Composition and craft

If you consult 'craft' in a Wordsworth concordance or a database, the report is not often cheering. There is much to do with contrivance, debased art, suspect artfulness: the 'dangerous craft of picking phrases out / From languages that want the living voice / To make of them a nature to the heart' (Prel.1805 vi 130-2), the 'craft' of 'gilded sympathies' in affected 'dreams and fictions' (vi 481-3), 'the marvellous craft /Of modern Merlins' (vii 686-7), 'the Wizard's craft' ('The Egyptian Maid' 44), modern 'Life' decked out by 'the mean handywork of craftsman' ('London 1802' 4), assassins led by those 'whose craft holds no consent /With aught that breathes the ethereal element' (Dion 54-5), the 'craft of age, seducing reason' (Borderers 363) or 'the craft / Of a shrewd Counsellor' ('Wars of York and Lancaster' 1-2). About as good as it gets is a rare reverence for 'the painter's true Promethean craft' ('Lines suggested' 24) or the poet's hope that his own 'Imagination' has 'learn'd to ply her craft / By judgement steadied' (Prel.1805 xiii 290-4). Making rigorous inquisition intoWordsworth and poetic craft might even seem perversity, for he is, legendarily, the antithesis. What care for craft can there be in his praise for 'Poets . . . sown / By Nature; Men endowed with highest gifts, / The vision and the faculty divine, / Yet wanting the accomplishment of Verse' (The Excursion i 81-4) - 'wanting' signifying no urgent desire but an unimportant, accidental lack?

On his way through Westmoreland in the 1650s, the Quaker George Fox had a vision:

Nothing so biblical appears either in Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journals (1800-3) or in her brother's poems. But the habit of mind shown in Fox's journal lived on in the conviction they shared with him, that epiphanies can take place by the roadside anywhere, and that they change a person's life. The traffic of that idea among what Wordsworth called 'the noble living and the noble dead' (1805 x 969) across two centuries of English history introduces us to the community that matters most in reading The Prelude.

For although Wordsworth’s is a secular vision, this is a deeply Protestant poem. Its roots are embedded in the dissenting tradition of confessional autobiography practised by Fox and John Wesley in their Journals, by John Bunyan in Grace Abounding, as well as by numerous authors of Methodist and Quaker conversion-narratives published throughout the eighteenth century. There are a number of important things to grasp about these narratives. First, they were written in idiomatic prose (what Wordsworth called ‘the ordinary language of men’); often read aloud to a select audience, then later dictated or transcribed; sometimes published only after the author’s death, with a view to converting others. Second, they concerned the private nature of conscience, whose accountability to God wasn’t governed by the prescripts of the Church. And third, they really did originate from the people. In mid-eighteenth-century England they gave workers and criminals, women and dissenters, the poor, the oppressed and the homeless, a medium and a voice.

The existence of a substantial body of Hebrew literature written on American shores is one of the best-kept secrets of Jewish American cultural history. In 1927, there were 110 Hebrew authors living in the United States, according to Daniel Persky, a columnist for the Hebrew-language newspaper Hadoar, which had been published in New York since 1922. Among this large number were at least a dozen Hebrew poets with serious bodies of published work and a smaller yet still substantial number of major prose writers, dramatists, and essayists. There were Hebrew publishing houses, Hebrew literary clubs and writers associations, and many Hebrew periodicals and literary journals that appeared over the course of the twentieth century. Hebrew belles-lettres were allied to a cultural and educational movement that established a network of Hebrew colleges and Hebrew summer camps and exerted enormous influence on the development of Jewish education in America.

There are many obvious reasons why Hebrew culture failed to thrive in America, but the reasons why its struggles and achievements have been forgotten are less obvious. This question, which is essentially a question about cultural memory, is entangled with the sad fate of Yiddish in America and the brilliant success of Hebrew in Israel. In contrast to Hebrew, Yiddish had a firm basis in the Jewish immigrant masses – in the music halls and the tabloids, at home and in the streets. When Yiddish declined under the force of galloping Americanization, it was the remembrance of popular culture that became the substance of nostalgia during the last quarter of the twentieth century.

Readers who think of Wordsworth as a visionary poet with his head in the clouds would be surprised to discover that these were his words. Such concern with the minutiae of domestic life as getting, spending, and weighing might not seem Wordsworthian. But these thoughts were on the seventythree-year-old poet's mind when he dictated notes on his poetry to his friend Isabella Fenwick. Ah, the puzzled reader might now say, these are the concerns of the stodgy old poet, not the fiery young man of the 1790s. But I will argue here that from an early age Wordsworth was concerned with home-making and with the dynamics of gender within 'household economy'. While we do see a shift in emphasis from the early to later years (an embracing of Victorian domesticity), the idea of domesticity as the source of family, love, and stability remains a constant in Wordsworth's life and work.

Paradoxically, too, Wordsworth’s critique of housewifery in the quoted passage referred to the popular poet Felicia Hemans, a woman who did not find the kind of domestic happiness in her own life that she praised in her poetry. Hemans might not have managed Minerva’s spear or a nineteenth-century lady’s needle, but she certainly used her pen to praise the idea of domesticity. In fact, she helped usher in the Victorian view of Wordsworth as soother of the soul and family poet: ‘Thine is the strain to read among the hills / . . . Or by some happy hearth where faces meet.’

When the Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell learnt that a friend was planning to visit the Lake District, she urged him to pack something by Wordsworth, not, as one might expect, his Guide to the Lakes, but the long, philosophical work in blank verse, The Excursion. The poem is set in the heart of the Lake District and its scenes and characters could have been of interest to any tourist going there; but Gaskell is not recommending The Excursion just for this reason. It is rather that to her mind Wordsworth is the prophet of the mountains and valleys, the best tutor and guide to the spiritual nourishment available from natural beauty, and The Excursion is his inspired word. Four figures occupy the ground of the poem, supposedly in dramatic interaction, but few readers have ever doubted that the most important of them is the Wanderer and that through him speaks Wordsworth the Sage. When the Wanderer declares that 'To every Form of being is assigned . . . / An active Principle' (Excursionix 1-3), his confession of faith recalls 'Tintern Abbey' and the early Prelude and it is no surprise to learn that the discourse of the Wanderer first published in 1814 was actually drafted in the year of 'Tintern Abbey', 1798.

'Wordsworth's name is nothing - to a large number of persons mine stinks', wrote Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1798, urging publisher Joseph Cottle to issue the poets' co-authored Lyrical Ballads anonymously (STCL i 412). In the ensuing decade,Wordsworth, the man with the 'nothing name', wrote many of the poems that for later generations established him as the principal poet of his age. The change is from seeing Lyrical Ballads as Coleridge's wife Sara early on described it - 'laughed at and disliked by all with very few excepted' - to what is the current critical consensus: 'Historically considered, it remains the most important volume of verse in English since the Renaissance, for it began modern poetry, the poetry of the growing inner self.' Wordsworth's achievement is all the more remarkable because most of the chief poems published in Lyrical Ballads (1798 and 1800) and Poems, in Two Volumes (1807) came from a very few bursts of activity, first at Alfoxden in Somerset, then at Goslar in Germany, and eventually at Grasmere.

Lyrical Ballads (1798)

In the aging memories of the one-time collaborators on Lyrical Ballads, the 1798 volume had a straightforward division of labour. Coleridge in Biographia Literaria (1817) recalled that he was to write on ‘persons and characters supernatural’, while Wordsworth would concentrate on subjects from ‘ordinary life’, giving ‘the charm of novelty to things of every day’ and showing ‘the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us . . .’ (BL ii 5–8). The seventy-three-year-old Wordsworth, in a note dictated to Isabella Fenwick about ‘We Are Seven’, agreed that his task was to write about subjects from common life but to treat them imaginatively. However, Wordsworth’s brief critical statement, or ‘Advertisement’, included in Lyrical Ballads (1798) emphasizes stylistic matters: the majority of the poems were ‘experiments’ written ‘to ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure’.

Returning to his American homeland in 1904, after more than twenty years of living abroad, Henry James discovered to his astonishment that the physical and cultural landscape of his “old neighborhood” had been utterly transformed by the palpable signs of immigration. The sounds and smells of the new New York City startled his refined sensibilities. Observing the picturesque urban spectacle of the Lower East Side, James was both fascinated and appalled by the overflowing scene of recently arrived humanity. Walking the ghetto's streets on a “warm June twilight,” James reports in The American Scene (1907) the sensation of “a great swarming, a swarming that had begun to thicken, infinitely, as soon as we had crossed to the East side.” James' response to what he called the “Hebrew conquest of New York” is indeed telling: “the scene here bristled, at every step, with the signs and sounds, immitigable, unmistakable, of a Jewry that had burst all bounds...where multiplication, multiplication of everything, was the dominant note...here was multiplication with a vengeance” (The American Scene, 131-132).

Most striking about James' views on immigration is his deep consciousness of a profound change looming in American speech, and thus in American culture in general. Taking in the strange sounds issuing from the ghetto streets, James heard, with nervous anticipation, the “Accent of the Future,” the tones of rhetorical newness – the grafting of immigrant speech onto English, the “accent of the very ultimate future, in the States” – which he associates with the realm of the popular.

So many of Coleridge's most fundamental poetic convictions converge on the figure of Wordsworth that, you feel, had he not existed, Coleridge would have had to invent him - which, in a manner of speaking, is what he did. Coleridge's Wordsworth - the great philosophical poet, divinely endowed with 'the vision and the faculty divine' (The Excursion i 79, as quoted by Coleridge, BL ii 60), sublimely solitary inhabitant of '[t]he dread Watch-Tower of man's absolute Self' (To William Wordsworth) - is one of the great creations of the age, one which affected the way Wordsworth's contemporaries perceived him, and continues to influence modern criticism. More importantly for us here, this idea of the poet decisively shaped Wordsworth's conception of himself too: it confirmed in him a colossal awareness of poetic vocation, and established in his mind the shape of that career which would testify to the vocation's successful fulfilment. But Wordsworth, and this Coleridgean figure of Wordsworth, are not a perfect fit; and the visionary ideal to which both men subscribed became increasingly the standard by which they could assess Wordsworth's failure, not his triumph. This sense of a discrepancy between the poet and Coleridge's invention of the poet was personally tragic, instilling in Wordsworth a conviction that, despite some of the language's greatest verse, his poetic life had somehow failed. At the same time, paradoxically, the sense of discrepancy proved thoroughly enabling: Wordsworth absorbed the gap between vocation and achievement and made of it some of his very greatest and most characteristic poetry - a poetry of embarrassed expectations which, if not precisely Coleridgean in its triumphs, still could hardly have achieved the kinds of triumph it did without a Coleridgean calling to frustrate. But then, to complicate the picture a little more, speaking of 'a Coleridgean calling' may imply too single-minded a conception of the poetic good life.

Over the last decades, a large, even astonishing number of Jewish scholars and critics have come to the fore in various fields of literary study. Their writings have played a large part in revolutionizing these fields, not only in the sense of revising (if not shattering) earlier approaches and assumptions, but also in introducing whole new avenues and attitudes toward literary experience. In some sense, it was their special task to pose such questions as what “literary experience” even is, moving literary investigation from critical commentary on particular texts (although they very much continued to do this, too) to questions concerning what critical commentary is and does: critical commentary on critical commentary. Theirs, in short, was the plunge into literary theory, into reflection on the premises and principles that make up literary study and literature itself.

America has a broad, bright crown of Jewish critics in a wide range of areas: Lionel Trilling, Alfred Kazin, Philip Rahv, Irving Howe, M. H. Abrams, Leslie Fiedler, Marjorie Perloff, Stephen Greenblatt, Susan Gubar – to name only a few. I will discuss, however, only a small group of Jewish American scholars, working largely at Yale from the 1950s onwards, whose writings were highly theoretical and concentrated on poetry and poetics: Harold Bloom, John Hollander, and Geoffrey Hartman – and I will extend the discussion to include Sacvan Bercovitch, who taught at Columbia and Harvard, as the major theorist of a poetics of American culture generally. I focus particularly on poetry and poetics because here reflection on language is most explicit and most pure; and it is a particular reflection on language that comprises the very core of these scholars' theories about literature.

In 1921, David Nichol Smith described Wordsworth as 'our greatest nature poet' and it is a judgement many would still accept. The poem generally called 'Daffodils' ('I wandered lonely as a cloud'), like Kipling's 'If', is one of the last remaining genuinely popular poems. From it, one gains an image of Wordsworth as someone sustained and cheered by the flowers he finds when walking among the dales and hills. In other words, Wordsworth's natural world seems to be restricted to the country - implicitly denying that urban life is 'natural' - and, secondly, Wordsworth is seen as emotionally nourished by attractive, rural objects. This example of his nature poetry is easily aligned with pastoral and, at the same time, it seems to support a tourist's or holidaymaker's experience of the countryside.

‘Nature’ in this context means, roughly speaking, the non-urban or rural and this meaning of the word now predominates (partly because of the way in which Wordsworth was understood by his Victorian readers). When celebrating Wordsworth as a nature poet, it is easy to assume he is no more than a spokesperson for rural values or for the National Trust, the society established in the late nineteenth century for the preservation of the finest of the English landscape, amongst the founders of which were many admirers of his poetry. It is easy, in other words, to forget that in Wordsworth’s day ‘Nature’ was a term continuously employed in profound theological, philosophical, and political debates. Nature could be seen as brutal or as a harmonious system reflecting the perfect order of its creator or as the world of the heart not the head – as a realm of intuitions and affections which counterbalanced the overly strict dictates of reason. Each of these readings could be employed in support of different political positions: natural brutality justifies an oppressive tyranny, natural harmony reflects not only God’s order but the settled order of the established state, and natural feeling encourages the rebel to believe that his or her impulse of defiance is right.

Of the many literary and intellectual groups that fueled the emergence of Jewish literature in America, none was as well situated to take advantage of the country's opportunities as the cohort centered in New York City during World War II. While social conditions alone can never inspire a renaissance, the quality of Jewish culture – and even the language in which it was produced – always depended on the Jews' relations to the surrounding polity. The radical intellectual community dominated by Abraham Cahan between 1897-1917 had drawn tremendous energy from the concentrated mass of Yiddish readers and theatergoers, but the urgent needs of immigrant audiences riveted the writers' attention on crises of security and material subsistence. Subsequent groups of Yiddish poets and writers,like the Yunge (Young) and Inzikhistn (Introspectivists), managed to distance themselves somewhat from the social and national claims of their immigrant society, yet their reliance on a Yiddish readership put them essentially at odds with English America even as their work responded to its atmosphere. During the 1920s, when American nativism spurred a fear of immigrants and tried to set limits on the advancement of those who had already entered the country, Jewish enthusiasts of the Russian Revolution tried to introduce its egalitarian ethos into America, but their dependence on directives from the Soviet Union limited ever more of their autonomy of mind and spirit the longer they stayed under its ideological influence.

In the third of the Zuckerman novels, Philip Roth includes the following poignant detail concerning the protagonist's dying mother:

Roth's figure of the Holocaust lodged in the brain of the American-born Jewish mother in a 1985 Jewish American novel that seems in no way a work of Holocaust fiction can be taken as a measure of the place of the Holocaust in the Jewish American imagination. As Norma Rosen puts it in the foreword to the recent republication of her 1969 novel Touching Evil: “As safe Americans we were not there. Since then, in imagination, we are seldom anywhere else” (Preface, 3). For most Jewish Americans (and many non-Jewish Americans as well: Rosen's own novel deals with non-Jews as does Emily Praeger's even more recent Eve's Tattoo [1998]), this Holocaust consciousness is largely unspoken and, as compared with the daily concerns of ordinary life, it is almost of radical disconcern.

In sketching Wordsworth's life, two portraits might be drawn, almost as mirror images of one another. The first would present a child who was orphaned by the age of thirteen, and to whose family the first Lord Lonsdale refused to pay the substantial debt (over £4500) that was owing to Wordsworth senior at his death; a boy who rebelled against his guardians, slashed through a family portrait with a whip, and failed, first to gain anything more than an unclassified BA (from St John's College, Cambridge, 1791), and then to take orders or enter one of the professions; a graduate who in 1792 travelled to revolutionary France, where he was converted to its cause and fathered an illegitimate child; a 'vagabond' who returned to England and several years of apparently aimless roving, leading, in 1796, to some kind of nervous breakdown; a young 'democrat' who kept dubious, if not actually dangerous company, and in 1798 was thought worthy of surveillance by a government spy; a republican who laid plans for a radical monthly called the Philanthropist, and may have been involved in a liberal London weekly of that name, which ran for forty-two issues, 1795-6; an author of oppositional political tracts, the unpublished Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff (1793), written in defence of the regicide in France and rights of man at home, and The Convention of Cintra (1809), which accepted that fighting imperialist France constituted a just war, but was highly critical of the deal by which a Spanish revolt ended with Britain allowing the defeated French army to evacuate Portugal without loss; a 'Semi-atheist' whom Coleridge persuaded into an unspecific form of Unitarianism, and who in 1812 still had 'no need of a Redeemer'; a would-be populist who argued that poetry was not the exclusive property of the middle and upper classes, and attributed to his own work the polemical purpose of showing that 'men who do not wear fine cloaths can feel deeply' (letter to Charles James Fox, 14 January 1801); a financially insecure poet who until his mid-forties lived in relative poverty, adopting a lofty defensiveness against an uncomprehending 'public' and the diffuse notoriety provided by hostile Tory critics, among whom he was synonymous at once with childishness and insubordination.

William Wordsworth's centrality to any review of English Romantic period writing continues fundamentally undisturbed. Critical fashions and methodologies change, but as regards English Romanticism they are tested against a canonical core of writers. Of those, Wordsworth almost always takes centre stage either as the best support of the new theories, or as the writer whose authority they must displace in order to show their innovative power and originality. One might risk saying that, for good or ill, Arnold has proved right in his predictions and Swinburne wrong: it is Wordsworth and Byron, not Coleridge and Shelley, who have remained the touchstones of canonical English poetry of the romantic age. In Wordsworth and Byron inhere the definitive contrasts of the period's sensibility and style, the consistent Englishness of the former and the cosmopolitan inconsistency of the latter. But the recognition Wordsworth received in his own lifetime was not so straightforward.

These days, the lingua franca on the Boardwalk in Brighton Beach is Russian. For every ice cream parlor there are two Gastronoms named after another city in the former Soviet Union. On any given morning, rain or shine, winter or summer, you can see a group of Russian Jews doing calesthenics on the beach. For some, the boardwalk joining Brighton Beach to Sea Gate via Coney Island represents Odessa. For others, its Russian restaurants, nightclubs, fruit stands, and bookstores represent their ethnic haven in the New World, within earshot of the ubiquitous El (New York elevated railway).

These Russian Jews have closed the circle of the mass immigration to America, not only because the beaches and baths, Luna Park and Dreamland, Thousand-and-One-Nights and Tower of Seville were the first taste of paradise for millions of their coreligionists, but also because, with their backs to America and their faces to the ocean, the new immigrants have replicated a whole era in Jewish American culture. By the first decade of the twentieth century, Coney Island became the physical and psychological boundary between the Old World and the New, a liminal, conflictual space where one's longing – and loathing – for the Old World were experienced most keenly; where, awash in the sea of humanity, or as pilgrim to this mecca of mass amusement, the Jewish newcomer sometimes felt more alone than anywhere else. On the beach itself, a million footsteps and a thousand sand castles are washed away daily with the tide. So too the Jewish cultural experiment whose bold contours were highlighted so clearly against the backdrop of Brighton Beach and Coney Island. It has vanished, with nary a trace, so that each generation is left to repeat the cycle all over again: from exile, to deliverance, to exile.