I agree with Ken in a way that there is too much attention to JHP
where it reduces him to the sum of his own poetics and doesn't
attempt to read him as a poet. See John Wilkinson's essay in the last
Parataxis for a splendid exception to this.
As for Wordsworth in JHP himself, in looking through last night i
found more echoes of Eliot than WW, but it was a skimpy survey. I
have always thought JHP's austere overload of habits of attention
(apart from the element of high Calvinist irritability and a
carnivalesque malice) was more to do with putting to the test what he
regards as his own rather than any programme of expansionist
subversion. In that sense he is an ethical poet, and to the extent
there are interludes where in this work too he can become "a halted
traveller" the darkness of what is ethically difficult sometimes
opens out to a sheer distance of horizon. "Into the Day" has a ready
example: Wishing to love is the sign now
painted with darkness, as the rain
moistens the huddled sheep
which recalls for me the moment in The Prelude when WW is awaiting
news of his father (one of the spots of time). But to come right up
to date, I'd also select from For the Monogram:
An affection is
a kind of natural fruitfulness arranged round a core
of the powers in exhaust signature of the mind
That for me echoes the "hiding places of my power" Prelude passage.
"I see by glimpses now, when age comes on etc".
I've assumes that where Prynne becomes more accessible and less
arcane in reference he is the more Wordsworthian, but this particular
register of his is suspended or sometimes gored by context. But what
one could point to is not the irony of this, but why he exposes one
type of material to this pressure and not another.
Peter
Peter Larkin
Philosophy & Literature Librarian
University of Warwick Library
Coventry CV4 7AL UK
Tel: 01203 528151 Fax: 01203 524211
Email: [log in to unmask]
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