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| British Romantic Poetry(2018) |
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Geoffrey Hartman's Comments on a few crucial episodes of The Prelude 1. On The Prelude in general ... the majority of readers have emphasized the
poet’s progression from nature worship or even pantheism to a highly qualified
form of natural religion, with increasing awareness of the “ennobling
interchange” between mind and nature and a late yielding of primacy to the
activity of the mind or the idealizing power of imagination. A very small group,
finally, has pointed to the deeply paradoxical character of Wordsworth’s dealings
with nature and suggested that what he calls imagination may be intrinsically
opposed to nature.
This last and rarest position seems to me closest to the truth,
yet I do not feel it conflicts totally with more traditional readings stressing the
poet’s adherence to nature. It can be shown, via several important episodes of
The Prelude, that Wordsworth thought nature itself led him beyond nature; and,
since this movement of transcendence, related to what mystics have called the
negative way, is inherent in life and achieved without violent or ascetic
discipline, one can think of it as the progress of a soul which is naturaliter negativa.
2. Simplon Pass in Book VI There are many who feel that Wordsworth could have been as great a poet as
Milton but for this return to nature, this shrinking from visionary subjects. Is
Wordsworth afraid of his own imagination? Now we have, in The Prelude, an
exceptional incident in which the poet comes, as it were, face to face with his
imagination. This incident has many points in common with the opening event
of The Prelude; it also, for example, tells the story of a failure of the mind vis-à-
vis the external world. I refer to the poet’s crossing of the Alps, in which his
adventurous spirit is again rebuffed by nature, though by its strong absence
rather than presence. His mind, desperately and unself-knowingly in search of a
nature adequate to deep childhood impressions, finds instead itself, and has to
acknowledge that nature is no longer its proper subject or home. Despite this
recognition, Wordsworth continues to bend back the energy of his mind and of
his poem to nature, but not before we have learned the secret behind his fidelity. 3. Nature as a Guiding Spirit It follows that nature, for Wordsworth, is not an “object” but a presence and
a power; a motion and a spirit; not something to be worshiped and consumed,
but always a guide leading beyond itself. This guidance starts in earliest
childhood. The boy of Prelude I is fostered alike by beauty and by fear. Through
beauty, nature often makes the boy feel at home, for, as in the Great Ode, his
soul is alien to this world. But through fear, nature reminds the boy from where
he came, and prepares him, having lost heaven, also to lose nature. The boy of
Prelude I, who does not yet know he must suffer this loss as well, is warned by
nature itself of the solitude to come.
4. Denying Nature, Recognizing Imagination The Prelude, as history of a poet’s mind, foresees the time when the
“Characters of the great Apocalypse” will be intuited without the medium of
nature. The time approaches even as the poet writes, and occasionally cuts across
his narrative, the imagination rising up, as in Book VI, “Before the eye and
progress of my Song” (version of 1805). This phrase, at once conventional and
exact, suggests that imagination waylaid the poet on his mental journey. The
“eye” of his song, trained on a temporal sequence with the vision in the strait as
its final term, is suddenly obscured. He is momentarily forced to deny nature that
magnificence it had shown in the gloomy strait, and to attribute the glory to
imagination, whose interposition in the very moment of writing proves it to be a
power more independent than nature of time and place, and so a better type “Of
first, and last, and midst, and without end” (VI.640).
5. Apocalyptic Imagination “And men go about to wonder at the heights of the mountains, and the mighty waves of the sea, and the wide sweep of rivers, and the circuit of the ocean, and the revolution of the stars, but themselves they consider not.” Petrarch, opening on the top of Mt. Ventoux his copy of Augustine’s Confessions, and falling by chance on this passage, is brought back forcefully to self-consciousness: “I closed the book, angry with myself that I should still be admiring earthly things, who might long ago have learned from even the pagan philosophers that nothing is wonderful but the soul, which, when great itself, finds nothing great outside itself.” Wordsworth’s experience, like Petrarch’s or Augustine’s, is a conversion: a turning about of the mind as from one belief to its opposite, and a turning ad se ipsum. It is linked to the birth of a sharper self-awareness, and accompanied by apocalyptic feelings. By “apocalyptic” I mean that there is an inner necessity to cast out nature, to extirpate everything apparently external to salvation, everything that might stand between the naked self and God, whatever risk in this to the self. 6. Snowdon Episode, Nature and Imagination are One The ascent of Snowdon, a great moment in poetry, stands in a place of honor:
Wordsworth chooses it as his coda episode for The Prelude. Not only is it, as
poetry, a true “mounting of the mind”; it is also a culminating evidence that
imagination and the light of nature are one. The certainty that there is an
imagination in nature analogous to that in man opened to him a “new world.”
The incident is a difficult one to interpret, not only for us, but for the poet
himself; yet he insists that though nature on Snowdon points to imagination, and
even thrusts the vision of it on him, what he sees is still a Power like nature’s
(XIII.312, XIV.86 ff.). This time his recognition of imagination sub specie
naturae does not (as in VI-b) give a mortal shock to nature. The episode is
Wordsworth’s most astonishing avoidance of apocalypse. |
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Geoffrey Hartman's Comments on a few crucial episodes of The Prelude 1. On The Prelude in general ... the majority of readers have emphasized the
poet’s progression from nature worship or even pantheism to a highly qualified
form of natural religion, with increasing awareness of the “ennobling
interchange” between mind and nature and a late yielding of primacy to the
activity of the mind or the idealizing power of imagination. A very small group,
finally, has pointed to the deeply paradoxical character of Wordsworth’s dealings
with nature and suggested that what he calls imagination may be intrinsically
opposed to nature.
This last and rarest position seems to me closest to the truth,
yet I do not feel it conflicts totally with more traditional readings stressing the
poet’s adherence to nature. It can be shown, via several important episodes of
The Prelude, that Wordsworth thought nature itself led him beyond nature; and,
since this movement of transcendence, related to what mystics have called the
negative way, is inherent in life and achieved without violent or ascetic
discipline, one can think of it as the progress of a soul which is naturaliter negativa.
2. Simplon Pass in Book VI There are many who feel that Wordsworth could have been as great a poet as
Milton but for this return to nature, this shrinking from visionary subjects. Is
Wordsworth afraid of his own imagination? Now we have, in The Prelude, an
exceptional incident in which the poet comes, as it were, face to face with his
imagination. This incident has many points in common with the opening event
of The Prelude; it also, for example, tells the story of a failure of the mind vis-à-
vis the external world. I refer to the poet’s crossing of the Alps, in which his
adventurous spirit is again rebuffed by nature, though by its strong absence
rather than presence. His mind, desperately and unself-knowingly in search of a
nature adequate to deep childhood impressions, finds instead itself, and has to
acknowledge that nature is no longer its proper subject or home. Despite this
recognition, Wordsworth continues to bend back the energy of his mind and of
his poem to nature, but not before we have learned the secret behind his fidelity. 3. Nature as a Guiding Spirit It follows that nature, for Wordsworth, is not an “object” but a presence and
a power; a motion and a spirit; not something to be worshiped and consumed,
but always a guide leading beyond itself. This guidance starts in earliest
childhood. The boy of Prelude I is fostered alike by beauty and by fear. Through
beauty, nature often makes the boy feel at home, for, as in the Great Ode, his
soul is alien to this world. But through fear, nature reminds the boy from where
he came, and prepares him, having lost heaven, also to lose nature. The boy of
Prelude I, who does not yet know he must suffer this loss as well, is warned by
nature itself of the solitude to come.
4. Denying Nature, Recognizing Imagination The Prelude, as history of a poet’s mind, foresees the time when the
“Characters of the great Apocalypse” will be intuited without the medium of
nature. The time approaches even as the poet writes, and occasionally cuts across
his narrative, the imagination rising up, as in Book VI, “Before the eye and
progress of my Song” (version of 1805). This phrase, at once conventional and
exact, suggests that imagination waylaid the poet on his mental journey. The
“eye” of his song, trained on a temporal sequence with the vision in the strait as
its final term, is suddenly obscured. He is momentarily forced to deny nature that
magnificence it had shown in the gloomy strait, and to attribute the glory to
imagination, whose interposition in the very moment of writing proves it to be a
power more independent than nature of time and place, and so a better type “Of
first, and last, and midst, and without end” (VI.640).
5. Apocalyptic Imagination “And men go about to wonder at the heights of the mountains, and the mighty waves of the sea, and the wide sweep of rivers, and the circuit of the ocean, and the revolution of the stars, but themselves they consider not.” Petrarch, opening on the top of Mt. Ventoux his copy of Augustine’s Confessions, and falling by chance on this passage, is brought back forcefully to self-consciousness: “I closed the book, angry with myself that I should still be admiring earthly things, who might long ago have learned from even the pagan philosophers that nothing is wonderful but the soul, which, when great itself, finds nothing great outside itself.” Wordsworth’s experience, like Petrarch’s or Augustine’s, is a conversion: a turning about of the mind as from one belief to its opposite, and a turning ad se ipsum. It is linked to the birth of a sharper self-awareness, and accompanied by apocalyptic feelings. By “apocalyptic” I mean that there is an inner necessity to cast out nature, to extirpate everything apparently external to salvation, everything that might stand between the naked self and God, whatever risk in this to the self. 6. Snowdon Episode, Nature and Imagination are One The ascent of Snowdon, a great moment in poetry, stands in a place of honor:
Wordsworth chooses it as his coda episode for The Prelude. Not only is it, as
poetry, a true “mounting of the mind”; it is also a culminating evidence that
imagination and the light of nature are one. The certainty that there is an
imagination in nature analogous to that in man opened to him a “new world.”
The incident is a difficult one to interpret, not only for us, but for the poet
himself; yet he insists that though nature on Snowdon points to imagination, and
even thrusts the vision of it on him, what he sees is still a Power like nature’s
(XIII.312, XIV.86 ff.). This time his recognition of imagination sub specie
naturae does not (as in VI-b) give a mortal shock to nature. The episode is
Wordsworth’s most astonishing avoidance of apocalypse.
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