A Poet’s Letters

One reads the letters of a great poet for various reasons – not least among them, the hope of discovering some part of the circumstantial scaffolding of his poems. In the case of Wordsworth there is added another main reason for scrutiny – to find a clue why poetry of Lucretian magnificence gave place to verse of pedestrian bathos. These letters do afford the hint of a cause. There are strong contrasts of style and content between the earlier and later letters of Wordsworth. In June, 1794, he writes to W. Mathews condemning ‘hereditary distinctions and privileged orders of every species.’ In December, 1821, he writes to James Losh: ‘When I was young, giving myself credit for qualities which I did not possess, and measuring mankind by that standard, I thought it derogatory to human nature to set up Property in preference to Person, as a title for legislative power. That notion has vanished . . .’.

It is hardly the part of the literary critic to discuss in which view Wordsworth was nearer the truth. But after 1805 a gradual, permanent and profound change is evident in Wordsworth’s view of society and of himself. From intuitive pantheism he progresses, not to a Christian vision of God immanent in His creation, but to stoic moralism – ‘Every great Poet is a Teacher: I wish either to be considered a Teacher, or nothing’. Wordsworth was indeed at all times a man of acute moral feeling. At the age of thirty-four he wrote to De Quincey, then at Oxford: ‘. . . I am anxious to hear . . . above all, that you have not been seduced into unworthy pleasures or pursuits . . . I need not say to you that there is not true dignity but in virtue and temperance, and, let me add, chastity’. These words might come well from the pen of a Bishop; but scarcely from an older writer to a young literary acquaintance.

Wordsworth’s positive counsels are over-tame. His scathing exhortation of Coleridge in 1808 seems the voice of one folded in the coils of the Cold Dragon who observes the danger of another in the gullet of the Hot Dragon, but not, alas, his own. The estrangement from Coleridge deprived Wordsworth of an irreplaceable literary collaborator. Thenceforward he enters a private winter, with no profound literary companionship, excepting that of his sister. The relation between William and Dorothy Wordsworth has been often extolled. I hazard the view that its exclusive nature, beyond all other factors, led to thepage 211 impotence of his genius and her own eventual mental collapse. At least, his letters offer ground for this conjecture.

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