English Poetry: 850-1850: The First Thousand Years
Robert Woof, Stephen Hebron, Pamela Woof
Wordsworth Trust, £17.50, 334pp
Talk about the stone that the builders rejected becoming the head of the corner! Once William Hazlitt was whipped away from every respectable Lakeside resort, accused of crimes ranging from rape to preaching red revolution. But in this blessed year 2000, he is promoted to master of ceremonies in an ambitious new history of English poetry published by the Wordsworth Trust to coincide with their summer exhibition.
Based at William Wordsworth's Dove Cottage on the shores of Lake Grasmere, the men and women in charge of the trust have championed - quite uniquely, as I believe - the combined achievements of both poets and painters, each performing an indispensable service to the other. A few, like William Blake, tried their hands at both, and of course he is properly represented in this volume. But long since at Dove Cottage they have known the secret that the eye and the ear may synchronise their discoveries, and maybe change the world in the process.
Wordsworth and Coleridge retain their special relationship, each sustaining the other as they did in life. Especially in the past decade, it has been necessary to commemorate the blissful revolutionary dawn that they once shared. But once the trumpet of revolution had been sounded, a host of other candidates for glory presented themselves, and the deed has been most magnanimously done. One rare insight relocated the true genius of Benjamin Robert Haydon, who had mistakenly thought of himself as the master of panorama, though in fact it is his portraits in paint and words that retain their immortality.
English Poetry, with William Blake on the front and Sir Geoffrey Chaucer with his 29 pilgrims on the back, beats all previous efforts to combine the two arts. Reproduced within these pages, and also on display at the exhibition, are the priceless first editions of the greatest poems, starting with Caedmon, Beowulf and William Langland. But soon enough, Chaucer takes over, with delightful proofs of how all the greatest handed down the tradition from one to the other.
Around the Dove Cottage table, Wordsworth and Dorothy read the Knight's Tale or the Miller's, noting that he was never "insidiously voluptuous". How Chaucer was honoured or bowdlerised is all part of the tale itself. Dorothy took a lenient view in these matters, more generous than she would allow for her own contemporaries.
What the greatest poets said about the other great ones, or even about the lesser breeds, adds a further, persistent charm. Sometimes they could be prophetically or anachronistically wise; sometimes they could fall flat on their faces. Wordsworth and Coleridge, as might be expected from this source, seemed to be offered advantages or protections above their rivals. But readers are always invited to judge for themselves. Consider a few examples.
Wordsworth receives a rebuke from Hazlitt for his treatment of Robert Burns. True enough. The charge was that "thoughtless follies laid him low/ And stained his name". Some others treated these follies more benignly, at their head Byron, who knew that "dirt and Deity" need not be confined in such strictly separate compartments. Robert Burns, as not only the Scots will insist, is even greater than he appears in these pages.
William Blake gets a better show: indeed, with his reproduced engravings, he commands as much space as Shakespeare or Milton, the latter having raised Blake's revolutionary ardour to the highest pitch. However, in his lifetime he was hardly ever appreciated for the right reason. Wordsworth himself said: "There is no doubt this poor man was mad but there is something in the madness of this man which interests me more than the sanity of Lord Byron and Walter Scott."
Which brings me, by a slightly circuitous route, to the thorny question of the madness of Jonathan Swift. Byron is quoted here as to how poets generally might suffer and how Swift in particular had in the end suffered from "lamentable idiocy and madness". The dates inscribed here suggest that it was the death of Swift's Stella almost 20 years earlier that broke his spirit and his command of the language.
No such tragedy was ordained, even by the most wrathful god. The accusation that Swift went mad was an invention of Dr Johnson, long since disproved by all the experts, none of whom published their findings early enough to save Byron from his mistake. No one would have welcomed the revelation more than Byron. More than any other two figures in our literature, he and Swift were kindred spirits. As long as 10 years after Stella's death, Swift wrote what may still qualify as the wittiest poem in the language, "Verses on the Death of Dr Swift" - at least before Byron fashioned his own revolutionary style.
But no reader of this volume need be led astray by such disputes. The great rhythms of English poetry take command as Hazlitt insisted, with Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton at their head. Hazlitt indeed could offer two additions: William Wordsworth, whose original voice he recognised before any other critic, and Jonathan Swift the poet, whom he acclaimed no less than the creator of Gulliver's Travels.
• The exhibition accompanying this book continues at Dove Cottage until October 31.
