In the 1790s, Romantic literary critic and essayist William Hazlitt visited noted Lake School poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, following which trip he penned the 1823 essay, “My First Acquaintance with Poets.” In this essay he details the visit and offers his thoughts on the Lake District school of thought and the unique relationship with the natural world that was forged by the poets he made acquaintance with. Through his essay, a unifying theme begins to emerge, one of the “face of Poetry” and the “face of nature.” By reading Hazlitt’s idea of Poetry’s face in “My First Acquaintance with Poets” through Book First of Wordsworth’s Prelude, the eyes of the natural world emerge as the doors of perception that are a unique characteristic of the Lake School, doors that open to poet, speaker, and reader.
In Hazlitt’s piece, his first experience with Poetry is that it is alive. Like a human, Poetry has a face complete with eyes, ears, lips, and a mind. Poetry is an entity to Hazlitt. He writes after spending time with Coleridge, “On my way back, I had a sound in my ears, it was the voice of Fancy: I had a light before me, it was the face of Poetry. The one still lingers there, the other has not quitted my side!” (586). After a brief time with a member of the Lake School, Hazlitt (the outsider) already begins to see the world around him in a different light. He sees and hears Poetry, he takes the art form and places a human characteristic to it: a face. The emergence of Poetry’s face does not linger as the “voice of fancy”, but instead stays with him wholeheartedly through his trip. Once he has been exposed to this school of thought, the idea of Poetry’s face, it is with him forever. Hazlitt’s choice in his essay to point out the “voice” and the “face” is mirrored in Wordsworth’s Prelude. “My own voice cheared me, and, far more, the mind’s / Internal echo of the imperfect sound” (Lines 64-65) suggests that the human mind can capture a level of the perfect sound, but that the true voice of chear comes from the lines written in response to the emotions evoked by the natural world.
The face of Poetry continues beyond the mere voice that comes from the natural world’s lips as overheard by the Lake School Poets. Wordsworth pays attention in his first book of the Prelude to what he calls “The surface of the universal earth” (Line 499). It is upon this surface that Hazlitt seems to find the face of Poetry, and it is Wordsworth who illustrates this face through his observations of Nature. Hazlitt writes that “There was a severe, worn pressure of thought about his temples, a fire in his eye (as if he saw something in objects more than the outward appearance)” (589). This is how the Lake School poets took in the world around them, through observation and through their ability to see the face of Nature and translate it to the face of Poetry.
During his visit with Coleridge, Hazlitt writes, “I went to Llangollen Vale, by way of initiating myself in the mysteries of natural scenery; and I must say I was enchanted with it. I had been reading Coleridge’s description of England in his fine Ode on the Departing Year, and I applied it, con amore, to the objects before me” (587). It is on this day trip that Hazlitt exclaims: “The valley was to me (in a manner) the cradle of a new existence: in the river that winds through it, my spirit was baptized in the waters of Helicon!” (587). Wordsworth’s idea of the earth’s universal surface read through Hazlitt’s observation suggests that the face of Poetry stretches universally, and is not merely isolated to one area. It is fluid, and as Wordsworth’s speaker states, “Yes, I remember when the changeful earth / And twice five seasons on my mind had stamped / The faces of the moving year, even then” (Lines 586-588). The faces Wordsworth’s speaker observes are both the faces of the seasons, the various changes in attitude, weather, plantlife, etc that the earth goes through each year and the faces of the Poetry that is created in response to these changes. The face of Nature speaks to Wordsworth’s speaker, “Even then I felt / Gleams like the flashing of a shield; the earth / And common face of Nature spake to me” (Lines 613-615). The faces all have had a unique impact on Wordsworth’s speaker as their memory is forever stamped onto his mind. The face of Nature is both seen and heard through their voice but also their eyes.
Hazlitt remarks, “With what eyes these poets see nature” (589). This astute observation applies not merely to the poet, but also to the poetry they create. It is not merely the eyes through which the Lake School poets see the world, but the eyes through which Nature and Poetry see the poet. The Prelude is riddled with references to sight, to both the sight of Nature and the impact that sight has on the speaker. Wordsworth’s speaker reflects, “The scenes which were a witness of that joy / Remained, in their substantial lineaments / Depicted on the brain, and to the eye / Were visible” (Lines 627-630). The relationship between Nature and the eye is one of direct give and take in the Prelude. The speaker has once seen that which he is reflecting upon, but is also aware that it is not in front of him to see once more, and never will be. The eyes of the poet see Nature in a larger scale than the eyes on the face of Poetry do, “Even while mine eye has mov’d o’er three long leagues / Of shining water, gathering, as it seem’d / Through ever hair-breadth of that field of light, / New pleasure, like a bee among the flowers” (Lines 605-607). The details of the face of Poetry, the eyes of Poetry, are in the details which Wordsworth’s speaker gathers together to create the overall landscape. To the face of Poetry, shining water is one face, and the bee among the flowers offers a different face.
The third element of Poetry’s face is breath. Wordsworth returns repeatedly to the breath of Nature in the Prelude. As Hazlitt writes of the winding river almost blowing life into him as he begins to experience Nature through the eyes of Lake School poets, there is a sense of movement, of repetitive breath coming from the face of Poetry. It only makes sense that if Poetry possesses a face, it must also possess a breath which the Lake District poets certainly picked up on. In the Prelude, Wordsworth returns to breath time and time again, from “The frost and breath of frosty wind” (Line 311), to Nature and Poetry’s more uncanny “Low breathings coming after me” (Line 330). The knowledge of Nature’s breath comes to Hazlitt during his time spent with the Lake District Poets, as Wordsworth’s speaker in the Prelude similarly suggests. “
“A knowledge, a dim earnest, of the calm / That Nature breathes among the hills and groves” (Lines 14-15)
Poetry to Hazlitt and Wordsworth and the other Lake School poets is a face consisting of eyes to see and a mouth from which to breathe life. The face is created by Nature, and observed by the poet. The face of poetry is a creation in part due to the eyes from which the poets see, but it is also the eyes of the reader, and the eyes of the outsider, in this case Hazlitt. He writes, “In the outset of life (and particularly at this time I felt it so) our imagination has a body to it. We are in a state between sleeping and waking, and have indistinct but glorious glimpses of strange shapes, and there is always something to come better than what we see” (588). What is better to come in this case, is the face of poetry shaped by those who observe it and those who create it.
Works Cited:
Hazlitt, William. “My First Acquaintance with Poets.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature The Romantic Period. Tenth Edition. Vol. D. W.W. Norton & Company. 2018.
Wordsworth, William. The Prelude: Book 1. The Norton Anthology of English Literature The Romantic Period. Tenth Edition. Vol. D. W.W. Norton & Company. 2018.