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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Wordsworth's love of freedom and independence is an ingredient in nearly all his best poetry. In his passages of highest elevation, when the language becomes richly connotative and evocative, the individual at the center stands untrammeled in the open air. Merely to take the subject of liberty was not, of course, to eliminate the chance of mediocre verse—Wordsworth forced undistinguished rimes on liberty as on other subjects—but on this subject, inevitably frequent, and with this impulse, present in all the happiest moments of his life, he achieved his furthest creative reaches. Without any effort to review or to discuss the chronological development of his ideas on political liberty, or to examine his political or social views at all, the following pages attempt to cast some light on the way ideas and feelings of personal liberty operate in Wordsworth's poems. The first section treats these ideas and feelings necessarily with some reference to chronological changes and to inter-weavings with love of political liberty; but the emphasis, as in Section ri on the range and variety of Wordsworth's libertarian imagery, is on his continuing interest in individual freedom.
page 1033 note 1 The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbi-shire, S vols. (Oxford, 1940–49), in, 128. All quotations from Wordsworth's shorter poems will be cited from this ed. and will be identified in the notes or within parentheses in the text, in order to reduce documentation, by the volume and page numbers of this ed. Quotations from The Prelude and The Excursion will be designated by their respective book and line numbers.
page 1033 note 2 PSO xiv.130–135. Quotations from The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet's Mind, ed. Ernest de Selincourt (London [1928]) will be thus designated, by the letter P followed by either 5 (for the 1805–06 version) or 50 (for the 1850 version) and by their respective book and line numbers. On liberty fostered by rural solitude, see also i, 61, 63; ii. 87, 88; iii, 73–75; P50 viii.104–105.
page 1033 note 3 See “The Source of the Danube” and the sonnet that follows, iii, 170, 171.
page 1033 note 4 “Literary Reminiscences,” Selected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, ed. Philip Van Doren Stern (New York [1949]), pp. 418–419. The passage is cited by R. D. Havens, who supports with his interpretative acuity my belief that Wordsworth's love of political liberty has kinship with his indolence, wilfulness, and love of wandering, to which Havens adds Wordsworth's self-confidence and (following A. V. Dicey) his “sympathy with vigorous action”—The Mind of a Poet (Baltimore, 1941), pp. 299, 348, 407–408, 416–417.
page 1033 note 5 On this kinship with favorite poets, except that it is treated too often as Wordsworth's echoing from them, the best study is Abbie Findlay Potts, Wordsworth's Prelude: A Study of Its Literary Form (Ithaca, [1953]). Wordsworth's letters (and Dorothy's), especially the comments on Beattie, Bums, Collins, Cowper, Dyer, Milton, and Thomson, reveal generally constant admiration of these poets; and see The Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson with the Wordsworth Circle, ed. Edith J. Morley (Oxford, 1927), n, 871–872.
page 1033 note 6 William A. Eddy, ed. Satires and Personal Writings by Jonathan Swift (London, 1933), p. xxxii; Maurice Johnson, “Swift and ‘The Greatest Epitaph in History’,” PMLA, lxviii (1953), 824.
page 1033 note 7 ii, 394. See in, 29; Exc. iv.824; The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Later Years, ed. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford, 1939), i, 437; Poems in Two Volumes, 1807, ed. Helen Darbishire, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1952), p. 388; Crane Brinton, The Political Ideas of the English Romanticists (London, 1926), p. 53.
page 1033 note 8 “Wordsworth: A Minority Report,” Wordsworth: Centenary Studies, ed. Gilbert T. Dunklin (Princeton, 1951), p. 21.
page 1033 note 9 The Egotistical Sublime: A History of Wordsworth's Imagination (London, 1954), pp. 194–195.
page 1033 note 10 For the distinction between the immediate “theme” and the continuing “motif” I am indebted to Heinrich Henel, The Poetry of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer (Madison, 1954), pp. 15 ff.
page 1033 note 11 Agrarian Age: A Background/or Wordsworth, Yale Stud, in Eng., Vol. 115 (New Haven, 1950), p. 96. See also Herbert Read, The True Voice of Feeling (London, 1953), p. 204.
page 1033 note 12 iii, 111, 112,115. Z. S. Fink has shown that the “myth” of Venice, including the image of the unconquered city as virgin, came from the Renaissance republicans; see “Wordsworth and the English Republican Tradition,” JEGP, xlvii (1948), 118–119, and The Classical Republicans (Evanston, 1945), pp. 28–51. Wordsworth could have found the myth in Machiavelli's Discourses.
page 1033 note 13 To determine the relative frequency of the concept of freedom and of competing concepts, I have made spot checks throughout Wordsworth's poems. One can only establish touchstones; no one can secure absolute agreement on what is to be understood by “image,” “concept,” or “freedom.” I should include among poetic images all beings and objects suggested concretely to the reader, but my counts depend largely on the figures of metaphor, simile, and concrete symbol. If it is difficult to determine what is imagery, it is much more difficult to determine what is a separable image. In The Excursion, written when the poet's first zeal for liberty had certainly cooled (but not chilled), I have found by my own touchstones 19 passages concerning liberty, 42 literal allusions to it, and 78 metaphors of freedom or bondage. By the inclusion of weaker images and figures and vaguer references to confinement, but still excluding most uses of the adjective free, the last number could be doubled. I do not use these numbers to convince but merely to suggest.
Concordance-counting has proved a valuable stimulus, in the patient hands of Josephine Miles, to inferences concerning a poet's diction; it is much less satisfactory for determining the frequency of concepts, because an idea can hide in an image or a circumlocution and will in any event reside in a vast number of synonyms. Yet hundreds of passages in which Wordsworth reveals a sensitivity to liberty or freedom can be isolated by searching out compounds of bind, bond, captive, chain, fetter, prison, slave, trammel, tyrant, yoke, etc., in Lane Cooper, A Concordance to the Poems of William Wordsworth (New York, 1911). For conflicting analyses see Franklyn Bliss Snyder, “Wordsworth's Favorite Words,” JEGP, xxn (1923), 253; Josephine Miles, Wordsworth and the Vocabulary of Emotion, Univ. of Calif. Pubs, in Eng., Vol. xn, No. 1 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1942), p. 171.
page 1033 note 14 iii, 529. See iii, 268; iv, 37–38.
page 1033 note 15 “Wordsworth's ‘Inscrutable Workmanship’ and the Emblems of Reality,” PMLA, lxviii (1953), 452. See ii, 330, 525.
page 1033 note 16 For examples, besides Bk. vii of The Prelude, the sonnets of 1802–07, noting that the “wealthiest man among us is the best,” and the well-known narratives, see ii, 219–220, 342; iv, 21.
page 1033 note 17 iii, 115. This elemental distinction eluded even so observant a critic as Florence Marsh, Wordsworth's Imagery: A Study in Poetic Vision, Yale Stud, in Eng., Vol. 121 (New Haven, 1952), pp. 21, 95.
page 1033 note 18 “Wordsworth's River Duddon Sonnets,” PLMA, lxix (1954), 131–141.
page 1033 note 19 iv, 10. Cf. Esc. n.827–881, and see “Wordsworth: Two Cloud-scapes,” N&Q, cxcviii (1953), 66.
page 1033 note 20 “Fancy in Nubibus; or, The Poet in the Clouds,” The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1912), i, 435.
page 1033 note 21 See Kurt Badt, John Constable's Clouds, trans. Stanley Godman (London [1950]), p. 43.
page 1033 note 22 ii, 237. See John Ruskin, Modern Painters, ii.iii.sec. 1, ch. 7, par. 2.
page 1033 note 23 Modern Painters, iii, ch. 16, pars. 1–2,5–6.
page 1033 note 24 The Letters of John Keats, ed. Maurice Buxton Forman, 3rd ed. (London [1948]), p. 205.
page 1033 note 26 Correspondence of Crabb Robinson with the Wordsworth Circle, i, 153. De Selincourt suggests that because of Robinson's strong plea Wordsworth returns in the sonnet “Just vengeance claims thy Soul for rights invaded?” to “the theme of Liberty, though in more general terms” (iii, 426). But I think the sonnet faces us with an unidentified topical allusion.