Wordsworth's genius lay in its own sort of negative capability. The most striking feature of his poetry, as of his personality, is their intense and intimate relations with what always remained outside them. He never seems identified with his own discoveries, even with the drama of his own sensibility. Yet what he writes is subtly and comfortingly self-confirmatory, never more so than when the world, the human heart, the music of humanity, the mountains, are speaking to him ('as if admonished from another world', 'To give me human strength by apt admonishment'). The writing of an 'Ode to Duty' shows how much the poet enjoyed the exhortation of that concept, whereas Coleridge's Dejection Ode is a powerful and poignant analysis of the actual state the poet is in.

LRB 2 May 1985 | PDF Download