Contents - ResearchSpace@Auckland - The University of Auckland

himself or his poetry’ (35). Later in his study he wrote that Wordsworth’s ‘consciousness apprehendsthings in a fashion essentially super-normal’(95).Garrod represents Wordsworth as a kind of ‘visionary’; his poetry is ‘essentially mystical. Butwhereas the mysticism of other men consists commonly in their effort to escape from the senses, themysticism of Wordsworth is grounded and rooted, actually, in the senses’ (105). 12 He asserts that ‘Thework of Wordsworth’s effective period is consciously dominated…by what may be called hismetaphysic of the imagination’ (143), and followed Legouis in making ‘the Imagination’ the centralfocus of Wordsworth’s ‘doctrine’. The ‘ultimate source’ of which is, ‘of course, the writings of thoseGerman philosophers whose opinion so powerfully influenced Coleridge’(131). Since ‘Coleridge hadplaced Wordsworth’s feet in the path of philosophy’ (137), Wordsworth was at a loss to produce anygood poetry once he was no longer available to advise him. According to Garrod, the last forty yearsof Wordsworth’s life were characterised by ‘philosophic and poetic poverty...in the main lamentablydull and drab, the most dismal anti-climax of which the history of literature holds record’(138). 13Having spent some time attempting to define Wordsworth’s understanding of Imagination Garrodconceded that, ‘When all is said and done, his theory of the interaction of sense and imagination hangsin the air’ (143); and he finally gave up the attempt by concluding, ‘The truth perhaps is that theimagination would not be what it is if we could say what it was; si deprehenditur, perit – its grandeurwould be departed in being known’ (171).In the Preface to the 1926 two-text edition of The Prelude Ernest de Selincourt expressed hispraise for Legouis’ ‘exhaustive and illuminating’ Early Life; acknowledged Harper’s ‘admirable’biography; and voiced his indebtedness to Garrod’s ‘brilliant study’ (DSP vii-ix). In his Introductionhe acknowledged Beatty’s exhaustive treatment of Wordsworth’s debt to the eighteenth century, andendorsed the claim that Hartley provided Wordsworth with the philosophy of life he sets out in ThePrelude. ‘But’ de Selincourt adds, ‘it is Hartley transcendentalized by Coleridge and at once modifiedand exalted by Wordsworth’s own mystical experience’ (lvi). De Selincourt saw Wordsworth placedin a dilemma between his need to define an empirical sense of self, and his earlier predisposition totrance states – states of mystical elation in which ‘the light of sense goes out’. He was alsosympathetic to the view that Coleridge played a major part in providing Wordsworth with the ideas heexpressed in The Prelude, and was particularly critical of Godwin’s influence. He wrote ofWordsworth’s ‘revulsion from the intellectual arrogance and self-sufficiency of Godwinism’, andbelieved that he took some time to recover from his experience of Godwin while at Racedown. 14Arthur Beatty’s positive representation of Wordsworth’s intellectual abilities was to bechallenged more directly, by Melvin Rader in his major study of Wordsworth’s ‘philosophy of mind’,12 Garrod picks up on the materiality of Wordsworth’s concepts, but does not discover his stoicism.13 For a study of the development of this particular myth see Willard L. Sperry, Wordsworth’s Anti-Climax.Sperry attributes Wordsworth’s theory to Locke, Hartley and, most specifically, John Alison (p.129).14 A view shared by Mary Moorman. Raymond Havens was dismissive of Godwin’s influence and F.E.L.Priestley, in his authoritative Introduction to the 1949 edition of Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning PoliticalJustice, appears to have listened to Havens. He maintained that, ‘It is hard to believe that the influence ofGodwin on Wordsworth was at all significant, or that the poet received from Political Justice anything morethan he gave’ (103). Peter Marshall in his more recent study of Godwin reiterates Priestley’s opinion.136