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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
The “many movements” of a poet's mind are so various, the hiding-places of his power are so obscured, even to the poet himself, that any attempt to
is very dangerous. Nevertheless, it is sometimes possible to generalize about a poet's mental or temperamental habits, and, if such habits are basic enough, an understanding of them may throw new light on his work. In Wordsworth, a pattern of basic habits of thinking and feeling unfolds itself in a kind of dualism: Wordsworth had a very strong habit of thinking in terms of paired opposites or contrarieties. Everywhere, in nature, in individual man and in society, he saw a constant interplay of opposing forces. These contrarieties were a characteristic manifestation of his mind. They found expression spontaneously in hundreds of images which are too short, too obviously unpremeditated to have been the result of conscious thought. Such images are, rather, an unconscious expression of a habitual turn of mind.
1 The Prelude ii.203-205(1850), ed. Ernest de Selincourt (London, 1926).
2 I shall capitalize the noun forms of all contrarieties because of their importance to this study.
3 Ernest de Selincourt, Dorothy Wordsworth: A Biography (Oxford, 1933), p. 101.
4 Prelude ix.50-51 (1850). Unless otherwise stated, all italics are mine.
5 “Composed in One of the Catholic Cantons,” Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1940-49).
6 “Written in Very Early Youth,” Works.
7 “Composed by the Side of Grasmere Lake,” Works.
8 The line “Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns” was greatly praised by Tennyson as giving the sense of “the permanent in the transitory.” This statement is reported in Hallam T. Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson: a Memoir, by His Son (New York, 1911), ii, 70. Oscar James Campbell, “Wordsworth's Conception of the Esthetic Experience,” Wordsworth and Coleridge: Studies in Honor of George McLean Harper (Princeton, 1939), p. 31, says, “Wordsworth attains the first eminence of rapture in the poem when he finds himself in the state of energetic quietude … .”
9 Campbell, “Wordsworth's Conception,” p. 37, also notices these contrarieties. The following scholars have noted occasionally the presence of contrarieties in Wordsworth's thought, but they have apparently been unaware that such pairs of contrarieties are parts of a widespread pattern running through his poetry and his poetic and political theory: Campbell and Mueschke, “Wordsworth's Aesthetic Development, 1795-1802,” Essays and Studies in English and Comp. Lit., Univ. of Michigan Publ., Vol. x (1933), 1-57; George Wilbur Meyer, Wordsworth's Formative Years, Univ. of Michigan Pubis; Vol. xx (1943), 220-229; Arthur Beatty, William Wordsworth: His Doctrine and Art in Their Historical Relations (Madison, 1927), Chap. iii.
10 “Expostulation and Reply,” Works.
11 I am aware that this is an over-simplification. George Wilbur Meyer (Wordsworth's Formative Years, pp. 155 ff.) shows clearly the untrustworthiness of The Prelude for this part of Wordsworth's life. I am mainly interested at this point, however, in tracing the contrarieties in Wordsworth's thought as he chose to represent its history in The Prelude.
12 Campbell and Mueschke (“Wordsworth's Aesthetic Development,” p. 38) express it this way: “This state of quiet exaltation Wordsworth came to regard as the aesthetic experience.”
13 George Wilbur Meyer (Wordsworth's Formative Years, p. 226) says, “To the Pedlar in other words, the ruined cottage and the various objects which surround it are significant as symbols of mutability, and it is to illuminate the nature of change and decay rather than to suggest the need for social reform that he proceeds with the history of Margaret.”
14 Campbell and Mueschke (“Wordsworth's Aesthetic Development”) notice similar contrarieties: “This story of Margaret is the first indication of a revolution in Wordsworth's aesthetic practice. It reveals his discovery that inner peace is a necessary condition to the transmutation of violent and tragic deeds into art. Consequently, the central peace of Nature is employed to raise the mind of the observer above the endless agitation of human action” (pp. 15-16). “In The Ruined Cottage he had successfully raised unwelcome events in the history of his emotional personality into permanent meaning and value by interpenetrating them with the peace of the changeless aspects of Nature” (p. 21).
15 O. J. Campbell (“Wordsworth's Conception,” p. 37) writes, “When Wordsworth realized that the essential law of Nature was change and that mutability destroyed man's most precious beliefs, he sought not only a religion but also an esthetic norm beyond nature —one that might produce in him through its permanence and stability unchanging peace.”