Wordsworth’s poems are admired for many reasons. Some readers are bound to think of him chiefly as a nature poet, or as a narrative poet, or a philosophical and reflective poet, or a poet of rural life and custom; others might care for him more as a lyricist or sonneteer, or even as a writer on political and patriotic themes. These categories are obviously not exclusive of one another; many of his poems can be classified in several ways at once, or can be seen to move from one mode to another as they proceed.

Early in his career he also became known as a strikingly “egotistical” and self-absorbed poet – the first of these adjectives being applied to him most famously, though not exclusively, by the young John Keats. (In a letter to his friend Richard Woodhouse, Keats distinguished between his own character as a poet – “unpoetical” he called it – and the “wordsworthian or egotistical sublime”.) Wordsworth himself came close to acknowledging that something of this sort could be fairly said of him. Referring to the long, unfinished poem that became known after his death as The Prelude, he wrote that it was “unparalleled in literary history that a man should talk so much about himself” – a remark suggesting that in his case self-knowledge and self-satisfaction managed quite easily to cohabit with one another.

As a quality of mind and character, Wordsworth’s “egotism” was central to his nature; it is therefore bound to lie at the heart of his greatest verse. It is present even when he writes about moods or states of being that in fact appear so generalized as to be strangely at odds with our usual notions of individuality and self-consciousness. At his best he was a peculiarly physiological poet – by which I mean that he managed to articulate the anonymous, humble, non-volitional bodily processes that precede all thought, and without which thinking cannot take place. In addition to all the other modes in which he wrote, he was in effect a poet of the autonomic nervous system, the spinal cord, the digestive tract, the circulation of the blood; he was also preoccupied to an exceptional degree with the capacity of people to notice things without being conscious of having done so, and to retain an unrecognized memory of them until some later circumstance should stir it into life.

At one point in The Prelude he writes that his “theme has been / What passed within me”, as if his “me”, his conscious, reflective, composing self, were not the initiator of what he is doing, but merely the site or arena within which certain activities – memories, moods, appetites – may or may not reveal themselves to him. In the same passage he says that this theme is “far hidden from the reach of words”, which implies that in his writing he has to do much more than find an approximate verbal mode of representing his experience. Rather, he goes on to say, his task is to “make / Breathings for incommunicable powers”.

His use here of that eerie, estranging, plural term “breathings” is typical of the language Wordsworth employs when exploring subliminal areas of experience such as these. (My two-volume Shorter Oxford English Dictionary gives not a single example of the word being used, whether by Wordsworth or anyone else, in this particular form.) Breathing is an activity we ordinarily carry out without noticing that we are doing so, though any interruption of it will remind us sharply that our lives depend on it. But “breathings”? What are they? Where do they originate? Something similar might be asked of the use he makes of the word “drinking”, which he applies not just to the slaking of thirst, but to the inducing of such states as pleasure, calm and “visionary power”.

“Feeding” and “flowing” also recur (the latter being used to evoke, among other things, both the movement and the “suspension” of blood in the veins). “Trance” and “trances” recur too, figuring in each case not as a doorway to the supernatural but, on the contrary, as a description of moods of heightened receptivity to “the very world which is the world / Of all of us”. This poet hears not only his own voice, but, more significantly still, the “internal echo of the imperfect sound” – the suggestion plainly being that that echoing, internal voice is the more perfect of the two. Like his own Cumberland Beggar (“seeing still / And never knowing that he sees”), or the suckling infant at the breast “drinking passion from his mother’s eye”, he seems to be most engaged with whatever is around him precisely when his consciousness is apparently in abeyance.

This applies even to his vocation as a poet. In Book I of The Prelude, he describes how he arrived at the subject of his greatest poem unknowingly, without meaning to do so: in fact, at the very time he was bitterly reproaching himself for having got nowhere with his ambition to write the kind of epic poem that had been his aim for many years, and for thus failing to live up to the promise of his childhood and early youth. A single disappointed yet ecstatic recollection of that earlier time (“was it for this / The one, the fairest of all rivers . . . / . . . sent a voice that flowed along my dreams”) is followed rapidly by a succession of other such memories, all of them bringing him to realize that the epic theme he has been searching for will not be the tale of the founding of a nation or empire, the topic to which all traditional epics had hitherto been devoted, but the story of his own Bildung, “the growth of a poet’s mind”. Thereafter “the road lies plain” before him.

William Hazlitt, who had been among the first to take notice of the “egotism” of Wordsworth both as a personality and a poet, wrote that he was someone who “contemplates the passions and habits of man not in their extremes but in the first elements”. To try to schematize Wordsworth’s mode of dealing with these “first elements” is to falsify it; nevertheless, it is useful to think of him evoking in verse three distinct levels of human awareness. The most basic consists of instincts and impulses that are the same for all men and women, though they manifest themselves differently within each individual. Of such elements Wordsworth says that they lie hidden “beyond the reach of words”. It follows, then, that they cannot be articulated by direct assault, as it were; they can be brought into the light of day only by the depiction of places, incidents, emotions, persons (the poet himself, often enough) which will render accessible the deeper “fluxes and refluxes of the mind”. The overall effect is to interfuse such movements of mind – which by their nature are involuntary and virtually anonymous – with processes that can be recalled and worked over by the poet.

Once this effort of consciousness is accomplished, Wordsworth relaxes into what can be called a kind of moral hydraulics: he tries to draw his verse towards a third, yet “higher” level of meaning, and it is then that he is inclined to fall into didacticism, into trying to present to his readers a considered, established, and universally applicable world-view. In his anxiety to “rectify men’s feelings” (as he wrote of his aims in another letter), he comes uncomfortably close to formulating rules for living: an ambition which is directly at odds with the passion and tentativeness that mark his writing about the two more primitive levels of experience outlined above.

Associated with these preoccupations is his brooding over boundaries and margins of all kinds: a feature of his verse that many critics have commented on. Knowing from experience (sometimes to the point of despair) just how unyielding boundaries within the mind can seem to be, he knows also that the more closely they are looked at, the more fluid and deceptive they will turn out to be. Within himself he finds that a myriad of crossing points lie between sleep and wakefulness; memory and forgetfulness; compassion and indifference; energy and sloth; thought and emotion (and whatever is below them both); the past as it was when it was present and as it is now in memory; the future in which the moment he is currently living through may or may not be remembered, in circumstances that are now unimaginable to him. And beyond? There, too, from moment to moment, countless distinctions are forever being made and unmade: between himself and other humans, for example; between all humans as a class and innumerable other, speechless forms of life – some seemingly insentient (trees, rocks, lesser celandines), others unmistakably sentient (dogs, sheep, birds); between all that lives and dies and that which has never been alive; between his own species, conscious of its mortality, and the countless creatures spared that fate.

Hence, on this last point, the fascination that outcast figures like tramps, discharged soldiers, “old men travelling”, leech-gatherers and suchlike people have for him. About Wordsworth’s attitude to people of this kind there is little or nothing Oxfam-like. Precisely because he cannot take his eyes off them, he wants them to remain just as they are, and he finds various specious reasons why busy-bodies and do-gooders should leave them alone in their weakness and incomprehension. Why? So that he can continue to marvel at their tottering, hovering existence between the two incommensurate worlds they simultaneously appear to inhabit.

And from moment to moment their case can become his too. What relation, he is driven to ask, do these lakes and mountains, these trees and monuments of the human past have with me – and I with them? Am I not in danger of being crushed by them? By their ignorance of and indifference to me? How can I be so aware of them, so exhilarated and frightened by their variety and solidity, their change and durability, while they, who have such an effect on me, do not even know that I exist? Am I nothing to them, then? If so, why am I so drawn to them, why does their presence or the mere thought of them affect me so greatly? Why can they not respond in kind? Don’t they owe me something – an acknowledgement at least, even perhaps a little gratitude? How is it that natural phenomena appear to have so vivid a life – when clouds move together in the sky or water is ruffled or trees sway, or, perhaps most compellingly of all, when they stand motionless, as if in tranquil self-contemplation – and yet also remain mute, uncomprehending and incomprehensible, forever beyond my reach? Or does the truth of the matter not lie the other way around: is it not they who would forever remain in “disconnection dead and spiritless” if I were not here to wonder at them? In which case, is it not they who depend on me to give them life and awareness, to speak to them and for them? More than that: surely I am not deceiving myself at those dizzying moments when I feel I can take them into myself and transform them, make them me? I eat them, drink them, breathe them; they flow within me; they hear with my ears and see with my eyes; I reflect them as a lake reflects whatever is above and around it, myself included, and like a lake I have depth enough to contain all that surrounds me.

If this is so – the hidden “argument” of the verse seems to continue – and if I use to the utmost the capacities I have had the good fortune to be endowed with, then in speaking for myself I do so not merely for the inanimate, speechless world around me, but also for all other men and women who are not endowed as I am, and to whom I am therefore indispensable. For it is precisely through the capacities that mark me out as exceptional, different from other men and women, a true poet, that they will be able to discover everything that ultimately makes me representative of them (of them as they should be, anyway). If I can manage that, then I will have proved myself equal in stature to the epic heroes of the past, whose lives inspired millions to follow them, and in so doing have enabled the populace at large to see yet another kind of reflection of itself in its heroes’ lives and achievements.

After all which it may seem anticlimactic (though I doubt Wordsworth himself would have thought it so) to add that though he wrote some rhyming poems that will be read as long as English poetry is read by anybody – lyrics such as the Lucy poems, narrative poems such as “Resolution and Independence”, sonnets such as “On Westminster Bridge” and “Surprised by Joy” – he is in my view at his greatest in his blank verse. I am thinking here of much of The Prelude, above all, but also of tales such as “Michael” or the story of Margaret from another long, unfinished poem, The Recluse, as well as of vignettes such as “Old Man Travelling” and “The Old Cumberland Beggar”, and poems of recollection and reaffirmation such as “Tintern Abbey”.

It would seem that the essentially frame-like nature of rhyme, its manner of creating expectations and fulfilling them at appropriate moments, cuts across the expression of some of Wordsworth’s deepest gifts and compulsions. Rhyme is a source of pleasure for poets and readers alike; but not to this particular poet, when he seeks both to establish and to dissolve his own selfhood at its deepest levels. Not when his thoughts have to move by way of a continual probing forward into the dark, with all the caution and excitement of a speleologist who never knows whether or not he might suddenly find himself hanging over sheer space. Not when his “labour”, as Wordsworth puts it (in a passage that is not merely physiological in its reach but positively uterine), is to “trace . . . the stream / From darkness, and the very place of birth / In its blind cavern whence is faintly heard / The sound of waters” – and then to follow it “to light / And open day”.

This essay will appear shortly in Literary Genius, a collection of essays edited by Joseph Epstein and published in the United States by Paul Dry Books. Among the British contributors are Tom Shippey, Elizabeth Lowry, John Gross, Hilary Mantel, A. N. Wilson, Frederic Raphael and David Womersley.

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