Wordsworth’s Satanic Autobiography

Abstract

SEVERAL YEARS BEFORE WORDSWORTH made the loss of his own former glory the subject of the ‘Intimations’ ode, he lamented the loss of Satan’s former glory in Paradise Lost. In his annotations to Milton’s poem, Wordsworth recorded his reaction to Satan’s final transformation from the ruined archangel, who, though robbed of some of his ‘original brightness’, was still no less than ‘th’ excess of glory obscured’ (I. 592-4), to ‘monstrous serpent’ (X. 514):1 Here we bid farewell to the first character perhaps ever exhibited in Poetry. And it is not a little to be lamented that, he leaves us in a situation so degraded in comparison with the grandeur of his introduction. Filling an interleaved page, Wordsworth goes on to suggest that Satan and his fellow rebel angels deserved a ‘more noble’ punishment, one ‘more consonant to the dignity of the beings’.2 His objection to the manner in which Milton ushers his character offstage suggests that Wordsworth ascribes a set of characteristics to Satan that the poem, he believes, does not fulfil. Joseph Wittreich explains that ‘Wordsworth’s poetical admiration should not be confused with moral sympathy’:3 Wordsworth is not ‘of the Devil’s party’, nor does he believe Milton to be.4 Rather, Wordsworth objects to this ending because it is ‘unworthy of [Milton’s] genius’, and ‘contains in it nothing that can afford pleasure’. These objections do bear the mark of poetical, rather than moral, judgements; but what of his announcement that Satan is ‘the first character perhaps ever exhibited in Poetry’?