Vanishings

Peter Swaab

  • The Unremarkable Wordsworth by Geoffrey Hartman
    Methuen, 249 pp, £8.95, September 1987, ISBN 0 416 05142 1
  • Wordsworth’s Historical Imagination: The Poetry of Displacement by David Simpson
    Methuen, 239 pp, £25.00, June 1987, ISBN 0 416 03872 7
  • Romanticism in National Context edited by Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich
    Cambridge, 353 pp, £30.00, June 1988, ISBN 0 521 32605 2
  • Romantic Affinities: Portraits from an Age 1780-1830 by Rupert Christiansen
    Bodley Head, 262 pp, £16.00, January 1988, ISBN 3 7031 1117 8

Wordsworth’s poetry has been able to animate critical writing, relevantly, from several different points of view. Narratologists have discussed the gaps in his storytelling and the vulnerability of the selves that do the relating; historically-minded criticism has unearthed the contemporary writings with which Wordsworth’s interact, and also shown how far he was involved not only in the politics of poetry but in the politics of public affairs; textual criticism has uncovered an exceptionally rich store of newly published texts and variants, many of them representing his first and arguably best thoughts; deconstructionists have homed in on the paradox of a poetic mission which aims to realise the ‘sad incompetence of human speech’, while both deconstruction and psychoanalysis have been attuned to Wordsworth’s sense that crucial human insights are founded, not on achieved knowledge, but on moments of loss, absence and negation – the ‘Fallings from us, vanishings;/Blank misgivings’ of the ‘Immortality Ode’. This hospitality to critical approaches is in part a sign of the real amplitude of Wordsworth’s achievement. Though he was never the kind of philosophical poet Coleridge asked him to be, Wordsworth’s subject was no less than the whole of human society; as with such holist contemporaries as Coleridge and Hegel, his views on different topics lead into each other, presenting comparable vocabularies and linked concerns whether his immediate subject is the developing self or the revolutions of society.

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[*] There is a full portrait of the late Wordsworth in the immense volume of his late letters which appeared last year: The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth. Vol VII: The Later Years, Part IV, 1840-1853, edited by Alan Hill. Oxford, 951 pp., £70, 28 April 1988, 0 19 812606 9.

Vol. 11 No. 8 · 20 April 1989 » Peter Swaab » Vanishings (print version)
Pages 18-19 | 3116 words