English 610 —British Romanticism

Professor
J. Jennifer Jones

The Pleasure in Defining Wordsworth’s Attempt at the Impossible: Hartman’s“Wordsworth, Inscriptions, and Romantic Nature Poetry”

Of Hartman’s famous and influential 1965 essay, “Wordsworth, Inscriptions, and Romantic Nature Poetry," it may be said that form and sense come together in ways that echo Wordsworthian sensibilities. Rarely stating his intentions explicitly, Hartman instead chooses to move the reader toward a sense of understanding through the slow and methodical accumulation and accretion of details and seemingly casual observations about the cultural, social, and natural landscape that Wordsworth inhabited. It would seem that Hartman truly takes pleasure in this process, and seeks to create, in his reader, a pleasure of discovery that mimics his own. He wants the reader to take part in his discovery as he has, following, via an artificially constructed linguistic means, the very path that he has followed in coming to a greater understanding of Wordsworth’s project, in the process of trying to define the genre of Wordsworth’s “Lines Left Upon a Seat in a Yew-Tree." Thus, the entire essay is a sort of slow burn, a very gradual crescendo, that leads toward an ultimate revelation that wants us to glimpse, even if in a very small way, the light of Wordsworth’s greatness and glory in a final burst of pleasure. This epiphany arrives near the end of the essay when Hartman announces that Wordsworth’s creation, “the modern lyric," attempts the impossible: a monument to spontaneity, a poem that coincides with the act and passion of its utterance . . . [that] tries to overcome the secondary or elegiac aspect of language by making language coterminous with life” (228). It is here that all of the carefully selected fragments that Hartman has arranged, come together as a unified whole. But first, before one arrives at this trumpeted conclusion, one has to go along the journey of discovery with Hartman, a pleasurable walk, if you will, that replicates his own pleasure at arriving upon this discovery.

Hartman evokes this feeling of pleasure production at the outset of the essay when he suggests that the reader’s inability to correctly designate the genre of Wordsworth’s poem is itself, in fact, pleasurable. He claims to enjoy the ways in which Wordsworth (as well his contemporary, Coleridge), stretch predetermined classifications and genres to their limits, forcing the reader or critic out of clichéd response and toward the challenge of defining projects that creatively reconfigure and rearticulate forms and formulas of the past, and thus he accepts the challenge of classifying Wordsworth’s poem with vigor and delight. He revels in the fact that one’s sense of the meaning of “Lines Left upon a Seat in a Yew Tree” does not depend on identification with a particular genre, and goes on describe this “lack” as a “positive virtue” (206).

Yet, make no mistake, identifying the poem with a particular genre, or, to be more precise, a set of genres or reconfiguration of genres, is exactly what Hartman intends to do. In opposition to those modernist critics who might scoff at Wordsworth’s lack of originality (Hartman names Robert Mayo as a prime example of this), Hartman attempts indeed to define Wordsworth’s “nature lyric," and, in the process, he hopes to show how, even if it is not necessarily composed of purely original elements Wordsworth’s composition and configuration of those elements indeed show how his project differs from the genres which preceded it, thus attesting to the genius of Wordsworth’s work.

Hartman begins his definition, innocuously enough, by comparing Wordsworth’s poem to the genre known as “inscription," a very general category of what might be termed loosely as poetry, in which words might be inscribed on any object in order to impart a sense of ownership, location, or occasion. He notes, in fact, that Charles Lamb referred to Wordsworth’s poem as “that inscription” (207). Inscription was (and is) indeed so commonplace and seemingly primitive form of writing that it almost goes without saying to call it a genre of writing. And, during the period preceding Wordsworth’s writings, inscriptions were indeed so popular that they branded a large number of physical objects, including even such seeming trivialities as dog collars. As Hartman writes, “the inscription could be anything conscious of the place on which it was written, and this could be tree, rock, statue, gravestone, sand, window, album, sundial, dog’s collar, back of fan, back of painting” (207). As readers we are left with a strangely humorous yet burning question: what do dog collars have to do with Wordsworth’s poems? Posing such a strange question ignites our curiosity and leads us to seek satisfaction for that curiosity.

Slyly employing humor, Hartman grabs our attention and does not let go. Coyly, he seems to suggest that literary critics have somehow missed the boat in designating a genre to Wordsworth’s nature-lyric. The inscription seems so obvious and commonplace that it is not even worth mentioning. Yet this play with an otherwise primitive, mundane, and prosaic form of writing is exactly what, for Hartman, makes Wordsworth’s poem so interesting and unique. The fact that Wordsworth’s poem is supposedly “left upon a seat in a yew tree” seems to suggest a very primitive, archaic aspect to his writing, making it a writing seemingly universally human. Thus Wordsworth succeeds in his self-appointed task of writing poetry in the language of the common man, by writing in a genre with which nearly any partially-literate human has experience, making a crude mark upon an object that indicates a feeling, thought, emotion, or simply existence itself.

Hartman proceeds to show how Wordsworth’s poems might relate to another form of poetry, the nature-inscription, which had begun to emerge in the mid-18 th century in the works of writers such as William Shenstone, who would write poems that would dot the landscapes of English show-gardens, positioned at various points and particular beautiful prospects, in order to direct the passerby as to how he or she might or should feel upon standing at such a beautiful spot. Hartman calls such poems “tourist guide[s] and antiquarian signpost[s]” (208), and suggests that Wordsworth’s poem is remarkable in that Wordsworth removes the nature-inscription from its function as “tourist guide and antiquarian signpost” and in the process, “ma[kes] the nature-description into a free-standing poem, able to commemorate any feeling for nature or the spot that aroused this feeling” (208). Again, Hartman demonstrates the ways in which Wordsworth transforms a generally uninteresting genre, a signpost (even if it is inscribed with poetry), that merely points to an object while being inseparable from that object, and makes it interesting, by removing the “signpost” from the spot itself and placing it instead directly in a poem. The poem can then work by invoking the feeling of the spot without necessarily being physically attached to it. In other words, Wordsworth succeeds in making the nature-inscription portable. This is another example of the ways in which Hartman cleverly draws us into his argument. He compares Wordsworth’s poem to a mundane genre, and then goes on to undermine that very mundanity.

Hartman’s next strategy is to place Wordsworth’s poem in the general tradition of the Greek epigram. He is careful to note that Wordsworth’s poem follows more in the tradition of the Greek epigram than the Latin epigram. The Greek epigram tended to be longer and more descriptive than the Latin epigram and also tended toward an elegiac tone, as it was placed on epitaphs, etc. The Latin epigram, as exemplified by Martial, on the other hand, tended to be short, terse, and satirical in nature, working pointedly and allegorically to attack Roman society and customs. With tongue-in-cheek wit, Hartman snickers at the fact that often the titles of Latin epigrams might be longer than the epigrams themselves, and jokes that since Wordsworth’s title is indeed excessively long, perhaps it does indeed share some resemblance to the Latin epigram. Again, Hartman disarms us with his humor. However, there is a very serious intention here. Clearly he is working to disassociate Wordsworth from the tradition of the Latin epigram, a tradition that was employed by many Enlightenment and neo-classicist writers in the formation of short, witty, punny maxims, proverbs, or saws, and finding voice in the poetry of writers such as Alexander Pope, who, in the use of heroic couplets in his locodescriptive poetry, repeatedly incorporated a form of Latin epigram. This demonstrates how Wordsworth imaginatively departs from the limitations imposed by Pope’s largely allegorical nature poetry, in which nature is pointed to (like a signpost) yet rarely, if at all, speaks for itself.

Next, Hartman uses Lessing’s definition of “the true inscription” as “not to be thought of as apart from that whereon it stands, or might stand,” and his notion that the inscription works first by providing readers with an “object of sense which arouses our curiosity” and then by giving us “the account of this same object, which satisfies that curiosity” (209) in order to show us that Wordsworth uses this very same structure in his poem. Wordsworth’s poem, in fact, begins with an “object of sense," namely, “the seat in a yew tree," which, due to its unusual nature, does arouse our curiosity, and he draws our attention to that object by beginning the poem in the tradition of the Siste Viator (“stop, passerby”), in the beginning of his opening line: “Nay, Traveller! Rest.” Then, in mentioning the anonymous man, the recluse, who may have sat in this same position under the bower and “piled the stones” there, Wordsworth succeeds in further sparking the curiosity of his reader, as the reader asks, “who was the man, and why was he here?”. There is some hidden meaning in the landscape that seems to require explanation, much like the signposts found in Shenstone’s show-gardens. This allows Wordsworth to then go on to satisfy this curiosity, by reading on. Yet Wordsworth’s poem, as it is simultaneously attached to the spot in spirit and, supposedly physically inscribed on the spot as well, while physically detached from the spot as it is printed on the page, it does not conform to Lessing’s interpretation of “true inscription” and in fact expands upon and explores the possibilities of the genre.

Likewise, Wordsworth’s poem, in conforming at least partially to the genre of the gravestone or epitaph, seems to recall the voice of the dead, the person who once existed there. The poem’s voice is seemingly removed from the mouth of the poet or the narrator and is instead placed in the mouth of the dead man, or the natural spot that man once inhabited. But instead of the gravestone speaking to the reader in the form of a short, witty epigram, the entire landscape is made to speak for itself. The impression in the yew-tree is made to speak, is given voice. By doing this, Wordsworth, unlike his predecessors such as Pope, removes locodescription from its function of using aspects of nature merely as pointing devices that encourages allegory or allusion alone. Furthermore, his poem works as a kind of gravestone, or epitaph, that follows in the tradition of Gray’s Elegy, “in which the division between countryside and cemetery is hardly felt” (210). At the same time, the poem works to “exorcise” the spirit of the dead man, restoring the beauty to the spot where the man once hid himself from that beauty: the Lines in a Yew-Tree exorcise the spot and rededicate the seat to its proper purpose of marking a beautiful view” (211). In this way, Wordsworth combines a feeling of alienation from the landscape with a love for the beauty of that same landscape, and in the process, both uses and reconfigures inherited genres.

It is here where all of the seemingly insignificant details begin to come together, and it is here where we are led happily to find that, despite what may have been said to the contrary, Wordsworth may be more original than had been previously considered. It seems implied that Wordsworth’s employment, reinterpretation, and recombination of various genres, all of which might have in some respects seem common, overused, abused, and even hackneyed and rendered clichéd, come together to produce a new lyric, the “nature lyric," which differs in form from its predecessors or antecedents: “what Wordsworth did was clear: he transformed the inscription into an independent nature poem, and in doing so created a principle form of the Romantic and modern lyric” (221). We arrive upon this finding as a great epiphany, as if to say, “oh, is that what Wordsworth’s poem has to do with dog collars?” Our curiosity has been, to a great extent, satisfied.

However, Hartman does not finish there. His encore has yet to come. Hartman goes on to argue that not only has Wordsworth created a new form of lyric, bringing a new form of nature writing into being, but he has also broken from a tradition of writing, exemplified by Alexander Pope, in which poets would, using a short, pointed style, use nature merely as a tool or pointing device in order to perform a certain didactic function that imposes the authority of the narrator over the landscape rather than letting the landscape in some way speak for itself. In combining features of Greek epigram, inscription, nature-inscription, the elegy, the epitaph, and the gravestone, Wordsworth, according to Hartman, is able, at least in some way, to achieve “the impossible," and in so doing “redeem[s] the poem from the bondage of the pointed or witty style” (228) so exemplified by Pope. Yet, at the same time, Wordsworth is still able to moralize, while seemingly having the morals come not from his own mouth, but rather that of the landscape, the deceased, or the nature which has been inscribed. This is Wordsworth’s genius, which results in replacing the “urbane didacticism of the school of Pope” with an “oracular didacticism which the inscription, with its palpable design on the passerby, allowed” (229). It is upon this second, final moment of epiphany that we find the pleasurable climax of Hartman’s essay, the moment when the enlightenment of his discovery is transferred.

James Patrick Gorham
University of Rhode Island
November 1, 2005

Flagg Road 124
TH 11-noon; 2-3pm

Required Texts

John Milton. Paradise Lost (Norton)

Marilyn Butler, ed. Burke, Paine, Godwin, and the Revolution Controversy (Cambridge)

William Godwin. Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (Penguin)

Stephen Gill, ed. William Wordsworth: A Critical Edition of the Major Works (Oxford)

William Wordsworth. The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850 (Norton)

H. J. Jackson, ed. Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Critical Edition of the Major Works (Oxford)

Donald H. Reiman, ed. Shelley's Poetry and Prose: A Norton Critical Edition (Norton)

Jerome McGann, ed. Lord Byron: The Major Works (Oxford)

Edward Hirsch, ed. Complete Poems and Selected Letters of John Keats (Random House)

Harold Bloom, ed. Romanticism and Consciousness (Norton)

Course Packet (Rhode Island Book Company)

NOTE: With the exceptions of Caleb Williams and the Course Packet, all materials are available through Reserve at the URI library.

Class Participation (15%)
Seminar Paper (70%)
Class Opening (15%