I thought it would be fun to do a Marxist interpretation of "I Wandered
Lonely as a Cloud" and this continues our series of different perspectives on the
poem. I've done a video as well just talking about some of the basics of
Marxist literary interpretation, and so we're just going to jump in and talk
about how you might provide this kind of perspective. I'm also going to refer
occasionally to ideas that I've taken from David Simpson's work "Wordsworth,
Commodification and Social Concern" -- quite an interesting book that in many ways
could be considered a Marxist interpretation. So if you want to read
more about this kind of point of view then I suggest that you start
there. Now if we think of the poem as a whole, in relation to its kind of
economic and social background, then I think pretty soon we start to get this
question of whether the poem in some ways is escapist, or if it engages with
the time period. So is it escapist or does it engage? And the question is there
because Wordsworth of course takes a journey that makes him leave
society, and he goes out into nature ... and I think right away then you see that
kind of tension between nature and economics or social concerns. We'll just
call this economics for now, but I think it's much broader than that. It's society
as a whole. Is he escaping society to go into nature or is he still engaging with
what was happening at the time. And if we're looking at the social background
here, then in particular we should probably point out the effects of
capitalism, and these effects we can see especially in the industrial revolution.
... Is this poem then escapist? W,ell it's a good
question! And I think if you look at it you could also argue that in many ways
it doesn't engage with what was happening at the time. You know, you have
all of these factories, you have cities that are becoming more
and more urbanized and developed, and here Wordsworth says, when I want to find
happiness I don't find it in in buying the latest commodities. I just go into
nature and I escape and I find my true self. That seems very kind of
counter-cultural. It seems like he's really trying to take himself out of the
urban landscape and trying to find some alternative reality. That's one
way to look at it, and I think if we were to work with that then we would see that
there is a kind of contrast in the poem between the imagination ...
which gives him happiness ... and the kind of larger social reality which
makes him lonely. So we could say imagination gives him happiness; society
causes depression and loneliness. That's quite a sharp contrast between
these two. What we can see then as well -- if we extend these ideas a little bit -- we
could say, well, society tends to emphasize the principle of utility.
Everything has to be useful, and we have to make ourselves useful through work, we
have to measure things in terms of money, and here Wordsworth seems to take
an entirely different attitude. He wants to find happiness through all of these
other things that don't seem to be measurable in terms of money and utility.
In fact, if we think of the poet as a worker (so what is the figure of
the poet? What is the job of this person?) then it seems like the poet is
kind of a lazy figure! "I wandered" He's aimless. He's not even really going in
any specific direction. He's just wandering lonely by himself, not doing
anything useful, and at the end it says, "For oft when on my couch I lie." Wow,
what a lazy person. He's just lying around and hoping for some inspiration.
So that would suggest then that the poet according to Wordsworth is
somehow outside of this realm of capitalism and utility and so on. The
poet dwells in the realm of the imagination, and that gives him true
happiness. From this perspective then I think we could argue that the poem is
really trying to set itself up as a different reality, away from capitalism,
something that is better, more worthwhile, that gives you true enjoyment. And if you
read critics like Terry Eagleton, who's a Marxist critic, I think that's what he
would probably say ... and that this problem is then also representative of a lot of
other romantic poems that make the same move. They escape reality, they go into
this imaginative world, and they set it up as a kind of protest almost against
what is going on. "I don't want to be lonely in the city with all of this
grime and urbanization. I want to take myself out of that and find my true self."
Initially that may indeed have been a kind of protest move -- is this all a
protest? But as Eagleton and others point out, over time that privatization of the
imagination, taking the imagination out of the public sphere and making it your
personal subjective kind of enjoyment of nature (and we see that in the last
stanza especially -- you know, when I'm on my couch and all by myself, it's
solitude) ... this kind of privatization of enjoyment and so on may eventually
take poetry out of the public sphere and make it kind of non-utilitarian. So the
utility has gone altogether from poetry, and the poet is describing things for
himself and for his own enjoyment, but has no effect on society. That's one way
to read the romantics. The other way is to say, maybe there is more of an
engagement. And in fact there are lots of Romantic poets (William Blake being a
good example) who tried to hold society to account for all of the
problems of capitalism and so on. So [it's] a very big issue then. You can see
that the poem is engaging with the reality of the time, but it can
be challenging for us as critics to really determine how it fits in with
that, and where we should position it. Another Marxist concept that I think
might be useful for this poem is the concept of alienation, and if you were
doing a larger study you could probably write an entire essay about this.
Marx essentially says that as workers we often become alienated from who we truly
are. There's actually something slightly romantic, I think, about his view of
alienation, but his point is that as workers we turn ourselves into machines
and that alienates us from what nature actually is and from our true
creativity. It's fascinating actually that one of the things that Marx says is
that we want to work as human beings. We don't want to be lazy, but we
want to be creative, and we want to work on projects that we actually enjoy. You
can think of the way Google lets its employee sometimes ... work
on a project that's entirely of their own making.
So what Marx is saying then is that modern capitalism has estranged us
from who we truly are, and in that sense there's actually a bit of continuity
between what Wordsworth is saying and what Marx is saying, because he [Marx] turns to
nature as a kind of way to recapture who we are.
Marx of course would say that turning to nature is not really enough. I mean it's
sort of an escape. It doesn't deal with the root of the issue, and we need a
radical revolution. We need to change the actual economic structure. But
I don't think Wordsworth would necessarily go that far, especially later
in life when he became more conservative. So the concept of alienation is quite
useful. Another concept that we could apply is this concept of what Marx calls
the fetishism of commodities. Quite a big term here, and this is what Simpson talks
about in this book as well ...
Fetishism is this obsession with or an adoration of
something, and there's almost the religious cult aspect to this. What
happens is that with commodities we almost treat them as if they are
animated, as if they are living beings. Think for instance if you buy a vehicle
and you treat it as if it has a name and a personality and so on. That would
be something a little bit like this, but we also do this in terms of value. We
ascribe values to things that are completely artificial, but we treat them
as natural. So we say [that] a Mac computer let's say ... should be
worth more than a regular PC, because, well, a Mac is better, and it has this
kind of status, and it's stylish, and all of these other things. Whereas really
it's somewhat of an arbitrary, artificial thing. We treat these things as
if they're natural, and that's why so many college students have Macs even
though you don't have to! Okay, so that's kind of this arbitrary value that we
ascribe to these things, and the poem seems to want to go away from economic
value, but at the same time it still uses this word "wealth," which is really
fascinating. It says "I little thought what wealth the show to me had brought."
Simpson points out that this is a kind of metaphysical wealth. It's not a real
wealth. But at the same time it raises this question of what is wealth? And
since the poet actually personifies these daffodils (he makes them seem
living) you could say that he actually treats the daffodils as a kind of
commodity -- something that gives him immense joy, something that he animates
and that he ties his own happiness to, just like we often do with commodities.
If you don't have the latest gadget you can't possibly be happy. So in that sense
we can see that the poem is engaged with this kind of larger market economy, and
the logic of it. And I think that's what a Marxist would probably point out, that
... even if [the poem] tries to escape from the reality of the market
it will still often use the same language and logic. And it cannot necessarily
escape from that, and that's how the larger social and economic
background determines the language and the logic of the text, which is kind of a
fascinating argument I think. So what Simpson says about this is
interesting. He says, if you think of this landscape as like a series of
commodities, then who actually provides this wealth? Where does his wealth come
from? Is it nature that gives the wealth? Simpson argues in this book that
I've mentioned before ... that it's the poet in a sense who's the
banker. He pays himself! He goes into the landscape and says, I need something. I
need some wealth. And then he pays himself with this emotional joy that he
finds from the daffodils. So as markets go then this is a market
in which nobody else can buy because it's a purely subjective, selfish thing,
and he himself controls the entire ... workings of the economy. Kind of a
wonderful fantasy isn't it? So what does that mean then in the end?
Is this a selfish poem? Well, Simpson seems to argue that it is, and his basic
argument then is that by making this experience so private, so subjective, he's
actually being a capitalist in a sense. He [Wordsworth] is saying, I have worked
for this. This is the product of my labor. This is my personal subjective
experience, and I get this wealth from it again and again. Because as soon
as I have these memories it all comes flooding back and then my heart with
pleasure fills and dances with the daffodils, and I can just enjoy this
commodity over and over again. Simpson's point then is that it's so
difficult to escape the logic of capitalism. But I don't think you
necessarily have to go that far. You don't necessarily have to be quite so
depressed about it all, and see the poem as failing to register a real protest
against capitalism! There's lots of room for a debate and
for discussion, and I certainly hope that at least by raising some of these points
you can now start to see that the poem is not completely immune from or
separate from economics and society, but engages with it in terms that are quite
interesting actually.