Williard L. Sperry, Wordsworth's Anti-Climax

Willard L. Sperry Wordsworth’s Anti-Climax. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1935.

The Ecclesiastical Sonnets… include some worthy appreciations of Nonconformists—Covenanters and Pilgrim Fathers and others—but are designed to extol the value of the historic English Church. Many of these Sonnets are trivial. The outlook seems too restricted. Yet the whole series is restrained from bigotry by their noblest number, Mutability (48)

Are we not reversing the issues when we ask why Wordsworth wrote mediocre poems for forty years? The real question is, How was Wordsworth able to write good poems for eight or ten years? (30)

No mystic has ever laid claim to constant inspiration…If we allow Wordsworth eight or ten years of inspiration out of his sixty years of productive life, we can only say that, as these matters go, the ratio is in his favor. (31)

…given the parallel of other literary lives, we may dismiss the last twenty, even the last thirty years, of Wordsworth’s life as lying beyond the time when we have normal expectation of first-rate work from a poet. This takes us back to 1820. The period which compasses a culpable anti-climax is shortened to the ten or fifteen years which followed the golden decade. (35)

Abstract theories are once removed from the facts which they profess to explain the normal follow those facts in time. If they antedate the experiences which are their subject they eventually become sterile…The theory, as he formulated it, seemed to throw much light on his own past thoughts and emotions, but his supply of past experiences was limited. (123)

During the golden decade he had used his best material with prodigality. The first books of The Prelude incorporated the matchless little poems about rowing and nutting and skating which were no small part of his most precious heritage from the past… but surely he should have been able to re-stock his mind and heart with fresh source-material for further verse… [yet] Anyone who understands how the human mind works knows that any such conscious and deliberate quest for experience must be self-defeating. (140-141)

Wordsworth said in so many words that he regarded the Church of England as the strongest buttress of the English Constitution, and therefore as necessary to the life of the nation…The church was to him a means to ends, which, if not political, were cultural rather than theological. (186)

After his settlement at Grasmere, his marriage, and the coming of the children, we find Wordsworth, with Dorothy and Mary, back at church. They went, we are told in the journals and letters, mainly for the sake of the children. But they ‘took turns.’” (Sperry 187) “As the children grew up, the dutiful habit of church-going seems to have been relaxed. There is an amusing description of Wordsworth in later life vehemently defending in one breath the Church of England, and then admitting in the next breath that he could not remember when he had last been to church. (188)

high-church propensities: “Crabb Robinson says that Wordsworth moved in this direction because high-churchmen had a greater reverence for antiquity than the evangelicals. (188)

Wordsworth “insisted upon the ‘distinction between religion in poetry and versified religion,’ and refused to venture in the latter field. His Ecclesiastical Sonnets contains fine lines, and was his contribution to the cause of tradition; but it is conventional as history and unimportant as theology. (188)

He loved the Church of England, not because it provided sermons and sacraments, but because it kept in its perpetual care the memory of the successive generations of his fellow-countrymen. Within its acre tradition was powerfully felt and the continuity of the English nation guaranteed. (189)