Table Of ContentMajestic Indolence
... his life of hope
And hazard, and hard labour interchanged
With that majestic indolence so dear
To native man.
Wordsworth, The Prelude, bk 8, 11. 387-90
... ait only flourishes in leisure time, I guess . . .
Elizabeth Bishop, letter to
Dr. Army Baumann, July 28, 1952
Majestic Indolence
English Romantic Poetry
and the Work of Art
WILLARD SPIEGELMAN
New York Oxford
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
1995
Oxford University Press
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Copyright © 1995 by Willard Spiegelman
Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.,
200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016
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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Spiegelman, Willard.
Majestic indolence : English romantic poetry
and the work of art/Willard Spiegelman.
p. cm. Includes index.
ISBN 0-19-509356-9
1. English poetry—19th century—History and criticism.
2. Art and literature—Great Britain—History—19th century.
3. Aesthetics, British—19th century.
4. Romanticism—Great Britain,
I. Title. PR590.S66 1995 821'.709—de 94-33158
Excerpts from One Art by Elizabeth Bishop, edited by Robert Giroux.
Copyright © 1994 by Alice Helen Methfessel.
Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc.
Excerpts from "The End of March," "Filling Station" and "Poem,"
in The Complete Poems, 1927-1979 by Elizabeth Bishop.
Copyright © 1979, 1983 by Alice Helen Methfessel.
Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc.
1 am grateful to Margaret Nemcrov for permission to reprint "The Metaphysical Automobile,"
in The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977).
"The Silken Tent," from The Poetry of Robert frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem.
Copyright 1942 by Robert Frost. Copyright © 1969 by Henry Holt and Co., Inc.
Copyright © 1970 by Lesley Frost Ballantine. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Co., Inc
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 42
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
For Charles Rowan Beye
Kcd oi ouvievTeg cpavoijoiv cbg cpcooxfiQeg TOIJ ovgavov
Qui autem docti fuerint fulgebunt quasi splendor firmamenti.
And they that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament.
Daniel 12:3
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Acknowledgements
An academic who claims to be working on indolence elicits a predictable
assortment of quips, wisecracks, and know-it-all glances from colleagues
and nonacademic friends. Jokes about narcolepsy, hammocks, lazy after-
noons, and unfinished tasks abound. The image of the professor who
hardly works at all is exaggerated, though hardly groundless. The Ameri-
can university, the contemporary institutional Maecenas for artists and
scholars alike, provides the closest thing to a pastoral locus amoenus in our
late-industrial world. (In his fable The Parasite Michel Serres has termed
his titular character "sometimes professorial, sometimes pastoral.") And
college teachers are practically the only workers who can routinely count
on extended temporal grace, whether in the form of sabbatical leaves or of
summer respite, as a dividend by which to accomplish a different kind of
"work." I recognize such time as anyone's greatest gift, the means by which
we transform the pastoral into the georgic.
Nowhere has the passage of time seemed so powerful or frightening as
in my realization that I first read a book of literary criticism in 1962 as a
college freshman. That book—for a course in nineteenth-century French
literature—was Irving Babbitt's Rousseau and Romanticism, a work anti-
quated even then. Perhaps I needed the three intervening decades to come
to grips with my first exposure to Romanticism and its detractors as well as
its advocates.
My professional debts are institutional and personal, the former often
serving as an occasion for the latter. The National Endowment for the
Humanities provided me with a series of awards, extending from a summer
viii Acknowledgments
grant in 1984 to a yearlong fellowship (1990-91), which allowed me the
time to begin and finally to complete this project. In 1989, at an NEH-
sponsorcd seminar entitled "The Lyric and History," intended for college
teachers and held in New Haven, I first tried out some of my speculations
before an audience under the patient guidance of Paul Fry. Two years later,
at Harvard University's Center for Literary and Cultural Studies, I further
elaborated on my ideas at a regular meeting of the Romanticism study
group. The probing questions and criticisms of John Hodgson, William
Keach, David Perkins, Alan Richardson, Charles Rzepka, and Vernon
Shetley forced me to clarify my focus and to expand my scope. As usual, I
am grateful to the deans of Dedman College at Southern Methodist Uni-
versity for their continuing encouragement and support of my scholarly
endeavors.
Others who have contributed in different ways to my thinking about,
and grapplings with, indolence may not remember their advice or recog-
nize their ideas as I have absorbed and transformed them in the following
pages. These people include David Bromwich, Paul Cantor, Bonnie Cost-
ello, Roger Gilbert, Sander Gilman, John Hollander, J. D. McClatchy, and
Anya Taylor. Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi, the press reader of my manu-
script, made invaluable recommendations and steered me away from some
flagrant errors. At Oxford University Press, Elizabeth Maguire and Henry
Krawitz proved themselves models of editorial generosity and kindness.
Amanda Heller performed the copy editing with a light but steady hand.
Three other friends variously supported my indolence and shared my
labors. Kenneth Bleeth read successive versions of the manuscript and
aided me in honing and expanding it where necessary. Stephen Orgel
steered the book to its final destination at Oxford. Charles Rowan Beye
provided me with a haven in Cambridge during the year of the book's
writing; he taught me Greek a long time ago and, subsequently, much else
about life and literature. I happily dedicate this book—about modern
transformations of pastoral—to a classicist who has himself negotiated the
straits of otium and labor and come back to port smiling.
Contents
A Note on Editions and Abbreviations, xi
1 "Majestic Indolence": The Progress of a Trope, 3
2 Wordsworth at Work and Play, 21
3 Coleridge and Dejection, 58
4 Keats's Figures of Indolence, 83
5 States of Possession: Shelley's Versions of Pastoral, 108
6 Our American Cousins, 142
Appendix A Shelley's Last Lyrics, 161
Appendix B The Text of Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode," 171
Notes, 177
Index, 213
