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Wordsworth's Humor
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
Generally speaking, we take Wordsworth too seriously. Perhaps we have been unconsciously conditioned by the equine solemnity of portraits of the aged poet and need to remind ourselves that Hazlitt, who himself painted a lugubrious portrait, described Wordsworth as “grave, saturnine, with a slight indication of sly humour,” and noted “a convulsive inclination to laughter about the mouth”—a hint of which appears in Shuter's 1798 likeness. Wordsworth's humor may be “slight” and “sly,” but it is pervasive; it crops out in mirth, gaiety, gamboling playfulness, and quirkish wit. Humor, wrote Landor, may be distinguished from wit in that it “indulges in breadth of drollery rather than in play and brilliancy of point.” This breadth of drollery is particularly Wordsworth's vein. He is not devoid of wit, but he supposedly said that he did not consider himself a witty poet, and specifically asserted in “The Waggoner” that he made “no pretense / To wit that deals in double sense.” He is characteristically droll.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1958
References
1 The Spirit of the Age, Works, ed. P. P. Howe (London, 1932), xi, 91; “My First Acquaintance with Poets,” Works, xvii, 118.
2 “Alfieri and Salomon the Florentine Jew,” Imaginary Conversations, Works, ed. T. Earle Welby (London, 1927), iii, 102.
3 Samuel A. Alibone, Critical Dictionary of English Literature, and British and American Authors, quoted in Personal Traits of British Authors, ed. E. T. Mason (New York, 1885), ii, 33; “The Waggoner,” MSS. 1 and 2, The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford, 1944), ii, 194, n. Future references to this edition will be indicated as DeS.
4 Henry N. Hudson, Studies in Wordsworth (Boston, 1884), p. 15; A. E. H. Swaen, “Peter Bell,” Anglia, xlvii (1923), 139; J. C. Smith, A Study of Wordsworth (Edinburgh, 1944), p. 63.
5 C. T. Winchester, William Wordsworth: How to Know Him (Indianapolis, 1916), p. 87.
6 Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and Their Writers, ed. Edith J. Morley (London, 1938), i, 73.
7 Preface, Lyrical Ballads, in Works, ed. Hutchinson and de Selincourt, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1950), p. 739.
8 Ibid., p. 740.
9 Robinson on Books, i, 166.
10 Wordsworth (London, 1949), p. 52; “The Establishment of Wordsworth's Reputation,” JEGP, liv (Jan. 1955), 68.
11 The Dead Asses, A Lyrical Ballad, probably by John Hamilton Reynolds; quoted by George L. Marsh, “The Peter Bell Parodies of 1819,” MP, xl (Feb. 1943), 272.
12 Edmund Gosse, “Peter Bell and his Tormentors,” Gossip in a Library (New York [1892]), p. 264.
13 Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron (London, 1941), p. 5 (I wish to thank Leslie A. Marchand for reminding me of this passage); Charles Lamb; A Memoir (Boston, 1866), p. 110; Memoirs of a Literary Veteran (London, 1851), ii, 139; The Greville Memoirs, 1814–1860, ed. Lytton Strachey and Roger Fulford (London, 1938), ii, 122; Men I Have Known (London, 1866), pp. 480–481.
14 The Correspondence of Henry Crdbb Robinson with the Wordsworth Circle, ed. E. J. Morley (Oxford, 1927), ii, 626; quoted by M. D. Conway, “The English Lakes and their Genii,” Harper's Mag., lxii (1880), 26.
15 Dorothy to Catherine Cookson, 1 Jan. [1807], The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Middle Years, ed. de Selincourt (Oxford, 1937), i, 109 (subsequent references to Wordsworth letters will be where possible to this edition and will be indicated by date only); The Letters of Sara Hutchinson, ed. Kathleen Coburn (London, 1954), p. 267.
16 H. D. Rawnsley, “Reminiscences of Wordsworth Among the Peasantry of Westmoreland,” Trans, of the Wordsworth Soc, ed. William Knight, No. 6 (1884), pp. 181, 185,191.
17 Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. de Selincourt (London, 1952), ii, 20, 308; Sara Hutchinson, p. 291.
18 “Wordsworth Bandies Jests with Matthew,” MLN, xxxvi (1921), 412.
19 Quoted in Mason, ii, 33.
20 The Prelude, ed. de Selincourt, (Oxford, 1932), p. li.
21 Elsie Swann, Christopher North (Edinburgh, 1934), p. 136.
22 [13 March 1821], Wordsworth Circle, i, 99 f.
23 [28 July 1838], Wordsworth Circle, i, 368.
24 Edinburgh Rev., xxiv (Nov. 1814), 1.
25 Wordsworth Circle, i, 321-324; DeS, iv, 478.
26 The Poet Wordsworth (Oxford, 1950), p. 152.
27 7 June 1819, Works, ed. E. V. Lucas (London, 1905), vi, 524.
28 Christopher Wordsworth, Memoirs of William Wordsworth (London, 1851), ii, 310.
29 De Selincourt (ii, 498–499) calls attention to these allusions to Budibras, ii.iii and Tristram Shandy, Bk. ix, Ch. xxviii.
30 Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. William Knight (London, 1896), i, 50; Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Alexander B. Grosart (London, 1876), iii, 27.
31 New Monthly Mag., xiv (1 Oct. 1820), quoted in Elsie Smith, An Estimate of William Wordsworth by Bis Contemporaries, 1793–1822 (Oxford, 1932), p. 361.
32 Wordsworth (London, 1925), p. 96; Wordsworth (London, 1930), p. 102.
33 Wordsworth told Miss Fenwick that “the incident [came] from Dr. Darwin's Zoonomia.”
34 Darbishire, p. 10. Coleridge's comment is quoted from his notebooks by George McL. Harper, William Wordsworth (London, 1929), p. 561.
35 Raysor (n. 10 above). See esp. reviews in British Critic (June 1819) and the Eclectic Rev. (July 1819).
36 This point has been made by Raymond D. Havens, The Mind of a Poet (Baltimore, 1941), p. 440.
37 The Comic and the Realistic in English Drama (Chicago, 1925), p. 208; “The Solemn Romantics,” Studies in the Comic, Univ. of Calif. Pub. in English, viii, ii (Berkeley, 1941), 261.
38 Havens (p. 305) points out examples of “quiet humor” in The Prelude.
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