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you if you wish.
As I have said in the past to most of my critics here, all their objections to my criticism of Wordsworth can be found
in my thesis and other articles. It is simply too exhausting to discuss such things here. So my apologies if I sound
evasive.
Jeffrey Side
[Addressing Tim Allen’s comment] True, it is difficult to locate empiricist poetry’s genesis with Wordsworth. It goes
back further in history-a lot of the Greek and Roman poets were just as culpable, at least from what I’ve seen in
modern translations. But my point is not that Wordsworth invented this mode of poetic expression, but that those
who came afterwards were specifically influenced by him (and Coleridge). Again, at the risk of plugging my thesis, I
have a chapter in it on this influence, and how it played out in the 20th century, via late modernism, through to the
movement, onto the confessional poets and up to Heaney. I don’t go any further, as the thesis was about Wordsworth
influences in that century.
Gerard Greenway
Coleridge too is an empiricist, Jeffrey! I think I am under no misconception with regard to the urgency with which
Coleridge seeks to counter empiricism, or his philosophical sources.
I exit.
Tim Allen
I’d buy that Jeffrey, the only change I would make in that sentence would be, “those who came afterwards were
specifically influenced by THAT SIDE OF him”. But I get lost in the sort of exchange you are having with G. Greenway,
when it comes down to picking out lines and saying that such a line points to this belief or that belief. I know it’s
what we do, indeed, what we have to do sometimes, but when it’s within a polarised black and white like this I just
find it too iffy.
Re Coleridge: I get confused by Coleridge. And I am never quite sure if it’s because he was confused himself. One
thing we have to remember is that those people lived in a world where they had to deal with the default metaphysic
of believing in God, which means that their relationship to various abstract philosophical concepts was not the same
as that of a C20 atheist, even though the concepts have the same meaning on paper. Do you know what I mean?
Jeffrey Side
Tim, yes, those who came after him were, indeed, influenced by “that side of him”. The other side, though, the poems
where his empiricism isn’t as pronounced-and there were some-are sometimes seen as not up to being his best
work. In a way, you could say that he is not so much to blame for his influence (if that makes sense) than his later
proselytisers are, people such as Edward Thomas etc.
Coleridge is confusing, and that is why I am reluctant to discuss him here, outside of the context of my thesis, which
needs to be read to avoid common misunderstandings of what he actually believed and thought about the ideals of
empiricism and transcendentalism in poetry. He did later on depart to some extent (though not as great as some
people think) from the more extreme empiricism of Wordsworth, but was an avid supporter of his for many years
before that, accepting Wordsworth’s poetic ideas as almost gospel. He was far less dogmatic than Wordsworth,
though.
[The discussion ended at this point]
A discussion in the British and Irish Poets Listserve about song and poetry
October 2016
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