Her eyes were wild

John Bayley

• Letters of Dorothy Wordsworth: A Selection edited by Alan Hill
  Oxford, 200 pp, £9.95, March 1985, ISBN 0 19 818539 1
• Dorothy Wordsworth by Robert Gittings and Jo Manton
  Oxford, 318 pp, £12.50, March 1985, ISBN 0 19 818519 7
• The Pedlar, Tintern Abbey, The Two-Part Prelude by William Wordsworth, edited by Jonathan Wordsworth
  Cambridge, 76 pp, £7.95, January 1985, ISBN 0 521 26526 6
• The Ruined Cottage, The Brothers, Michael by William Wordsworth, edited by Jonathan Wordsworth
  Cambridge, 82 pp, £7.95, January 1985, ISBN 0 521 26525 8

Wordsworth’s genius lay in its own sort of negative capability. The most striking feature of his poetry, as of his personality, is their intense and intimate relations with what always remained outside them. He never seems identified with his own discoveries, even with the drama of his own sensibility. Yet what he writes is subtly and comfortingly self-confirmatory, never more so than when the world, the human heart, the music of humanity, the mountains, are speaking to him (‘as if admonished from another world’, ‘To give me human strength by apt admonishment’). The writing of an ‘Ode to Duty’ shows how much the poet enjoyed the exhortation of that concept, whereas Coleridge’s Dejection Ode is a powerful and poignant analysis of the actual state the poet is in.