New Perspectives on William Wordsworth – Editoriale

[POTKAY 2007, p. 393], not to mention an academic anxiety voiced by at least some of the profession that Romanticism itself is nothing more than a movement of «ideological hostility to the forces giving rise to the modern world» [MANNHEIM 1986, p. 90]. Fears that Romanticism signifies a nostalgic looking back to outmoded virtues have been fired further by the British coalition government’s recent attempt to re­-brand Romantic poetry as a «demanding» subject with which school children should engage as a test of their intellectual mettle [see ADAMS 2013]. On the one hand, the association between rigour and Romanticism proffered by a Tory-Liberal education system grants ammunition to those who seek to censure the field as «heritage studies»; on the other, it boosts those critics who wish to elevate Romanticism as the most difficult of subjects, an arena for challenging theoretical innovation, marathon archival editions and readings designed to showcase the ingenuity of the critic over and above period writing. Against this is that aspect of Romantic criticism that seeks to protest its cultural diversity, a period of «rebels and reactionaries» whose «distinguishing feature», Octavio Paz writes, was change, «not only in the arts and letters, but also in imagination, sensibility, taste, and ideas. It was a morality, an eroticism, a politics, a way of dressing and a way of loving, a way of living and of dying» [PAZ. 1989, p. 60]. Yet as Paz notes, the period’s obsession with the emotional experience of «the instantaneous present» has almost obliged critics to turn the other way by anatomizing its world picture into historically measurable themes. This has been particularly true for new historical readings of Wordsworth that, rather than blaming him for overlooking the historical, hyper-historicize his work through contextualizing and cross-referencing it with specific knowledge sets. While these readings deepen our sense of what Wordsworth read and responded to in his writing, they bave hardened the framework through which we approach his poetry, making an approach to his work at once more difficult (only the reader w1th specialist knowledge can access his work) and more limiting (only methodologies that toughen up our reading experience are seen as legitimate).

Our shared experience of reading and teaching Wordsworth, however, in Italy, the UK and the US, suggests that readers are drawn to Wordsworth because of the way he allows and warrants a kind of «soft» thinking. By «soft» we do not mean «easy» or «weak», but rather «gentle», «malleable» and affective, one that enables the reader to reflect on what is given in the experience of a text rather than basing an interpretation on a working back from external events and sources. Simon Jarvis has recognized this in his commentary on blank verse as a «flexible medium» for Wordsworth, one «in which he is able to follow with close discrimination the minutest nuances of affective coloration or of deep conceptual reflection, and which at the same time is intensely and evidently melodic» [JARVIS 2011, p. 295]. For Jarvis, Wordsworth’s investment in form «does not drive the reader forward, but accompanies him or her: a movement inward, a comparison with the shape of our own experience, is necessary to make the writing intelligible» [JARVIS 2011, p. 295]. This movement inward toward experience, sound and feeling begins with observations about Wordsworth and his writing, rather than using him as a text-book guide to various contemporary topics. Why is he always in bed? How does he figure our being in nature? What does he mean when he calls faith «intuition»? Does his philosophical song extend to a singing of materiai objects, like sofas? How bad was his sense of smell? Why do his gestures of sympathy seem at times so reticent and distanced? What would it mean to think of Wordsworth’s imagining of time as a «touch» as well as narrative? What do his ballads reveal about the way his poems tell us stories?

These ideas, all addressed in this issue, are not really «topics» as such, but are rather modes of intimacy with Wordsworth’s poetry that fall within fields that comprise the most interesting and exciting of recent work on Wordsworth: affect studies, eco-criticism, thing theory, phenomenology and religion. These are «matters of concern» and not «matters of fact». As Bruno Latour argues, twentieth-century criticism «made a mistake» in believing «there was no efficient way to criticize matters of fact except my moving away from them and directing one’s attention toward the conditions that made them possible» [LATOUR 2004, p. 231]. Encouraging a turn away from
«matters of fact» (apparently indisputable, polemical certitudes) to «matters of concern» (that which we «cherish» and seek to protect and care for), Latour asks us to re-assess the thinker who can only debunk, undermine and «toughen up» criticai studies. He does this by inviting us to follow Alfred Whitehead’s observation that philosophy «bifurcates» nature into primary qualities (the objective «real», the physical world known only to science) and secondary qualities (subjective experience, what the mind adds to the real to make sense of it). For example, what objectively passes into our eyes (light waves) is not visible until we subjectively «see» them as colour and shape. Whitehead negotiates this dualism by suggesting we «prehend» things in the world through and in our bodies by physically and emotionally perceiving their continuai interactions with the environment, us, and the system of relationships in which they occur. If the objective really were split from the subjective, Latour reminds us, living organisms would not be possible «since being an organism means being the sort of thing whose primary and secondary qualities – if they did exist – are endlessly blurred» [LATOUR 2005, p. 227]. Despite this, modern critical thinking still elevates material objects over and above objects of belief (poetry, gods, emotion), the latter clung to only by, it is assumed, the most naïve of believers:

When naïve believers are clinging forcefully to their objects, claiming that they are made to do things because of their gods, their poetry, their cherished objects, you can turn all of those attachments into so many fetishes and humiliate all the believers by showing that it is nothing but their own projection, that you, yes you alone, can see. [LATOUR 2004, p. 239]

The modem critic then strikes these naïve believers again by showing that «whatever they think, their behaviour is entirely determined» by an «objective reality they don’t see», thus privileging a realist thinking directed only to matters of fact, never to matters of concern.

This issue on Wordsworth, however, seeks to engage with matters of concern and collects a series of essays that speak from a criticai position that assembles (rather than debunks), gathers (rather than belittles) and cares for a way of reading Wordsworth gently. Latour’s engagement with Whitehead is especially relevant here because of Whitehead’s own investment in Wordsworth, whom he triumphs in the 1925 Science and the Modern World. In Whitehead’s cosmologica! scheme, Wordsworth’s imagining of nature is inclusive and unifying and grasps the human, the living and nonliving, and all surrounding things as an ongoing «whole» [WHITEHEAD 1925, p. 127]. Wordsworth’s ability to think «beyond anything which we can grasp with a clear apprehension» allows Whitehead to both think «enduring things» («some greater reality […] thought under many names, The Absolute, Brahma, The Order of Heaven, God») apart from «eternal objects» («colour and shape»); but also to recognize the inherent and unifying value of everyday experience:

Remembering the poetic rendering of our concrete experience, we see at once that the element of value, of being valuable, of having value, of being an end in itself, of being something which is for its own sake, must not be omitted in any account of an event as the most concrete actual something. […] This is the secret of Wordsworth’s worship of nature. [WHITEHEAD p. 95]

Wordsworth’s poetry thus realizes the value of «all things» in one interwoven texture, from valuing the worth of organic life (against scientific abstraction) to its aesthetic appreciation [p. 96]. It forges a contract between things where, in Latour’s terminology, matters of fact are suddenly considered as matters of concern, transforming the word «criticism» into an association with «positive metaphors» [LATOUR 2004, p. 247]. Without this impulse, Latour argues, criticism becomes barbarous, seeking facts, science and objectivity as a way of humiliating «naïve believers», who cling to «their gods, their poetry, their cherished objects» while the critic turns «all of those attachments into so many fetishes» to show «that it is nothing but their own projection, that you, yes you alone, can see» [p. 239]. Quoting Whitehead, Latour invokes a nondualist reading of the world as a counter, one in which «the red glow of the sunset should be as much part of nature as are the molecules and electric waves by which men of science would explain the phenomenon» [WHITEHEAD 1920, pp. 28-29]. Such thinking does not oppose the «boring electric waves» to the «rich world of the glowing sun», but rather attempts to see them together, to «gather» them, as Heidegger would say, as mediating objects of experience without reducing that experience to explanation (LATOUR 2004, p. 244].

The volume opens with Geoffrey Hartman, a critic whose percipience and generosity of spirit can be felt across this issue and to whom we dedicate its contents. His wonderful exploration of the ways Wordsworth recasts English cultural memory at the turn of the nineteenth century moves beyond the chivalric ethos and the neo-gothic imagination at work in the traditional ballad form to foster a non-apocalyptic idea of poetic story-telling. The Wordsworthian ballad rescues folkloric belief from residuality and expands cosmic sympathies by igniting a «cultural chain of memorialization» in which collective forms of transmission and post-revolutionary identity issues are not sensed as mutually exclusive. At the same time, Wordsworth’s rejection of catastrophic language confronts present-day poets and readers with a radical question: can the mild handling of memory and trauma, figuring in the spots of tradition of the type epitomized in «Hart-Leap Well», still provide template for post-Holocaust places and genocidal settings? On parallel grounds, Rhian Williams’s essay interrogates canonical eco-critical perspectives on Wordsworth’s poetry of nature, initiating her discussion with a reflection on the 2009 Cumbrian floods that inundated the town of Cockermouth. The temporary exposure of Wordsworth’s former home – a property of the National Trust since 1837 – to the vulnerability of an ordinary piace undermines the interpretation of Wordsworth’s nature poetry in terms of a middle-class conservative ideal of permanence and harmony. In confronting contemporary readers with the disquieting spectacle of a disarrayed environment, the image of a flooded Cockermouth encourages a reading of Wordsworthian eco-poetics as an engagement with the affective experience of a natural world that subsists in a continuous process of interaction with human presence and is exposed to the same condition of instability.
Shifting from environmental to communitarian spiritual ethics, the volume proceeds with Emma Mason’s investigation on the role of intuition in the religious experience envisaged in The Excursion. Against the grain of criticai interpretations that downplay the relevance of intuition in Wordsworth’s poetry and overvalue the politics of isolation and disengagement embodied by the Solitary and the Wanderer, Mason argues for intuition as an affective and cognitive phenomenon caught up between un­theorized ordinary experience and high philosophical and theological speculation. By reading intuition instead as a vehicle of mutual attention, dialogic exchange, and intimacy among humans, she takes Book IV of The Excursion beyond the usual limits designated by a denominational Christianity that is often reductively associated with the poem’s religious ethics. Similarly, Rowan Rose Boyson approaches Wordsworth’s religious verse from the unconventional vantage point of the poet’s anosmia and reads the scent references in Ecclesiastical Sonnets in the context of medical discourse on sense deficiencies, as well as in relation to the shifting significance of sensuousness in the nineteenth century. By showing how in Wordsworth’s late poetry scent is employed as a metaphor for divine communication and for the cognitive work of the senses, Boyson offers the association of faith, scent, and thought as a strategy of negotiation between the poet’s unflinching Anglican affiliations and his subterranean Catholic sympathies.

The intermittence of emotional connectedness and of memory dynamics is the focus of the volume’s two succeeding essays. Leslie Brisman investigates Wordsworth’s «autistic behaviours» arguing that, although human suffering is a characteristic Wordsworth theme and the transition from love of nature to love of man appears as the trademark of much of Wordsworth’s poetry, the poet often exhibits an unnerving reticence about gestures of sympathy. Brisman invites readers to accept Wordsworth’s spots of emotional austerity as an affective counterpoint to an all-embracing ethics of poetry that does not discriminate between the touch of nature and the touch of mankind, yet demands occasional pause from the «dizzy raptures» of fellow-feeling. Time imagined in the guise of a sudden, epiphanic touch, as opposed to chronological sequence, is at the core of Giuliana Ferreccio’s cross-examination of the different beginnings of The Two-Part Prelude and The Prelude 1805, as well as of her parallel reading of one landmark spot of time and its earlier sub-text. Drawing from current narratological debates, Ferreccio shows how critically productive the notion of anticipation of retrospection can be when the critic needs to approach the complex time settings of The Prelude in terms of a palimpsest of memories and attachments.

The final two essays included in the volume interrogate Wordsworth’s poetry from the allegedly polarised perspectives of thing theory and affect studies. Comparing Cowper’s and Wordsworth’s view of the «life of things», Crystal Lake reads Wordsworth’s poetry of nature and affection as building a case against commodities and global commercialism. Does matter feel? Are all kinds of objects endowed with agency? Does acknowledging the agency of things imply an avowal, or rather a disavowal, of their relationship with imperial economy? These are the questions to which Wordsworth’s poetry implicitly responds. Lake contends that Wordsworth creates a typology within those eighteenth-century epistemologies that conflate things with objects, and that such typology enables him to celebrate many organic objects as sentient and autonomous things, while also excluding commodities. In denying commodities the status of «best objects» with which the poet and the readers can «hourly communicate», Wordsworth offers poetry as a site of resistance to the homogenizing pressure of global consumerism and its propensity to neutralize the healthy distance between the world and the mind. Finally, Adela Pinch takes readers as far as Wordsworth’s bedchamber through a reading of an 1802 manuscript poem Lake also discusses, one that explores the affective as well as the editorial implications of unsettled feelings: «These Chairs they have no Words to Utter». If the only way to detect the quality and intensity of emotions in poetry is to study how they materialize, not only in speech and words but also in punctuation, what do we make of such weird and inscrutable feelings as shame, disappointment, or irritation, that appear editorially untranslatable? Pinch’s essay encourages us to think of the study of literary affect as something that involves transferences and projections of feelings and is highly dependent on our angle of entry into a text. Emotions are intelligent responses to a perception of values [NUSSBAUM 2003] and it is important that, in acknowledging Wordsworth’s poems as «containers» for a wide range of feelings, we are ready to take responsibility for our own angles of vision.

We are grateful to Peter Randall-Page for his generosity in allowing us to use ‘Memory of Rain’ as our cover image.

Bibliografia

ADAMS, R. [2013]: «New OCSE curriculum to be more demanding, says Gove», The Guardian, November 1, 2013:
<http://www .theguardian .com/education/2013 /nov/Ol/new-gcse-curriculum­ maths-more-demanding-michael-gove >.
— [2013]: «GCSEs to become more demanding and rigorous, says Michael Gove», The Guardian, June 11, 2013:
<http://www.theguardian.com/education/2013 /jun/11 /gcse-demanding­ rigorous-michael-gove >.
JARVTS, S. [2011]: «William Wordsworth», in C. Rawson, ed., The Cambridge Companion to English Poets, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 291-307.
LATOUR, B. [2005]: «What is Given in Experience?», Boundary 2, 32.1, pp. 222-237.
— [2004]: «Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concem», Critical Inquiry, 30, pp. 225-248.
LOWE, V. [1962]: Understanding Whitehead, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins.
MANNHETM , K. [1986]: Conservatism: A Contribution to the Sociology of Knowledge, trans. D. Kettler and V. Meja, London, Routledge.
NUSSBAUM , M. [2003]: Upheavals of Thought. The lntelligence of Emotions,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
PAZ, O. [1989]: «Poetry and Modemity», trans. E. Weinberger, The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, University of Utah, October 18-20.
POTKAY, A. [2007]: «Wordsworth and the Ethics of Things», PMLA, 123.3, pp. 390-404.
WHITEHEAD, A.N. [1925]: Science and the Modern World, New York, Free Press.
— [1920]: The Concept of Nature, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.