English Romantic Poetry’s Clash of the Generations

Jeffrey Cox’s new book takes as its guiding thesis the rejection of the widely-held view of Wordsworth (1770-1850) as a poet whose only substantial work was produced from 1798 until about 1808. This account was fathered by Wordsworth’s Victorian reviver Matthew Arnold in the Preface to his edition of Wordsworth’s poems (1879) and accepted tacitly or explicitly by generations of important critics since then. Cox adduces a recent example in Kenneth Johnston’s well-known 1998 The Hidden Wordsworth: Poet, Lover, Rebel, Spy, in which we read that “Wordsworth the Romantic poet ‘died’ when he read the recently completed Prelude to Coleridge in January 1807.” The problem with this notion is that Wordsworth―the longest-lived of the major Romantic versifiers―survived another forty-two years after 1808 and continued to write new poems until eight years before his death. And, though not the focus of Cox’s book, there is the added fact that during his last four decades Wordsworth constantly, one might almost say obsessively, returned to his earlier poetry, in many instances creating multiple revisions. Posterity has not been kind to most of these, for in later years Wordsworth was given to altering the strongest poems of his “golden prime,” as Arnold called it, by diluting their religious nonconformism in sometimes painfully discursive ways. Cox aims to examine in detail many of the original poems from the later, post-1808 volumes published by Wordsworth. He contextualizes them by arguing that they contain challenges to the poetry of the writers of the so-called Cockney school (Keats, Leigh Hunt, and the critic William Hazlitt). For brevity’s sake, he also subsumes Hunt’s aristocratic friends Shelley and Byron, as well as Shelley’s friend Thomas Love Peacock, under this pejorative label coined by Tory critics to diminish the poetry of Keats and Hunt because of its working-class origins. (The Whig and even radical politics of the young aristocrats made them equally reprehensible to the Tory literary establishment.) These writers of the Secondor Younger-Generation of British Romantics (Wordsworth and Coleridge and, latterly, Blake, comprise the principal First-Generation figures) had uniformly admired Wordsworth for the fervent pro-French Revolution stance of the poetry of his Great Decade but came to despise what they perceived as his abandonment of egalitarian political ideals in the later poetry, especially his long philosophical poem, The Excursion