Against Expressivism

Against Expressivism: Wordsworth's Cyber-Poetics

by Roman Sympos

Prefatory Note:

The attached essay, which first appeared in print in the Summer 2019 issue of The Wordsworth Circle, was originally written under the pseudonym, “Charles J. Rzepka,” which happens to be the real name of my editor. I thank him for letting me use it as my own, but after all, we have so much in common, including our love of William Wordsworth, that it matters little under whose name it appears.

Wordsworth’s verse has graced the pages of the Sympos site many times during the course of the last eight months. If his name was familiar to you before you visited here, and you didn’t major in English as an undergraduate, it’s probably because you know his “Daffodils” poem, which goes by the title, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.” No one, it seems, has escaped hearing it or reading it at some point in their lives.

It describes a walk the poet took one fine spring day—in April, in fact, his birth month—with his sister, Dorothy, in England’s lovely Lake District, where the two of them were then living. In their walk, says Wordsworth, they came upon “a crowd,/ A host, of golden daffodils.” The blossoms filled the poet with “glee,” “tossing their heads in sprightly dance”:

A poet could not but be gay,

In such a jocund company:

I gazed—and gazed—but little thought

What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils.

You wouldn’t guess, from listening to or reading this poem, that the man who wrote it revolutionized English poetry, and could be said to have revolutionized poetry the world over. The lines are metrically repetitive, the vocabulary and syntax unremarkable, the dominant metaphor trite, and the sentiment too childishly simple to bear this much elaboration—almost simplistic, even (dare I say it now? I did when I was, in fact, a foolish English major) simple-minded. The man saw some flowers (he left his sister out of the poem entirely, by the way—so much for “lonely”), they filled him with glee, and then, when he went home and lay down—probably to take a nap after so much excitement—they filled him with glee again.

“I wandered lonely as a cloud” seems to epitomize the Wordsworth that has come down to us via the Victorians and that still survives as a literary historical cliché: a poet of Nature and spontaneous effusions and domestic affections and the simple, unalloyed pleasures of life—a poetic Peter Pan who refused to grow up.

All that’s required to maintain this myth of Wordsworth the goofy, childlike poet from generation to generation is that we overlook, or actively look away from, the darkness winking up at us through the bright, dancing petals of his daffodil glee, not just in this poem, but in nearly every poem he ever wrote. Sometimes the darkness even swallows up the glee. On rare occasions, it’s all there is, as in the epigram I chose to begin this month’s “View from the Precipice,” excerpted from the poet’s blank verse autobiography, The Prelude. This is the darkness of loss, past or to come, real or imagined: the loss of innocence, of the beloved, of the parent or sibling, of "what man has made of man," or of poetic power itself. Sometimes it’s not even that specific, just the nagging accumulation of the innumerable and inevitable losses that attend growing up, or old.

Although he wrote heartbreaking poems about death and mourning—“A slumber did my spirit seal” and “Surprised by Joy” come immediately to mind—in general, Wordsworth liked to hint at this darkness, rather than spell it out. Take “I wandered lonely as a cloud.” Did you just breeze through that unassuming phrase, “could not but”? Maybe, like me when I was an English major and knew it all, you discounted it as fancy metrical filler. But listen carefully to what’s not being said, only implied: would this man, who is after all “a poet” and, presumably, acutely responsive to beauty, have any reason not to be “gay” in this “jocund company”? If he doesn’t, why even raise the suggestion that he might, as if his taking pleasure in this gleeful sight required overcoming a reluctance to do so?

The darkness becomes visible again, looming like a shadow under thin ice, in the word “pensive,” which means “thoughtful,” but also connotes a sad or somber mood, deriving as it does from the Latin “pendere,” which means “hang” or “weigh,” as if thinking itself were difficult to support. Is there something weighing on the poet’s mind when he lies down on his couch to rest? Is it something that rushes to fill the mental void left by his “vacant” moods? We are never told, because what’s important here is the surprise of the dancing daffodils as they “flash upon” the poet’s “inward eye”—the eye of memory and imagination—and in doing so, fill his heart with pleasure.

We are never told the cause of the poet’s pensiveness, or the reason he might find it difficult to take pleasure in the dancing daffodils, whether encountering them on a sunny spring day or later beholding them, at one remove, with his “inward eye.” What interests Wordsworth, throughout his poetry, is never the emotion he is experiencing—sorrow or mirth, anxiety or serenity, love or hate—but how these emotions affect thinking itself, which is the process by which we make sense of the world. As he put it in the “Preface” he wrote to the second edition of his poetic debut, Lyrical Ballads, in 1800, he is interested in how the mind “associates ideas in a state of excitement”—emotional excitement, that is, and often contradictory ideas—or, as he puts it in “Lines Written in Early Spring,” how “pleasant thoughts” so often bring “sad thoughts to the mind.” The ground-breaking poems in Lyrical Ballads, he tells us, are “experiments” in which he will conduct a study of this process.

The revolution Wordsworth incited in the history of poetry was this: he deemed his own mind, with all its quirks, prejudices, habitual trains of thought, enthusiasms, douleurs, contrary moods, and contradictory ways of experiencing the world, to be a worthy subject for poetry. This assumption is what led the younger poet, John Keats, to call Wordsworth’s poetic achievement, somewhat dismissively, “the egotistical sublime.” But it wasn’t just his own mind that the poet thought worth writing poems about. It was every person’s mind, whatever their station in life, or their personality or gender or age or race or vices, disabilities, and disfigurements.

Why?

Because, like him, they were each unique—literally, one of a kind. Every one of us, under the pressure of emotional “excitement,” combines or “associates” the “ideas” in our mind—mental images, concepts, feelings, memories, anything that can become an object of thought—in a way all our own, and Wordsworth considers the way we each do that a legitimate subject for poetry. Wordsworth thus gave permission to all future poets to write about anything—a gnarled old thorn, a broken pot, an old man trying to dig up a stump in his garden—as long as it was done in such a way as to tell the reader something interesting about how the mind of the person writing, or being written about, works, and gives the reader pleasure in doing so.

One of the interesting things about “I wandered lonely as a cloud” is what it tells us about something else you may have heard in connection with the name “William Wordsworth,” his famous pronouncement, “poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” This definition has long been the centerpiece of an expressivist interpretation of Wordsworthian poetics, according to which the poet saw poetry as an unpremeditated outpouring of emotion with little or no regard for the niceties of composition, or even making sense. The sudden “flash” of the remembered daffodils that fills the poet’s heart with pleasure as he lies pensively on his couch could serve as a perfect example. Except that it’s not, not by a long shot. For what the expressivists tend to leave out of their analysis is what immediately follows the word "feelings": “it”—that is to say, “poetry”—"takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.”

Spontaneous overflow? Or tranquil recollection? “I wandered lonely as a cloud” offers both. But how do we get from one to the other? And where along the way does a poem appear?

Something needs sorting out.

Wordsworth’s understanding of how poems really work on and in the minds of their readers was much more sophisticated and complex and ahead of its time than his expressivist critics give him credit for. In fact, we needed to invent an entirely new theory of communication to explain how sophisticated and complex and advanced it turned out to be. The essay that follows attempts to do just that.