Wordsworth’s Ghostly Language

Abstract

Abstract Wordsworth’s ‘crisis of reason’ of the mid-1790s is understood as a formative experience for the young poet, removing him from Godwin’s world of abstract reasoned morality, and ushering in the period of creativity that would give rise to the early versions of The Prelude and the Lyrical Ballads. This chapter reads that crisis historically, to show that Wordsworth’s turn away from Godwin coincided with his first exposure to Berkeley, by way of his meeting with the then ‘Berkleian’ Coleridge. The chapter pursues the idea of a ‘ghostly language’ at work in Wordsworth’s poetry of the 1790s that is derived from Berkeley’s conception of nature as a divine natural language—one that is not a simple metaphor for the world as a book, but one that renders nature as an actually legible and wholly spiritual entity.