Wordsworth's "after-sojourn"

revision and unself-rivalry in the later poetry

pp. 11-32

in: Peter Larkin, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012

Abstract

For Jeffrey, even by 1807, Wordsworth had come to appear as "a bad imitator of the worst of his former productions"—a premature condemnation better directed against Wordsworth's later poetry.¹ Jeffrey's remark suggests a reading looking at the faulty "production" of originality in the early work, which would relate it ironically to the defensive "imitation" of the later. It is tempting to juxtapose the periods of Wordsworth's writing life on a binary basis. To retain "early" and "late" as terms of temporal distribution remains more useful, however, in terms of what might have been provoked and suffered by Wordsworth's poetic career as a whole. Throughout that career is a double perspective—on the past as source of imaginative testimony and on the future as witness, an expected time of witness-giving.² Wordsworth's poetry is caught between discovering in itself the grounds for a personal testimony with which to address and instruct the future, or sustaining a witness remaining as the only survivor of a no longer generative testimony. Wordsworth is left with a fortitude that itself has to become indirect testimony, one valid only from within the project of an endlessly repeated, but never recreative or rivaling, fidelity of witness. This fragile rotation of roles succeeds in not compromising temporality only by being itself compromised by a radical inequality of utterance.