Contents - ResearchSpace@Auckland - The University of Auckland

according to its innate potentiality. Hence, the actualisation of the potentiality is a process inaccordance with nature and the epithet natural is applied to it. (3)Wordsworth’s ethos as ‘A Poet’ – who is also considered to be a ‘Prophet of Nature’ – is somethingthat he considered essential to his identity. There was no possibility, according to his stoic principles,that he could merely ‘seem’ to be what he claimed to be. The universe reflected the working of divinelaws ordained by reason – and Imagination is famously celebrated as ‘Reason in her most exaltedmood’ at the climax of argument of The Prelude. One of the ways to better understand thecomplexities of the Wordsworthian imagination and the apparent paradoxes of his theory of poetry,lies in appreciating the extent to which Wordsworth saw Nature as the Stoics did, as ‘the inherentforce which directs either the world or human beings or both’. In describing the summum bonum of theStoics in his Lives of the Philosophers Diogenes Laertius wrote:The end is to live in accordance with nature – both one’s own nature and the nature of wholes– doing none of the things that are forbidden by the Law that is common, which is the samething as Right Reason that pervades all things, and is the same as Zeus. (7.87)I suggest that Wordsworth was already committed to Stoic principles in the later 1790s –much earlier than canonical Wordsworth studies allow. At this time, I believe his knowledge of Stoicconcepts was limited mainly to his reading in Cicero. Although he may also have read in Seneca orMarcus Aurelius or Epictetus, my own attempts at accounting for Wordsworth’s stoic frame of mindin the later 1790s are linked also to a ‘sceptical’ attitude that I see as originating in Cicero’s praise of‘Academic’ scepticism. For this reason I do not go beyond Cicero’s works here, to present a moredetailed and specialised study of Stoic philosophy, something that would be necessary to fully explainWordsworth’s intellectual debts, which became more considerable as he subsequently read morewidely in the later Roman Stoics. 5 Seneca’s influence is recognisable, by 1804, in the ode ‘To Duty’,and his Moralia would also have been of obvious interest to Wordsworth as he sought answers to‘moral questions’ at Racedown, where there were two editions of Seneca’s Morals, in the library. 6Here, I limit my enquiry to the proposal that Wordsworth framed his reality according to paradoxicalStoic concepts in his dispute with Coleridge over Imagination in 1802 and 1805. Stoic philosophy waswidely discussed by eighteenth-century intellectuals, who probably focussed on the more popularrepresentation of Stoicism found in the works of the later Roman Stoics, especially Seneca. Theymight also have referred to later, secondary literature, describing Stoic philosophy in the work of suchwriters as Diogenes Laertius or Sextus Empiricus, or the record found, more generally, in Plutarch.Earlier in the century both Old Whig and the Country party sympathisers recognised the virtuousexample of Cato (the younger), who was a folk hero of the republican movement. Stoic philosophywas taught alongside the study of Plato and Aristotle at Oxford, though not at Cambridge where the5 A detailed study on the topic of ‘Wordsworth and Stoicism’ would require a far more complex discussion ofStoic philosophy and would require another thesis length study to do it justice. This is not a study ofWordsworth and stoicism, but one that stresses the significance of Cicero’s influence at a particularly crucialtime in the development of Wordsworth’s poetic ethos.6 Seneca’s Essays De Vita Beata, De Tranquillitate Animi, and De Providentia, in particular, can be seen tohave influenced Wordsworth’s attitude of mind in the early 1800s.74