Becoming artists of ourselves: Wordsworth's 'egotistical sublime'

The human Self is a majestic source of wonder

The Cumbrian countryside, where Wordsworth grew up. Image by Sagesolar

In a letter to Richard Woodhouse in 1818, John Keats explained his views on what it really means to be a poet. In order for a poet to inhabit the subjects and experiences truly worth writing about, he must himself be ‘unpoetical.’ Keats wrote:

‘A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity---he is continually in for—and filling some other Body—The Sun, the Moon, the Sea and Men and Women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have about them an unchangeable attribute—the poet has none; no identity—he is certainly the most unpoetical of all God's Creatures.’ 

Keats contrasted this unpoetical nature with what he called the ‘Wordsworthian Egotistical Sublime’, which he said, is ‘a thing per se and stands alone.’ Keats was referring to William Wordsworth’s ability to turn even the most ordinary and common personal experiences into moments of religious insight. This is most evident in his autobiographical epic The Prelude, which was drafted in 1798, written fully in 1805 and then revised in a version published in 1850. In it, Wordsworth wrestles with how to apply his heightened poetic nature. In an age of revolutions, wars and industrialisation, what can a new Milton or Shakespeare write about? However, in exploring the discovery and formation of his poetic sensibility, Wordsworth stumbled on his true subject—the growth of a poet, and as a result, the growth of any human self into a fully realised, imaginative being. Keats’s view that the poet should not ‘become the story’ of his own work is deeply sane and a caution to the confessional instinct. However, Wordsworth’s great achievement was to use his own formation as an artist to reveal the religious power of human consciousness and how we become creative and morally enlarged by even the most uneventful encounters with nature. 

In the first draft of The Prelude, now known as ‘The Two-Part Prelude,’ Wordsworth talks about his earliest memories of being ‘a rover’ in Cumbria, running about ‘the high places, on the lonesome peaks/Among the mountains and winds.’ He tells tales of playing wild among the hills and rivers, stealing bird’s eggs or even hunting birds themselves, and how in those moments of brutal transgression, the landscape seemed even more alive, more awesome and present. In these moments, Wordsworth was being formed as a moral creature. The intervention of hidden forces seems to educate him into full humanity through intimations of his own wrongdoing. 

The most memorable of these is when he steals a shepherd’s boat at night—‘a skiff, that to a willow tree was tied…’ He takes the boat out onto the lake which was ‘shining clear/Among the hoary mountains…’ Wordsworth then tells us how he moved out from the shore and ‘struck the oars, and struck again/In cadence, and my little boat moved on/Just like a man who walks with stately step/Though bent on speed.’ This little simile is a brilliant example of Wordsworth’s innovative technique. It is a commonplace image, easy to see in our mind’s eye, but creepy and unsettling in its plainness and recognisability. Wordsworth has no need to evoke metaphysical creatures to communicate a sense of building dread and the thrill of criminality. 

Wordsworth feels himself being watched and followed by ‘a huge cliff’, which, ‘as if with voluntary power instinct,/Upreared its head.’ He keeps rowing on the silent, icy lake, and yet the cliff seems to stride after him and loom ever larger. When he finally puts the boat back where he found it, he is filled with ‘grave/And serious thoughts’ and for days is vexed by ‘a dim and undetermined sense/ Of unknown modes of being.’ The whole experience, Wordsworth writes, was ‘an act of stealth and troubled pleasure’ but one which led to a religious insight, a sense of clarity about his own existence which was beyond words. In short, this small event had led him to an encounter with the sublime—a confrontation with forces beyond human understanding, which are both eternal and life-giving.

That’s not all, however. These experiences are not just moments of intensity and growth. They become windows into the mystery of what it means to be human, portals of philosophical insight. In his Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth had written that he wanted to write poetry in ‘the language of men’ and to write of commonplace situations and events. But he also wrote that he wanted to ‘throw over them a certain colouring of the imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual way.’ The point for Wordsworth was to demonstrate that it is the human imagination itself which is the primary spiritual power. The sense of the sublime and the vastness that he encounters in nature is not just the impressiveness of high crags and rushing rivers. It is the presence of his own consciousness and its creative energy. Human psychology itself is a source of awe and wonder. 

In recounting these moments and many more, Wordsworth comes to see the significance of his memories and his formation in the wildness of nature. He writes:

‘Ah! Not in vain ye Beings of the hills!   
And ye that walk the woods and open heaths
By moon or star-light, thus from my first dawn
Of childhood did ye love to intertwine
The passions that build up our human soul,
Not with the mean and vulgar works of man,
But with high objects, with eternal things,
With life and nature, purifying thus
The elements of feeling and of thought,
And sanctifying by such discipline
Both pain and fear, until we recognize   
A grandeur in the beatings of the heart.’

We are made something more by such moments of quickening, moments of intense consciousness, and the suffering and sense of danger and fear that comes with them, are integral to the enlargements of the soul that Wordsworth sees as their final end. He goes on to recount other moments when he ‘wheeled about’ with his friends like ‘an untired horse/That cares not for its home.’ In these ‘games confederate’ the voices of he and his friends ring out in the crags and waters and reflects back ‘an alien sound/Of melancholy, not unnoticed…’ He says that often in these moments did he break away from the crowd and experience a kind of visionary vertigo, a disorientation of being engulfed by the circling crags and banks, followed by a moment of spiritual calm. The experience was not that of being a boy swallowed up by nature, so much as that of an intense unity with the landscape, as if he and his boyish friends were a vital part of the splendour. He writes:

‘Ye Powers of earth! Ye Genii of the springs!
And ye that have your voices in the clouds
And ye that are Familiars of the lakes
And of the standing pools, I may not think
A vulgar hope was yours when ye employed   
Such ministry, when ye through many a year
Thus by the agency of boyish sports
On caves and trees, upon the woods and hills,
Impressed upon all forms the characters
Of danger and desire, and thus did make
The surface of the universal earth
With meanings of delight, of hope and fear,
Work like a sea.’

Many critics and commentators today like to look to Wordsworth and his worship of nature as a resource for modern environmentalism, and rightly so. However, in passages like this we also see that for Wordsworth, human psychology was a critical part of the sublime found in nature. It is only through ‘the agency of boyish sports’ and the ‘danger and desire’ in the human heart, that ‘the surface of the universal earth’ can be graced with ‘meanings of delight.’ This is very much the opposite of the utopianism of modern climate change activism, which sees that very vibrancy of human consciousness as the source of the problem. It is important in understanding Wordsworth’s praise of nature’s power, that we see he is talking about the totality, the horror and the fear, as well as the beauty. And he is also talking about how we are shaped into autonomous agents by these moments of intensity and how our humanity is an essential part of the beauty we encounter. 

Wordsworth addressed his long poem to Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Though he and Coleridge had very different upbringings and concerns, he calls Coleridge ‘The most intense of Nature’s worshippers’ and a brother ‘in this deep devotion.’ It was in the commitment to the creative power of the sublime found in nature and its nourishing effects on the human imagination, that Wordsworth and Coleridge were bonded. It is a power that Wordsworth believes not only formed him, but also sustained him in the face of contemporary political turmoil—‘times of fear’ and ‘melancholy wastes of hopes o’erthrown.’ Yet in these times of ‘dereliction and dismay’, Wordsworth says he has a strength of inner resources that came from his formative experience among the ‘sounding cataracts’ and ‘the mists and winds.’ These have given him he says, ‘lofty speculations’ and a ‘never-failing principle of joy and purest passion.’ And turning to Coleridge he further says he is: 

‘…unapprehensive of contempt,
The insinuated scoff of coward tongues,
And all that silent language which so oft
In conversation betwixt man and man
Blots from the human countenance all trace
Of beauty and of love…’

The sublime, then, is found in our most commonplace encounters with nature and other human beings. It forms us and shapes us, not just in our brute senses, but also as moral beings and as psychologically robust beings with—to use modern terms—healthy boundaries and capacities for resilience. Wordsworth is able to perform a psychotherapy on us and himself through his blend of heroic meter and everyday diction, through a mix of intense lyric imagery and cascading abstraction and meditation. He has never been more relevant as a poet. But not just because he reminds us how much we are dependent upon nature, but also in reminding us of the beauty and majesty of what it means to become a fully realised and creative person. 

The full text of Wordsworth’s Two-Part Prelude can be found here.