Wordsworth isn’t too much with us
I noticed this today at Althouse:
[Chris Williamson was talking] with Robert Greene, who has a new book called “The Law of the Sublime” (commission earned). Maybe he’s got the answer to our problem of colorlessness.
Williamson prompts: “You talk about sort of pagan time, pagan religions, this sense of so much more wonder, so many more unanswered questions, the opportunity to use story and narrative and personification. It’s the gods fighting that’s made the lightning, how much easier it must have been to have been infused by life. Should we all become pagans again? Is that the answer? Can we just do that?”
Greene responds: “I would love it if we would. I’m down. If you want to make a pagan commune somewhere, I’ll join. I would because I’ve always felt myself to be pagan. I’ve always, when I see, when I go to the British Museum and I see that section on Assyrian [artifacts], I see some of those massive sculptures of like half human, half tiger, lions, whoa, I feel like it’s expressing something so powerful in me. I’ve always been deeply, deeply attracted to the designs, to the things of like the, in the Aborigines, their little paintings that they make of, you know, the waves inside of animals, something. It seems more alive. It seems like something so powerful and so direct.”
I don’t know about you, but when I read that I immediately thought “Wordsworth, ‘The World Is Too Much With Us.'” Perhaps it’s a small nitpicky point I’m making. But Greene’s thoughts so closely parallel that poem of Wordsworth’s, yet when I looked at the interview I saw not a single reference to Wordsworth or to the antiquity of the thoughts Greene himself was expressing (at least, I couldn’t find any – it’s a long long interview and perhaps I missed something).
Why does this absence bother me? Well, as a poetry lover, it just does – but it also indicates a cultural illiteracy that’s commonplace even among the highly educated. After all, Wordsworth is – or used to be – a big part of the Western canon. I had to memorize that poem (along with so many others) in junior high school in a NYC public school. Wordsworth was the founder of English Romanticism, and as such was an extremely important figure:
William Wordsworth was one of the founders of English Romanticism and one its most central figures and important intellects. He is remembered as a poet of spiritual and epistemological speculation, a poet concerned with the human relationship to nature and a fierce advocate of using the vocabulary and speech patterns of common people in poetry.
And “The World Is Too Much With Us,” a sonnet of which I’m not inordinately fond but which I can still recite from memory, goes like this, which seems to track very very closely with the point Greene is trying to make. It was written in 1802, well over two hundred years ago:
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.
I graduated from high school nearly 50 years ago, and I don’t recall reading Wordsworth. (I did read him and other great poets in college.) But we definitely read Langston Hughes and Maya Angelou (this was an urban public school). And we never had to memorize any poem. By then, educators were turning their noses up at memorization, though it’s clearly invaluable for poetry. We may have had to memorize some Shakespeare, though not the sonnets, just some scenes.
My point being that the decline in education began long ago probably by the 1970s.
Jimmy:
I’m older than you, plus my teachers were really old at the time, for the most part. Many many of my teachers made us memorize poetry, for which I’m very grateful.
I read Wordsworth in high school but that may just have been me reading through the unassigned portions of the text book because school was boring.
Without thinking of Wordsworth — we are becoming an increasingly pagan society. This does not raise nostalgia in me; it is fearful.
It’s been a lot of years since I thought about Wordsworth, 62 years ago I had a English Romantics poetry class at the University of Oklahoma taught by a kind of mean old lady who looked a bit like a warden at a Russian Women’s Prison. She loved Wordsworth and I have a neat collection of Poems by various authors, 18 volumes three are Wordsworth’s work and the collection was published in 1902 and sets on a shelf three feet away from my computer. It was easy for me to reach over and open up one of the volumes and remember the skill of the great poets. My taste tends to run more towards Kipling and I have a volume of his work that I enjoy for the humor and snarky-ness of his writing. Now I will take some time, which at my old age I have a lot of and keep the Wordsworth work close at hand for a bit.
Thank you Neo for sharing this with us and I visit Altman every day and I did see her reference to Wordsworth but I was moving kind of fast keeping up with all the various nice sites I check on every day. Thank you Neo and I hope each day brings you peace and wellness.
The Cliche Came Out of its Cage by C.S. Lewis
You said ‘The world is going back to Paganism’.
Oh bright Vision! I saw our dynasty in the bar of the House
Spill from their tumblers a libation to the Erinyes,
And Leavis with Lord Russell wreathed in flowers, heralded with flutes,
Leading white bulls to the cathedral of the solemn Muses
To pay where due the glory of their latest theorem.
Hestia’s fire in every flat, rekindled, burned before
The Lardergods. Unmarried daughters with obedient hands
Tended it By the hearth the white-arm’d venerable mother
Domum servabat, lanam faciebat. At the hour
Of sacrifice their brothers came, silent, corrected, grave
Before their elders; on their downy cheeks easily the blush
Arose (it is the mark of freemen’s children) as they trooped,
Gleaming with oil, demurely home from the palaestra or the dance.
Walk carefully, do not wake the envy of the happy gods,
Shun Hubris. The middle of the road, the middle sort of men,
Are best. Aidos surpasses gold. Reverence for the aged
Is wholesome as seasonable rain, and for a man to die
Defending the city in battle is a harmonious thing.
Thus with magistral hand the Puritan Sophrosune
Cooled and schooled and tempered our uneasy motions;
Heathendom came again, the circumspection and the holy fears …
You said it. Did you mean it? Oh inordinate liar, stop.
Or did you mean another kind of heathenry?
Think, then, that under heaven-roof the little disc of the earth,
Fortified Midgard, lies encircled by the ravening Worm.
Over its icy bastions faces of giant and troll
Look in, ready to invade it. The Wolf, admittedly, is bound;
But the bond wil1 break, the Beast run free. The weary gods,
Scarred with old wounds the one-eyed Odin, Tyr who has lost a hand,
Will limp to their stations for the last defence. Make it your hope
To be counted worthy on that day to stand beside them;
For the end of man is to partake of their defeat and die
His second, final death in good company. The stupid, strong
Unteachable monsters are certain to be victorious at last,
And every man of decent blood is on the losing side.
Take as your model the tall women with yellow hair in plaits
Who walked back into burning houses to die with men,
Or him who as the death spear entered into his vitals
Made critical comments on its workmanship and aim.
Are these the Pagans you spoke of? Know your betters and crouch, dogs;
You that have Vichy water in your veins and worship the event
Your goddess History (whom your fathers called the strumpet Fortune).
I was thinking recently how much of culture will likely fade from common knowledge. I wondered if this was just the passage of time (of course young people don’t know who Johnny Carson or Carol Burnett were/are, there are big entertainers from the 20s and 30s I don’t know of).
But no, I thought. Much of what is lost is, like Wordsworth, timeless. My generation, my parents’ generation, their parents’ generation… knew of Plato and Socrates, Aristophanes and Shakespeare, Liszt and Bach, Kipling and Chaucer, Caesar and Attila the Hun, Dante and Cervantes.
What percentage of young people could even tell you what profession the people on that list made their names in?
I remember watching Jay Leno interview graduates at a major University (UCLA?) and many didn’t know how many moons planet Earth has. They couldn’t name the planets in our solar system or state who won the Civil War. College graduates!!
RTF:
There is the possibility that Jay Leno was only showing the “Philomena Cunks” of UCLA. Youts who knew the correct answers wouldn’t be laughable.
The Wordsworth is too much for me.
It’s also a Petrarchan sonnet.
* Fourteen lines.
* Rhyme scheme is ABBACDDC EFEFEF.
* Octet (first eight lines) states the problem.
* Sestet (six lines) states the solution.
Sonnet spotting is one of my hobbies. There are a lot of them out there, even by e.e. cummings, though cummings can be tricksy about it.
huxley:
A sonnet in praise of sonnets.
I like rhymes & rhyming, like Dr. Seuss, (doggerel?) but most poems leave me cold. The passions of the poems are missing the emotional impact of songs, even pop songs. Or especially pop songs?
RTF – culture is what folks talk about. Politics & saving the world has become too much a part of culture, crowding out poetry. As does power pop & pop punk (a new-ish YouTube category I like) & all current music.
The fragmentation of music, with thousands of choices from hundreds, or maybe thousands, of different genres, has hugely reduced common culture.
This is also part of the games, board & card & computer games, that people play. Like Dominion, Settlers of Cataan, 7 Wonders of the World, & Harmonies (all board games my family has played in the last year.) Reminding me of a David Bryne quote on the death of the music industry along the lines of “there is no death of music, lots of great stuff is being created. The business of making money by putting music on media & selling is in trouble.”
Sub-cultures are replacing common culture. In music, TV/movies, games, hobbies; and perhaps least so in jobs, tho industrialization long ago fragmented jobs away from farming.
As I’m writing this, I’m listening to: Sam Fender – Hypersonic Missiles, which I noticed as thinking about a tweet of a young (13 y.o.?!!) amateur rocket maker who made a rocket that reached Mach 4.7, where hypersonic is usually Mach 5 (times the speed of sound). What a cool, dangerous hobby.
I’ve gone back to playing chess, online with my H.S. friend, despite knowing computers can easily beat my best.
My karaoke hobby makes me focus more on music. The closest to Wordsworth our culture now gets. Watching Yungblud live, paganism is alive & well & emotionally intense, passionate. Poets literally singing their poems.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6foOzz3r3FM&list=RD6foOzz3r3FM&start_radio=1
(My current favorite Yungblud song for karaoke. “Everybody wants to be adored”)
When we die(something all people do) and go to the other side, there will be a lot of surprised people.
Wordsworth rocks. I love “The World is Too Much With Us.” We read his poetry every year in high school. Read Homer in jr. high school, again in high school — Fitzgerald translations, which I didn’t much like, but they directed me to Lattimore, whom I worship, so all good. In freshman year honors English we had to memorize, recite, and write 100 lines of Shakespeare. I was fortunate and blessed to be of an age, and in living in a time, when such was typical in the course of being educated. It’s why I became a writer. Sometimes I feel as though I’m living in the novel “A Canticle for Leibowitz.”
I attended an elementary school at which a majority of my teachers were born in the 19th century. As I said: blessed.
My problem with most modern American poetry is that it is neither classic nor romantic, neither T.S. Eliot nor Walt Whitman. The poems are carefully written and create a mild effect without saying anything. They are a sort of dilute John Ashbery without the surprises and brilliance.
There is sameness to them and they have the smell of workshop poems.
It’s like all the people in the 20th Century who read William Carlos Williams’ free verse and decided “I can do that” and they did. Only now the model is Ashbery.
SENNACHERIB:
When we die
(all people do)
and go to
the other side,
there will be
surprised people;
lots, lots, lots.
—
He’s a poet;
doesn’t know it,
but his feet …
Busted, lololol!
The post-Enlightenment reverence for paganism is worrisome, because the people indulging in it usually know nothing of the actuality of it. Even the Romanticized paganism of Greece and Rome was ugly up close and without a shielding screen of Christian thinking (which is always present in such Romanticism even if not acknowledged).
A classic example of this was Goethe. He was one of the Romantics and Enlightenment thinkers (two sides of one thing, ultimately) who idealized Classical Civilization. When Pompeii was excavated, he traveled there to see a preserved sample of it. He was initially disappointed and somewhat repelled because the reality of Classical Civilization was not what his images had been
Eventually he came to be able to see it for what it was, appreciating it on its own terms, but at first he was repelled because he had been seeing it through a lens of fantasy.
I’m with Kate:
we are becoming an increasingly pagan society. This does not raise nostalgia in me; it is fearful.
and with HC68:
The post-Enlightenment reverence for paganism is worrisome, because the people indulging in it usually know nothing of the actuality of it. Even the Romanticized paganism of Greece and Rome was ugly up close and without a shielding screen of Christian thinking
——————————
The 60s love-in and ensuing sexual revolution was another such spasm of romanticised paganism… which has led predictably from selfish material hedonism to aimless nihilism.
We just began the annual Torah cycle, and read Cain’s shrug “am I my brother’s keeper?”
There really are no Noble Savages.
I’ll take Judeo-Christian monotheism – and the principles of universal human freedom, dignity, equality, and brotherhood that flow axiomatically from it.
The “intellectuals” faux or no basically want license to harm in paganism.
The Gods of the Copybook Headings unheeded.
I dunno.
Six years of parochial school deeply shocked me — the physical cruelty and the verbal belittling of students. One of the nuns was known for her “loving cup” — putting her left hand on a student’s cheek then wheeling back with her right for a sharp slap to the other cheek. Two of my male friends were propositioned by priests.
The Church solved that problem by taking all the priests, nuns and brothers out of the schools. I suspect, however, that was more for financial reasons than for the students.
And Christian history is replete with its well-known horrors. I give Christianity credit for acknowledging and repenting much of its misbehavior, but still…
I turned to the hippie movement and found much more kindness, love and humor there, Though of course that movement wasn’t without its horrors too. Plus it was unsustainable. Peter Pan eventually has to leave Neverland.
I view both sides of whatever we call this dichotomy as part of our human heritage. Our assignment is to make the best of them.
Humans make a church. Astounding (not) that churches aren’t perfect since all humans aren’t saints.
Could be worse, could be pagans.
Some history could be useful.
om: “Astounding (not) that churches aren’t perfect since all humans aren’t saints.”
This. A lot of bad things have been done in the name of religion, causing some to disdain religion. But consider this: in the 20th century there were two ideologies who had contempt for religion and considered themselves above it. They murdered tens if not hundreds of millions of people.
I don’t see how one gets to dismiss the faults of Christianity due to its human members while insisting that the full weight of the faults of, say, the ancient Greeks fall on paganism.
Further, do we get to blame paganism for the Nazis and Communists?
Yes, I have read history probably as much as anyone here who didn’t major in it.
Astounding (not) that non-Christians aren’t perfect either since all humans aren’t. saints.
The ancient Greeks provided much of the philosophical foundation of the West, in spite of being pagans. Do we throw out Greek philosophy because they were pagans?
Christianity incorporated much philosophy from Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics into its theology. Thomas Aquinas is a strong, clean example. Do we throw out Aquinaas?
Eschew special pleading.
Eschew your own troubled childhood with the nuns and priests. Anecdotes don’t represent the entire Christian church.
And who is saying that Aristotle, Socrates. Plato, the Stoics, etc., are to be erased and discarded?
That is your straw man huxley.
The Bible has a few things to say about paganism, see the Old and New Testaments.
But the neo-paganists needed something new? License?
I wasn’t saying Christianity is perfect, if you’ve read my posts you must know by now that I’m not a Christian. But it is notable the direction two Christian countries – Germany and Russia – went when they discarded Christianity.
— huxley
The early Church took much of what was good from Classical Civilization, and left the rest behind. What they left behind was left behind mostly for very good reasons.
Modern Western Christendom owes less to Greece than is often believed. Classical Greece is not directly ancestral to our society, it’s more like an aunt or uncle. If we’re looking for pagan roots, we owe more to the Norse pagans (as C.S. Lewis observed) than we do to pagan Greece.
Our political institutions, languages, customs, all owe more to northern Europe than they do to Greece. That’s not an entirely comfortable heritage. But it’s so.
— om
Though some of their thinking and programs should be left in the past. Plato, esp. is a mixed bag, Aristotle is better overall, but not all good input. Again, over time we took the good from them and mostly eschewed the bad.
The thing is that the really nasty parts of Classical paganism are mostly forgotten except by historians and classicists. The myths we read about are bowdlerized, esp. the Classical ones, but the Norse ones are somewhat sanitized in most popularizations, too. As for the pre-Indo-European paganism of Europe:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindow_Man
We don’t absolutely know it was ritual human sacrifice, but that’s the way to bet.
om:
With you it’s straw men all the way down.
huxley:
“If I only had a brain.”
See and consider the comments above by HC68.