The English Department
Subject: Wordsworth's Revisions
Supervisor: Prof. Leona Toker
Abstract: This dissertation studies the revisions made by William Wordsworth to Salisbury Plain, The Borderers and The Ruined Cottage, the works whose early versions are, to a large extent, his response to the social and political upheaval of the French Revolution. The revisions made by the poet to these three works in the course of his life, during which his ideological, moral, political and poetical principles underwent changes, are sometimes radical. This study demonstrates how his evolving worldview is reflected in his textual changes. The revisions also show how Wordsworth’s experience of the French Revolution influenced not only his early political inclinations and poetic vocation but also many of his responses to political events in his conservative years and thus his later poetry. Hence, among other things, my research supports the position of those literary critics who deny that Wordsworth’s poetry elides its political moment: his early works do respond to the political and historical events of the time of their composition.
Pace New Criticism, which marginalizes the author’s intention or rather seeks to separate the artist and his works in accordance with the critique of the intentional fallacy, I argue that in order to understand what stimulated the composition of Salisbury Plain, The Borderers and The Ruined Cottage, and what later motivated the revisions made to these poems, we may seek suggestions from Wordsworth’s life even at the risk of disturbing his image as an extraordinary being.
The three works, initially composed in the 1790s, mark a turning point in Wordsworth’s poetic progress. It was only after his return to England from France in 1792, during cycles of his hope and despair, that his genuine voice emerged. None of the poems written prior to Salisbury Plain manifests the revolutionary power of his poetic genius. Salisbury Plain, The Borderers and The Ruined Cottage form the foundation of Wordsworth’s life-long defence of humanity in general and the people of the lower classes in particular. Moreover, it is through these works that the poet’s philosophical vision of the oneness of the human heart with nature ripens, in his attempts to come to terms with the human condition and place suffering in a framework which facilitates coping with it.
Evidence in Wordsworth’s correspondence suggests that in 1798, while working on The Ruined Cottage, he was also thinking about Adventures on Salisbury Plain and The Borderers. Rather than finishing one poem, laying it aside and taking up another, he simultaneously worked on the three, which explains some of the similarities in their thematic concerns and style. Yet the move from Salisbury Plain to The Borderers attests to changes in Wordsworth’s attitude to such issues as motivation, intention, crime, punishment, political institutions and formal law. Furthermore, whereas after 1799 Wordsworth never attributed importance to either Adventures on Salisbury Plain or The Borderers till the decision was made to publish them in 1842, The Ruined Cottage preoccupied him for the rest of his life.
The study of the development of the early versions of the three works reveals the maturation of Wordsworth’s art and the evolution of some aspects of his political and philosophical stance. He gradually becomes a poet of the human psyche. Whereas the early version of Salisbury Plain shares some features with contemporary protest poems, in his revisions Wordsworth transcends the political and social focus of protest poetry in probing the inner lives of his suffering characters, with an emphasis on guilt and fear. Conveying tension between reason and emotions, he works out emotivist principles in the ethical positions that transpire from his works as well as in his literary theory, unifying his axiology. He also resolves his attitude to such issues as compassion, remorse, penitence and justice. The Wanderer, as The Ruined Cottage was titled in 1814, serves as a step towards a larger work which would grant completion to Wordsworth’s philosophical and ideological principles. The alterations made for the 1814 version facilitate its incorporation into the design of The Recluse, the poet’s planned philosophical work about man’s relation to nature and society.
Wordsworth endorsed a succession of political and philosophical identities, moving from liberal republicanism to Godwinian rationalism to the transcendental philosophy of the One Life and eventually to political and religious conservatism. His longevity as well as shifts in his socio-economic condition made axiological changes possible. By his seventies he had become a rather conservative financially secure family man in the government employ. In 1843, the poet who had once declared that he abhorred monarchy became Queen Victoria’s Poet Laureate. Wordsworth did not deny that he was changing. Time-induced changes constitute recurrent thematic concerns in many of his works. In 1801 he noted that his early poems represented opinions widely different from those that he held at present. In The Prelude the speaker repeatedly observes that youth played a significant role in his early judgments. The mainstream public opinion of Wordsworth changed as well. By the late 1830s, those attributes of his poetry which had once been scorned by many came to be identified as the sources of his strength. His poetry was constantly quoted, and his works were acknowledged as intellectual stimuli. This new status imposed new obligations.
My research examines the ways in which these biographical factors may have influenced the revisions of Wordsworth’s early works, revisions that affected the fashioning of his image for posterity.
The changes which some of Wordsworth’s principles underwent are evident in the revisions that he made to the poems that he had written in his twenties but published in his seventies. In 1842, when he published his earlier radical, pantheistic and revolutionary anti-war poetry, such as Salisbury Plain, in Poems, Chiefly of Early and Late Years, he omitted, added or rewrote complete verse paragraphs, as well as separate lines and words. Guilt and Sorrow; or Incidents upon Salisbury Plain and (to a smaller degree) The Borderers were so altered that they revealed little or nothing of Wordsworth’s erstwhile radicalism. This was followed by the 1845 publication of the likewise heavily revised version of The Excursion, of which the first book had started as The Ruined Cottage in 1797. By this time, in addition to other changes in his status, Wordsworth was also held in reverence as a conservative Christian poet. He now had to and probably wished to conform to what was required of him as a public figure. Drawing attention to his political past or reviving its spirit would have been counterproductive. The study of Wordsworth’s revisions suggests that he might have mitigated his earlier radicalism by self-censorship.
When the conformist elderly poet excised those cultural cues that anchored the poems in the historical context of the reactionary 1790s, he altered the portrayal of characters, their interactions, conversations and the nature of their relationships. Sometimes such changes cause inconsistencies and logical contradictions in the plot and the arguments made in the poems. Even when no drastic changes in thematic concerns are detected between two versions, changes in emphasis or word order indicate different attitudes or altered states of mind. The later version of The Borderers, for instance, seems to enhance the play’s philosophical concerns at the expense of the psychological ones. Although the revisions sometimes attest to major ideological changes, the earlier and later versions of the poems share thematic concerns, which points to a continuity in the poet’s preoccupations.
Comparing the published versions with the earlier manuscript ones, this study considers whether the revisions serve to adapt Wordsworth’s early works, directly related to his moral crisis in France and suffused with republican opinions, to engagement with newly emerging social and political affairs, such as the contemporary debates concerning the Poor Laws and the abolition of the death penalty. The changes in the poet’s attitude explain how Salisbury Plain and The Borderers accrued different meanings when, as a political figure, he started serving different causes, some diametrically opposite to those of his early years. The new versions are not only geared up to the context of 1842 but also praise the selfsame institutions which Wordsworth had earlier abhorred.
Wordsworth’s 1842 revisions also reflect changes in aesthetic preferences. In his later years he disavowed that principle on which his poetics was founded; namely, to write in ordinary language for ordinary people. Rather, he resorted to eloquent sometimes artificial language which suits élite expectations. Judging by his own criteria, with which some literary critics agree and some do not, the later versions have a greater aesthetic merit. This claim is examined in the dissertation.
Bio: I am interested in the Romantic period. I love excursions in nature. I have a husband, a son and a dog.
Rotenstreich Stipend 2016/17