Is The Excursion a "metrical Novel?"

Abstract

In final paragraph of his bewildering preface to The Excursion, Wordsworth famously denies having any intention of formally announcing a system, even in The Recluse itself, let alone in intermediate poem. He hints reader may be able to extract a system for if poet succeeds in conveying clear thoughts, lively images and strong feelings, but, again, this claim made not about The Excursion, but about the whole poem, namely The Recluse, and it ghostly entity whose ambitious, appetizing and never-to-be-fulfilled Prospectus his final paragraph introduces. (1) Approaching digressive instalment, The Excursion, in expectation of finding exposition of a philosophy of life must, therefore, be self-defeating. What, though, if we look instead for palpable life experiences and for a variety of perspectives on those experiences, offered through subtly differentiated fictional minds, whose role to act as lenses upon our world? This being a poem composed of ambulatory dialogue among four characters, designed to tell how three of those characters conspire to reform fourth, it seems appropriate to engage one's critical faculties in adjudicating among perspectives, suspending judgment as to which perspectives carry author's imprimatur, and prepared to question what one told, rather than assuming reader's role merely to be borne upon a palanquin (I borrow Wordsworth's own 1815 trope for passive reader) into realms of transcendental revelation. Is its design, perhaps, more maieutic (in Socratic and Kierkegaardian sense) (2) than it has been given credit for? Such a question not as strange as it may sound, if one remembers both Wordsworth's own compositional practice before he wrote The Excursion--his radical experiments with voice and character in years 1798 to 1807-and what happened to long poem very soon after Wordsworth, in, perhaps especially, Adam Mickiewicz's Pan Tadeusz (1834), dough's Amour de Voyage (1858) Browning's The Ring and Book (1868) and Barratt-Browning's Aurora Leigh (1857).-H He has explored potentialities for ironized speakers, limited points of view, and (especially germane to telling of Solitary) merits of twice-told of which Hart-Leap Well--a poem associated in Home at Grasmere with burden of The Recluse--is so remarkable an instance. And in Preface of 1815, he himself numbered the metrical Novel among poetic genres. (4) What works Wordsworth had in mind by that dear production of our days, metrical Novel hard to say. W. J. B. Owen's wonderfully laconic note on matter reads (in its entirety): Crabbe's tales? Scott's narrative poems? (189, n. 4.). The recent success of Byron's The Giaour (1813) and The Corsair and Lara (1814) might also contribute to Words-worth's hint of derogation in 1815 (that dear production of our days) except these are tales, and whatever he means by the metrical Novel it apparently not synonymous with Epic, or Tale, or Romance, which he lists in same sentence as exemplifying other modes of narrative genre. Since Landor's Gebir also no more than a tale, and works like Madoc and Thalaba are more often styled epics or romances, one might conclude primary instances of that dear production of our days, metrical Novel are in fact Goethe's 9-Canto Herman and. Dorothea (translated by Holcroft and printed in Bristol by Biggs and Cottle) and The Excursion itself. Indeed Holcroft's summary of impact of Goethe's work upon its translator rather suggests this conjunction: Goethe's poem may have a more eventful plot than Wordsworth's, but like The Excursion it offers No artful denouement, no crouded incidents, nor any prolonged suspence (sic and sic). In reading, Holcroft continues, the mind always kept alive, it never so hurried as to lose power of reflection and soul is never tortured by compassion: its feelings are pure, mild and in unison with dignified tone of narrative. …