Wordsworth and the Art of Philosophical Travel by Mark Offord

Abstract

Reviewed by: Wordsworth and the Art of Philosophical Travel by Mark Offord Adam Potkay (bio) Mark Offord. Wordsworth and the Art of Philosophical Travel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Pp. xi + 271. $99.99. Wordsworth and the Art of Philosophical Travel is, in my opinion, one of the best books on Wordsworth of the past ten years. Developed from a Cambridge University Ph.D. thesis supervised by Simon Jarvis, Offord’s monograph is a worthy successor to Jarvis’s dazzling Wordsworth’s Philosophical Song (Cambridge University Press, 2007) and may even surpass its model in its rigorously dialectical and interpretively subtle presentation of Wordsworth’s moral-political verse-thinking. With more tidiness than Jarvis, Offord places Wordsworth in dialogue with the political and to a lesser degree the moral philosophy that precedes him, Hobbes to Godwin, and also, looking forward, with twentieth-century social theory, chiefly Benjamin, Brecht, and Adorno. Offord derives his themes of anthropological encounter and Enlightenment travel-writing from the works of Alan Bewell, Jonathan Lamb, and David Simpson, but he doesn’t have a clear or over-arching argument to [End Page 336] make about travel, or ethnography, or for that matter Wordsworth. Rather, he traces the dialectic in Wordsworth’s 1793–1805 writings between philosophy, as generalizing and systematic, and experiential encounters that are particularizing and mimetic. Wordsworth offers both verbal pictures from the field and also engagements with moral philosophy, even if these latter are largely negative, as in the 1798–99 “Essay on Morals” (9–11). “Across the distance of social class, and an estranged nature itself, Wordsworth’s explorations of a Lakeland landscape of the working and vagrant poor was also a mode of foreign travel. But this project, centered on the ‘picture’ more than systematic exposition . . . was in a state of critical tension with moral philosophy” (1–2). Thus Offord’s title phrase “Philosophical Travel” is, like “lyrical ballads,” an oxymoron and dialectical provocation. Offord provides no road map to Wordsworth and the Art of Philosophical Travel, no summary of chapters at the outset. His Introduction and first chapter serve rather to establish, poetically, a constellation of key terms or motifs that will reappear, with variations, throughout his study: habitus, human right, terra incognita, homelessness, stranger, savage, litotes, sacrifice. I would call this Offord’s symphonic method. His chapters, unfolding through theme, variation, development, with gentle shocks of mild surprise, tend not to tell clear tales even in retrospect—“but should you think, / perhaps a tale you’ll make it.” Towards the end of the Introduction, Offord adumbrates a dialectic (embedded in his larger dialectic) that, as it turns out, will animate Chapters 1–3: “What is uncovered [in Wordsworth] is not a single and definitive state of nature, but a plurality of conflicting and changing states—prefigured in the contrast between the violently hostile and blank nature of Salisbury Plain [Chapter 1] and the Arcadian pastoral of Descriptive Sketches [Chapter 2].” Philosophical travel concerns states of nature, illustrating or negating what’s in the pages of the philosophers, and the 1793–94 draft poem Salisbury Plain is “the young Wordsworth’s most extensive attempt to image the state of nature” (20). The poem opens on a Hobbesian “savage” state of nature as universal violence and insecurity and traces this state’s transformation, in modernity, into political society built on sacrifice (of the poor, of soldiers) and self-sacrifice (of the poem’s protagonist, the traveler). In counterpoint to this dark vision there is the Arcadian state of nature of Descriptive Sketches and The Prelude, Book 6 description of Lake District shepherds: here Wordsworth affirms natural independence. The critical tension of Chapters 1 and 2 resolves, in Chapter 3, in “The Discharged Soldier”: “The independence affirmed in Descriptive Sketches, and the isolate misery of Salisbury Plain, have here been superimposed: the man seems both to need, and not to need, a human context” (76)—or, I would add, human contact. Such is my [End Page 337] attempt to lay out the main points of each of the first three chapters baldly, but in doing so almost all is lost: Offord’s talent is for flow and texture, particular observations and observations...