Going Off Wordsworth

 Confession time: I believe I've finally, and all but totally, gone off Wordsworth. This would have seemed inconceivable in my youth, when I all but worshipped him, but with the passing years I've found his 'intense intellectual egotism' more and more oppressive, to the point where now I rarely feel an urge to read him, and then only in small doses. His poems – certainly the longer, more 'philosophical' ones – seem strained and airless, with no space in them for anything but their self-absorbed author, his fine feelings and his philosophy. Such self-absorption sits well with youth, I suppose, but as we get older it tends to pall, and might drive us to look for other satisfactions in reading poetry, preferring poets who look out and around them, beyond the dreary citadel of the Self.  
  The phrase 'intense intellectual egotism' comes from William Hazlitt's Observations on Mr Wordsworth's poem, The Excursion (a poem which, even in my Wordsworthian days, I found hard to enjoy). It is, Hazlitt rightly observes, 'less a poem on the country, than on the love of the country. It is not so much a description of natural objects, as of the feelings associated with them; not an account of the manners of rural life, but the result of the poet's reflections on it. He does not present the reader with a lively succession of images or incidents, but paints the outgoings of his own heart, the shapings of his own fancy. He may be said to create his own materials; his thoughts are his real subject ... He sees all things in himself.'  And here's the phrase again – 'An intense intellectual egotism swallows up every thing ... The power of the mind preys upon itself. It is as if there were nothing but himself and the universe.' (Yes, and the best poetry surely inhabits the zone between Self and Universe; that is where the real interest of life resides.) Hazlitt writes of the 'philosophical poet' as 'making every object about him a whole length mirror to reflect his favourite thoughts'. And that kind of thing, as Hazlitt doesn't say, can become decidedly wearisome. 
  Oscar Wilde – or rather the character Vivian in 'The Decay of Lying' – takes an interesting line on Wordsworth, who, he declares, 'went to the lakes but was never a lake poet. He found in stones the sermons he had already hidden there. He went moralising about the district, but his good work was produced when he returned, not to Nature but to poetry. Poetry gave him 'Laodamia', and the fine sonnets, and the great Ode, such as it is. Nature gave him 'Martha Ray' and 'Peter Bell', and the address to Mr Wilkinson's spade.' 
  To which Vivian's interlocutor, Cyril, mildly replies: 'I think that view might be questioned.'