Geoffrey H. Hartman (1929–2016)

Oscar Wilde once declared that "literary criticism is the only civilized form of autobiography," and Geoffrey Hartman has obviously taken this apothegm to heart. Closely associated with Yale University for most of his professional life, Hartman is one of the most well-known literary critics in the United States, and often identified with the Yale school of deconstruction, even though no overarching methodology can be applied to the entire body of his work.

First, a word on the audience at which this book is aimed: it will be of little interest for most readers who are not at least moderately familiar with the last fifty years of literary criticism in Europe, and especially the American upending thereof in the 1970s and 1980s. The title of the book both is and is not a bit of self-conscious omphaloskepsis: while Hartman does a lot of name-dropping, he discusses many of those names in detail, or at least as much detail as a 180-page book could. Those particularly interested in Hartman's contributions to Holocaust studies, memorial studies, and digitization will certainly find something interesting.

Born in 1929 in Germany, Hartman was taken via Kindertransport to England until the end of World War II, when he was able to move to the United States to pursue his education. While he was doing his graduate work at Yale, and later when he was a professor there, he met a number of important people in the field, including but not limited to Paul de Man, Hans Robert Jauss, Derrida, Harold Bloom, Rene Wellek, and Erich Auerbach. Instead of turning his formidable power as analyst and critic toward himself, he looks at their ideas and offers the occasional insight of them as people, including passionate defenses of both de Man and Jauss against accusations concerning their questionable pasts. The book ends with a beautiful tribute to the German critic Erich Auerbach, whose "Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature" is one of the most important contributions to the genre.

Beyond these occasional coruscations, we get precious few glimpses into his inner life, which is perhaps what many readers might want. But this wouldn't be the first time in his life that he bucked a trend. The material in the book is wholly refracted through scholarly apparatus and his contribution to it, and therefore comes across as more aloof and impersonal. Hartman is a gentle, avuncular soul with a capacious intellect. His call for the continued close reading of literature is a vital one, as is his continuing suspicion of literary fads like postmodernism, in its all sundry incarnations. I recommend it for those interested in a meditative account of a life in reading and learning, both of which Hartman does with a considerable joie de vivre.… (more)

What Earl Wasserman, The Finer Tone, did for my appreciation of the poetry of John Keats when I was an undergraduate, and what Robert Gleckner, The Piper and the Bard, did for my appreciation of the songs and early prophecies of William Blake when I was a young instructor in English, Geoffrey Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry 1787-1814, did for my understanding and appreciation of Wordsworth’s great autobiographical poetry in my maturity.

Young in the profession, I was outspoken in my admiration for the young John Keats, and probably somewhere in the depths of my psyche I was aware of my identity with him as thinker, lover, and visionary. Then, on my own, I discovered the greatness of Blake, and I became positively vociferous in my advocacy of his poetic and prophetic vision and his stylistic devices. Toward Wordsworth, I was, if not condescending, at least temperate in my respect. Borrowing my terminology from Keats, I talked about his “egotistical sublime.” An older, quieter, humbler colleague would chuckle (and, I suspect, avoid me whenever possible). “As you grow older,” he finally said, not exactly in exasperation, but firmly, “you will grow into Wordsworth.”

And I did. But not to the displacement of Keats and Blake in my esteem and affection. Never. In fact, under Hartman’s guidance, I discovered a Wordsworth who was not quite as far removed from Keats and Blake and Coleridge as I had presumed, particularly in his view of the imagination. The Prelude became, in my mind, yet another British Romantic apocalypse, focusing directly on the growth of the poet’s mind—as, indeed, all three of these other romantic poets had done indirectly and symbolically. Then my study of Wordsworth (and of the British Romantics in general) was interrupted by other professional responsibilities and, eventually, by administration. I never grew beyond The Prelude. Perhaps it is just as well, for as even Hartman says of The Excursion, “One must admit that to read carefully its nine books is a massively depressing experience.” Though it falls “(like a dinosaur) of its own weight,” even so Hartman finds in it, “tokens of a habitual poetic greatness.” Unlike my older colleague, I never moved beyond the exuberance of my romantic youth into the solemnity and melancholy of a Wordsworthian maturity.

Though in his preface Hartman says, “Minute stylistic or structural analysis has been avoided, except for a few ‘close ups,’”he gives Wordsworth the same thoughtful, close textual analysis that Wasserman and Gleckner did for Keats and Blake, but he goes well beyond that in reflecting upon the structure and character of the poet’s work as a whole and of the mind reflected in the work as it is seen developing in and through the work. That is a Herculean task. He outlines the foci of his critical procedure in the first sentence of his preface: “the individual poem, the sequence of the poems, and the generic relation of poetry to the mind.” It was, however, in his close reading of individual poems, or passages, that he brought new attention to Wordsworth and a new community of readers into an appreciation of his work.

The two passages to which he gives most attention are two accounts of mountain-top experiences in The Prelude: the Simplon Pass in Book VI, lines 557-640 and Mt. Snowden in Book XIV, especially lines 11-63ff. Both deal with the interrelationship of Nature and the Imagination in the poet’s experience and in his creativity. The more conventional way of understanding Wordsworth is through an application of what he called “the correspondent breeze”; that is, a Presence dwelling simultaneously in nature and in human nature, in “the light of setting suns, / And the round ocean and the living air, / And the blue sky, and in the mind of man.” Hence, the same spirit “impels / All thinking things, all objects of all thought.” [‘Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey”] Nature answers to the human imagination, and Imagination responds to the impetus of nature.

For I, methought, while the sweet breath of heaven
Was blowing on my body, felt within
A correspondent breeze, that gently moved
With quickening virtue, but is now become
A tempest, a redundant energy,
Vexing its own creation.
[The Prelude, Book I, lines 33-37]

Hartman, however, finds the interaction between Nature and the Imagination more complex, and he explicates Wordsworth’s own struggle with the concepts, or rather the experiences, of absence as well as Presence, both in nature and in his own responsiveness.

Already, in the description of “the correspondent breeze” one senses a slight element of tension. The natural breeze that inspires the poet (to use the word quite literally) is gentle and “quickening,” but the ecstatic joy is tempered by words like “redundant” and “vexing.”

In the first composition of the Simplon Pass passage from Book VI (1799), there is a loss and recovery of inspiration in nature, or of the poet’s responsiveness. But in a passage composed later (1804) and inserted between the loss and the recovery, Wordsworth discovers the autonomous power of the imagination, “a mind finally forced to meet and to recognize its inherently apocalyptic vigor” (according to Hartman).

Imagination—here the Power so called
Through sad incompetence of human speech,
That awful Power rose from the mind’s abyss
Like an unfathered vapour that enwraps,
At once, some lonely traveller. I was lost;
Halted without an effort to break through;
But to my conscious soul I now can say—
“I recognise thy glory:” in such strength
Of usurpation, when the light of sense
Goes out, but with a flash that has revealed
The invisible world, doth greatness make abode,
There harbours whether we be young or old
Our destiny, our being’s heart and home,
Is with infinitude, and only there;
With hope it is, hope that can never die,
Effort, and expectation, and desire,
And something evermore about to be.

By absence rather than Presence, "when the light of sense / Goes out," Nature leads the poet on into his own imaginative vision, an "invisible world." In a critical section of his exposition, entitled “The Via Naturaliter Negativa,” Hartman comments on this passage:

“His mind, desperately and unself-knowingly in search of a nature adequate to deep childhood impressions, finds instead itself [italicized], and has to acknowledge that nature is no longer its proper subject or home.” [p39]

Suddenly, Wordsworth is a poet, not of material nature, but like Blake and Coleridge, of the human imagination. Thence, Hartman goes on to explore this passage in its structural placement within the poem, in its chronological occurrence in the poet’s thinking, and in the order of its composition. In it he sees yet another variation of his focal image, which he calls “the halted traveller.” Confronting a sense of absence in nature, the poet is propelled into its own, autonomous vision. Hartman, therefore, can describe, with some assurance, Wordsworth’s apocalyptic vision, or what in his later book, The Unmediated Vision, he will term “the direct sensuous intuition of reality.”

However, the Snowden passage, which Wordsworth wrote earlier than the passage quoted above but chose to retain in the last book of The Prelude, his coda as it were, leads Hartman once again to rethink his explanation.

“The incident is a difficult one to interpret, not only for us, but for the poet himself; yet he insists that though nature on Snowden points to imagination, and even thrusts the vision of it on him, what he sees is still a Power like nature’s . . . . This time his recognition of imagination sub specie naturae does not . . . [as in the Simplon Pass passage] give a mortal shock to nature. The episode is Wordsworth’s most astonishing avoidance of apocalypse.” [pp. 60f]

What is so enlightening and satisfying in reading Hartman’s interpretation is not so much his conclusions but his thoughtful attention to Wordsworth‘s language and apparent intention. One can only admire the critic’s willingness to temper his own conclusions in the context of further details. The mind of the poet is fascinating to the critic, and quite frankly the response of the critic is fascinating to this reader. In his later work Hartman will refer to a theme “hidden throughout (even to the writer) until the last chapter.” A reader gets to see, in Hartman’s own work, a critic in the process of responding to an author’s work, whose point of view quite literally shifts and changes through the very last chapter. As Wordsworth let us see the working of a poet's mind, Hartman lets us see the working of a critic's mind. All in all, one is left with insight into Wordsworth’s poetry and his impact on readers that is far more complicated and interesting than simply an “egotistical sublime.… (more)