Acknowledgements
I wish to thank the Fellows of St John’s College, Oxford, for the award of a Lamb and Flag Scholarship which enabled me to undertake doctoral study and the Leverhulme Trust for the Early Career Research Fellowship which gave me the time to revise my doctoral thesis into its current form. I am also obliged to the Trustees of the Wordsworth Trust for permission to use and quote from their manuscripts and to Jeff Cowton, Melissa Mitchell, and Rebecca Turner for all of their help at the Jerwood Centre. I am grateful to Taylor and Francis for permission to reproduce research that was originally published in ‘Prospects of Contemplation: Wordsworth’s Winter Garden at Coleorton, 1806–1811’, ERR, 24 (2013): 307–15 (<http://www.tandfonline.com>). Chapter 6 is a development of work that initially appeared in two separate places: ‘A Question of Loyalty: Wordsworth and the Beaumonts, Catholic Emancipation and Ecclesiastical Sketches’, Romanticism, 22 (2016): 1–14 and ‘Wordsworth’s Northumbria: Bede, Cuthbert, and Northern Medievalism’, MLR, 111 (2016): 917–35. Edinburgh University Press and the MHRA have kindly granted permission to reprint sections of these articles. Figures 1, 2, 3, and 4 appear by permission of The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford.
My greatest personal debt of gratitude is to Jon Roberts, through whose inspirational teaching I first encountered Wordsworth. I was then extremely fortunate to have Fiona Stafford as a graduate supervisor; I could not wish for a better role model. The wisdom, generosity, and kindness of Stephen Gill is immeasurable; it has been a privilege to receive his guidance. I am also indebted to Emma Mason who constructively examined my doctoral thesis and to Seamus Perry for offering helpful suggestions as the thesis developed. I subsequently learned a great deal from colleagues at the University of Bristol, in particular, Tamsin Badcoe, Stephen Cheeke, Edward Holberton, and Ad Putter; I wish especially to mention Lesel Dawson, Samantha Matthews, and Ralph Pite. Andrew Bennett has been an excellent mentor; I have been inspired by his skilful reading and clarity of thought.
Many friends have helped in numerous ways; in particular I would like to thank Judyta Frodyma, Suzannah Hexter, Sophie Howarth, Rosie H. Mulqueen, Thomas Palmer, Ying Roberts, Julia Tejblum, Clare Tilbury, Bonnie Wulff, and Philip Wulff. A special mention is due to Micha
Lazarus. I will for ever be grateful for the friendship of Tom Owens and for all that we shared while this work was in progress. I also remember with gratitude the help and encouragement I received from Pat McGuire. I could not have written this book without the support of my family; for them, I always endeavour to be the best that I can be.
List of Figures and Map
Figures
1. ‘East View of Bolton Abbey’, in Thomas Dunham Whitaker, The History and Antiquities of the Deanery of Craven in the County of York (London, 1801), Douce W. 268, illustration following p. 324. Reproduced by permission of The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford. 33
2. ‘Grace Dieu’, in John Nichols, The History and Antiquities of the County of Leicester, 4 vols (London, 1795–1811), iii, pt. ii (1804), Gough Leic. 19, illustration between pp. 650 and 651. Reproduced by permission of The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford. 89
3. ‘South East View of Kirkstall Abbey’, in Thomas Dunham Whitaker, The History and Antiquities of the Deanery of Craven in the County of York (London, 1801), Douce W. 268, illustration following p. 55. Reproduced by permission of The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford. 90
4. ‘North View of Bolton Abbey’, in Thomas Dunham Whitaker, The History and Antiquities of the Deanery of Craven in the County of York (London, 1801), Douce W. 268, illustration following p. 324. Reproduced by permission of The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford.
Map
110
Map 1. Sites within the Scope of Wordsworth’s Monastic Inheritance. 206
Chronology
CLB
DWJ
Excursion
ELH
ERR
EY
Grosart Prose
IF Notes
JEGP
LY i
LY ii
LY iii
LY iv
Lyrical Ballads
Abbreviations
Mark L. Reed, Wordsworth: The Chronology of the Middle Years, 1800–1815 (Cambridge, Mass., 1975).
Charles Lamb Bulletin.
The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals, ed. Pamela Woof (2002; reissued Oxford, 2008).
The Excursion, ed. Sally Bushell, James A. Butler, and Michael C. Jaye (Ithaca, NY, and London, 2007).
English Literary History.
European Romantic Review.
The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years, 1787–1805, ed. Chester L. Shaver (Oxford, 1967).
The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. A. B. Grosart, 3 vols (London, 1876).
The Fenwick Notes of William Wordsworth, ed. Jared R. Curtis (London, 1993).
Journal of English and Germanic Philology
The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Later Years pt. I, 1821–1828, ed. Alan G. Hill (Oxford, 1978).
The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Later Years pt. II, 1829–1834, ed. Alan G. Hill (Oxford, 1979).
The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Later Years pt. III, 1835–1839, ed. Alan G. Hill (Oxford, 1982).
The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Later Years pt. IV, 1840–1853, ed. Alan G. Hill (Oxford, 1988).
Lyrical Ballads, and Other Poems, 1797–1800, ed. James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca, NY, and London, 1992).
MLN
Abbreviations
Modern Language Notes.
MLR Modern Language Review.
MY i
MY ii
Oxford Handbook
P2V
The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Middle Years pt. I, 1806–1811, ed. Mary Moorman (Oxford, 1969).
The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Middle Years pt. II, 1812–1820, ed. Mary Moorman and Alan G. Hill (Oxford, 1970).
Richard Gravil and Daniel Robinson, eds, The Oxford Handbook of William Wordsworth (Oxford, 2015).
Poems, in Two Volumes, and Other Poems, 1800–1807, ed. Jared R. Curtis (Ithaca, NY, and London, 1983).
PMLA Publications of the Modern Language Association. Primroses
The Tuft of Primroses, with Other Late Poems for ‘The Recluse’, ed. Joseph Kishel (Ithaca, NY, and London, 1986).
Prose
The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Smyser, 3 vols (Oxford, 1974).
RES Review of English Studies
SEL Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900. Shorter Poems
Shorter Poems, 1807–1820, ed. Carl H. Ketcham (Ithaca, NY, and London, 1989).
Sonnet Series Sonnet Series and Itinerary Poems, 1820–1845, ed. Geoffrey Jackson (Ithaca, NY, and London, 2004).
Thirteen-Book Prelude
TWC
White Doe
W’s Reading I
W’s Reading II
The Thirteen-Book Prelude, ed. Mark L. Reed, 2 vols (Ithaca, NY, and London, 1991), i.
The Wordsworth Circle.
The White Doe of Rylstone; or The Fate of the Nortons, ed. Kristine Dugas (Ithaca, NY, and London, 1988).
Duncan Wu, Wordsworth’s Reading, 1770–1799 (Cambridge, 1993).
Duncan Wu, Wordsworth’s Reading, 1800–1815 (Cambridge, 1995).
And all the Hills were glad to bear Their part in this effectual prayer.
The White Doe of Rylstone (lines 1794–5)
Introduction
On 25 October 1853, the Anglo-Irish poet Aubrey De Vere wrote excitedly from Leicestershire to Wordsworth’s friend Isabella Fenwick, reporting a recent excursion to the ruins of Grace Dieu Priory: ‘My dear Miss Fenwick,— I really cannot help writing you a few lines to tell you of the great pleasure I have had in treading again Wordsworthian ground.’1 Situated close to Coleorton Hall, the Leicestershire residence of Wordsworth’s patron Sir George Beaumont (1753–1827), Grace Dieu Priory was dissolved in 1539, after which it passed into the hands of Beaumont’s ancestors.2 Wordsworth visited the ruins of the priory twice while staying on the Coleorton Estate during the winter of 1806.3 The idea of ‘treading’ a piece of ground distinguished by the historical presence of others was important for Wordsworth and by taking pleasure from being in a place Wordsworth had visited De Vere was, therefore, following in the poet’s footsteps figuratively as well as literally. De Vere’s trip to Leicestershire also included the village of Whitwick, which is just a short distance from Grace Dieu and is the site of the first monastery established in England after the Reformation, Mount Saint Bernard.4 De Vere heard the monks of this new Cistercian abbey at prayer, noting that ‘whatever time is not spent in psalmody, vigil and meditation, is spent in manual labour’.5 He was pleased that Wordsworth himself had encountered this community of monks in 1841 and asserted that Wordsworth ‘must have heard the very same harmonies as in the time of St. Bernard, and, centuries earlier, of St. Benedict. I have no doubt
1 Aubrey De Vere, a Memoir Based on His Unpublished Diaries and Correspondence, ed. Wilfred Philip Ward (London, 1904), p. 223.
2 John Nichols, The History and Antiquities of the County of Leicester, 4. vols, 8 pts (London, 1795–1815), iii, pt ii (1804), pp. 651–64.
3 De Vere Memoir, p. 224. Wordsworth’s visits to Grace Dieu are noted in MY i., pp. 108–9, and 121. The monastic site and its historic association with the Beaumont family is the subject of Wordsworth’s ‘Inscription for a Seat in the Groves of Coleorton’ which was erected in the grounds of Coleorton in 1812. See Shorter Poems, pp. 107–8.
4 LY iv., p. 218 n. 1. Mount Saint Bernard opened in 1835; the architect was A. W. N. Pugin. Whitwick became significant to the Wordsworth family after Wordsworth’s son John accepted a curacy there in 1827. See LY i., pp. 557 and 559–60.
5 De Vere Memoir, p. 225.
he was delighted with all he saw; and gave it at least a poetical, if not a theological, blessing.’6 For Wordsworth, monastic ruins did indeed constitute a deeply resonant aspect of the landscape and he was particularly struck by Grace Dieu when he visited its remains in 1806. Contrary to the tone of De Vere’s testimony, however, Wordsworth’s response to monasticism was far from uniformly positive. Wordsworth was wary of certain types of religious reclusion and, as is evident from his own report of Mount Saint Bernard (given in 1841), he had a strong antipathy towards the foundation of Roman Catholic monasteries in England.7 Wordsworth’s subtle, complex, and often conflicted thinking about the routines and legacies of monasticism is the focus of this book. This topic is not merely of interest in terms of what it suggests about religious dimensions of Wordsworth’s writings or his opinions concerning Roman Catholicism; rather, Wordsworth’s thinking about monasticism offers new insights into a range of important issues in his poetry and prose, including the historical resonances of the landscape, local attachment and memorialization, gardening and cultivation, Quakerism and silence, solitude and community, pastoral retreat and national identity. De Vere’s account serves to introduce the parameters of the present study and to highlight the caution needed when assessing Wordsworth’s responses to monasticism. First, De Vere alerts us to the significance, for Wordsworth, of Sir George Beaumont’s Coleorton estate in Leicestershire. The poet’s eight-month residence there in 1806–7 was a transitional moment in his career and it marked the start of a period in which he recurrently read about and visited monastic sites. Secondly, De Vere’s claim that Wordsworth would have appreciated the audible harmony connecting the nineteenth-century monks of Mount Saint Bernard with the medieval inhabitants of Grace Dieu opens up questions about the value, for Wordsworth, of monastic sites as loci that draw together temporally disparate communities. Enriched by the passage of time and the work of nature, such sites become palimpsests of collective identity; centuries of worship in these places produces a spiritual legacy that is inherited and enriched by successive generations and that creates a sense of local attachment and transhistorical community.8 Thirdly, De Vere’s claim that
6 Ibid., p. 226. De Vere makes this observation not in the letter to Fenwick but in a letter to his sister of 27 October 1853. De Vere’s enthusiasm for Mount Saint Bernard was perhaps coloured by his recent conversion to Roman Catholicism.
7 LY iv., p. 218.
8 Alexandra Walsham notes the widely accepted conceptualization of the landscape as a palimpsest ‘upon which each generation inscribes its own values and preoccupations without ever being able to erase entirely those of the preceding one’. In other words, ‘the landscape is a repository of the collective memory of its inhabitants, a mnemonic to their knowledge of previous eras, and a source of ideas about their social identity’. See The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity, & Memory in Early Modern Britain & Ireland
Wordsworth would have given ‘a poetical, if not a theological blessing’ to Mount Saint Bernard, implies a tension between Wordsworth’s aesthetic appreciation of monasticism and his objections to Roman Catholicism. The most complex example of this tension occurs in Wordsworth’s Ecclesiastical Sketches, a series of sonnets on the history of the Church in England first published in 1822. Ecclesiastical Sketches, which expresses Wordsworth’s allegiance to the Church of England and his desire for national ecclesiastical unity, is the culmination of a sustained period of interest in the monastic history of his local region and therefore it marks the end of the present study.9 My purpose is to show that Wordsworth’s writings from 1806 to 1822 are persistently responsive to the cultural and material remains—the routines and structures, the landscapes and architecture—of the monastic system. I will argue that attention to such thematic dimensions of Wordsworth’s poetry and the rhetorical strategies he developed to articulate them opens up an important new perspective from which to read and interpret Wordsworth’s mature work.
MONASTICISM AND WORDSWORTH’S ‘MIDDLE YEARS’
While there has been no previous book-length study of the topic, readers and critics have, in different contexts and from various perspectives, detected traces of monasticism in Wordsworth’s verse. For example, Aubrey De Vere records that the abbot of Mount Saint Bernard admitted his ‘first inclination to the monastic life’ had arisen from reading lines in The Excursion (1814):
The life where Hope and Memory are one, Earth quiet and unchanged; the human soul Consistent in self-rule; and heaven revealed To meditation in that quietness.10
(Oxford, 2011), pp. 6–7. Fiona Stafford’s account of the importance, for Wordsworth, of poetry that is situated or attached, physically or emotionally, to a particular space or place is a foundation for the present study. I consider that this sense of ‘local attachment’ underpinned Wordsworth’s interest in the monastic history of the north of England. See Local Attachments: The Province of Poetry (Oxford, 2010).
9 I follow Robert M. Ryan in considering the unorthodox religious tendencies that Wordsworth adopted during the 1790s as anomalous within the larger Christian context of his life; that is to say, I interpret his later Anglicanism as a return to the religion of his childhood rather than apostasy from political and religious radicalism. See The Romantic Reformation: Religious Politics in English Literature, 1789–1824 (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 80–118.
10 De Vere Memoir, pp. 224–5. De Vere quotes lines from The Excursion, III. 407–10, which Wordsworth originally composed in 1808 for The Tuft of Primroses, ll. 305–8. See Excursion, pp. 114–15 and Primroses, pp. 47–8. I discuss this passage at length in Chapter 4.
The abbot had been drawn to this passage from Book III of The Excursion in which Wordsworth’s despondent Solitary celebrates the monastic world as a realm in which the anticipated stability and tranquillity of heaven may be glimpsed. This laudation is itself complicated because it is spoken by the religious sceptic, the Solitary; yet, the fact that these lines are said to have ignited the abbot’s sense of his vocation makes Wordsworth’s own disapproval of Mount Saint Bernard all the more striking. After visiting that working monastery in 1841, Wordsworth wrote:
Where are these things to stop, is a question which any one who has reflected upon the constitution of the Romish Church will naturally put to himself with such objects before him and not without some apprehensions of mischief. Perhaps alarm may be needless, but surely it is too late in the day for such Institutions to be of much service, in England at least. [T]he whole appearance had in my eyes something of the nature of a dream, and it has often haunted me since—11
Wordsworth’s confession that he was ‘haunted’ by the image of cowled monks chanting psalms in the Leicestershire countryside suggests not just prejudice against Catholicism but a repulsion for monastic practices. The abbot of Mount Saint Bernard (who had a portrait of Wordsworth hanging on an abbey wall)12 had certainly not misread The Excursion, yet he perhaps failed to register the subtleties of Wordsworth’s appreciation for monasticism, some of which are hinted at here in the qualification that it is ‘too late . . . in England at least’.
Like the abbot, a reviewer of Ecclesiastical Sketches interpreted Wordsworth’s position positively: a writer for the General Weekly Register was led by the sonnets’ treatment of the dissolution of the monasteries to characterize the poet as ‘a champion of monastic institutions’; yet the sonnets catalogue various ‘monastic abuses’ and the ‘Advertisement’ to the volume states that Wordsworth’s purpose was to garner opposition to the Roman Catholic Relief Bill which was under parliamentary debate in 1821.13 Another example of Wordsworth’s ambivalence towards monasticism occurs in ‘Stanzas, Suggested in a Steam-boat off St. Bees’ Heads’ (1833). The poem celebrates a local abbey as a bulwark of piety, charity, hospitality, and education, but in an accompanying note Wordsworth modifies this praise by arguing that ‘while we deplore and are indignant at these [monastic] abuses, . . . Charity is, upon the whole, the safest guide that we can take in
11 LY iv., p. 218. 12 De Vere Memoir, p. 226.
13 The review appeared on 5 May 1822. See Donald H. Reiman, ed., The Romantics Reviewed: Contemporary Reviews of British Romantic Writers, Part A: The Lake Poets, 2 vols (London, 1972), ii, 551. See Sonnet Series, p. 137 for the ‘Advertisement’ and Chapter 5 for my discussion of Ecclesiastical Sketches.
judging our fellow-men, whether of past ages, or of the present time.’14 What Wordsworth was willing to own as a charitable assessment was, in 1885, in the eyes of a Catholic historian, wholehearted admiration: ‘[a]mong the modern poets, no one has celebrated with more feeling and truth the glory of the Monastic Orders, nor more eloquently deplored their ruin, than the English Wordsworth’.15 In fact, however, Wordsworth’s engagement with monasticism suggests something more complex than a charitable portrayal of ‘fellow-men . . . of ages past’ and something more nuanced than a celebration of monastic ‘glory’.
Wordsworth’s interest in monasticism is conveyed in a letter of December 1844 in which he attempted to help Henry Crabb Robinson towards a clear understanding of his position. The letter recommends Samuel R. Maitland’s The Dark Ages (1844) which, Wordsworth writes, ‘confirms, without alluding to any thing of mine all that I had previously thrown out upon the benefits conferred by monastic institutions’.16 Maitland commends the social function of the monasteries claiming that as places of refuge ‘for the orphan[,] maiden and the desolate widow’, and as centres of learning, their value was ‘beyond all price’. But Maitland (who was librarian at Lambeth Palace) argues that the monastic and conventual system ‘never can be adapted to meet the present exigencies of the Church of England; and that any attempt to revive that system in this time and country can only prove a sad and mischievous failure’, not least because the current ‘way of living’ is ‘characterized by an increasing tendency to independence, individualization, and . . . the dissociation, and disconnection of men’.17 The idea of a monastery as an abstract social model is appealing, but the nineteenth-century reality (from an Anglican perspective at least) would be much more complicated to achieve. Wordsworth’s appraisal of Maitland’s work goes some way towards helping to identify the poet’s position but its value is limited. As I will explain, a substantial shift in thinking about the monastic world took place during Wordsworth’s lifetime: by 1844—fifteen years after Catholic Emancipation had been granted and just before the Oxford Movement began to wane—prevailing opinions were very different from those of half a century earlier.18 Wordsworth’s perspective
14 Sonnet Series, pp. 638–9. The poem was published in 1835.
15 Charles Forbes Montalembert, The Monks of the West: From St. Benedict to St. Bernard, 6 vols (London, 1896), i, 56 n. 96.
16 LY iv., p. 633.
17 Samuel R. Maitland, The Dark Ages; A Series of Essays, Intended to Illustrate the State of Religion and Literature in the Ninth, Tenth, Eleventh, and Twelfth Centuries (London, 1844), pp. iv, vi, and xix.
18 Anti-clerical sentiment and opposition to Roman Catholic Relief was strong in the 1790s. Following the dissolution of the Church in France, the arrival in London of many of the French émigré clergy did much to counter British prejudice. Edmund Burke, in particular,
Wordsworth’s Monastic Inheritance
was not always aligned with widespread public opinion, but this cultural shift means that his letter to Crabb Robinson was written and received in a context widely different from that in which he composed the poetry that will be under discussion in this book.
In her 1940 edition of The White Doe of Rylstone, Alice Pattee Comparetti noted the importance of the Cistercian and Benedictine Rule in Wordsworth’s verse ‘not alone in The Ecclesiastical Sonnets or the stanzas extolling the community at St. Bees, but in The White Doe as well’.19 Comparetti is the only critic to have made such a specific statement but she does not expand on this astute observation. The Cistercian and Benedictine Rule is indeed significant to Wordsworth because this type of monasticism was predominant in the north of England throughout the Middle Ages; moreover, the Cistercians and Benedictines operated under the principles established by St Basil (b. circa ad 330), which dictated that monks live in community rather than in solitude. This emphasis on communal life is the basis of the coenobium or ‘conventual establishment’, which contrasts with eremitical forms of monasticism in which an eremite (recluse or hermit) lives alone. As I will show, Comparetti was right to note Wordsworth’s specific interest in these coenobitic orders. While one of the most dangerous and debilitating forms of monasticism, for Wordsworth, is solitary eremitism, he values the coenobium because, by contrast, it exemplifies stable community and shared observation of silence.20 The White Doe of Rylstone (composed in 1807) is at the centre of Wordsworth’s response to the coenobitic history of the north of England and it is at the centre of the present study.
In the early Victorian period (before the publication of Matthew Arnold’s popular 1879 edition) Wordsworth’s post-1807 poetry—particularly
exerted himself to ensure that French nuns, monks, and priests received a warm welcome. See Derek Beales, ‘Edmund Burke and the Monasteries of France’, The Historical Journal, 48 (2005): 415–36.
19 The White Doe of Rylstone, ed. Alice Pattee Comparetti (Ithaca, NY, 1940), p. 19. Wordsworth changed the title of Ecclesiastical Sketches to Ecclesiastical Sonnets in 1836.
20 See Chapter 4 for my discussion of reclusion and the gradations between eremites, coenobites, and recluse-poets. I am aware that narratives of the origins and development of monasticism (including my own) are often simplified and generalized. J. William Harmless SJ shows that monasticism does not in fact have ‘nameable founders and known origins’, there were not ‘clear, easily identifiable stages of development’, and the two organizational patterns of coenobitic and anchoritic ‘do not begin to do justice to the wide-ranging experiments in monastic living that sprouted up’ from the third century onwards. See ‘Monasticism’, in Susan Ashbrook Harvey and David G. Hunter, eds, The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies (Oxford, 2008), pp. 493–517 (pp. 498 and 493). I aim to present a picture of monastic history Wordsworth could have constructed from the sources he encountered. To treat monks and hermits synonymously is to underestimate Wordsworth’s knowledge of the monastic world. I have not, therefore, been concerned with hermits such as the one in ‘Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey’.
The White Doe and The Excursion—was widely read and appreciated.21 Throughout the twentieth-century, however, critical acclaim of the poetry of Wordsworth’s so-called ‘Great Decade’ (1797–1807) meant that the phrase ‘late poetry’—whether that refers to post-1807 or post-1814 output—came to denote the less impressive portion of his work.22 To some extent, lack of modern critical enthusiasm for the ‘later’ Wordsworth was shaped by responses of the second-generation Romantic poets. Jeffrey Cox has shown, for example, that in the post-Napoleonic era Wordsworth ‘was seen as promulgating a conservative position’ and the poets of the Cockney School felt impelled to rework and reframe The Excursion (which was ‘the central poem in their Wordsworth canon’) in an effort to reaffirm the radical intellectual and political ideals they believed he had lost.23 In the context of ‘St Bees’ Heads’ (1833), Peter Manning notes that twentieth-century ‘distaste’ for Wordsworth’s conservative views precluded close attention to the ‘kinds of poetry he evolved to convey’ those views.24 Manning implies that although Wordsworth’s political and religious perspective changed as he matured, the poet remained committed to stylistic and formal innovation. One of the aims of this study is to show that the poetry Wordsworth produced as his career progressed remained radical insofar as it continued to be generically experimental. Monasticism is a rich area of research because it occurs in Wordsworth’s writings as both a theme and a style. As the content of Wordsworth’s writings began to be inflected by knowledge of monasticism, this knowledge also coloured the ways he chose to push against established literary norms.25
21 Stephen Gill, Wordsworth and the Victorians (Oxford, 1998), pp. 1–2.
22 James M. Garrett summarizes the situation: ‘The persistence of the Great Decade Wordsworth and the narratives of anticlimax and decline is remarkable A. C. Bradley was arguably one of the last critics to reject the two Wordsworths (one lyrical and one philosophical) . . . offering praise even of Wordsworth’s late poetry. With very few exceptions, however, Wordsworth criticism has proceeded under the tacit assumption that little of value happens after 1807 or 1814.’ See Wordsworth and the Writing Nation (Aldershot, 2008), p. 187 n. 12.
23 Jeffrey N. Cox, ‘Cockney Excursions’, TWC, 42 (2011): 106–15 (pp. 106 and 108). Keats, of course, was enamoured with The Excursion yet disappointed by Wordsworth’s political leanings. The younger poets’ disappointment in Wordsworth’s later politics has been interrogated by Duncan Wu, however, who shows that influential responses to Wordsworth’s 1816 ‘Thanksgiving Ode’ from Byron, Shelley, and Hazlitt were rooted more in prejudice and misinformation than in any actual reading of the poem. See ‘Wordsworthian Carnage’, Essays in Criticism, 66 (2016): 341–59.
24 Peter Manning, ‘Wordsworth at St Bees: Scandals, Sisterhoods, and Wordsworth’s Later Poetry’, ELH, 52 (1985): 33–58 (p. 33).
25 Tintern Abbey is perhaps the most prominent monastery in Wordsworth’s verse, even if critics—from Marjory Levinson’s ‘Insight and Oversight: Reading “Tintern Abbey” ’, in Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems: Four Essays (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 14–57 to Ryan Haas’s ‘Wordsworth and the Monks of Tintern Abbey’, Modern Philology, 114 (2016): 82–105—have debated the terms on which the abbey is in fact present in the poem. I do not
That which is commonly denoted Wordsworth’s ‘later poetry’ has recently been subject to reappraisal (Tim Fulford’s The Late Poetry of the Lake Poets, which discusses Wordsworth’s tour poems of the 1820s and 1830s, is a prime example).26 While this reconsideration of the ‘late’ poetry is important, the demarcation of Wordsworth’s work as either ‘early’ or ‘late’ has resulted in the relative neglect of what, in these terms, constitutes the ‘middle’; that is to say, analysis of the transition between these two versions of Wordsworth has been elided.27 And yet, the poet’s assertion of the cohesiveness of the whole body of his work should perhaps caution critics against such divisions in the first place. In the Preface to The Excursion Wordsworth famously describes his oeuvre as a ‘gothic Church’, in relation to which the smaller poems resemble ‘the little Cells, Oratories, and sepulchral Recesses, ordinarily included in those Edifices’ and to which The Prelude stands as an ‘Anti-chapel’.28 This metaphor is important both for its monastic implications and for indicating that Wordsworth did not conceive of sections of his work in isolation. When in the Preface to Poems (1815) Wordsworth suggests ‘that the small pieces of which these volumes consist might be regarded under a two-fold view; as composing an entire work within themselves, and as adjuncts to the philosophical Poem, “The Recluse” ’, he is offering instructions regarding how to read his poetry and it is significant that these volumes (and all subsequent lifetime collected editions) disavow chronological
discuss ‘Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey’, however, because it was composed during a period of religious radicalism, before Wordsworth was reintegrated into the Church of England and before he embarked on his reading of monastic history. Moreover, Tintern is not included in this study as it was not part of the poet’s local region. I discuss Wordsworth’s expanded sense of regionalism in Chapter 5. Using ‘Tintern Abbey’ as a starting point, Dennis Taylor argues that ‘the experience of Catholic monks and hermits’ is analogous with the psychological experience of Wordsworth’s ‘spots of time’: for Taylor, monkish existence is Wordsworth’s prime analogy for the ‘natural solitude’ that is the ‘mainstay of his imaginative life’. Taylor’s argument is rich and convincing with regard to ‘Tintern Abbey’ and The Prelude, but it is not easily applicable to Wordsworth’s experience of monasteries after 1806 when the poet sees ruins as symbolic of communal identity and shared heritage. See ‘Wordsworth’s Abbey Ruins’, in J. Robert Barth, ed., The Fountain Light: Studies in Romanticism and Religion (New York, 2002), pp. 39–40 and 52.
26 A resurgence of interest in The Excursion began with Sally Bushell’s Re-Reading ‘The Excursion’: Narrative, Response and the Wordsworthian Dramatic Voice (Aldershot, 2001), but more recently critics have ventured beyond 1814. See Tim Fulford’s The Late Poetry of the Lake Poets: Romanticism Revisited (Cambridge, 2013).
27 For the Oxford editors of The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, the ‘middle years’ are 1806–20; in Mark L. Reed’s Chronology, the ‘middle years’ are 1800–15, which is the same span as that of the second volume of Duncan Wu’s Wordsworth’s Reading. That these key sources by Reed and Wu stop at 1815 has, arguably, contributed to the relative lack of critical investigation into Wordsworth’s post-1815 work.
28 Excursion, p. 38.
arrangement.29 Wordsworth never distinguished his poems according to periods of composition; thus, by focusing on the transitional years of 1806 to 1822, I aim to undo the ‘overdramatized polarization’ of Wordsworth’s poetry into ‘early’ and ‘late’ in order to advance a greater understanding of the coherence of the whole.30
Chapters 1–4 of this study focus on Wordsworth’s career from 1806 to 1815, during which time his knowledge of and imaginative engagement with the history of monasticism was continually developing. Wordsworth’s life and work during these years was, in many respects, riddled with anxiety, grief, and failure. Following the poor reception of Poems, in Two Volumes (1807), he refused to publish The White Doe of Rylstone (which would have eased the family’s financial worries) due to negative comments from Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Charles Lamb; in 1808 he aborted The Tuft of Primroses in mid-sentence without shaping it into a complete section of The Recluse; he was deeply troubled by the signing of the Convention of Cintra and the events of the Peninsular War, and his extended prose discussion of the controversy failed to sell when it was published in 1809.31 Coleridge was under pressure to produce his periodical, The Friend, and his disintegrating marriage and bad health were the cause of much anxiety in the Wordsworth household at Allan Bank in Grasmere.32 As the long European war dragged on, the relationship with Coleridge broke down, and then in 1812 the Wordsworths suffered the deaths of two of their children, Catherine and Thomas. Wordsworth composed much of The Excursion during this time of deep personal sorrow, professional struggle, and financial difficulty when friendships were strained and the anxieties of war prevailed.33
29 Prose, iii, 28. Based on the poet’s lifelong practice of re-experiencing and revising his poetry, Stephen Gill’s Wordsworth’s Revisitings (Oxford, 2011) demonstrates the extent to which Wordsworth’s work (in manuscript and in published form) exists as an evolving organic whole.
30 Alan G. Hill complains of this ‘polarization’ in ‘Wordsworth’s “Grand Design” ’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 72 (1986): 187–204 (p. 203). In a very subtle and moving essay, Peter Manning shows that Wordsworth’s ‘middle-aged’ narrators powerfully harness the distance between ‘an unsettled here and an unknown there’. By focusing on the distinction between youth and age, and noting that Wordsworth takes his impetus from this ‘middle’ position, Manning indirectly offers a convincing argument in support of greater critical attention to the ‘middle’ years, to which this book contributes. See ‘Wordsworth in Youth and Age’, ERR, 25 (2014): 385–96 (p. 385).
31 De Quincey took on the role of Wordsworth’s London editorial assistant but the confusion over the publication process almost ruined their relationship. See Prose, i, 201–17.
32 Wordsworth travelled to London in February 1808 because of ‘such alarming accounts’ (MY i., p. 198) of Coleridge’s health.
33 Jeffrey N. Cox explores the cultural and literary impact of the Napoleonic Wars on the second generation Romantic poets in Romanticism in the Shadow of War: Literary Culture in the Napoleonic War Years (Cambridge, 2014).
However, the work Wordsworth produced during this time is consistent, focused, and highly illuminating with regard to his ambitions for his overarching poetic project. With The Prelude complete in thirteen books, the period saw Wordsworth confidently developing clear themes as manuscript drafts were shaped into published poems and privately articulated ambitions were crafted into a new poetic manifesto. The period begins with the long sojourn at Beaumont’s Coleorton estate over the winter of 1806–7 and ends with Wordsworth dedicating his collected Poems to Sir George in 1815; it is circumscribed by The White Doe of Rylstone, which he conceived in 1807 and published in 1815, while sections of The Tuft of Primroses (initially drafted in 1808) were integrated into The Excursion by 1814; it starts with Wordsworth formulating critical statements in a private letter to Lady Beaumont of 1807 and ends with the defiant public proclamation of these ideas in the ‘Essay, Supplementary to the Preface’ (1815).34 As well as the deepening attachment to Sir George and Lady Beaumont, Wordsworth forged other important friendships during these years, meeting De Quincey for the first time in November 1807 and Henry Crabb Robinson in March 1808.35
Crucially, during this period, Wordsworth’s work was badly received both privately and in the periodical press. As his published writings failed to sell (it was not until The River Duddon volume of 1820 that Wordsworth really began to gain popularity) he despaired of the reading public’s inability to appreciate his work. This prompted his public assertion in 1815 that ‘every author, as far as he is great and at the same time original, has had the task of creating the taste by which he is to be enjoyed’.36 Wordsworth perceived that the excesses of gothic novels—which are more straightforwardly anti-Catholic and abound with haunted monastic buildings, evil monks, and corrupt nuns—contributed to the blunting of readers’ sensibilities. His interest in monastic history, therefore, was sustained alongside a concerted effort to produce poetry that would reformulate and refine readers’ taste: his thematic treatment of monasticism (attention to its architecture, routines, organization etc.) is, at least in part, an engagement with ecclesiastical history; but analysis of these themes helps explain stylistic shifts in his writing. In this often-neglected phase of his career, Wordsworth undertakes a series of generic experiments in order to craft poems capable of regenerating taste; he adapts popular narrative forms and challenges pastoral conventions, creating difficult, austere poetry which,
34 The letter of 21 May 1807 (MY i., pp. 145–51) is Wordsworth’s response to Lady Beaumont’s proclamation of support following poor reviews of Poems, in Two Volumes
35 See Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life (1989; repr. Oxford, 1990), p. 272 and Chronology, p. 378.
36 Prose, iii, 80.
he hopes, will encourage contemplation and subdue readers’ appetites for exciting narrative action. In this context, this book grants poems such as The White Doe of Rylstone and The Excursion the centrality Wordsworth believed they deserved, and reveals how Wordsworth’s engagement with the monastic history of his local region inflected his radical strategies for the creation of taste.
Wordsworth’s poetry deals thematically with monasticism in a very particular way. While it is not possible to provide an exhaustive account of what Wordsworth knew about the topic, we do know that he gained a nuanced understanding of the monastic world through a series of topographical, antiquarian, and hagiographic writings (composed in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries) by William Cave, John Weever, Thomas West, and Thomas Dunham Whitaker.37 Although they have long been identified as works that informed The White Doe, The Tuft of Primroses, and the Essays upon Epitaphs, these sources have not received from critics the careful attention they were given by Wordsworth, and scholars have neglected to note that together they amount to a substantial study of monastic history.38 These sources detail how the cultural and geographical landscape of the north of England was shaped by the rise and dissolution of powerful monastic houses. Such antiquarian studies are repositories of the cultural heritage of specific rural communities within Wordsworth’s local region; as layers of topographical and human history accumulate, his perception of that landscape and the identity of its present community is enriched. In addition to providing antiquarian minutiae, these sources make sense of feelings of local attachment and the instinct for memorialization; thus, monasticism resonates with Wordsworth as much more than ‘Roman Catholicism’.
For this reason, the present study is not particularly concerned with the development of Wordsworth’s High-Anglicanism and it differs from earlier accounts of the religious dimensions of his poetry in that it does not attempt to map explicit or subliminal theistic sympathies in his work, or in his privately or publically articulated beliefs.39 Moreover, it is evident that the
37 See Chapter 3 for full details.
38 As I explore the significance of this set of sources, I will question Tom Duggett’s assertion that antiquarian materials were, for Wordsworth, ‘only curiosities’ that he soon outgrew. While I agree with Duggett that Wordsworth was keen to distance himself from the type of romance writing at which Walter Scott excelled, I suggest that Wordsworth was in fact extensively influenced by local antiquarianism, which, for him, offered more than historical minutiae. See Gothic Romanticism: Architecture, Politics, and Literary Form (Basingstoke, 2010), pp. 12–13.
39 See, for example, H. N. Fairchild, Religious Trends in English Poetry, 6 vols (New York, 1939–68), iii (1949), 138–262; M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (London, 1971); Nancy Easterlin, Wordsworth and the
Wordsworth’s
open and suggestive style in which Wordsworth conveys religious ideas together with his thinking about the relationship between imagination and faith allows for (and even perhaps encourages) divergent interpretations of those ideas. From one perspective, for example, Richard E. Brantley makes the case that Wordsworth was inclined towards Evangelical Anglicanism, while at another extreme, John G. Rudy finds Zen Buddhism to be part of Wordsworth’s inclusive radical spirituality.40 Undoubtedly, Wordsworth’s interest in monasticism is grounded in material evidence of faith within a particular denominational context: he is concerned with ruined monasteries, coenobitic life, and ecclesiastical history and it is difficult to see how this could not have influenced the development of his High-Anglicanism; yet, within the antiquarian volumes through which Wordsworth encounters it, monastic history is framed as an aspect of England’s topographical and cultural heritage. Monasticism in England exists as a residual presence, as a religious legacy, which is inscribed in the landscape, in architecture, in graveyards, even in trees. Indeed, such natural features, relics, and ruins have increased value because they carry ‘That incommunicable sanctity | Which Time and nature only can bestow’.41 Wordsworth’s thematic engagement with monasticism, therefore, has a local topographical inflection and is not restricted to theological or ecclesiastical issues.42 In The White Doe of Rylstone, for example, Wordsworth emphasizes the long history of Bolton Abbey: Emily’s Catholic heritage has evolved and has been purified, not eradicated or secularized, but it is her experience of sorrow in that place that enables her to find fortitude. Furthermore, it is Wordsworth’s own visit to the ruins of Bolton Abbey in July 1807 that inspires him to read Whitaker’s work and to write the poem. Wordsworth does not have to Anglicize or secularize the monastic site and its surrounding landscape in order to make it palatable; rather, its affective power is enhanced because it has endured the passage of time.
While Wordsworth incorporated elements of monasticism into his poetry thematically, he also began to adopt its tenets as an aspect of his evolving style. In particular, as I have noted, a monastic aesthetic infiltrated Wordsworth’s attempt to ‘create the taste’ for his work. Again The White Doe of Rylstone exemplifies the process. In this poem, Wordsworth withholds narrative action and refuses to offer the exciting romance style that
Question of ‘Romantic Religion’ (Lewisburg, Pa, 1996); Robert M. Ryan, The Romantic Reformation; William A. Ulmer, The Christian Wordsworth, 1798–1805 (Albany, NY, 2001).
40 Richard E. Brantley, Wordsworth’s ‘Natural Methodism’ (New Haven, 1975); John G. Rudy, Wordsworth and the Zen Mind: The Poetry of Self-Emptying (Albany, NY, 1996).
41 The Tuft of Primroses, ll. 116–17, in Primroses, p. 42.
42 As an important aspect of Sir George Beaumont’s heritage, Grace Dieu is an exception to my emphasis on Wordsworth’s ‘local’ monastic history. See Chapter 2.
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