All the rage: Wordsworth's attack on Byron in Lines Addressed to a Noble Lord

Papers on Language and Literature, Summer 2001 by Parille, Ken

Late in his in life, Wordsworth wrote to a correspondent outside of his circle that he never "spoke with acrimony of Lord Byron" (LWD W7: 841) .Yet such a statement is surely an equivocation, for as his letters, conversations, and Lines Addressed to a Noble Lord attest, he repeatedly railed against "his crack-brained ... Lordship." And his claim to Hutchinson that he did not want Byron to know of his involvement also appears somewhat disingenuous. The typical practice of anonymous printing would only have invited speculation about the poem's author, and Wordsworth knew he would be a suspect-because of both his well-known animosity towards Byron and his identifiable poetic style. When the poem is read in light of Wordsworth's letters and conversations, especially those in late 1814 and early 1815, we can see the ways in which the poem reflects his most deeply felt anxieties about success and recognition, anxieties intimately tied to his acrimony towards the more popular poet, Lord Byron. That Wordsworth would channel these anxieties into Lines Addressed to a Noble Lord-a poem unlike any other in his oeuvre-suggests that we need to investigate how the animosity that motivated this work might have influenced his canonical writings as well.

Where are, however, indirect references. In the Fenwick Notes, for instance,Wordsworth says that as he was writing Not in the Lucid Intervals of Life, "the lines following `Nor do words' were written with L. Byron's character as a Poet before me" (55). See also Khan, 78-79, for a discussion of Wordsworth's The Pilgrim's Dream and Upon the Same Occasion as commentary on Byron and his works.

21,ittle relevant information on Mary Barker is available. She was an amateur painter and writer who at times lived near the Wordsworths and Robert Southey, a close friend who described her as a "very clever girl" (qtd. in Storey 140). She is mentioned in the

letters of William, Dorothy, and Mary Wordsworth, as well as those of Southey and Sara Hutchinson. See also Robert Southey (New Letters ofRobert Southey. Ed. Kenneth Curry. New York: Columbia UP, 1965), 262; and Robinson, Books 1: 297.

3Prior to being reprinted in Shorter Poems, the poem was available on microfiche in The Nineteenth Century: Women Writesseries. Barker is listed as the author while Wordsworth's sizable contributions are unacknowledged.

4As originally printed, the poem has 189 lines. The version in Shorter Poems includes two extra lines by Wordsworth that only appear in the Monkhouse manuscript (601). Ketcham attributes to Wordsworth only the lines he specifically mentions in letters, and his printing of these lines in bold might bias readers against seriously considering that others are Wordsworth's. He also does not attribute the first stanza to Wordsworth (it is not in bold), yet Dorothy refers to William's work on it in a letter to Sara Hutchinson (LWDW3: 204). Ifwe include this stanza, then the number of Wordsworth's lines in the printed 1815 version becomes 67. In a note to Wordsworth's December 10, 1814 letter to Hutchinson, the editors say "this letter reveals what passages were contributed to the poem by Wordsworth" (LWDW 3: 175, note 3). But given that he worked on the poem in February 1815, no such definitive claim can be made. wordsworth scholar Mark Reed attributes to Wordsworth three additional lines, suggests that he likely wrote at least 34 more (lines 90-123), and believes that he probably revised the entire poem. Reed does not offer any evidence in support of these claims, however (581). Ketcham speculates that when Wordsworth told Hutchinson he wrote "from old Helvellyns [sic] brow" till the end of the poem, he meant that he wrote all the lines after this phrase (601). Ketcham's rationale that Wordsworth would not start his revision in the middle of a line, however, is unconvincing. It is likely that he wrote this line, too, as similar phrases appear throughout his work. For example, Wordsworth uses "old Helvellyn's brow" in Musings Near Aquapendente (62), and "the brow of old Helvellyn" appears in the Waggoner (2: 8). Reed credits the entire line to Wordsworth (581). All citations from Wordsworth's poetry (except Lines Addressed to a Noble Lord and The Excursion) are from The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth.