Eleanor Monroe mentioned Radical Wordsworth in her contribution to The Rialto Books Review vol.021, her essay The Poetic Plant: Nature in Wordsworth and Hardy.
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collaboration on any kind of writing is difficult, even more so when that writing is literature. Poetry must require a special relationship between the two authors to abide collaboration in any degree.
Literary relationships are like the atom. They bear their fruit through either fusion or fission, indifferent as to the mechanism. My cats attend this reading and adopt the aspects of Coleridge and Wordsworth.
I intend to pay particular attention to accounts of life, manifest then, and all but absent now, that contribute to a life in letters and its products, which seem a natural outgrowth of the era described here. Literature feels like its estate in contemporary life requires constant upkeep, like it is situated on a cliff side that, however sound it was when the house was erected, now falls away en masse and takes portions of wall with it. Not only the house, but also the cliffside, has to be maintained, and residence in its walls is more a wellspring of anxiety than comfort.
This wealth of life is not likely to be encountered on walks in America, nor, I suspect, in contemporary Cumbria.
Nor today are there so many dead mothers, and perhaps, though bleakly, this is also poetry’s loss.
The smoothing over of the day to day dynamics of transport, social functions, landmarks, and nature is regrettable, as the ability to think through these removes, imbuing them with self, is not so easy when it comes to machinery, and even more difficult when it comes to technology. The life I lead now would have to be totally diverted to experience a shade of these elements common to Wordsworth’s Cumbria.
Pickwick Papers also contains an excellent skating sequence.
When I work intensively at my writing, I feel that an epiphenomenon of the minor parts of writing, those being the construction of sentences, the choice of words, etc. is that a lexicon of memory is produced and can produce a reliable effect along the lengths of that instrument, just as a note can be shaped through the body of the piano by way of a shapeless and singular impact on the string.
I thought yesterday of how the smoothing over of life makes for vessels that would require a more potent liquor to achieve the same effect that the deeper vessels of life's dynamics in the past offered with a less volatile substance. This image of a woman with a pitcher is an embodiment of this symbol in actual fact. As with chemical manufacturing, we have gone from kettles to beakers, and the beakers have been sequestered in opaque facilities. No woman can be observed struggling with her role in the exchange of substances. It all end up in bottles and pill bottles on shelfs in stores, ready to be purchased and consumed.
the parallels to Proust’s cascading remembrances arising out of occurrences that strike their observer in a particular fashion are plain. I need to read Wordsworth in full to see how direct the comparison is, and where it swerves.
For me to re-enter this state, either fleetingly in the common code of the day, or permanently figured in writing would require a feat of concentration. as with any reading, a shade of that full ability would be achieved simply by reading Wordsworth. it’s integration as a skill into life would require continued study and practice in the same mode.
Interesting. This is an entirely novel concept to me, but it opens the doors of perception that much wider.
Ted hughes wrote in the 21st century. The startling image of a half-man half-fox feels like it comes out of earlier modes of English literature, or even further back to Greek and Roman literature, whereas Wordsworth existed in a moment when the fantastical was diminished in favor of romantic communion with nature.
I never saw described before this distinction Edmund Burke makes between sublime and beautiful.
I remember from my own religious life how urgent paradise seemed, but access to it required constant vigilance and traversal of the layered Catholic imperatives. This is how it must have felt for most Europeans. Blake’s framing of paradise must have been rather shocking to his readers, but even today it feels urgent. It perhaps is the kind of idea that is required to sustain the urgency of paradise in a secular context.
Books, especially of the kind Rousseau wrote, no longer able to effect public discourse or perception, we no longer select for or elect to the upper ranks of consideration individuals with the disposition and discipline needed to write books. This is a loss.
on “agitation“ see note on introduction of Illuminations