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himself, […] proposes something decidedly different when he stresses ‘the Mind of Man’ as ‘My haunt,
and the main region of mysong’. 65
Leavis regards him as so far removed from the mystical life that his poetry can act as instruction to daily
commonplace living:
[Wordsworth] stands for a distinctly human naturalness; […] A poet who can bring home to us the
possibility of such a naturalness should today be found important. In Wordsworth’s poetry the
possibility is offered us realised-realised in a mode central and compelling enough to enforce the
bearing of poetry upon life, the significance of this poetry for actual living. 66
That his poetry should enable this derives from his early upbringing, ‘in a congenial social environment, with its
wholesome simple pieties and the traditional sanity of its moral culture, which to him were nature’. 67 This early
nurturing was able to produce a man who ‘was, on the showing of his poetry and everything else, normally and
robustly human’. 68 Leavis says that Wordsworth’s reputation as a mystic and the ‘current valuation’ of his greatness
is due largely to the ‘visionary moments’ and ‘spots of time’. 69 He acknowledges that Wordsworth, himself, placed
value on the visionary aspect of his verse but thinks it important to examine the significance he assigns to it. Leavis
then cites the following from Book II of The Prelude:
and, at that time,
Have felt whate’er there is of power in sound
To breathe an elevated mood, by form
Or image unprofaned; and I would stand,
Beneath some rock, listening to sounds that are
The ghostly language of the ancient earth,
Or make their dim abode in distant winds.
Thence did I drink the visionary power.
I deem not profitless those fleeting moods
Of shadowy exultation: not for this,
That they are kindred to our purer mind
And intellectual life; but that the soul,
Remembering how she felt, but what she felt
Remembering not, retains an obscure sense
Of possible sublimity, to which,
With growing faculties she doth aspire,
With faculties still growing, feeling still
That whatsoever point they gain, they still
Have something to pursue. 70
Leavis, while admitting that the passage is philosophically vague, nevertheless, tries to recuperate it from any
transcendentalist taint by drawing our attention away from its vagueness and towards the ‘sober verse’ in which
these ineffable experiences are presented. 71 Moreover, having glossed over this transcendentalism Leavis refers to
the eighteenth-century poet Mark Akenside to root Wordsworth in a pre-transcendentalist tradition:
How strong are the eighteenth-century affinities to this verse Mr. Nichol Smith brings out when, in his
introduction to The Oxford Book of Eighteenth Century Verse, he quotes a piece of Akenside and suggests
rightly that it might have passed for Wordsworth’s. Wordsworth’s roots were deep in the eighteenth
century. To say this is to lay the stress again-where it ought to rest-on his essential sanity and
normality. 72
In light of this discussion of Leavis, it is possible to discern his influence on Hobsbaum’s poetic ideas, especially those
directly related to Hobsbaum’s writings on Wordsworth.
As well as Leavis, Hobsbaum was also influenced to some extent by Philip Larkin. That Larkin is considered an
empiricist poet should not now be a controversial observation. Indeed, displaying a characteristic droll cynicism
Larkin has said that ‘deprivation is to me what daffodils were to Wordsworth’, consequently empathising, albeit
cautiously, with Wordsworth’s poetic.
73
Of his poem ‘The Whitsun Weddings’, Antony Easthope says that his
43