The Commodification of Time in Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey"

Abstract

Marorie Levinson's influential historical materialist approach to William Wordsworth's Lines: Composed a Few Miles above Abbey addresses the sociohistorical dimensions of the poem, often to the exclusion of formal and aesthetic considerations. More recently, Thomas Pfau's pragmatic materialist approach addresses the social dimensions of Wordsworthian poetry, while dwelling also on its formal and aesthetic dimensions. ' Both materialist approaches address the poem in the context of the issue of time; neither approach, however, considers the issue of time from the perspective of materialism. Contrary to what this might seem to indicate, compelling reasons exist for why the issue of time has relevance to the socioeconomic context in which the poem was written-given that the poem itself was first published in the same year as William Pitt's controversial tax on clocks and watches (1798-99), a tax imposed on a nascent industrial capitalist society increasingly reliant on the commodification of time as labor. Thus, my approach acknowledges the relevance of time as an issue both which addresses current materialist concerns, and which addresses the contemporary production of the poem. In this respect, I look beyond Levinson (who overlooks the materialist aspects of time to keep her sights on history) and Pfau (who somewhat uncharacteristically addresses the issue of time in exclusive relation to the poem's formal and aesthetic dimensions), to address both aesthetic and social concerns in the context of thinking about the time of Tintern Abbey.2