Nostalgia's Freight in Wordsworth's Intimations Ode

Abstract

essentially nostalgic text. This view of the poem has contended that the poet's philosophic mind synthesizes objective and subjective orders to produce either Cleanth Brooks's paradox of the or Jerome McCann's Romantic ideology.' The problem with this theoretical binary of imagination construed as revelation or false consciousness is that it tends to exclude the possibility that a poem might enact the critical distance poets require to break the usual (or, in the language of Romanticism, customary) correspondences between inner and outer worlds that comprise the structures by which we live. Without sufficiently acknowledging the resources available to poetic and cultural agency even within apparently constraining structure, readers are quite literally bound to confuse Wordsworth's nostalgic material with poetic practice. In brief, the perception that the Ode promotes a politics of nostalgia may indicate a premise about agency shared by otherwise contrary critical methods. Against the tradition of readings that assume nostalgia, then judge it as cure or regressive ideal, I argue that it serves as a strategic medium that undermines nostalgia's putative status as the revered (or reviled) basis for the Ode's argument about recollection and identity.2 As Kenneth Johnston has argued, Wordsworth aims to use mental custom against itself, a goal he images in the Fenwick note as an Archimedean fulcrum point whereon to rest machine; once gained, that point empowers the poet to lever off the weight of his own mind.3 I suggest that killing weight leveraged breeds joy because the poet has gained agency from the customary formalism that is nostalgia's inertial freight. The theoretical dimension of my argument is adapted from the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Anthony Giddens, which conceptualizes practice such that it enables agency even within structural constraints that seem to demand strict reproduction or imitation.