The Return of the Visible and Romantic Ekphrasis: Wordsworth in the Visual Art Culture of Romanticism

Abstract

Wordsworth is often identified with a deep iconoclastic scepticism regarding sight and visual phenomena. In The Prelude, he refers to the eye as ‘The most despotic of our senses’ and recalls a time when it had ‘gained/Such strength in me as often held my mind/In absolute dominion’ (1805, XI, ll. 171–176). As he continues by saying that he would ‘Gladly’ ‘endeavour to unfold the means/Which Nature studiously employs to thwart/This tyranny’ (ll. 176–180), Wordsworth encourages the identification enabling W. J. T. Mitchell, for instance, to state that ‘the first lesson we give to students of romanticism is that, for Wordsworth… “imagination” is a power of consciousness that transcends mere visualization. We may even go on to note that pictures and vision frequently play a negative role in romantic poetic theory’.¹ One reason among many why the eye is a touchy subject in Wordsworth is no doubt that from January 1805 and for the rest of his life he suffered from attacks of severe inflammation of the eyelids that made him hypersensitive to light and inhibited poetic composition.² Yet, while his bad eyes thus put a strain on composition, they also undoubtedly caused Wordsworth to become increasingly aware and appreciative of the gift of seeing, and consequently contributed to the foregrounding of the visible and the turn to descriptive and ekphrastic writing in the later career: a turn that was coterminous with what Alan Liu calls the later Wordsworth’s ‘effort to criticize the flight of imagination’ resulting in predominantly ‘disimaginative work’ that revises the early visual scepticism which informs much of the Great Decade poetry.³