Wordsworth and Empire — Just Joking

Abstract

The dynamics of Empire and their presence in Romantic writing have been lately much inspected, and most people probably think they know what Wordsworth thought about them. He did not, one might say, think much about them at all, lining up with a number of other major writers who seem to have said very little on the difficult topics of slavery, imperialism, commerce and conquest. To be sure there is the vigorous critique of militarist empire-building in the ‘Salisbury Plain’ poem, along with the more or less sympathetic 1802 sonnets on Toussaint and on the ‘female Passenger’ exiled from France because of her race; but then there are those purple passages in The Excursion which might well continue to make us wince even if we convince ourselves that they are dramatic and not doctrinal, the property of the poem’s speakers and not (or not simply) of its author. We may wince because it is after all the ‘poet’, and not one of the more obviously distanced characters, who launches into an encomium on the state and church of England — ‘Hail to the State of England!’ (BK. 6, 1.6) 1 — in a moment of hyperbole that elides the controversial unions of 1707 and 1800 with Scotland and Ireland, and quite forgets the earlier one with Wales. We are sensitive to these matters now. It is hard to make the case that this voice is not Wordsworth’s own — for the poet says hardly anything in this poem, at least not enough to deserve the attribution of a dramatic personality clearly or interestingly distinct from that of the author.

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