GIVEN WORDSWORTH'S TENDENCY TO TROPE HIMSELF AS A WANDERER, as an idler, as a vagabond, recluse, gatherer of leeches, and perhaps most memorably, in Prelude, as blind beggar ... propped against a Wall, upon his Chest / Wearing a written paper, to explain / story of Man, and who he (7.612-15),(1) his wish in The Old Cumberland Beggar that political economists grant his ambling vagrant a function and a place in larger economic community, despite his seemingly repulsive uselessness, invites questions about of poetry. deem not this man useless--Statesman! (67);(2) Wordsworth may well have been speaking of himself. On what grounds is this comparison justified? How could poetry have anything to do with misery of hunger and destitution, let alone charitable attempts to relieve them? Certainly, metaphorical resonances between Wordsworth's poetic goals and economic questions of and distribution are compelling. Wordsworth was well aware of pun embedded in his own name--words' worth--and even signed his first ever published poem with epithet Axiologus, a playful combination of axiom, meaning or worth, and logos, word.(3) A school of post structuralist Wordsworthian criticism, indebted particularly to Geoffrey Hartman and Paul de Man, has revitalized Wordsworth's unique sense that language, diction, metaphor, and writing are not and insufficient substitutes for greater of nature and spirit but that language manufactures those realities that cannot be otherwise understood as products of verbal creativity.(4) Kurt Heinzelman has similarly proposed that Wordsworth adapts classical economic notion of real value of labor, as opposed to exchange values arrived at through estimation and negotiation, to lend credibility to a poetics in which writer and reader strive, and often fail, to do equal amounts of imaginative work. More recently, and with more direct relevance to questions of poverty and charity, Celeste Langan has shown that throughout his poetic oeuvre, Wordsworth conceives of poetry as errant wandering, evading synonymous enclosures of economic policy and literary convention.(5) Available historical and biographical evidence supports Heinzelman's and Langan's readings. Between 1796 and 1800, years in which he composed, revised, and finally published The Old Cumberland Beggar, Wordsworth was deeply concerned that occupation he had chosen for Himself would not support his growing household and worrisome financial responsibilities: Calvert Legacy, Lowther debt, his impending marriage, his concern for Annette Vallon and their daughter Caroline, his difficult partnership with Coleridge, and clamourings of his publishers.(6) As demobilized soldiers returned from West Indies and were unable to find work, crime and vagrancy increased, while country also faced starvation and famine, especially in agricultural regions, after disastrous harvests of 1994 and 1795.(7) Wordsworth's sympathy, and to some extent, his identification with the abject (135) reflect genuine anxieties about economic viability of his occupation as much as they demonstrate paradoxes of imagination and representation. Wordsworth's interest in poverty is not distinguishable from Hartman's ahistorical treatment of Wordsworth's poetry, though only now is that symbiosis beginning to be fully appreciated. Indeed, mutual realignment of post-structuralist and new-historicist methodologies in Wordsworth studies represents a much-needed alternative to theoretical prejudices which have polarized romantic criticism. But how is it possible for Wordsworth's self-reflexive interest in poetic language and self-concerned anxiety over poetic occupation to amount to anything as outward looking as a proposal for poor relief or, at best, a theory of charity? I propose that crux of Wordsworth's poetic treatment of vagrancy is idea that poetry, poverty, and charity are unproductive labors. …
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Apr 1, 2002
L Barnett 
Open Access
