Wordsworth’s Self-Composure

Abstract

Abstract This essay examines William Wordsworth’s attraction to fractious and perplexing selfhood. Attending to the often overlooked riches of the Cornell edition of Wordsworth’s poetry, I argue that the poet’s sense of the self is more than a straightforward aspiration towards organic creation. Recent scholarship has cast Wordsworth’s processes of revision as an effort to create continuity between his past and present selves. Memory, in this respect, becomes an instrument to invest back into original moments of creation. It is my contention that Wordsworth is instead fascinated by a self that cannot be drawn together neatly. I also consider the psychological contexts of Wordsworth’s writing. Contemporary theorizations of memory were sometimes too quick in reforming the fragmentary aspects of memory into a positive state of unity. Wordsworth’s poetic and compositional practices, then, challenge the stricter divisions in the eighteenth century between undesirable and splintered forms of selfhood and the more unified kinds of self, which usually rely on fulfilling a telos. Teleological views of selfhood, in Wordsworth’s eyes, are insufficient to account for the contingencies and happenstance that are natural and attractive aspects of experience. As this essay suggests, his practice of revision often thrives on the unpredictable elements of composition and drawn on by an attraction to the unknown.