#Wordsworth death full
He demanded for the ordinary and the damaged not a grudging pity but the full sympathy that recognizes “that we have all of us one human heart.” Wordsworth’s faith in the heart, in fact, has something of the paradoxical, frightening absoluteness of the New Testament. What discomfited them was not just the defiant humility of Wordsworth’s subjects-an old beggar, a madwoman, a retarded child-but the revolutionary scope of his claims on their behalf. For his first critics, it was a nervous response to the poet’s intense seriousness, like the giggling of children during a sermon. “For nearly twenty years,” Samuel Taylor Coleridge complained in “Biographia Literaria,” Wordsworth’s poems “have well-nigh engrossed criticism, as the main, if not the only, butt of review, magazine, pamphlet, poem, and paragraph.”īut the urge to make fun of Wordsworth has always been a guilty one. Francis Jeffrey, the critical dictator of the Edinburgh Review, declared that “if the printing of such trash as this be not felt as an insult on the public taste, we are afraid it cannot be insulted.” Jeffrey remained the chief bane of Wordsworth’s career-in 1814, his review of “The Excursion,” a nine-thousand-line epic, began with an airy “This will never do”-but he was just one of many who felt the need to cut the poet down to size. In 1807, when Wordsworth published “Poems, in Two Volumes,” the fashionable reviewers competed in the ingenuity of their scorn. Has there ever been a great poet as tempting to laugh at as William Wordsworth? The tradition of mocking him is as old as the tradition of revering him. A visit to France made Wordsworth an ardent supporter of the Revolution, but his best work came when his ardor started to cool.
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