I dashed this off this afternoon after thinking about Gov. Corbett's budget address. I imagine it as an op-ed where I am given WAY more room than I would actually be given. In a more liberal environment, it would have more piss and vinegar. In a more academic one, it would qualify its claims about the value of literary study, though I still do believe in these things.
In any case, I'll be eager to hear what you all think. I don't imagine most of you are as exercised as I am about Corbett's misuse of Wordsworth, since most of you probably aren't English professors who publish on this particular era of British literary history. Still, I hope I articulated my anger, disbelief, and sorrow over Corbett's budget in a way that rhymes with some of your feelings.
More below the fold. . .
Normally, my heart leaps up when I hear a politician quote William Wordsworth, especially when a governor does so in his first budget address--and this after quoting William Faulkner! But if my heart leapt up at Gov. Corbett's speech, it was directly into my mouth (it tastes like bile, by the way) and then sunk way down. For in that same speech Gov. Corbett articulated a set of values that deeply contradict the poem he quotes and make it much less likely that good conversations about Wordsworth, Faulkner, or any other poet or novelist or mathematician or physicist or sociologist will happen in Pennsylvania's schools, from kindergartens to doctoral programs.
Here's what Gov. Corbett said: "Two hundred years ago a group of English poets talked of building a utopian community along the banks of the Susquehanna. It was their dream to come to Penn's Woods and flourish. They never made it here. Maybe they heard about our property taxes. One of their friends was the poet William Wordsworth. He identified the dangers of a culture of spending. He wrote: Getting and spending We lay waste our powers Note the subtlety there. It's not that we use up our powers. We lay them waste. We lose them outright. Getting and spending we lose track of our real purpose. Our job isn't to spend. It's to conserve."
Here, the governor refers first to Robert Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and their plans as young radicals, flush with the energies of the French Revolution, to establish a "pantisocracy" in Pennsylvania. It's safe to say that "property taxes" wouldn't have deterred them, since they believed in group ownership of property. As for their friend, Wordsworth, it is peculiar for the governor to cite "The World is Too Much With Us" as a brief for his budget. You see, that sonnet, published in Poems in Two Volumes (1807), opposed a world of "getting and spending" not to a vision of, say, exploiting the land for mineral wealth, as the governor imagines in the case of the Marcellus Shale and the Utica Shale and its dreams visions of Pennsylvania as "the Texas of natural gas" (his enthusiasm reflected here in that this resonant phrase was not part of the circulated text). Wordsworth worries instead that we have in our rage to commodify the natural world, broken our relationship with it. In other words, the opposite of what the governor envisions. After speaking of the power and the beauty of the sea and winds, he says, "For this, for everything, we are out of tune." It is particularly strange for the governor then to claim the mantle of "conservative"--as in "one who conserves" when one of the things he seems most eager to spend, despite his passing mention of the need to protect the environment is precisely the sort of thing that Wordsworth is so keen to conserve. The subtlety the governor finds in "[w]e lay waste our powers" is interesting; but it is not persuasive because the message he extracts does such violence to the sense of the poem.
Now, Wordsworth ended up a conservative in at least two senses of that word, someone we might call a conservationist and a political conservative, growing more conservative as he grew older, though he never recanted his support for the French Revolution. Some, like the governor, might say that he grew older and wiser; others, like me, that he lost his way. But there's not too much debate among readers and scholars that his poetry certainly didn't get any better as he drifted more to the right.
If I were teaching this poem in a more introductory undergraduate class--say, a survey of British literature--I would hope that in the discussion my students would hit on how Wordsworth positions himself as a spokesperson for a collective "we" (not unlike a governor) and yet does so in a prophetic mode that opposes himself to this collective (governors sometimes do this, too). I would draw our attention to the structure of the sonnet, including the turn as we move from octave to sestet where the speaker wishes that he were "a Pagan suckled in a creed outworn" if it gave him access to the connection to the natural world--the Greek belief in Proteus and Triton as embodiments of the spirit of the sea-- that he and his contemporaries lack, the sort of pantheism that often got him into trouble with the authorities. (I wonder how it would play with the orthodox of our own moment.) I would ask them to think about how that wish for another's belief might speak to Wordsworth's disillusionment with the French Revolution, about what crucial cultural and political work Nature is doing in this poem. I'd probably tie it to Tintern Abbey and to the Romantic movement more broadly. We might also speak of the way the sea is feminized as baring its "bosom to the moon." In more advanced undergraduate courses and graduate courses, we'd consider the recent critical reading of Wordsworth's turn to Nature as a turn against Politics and History; or the way Wordsworth prefigures current ecological thinking and its sometimes unreflective attachment to Nature; or how this sonnet stands next to the many other sonnets Wordsworth publlishes in 1807 as he tries to think about how objects, poems, and citizens might be bound together in two dual moments of crisis--the punctual threat of a Napoleonic invasion and the larger threat to the sort of elite reading public Wordsworth hopes to reach and/or create.
However, those sort of investigations and exchanges will be harder to come by if the governor's budget is passed. It slashes aid to K-12 education by $550 million and cuts in half the state appropriation for higher education, including my own school, Temple University. How these schools will deal with those cuts remains to be seen. I could go into various scenarios and try to counter various myths about the fat in school budgets (though there is some). But whatever I'd say, it's hard for me to see how these cuts into bone and sinew will lead to the sort of intense consideration of the poetry of Wordsworth or the novels of Toni Morrison or the plays of Shakespeare or so many other valuable texts from a range of disciplines. These are the encounters that sharpen minds, help to mold more informed and engaged citizens, and, as it turns out, make for the kind of workers that well-paying employers want in a twenty-first century economy.
To judge from the governor's biography, he must know how valuable an education is to a citizenry, having taught civics and history in high school. In case Wordsworth might be dismissed as a flighty Romantic, I quote a figure whom I feel sure is held in high regard by the governor and his supporters. Adam Smith, writing in Book V of The Wealth of Nations, worries over the effects of the division of labor that he helped to theorize and celebrate as the great engine of the economy: "The torpor of [a worker's] mind renders him not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life." There is much I would object to here and elsewhere in Smith, including its assumption that laboring people have no other modes except formal schooling to fight those aspects of their work that dehumanize them. But it is instructive that Smith, so often cited as the father of capitalism--often by those who haven't properly read his work or the text he published before it, The Theory of Moral Sentiments--saw the dangers of an unfettered market economy just as Wordsworth saw them from a different vantage.
Gov. Corbett clearly values Wordsworth and Faulkner, however much we may differ in our reading of them. I wish, then, that he had cited them in defense of a budget that would make it more likely for other students to have a chance to study them, along with many others. For if we are to "not only endure but prevail" we need political leaders who understand why education is valuable on so many levels, and why it deserves to be funded not in an undisciplined way but in a way that has a chance of sustaining them as a public enterprise. And if our political leaders don't get that, then we need to educate them. I'll do what I can.