Republican, eco-warrior young Wordsworth v grand older poet – 250 after his birth, do we still have to take sides?
James Boswell started his biography of Dr Johnson on an anxious note: “To write the Life of him who excelled all mankind in writing the lives of others,” he confessed, “may be reckoned in me a presumptuous task.” How presumptuous, then, must the biographer of William Wordsworth feel? Not only is he one of the greatest of all English poets, but in The Prelude,largely unpublished until after his death, he excelled all mankind in writing the history of his own life – or rather, what he called “the growth of a poet’s mind”. No biographer could hope to compete with the sheer audacity and originality of Wordsworth’s 14-book blank verse account of what had made him a writer and a man. But as these three studies make plain, there is more than one way to tell the story of a life.
Although his verse autobiography tracks the sources of a poet’s character and imagination, in real life its author tried just as strenuously to keep himself hidden from view. Wordsworth thought one of the best ways to put off would-be biographers was to claim that virtually nothing had ever happened to him. Now we know differently. The “well-kept secrets” to which Andrew Wordsworth (a descendant) alludes in his title are, first, the poet’s “true feelings towards his sister”, and second, “the existence of his illegitimate daughter”. The latter might justly be described as a secret, since knowledge of Caroline Wordsworth’s birth in revolutionary France did not become public until seven decades after Wordsworth had died. It is also true that he enjoyed an intensely and unusually loving, creative relationship with his sister Dorothy. But this can scarcely be said to constitute a “secret”; Wordsworth doesn’t appear to have felt burdened by his feelings towards her, nor did he try to conceal them. Andrew Wordsworth stops short of suggesting, as others have done, that the connection may have been incestuous. Rather, he sees in the five celebrated “Lucy” poems – a series of works concerning a young girl who has died, composed between 1798 and 1802 – coded references both to Caroline and Dorothy, expressing the author’s fears for the loss of one or both of them but also in some sense steeling himself to bear it.
Continue reading...
