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Wordsworth's “Minuteness And Fidelity”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

John E. Jordan
John E. Jordan*
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley 4
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Extract

When coleridge, in the famous Chapter xxii of his Biographia Literaria, used the “uncouth and new-coined word” matter-of-faclness to describe one of Wordsworth's “defects,” he was accurately putting his finger on a strain of prosaic prolixity that is all too evident in Wordsworth's poetry. But when he went on to find the principal cause of this matter-of-factness in “a laborious minuteness and fidelity in the representation of objects, and their positions, as they appeared to the poet himself,” was he equally accurate? There is no question that Wordsworth, for all that the earth could be to him “an unsubstantial faery place,” was a hardheaded hillsman with an eye to a shilling and a fact; Raymond D. Havens well pointed out that “it was in the man as well as in the poetry that Coleridge lamented a deficiency.” Coleridge's complaint of “minuteness and fidelity” amounts, however, almost to a charge of unselective, photographic detail, of scrupulous concern for factual accuracy for its own sake. And this charge has been and is still being echoed: Emile Legouis writes of “Wordsworth's veneration for accurate facts and minute details” and John Jones, of Wordsworth's “delusion that he had done what was required of him if he stuck closely to the facts.”

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 72 , Issue 3 , June 1957, pp. 433 - 445
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1957

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References

Note 1 in page 433 The Mind of a Poet (Baltimore, 1941), p. 16.

Note 2 in page 433 The Early Life of William Wordsworth, 1770–1798, trans. J. W. Matthews (London, 1921), p. 448; The Egotistical Sublime: A History of Wordsworth's Imagination (London, 1954), p. 16.

Note 3 in page 434 The Prelude, ed. Ernest De Selincourt (Oxford, 1926), p. xliii. All quotations from The Prelude are from De Selincourt's edition, and I have followed his notation and dating of the MSS. In addition to the almost complete texts A (1805–06), B (1806), C (1817–19), D (1828–32), and E (1839), reference is also made to fragmentary texts JJ (1798–99), V (1799–1800), and Z (possibly 1805). Variants apparently resulting from corrections to these basic MSS. are indicated by superscript numerals. Line citations without prefix refer to the 1850 text.

Note 4 in page 434 The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe (London, 1932), xi, 91,93, 88.

Note 5 in page 435 The Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson with the Wordsworth Circle, ed. Edith J. Morley (Oxford, 1927), i, 15; Lockhart's Literary Criticism, ed. M. Clive Hildyard (Oxford, 1931), p. 148.

Note 6 in page 435 The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey (Edinburg, 1889-90), ii, 359: xi, 315.

Note 7 in page 436 “Wordsworth's Prelude: The Poetic Function of Memory,” SP, xxxiv (1937), 552–563; Wordsworth's Imagery: A Study in Poetic Vision (New Haven, 1952), p. 118; “The Eye and the Object in the Poetry of Wordsworth,” Wordsworth Centenary Stud., ed. G. T. Dunklin (Princeton, 1951), p. 32.

Note 8 in page 436 The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. A. B. Grosart (London, 1876), iii, 487.

Note 9 in page 436 The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Later Years, ed. De Selincourt (Oxford, 1939), ii, 580.

Note 10 in page 437 This revision is described by Charles Norton Coe in Wordsworth and the Literature of Travel (New York, 1953), pp. 35–38.

Note 11 in page 437 Letter to Wordsworth, 7 April 1815.

Note 12 in page 437 Wordsworth to Isabella Fenwick.

Note 13 in page 438 Prelude, pp. xxxiii, 525.

Note 14 in page 438 Cf. also vii.345, 350, 363–364.

Note 15 in page 439 Prelude, pp. 474, n., 473, n., 442, n.

Note 16 in page 441 Ed. W. M. Merchant (London, 1951), pp. 114–115.

Note 17 in page 443 Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and Their Writers, ed. Edith J. Morley (London, 1938), i, 191; Cleanth Brooks and Robert Perm Warren, Understanding Poetry (New York, 1950), p. 36.

Note 18 in page 444 “The Contemporaneity of the Lyrical Ballads,” PMLA, LXIX June 1954), 499, n. 19 Letters ...The Later Years, ii, 812.

Note 20 in page 444 Ibid., i, 435, 473.

Note 21 in page 444 Robinson on Books, 1,191; The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Middle Years, ed. De Selincourt (Oxford, 1937), i, 244; The Later Years, I, 65 f.; ii, 1036; i, 307; Robinson on Books, i, 166.

Note 22 in page 445 The Early Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth (1787–1805), ed. De Selincourt (Oxford, 1935), p. 270.

Note 23 in page 445 Letters ... The Middle Years, ii, 611; The Later Years, i, 184; “Preface,” Lyrical Ballads, in Works (Oxford, 1933), p. 938; Wordsworth to Isabella Fenwick.