge, Mass., in 1837; his little book, Nature, was printed in 1836.

2 The most complete edition is the “Centenary Edition.” ed. by E. W. Emerson, Boston, 1903-4.

3 Emerson's Journals, ten volumes, edited by E. W. Emerson, and W. E. Forbes, Boston, 1909. The Journals, as edited, contain entries from 1820 till 1876: Emerson's thoughts from the age of sixteen to that of seventy-eight.

4 The three are: Bronson Alcott, Carlyle, and Thoreau.

5 Emerson met and talked with Wordsworth in 1833 at Rydal Mount (See ch. I, of English Traits); and again in 1848 at Ambleside (see ch. XVII of English Traits). The personal impression made upon Emerson seems not to have been altogether pleasant on either occasion.

6 Journal, II, 106.

7 Journal, II, 230-231. The five poems are: Dion; Ode on Intimations of Immortality; Ecclesiastical Sonnet X; Lines Left upon a Seat in a Yew Tree; Sonnet I, to the River Dudden.

8 Journal, II, 232.

9 Ibid., p. 235. Emerson may be considered properly Byronic at twenty-four.

10 Ibid., p. 402. Emerson was then (1831) twenty-eight.

11 Emerson's ultimatum to his church was the sermon on The Lords Supper, delivered at the Second Church in Boston, 1832.

12 Journal, II, 429, 430. The commended poems are: a sonnet (River Duddon series); Ode to Duly; Rob Roy; The Happy Warrior; Dion.

13 Journal, II, 534. Emerson cites two passages to illustrate Wordsworth's tendency to ruin high poems by impotent conclusions. He declares sapiently: “If he had cut in his dictionary for words, he could hardly have got worse.”

14 Journal, III, 182, 183.

15 Ibid., p. 188.

16 When Emerson next talked with Wordsworth, some fifteen years later (1848), he still found himself somewhat offended by Wordsworth's ways, though he (Emerson) had long since come to rank Wordsworth very high as a poet. Cf. English Traits, Ch. XVII.

17 Journal, III, 328.

18 Journal, III, 333.

19 Journal, III, 333.

20 Journal, III, 560. This passage illustrates the ease with which Emerson may be (and is l) misrepresented by isolated citation. He is now a “Wordsworthian,” now an infidel Byron!

21 Ibid., p. 561.

22 Lines Written in Early Spring and Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, are good examples of poems indicating his idea of nature's power. In the Prelude, the first two books reinforce the same idea, though the poem as a whole was not published till after 1836—not till 1850.

23 Cf. The Prelude, Book I,

“….Praise to the End!

Thanks to the means which nature deigned to employ; ….

…. The grim shape [of the mountain]

Towered up between me and the stars, and still,

For so it seemed, with purpose of its own

And measured motion like a living thing

Strode after me. With trembling oars I turned, ….“

24 E. g. The Prelude, Book I. Wordsworth, as a boy, sometimes stole a bird that had been trapped by another boy.

“ …. and when the deed was done

I heard among the solitary hills

Low breathings coming after me…..“

25 Tinlem Abbey.

26 Tintern Abbey.

27 Ode on Imitations of Immortality.

28 Take as a typical case of Emerson's native proximity to Wordsworth, The River (1827):

…. Oh, call not nature dumb;

These trees and stones are audible to me,

These idle flowers, that tremble in the wind,

I understand their faery syllables,

And all their sad significance. The wind,

That rustles down the well-known forest road—

It hath a sound more eloquent than speech.

29 It is not out of place to recall that in one very important respect Emerson's temper was different from Wordsworth's. The reforming or rebel instinct was in the bed-rock of Emerson's nature. Rebellion was only a youthful phenomenon with Wordsworth (though, to be sure, he entertained some “liberal” ideas all his life). Emerson was one of the infrequent rebellious reformers who never abate one jot for circumstances or old age. There was something incompatible about the two, here. And this incompatibility helps to make more plausible Emerson's substantial independence of Wordsworth's ideas. Emerson was conscious of this difference but characteristically continued to prize the freedom and resolution of the remote Grasmere poet.

30 Journal, IV, 55.

31 No better examples of the natural attitudes of youth and of maturity in readers of Wordsworth can be mentioned than Byron (youth) and Matthew Arnold (maturity).

32 Journal, IV, 398.

33 Journal, V, 393.

34 Journal, VI, 264, affords us the only even slightly derogatory reference of the “latter days.” This is the passage; “If in this last book, of Wordsworth there be dulness, it is yet the dulness of a great and cultivated mind.”

35 Journal, VII, 400. This account in the Journal of the second meeting with Wordsworth does not differ materially from that in English Traits, ch. XVII.

36 Journal, VIII, 558.

37 The context gives no clue as to this “narrative of Wordsworth.” Possibly it was the account in English Trails.

38 Journal, IX, 53.

39 Ibid., p. 151-2. “Wordsworth's Prelude is not quite solid enough in its texture; is rather a poetical pamphlet, though proceeding from a new and genuine experience.”

40 Journal, X, 68-9. Emerson was now sixty-one.

41 Ibid., p. 253.

42 Ibid., pp. 267-8. These are, as far as I know, Emerson's final words upon the “manliest poet.”

43 In presenting Wordsworth's view of nature as pantheistic (in his twenties and early thirties), I may seem to many to have run amuck! I do not maintain that Wordsworth was the type and model of pantheism, but I do stand upon the affirmation that no English poet can justly be declared more pantheistic than the early Wordsworth. If pantheism is a theory unexemplified in verse, why not cease to mouth the term? Why it is viewed as a term of opprobium, it would be hard to discover.

44 Nothing reminds a student of the severe scrutiny to which Emerson subjected Wordsworth more vividly than the over-thirty quotations in the published works (exclusive of the Journal). As I have already recorded, there are not a few quotations in the Journal itself.

45 It is of interest to note where Emerson generally went for his many quotations from Wordsworth's verse. A large third of the total are excerpts from sonnets (e. g. the above quotation). The individual poem to which Emerson never tires of recurring is the Ode on Intimations of Immortality. In his essay on Immortality (Centenary Ed., VIII, 346 ff.), Emerson pronounces confidently—“Wordsworth's Ode is the best modern essay on the subject” (i. e. immortality). The general body of quotations reveals few passages primarily concerned with nature. The “Ode” and various sonnets yielded over half the passages that Emerson felt interested to quote.