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Wordsworth’s
Ethics Adam
Potkay
Baltimore:
The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015* Paperback.
ix+254 p. ISBN 978-1421417028. $29.95
Reviewed by Bruce Graver Providence College (Rhode
Island)
Adam Potkay borrows
his title from a Leslie Stephen essay, written in 1876, a time when books of
poems were selling at unprecedented rates, and when poets were looked to,
without irony, as moral authorities. Potkay’s aim is to reestablish
Wordsworth’s place as a significant ethical thinker, and to vindicate poetry
itself as a way of knowing and thinking about ethical matters. To do so, he
looks back to classical writers that Wordsworth knew—principally Cicero and
Seneca—as well as to the neo-Stoic ethics of Shaftesbury, Spinoza, and Kant, writers
Wordsworth either read or discussed at length with Coleridge. But not content
just to trace influences from the past, Potkay places the poet at the center of
late 20th-century ethical debates, by arguing that Wordsworth’s poetry anticipates
in crucial ways Emanual Levinas’s ethics of the “Other.” And he does so by
demonstrating that the very things that distinguish poetic from philosophical
discourse—poetic form, rhythm, and sound—are essential to the practical
application of Wordsworth’s ethics. As Potkay puts it in his introduction, my focus is very much
on how ethics can get done in poetry,
and especially through the music of
poetry. This book ventures back in order to move ahead, seeking in the past a
power that might reinvigorate our contemporary discussion of Romantic and modern
poetry—one that, on the far side
of poststructuralism and the New Historicism … can seem stalled, aimless,
anomic. [3-4, emphasis his] I hope to contribute to what I see as positive yet still fragile trends within twenty-first century
literary criticism: its so-called ethical turn; a more general interest in
thinking about the sort of thought that literature facilitates and makes possible;
and a renewed commitment to poetry’s meter and rhythm, sounds and forms—that is,
what makes it poetry and not prose, at least scientific prose. As these statements
suggest, Wordsworth’s Ethics is an ambitious
book, and its argument is compelling. It should be welcomed by anyone
old-fashioned enough to believe that poetry matters, and required reading for
those who do not. In making his
argument, Potkay refuses to confine himself to a narrow range of Wordsworth’s
poetry, or to the works of the so-called “Great Decade.” Instead, he begins at
the beginning, giving close attention to the “School Exercise” of 1785 and to early
notebook fragments, including the translation of the Orpheus passage from Georgics IV, and offers one of the most
sensitive readings we have of An Evening
Walk. He treats almost all of the canonical poems of Wordsworth’s maturity,
as well as Peter Bell, The Waggoner, The Excursion, and The White
Doe of Rylstone, and neither shies from, nor denigrates, the late
Wordsworth: The Egyptian Maid, “The
Cuckoo at Laverna,” and the “Ode, On the Power of Sound” all have their appointed
place. Indeed, I cannot recall a more comprehensive study of Wordsworth’s poetic
career, certainly not recently, nor one that seeks more diligently to peel away
layers of critical opinion to explore what the poet may have actually been
doing. Potkay’s reading of
“Tintern Abbey” exemplifies his method well. He has written about the poem in
his earlier book, The Story of Joy, a
broad study stretching in scope from the Bible to the lyrics of the rock band
Three Dog Night. In Wordsworth’s Ethics,
the more concentrated focus on Wordsworth allows him better space both to
contextualize his understanding of “Tintern Abbey” and develop his argument. Part
of the poem is treated in a chapter entitled “The Ethics of Things,” which begins
with a nod to Bill Brown and “thing theory,” but quickly does what Brown does
not: Potkay attempts “an etymological inquiry” into the meaning of the word
“thing” in English generally, but specifically in the late eighteenth century,
using the definitions of Johnson’s Dictionary
and the legal discussions in Blackstone’s Commentaries
on the Laws of England to establish the range of things Wordsworth might
have meant when using the word. The relationship of the human mind to external
“things” has been a central concern of Wordsworthian criticism, at least since
Geoffrey Hartman’s Wordsworth’s Poetry (1964). As in his earlier book, Potkay
connects the two by focusing on the 1798 fragment: “in all things / I saw one
life and saw that it was joy.” The ability to see joy, and to feel it, in “all
things” is, Potkay maintains, the central issue of ethics for Wordsworth, and
Wordsworth derived this concern from his reading of Stoic ethics, principally
in the writings of Cicero and Seneca, but also in the Ethics of Spinoza, which he at least discussed with Coleridge in
the summer of 1798 (not 1796, as Potkay states on p. 81). “Spinoza’s impress,”
writes Potkay, "may be seen in
Wordsworth’s (and Coleridge’s) emphatic use of 'joy' as an aspect of the
apprehension of God in or as nature. Spinoza, still more than the Stoics from whom
he borrowed, stresses the joy of coming to know God." [82] But Wordsworth also
suggests that “things,” those things of nature external to the mind, are also
capable of a kind of joy: "Wordsworth not only
proposes a more generally human ability to intuit (rightly or wrongly) the
interconnection of all things but also suggests that things can do the same and
thus deserve the respect owed exclusively to human beings in Spinozan and
ancient Stoic ethics. This is, Potkay
suggests, what Wordsworth means when he writes, in Home at Grasmere, of “joy in widest commonalty spread”: joy that is
inherent in all things and in some sense felt by all, those that can think, and
those that, from a human point of view at least, cannot. At this point, Potkay
turns to “Tintern Abbey,” focusing on the phrase “the life of things,” and the
great passage beginning “And I have felt / A presence that disturbs me with the
joy / Of elevated thoughts,” and ending “All thinking things, all objects of
all thought, / And rolls through all things.” These lines, he writes, “resolve
the tension” between ourselves, as thinking things, and the things we think
about, subordinating all of these things to a comprehensive vision of the
universe, in which all things are united by the disturbing presence that rolls
through them. This is essentially a “lyric apprehension,” not a logical
conclusion drawn from a “procedurally philosophical” argument.
Wordsworth, working with the stuff of the English language, working from Stoic and Spinozan
philosophy and from a poetic “face” of world order, wound his way into a lyric
apprehension of the life of things, a life that humans, with their passions and
words, share almost as equals with other thinking things, other breathing
things, and indeed with all things. The chapter concludes
with brief looks at passages from The
Prelude and The Excursion, as
well as the unpublished “active principle” fragment from the Alfoxden Notebook,
that show later developments of Wordsworth’s understanding of “things.” Potkay returns to
“Tintern Abbey” in two further chapters. In “Music Versus Conscience,” he muses
on the phrase “still, sad music of humanity,” which is, he claims, emphatically
not the voice of conscience, but a
voice that reflects or articulates the harmony of the universe and calms the
unquiet mind, musing on human mortality. The word music matters here, as does
the music of Wordsworth’s own verse, with its sibilants, varying rhythms, and
lightly accented syllables, because it both figures and expresses the cosmic
order, understood, as the Stoics maintained, to be a kind of harmony. In “The
Moral Sublime,” Potkay turns to the closing verse paragraph of the poem,
countering arguments like those of John Barrell who have faulted Wordsworth for
his supposed condescension towards his sister. Rather than criticizing
Wordsworth for not writing the poem he himself would write, as Barrell does, Potkay
looks closely at the language of the poem, and sees something so simple and
clear that one wonders why it has not been remarked on before: that when
William turns to Dorothy and writes “For thou art with me,” he is quoting the
23rd Psalm, and his delay in identifying “thou” as specifically his sister lures
the reader into identifying her with God, or, as “my dearest Friend,” with
Jesus, as in so many Protestant hymns. That is, rather than demeaning his
sister, or imposing his own thoughts upon her, Wordsworth does something more
interesting and more radical: “she emerges as a new shepherd, at once
naturalized and numinous…. The speaker here assures his sister that a feminized
nature (no longer the Lord of Hosts) can … quell the fear of evil.”
Wordsworth deploys scriptural allusion in crafting his oppositional (or complementary) religion,
elevating alternately the other (as the good shepherd) and the self (as
nature’s prophet) to the perch of lovingkindness God alone occupied. Alluding
to Dorothy first as his Lord, and then casting her as one who (as a younger
version of himself) needs shielding from evil, Wordsworth expresses their
mutual friendship and love through oscillating asymmetries, turning the rigid
verticality of theological ethics into a seesaw. [133-135] Potkay’s treatment of
“Tintern Abbey,” spread over three chapters, also demonstrates that this book
does not have the traditional, chronological organization of a book so comprehensive.
It is organized in a roughly chronological way, in that early poems are treated
early in the book, and later poems are generally treated later. But seminal
poems, like “Tintern Abbey” or The
Prelude, recur at different points in Potkay’s argument, according to the
thematic categories that he has established for his individual chapters: “Close
Encounters,” for instance, “Independence and Interdependence,” or “Surviving
Death.” These categories build on each other: early chapters take up questions
of seeing and hearing, basic sensory ways we interact with the world, and from
those chapters questions of music, including the musicality and rhythms of
Wordsworth’s verse, naturally develop. Finally, Potkay moves into larger
ethical questions, especially as he takes up Wordsworth’s later poems, which
sometimes (as in The Excursion) seem
almost ponderous in their ethical weight, or so they have to many
post-Victorian readers. Nonetheless, there
are a number of places where Potkay’s ethical emphases seem a bit ponderous
themselves, leading him to miss or at least slide over Wordsworthian humor or
irony. He is absolutely right, for instance, to classify the Leech-gatherer of
“Resolution and Independence,” as a version of the Horatian “happy man,” and I
have myself argued that he is a Wordsworthian incarnation of the Stoic sage. But
the oddness of the old man’s form and the obtuseness of the narrator’s reaction to
his very simple statements also need to be taken into account, and here they
are not. That is what makes the poem so weird, and so prone to parody: how can
a figure like the Leech-gatherer really be taken seriously? This is a central
problem in many of the “close encounter” poems: Wordsworth sets us up to laugh
at either his speaker or the person he meets, and by the end of the poem (I am
thinking of “Simon Lee” or “The Idiot Boy”) implicitly chides us for doing so. I
think Potkay needs to consider this ethical move also: why lure us into an
ethical error, especially in this way? One final problem, specific to
“Resolution and Independence”: Potkay calls its verse form rhyme royal, and,
strictly speaking, it is not. The closing hexameter line in each stanza makes
it a hybrid of rhyme royal and the Spenserian stanza, a hybrid form Wordsworth
borrows from Chatterton (as Potkay notes) and Milton (as he does not). Potkay’s
discussion seems to imply that it makes no difference whether the final line is
a pentameter or an Alexandrine—and it does. The lengthening of the line, its
rhythmic alteration, and the emphatic closure it gives to the individual
stanza, have an important effect on how we perceive the poem, and thus
(following Potkay’s own argument) on its ethical import. But this is not to
diminish in any way my admiration for this book. It is both a fine exposition
of the workings of Wordsworth’s verse, and a stirring defense of poetry, in an
age in which the value of the humanities themselves is constantly being
challenged. These are poems that have changed lives, not because of their
hermeneutic complexity, but because they speak directly to what Wordsworth
called “the soul of all [our] moral being.” Potkay emphatically makes the case that
Wordsworth’s poetry has done that, and continues to do so, and by implication he
vindicates literary art. _____________ * Reissue
of 2012 hardcover edition.
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