05cwordsworth'spoetry

7/30/2019 05CWordsworth'sPoetry

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1Dr. Richard Clarke LITS2002 Notes 05C

WORDSWORTHS POETRY

Lyrical Ballads (1798)

This is a collection (to which both Wordsworth and Coleridge contributed) of short poems, innovative in both

form and content, that are quite different from the kind of poetry (e.g. Popes) which had predominated to thatpoint. Wordsworth felt compelled to defend himself against certain criticisms that arose in the wake of theirpublication by offering a theory of the poetry he was trying to put into practice. (See his Preface to the 1800edition of the Lyrical Ballads.)

Tintern Abbey:

This is the most important of the poems in this collection. In what some describe as a miniaturised versionof The Prelude), Wordsworth claims for himself the power to see into the life of things (49): he boasts ofhaving felt / A presence that disturbs me with the joy / Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime / Of somethingfar more deeply interfused, / Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, / And the round ocean and the livingair, / And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: / A motion and a spirit, that impels all thinking things, allobjects of all thought, / And rolls through all things (93-102). Wordsworth acknowledges, fusing Locke with

Kant, that the mind and the world are in a relationship of reciprocity (he speaks of his love of all the mightyworld / Of eye and earboth what they half create, / And what perceive [105-7]), neither one transcendent,but concludes by stating the pleasure he feels in ultimately recognising in nature and the language of thesense / The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, / The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul / Of allmy moral being (108-111): God.

The Prelude, or, Growth of a Poets Mind (1798-1805; Rev. And Exp. Ed. 1850)

As the title implies, Wordsworth saw The Prelude as a necessary preamble to what he thought would be hisphilosophical magnum opus, The Recluse. The latter was never completed as a result of which the formerturned out to be his masterpiece. Written between 1798 and 1805, at which point it was published in smallerform, it was revised by Wordsworth for the rest of his life and only published in expanded form posthumously.

M. H. Abrams (in Natural Supernaturalism) describes The Prelude as the paradigmatic example ofRomanticepic. Something akin to a veryextended ode (the final version consists of fourteen books!), it is

written, by contrast to classic examples of the epic form, not in the third person but in the first person singular,indicating thereby its personal or subjective, rather than collective, focus. A kind of lyrical autobiography, thepoem is described by Abrams as belonging to the genre of crisis autobiography, a secularised version(inspired by Rousseaus Confessions) of seventeenth and eighteenth century religious autobiographiesgrounded in a narrative of confession and conversion, of retrospection and introspection, and originally basedon the literary model supplied by St. Augustines Confessions. In support of this, some critics such as HerbertLindenberger contend that the most crucial moments of Wordsworths past are those traumatic (rather thanjoyful) ones in which the poet experienced a separation from all that he felt most sacred. Some of the mostimportant of these include

C his stealing of a boat on Lake Ullswater in Book I, an experience which left him feelingalienated from nature;

C his residence at Cambridge University during which his Imagination slept (Book III);C his experiences in London and his encounters with the down trodden; andC his disillusionment in the wake of the French Revolution.

However, if The Prelude, not insignificantly borrowing the central tropes from Miltons Paradise Lost, recountsWordsworths falls from grace, his dark nights of the soul, as it were, it also traces, however, his ultimaterestoration, his recuperation of grace, or Paradise Regained). His falls, in other words, are represented asultimately fortunate, the one illuminating or paving the way for the other. They lead him to an ever subtlercomprehension of his poetic vocation, of the one life that flows between himself and external nature, of theenduring coherence of his self, and of the presence of the divine in all material things: he learns that alltransient physical objects are symbols of the eternal and spiritual in the climactic episode on Mount Snowdondescribed in Book 14.

In short, The Prelude constitutes something of a lyrical bildungsroman (novel of self-discovery and


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education) which is accordingly chronologically structured as follows (this is based upon the posthumouslypublished fourteen book version of The Prelude):

C Books 1, 2: childhood and school-time experiences--very much enamored with nature;C Book 3: residence at Cambridge university--growing alienation from nature and self-

absorption;

C Book 4: summer vacation;C Book 5: books read;C Book 6: his experiences at Cambridge University and on walking expeditions in the

Alps--epiphany on one climb where he sees into the life of things and bywhich a sense of balance between self and not-self, the mind and nature isrestored by the insight that everything physical manifests the presence ofthe spiritual;

C Book 7: residence in London--depressing first-hand encounters with the down-trodden, the disenfranchised and examples of mans inhumanity to man (allproducts of the industrial revolution);

C Book 8: restorative insight: how the love of nature leads to the love of man;C Book 10, 11: his experiences in France both before and after the Revolution and their

negative impact upon him--his disappointment with the bloody outcome ofthe French revolution;

C Book 12, 13: the climax of the poem: while climbing Mt. Snowdon, Wordsworth hasanother epiphany thanks to the Imagination: self and other exist inharmonious balance;

C Book 14: Conclusion.In short, The Prelude, like Romantic poetry in general, emanates out from the poet as centre, using the playof memory across time to narrate the process of growing out of childhood into maturity, a voyage of the self(Stromberg 42) by detailing those spots of time, as he calls them at one point, those especially formativemoments in his development.

By the end of The Prelude, Wordsworth arrives at compete self-consciousness or individuation inthe wake of three broad stages of psychic development:

C a Lockean youth where he reacts to the natural world in a purely sensual way and where hisself is subordinated to the external world; he has no sense of his own individuality, no senseof self;

C

Young adulthood when, cloistered at Cambridge, for example, he experiences alienationfrom the external world (the opposite extreme); and finally,

C a Kantian maturity, when he realises that his own mind is the counterpart of natures owncreative power, self and other being in harmonious balance and existing in a relation ofdialectical interdependency.

Throughout The Prelude, he uses several metaphors to connote the growth into self-knowledge: the self isoften figured as a river or stream that gathers force as it flows; as a circuitous path or journey wherein oneleaves home only to return, spiralling upward to a higher level of knowledge; as a wanderer or touristexploring the wide universe with the goal of ultimately returning home, and as something organic or plant-l ike(Fairseed-time had my soul [305], he writes in Book I).

Wordsworth never thought of The Prelude as his magnum opus. His conceived masterwork was tohave been the never completed The Recluse which he envisaged as a spousal verse, a prothalamioncelebrating the consummation of the marriage of mind and nature, self and other. Wordsworth hoped to offera vision of a revitalised, living world in contradistinction to the dead, mechanical universe depicted by

Newtonian physics. It was to be a nineteenth century epic to rival Miltons but it would have had a verysubjective, introspective and, thus, Romantic cast to it: its subject was to be the sensations and opinions ofa poet living in retirement incorporated in a poem of which the first and third parts . . . will consist chiefly ofmeditations in the Authors own person (qtd. in Abrams 98-9). The Prelude Or, Growth of a Poets Mind wasto have been just that, a prelude, a prefatory review of his own mind and, as such, an autobiographicalcurriculum v itae, as it were, documenting his training and thus suitabil ity for such a task. Indeed, he wrotethat all his poems were collectively to be considered as so many components of a Gothic cathedral in whichthe poet himself constitutes the principle of unity. The Prelude has to The Recluse, he suggested for ourconsideration, the same relation as the antechapel to the body of a gothic church (99) while the other poemsare the cells, oratories, and sepulchral recesses, ordinarily included in these edifices (99).


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To put all this another way, if Wordsworth was to offer in The Recluse a credible organic world viewto rival and even replace that of his Newtonian predecessors, he thought he had to retrace the steps, theformative influences both good and bad and epiphanic moments (what he calls in The Prelude the spots oftime) which had brought him to this point. The central question implicitly posed by The Prelude is whetherthe poets self is the product of his lived experiences and, thus, of his intercourse with everything that is not-

self or whether the self that Wordsworth liked to think of as his own at least to some degree transcends hisearthly experiences. Wordsworths answer falls somewhere in between these two extremes: as Wellek putsit, at times in The Prelude and elsewhere Wordsworths imagination is purely subjective, that is, in a positionto impose itself and its inherent categories upon the world around. It is creative, capable of transfiguring theworld and investing natural phenomena with an almost supernatural phosphorescence (Heffernan 166). Atother times, it appears formed by its intercourse with nature, it is the mirror of the fairest and interestingproperties of nature (267), as he puts it in his own preface to the Lyrical Ballads. In short, Wordsworth seemsto offer a Kantian solution: it is a question of a dialectical interplay between or synthesis of self and not-selfwith neither gaining the upper hand.

To what extent is Wordsworths self formed and to what degree is it a pre-given: this, then, is thephilosophical dilemma at the heart of The Prelude. The debate in which Wordsworth found himself immersedwas basically that between Rationalism and Empiricism, Descartes and Locke. What is the precise natureof the relationship between (the poets) mind and external nature? Does the mind exist a priori, as theRationalists claimed, does it precede existence (i.e. is it transcendental)? Or is the mind thepost hoceffectof day to day life, as Locke claimed, a passive receptor of sense impressions by which it is entirely formed(the mind qua mirror)? The Prelude is a refutation of Lockes insistence that the self is nothing more than thetransitory function of the intake of sense impressions and the product of the synthesising power of thememory to assemble past experiences. While he does not deny that the world to a large extent does impingeupon and is thus formative of the self, Wordsworth asserts that the self is not formed solely from without bythe bodys sensory experience but is something at least in part pre-given, emerging from within to imposeitself upon external reality. Adopting a position that is very much inspired by Immanuel Kant, Wordsworthclaims, in short, that the mind is to a very large degree a shaper of that reality which it perceives.

Abrams argues in Two Roads to Wordsworth that at the core of all Romantic poetry is a tensionbetween the twin polarities of consciousness and otherness, that is, a dialectic between consciousness of selfand consciousness of not-self, mind and nature. According to Hegel, human beings historically developeda sense of their distinctive humanness by coming to a realisation of their distinction from the animal kingdomand, by extension, from the natural world. Such a process of differentiation from everything outside of the

self is one ultimately designed, therefore, to facilitate self-realisation. However, to find ones self (i.e. todevelop self-consciousness) depends paradoxically upon consciousness of everything not-self. Hence, thepreoccupation with nature that is the hallmark of Romantic poetry. Romantic poetry is informed, accordingly,by an insatiable yearning on the part of the poet to achieve autonomy or absolute independence from all thatis not himself, namely, nature or the world of sensible objects, in other words, to realise himself through thecontemplation of nature. Harold Bloom puts it this way with regard to Wordsworth:

the inner problem of The Prelude, and of all the poetry of Wordsworths great decade, is thatof the autonomy of the poets creative imagination, hence of a hidden conflict betweenPoetry and Nature. (qtd in Abrams Two Roads, 156)

His greatest insight, according to Bloom, is the possibility of a union, by means of imagination, between mindand nature, in a reciprocity that redeems the world of ordinary experience (156). The theme of all his bestpoetry is, thus, the reciprocity between the external world and his own mind in which the two agents areequal in initiative and power (157).

In other words, for Wordsworth in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads, poetry is the spontaneous overf low

of powerful feelings (271). These passions and feelings are the general passions and thoughts and feelingsof men (268). The cause of these passions is external to humankind. Wordsworth lists some of these asthe

operations of the elements, and the appearances of the visible universe; . . .storm andsunshine, . . . the revolutions of the seasons, . . . cold and heat, . . . loss of friends andkindred, . . .injuries and resentments, gratitude and hope, . . . fear and sorrow. (269)

However, the mind is not merely a sponge. It is a creative force acting in turn upon the universe.Wordsworth puts it this way: the Poet

considers man and the objects that surround him as acting and re-acting upon each other,so as to produce an infinite complexity of pain and pleasure. . . . He considers man and


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nature as essentially adapted to each other. (266-7)Wordsworth puts all this another way in Bk. 13 of The Prelude when he speaks of an ennobling interchange/ Of action from within and without (375-6). Elsewhere he speaks of What we half create and . . . perceive(Tintern Abbey).

Morse Peckham puts it this way: for Wordsworth, the mind is exquisitely adapted to the outer world

(215) while, inversely, the outer world isequally adapted to the mind. Of the union of the two he speaks as of a wedding orconsummation, the offspring of which is creation. . . . We see intuitively . . . into thestructure of order of which the world is a symbol. Really it is not too distant a position fromKants notion that the structural power of the mind is a guarantee that the world has structure.. . . In the moments of revelation, then, the spots of time, the world is seen as a symbol ofthe self which underlies the conscious rational powers. But the world and the self have thesame origin--the divine. The imagination closes the gap between man and the world, andthe divine current . . . runs unhindered through the great triad of God, man, and nature. . .. [N]o author has succeeded so well in communicating the feelings of the arousedimagination when it sees into the life of things. . . . [H]e feels the life in rocks and stones.. . . It is the imagination that redeems the world; in the deepest recesses of the self is thesource of value. (215-6)

The technical term given to those moments of insight into the dialectical relationship of self to reality/natureis epiphany. This means the sudden sense of revelation that one may feel while perceiving a commonplaceobject, the sudden flare into significance of an ordinary object or scene. The term was originally used by earlyChristians to signify moments when they recognised particular manifestations of Gods presence within thecreated world. Shelley in his Defence of Poetry speaks of the best and happiest moments . . . arisingunforeseen and departing unbidden, visitations of the divinity which poetry redeems from decay.Wordsworth called such epiphanic moments spots of time. Indeed, The Prelude is constructed as asequence of such visionary encounters, all of which were crucially important in the formation of Wordsworthssubjectivity and which, through memory or the process of recall, are essential ingredients in his emergenceinto self-consciousness.

The sight of Mont Blanc in Book 6 is such an epiphanic moment for Wordsworth. He compares themountain to a book (473) in which we could not choose but read . . . The universal reason of mankind(474-6). Imagination! Wordsworth exclaims: here that power, / In all the might of its endowments, came/ Athwart me (525-9). In such visitings / Of awful promise, he continues, the light of sense / Goes out in

flashes that have shown to us / The invisible world (533-6). Wordsworths realisation? That all the naturalphenomena around him, the pleasant and the unpleasant, Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light, /Were all like workings of one mind, the features / Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree, / Charactersof the great Apocalypse, / The types and symbols of eternity (567-571).

In a similar epiphanic moment (the significance of which is more fully comprehended in the tranquilli tyof the following night), Wordsworth comes to realise that spectacle which he witnessed on Mount Snowdon(in Book 13) was the perfect image of a mighty mind, / Of one that feeds upon infinity (69-70), the express/ Resemblance, in the fullness of its strength / Made visible, a genuine counterpart / And brother, of theglorious faculty / Which higher minds bears with them as their own (86-90). In short, for Wordsworth, thestudy of Nature, a phenomenon seemingly external to man, is in effect the study of the Universal Mind (God,Spirit, Reason) which manifests itself in the analogies offered by natural phenomena and in which the humanmind sees a reflection of its own workings.

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