| |
Richard Matlak uses psychobiography to look at the writings of William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Dorothy Wordsworth. He examines the intimate relationship between the three writers for clues to their poems, providing a major reinterpretation of their canonical works based on psychological and intertextual contexts. The themes of romance, incest, guilt, and familial breakdown and reunion are especially scrutinized in the work and lives of these prominent figures. In particular, he gives long-overdue credit to Dorothy Wordsworth for her profound influence on her brother's major verse, and the effect their relationship had on the work of Coleridge, causing us to view all creative relationships in a new light.
Review of The Poetry of Relationship
Review Author: Robert Churchill
Affiliation: Creighton University
Some wags might suggest that human relationships are, given the nature of their participants, essentially unstable. Take three gifted artists, add sibling dynamics and the creative sparks struck by such artists, and one has concocted a recipe for disaster. The volatile permutations of one such set of relationships -- that between Dorothy and William Wordsworth and their connections with Samuel Taylor Coleridge -- is the primary subject of Richard Matlak's book The Poetry of Relationship.
This richly layered text offers insights about the intimate connections between an artist's life and the writing it engenders, suggesting ways a reader might dovetail a writer's psyche with his or her art. Most interesting and original, however, is Matlak's examination of the complex ways the works of Dorothy, William, and Samuel speak to and with one another. Matlak asserts that Wordsworth's and Coleridge's intertextual rhetoric is "primarily and formally forensic" (1), or argumentative, rather than dialogic or meditative, as they have often been regarded. And, where some important criticism has suggested that Dorothy and William form a kind of twinned self (see Elizabeth Fay's Becoming Wordsworthian, 1995), Matlak convincingly offers a more provocative and controversial reading: that the responsive nature of Dorothy's journals to her brother's poetry provokes a "resulting tension in his verse." In fact, Matlak says,
the stress that Dorothy's oppositional ideas provided for her brother's poetry, the confusion that his commitment to her made for his early moral life, and his emotional desires for her that he finally wrote into a state of sublimation all fed the incendiary power of his genius. (3)
While Matlak does not deny, then, the importance of Dorothy's and William's collaborative "romantic fusion," he regards her disagreement with or resistance to her brother's ideas as far more important to his early poetic development.
Equally impressive is Matlak's discussion of the intertextual communication between specific early poems of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Tracing the point-counterpoint structures and ideas in Wordsworth's The Ruined Cottage and Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancyente Marinere, as well as Coleridge's "Eolian Harp" and Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," Matlak convincingly argues that the poems in each set represent opposed positions in a classical debate. He regards The Ruined Cottage and The Rime of the Ancyente Marinere as "an initial encounter over the challenge of poetic and moral responsibility toward an auditor (i.e., the audience)" (7). "Eolian Harp" and "Tintern Abbey," on the other hand, represent the poetic rendition of an ongoing debate in which Dorothy figured prominently. Matlak suggests that Coleridge's "Eolian Harp" rejects "a troubled past as a period to be repented rather than . . . [accepted] . . .as the formative period of the present [and] rejects personal religious vision as . . . prideful . . . negative" (123-24). The structure of "Tintern Abbey" mirrors that of "Eolian Harp," using the formal five-part ordering of classical oratory. But its conclusions counter those of Coleridge's poem. Wordsworth's hymn to Nature glories in his personal religious vision -- unlike Coleridge's a decidedly non-Christian one -- and tries to convince Dorothy to accept William's natural supernaturalism .
Matlak's book is, in the end, much too detailed and richly provocative to do it justice in so short a review. Utilizing biographical data and inspired close readings of the authors' texts, Matlak is most compelling in his deep, complex analyses of individual poems. Here again, his view of "Tintern Abbey" is worth further examination. After cataloging and analyzing important life events William and Dorothy shared, Matlak presents a credible, detailed analysis of the way Wordsworth's poem becomes an argumentative tour de force aimed at overcoming Dorothy's skepticism about his view of nature. The poet also wished, Matlak says, "to reflect upon, indeed to interpret the flow of . . . life for Dorothy, obviously in the face of what she knew and believed of it herself" (120). But "Tintern Abbey" addresses an additional auditor -- their friend Coleridge -- whose "Eolian Harp" had espoused critical positions that Dorothy found attractive: positions opposed to Wordsworth's views about the importance of biography, the nature of religious experience, and the ends of poetic purpose. Here, Matlak's careful point-by-point comparison of the two poems' ideas and structure (that of classical oration) identifies "Tintern Abbey" as a persuasive vehicle "working against the favorite poem of Coleridge's to clarify his opposing beliefs and to win back his sister's admiration" (136).
Less fulfilling, however, are the sections where Matlak first hypothesizes about what Wordsworth must have been thinking and then tries to parlay such tenuous speculations into an authoritative reading of Wordsworth's poetic inspirations and intentions. For instance, Matlak unconvincingly glosses Wordsworth's play The Borderers as "the poet's purgation of incestuous desire" for his sister (71), or the "Lucy" poems as indicative of Wordsworth's "fantasy of Lucy/Dorothy's death" (161). Despite Matlak's attempts to ground these speculations in biography and justify them with exhaustive explication, such hypotheses seem less firmly anchored to critical bedrock. Occasionally, the reader might feel as if the facts -- of the subjects' lives and their writings -- are being wedged into a mold whose shape they can not readily assume. And, although Matlak tries to dismiss them as simple theoretical confusion, Brian Caraher's misgivings about certain critical assumptions employed in psychobiography remain salient objections (see, for example, his Wordsworth's Slumber and the Problematics of Reading, 1991). Speaking of Matlak's view of the "Lucy" poems, Caraher remarks that Matlak
offers no readings . . . until he has fully stated the context in which they are to be read. The evidence for this psychobiographical context comes solely from sources and authorities other than the poems and the experience of reading them. . . . This privileging of one set of texts (letters) and evidence (psychobiographical deductions) over another set (the poems) and the evidence they might have to offer . . . betrays an important assumption about Matlak's critical procedure. (71)
This demur, in fact, may well apply to the psychobiographical method -- a retrospective imposition of meaning upon selected material that has been predetermined as being relevant. And yet, such flaws do not invalidate Matlak's impressive work. It is rich, complex, and offers important critical insights about one of the most significant personal and professional relationships in literary history.
|
