Bloom’s Modern Critical Views African American Anton Chekhov Langston Hughes Poets: G.K. Chesterton Zora Neale Hurston Wheatley–Tolson Kate Chopin Aldous Huxley African American Agatha Christie Henrik Ibsen Poets: Samuel Taylor John Irving Hayden–Dove Coleridge Henry James Edward Albee Joseph Conrad James Joyce Dante Alighieri Contemporary Poets Franz Kafka Isabel Allende Julio Cortázar John Keats American and Stephen Crane Jamaica Kincaid Canadian Women Daniel Defoe Stephen King Poets, Don DeLillo Rudyard Kipling 1930–present Charles Dickens Milan Kundera American Women Emily Dickinson Tony Kushner Poets, 1650–1950 E.L. Doctorow Ursula K. Le Guin Hans Christian John Donne and the Doris Lessing Andersen 17th-Century Poets C.S. Lewis Maya Angelou Fyodor Dostoevsky Sinclair Lewis Asian-American W.E.B. DuBois Norman Mailer Writers George Eliot Bernard Malamud Margaret Atwood T.S. Eliot David Mamet Jane Austen Ralph Ellison Christopher Marlowe Paul Auster Ralph Waldo Emerson Gabriel García James Baldwin William Faulkner Márquez Honoré de Balzac F. Scott Fitzgerald Cormac McCarthy Samuel Beckett Sigmund Freud Carson McCullers The Bible Robert Frost Herman Melville William Blake William Gaddis Arthur Miller Jorge Luis Borges Johann Wolfgang John Milton Ray Bradbury von Goethe Molière The Brontës George Gordon, Toni Morrison Gwendolyn Brooks Lord Byron Native-American Elizabeth Barrett Graham Greene Writers Browning Thomas Hardy Joyce Carol Oates Robert Browning Nathaniel Hawthorne Flannery O’Connor Italo Calvino Robert Hayden George Orwell Albert Camus Ernest Hemingway Octavio Paz Truman Capote Hermann Hesse Sylvia Plath Lewis Carroll Hispanic-American Edgar Allan Poe Miguel de Cervantes Writers Katherine Anne Geoffrey Chaucer Homer Porter Bloom’s Modern Critical Views Marcel Proust John Steinbeck H.G. Wells Thomas Pynchon Jonathan Swift Eudora Welty Philip Roth Amy Tan Edith Wharton Salman Rushdie Alfred, Lord Tennyson Walt Whitman J. D. Salinger Henry David Thoreau Oscar Wilde José Saramago J.R.R. Tolkien Tennessee Williams Jean-Paul Sartre Leo Tolstoy Tom Wolfe William Shakespeare Ivan Turgenev Virginia Woolf William Shakespeare’s Mark Twain William Wordsworth Romances John Updike Jay Wright George Bernard Shaw Kurt Vonnegut Richard Wright Mary Wollstonecraft Derek Walcott William Butler Yeats Shelley Alice Walker Émile Zola Alexander Solzhenitsyn Robert Penn Warren Bloom’s Modern Critical Views WILLIAM WORDSWORTH Updated Edition Edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom Sterling Professor of the Humanities Yale University Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: William Wordsworth—Updated Edition Copyright ©2007 Infobase Publishing Introduction © 2007 by Harold Bloom All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For more information contact: Chelsea House An imprint of Infobase Publishing 132 West 31st Street New York NY 10001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data William Wordsworth / Harold Bloom, editor. — Updated ed. p. cm — (Bloom’s moden critical views) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7910-9318-2 1. Wordsworth, William, 1770–1850—Criticism and interpretation. I. Bloom, Harold. PR5881.W46 2006 821’.7—dc22 2006025337 Chelsea House books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk quantities for businesses, associations, institutions, or sales promotions. Please call our Special Sales Department in New York at (212) 967-8800 or (800) 322-8755. You can find Chelsea House on the World Wide Web at http://www.chelseahouse.com Contributing Editor: Janyce Marson Cover design by Takeshi Takahashi Cover photo © The Granger Collection, New York Printed in the United States of America Bang EJB 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is printed on acid-free paper. All links and web addresses were checked and verified to be correct at the time of publication. Because of the dynamic nature of the web, some addresses and links may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. Contents Editor’s Note vii Introduction 1 Harold Bloom Two Roads to Wordsworth 11 M.H. Abrams The Scene of Instruction: “Tintern Abbey” 23 Harold Bloom The Preludeand the Love of Man 47 Frances Ferguson Wordsworth’s Severe Intimations 67 Paul H. Fry Wordsworth and the Defile of the Word 89 Thomas Weiskel “Was it for this...?”: Wordsworth and the Birth of the Gods 131 Geoffrey Hartman From Wordsworth to Emerson 147 David Bromwich vi Contents “While We Were Schoolboys”: Hawkshead Education and Reading 163 Kenneth R. Johnston William Wordsworth, The Prelude 191 Jonathan Wordsworth Wordsworth’s Abbey Ruins 207 Dennis Taylor The Excursion: Dramatic Composition, Dramatic Definition 225 Sally Bushell Chronology 245 Contributors 255 Bibliography 259 Acknowledgments 267 Index 269 Editor’s Note My introduction centers upon Wordsworth’s exaltation of the natural man, particularly in the sublime poignance of “The Old Cumberland Beggar.” M.H. Abrams, dean of Romantic scholar-critics, contrasts the two traditions of Wordsworth criticism, Matthew Arnold’s “Poet of Nature” and A.C. Bradley’s Hegelian sense of Wordsworthian Sublimity. My interpretation of “Tintern Abbey” explores the poem’s triumph over its own myth of memory, while Frances Ferguson subtly finds implicit in The Preludea poetically enabling “extensive chain of affections.” The “Intimations of Immortality” Ode is seen by Paul H. Fry as mediating between the Simple Wordsworth (Arnoldian) and the Sublime Wordsworth (Bradleyan). Thomas Weiskel provides an appropriate Romantic Sublime exegesis of The Prelude’s Simplon Pass passage in Book 6, after which Geoffrey Hartman, luminary of twentieth-century Wordsworth criticism, demonstrates the alliance between radical inwardness and expressionistic power in The Prelude. The affinity between Wordsworth and Emerson, despite their different visions of the self, is analyzed by David Bromwich, while Kenneth Johnston examines early poetic influences upon the young Wordsworth. Something of the complex differences between the separate versions of The Prelude is given by Jonathan Wordsworth, after which Dennis Taylor argues for a Catholic element in Wordsworth’s achievement. In this volume’s final essay, Sally Bushell traces connections between Wordsworth’s drama The Borderers and his long narrative poem The Excursion. vii HAROLD BLOOM Introduction There is a human loneliness, A part of space and solitude, In which knowledge cannot be denied. In which nothing of knowledge fails, The luminous companion, the hand, The fortifying arm, the profound Response, the completely answering voice.... —Wallace Stevens The Prelude was to be only the antechapel to the Gothic church of The Recluse, but the poet Wordsworth knew better than the man, and The Prelude is a complete and climactic work. The key to The Prelude as an internalized epic written in creative competition to Milton is to be found in those lines (754–860) of the Reclusefragment that Wordsworth prefaced to The Excursion (1814). Wordsworth’s invocation, like Blake’s to the Daughters of Beulah in his epic Milton, is a deliberate address to powers higher than those that inspired Paradise Lost: Urania, I shall need Thy guidance, or a greater Muse, if such 1