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A Review of
Myself and Some Other Being: Wordsworth and the Life Writing
Daniel Robinson
Paperback: U of Iowa Press, 2014
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Reviewed by Amy Gentile
There’s this odd phenomenon that happens from time to time, where you hear a word, a name, or an idea for what feels like the first time—or at least the first time you really noticed it—and then you start hearing it everywhere, as though you can’t escape it. And it’s so prevalent that you begin to wonder if you really never heard about it before, or if it really is as it seems—that this word or idea is suddenly haunting you, following you around for some purpose.
In many ways, that has been my experience with some of the concepts in Myself and Some Other Being: Wordsworth and the Life Writing by Daniel Robinson. While I have long appreciated what poetry I’ve read of Wordsworth’s, this book led me to appreciate so much more about him and his life’s work. Suddenly, these ideas and concepts started cropping up in other areas of my life as well, adding an extra sense of relevance to this book for me and giving me some good material for personal and intellectual reflection.
Myself and Some Other Being is really a story about Wordsworth’s autobiographical poem, The Prelude. He originally intended it to be a preface to “The Recluse”, the epic poem that was his lifelong ambition to complete, and that he and Samuel Coleridge imagined would rival Milton’s epic Paradise Lost. Unfortunately, “The Recluse” was never completed, but The Prelude remains a fabulous poem in its own right, a creative retelling of Wordsworth’s life woven together with his philosophical musings.
Robinson’s book explains the context of The Prelude, giving the reader the necessary lenses from which to view it and rightly interpret its meaning. He then makes connections between Wordsworth’s particular devices in this poem and how they apply to the life of a writer in general. Though I don’t consider myself a writer in the same grand sense that Wordsworth did, I do enjoy writing and thinking deeply about literature and poetry, and I found much “food for thought” in Robinson’s examination.
Some of the key ideas that Robinson highlights, that have stuck with me ever since I finished this book about a month ago, are the “two consciousnesses” and the “creative imagination.” The “two consciousnesses” is a reference to these lines from The Prelude, which form the epigraph of the second chapter: “A tranquillizing spirit presses now/On my corporeal frame: so wide appears/The vacancy between me and those days,/Which yet have such self-presence in my mind/That, sometimes, when I think of them, I seem/Two consciousnesses, conscious of myself,/And of some other being” (The Prelude, Book Two, lines 27-33). These lines also give rise to the very title of the book, and represent Wordsworth’s imagining of himself in the present related to his past, or as Robinson puts it, a “now-self seeking to define itself in relation to a then-self that does not really exist (perhaps never did)” (7). As Robinson further notes, The Prelude was never completely fixed down, but was constantly visited and revisited throughout Wordsworth’s life. This process of examining and interacting with the past, making changes, adding and perfecting, constantly refining, is both a key to this poem and a necessity for any writer. I found myself captivated by the way Wordsworth used this technique of self-examination (a present self examining a past self), which reminded me of how I’ve written about and examined my own life. However, I wouldn’t have ever been able to put it as eloquently as Wordsworth did with his poetry, nor able to identify it as clearly as Robinson did in his discussion.
Intimately tied to this concept of the “two consciousnesses” examining the past is the idea of “creative imagination”, which is how Robinson discusses Wordsworth’s use of past events in his poetry. This is not some purely historical autobiography, nor is it meant to be. Ultimately, The Prelude is “poetics of a memoir”, a place where “The past does not exist: it is a fiction, it is cognitive material that the creative imagination may forge into something that does exist…” (8) The past becomes something new, something relevant to the reader, something that in a sense may be truer than a strict, 100% factual interpretation of the past.
For me, this connected with so many different ways of describing the world…and it hinted at a sort of transcendence that I have always felt is a part of Wordsworth’s poetry, which is perhaps why I’ve always connected with it so deeply. It is a transcendence which Robinson discusses later in the book as an important counter to a strictly empirical view of the world, which is part of why I think Wordsworth (and this book) is so relevant to us today. It is why I love reading the fantasy of Madeleine L’Engle and C.S. Lewis, and find it so fascinating how a book that has such a strongly fictional element can grasp onto certain types of truth far more deeply.
Wordsworth and most of my favorite authors use both creativity and imagination to color their experiences of the world and craftily weave poetry and stories that transcend themselves, that are relatable: stories of every human. As Robinson notes at in the finale, “What the maker seeks to do is to find figures from his life that will correspond with similarly peculiar ones from his readers’ lives and then model for his readers what they can do with those figures, to produce creative fruits of their own and to repair imaginations that become impaired during the intercourse of everyday life” (102). This is what Wordsworth achieves through his poetry, and what Robinson definitely achieved with this book, evidenced by the fact that I have not been able to put it out of my mind for weeks, and have been craving to get back into writing myself.
While I’d encountered these themes in Wordsworth’s poetry before, to see it so clearly explained in Robinson’s book helped me to clarify exactly what it is I loved about this poetry and how I wanted to connect it to my own writing. At times the language was dense, and it does read a little bit like an English text in places, but there is so much depth of thought in Robinson’s writing, and so much beauty in Wordsworth’s poetry that this is well worth the time it takes to read and engage with it. I’m indebted to Wordsworth’s life-philosophy-through-poetry and the lens through which it helps me see the world, and to Daniel Robinson for pulling all those concepts together. I’m truly envious of anybody who gets to take a class with Professor Robinson, his clear passion for poetry and for Wordsworth taught me more in a short 106-page book than I imagine I could’ve learned in a semester on my own.
C. Christopher Smith is the founding editor of The Englewood Review of Books. He is also author of a number of books, including most recently How the Body of Christ Talks: Recovering the Practice of Conversation in the Church (Brazos Press, 2019). Connect with him online at: C-Christopher-Smith.com
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