Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

184William Wordsworth(1) the prevailing color of the land scape of Tintern Abbey isgreen, another traditional emblem of hope; (2) in Book VI ofThe Prelude, at the moment of Wordsworth’s un mediated contactwith imagination rising from the mind’s abyss, the poet claimsto see, among other things, thatour being’s heart and homeIs with infinitude, and only there;With hope it is, hope that can never die.[Ll. 604–606]The vision provided by his encounter with imagination, inother words, reveals the grounds of hope. In “Tintern Abbey”Wordsworth decides that “nature and the language of thesense” will be his anchor immediately after his encounter withthe transcendent “something.” It goes without saying that theparallel is striking: in “Tintern Abbey” Wordsworth searchesthrough the dwelling-places of nature to a “sense sublime” of theactivity of his own consciousness, i.e., the act of imagination.21. The Prelude, XII, 272–273, 277–280.22. In sect. IV of this chapter I deliberately abandon the useof the term “imagination.” Up to this point I have beenemploying the term freely because I have been attemptingto trace indications of certain features of what I have calledWordsworth’s “geography of introspection”; and from that pointof view it seemed necessary to say—led on by the example ofWordsworth’s own metaphors—that imagination is encounteredby the act of introspection in the depths of subjectivity. In theconcluding analysis of sect. IV, however, I try to shift my termsaway from metaphor toward greater precision. The reader isasked to assume that I intend a rough equation between “theact of reflexive self-awareness” and “the act of imagination.”The grounds of this equation [ . . . ] are exceedingly intricateand cannot be faced now without muddling somewhat theanalysis of the poem. To avoid this muddle, I momentarilysuspend my use of the term “imagination,” and ask my reader’spatience. Hartman occasionally uses the term “imagination” asalmost a synonym for “self-consciousness.” He does not, in myjudgement, sufficiently distinguish between what I call in sect.IV “thinking” about the self, i.e., constituting the subject as anobject for thought, and what I call “reflexive self-awareness” or