SOURCE: Liu, Yu. “Revaluating Revolution and Radicalness in the Lyrical Ballads.” Studies in English Literature 36, no. 4 (autumn 1996): 747-61.

[In the following essay, Liu examines the influence of the French Revolution on Wordsworth's poetry in Lyrical Ballads, suggesting that he attempted to work out his personal and political response to revolutionary ideas through his poetry.]

Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads has been treated consistently in the past thirty years or so as both a consequence and an expression of deterministic history.¹ In particular, the inspirational origin and the motivational impetus of that poetic project are now generally accepted as inextricably intertwined with a personal reversal from high hopes for the social and political upheavals of France in the early 1790s to bitter disappointment and even despair in the mid-1790s. Yet what is retrospectively so interesting and enlightening about the Lyrical Ballads of 1798 is how the poet did not come across as overwhelmed by history. Rather than being overpowered with a self-protective desire to escape from politics to poetics, Wordsworth was surprisingly and endearingly ingenious and efficient in using a rich variety of ambiguities to move beyond the potentially crippling tension of ideals and realities and to make an analogical revaluation of both the French Revolution and his own radical politics.

Born and brought up in a poor rural community in the English Lake District, Wordsworth had early imbibed a deep respect and admiration for the ordinary working people. Having lived through the financial misfortunes of his own family, he had also acquired a strong distaste for the old hierarchical social order. As he had thus been inclined all along for an egalitarian way of life, he understood instinctively what his French friend Michel Beaupuy meant in his vow to fight for the “hunger-bitten girl” whom they met in the streets of the French city, Blois.² As Nicholas Roe puts it, “Beaupuy's political creed meshed with Wordsworth's personal response to suffering and realized their objectives as ‘philosophical warriors’ with the force of sudden revelation.”³ Wordsworth's unequivocal support for the French Revolution at its outset had come, not from youthful impulse or simple-mindedness, but from his earliest intuitive understanding of people as “brothers all / In honour, as in one community” (Prelude, 9.227-8) and from his innermost personal vision of the revolution as “the cause, not simply of a people struggling to be free, but of mankind.”⁴

Having pledged himself to be “a patriot” of France or “[a] patriot of the world” (Prelude, 9.123 and 10.242), Wordsworth was deeply disappointed and disturbed by the disastrous downturn of events in France, especially the arbitrary use of power and violence during the Reign of Terror. Since the egalitarian ideals of the French Revolution had seemed to him to be “nothing out of nature's certain course, / A gift that was rather come late than soon” (Prelude, 9.247-8), and since France had therefore come to represent for him “the deliverer—no less—of humanity,”⁵ he felt compelled to side with the French no matter what they did. But even though he did make some attempts in this direction (e.g., his “Letter to the Bishop of Landaff” in 1793 and his plan and preparation between 1792 and 1795 to start a journal of radical politics and literature called The Philanthropist), he increasingly found it difficult to do so in the face of the French betrayals of the early and the mid-1790s. Yet no matter how he “suffered grief / For ill-requited France” and was “distressed to think of what she once / Promised, and now is” (Prelude, 11.382-3 and 385-6), he could neither condemn nor distance himself from the social and political practices of France, because, in spite of everything, nothing had seemed to him to lessen the moral and ideological justification of either the revolutionary ideals in general or Michel Beaupuy's vow to fight for the poor in particular.

As a result of his inability to separate the egalitarian ideals of the French Revolution from the momentous events in and around France, Wordsworth inevitably made it difficult for himself to retain his social and political convictions on the one hand and to understand and accept the failure of the French Revolution on the other. This difficulty, together with the failure of Godwinian political theory to explain why what ought to succeed in theory did not work out in practice, may have been responsible for the recurrent emotional and intellectual downswings he very graphically delineates in The Prelude. All his nervous problems in this regard seem to have occurred in the early and mid-1790s rather than in the late 1790s and the early 1800s. Between 1793 and the summer of 1796, while he was most intensely involved emotionally and intellectually with the course of events in and around France, Wordsworth worked only in sparing fits and starts on the technical revision of the “Adventures on Salisbury Plain” and on his “five-finger exercises on ideas suggested by” that poem. But in October 1796 he was already hard and fruitfully at work on The Borderers, and with its completion in the spring of 1797, and with the successful realization of its “formal ambition” and “the profundity of its themes,” Wordsworth was able to show how his “recent months had been anything but barren.”⁶

In his fight for his mental and spiritual well-being in the mid-1790s, Wordsworth was helped immensely by several special circumstances of his own personal life. First, the benevolent bequest of money by Raisley Calvert on his deathbed and the generous offer by the Pinney brothers of Racedown Lodge rentfree made it possible for Wordsworth to move away from London and to reunite with his beloved sister in the English countryside. Second, the devoted love and care of Dorothy Wordsworth ensured the preservation of his faith in himself as a poet. Finally, the quickly flourishing friendship with Coleridge not only rekindled his reverence of nature and fortified his love of mankind but also encouraged and eventually facilitated his endeavor to “give pictures of Nature, Man, and Society,”⁷ or to “justify the ways of man to nature.”⁸ All these things contributed to his moral and psychological recovery, but what ultimately enabled him to break out of his emotional and intellectual crisis was his gradual separation of the egalitarian ideals of the French Revolution from the monumental events in and around France, and the reconciliation of his social and political convictions with the failure of the French Revolution. As early as 1794, Wordsworth confided to his friend William Mathews that he would “recoil from the bare idea of a revolution.”⁹ When France invaded Switzerland in the spring of 1798, Wordsworth was finally able to free himself from any emotional entanglement with the French.¹⁰ Ideologically, however, he remained attached to the egalitarian ideals of France. Although he stopped seeing the French Revolution as “a Paradise Lost heralding redemption” and began to view it as “a Paradise Lost in which no hint of salvation mitigates the calamitous history of Michael's vision,”¹¹ he continued to be “an enemy of his country's institutions,”¹² and to defiantly parade his social and political allegiances. He openly associated with such well-known English Jacobins as Coleridge and John Thelwall, even though his association with them aroused the suspicion of government spies and eventually resulted in his ejection from Alfoxden (in 1798).¹³

With his apparent success in breaking up the link between his belief in the egalitarian ideals of the French Revolution and the actual course of events in and around France, Wordsworth effectively renders irrelevant or at least peripheral the incompatibilities between the historical circumstances of his life and his social and political aspirations which deterministically-minded critics have regarded as central to their contextual examinations of his poetry. A hitherto generally overlooked explanation of how he could so miraculously recover from his emotional and intellectual crises of the early and mid-1790s, Wordsworth's ability to rise above history rather than letting himself be overwhelmed by it, nevertheless seems to have very little to do with either a self-righteous rejection of all the superficial aberrations in and around France or a stoic and self-vindictive reaffirmation of his own steadfast loyalty to the revolutionary ideals. Instead, this triumph results from his deliberate yet largely intuitive effort to probe the very things which first crystallized for him the justification of the French Revolution and cemented his sympathy for France. In particular, his thoughts often seem to hover over the heroic figure of his French friend Michel Beaupuy, who epitomized for him the essence of the French Revolution with his vow to fight for the “hunger-bitten girl.” Wordsworth never doubts the sincerity and good intentions of Beaupuy's promise, but in the context of what subsequently happened in France, he cannot but question the implications of the grandstanding gesture itself. While Beaupuy's empathy for the starving girl and his impulse to right social injustice are both admirable, his implicit designation of himself as the superior dogooder and savior must strike Wordsworth, retrospectively, as constituting a certain contradiction to the egalitarian ideal which they both wished to uphold, and as foreshadowing the evil which was perpetrated in the name of good in the French Revolution.

Even though he never spells all this out explicitly, Wordsworth had already begun to explore the moral ambiguity of the situation analogically between 1793 and 1795 when he included in the “Adventures on Salisbury Plain” a peasant murderer whom he presented as technically guilty but essentially good. When he made “the perversion of good men to crime” the central theme of his tragedy The Borderers between late 1796 and early 1797,¹⁴ he was similarly concerned with the same paradoxical origination of “sin and crime … from their very opposite qualities.”¹⁵ But while the peculiar plot and characterization in both the “Adventures on Salisbury Plain” and The Borderers obviously have a great deal to do with Wordsworth's efforts to deal with the disappointing outcome of the French Revolution (Wordsworth himself mentions this connection to France directly in his 1842 note on The Borderers), his overwhelming sympathy for the major characters indicates that he was still unable to come to terms with that failure. It was not until 1797, when he began to work on the Lyrical Ballads, his autobiographical poem The Prelude, and his life-long philosophical project The Recluse, that Wordsworth was finally able to use the exploration of moral ambiguities intuitively and analogically to understand and accept the failure of the French Revolution and to retain his social and political convictions.

One of the very first poems which Wordsworth wrote in 1797 is about a personal encounter with a down-and-out veteran in the Lake District. In “[The Discharged Soldier],” the poet's younger self helps a lonely and emaciated former serviceman by leading him to a farm house, but before leaving him there, he advises the discharged soldier not to

                                        linger in the public ways,
But at the door of cottage or of inn
Demand the succour which his state required.(16)

In reply, the former serviceman quietly rebukes him by pointing out how his “trust is in the God of Heaven, / And in the eye of him that passes me” (lines 164-5). Although Wordsworth never describes how his younger self felt about the veteran's words, he retains the rebuttal through all subsequent revisions of the poem, and in one of his other early poems from the same post-depression period, he echoes the very words of the discharged soldier when making the identical appeal to “the benignant law of heaven” on behalf of a recipient of some actual or potential charitable deeds (line 160).

Prompted ostensibly by the proposal of English politicians to round up all the rural mendicants into government-run relief stations, Wordsworth's “The Old Cumberland Beggar” also explores the ambiguous relationship between the helper and the helped. In this poem, Wordsworth directs his objection not so much at the inhuman nature of the proposed action itself as at its underlying assumption about the old country beggar as “useless” and as “A burthen of the earth” (lines 67, 73). In spite of the appearance of his being “so old” and “So helpless” (lines 23, 25), and in spite of his dependence upon the charitable deeds of others for his primitive survival, Wordsworth contends that the old almsman is nevertheless never simply an object of pity or a recipient of assistance. As Wordsworth points out,

                                                                                While thus he creeps
From door to door, the Villagers in him
Behold a record which together binds
Past deeds and offices of charity
Else unremembered, and so keeps alive
The kindly mood in hearts which lapse of years,
And that half-wisdom half-experience gives
Make slow to feel, and by sure steps resign
To selfishness and cold oblivious cares.

(lines 79-87)

Since he can thus be a helper to the person who helps him, the old almsman is able to live in his world of poverty and subsistence as an object of respect rather than pity and contempt.

Though consistent with his life-long sympathy and respect for the poor, Wordsworth's ennoblement of his low-class protagonists is fully explicable only with reference to his peculiar need to reconcile his emotional and intellectual entanglement with the French Revolution. On the one hand, the image of the old almsman as “so old” and “[so] helpless” and the appearance of the former serviceman as a “ghostly figure” (line 125) invite a comparison with the “hunger-bitten girl” whom Beaupuy and Wordsworth met in Blois. On the other hand, Wordsworth's critique of what his own younger self did and what certain English politicians proposed contrasts with his unequivocal and unqualified endorsement of what his French friend Beaupuy pledged on a superficially similar occasion. In the poems about the discharged soldier and about the old country beggar, Wordsworth is by no means arguing against giving care to the poor. After all, his younger self provides such help in “[The Discharged Soldier]” and draws attention to the belief that “man is dear to man” and that “we have all of us one human heart” (“The Old Cumberland Beggar,” lines 140, 146). Yet rather than dwelling on the plight of the poor and discussing what ought to be done for them, Wordsworth confounds all conventional expectations of such narratives by choosing to question the very implications of such thoughts and deeds. Out of context, Wordsworth's decision to problematize the well-meant help of his younger self and his proposal to let the old almsman live and die in his own dignified poverty appear strange. But, in the context of Wordsworth's endorsement of the French Revolution when good intentions were often the cause of evil consequences in and around France, Wordsworth's poetic effort to recast the relationship between helper and helped makes sense. By exposing the self-aggrandizing motives behind the otherwise laudable impulse to give assistance, Wordsworth analogically confronts the social and political events that first sealed his sympathy for the French Revolution and subsequently made it difficult for him to understand and accept its outcome.

Never negating the egalitarian ideals themselves, but still somehow associating them with the deplorable outcome of the Revolution, Wordsworth's revaluation of the French Revolution plays itself out over and over again in the Lyrical Ballads through the repeated representations of morally ambiguous situations. In “Simon Lee,” for instance, the narrator / protagonist helps an old and frail former huntsman cut down an ancient tree, but subsequently feels somehow chastised by the elderly man's gratitude. In proffering his assistance to the old man, the narrator does not seem to have done anything wrong, and yet at the same time there clearly is something inappropriate in the situation which makes the narrator feel uncomfortable about having assisted the old man. In “We Are Seven” and “Anecdote for Fathers,” the narrators likewise do not seem to be wrong in their assessments of two young children's beliefs, yet at the same time there evidently is something improper in both situations which inclines the poet to cast the narrator of “We Are Seven” in a ridiculous light and to emphasize the lesson of “how the art of lying may be taught” in “Anecdote for Fathers.” Similarly, in “Old Man Travelling,” the young narrator seems to have every reason to marvel, early in the poem, at the old man who

                                                                                                              is by nature led
To peace so perfect, that the young behold
With envy, what the old man hardly feels.

(lines 12-4)

However, the narrator's assumption is problematized by the subsequent discovery that the old man is actually on his way to his dying son in a hospital. Finally, in “A Narrow Girdle of Rough Stones and Crags,” the narrator may again seem to be fully justified at first in condemning a man “attired in peasant's garb, who stood alone / Angling beside the margin of the lake” while others are busily working (lines 51-2). Yet at the same time there is, again, apparently something so impertinent about this self-righteously harsh judgment that the poet is impelled to contrast it with the narrator's subsequent realization that the man is

                                                                                                                                  worn down
By sickness, gaunt and lean, with sunken cheeks
And wasted limbs, his legs so long and lean

(lines 64-6)

and with the narrator's subsequent recognition of “What need there is to be reserved in speech, / And temper all our thoughts with charity” (lines 78-9). In all these and many other characteristically Wordsworthian situations in the Lyrical Ballads, as in “[The Discharged Soldier]” and in “The Old Cumberland Beggar,” there is a narrator or a character who has the opportunity to put himself in a superior position in relation to another character. In each case, the narrator or character apparently justifiably avails himself of such an opportunity only to discover or to have exposed the inappropriateness of his own prior posture.

Both a repudiation and a revalidation at the same time, Wordsworth's complex new feeling about the French Revolution is, finally, expressed analogically in the Lyrical Ballads through the profoundly self-reflective and self-critical orientation of both his poems and his critical prefaces to the poetic collection. Rather than glorifying the poetic profession to which he belongs, for instance, Wordsworth scathingly castigates “the gaudiness and inane phraseology of many modern writers” and pointedly privileges “the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society”¹⁷ or “the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation.”¹⁸ Rather than eulogizing himself as a poet, he similarly subordinates “the action and situation” within his poems to “the feeling therein developed,” proclaiming that “all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” rather than any objective choice of language, style, or even subject matter.¹⁹ Wordsworth desanctifies the poet, or dissipates his god-like aura, through his portrayal of the poet as “a representative man” or as “a man speaking to men,”²⁰ but he also despecializes or deprivatizes the domain of creative activity through his designation of “poet and reader” as “joint participants in the experience of literature”²¹ and through his promotion of an “interrogative mode” of writing or a “poetics of questioning.”²² Not only does Wordsworth go out of his way in poems such as “Simon Lee,” “Hart-Leap Well,” and “The Idiot Boy” to belittle his own creative prowess by disrupting the ongoing narrative or by refusing to deliver what has been promised or expected, but he also routinely subverts or restricts his own representational and versificational endeavor by producing a certain “wave effect of rhythm whose characteristic is that while there is internal acceleration, the feeling of climax is avoided.”²³

In the context of his effort to ferment the cognitive and moral ambiguities of his subject matter and to funnel the self-reflective and self-critical orientation of his formal and rhetorical strategies, the unique convergence of Wordsworth's radical poetics and radical politics in the Lyrical Ballads becomes discernible in his consistent employment of an ambiguous narrative scheme which superficially may not even seem to be radical poetically or politically. In the form of an inherent deficiency of meaning either at the semantic level or at the syntactic level, this distinctively Wordsworthian narrative procedure can be seen in its most dramatic and most compelling manifestation in Johnny's travel story of “to-whoo, to-whoo” in “The Idiot Boy” (line 460) and in those experiential accounts either by or about mentally disturbed women. Though not immediately obvious, the same narrative design can also be detected in the inexorable movement of sense toward senselessness in many otherwise unrelated narrative poems, where things happen but the central event or the most important detail of the dramatic situation remains inexplicable.

In “Goody Blake and Harry Gill,” for instance, an old woman is driven by her poverty and cold to steal firewood from the hedges of a rich farmer, who in turn braves many cold nights to catch her in the act of petty theft. But just when he finally succeeds in his waiting game, she curses him and somehow reduces him to an all-consuming cold. In the poem, in addition to the comedy and the humor of the situation, there is a great deal of circumstantial information about how the rich farmer catches and suffers from his cold, and yet there is no explanation whatsoever as to how an old woman's mere words could bring about such a magical transformation in the physical condition of a robust young man.

Similarly, in “Simon Lee,” in the context of a flashback about the title hero's glorious past, the narrator recalls how he once helped the old huntsman cut down an old tree, and how he was then suddenly overwhelmed by emotions of mourning when the elderly man thanked him for his assistance. In the poem, the narrator hints at the pivotal importance of his peculiar response to the old man's gratitude through his prior warning to the reader that what he has to tell “is short” and “is no tale” (lines 77, 79), and yet he never explains why he should feel sad for having done something kind to another person or for receiving the apparently heart-felt appreciation of the old man.

At the beginning of “The Two April Mornings,” the narrator similarly recalls how Matthew once dampened the merry mood of their spring outing with his sad sigh. In answer to the inquiry of the narrator's younger self inside the recollected incident, the old schoolmaster describes, in a tale within a tale, how he visited his daughter's tomb thirty years before on a similar April morning and how he met a girl who looked exactly like his lost daughter. He had wanted to claim her, but he was suddenly gripped with “a sigh of pain / Which [he] could ill confine” and he consequently “looked at her and looked again; / And did not wish her [his]” (lines 53-6). As the most important details of the incident inside Matthew's recollection, and as the direct cause of Matthew's sigh inside the narrator's recollected event, both Matthew's sigh at the sight of the beautiful girl and his refusal to claim her are obviously of vital importance to the poem, and yet nowhere in the poem is there any explanation why Matthew would not even wish to accept the girl as his reincarnated daughter.

In these poems and in similar instances, the apparently self-induced breakdown of meaning inevitably engenders ambiguity in Wordsworth's narrative poems. On the one hand, things happen within the boundaries of these poems. These things may seem trivial and insignificant, but insofar as his narrative poems obviously function to record and report the occurrences of these specific things, Wordsworth is no different from any conventional storyteller in adhering to a fairly straightforward representational orientation. On the other hand, what occurs and what gets recorded very often makes little or no sense. Insofar as the signifying mechanism of his narrative poems thus apparently predicates meaning upon meaninglessness, Wordsworth is radically different from any conventional storyteller in conspicuously confounding the very purpose of representation. Even though he may seem to be telling his readers something in his narrative poems, he often leaves important aspects of these narratives unresolved or unspoken. Although Wordsworth himself is the recorder and reporter of many specific incidents, the ultimate effect of what he does in his narrative poems very often amounts to nothing short of his writing himself out of his own poetry.

Amply ambiguous, Wordsworth's unusual narrative scheme in the Lyrical Ballads is precisely what uniquely brings together his radical poetics and radical politics. The self-annihilation of meaning in his narrative poems, for instance, creates ambiguity and makes it necessary for the reader to become self-reflective and self-critical about his or her own sense-making mechanism outside the poems so that he or she can look from a different angle at what is given inside the poems and understand in the “silent hour of inward thought” why the seemingly senseless may make sense after all (“Lines Left upon a Seat in a Yew-tree,” line 58). As the focus of the aesthetic experience thus changes from what the poet does in a poem to what the reader does or can possibly do outside it, the literal or literary text begins to function as a coincidental or even accidental pretext or context. Insofar as it only triggers the real text but never contains it in its own composition, it helps to show how “poetry is … essentially beyond the compass of the poem” or how “poetry itself is only secondarily linguistic, that it is driven to the use of words, as religion is driven to the use of material symbols, in order to communicate its immaterial essence.”²⁴ This new dynamics of meaning which effectively subordinates the actions and situations in a poem to the feelings which may be provoked by those actions and situations, helps to exemplify, analogically, what Kant calls the “universal rule” which cannot be stated but which somehow has to be communicated,²⁵ or what Adorno calls the dynamic concept of beauty which is “not being, but becoming” and which “is only a moment in the totality of aesthetic reflection” that “points to something essential without being able to articulate that essence directly.”²⁶

Wordsworth's complex act of deferring the signifying process in his narrative poems and then resurrecting it outside them is a reflection of his success in dealing with what he would otherwise not be able to confront directly, the failure of the French Revolution. In particular, the sense-making mechanism of his narrative poems both re-enacts the disappointing outcome of the social and political event in France with the short-circuiting of itself and reaffirms the egalitarian ideals of the revolution with its explicit predication of its own success upon its own failure and with its implicit promotion of the “readers' self-consciousness about their own thought processes and the implications of these processes that govern all human activity.”²⁷ Unlike the reader in the case of traditional narratives who is only a recipient of meaning, and unlike the reader “in the case of a supplement to an encyclopedia” who operates merely as a filler for the “gap in the written text,”²⁸ the Wordsworthian reader is the primary meaning-maker who “might pass by, / Might see and notice not” (“Michael,” lines 15-6), but who alternatively might see “into the depth of human souls, / Souls that appear to have no depth at all / To careless eyes” (Prelude, 13.166-8). As this new poet-reader relationship unobtrusively transforms Wordsworth's poetry from a poet-centered representational endeavor to a reader-oriented experience, Wordsworth is finally able to practice rather than just preach egalitarianism, because both he and his poetic characters already function inside the narrative poems as representative or surrogate readers.

In “Simon Lee,” for instance, one reason why the narrator responded to the old man's gratitude with feelings of mourning is not so much that he regrets having helped the old man, or that he is dissatisfied with the elderly man's expression of gratitude, as that the narrator, at the moment of his receiving thanks, is able to read and recognize unkindness in his own superficially kind assistance to the old man. Similarly, in “Goody Blake and Harry Gill,” Goody Blake is able to freeze Harry Gill not because her words contain any magical power, but because they enable Harry Gill momentarily to see all the connections of cold in their situations: Goody Blake's being old and cold, her desperate need for sticks to keep herself warm, Harry Gill's own cold in staking out Goody Blake, and his own cold cruelty in relentlessly hunting down the old woman. Finally, in “The Two April Mornings,” Matthew categorically refuses to claim the beautiful girl not because she has no blood ties with him or because her resemblance to his dead daughter would give him pain, but because Matthew is momentarily able to assemble various disparate facts: his own daughter was once young and beautiful and the girl he now meets is young and pretty; his own daughter is dead and in her grave while this other girl lives. Matthew would very much like to make the beautiful girl his new daughter, but since he is already the father of a dead daughter, he questions his right to take the very palpable life out of the unknown girl by claiming her as his own.²⁹

Within Matthew's own tale, it is this utterly unconventional and unexpected convergence of all these superficially unrelated things which gives Matthew the undefined pain and leads to the sigh and unexpected exclamation that he would not wish her his. The narrator's recollection of Matthew's tale, and his implicit recognition of the unusual linkage accord significance to this otherwise trivial and unremarkable incident. In both situations, the narrator/character functions as the internal or surrogate reader. As the narrator of his own tale, it is Matthew's thoughtful reading of what he sees and what he remembers that first April morning which makes him sigh and exclaim that he does not wish the beautiful girl his. As the narrator of the poem, it is the mature narrator's sensitive reading of Matthew's two sighs which gives him the motivation and justification for recording this particular incident. In contrast, the narrator's younger self seems to have completely failed the reading test and in consequence must have walked away without a tale.³⁰

In the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth is not always comfortable with his self-abdication from his poetry. Among other instances, this can be seen in his many references to himself as an idler and to his poetry as “fond deceit” (“Lines written near Richmond,” line 13). An early example of what Fredric Jameson in the late twentieth century calls “schizophrenia,”³¹ Wordsworth's uneasiness could have come from his recognition of his own literal text “as a stimulus for the production of meanings that cannot entirely be fixed.”³² But regardless of his uneasiness about his intense though ultimately ineffective attempt to channel his poetry from an inward orientation back to an outward orientation (especially through a mystical search for his own poetic origin and genius), what is so especially interesting and enlightening about Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads is that rich reverberation of ambiguities which helps him to work out an analogical revaluation of both the French Revolution and his own radical politics.

Notes

1. For two markedly different versions of essentially the same deterministic reading, see M. H. Abrams, “English Romanticism: The Spirit of the Age,” in Romanticism Reconsidered: Selected Papers from the English Institute, ed. Northrop Frye (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1963), pp. 26-72; E. P. Thompson, “Disenchantment or Default? A Lay Sermon,” in Power and Consciousness, ed. Conor Cruise O'Brien and William Dean Vanech (London: Univ. of London Press; New York: New York Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 149-81; Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1983); and Marjorie Levinson, Wordsworth's Great Period Poems: Four Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986).

2. William Wordsworth, The Prelude, 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (New York: Norton, 1979), 1850, 9.510. Further references to The Prelude are to the 1850 version and will appear parenthetically in the text by book and line number.

3. Nicholas Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 58.

4. Mary Moorman, William Wordsworth, A Biography: The Early Years, 1770-1803, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), p. 221.

5. Helen Darbishire, The Poet Wordsworth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950), p. 26.

6. Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 101.

7. Gill, p. 144.

8. Kenneth Johnston, “The Triumphs of Failure: Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads of 1798,” in The Age of William Wordsworth: Critical Essays on the Romantic Tradition, ed. Kenneth R. Johnston and Gene W. Ruoff (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1987), pp. 139-59, 139.

9. Moorman, p. 254.

10. Cf. Moorman, p. 382 and Gill, p. 129.

11. Alan Liu, Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1989), p. 379.

12. Moorman, p. 254.

13. Cf. Gill, p. 128.

14. Darbishire, p. 30.

15. William Wordsworth, “Note on The Borderers,” in The Poetical Works of Wordsworth, ed. Paul D. Sheats (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982), p. 33.

16. William Wordsworth, “[The Discharged Soldier],” in William Wordsworth, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford and New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1984), lines 158-60. All other poems from the Lyrical Ballads will also be quoted from Gill's edition, and further references to the poems will appear parenthetically in the text by line number.

17. William Wordsworth, “1798 Advertisement,” in The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), pp. 116-7.

18. William Wordsworth, “1800 Preface,” in Owen and Smyser, p. 128.

19. “1800 Preface,” in Owen and Smyser, pp. 128, 126.

20. Stephen Pricket, Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Lyrical Ballads (London: Edward Arnold, 1975), p. 52; William Wordsworth, “1802 Preface,” in Literary Criticism of William Wordsworth, ed. Paul M. Zall (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1966), p. 48.

21. Stephen Maxfield Parrish, The Art of the Lyrical Ballads (Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1973), p. 32.

22. Susan J. Wolfson, The Questioning Presence: Wordsworth, Keats, and the Interrogative Mode in Romantic Poetry (Ithaca and London: Cornell Univ. Press, 1986), pp. 17, 20.

23. Geoffrey H. Hartman, Wordsworth's Poetry, 1787-1814 (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1964), p. 26.

24. Stephen K. Land, “The Silent Poet: An Aspect of Wordsworth's Semantic Theory,” UTQ [University of Toronto Quarterly] 42 (Winter 1973): 157-69, 16, 163.

25. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York and London: Hafner Publishing, 1966), p. 74.

26. T. W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), pp. 252, 75.

27. Regina Hewitt, “Towards a Wordsworthian Phenomenology of Reading: ‘The Childless Father’ and ‘Poor Susan’ as Paradigms,” in ELWIU [Essays in Literature] 16, 2 (Fall 1989): 188-202, 199.

28. Tilottama Rajan, The Supplement of Reading: Figures of Understanding in Romantic Theory and Practice (Ithaca and London: Cornell Univ. Press, 1990), p. 2.

29. This line of unusual thinking (i.e., the thought of death could actually lead to its realization) can be clearly seen also in “Strange Fits of Passion Have I Known,” where the narrator links the setting moon with the death of his loved one. Two other examples can be found in “The Fountain,” where Matthew rejected the offer of the narrator's younger self to be his son, and in The Prelude, where Wordsworth felt responsible for his father's death because he had been anxious to get home.

30. This is much more obvious in “The Fountain,” where the narrator's younger self responds to the old man's melancholy by offering to be his son. When the old man vehemently refuses (“At this he grasped my hand, and said, / ‘Alas! that cannot be’” [lines 63-4]), the narrator's younger self is only puzzled but does not seem to understand why.

31. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism; or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1991), p. 26.

32. Rajan, p. 5.