Volume 29, Number 2 · February 18, 1982
Family Man
By John Bayley
The Love Letters of William and Mary Wordsworth
edited by Beth Darlington
Cornell University Press, 265 pp., $17.95
My Dearest Love: Letters of William and Mary Wordsworth, 1810 by Blackwell's Rare Books, Fyfield Manor, Abingdon, Oxford, OX13 5LR
edited in facsimile by Beth Darlington, foreword by Jonathan Wordsworth
The Trustees of Dove Cottage, printed by the Scolar Press, distributed, 81 pp., £215; limited edition £450
Wordsworth's poems are like one's parents' clothes—always out of fashion. Donne is always our contemporary, even more so is Stendhal, who was in fact Wordsworth's contemporary. How does one name these feelings, or rather how can one rationalize them? Why have Donne and Stendhal in their writings a modern mind and Wordsworth an irremediably dated one? He is as egotistic as they, as intent on impressing his own consciousness on paper. But perhaps, as Keats intuited, it is because Wordsworth in his poetry appears as the 'Egotistical Sublime.' That, where posterity is concerned, is a fatal combination. Most artists redeem their natural solipsism as artists by continual suggestions in their art of personal chaos, drama, disaster, accident-proneness, what Auden calls 'human unsuccess.' They are not in the least sublime, they are 'human, all too human'; and we respond to that. We admire the artist's talent for self-destruction.
Review, 3884 words
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