Featured in New Lyre Summer 2022
Wordsworth contends with Blake as “the poet of childhood.” His particular strain of Romanticism saw in the innocence of childhood a reflection of the “genuine” person with the external impositions of society and culture stripped away. Thus, much of his poetry examines childhood and the childlike view of the world. In The Prelude, for example, he uses the epic form to describe his own childhood experiences both as he saw them at the time and as an adult reflecting back on them.
Wordsworth’s “Ode,” subtitled “Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” was recognized in his lifetime as one of his most important works. While on its surface it seems consistent with Wordsworth’s Romantic fixation on childhood, it is radically different from Romantic poetry. It treats an aspect of childhood, but it is a reasoned, highly abstract philosophical discussion highly uncharacteristic of both Wordsworth and Romanticism more generally. Like the music of Beethoven, which for all its emotional engagement adheres to strict and complex classical forms, the “Ode” is properly viewed as a classically composed poem with a similarly Romantic “feel.”
I
The poem has a rather complex compositional history. The first four stanzas likely date to 1802 and the rest of the poem to 1804. In the 1807 publication of Wordsworth’s poems, it appeared titled simply “Ode” and having the Latin epigraph from Virgil. In the 1815 edition, the subtitle was added and substituted a new epigraph. Starting in the 1807 edition, the “Ode” was set apart by placement and typography as the culminating work in Wordsworth’s collection.[1]
The original Latin epigraph comes from the first line of the fourth of Virgil’s Eclogues (also called Bucolics or Pastorals): paulo maiora canamus, or “let us sing a little of greater things.” Dryden translates this phrase more loosely as “begin a loftier strain.” This short text is reminiscent of Beethoven’s own textual preface to Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” in his Ninth Symphony: “laßt uns angenehmere anstimmen” (“let us sing a more pleasant [tone]”). In both instances, the preface frames the poem as a break from what came before. As we shall see, in Wordsworth’s case, the break is from the physical and mortal towards the eternal and ideal.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Chained Muse to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.