Wordsworth, Commodification and Social Concern: The Poetics of Modernity by David Simpson

Abstract

David Simpson. Wordsworth, Commodification and Social Concern: Poetics of Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pp. 292. $99. David Simpson's gorgeously written, audacious study gives us a haunted Wordsworth, an occupant and observer of a modern capitalist world's ghost-ridden dark and twilight zones (3). By characterizing him these terms, Simpson is part calling attention how obsessively William Wordsworth's verse treats figures--like the discharged soldier of Prelude, Book 4, the old Cumberland beggar, or Margaret The Ruined Cottage--who are spooky their de-animated, death-in-life demeanor and their tragic disconnection from human sociality. He is also underlining how Wordsworth's self-representations partake of the same spectrality, so that the poet somehow wanders lonely even when, as Dorothy Wordsworth's journals indicate, he ought by rights describe himself as enjoying company. To approach this Romantic ghost world Simpson takes a path distinct from that followed by the many Romanticists who, while aligning Wordsworth and Freud, have foregrounded the elegiac strain verse that seems forever be rehearsing loss (of Lucy, of a younger self, of his brother John) and that brings the dead back only lose them once more. spectrality this book treats is likewise misapprehended if construed as a link connecting Wordsworth the Romantic period's Gothic tales and ballads and so as yet another indication that a poet his day perforce lived (as Thomas Love Peacock complained) in the days that are and was obliged make exploded superstition and premodern custom his stock-in-trade. On the contrary, the ghost-seeing recorded by Wordsworth's verse and demanded of his readers is not the product of a backward look, but rather, Simpson insists, a marker of this poet's ongoing relevance. Wordsworth's specters express the conditions of their time, which is ... still our time and as far as we can see the time still come (11). poetry which they feature is the vehicle of an unresolved history we still inhabit (13), one reason Simpson has found himself returning it, making this his third book on Wordsworth (Wordsworth and the Figurings of the Real appeared 1982, and Wordsworth's Historical Imagination 1987). In its dramatization of indigence, dislocation, and disconnection, guilt and sorrow, Wordsworth's poetics of modernity represents, Simpson avers, a signal resource with which theorize the conditions of human existence a modern lifeworld shaped by the achieved dominance of the commodity form. In Specters of Marx--a key resource for this argument--Derrida pondered the claim about the specter haunting Europe that had opened Marx and Engels's Communist Manifesto and noted that there are several times of the specter. By returning, the revenant might testify either to a living past or a living future. capitalist societies who post-1989 triumphally declared communism history--obsolescent, a dead end--should have remembered, Derrida suggests, that precisely never dying the ghost remains both to come-back and to come (trans. Peggy Kamuf [Routledge, 1994], 99). Through brilliant readings of an immense range of Wordsworth's poems, Simpson seeks a similar fashion rebuke accounts of Wordsworth as history, a figure so distant time from us as be over and done with. (Generally this is his students' response, he notes an Introduction whose attention the travails of pedagogy will, for many academic readers, occasion gleams of recognition and remembered sensations of sad perplexity.) For Simpson, the ghostly figures Wordsworth's works, rather than blasts from the past, haunt the present from the present itself (145). Thus Simpson's Wordsworth finally places little credit the Burkean traditionalism and attendant notions of an organic social solidarity that he sometimes espoused. He is notable, rather, for his insight into the abstraction, hollowness, and deadness that commodification introduces into human relations. …