F.R. Leavis on Wordsworth

The last public lecture Q. D. Leavis gave and saw published in her lifetime was the Cheltenham Festival lecture “The Englishness of the English Novel.” If Dr. Leavis were to have given a lecture on “the Englishness of English Poetry”—hardly a Leavisian title, I should have thought, until I recalled his essay on “The Americanness of American Literature”—­William Wordsworth would surely figure in it as a key name or, to use a Poundian phrase, a key “exhibit,” just as Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Charles Dickens figure in Q. D. Leavis’s lecture. And, if only non‑dramatic poetry were in question, perhaps the key figure. Of course Leavis didn’t write on Wordsworth as much or as often as he did on Lawrence or Eliot; nor did he, in matters relating strictly to form, technique, and style, consider Wordsworth as important, or, at least, as interesting as, say, Donne, Pope, or Hopkins. And insofar as he responded to the mystical, the religious, or the visionary in poetry, he valued Blake more than Wordsworth; one could go even so far as to suggest that he valued Blake even more than Eliot.

Yet Wordsworth’s poetry at its best meant a great deal to Leavis. What it meant is as difficult to pinpoint or illustrate as it is to give, in Leavis’s own words, “a satisfying account of Wordsworth’s greatness.” Leavis responded to Wordsworth’s poetry at its best, with the utmost powers of perception, analysis, and judgment at his command; and he wrote about it with an unusual degree of sympathy and inwardness. In fact there is no major poet except Shakespeare vis-à-vis whom Leavis had fewer critical reservations than Wordsworth. The earlier essay of his from Revaluation (1936)—the weightiest and the most original in that volume—is a landmark in Wordsworth criticism, and more significant than any other single piece of Wordsworth criticism since Arnold’s es­say, not excepting James Smith’s Scrutiny essay that Leavis himself admired.

After Revaluation Leavis’s critical in­terest shifted to and was mostly focused on T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence. But in later years he returned to Wordsworth. He gave seminars on him at York Univer­sity; delivered the “Wordsworth Bicentenary Lecture” at Bristol Univer­sity; and, in the last two years of his life, whatever he was engaged in writing was directly or indirectly connected with Wordsworth, whom he came to see both as a corrective and as a supplement to Eliot—and not least so because like Eliot, Wordsworth too had been responsible for altering expression.

In his earlier essay Leavis was con­cerned with discriminating not only be­tween Wordsworth’s poetry and his philosophy, but also between critical recognition of Wordsworth’s greatness as such and its “current acceptance, the estab­lished habit of many years.” He agreed with Arnold that Wordsworth’s philoso­phy was an “illusion” and set out to dem­onstrate what constituted its reality and its greatness. “If not a philosophy,” Leavis observed, Wordsworth had “a wisdom to communicate.” Leavis’s own strength and originality as a critic lie in the fact that while dealing with Wordsworth’s poetry, he doesn’t feel called upon, as René Wellek had hinted in his criticism of Revaluation he should have, to discuss and interpret that wisdom in terms of abstract moral, philosophical, or ethical concepts or assumptions, nor does he evaluate the poetry merely as a vehicle of that wisdom. And it is precisely what is unparaphrasable about that wisdom, and the way it works into and through Wordsworth’s poetry, that engages Leavis as a critic (i.e., as an anti-philoso­pher). Even what he himself calls the “convincingly expository tone and man­ner” of Wordsworth’s philosophical po­etry evokes in Leavis what is primarily and essentially a critical rather than a philosophical response. Such poetry, Leavis points out, might give one the impression of offering “paraphrasable arguments,” but a real critic cannot re­ally paraphrase it, and it would be worse than futile to try. And this because Wordsworth’s triumph is precisely “to command the kind of attention he requires and to permit no other.” What that kind of attention means it takes a literary critic, an ideal reader, to per­ceive and determine, and this is what Leavis, in his first essay on Wordsworth, does so superbly.

He sets out to work his way into what he calls “an essential Wordsworthian habit”—namely, that of producing “the mood, feeling and experience,” and at the same time appearing to be “giving an explanation of it.” Such a habit enables Wordsworth to register his kinship with the universe, “inwardly through the ris­ing springs of life and outwardly in an interplay of recognition and response.” Without insisting on the demarcation between poetry and philosophical argu­ment as such, Leavis assumes the demarcation when he comments on the most overtly philosophical and discursive pas­sages of The Prelude. For instance, he notices how the verse “evenly medita­tive in tone and movement, goes on and on, without dialectical suspense and cri­sis or rise and fall”—verse in which not only thought is presented in disjunction from poetry, but also even the language it is presented in hasn’t succeeded in exer­cising its own discipline on the thought expressed. It is by virtue of this discipline that creative literature becomes the lan­guage of thought—a phenomenon that makes Leavis bracket Wordsworth with Eliot. For “the withdrawn contemplative collectedness of Wordsworth’s poetry” and what it represents find their corre­spondence or counterpart in Eliot’s po­etry as exemplified by such a line as “Thus devoted, concentrated in pur­pose.” For Leavis, his bracketing Wordsworth and Eliot became increas­ingly charged with a significance that was at once critical and historical. For both Wordsworth and Eliot had not merely effected a revolution in poetic diction; they were also engaged in “thinking” creatively in and through their po­etry, and the presentation of “thought” in Wordsworth’s poetry, as in Eliot’s, demanded, “not only what the full attention of the working mind suggests,” but also “a sustained and alert delicacy of attention, a quick and delicate responsiveness of full apprehension.”

Leavis himself impressively displays such attention in his dealings with Wordsworth, and to be aware of the vary­ing degrees and manifestations of this attention is a proof of one’s being instinc­tively in sympathy with the critical grounds on which Leavis advances Wordsworth’s claim to greatness and originality. One factor that made a funda­mental difference to Leavis’s attitude to Wordsworth is the latter’s embodying in his poetry “a type and a standard of human normality, a way of life”; so that what Leavis says concerning the theme of time in Four Quartets—“an attitude towards time is an attitude towards life”—one can apply to Wordsworth’s “preoc­cupation with sanity and normality . . . at a level and in a spirit that it seems appro­priate to call religious,” and say that Wordsworth’s attitude to sanity and normality stands for and amounts to his attitude to life. Coupled with, and to a large extent both determined by and determining this preoccupation was Wordsworth’s handling of his own thought and experience in poetry, which entailed a creative use of language, so that the language of poetry becomes the language of thought at its most subtle and perceptive, and it has, according to Leavis, a bearing upon life, upon actual living.

Hence, in his attempt to give a “satis­fying” account of Wordsworth’s great­ness, Leavis didn’t lay as much stress, as perhaps Wordsworth himself would have laid, on the mystic element in his poetry, or on “the visionary moments” or “spots of time,” but on Wordsworth’s “essential sanity and normality”—the sanity and normality of one who was, unlike Shelley, “surely and centrally poised” and whose “firm hold upon the world of common perception” was the more notable be­cause he knew “falling from us, vanishings, blank misgivings.” And yet there was nothing complacent about such sureness in Wordsworth. It rested “consciously over unsounded depths and among mysteries, itself a mystery.” The analysis of what constitutes the sanity and normality in Wordsworth’s poetry is part of Leavis’s account of Wordsworth’s poetic greatness, and of his critical dem­onstration as to how Wordsworth’s “inveterately human and moral preoccupation” leads to the creation of thought no less than that of poetry.

Another element in Wordsworth’s poetic greatness for Leavis is his “matu­rity”—a pivotal criterion in Leavis’s criticism. “If the strength of Wordsworth’s poetry,” says Leavis, “is that it brings maturity and youth in relation, the weak­ness is that the experience from which it draws life is confined mainly to and lies at a distance,” a remark that throws as much light on the underlying ethos of Leavis’s own criticism as on the poetically realized link between matu­rity and wisdom, or between “the impersonality of Wordsworth’s wisdom and an immediately personal urgency.” One characteristic, and critically pregnant, passage in Leavis’s earlier essay on Wordsworth is where he defends him against the charge of averting his ken from half of human fate. If Wordsworth did so, observes Leavis, it was not a matter of weakness or cowardice, nor was his heart “unoccupied by sorrow of its own.” But for him “a disciplined limiting of contemplation to the endurable, and, consequently, a withdrawal to a reassuring environment, became terrible necessities.” In order to bring home this truth and its relevance to Wordsworth’s creativity, Leavis deals at some length with the story of Margaret in Book 1 of The Excursion, which he considered to be “the finest thing that Wordsworth wrote and certainly the most disturbingly poignant,” and to which he was to return in his “Bicentenary Lecture.” His critique of this poem brings into play Leavis’s key concepts and criteria which comprehend the whole gamut of his moral and critical sympathies. After having indicated “the emotional sources of Wordsworth’s poetry” and its “creative pressure and incitement,” Leavis distinguishes between Wordsworth’s “equipoise” and his “settled habit” and “inert­ness” to which that equipoise gradually led, and analyzes the way Wordsworth’s “inner voice” was transformed into a public voice. “The intimately and particularly realized experience of an un­usually and finely conscious individual,” we are told, was replaced by the sentiments and attitudes of the patriotic and Anglican Wordsworth, and what resulted from such a transition (or deterioration) is poetry that is at once “external, general and conventional,” and its medium is “insensitively Miltonic”—“not felt from within as something at the nerve‑tips, but handled from outside.”

In the “Wordsworth Bicentenary Lec­ture” delivered some thirty‑five years later, Leavis examined the creative con­ditions that made Wordsworth’s achieve­ment possible, and at the same time re­formulated his own approach to his po­etry, contrasting it with what he consid­ered to be “inert concurrence in conven­tional valuations and reputations” that the Wordsworth criticism—past and present—amounted to for Leavis. With an increasingly “personal” involvement in what Wordsworth’s poetry meant to him in his later life, Leavis came to be deeply impressed by the fact that Wordsworth “affects us as a creative force of life,” as “the growing tip of life,” and how he was as “robustly individualized as a human being can be.” For even though he, in the twentieth century, was “of the acclaimed poets” the one most neglected, he was for Leavis “peculiarly qualified to speak to our present sick civilization,” as well as to demonstrate, together with Eliot, “how formidable poetry can be as thought,” and how a poet of genius is “capable of creating reality.”

In his earlier essay Leavis had con­fined Wordsworth’s decisive creativity—his innovating power and the nature of his originality—to a very limited phase of his life, and had singled out the story of Margaret—“The Ruined Cottage”—as a poem that more than any other single poem of Wordsworth’s firmly vindicates Wordsworth’s importance and original­ity as a major poet. In his “Bicentenary Lecture,” he takes up that poem again and analyzes it at some length as bringing out Wordsworth’s “vital equivocalness” and “tense equipoise.” Quoting from Shelley’s poem “Peter Bell the Third,” where Shelley “turns the intensity of his interest and critical intelligence on Wordsworth,” registering, among other things, “his perception of the differences between himself and Wordsworth,” Leavis considers Shelley’s tribute to Wordsworth’s genius of crucial impor­tance—a tribute that helps him define and pinpoint his own critical response to Wordsworth’s poetry.

For instance, Leavis considered Wordsworth’s altering of expression as something much more than what goes by the name of Poetic Diction and “the confused and ineffective, though not essentially unintelligent, arguments” apropos, as expounded in the Preface. In “The Ruined Cottage,” the altering of expression is synonymous with, as it largely resulted from, what Leavis calls “the inner organic, the emotional moral­-spiritual, structure or economy of the poem” on which Wordsworth’s distinctive power depended. In other words, the question of altering expression was, according to Leavis, very much tied up with Wordsworth’s inner compulsion which exposed him to “the contemplat­ing he can hardly endure.” In this respect he was radically unlike Joyce—especially the Joyce of the later works—whose ver­bal innovations or creative audacities were largely dictated by his desire to “develop his medium to the fullest,” and not dictated by a pressure from within—the pressure of something that has to be conveyed. Thus Wordsworth’s mastery over expression—a mastery that makes the style of “The Ruined Cottage” in­tensely Wordsworthian—is determined by a pressure from within, which Leavis calls “the Traumatic expression,” “a pro­found emotional disturbance.” That there is something at once impersonal and universal about Margaret’s tale as well as about the way Wordsworth relates it, transforming it—“a common tale,” “an ordinary sorrow of man’s life”—into something incident to human life in gen­eral, confers upon the story both tragic dignity and human poignancy. Hence Leavis’s analysis of the experience behind the pressure, both moral and emo­tional, which dictates its own style, its own expression, and which becomes one with the analysis of the character of the experiencer—in “The Ruined Cottage” the Wanderer who represents “the Ideal Wordsworth he, the Wanderer, aspired, in an effort of imaginative realization, to be.”

Leavis’s critically perceptive appre­hension of the Wordsworth/Wanderer relationship has a central importance in his evaluation of “The Ruined Cottage.” The evoked Wanderer, Leavis tells us,

. . . is no more a poet potentially than he is one in his serene actuality. It was because the Wordsworth of 1797 was so different that he longed to be the Wanderer. The “equipoise” of “The Ruined Cottage,” then, is not the equipoise that Wordsworth attributes to the Wanderer. Its poignant livingness unsays any promise of finality, of permanence, the poem may seem to offer—to say which is to point to the pecu­liar poetic vitality of the poem, even while we note, knowing of course what is to happen, the poet’s strong impulse towards the Wanderer’s state. He can’t hold this tense and difficult poise very long.

Why Wordsworth can’t hold this tense and difficult poise very long, how young, troubled Wordsworth became more and more the Wanderer, and how equipoise settled into serenity leading to inertness, Leavis analyzes with that critical acu­men, subtlety, and delicacy of reasoning where, as far as the reading of poetry is concerned, he has no rivals. The con­cluding paragraph of the “Bicentenary Lecture” epitomizes all those qualities with an admirable finality: “When with his gift of piety Wordsworth had arrived at affording to suffer with those whom he saw suffer as easily and securely as the Wanderer did, there wasn’t much to save his creativity from lapsing into habit, or the Wanderer’s philosophic calm. It had lost its intransigence. It had lost, that is, its creativeness.”

The conclusion, and the whole drift of the lecture in general, must have im­pinged on Leavis’s thinking in the last ten years with a particular force, for in what he wrote during this period, as well as in his notes and jottings, he is seen repeatedly pondering on Wordsworth’s cre­ative achievement and reformulating and redefining his own critical response to it. Having Wordsworth’s “perfect” poems in mind—“The Ruined Cottage,” particu­larly—he goes on to argue how we “meet” in a poem as individuals—individuals who have ceased to be individuals and whose individuality is in abeyance or replaced with something else—“unanim­ity at a high level instead of the oneness of the flock of birds on the wing.” And to be critically articulate about such poems amounts for Leavis to one’s compelling oneself “to think vitally, that is profit­ably, about the sui generis nature of life,” which itself entails being articulate about meaning, value, and art-speech. Having notably achieved such articulation in the last two books published in his lifetime—The Living Principle (1975) and Thought, Words and Creativity (1976)—and in the posthumously published collection of his essays, The Critic as Anti‑Philosopher (1983), which contains the “Bicentenary Lecture” on Wordsworth—Leavis sets out to explore further in that direction, with Wordsworth and Eliot sharing the focus of his critical attention. For the way a poetic genius—say a Wordsworth or an Eliot—expressed himself was for Leavis one with the way the poet thought, and with the nature and working of that thought into and through his poetry—something that Leavis evaluates not in terms of abstract philosophical dialec­tics or exegesis, but in terms of discuss­ing the organic roots the thought is shown to have in concrete individual experience. With his critical convictions and assumptions being implicitly but opera­tively present in the background, Leavis argues how Wordsworth is not only “the great master of expression in language,” but also, “as in obvious ways, a foil to Swinburne.” In any poem worthy of his genius, we are told, Wordsworth “is moved by a creative impulsion which, when developed through intermittent hard work over a long period, achieves a rightness and precision of thought that has a compelling impersonal authority,” which means freedom from egoism and egotism. “The steps by which the poet moves towards the final rightness,” Leavis argues, “compel him to cultivate a considering, weighing, testing conscious­ness”; so that a typical Wordsworthian poem becomes—is for Leavis—“an achievement of thought . . . thought of a non-philosophic and non-scientific kind.”

To be articulate about the nature of Wordsworth’s genius engaged Leavis, in his last years, in pondering and exploring how “by the study of precisions created by poetic genius we advance our knowledge of ourselves,” and how “the fact of the ‘meeting’ of individual sensibilities ‘out there’ in the poem” entails “shifting the emphasis in our thought from living individual being to life.” But for all his “personal” involvement in what he was writing and the author he was writing about, Leavis was always concerned with achieving what he calls “pure and real impersonality.” For not only the creative artist as such, but also the critic no less had to be “a wholly pure individual (and an individual remains ‘I’) in order to free himself from any egoistic taint and achieve pure and real impersonality.” Hence in examining a particular poem, a critic aims at “making more adequate our knowing what it is and why it affects us—making more adequate by bettering our sense of it.” For Leavis the consciousness accompanying that greater ad­equacy in our knowing is “not a matter of clear and distinctive ideas; Descartes was a mathematician. Art‑speech inspiration is pledged to cultivate the concrete—aspires to precision in rendering the ac­tual experience.”

It is precisely by virtue of his mastery over art-speech that Wordsworth suc­ceeded in doing what Blake, for all his genius, could not—namely, “liberate cre­ative sensibility from the yoke of Augustanism.” But if Wordsworth suc­ceeded, it was because of his debt to Shakespeare. In fact, according to Leavis, “he couldn’t have accomplished this lib­eration if he hadn’t been so intensely interested in the language of poetry, or if English hadn’t been the language of Shakespeare rather than the language of Dryden—or of Milton.” If Eliot didn’t appreciate this aspect of Wordsworth’s poetry it was because, Leavis points out, he was not really interested in Wordsworth. In Eliot’s introduction to Johnson’s satires—according to Leavis the best essay on eighteenth century poetry—“there is nothing to make one guess that Wordsworth was the genius who liber­ated and thereby launched the great poets of the nineteenth century.” In fact Eliot speaks of Wordsworth’s interest and achievement as having had the way prepared for them by Akenside, Cowper, and the eighteenth century Miltonizers, which makes Leavis not only reaffirm the real nature of Wordsworth’s genius, but also bring out the difference that there is “in magnitude of gift between him and those versifiers” as well as “the quite other preoccupation and profoundly di­rected effort” that was Wordsworth’s. Without this and without the “disciplined self‑searching” Wordsworth couldn’t have written “The Ruined Cottage”; nor could he have realized those distinctive characteristics of his which, Leavis ob­serves, “bring out effectively the sense in which creative genius pushes forward the frontiers of language, thought and perception.”

Thus having—at times for comparative purposes—Wordsworth’s poetic achieve­ment on the one hand and Eliot’s on the other in mind, Leavis continued to sharpen as well as delve into his own response to it—a response that fully ex­emplifies the nature of value-judg­ment as Leavis conceived it; a value­-judgment that can never have “its right­ness proved—or disproved.” And for Leavis the only thing to do was “to con­tinue the battle while perception—while life—persists in one,” which is precisely what he went on doing indefatigably. Being all too conscious of how the word “creative” has been badly overworked, he had committed himself to defining and demonstrating what constitutes the nature of creativity as applied to poetry, in terms of words and thought. His com­ment, one of the last things he jotted down, on the first movement of Eliot’s Four Quartets, is a characteristic example of the infallible union in his criticism between the personal and the imper­sonal, the individual and the universal, his concern for creative use of words and the nature of creative thought: “the or­ganic change has taken place; life has entered into the words—they are not words, but the livingness of the life of meaning; transmitted beyond my pow­ers, but not beyond my perception, which is untiring and inexhaustible.”