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“Home at Grasmere”: Ecological Holiness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Karl Kroeber
Karl Kroeber*
Affiliation:
Columbia University, New York, New York
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Abstract

Wordsworth's “Home at Grasmere,” the one completed book of The Recluse, expresses a conception of home as a territorial sanctuary. The holiness of Grasmere Vale as a dwelling place consists in the possibility for ecological wholeness which it provides. The enclosure of the valley liberates the poet's psychic potency, because there he is encouraged to be receptive to multiple dimensions of experience. Through such openness he is consciously able to reintegrate his being into the enduring rhythms of natural existence, thereby articulating his unique individuality. “Home at Grasmere,” then, embodies Wordsworth's ideal of what poetry should be, namely, the realization through language of the intrinsic poeticalness of commonplace actuality. This true poetry, which is characterized by interplay between physical “fact” and mental “fancy,” liberates man from the prison of mere perception, revealing how individuals'—by fitting themselves to nature and fitting nature to themselves—can give unique expression to the unified, interdependent wholeness which is life, the expression being a fulfillment rather than a negation of fundamental inherent tendencies of natural process. In so celebrating such interaction of art and nature, Wordsworth raises questions about some current presuppositions of what constitutes basic interrelations among literature, civilization, and the physical environment.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 89 , Issue 1 , January 1974 , pp. 132 - 141
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1974

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References

Note 1 in page 141 Two good commentaries, however, are those of Herbert Lindenberger, On Wordsworth's Prelude, 2nd ed. (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1966), pp. 163–66; and Geoffrey Hartman, Wordsworth's Poetry 1787–1814 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1964), pp. 171–74.

Note 2 in page 141 Although Carlos Baker does not use the word “superimposition” in his introduction to the Rinehart Edition of The Prelude (New York: Holt, 1948), my term doubtless derives from his analogy of a photographic “double exposure” in that excellent essay.

Note 3 in page 141 “A Whole without dependence or defect, / Made for itself; and happy in itself, / Perfect Contentment, Unity entire.” “The Recluse. Part First. Book First. Home at Grasmere,” The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. E. de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1949), Appendix A, 318, 11. 149–51. All my quotations from “Home at Grasmere” are from this edition, which prints what I call the “Prospectus lines” (the last 107 11.) in their “final” form only in the Preface to The Excursion, v, 3–6. At least a portion of these lines probably was composed as early as 1798.

Note 4 in page 141 The quoted phrase is from the MS. ? version of the “Prospectus lines,” de Selincourt, v, 327. Hereafter quotations from “Home at Grasmere” are identified by line number only.

Note 5 in page 141 On art as miniaturization, see Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1966), pp. 22–25.

Note 6 in page 141 Leavis' discussion appeared originally in Revaluation, but my quotations are from the reprint of his essay appearing in Jack Davis' handy collection, Discussions of William Wordsworth (Boston: Heath, 1964), pp. 90–108.

Note 7 in page 141 ' A tradition in which Wordsworth works in “Home at Grasmere” originates in Denham's “Coopers Hill,” the first example of “local poetry,” as Dr. Johnson named it. An aspect of this tradition is discussed by Geoffrey Hartman in “Romantic Poetry and the Genius Loci,” The Disciplines of Criticism, ed. Peter Demetz, Thomas Greene, and Lowry Nelson, Jr. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1968), pp. 289–314. In a larger study, of which this essay is a part, I discuss not only literary but also graphic traditions of landscape art upon which Wordsworth drew.

Note 8 in page 141 Only after writing this comment on Wordsworth's diction and syntax did I encounter the late W. J. Harvey's “Poetic Vision in the World of Prose,” Inaugural Lecture, The Queen's University, New Lecture Series, No. 29 (Belfast: Queen's Univ., 1966), which anticipates several of my observations; see esp. pp. 9, 11–12.