Johnny Foy: Wordsworth's Imaginative Hero

Abstract

In the advertisement to the 1798 edition of Lyrical Ballads, William Wordsworth requests that we “consent to be pleased in spite of that most dreadful enemy to our pleasures, our own pre-established codes of decision.”1 And yet many readers decline—even stubbornly refuse—to be pleased by several of the poems. In particular, “The Idiot Boy” has frustrated, confused, or offended readers since its first appearance in print. John Wilson, a devoted fan, wrote to the poet in 1802, “[A]mong all the people ever I knew to have read this poem, I never met one who did not rise rather displeased from the perusal of it.”2 Byron satirized the poem, implicitly comparing Wordsworth to his intellectually disabled hero: “[A]ll who view the ‘idiot in his glory’, / Conceive the Bard the hero of the story.”3 Contemporary scholars like Geoffrey Hartman continue to echo Byron’s comparison: “[T]he poet’s obvious pleasure while narrating . . . draws too much attention to Wordsworth’s own ‘burring.’”4 Indeed, Wordsworth’s pleasure shows in every bouncy line; in 1843 he famously recalled that, “[I]n truth, I never wrote anything with so much glee.”5 But to attribute Johnny’s disability to Wordsworth, however glibly, oversimplifies the poet’s complex appropriation of intellectual disability as an image of the poetic imagination and forecloses the possibility of enjoying the poem beyond dismissive laughter at the poet’s expense. For readers willing to distinguish Wordsworth from Johnny and from the narrator, “The Idiot Boy” offers a double pleasure, both satirical and sublime. As Brooke Hopkins points out, the poem’s pleasure comes from Wordsworth’s fulfillment of his objective in Lyrical Ballads to “purify the hearts of [his] readers by awakening them to the wonder that was, literally, right in front of their eyes” (Hopkins’s italics).6 As Samuel Taylor Coleridge writes, Wordsworth seeks to “give the charm of novelty to things of every day . . . by awakening the mind’s attention from the lethargy of custom.”7 “The Idiot Boy” accomplishes this by surprising us with sublimity where we expect only silliness and imagination where we expect only idiocy. Whereas Byron and Hartman compare Wordsworth and Johnny to the former’s detriment, contemporary scholars have been increasingly