Miller 1 Dara Miller Dr.

Richard Squibbs ENG 439 7 February 2012 Thus strangely did I war against myself: Wordsworths Re-imagination of the French Revolution Inspired by the idealistic promises of the early years of the French Revolution, a young Wordsworth travelled to France in 1791 in order to pursue the spirit of liberty that was sweeping Europe. He spent the next year in France, both experiencing the ecstasies and uncovering the horrors of the Revolution. As the Revolution grew increasingly bloody through Robespierres Reign of Terror, Wordsworths fascination with the glory of the Revolution began to falter; as it abandoned its democratic principles in subjection to Napoleon, he became disgusted with the war that had initially enchanted both his poetic and his intellectual senses. As a poet looking back on his youth, Wordsworth later attempts to reason out the tumult of emotions he experienced in conjunction with his interaction with the Revolution in his continuously reflective work, The Prelude. Throughout The Prelude, Wordsworth experiments with the idea that human imagination holds the power to reshape ones experiences, and uses these visitings of imaginative power to publically revise his experience of gradual disillusionment with the Revolution. By engaging in the political discourse of Reason through his use of imaginative reconstruction, Wordsworth both justifies his abandonment of his idealistic commitment to the Revolutionary cause and invites his readers to similarly invoke imagination in their own lives. In Book X of The Prelude, Wordsworth refers to spots of time (258) that define a persons life and require both meditation and re-evaluation. Although that point in the poem is

Miller 2 made as Wordsworth begins a lengthy series of reflections on his personal life experiences, he applied this same re-imaginative principle to his reflections on his time in France and his fascination with the Revolution. For Wordsworth, his experiences with the Revolution became a personal journey, and his struggle to reconcile the jubilant support felt by his younger self with the disgust that eventually replaced it comprises an essential facet of the poem. According to John Reider, Wordsworth draws a distinct parallel between his personal journey and the journey of the French Revolution itself, as the course of the French Revolution follows a plot of maturation in The PreludeThe Revolution, like Wordsworth, having suffered through a tragedy of betrayal, hopes to recapture the visionary promise of its youth (18). Unlike the Revolution, however, Wordsworth is able to recover; although he comes to regard the cause he once championed with revulsion, he is still able to derive pleasure from his experience through his imaginative reconstruction. This sense of aesthetic pleasure, although it seems to contradict [Wordsworths] association of poetry with knowledge (Hewitt 98) actually provides an essential understanding for how he views both the Revolution and his later remembrances of it; as a poet, he is supremely concerned with creating a conduit for the human emotion, and thus his sense of pleasure in recreating his experiences transfers into a variety of outlets for both himself and his readers; in his imaginative reminiscence, he personally enjoys the nostalgia associated with his memory; in his recreations, he is able to experience the generative forces of poetic creativity; and in through his guided constructions, he is able to envision a past wherein his poetic process compensates for what he seems to believe were his past mistakes. Additionally, poems constructed from this awareness [of pleasurable discourse] perform the sociological task of

Miller 3 illustrating the meanings and motives adequate to particular social contextsthey are modelsfor learning how a coherent society can function (Hewitt 98). Due to his dedication to reimagining and improving on his spots of time, Wordsworth is able to simultaneously re-experience his youthful pleasures and confer judgment on the segments of his experience that would lead him to his disillusionment. His meticulous process allows him to a develop a consciousness throughout the poem that is both uniquely personal and comprehensively universal; The Prelude is not singularly a a political abnegation or the poets accession to a more profound awareness of social conflict, nor a defensive reconstruction or a substantial, confessional self-understanding; (Reider 19) rather, it is all of these seemingly conflicting stances, enveloped in the Romantic imagination and yet grounded in the Reason of the Enlightenment. Although he is awareof the increasing improbability ofhis properly imaginative poems being understood as such by others (Simpson 60), he focuses on his ability to use the language of the common people in such a way that his narrative experience with the French Revolution can resound with both broad and specific audiences; in The Prelude, he creates a model environment that offers specific conditions in which the intrinsically and extrinsically problematic figurative faculty essential to imagination and to all perception might develop and be sustainedthat provide the opportunity for the correction of improper figurations, and the modifications of authentic ones (Simpson 60). This model environment, although shaped throughout the course of the work, is perhaps most evident in the sections in which he reflects on the impact of the French Revolution on both his life and his art; as he traces the modifications of his authentic feelings, he holds himself up as an exemplar of the mode for imaginative reconstruction of memory.

Miller 4 Wordsworth establishes his multi-dimensional perspective of time early on in Book X, when he first foreshadows his mature disenchantment through the guise of his young memorys reason as he recounts his 1791 pilgrimage to France: Lamentable crimes, Tis true, had gone before this hour, the work Of massacre, in which the senseless sword Was prayed to as a judge; but these were past, Earth freed from them for ever, as was thought, Ephemeral monsters, to be seen but once; Things that could only shew themselves and die. This was the time in which enflamed with hope, To Paris I returned(Wordsworth 10:31-39) As evidenced throughout The Prelude, Wordsworth recognizes the latent violence in the Revolutionary on two different levels; as an older man who saw the Revolution turn and degenerate, he sees these past crimes as a foreshadowing of the bloody Reign of Terror. His young mans voice, however, is still heard in this memory; the fervor of the cause, which swept all doubts away as ephemeral monsters, is not dismissed or cheapened by Wordsworths hindsight. In the voice of his younger self one can also glimpse his early potential for fanaticism; the young Wordsworth, according to Nicholas Roe, was quite aware of his active revolutionary self and, more significantly, of that self as potentially violent and extreme, (39). However, in his reexamination of his journey, Wordsworths personal experiences become a vehicle for expiation by explaining both his own reactions in relation to the national British response to the Revolution. Although he is a poet of private experience, Wordsworth

Miller 5 simultaneously captures the tumultuous emotions of a generation forced to deal with the impact of the Revolution on the Western world as a whole, and his articulation of these tensions and anxieties takes place in a language that so fully images and alludes to the public and political dimension that it becomes profoundly representative (Simpson 2,4). As a poet interested in the social nature of all human activity, (Hewitt 45) Wordsworth additionally focuses in on the relationships created within the context of the Revolution, and the fellow-feeling that it engendered fascinated him and pulled him deeper into the cause. In Book IX, Wordsworth describes how Even files of strangers merely, seen but once (281) strike a resounding chord within him that uplifts his heart and secures his developing republican ideals. As an autobiographical narrative, The Prelude explores this relationship between the separate identities of the observer and the observed[and] promotes a fuller understanding of the situation under consideration (Hewitt 79). Wordsworth continues to develop his reconstructed memory with redemptive prospects towards the wide spectrum of relations between self, nature, and society (Simpson 113) that enveloped his feelings in regard to the French Revolution. Although he realized the reflections of other historical tragedies in the movements of the Revolution with substantial dread (Wordsworth 10.65), he still claims that I would willingly have taken up/ A service at this time for cause so great,/ However dangerous (Wordsworth 10.133-135), again revealing his initial fervor for the Revolutionary cause. Likewise, he invites his fellow man to partake of this feeling, assuring that equity and reason (Wordsworth 10.173) would always triumph. With this confidence that the virtue of one paramount mindwould havecleared a passage for just government, (Wordsworth 10.194) Wordsworth returned to his native England.

Miller 6 Wordsworths memory of his return prompts him to continue his journey of reimagination; as he finds the British people embroiled in the same questions that he has regarding the virtues of the Revolution, he continues to trace his progression of thought. At the point of Britains entrance into the war against France, he finds himself struggling with a most unnatural strife (Wordsworth 10.250) as his sympathies with France undermine his loyalties to his own country. His present self, looking back on these subversive emotions, finds them a truth painful to record (Wordsworth 10.258); nevertheless, he persists in recreating the experience both for himself and for others who may have undergone a similar experience. According to Reider, Wordsworths formula [hardly] represses history or evades politics. On the contrary, it convenes poet and audience in a radically democratic scene. The oratorical situation of man speaking to menemerges from the poets transformationof a version of the political animal into the humanity that discovers itself in poetrys empire. (18) Thus, he claims, the development of the French Revolution parallels Wordsworths own maturation; as he works to come to terms with the solidification of his own philosophy, he invites others to partake in the same process. As Wordsworth sees the progress of the Revolution unfold from the other side of the channel, his fascination with it quickly begins to dim as the war becomes increasingly bloody. Although he at first calls the British involvement an unworthy service, (Wordsworth 10.291) and heard the boom of English cannons with a spirit overcast, (10.304) his thoughts soon began to turn, moving at first from an unhappy resentment over British involvement to a deep / Imagination, thought of woes to come, / And sorrow for mankind and pain of heart (10.304-307).

Miller 7 As he watches the disintegration of the cause he recently put so much faith into, his imagination begins to reshape his perception of the Revolution in its entirety. According to Simpson, Wordsworth saw all creative human perception as basically figurative. The imaginationis a faculty that works by conferring and abstractingthus providing a basis for the agreement of others (59). As Wordsworth begins to shape his ideas of the Revolution around British critics of the Revolution, his perception shifts; France is no longer A Spirit thoroughly faithful to itself, /Unquenchable, unsleeping, undismayed, (10.147) but rather a goaded Land waxed mad, full of blind rage, insolent tempers, and light vanity (10.31221). In the light of this changed perception, Wordsworth begins to feel his own culpability in what he sees as the perversion of the Revolution, and he seeks to redeem himself from his responsibility for revolution violence in his failureto act or speak out against it (Roe 75) through his poetic reconstruction. At the fall of Robespierre, he rejoices in the same abstract joy that he once felt at hearing of the destruction of the British troops by the French. Despite his disillusionment with the actual Revolutionary cause, Wordsworth still remains enchanted with the poetic spirit that urged him to re-remember his experience; so much so, in fact, that he even repeats his re-imagination of this process within the tenth book of The Prelude. He questions, How could I believe / That wisdom could in any shape come near / Men clinging to delusions so insane? (Wordsworth 10.627-29) and this is precisely the enigma he determines to explore. In his second retelling of his association with the Revolution, he focuses less on the events that led to his disillusionment and more on the emotions he experienced throughout this time period, recalling that Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven! (Wordsworth 10.693-4). Within this section, he not only provides the readers with a intimate glimpse into the disappointment and eventual disgust he felt, but also

Miller 8 with a firm roadmap for changing their own minds in regards to the Revolutionary cause as well. His empathetic reminisces encourage readers to identify with his journey, and his awareness of how the outside events shifted his mindset leads the reader, along with the young Wordsworth, to concur that the once-great cause of the Revolution ultimately ended up no more than a dog / Returning to his vomit (Wordsworth 10.934-5). Through Wordsworths creative re-imaginings, he shapes an interactive experience with the French Revolution. His personal reflections make this portion of The Prelude deeply personal, and yet the all-encompassing language and universal appeals also make the poem an outreach to the like-minded man. The very proximity of political revolution [creates a] need to resolve competing interests for the protection of the common good andthe legal and political means of achieving social unity imposes itself as both a conceptual and a practical goal, (Rieder 46) and Wordsworth uses this drive towards the common good to re-imagine his own understandings. By writing his experiences twice-imagined, Wordsworth both justifies the views he no longer holds and promotes his adult views of the political sphere to the greater world. In order to create this both personal and public experience, Wordsworth uses language that equally draws from his own life as from the experiences of his peers. For example, in Books IX and X Wordsworth portrays the Revolution, at points, as a tempestuous child, thus pulling from his own strong memories of childhood and adolescence and also creating an extended metaphor that becomes strikingly universal. He describes the increasing violence of the Revolution in terms that highlight both the innocence he initially associated with the cause and also the brutality to which both children and young political movements can often fall guilty. In Book X, Wordsworth disturbingly describes the rising number of dissidents who fell victim to the guillotine under the Reign of Terror:

Miller 9 Head after head, and never heads enough For those who bade them fall. They found their joy, They made it, ever thirsty, as a child If light desires of innocent little ones May with such heinous appetites be matched Having a toy, a windmill, through the air Do of itself blow fresh and makes the vane Spin in his eyesight, he is not content, But with the plaything at arms length he sets His front against the blast, and runs amain To make it whirl the faster. (10.335-45) This comparison of the Revolution to a child obsessed with control over its playthings helps fully develop Wordsworths message to his readers: he believed the Revolution, while in its nature innocent and good, could easily in its zeal turn tyrannical with all the willpower of a stubborn child who is not yet mature enough to see the harm he inflicts. These harrowing images of the careless child suggest, according to Ann Rowland, that the combination of the Revolutions innocent desires with dangerously impetuous impulses created a catalyst for a Revolution that [took] on shades of innocence even while that innocence [took] on shades of violence (681). This paradoxical combination was an essential element of Wordsworths preoccupation with the question of how innocent desire ends in violent action (Rowland 681), and couching this concern in familiar language allows his readers to share the unease he felt in regards to the anarchic turn of the Revolution.

Miller 10 Works Cited Chandler, James K. Wordsworth and Burke. English Literary History. 47.4 (1980): 741-771. JSTOR. Web. 15 Feb. 2012. Hewitt, Regina. The Possibilities of Society: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the Sociological Viewpoint of English Romanticism. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. Print. Rieder, John. Wordsworths Counterrevolutionary Turn: Community, Virtue, and Vision in the 1790s. Newark: U of Delaware P, 1997. Print. Ogden, John T. The Power of Distance in Wordsworths Prelude. PMLA. 88.2 (1973): 246259. JSTOR. Web. 15 Feb. 2012. Roe, Nicholas. Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Print. Rowland, Ann Wierda. Wordsworths Children of the Revolution. Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900. 41.4 (2001): 677-694. JSTOR. Web. 15 Feb. 2012. Simpson, David. Wordsworths Historical Imagination: The Poetry of Displacement. New York: Metheun, 1983. Print. Turner, John. Wordsworth: Play and Politics. New York: St. Martins Press, 1986. Print. Wordsworth, William. William Wordsworth: The Major Works. Ed. Stephen Gill. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1984. Print.