Wordsworth William - Wordsworths poetry, 1787-1814 : [with the essay Retrospect 1971]

WORDSWORTHS POETRY
17871814

17871814

BY GEOFFREY H. HARTMAN

Copyright1964 and 1971 by Yale University.

Fourth printing, 1971, with a new essay Retrospect 1971.

All rights reserved. This book may not be

reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form

(except by reviewers for the public press),

without written permission from the publishers.

Library of Congress catalog card number: 6420920

ISBN: 0300005385 (cloth), 0300001088 (paper)

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In memoriam
ERICH AUERBACH

And he said, Go forth, and stand upon the

mount before the Lord. And, behold, the Lord

passed by, and a great and strong wind rent

the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks

before the Lord; but the Lord was not in the

wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but

the Lord was not in the earthquake: And

after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was

not in the fire: and after the fire a still

small voice.

I KINGS 19:1112

It is seven years since this book appeared; and as books have their own fate, this one too has been interpreted in ways its author could not foresee. There have been many generous comments, also some misunderstandings. One critic, quite upset, reduced the book to the interesting if bloody-minded argument that Wordsworth needed to kill or violate nature in order to achieve his moments of visionary poetry. I must admit that poetry can exact a price, but I would not put it so high. Indeed, I thought my book had argued almost the reverse: that Wordsworth, deeply wary of visionary poetry of Miltons kind, foresaw a new type of consciousness, satisfied with nature, or at least not obliged to violate it in imagination. Wordsworth was haunted, certainly, by the fear that coming-to-consciousness was connected with the sense of violation or trespass: so Oswald, in The Borderers, raises the consciousness of Marma-duke by having him commit a murder. Yet the poets utopian or saner view is that we do not have to pay a blood price for consciousness. A similar confusion underlies the argument that I was too preoccupied with self-consciousness to give much thought to the creative or social aspects of imagination. Yet the difficult humanizing of imagination is what I chiefly followed in Wordsworth. I would not have needed to follow it if it were not a problem. Just as the first critic had little appreciation of dialectical thinking, so the second saw the counterbalanced and ideal vision rather than the labor necessary to achieve it.

I could discuss other misunderstandings but that might become an exercise in self-justification. I hope, however, that a brief summary of the books central purposes will be helpful to old as well as new readers. It will also allow me to restate some of my themes in terms which reflect what has interested me since the completion of this study.

What I did, basically, was to describe Wordsworths consciousness of consciousness. Everything elsepsychology, epistemology, religious ideas, politicswas subordinated. If that is phenomenological procedure, so be it. I did not, however, support any special (Hegelian, Jungian, etc.) theory of personal identity or human and historical development. Though sometimes adducing analogies from other writers, I tried to describe things strictly as they appeared to the poet, while raising the question as to why he so carefully respected their modes of appearance. The answer given by Wordsworth was that he had made when young a providential error: then it was already consciousness that was appearing, not simply things; and the blindness which caused the growing spirit to feel not its own burden but that of natural objects (they lay upon his mind like substances and perplexed the bodily sense) initiated a quest-romance in pursuit of the creation, one which gave the boys imagination time to naturalize itself, to direct its great but uncertain powers toward the things of this world.

In short, I followed Wordsworths self-interpretations as closely as possible. I saw him trace certain sensory fixations, especially an obsession with place. Haunted by the idea of a secret or sacred spot on which nature seemed to converge, he rediscovered the religious (and romance) motif of numinous places. My analysis of how, and with what difficulty, Wordsworths spirit detached itself from place and raised itself to the larger, more generous idea of nature showed that the notion of spots of time was still indebted to that of spirit of place. Poetic genius, in Wordsworth, never quite freed itself of the genius loci, and in attempting to respect these nature-involved epiphanies, he relived on the very ground of his senses the religious struggle between Hellenic (fixed and definite) and Hebraic (indefinite, anti-anthropomorphic) representations of the divine.

This, too, was one of the few occasions when terms from outside poetry seemed useful. I called the haunting-and-haunted spot an omphalos (after Mircea Eliades studies of myth) and the movement of the mind toward it centroversion (after Jungs studies of the process of individuation). Other terms could have been suggested: the power-place, though in nature (or at least sub specie naturae), could have been associated with Freuds primal scene. I did not want to overdefine, however, and for the same reason, later in the book, did not develop the implications of calling the contrary of apocalypse an akedah, after the binding of Isaac by Abraham in Genesis 22.

The poets development, I argued, was essentially a matter of converting apocalypse into akedah, or binding to nature, as a preparatory humanizing, an otherworldly power of imagination. Otherworldly, in that the imagination tended to seek a separate reality and that the everyday world was often so inadequate that the imagination preferred withdrawal or ecstasy: the illusion of a life beyond life. Wordsworth rarely expressed this flight in visionary terms because vision was a symptom of the disease he wanted to cure. The difficulty of adjusting his reality-hunger to realitya hunger which could paradoxically turn into an appetite for death is pursued in its many changeable forms as an important, even intrinsic factor in the growth of the individual mind. Nature, fearful and beautiful, succeeds at first in attaching the childs thoughts to itself and becomes a foster home to this alien from the sphere of celestial light. But as he grows aware of what is within and separates imagination more clearly from nature (redeeming his emanation, Blake would say) the child passes from unselfconsciousness to selfconsciousness and faces all the dangers of that complex passage. He realizes both his inner strength and his vulnerability: he fears isolation yet rejoices in autonomy. In retrospect, nature is seen to have played an essential though self-transcending role in the growth of the mind. It drew the poets fantasies toward life yet left them room; it gave him the basis for his faith that imagination was an excursive power able to find satisfaction in man as it had in nature.