The Poetics of Susceptibility: Wordsworth and Ecological Thought

Abstract

The Poetics of Susceptibility: Wordsworth and Ecological Thought Amelia Klein (bio) Although wordsworth was heralded early on as a poet of nature, there is a long tradition of looking askance at his engagement with the natural world, indeed of questioning whether his poetry actually says anything about nature at all. Reviewing The Excursion in 1814, William Hazlitt implies that, whatever its purported subject may be, Wordsworth’s poetry is always in truth about Wordsworth himself. “There is, in fact, in Mr. Wordsworth’s mind,” writes Hazlitt, a repugnance to admit any thing that tells for itself, without the interpretation of the poet,—a fastidious antipathy to immediate effect,—a systematic unwillingness to share the palm with his subject.1 Despite Wordsworth’s own affirmation, in his 1802 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, that “I have tried always to look steadily at my subject,”2 he is, according to Hazlitt, constantly getting in his subject’s way, constantly displacing “immediate effect” into “interpretation”—as if it were always quite clear where one ends and the other begins. He gives us not the thing itself, but only his ideas about it. This image of a narcissistic Wordsworth, unwilling “to share the palm with his subject” and interested in nothing so much as his own mind, has proven extraordinarily tenacious. An entire critical heritage has taken Hazlitt’s position, a position reinforced by Keats when he spoke in a letter of “the Wordsworthian or egotistical sublime,”3 a characterization that would come to be, as Paul Fry observes, “the singlemost tyrannical [End Page 105] notion governing preconceptions about Wordsworth to this day.”4 The result has been a persistent and exaggerated emphasis on self, and mind, and consciousness in Wordsworth’s poetry, while his real sensitivity to nature has been obscured. Throughout this critical history, the charge of egotism or subjectivism has been closely allied with the idea that Wordsworth is preeminently a poet guilty of what John Ruskin termed the pathetic fallacy. Not only does he impose his interpretation on things that would otherwise tell for themselves, as Hazlitt gripes; he habitually misperceives things to begin with by projecting his own thoughts and feelings onto them. Ruskin defined the pathetic fallacy as that “state of mind” which produces “a falseness in all our impressions of external things.”5 The pathetic fallacy projects inner, subjective experience where it doesn’t belong, onto what Ruskin calls “pure physical nature”—which he describes as “mere cold corporealness” and as “dead enough in itself.”6 The implication is that we know with certainty what nature is (purely physical, inert) and isn’t (animated, expressive). Wherever we find a description of nature as charged with emotion, as somehow moving or even speaking to the perceiver, what is being described is not really nature at all, but only the person looking at it—not “immediate effect,” in Hazlitt’s terms, not a “thing that tells for itself,” but “interpretation.” According to Ruskin, poets who fall prey to the pathetic fallacy—chief among them Wordsworth—are “in some sort too weak to deal fully with what is before them or upon them.”7 They can’t see straight, can’t see what is really there, and therefore can’t describe it accurately. Drawing a parallel between a poetics that saturates the natural world with private feelings and an idealist philosophy that holds “it does not much matter what things are in themselves, but only what they are to us,”8 Ruskin like Hazlitt casts Wordsworth as a poet who makes the outer world a reflex of personal affect, an emblem of the self, rather than offering materially accurate images of things themselves. Critics of quite different stripes have agreed that Wordsworth’s descriptions of nature are not to be trusted. They disagree as to whether, or to what degree, his disingenuous engagement with nature—and his body of work as a whole—is to be censured or applauded. Among the positive readings are Geoffrey Hartman’s classic analysis of Wordsworth as a poet of [End Page 106] transcendent, “essentially apocalyptic” imagination,9 who repeatedly turns and returns to nature to shield himself from his own visionary power and...