Chapter 5 William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth was born in Cockermouth in West Cumberland, just on the northern fringe of the English Lake District. When Wordsworth’s mother died, the eight-year-old boy was sent to school at Hawkshead, near Esthwaite Lake, in the heart of that thinly settled region whereafter he and Coleridge transformed into the poetic center of England. Wordsworth is above all the poet of the remembrance of things past, or as he himself put it, of“emotion recollected in tranquility.” Some objects or events in the present triggers a sudden renewal of feelings he had experienced in youth; the result is a poem exhibiting the sharp discrepancy between what Wordsworth called “two consciousnesses”: himself as he is now and himself as he once was. Wordsworth is at his best in his poetry of nature. As a great poet of nature, he found that nature means more than rivers, trees, rocks, mountains, lakes, and so on. Nature has a moral value and has its philosophical significance. In his poems, Wordsworth aimed at simplicity and purity of language, fighting against the conventional forms of the 18th century poetry.
Critical Perspectives
1.Philosophical Study
William A. Ulmer, in “William Wordsworth and Philosophical Necessity”, argues that Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Hazlitt both testified that William Wordsworth in his radical years believed in the doctrine of philosophical necessity. Prompted by that testimony, this essay undertakes a detailed reconstruction of Wordsworth’s necessitarianism. Wordsworth was most probably converted to necessity by his reading of William Godwin’s Political Justice. As a convert to the doctrine in its Godwinian formulation, Wordsworth would have accepted several ideas implicated in the necessitarian infrastructure of Political Justice: the human mind’s deterministic obligation to reasoned preference, the principle of universal benevolence, a marginalization of human agency and guilt, a prospective approach to ethical questions, and the inevitable triumph of reason and social reform. Wordsworth apparently believed in this complex of ideas only briefly, for the moral pessimism of Adventures on Salisbury Plain intimates a lapsing of the poet’s Godwinism, including his loss of faith in necessity, by late 1795. By 1797, however, Coleridge allowed Wordsworth to reclaim his necessitarianism by introducing him to an alternate version of the doctrine indebted to Hartleyan associationism and freed from its objectionable Godwinian features. Wordsworth grandly expounds this new version of philosophical necessity in 1798 poetry written for The Recluse, but then suddenly seems to lose interest in the idea. In concluding, the essay invokes both Coleridge’s 1799 dissatisfaction with necessity and Wordsworth’s later writing, especially The Excursion, to speculate about the poet’s reasons for finally rejecting the doctrine of philosophical necessity in late 1798.[1]
2.New Historicism
Maurice Hindle, in “Humphry Davy and William Wordsworth: A Mutual Influence”, focuses on the mutual influence between British scientist Humphry Davy and British Romantic poet William Wordsworth. The poetry written by Davy and published in The Annual Anthology, edited by Robert Southey, explores how Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads impacted Davy’s natural philosophy, and examines how Davy’s scientific work on chemistry led Wordsworth to believe there was a creative aspect to science.[2]
Arden Hegele, in “Wordsworth’s Dropsy: Flux and Figure in The Excursion”, traces how William Wordsworth engages with both Romantic medical discourse and aesthetic theory by insisting that the mind is physically embodied and finds his most complex and compelling treatment of this subject in his long poem of 1814, The Excursion. Adapting the formal model of poesis as a hydraulic process that he had theorized in the “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads, the Wordsworth of 1814 considers minds as embodied brains governed by the influx of both liquid and language: the discovery of a waterlogged Voltaire corresponds to the shape of the Solitary’s psychology through the formal mechanisms of intake, excess and outflow. In this poem, however, Wordsworth’s well-established hydraulics take on a newly pathological function, as his characters employ the imagery of the dropsy of the brain, or hydrocephalus, as they investigate and attempt to treat the Solitary’s morbid state of being. What emerges throughout The Excursion and, in turn, in “Simon Lee”—is that the physical register of disease stands in for the character’s emotional states as a sylleptic structure of feeling. Ultimately,Wordsworth’s dropsical brains bring into focus the Romantic idea of poetry as organic form, to ask how mechanistic and organic models might be reconciled in his notion of the hydraulic mind.[3]
Kurt Fosso, in “Community and Mourning in William Wordsworth’s The Ruined Cottage, 1797-1798”, examines the attitude of William Wordsworth’s attitude of English society as a social structure bound together by, constituted by, and articulated between dead and living, in context of his novel The Ruined Cottage of 1797-1798; theme and characterization in the book; conclusion of Kurt on the book.[4]
Harold Anthony Lloyd, in “Good Legal Thought: What Wordsworth can Teach Langdell about Forms, Frames, Choices, and Aims”, discusses legal analysis in relation to the late poet William Wordsworth’s composition of a sonnet on form and the issue, rule, analysis, conclusion (IRAC) case method which was developed by the late jurist Christopher Columbus Langdell. Training for lawyers and law students is addressed, along with choice, the nature and flexibility of framing in thought, and the claim that complete thoughts include reference, issue, analysis, and conclusion (RIAC).[5]
Heidi Thomson, in “Wordsworth’s Song for the Wandering Jew as a Poem for Coleridge”, offers poetry criticism of the poem Song for the Wandering Jew by William Wordsworth. It states that the poem refers to the ill-treatment of William and Dorothy Wordsworth in Hamburg, Germany. It is noted that the poem is inappropriate for poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Wordsworth’s book Lyrical Ballads as it does not fit in any category. The poem portrays a bond between Wordsworth and Coleridge.[6]
Jacob Risinger, in “Wordsworth’s Imaginative Duty”, presents an exploration into the poetry of William Wordsworth and his treatment of literary duty. Several of his poems, especially Ode to Duty, are analyzed in regards to his use of the first person and their reflections on his personal aesthetics, career trajectory, and work ethics as a writer. The connections between Wordsworth’s idealism and his literary output are particularly examined.[7]
3.Rhetorical Study
Jessica Fay, in “Rhythm and Repetition at Dove Cottage”, examines the poetry of William Wordsworth, highlighting his routines and activities at his house Dove Cottage in England. Topics include the characteristics of his poems, the rhythm and repetition in the poems, and his sonnet series “Ecclesiastical Sonnets” on the history of the Church of England. Also discussed are Wordsworth’s life at Dove Cottage, his marriage to Dorothy, and their habit of murmuring and humming lines of poetry to themselves.[8]
Jessica Fay, in “A Question of Loyalty: Wordsworth and the Beaumonts, Catholic Emancipation and Ecclesiastical Sketches”, argues in the Roman Catholic Emancipation debate, William Wordsworth took the opposite view to his friend and patron Sir George Beaumont. Whilst Wordsworth’s position as a committed antiemancipationist is well-known, this essay explores the Beaumonts’ Catholic heritage and their political allegiances. This contextual material provides a backdrop for a reading of a previously un-noted document that Lady Beaumont sent to the Wordsworths in 1809: “An Account of an English Hermit”. This pamphlet, by an unknown Anglican clergyman (Thomas Barnard), describes the life of an unknown nonjuror (Thomas Gardiner). Analysis of the manuscript, and the circumstances of its circulation, resituates Wordsworth’s objections to Emancipation and casts new light on the tone of his Ecclesiastical Sketches (1822). Jessica explores how Wordsworth uses the “Advertisement” to the sonnets in order to counter any resentment the anti-Catholic publication may have engendered between the poet and Sir George, and conclude with a close reading of “Catechising”.[9]
Mark Sandy, in “ ‘Lines of Light’: Poetic Variations in Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley”, recognizes the importance of Wordsworth’s sense of nascent light (elegised in his Ode: Intimations of Immortality), the essay traces how influential this idea was on later Romantic poetic treatments of light. Wordsworth’s qualitative distinction between the “fountain light of all our day” and the “light of common day” reveals his alertness to the revelatory and blinding effects of light and establishes the terms of Byron’s and Shelley’s imaginative engagement with the transformative aspects of light in their depiction of Italian cityscapes and coastal scenes. This transformative quality of light, for Byron and Shelley, is inextricable from those utopian aspirations to recapture future edenic states, which are configured in terms that consign such future idylls to the irrecoverable past. Finally, Shelley’s The Triumph of Life is read as avowing an apocalyptic, rather than transformative, light whose “severe excess” is still reimagined in terms familiar to the reader of Wordsworth’s “Ode”.[10]
4.Canonization Study
Tracy Ware, in “Wordsworth’s Canadian Ministries”, argues that Canadian writers have long been as divided on the matter of William Wordsworth’s influence as writers elsewhere. After looking at the criticism that regards Wordsworth as inappropriate in Canada, this essay considers three aspects of his enduring influence: responses to I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, the preferred text for those who wish to ridicule Wordsworth, but also a touchstone for such poets as Elizabeth Brewster and Don McKay; responses to Tintern Abbey, such as Charles G. D. Roberts’s The Tantramar Revisited and AI Purdy’s The Country North of Belleville; and Peter Dale Scott’s revision of The Prelude in Minding the Darkness. Wordsworthian poetry flourishes in diverse environments because it is less a matter of the Lake District than of “the mighty world/Of eye and ear,—both what they half create, /And what perceive” (Tintern Abbey 105-107). The essay concludes that Canadian criticism has placed too much emphasis on geography, especially for poets who are not exclusively concerned with national landscapes or themes.[11]
5.Thematic study
David F. Maas, in “Exploring Time-Binding Formulations with William Wordsworth”, provides information on the time-binding formulations of William Wordsworth; kinds of general semantics formulations anticipated by Wordsworth; advantage of the man’s ability to bind time; significance of time-binding.[12]
Kurt Fosso, in “A ‘World of Shades’: Mourning, Poesis, and Community in William Wordsworth’s The Vale of Esthwaite”, discusses races poet William Wordsworth’s interpretation of the relationship between the Wordsworthian community, the living and the dead, with specific reference to the poem The Vale of Esthwaite. Theme of the poem; how death and mourning are represented in the poem; how the poem’s summation of trauma can be represented.[13]
Eliza Borkowska, in “‘But I am too particular for the limits of my paper’: Religion in Wordsworth’s Poetry, Prose and Talk”, discusses about religious inspiration behind William Wordsworth’s poetry focusing on religious subjects or religious imagery that appear in his poetry works including God and Heaven, faith and worship, and Jesus and the Cross. Topics include catholic themes and attitudes in poems, opinion on Catholicism, and topic of worship in Wordsworth’s prose. Also discussed are his poems and prose We are Seven, Ode: Intimations of Immortality, and The Fenwick notes of William Wordsworth.[14]
Jasmine Jagger, in “Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the Healing Powers of the Imagination”, discusses a medical link between Wordsworth and Coleridge during and around the composition of The Prelude. Looking closely at popular medical treatises on the imagination and its specific powers over the human mind and body in the late 1700s and early 1800s, it identifies a medical “strand” within The Prelude, particularly in relation to its address to an ailing Coleridge. Through biographical tracking and close attention to certain poetic emphases and motifs, it identifies a special motive for Wordsworth’s writing of his poem, as well as an emergent dynamic between the two poets at this time: namely, that of benign physician (Wordsworth) and wandering patient (Coleridge).[15]
6.Comparative Study
Stacey McDowell, in “Rhyming and Undeciding in Wordsworth and Norman Nicholson”, discusses Wordsworth’s poem Yarrow Unvisited, suggests that it is better not to go somewhere than to go and risk being disappointed. Responding to this idea in the poem Askam Unvisited, the twentieth-century Cumbrian poet Norman Nicholson describes how he had planned to visit the dilapidated town of Askam in the southern Lake District only to face an agony of indecision before resolving in the end not to go. Both poets look forward to a time when they might be forced to look back with regret, and choose instead to preserve a sense of what might have been. A preoccupation with the passage of time and the consequences of decision-making is connected in these poems to the workings of rhyme, particularly to rhyme’s relationship with effects of timing and determinism.[16]
7.Reader-Oriented Criticism(https://www.daowen.com)
Karen Guendel, in “Johnny Foy: Wordsworth’s Imaginative Hero”, focuses on William Wordsworth’s poem The Idiot Boy, which pleasure according to Brooke Hopkins comes from the author’s fulfillment of his objective in Lyrical Ballads to purify the hearts of his readers. Topics discussed include the criticism of Samuel Taylor Coleridge on Wordsworth’s shortcoming in poets’ task of giving pleasure in favor of the moral philosopher’s search for truth and what kind of poet Johnny represent.[17]
Saeko Yoshikawa, in “An 1850 ‘Wordsworth’ Album and the Poet’s Nineteenth-Century Reputation”, discusses poet William Wordsworth’s reputation in the 19th century. Saeko analyzes a mid-Victorian sketch album that was dedicated to the memory of the poet to reveal the fact that many people were very aware of Wordsworth’s life before the first biographies about him were written. He attempts to determine the identity of the artist of the album, who was extremely familiar with the places that Wordsworth spent his life. An itinerary of the artist’s trips to each destination is presented.[18]
8.Psychoanalytical Criticism
Mushtaq Rehman and Muhammad Iqbal, in “Wordsworth’s Poetry: An Undertone of Psychic Synchronism”, argues that humans are consciously torn in the binary opposites; they are not aware that there lies some dark power or psychic twilight working beneath the surface of apparent sharp contradictions that binds the opposites and reconcile them into one organic whole. Wordsworth’s poetry, if read from a psychological perspective, manifests such scenes and sights symbolizing these psychic opposites and their psychic integration. This paper is an attempt to psychologically throw light on how these implicit manifestations of psychic integration effectively work in Wordsworth’s poetry which carry a message of psychic wholeness for the readers so feverishly involved in outer conflicts and rigid differences disintegrating a vast empire of human society.[19]
【注释】
[1]Ulmer W A. “William Wordsworth and Philosophical Necessity”. Studies in Philology, 2013, 110(1):168-198.
[2]Hindle M. “Humphry Davy and William Wordsworth: A Mutual Influence”. Romanticism, 2012, 18(1):16-29.
[3]Hegele A. “Wordsworth’s Dropsy: Flux and Figure in The Excursion”. Romanticism, 2018, 24(1):36-52.
[4]Fosso K. “Community and Mourning in William Wordsworth’s The Ruined Cottage, 1797-1798”. Studies in Philology, 95, 92(3):329.
[5]Lloyd H A. “Good Legal Thought: What Wordsworth can Teach Langdell about Forms, Frames, Choices, and Aims”. Vermont Law Review, 2016, 41(1):1-22.
[6]Thomson H. “Wordsworth’s Song for the Wandering Jew as a Poem for Coleridge”. Romanticism, 2015, 21(1):37-47.
[7]Risinger J. “Wordsworth’s Imaginative Duty”.Romanticism, 2008, 14(3):207-218.
[8]Fay J. “Rhythm and Repetition at Dove Cottage”. Philological Quarterly, 2018, 97(1):73-95.
[9]Fay J. “A Question of Loyalty: Wordsworth and the Beaumonts, Catholic Emancipation and Ecclesiastical Sketches”. Romanticism, 2016, 22(1):1-14.
[10]Sandy M. “ ‘Lines of Light’: Poetic Variations in Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley”. Romanticism, 2016, 22(3):260-268.
[11]Ware T. “Wordsworth’s Canadian Ministries”. Journal of Canadian Studies,2013, 47(1):197-220.
[12]Maas D F. “Exploring Time-Binding Formulations with William Wordsworth.” A Review of General Semantics, 2004, 61(1):151-158.
[13]Fosso K. “A ‘World of Shades’: Mourning, Poesis, and Community in William Wordsworth’s The Vale of Esthwaite”. Modern Language Review, 1998, 93(3):629.
[14]Borkowska E. “‘But I am too particular for the limits of my paper’: Religion in Wordsworth’s Poetry, Prose and Talk”. Romanticism, 2015, 21(1):14-24.
[15]Jagger J. “Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the Healing Powers of the Imagination”. Romanticism, 2016, 22(1):33-47.
[16]McDowell S. “Rhyming and Undeciding in Wordsworth and Norman Nicholson”. Romanticism, 2017, 23(2):179-190.
[17]Guendel K. “Johnny Foy: Wordsworth’s Imaginative Hero”. Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 2014, 56(1):66-89.
[18]Yoshikawa S. “An 1850 ‘Wordsworth’ Album and the Poet’s Nineteenth-Century Reputation”. Romanticism, 2009, 15(2):156-180.
[19]Rehman M, Iqbal M. “Wordsworth’s Poetry: An Undertone of Psychic Synchronism”. Dialogue, 2014, 9(1):97-103.