1In his 1802 Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, William Wordsworth portrays the ideal poet as having “a disposition to be affected more than other men by absent things as if they were present” (256). The ability to be absorbed in imagined experiences could be pursued so intensely that it could become a form of experience in itself. In the Essays upon Epitaphs, three prose essays mainly written in 1810, Wordsworth dwells on the imagined presence not so much of absent things, but of absent people. This new strain is catalysed by a combination of factors. It originates, first of all, in personal circumstances, as it develops in between the painful loss of his brother in 1807, and the devastating loss of two children in 1812. It also emerges from two decades of war with France which, as Linda Colley has shown, played a decisive part in the making of British identity. Wordsworth’s interest in epitaphs manifests a somewhat darker side of the process of nation-wide militarisation, as it highlights the threat of open war and geopolitical crisis (Colley 283‑319). Their memorial purpose nevertheless articulates a widespread culture of patriotism. At the same time, epitaphs indicate both the familiarity and the strangeness of a war which, as Mary Favret has discussed, was fought at a geographical remove. The phenomenon of “war at a distance” was channelled through everyday objects, such as epitaphs, which invite us to read Wordsworth’s Essays as wartime literature (Favret 4‑41). A final impetus behind Wordsworth’s turn to epitaphs can be traced to the hostility of critics, which impelled Wordsworth to revise his reputation as an egotistical writer (Fulford 3-21), but also exacerbated his belief that he would only achieve fame posthumously (Bennett 11-37 and 95-115). The epitaph thus crystallises a mixture of personal grief, political anxieties, and literary frustrations.

2For Wordsworth, an epitaph is more than just a landmark recording biographical details. An epitaph embodies realities that transcend personal concerns, social divisions, and national histories. It evokes ways of thinking and feeling held in common by all members of a community. This is made evident by their being grouped in cemeteries, that is to say, public spaces reserved for a both personal and collective commemoration of the dead. The epitaph is a private object and a social institution at once, showing a continuity between affective experiences and communal processes. The Wordsworth of the Essays asserts himself less as a poet than as a public thinker. His literary interests are incorporated in a broader discussion of the state of society. He repeatedly advances the notion that what informs the individual’s mind is inextricably linked to the life of his community, both of these worlds being mutually dependent. While Wordsworth meditates on the principles of human nature, he also ponders how society is fashioned, and even strengthened, by the collective values and sensibility that the epitaph materialises. The epitaph brings to bear a creative tension between ideality and materiality within a wider culture of “Necromanticism” (Westover 50). Conversely, the epitaph raises questions about the limits, and even the nature, of language that is used to give meaning to death (Chase; De Man; Mills-Courts). The Essays contest the perceived triviality of the epitaph by recovering its philosophical, spiritual, literary, and political significance.

3What is the paradox of the Essays also forms their cornerstone: the shared experience of death is the basis of a living language and a living community. This paper will aim to make sense of this paradox by examining the nexus between language, space, and death in the Essays. It will argue that these elements converge on what Wordsworth calls “common-places.” Wordsworth deploys the multiple senses of this word to reflect on how death is mediated by the overlapping experiences of language and space. Because it is a literary text that is given physical presence, the epitaph has a partly material, partly immaterial, nature. It grounds language in the material world, and more specifically in public spaces. The epitaph stands at the centre of the community from a both physical and ideological point of view, reminding the visitor that the dead are socially constructed.

4This dual perspective accordingly combines two approaches to Wordsworth’s Essays. A variety of critics have traditionally valued the Essays, and Wordsworth’s epitaphs more generally, for their contribution to Romantic aesthetics. For instance, Geoffrey Hartman has examined how Wordsworth’s “nature-inscriptions” blend the epitaph with loco-descriptive poetry. This generic mixture injects an epitaphic quality into nature poetry because “Nature is herself a larger graveyard inscribed deeply with evidences of past life” (Hartman 392). Paul de Man was similarly interested in the epitaph as a philosophical conception of language. In his view, language is doomed to misrepresent the world it purports to reproduce, thereby making the world inaccessible to the mind. The Essays thus demonstrate that “Death is a displaced name for a linguistic predicament” (De Man 81).

5While these readings have dominated debates on the Essays, they have tended to neglect the epitaph as an actual object, singling out Wordsworth’s “epitaphic mode” (Ferguson 155‑72) instead. This paper contends that such a preference for abstraction can prove somewhat restrictive, all the more so as Wordsworth never asks his reader to separate the material and imaginative properties of the epitaph. Taking inspiration from more recent studies of the Essays, such as that by Westover, it will therefore set out to explore the interaction between the two integral aspects of the epitaph. It will suggest that this more complex understanding of the epitaph emerges from the influence of major eighteenth-century literary traditions and political debates. It will seek to uncover Wordsworth’s debts to eighteenth-century writers and thinkers by exploring his critical engagement with their legacies. The paper will first outline the notion of a “commonplace” language. It will then consider Wordsworth’s discussion of the epitaph as a genre, with a particular emphasis on Wordsworth’s literary conversation with Thomas Gray and James Hervey. It will finally link the epitaph to a process of nation-building by placing the Essays in the context of eighteenth-century debates on national sympathy, in particular by reclaiming their unacknowledged Burkean politics.

The commonplace language of epitaphs

6Wordsworth’s defence of the epitaph is counter-intuitive: the epitaph is important precisely because it is “commonplace.” Its presence in everyday life at once reveals and conceals its centrality to human concerns:

• 1 All citations to the Essays include a reference to the relevant Essay, followed by the page number (...)

Now in fact, as may be deduced from the principles of this discourse, it is not only no fault but a primary requisite in an Epitaph that it shall contain thoughts and feelings which are in their substance common-place, and even trite. It is grounded upon the universal intellectual property of man;––sensations which all men have felt and feel in some degree daily and hourly;––truths whose very interest and importance have caused them to be unattended to, as things which could take care of themselves. (II, 78)1

7Wordsworth emphasises the expressive resources of the epitaph, which harnesses “thoughts and feelings” of the most ordinary kind. The style and contents of the epitaph are modelled on the notion that death is inevitable; the epitaph is commonplace because death is too. Its impersonality is a consequence of this universality, as the epitaph must go beyond the individual circumstances of the dead person it commemorates by expressing “the universal intellectual property of man.” The epitaph deals with the most elementary contents of human experience, encompassing “sensations” and “truths.” The language of human psychology that Wordsworth uses – both here and throughout the Essays – indicates the empiricist framework of his argument. “Thoughts and feelings” are presented as equally integral because “thoughts” are born of “sensations.” In other words, thinking has a pre-rational origin, and its mental operations are grounded in primarily affective experiences. Wordsworth is concerned with what precedes individuation, the formation of individual identities: the “sensations” that underlie the epitaph have been felt by “all men […] in some degree daily and hourly,” and the “truths” it contains are so familiar that men often stop being aware of them, as though they were universally accepted and “could take care of themselves.”

8The continuity between thoughts and feelings highlights one of the main challenges of the epitaph, namely creating a tension between impersonality and pathos. The universal insight it aims to convey demands a generalising language that is restricted to conventional tropes, though it must be charged with emotional energy at the same time. The emotional response the epitaph elicits is related not to the dead person alone, but also to the consciously shared mortality of human beings. The language of the epitaph thus maintains a balance between “our common nature” and the “individual character” of the deceased (I, 59). The genius of the epitaphic writer does not consist in asserting his creative originality; it rather resides in an ability to erase all traces of his artistic singularity and to remain strictly “general.” Wordsworth attributes a special authority to the writer who, provided that he is successful, shows that “he has […] penetrated the dark cavern from which the River that murmurs in every one’s ear has flowed from generation to generation” (II, 79). In this view, the epitaph initiates the living into invisible, spiritual realities thanks to the vatic powers of its author.

9This tension between the individual and the general accounts for the interest that the epitaph possesses beyond the small circle of the bereaved; “the perfect epitaph,” Wordsworth writes, treats “what was peculiar to the individual” as “subordinate to a sense of what he had in common with the species”:

Bring forward the one incidental expression, a kind of commiseration, unite with it a concern on the part of the dead for the well-being of the living made known by exhortation and admonition, and let this commiseration and concern brood over the whole so that what was peculiar to the individual shall still be subordinate to a sense of what he had in common with the species––our notion of the perfect Epitaph shall then be realized. (III, 89)

10Without erasing the “incidental” aspects of the dead person, the epitaph invests loss with a universal resonance. Wordsworth frequently worries that epitaphs may be perceived as overly trivial, or as giving a naively idealising picture of the deceased. But far from being merely narrative or descriptive, the tension between the individual and humanity suggests that the epitaph comes close to serving a heuristic purpose. The epitaph is an instrument for exploring “the intricacies of human nature” (I, 59), a vehicle for cognition that produces thoughts and conveys truths. Wordsworth emphatically declares that what an epitaph contains “is truth, and of the highest order” (I, 58). The truth-value of the epitaph is guaranteed by the contract to which its author implicitly subscribes, this contract involving two conflicting requirements. On the one hand, it is imperative that he “give proof that he himself has been moved” (I, 59). On the other, the very cost and labour that are needed to craft an epitaph – to convert a literary text into a material grave – mean that “the passions should be subdued, the emotions controlled” (I, 60). The slow process of engraving an epitaph dictates not only its brevity, but also a self-conscious approach to the task: the author must have thought seriously about how he wants the deceased to be remembered. This rules out a straightforward equation of sincerity to spontaneity (Perkins 22-24). This reflexiveness bears a striking affinity with Wordsworth’s conception of poetic creation, as it recalls his statement that poetry “takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity” (Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 266). Knowing the true character of the deceased, as well as writing about the deceased, is only made possible by retrospection.

11Another difficulty of the epitaph arises from the precarious equipoise between passionate utterance and restraint. Wordsworth resolves this predicament by advancing “a criterion of sincerity, by which a Writer may be judged” (II, 70). As David Perkins argues (1‑4), truth hinges on truthfulness for Wordsworth, meaning that the writer must be a “sincere mourner” (II, 66) to capture the truth. In that regard, his subjectivity is not an obstacle, but the foundation of the writing process. The confidence that Wordsworth reposes in the ideal of sincerity springs from his belief that it is the subject’s feelings that validate truth as truth. He asserts that “truth is the soul of passion” (III, 90), suggesting that the reader recognises a proposition as true because he experiences it as such.

12Wordsworth offers further justification of the truth-value of the epitaph on epistemological grounds. Despite its solemnity and “monotonous language” (II, 66), the epitaph can give enjoyment to the reader. The ability of the epitaph to produce “a gleam of pleasure” (II, 66) significantly contributes to its cognitive powers. As Wordsworth had stated in the 1802 Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, “We have no sympathy but what is propagated by pleasure, […] We have no knowledge […] but what has been built up by pleasure, and exists in us by pleasure alone” (258). The pathetic element of the epitaph is not reducible to shallow sentimentalism; it rather reveals that pleasure is generative of both knowledge and positive affect (Boyson 3). The epitaph can communicate “truth hallowed by love” (I, 58) precisely because of the continuity between emotional attachments and the production of ideas.

13The insistence on sincerity as a condition of truth underlines the centrality of language in Wordsworth’s thinking. It is through the language that is used that the reader can derive knowledge from the epitaph. If it fails to give an impression of sincerity, the epitaph has a “killing power” (II, 70) that prevents the reader from participating in the community of knowledge and feeling that the “commonplace” epitaph underpins, or should underpin. The adequacy of language to its subject is crucial. Writing an epitaph is “the art of bringing words rigorously to the test of thoughts; and these again to a comparison with things, their archetypes” (II, 77). The writer must ensure that the words he chooses accurately reflect his thoughts; in turn, the validity of his thoughts are measured by a comparison with “things,” the extralinguistic referent that words denote. The uneasy triad of words, thoughts, and things accounts for the problematic referentiality of the epitaph. The need to bring the three parameters into complete agreement places the writer on a tortuous path (Mills-Courts 173): the writer must find a satisfactory compromise between the things that he thinks and the words he uses to say what he thinks. The potential for getting this wrong is immense; it is all too easy to see how the writer could fail to match any of these elements to the others. The possibility that this cycle may never end risks reducing the writer to silence (Perkins 2; Devlin 74). In Wordsworth’s eyes, this challenge marks out the epitaph as a difficult and highly serious genre.

14Wordsworth’s interest in the language of the epitaph expands into an important pronouncement about the nature of language itself. Language would have the power to incarnate what it denotes:

Words are too awful an instrument for good and evil to be trifled with: they hold above all other external powers a dominion over thoughts. If words be not… an incarnation of the thought but only a clothing for it, then surely will they prove an ill gift; such a one as those poisoned vestments, read of in the stories of superstitious times, which had power to consume and to alienate from his right mind the victim who put them on. Language, if it do not uphold, and feed, and leave in quiet, like the power of gravitation or the air we breathe, is a counter-spirit, unremittingly and noiselessly at work to derange, to subvert, to lay waste, to vitiate, and to dissolve. (III, 84-85)

15Although language is the medium for “thoughts,” Wordsworth is anxious to reduce the mediating role of language as much as possible. He sets out strict rules to curb its “dominion”: words must enact “an incarnation of the thought”, as though the thought were expressed so faithfully that words could embody it rather than simply representing it. Wordsworth seems to assume that thoughts pre-exist language, hence the stricture that language should render thoughts in a completely unprocessed state. A model for such a use of language is the laws of physics which denote a strict correspondence between the sign and the referent, such as “the power of gravitation.” Otherwise, language acts like mere “clothing” that disguises or distorts one’s thoughts.

16Wordsworth insists that the supreme influence that language holds over the mind makes it a fundamentally dangerous instrument. Failing to match thoughts and words produces an inadequate understanding of reality, so much so that language then becomes a “counter-spirit” that has a “power to consume and to alienate from his right mind the victim.” The rhetorical accumulation of verbs – derange, subject, lay waste, vitiate, dissolve – expresses a profound distrust of language. Because language can corrupt the mind, one can be organically alive, but spiritually dead. The idea that words are “awful” – “Words are too awful an instrument for good and evil” – postulates that language itself is sublime. Its sublime powers, which Wordsworth increasingly considered as suspicious (Kelley), arouse a mixture of pleasure and danger. They register both fascination with, and fear of, the ability of language to overpower the mind. It is language that controls the mind, rather than the opposite.

17The incarnational conception of language implies that words are grounded in material realities. By the same token, physical objects are not reducible to their materiality, as they admit of an imaginative dimension. Wordsworth intimates that language influences thought, which in turn conditions behaviour. The implication is that society is structured by the thoughts that language both enables and constrains, which explains why “words are… an instrument for good and evil.” For Wordsworth, epitaphic language channels such a wholesome, unmediated connection to the world. It does so by restoring “universally received truths” to their original force: “what is most needful and most difficult in an Epitaph to do; namely, to give to universally received truths a pathos and a spirit which shall re-admit them into the soul like revelations of the moment” (III, 83). The pathos and the spirit that underlie the epitaph forces the reader to receive its truths “like revelations of the moment.” Epitaphic language remotivates truths that are fundamental but to whose significance the reader has become blind as a result of over-familiarity. This is why the linguistic resources of the epitaph only “re-admit” them into the soul. The epitaph brings about moments of re-cognition by defamiliarizing its commonplaces. The use of religious terms – like “spirit,” “soul,” “revelations” – suggests that the meaning that emerges from the reading experience is of a more-than-rational kind. The dynamic nature of reading epitaphs occupies a central position in the Essays, as it supposes that the reader can be deeply transformed by the interpretations he produces. It also highlights Wordsworth’s own commentary of epitaphs, which in turn draws attention to his bid to redefine the epitaph as a genre.

The commonplace as a genre

18Epitaphs are a common sight in Wordsworth’s landscapes. The two thousand lines that Wordsworth dedicates to the graveyard scenes of The Excursion (1814) in books V-VII, whose composition overlaps with that of the Essays, make the attraction of the epitaph abundantly clear. The Lyrical Ballads testify that he was already drawn to the themes of death, mourning, and commemoration, as illustrated by the long conversation over James Ewbank’s grave in “The Brothers,” or the ordeal of child loss in “The Thorn.” Of all poems, “A Poet’s Epitaph’s” best reflects the obsolescence of the epitaph, or at least its lack of credibility among contemporary readers. The length of the poem belies its title, as does the ironic treatment of its theme: the speaker of the poem wryly bars “lawyers,” “statesmen,” and a number of other professions from the group of accepted mourners. Wordsworth employs a satirical tone that is reminiscent of Burns’s epitaphs (Tholoniat §4-§18). In the end, only a small circle of the living is permitted to pause at the speaker’s imagined tomb. In the Essays, Wordsworth once more resolves to overturn “our own pre-established codes of decision” (Advertisement to Lyrical Ballads, 7) by countering hostile assumptions about the epitaph, including those which he had formerly held. While he does not include any epitaphs he wrote himself, Wordsworth makes a contribution to the genre by giving it an explicitly public orientation.

19The challenge that Wordsworth undertakes is threefold. First of all, he sets out to expose and correct the bad examples that eminent predecessors have set. He apportions especial blame to Samuel Johnson and Alexander Pope, whom he faults respectively for scorning the epitaphic genre, and for writing parodic, or at least derivative, epitaphs. By contrast, he argues that the epitaph dictates elevation in style and spirit. Wordsworth is all the more alarmed as he perceives that the country is swamped with epitaphs “thoroughly tainted by the artifices which have overrun our writings in metre since the days of Dryden and Pope” (III, 84). Another goal he pursues in the Essays is to revive the epitaph as a serious genre. Wordsworth endeavours to counter the reputation of the epitaph, then widely regarded as inferior; according to Scodel, “Wordsworth’s epitaphic poetry simultaneously combats and confirms the demise of the epitaph as a vital literary form [and genre]” (404). The final obstacle he confronts is posed by “the tyranny of bad taste” (III, 85), which he decries for corrupting both the sensibility of modern men and the purity of the epitaph.

20Wordsworth’s interest in the genre is not confined to British literature, as he expresses the most admiration for the verse epitaphs of the Italian poet Gabriello Chiabrera (1552-1638). The references to Greek antiquity (I, 50-53) or to “Turkish cemeteries” (I, 54) further glance beyond the limits of national tradition and lend an anthropological background to his enquiry. His authority is based not only on well-documented research into the epitaph, but also on the fact that many of the examples he provides were gleaned from the numerous graveyards he has visited himself.

21Most of all, Wordsworth’s theory of the epitaph is informed by the influence of graveyard literature, from which Wordsworth borrows key elements to forge a different kind of literary voice. He cites Thomas Gray approvingly, with the following extract from the “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1750) prominently heading the second Essay as an epigraph:

Yet ev'n these bones from insult to protect,
Some frail memorial still erected nigh,
With uncouth rhymes and shapeless sculpture deck'd,
Implores the passing tribute of a sigh.

Their name, their years, spelt by th' unletter'd Muse,
The place of fame and elegy supply:
And many a holy text around she strews,
That teach the rustic moralist to die.

22Gray’s “Elegy” supplied Wordsworth with an exploration of an introspective, confessional poetry. Although it is not an epitaph itself, the poem records Gray’s response to epitaphs and his attempts to make sense of them. Night-time and solitude compel his mind to turn inward, at the same time as his consciousness reaches out to the nameless dead buried around him. The poem elaborates a subjective reaction to the tombstone, with its poignancy complementing the impersonal pathos of the epitaph. Gray is noticeably sympathetic towards the dead villagers, and he models his plain, spontaneous diction on their artlessness – their “uncouth rhymes and shapeless sculpture.” “The passing tribute of a sigh” can be paid all the more freely as the choice of “th’unlettered Muse” releases self-expression from artificial constraints.

23Gray’s meditation reads like a forerunner of the linguistic simplicity that Wordsworth lays down as an essential feature of the epitaph, or what he terms “matter of fact in its intensity” (II, 76). Wordsworth praises “the homeliness of some of the inscriptions” that can be found in rural graveyards as a model to be followed. Their “grotesque spelling” and the “quaint jingle of the rhymes,” far from detracting from the solemnity of the epitaphs, proves “how deeply the piety of the rude Forefathers of the hamlet is seated in their natures” (II, 68-69). In keeping with statements made in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth continues to regard “low and rustic life” as a linguistic and social model (245-246). Though Wordsworth addresses the private, subjective response to the epitaph, he redirects its emotional energy onto the scale of the community. This reworking finds expression in a notable passage:

But an epitaph is not a proud writing shut up for the studious: it is exposed to all––to the wise and the most ignorant; […] the stooping old man cons the engraven record like a second horn-book;––the child is proud that he can read it;––and the stranger is introduced through its mediation to the company of a friend: it is concerning all, and for all:––in the church-yard it is open to the day; the sun looks down upon the stone, and the rains of heaven beat against it. (I, 59)

24Wordsworth insists on the accessibility of the epitaph, that is to say, both its intelligibility and its spatial openness. Its exposure is an essential characteristic; the epitaph is “exposed to all––to the wise and the most ignorant,” as well as to the weather. In other words, it is at once intellectually and physically available, a site where all can gather and which all can comprehend. Wordsworth can be said to “publicise” graveyard literature, that is to say, to bring out its public concerns by adopting an impersonal voice and emphasising the social purpose of the epitaph. The epitaph is thus turned into a symbol of private introspection as much as of collective recollection, these two attitudes mutually enhancing each other.

25The collective function of the epitaph sharpens the social critique implicit in Gray. The muted politics of the “Elegy” point to the social awareness that Gray hoped to raise in the poem. The rural poor are not remembered for wielding “celestial fire,” “the rod of empire,” or “the living lyre” (Gray 63, ll. 46-48) because they did not have access to “knowledge,” while “chill penury” destroyed their latent “noble rage” and “the genial current of the soul” (ll. 51-52). Gray postulates that their obscurity is not so much a cause as an effect of their poverty. In other words, the “mute inglorious Milton” (l.59) that the tombs may harbour was excluded from history because the social and material conditions of cultural production did not allow him to participate in it. The rural poor’s potential for greatness was thwarted by their humble social environment, causing their innate talents and qualities never to be fulfilled: the many “gems” of the community remained “unseen” and its beautiful “flowers” were “wasted on the desert air” (ll. 53-56). Cultural activities, Gray hints, are entirely in the hands of the social and economic elites.

26This political thrust is not limited to Gray alone, as it occurs repeatedly in other major precedents of the graveyard tradition, such as James Hervey’s Meditation Among the Tombs (1746). Hervey furnishes an important prose precedent of walking among tombs and engaging with the spiritual and obliquely political implications of his surroundings. Like Wordsworth, who concentrates on “operations of intellect” (II, 79), Hervey foregrounds the impact of the epitaph on the subjective mind. Both writers frame the process of reading tombstones as a didactic vehicle for improving one’s moral and spiritual faculties. The immediacy of Hervey’s personal response is presented as a condition for instruction:

Behold! How providentially I am brought to the School of Wisdom! The Grave is the most faithful Master, and these Instances of Mortality the most instructive Lessons. –– Come then, calm Attention, and compose my Thoughts! Come, thou celestial Spirit, and enlighten my Mind […] (21).

27Hervey’s emotional investment in graveyard-touring, as reflected by the exclamatory syntax, is the medium through which the “Spirit” of the place can dispense “wisdom” and “lessons” and thus “enlighten” his mind. Though reading tombstones is a private activity, it is implicitly prescribed because it serves the common good. Hervey offers what Parisot has described as “a literary form of experiential didacticism” that works through “subjective poetic edification” (13‑14). Wordsworth, too, emphasises the reader’s psychological investment: the epitaph appeals to “an experienced and well-regulated mind” (II, 66) and improves one’s “inward simplicity” through “habits of reflection” (II, 70). Though Wordsworth devotes less space to an inward-looking perspective than Hervey, both writers share the assumption that its private benefits effectively feed into the public sphere.

28The didacticism of both the Essays and the Meditation acquires an overtly political edge. Like Wordsworth, who ponders “the all-uniting and equalising receptacle of the dead” (I, 57), Hervey stresses that death affects all men equally and thus questions social hierarchies. Hervey angrily wonders why we should “raise such a mighty Stir about Superiority and Precedence, when the next Remove will reduce us all to a state of equal Manners” (12); elsewhere, he sneers that “Your nobility arrayed in a winding-sheet, your grandeur mouldering in an urn, are the most invincible proofs of the nothingness of created things” (Hervey 53). The subversive energy that surfaces intermittently in the Meditation underlines “the democracy of death” (Bernhardt-Kabisch 508) that the epitaph foregrounds in Wordsworth’s Essays. Hervey, and after him Wordsworth, deploys the topos of death as the great leveller – a topos in the strictest sense, namely a commonplace idea rooted in the physical location that inspired it. Wordsworth mirrors this tendency when he remarks that death is the point “wherein all men most resemble each other”, because death “equalises the lofty and the low” (I, 59). Both writers take a distinctly worldly view of death by associating it with a form of classlessness.

29Wordsworth’s originality once more stems from his heightening the politics of graveyard literature: insofar as death exceeds social hierarchies, the epitaph materialises a principle of commonality. The epitaph symbolises a universal and socially levelling condition that challenges both social and generic oppositions between “high and “low” (Scodel 5). In doing so, it represents the possibility of building a community on a shared history and shared values that are raised above private interests. By pointing out “the mediation” that it effects, Wordsworth insists on the social utility of the epitaph. The somewhat sentimental picture of an epitaph uniting “the stooping old man,” the “child,” and the “stranger” shows that the epitaph is both beneficial and foundational to community, as it creates a sense of a collective identity that accommodates both insiders and outsiders. The integrating effect of the epitaph is directly linked to the odd status that it assigns to the reader, this reader being also a spectator physically present at the site of the epitaph. The epitaph is meant to be visited before it is seen. The epitaph, as a “common-place,” is characterised by continuity between its textual and extra-textual dimensions: it actively shapes the social environment in which it is placed by enabling a lived experience of a social and epistemic mutuality. The act of reading the epitaph thus operates as a social ritual whereby the visitor absorbs, and even performs, a collective identity.

The role of epitaphs in nation-building

30In his poetic autobiography The Prelude (1805), Wordsworth famously tells of his “spots of time” (XI.257-278) to account for the discontinuous workings of memory and the psyche. These spots of time originate in a sense of mental empowerment: they give “deepest feeling that the mind / Is lord and master” (XI.270-271). As Peter Newbon observes, their restorative properties involve “radically defamiliarizing experiences [that] replenish the soul from the mundanity of existence” (Newbon 727). The subject mentally revisits his spots of time throughout his life to recover this sense of mastery and insight. Significantly, spots of time also involve close encounters with death. They occur, for instance, when Wordsworth happens on the gibbet where a criminal had once been hanged (The Prelude, XI.278-301), and they are associated with the loss of his father (XI.363-374). Spots of time act as sources of strength derived from recollection, making the present continuous with the past.

31Wordsworth’s theory of the epitaph is informed by his idea of “spots of time.” Their analogous functions makes them virtually interchangeable (Devlin 121). Epitaphs are born of the same pattern of loss and recovery and, as Karen Mills-Court notes, they exploit the dual nature of the spots of time: epitaphs spatialise time by marking the past and look to the future at the same time (Mills-Courts 198). Wordsworth revealingly wishes to preserve the spots of time for posterity: “I would enshrine the spirit of the past / For future restoration” (The Prelude, XI.341-342). Epitaphs simultaneously internalise and monumentalise these spots of time; they are designed to be permanent sites of remembrance while appealing to common psychological realities. But unlike the predominantly personal tenor of The Prelude, Wordsworth’s epitaphs construct a collective memory and sensibility.

32The epitaph mobilises a national sympathy by fostering identification with other members of the nation, even when they are strangers. Wordsworth taps Adam Smith’s idea that it is the imagination that does most of the work of sympathy. Like Adam Smith’s external spectator, the visitor of the epitaph experiences the sentiments that the epitaph expresses and is made to share the sufferings of the dead vicariously (Westover 68). Smith explicitly states in The Theory of Moral Sentiments that “we sympathise even with the dead”:

The tribute of our fellow-feeling seems doubly due to them now, when they are in danger of being forgot by every body; and, by the vain honours which we pay to their memory, we endeavour, for our own misery, artificially to keep alive our melancholy remembrance of their misfortune. That our sympathy can afford them no consolation seems to be an addition to their calamity […] And from thence arises one of the most important principles in human nature, the dread of death, the great poison to the happiness, but the great restraint upon the injustice of mankind, which, while it afflicts and mortifies the individual, guards and protects the society. (Part I, I.1, §13)

33“Our fellow-feeling” is strengthened by the “danger of being forgot by everybody” that threatens the dead. From the point of view of the dead, such a “tribute” is pointless, as it will not bring them back. “Our sympathy” only adds to “our own misery.” However, “the dread of death” it instils has important political effects: it secures “the great restraint upon the injustice of mankind,” as “our sympathy” with the dead “guards and protects the society.” By civilising men, the aesthetics of the epitaph mesh with a political project: they channel the spectator’s affective energies into adhering to social order. It moderates all the better as it is “commonplace” – intelligible and widespread.

35This explains why the neglecting of “the tombs of our forefathers” becomes a symptom of national decline: the lessening proximity between the living and the dead undermines the traditions that shape social identities:

[It is] as if our Countrymen, through successive generations, had lost the sense of solemnity and pensiveness […] and resorted to the Tombs of their Forefathers and Contemporaries only to be tickled and surprized. Would we not recoil from such gratifications, in such a place, if the general literature of the Country had not co-operated with other causes insidiously to weaken our sensibilities and deprave our judgements? (III, 84)

36Respect for one’s evolving history and the ability to let one’s judgement be guided by it – “solemnity and pensiveness” – support a national sensibility. Writers and thinkers have a crucial part in this process, since Wordsworth deplores the “weakening” of “our sensibilities” and the “depravity” of “our judgements.” The affective and intellectual strength of the nation has lapsed because “the general literature of the country has cooperated with other causes insidiously.” The assumption is that if writers and thinkers are to be blamed for this trend, they also wield the ability to reverse it. In his words, “the taste, intellectual Power, and morals of a Country are inseparably linked in mutual dependence” (III, 89).

37In that regard, Wordsworth follows the political thinking of Edmund Burke. Though he does not acknowledge his influence openly, Wordsworth had already adopted a Burkean outlook (Chandler 31‑32). This strain emerges in the belief that the inherited values and habits of the past ensure stability and connect the present to the past and the future at once. Wordsworth champions “the wholesome influence of that communion between living and dead which the conjunction in rural districts of the place of burial and place of worship tends so effectually to promote” (II, 66). In doing so, he relies on Burke’s vision of a transhistorical community where the past sustains the present and connects it to the future: “Society is […] a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born” (Burke 96). Wordsworth draws on Burke’s anti-revolutionary Reflections to counter what he perceives as the tendency to the social and cultural alienation that characterises modernity. Traditional churchyards, which used to be built in a natural setting, stimulated the passer-by to reflect on spiritual concerns; Wordsworth laments the fact that “We, in modern times, have lost much of these advantages,” imputing this tendency to a growing urbanisation (I, 54).

38By contrast, epitaphs contribute to what Burke calls a “second nature” (185): the “common-places” that they enshrine impart a historical wisdom that regulates individual behaviour and harmonises social relationships by linking all social orders to each other. The values that epitaphs protect are described as best surviving in rural England, which Wordsworth idealises as the repository of these nourishing customs and practices. For Wordsworth, “the encomiastic language of rural Tomb-stones” attests to the “virtue” of “Peasants and rural Artizans,” whom he praises for possessing “minds the most enlightened by reflection.” Their moral qualities originate as much in “flourishing fields [and] rosy complexions” as in the native fortitude that “humble life” nurtures (II, 64-65). Only in rural churchyards can one find examples of a “habitual and constitutional” faith (II, 69). The preference for established customs of thought and action once more parallels Burke’s apology for “prejudice,” which “renders a man’s virtue his habit” (87). Burkean automatic habits, just like Wordsworth’s commonplaces, civilise men into social beings by substituting collective wisdom for one’s “own private stock of reason” (Burke 87). Epitaphs contribute to nation-building by pressing their aesthetics into the service of social reproduction. They enact the Burkean project of establishing “the natural grounds of a passionate social consensus” (Frank 100). Epitaphs can thus serve a directly political goal by cultivating public affects:

As in these registers the name is mostly associated with others of the same family, this is a prolonged companionship, however shadowy; even a Tomb like this is a shrine to which the fancies of a scattered family may repair in pilgrimage; the thoughts of the individuals, without any communication with each other, must oftentimes meet there.––Such a frail memorial is not without its tendency to keep families together; it feeds also local attachment, which is the tap-root of Patriotism. (III, 93)

39Epitaphs organise “the thoughts of individuals” and “keep families together,” promising domestic and cultural kinship. Though Wordsworth focuses on “local attachment”, he introduces an analogy between local communities and the national community: “local attachment” acts as “the tap-root of Patriotism,” rather than confining men to a parochial mindset. Fiona Stafford observes that “Local work––or what Wordsworth might term ‘native poetry’––was as necessary as nature for anchoring the poet in the real world” (Stafford 18). What takes place on a local level is mirrored in events and processes on a national level. Wordsworth defends this bond on the grounds that “The affections are their own justification” (I, 57) – any relationship is primarily emotional, as opposed to coldly rational. This harks back to Burke’s notion that the “public affections” that tie each man to his local “subdivision” dispose him to consider himself as a part of a much wider entity: “To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country and to mankind.” (46-47) The vision of embedded communities is imbued with a certain idealism, in that civic involvement in one’s “little platoon” can be relevant on a national, and even supra-national, scale. Like Burke, Wordsworth gives priority to feeling in moral and political activity (Chandler 62). This substantiates the claim that epitaphs fuel nation-building by arousing a “general sympathy” that balances “a common or universal feeling of humanity” and “the individual, whose death is deplored and whose memory is to be preserved” (I, 57). It justifies, too, the intensity with which Wordsworth reflected on them.

40Ultimately, Wordsworth’s Essays upon Epitaphs unfold the ramifications of his poetry of the mind and the imagination. Only a few years after completing The Prelude of 1805, his interest in epitaphs reveals that the “ennobling interchange” (XII.376) between man and his environment could be translated into the relationship between the individual and his social world. The strikingly personal Prelude and the more detached Essays bring into focus an essential aspect of Wordsworth’s creativity. While the latter exhibit a desire for the kind of fixed, unrevisable language that the epitaph enables, the history of The Prelude indicates a countervailing energy, as Wordsworth repeatedly altered his autobiography throughout his life to make sense of his constantly changing self. What transpires from this reading of the Essays, however, is that both processes intersect. Having previously investigated the growth of his own mind, the Wordsworth of the Essays transfers the dynamism of the human mind from the poet and onto the reader and his community at large. Not unlike The Prelude, the epitaph is always open to revision, as it allows the reader to constantly revisit it, to return to it and re-interpret its contents. Wordsworth’s fascination with epitaphs suggests that, ten years after writing the first Preface to Lyrical Ballads, he was already revaluating his own role as a poet (Simonsen 37). Wordsworth had long been drawn to “placed” poetry that took shape in imagined inscriptions – inscriptions left, for instance, on rocks and trees. But this motif of his earlier poetry finds expression on a far more literal level in his Essays. The attraction to inscribed language is channelled into monuments, sculptures, and public spaces that displace the central position that nature formerly occupied. It also reveals that he wishes to bridge the gap between his celebrated poetry of lived experience and aspirations to become a public, if not national, poet. The materiality of the epitaphic sign thus seems to have offered the permanence he sought, while rooting his poetry in a public culture which, he hoped, could pervade and unify society.