Wordsworth's Descriptive Sketches and the Growth of a Poet's Mind

The AIM of this essay is to examine Descriptive Sketches (written in 1791-92, published with An Evening Walk in 1793) as a poem with its own personal and stylistic integrity. Though not, of course, a great or even very exciting work of art, its relation to Wordsworth's growth as man and poet has been neglected. One reason for this neglect is Legouis' account of its derivative nature: the many borrowings in it from eighteenth-century writers and the extensions of their technique. Legouis is controvertible only on the ground of method: by atomizing the poem he shows convincingly that a great proportion of phrases have a direct or exaggerated relationship to that “gaudiness and inane phraseology” Wordsworth was later to condemn. His view of Descriptive Sketches as mainly patchwork, though sincere and really alive to nature, has prevailed almost continuously. The few notable attempts to go beyond Legouis should, however, be mentioned. M. L. Barstow, an exact reader, discriminates Wordsworth's “faults” from those of the eighteenth-century landscape school, and states against Legouis that what we find in Descriptive Sketches is “not the remnant of an old style; it is the crude but vigorous beginning of the new.” But because of her specific approach, the study of Poetic Diction, she does not, except in a general way, correlate Wordsworth's stylistic struggle with a particular phase in his personal development. De Selincourt, on the other hand, writing almost forty years after Legouis, tried to combine the study of the poet's style and that of his mind. “The early crudities,” he declared, “of a great and original poet have a value irrespective of their intrinsic merit in the light they throw upon that fascinating … study, the growth of a poet's mind and art.” He applied his principle vigorously to “The Vale of Esthwaite” and other juvenilia, but An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches proved too discouraging. After briefly summarizing the flaws of the former, he passes over its companion with: “The faults of An Evening Walk were exaggerated in Descriptive Sketches,” and we hear no more of that juvenile disaster. Arthur Beatty, at about the same time, gives the fullest and most suggestive account we have of the poem, yet also hedges on its language, said to be, in parts, “almost all borrowed” from two earlier travelers to Switzerland, Coxe and Ramond. The only recent consideration of Wordsworth's early style as something sui generis comes from F. A. Pottle, who sees in An Evening Walk “a powerful and original genius grappling with the problem of poetic diction.” The remark takes us back to the point at which serious interpretation of the early poems begins, to Coleridge's comment on Descriptive Sketches. “The language,” he says, “is not only peculiar and strong, but at times knotty and contorted, as by its own impatient strength.” It may not be unwarranted, then, to take another look at Descriptive Sketches, to see the significance of its strongly impatient style.