John Cowper Powys on William Wordsworth

Yesterday was William Wordsworth’s Birthday and to mark the occasion I thought I would post this extract from John Cowper Powys’s book, The Pleasures of Literature.  Powys was greatly influenced by the Lake District poet, and this is evident in his life-philosophy with its emphasis on living a happy and simple life based on nature and sensations.

“He set out to convey in poetry a philosophy of human happiness that was of necessity a philosophy of human endurance; and he deliberately based it upon the senses.  From the senses came all those overtones and undertones that transported him so constantly to that region, to that dimension rather, where we feel the presence of the something else, the “Something far more deeply interfused” that lies “too deep for tears,” too deep for words, too deep for reason.

It was Shelley, I believe, who said that in Wordsworth the senses think.  And this is true.  But they not only think, they become ministers of grace in the sternest endurance of the spirit.   This is where Wordsworth is indeed unique among poets…

In Wordsworth there are always the simpler, austerer, lonelier presences of Nature which, like a shadow on a wayside stone, or a raven crossing a mountain chasm, or the cuckoo’s cry “breaking the silence of the seas,”  or a twisted thorn on a desolate moor, or a tuft of feathered grass stirred by the wind upon a ruined wall, blend themselves with the refusal of the stoical heart to abate one jot of resolution and independence under the shocks of untoward fortune.

It is not necessary to journey to the Lake Country, where he was born, and lived, to catch the essence of his revelation.  Many of his most characteristic poems were written elsewhere.  Wherever a wave breaks or a wind blows, wherever the sun rises or sets, wherever a highway crosses an upland unto the wide unknown, wherever the moonlight falls on the works of men’s hands, wherever a roadside ditch reveals a flowering weed, or the smoke mounts from a human hearth, or a girl sings at her work, or a child “leaps up on his mother’s arm,” or, “a single field, of many, one” rests us with its mysterious shock of obscure memory, the spirit of Wordsworth’s poetry abides.

What he communicates is deeper than the potency of the picturesque, or even, in the ordinary sense, of the beautiful.  It is of those mysterious feelings that come to us all now and then, and lift us out of ourselves and out of our sorrows, with vague intimations of something in the inner-experience of life beyond luck, beyond ill-luck, that his poetry keeps hinting…

(John Cowper Powys, The Pleasures of Literature)