Pope, Wordsworth, and the problematic pendulum swing

I suspect that for most University students, the eighteenth century feels like the most foreign and unfamiliar period covered in English courses. It feels more foreign to our students than the Middle Ages and Renaissance, largely because the Romantics appropriated and re-interpreted these periods to fit into their paradigms about literature, poetry, art, the psyche, and society. Survey courses tend to teach undergrads the Medieval and Renaissance texts that Romantic authors liked; e.g., the baudy bits of Chaucer, but not the Parson’s Tale, the first book of Paradise Lost, while ignoring the far-less-easily Romanticized later books. We all know too well the common “pendulum swinging” story of how we got from the literature of the Enlightenment to the Romantics. In this model the latter is a strong reaction to the former. The Romantics break free from the formal, stiff, rational, and aristocratic Enlightenment, its scientific and commercial optimism, and emphasis on public duty. The Romantics are democratic, in-tune with nature, skeptical of science and commerce, and value individuality above all. We know that it is a very misleading oversimplification. But, at the same time, many still teach undergraduate world literature courses as if it were true. Even when professors preface the discussion by warning students of how much of an over-simplification this is, many then proceed to teach the old myth as if we still believed it. One of the common methods of teaching this “pendulum swinging” story is to set up two poems as fierce opponents, the first epistle of Pope’s Essay on Man (1734) and Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” (1798). I taught this way until the moment when I found myself delivering a lecture I didn’t believe.

In my second semester teaching Modern World Literature, my students had just finished reading these two poems back-to-back. I intended the readings to show up the differences between a stereotypical eighteenth-century Enlightenment and nineteenth-century Romantic worldview. The contrasts between these poems are perspicuous enough, but even more so if you have already decided that’s how you mean to teach them. Upon this reading, however, and (most surprisingly) while I was lecturing on a particular Wednesday afternoon, I was more and more struck by the commonalities between these poems. I do not mean to make light of the difference between them, by any means; but, if we jettison the jejune myth of the swinging pendulum, we will be able to more fully appreciate the remarkable affinity between these works, and better see the influence of a common body of texts behind them both.

The following two samples showcase the similarity. In lines 121-134 of “Tintern Abbey,” Wordsworth writes:

this prayer I make,

Knowing that Nature never did betray

The heart that loved her; 'tis her privilege,

Through all the years of this our life, to lead

From joy to joy: for she can so inform

The mind that is within us, so impress

With quietness and beauty, and so feed

With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,

Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,

Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all

The dreary intercourse of daily life,

Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb

Our chearful faith that all which we behold

Is full of blessings.

Pope, concludes Epistle One (lines 285-294) of Essay on Man with these lines:

Submit. In this, or any other sphere,

Secure to be as blest as thou canst bear:       

Safe in the hand of one disposing pow’r,

Or in the natal, or the mortal hour.

All nature is but art, unknown to thee;

All chance, direction, which thou canst not see;

All discord, harmony not understood;       

All partial evil, universal good.

And, spite of pride, in erring reason’s spite,

One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right.

Though undoubtedly differing in prosody and tenor and scope, they draw a quite similar conclusion. In both, observation on nature leads the poet to share with a dear friend. This set-up alone is ancient artifice embraced by Wordsworth, despite all his supposed radicalism. Both speakers arrive at something like a conviction that things are working inevitably towards the good; therefore, in all circumstances hope and peace are always possible and justified. While Wordsworth's argument is limited and tentative in scope (the number of circumstances and the number of possible "readings" he considers) and tentative in his conclusion--"If this / Be but a vain belief" (49,50)--even this is not too far off from Pope. Admission of limitations, is essential to Pope's argument: "What can we reason, but from what we know? / Of man what see we, but his station here" (18, 19). He denounces presumption at every turn: "From pride, from pride, our very reas'ning springs" (161), advising, rather: "Hope humbly then; with trembling pinions soar" (91), knowing that "What future bliss, he gives not thee to know" (93). Concerning the future state of man, Pope too argues tentatively: "If to be perfect in a certain sphere" (73).

The assumptions about the world are not all that different, as the two quoted passages amply show. Moreover, Wordsworth’s verse is also not so radically different. Unlike he told us to expect in the preface to Lyrical Ballads, this is decidedly not the idiom of the “common” folk, nor was this poem composed in one sitting in a moment of great insight, as he claimed – we can see the manuscripts that show otherwise. Furthermore, he hardly abandons the familiar forms of poetry. Tintern Abbey is regular blank verse, not free-verse or a new form fitted just for this set of reflections.

Wordsworth’s verse is as removed from ordinary speech as Pope’s if not more. Wordsworth, not the rhyming Pope, is forced into an un-idomatic phrase like “greetings where no kindness is” – a problem both Dryden and Pope observed abut Miltonic blank verse. Without rhyme, one has to rely on something else to signal aurally that the piece is poetry not prose – that tends to mean more Latinate syntax, like we see here. That’s not the language of the people, which Wordsworth told us he would use. The resulting verse style, while certainly not Popean, is as difficult and undemocratic as anything in Pope.

Robert J. Griffin’sWordsworth's Pope: A Study in Literary Historiography shows that we are past due for a re-consideration of this familiar antithesis of Pope and Wordsworth, an antithesis artificially heightened by this broken teaching model. The false narrative that the two poems were conscripted into illustrating also had blinded me to Popean echoes in “Tintern Abbey.” Wordsworth famously dismissed Dryden and Pope as mere versifiers, not true poets, but Griffin has exposed extent of Wordsworth’s dependence on Pope, a dependence Wordsworth was keen to obscure.

Though Wordsworth might not appreciate the observation (for he certainly helped create the meta-narrative that devalues Pope), after he had "Expatiate[d] free o'er all this scene of man" (Essay 5), he seems to have settled down in a spot not at all far from where Pope did. And, in both cases, their work reflects a whole set of assumptions about the world, God, and poetry that is not unique to either of them, that precedes them both, but on which a very common model of teaching these poems sheds no light. Wordsworth’s poem, like Pope’s, has more in common with Boethius than it does with transcendentalists like Thoreau. Yet, most students would group Wordsworth and Thoreau together, and they’ve never heard of Boethius.