Of Perfect Speech

A WORDSWORTH ANTHOLOGY--Co//ec/-ec/ 6y Laurence Housman--Scrlbner ($2).

To a world less likely to be moved by "one impulse from a vernal wood" than by a burst from a bazooka, Author Laurence Housman (Victoria Regina) has seen fit to issue a new selection of the poems of William Wordsworth.

This book, the first important edition of Wordsworth since Matthew Arnold selected and edited the best of Wordsworth more than half a century ago, fills an important gap.

Rustic Herbivore. Editor Housman is apologetic about filling it. Most people, when they think of Wordsworth at all, think of him as a rustic herbivore who wrote, among reams of rhymed prose, some 100 sonnets glorifying the Church of England. By some literary freak he also managed to write the Ode on Intimations of Immortality. Then he earned Robert Browning's versified contempt ("Just for a handful of silver he left us") by changing his politics, later becoming poet laureate of England.

Yes, says Editor Housman, Wordsworth is the great poet "it is most easy to laugh at, and sometimes the most difficult not to find dull." He was conservative, parochial, smug. "I could have written like Shakespeare," Wordsworth is reported to have said to Charles Lamb, "had I had a mind." "Yes," stammered Lamb, "it was the m-m-mind that was 1-1-lacking."

Undiminfshed Fame. Nevertheless, "Wordsworth's fame stays undiminished. . . ." Matthew Arnold, good critic and better poet, ranked Wordsworth just below the greatest poets: "Dante, Shakespeare, Moliere, Milton, even Goethe, are altogether larger and more splendid luminaries in the poetical heaven over Wordsworth. But I know not where else, among the moderns, we are to find his superiors." As the modern skies grow darker, the comets sizzle into oblivion, and the novas burn themselves out, the body of Wordsworth's best work shines with the steadiness of those far suns whose light reaches us over unimaginable distances. To Wordsworthians, Wordsworth at his best is the greatest English practitioner, after Milton, of that literary form to which Matthew Arnold gave the classic definition: "Now poetry is nothing less than the most perfect speech of man, that in which he comes nearest to being able to utter the truth."

Repentant Revolutionist. For the utterance of truth Wordsworth had a surprisingly modern experience. As a young man, he was an ardent revolutionist. The French Revolution was for him what the Russian Revolution was for a later generation. Unlike many later enthusiasts, Wordsworth was not content to applaud from the sidelines. He went to France and took a small post in the revolutionary government. In time he decided that revolutions can reform practically anything except man. So he became a philosophic conservative of the most unrepentant kind --the repentant revolutionist. For some. 50 years he sounded the emotional overtones of this position in verse that ranged from bald simplicity:

A violet by a mossy stone

Half hidden from the eye,

Fair as a star when only one

Is shining in the sky,

to Miltonic grandeur:

Thy friends are exultations, agonies,

And love, and man's unconquerable

mind.

Pure Fountain. It has been said that "when Wordsworth's inferior work has been pruned away, only a half dozen first-rate poems remain. Arnold in his selection found 312 pages of first-rate poetry; Housman finds only 129 pages. Included in his selections are the Ode on Intimations of Immortality, Tintern Abbey, Michael, the best episode from The Prelude, a few narrative poems and a swatch of lyrics, 14 of Wordsworth's grand total of nearly 150 sonnets (some of which Housman considers greater than Milton's). All the Lucy poems are included. From one of them Editor Housman invites those who still doubt Wordsworth's supreme place in English poetry to read the stanza:

The stars of midnight shall be dear

To her; and she shall lean her ear

In many a secret place

Where rivulets dance their wayward

round,

And beauty born of murmuring sound

Shall pass into her face.

The music of Mozart and the music of Wordsworth are very different in expression, but both flow from the same pure fountain.

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