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simple violation of nature. Though the poet realizes as strongly as before
that the imagination must separate from nature, he now sees the separa–
tion as part of a process providentially encouraged by nature itself."
One real test of any such interpretation is the
Lyrical Ballads
which,
unlike
The Prelude
(with its many dense and abstract passages), stub–
bornly resists assimilation into any synoptic account of Wordsworthian
"doctrine." But at this point Hartman, far from forcing his theme as
he does on the very early poems, enlarges and deepens it. Brilliantly
pursuing the motif of separation, he shows how many of the frightful
obsessions of the characters consist in a tenacious clinging, a refusal of
separation, whose meaning is a refuge from selfhood and individuation.
He treats Lucy as "a boundary being" who on the threshold of humaniza–
tion instead dies into nature. But the emphasis, as he shows, is not on
her death but on the consciousness of the survivor.
"If
Lucy avoids
the crisis of separation, the poet does not. She dies on the threshold of
humanization, but he survives with 'The memory of what has been,/
And never more will be.'''
This is critical intelligence that stands easily with the finest Words–
worth has received, and it is followed by an even more remarkable
chapter called "Toward
The Prelude,"
the best in the book. Here Hart–
man, allowing himself an unusual degree of generalization, analyzes
recently published fragments of blank verse, little epiphanies in which
we see Wordsworth experimenting on both language and experience
precisely in the direction of those visionary moments of
The Prelude.
Epiphany is the crucial word, though Wordsworth does not use it, and
it embodies my objection to what will be the most controversial gesture
of the book, Hartman's use of the term apocalypse. He takes off from
an interpretation offered by Wordsworth himself in Book VI of
The
Prelude
of the experience of crossing the Alps, in which he describes
the landscape of the Simplon Pass as ''Characters of the great Apo–
calypse,/ The types and symbols of Eternity." This passage, with its
apostrophe to Imagination, is central to Hartman's thinking, and his
account of it is the most subtle and thorough ever given. But in treating
this episode and the ascent .of Snowdon in Book XIV as the two rival
highpoints of
The Prelude,
Hartman ignores his wise observation that
"Wordsworth generally avoids making his epiphanies into epocha: into
decisive turns of personal fate or history."
If
Hartman were merely to use "apocalyptic" as he often does, to
describe any impulse that questions or asserts its autonomy from nature,
we might quarrel with the word but not with the argument. But when
he associates Wordworth with-to cite one of his own prefatory defini-
