Abstract
Chapter 3 discussed how place informs constructions of the poet. This chapter explores a form more usually associated with the post-Romantic period, the dramatic monologue, to suggest that the egoistic personae developed by Wordsworth and Smith in effect deconstruct a particular kind of poet. Read by many as establishing the use-value of the autobiographical within Romanticism, much of Wordsworth’s poetry is discussed as arising from a particular function of self-reliance; in the same way, Smith has emerged as a prime user of biographical details to underpin her expressions of unhappiness. I want to trouble this conclusion, and will do so first by projecting the dramatic monologue back to, initially, the 1790s as dramatized monologues, a fine distinction that is meant to acknowledge how Smith and Wordsworth write performances of selfhood. They model several versions of Poet through an emphasis on revealing, discretely, how speakers perform questionable identities, in the process undoing their own poetry; Smith and Wordsworth concentrate on establishing the parameters of the Poet, filtered through an exploration of the artfully constructed Self. In some of the most composed of the Elegiac Sonnets, in “Beachy Head,” in Lyrical Ballads, and in The Prelude, the “theatrical,” to use Judith Pascoe’s term, underpins and indeed creates the personalized narrators of the poems.1
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Notes
See Romantic Theatricality: Gender, Poetry and Spectatorship (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997).
Letter to Richard Woodhouse (27 October 1818), in Selected Poems and Letters by John Keats, ed. Douglas Bush (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959), p. 279.
Parrish included this essay in Chapter 3 of The Art of the Lyrical Ballads (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973). Parrish sees Smith’s “Apostrophe to an Old Tree” as the inspiration for “The Thorn,” p. 106.
Wordsworth, of course, also made use of the European Magazine in March 1787 to house his first published effort, the sonnet on H. M. Williams, which he signed “Axiologus” (“a Greek compound for ‘Words-Worth’” says John O. Hayden in William Wordsworth: The Poems Volume One [1982; London: Penguin, 1977], p. 923).
Wordsworth’s many periodical poems in the 1790s were a virtual secret until well into the twentieth century. See, for instance, N. B. Bauer, “Wordsworth’s Poems in Contemporary Periodicals,” Victorian Periodicals Review 11 (1978): 61–76.
Robert Langbaum, The Poetry of Experience: The Dramatic Monologue in Modern Literary Experience (London: Chatto and Windus, 1957), pp. 25, 33.
David Perkins, Wordsworth and the Poetry of Sincerity (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1964), pp. 2, 210, 84.
Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 2.
William Galperin, Revision and Authority in Wordsworth: The Interpretation of a Career (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), p. 66.
Leon Guilhamet, The Sincere Ideal: Studies on Sincerity in Eighteenth Century English Literature (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1974), p. 276.
Frances Ferguson, Wordsworth: Language as Counter-Spirit (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), p. xiv.
Sheila Kearns, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Romantic Autobiography: Reading Strategies of Self-Representation (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1995), p. 25; Elizabeth Fay, Becoming Wordsworthian: A Performative Aesthetics (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), pp. 2, 16.
Deborah Forbes, Sincerity’s Shadow: Self-Consciousness in British Romantic and Mid-Twentieth-Century American Poetry (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 34.
Alan Sinfield, The Dramatic Monolgue (London: Methuen, 1977), pp. x, 45. Sinfield refers to the “simple sincerity of the Romantic poetic ‘I’” (p. 60).
See Pascoe, who views the peripatetic Wordsworth as spectacle, and links his impromptu rural performances with those of strolling players and minstrels (p. 196 passim). See also Romanticism and Celebrity Culture, 1750–1850, ed. Tom Mole (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
I discussed some of these personae in Charlotte Smith, which is mainly concerned with the gendering of the Selves Smith concocts. See also Jacqueline Labbe, “The Seductions of Form in the Poetry of Ann Batten Cristall and Charlotte Smith,” Romantic Form, ed. Alan Rawes (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 154–70.
Most critics discuss this poem in terms of its suggestive content as developed by a woman writer. Its actual generic continuity is less remarked. See, for instance, Stella Brooks, “The Sonnets of Charlotte Smith,” Critical Survey 4.1 (1992): 9–21; Deborah Kennedy, “Thorns and Roses: the Sonnets of Charlotte Smith,” Women’s Writing 2.1 (1995): 43–53; Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996); Esther Schor, Bearing the Dead: The British Culture of Mourning from the Enlightenment to Victoria (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, eds. W.J.B Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), II. 125. Quoted in Brooke Hopkins, “Wordsworth’s Voices: Ideology and Self-Critique in The Prelude,” Studies in Romanticism 33 (1994), p. 279, n. 2.
Jean Deubergue, “Time, Space, and Egotistical Sublime: The Unity of ‘Tintern Abbey,’” Bulletin de la Faculté des Lettres de Strasbourg 47 (1969): 203–16. Although Deubergue’s stance may strike readers as outdated, it is worth comparing to Deborah Forbes’, quoted above (p. 111).
See The Character of the Poet: Wordsworth in The Prelude (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 29.
In William Wordsworth, A Life (2001; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), Gill situates the poem as one of “Wordsworth’s greatest autobiographical poems” which “seizes imperiously on the ‘facts’, to forge a poetic fiction with which to convey essential truth” (p. 152).
See “Beachy Head: The Romantic Fragment Poem as Mosaic,” in Forging Connections: Women’s Poetry from the Renaissance to Romanticism, eds. Anne K. Mellor, Felicity Nussbaum, and Jonathan Post, Huntington Library Quarterly 7 (2002), 119–46.
See “The Case of William Wordsworth: Romantic Invention versus Romantic Genius,” Rhetorical Traditions and British Romantic Literature, eds. Don Bialostosky and Lawrence Needham (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995): 122–38, p. 130.
Michael O’Neill, Romanticism and the Self-Conscious Poem (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), p. 60; Theresa M. Kelley, “The Case of William Wordsworth: Romantic Invention versus Romantic Genius”; Brooke Hopkins, “Wordsworth’s Voices: Ideology and Self-Critique in The Prelude”; Abbie Findlay Potts, Wordsworth’s Prelude: A Study of its Literary Form (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1953), p. 362. And yet most critics still want to read the poem as autobiographical. For a reading that highlights the text’s competing voices, see Chris Jones and Li-Po Lee, “Wordsworth’s Creation of Active Taste,” Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net 54 (2009), “the narrator demonstrates the processes of imagination but in ways that reveal its artifice.” http://www.erudit.org/revue/ravon/2009/v/n54/038764ar.html?lang=en. Accessed 21 June 2010.
See The Oxford Authors: William Wordsworth (1988; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 727.
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© 2011 Jacqueline M. Labbe
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Labbe, J.M. (2011). Modeling the Romantic Poet. In: Writing Romanticism. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230306141_5
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