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Wordsworth and The Recluse: The University of Imagination

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Kenneth R. Johnston
Kenneth R. Johnston*
Affiliation:
Indiana University, Bloomington
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Abstract

Wordsworth's unfinished masterwork, The Recluse, is often regarded as a nonexistent text. Though Wordsworth never completed the entire plan, its fragments constitute nearly twenty thousand lines of poetry that can be coherently interpreted. In their probable order of composition, the extant parts reveal a dialectical movement between Wordsworth's commitment to a public epic of secular redemption and his fascination with private poetry exploring his own genius. Three distinct episodes in this pattern can be identified in the active period of The Recluse's development (1797-1815). Each begins with Wordsworth's effort to write The Recluse, followed by a recoil into Prelude-type poetry, ending with the completion of some portion of The Recluse. In all three, Wordsworth's determination to give “Human Life” or society its due can be seen as at once the motivation and the stumbling block of his uneven progress toward The Recluse.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 97 , Issue 1 , January 1982 , pp. 60 - 82
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1982

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References

Note 1 Darbishire, The Poet Wordsworth (Oxford: Clarendon, 1950), p. 90.

Note 2 The exception is John Alban Finch's “Wordsworth, Coleridge, and ‘The Recluse,‘ 1798–1814,” Diss. Cornell 1964, a valuable beginning cut short by Finch's untimely death. Finch examines the sequence of Recluse texts primarily in terms of compositional problems and biographical data. Other important statements about The Recluse's contents and intentions are Ernest de Selincourt, “The Prelude and The Recluse,” in his ed. of The Prelude (Oxford: Clarendon, 1959), pp. xxxii-xl; Mark L. Reed, Wordsworth: The Chronology of the Middle Years, 1800–1815 (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1975), pp. 656–86 (hereafter CMY); Beth Darlington, ed., “Home at Grasmere”: Part First, Book First, of “The Recluse” (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1977), pp. 3–32; Lionel Stevenson, “Wordsworth's Unfinished Gothic Cathedral,” University of Toronto Quarterly, 32 (1963), 170–83; William Minto, “Wordsworth's Great Failure,” Nineteenth Century (Sept. 1889), rpt. in part in Wordsworth's Mind and Art, ed. A. W. Thomson (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1969), pp. 10–27.

Note 3 The dating of the “Prospectus” is perhaps the most vexed of The Recluse's many textual cruxes. Darlington, the definitive authority, identifies “the period between spring, 1800, and early spring, 1802” as “the likeliest time” but cautions that exact pinpointing is not possible (p. 22) and assigns an all-but-complete version to early spring of 1800 (p. 13). Reed concurs, adding that “no evidence … absolutely precludes composition—and such a speculation remains persistently appealing on the basis of content—between 1798 and 1800” (CMY, p. 665). Most recently, Jonathan Wordsworth has argued for dating the “Prospectus” January 1800, principally on the basis of its very close similarities in spirit to the “Glad Preamble” of November 1799 (“On Man, On Nature, and On Human Life,” Review of English Studies, NS 31 [1980], 26–28). The January date would place it exactly in the sequence I am proposing: after the completion of the two-part Prelude of late 1799 but before, or simultaneous with, the inception of “Home at Grasmere” in early 1800.

Note 4 Finch, pp. 32–64; Reed, Wordsworth: The Chronology of the Early Years, 1770–1799 (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1967), pp. 215, 225, 337–39 (hereafter CEY); and de Selincourt and Darbishire, Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, v (Oxford: Clarendon, 1966), 363–64 (hereafter PW), establish the likelihood that these texts formed the first drafts of The Recluse; definite proof will probably remain impossible, given the volatile nature of Wordsworth's composition and conception of the poem. For purposes of clarity, I am ignoring “The Pedlar” as a separate version of “The Ruined Cottage” and as the main tributary whereby autobiographical elements from The Recluse—the many similarities between the Pedlar's boyhood and Wordsworth's—filtered into The Prelude; see Jonathan Wordsworth, The Music of Humanity (Edinburgh: Nelson, 1969), pp. 157–241.

Note 5 The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years, 1787–1805, ed. E. de Selincourt, rev. Chester Shaver, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967), pp. 212, 214.

Note 6 Stephen Gill, “ ‘Adventures on Salisbury Plain’ and Wordsworth's Poetry of Protest 1795–97,” Studies in Romanticism, 11 (1972), 48–65.

Note 7 All line citations for the 1798–99 Prelude are to the Reading Text of “The Prelude,” 1798–1799, ed. Stephen Parrish (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1977).

Note 8 The Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, I (Oxford: Clarendon, 1956), 527.

Note 9 Finch, “On the Dating of ‘Home at Grasmere,‘ ” in Bicentenary Wordsworth Studies, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 14–28. Finch's reassignment of portions of “Home at Grasmere” to 1806 from the traditionally accepted 1800 date is substantially endorsed by Reed, CEY, pp. 656–57.

Note 10 My identification of the portions of “Home at Grasmere” composed in 1800 and those from 1806 is based on Darlington's tentative conclusions in the introduction to her edition, pp. 8–22; all line numbers refer to the MS. B Reading Text of this edition. Jonathan Wordsworth, in his essay in Review of English Studies, disputes her findings in favor of an 1800 date for all but a few connective passages of the poem. This view, if established, would damage the symmetry of my argument but not its substance, since my interpretation of the lines Darlington assigns to 1806 (principally 11. 469–859 of MS. B) is essentially the same as his, i.e., that the lines show Wordsworth consciously trying to rectify problems created by his excessively optimistic celebration of Grasmere. I find Darlington's postulated division of the poem (which follows Finch and has been corroborated by Reed) persuasive because in the portions she assigns to 1806 Wordsworth writes primarily about others—the people and animals of Grasmere—while in the 1800 portions he focuses much more on himself.

Note 11 I develop this interpretation in “ ‘Home at Grasmere’: Reclusive Song,” Studies in Romanticism, 14 (1975), 1–28.

Note 12 The comparison of long poems to large buildings is a rhetorical tradition of ancient date. Stuart Peter-freund identifies some of the immediate influences of this tradition on Wordsworth in his “ ‘In Free Homage and Generous Subjection’: Miltonic Influence on The Excursion” Wordsworth Circle, 9 (1978), 173–77.

Note 13 I am indebted to Karl Johnson's study The Written Spirit: Thematic and Rhetorical Structure in Wordsworth's “The Prelude” (Salzburg: Institut fur Englische Sprache und Literatur, 1978) for stimulating my thoughts on the “homing” pattern of Wordsworth's imagination.

Note 14 All line references to the 1805 Prelude are from the de Selincourt edition.

Note 15 Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971), esp. pp. 17–32, 65–70, 325–72.

Note 16 For varying interpretations of the exceptional nature of “Home at Grasmere” see Abrams, pp. 288–92; John Jones, The Egotistical Sublime (London: Chatto and Windus, 1954), pp. 133–37; Geoffrey Hartman, Wordsworth's Poetry 1787–1814 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1964), pp. 171–74; William Heath, Wordsworth & Coleridge: A Study of Their Literary Relations in 1801–1802 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970), pp. 11–16; and Karl Kroeber, “‘Home at Grasmere’: Ecological Holiness,” PMLA, 89 (1974), 132–41.

Note 17 Heath, pp. 11–19, makes the point with reference to “Home at Grasmere,” but it applies equally to “The Tuft of Primroses.”

Note 18 De Selincourt and Darbishire, PW, v, 483; all line numbers refer to Appendix C of this edition. Another edition, in Late Poems for “The Recluse,” ed. Joseph F. Kishel, is forthcoming from Cornell Univ. Press.

Note 19 For further interpretation of the dirgelike qualities of the poem, see James Butler, “Wordsworth's The Tuft of Primroses: ‘An Unrelenting Doom,‘ ” Studies in Romanticism, 14 (1975), 237–48.

Note 20 I have confirmed the poem's appearance by examination of the manuscript in the Dove Cottage Library.

Note 21 I interpret this passage further in “Wordsworth's Last Beginning: The Recluse in 1808,” ELH, 43 (1976), 316–41.

Note 22 The image of Wordsworth sitting down to resume work on The Recluse in 1809 is a tidy critical fiction imposed on a vastly complicated textual history, much of which will be elucidated for the first time in Michael Jaye's forthcoming edition of The Excursion in the Cornell Univ. Press series. At present, it is difficult to say when Wordsworth's composition of the poem began to proceed toward the final form as we know it. Recent scholarship has, however, moved the likeliest early date of sustained composition of Books ii-iv from the 1806–07 date cited by de Selincourt and Darbishire (PW, v, 415, 418–19, 423) to 1809 (Reed, CMY, pp. 23–24, 666). Although some drafts of passages in The Excursion can be dated as early as 1797–98, the essential evidence for the present argument is that major, conscious composition of The Excursion postdates “The Tuft of Primroses” and that the sections devoted to the Solitary (Bks. ii-iv) antedate those devoted to the Pastor (Bks. v-ix). Reed's summary (CMY, pp. 23–24) shows the composition of Books II-IV falling primarily between 1809 and 1812, that of Books v-ix primarily between 1813 and 1814.

Note 23 John Thelwall, the political speaker and writer, is usually considered the likeliest model for the Solitary, and, as author of The Peripatetic, the influence nearest Wordsworth in the loco-meditative poetic tradition. Alan G. Hill has also shown persuasive similarities between the characters and plan of The Excursion and those of the Octavius of Minucius Felix (2nd-3rd century A.D.), an urbane dialogue between a skeptical pagan philosopher and a Roman Christian lawyer that Wordsworth borrowed from Coleridge's library (“New Light on The Excursion,” Ariel, 5 [1974], 37–47). Of course, Coleridge, Hazlitt, and other contemporary friends and reviewers immediately recognized Wordsworth's personality in all The Excursion's characters: “three persons in one poet,” as Hazlitt put it.

Note 24 Book iv's open-ended theology has been variously interpreted by Judson S. Lyon, The Excursion: A Study (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1950), p. 80; Hartman, p. 316; Enid Welsfoid, Salisbury Plain: A Study on the Development of Wordsworth's Mind and Art (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1966), 77–91; and this author, in “Wordsworth's Reckless Recluse: The Solitary,” Wordsworth Circle, 9 (1978), 131–44.

Note 25 The Poetical Works of Wordsworth, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, rev. E. de Selincourt (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1960), p. 680 (1. 971). Wordsworth changed the name from Knott, “a gentleman (I have called him a knight) concerning whom these traditions survive” (de Selincourt and Darbishire, PW, v, 468, quote the Fenwick note).

Note 26 De Selincourt and Darbishire, PW, v, 473; Mary Moorman, William Wordsworth: The Later Years, 1803–1850 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), pp. 178–79, 340.

Note 27 See James A. W. Heffeman, “Mutilated Autobiography: Wordsworth's Poems of 1815,” Wordsworth Circle, 10 (1979), 107–12.