Contents - ResearchSpace@Auckland - The University of Auckland

Chapter 6Romantic ImaginationsI. Empiricism and Transcendentalism in the PoetryMy argument about the classical voice of the poet in The Prelude necessarily contradicts allthe foundational critical analyses of the poem, which were based on the 1850 text in which laterrevisions to key parts of the ‘original’ poem had led to a loss of the integrity of the argumentaddressed to Coleridge. In fact Wordsworth did not alter a great deal to do with the representation ofhis character, but his revisions did alter the precision of the original argument, and he muddied thewaters by adopting a Christian transcendentalist position at odds with his earlier, principled,representation of a stoic, classical humanist ethos. As a result, the carefully structured rhetoricaldialectic that defined the original ‘Address’ was altered in key places and the finer points of theargument over ‘imagination’ were obscured. The brief summary of those changes in the Preface to theNorton Prelude touches on the concern that is most important to this study:In his successive revisions Wordsworth smoothed out what had come to seem rough spots,clarified the syntax, elaborated the detail, and most consciously, had toned down, by touchesof Christian piety, the poem’s more radical statements of the divine sufficiency of the humanmind in its interchange with Nature.’ (NP xii)In The Mind of a Poet, Raymond Havens made a point of studying the 1850 text, havingdecided to honour Wordsworth’s later intentions, and refusing to follow Ernest De Selincourt’spreference for making the 1805 text normative. 1 And other critics who based their reading on the‘official’ published text will have found a different argument to the one presented to Coleridge in1805. I have, therefore, not been concerned with arguing against the ‘canon’ – or with wilfully readingagainst the grain of established opinions for the sake of a more sophisticated theoretical argument.Critical opinions on Wordsworth’s understanding of ‘imagination’ in The Prelude will depend on thetext that is being read. My argument has focused specifically on the 1805 ‘Address to Coleridge’ withthe aim of achieving a better understanding of the argument that Wordsworth originally intended. Ithas also been part of my enquiry to try and understand ‘both sides of the question’, and in doing so, totrace the development of the idea – expressed most forcefully by Meyer Abrams and re-iterated byJerome McGann and Clifford Siskin – that Wordsworth is the ‘exemplary’ British Romantic poet andThe Prelude an ‘exemplary’ Romantic poem. In this concluding chapter to the first part of this study Ipresent something of a reception history of The Prelude in order to account for the way in whichtwentieth–century scholarship accepted Wordsworth as a ‘Romantic’ and came to understand the topicof ‘imagination’ according to Coleridge’s definition of the term.1 See Havens’ comments in his Preface in which he quotes Wordsworth’s comments to Dyce, ’You know theimportance I attach to following strictly the last Copy of the text by an author’(Mind of the Poet xiii-xv).130