Force of Nature: Irritable Bowel Syndrome

The opening paragraph of Geoffrey Hartman’s “A Poet’s Progress: Wordsworth and the Via Naturaliter Negativa” notes that Blake blamed some of Wordsworth’s poetry for an unspecified “bowel complaint” that Blake claimed almost killed him. My first thought was that any poem powerful enough to nearly kill a reader is a poem worth reading. However, after a beat or two, I began to suspect that Blake was insultingly suggesting that Wordsworth’s poetry was so toxic that it had given him dysentery or something along those lines. Naturally, at this point I was extremely interested in the reading the verses in question so I referred to the footnote that documents the source of the information.

 The source was the diary of Henry Crabb Robinson, a man who made a point of becoming intimate with many of the most important English and German writers of the day. Fortunately, Robinson’s diary has been digitized and so I quickly Googled it in hopes that it would provide enough context to determine what Blake meant and also to learn what specific verse Blake found so offensive, or at any rate, so powerful. It turned out to be a few lines from “The Recluse”, one of the feeder poems that evolved into “The Prelude,” the poem our class is focusing on this week. Here’s the line’s in that Blake felt so powerfully:

                     Jehovah,—with his thunder & the choir
                     Of shouting angels, & the empyreal thrones—
                     I pass them unalarmed.
                                   - The Recluse, Part One, Book One – Home at Grasmere (lns 786-788)


 The main complaint that Blake had with these lines is that they indicate that Wordsworth, whom Blake felt was the best poet of the age, was not a Christian. Robinson reports in a private conversation with Blake about Wordsworth, Blake asked if Wordsworth thought “his mind can surpass Jehovah?” Blake then sets his mind on identifying Wordsworth as a pagan. I should add that Robinson places the lines cited above as belonging to the introduction to the “Excursion.”

 According to Robinson, Blake viewed people who believed in the “reality of the natural world” as a type of atheism. Robinson also reports that Blake identified Locke, Bacon, and Newton as the three great teachers of “Atheism and Satan’s doctrine.” I am reminded of St. Augustine’s aligning science with demons in one his works; demons are incapable of revealing Truth but they can assist man with science. This made me realize I have no understanding of Blake whatsoever – I thought he began the “sympathy for the devil” idea. Oops.

 Back to Hartman, who argues that Wordsworth held a “sense of reality in Nature” (Hartman 214). How nicely what I felt was becoming a non sequitur post has dovetailed back to the assigned readings; that is exactly the problem Blake reportedly had with Wordsworth. I wonder if Blake ever read the version of “The Prelude” that we have in our books where Wordsworth is far more explicit about his allegiance with Nature as the foundation of reality, or at least how man interprets this reality. I think Blake would have found Lns 491-502 of “The Prelude” Book First even more offensive as they are particularly aggressive about supplanting the church with Nature - attributing to Nature a “ministry” that employed the “universal earth,” a play on the Catholic church’s status as a “universal church,” as a living Bible that had the advantage of actually being alive. Blake’s poor bowels would have suffered even greater calamities, no doubt worthy of a South Park episode, over that passage.

 By the way, I am pleased to report no bowel complaints during my reading any of this week’s poems, although I agree that this was very powerful poetry, especially for the time when the Western world was still straining under the yoke of Christian religions, both Catholic and Protestant (I mean that during this time religion was still a dominant force in public life, where disagreeing with the official religion of state had very real and legal consequences as compared to our times where religious disputes seem more about the sound and the fury than anything else).

PS - I signed up as "Rabelais" for Blogger a number of years ago. It seems appropriate considering the inspiration for this post was Blake's irritable bowels - Scott Ross