Wordsworth’s Revisitings by Stephen Gill

Abstract

Book Reviews Stephen Gill. Wordsworth’s Revisitings. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Pp. xii+265. $45. This masterful, sensitive, and instructive book begins by citing a passage from an unpublished draft of “Michael” in evidence of its theme, the con­ tinuous textual life of Wordsworth’s imagination over the half-century in which he was a writer: thus it is That in such regions, by the sovereignty Of forms still paramount to every change Which years can bring into the human heart Our feelings are indissolubly bound Together, and affinities preserv’d Between all stages of the life of man. Hence with more pleasure far than others feel, Led by his son this Shepherd now went back Into the years which he himself had lived . . . Wordsworth’s Revisitings offers the passage twice for how it “leads to the centre of [Wordsworth’s] being as a man and a poet” (1). Indeed, these lines “go to the very heart of Wordsworth’s deepest compulsions” (168). Their testament to a labor of “affinities preserv’d” may be turned to Gill’s own distinguished record as a Wordsworth scholar. The many “stages” that are made pleasurably available here include not only Gill’s authoritative modern biography ofthe poet (1989), but the rich trove ofhis study Words­ worth and the Victorians (1998), and the group labor of the Cornell Words­ worth series, the first volume of which to appear in print (The Salisbury Plain Poems, 1975), Gill edited. A Cornell Wordsworth textual philosophy that reads the author-approved last versions alongside startling first versions (and everything in between) animates the present study deeply. The book’s methodology of gathering up the spoils of time, while making “sorties across the boundaries” of Wordsworth’s published and unpublished work (21), indicates its range of interpretive moods: often elegiac in tone, but al­ ways restive. A complex Arnoldian interpreter of Wordsworth, Gill is unafraid to say how Wordsworthian eloquence can matter: “The one common bond ofall SiR, 53 (Winter 2014) 617 618 BOOK REVIEWS human hearts is that we are mortal. What makes Wordsworth’s poetry at its best so profoundly moving is the steadiness with which it confronts that fact and produces beauty from it. His poems about every kind of loss ac­ knowledge ‘the unimaginable touch of time’ and yet uncover what sources of consolation and strength can be gleaned. Revisiting his own experience through the traces, both human and inanimate, of a life lived, Wordsworth continually checked his own sense of personal continuity against what Hardy called ‘Time’s mindless rote’ ” (9). The specific verbal echo is appo­ site: “the unimaginable touch of time” is a line Wordsworth “rescued” from a “discarded notebook,” at once to mark and to outface passing time (23). However, Gill’s topic is not quite the illimitable one of memory in Wordsworth. In observing the very centrality of the “drive to revisit” to Wordsworth’s “imaginative life” (9), Gill distinguishes what he calls re­ visiting from retrospection. “ Wordsworth’s Revisitings is about the poet’s con­ tinual return not to his past but to his past in his past writing” (10). Each of the book’s six chapters explores this temporal dynamic for a given strand of Wordsworth’s textual revisions. Since Gill’s reading of The Prelude covers a pair of chapters, the strategy makes for five capsule ac­ counts of Wordsworth’s writing life. The organizing idea of Wordsworth’s Revisitings is “that Wordsworth had a sense of his whole oeuvre—published and unpublished—as interrelated and interdependent” (36). Though by no means a revisionist in his literary historiography, Gill joins recent commen­ tators on Wordsworth who chronicle how “ [t]he poet’s right of control, as creator, was exercised most imperiously through the power of determining what would emerge as the Wordsworth canon” (33). Following such “imaginative husbandry” (25) imparts a crucial dimension of the ordinary. Fits of minutia over revision admit much needed elements—compulsion, chance, and risk—through an anti-narrative force of contingency. Words­ worth cannot help but obsessively “tinker” (13, 51, 177). The “infirmity” of revision included even “retouching” of “favorite passages of favorite Authors” (19). In the Introduction and first chapter...