Wordsworth's Preface Research Articles

Philip Roth and Pleasure

Philip Roth and Pleasure Patrick Hayes (bio) William Wordsworth's Preface to the Lyrical Ballads is in no sense an aesthete's charter, nor do we tend to think of Wordsworth himself as a hedonist. But this writer, who did perhaps more than anyone to establish modern literature as an object of serious attention and human importance, nonetheless insisted that its primary function is to give "immediate pleasure," and that pleasure itself is no less than the "grand elementary principle" of our lives. Any form of writing that forgets this fact, Wordsworth insisted, will quickly become irrelevant.1 The question of irrelevance was on everyone's mind in a seminar I attended in Boston a few years ago, the aim of which was to reflect upon the crisis in literary studies in America. Falling enrollments, cuts in funding, and a sense of becoming ever more peripheral: these were our concerns. It was led by two scholars who had both published well-received academic books on postwar literature: one was about the institutional and economic environment of contemporary writing; the other dealt with the relationship between literature and human rights discourse. Neither of these thoughtful and intelligent books was animated by the idea that pleasure is the "grand elementary principle" that should inform our attention to literature at its deepest level. And as the seminar developed, there was an absence of the word "pleasure," or any of its cognates. Instead, the discussion was very much in keeping with the broadly sociological emphasis of the "Post-45" group of scholars, who are currently setting the direction of contemporary American literary studies.2 By contrast, pleasure is very emphatically something that Philip Roth did not forget about. It might even be said that his fiction rubs our noses in it. From Alexander Portnoy's frantic pursuit of sexual gratification, to Mickey Sabbath's delirious mockery of all moral values, Roth was intent on showing us that pleasure matters. He refused, to quote another of his characters, to "deodorize life and make it palatable" (Communist 179), insisting we confront the most embarrassing aspects of our humanity. And while Roth remains a very popular writer, he has often been marginalized and treated with suspicion by academic literary studies in America—that profession which now [End Page 62] finds itself in crisis, with falling enrollments and a sense of becoming ever more peripheral. Of course Wordsworth himself would hardly have recognized Roth's conception of pleasure, let alone hailed him as the savior of literary value. In the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads the experience of pleasure is understood via David Hartley's pantheistic psychology as a route to our best selves, and in some ways The Prelude affirms this view: its main narrative suggests that nature teaches us through pleasurable encounters with the beautiful and the sublime, and that poetry recaptures and intensifies those experiences, deepening that process of education.3 As I have argued elsewhere, Roth's significance lies not least in the way his writing challenges this redemptive view of life—or more precisely, the assumption that our life is in need of any sort of redemption. Instead there is a distinctively Nietzschean orientation in his work, a tendency to conceive pleasure in a more explicitly vitalistic and embodied way as a love of intensities, of those qualitatively rich forms of becoming that Nietzsche called the "will to power" (his own name for that "grand elementary principle"). But while there is much to separate Roth and Wordsworth, they are united in the view that pleasure is in the deepest sense not a form of hedonistic dissipation but a special type of intelligence, and that one of the most primary things literature can do is educate us about it. Education was one of Roth's most enduring concerns, and among the many educators portrayed in his fiction one of the most memorable is Murray Ringold, the high school English teacher featured in I Married a Communist. Zuckerman remembers feeling "in the sexual sense, the power of a male high school teacher like Murray Ringold—masculine authority uncorrected by piety" (Communist 2). Yet Mr. Ringold's interest in power resides not in crude forms of...

Wordsworth and the poetics of disappointment

This paper discusses the disappointment produced by poetics for a certain kind of literary reading, and its implications for critical practice. Reading two texts by Plato, I consider the seductive force of the withholding or refusing of knowledge, and in particular, the compound erotic and philosophical desire of Alcibiades. Through a brief overview of J-D Nasio's work on love and pain, I outline the therapeutic importance of erotic disappointment in his theory, and contrast with the therapeutic role played by poetics in Wordsworth's Preface. Finally, I suggest how Nasio and recent work in poetic theory might offer a supplement to Wordsworth's conception, underscoring the importance of ‘Alcibiadean’ disappointment, and I read ‘Simon Lee’ in light of this supplement.

Delirious Bulldogs and Nasty Crockery: Tennyson as Nonsense Poet

In concluding his 1833 essay Two Kinds Poetry, John Stuart Mill turns to role critic and suggests that, just as a person must be possessed a certain amount feeling and philosophy to be poet, so a critic must be possessed those same qualities to be able to recognize poetry: When, ... after reading or hearing one or two passages [of writing], we instinctively and without hesitation cry out, is a poet! probability is that passages are strongly marked with peculiar quality. And we may add that in such a case a critic who, having sufficient feeling to respond to poetry, is also without sufficient philosophy to understand it though he feel it not, will be apt to pronounce, this is but this is this is or this is (1) Mill's remark about how an ill-equipped critic is likely to respond to poetry is a return to his essay What is Poetry?, published earlier that year, in which he agrees with Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads that opposite poetry is not prose, but matter fact or science. (2) In both instances, Mill's explicit exclusion prose from his discussion poetry bespeaks his conviction that poetry is a form or a genre, but a mode knowledge. By replacing prose with science as poetry's opposite Mill admits sameness poetry and science as well as their difference: they are polar extremes a common spectrum. In same way, by suggesting that poetry is most likely to be mistaken for exaggeration, mysticism, or Mill implies, perhaps unwittingly, common life poetry and nonsense. To say that nonsense is poetry that has been recognized, or that poetry is nonsense with a sympathetic readership, would be wilfully to misread Mill. However, Mill's belief that, on first encountering a piece writing, a reader might recognize its poetry before being fully confident its meaning does that poetry stands at a certain remove from sense, that a poem might make nonsense before it makes sense. article seeks to explore relationship suggested by Mill between poetry and nonsense through a discussion Edward Lear's reading Tennyson. When Lear, after reading poem that Tennyson dedicated to him, wrote a parody it that pronounced This is nonsense, he was accurately identifying in Tennyson want sense that makes room for poetry. In reviewing Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1833), Mill takes up role feeling and judicious critic that he describes in Two Kinds Poetry. After pouring scorn on reviews Tennyson published in Blackwoods and Quarterly, he makes a claim for Tennyson's considerable, though yet fully realized, poetic talent and writes that of all capacities a poet, that which seems to have arisen earliest in Mr. Tennyson, and in which he most excels, is that scene painting. (3) He goes on to qualify assertion, writing that Tennyson's power lies, in mere landscape description, but in creating scenery (p. 86). Mill's example choice is Mariana. Perhaps first many critics to address question Tennyson's epigraph to poem, Mill writes: The subject is Mariana, Mariana Measure for Measure, living deserted and in solitude in grange. The ideas which these two words suggest, impregnated with feelings supposed inhabitant, have given rise to following picture.... To place ourselves at right point view, we must drop conception Shakespeare's Mariana, and retain only that a grange, and solitary dweller within it, forgotten by mankind. (p. 87) Mill places Shakespeare's words at generative heart poem, but requires that reader empty these words, already more or less divorced from Measure for Measure by brief (mis)quotation, meaning provided by its original context, so that moated grange may house instead the ideas which these two words suggest (Critical Heritage, p. …

The Opposite of News: Rethinking the 1800 "Lyrical Ballads" and the Mass Media

I heartily recommend a dose of British Romantic poets to defuse constant barrage of current news reports. --Letter to Editor, New York Times, 31 March 2003 THE POSSIBILITY OF AN OVERLAP BETWEEN EARLY ROMANTIC LITERATURE and newspaper journalism might seem unlikely to scholars, since many of central tenets of a key Romantic document, William Wordsworth's Preface to 1800 Lyrical Ballads, appear to be fundamentally opposed to transitory, episodic, and heterogeneous qualities of any periodical publication, especially a daily newspaper. Romantic literature, as author of letter quoted above suggests, is generally seen as opposite of news, an antidote to dominance of newspapers and proclivities of their readers. This view has been rigorously challenged, most prominently by Marjorie Levinson, who has drawn attention to topicality and contemporary significance of Wordsworth's verse, implicitly situating poems within world of current affairs. (1) But a specific, personal and sometimes overlooked contest for readers and for authority emerges from relationship between newspapers, journalism and literature in year that Wordsworth wrote Preface. Eighteen hundred was a year in which battle between newspapers and books for readers was felt particularly keenly. Mary Robinson, writing in Monthly Magazine in late 1800, provides a valuable insight into this battle: There never were so many monthly and diurnal publications as at present period; and to perpetual novelty which issues from press may in a great measure, be attributed expansion of mind, which daily evinces itself among all classes of people.... The daily prints fall into hands of all classes: they display temper of times; intricacies of political manoeuvre; opinions of learned, enlightened, and patriotic. But for medium of a diurnal paper, letters of JUNIUS had been unknown, or perhaps never written. Political controversy and literary discussions are only rendered of utility to mankind by spirit of contention. The press is mirror where folly may see its own likeness, and vice contemplate magnitude of its deformity. It also presents a tablet of manners; a transcript of temper of mankind; a check on gigantic strides of innovation; and a bulwark which REASON has raised, and, it is to be hoped, TIME will consecrate, round altar of immortal LIBERTY! (2) Robinson's notion of emulative contention within and between press and literature is a canny summary of state of affairs in 1800. Literature and journalism, as Lennard Davis has convincingly argued, spent eighteenth century disengaging themselves from their tangled relationship while struggling to secure same pool of readers. In Factual Fictions, Davis outlines a tentative theory of relationship between news and fiction, arguing that, prior to eighteenth century, the news/novels discourse is a kind of undifferentiated matrix out of which journalism and history will be distinguished from novels--that is factual narratives will be clearly differentiated from fictional ones. (3) Davis' intriguing speculation implicitly raises a critical challenge for poets around 1800: if, by end of eighteenth century, readers turned to newspapers for facts and to novels for pleasure, what role could poetry play in literary marketplace, and how could poets engage with a public accustomed to reading in this way? This challenge evidently underpins Wordsworth's characterization of contemporary readers in 1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads. Unlike 1798 Advertisement's warnings about feelings of strangeness and aukwardness that readers would have to confront when approaching first edition of Lyrical Ballads--warnings that juxtaposed Wordsworth's and Coleridge's poems with contemporary expectations about poetry--the 1800 Preface identified challenge to new edition as emanating from journalism and literary genres and tastes that it spawned and fostered. …

Present State of the Manners, Society, Etc. Etc. of the Metropolis of England

Mary robinson's essay “present state of the manners, society, etc. etc. of the metropolis of England,” published in the reformist Monthly Magazine shortly before the author's death in 1800, makes a significant statement on the volatility of British print culture at the turn of the nineteenth century. Once again recognized as a major writer of the Romantic period, Robinson influenced and was influenced by contemporaries such as Southey, Wordsworth, and especially Coleridge, who called Robinson “a woman of undoubted genius” (Letter). “Metropolis” is an important document not only because of its engagement with the contemporary debate over the direction of print culture and the public sphere but also because of the alternative it offers to Wordsworth's Preface to the Lyrical Ballads. Moreover, it provides an important link between earlier eighteenth-century concepts of urban culture and cosmopolitan refinement and later nineteenth-century ideas of urban identity such as Poe's Man of the Crowd and Baudelaire's flâneur. Resolutely urban, democratic, and cosmopolitan, Robinson's essay amounts to a manifesto of metropolitan culture.

John Wilson to William Wordsworth (1802): A New Text

John Wilson was profoundly affected by his first reading of Lyrical Ballads. At age sixteen in June, 1802, he wrote a remarkably insightful letter to Wordsworth praising volume--to which Wordsworth replied [William Wordsworth's Letter to John Wilson, 1802: A Corrected Version, ed. John O. Hayden, TWC, XVIII (1987)33-38]. This sensitivity to Wordsworth's poetic philosophy was rare at time, and began a relationship, which, despite controversy, was always marked by Wilson's high regard for Wordsworth's poetry. Many years later in an essay in Blackwood's Magazine, Wilson, as his alter-ego Christopher North, describes praise he has courted from all corners of earth, for his role in extending and promoting Wordsworth's reputation from the banks of Mississippi to the Ganges. In same essay North claims that in Scotland in early 1800s, there not twenty copies [of Lyrical Ballads]--we question if there were ten (Stroll to Grasmere, Collected Works). Despite his youth, Wilson's exuberant letter marks him out as a vigorously independent thinker and clearly able to extrapolate some of key concepts in Wordsworth's Preface. He conceives of poet's readers as connected by a delightful sympathy of Souls; a union of common interest in spontaneous appreciation of poetry. This system of philosophy, is embodied in poetry that, Wilson writes, flash on our Souls a conviction of immortality. Crucially here, Wilson recognises and responds to poet's intention. In his Preface to 1802 edition of Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth makes claim for poems that their purpose is to illustrate manner in which our feelings and ideas are associated in a state of excitement ... to follow fluxes and refluxes of mind when agitated by great and affections of our nature. Wilson is excited by Wordsworth's radical views on duty of poet and he even embraces tone of his writing. letter opens effusively praising Wordsworth's simple and forcible language in rhetoric that bears all hallmarks of an imagination profoundly coloured by Lyrical Ballads and its Preface. Once he graduated and moved to Lake District, Wilson became a friend of both Wordsworths and Coleridges. At one point he was assisting Coleridge's research for Friend by running errands to library at Calgarth Park, home of Richard Watson, Bishop of Llandaff. Wordsworths were frequent visitors to Wilson's home at Elleray, which was far more comfortable than their own. It is not unlikely either that two friends, Coleridge and Wordsworth, would have discussed their young acolyte's earlier letter. After all, it was a rare critical correspondence that had elicited an equally uncharacteristic reply, especially on subject of The Idiot Boy. Wilson's lucid comments on poem in 1802 are so clearly articulated that it may well be with them in mind, some fifteen years later, that Coleridge refers to only plausible objections, which I have heard to that fine one is, that author has not, in poem itself, taken care to preclude from reader's fancy, disgusting images of ordinary, morbid idiocy, which yet it was by no means his intention to represent. He has even by 'burr. burr, burr,' uncounteracted by any preceding description of boy's beauty, assisted in recalling them. other is, that idiocy of boy is so evenly balanced by folly of mother, as to present to general reader rather a laughable burlesque on blindness of anile dotage, rather than an analytic display of maternal affection in its ordinary workings. (Biographia Literaria, xvii) Wilson is torn between his genuine admiration for poet and his uncertainty that design of poem achieves its motive. He questions validity of subject as a suitable vehicle for moral intention of poem. …

Mary Robinson, the Monthly Magazine, and the Free Press

Mary Robinson's essay on the “Present State of the Manners and Society of the Metropolis,” published in the Monthly Magazine in 1800, is read as a significant statement on the status of print culture and the free press at the turn of the nineteenth century. Suggesting that Robinson's “Metropolis” essay may have been an catalyst for (or at the very least an counterargument to) Wordsworth's Preface to the Lyrical Ballads. this essay traces one possible genealogy of “Metropolis” and its influence through different periodicals, genres, and even au t h m (in its pirated versions). “Metropolis” is characteristic of Robinson's later prose works in its engagement with radical print culture and its championing of the free press, particularly in reformist periodicals like the Monthly Magazine and newspapers like the Morning Post.

Wittgenstein as a Modernist Philosopher

Notes and Fragments WITTGENSTEIN AS A MODERNIST PHILOSOPHER by Michael Fischer Much attention has recently been given to Martin Heidegger and his disturbing relationship to fascism. I want here to look at another philosopher in this context: Ludwig Wittgenstein. As a source of insight into the politics of modernism, Wittgenstein would seem to have at least three strikes against him. His explicit political pronouncements are rare; his relationship to literary modernism is unclear; and the political implications of his philosophical writings are notoriously difficult to assess. Perhaps for these reasons, discussions of modernism usually omit Wittgenstein, and discussions ofWittgenstein usually ignore modernism. Stanley Cavell is an important exception to this tendency, and his early essays collected in Must We Mean What We Say?1 will be my starting point here. I will be reviewing in very general terms how Cavell defines modernism; how his definition encourages us to read Wittgenstein as a modernist philosopher; and, finally, how aligning Wittgenstein with modernism can shed light on its troubling politics. Cavell's comments on modernism initially concern painting, sculpture , and music. He is interested in how modernist forms of these arts touch off radical uncertainty in their audiences. According to Cavell, when we confront a sculpture by Anthony Caro, a painting by Morris Louis, or a composition by Arnold Schoenberg, we wonder, not whether the particular piece is good art but whether it is art at all. Fraudulence, in other words, is always a possibility risked by modernist art, not a threat that disappears over time when the work commands a high price or an academic following or is housed in museums or heard in concert Philosophy and Literature, © 1993, 17: 279-285 280Philosophy and Literature halls. Commenting on the vain hope that time will tell whether a given work is really art, Cavell skeptically asks What will time tell? That certain departures in art-like pursuits have become established (among certain audiences, in textbooks, on walls, in college courses); that someone is treating them with the respect due, we feel, to art; that one no longer has the right to question their status? But in waiting for time to tell that, we miss what the present tells—that the dangers of fraudulence, and of trust, are essential to the experience of art. (pp. 188-89) We trust that a given modernist piece is art—we cannot know for sure— and that trust can always be betrayed. That is the risk we run in experiencing such art, the risk that arises when we feel that someone always has the right to question the work's status as art: hence the many legendary stories of the riots and walkouts and outrages that have marked the reception ofmodernist art when audience members angrily suspect that they have been taken in or used. "It is as though," Cavell writes, "the impube to shout fraud and storm out is always present, but fear of the possible consequence overmasters the impulse" (pp. 2056 ). From this point of view, we may keep quiet, or stay seated, out of anxiety rather than conviction. We fear that in rejecting a work, we may be exposing ourselves, revealing our own lack of sophistication or taste, not the work's. Put a bit differently, we do not know whether our attention to the work isjustified by the work or by what others say about it. Because the reception of modernist art is so uncertain, manifestoes and prefaces typically try to influence our response to it, as if the art does not simply benefit from explanation but stands in need of it. For me, Wordsworth's Preface to the Lyrical Ballads illustrates this problem. Like the modernists discussed by Cavell, Wordsworth suspects that his readers will "struggle with feelings of strangeness and awkwardness" when they encounter his work: "they will look round for poetry" and be disappointed by Wordsworth's prosaic style.2 To orient these readers, to help them feel more at home with what he has done, Wordsworth reluctandy writes a preface, hoping to explain his poetry but not explain it away by assimilating it to poetry as his readers conventionally regard it. According to Wordsworth, we appreciate his poems not...

"Elementary Feelings" and "Distorted Language": The Pragmatics of Culture in Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads

L'esthetisme de W. defini dans la preface des Ballades lyriques met en jeu la tension entre poetique et pragmatique.

Poems of the Imagination, Allegories of the Imagination: Wordsworth's Preface of 1815 and the Redundancy of Imaginative Poetry

Poems of the Imagination, Allegories of the Imagination: Wordsworth's Preface of 1815 and the Redundancy of Imaginative Poetry

Wordsworth's Preface - Reply

An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

Wordsworth's Preface

Wordsworth's Preface

Wordsworth's Preface

Wordsworth's Preface

Coleridge's Interpretation of Wordsworth's Preface - Reply

An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

Wordsworth's Preface to 'Lyrical Ballads'

Wordsworth's Preface to 'Lyrical Ballads'

Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads.

Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads.