Goodison’s Wordsworth

This essay discusses contemporary Jamaican poet Lorna Goodison’s poetic conversation with British Romantic poet William Wordsworth. Wordsworth’s lyric “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” also known as “The Daffodils,” has been widely taught in colonial schools but speaks about a flower that most colonials have not seen. While Wordsworth would thus be considered an imperial delegate to be resisted in the Caribbean and other ex-colonies, Goodison proceeds from her postcolonial standpoint to evaluate his poetics more broadly. The result is a generically oriented reflection on poetry that seeks to transcend the lyrical mode exemplified by “The Daffodils” and values poetry’s relational, intersubjective, and communal affordances as demonstrated by Wordsworth’s encounter-based, community-focused poems. Goodison powerfully enacts this reflection in two poems: “A Quartet of Daffodils,” which fashions an intersubjective “I,” and “To Mr Wordsworth, Distributor of Stamps for Westmoreland,” which ponders poetry’s prospects as a communal genre. Goodison’s engagement with Wordsworth, I ultimately argue, allows us to practice reading postcolonial poetry for poetry’s versatility as a worldly and communicative genre; it suggests how postcolonial critique may give impetus to a poetry critique that demystifies the sublimity of the lyrical self and revivifies poetry’s connection-building pulses and its multifarious relationalities with life.