A Brotherhood is Broken: Wordsworth, Benjamin, and the Fragmentation of Language

Abstract

This essay discusses the importance of the notion of fragmentation in relation to the early writings of Walter Benjamin on language, and a number of William Wordsworth's poetical works. The essay uses the image of the tower of Babel—a powerful signifier for the fundamental fragmentation of language—as a conceptual springboard for illustrating how Wordsworth and Benjamin identify and negotiate a fundamental rift within language that dooms linguistic utterance to fragmentariness. By uncovering striking parallels between an aporia of mourning in Walter Benjamin's essay “On Language as Such” and Romantic figurations of silence in Wordsworth's The Ruined Cottage, I show how the two different texts stand in a meaningful and productive relationship. The article illustrates how Wordsworth's reaction to the fundamental fracture between human and nature in The Ruined Cottage is also an attempt to negotiate the break between a human and an ideal (pre‐Babelian) language. A concluding discussion of Wordsworth's Essays on Epitaphs shows how this central predicament of his oeuvre also invades the language of his theoretical writings as well as his arguments about poetry at large.