Wordsworth's Poetics Research Articles

Bound by “the Principles of 1776”: Dilemmas in Anglo- American Romanticism and Douglass’s The Heroic Slave

THE PUBLICATION OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS'S 1853 HISTORICAL NOVELLA The Heroic Slave based on Madison Washington's 1841 slave uprising onboard the Creole, a U.S. slave ship bound for New Orleans, came just two years after his change of opinion on the pro-slavery character of the United States Constitution. This change in Douglass's interpretive approach to the document was marked by two literal and very public shifts in allegiance: the first was from William Lloyd Garrison's radical, yet nonviolent, abolitionism to Gerrit Smith's reformist abolitionism, which was more capacious in its thinking regarding the means by which slave liberation could be achieved; and, following from the first, Douglass's second shift in allegiance saw him go from a principled skeptic of the Revolutionary ideals that supposedly lay at the foundations of the American Union, to a forceful, though I believe strategic, defender of the Revolutionary principles the vast majority of nineteenth-century Americans believed to be enshrined in the Constitution. Whereas Douglass previously, and Garrison still, saw an irreparable flaw in those foundational principles given the Constitution's legalization and martial defense of slavery, Douglass now saw in the Constitution a document in reconcilable contradiction with its preamble, the aspect of the document in closest sympathy with the Declaration of Independence and the best illustration, he and Gerrit Smith believed, of the true intents, aims, and aspirations--the spirit--of the law. Douglass now believed that the Constitution might be made consistent in its details with the noble purposes avowed in its preamble. (1) Strikingly, Douglass's dilemma over how best to accomplish abolition/change in society places him solidly within a transatlantic Romantic tradition profoundly shaped by what I call the reform-revolution dialectic produced by the late eighteenth-century debate between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine over the significance of the French Revolution. This debate, I argue, had aesthetic and political consequences for expressions of national attachment and detachment that also may be observed in the way Douglass proffers an attachment to national ideals and foundational principles rooted in revolutionary violence as the justification both for Madison Washington's liberation struggle, and for viewing him, as his name invites, interchangeably with the founding fathers, whom the nation's white consensus recognized as heroes. The turn towards familiar national symbols and the decision to promote, rather than dispel, national romance is just as much an aesthetic choice as it is a political one. And William Wordsworth features just such a choice regarding his disillusionment with the French Revolution, and the normative critique of national life that served as its inspiration, in the increasingly counter-revolutionary 1805 and 1850 versions of his autobiographical poem The Prelude, the latter version published posthumously and the only one known to the nineteenth-century public. Once a Jacobin, Wordsworth had been England's poet laureate at the time of his death in 1850, and in many ways his poetry had come to be considered national poetry. (2) While I am indebted to and align myself with James Chandler's pace-setting work on Burke's influence on Wordsworth's poetics in Wordsworth's Second Nature: A Study of the Poetry and Politics, my distinct contribution to this area of inquiry builds on his work by reading Wordsworth through the lens of the debate Burke and Paine had over the significance of the French Revolution, which not only construed reform and revolution as dialectical narratives of change, but also as the central dilemma for the construction of one's worldview, a choice that promised to impact the very nature of one's everyday sympathies and attachments. More than merely a Burkean turn in thought, Wordsworth's change of opinion on what forms of attachment and/or detachment to praise and/or vilify provides insight into his self-conscious interpolation into the reformrevolution dialectic produced by the debate over the significance of the French Revolution, and, I argue, both advances a sense of and makes the persuasive case for a ethics, that is, a sense of propriety regarding sympathetic identification (to invoke a philosophical concept popularized by Adam Smith in his The Theory of Moral Sentiments [1759]) that includes forms of attachment comprising the subjectivity of persons best suited to both the institutionally preferred commitment to radical continuity over radical discontinuity and pre-existing forms over new ones built upon the creative destruction of the old. …

“Contagious Air[s]”: Wordsworth's Poetics and Politics of Immunity

This article explores how Wordsworth routinely borrows ideas and concepts from Romantic-period medicine in order to define both his politics and his poetic theory. In particular, Wordsworth advocates a kind of immunity designed to curb the diffusion of radical affects and to craft the proper biopolitical subject. Importantly, according to Wordsworth, political and affective excess can be prevented through the act of reading poetry. The success of Wordsworth's poetics depends upon an implicit inoculation of “powerful feelings” into the reader's body that prevents the kinds of “jacobinal infatuations” that he fears in later works. The poet promotes a form of biopolitical immunity in his prose and poetry that reflects Romantic-era medical practice, especially the controversial innovations of vaccination. Finally, this essay tracks how Wordsworth's use of the term “immunity” – always pluralized into “immunities” – shows how the term's meaning was slowing changing from a strictly legal or political attribution to a biopolitical one during the early nineteenth century. At stake in this shift in meaning is the way in which literature, and especially Romantic literature, aided the total absorption of the body into politics that is characteristic of modern biopolitics.

The Romantic Political Economy of Reading: Or, Why Wordsworth Thought Adam Smith was the Worst Critic Ever

Why did Wordsworth call Smith the worst critic ever? It wasn't because he thought economics and literature were radically distinct: both men saw these domains as interfused. Nor was it because Wordsworth opposed Smith's argument that mass education defused working-class unrest: Wordsworth himself advanced this argument in The Excursion . Nor was it because Smith's argument, drawing on Hume, implied the historicization of readerly experience: this historicization was central to Wordsworth's poetics. But Smith's debt to Hume meant that his theory also implied the feminisation of the mass readership. This formed the kernel of Wordsworth's opposition--which was as much to himself as to Smith.

Wordsworth's Folly

Previous articleNext article No AccessWordsworth's FollyMatthew BevisMatthew Bevis Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 43, Number 3Summer 2012 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/TWC24043984 Views: 9Total views on this site © 2012 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

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

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. …

On Being Moved: Sympathy, Mobility, and Narrative Form

This essay explores two approaches to affect in literary theory. The first of these approaches locates affect in discrete bodies and persons. The second views affect as a phenomenon anterior to the distinction of persons: a flow of energy among bodies as well as between bodies and the world. The essay argues that the first tends to function in recent theory as a stand-in for the other. Drawing a parallel with the operations of metaphor in William Wordsworth's poetics, the essay elaborates a late-eighteenth-century context for the emergence of what I argue is the similarly metaphorical relation between the two dominant conceptions of affect in theory: the development of systems of transport that seemed to threaten the autonomy of persons and feelings by putting into circulation feelings and persons from abroad; and the emergence of philosophical ideas about sympathy (Adam Smith) and aesthetic pleasure (Immanuel Kant) that reassuringly asserted, and gave priority, to the essential autonomy of the feeling self. Arguing for an understanding of metaphor as a formal enactment of displacement, for displacement as constitutive of anxiety, and thus for metaphor and displacement as the media through which late-eighteenth-century anxieties about the mobility of affect were displaced, I trace the philosophical genealogy through which this figural mode is inherited by recent theory, even in the absence of the unease that originally impelled the turn to metaphor. This essay demonstrates how narrative form may offer a conceptual alternative to figuration in affect theory, and how a model for rethinking affect may go beyond the bounded body.

Visions of the City of London: mechanical eye and poetic transcendence in Wordsworth's Prelude, Book 7

Scholarship on Wordsworth's Prelude has often remarked, paraphrasing the poet, that the sensational overkill of book 7 represents a critical moment in the autobiographical narrative. Instead of a failure of vision, however, I would speak of the verses depicting the city of London as an extraordinary mimetic rendition of urban fragmentation that pushes the boundaries of what constituted a spectacle worthy of artistic representation. In doing so, this section parallels the innovative styles of painting that were beginning to emerge in Great Britain as well as the contemporary attempts at studying, capturing and reproducing movement through fragmentation in scientific research on sight and in popular forms of pre‐cinematic entertainment. In this sense, Wordsworth's poetics of juxtaposed, fragmented “takes” seen by the “eye‐I” of the poet inaugurates a new aesthetics of urban modernism that may proleptically give the impression of reality made possible by the technology of film. Wordsworth's representation, therefore, finds inspiration not in the panorama or the diorama, but rather in a kinetic sensitivity that will find an echo in a specific genre of the early history of film, “a day in the life of a big city,” to which Paul Strand, Walther Ruttmann and Dziga Vertov contributed.

Cognition and Representation in Wordsworth's London

1. Introduction THIS PAPER IS PARTLY AN EXPLORATION OF SPATIAL PROCESSING IN LITERARY cognition and partly an analysis of Wordsworth's mimetic theory and practice in Book 7 of The Prelude, Residence in London. The yoking of these topics is less arbitrary than it may seem, though it was, I admit, fortuitous that I picked Wordsworth straight upon heels of Stephen Levinson's definitive new treatise on Space in Language and Cognition. (1) Having Levinson's study in background no doubt helped to foreground for me what is on any view a remarkable passage of spatial representation early in Book 7, in which Wordsworth bids London, Rise up and Before me flow! (149-50) and then proceeds to escort his readers (note shift to first person plural pronoun at line 169) through streets and districts of city thus conjured. (2) This seventy-line imitation of phenomenal experience of London is unusually thorough-going and consequently absorbing; obliging reader feels, for duration at least, in midst and on move, advancing through a streaming scene of buildings, people, and objects, with attention shifting here and there among clusters of visual and auditory images that give way one to next in steady succession--much as they appear to do when one is really walking in city. (3) The passage thus provides an exemplary instance of what cognitive linguists like Levinson call a body or driving tour, that is, a mental or linguistic representation of embodied movement through a spatial array, such as one pictures to oneself in wayfinding or speaks to another when giving directions. For obvious reasons, body tours and route descriptions tend to be scrupulously and single-mindedly realistic, and that Wordsworth's passage is no exception in this regard should suggest at once how exceptional it therefore is with respect not just to bulk of his verse but indeed to better part of English romantic verse in general. (4) By happy conjunction, then, I found myself possessed of a deviant text, a new descriptive apparatus, and two substantial and potentially related questions (and if that's not a recipe for a scholarly article, I don't know what is): first, how exactly does this or indeed any text work its mimetic magic in mind of reader? And second, what is function and status of this and other orders of mimesis in Book 7 specifically and Wordsworth's poetics generally? Though simply fortunate in event, I might have found my way to these important cognitive and mimetic matters more intentionally and systematically. As long ago as 1958 M. H. Abrams in The Mirror and Lamp traced development of a new psychology of art in romantic criticism and philosophy, especially English variety, which, though typically idealistic in its interpretation of psychological data, was nevertheless habitually empirical in their pursuit. As Abrams puts it, in language that suggests how deep foundations of contemporary cognitivism lie, A salient aspect of romantic era in general was sharpened 'Inner Sense,' as Coleridge called it, for goings-on of and a new power, by these poets and critics who are 'accustomed to watch flux and reflux of their inmost to venture at times into twilight realms of consciousness.' Coleridge himself had no equal as a microscopic analyst of interplay of sensation, thought, and feeling in immediate cross-section, or 'fact of mind.' ... In this aspect, English criticism, of course, participated in tendency of English empirical philosophy, which characteristically tried to establish nature and limits of knowledge by an analysis of elements and processes of mind. (5) Wordsworth, of course, is poet foremost in Coleridge's mind when he speaks of watching the flux and reflux of [our] inmost nature, and though Wordsworth writes in The Prelude that it is a Hard task, vain hope, to analyze mind, . …

“Empire of the Muse”: American Encounters with Wordsworth

This essay investigates a series of encounters – critical, textual, and personal – between Wordsworth and his American Romantic contemporaries that helped to solidify the poet's transatlantic reputation. In keeping with negative British reviews, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Cullen Bryant, and William Ellery Channing initially scorned Wordsworth's experimental poetics, but they became earnest advocates of both his poetry and his values as a result of their contemplative reading and their conversations with the poet himself. These writers function as case studies of the larger history of Wordsworth's reception in America: a history fraught by both nationalist suspicion and tremendous creative exchange.

Wordsworth's Poetics of Speech and Language Acquisition in "Lyrical Ballads"

the cold, lonely winter of 1799, Wordsworth complained Coleridge, acquired more french in two months, than I should acquire German in five years living as we have lived. Wordsworth continued. In short[,] sorry am I say it I do consider myself as knowing any thing of the German (EY 255). He believes that conversation with native-speakers would help: should be perfectly contented if we could find a house where there were several young people some of whom might perhaps be always at leisure converse with us. We do wish read much but should both be highly delighted be and chatter'd to, through the whole day (EY 254). But the inhabitants at Goslar are inhospitable, petty tradespeople; in general a low and selfish race; intent upon gain, according Dorothy. They cannot find in their hearts ask of a stranger a fair price for their goods, she continued (EY 245). Similarly, William dismissed the inhabitants of Goslar as grocers and linen-drapers,...a wr etched race; the flesh, blood, and bone of their minds being nothing but knavery and low falsehood (EY 249). And, as Dorothy explained Christopher, their lack of funds prevented their entry into the better society of the place. Their best conversant, according William, was dear kind creature whose deafness and poor teeth made their conversations a jolly lesson in talking at utter cross-purposes. With bad German, bad English, bad French, bad hearing, and bad utterance you will imagine we have had very pretty dialogues (EY 249). Learning a language, Wordsworth observes, is not merely the knowing that 'Liebe' is German for 'love', and 'darum' for 'therefore' c words are a mere dead letter in the mind (EY 249-50). Literary emolument is even dust in the balance. If I had had the opportunities of conversing I should have cared much if I had read a line, he wrote Coleridge (EY 254-55). 1791, however, within two months of his arrival at Dieppe, passing through Paris settle in Orleans, Wordsworth found himself chattering and being chatter'd to in French through both days and nights. Virtually no English speakers lived in Orleans in 1791, Kenneth Johnston notes, and Wordsworth entered into the lives and language of a diverse group of French speakers. Indeed, as early as December 19, less than a month after his arrival, Wordsworth told his brother, Richard, that he thought economize engaging a French master, for he could do nearly as well without one (EY 70). Looking back on his stay in France, Wordsworth describes the experience of stepping out of English ways and leaving English words behind as a growth and expansion into a new, vital world. His attention was engrossed by novelties in speech,/Domestic manners, customs, gestures, looks,/And all the attire of ordinary life. His rapt interest in the strange life around him kept him tranquil almost, and careless as a flower/Glassed in a green-house, or a parlour shrub/That spreads its leaves in unmolested peace,/While every bush and tree, the country through,/Is shaking the roots (Pr 1805 9:82-4, 87-91). The Royalist officers at Orleans kindly indulged his half-learned speech (Pr 1805 9:195). I--who had been else/Shunned and tolerated--freely lived/With these defenders of the crown, and talked,/And heard their notions, Wordsworth writes (Pr 1805 9:196-199). Wordsworth also met Michel Beaupuis, whom Johnston calls a military version of the 'man speaking men' of Wordsworth's ideal Poet (304). Words worth remembers tromping through the countryside with Beaupuis discussing government, chartered rights/Allegiance, faith, and laws time matured/Custom and habit, novelty and change (Pr 1805 9:331-333). …

Signs of the Dead: Epitaphs, Inscriptions, and the Discourse of the Self

The 1805 and 1850 texts of The Prelude book 10 differ in their recollections about how Wordsworth came to visit William Taylor's gravesite. In 1805, the poet attributed the discovery of Taylor's grave to chance as though he happened upon it. This version of the memory expresses uncertainty and, ironically, identifies chance as the agent of self-revelation that initiates Wordsworth's entry as mental traveller into the static world of the deceased; however, in Wordsworth's poetics, self-contemplation of the "emotion recollected in tranquillity" leaves very little possibility for chance to have any sort of causal relation to the poetic production of lyrical ballads, and especially epic poetry. If chance does not seem to be the causal factor in Wordsworth's stumbling on Taylor's grave, then why does the poet claim that he "chanced to find" the gravesite? 1 The line uncannily echoes the opening stanza of "Lucy Gray" (1799). The poet claims: "Oft I had heard of Lucy Gray: / And, when I crossed the wild, / I chanced to see at break of day / The solitary child" (my emphasis). 2 Does the poet really see a "solitary child" before or after her death? If so, then the vision of Lucy Gray can either be that of the living child or her wraith. 3 My purpose here is not an attempt to assign determinacy to indeterminate lines; but rather to note that, interestingly, what appears in Wordsworth's poetics is this sense of spontaneity implied in the term "chanced," when, instead, the poet's sighting of Lucy Gray is really a self-consciously constructed and contrived memory here. 4 Chance is no more a significant index of identifying Lucy Gray than it is in leading the poet to rediscover William Taylor's gravesite at Cartmell Priory.

Figures of Revision in Wordsworth's Critical Arguments

[Extract] This essay deals with three key arguments in Wordsworth's poetics: the theorisation of tautology; the definition of the poet; and the relationship between thoughts and feelings. The peculiar discursive manoeuvres of these three arguments may be called figurative revisions. Although the literal notion of revision has its own place, the more comprehensive conceptualisation of revision presented here cannot rely solely on it: understandably, the notion of revision, therefore, has reference not only to that literal activity of making retrospective changes in a text, but even more so to that turning around associated with it. It is in this turning around, this looking again, that revision—or re-vision—constitutes a form of textual self-consciousness that is examined here. No less is revision a form of reflexivity.

Narrative Diction in Wordsworth's Poetics of Speech

Narrative Diction in Wordsworth's Poetics of Speech