The Columbia History of British Poetry (92 page)

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Authors: Carl Woodring,James Shapiro

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BOOK: The Columbia History of British Poetry
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Page 369
The lady is silent: the stranger complies,
    His vizor he slowly unclosed:
Oh God! what a sight met Fair Imogine Is eyes!
    What words can express her dismay and surprise,
When a skeleton's head was exposed!
All present then uttered a terrified shout:
    All turned with disgust from the scene.
The worms they crept in, and the worms they crept out,
And sported his eyes and his temples about,
    While the spectre addressed Imogine:
Although marked with the sign of comedy, the text's extreme civility ("partake of our chear," "dismay and surprise," "turned with disgust," ''sported," and the like) is finally far more deeply disturbing than the poem's stock figural horrors. Lewis has introduced disorder into the most primitive levels of his work by upsetting the poem's aesthetic base. The text is anarchic"idle and extravagant"precisely because, as Wordsworth saw, it has made itself the primary instance of its im/moral subjects. A lord of misrule presides over this balladover the way the ballad materials are rhetorically managed. The poem exhibits a reckless and cosmopolitan savagery resembling nothing so much as the fiction of the Marquis de Sade.
AA. According to Wordsworth, these landscapes of savage places and demon lovers figure a natural world corrupted by menspecifically, by men (and poets) like Lewis and, later, Byron.
XX. But the devil's account is that the messiah fell and formed a heaven of what he stole from the abyss. According to this view of things, Lewis's work exhibits the eternal delight of its own idle and extravagant energies. How did Keats put it later? "might half slumbering on its own right arm" ("Sleep and Poetry"). Corruption and sin are problems according to the still sad music of humanity, not according to the mighty working of the universal order of things, the music of the spheres.
Henry Boyd's academic treatment of Dante is misguided, Blake says, because the critic brings ethical touchstones to Dante's work. But poetry for Blake is committed to the splendid struggles of Good and Evil. "The grandest Poetry is Immoral," according to Blake's view ("Annotations to Boyd's
Dante
"). And his further thought is also very much to the historical point. The Byronic and
 
Page 370
the Wordsworthian, the city and the country, the aristocrat and the bourgeois: "These two classes of men are always upon earth, & they should be enemies" (
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
, plate 16).
NN. No doubt. But those two classes of men are not the only citizens of these worlds.
XX. True. Wordsworth and those who sympathized with his workColeridge and Hazlitt, for examplefound as little to praise in the work of George Crabbe as in the work of Lewis, although Crabbe could hardly be seen as an idle or extravagant versifier. His representations of madness, for example, so detailed and methodical, empty themselves of all their Romantic possibilities. With "Peter Grimes" (1810) he writes a kind of case report of a deranged mind:
"'All Days alike! for ever!' did they say,
'And unremitted Torments every Day.'
Yes, so they said:" but here he ceas'd and gaz'd
On all around, affrighten'd and amaz'd . . .
Then with an inward, broken voice he cried,
"Again they come," and mutter'd as he died.
One has only to compare Grimes's imaginary visitations with those of Byron's Giaour. Both apparitions rise up from watery graves, but while Byron's hero lives in a charged erotic worldhis despair is sublime and finally transcendentGrimes has no access even to the negative dialectics of Romanticism. For Crabbe's work is a dismissal of eros, the world he sees and represents is survivalist at best. The grimmest reading of the culture of the period that we have, Crabbe's poetry is, for that very reason, an indispensable limiting case for criticism.
NN. But very much a special case. I was recollecting another differential. We customarily think of Byron's spectacular arrival on the cultural scene in 1812 as a turning point in the history of Romanticism . . .
XX. . . . as it surely was. His work distinctly sharpened the Romantic critique of culture. Byron's importance was to have (fore)seen that Romanticism itself would become a cultural norm. For this reason his work became the bar sinister across what he called the "wrong revolutionary poetical system" of Romanticism (letter to Murray, September 15, 1817).
 
Page 371
The movement's systematic inertias deflected its revolutionary potential, turning the poets into schoolmasters, imagination into pedagogy. As Wordsworth, addressing Coleridge, declared:
Prophets of Nature, we to them will speak
A lasting inspiration, sanctified
By reason, blest by faith: what we have loved,
Others will love, and we will teach them how;
                                                  (
Prelude 
XIV)
The Byronic resistance to this potential in Romanticism recalls the exuberant independence of Burns and Blake. But later Romantics, paradigmatically Byron and Shelley, developed the sorrow that came with twenty and more years of dark knowledge:
But all the bubbles on an eddying flood
Fell into the same track at last, and were
Borne onward.
                ("The Triumph of Life," 1822)
NN. Byron's and Shelley's knowledge comes from deeper roots. Look at the cultural scene through Mrs. Barbauld's
Eighteen Hundred and Eleven
(1812), published the same year as Byrods
Childe Harold
.
A Romaunt
. As dark a vision as Byron's, Barbauld's poem imagines a world at war with itself The torments of contemporary civilization are not tares among the new spring wheat; they are a function of the presiding "Genius" of the European world in general:
There walks a Spirit o'er the peopled earth,
Secret his progress is, unknown his birth;
Moody and viewless as the changing wind,
No force arrests his foot, no chain can bind;
"a world at war with itself': Barbauld's poem is a late reflection on the dominant political event of the Romantic agethe French Revolution and its aftermath, the Napoleonic wars.
Seen from a contemporary vantage point, this is the spirit of what Mary Shelley would call "The New Prometheus," here imagined raising up "the human brute" from ignorance and darkness. Like Shelley's Frankenstein, Barbauld's Prometheus is a figure of severest contradictionas one sees in the startling conjunction of "moody" with the Miltonic poeticism "viewless.'' A spirit of grandeur, beauty,

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