This Day in Literary History (Wordsworth Sparks Romantic Movement With ‘Tintern Abbey’)

 

July 13, 1798—Returning to a sylvan landscape he’d visited five years before, inspired by conversations and shared poems with a recently made poet friend, William Wordsworth wrote 159 lines of blank verse that served as the foundation of England’s Romantic movement.

The title of the poem “Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour, 13 July 1798,” was mercifully shortened in conversation by its author and his circle to “Tintern Abbey.” But it’s important to keep the longer title in mind because Wordsworth wanted to summarize the change and reconnection to the natural world that the trip meant for him.

The 28-year-old poet was trying to make sense of the turbulence in his political beliefs and personal life wrought by the French Revolution in that decade. (While in France, he had fathered an illegitimate child by his mistress, then was prevented from returning to the country by the Reign of Terror and the wars that ensued on the Continent shortly thereafter. His growing disgust with Napoleon led him to shed his onetime radicalism.)

The French Revolution might be thought of as an experiment in a new kind of relation among men through government. Wordsworth used the word “experiments” to describe most of the poems in the collection he issued anonymously two months after his ecstatic pastoral experience by the Wye with his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, which, he noted, were written chiefly to “ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure.”

More concisely, Wordsworth wrote in an 1800 preface to the Lyrical Ballads, he was hoping for “fitting to metrical arrangement a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation.”

Rather than the public controversies in which the likes of John Dryden and Alexander Pope engaged, these works focused on the private and the subjective, the local and even rural. In giving voice to “the commonplace” in the speech of men and women, Wordsworth would indelibly influence later poets such as Thomas Hardy and Robert Frost.

Moreover, to an extent never before explored, Wordsworth’s poems did not directly address religious beliefs, but found in nature overwhelming elements of the divine. In this way, he inspired American Transcendentalists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.

Wordsworth scholar Stephen Gill referred, in his notes for the poet’s Major Works, to 1798 as the “annus mirabilis” (Latin for “miraculous year”) for him and Coleridge.

The two young men, along with Wordsworth’s devoted sister Dorothy, couldn’t get enough of each other’s company, on walks taking in the rural landscape”—or, as Coleridge observed in his Notebooks, “The flames of two Candles joined give a much stronger Light than both of them separate.

Coleridge contributed to Lyrical Ballads several of the poems that established his enduring fame, including “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” “The Foster-Mother’s Tale,” and “Nightingale.” Wordsworth managed to make a last-minute addition to the volume with “Tintern Abbey.” Indeed, he composed the poem so rapidly, judging from his description below, that the verses could have written themselves:

“No poem of mine was composed under circumstances more pleasant for me to remember than this. I began it upon leaving Tintern, after crossing the Wye, and concluded it just as I was entering Bristol in the evening, after a ramble of 4 or 5 days, with my sister. Not a line of it was altered, and not any part of it written down till I reached Bristol.”

Several years later, when Wordsworth, strongly encouraged by Coleridge, attempted a more ambitious project, he was more self-critical, unable to summon the spirit of transport that enabled him to write “Tintern Abbey” so rapidly. Though he finished “The Prelude” (only one-third of this larger work), he refused to publish it during his lifetime. His wife Mary only did so after his death 45 years later.

The friendship of Wordsworth and Coleridge had its own bumps along the way. In the last quarter-century of their relationship, the two poets became estranged over misunderstandings, and even when the breach was healed their easy onetime intimacy was gone for good.

But in this first phase, when they were young and unburdened by ill health (Coleridge’s addictions to laudanum and opium) and family tragedies (deaths of Wordsworth’s young son and daughter a couple of years apart), they embarked on what Adam Sisman, in his dual biography The Friendship, called “their joint mission, to fulfill the hopes of a generation disappointed at the failure of the French Revolution: nothing less than a poem that would change the world.”

For the Romantic movement of which Wordsworth and Coleridge formed the leading edge—and for the hundreds of thousands of nature and poetry lovers sustained by “Tintern Abbey” in the 225 years since—it became a matter of faith that “Nature never did betray/The heart that loved her.”

Quote of the Day (William Wordsworth, on a Man Out in a Storm)

“One who was suffering tumult in his soul,
Yet failed to seek the sure relief of prayer,
Went forth—his course surrendering to the care
Of the fierce wind, while mid-day lightnings prowl
Insidiously, untimely thunders growl;
While trees, dim-seen, in frenzied numbers, tear
The lingering remnant of their yellow hair,
And shivering wolves, surprised with darkness, howl
As if the sun were not.”—English Poet Laureate William Wordsworth (1770-1850), “Composed During a Storm,” in The Sonnets of William Wordsworth (1838)

With yesterday’s nor’easter—one that, with flash flooding in my area of New Jersey late morning, then a return engagement in the evening—I was grateful to be in my house, and dreading anything even remotely like the damage caused in early September by Hurricane Ida.

Quote of the Day (William Wordsworth, on Conscience, ‘Reverenced and Obeyed’)

“By strength
Of heart, the sailor fights with roaring seas.
Alas! the endowment of immortal power
Is matched unequally with custom, time,
And domineering faculties of sense
In all; in most with superadded foes,
Idle temptations; open vanities,
Ephemeral offspring of the unblushing world;
And, in the private regions of the mind,
Ill-governed passions, ranklings of despite,
Immoderate wishes, pining discontent,
Distress and care. What then remains?—To seek
Those helps for his occasions ever near
Who lacks not will to use them; vows, renewed
On the first motion of a holy thought;
Vigils of contemplation; praise; and prayer—
A stream, which, from the fountain of the heart
Issuing, however feebly, nowhere flows
Without access of unexpected strength.
But, above all, the victory is most sure
For him, who, seeking faith by virtue, strives
To yield entire submission to the law
Of conscience—conscience reverenced and obeyed,
As God's most intimate presence in the soul,
And his most perfect image in the world.”— English Romantic poet William Wordsworth (1770 –1850), “The Excursion” (1814)

Quote of the Day (William Wordsworth, on a Valley Glimpsed in Childhood)

“The place from which I looked was soft and green,

Not giddy yet aerial, with a depth

Of Vale below, a height of Hills above.

Long did I halt; I could have made it even

My business and my errand so to halt.

For rest of body ’twas a perfect place,

All that luxurious nature could desire,

But tempting to the Spirit; who could look

And not feel motions there? I thought of clouds

That sail on winds; of breezes that delight

To play on water, or in endless chase

Pursue each other through the liquid depths

Of grass or corn, over and through and through,

In billow after billow, evermore;

Of Sunbeams, Shadows, Butterflies and Birds,

Angels and winged Creatures that are Lords

Without restraint of all which they behold.

I sate and stirred in Spirit as I looked,

I seemed to feel such liberty was mine,

Such power and joy; but only for this end,

To flit from field to rock, from rock to field,

From shore to island, and from isle to shore,

From open place to covert, from a bed

Of meadow-flowers into a tuft of wood,

From high to low, from low to high, yet still

Within the bounds of this huge Concave; here

Should be my home, this Valley be my World.”— English Romantic poet William Wordsworth (1770-1850), from “Home at Grasmere,” composed 1800-1906, in William Wordsworth: The Major Works. Including “The Prelude,” edited by Stephen Gill (1984)

Photo of the Day: ‘Tranquil Restoration’ in Overpeck County Park Extension, NJ

“These beauteous forms,

 Through a long absence, have not been to me

 As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:

 But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din

 Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,

 In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,

 Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;

 And passing even into my purer mind,

 With tranquil restoration: - feelings too

 Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,

 As have no slight or trivial influence

 On that best portion of a good man's life,

 His little, nameless, unremembered, acts

 Of kindness and of love.”— English Romantic poet William Wordsworth (1770–1850), “Tintern Abbey” (1798)

Whenever I require “tranquil restoration,” I often head to the Overpeck County Park Extension not far from where I live, in Bergen County, NJ. I took this particular image there five years ago

Photo of the Day: London’s River Thames, ‘At His Own Sweet Will’

“Never did sun more beautifully steep

   In his first splendour valley, rock, or hill;

Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!

   The river glideth at his own sweet will:

Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;

   And all that mighty heart is lying still!”— William Wordsworth, “Upon Westminster Bridge, Composed September 3, 1802”

I took this photograph of the River Thames from a bus three years ago, when I was visiting London on a very short business trip.

Quote of the Day (Mary Lamb, Likening Envy to a ‘Blind and Senseless Tree’)

“Like such a blind and senseless tree

As I’ve imagined this to be,

   All envious persons are:

With care and culture all may find

Some pretty flower in their own mind,

   Some talent that is rare.”—Mary Lamb, from “Envy”

Mary Lamb, born on this date in London in 1764, was lucky to have “some talent that is rare,” along with a caring (and talented) brother. No other sister-brother literary combination in the Romantic Era may have surpassed the achievements—and life stories—of Mary and Charles Lamb except for inveterate diarist Dorothy Wordsworth and her poet sibling William. But even the Wordsworths didn’t collaborate as the Lambs did.

In 1796, lacking money and support from other family members as she coped with a senile father and a mother requiring round-the-clock help, Mary snapped one night. Grabbing a knife at dinnertime, she stabbed her mother to death. Only days after her act of matricide, she was expressing intense remorse over her moment of madness. The authorities agreed not to confine her to an insane asylum so long as Charles, 10 years younger—who himself had been institutionalized for six weeks—agreed to take care of her for the rest of his life.

Paradoxically, Mary—now believed to have suffered from bipolar disorder—was, Charles’ friend William Hazlitt once said, the only exception to his rule that he “never met with a woman who could reason, and had met with only one thoroughly reasonable - the sole exception being Mary Lamb.” Virtually all of his friends praised her warmth and gentleness. 

Though Mary published poetry for children, she is probably most famous for Tales From Shakespeare (1807). Though the first edition bore only the name, of Charles (who became famous as an essayist), his sister had actually written two-thirds of these retellings of dramas by The Bard. Perhaps her name was not included originally because of publishers’ sexism (the same reason why the Bronte sisters used pseudonyms when their great novels appeared in the 1840s).  Or, perhaps, Mary recoiled from anything that reminded readers of the tragedy that befell her years before.

Mary remained subject to episodes of mental illness throughout the rest of her life. Did this autodidact identify especially with Shakespearean heroes King Lear and Othello in their moments of temporary derangement? Surviving Charles by 13 years, she ended up being buried with him when her own time came to die in 1847.