‘If Mine Had Been the Painter’s Hand’: Wordsworth’s Collaboration with Sir George Beaumont

Abstract

William Hazlitt first noted Wordsworth’s visual turn to ekphrasis. Hazlitt’s criticism of Wordsworth is justly famous for the strong correlation he made between the poetic principles of the Lake School poets and the French Revolution when he suggested in Lectures on the Living Poets that they ‘went hand in hand’.¹ In The Spirit of the Age, Hazlitt repeated his well-known characterisation of the levelling tendencies of Wordsworth’s early poetry and said that his revolutionary ‘first’ poetic principles generated a nature poetry, wherein objects were described ‘in a way and with an intensity of feeling that no one else had done before him’. This made Wordsworth ‘the most original poet now living, and the one whose writings could the least be spared: for they have no substitute elsewhere’.² What is rarely mentioned in the discussion of Hazlitt’s reception of Wordsworth is that he registered a change in Wordsworth, and that the change and the duplicities it entailed may in fact be what Hazlitt means by the problematic phrase, ‘the spirit of the age’.