Category: poetry

Every poem has a purpose, William Wordsworth says in the preface to Lyrical Ballads, the poetry collection he collaborated on with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. This probably isn’t what most people remember him saying. More memorable are his claims that poetry should be written in “the real language of men” (i.e., not in self-consciously poetic diction), that poetry consists of “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” and that poems are made out of “emotion recollected in tranquility.” His claim about purpose, which is abstract and slightly odd, is easy to forget.

According to Wordsworth, the purpose of a poem is “to illustrate the manner in which our feelings and ideas are associated in a state of excitement.” This is so bland that a reader’s eye impatiently skips over it. It’s less pithy and much less amenable to conceptual handling than, say, Horace’s idea that literature is supposed to delight and instruct. Don’t people always experience feelings and ideas in association with other feelings and ideas? Excitement, by the way, is notwhat makes poetry poetry, Wordsworth goes on to say. To the contrary! He’s against sensationalism (“this degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation”); he deprecates the idea that extreme subject matter—death, violence, lust—makes a work of literature valuable or interesting. In good poems—in his poems—“the feeling therein developed gives importance to the action and situation, and not the action and situation to the feeling.”

If a little girl dies in a snowstorm, in other words, Wordsworth writes a poem not for her sake but in order to find out what he thinks and feels about it. The narcissism of this is wonderfully Wildean, though maybe this is the case with all true literature. The specifics of what Wordsworth seems to mean are both subtle and impossibly grandiose. “I believe,” he writes, “that my habits of meditation have so formed my feelings, as that my descriptions of such objects as strongly excite those feelings, will be found to carry along with them a purpose.” Purpose here seems to be almost an aftereffect of sensibility. It isn’t a specific aim, but a sense of having an aim—a feeling of meaningfulness. The events that inspire a poem are more or less arbitrary. What matters is the nature of the mind excited by the events, a nature revealed through the choices the mind makes as it does its describing. “Nature,” by the way, is probably the wrong word. The mind in question has been formed, given shape and edge by a kind of study—by long-continued effort to enhance and structure its receptivity. One implication of this theory is that at the moment of a poem’s creation, the poet may not have much control. His conscious labor, to the extent that volition comes into play at all, has to happen earlier: in the years leading up to that moment, years the poet spent cultivating an openness to feelings and to the beauty of the world.

Though Wordsworth never quite out and says it, the purpose of a poem is to show the mind of the poet, to show the resonances that his way of life has given to his sensibility. A great poet, Wordsworth writes (his grandiosity flushed out into the open by the imperative to explain what he’s trying to do), has “a more comprehensive soul.” He is distinguished by his “greater readiness and power in expressing what he thinks and feels, and especially those thoughts and feelings which, by his own choice, or from the structure of his own mind, arise in him without immediate external excitement.” Notice that by this point in Wordsworth’s explanation, excitement is by the way, and any real events that cause excitement are almost regrettable, maybe even a little vulgar. In several passages in the preface, in fact, Wordsworth stresses that the poet probably can’t and maybe shouldn’t make poetry directly out of his feelings about real events, not even when the events have happened to him personally. Instead the poet is to use doubles or mirrors or imagined representations of original feelings. Even when the poem is about his own emotions, he is to work from “an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation.” The doubling distances the poet from reality, and in Wordsworth’s opinion, this distance is to the good. Meter further de-realizes a poem. No one in real life consistently speaks in meter, after all. “The co-presence of something regular,” Wordsworth writes (a lovely phrase!), soothes and reassures in cases where too sharp an apprehension of reality would be distressing.

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Not long ago I read the poet Thom Gunn’s letters, and because Gunn was an enthusiast, who raved to friends about his favorite music, movies, novels, and gay bars (including a bar in New York’s East Village that was a favorite of mine, too, at the time he was writing about it, the mid-1990s—though I never ran into him; I biked past it yesterday; it’s a bodega now), I found myself taking notes. To read, on Gunn’s recommendation: Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts. Robert Duncan’s Opening of the Field. Marianne Moore’s Observations. And a Wordsworth poem that Gunn wrote to Robert Pinsky about, in June 1989:

I did find a wonderful poem by Wordsworth I’d never read before, “St Paul’s,” written 1808, not published till 1947. . . . I have never really been able to figure W out. . . . the Lucy poems leave me feeling that it’s possible to be too artless . . . I know how Keats’s worst poetry is connected to his best (it would be possible to make a kind of spectrum), but I don’t know how W goes from his worst (or even his average) to his best. It’s as if, once in an age, he is suddenly able to find a tune which matches his complete intentness of feeling. As in this poem. [Gunn, Letters 467]

Wordsworth’s unevenness is one of the mysteries about him. For pages and pages he writes about clouds floating through his mind that he happens to find morally significant, the verse as flocculent as the subject—and then a gust lifts his kite into the sun, and he makes you want to cry. (Or makes me want to, anyway. A friend of mine who’s a beautiful poet is so immune to his intermittent charm that she can’t understand how I can bear him.)

“St. Paul’s” was written in Grasmere, the village in the Lake District where Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy, lived, in the spring of 1808. It describes the end of a trip to London. Wordsworth had traveled there to find a publisher for The White Doe of Rylstone, a long historical poem of his that he and Dorothy were hoping would bring in money. Unfortunately for Wordsworth’s bargaining position, a two-volume collection of his poems, published the year before, had sold poorly. Byron had trashed it as “namby-pamby,” and was not the only reviewer to have been unkind. Wordsworth made his bargaining position even weaker by refusing to let his editor read the manuscript before bidding on it. “Without money what can we do?” Dorothy wrote to him, in exasperation, when she heard he was being difficult.

New House! new furniture! such a large family! two servants and little Sally! we cannot go on so another half-year. . . . Do, dearest William! do pluck up your Courage—overcome your disgust to publishing . . . [quoted in Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life 1990: 265]

A second object of this London trip was to visit Coleridge, who was ailing. The Royal Institution had commissioned Coleridge to deliver twenty-five lectures on poetry, but Coleridge had had a breakdown—vomiting, diarrhea, paralyzing anxiety—and was dosing himself with hensbane, rhubarb, magnesia, and laudanum. He dodged Wordsworth’s first attempts to pay a visit, maybe because he sensed that Wordsworth felt he should be making more of an effort to wean himself off the opiates. Over the years, a fair amount of tension had developed between the two—the one an industrious if underpaid tribune of sanity, and the other a chaotic and irresolute prophet of imagination. They had started to get on each other’s nerves. During this visit to London, Wordsworth, ever the philosophical egotist, declared that he did “not see much difficulty in writing like Shakespeare,” and the essayist Charles Lamb reported in a letter, with amusement, that Coleridge was “a little checked by this hardihood of assertion.”

While Wordsworth was in town, Coleridge’s health improved enough for him to throw a tea party, which he presided over from bed, swaddled in sheets and blankets, and to resume his lectures. In the third lecture, which Wordsworth attended, Coleridge quoted a poem of Wordsworth’s about daffodils (“I wandered lonely as a cloud”) as an example of the power of  imagination. In his fourth, on April 2, he praised poetry’s “power of so carrying the eye of the Reader as to make him almost lose the consciousness of words—to make him see everything” [quoted in Holmes, Darker Reflections 115–27].

The peroration must have been echoing in Wordsworth’s ears when he left London the next day, April 3. He left Coleridge’s apartment “at 7 o’clock on Sunday morning . . . in a very thoughtful and melancholy state of mind,” he was to write to his friend Sir George Beaumont on April 8, in a letter that shares so much of the phrasing of “St Paul’s” that it could be considered a dry run in prose. [Joseph F. Kishel, ed., The Tuft of Primrose 1986: 3] (Maybe this is the secret of Wordsworth’s breakthroughs—that they are poems he first worked out in prose? Call it the Edward Thomas method.) He hadn’t found a buyer for the White Doe. He was leaving the manuscript behind with Coleridge, who was under the impression that Wordsworth wanted him to try to sell it. (When Coleridge did negotiate a sale, about a month later, Wordsworth was to declare that he hadn’t wanted him to and to hurt Coleridge’s feelings by canceling the deal.) In Grasmere, Wordsworth knew, a family friend had been coughing up blood, and when he arrived home, he was to find his son John gravely ill with meningitis. Failure and loss, vocational and personal, threatened on all sides. Here is how the poem begins:

Pressed with conflicting thoughts of love and fear
I parted from thee, Friend,

Wordsworth addresses the poem to Coleridge, without naming him. Also unnamed are the specific thoughts of love and fear in his mind. Had he already been thinking of Coleridge, consciously or unconsciously, in the prose version he sent to Beaumont? Had he been thinking of him but reluctant, because of the rivalry between them and the growing difference in their ways of life, to write to him? It’s also possible, of course, that in both versions, Wordsworth is speaking mostly to himself. A public letter is usually meant for its addressee only in a sort of ostensible, fictional way. It is not an accident that the poem starts with parting.

and took my way
Through the great City, pacing with an eye
Downcast, ear sleeping, and feet masterless
That were sufficient guide unto themselves,
And step by step went pensively.

Eye, ear, feet. This is a poem of detachment—of things taken apart and seen, at least for a moment, only for themselves. The poet’s body is here disassembled, and from each component, the corresponding faculty is taken away. Vision declines, hearing goes dormant. Feet are left to find their own way. The poet is dropping into a state that is the opposite of poetic intensity. His senses are lessened; his mind is growing inattentive, less present. In dejection and exhaustion, he is shutting the world out. Reducing himself, absenting himself. According to Wordsworth’s preface, a poet is supposed to have a sensibility across which the events of the world play, like a breeze across a wind chime. Wordsworth has sunk here to sensibility at degree zero, if not below zero. He is closed, empty. Even in this hollowed, slumbrous state, however, there’s a shut-down, depressive, lumbering majesty to the rhythm.

Now, mark!
Not how my trouble was entirely hushed,
(That might not be) but how, by sudden gift,
Gift of Imagination’s holy power,
My Soul in her uneasiness received
An anchor of stability.

From inattention, pay attention! From this point on, the poem is built out of appositives, noun phrases placed one after the other so that the second modifies or clarifies the first, a grammatical structure that suggests addition and also unfolding. A word in one line bumps into, and opens up into, an idea in the next. Here, for example, the words “sudden gift” hit up against, and give way to, the phrase “gift of Imagination’s holy power.”

The idea here about beauty—that perceiving it can restore, at least for a moment, a person’s balance—seems like it must be an old one. Plato wrote in the Phaedrus about beauty as the inspiration for art, but for Wordsworth, the apprehension of beauty is much less erotic than what Plato describes, and the benefit is more sharply limited: a temporary finding of one’s center, and no more. Of this hedged, disillusioned version of the idea, Wordsworth’s might the earliest formulation. The poet Charles Reznikoff, in his novel By the Waters of Manhattan(1930), gives it to his hero, Ezekiel: “To see a painting or a statue, he thought, and then to look out of the window, is to see how fresh and richer life itself is.” Ezekiel remembers coming across the idea in the work of a “German philosopher” (who may have been Schopenhauer, but I haven’t read Schopenhauer). The idea recurs again in the novelist Iris Murdoch’s philosophical treatise The Sovereignty of Good (1970): “I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious of my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel. And when I return to thinking of the other matter it seems less important.”

— It chanced
That while I thus was pacing, I raised up
My heavy eyes and instantly beheld,
Saw at a glance in that familiar spot
A visionary scene—a length of street
Laid open in its morning quietness,
Deep, hollow, unobstructed, vacant, smooth,

Another appositive, but with verb phrases instead of noun phrases: “instantly beheld” bumps into and opens up into “Saw at a glance in that familiar spot / A visionary scene.” Then comes an incantatory line of five adjectives in a row, suspended from the normal rules of poetic meter. Somehow we accept the four syllables of the word “unobstructed” as a single beat. The adjectives refer backwards to the noun “street” two lines above, as if they descend from it or radiate from it, the way snowflakes descend and radiate from the sky, each becoming, as it does, a potential independent focus of attention.

And white with winter’s purest white, as fair
As fresh and spotless as he ever sheds
On field or mountain.

I’m ruining the poem a little bit, of course, by glossing it like this—by saying explicitly that what we’re seeing here is snow, when Wordsworth chooses to withhold the word “snow” until the poem’s last moment, when it arrives like a ratification. Note that at this point Wordsworth has only revealed one element of the “visionary scene,” the (snow-covered) street.

Moving Form was none
Save here and there a shadowy Passenger
Slow, shadowy, silent, dusky,

A second incantation. Again the words break meter; the word “shadowy” is made to last as long as the word “slow.” Wordsworth isn’t shy about repeating the word “shadowy,” just as he isn’t about repeating the words “gift,” “pacing,” and “white” earlier in the poem, or the words “street,” “silent,” and “veil” later. One senses that the moving form, who is and isn’t here, is a double of Wordsworth. A self that has become diminished, a self somewhat disavowed.

and beyond
And high above this winding length of street,
This moveless and unpeopled avenue,
Pure, silent, solemn, beautiful,

A third incantation. The eye has taken in, as it rises, first the street, second the walker, and now, third, . . . Without yet knowing what the third element is, we are told about its silence and purity, qualities it shares, we sense, with the snow.

was seen
The huge majestic Temple of St Paul
In awful sequestration, through a veil,
Through its own sacred veil of falling snow.

Maybe the street represents a journey, and the passenger, the self who is taking the journey. One thinks of Keats’s speculation that this world is a “vale of soul-making.” London, for the moment, was that vale, for Wordsworth. Is that the meaning of the scene’s third element—is St. Paul’s the soul that Wordsworth is journeying toward? T. E. Hulme’s famous objection to Romanticism, which he dismissed as “spilt religion,” was that the Romantic aesthetic deliberately makes it impossible to answer such a question; the referent of such a signifier is kept vague in order to suggest that “man, the individual, is an infinite reservoir of possibilities,” as Hulme put it, which Hulme, a political conservative, didn’t think man was. Literally, of course, St. Paul’s is a cathedral, a “temple” as the poem says. To use the seat of religious authority in one’s country as a symbol of the infinite in oneself—a conservative wouldn’t have liked that one bit. Does the cathedral here represent the vocation of poetry? Is it a version of Wordsworth’s self that could survive not being paid, that could rise above not being understood? Superimposed on the cathedral are traces of another image: a person behind a veil, probably a woman, kept apart for reasons of ritual. In awful sequestration. A person initiated in the mysteries. Kept pure. Alone. Apart from Coleridge, apart from Dorothy, apart from wife and child. Maybe Wordsworth was having a vision of the sensibility he believed it was his calling to develop in himself, of the vital texture of associations that he thought gave him his purpose in the world. He couldn’t ever rely on seeing it, and he couldn’t consistently summon it, but at moments, unexpectedly, it was revealed.