Jeff Ward's server appears to be down, and I wanted to have another look at his intriguing contrast of Wordsworth with Henry Miller before dashing to the defense of the former. Its elaborate mise en scene leads me to think the charges may be less serious than they first appeared, given the humorous incongruity of Jeff's gesture of stating his preference for extroverted social situations (Miller in full party mode) over Wordsworthian tranquility, delivered in a meditative voice from the pensive solitude of a bathtub: a setting that fairly screams,
<<Introspection In Progress>>
I have no reason to doubt Jeff's view of Henry Miller. If he is truly a celebrant of the infectious expansion of the crowd, of the joint and the joined blurring of identities of the festival, more power to him. Things are less straightforward with his take on Wordsworth. One of the lyrics used to illustrate what Wordsworthian recollection is Daffodils, with its celebration of multitudes in motion:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
That is to say, the emotion recollected by the poet's "inward eye" doesn't issue from some solitary movement of the soul glued to the image in its reflecting pool. The thrust of the poetic impulse in this case arises from the humblest (and least inward) of Dionysian orgies - a fact that has inspired a lengthy tradition of contemptuous raillery.
The larger point, though, and one that Jeff might entertain even as he seems to polarize the two writers, is that Wordsworth's notion of poetry is entirely compatible with Miller's refusal to privilege the esoteric world of "high" art.
In linking poetry to the wellsprings of memory and to the state he names tranquility, Wordsworth is bringing the pretensions of visionary transcendence down to earth, to the most common of faculties we share.
As he says in The Prelude, describing a moment of "visionary dreariness":
'It was, in truth, / An ordinary sight;' Prel. xii. 253-4
In Wordsworth, simple things can and do become uncannily, terribly transformed, but not because they derive from esoteric texts - arcane learning rooted beyond the world we inhabit - or from obdurate brooding. The transformative power of imagination arrives as surprise, but it's nothing special - just as Miller would have it. It does take some imagination to see it, since it's plain as the nose on one's face. When the server permits, I mean to have another look at Jeff's thoughts. This entire brief for the Lake poet might need to be thrown out with the bathwater.
