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Wordsworth and the Rabbis
The Affinity Between His
- Abstract
In our culture it is not the common habit to read the books of a century ago. Very likely all that we can mean when we say that a writer of the past is “alive” in people’s minds is that, to those who once read him as a college assignment or who have formed an image of him from what they have heard about him, he exists as an attractive idea. And if we think of the three poets whom Matthew Arnold celebrated in his “Memorial Verses,” we know that Byron is still attractive and possible, and so is Goethe. But Wordsworth is not attractive and not an intellectual possibility. He was once the great, the speaking poet for all who read English. He spoke both to the ordinary reader and to the literary man. But now the literary man outside the university will scarcely think of referring to Wordsworth as one of the important events of modern literature; and to the ordinary reader he is likely to exist as the very type of the poet whom life has passed by, presumably for the good reason that he passed life by.
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