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COPYRIGHT 1993 Johns Hopkins University Press
"THE CURRENT CONSENSUS"
My interest in the problem of Wordsworth's revisions began in the early 1980s, in the face of an awkward pedagogical reality: many of the upper-level undergraduates to whom I taught the English Romantic poets simply could not afford the books I was assigning, particularly the bulky two-volume Penguin Wordsworth and the parallel-text Penguin Prelude. Yet cheaper alternatives, at least for Wordsworth, were either too selective, or forbiddingly inclusive, cramped, and unannotated.(1) It was not until 1984, and Oxford University Press's publication of an inexpensive one-volume Oxford Authors Wordsworth, edited by Stephen Gill, that a solution seemed at hand. This solution, though, turned out to raise as many problems as it solved.
The Oxford Authors series aims to offer "authoritative editions of the major English writers for the student and general reader." Each edition prints what it calls "the best texts available" in a selection that seeks out "the essence of a writer's work and thinking." In the case of Gill's edition, though, other, and potentially conflicting, aims are at work. "Here, for the first time," the blurb tells us, Wordsworth's poems "are presented in order of composition and in texts in which their original identity is restored." That is, in versions Wordsworth revised in subsequent editions.
Wordsworth's career as a poet spanned sixty-five years, from 1785 to 1850. Between 1793 and 1850, Wordsworth published fifteen books of new verse, and nine collected editions, the first of which appeared in 1815. These collected editions were arranged topically rather than chronologically, and contained both fresh poems and the latest revised versions of older poems. According to Ernest de Selincourt, editor of what is still the standard edition (until, at least, the completion of the Cornell Edition, to be discussed later), "it is probable that no poet ever paid more meticulous or prolonged attention to his text."(2) As Gill himself puts it, in a textual note to the Oxford Authors edition, and amply documents in his richly informative 1989 biography, Wordsworth: A Life, "over revision the poet expended enormous vigilance and the labour did not end until his death."(3) That death followed hard on the heels of the publication in 1849-1850 of a six-volume Poems, the last collected edition worked on by Wordsworth himself. Though Wordsworth was eighty when he died, and incapable of the major revisions of, for example, the 1836-1837 and 1845 collections, he was, as Gill's biography puts it, "alert enough to attend to details."(4) There is little reason to question the edition's status as "the poet's final authorized text," or to suppose he ever changed his mind about the importance, as he wrote to Alexander Dyce in 1830, of "following strictly the last Copy of the text of an Author."(5)
Gill's motives for ignoring Wordsworth's final texts relate only indirectly to the aims of the Oxford Authors series. On the back of the edition, right next to the general rubric (with its talk of "best" texts and "the essence of a writer's work and thinking"), is a one-paragraph description beginning as follows:
This edition enables today's readers to share something of the
experiences of Wordsworth's contemporaries. Keats and Shelley,
Hazlitt and Lamb read his poems as they were first published, but
later readers have generally been familiar only with the poems
altered, often markedly, by the revisions Wordsworth made to his
work throughout his long life. The question of aesthetic value--are these versions "best"--goes unmentioned here. What matters is Wordsworth's relation to history, specifically literary history. By restoring his poems to "their original identity" the reader will have a more accurate sense of their immediate impact on his contemporaries.
Whether this historical sense is quite what is wanted or needed by "the student and general reader" is not addressed in the publicity material on the back cover. Nor are such needs addressed in Gill's textual note, which offers a rather different account of his editorial procedures:
In the belief that a chronological presentation can best reveal the
growth of the poet's mind (the subject, after all, of his greatest
poem, The Prelude) and the unfolding of his imagination, the volume
is ordered according to date of composition. If follows--and here
I break with all of the editorial pioneers, Dowden, Knight, Hutchinson,
de Selincourt, Darbishire--that one must print a text which
comes as close as possible to the state of a poem when it was first
completed.(6) Though John O. Hayden's two-volume Penguin edition also orders the poems chronologically, its use of authorized or revised texts poses, as he himself admits, "very complex problems" to students of Wordsworth's poetic evolution.(7) As Gill puts it: "To place a poem under 1795 in a text encrusted with the revisions of perhaps forty years--the practice of the current Penguin edition--is, to say the least, confusing."(8) This confusion, though, originates with Wordsworth, who "towards the end of his life, does not even scruple to offer the present as if it were the past." When in 1842 Wordsworth issued Poems Chiefly of Early and Later Years, for example, ostensibly "to gratify the natural interest faithful readers have in all his verse," those readers. in Gill's words, "could not have known that what was presented as historical period pieces are in fact freshly revised poems."(9)
But there are confusions in Gill's practice as well. On the one hand, his editorial justifications present themselves as historical or biographical; on the other, they draw on implicit aesthetic or value judgements. The privileging of chronology and original (or originally published) editions highlights Wordsworth's development. This development matters because poetical or imaginative growth is the subject matter of Wordsworth's "greatest" poem, The Prelude. But in order to highlight this subject matter Gill prints versions of other poems, not to mention The Prelude itself, Wordsworth importantly revised, ignoring long-famous and much-honored authorized versions. Hence, in "Resolution and independence," a "great" poem openly concerned with poetical or imaginative growth, Gill retains lines 59-63, in which the leech gatherer is described with a flatness Coleridge thought "only proper in prose," because they appeared in the "original" 1807 publication (by which Gill means the first version to appear in a book of Wordsworth's poems, rather than in newspapers or periodicals).(10) Wordsworth's excision of these lines in 1815 and all subsequent editions, along with a number of smaller changes, both in 1815 and later, is simply ignored, presumably on the grounds that what matters is our sense of Wordsworth in 1807, at the time of "original" publication. But "Resolution and Independence" was mostly written five years earlier, in an already revised version of July 1802 which Jared E. Curtis, its Cornell editor, calls "substantially the one published in 1807."(11) As for the aim of allowing readers to "share something of the experiences of Wordsworth's contemporaries," it is true that neither Keats nor Shelley nor Hazlitt would have known the poem before 1807, but Coleridge did, and Lamb may also have read it. Moreover, Wordsworth's contemporaries are as likely to have known the 1815 version, in which lines 59-63 were first excised, as that of 1807. But in either case the number of contemporaries about whom we are talking--certainly in terms of sales--is minuscule: the poem did not appear in the magazines; of the 1,000 copies of the 1807 Poems, in Two Volumes, 230 remained unsold by 1814; of the 500 copies of the 1815 Poems by William Wordsworth, also in two volumes, only 352 copies were sold by 1817, and the remaining copies only by 1820.(12) Most readers--that is, most of Wordsworth's contemporaries--would have known the poem in the later collected editions.
Gill, I am suggesting, ignores Wordsworth's explicit intentions for reasons that are not always clear or consistent--at least as stated. One might argue the aesthetic or artistic merits of different versions (about which there is no consensus), but Gill chooses not to. Nor does he do so in support of comparably noteworthy instances, such as that of "Ode: Intimations of Immortality," here titled merely "Ode" (its title in the 1807 printing), or "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" (with its host of "dancing" as opposed to "golden" daffodils), or a number of early versions of importantly-revised Lyrical Ballads.(13) In other instances--notably Peter Bell, The Ruined Cottage, and The Prelude--he even prints manuscript versions, because the time between original composition and publication is so great. But what, then, of Wordsworth's impact on his contemporaries?
The implicit aesthetic dimension of Gill's editorial rationale is suggested by another passage in the "Note on the Text." The 1849-1850 edition is "most unsatisfactory," writes Gill, because "many poems have been considerably revised from their first published state, altered moreover not in one creative burst of revision, but at various times throughout Wordsworth's lifetime."(14) In other words, periodic and deliberated revisions are somehow less likely to be creative than those that come in a burst: poetic power and spontaneity or imagination go hand in hand, even in secondary or cognitive processes of creation, such as revision, a belief with obvious connections to the privileging of earlier over later versions.
That Wordsworth himself played a vital role in propagating such views--in championing the so-called primary-process claims of originality, spontaneity, authenticity, inspiration--is a central irony of the recent history of his texts. Wordsworth's account of the poetical process is no simple, single thing: he had almost as much to say about "labour," "judgment," "finish," "poetical pains," the necessity of having "thought long and hard," as about "powerful feelings" or "unelaborated expression." But in literary historical terms the Wordsworth who is remembered is the Wordsworth of "spontaneous overflow," of verses "written at a heat," "fresh from the brain," "piping hot," and free of any merely "mechanical" adoption of tropes or figures.(15), bibliographical circles, the influence of this Wordsworth has only recently, in the last fifteen or so years, held sway. Earlier, the Wordsworth who mattered to textual critics was the Wordsworth of authorized versions, the careful reviser who wondered whether "such thoughts as arise in the process of composition should be expressed in the first words that offer themselves, as being likely to be most energetic and natural," and then concluded that "it is frequently true of second words as of second thoughts, that they are the best."(16) For followers of the authorized Wordsworth, such as Edward Dowden, in his influential seven-volume edition of 1892-1893, "the latest text is the best text."(17)
The move away from Dowden's view--from what might be called Wordsworth's practice as opposed to his theory--is most clearly, marked in the opening words of the preface to Jonathan Wordsworth's 1969 critical and textual study of The Ruined Cottage, entitled The Music of Humanity. "On the whole," writes Jonathan Wordsworth, in what looks like an allusion to Dowden, "poets are known by the best versions of their works: Wordsworth is almost exclusively known by the worst."(18) Today, this judgement--echoed, for example, in Stephen Maxfield Parrish's introduction to the Cornell Wordsworth editions, with its talk of "the original, often the best, versions"--prevails among Wordsworth's editors, so that, as Jack Stillinger puts it in a powerful "revisionist" article of 1990, "the later Wordsworth is being forced out of the picture, and a kind of textual primitivism has taken hold, that in effect is burying, possibly forever, some of Wordsworth's most admired writing."(19)
As I have been suggesting, Wordsworth himself helps sanction these changes--the Wordsworth whose theories of poetical power and natural virtue, in M. H. Abrams's words, "may in all fairness be classified as a form ... of cultural primitivism," the Wordsworth for whom "the child is father of the man."(20) It might even be argued--as it has been, in effect, by Jerome McGann--that a more general bibliographical primitivism, in which earliest is best, is also indebted to Wordsworth, or at least to the Romantic Ideology with which he is so centrally associated. When, for example, current bibliographical scholars privilege manuscripts over first editions, invariably attributing discrepancies to editorial interference, the "practical experience" they cite in defence of these attributions is seen by McGann as colored by unacknowledged "Romantic" notions of poetical autonomy.(21)
"THE CORNELL WORDSWORTH"
Chief among the textual primitivists to whose procedures Stillinger objects are the editors of the magisterial Cornell Wordsworth, a projected 20-volume edition which aims to supplant Ernest de Selincourt's five-volume Poetical Works (1941-1949, revised by Helen Darbishire, 1952-1959). Parrish, the series co-editor, lays out its aims in a half-page introduction at the front of each volume. It is here that he writes of recovering "the original, often the best, versions" as the edition's first objective, quoting de Selincourt on the "obsessive" nature of Wordsworth's revisions, and then identifying as a second, historical objective the presentation of "a complete and accurate record of variant readings." The resulting format of the edition is uniform: an "original" or earliest version is designated as "reading text," even in cases of the most famous later versions, and variant readings are relegated to an apparatus criticus, though the "most important variants are shown in full transcription, and photographs of the manuscript pages are also provided." The Cornell edition is thus something of a mirror image of de Selincourt's five-volume Poetical Works, in which it is early readings that are relegated to the apparatus. When Stillinger complains...
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