Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

Cambridge. In 1790, he went to France. Not long ago, something was discovered that caused a scandal. It was discovered that he had a love affair with AnnetteVallon, who bore his child.
    Wordsworth was a supporter of the French Revolution. About this, Chesterton said—many Englishmen supported the Revolution—that one of the most important events in English history was this revolution that was about to take place. [Wordsworth] was a revolutionary as a young man, then ceased to be. He ceased to be, and ceased to support the French Revolution, because it culminated in the dictatorship of Napoleon.
    As far as his production, it is to a large extent devoted to geography. I remember that Alfonso Reyes said the same thing about Unamuno. 1 He said that in Unamuno, his feeling for the landscape replaced his feeling for music, to which he was quite insensitive. Wordsworth traveled on the continent a lot. He was in France, in the north of Italy, in Switzerland, in Germany, and he also traveled through Scotland, Ireland, and, naturally, England. He settled in what is called the Lake District, also in the north of England, a little to the west, an area full of lakes and mountains similar to Switzerland, except the heights are not as considerable. However, I have visited both countries, and they make a similar impression. There’s a story about a Swiss guide who went to the Lake District and did not at first realize the difference in the altitude of the highest peaks. The climate, moreover, is very cold in the Lake District, and it snows a lot.
    Now, Wordsworth’s life was devoted to poetry. He returned to England—he would never see AnnetteVallon again—married an English girl, and had several children with her, all of whom died young. Wordsworth himself was orphaned at a young age, and he had the means to be able to devote himself exclusively to literature: to poetry and sometimes prose. He was an extremely vain man, a hard man. I think it isEmerson who recounts that he paid him a visit and made an observation, and Wordsworth refuted him immediately—as was his habit, because no matter what anyone said, he would assert the opposite—and ten minutes or a quarter of an hour later, Wordsworth expressed that same opinion that he had found absurd. Then Emerson politely said to him, “Well, that is what I told you a while ago.” And then Wordsworth, indignant, said, “Mine, mine, and not yours!!” And the other understood that one could not converse with a man with such a character. Moreover, like all poets who profess a theory, who are convinced of it, he came to believe that everything that fit into that theory was acceptable. And that is why Wordsworth’s work is, like that ofMilton, one of the most uneven in literature. He has poems that have melody, sincerity of passion, incomparable simplicity. And then we have large expanses of desert.Coleridge made this observation; he saw this difference. The truth is that Wordsworth wrote with great facility—he wrote when he was inspired, when the muse prompted him—and at other times, he wrote simply because he had decided to produce a hundred, or however many lines of poetry that day. At first Wordsworth’s theories and his practice seemed scandalous. Then they were accepted, and he was seen—as happens with all old poets who have not failed—he was considered a bit like an institution, so much so that they gave him the title of poet laureate, which he accepted. . . . We must remember that he was not only a good walker, he was also an excellent skater.
    We will talk about Wordsworth’s friendship with Coleridge later. The truth is they met around 1790 or thereabouts. Both were young, both were excited about the French Revolution. Coleridge suggested establishing a socialist colony in North America, along the banks of a great river, and they also shared the same aesthetic opinions. At the end of the eighteenth century, poetry—with the exception of Macpherson’s prose, which I spoke about last time, and a few of Gray’s poems—had turned into a poetic dialect, what has been called “pseudo-classicism.” For example, a respectable poet did not talk about the breeze, he talked about the “soft zephyrs.” He did not talk about the sun, he talked about “Phoebus.” He preferred not to talk about the moon, the word was too common, so he talked about “chaste Diana.” There was a whole poetic dialect based on classical mythology, a mythology that was already dead