When it first appeared at the end of William Wordsworth's Poems, in Two Volumes (1807), the Immortality Ode was called "illegible and unintelligible" by Wordsworth's nemesis Francis Jeffrey (qtd. in Davidson 91). Not much more was said about it at the time, but since then there has been a "repeated refusal by some of every generation to read it for anything but its music and emotional power," glossing over its meaning (Davidson 27). Even today, the critical consensus seems to be that the Ode offers nature as consolation to existential angst. In The Intelligible Ode, however, Graham Davidson draws on Wordsworth's full oeuvre, from the published poems to their manuscript revisions, in order to make Wordsworth's great ode intelligible to the current generation of readers.

Arguing that the Immortality Ode represents "the culmination of the poetry that both preceded and succeeded it" (79), Davidson undertakes the monumental task of closely reading nearly all the poetry written from 1804, when Wordsworth began writing the Ode, to 1807, when he published it. He opens with two disclaimers. First, if there is any theory driving his analysis, it is "that poems will provide most of their pleasure, as well as share most of their insights, principally by reading and reflection, by establishing connections between different poems ... and by listening to what the author says" (1). Second, Davidson wrote most of the book while under lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020--22 and, consequently, often lacked access to a library. Despite these limiting conditions, a deep intellectual curiosity clearly drives The Intelligible Ode, a fascinating attempt to understand a poet on his own terms.

Davidson's method combines close reading, composition history, and biography. It is an impressive undertaking, even if the readings are sometimes a bit strained and repetitive. Some of the repetition is deliberate: Davidson takes into account contemporary academic habits which tend to cannibalize books, reading individual chapters rather than cover to cover. This is a book, however, that rewards reading the whole thing in order. In the absence of library access, Davidson's engagement with contemporary scholarship is wanting. The consequence is a thesis reminiscent of those advanced by the likes of M. H. Abrams and Harold Bloom in the 1950s--70s. However, it is important to remember that Lutterworth Press publishes scholarly nonfiction for a general audience, who are likely to be unfamiliar with the decade-long quarrels of academia. Furthermore, The Intelligible Ode is the obvious product of deep thought, an impressive range of knowledge, and sensitive close reading. Both general and academic readers will find much to appreciate.

Through his five sections and seventeen (short) chapters, Davidson argues that as a child Wordsworth felt the presence of a transcendental power--variously called mind, imagination, Reason, or eternity--which he associated with feelings of deep love and joy. As he matured and as he struggled with The Recluse, that great never-to-be-finished philosophical poem that Coleridge had charged him with writing, he no longer experienced that power in the immediacy of nature. Thus began "Wordsworth's continuous debate with himself" (9) as he tried to determine "Whither is fled the visionary gleam?" (line 56) and whether he could recover it. According to Davidson, Wordsworth's driving question was whether nature or mind is the source of that elusive power. These questions and their answers culminate in "Wordsworth's finest expression of the lyric spirit of philosophy," moving "from dead years and sadness to a feeling of power" (216), and cautiously concluding in the great Ode "that grace once experienced was ineradicable" (206).

This is a familiar story to most students of Wordsworth, and seems to replicate the Romantic Ideology identified by Jerome McGann. For example, Davidson asserts that Wordsworth "f[ound] his freedom" in "deeper seclusion" when he moved to Grasmere (43). However, he engages with New Historicism only briefly to caution readers that it is important to take Wordsworth at his word if we want to understand the Ode as he did. Recognizing that few readers today have the same belief systems as the Romantic poets, Davidson asserts that the "ideas and feelings of immortality are the premises of the Ode[;] its intelligibility depends upon readers ... suspending their rejection of them" (97) and buying into the idea that children have access to a celestial something that they lose as adults. Although he clearly articulates the terms of Wordsworth's internal debate--is the return to childhood's celestial vision "a reversion to an illusion, or a reversion to truth" (106)?--sometimes it is difficult to tell if Davidson is merely tracking them or trying to answer them himself.

Even so, Davidson's undertaking is impressive. In the first part of the book, "Patterns," he establishes enduring themes in Wordsworth's thinking and poetry--nature, human suffering, the imagination, and transcendence--and provides a brief overview of the context in which they were forged. René Descartes had rendered nature unintelligible, Davidson explains, by postulating that it was lifeless and inert. Substantially disconnected from God, nature no longer offered access to the divine. Cambridge Platonists like Ralph Cudworth, however, found a way to reunite mind and nature in the wake of Cartesian empiricism, asserting that reason enabled human beings to apprehend truths that did not rely on the sensible world. Although Davidson acknowledges that there is no evidence that Wordsworth ever read Cudworth or any member of his circle, he contends that the poet saw reason as a divine faculty that worked in both the human mind and nature. He also points to geometric proofs, which do not depend on the sensible world, as another source of Wordsworth's fundamental belief that truth exists transcendentally. These claims are similar to Mark J. Bruhn's in Wordsworth before Coleridge (Routledge, 2018), though Davidson arrives at them independently. Davidson argues that "Tintern Abbey" maps the themes that structure Wordsworth's thought and that culminate in the Ode: the relationship between power and phenomena, the loss of nature's immediacy, and the possibility of recompense. For Wordsworth, the light of sense must be extinguished before power's presence can make itself known--not through literal death, but through the transcendence of ordinary apprehension.

Because "ideas and feelings of immortality are the premises of the Ode," readers need to understand what Wordsworth meant by them (Davidson 97). In "Principles," Davidson argues rather vehemently that for Wordsworth, immortality has nothing to do with the resurrection of the body. (Here, it feels as though Davidson is tilting at windmills, but at the end of the book we learn that he is tilting with John Ruskin.) Like John Davies, Wordsworth sees immortality rather as the consciousness of an elusive power that originates in God. Like Thomas Traherne, he experiences a sense of unity with God, mourns its loss as he gives into the demands of adulthood, and retires to the country in an effort to regain it. Davidson further connects both poets' ideas to what Freud calls an oceanic state in infancy. Although Traherne was not rediscovered until the twentieth century, Davidson discusses his resemblance to Wordsworth with a palpable excitement that, I suspect, partially motivated this project.

In the third section, Davidson offers an in-depth analysis of what he calls the poetry of crisis. Wordsworth advertised Poems, in Two Volumes as diversions. Nevertheless, Davidson contends that the seemingly light verse written in the wake of his brother John's death, Coleridge's removal to Malta, and his pending marriage to Mary Hutchinson reflects his doubts about whether he had the poetic resources to complete The Recluse. Minutely analyzing several poems about flowers, birds, butterflies, and the singular "To H.C.," Davidson claims that they rehearse the questions and answers that would converge with "resolute clarity" in the Ode (156).

The fourth section devotes seven chapters to close-reading the Immortality Ode. Wordsworth's deceptively simple syntax and imagery belie his often-obscure meaning. Furthermore, although his use of the present tense and irregular stanzas give the impression of dramatic spontaneity, the poem is both structured and progressive, as the speaker mourns the loss of the celestial vision and ponders whether power resides in nature or in the mind. It follows the tripartite structure that, according to Davidson, characterizes Wordsworth's pattern of thought, opening with the statement of loss, followed by the analysis of loss, and concluding with its tentative recovery. The adult speaker seeks to make conscious what he knew only intuitively as a child: that love of nature and primal sympathy in the wake of human suffering can be rewarded with a sublime experience of power, reaffirming the belief in something beyond mere mortal existence. This transcendent peace is the fruit of the philosophic mind.

"Looking Forward into History," the final section, takes Wordsworth and Coleridge to task for failing to understand the importance of the Ode and for misreading The Prelude as a private poem, thereby suppressing its publication until Wordsworth's death. Davidson concludes with a conjectural publication history that asks how the reception of the Ode might have been different if Wordsworth had published all of his longer works when they were written--for example, Salisbury Plain and The Borderers before Lyrical Ballads, or The Ruined Cottage before Poems, in Two Volumes and The Prelude shortly thereafter. Davidson speculates that readers would have recognized two themes that dominate Wordsworth's work: radical human sympathy and poetry that transcends suffering. The Victorians and their successors might also not have mischaracterized Wordsworth as a nature poet. The larger, unstated point, however, is that only when we read Wordsworth's poetry in the order of composition rather than publication do his metaphysics cohere. In fact, doing so makes intelligible the famous poem that has been so much admired and so little understood.

Davidson's book would make a useful study for undergraduates on how to close-read and write about poetry. For more seasoned scholars, Davidson puts Wordsworth's poems into productive relationships with each other. Clear writing, broad biographical and other contextual information, and colloquial asides also make this a suitable book for a general reader who wants to know more about Wordsworth, his famous ode, or even how literary analysis is conducted. Regardless of whether one agrees with Davidson's argument, The Intelligible Ode presents a fascinating example of intellectual curiosity, scholarship driven by passion rather than necessity, and the fruits of sustained thinking about a body of work.

Lisa Ann Roberson is Associate Professor of English at the University of South Dakota.

Graham Davidson responds to Lisa Ann Roberson (2024-7-25):

I am very grateful for Lisa Ann Roberson's generous and sympathetic review, which I feel captures the spirit in which I attempted to write the book. Any author must be happy if the word "impressive" is used of their work. If considered in the light of my caveats, her criticisms are just. My "engagement with contemporary scholarship is wanting" not only because much of the book was written in lockdown, but because one of the of the downsides of close reading is that discussion of secondary sources tends to produce a digressive narrative. I wanted to avoid that, so to some extent references to recent scholarship went by the board.

Because I think of myself less as a scholar or academic, more as a reader writing for readers--for anyone who wants, above all else, to get to grips with Wordsworth's poetry--I regard the comparison with the work of Abrams and Bloom as a compliment. Many of our finest critics stood aside from "the theory wars" and "the decade-long quarrels of academia," so what seems reactionary may be no more than a return to the norm. The question in my mind is whether this book gets any farther in making the "Ode" coherent and intelligible, and in ways that address long-perceived difficulties. It may be "a familiar story," but as classic stories often are, has it been re-told in a way that finds new connections, helps illuminate obscurities, and so makes the poem more if not perfectly intelligible, giving readers greater confidence in their reading? Though not mine to answer, that's the question.

If I seem to replicate the Romantic ideology, that's probably because I do. McGann's analysis may be sound, but does his repudiation of that ideology therefore render it redundant? Is it just an uncomfortable fact to be got over prior to evaluating Wordsworth's poetry, rather than considered as its foundation? Not in my opinion. For instance, no one doubts that Wordsworth retired, but McGann thinks Wordsworth retired in order "to save his own soul," as he reductively puts it, thus abandoning the political questions a responsible poet should address. I think, as Wordsworth thought, that he was turning away from the vanities and impermanencies of life, "the passing shews of being," in order to pursue his real vocation, to look through death, to reunite mind and nature, just as Traherne had done before him. Readers must choose between these conflicting points of view. But McGann is deciding that Wordsworth ought to have been something he wasn't. As Coleridge said, developing Pope's aphorism, if you don't read a poet in the spirit in which they wrote, you are reading a sundial by moonshine.

I also agree that some of my readings are strained and repetitive. "Strained" can mean two things--stretching a connection beyond what is quite credible, and struggling to explain something one finds difficult to understand oneself. Guilty on both counts, I would ask readers to be more sympathetic to the latter, as instinct is often right in sensing there is something there, even though the conscious intellect has difficulty in expressing it.

As Roberson recognizes, some of my repetitions are deliberate, some not. If there is one I would keep at all costs it is "Imagination is reason in her most exalted mood." It's fundamental: it ties the Cambridge Platonists use of the word "reason" to Traherne's "highest reason," to the course of The Prelude, and to the whole intended course of the Biographia Literaria. It is the insight lost to the Victorians, and although he didn't know it--as a consequence of his deeply irresponsible reading of Wordsworth and Coleridge--it is of a kind with T.S. Eliot's understanding of the Logos. It is a phrase that encapsulates the whole of a lost tradition.

In respect of immortality, and its corporal impossibility, am I tilting at windmills? Any reflective mind must dismiss almost out of hand the idea of physical resurrection, and of immortality happening in a place--so that looks like a windmill. However it was, and still is, a Christian doctrine, and if that is not immortality, what is? The Cambridge Platonists, not wanting to upset the Anglican applecart, turned instead turned to thinking about the immortality of the soul, enabled by Descartes' division of mind and body. Wordsworth wrote in that spirit, but was criticized for the immateriality of his idea--that it did not involve physical resurrection, a word he almost never used. Ruskin was my example, but this attitude was endemic among the Victorians. Even Browning, of all people, succumbed. Thus Wordsworth needs defending because his insights, we should always remember, were tentative--not declarations but intimations, not simple but elusive, not material but immaterial.

It is possible that in my attempted elucidation of passages haunted by those ideas, I was more tracking than answering or explaining. Of such passages, my wife sometimes asks me, "Do you believe it, or don't you?" Well, I do while I'm reading it, though I can hardly explain my admiration. It must have something to do with the poetry.

I am glad that Roberson feels that this book is best read in the order of writing, though I do also think that the chapters on "Expostulation" and "Tables Turned," "Tintern Abbey," and the 1802 poems can be read separately, and would by themselves be useful to those still getting to know Wordsworth's poetry. In respect of the last chapter, "Looking Forward into History," I think we are still living in the shadow of the Victorians, so that Wordsworth's achievement has yet to be fully understood, and the tradition in which he wrote fully recognized. I feel I've only scratched the surface of the relations between his work and that of the seventeenth century, particularly of the Cambridge Platonists and Thomas Traherne.

Finally I hope, perhaps against hope, that I never hear again any remark that suggests the "Ode" is musical but meaningless. And never, I also hope, anything like Eliot's foolish, foolish remark that it is "a fine piece of verbiage."