Jan Rosiek

Université de Copenhague

A Missed Opportunity - Brandes Reading Wordsworth

With his book on Naturalism in England (1875), Brandes brought English Romanticism into Danish literature. His championship of Byron and Shelley had a major impact on poets like Drachmann and Claussen. His views, including his distaste for Wordsworth and Coleridge, have determined the Danish image of English Romanticism, and not only for his followers. Brandes saw Wordsworth as a regional, mimetic poet of nature and ascribed the notorious continental negligence of his work to his High Church allegiances. But in fact the young Wordsworth was inspired by critical and political concerns very close to his own. Had Brandes found an ally in Wordsworth, Danish criticism would have had a more complex understanding of Romanticism and better have understood the full scope of the early romantics' commitment to the Enlightenment ideals of the French Revolution and the connection between the Romantic imagination and failed political hopes. In this paper I want to look into Brandes' reading of Wordsworth, what he read and what he did not read ( The Prelude ), and raise the question of poetic identity and the basis of canonization (Wordsworth's early radical poetry or his later conservative ideology).