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Any discussion of William Wordsworth invariably brings forth three maxims. First, he's the great poet of self-consciousness, having practically cooked up the concept in The Prelude; second, he's the preeminent nature boy of the romantic era; and third, his work went steadily downhill after the glory days of Poems in Two Volumes (1807). David Bromwich, however, feels differently. In Disowne... More

Any discussion of William Wordsworth invariably brings forth three maxims. First, he's the great poet of self-consciousness, having practically cooked up the concept in The Prelude; second, he's the preeminent nature boy of the romantic era; and third, his work went steadily downhill after the glory days of Poems in Two Volumes (1807). David Bromwich, however, feels differently. In Disowned by Memory, he slides Wordsworth's poetry of the 1790s under the magnifying glass and comes up with some persuasive revisionism.

It's not that Bromwich presents an brand-new, nature-hating Wordsworth. But he does suggest that we do the poet an injustice by tarring him with the tranquil, touchy-feeley brush: We have honored him for uninteresting virtues; but the fault is not entirely his. Art of a certain dignity risks being fancied in the minds of spectators as a monumental thing. Wordsworth was a disagreeable man and an interesting poet, but a man wrote the poems and it seems worth keeping him in view, as disagreeably as possible. Bromwich initially applies the blowtorch to our conception of Wordsworth's ideology, examining the early poem "The Old Cumberland Beggar" for its expression of what the author calls "radical humanity." This is no bucolic postcard, he argues, but a complicated spin on worth and worthlessness, the self and society, in which the beggar operates as a odd medium of exchange: "His life is more valuable than others just because it is obviously less valued." Elsewhere Bromwich ponders his subject's verse-play, "The Borderers"--in which he sees Wordsworth working out his mingled guilt and joy over the violence of the French Revolution--and recasts "Tintern Abbey" as an expression of seclusion from nature, rather than an anticipatory tree-hugger's anthem. Here as always Bromwich is tartly provocative, even on the subject of being provocative: "To become detached from one habitual sense of a poem is an odd and unsettling process, and it takes time. I can compare it to having a fixed idea of a friend who, when you meet him after a long absence, says or does something so peculiar that it changes the whole picture of his character, until you think about it and realize this was part of the picture all along."

The Wordsworth we encounter in Disowned by Memory is indeed detached from our habitual sense of the poet. Still, Bromwich's arguments are so sound, and his prose so agreeably spiky, that he forces you to think through what he's saying and offer some articulate reply. It was Hazlitt who first put the finger on Wordsworth's paradoxical insularity: "He sees nothing but himself and the universe." But Bromwich too makes you wonder whether being self-centered is a good thing, a bad thing, or just a fact of life for a poet. --James Marcus

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