Wordsworth’s “Ode” and Bellow’s Seize the Day

NotesSee, for example, Bellow’s quotations from stanza V of the “Ode” in Henderson the Rain King (339) and Humboldt’s Gift (443). John J. Clayton convincingly argues that the “Ode” “must have been very much in Bellow’s mind as he wrote Humboldt’s Gift” (279), while Jeff Campbell and Daniel Majdiak show the important influence of Wordsworth’s poem on Henderson. In both novels. Bellow reveals how his protagonists can achieve a “soul” according to the conception of spiritual growth delineated in the “Ode.”It is interesting to note that in the earliest draft of the complete novel, a holograph entitled “One of Those Days,” the final two sentences of the published novel are absent: instead this manuscript draft concludes with: “The lights & flowers fused in his blind wet eyes and the music shuddered at his ears.” The manuscripts of Seize the Day are in the Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas at Austin. I am grateful to Mr. Bellow for granting me permission to examine them.For a detailed discussion of the influences on Bellow’s view of suffering, see Allan Chavkin.I am grateful for a Southwest Texas State University Organized Research Grant which allowed me to complete this article

Art · Art history · Literature · Ode · Poetry · Soul · Stanza · Theology · American Jewish Fiction Analysis · Borges, Kipling, and Jewish Identity · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Philosophy

• Saul Bellow

  Irving Malin, John J Clayton•American Literature•1969

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