The Palpable Presence of Time: David Lehman on Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey"

It is not difficult to see why some poets from Lord Byron to the present have resisted and sometimes even jeered at William Wordsworth (1770-1850). The refreshing heterodoxy of Wordsworth's youthful verse gave way to the piety of his "Ode to Duty." He started out full of French revolutionary fervor—"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven!"—but grew disenchanted and became a Tory. By the time he was 40 he had lost what he called the "visionary gleam." But he lived 40 years more and kept writing.

Not for Wordsworth the ghostly galleons of Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"; Wordsworth's imagination was tamer than that of his collaborator on the landmark "Lyrical Ballads," to whom he was a less than generous friend. Nor was he as adroit a craftsman as Keats or Shelley, masters of lyric forms, although he single-handedly revived the sonnet from a century of neglect. He lacked utterly what Byron had to excess: a sense of humor. There isn't an intentionally funny line in Wordsworth.

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Comments

[Mitch S.]

I had just been reading "Tintern Abbey" this evening! W is about my favorite poet and I'm always inspired by his work: his perfect sonnets, "Intimations of Immortality" etc. It's all really "spontaneous overflow of emotion recollected in tranquility." What an amazing phrase and formulation!

[Mitch S.]

Oh, and just one more thing, as Detective Columbo used to say. When David writes "there is not a single intentionally funny line" in Wordsworth, mustn't we ask (with Professor deMan!) whether we can really know the poet's intention? Perhaps EVERY line was intended to be funny, but Wordsworth didn't have a good sense of humor. Or maybe every line actually IS funny, and it's we who lack a sense of humor! Or maybe what doesn't seem funny now will be very funny later on. In fact, Wordsworth is getting funnier (imho) as time goes by -- and though some may say that was not his intention, Professor deMan again asks, "How do you know that? You a mind reader?" Remember what Joe Pesci said: "Funny how?! What in the FUCK is funny about me?!" Now that's funny!