Odds and Ends Essays, Blogs, Internet Discussions, Interviews and Miscellany

such a thing in a single person or oeuvre. I believe you are right about Wordsworth in the sense that yes, the kind of
limiting psychological realism, and the way such a thing utilises poetic language, does find an echo in some of the
things Wordsworth wrote both about and within poems, but other things echo through Wordsworth too, some of
them almost saying the opposite. But this is the trouble when talking about poetry, when trying to suck out
philosophical abstractions from the slippery actions of language. Romanticism in general was full of contradictions.
In relation to one of my takes on the subject of the split, which is that it is the modern Brit mainstream that is the
anomaly, that a lot more unites the wider history of poetry to the poetics of modernism than does the parochial
heritage of the movement etc., it could of course be the case that Wordsworth was one of the roots of that difference.
This is the case you are making and I think it is a fair case to make, but because of the stuff I’ve referred to above I
don’t think you are going to convince anyone-people often see in a poet’s work only what they want to see.
Jeffrey Side
[Addressing Gerard Greenway’s comment] Gerard, I will respond to your points in order, as follows:
‘“An unfathered vapour” does not smack of empiricism to me :)’
Wordsworth’s use of the phrase ‘An unfathered vapour’ is as a simile: an attempt to describe how he sees the
imagination operating on him as inspiration. In other words, the image is serving solely a descriptive function, albeit
describing an abstract concept. As a simile, like all similes, it is striving to make something more precisely knowable
via language. Ted Hughes does this a lot, and he was a fan of Wordsworth and nature poetry.
‘I think you are pushing terms (mimesis, empiricism) to the point of meaninglessness, or rather inversion. On your
usage Blake, at war with Lockean empiricism, seeing the sun as an army of angels might be described as empiricist
and mimetic’.
I’m not sure which Blake poem you are referring to here, but I’m sure the imagery you mention is such that I would
not see it as you think I would. Blake was more abstract than Wordsworth. For example in Blake’s ‘To the Muses’ the
phrase ‘chambers of the sun’, in the first stanza, does not specifically refer to anything in nature. I can allow that the
phrase ‘chambers of the East’ in the previous line, however, does. It refers to the cavernous areas located near the
mythical Mount Ida (represented in line one as ‘Ida’s shady brow’). The phrase ‘chambers of the sun’ does not allow
for closure in this way. The word “sun” (a source of light) has no connection semantically with the word “chambers”
(a source of darkness). Also the sun is noted for its lack of vacuity, unlike caverns. We see here, a mixture of the types
of uses for imagery that Blake employs. I’m not against such a mixture, by the way, but I don’t see it as frequently
employed in Wordsworth-certainly not in much of the Prelude, which is more of a philosophical treatise about how
Wordsworth’s mind operates. So I don’t think Wordsworth is doing anything similar to Blake, or even attempting to.
He is more concerned with describing his philosophical state of mind and the way nature forms this mind state.
‘It is the central concern of the major theoretical statement of the time, Biographia Literaria, to oppose the empiricist
theory of mind (Hartley’s) with the philosophical idealism-saturated theory of the creative imagination’.
This is a common misconception about the Biographia. It is impossible for me to deal with this here, as it is a very
complicated and nuanced area. I do deal with it, though (and Hartleian philosophy in relation to Coleridge), in my
article about Coleridge’s early empiricism, which you can find here
http://www.argotistonline.co.uk/COLERIDGES%20EARLY%20EMPIRICISM.pdf
‘And in all theories of the poetic imagination-Coleridge, Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley-the experience of poetic
imagination is opposed to the ordinary, individuated sense of self and brings into question the ordinary opposition of
subject and object. But, yes, Wordsworth is a discursive poet. He is a philosophical poet. The philosophical poet,
whether it be Wordsworth or Eliot in Four Quartets, seeks to give an account of the lyric/visionary moment. But the
discursive and the visionary are not in opposition, they are part of the same movement. In a poem like Shelley’s
‘Mont Blanc’ the discursive/analytic is identical with the lyric/visionary, and the kernel is the question of the
relation of subject and object-a theme impossible to miss in Wordsworth’.
Again, I can’t deal with this here, but have done so in my PhD thesis about Wordsworth, a PDF of which I can send
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