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COPYRIGHT 2000 Boston University
David Bromwich. Disowned by Memory: Wordsworth's Poetry of the 1790's. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Pp. 186. $25.00.
In this patient exploration of early but decidedly major Wordsworth, David Bromwich scrupulously avoids reading the mountain-top triumphs of the 1805 Prelude back into the ground-mist falterings and perplexities that dogged the twenty-something poet. In an opening chapter bracingly alive to the eighteenth century's moral language and to Wordsworth's turns on it, Bromwich contends that it was "The Old Cumberland Beggar" more than anything else that allowed a new Wordsworth to tentatively emerge from out the cover of a circulating human figure, whose alienated and almost robotic bearing confirms the community through which he moves in the sustaining at-homeness of their "one human heart" as it finds expression in a habitual and spontaneous going out of hand as well as heart.
Wordsworth always remained confident that he had experienced the "radiance" and promise of such spontaneity in two regions of his life: his childhood and a French Revolution with "human nature seeming born again." Wordsworth's steadfast commitment to such independence prompts Bromwich to make an enormous but judiciously measured claim for Wordsworth: "It would be a misjudged enterprise to try to say what sort of thinker he was. His work is more primary than that; it is a portrait of the conditions for thinking" (22). Bromwich uses the plural "conditions," but the one underlying condition--the condition for any and all conditions--is independence. Wordsworth was "always interested in people who continue to be themselves" (172) because such utterly specific instances of humanity were the oblique routes to what he himself was made of and how he too might authentically stand single. They embodied "a state in which [one has] the power to originate [one's] feelings and need not submit to a mode of feeling devised by others" (157).
Chapter 2...
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