Abstract
Wordsworth criticises ideologies and abstractions that he believes, by curbing the possibilities of thought and feeling, cause pain and injustice.1 Profoundly suspicious of ideas, his poetry develops into a materialism that negates political dogma of all hues. It appears, then, that the poet’s relatively autonomous art is condemned always to be reactive: defined in opposition to fixed modes of thought and feeling, it cannot imagine anything else and has little substantive identity of its own. This chapter argues, however, that Wordsworth does not remain permanently critical in the years around his ‘Great Decade’. Rather, he negates his own negations, and moves beyond endless critique towards a ‘positive’ idea of poetry. In its negotiations with Burke (and Kant, to a lesser extent), Wordsworth’s ‘The Sublime and the Beautiful’ surmounts the involuntary moment of dialectics (its structural negativity) and begins to theorise a ‘primary’ poetics.
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Notes
Richard Gravil argues that Wordsworth ‘comes to refuse the choice’ between conservative and radical abstractions (Richard Gravil, Wordsworth’s Bardic Vocation, 1787–1842 [Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2003], p. 234).
Withdrawing from the world in attention to its own forms, relatively autonomous art achieves what Robert Kaufman describes as ‘freedom from determination by extant governing (or, for that matter, extant oppositional) concepts of the sociohistorical or political’ (Robert Kaufman, ‘Poetry’s Ethics? Theodor W. Adorno and Robert Duncan on Aesthetic Illusion and Sociopolitical Delusion’, New German Critique 97. 1 [Winter 2006]: 105). Such art, as a result, is ‘inherently experimental’ (105): it ‘plays around with, is free to recombine, stretch, or extend the conceptual materials, in ways not usually sanctioned where an already determined conceptual content necessarily delimits the acceptable range of results’ (105).
Frances Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime (London: Routledge 1992), p. 52.
Mary Wollstonecraft, The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Vol. 5, eds Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler (London: William Pickering 1989), p. 47. Wordsworth had read A Vindication of the Rights of Men by 1791 (Duncan Wu, Wordsworth’s Reading [Cambridge: Cambridge University press 1993], p. 152).
Linda M. G. Zerilli, ‘Text/Woman as Spectacle: Edmund Burke’s “French Revolution”’, The Eighteenth Century 33 (1991): 55.
Tom Furniss, Edmund Burke’s Aesthetic Ideology: Language, Gender and Political Economy in Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1993), p. 38.
Lucy Newlyn, ‘“Questionable Shape”: The Aesthetics of Indeterminacy’, in Questioning Romanticism, ed. John Beer (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press 1995), p. 211.
Ibid., p. 214. According to Newlyn, the sublime ‘succeeds in closing off, or “finishing”, the expansiveness of subjectivity’ (p. 216). In her reading of the sublime, then, the subject is preserved, rather than undermined. She emphasises completion and wholeness over process and destruction.
R. Bourke, Romantic Discourse and Political Modernity (London: Harvester Press 1993), p. 241.
For Benjamin Kim, the absence of discussion about ‘art and the human figure’ in ‘The Sublime and the Beautiful’ suggests that Wordsworth’s aesthetics owe very little to Kant (Benjamin Kim, ‘Wordsworth’s The River Duddon and The Guide to the Lakes’, Studies in Romanticism 45 [Spring 2006]: 57 n. 22).
For a classic statement of the argument that Book 13 contains ‘Wordsworth’s moment of Absolute Knowledge’, see Alan Liu, Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford: Stanford University Press 1989), p. 447. More recently, Anne Janovitz has asserted the poet’s Kantianism: ‘The austerity of the Wordsworthian sublime co-exists with and compensates for its superfluity, its immateriality, its transcendence, its positing of an experience which is counter to the material’ (Anne Janovitz, ‘The artifactual sublime: making London poetry’ in, Romantic Metropolis: The Urban Scene of British Culture, 1780–1840, eds James Chandler and Kevin Gilmartin [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2005], p. 250). She adds: ‘the sublime offers a severe mental regime of anxiety. If the sublime experience were to be actual, you would be falling down the pit, vomiting from vertigo, and be in rather than looking at the sublime object’ (ibid.). See Chapter 6 for my argument that Wordsworthian allegory makes simultaneously ‘being in’ and ‘looking at’ possible.
The definitions of the sublime given by both Burke and Kant can be considered ideological. For Burke, the sublime is a mechanism that disciplines the subject and motivates permitted activity. The sublime, in effect, trains the subject to acquiesce to the demands of second nature. For Kant, however, the mind’s inability to encompass nature teaches Reason that it is superior to the senses. Freed from the bondage of sensory experience, it is possible for reason to create ‘a second nature out of the material supplied to it by actual nature. It affords us entertainment where experience proves commonplace; and we even use it to remodel experience’ (Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith [Oxford: Oxford University Press 1952], p. 176). Whereas Burke’s sublime subjects the individual to the power of an already existing second nature, Kant’s sublime allows the subject to help produce second nature. The former demands habitual and passive obedience, whereas the latter encourages active collaboration.
E. W. Stoddard, ‘“Flashes of the Invisible World”: Reading The Prelude in the context of the Kantian sublime’, The Wordsworth Circle 16 (1985): 33.
For the difficulties involved in dating ‘The Sublime and the Beautiful’ see Mark L. Reed, Wordsworth: The Chronology of the Middle Years, 1800–15 (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts 1975), p. 670.
T. M. Kelley, ‘Wordsworth and the Rhinefall’, Studies in Romanticism 23 (1984): 77.
For a powerful and influential feminist reading of this part of The Prelude, see Mary Jacobus, Romanticism, Writing and Sexual Difference (Oxford: The Clarendon Press 1989), p. 194. I disagree with Jacobus’ view that Wordsworth’s ‘use’ of le Brun’s painting is basically conservative and heterosexist.
See Elizabeth Samet, ‘Spectacular History and the Politics of Theatre: Sympathetic Arts in the Shadow of the Bastille’, PMLA 118. 5 (2003): 1305–19. Samet notes that ‘Danton himself … complained during the trial of Louis XVI that the audience had forgotten they were involved in a tragedy rather than a comedy’ (1308).
Jon Mee, Romanticism, Enthusiasm, and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of Culture in the Romantic Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2003), p. 247.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid, p. 249.
James K. Chandler, Wordsworth’s Second Nature: A Study of the Poetry and Politics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press 1984), p. 75.
Ibid., p. 198.
Ibid., p. 199.
J. H. Prynne, ‘English Poetry and Emphatical Language’, Proceedings of the British Academy 74 (1988): 63.
Geraldine Friedman, The Insistence of History (Stanford: Stanford University Press 1996), p. 82.
See Adorno’s comment that ‘Neutralization is the social price of aesthetic autonomy’ (Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor [London: The Athlone Press 1997], p. 228).
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© 2010 Stuart Allen
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Allen, S. (2010). Poetry and Embodiment. In: Wordsworth and the Passions of Critical Poetics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230283343_5
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