The immortal Wordsworth

Robert Zimmer's book "Clairvoyant Wordsworth" is an extended analysis of British Romantic poet William Wordsworth's poem "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood". The author calls himself a student of Anthroposophy, a spiritual path associated with the Austrian clairvoyant Rudolf Steiner. Anthroposophy is "pro-Romantic", indeed, Owen Barfield (another prominent student of Steiner) called it "Romanticism grown up". Zimmer's book is extremely interesting. In fact, I probably never read a book-length analysis of one poem that was so interesting. But then, I don't usually read book-length analysis of poems. Or poems, for that matter... ;-)

Zimmer argues at length that William Wordsworth really did believe in the pre-existence of souls, and probably also in the related idea of reincarnation. He also argues that Wordsworth was describing a form of clairvoyance in his Immortality Ode, a form usually associated with early childhood, and that this reflected the poet's own childhood experiences. Zimmer finds parallels in the poetry of Vaughan and Traherne. The author even attempts to prove that clairvoyance is a real phenomenon, not simply an irrational fancy. In this section, he treats Steiner seriously as a source for "scientific" knowledge about the supersensible world.

Denial of Wordsworth's belief in pre-existence began with his friend Coleridge, continued with Wordsworth himself in older age, and then proliferated to most Wordsworth scholars, both Christian and agnostic. Zimmer believes that everyone who denied Wordsworth's obvious references to pre-existence did so for thinly veiled ideological reasons. Coleridge wanted to prove to his contemporaries that he had become a good, Trinitarian Anglican and felt a need to appropriate Plato as an unproblematic path to Christianity. For that reason, Coleridge denied that Plato had taught pre-existence or reincarnation, a notion he instead foisted upon "Proclo-Plotinism", which he associated with dreaded Roman Catholicism and "enthusiasm" (irrationalism, etc). It therefore became necessary to deny that his friend Wordsworth was tainted with Proclo-Plotinism. Later, Wordsworth himself felt a similar need to prove *his* Anglican orthodoxy, penning the so-called Fenwick note in which he (seemingly) denies teaching the heterodox doctrine.

In Zimmer's opinion, those who have taken Coleridge and the later Wordsworth at their words, have done so from deep-seated Christian, cultural or positivist prejudices. Later, a kind of pseudo-Freudian/pseudo-Marxist postmodernism entered the fray, as well. I admit I was somewhat shocked reading this part of the book. Subjective interpretations (some of them very "Freudian" indeed) seem to abound among literary scholars. Aren't they supposed to tell us of what Wordsworth's poems *really* mean? I can crack a nutty interpretation myself, but that doesn't make me a prof! Somehow, *my* prejudices about fraudulent intellectuals were confirmed by "Clairvoyant Wordsworth". The Immortality Ode has been variously attributed to the poet's wish to kill his daughter, to his libidinous and adolescent passions, or to his interest in optics. At other times, Wordsworth's poetry is said to have been a precursor of Darwinism or Heidegger. The main paradigm shift within Wordsworth studies, if Zimmer is to be believed, is that critics before the advent of postmodernism generally wanted to appropriate the Poet Laureate for their own agendas, while postmodernists generally reject him as unsavoury...

Although I'm not an avid reader of poetry, I admit I got away from this book with more respect for Wordsworth, and decidedly less respect for his would-be interpreters.

Five stars?