Wordsworth in his major lyrics: the art and psychology of self-representation

Abstract

This text explores identity, role and subjectivity of speaker in Wordsworth's finest and best-known longer lyrics - Tintern Abbey, Resolution and Independence, Ode: Intimations of Immortality, and Elegaic Stanzas. Because Wordsworth is most autobiographical poet of romantic period, and perhaps in English language, readers naturally take speaker to be poet himself or, as Wordsworth says in his prefaces and essays, the poet in his own person. Some readers allow for a fictional dimension in characterization of speaker and refer to him as a persona; others treat him as a biographical self, defined in literary, political, historical or cultural terms. Leon Waldoff examines critical issues posed by these different understandings of speaker's identity and argues for a conception of Wordsworth's lyrical I that deals with dramatic and psychological complexities of speaker's act of self-representation. Taking concepts from Freud and Winnicott, this book presents a psychoanalytic model for defining speaker and conceptualizing his subjectivity. Waldoff suggests that lyrical I in each poem is a transitional self of poet. The poem offers, in suspended moment and cultural space of lyrical form, a self-dramatization in which speaker attempts to act out, in sense of both performing and attempting to achieve, a reconstitution and transformation of self. In a series of close readings that provide formalistic and psychological analysis, book shows that major lyrics contain compelling evidence that Wordsworth devoted much of his poetic art to each speaker's act of self-dramatization. The various strategies that each speaker employs and self-dramaticizing character of his utterance are theorized and assimilated into an understanding of subjectivity he represents. Waldoff concludes that Wordsworth's lyrical I requires a conception of subjectivity that gives greater recognition to its individual, psychological dimensions and to art of self-representation in each poem than recent Wordsworth criticism has provided. This book should be appreciated by anyone interested in Wordsworth or in Romantic poetry.