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THESIS

230}

This is to certify that the
dissertation entitled
EMBODYING MODERNITY: THE CONVERSATION
POEM AND THE PROBLEM OF INTERSUBJECTIVITY

presented by

Heejeong Cho

has been accepted towards fulﬁllment
of the requirements for

PhD degree in Engl ish

ﬂ/ Ayn/L

Major/pr essor

Date November 22! 2002

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EMBODYING MODERNITY:
THE CONVERSATION POEM AND THE PROBLEM OF
INTERSUBJECTIYITY

By

HeeJeong C ho

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Ar'lichigan State University
in partial fulﬁllment of the requirements

for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Department of English

2002

ABSTRACT

EMBODYING MODERNITY: THE CONVERSATION POEM
AND THE PROBLEM OF INTERSUBJECTIVITY

By

Heejeong Cho

This dissertation aims at understanding the conversation poem as an important poetic
form that embodies various issues and problems involved with the notion of
intersubjectivity in the “modern” condition. Although scholars have critically analyzed
individual conversation poems, they have not devoted sufﬁcient attention to the
intersubjective orientation inherent in the construction of the conversational form of such
poems, due to the widespread tendency to regard Romanticism as a literary movement
aimed at the celebration of the “self.” To fill this gap, I use J ﬁrgen Habermas’s theory of
the “communicative ethic” for the study of the conversation poem and show the complex
ways in which the poetic form explores the possibility of an ethical relationship between
human beings.

Habermas’s theory of modernity deﬁnes the communicative/intersubjective ethic as the
ultimate potential of “modernity.” Temporarily locating the onset of modernity in the
late eighteenth century, Habermas emphasizes the function of ongoing linguistic
interaction, which can lead ultimately to the “paradigm of understanding.” Applying
Habermas’s theory to the reading of the conversation poem, I argue that the
intersubjective impulse expressed through the invocation of the interlocutor in the
conversation poem assertively admits the importance of the communicative ethic in the

“modern” period when rational individualism dominates the entire lifeworld. Yet,

 

simultaneously, I propose to understand that the formal instability of the conversation
poem resulting from the frustration of the communicative impulse ultimately denotes the
“incompleteness” of the project of modernity.

In highlighting the intersubjective dimension of the conversation poem, my argument
revises the traditional view of Romanticism as a purely lyrical movement. In fact, many
interdiscursive poems produced in the Romantic period problematize the lyrical mode by
revealing the traces of another voice within the seemingly autonomous lyric voice. By
illuminating the conversation poem as an important poetic form of Romanticism that
questions the validity of the lyric in the “modern” period, this dissertation helps establish
a new view of Romanticism as a complex literary movement, which poses challenges to
modern individualism, yet simultaneously acknowledges the arduous nature of such
challenges.

My project also demonstrates the fact that Bakhtinian dialogism can be effectively
used for the analysis of poetry. Although Bakhtin excludes lyric poetry from the scope of
his theory, his earlier works occasionally deal with short poems and investigate the
function of various voices operating beneath the seemingly coherent lyrical voice. Using
Bakhtin’s theory, I examine the significance of dialogism in the composition of “modern”
poetry, which “novelizes” the genre and thereby attempts to escape the narrow vision of a

single individual.

T0 Y oung-Kyzm, my loving husband

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Samuel Beckett once said that a work of art is never completed, but abandoned at one
point. Although I do not feel that this dissertation deserves to be called a work of art, I
certainly share Beckett’s feeling about having to “abandon” the work at some point.
Unless I believe writing a dissertation is not the end, but only the beginning of one’s
scholarly growth, I would not be able to submit this dissertation in its present form.

Numerous people kindly helped me during the long process of conceiving and
undertaking this project. I am especially grateful to my dissertation advisor, Prof. A. C.
Goodson, for his insightful guidance through the maze of my Ph. D. studies. His
unfailing trust in me was truly encouraging, and his practical advice always helped me
reforrnulate my ideas. I also thank the other members of my guidance committee, Prof.
Judith Stoddart, Prof. James Hill, and Prof. Victor Paananen, for their perceptive
suggestions and emotional support. Prof. Richard Peterson of the Philosophy department,
who served as College Representative for my dissertation defense, offered me helpful
comments on my use of Habermas in this dissertation.

When I recall my days in the English department at Michigan State University, many
friendly faces come to my mind. Prof. Robert Uphaus recruited me with a generous
fellowship offer and helped me adjust to the department. At various times, many faculty
members guided me to grow as a teacher and scholar of English literature. I am also
grateful to my fellow graduate students in the department for the friendship and
intellectual stimulation they offered me. Especially, members of the nineteenth-century

reading group --- Tammy Agnew, Susan Kroeg, Patty Payette, Rich Manderﬁeld, and

others --- served as the first readers of my drafts, when my ideas were still sketchy. I also
remember many conversations I had with Sul-Hyun Kim, a fellow English Ph. D. student
from Korea. Her academic enthusiasm always challenged me, while her generosity made
me feel right at home.

Many friends I met during my graduate studies enriched my life in East Lansing. I am
thankful that I had an opportunity to join the University Methodist Church, where I sang
in the choir and also participated in the graduate Bible study group. I also owe thanks to
friends from the Seoul National University alumni association in the greater Lansing area
and my kind neighbors in the Spartan Village. After I moved to Berkeley, CA, many
people at Richmond Korean Baptist Church generously extended friendship to my family.

Above all, I thank God for providing me with the most wonderful family I can ever
imagine. I will be forever grateful to my parents for having raised me as an independent
individual, who loves learning and adventures. My two sisters, who are engaged in
advanced studies in their own fields, have always been good friends and academic
colleagues for me. I also thank my mother-in-law and late father-in-law for their constant
prayers. My two-year-old son, Alex, was literally born into this project. Although
writing a dissertation while raising a kid was certainly a challenge, I am glad to be able to
say it was still a great blessing. Finally, my warmest thanks go to my husband, Young-
Kyun, who taught me the possibility of a genuinely democratic relationship in every
aspect of our shared life. As a small token of my gratitude for his consistent love and

understanding, I dedicate this dissertation to him.

vi

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction 1
I. The Conversation Poem and the Ethics of the Poetic Form 26
1. The Poetics of “Sympathy” and its Discontents 30
2. The New Criticism and the Idea of “Romantic Organicism” 43
3. Deconstruction and the Division between Form and Intent 47
4. The New Historicism and the Romantic Ideology of Poetic Form 51
5. The Revival of Interest in Romantic Poetic Form and the Conversation Poem 56
6. Intertextuality as Conversation 62
II. Conversing with Nature: A Revision of the “Teleological” Model 66
l. Toward an Intersubjective Epistemology: Coleridge’s “This Lime-Tree Bower My
Prison” 71
2. The “Dejection” Dialogue and the Birth of the Romantic Lyric: Wordsworth’s
“Intimation: Ode” and “Resolution and Independence” 78
3. Reactive Lyric: Shelley’s “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” and “Mont Blanc” 85
4. The Afﬁrmative “Encounter”: Charles Tomlinson’s Poetry 91

III. Conversing with the Auditor: Rethinking the “Consensus” in the “Norm-

 

 

 

Guided” Model 99
1. Questioning the Consensus: Coleridge’s “The Eolian Harp” 104
2. Lyricizing Narrative: Wordsworth’s Poems to Dorothy 112
3. Conversation as Liberation: Dorothy Wordsworth’s Rewrites of “Tintem Abbey” 120
4. A Victorian Comment on the Conversation Poem: Browning’s Pauline 127
5. A Guilt-Ridden Yearning for a Conversation: Thomas Hardy’s Poems for Emma 133
6. Toward a Glimpse of Intersubjectivity: Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters 138
IV. Conversing with the Self: The “Other” Consciousness in the Dramaturgical
Model 145
1. The Deferral of Self-Objectiﬁcation: Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight” 151
2. Self-Mockery/Self-Vindication: Wordsworth’s The Prelude 157
3. A Meta-Poetic Look at the Formation of Subjectivity in the Conversation Poem:
Shelley’s Julian and Maddalo 163
4. In the Flux of Identity: Arthur Hugh Clough’s Amours de Voyage 169
5. A New Conception of the “Self”: Yeats’s Conversational Poems 176

V. Conversing with the Audience: The Ultimate Challenge of the Communicative

Model 182
1. Deﬁning the Conversation Poem as a “Father’s Tale”: Coleridge’s “The Nightingale”
187

2. Undoing the Psychological Impact of the Feminine Gaze: Wordsworth’s “To Joanna”
194

vii

3. A Deferral of a Readerly Judgment: Keats’s The Fall of Hyperion 200
4. In Search of “Lyrical” Centrality: Matthew Amold’s “Resignation” 205
5. The Lost Conversation (Poem): T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock and Other Observations 211

 

Conclusion 218

Bibliography 224

viii

Introduction

This dissertation raises and explores a series of questions surrounding the
“conversation poem.” What is the nature of the conversation occurring in the
“conversation” poem? How does understanding this “conversation” affect the
(re)construction of the Romantic self, aloof, isolated, and contained within his own
subjectivity? Does the group of poems frequently classiﬁed as such share enough
characteristics to render a discussion of the poetic mode feasible and useful? How can
we locate this poetic mode in relation to other kinds of Romantic writing? How does the
“conversation poem” inﬂuence the poetry of the later periods?

Through my investigation of these questions, I propose to understand the conversation
poem as an important poetic form that shaped Romantic poetry and informed “modern”
poetic discourse. I also argue that the conversation poem embodies many issues and
problems involved with the notion of intersubjectivity in the “modern”1 condition. The
kind of “conversation” contained in the conversation poem necessarily invokes the selt’s
relationship with others (natural obj ects, other humans, and readers of the poem).
constantly revising the notion of a countervailing self, the subject of modernity. At the
same time, the “conversation” involves the intense gaze on the self that intentionally
exposes subjectivity and thus complicates the problem of individualism. In order to

address this complexity effectively, I intend to situate my discussion of the conversation

 

' It might be useful to provide a working deﬁnition of the term “modern” at the outset of this discussion as
it is used in various ways in different disciplinary contexts. For example, in Philosophy, the “modern”
usually refers to the period after Descartes, whereas. in English, the same term is typically applied to the
early twentieth century (e.g., “modern fiction”). I use this term to point to the “post-Enlightenment”
period, when the discourse of rationality was in the process of replacing the mythical worldview, following
J lirgen Habermas’s usage.

 

poem in the context of current philosophical/sociological debates over modernity and
intersubjective ethics. I will use J ﬁrgen Habermas’s theory of the “communicative ethic”
and other theories of intersubjectivity for the study of the conversation poem and show
the complex ways in which the poetic form both endorses and questions the possibility of
an ethical relationship between human beings. This approach will help investigate the
signiﬁcance of the experimental poetic mode invented by Romantic poets and continued
by many poets in the following periods. Simultaneously, my discussion will indirectly
intervene into the present controversy surrounding the limits and consequences of

modernity.

As early as in the 19603, discussing Coleridge’s “The Eolian Harp,” Albert Guerard
called attention to the signiﬁcance of the conversation poem. Guerard designated
Coleridge’s poem as “the ﬁrst Romantic piece to stand on its own merit as a poem” and
claimed that many characteristics of “The Eolian Harp,” which constitute a worthy
sample of the conversation poem, signal the advent of the age of Romanticism itself.
Clearly equating the moment of the conversation poem with that of Romanticism,
Guerard’s argument pointed to the signiﬁcance of the poetic form, but during the past
three decades, literary scholars have not been sufﬁciently attentive to his call. Although
individual poems such as “Frost at Midnight” and “Tintern Abbey” have always been
discussed as important Romantic poems, an adequate theorization of the poetic form
itself still appears long overdue, despite the surge of theoretical interest in Romantic
poetry since Deconstruction.

It is possible to partially attribute the overall lack of theoretical interest in the

conversation poem to the poetic mode’s own problem, its evasive fluidity, which seems
to resist an easy application of generic categories. One may argue that better-known
examples of the conversation poem such as “The Eolian Harp,” “Frost at Midnight,” and
“Tintern Abbey” display more or less similar features, focusing on the poems’ structural
afﬁnity with each other or their shared thematic concern. Yet, Coleridge’s “The
Nightingale, A Conversational Poem,” the poem that actually provided the name for the
poetic form, is relatively free of those features, rendering generic discussions difﬁcult and
problematic. As J. T. Barbarese states, “The Nightingale” possesses features that none of
the usual descriptions of the conversation poem entirely satisﬁes (675). While some
other conversation poems are structured around the auditor’s presence, “The
Nightingale”s vague description of circumstantial details does not necessarily present the
poem’s auditors as participants in the actually simulated conversational process. Rather,
Wordsworth and his sister in this poem function almost as the recipients of an epistle,
who do not impose a clear sense of physical presence on the compositional scene.
Moreover, the famous theme of many other conversation poems, the Romantic
preoccupation with the mind’s relation to nature, does not appear prominent in "The
Nightingale.” Composed of a series of shifting observations about poetic creation and
reception, “The Nightingale,” which does not center exclusively on the poet’s
consciousness, is relatively free of the notoriously “internalizing” tendency of other
conversation poems. Nonetheless, it is a “conversational poem,” unequivocally
designated as such by its author.

If neither formal apparatuses nor thematic concerns supply a clear boundary for the

poetic mode, and if the group of poems called the “conversation poems” includes diverse

kinds of poems that only share minimal characteristics, then, how can one approach the
poetic form theoretically? Or, does one even need to theorize it? This daunting
question, which has probably hindered scholars from undertaking theoretical discussions
of the conversation poem, accounts for both the difﬁculties inherent in my project and its
chosen methodological direction. As I am aware of the problems associated with
generalizing about the poetic form or constructing a theoretical model for it, I refrain
from designating it as a genre, the term that tends to be applied to more formally
stabilized literary modes. Although I ﬁnd the recent development of genre theories
highly informative in that they point to various changes and contradictions within a genre
rather than assuming a petriﬁed theoretical mold preceding actual texts, I still intend to
use looser terms such as a “poetic form” or a “poetic mode” in order to highlight the
fluidity of formal elements that constitute the conversation poem. Accordingly, instead
of attempting to produce well-constructed statements about the conversation poem, I
choose to limit myself to describing theoretical issues and problems surrounding the
poetic form.

Tilottama Rajan’s short, yet perceptive comment on the conversation poem is one of
the rare examples that approach the poetic mode in a theoretical way, yet without
imposing generalized rules on it. Rajan’s view of the conversation poem foregrounds the
fact that it is a poetic form in constant making, attending particularly to its oscillation
between two conﬂicting generic tendencies. In her provocative essay “Romanticism and
the Death of Lyric Consciousness,” which completely rejects the classical view of British
Romanticism as a purely lyrical movement, Rajan takes the conversation poem as one of

the poetic modes that attempt to escape the sphere of the lyric. While acknowledging

4—41.;

various theoretical problems involved in conceptualizing such terms as lyric and
narrative, Rajan nonetheless proposes to deﬁne lyric as a “purely subjective form whose
desire is shaped by the exclusion of the other through whom we become aware of the
differences of the self from itself” (354). She goes on to borrow Sartre’s famous
description of the lyrical subject: a "shut imaginary consciousness” without the
dimension of being-in-the-world. Rajan’s deﬁnition of lyric reveals problems residing in
the widespread understanding of Romantic poetry as lyric, given that many poems
written in the period actually attempt to restore the realm of narrative that can be defined
in terms of connection and interaction with the world. Thus, she revokes any attempt to
center Romantic discourse in the mode of lyric and calls attention to “the interdiscursive
nature” of Romantic poetry that problematizes the lyrical mode by revealing the traces of
another voice within the seemingly autonomous lyric voice. In the ensuing discussion,
Rajan provides examples of such interdiscursive poems, which include Coleridge’s and
Wordworth’s conversation poems that expose lyrical meditation to the response of
another voice already present within lyrical discourse. Through the evocation of a silent
listener, the conversation poem implies that the moment of its utterance is contained in a
larger conversational context.

Although Rajan does not supply a more detailed discussion of the conversation poem
itself, her valuable insight into the matter of generic encounters and conﬂicts serves as a
good starting point toward theorizing the conversation poem as an experimental poetic
mode that intentionally blends different generic conventions. The conversation poem is a
poetic form that occupies an unstable position somewhere midway between lyric, which

seeks to reside within the enclosed sphere of subjectivity, and narrative, which attempts

to move outside the enclosed sphere and reach toward history. In this dissertation. I
argue that this instability, which often results in formal anxiety within a single text, is
precisely what renders the conversation poem worthy of detailed critical discussion and
what prompts many later poets to constantly revisit the poetic mode of the Romantic
period.

The formal tension that arises from the clash between the two conﬂicting impulses
possesses far-reaching signiﬁcance. In Rajan’s analysis, the emphasis on the
conversational context in a seemingly lyrical text paradoxically signals the poet’s
unprecedented awareness of isolated selfhood. In the period when the dominant social
norms that retained the communal aspect of human life were rapidly breaking down in
the aftermath of the French Revolution, romantic writers attempted to reconnect severed
ties between individuals and restore a sense of community through the exploration of
communicative possibilities. As Regina Hewitt suggests, the Romantic poets were
deeply interested in “community values” and the power of poetry in improving human
relations (The Possibilities of Society viii).

In this dissertation, I intend to focus on this communal orientation within the
conversation poem, using Jiirgen Habermas’s theory of communicative action.
Temporarily locating the onset of modernity in the late eighteenth century (which is, not
accidentally, the age of the conversation poem), Habermas points to the “communicative
ethic” as the ultimate potential of modernity. In The Theory of Communicative Action.
Habermas argues that the “communicative” use of language has the ability to coordinate
action in a consensual or cooperative way. Therefore, he emphasizes the function of

ongoing linguistic interaction, which can lead ultimately to the “paradigm of

 

understanding.” Applying Habermas’s theory to the reading of the conversation poem, I
argue that the intersubjective impulse expressed through the invocation of the interlocutor
in the conversation poem assertively admits the importance ofcommunicative action in
the “modern” period when rational individualism dominates the entire society. Yet,
simultaneously, I propose to understand that the formal instability of the conversation
poem resulting from the frustration of the communicative impulse ultimately denotes the
“incompleteness” of the project of modernity. However, I refuse to view this
“incompleteness” simply as the indication of failure, for I think that the unending trust in
the potential of modernity is the strength of Habermas’s theory that distinguishes it
fundamentally from his Frankfurt school predecessors’ pessimistic account of modernity.
Habermas’s quarrel with the Frankfurt critical theorists revolves mainly around Adorno
and Horkeheimer’s bleak diagnosis of modernity in their Dialectic of Enlightenment.
Robert C. Holub explains that Habermas seeks the possibility of an emancipatory social
theory by declaring a break from determinism in Adorno and Horkeheimer’s dialectical
theory (36). From their perspective, the rationality that epitomizes the Enlightenment
leads straight to the horrors of the Second World War and Nazism, and the insatiable
desire to control the environment necessarily results in repressive control over humanity.
All these tragic outcomes are preordained by enlightenment rationality; thus, Adorno and
Horkeheimer designate the “present collapse of bourgeois civilization” (xi) as the “self-
destruction of Enlightenment” (xiii). Habermas attempts to undo this inevitability of
large-scale human tragedy by discovering the latent possibility of modernity in
communicative action that critiques the individual’s blind purposive rationality.

According to Holub, Haberrnas’s turn from Adomo and Horkeheimer reveals his

 

unique view of Marxist analysis (41). Traditionally, Marxist theory of history relies on
Marx’s statement in “the Grundrisse” (1857-5 8), where he asserts that only the most fully
developed form enables us to comprehend the history of a concept. Thus, for Adomo and
Horkeheimer, who follow this methodology, modernity is only fully realized in its most
ﬁnal form that destroys humanity and leaves nothing but the mechanical movement of
capital. Habermas rebukes this kind of Marxist methodology by revisiting the originary
ideal of modernity, in which he discovers an unrealized potential that was
underdeveloped in the process of history. In his Structural Transformation of the Public
Sm; Habermas goes back to the eighteenth-century England and describes a realm in
which individuals gather to participate in open discussions. This realm called the “public
sphere” is characterized by its democratic, non-hierarchical, yet critical aspects.
Although most of these aspects that constituted eighteenth-century British society have
disappeared in the course of history, Habermas declares that the ideals contained in the
public sphere are worthy of reconsideration. Accordingly, Habermas refuses to accept
modern society as the ultimate ﬁnality of history; rather, he attempts to open up the
process of history and escape the hopeless stasis of the post-war Western world. Despite
bleak social scenes full of despair and pessimism, Habermas believes that the critical
potential of modernity is still alive and that its enactment will effect an evolutionary
movement and progress of history.

Yet, unlike American postmodemists’ view of Habermas2 that completely dismisses his
theory as a useless Utopian dream, Habermas’s theory is acutely aware of difﬁculties that
hinder the development of emancipatory society. For example, his account of the

historical transformation of the public sphere shows the ways in which the power of the

 

market has come to pervade the once democratic domain of the public sphere and to
convert participants of open discussions into mere recipients of cultural commodity
production. In this respect, Habermas’s theory preserves traces of Marxist theory.
Analyzing Habermas’s complex relationship to Marx, Nancy C. Love shows that Marx's
notions such as “alienation” and “reiﬁcation” function as key concepts in Habermas’s
social theory (48). According to Marx, capitalist society is characterized by alienation
from productive activity and subsequent commodity fetish. Worker’s production and
capitalists’ appropriation do not occur as part of a collective effort, but as isolated
activities, and the resulting commodity fetish erases the qualitatively different social use-
value of various commodities. Thus, in capitalist society solely dominated by the
exchange-value, people are alienated from one another. Individuals interact only in
exchange, obscuring the social character of their relation to one another. Cultural
production in the capitalistic social condition promotes individualistic concepts such as
genius and originality, engendering ﬁerce competition between artists who struggle with
each other in order to appeal to consumers of culture.

Habermas’s enduring affiliation to Marxist concepts of“'alienation” and “reiﬁcation” is
worth mentioning in my discussion, for these notions account both for the social
circumstances surrounding Romantic poetry and the anxiety of the Romantic poets under
these circumstances.3 Recently, many critics have focused on the Romantic poet’s desire
for cultural centrality conditioned by the increasingly competitive capitalist market
system. The most successful of them is Marlon Ross, whose The Contours of Masculine

Desire perceptively documents the cultural condition that generated the Romantics’

 

2 Martin Jay’s short article provides a good summary of the issues between Habermas and postmodernists.
3 For a general discussion of the contemporary cultural ﬁeld, see Williams, Culture and Society.

egotistical subjectivity. As Ross shows, the communicative aspiration in the
conversation poem frequently submits to the imperatives of artistic originality and
individual fame as a successful poet. Simultaneously, the impulse toward narrative often
results in a paradoxical outcome in which the poet/speaker enacts strategies of control
and dominance over his interlocutor and thereby enhances the power of his lyrical voice.

Yet, the intersubjective dimension in the conversation poem merits close investigation
precisely because it is the unrealized potential of the poetic form that embodies the
anxiety of “modernity” itself. According to Habermas, modern individuals’ aesthetic-
expressive attitude to the self and social connections has the capacity to recover the lost
domain of reciprocity between individuals. Habermas believes that an individual’s
ability to approach one’s self reﬂectively can be translated, to a certain extent, into
comprehensibility to the other’s needs and interests. While admitting that his original
distinction between lifeworld and system is difﬁcult to sustain in the present social
circumstances that colonize the entire lifeworld and reify communication processes,
Habermas still refuses to abandon the notion of lifeworld, a public space distinct from
political or economical institutions (system) and one in which individuals can find a
sense of solidarity and mutual recognition.

Habermas’s attention to communication and intersubjectivity alters the paradigm in
which one approaches the conversation poem. In lieu of the traditional way of focusing
only on individual meditation, one can adopt a more relational worldview and investigate
various issues and problems in the poetic mode with acute interest in their interpersonal
dimension. For example, the man-nature relationship in the conversation poem is no

longer delineated simply as an encounter between the isolated human mind and natural

objects. Instead, nature should be viewed as a much more concrete space, in which men
establish a communal form of life. In this highly intersubjective universe, even one’s
reﬂection on one’s own self takes on a new kind of signiﬁcance as it preserves the traces
of the other through mediating other peOple’s gaze on the self. Thus, subjectivity is
constantly informed by intersubjectivity. signiﬁcantly blurring the traditional boundaries
of the ego.

Habermas’s social theory, when it is applied to the analysis of literary texts, displays
afﬁnities to Bakhtin’s dialogism, a theory widely used for literary studies. Both
Habermas and Bakhtin focus on the process of communication, as its critical function
ultimately enriches one’s worldview. Bakhtin does not use the term “intersubjectivity,”
but his notion of “the co-being of beings” highlights the intersubj ective dimension of
ordinary individuals, anticipating Habermas’s intersubjective theory. According to Greg
Marc Nielson’s recent study The Norms of Answerability, Bakhtin’s earlier term
“answerability,” which denotes his “philosophy of answerable act” and later develops
into dialogism, also reveals that Bakhtin’s theory is ﬁrmly grounded upon intersubjective
ethics from the very outset.

Contrary to the widespread belief, Bakhtinian dialogism can be effectively used for the
analysis of poetry. Although Bakhtin appears to exclude lyric poetry from the scope of
his theory, his earlier works occasionally deal with short poems and investigate the
function of various voices operating beneath the seemingly coherent lyrical voice. In
applying Bakhtin’s theory to the poems that are usually classiﬁed as “lyric,” my method
differs from Don Bialostosky’s more obvious use of Bakhtin in his readings of

Wordsworth’s narrative poems. While Bialostosky deals with Wordsworth’s

experimental poems that visibly contain multiple voices, I attend to subtle traces of
different voices that exist within the seemingly lyrical text. Paul Magnuson partially
applies Bakhtin’s critical method to the reading of the conversation poem by analyzing
Coleridge’s and Wordsworth’s poetry as a “double-voiced” utterance that consists of the
two Romantic poets’ dialogic exchanges. Building on Magnuson’s theory, I will examine
the signiﬁcance of dialogism in the composition of “modern” poetry, which “novelizes”
the genre and thereby attempts to escape the narrow vision of a single individual.

I also believe that Bakhtin’s dialogism supplements Habermas’s intersubjective theory
in a highly useful way because Bakhtin’s keen interest in heterogeneous elements in
communication serves as a corrective to Habermas. The notion of “otherness,” which
does not operate as a signiﬁcant concept in Habermas’s theory, occupies a central
position in Bakhtin’s dialogism, as it does in the recent development of ethics. As Alex
Honneth sums up, Lyotard, Stephen K. White, and Derrida commonly propose to
consider the particular and the heterogeneous in intersubjective ethics (290) and thereby
Oppose Habermas’s assumption of the ideal speech situation that presupposes
symmetrical intersubjectivity and equivalences between individuals. In The Differend:

Phrases in Dispute, Lyotard’s argument for the protection of the heterogeneous is based

 

upon his observation regarding the injustice inherent in the untranslatability of one kind
of discourse into another. For example, the survivors of Nazi concentration camp cannot
ﬁnd an appropriate medium of articulation in the genre of discourse constituted by formal
law. In a similar vein, the workers’ protest against unacceptable working conditions
ultimately end in frustration, as it cannot ﬁnd an adequate way of expression in the

discourse of capitalism that upholds the exclusive ideology of economic efﬁciency

(Honneth 294). Even within a linguistic community that shares the same language,
communication blocks exist in the form of ostracizing mechanisms, the political
regulation of language, or the psychological exercise of violence (Honneth 297).”
Stephen K. White also suggests that the particularity of the other should be sufﬁciently
considered in intersubjective relations. White especially underscores the virtues of
sensitivity to individual nuances and differences. Derrida’s position regarding this issue
overlaps with Lyotard’s and White’s in many aspects. Analyzing the case of “friendship”
and the matter of legal relationships in his later works, Derrida emphasizes the “inﬁnity”
of the concrete other rather than equality. The above theorists ﬁnd that Habermas’s
theory treats various individuals by the same standard and thus establishes “formal
reciprocity” between “generalized others.”

Even the moment of “consensus,” when language apparently expresses the uniﬁed
opinion of the interlocutors involved in a given conversation, is highly problematic and
profoundly trapped within the structure of power. Romand Coles suggests that
Habermas’s optimistic view of “consensus” is a major weakness in his theory when
compared to Adomo’s profound appreciation of “dissent” as an essential component of
dialogical relationships (28-32). Adomo proposes to cultivate thoughtful dissent that
recalls “the untruth of identity.” In a similar vein, Foucault’s interrogation of the concept

of “consensus” as a technique of power reveals a hidden agenda underneath the

harmonious surface of agreement in a quite convincing way. Foucault is reluctant to

 

" In the global context, these communication blocks could pose more serious problems, and thus,
Habermas’s theory is frequently criticized for its tendency to reinforce the hegemony of Western
philosophy. He attempts to revive Western thought not as Western thought, but on a universalistic basis,
but the ﬁrst-person pronoun that often appears in his writing seems to designate only “we Europeans.”
Although I do not delve into this problem within the limited scope of my dissertation, it certainly
constitutes a central issue in Habermas’s theory. For a relevant discussion, see Li.

endorse the seemingly benign principle of consensus because he sees that the other side
of consensus is domination. According to Foucault, consensus could contain artiﬁce and
participates in the defeat of otherness.5

Emmanuel Levinas’s intersubjective ethics also puts an emphasis on the dangers
inherent in the seemingly established consensus. Suggesting linguistic openness as a pre-
condition of genuine intersubjectivity, Levinas proposes to respect “otherness” in the
Other. Especially, with regard to the conversation poem, Levinas’s distinction between
the “saying” and the “said” is highly suggestive. While the act of “saying” exposes
oneself to ethical sincerity and enables a state of openness to the Other, the “said”
reduces the “saying” to totalizing closure. The “saying” foregrounds the relation to its
addressee, whereas the “said” obscures the intersubjective function of language. This
distinction, which bears some resemblance to the distinction between narrative and lyric,
effectively illuminates the most important, yet problematic aspect of the conversation
poem. The structure of the conversation poem simulates a conversation in process and
thereby aspires toward narrative and its progress on the temporal plane. Simultaneously,
however, the conversation poem displays an opposing impulse toward a lyrical closure in
which the act of “saying” succumbs to the absolute power of the “said.” Therefore, the
“conversation” in the conversation poem frequently falls short of becoming a “genuine”
dialogue.6

Such a failure in establishing a “genuine” dialogue constitutes an interesting problem in

 

5 For the discussion of issues between Habermas and Foucault, see Kelly, Mumby, and Dumm.

6 With regard to this point, it is useful to note Donald G. Marshall’s short, but keen insights into the
difference between “conversation” and “dialogue.” Marshall envisions the modern change from “dialogue”
to “conversation” as a decline (90). Unlike “dialogue,” which promotes genuine debates, “conversation”
frequently degenerates into the suppression of controversy, either to achieve the totalitarian monotone or in
accord with an internalized bureaucratic ideal of minimizing social friction.

many conversation poems, which typically assign the role of the auditor/interlocutor to a
female household member of the poet/speaker and reveal apparent gender disparity in the
course of communication. The unequal power relationship between the male poet and the
female auditor in some conversation poems has recently attracted the attention of many
feminist critics, who have shown how poems such as “The Eolian Harp” and “Tintern
Abbey” suppress the female auditor. In a similar vein, feminist sociologists and
philosophers such as Nancy Fraser, Seyla Benhabib, and Marie Fleming have designated
the problem of gender as one of the weakest spots in Habermas’s seemingly universalist
theory. For example, Frazer criticizes Habermas for insufﬁciently stressing that “actions
coordinated by normatively secured consensus in the male-headed family are actions
regulated by power” (38). Similarly opposed to the “consensus” that conceals
differences, Benhabib proposes to sustain “open-ended” moral dialogue and practice the
reversibility of perspectives rather than to reach a closure.

The recent development of feminist ethics and its unique view of intersubjectivity
revise and supplement Habermas’s theory. Carol Gilligan, Nancy Chodorow, and
Annette Baier hold a similar view in that all of them base their model of intersubj ectivity
on feminine relationships and oppose it to the masculine model of control and

dominance.7

Following their cue, in my discussion of individual conversation poems, I
will attend to subtle strategies of control and dominance expressed through the poets’ use

of language and speech acts. Curiously, these strategies employed by male poets have

 

7 Habermas’s position on this distinction between feminine and masculine relationships is complex. He
appears to emphasize the shared value between the two by situating the feminist movement in the tradition
of bourgeois liberation movements. Yet, he also recognizes particular values inherent in the feminine
“ethic of care” in the following: “The historical legacy of the sexual division of labor, to which women
were subjected in the nuclear bourgeois family, also gives them access to virtues, to a set of values that are
both in contrast and complementary to the male world and at odds with the one-sided rationalized praxis of

everyday life” (The Theory 2:394).
y

been perceptively observed by their female counterparts and even by their male
descendants in the later generation. For example, in her later days, Dorothy Wordsworth
produced various rewrites of “Tintern Abbey” that point to the problematic aspects in her
brother’s original poem and supply an altemative to the suspicious consensus evoked at
the end of “Tintern Abbey.” Similarly, poets such as Browning, Hardy, and Hughes
often problematize the issue of male dominance by rewriting Romantic conversation
poetry in their own ways. Through my reading of these poems, I will attempt to reveal
possible dangers residing in seemingly innocuous conversations and thereby reﬁne
Habermas’s theory.

Yet, his theory, more than any other theory dealing with intersubjectivity, remains
advantageous in investigating the conversation poem in two ways. First, Habermas’s
theory offers the historical dimension to the discussion of various forms of
intersubjectivity in the conversation poem. The intersubjective orientation in some
original examples of the Romantic conversation poem needs to be situated in the
historical context of the late eighteenth century in order to be adequately understood.
Habermas’s highly historicized theory of modernity and the public sphere informs us of
the cultural conditions behind the Romantics’ aspiration toward intersubjectivity and their
anxiety about the potential subordination to the hegemony of the other.

In addition, Habermas’s view of modernity enables one to see the undeniable
continuity from the late eighteenth century to the contemporary world. Habennas’s
notion of the “incomplete (or unﬁnished)” project of modernity repudiates the
postmodernist understanding of modernity as a monologic moment of history simply

characterized by the dominance of instrumental rationality. While Habermas also agrees

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that instrumental rationality colonized the entire lifeworld in the period of modernity, he
seeks the ultimate potential of modernity in its simultaneous tendency to critique and
counter the function of instrumental reason. Therefore, according to Habermas, the
postmodern disavowal of instrumental reason is not a brand new phenomenon, but a
realization of modernity’s latent potential. In this aspect, Habermas’s theory coincides
with that of Anthony Giddens, who argues that the postmodern critique of modernity
should be understood as “modernity coming to understand itself” rather than the
overcoming of modernity (48).

Following Habermas’s and Giddens’s broader understanding of modernity, I will show
that the poetry of the “modern” period from the late eighteenth century to contemporary
days share certain common elements; it evolves out of the “modern” world in which the
logic of instrumental rationality holds its dominance. This fundamental continuity needs
to be accentuated within the history of the conversation poem, since the deployment of
the poetic form itself in the works of later poets is a conscious act of revisiting the poetry
of the Romantic poets and thereby re-living the past. In this sense, the history of the
conversation poem is always “conversational” in itself and should be investigated with
heightened interest in its intertextual dimension. As will be made clear in my later
discussion, from the very beginning of the poetic form’s history, Coleridge and
Wordsworth wrote their conversation poetry in a highly dialogic context, in which each
other’s presence performed an indispensable role. Even when the apparent auditor of a
given conversation poem is designated as a different person, the ﬁgure of the friend/rival
often emerges as a true recipient of the poetic utterance in the subtext. This feature of the

conversation poem is ceaselessly reproduced in the poetry of later poets, ranging from

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Shelley’s evocation of Wordsworth in the early nineteenth century to Charles
Tomlinson’s allusion to Coleridge in the late twentieth century. My readings of
individual poems will be alert to such intertextual connections in the history of the poetic
mode, aiming at an eventual mapping of poets and their historical circumstances with
regard to the overarching project of modernity.

Second, Habermas’s detailed account of “communicative action” illuminates some of
the most signiﬁcant, yet problematic aspects of the conversation poem. According to
Habermas’s theory, linguistic interaction can be viewed as a comprehensive act of
adhering to the following four models of communicative action: 1) “the teleological
model” that presupposes a relation between the individual and the objective world, 2)
“the norm-guided model” that relates the individual to the social world through his
utterance, 3) “the dramaturgical model” that reveals the individual’s subjectivity and
represents his subjective world to an audience, and ﬁnally, 4) “the communicative
model” that requires “a cooperative process of interpretation aimed at attaining
intersubjectively recognized deﬁnitions of situations.” Habermas also clariﬁes that these
four models are not complete when separated from the other models; the comprehensive
way of envisioning the models from the perspective of communicative ethics is necessary
for correcting and revising the traditional view of the individual models.

The ﬁrst “teleological” model points to epistemological problems that are located at the
heart of the conversation poem. Through the scrupulous documentation of the mind’s
response to the outer world, the typical conversation poem displays its profound interest
in epistemological issues that have obsessed modern writers. The second “norm-guided”

model refers to the actual conversational dimension of linguistic interaction. and when

18

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applied to the understanding of the conversation poem, it directs attention to the
intersubjective relationship between the speaker and the auditor. The next
“dramaturgical” model also sheds light on one of the most interesting features of the
conversation poem: the fact that the most important conversation taking place in the
conversation poem is actually one’s conversation with oneself. The intense ethnographic
gaze at one’s subjectivity characterizes the poetic mode and constitutes an indispensable
dimension in its discussion. Finally, the “communicative” model pertains to the most
comprehensive stage of intersubjective relations, which, in case of poetic communication,
can be translated into the poet’s linguistic interaction with his audience. Historically, the
late eighteenth century witnessed the birth of the expanded “public sphere,” and the
institutionalization of the literary market through the establishment of such apparatuses as
journals, magazines, literary critics, and circulation libraries conditioned the
transformation of the “public sphere,” in and for which the poets were writing. Many
conversation poems display their authors’ anxiety over the changing circumstances of the
literary market that regulated the production and consumption of literary works. In order
to effectively investigate the signiﬁcance of the conversation poem with regard to “the
project of modernity,” I intend to devote a separate chapter of my dissertation to each of
the above models and illuminate each important aspect of the conversation poem from

the standpoint of communicative ethics.

The following chapters of this dissertation respectively address issues and problems

raised in constructing a theory of the conversation poem and understanding the history of

the poetic mode based on the theory. I am aware that the complex nature of those issues

 

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and problems resists a neat division and classiﬁcation, and therefore, I intend to allow
some overlapping elements to reappear in a different guise in a later chapter.

The ﬁrst chapter tackles problems residing in a “formal” discussion of Romantic
literature in general, and the conversation poem in particular. Romanticism is known as a
cultural phenomenon that counters the dominance of formal elements in literary practice,
and this knowledge often halts a generic approach to Romantic literature. Although, in
my dissertation, the Romantics’ aversion to the inherited literary modes functions as the
basis upon which I can apply the intersubjective ethics of Habermas and others to their
poetry, I simultaneously suggest that such a break from the traditional cultural forms
ultimately constitutes another kind of form, one engaged in a process by which it
constantly cancels out and remakes itself. In order to grasp the complexity of this new
kind of formalism, I will look at ways in which various critical approaches to
Romanticism----the New Criticism, Deconstruction, and the New Historicism--- have
ignored the idea of “Romantic form” and also ways in which recent formal discussions of
Romantic literature have introduced a new paradigm of genre theory characterized by its
emphasis on change and ﬂexibility. My view of the conversation poem primarily stresses
the fact that this poetic mode is, like many other Romantic forms of literature, a product
of intense generic experimentation. This generic experimentation, in turn, serves as a
motivation behind many later poets’ rewrites of the Romantic conversation poem, which
repeatedly attempt to unravel various problems raised in original examples of the poetic
form.

In Chapter 2, I will investigate epistemological issues that constitute an important

theme in the conversation poem. Following Habermas’s suggestion that the relationship

20

between humans and the world should be reconsidered as an extension of the relationship
between human beings, my discussion will focus on ways in which the epistemological
vision of a given poem is contingent upon its ethical subtext. In this chapter, I propose to
abandon the “goal-oriented” worldview that has been dominant in the modern period and
to understand the world or nature primarily as an entity “shared” between humans. As I
will elaborate later, this attempt to locate the perception of the world not within
individual consciousness, but in the communal space created by collective consciousness,
is informed by ecological criticism and feminist criticism, in addition to the
intersubjective ethics of Habermas and others. The chapter will also explore in detail the
implication of poetic forms for ethics and epistemology; for I believe that formal
elements, at times even more than the content of poetic utterance, attest eloquently to the
ideological connotation of the text. Especially, I will discuss how Wordsworth’s and
Shelley’s lyrical poetry is created in a complex relation to the conversation poem. The
shift from the conversation poem, a hybrid genre between lyric and narrative, to a lyrical
form that has expelled narrative elements from the poetic space, indicates a certain break
in both the ethical and the epistemological dimensions. After the discussion of this break,
an ethical-epistemological reading of Charles Tomlinson’s contemporary poetry, which
consciously attempts to recover the project of the conversation poem, will function as a
conclusion to this chapter.

Chapter 3 focuses on issues stemming from the intersubjective relationship between
human beings in the conversation poem. As the invocation of an auditor is the major
mechanism by which the poetic mode inserts the dimension of intersubj ectivity into

textual space, I will devote most of the chapter to exploring various ways of envisioning

21

the speaker-auditor relations in the conversation poem. Coleridge’s and Wordsworth’s
original conversation poems usually designate a female family member as the auditor of
the poetic utterance, entailing complex power dynamics in the intersubjective
relationship. The Romantic poets’ manipulation of language aiming at enhancing the
force of their own artistic imagination at the expense of a potentially democratic
exchange with their interlocutors provides a strong example that reveals problems latent
in Habermas’s somewhat optimistic construction of communicative ethics. In order to
effectively illuminate these problems, I will draw upon alternative views of
intersubjectivity developed by Levinas and feminist philosophers such as Benhabib,
Fleming, and Fraser. A disucussion of feminist critics’ works on Coleridge and
Wordsworth and a reading of Dorothy Wordsworth’s poetry will offer additional
criticism to the male-centered tendency in Habermas as well as in the Romantic poets.
Yet, despite all these attacks on Habermas’s theory of intersubjectivity, I think that, in the
ﬁnal analysis, later poets’ various responses to the Romantic conversation poem, which
rethink the problematic speaker-auditor relationship and create a more egalitarian kind of
poetic communication, attest to the ultimate potential of modernity to cast a reﬂective
gaze upon itself and enact a regenerative project. In the latter part of the chapter, I will
investigate how Browning, Hardy, and Ted Hughes revise the conversation poem in their
own ways, aspiring toward a poetics of genuine “communicative ethics.”

In the fourth chapter, I will deal with the problem of subjectivity within the framework
of intersubjectivity. Speciﬁcally, I am interested in examining ways in which the shift to
the paradigm of intersubjectivity alters and reshapes one’s approach to subjectivity.

According to Habermas, the subjectivity formation of a participant in communication

22

necessarily involves a certain degree of reflexivity by which one utilizes the other’s
perspective for self-assurance and/or self-criticism. This view of subjectivity not as a
uniﬁed consciousness that functions as the supreme center of the universe, but as a split
consciousness that is accustomed to self-scrutiny, appears more appropriate for the
understanding of the dramatic monologue rather than the conversation poem. However, I
argue that, although this generic tendency is difﬁcult to overcome, conversation poems
such as “Frost at Midnight” or The Prelude display some efforts toward an ethnographic
self-examination. In later poets’ texts that intentionally revise the conversation poem,
such efforts take the form of formal mechanism by which one can indicate the existence
of an alternative consciousness more effectively. Shelley’s Julian and Maddalo serves as
a good early example; through naming the madman’s monologue a “conversation” and
offering alternative ways of interpreting the conversation, Shelley’s poem attempts to
rewrite the conversation poem in its own way. In terms of indicating the existence of
plural consciousness, Clough’s Amours de Voyage both continues and revises the
conversation poem, centering on a single speaker’s utterance, yet simultaneously
allowing the reader to overhear the third party’s view of the centraI speaker. Likewise, in
the modern period, Yeats produced conversational poems in which the critical gaze upon
the speaker’s self determines the formal pattern and also constitutes one of the most
important themes.

The last chapter will address issues involved in the communication process between the
text and the audience. So long as poetry is composed to be read, the text’s relationship
with its audience constitutes the ultimate stage of poetic communication. In investigating

this dimension of the conversation poem, I will draw upon Habermas’s theory of the

23

“public sphere,” which I believe is highly conducive to the historical/sociological
understanding of poetic form. According to Habermas’s documentation of the changes
occurring to the public sphere, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the
once narrow bourgeois public sphere was witnessing a large-scale expansion. The public
sphere, which, in the earlier period, involved only limited segments of the European
population, mainly educated, propertied men. was expanding to include more and more
participants, and this inclusivity, in turn, brought degeneration in the quality of discourse.
With the impoverishment of the public sphere and with the transfomiation of the once
intimate relationship between cultural producers and consumers, the public sphere was
quickly becoming an arena for commercialistic exchanges rather than a setting for
rational-critical debate. Interestingly, consumer-goods advertising started to interpellate
its subject as feminine, as the sexual division of domestic labor assigned to women the
role of the consumer.8 The literary market was not an exception; mass literacy and the
cultural apparatuses such as the circulating library created circumstances under which the
author needed to cater to feminine desire. The Romantic male poets experienced a
certain anxiety in this cultural condition, as is revealed in conversation poems such as
Coleridge’s “The Nightingale” and Wordsworth’s “To Joanna.” Keats’s two Hyperions
also deal with this anxiety, although the formal aspects of Keats’s poem point to a
different strategy in coping with it. In the Victorian period, Matthew Arnold produced
conversational poems that focus on the male poet’s fear of the female audience. Lastly, I

will look at T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and discuss how this

 

8 Habermas’s theory of the “public sphere” is often criticized for ignoring women’s role in the public
sphere and thereby missing an important link between ofﬁcial economy and family. For detailed
discussion of this omission in Habermas, see Fraser 43.

24

problematic relationship between the poem and its audience was transformed in the

modern period.

I. The Conversation Poem and the Ethics of the Poetic
Form

Within recent literary criticism, applying philosophical/sociological theories to the
reading of literature has almost become a convention. In fact, such an application even
appears to constitute a necessary condition for a well-conceived (and well-received)
critical work on literary texts. Yet, at times, this prevalent practice conceals theoretical
difﬁculties that arise naturally from translating one particular type of discourse into
another. Although current theories of poststructuralism tend to blur the distinction
between fact and ﬁction or between the literal and the ﬁgurative, such an attempt to
overturn the ideology inherent in the maintenance of the traditionally rigid distinction
between various types of discourse does not lead necessarily to the conclusion that the
literary discourse can be completely dissolved into other kinds of discourse; for, as
Habermas argues, the separation of art from religious, political, scientiﬁc and other
concerns that occurred in the eighteenth century is not easily reversible.

If so, how can one justify an interpretation of literary texts from the perspective of
philosophical/sociological theories of ethics? In David Haney’s words, such an
interpretation raises “the question of how the kind of knowledge used in approaching
ethical life is related to the kind of knowledge involved in the production and reception of
literary works” (“Aesthetics and Ethics” 32). I do not intend to respond to this charged
question with an answer that provides a generalized argument regarding the relationship
between literature and ethics; rather, my answer is limited to the scope of my own

project, that concerning whether or not one can make a feasible connection between the

26

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literary mode of the conversation poem and the ethical theory of intersubjectivity.

At ﬁrst sight, the connection might appear hard to sustain, as the realm of the
“everyday” in which Habermas situates his theory is certainly distanced from the domain
of poetry and literature. As Gary Shapiro states, “by now it is a rather standard
observation that Habermas lacks an aesthetic theory” (42), and Habermas’s sophisticated
theory on communicative ethics, therefore, is not originally intended to be a tool for
interpreting art. Yet, despite my awareness ofHabermas’s reluctance to deal with literary
texts, I still argue that his theory offers tremendous insights into the reading of the
conversation poem, precisely because the particular poetic form expresses a worldview
that is highly compatible with the intersubj ective ethics of Habermas. In positing that
literary form is a visible manifestation of a particular worldview, I follow the Marxist
view of the relationship between form and content. Perhaps the most classical form of
such a view can be found in Lukacs, who states that the problem of content always
converts into the problem of form (52), relying on Marx’s artistic ideal that assumes an
interfusion of form and content. Terry Eagleton and Fredric Jameson adopt similar
premises, sophisticating the argument by employing the notion of ideology for the reﬁned
discussion of the “content” of an art form. My argument is in line with these Marxist
theorists, yet in choosing to use the term “ethics” rather than “ideology,” I intend to place
a little more emphasis on the notion of human agency than on the structural elements
usually stressed by the term “ideology.” My point is not that the production of a
particular art form is solely based on conscious choices made by its author(s); rather, I
would like to argue that cultural/ structural factors enter into the domain of art through

the mediation of the author(s), whose ethics reinforces and/or counters the dominant

27

ideology of the contemporary period.9

The term that summarizes the ethics of the Romantic poets expressed through the
poetic form of the conversation poem is “sympathy,” the notion that radically challenges
bourgeois individualism, yet simultaneously acknowledges difﬁculties inherent in such
challenges. I think that this poetics of “sympathy,” shared to a degree between Coleridge
and Wordsworth, parallels current theories of intersubjectivity in the following ways:
ﬁrst, it places a high value on interaction and relationships, envisioning the achievement
of empathy and mutual understanding as the highest ideal. As in Habermas’s theory of
communicative ethics, the connection with other human beings is constantly invoked and
explored in the conversation poem. The auditor’s presence constitutes a condition
necessary for poetic production, determining the unique formal elements of the poetic
mode.

Second, Coleridge and Wordsworth take a “linguistic turn” in reinventing poetry in the
cultural conditions of the late eighteenth century. They both believe that the
revitalization of language enables the renewal of human consciousness, enacting a
critique of contemporary language as a means of purifying the medium of
communication. Especially, in Wordsworth’s case, the “linguistic” turn takes the form of
returning to an “ideal speech community” composed of “low and rustic lives.” This
move is reminiscent of Habermas’s attempt to evoke a similarly regulative speech
community that can offer a model of idealized communicative possibilities. Unlike some

other poems included in the Lyrical Ballads, the language of the conversation poem is not

 

 

9 In this respect, I am in sympathy with Julie Ellison’s position regarding the choice of the term “ethics” or
“ideology.” Opposed to J. Hillis Miller’s “either/or” construction that deﬁnes ethics as “the
nonideological,” Ellison sees clear “points of contact” between ethical and ideological critique (108-9). As
she observes, “literary ethics is constituted by the experience of subjective response to the moral content of

28

a conscious replica of linguistic features of “low and rustic lives.” Yet, the Romantic
poets’ attempt to democratize poetic diction nonetheless runs through the conversation
poem, which explores discursive alternatives to traditional poetic discourse.

Lastly, the conversation poem struggles to break free from contemporary modes of
literature, both the decorative poetry of neo-classicism and the overly emotional writings
of sentimentalism. Although this break is partially intended to ensure a degree of
originality necessary for the survival within the competitive literary market, Coleridge’s
and Wordsworth’s condemnation of the above literary forms is based ﬁrmly on ethical
grounds. As writers who cherish their mission of educating the general public, they see
in these contemporary modes of literature a strong tendency to deteriorate morality.
Subsequently, the Romantic poets search for a new poetic form that can contribute to the
promotion of ethical sentiments in the reading audience, providing a good example for
the Habermasian view of the relationship between art and morality.

Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s ethical ideas contained in the poetic form of the
conversation poem, however, have not been sufﬁciently recognized by their readers and
critics, for the prevalent view of Romanticism as a literary movement centering on the
notion of the individual has effaced the ethical dimension in Romantic poetry. In a
similar vein, the conversation poem has been read as pure “lyric,” stripped of its formal
elements that actually denote both its desire toward a communal experience and the
anxiety accompanying the desire. Such a disregard of the signiﬁcance of poetic form is
largely due to the widespread tendency to refrain from formal discussions of

Romanticism. From the New Criticism to the New Historicism, various critical

 

ideological positions.”

29

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approaches to Romantic literature have consistently applied the notion of “organicism” to
the reading of poetry, constantly misinterpreting the Romantics’ refusal of inherited
literary forms as a sign indicating the absence of any formal design. This
misunderstanding, in turn, effects insufﬁcient attention to ethical implications of formal
matters.

The purpose of this chapter is to revive formal discussions of the conversation poem
and thereby rediscover the ethics expressed through the medium of the particular poetic
form. For this purpose, I will ﬁrst revisit Coleridge’s and Wordsworth’s ideas about their
own poetic form, using the Biographia Literaria and the “Preface” to the Lyrical Ballads
as main texts. Then, I will discuss ways in which various critical schools ranging from
the New Criticism to the New Historicism have distorted those ideas through their
misconstruction or disregard of formal issues. Fortunately, the recent revival of interest
in poetic form of Romanticism has been attempting to correct such mistaken attitudes
toward formal matters, and I will devote part of this chapter to the introduction of several
critical works that reconsider the implication of poetic form for the understanding of
Romanticism. The last part of this chapter will discuss various theories of intertextuality
for discovering an effective way of dealing with the new notion of the poetic form

characterized by its continuous self-revision.

1. The Poetics of “Sympathy” and its Discontents:
Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey”

Recent books on Wordsworth and Coleridge such as Regina Hewitt’s The Possibilities

30

of Society and Richard E. Matlak’s The Poetryof Relationship develop cogent arguments

 

that rebuke the popular notion of the Romantic poet as an aloof, detached individual.
Focusing instead on the ﬁrst-generation Romantic poets’ emphasis on interaction and
relationship, they reinvent the poetics of “sympathy,” which inspired much of early
Romantic writing. Some of the passages on which Hewitt and Matlak ground their

discussions appear in Wordsworth’s “Preface” to the Lyrical Ballads, the paradigmatic,

 

yet contradictory prose, where the poet attempts to deﬁne his poetics, relying on the

notion of sympathy. For example, Wordsworth states the poet’s mission as follows:

What then does the Poet? He considers man and the objects that surround him
as acting and re-acting upon each other, so as to produce an inﬁnite complexity
of pain and pleasure; he considers life as contemplating this with a certain
quantity of immediate knowledge, with certain convictions, intuitions, and
deductions which by habit become of the nature of intuitions; he considers him
as looking upon this complex scene of ideas and sensations, and ﬁnds
everywhere objects that immediately excite in him sympathies, which, from the

necessities of his nature, are accompanied by an overbalance of enjoyment (75).

In this passage, Wordsworth declares that a poet’s vocation lies in the enhancement of
human beings’ capability of sympathizing with objects of perception, whether they are
fellow men or inanimate things. A poet’s ability to “ﬁnd objects that excite sympathies”
is communicated to his audience by means of language, and ultimately transformed into
the reader’s receptive power in his daily life. Wordsworth claims that “the Poet binds
together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over
the whole earth, and over all the time (“Preface” 77),” by fully performing his duty of

promoting “sympathy” in the reader’s mind.

31

“Sympathy,” in its eighteenth-century sense, refers to “fellow-feeling” that creates a

 

link between the individual and others. Shaftesbury, in his Characteristics of Men,
explains that “in the Passions and Affections of particular Creatures, there is a constant
relation to the Interest of a Species, or common Nature” (2:78). As many of his
successors acknowledge, “sympathy” in Shaftesbury represents one of his numerous
attempts to cope with the danger of individualism inherent in Locke’s epistemology.
Locke, the most inﬂuential English philosopher in the eighteenth century, asserts that the
individual’s knowledge of the world relies on his sensory perception. This assertion
certainly possesses a degree of emancipatory power, since it marks a break from the
traditional belief in received ideas; according to Locke, it is the individual who is
responsible for his own perception of the world. This liberating notion, however, values
the individual over the community, and refuses to offer a link between individuals. In
relation to Locke’s trust in epistemological self-reliance, Shaftesbury’s emphasis on
“sympathy” attempts to restore the lost community by attending to the individual’s moral
sense that enables him to get beyond his own experiences. '0

The discussion of “sympathy” reaches its culmination in Adam Smith’s The Theory of

 

Moral Sentiments. As a founder of modern economics, Smith aims at the reconciliation
between the individual’s pursuit of his own desire and the common good by resorting to
the notion of “sympathy”: “How selﬁsh soever man may be supposed, there are evidently
some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their
happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of

seeing it” (3). Smith’s “sympathy” requires that every individual exert his power of

 

’0 For a general discussion of Locke and Shaftesbury, see Hewitt, Wordsworth and the Empirical Dilemma
1-5 and 21-23. See also Engell 17-25.

32

“imagination” and get access to an analogous experience of another’s perception. For

example, he envisions the relationship between imagination and sympathy as follows:

As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no
idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we
ourselves should feel in the like situation... It is the impressions of our own
senses only, not those of his, which our imaginations copy. By the imagination
we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same
torrnents, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the
same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations, and even
feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them.

<3-4)

Since another’s perception is not available to the individual, “imagination” should
function as an alternative means to endow the individual with a vicarious experience of
another’s feelings and ideas.

The ethical implication of “imagination” underscored in Smith’s theory also surfaces
in Coleridge’s famous passage in the Biographia Literaria, where he posits the distinction
between “fancy” and “imagination.” Coleridge’s main point in separating “imagination,“
especially the “secondary imagination,” from “fancy” consists in the addition of “the
conscious will” to the faculty of imagination (167). As David Haney interprets, through
the insertion of ethical intention into the process of poetic creation, the passage responds
effectively to the Wordsworthian claim that the affective dimension of poetry can heal an
ethically impoverished culture (“Aesthetics and Ethics” 33).

The emphasis on the affective function of poetry and the sympathetic fusion between

individuals that can be achieved through a poetic experience constitutes an essential

33

OI]

{of

dimension in the poetics of Coleridge and Wordsworth, and serves as a signiﬁcant link
between their poetry and the current theories of intersubj ectivity. Through their
exploration of an imaginary correspondence between individuals, the Romantic poets
attempt to reach a fundamental interaction between self and other. Intersubj ective
connections and communal experiences are repeatedly invoked in the early poetry of
Wordsworth and Coleridge, who, in their real life as well. strived to form a community of
their own.

For the Romantic poets, language is the very medium through which one can regenerate
one’s consciousness and interact with other. As Habermas discovers ethical possibilities
in the everyday use of language, Wordsworth and Coleridge also see the potential of the
communal in ordinary speech acts. In Olivia Smith’s succinct words, the Lyrical Ballads
challenged “the alleged dichotomy between primitive and reﬁned language” and also “the
dichotomy between literary and vernacular language” (208). Wordsworth’s and
Coleridge’s attack on the elitist tradition of poetry and the artiﬁciality of the poetic
language11 denotes an important turn to “ordinary” language, and especially, in the case
of Wordsworth, this turn takes the form of appealing to the language of the rural

community:

The language... of these (low and rustic) men is adopted... because such

 

” While many critics acknowledge Wordsworth’s radical critique of the “literary language,” they tend to
deny Coleridge’s interest in the same project. For example, limiting his scope of study to Wordsworth’s
experimental narrative poems, Don H. Bialostosky interprets Coleridge’s later objection to Wordsworth’s
use of the rustic poor’s language as a “more intelligent” Neoclassicist’s reaction toward Wordsworth’s
revolutionary poetics (“Coleridge’s Interpretation” 27). The difference between Wordsworth’s and
Coleridge’s ideas of language is certainly an issue of great interest, but I believe that the difference still
allowed room for their shared project of revamping the language by resorting to “the ordinary.” The
conversation poetry is one of many examples that exhibit the convergence of their ideas. For related
discussions, see Goodson, “Romantic Theory”; Magnuson, Coleridge and Wordsworth; and Roe.

34

men hourly communicates with the best objects from which the best part of
language is originally derived; and because, from their rank in society and the
sameness and narrow circle of their intercourse, being less under the inﬂuence
of social vanity they convey their feelings and notions in simple and
unelaborated expressions. Accordingly, such a language, arising out of repeated
experience and regular feelings, is a more permanent, and a far more
philosophical language, than that which is frequently substituted for it by
Poets... (“Preface” 60-61).

Although it is questionable how accurately the language of the Lyrical Ballads
reproduces the language actually used in such rural communities, it is important to
understand that Wordsworth’s radical argument in the above passage does not necessarily
point to the mimetic quality of poetic diction. As Wordsworth himself acknowledges in
the statement that the language is “puriﬁed indeed from what appear to be its real defects,
from all lasting and rational causes of dislike or disgust” (“Preface” 61), there is always a
certain undeniable distance between the language of poetry and that of the “low and
rustic” life. Yet, nonetheless, Wordsworth’s evocation of the low community and its
language performs an ethical function in that the hypothetical potential of the idealized
linguistic community can lend a “critical ﬁction,” by which urban readers measure their
own mechanized use of language.l2 In this respect, Wordsworth’s turn to the rural
neighborhood is reasonably strategic, as is Habermas’s endorsement of the regulative
ideal of a speech community. In order to achieve the goal of transforming forms of
linguistic interaction for the complete realization of communicative possibilities,

Habermas conceives an ideal speech community constituted by fully unconstrained

 

'2 The “critical ﬁction” is the term used by Thomas Pfau in his pragmatic reading of the “Preface” (135).
Although his focus is not exactly on the ethical dimension of Wordsworth’s argument, Pfau’s essay is
certainly helpful in comprehending the locus of Wordsworth’s discussion of poetic diction.

35

discourse. Yet, such a community is a “regulative” rather than a “constitutive” idea
(Shapiro 44), which can offer necessary ethical criticism to everyday linguistic practice.
Wordsworth’s evocation of the agrarian community, however, is not an apparent
linguistic feature of the conversation poem, and that partially explains why poems such as
“Tintern Abbey” have been isolated from its context and separated from other
experimental poems contained in the Lyrical Ballads. Since the Victorian age, most of
Coleridge’s and Wordsworth’s conversation poems have been understood as examples of
lofty meditative lyric, sharply distinguished from the derivative “ballads” and “tales” by
the poets. Yet, nonetheless, just as in the case of creating those narrative poems, the ﬁrst-
generation Romantic poets’ conception of the conversation poem reﬂects their negative
judgment on current literary forms and their subsequent struggle toward a discovery of an
alternative poetic mode. Thus, although conversation poems are usually written in
traditional blank verse, they refuse to adopt the currently circulated form of ﬁgurative
language; for, as Wordsworth himself explains eloquently, “many expressions, in
themselves proper and beautiful, have been foolishly repeated by bad Poets, till such
feelings of disgust are connected with them” (“Preface” 66). This misuse of language
constitutes one of the causes that “blunt the discriminating powers of the mind” and
“reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor” (“Preface” 64). The metaphor of “paralysis”
in “savage torpor” associated with the pseudo-artistic abuse of language resembles the
trope of “petriﬁcation” that Emmanuel Levinas employs in order to designate the danger
in ﬁgurative language. For Levinas, while “straightforwardness,” which reveals rather
than hides self and other alike, is a virtue in intersubjective communication, ﬁguration

should be condemned because its freezes the persons involved in dialogue. Figural

36

language “petriﬁes” the “face” that needs to be mobile and thus becomes violence. Just
as Levinas’s opposition to “rhetoric” expresses his concern for genuine intersubjective
relations, Coleridge’s and Wordsworth’s evasion of overtly ﬁgurative language and their
adoption of plainer poetic diction in the conversation poem conveys the poets’ attempts
to reinvent language suitable for their poetics of “sympathy.” Poetry, according to the
two Romantic poets, should contribute to the enlargement of the sympathetic capability
of the mankind.

Yet, Coleridge and Wordsworth are well aware that this poetics of “sympathy”
involves complex questions and problems within the framework of the eighteenth-century
epistemological and moral theories. For example, Shaftesbury’s moral theory, which
provides links between individulas, is also aware of its own uneasiness: he acknowledges
that “there is a plain and absolute Opposition” between “the pursuing of the common
interest or publick Good thro the Affections of one kind” and “the Attainment of private
Good thro the Affections of another” (I: 79; Shaftesbury’s emphases). Thus, in
Shaftesbury’s moral scheme, there still exists an undeniable tension between “sympathy”
and the danger of self-projection. Adam Smith’s theory also recognizes the limit of
“imagination”: “Mankind, though naturally sympathetic, never conceive, for what has
befallen another, that degree of passion naturally animates the person principally
concerned. That imaginary change of situation, upon which their sympathy is founded, is
but momentary. The thought of their own safety, the thought that they themselves are not
really the sufferers, continually intrudes itself upon them”(22-23). “Imagination,” the
very medium to bring about “sympathy,” is susceptible to both temporality and self-

interest, and as a consequence, liable to be a projection of one’s own self rather than an

37

accurate reproduction of another’s situation.

This problematic aspect in the poetics of “sympathy” is apparent in the conversation
poem, in which, while the appeal to the auditor conditions poetic utterance, the auditor’s
silence simultaneously allows the speaker’s way of envisioning the “other” to dominate
the poetic space. Such a conﬂict-ridden response to the presence of the “other” shapes
the unique form of the conversation poem that attempts to accommodate the generic
components of both lyric and narrative and thus reveal a certain amount of anxiety in
between the two genres. The generic clash characterizes the conversation poem and
displays the poetic mode’s complicated attitude toward the problem of intersubjectivity.

Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” is a highly convenient example for a discussion of the
generic clash, especially because Wordsworth’s designation of Dorothy as his “former
self” exposes the ways in which the poet’s dependence on the “other” is conﬂated with
his imposition of selfhood on the “other.” In this sense, the trope of the “past self”
embodies the conversation poem’s constant replication of sameness and difference.
According to Elizabeth F ay’s brilliant analysis, “Tintern Abbey” operates on the basis of
a “double plotting.” Dorothy is notjust the sister-maiden addressed but a second or prior
self, a more naturalized self (25). Envisioned by the poet as partially self and partially
other, Dorothy exempliﬁes the kind of the auditor sought by the conversation poem,
which nonetheless generates the tension between lyrical centrality and intersubjective
orientation.

In recent years, many critics have emphasized the fact that Dorothy’s proper identity
evaporates as Wordsworth inscribes her into his own story. Although this is certainly a

fair observation, one also needs to note that Wordsworth’s recreation of his “past self” in

38

his sister is charged with fear and anxiety. Above all, the ﬁgure of the “past self” in
“Tintern Abbey” is primarily an alien “other,” who threatens to disrupt the poet’s vision
of continuity and permanence. The poet’s sense of distance from his “past self” is so
great that the poet initially ﬁnds it impossible even to depict it, as Wordsworth confesses
in the following lines: “I cannot paint/ What then I was” (11. 76-77). Thus, the ultimate
goal of the poem is to discover a way in which the poet may resolve or overcome the
discrepancy between the two versions of the self.

At first, Wordsworth attempts to rely on an economic discourse of gain and loss in

order to rationalize the “fallen” existence of his present self:

The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion; the tall rock,
The mountains, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms, were then to me
An appetite, a feeling and a love
That had no need of a remoter charm
By thought supplied, or any interest
Unborrowed from the eye. That time is past,
And all its aching joys are now no more,
And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this
Faint I, nor mourn, nor murmur; other gifts
Have followed --- for such loss, I would believe,
Abundant recompense.

(II. 76-89)

Through this rendition of his own spiritual economy, Wordsworth attempts to afﬁrm the

present state of his adult existence that lacks the kind of close, intuitive interaction with

39

nature he used to have in his younger days. In the ensuing lines, Wordsworth unfolds his
philosophical view of man-nature connection and advocates the power of the mature
mind that is able to recognize “A motion and a spirit that impels/ All thinking things, all
objects of all thought,/ And rolls through all things” (11. 101-103). The poet’s emphasis
on the epistemological fusion of the human mind and natural objects seems to suggest
that one ﬁnally learns to appreciate nature in spiritual ways after reaching the adult stage.
Yet, for all its eloquence and emphatic tone, the poet’s insistence of “abundant
recompense” fails to be persuasive when he exposes his doubts about the spiritual gain
that occurred during the ﬁve-year hiatus: “Nor, perchance, / If I were not thus taught,
should I the more/ Suffer my genial spirits to decay” (ll. 1 12-14). The complicated
syntax of these lines reveals how much the poet fears temporal progress, which
undermines his vision of continuity and saps his creative energy. Thus, in the last stanza
of the poem, Wordsworth resorts to an ethical discourse of intersubjectivity in order to
resolve his crisis. To be precise, his strategy here is to replace the temporally distanced

“self” with a more concrete, tangible, and sympathetic image of “other:”

For thou are with me, here, upon the banks
Of this fair river --- thou, my dearest friend,
My dear, dear friend, and in thy voice I catch
The language of my former heart, and read
My former pleasures in the shooting lights
Of thy wild eyes. Oh, yet a little while
May I behold in thee what I was once,
My dear, dear sister!

(11. 115-22)

40

In this fashioning of Dorothy as his “former self,” Wordsworth appeals to her compassion
as a source of comfort that may help overcome his sense of alienation and disconnection.
This moment appears to contain highly signiﬁcant implications for the discussion of
intersubjectivity. Above all, Wordsworth’s turn to his sister suggests that one’s
construction of selﬂtood is contingent upon one’s connection with “other.” Problems
within the poet’s self are addressed in an intersubjective context, and sympathy becomes
a major force that can cure the anxiety of isolated selﬂiood.

Yet, Wordsworth’s invocation of intersubjectivity in this final moment of“Tintern
Abbey” is ﬂawed in some ways from the very beginning, for the exchange between
Dorothy and the poet’s “former self” is inherently detrimental to the identity of Dorothy,
who becomes a mere object of interpretation. This does not mean that the difference
between Dorothy and the poet disappears and the two become conﬂated, as some critics
might argue. The interpersonal difference still exists in “Tintern Abbey,” but the real
problem is rather that the difference between the two separate human beings is deﬁned
only in Wordsworth’s own terms. As a result, Dorothy’s otherness is not perceived as a
whole, but only reduced to a certain functional difference, which can be used to
resuscitate the poet’s declining creative energy.

However, “Tintern Abbey” retains its unique poignancy by revealing rather than
concealing the poet’s project toward subordinating Dorothy’s existence to the poetic plot.
Even when Wordsworth equates his sister with his “former self,” his angst-ridden
language (Oh, yet a little while/ May I behold in thee what I was once, 11. 120-21)
intimates that this problematic equation will not hold for a long time; instead, it is only a

temporary delusion, as the poet admits. Thus, later in the same stanza. the poet confesses

41

that, in the future, he will “no more can hear/ Thy voice, nor catch from thy wild eyes
these gleams/ Of past existence” (11. 148-50).

Moreover, in the ﬁnal part of the poem, the complex formal structure indicates the
uneasy vacillation between the desire for a sympathetic relationship and the opposing

desire for self-dominance:

Nor wilt thou then forget
That, after many wanderings, many years
Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs
And the green pastoral landscape, were to me

More dear, both for themselves, and for thy sake.
(11. 156-60)

On the one hand, Wordsworth foregrounds the presence of the auditor by admitting that
the signiﬁcance of the natural scene lies with the experience shared between him and his
sister. Yet, on the other hand, Wordsworth undermines the textual status of the auditor,
when he attempts to impose the content of his perception on his sister. The syntactical
ambiguity, which saturates the sentence starting with “Nor wilt thou,” is perhaps due to
this ethical ambivalence that oscillates constantly between the genuine desire for
intersubjective connection and the seductive vision of self-supremacy. Does the negative
sentence construction underline the poet’s urgent need for other’s sympathetic
reinforcement? Or, does it connote the poet’s egotistical vision that precedes and negates

the “will” of the auditor?

42

2. The New Criticism and the idea of “Romantic Organicism”

While the form of the conversation poem embodies both the Romantic poets’ aspiration
toward a relationship with others and their desire for self-afﬁrmation, the widespread
tendency to avoid formal discussions of Romantic poetry has concealed the complex
ethical implications of the poetic form. Of course, critics’ unwillingness to provide
formal discussions of Romantic poetry can be partially ascribed to the Romantics’ own
evasion of inherited poetic forms. Yet, the ﬁrm establishment of the idea of “Romantic
organicism,” which tends to turn the reader’s attention away from formal matters and
underscore the formlessness of Romantic poetry, occurred in the early twentieth century.
With the introduction of the New Critical approach to literature and the rise of English
studies as an academic discipline, “Romanticism” became a virtual synonym with “Anti-
formalism.”

It may sound ironic to state that the New Criticism, widely regarded as the American
counterpart of formalism, ignored the matter of form in dealing with Romantic literature.
However, as Susan Wolfson explains, in its quest for a tightly-constructed poem that
resembles a “well-wrought urn,” the New Criticism limited its scope to particular poems
that smoothly ﬁt the agenda of the critical school. As a result, while preferring a few
relatively well-formed poems such as Blake’s and Wordsworth’s short early poems and
Keats’s Odes, the New Criticism left many long and/or fragmentary Romantic poems
virtually untouched. Those poems were merely classiﬁed as “lyric,” the genre that often
meant “formlessness” to the New Critics. Thus, Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn

Warren’s Understanding POCIQZ only contained a handful of Romantic poems as

43

examples of the authors’ critical approach. Revealingly, the collection did not include
any of the conversation poems, devoting its space only to shorter poems that were less
resistant to the New Critical method.

Moreover, various cultural/ social factors of the period promoted the tendency to
equate Romantic organicism with anti-formalism. In his article “The Institutional
Overdeterrnination of the Concept of Romanticism,” John Rieder explains the ways in
which the professionalization of literary studies and the bureacratization of the university
shaped the concept of Romanticism. As an academic discipline, literary studies had to
employ specialized analysis and commentary for the texts that were highly susceptible to
critical labor. Naturally, many Romantic poems that did not ﬁt into the systematic
scheme of the new discipline were excluded from intense critical scrutiny. Also, under
the pressure of the normative demands of academic institutions such as departments,
credit units, etc., the notion of Romanticism was reconstructed as a period-concept in
clear opposition to both the formulaic regularity of Neo-Classicism and the intellectual
design of Modernism.

Once established, the notion of “Romantic organicism,” which borders on the idea of
anti-formalism, has become dominant in various types of critical studies devoted to
Romantic literature. Although recent critical theories appear to unequivocally discredit
the New Criticism, in the actual practice, most of them still display a profound inﬂuence
of the New Criticism on their ways of approaching Romanticism. In this respect, The
New Criticism and Contemporary Literary Theog, a collection of essays that investigate
the “connections and continuities” between the New Criticism and recent critical theories,

has performed the important task of identifying links that connect the two seemingly

44

unrelated moments of literary criticism; especially, with regard to Romanticism, Scott
Simpkins’s essay contained in the collection effectively shows the ways in which the
inﬂuence of the New Criticism is mediated through M. H. Abrams’s implicit defense of
New Critical approaches.

Simpkins begins his argument with an observation that Abrams’s The Mirror and the
_La_mp_, which has served as a standard for Romantic studies for many years, reﬂects a
prominent strain in the New Criticism. Simpkins discovers Abrams’s undeniable
afﬁliation with the New Criticism in “his central contention regarding the Romantic shift
in focus away from the audience and toward the poet” (185). As Simpkins states, in ﬁg
Mirror and the Lamp, Abrams asserts that the audience does not occupy an important
position in the imagination of the Romantics and that Romantic literature is geared solely
toward creating and enhancing authorial privilege. Abrams therefore understands most of
Romantic poetry as “lyric,” the poetic mode most ﬁt for the period’s heightened interest
in the “artist” rather than the “audience.” Naturally, Abrams ignores the Romantic poets’
investments in generic experiments, for formal elements, which offer modes of
interpretation to the reading audience. should not carry much importance in his poet-
centered theory of Romanticism.

Abrams’s theorization of the expressive poetics of Romanticism seems to be founded
upon the statements of the Romantic poets themselves, but a closer look at the quotes on
which Abrams relies reveals that his theory reﬂects only a part, and that, a very selective
part of the true story. For example, Wordsworth’s well-known deﬁnition of poetry as
“the spontaneous overﬂow of powerful feeling,” which serves as the centerpiece of the

expressive theory in Abrams’s scheme, carries a wholly different meaning when properly

45

contextualized within Wordsworth’s “Preface.” Just before he mentions the famous
deﬁnition, Wordsworth considers the difference between his own poetry and that of his
contemporary poets and concludes that each of his poems has a “worthy purpose” (62).
As I already argued before, this “purpose” is none other than “to illustrate the manner in
which our feelings and ideas are associated in a state of excitement” and thereby to
cultivate the reader’s sensibility in order to develop the emphatic faculty of the general
public. Yet, Abrams states that Wordsworth’s remark on the audience is a mere lip-
service as the pleasure and proﬁt of the audience is an “automatic consequence of the
poet’s spontaneous overﬂow of feeling” (The Mirror and the Lamp 26, my emphasis).
Such a partial way of quoting from the “Preface” completely erases the ethical elements
originally contained in Wordsworth’s discussion.

Likewise, Abrams’s use of Shelley’s prose turns out to disregard the central point of the
poet’s argument. Shelley does state that “a poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness and
sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds,” but this famous quote from Shelley’s
“Defence of Poetry” appears in the context in which the poet also considers the role of
the auditor as an important participant in the process of poetic production and reception.
As Simpkins points out rightly, the removal of this aspect of Shelley’s quote helps
Abrams construct his argument that the Romantics devalued the audience (202).

Abrams’s expressive theory of Romanticism based on these partial quotes, nonetheless,
has been an inﬂuential factor in the interpretation of Romantic conversation poems. His
essay entitled “Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric,” which deals with most
of the original conversation poems by Coleridge and Wordsworth, was conducive to

turning the attention of other critics to those conversation poems, but was also

46

responsible for the widespread understanding of the poems as pure “lyric.” In this essay,
Abrams virtually denies the auditor’s role of providing a context for the speaker’s
utterance and foregrounds the speaker’s mental and emotional experience.
Appropriately, Abrams refers to Bowles’s sonnets and verses rather than COWper’s “The
Task” as the “pre-eminent” models for Coleridge’s conversation poems (“Structure and
Style” 539-44). Through this strategic designation of the precursor of the poetic mode,
Abrams, in effect, performs a generic labeling of the conversation poem; the removal of
narrative elements associated with Cowper’s conversational blank verse constructs the
conversation poem as predominantly “lyric,” along with the emphasis on “the lonely
mind in meditation” and “the mood of weary and self-pitying isolation” represented in
Bowles’s sonnets. Moreover, Abrams’s scrupulous examination of the hidden structural
unity residing in the seemingly formless utterance of the Romantic poets completes the
New Critical notion of Romantic organicism, at the expense of disregarding various

traces of generic conﬂicts arising from the clash between lyric and narrative elements.

3. Deconstruction and the Division between Form and Intent

Although the close reading practice of Deconstruction is clearly indebted to the New
Criticism, the kind of meticulous textual analysis performed by Deconstruction is
distinguished from that deployed by the New Criticism in that the former strives to
discover formal instability rather than harmony and unity in the text. Irony and structural

tension are often invoked in the New Critical interpretation of the text, but ultimately,

47

they are used to reinforce the concept of imaginative unity on which the critical position
places the highest value. In contrast, critics following the tenets of Deconstruction
approach textual gaps and fractures themselves as signiﬁcant features of a given text and
focus on revealing those ﬁssures through a careful scrutiny. As a result, in lieu of
shorter lyric poems that used to represent the Romantic period in the New Critical era,
longer poems that present fragmentation and other experimental features attract the
attention of the Deconstructive critic.

For example, de Man’s reading of Shelley’s “The Triumph of Life,” a conversational
poem, delves into complex ways in which the narrative element, introduced through the
poem’s unique question-response format, turns into a monologic aporia that negates the
seemingly dialogic structure of the text. A question only begets another question rather
than generates an appropriate response, and thus, the kind of progress that should drive a
narrative structure fails to occur in Shelley’s fragmentary poem (The Rhetoric of

Romanticism 97-98). De Man also interprets passages from The Prelude, concentrating

 

on the distance between the two kinds of consciousness that cohabit the textual space and
create a uniquely intersubjective dimension in it. Although Abrams also mentions this
double consciousness in his essay on the “greater Romantic lyrics,” his passing comment
aims at offering another example of structural apparatuses that constitute unity. In
contrast, de Man foregrounds conﬂicts between the two consciousnesses and the anxiety
accompanying them. According to him, the idyllic passages from the part of T_h§
Brim, where Wordsworth describes his childhood experiences, are profoundly tainted
with the tone of uncertainty, which undermines the unity between nature and

consciousness (The Rhetoric of Romanticism 51-55).

48

In a way, de Man’s critical achievement uncovers how dialogic or intersubjective
components operate within predominantly lyrical texts and thereby provides precious
insights into the matter of generic hybridization frequently performed by the Romantics.
However, he shies away from probing into the ethical or historical signiﬁcance inherent
in such formal complexity, mainly because his critical method only allows textual anxiety
as the effect of a reading process rather than a compositional procedure. In other words,
de Man’s way of separating form from intent, despite its attempt to distance itself from
the New Critical attack on the intentional fallacy, exiles the notion of ethical/historical
agency from critical practice. In “Form and Intent in the American New Criticism,” de
Man refutes the psychological understanding of intentionality prevalent in the New
Criticism and suggests that one should consider the concept of structural intentionality.
This newly deﬁned intentionality is characterized by its focus on the structural factor
involved in the productive activity rather than on the “particular state of mind of the
person engaged in the act of structurization” (Blindness and Insight 25). Thus, regardless
of the author’s intent, the work of literature attains “unity” as a poetic entity through
these structural components that establish the unity. Then, the “ordered and consistent
systems” suggested by this idea of unity should be cracked open by the interpreter, who
interrogates and discloses formal instability. De Man states that “this dialogue between
work and interpreter is endless” and that the temporal act of understanding “forever
eludes totalization” (Blindness and Insight 32).

De Man’s interpretive scheme attributes only unity and totality to the notion of
intentionality and assigns to the critic the role of uncovering textual anxiety. The reason

why Shelley’s “The Triumph of Life” constitutes such an important centerpiece for de

49

Man’s criticism of Romanticism has much to do with the centrality of the above
interpretive scheme in his theory. According to de Man, Rousseau, whom Shelley
constantly invokes in order to gain access to the hidden meaning of “life,” is a ﬁgure who
embodies the problematics of action and intention. In a way, Rousseau’s words, which
have acquired the power of actions as well as of the will, appear to have overcome the
discrepancy of action and intention. Yet, as in the case of Aristotle and Plato, with whom
Rousseau compares himself, Rousseau does not have any control over the “deeds that
ensued as a consequence of (his) words and with which (he) was directly involved” (I_h_e
Rhetoric of Romanticism 103). “The power that arms their words also makes them lose
their power” and therefore, de Man concludes that “Rousseau gains shape, face, or ﬁgure
only to lose it as he acquires it” (The Rhetoric of Romanticism 103). This process of
effacement is transferred to the interpretive act of literature: the coherent meaning of the
text, which is, supposedly, constructed by the author, is revealed only to be undermined
and repudiated.

Naturally, de Man, who regards structural anxieties found in the Romantic text solely
I as the outcome of the interaction between work and interpreter, leaves no room for the
notion of formal experimentation as the function of ethical agency embedded in its own
historicity. Thus, although he recognizes the operation of double-consciousness in I_h_e
Prelude and textual ﬁssures that destabilize the consistency of the lyric voice, de Man
ascribes those features of Wordsworth’s poetry solely to the product of interpretive
efforts. The unique ethical distance, placed between the self engaged in action and the
self involved in narration in the autobiographical text, is valued for its resistance to

closure and totalization, but it is regarded only as “a ﬁgure of reading or of

50

uttl

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for

RISE

4.1

,
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understanding” (The Rhetoric of Romanticism 70).

In the end, de Man’s construction of Romanticism returns to the familiar story of
“lyrical organicism.” As he views the Romantics’ quest for a “symbolic” rather than an
“allegorical” structure primarily as an attempt to escape from temporality, de Man
assumes that Wordsworth and Coleridge’s poetry aims only at a lyrical moment, which
suspends temporal progress and attempts to encompass past, present, and future within
the single “spot of time.” Therefore, for de Man, poetic elements that challenge the
supposedly “lyrical” structure of a Romantic text conﬁrm the discrepancy between
intention and execution. I do not intend to deny that such a discrepancy does exist in
Romantic literature, but limiting the notion of Romantic intentionality to the desire
toward organic unity and lyricism tends to simplify a much more complex story about the
Romantics’ poetic production, which also includes premeditated fragmentation and
generic experimentation. De Man’s sophisticated readings of Romanticism are founded
upon the dismissal of the poets’ innovative attempts to reinvent poetry and their social/

historical consciousness that shapes those attempts.

4. The New Historicism and the Romantic Ideology of Poetic Form

In the 19805, the matter of poetic form in the discussion of Romanticism became more
problematic than it had been before, when the New Historicists proposed to unveil
ideology inherent in the Romantic theory of “organic” form. In their critical practice,

Jerome McGann and Margery Levinson equate the visible form of a poem with the

51

 

Romantic author’s intention that attempts to achieve organic unity. The author’s
intention is, in turn, a function of ideology, which conceals conﬂicts and struggles
existing in reality. The New Historicism locates the critic in the position of unmasking
the ideology that operates beneath the seemingly organic surface of Romantic poetry.

The critic’s task is to be accomplished when (s)he discovers ruptures and ﬁssures inside
poetic form; those are traces of ideological erasure and displacement, through which the
critic can enter the domain of reality and thereby master ideology. Thus, in light of the
New Historicist account of Romantic poetry, form exists only to be smashed by the critic,
and discussing Romanticism in formal terms is largely dismissed as an act of condoning
and perpetuating the ideological work of Romanticism.

The only signiﬁcant formal contradictions for McGann and Levinson are the ones
between the existing visible form of the poem and the absent real, suggested by ﬁssures
in the text but never mentioned nor represented. Thus, as Levinson herself states in
characterizing the critical practice of various New Historicists, they look upon the literary
text as “that which speaks of one thing because it cannot articulate another---presenting
formally a sort of allegory by absence where the signiﬁed is indicated by an identiﬁably
absented signiﬁer” (Wordsworth 9). The New Historicists are interested in locating
“precisely where the work blurs its manifest representations and where its smooth surface
thicken, or breaks open” as that is “where its ideological situation can begin to take
shape for us” (Wordsworth 9).

Although Levinson goes on to add that she does not mean to discount the “achieved
form” of the text, her analysis of Romantic poems, which values the “absent real,”

inevitably takes the risk of trivializing the manifest form, and subsequently, the content it

52

 

suggests. As McGann and Levinson’s critical approach to Romanticism is firmly
grounded upon the assumed binary opposition between history and poetry, what takes
place within the poetic space is by deﬁnition “not historical,” and therefore insigniﬁcant
unless the critic uses it as a contrast to the material world outside the poem. An
extremely narrow interpretation of Marxist materialism informs the New Historical
version of historicism; the kind of “historical” contextualization attempted by McGann
and Levinson should not concern Rousseauvian primitivism nor associational
psychology, but an “extrinsic” referential universe (Levinson, Wordsworth 1). Including
only topical incidents and material objects in the boundary of “history,” the New
Historicism separates poetry from history and thereby impoverishes both. Poetry as it
exists is condemned for its pursuit of organic unity that conveys metaphysical ideas
utterly detached from reality.

Perhaps the most brilliant and well-known example of the New Historicist analysis, the
one that deals with Wordsworth’s “Tintem Abbey,” reveals the agenda of the critical
position in the most dramatic form. In her essay, “Insight and Oversight: Reading
‘Tintem Abbey’,” Levinson investigates “the discrepancy between title and poem” and
cleverly discovers hidden meanings beneath the speciﬁc dates given in the poem’s
subtitle. Then, she criticizes the poem and its author for erasing “the occasional character
of his poem” (Wordsworth 15). Perplexingly, at this instance, Levinson appears to place
a high value on the loco-descriptive poem of the Neoclassical period that openly
celebrates the domination of royalty and the ruling class, as it exposes its topical context
without reservation. In contrast, “Tintern Abbey,” which converts the poet’s perception

of historical changes into imaginative energy, is designated as an extremely ideological

53

 

piece, for it fails to name historical facts and incidents in a literal manner.

Likewise, for Levinson, the poem’s omission of “vagrants,” who supposedly peopled
the forests around Tintem Abbey, constitutes another unforgivable sin that reveals its
ideological nature. According to her explanation, those vagrants were “the casualties of
England’s tottering economy and of wartime displacement” (Wordsworth 29). Yet, what
Levinson does not consider here is that these people ---- beggars, old soldiers, and mad
women, etc.--- function as central characters in Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads, the
collection of poems to which “Tintern Abbey” was added as a sort of “Afterword.” As
Wordsworth’s 1798 “Advertisement” of the volume and several versions of the “Preface”
conﬁrm, the intended focus of the volume was clearly placed on those idiosyncratic
poems that foreground the lives and emotions of marginalized people. Then, Levinson’s
reading of “Tintern Abbey” could provide a well-targeted critique of the prevalent critical
practice that utterly separates the poem from its publicational context and celebrates it
exclusively, but may lose grounds when it attempts to disapprove of the particular poem
or its author for the failure to mention the presence of vagrants.

Due to the tendency of the New Historical methodology to limit the “historical” to the
literal representation of the factual universe, themes and ideas contained in poetry are
deemed anti-historical even before critically analyzed. For Levinson, the phrase
“historical imagination” is an oxymoron, as imagination, which is not material, cannot be
historical in any case (Wordsworth 11). In a similar vein, McGann assumes that evoking
such mental faculties as “sympathy” is in itself an anti-historical act, for it denotes an
escape out of things and events of the material world (86).

Once removed from the plane of historicity, Romantic themes such as “imagination”

54

and “sympathy” are simply dismissed as ideological. As these are viewed merely as
idealized notions that conceal material reality, the complex problems residing in the
imaginary representation of the world and other people, the very problems that constantly
trouble Romantic poets, receive very little attention. Likewise, for McGann, “sympathy”
only means a metaphysical idea transcending temporal progress; thus, he assumes that
“Tintern Abbey” creates “the abbey of the mind,” which “suffers no decay, but passes
from sympathetic soul to sympathetic soul,” and which is not susceptible to historical
changes and transitions (87). McGann does not see that, until the very end of “Tintern
Abbey,” Wordsworth never stops struggling with temporal movements and the
undeniable “difference” between himself and his sister that ceaselessly reminds him of
those movements. Levinson’s more sophisticated reading appears to acknowledge part of
this complexity by observing that “the turn to Dorothy is a move toward otherness, or
toward a social reality” (Wordsworth 45). Yet, she refuses to fully explicate the
signiﬁcance of this “turn to otherness,” for Levinson assumes that it is merely an
ideological substitute for other kinds of encounters with “other,” which would have
threatened the vision of unity given in the poem.

As is apparent from the above examples, in order to highlight ﬁssures that point to the
space out of the text, New Historicist readings of Romantic poetry omit tensions existing
in the established form and thereby return to the old organicist model of describing poetic
form of Romanticism. Regarding this New Historicist disparagement of poetic form as it

exists, Susun Wolfson astutely remarks the following:

There is a tendency in McGann and Levinson (at least) to limit accounts of

poetic form to the organic, the uniﬁed, the achieved, the stable. Everything

55

 

factitious, contradictory, and unstable is credited to the world “outside” the
poem, or readable in its form only as the rupture of organicist desire. This kind
of reading misses how canonical Romantic texts such as “Tintern Abbey” or
book 1 of The Excursion expose rather than conceal the constructedness (not
only aesthetic, but social and ideological) of their designs of unity, how visibly
strained (not magical) their forms of reconciliation often are (Formal Charges

144, my emphasis).

While admitting that the New Historicist line of reading is helpful in historicizing
Romantic poetry, Wolfson resists the New Historicist division of “form vs. ﬁssures that
deconstruct it” and proposes to view “the contentious and internally divided poetics”
(Formal Charges 144) itself as a Romantic legacy.

As Wolfson rightly observes, the form of Romantic poetry is meaningful precisely
because it is unstable and contradictory. As is the case with many other modes of
Romantic poetry, the conversation poem’s unique formal anxiety reﬂects a clash between
conﬂicting ethical stances. It also attests to the Romantic poets’ innovative attempts to

reinvent “poetry” that can survive modernity.

5. The Revival of Interest in Romantic Poetic Form and the Conversation Poem

Fortunately, many recent critical works devoted to the studies of British Romanticism
turn to the complex contradiction inherent in Romantic poetic form and its ethical/
ideological implications. As the most outspoken critic who attempts to refresh critical

interest in formal matters, Susan Wolfson proposes to focus “an historically informed

56

formalist criticism” on Romantic aesthetics (Formal Charges 1). She goes on to assert

 

that this new kind of formalist criticism, which distances itself from ideas such as organic
coherence, closed designs, and cognitive totality, attends instead to “the construction of
forms in relation to subjectivity, cultural ideology, and social circumstances” (Formal

Charges 19).

Although Stuart Curran’s earlier Poetic Form and British Romanticism consists of a

 

catalogue of various poetic forms in Romanticism rather than critical discussions of them,
at times, Curran appears to recognize the signiﬁcance of internal contradiction within

poetic form, which constitutes a subject matter in Wolfson’s Formal Charges. He also

 

states that, in many cases, this internal contradiction results from the poet’s endeavor
toward revising an inherited genre. According to Curran, poetic forms of British
Romanticism merit close investigation because, far from being uniﬁed, they expose inner
conﬂicts that signal their historicity. He states, “over time (the genres) create their
parameters not by simple imitation but by a competition of values, a subversion of
precursors, all the paraphernalia of revision” (8). The historicity of poetic genre is
revealed through traces of formal tension generated by competing values and worldviews.
Thus, in lieu of explaining the poetic genres as abstractions, Curran concludes, “they are
always individually recreated in a particularized time and place” (8).

Wolfson’s and Curran’s views of poetic form appear to be acutely aware of problems
within past genre theories informed by formalism or its American counterparts, New
Criticism and archetypal criticism. For example, both of them resist Northrop Frye’s
schematic account of genre in Anatomy of Criticism, which shows a highly deductive

tendency. Instead, their discussion of poetic form parallels Hans Robert Jauss’s

57

 

 

suggestion that genre should be understood in historical terms. Genres necessarily
transform throughout history, and thus an individual text reﬂects a degree of historicity
through its manipulation of generic conventions. According to J auss, a text’s
stereotypical repetition of the generic is a sign of its artistic failure, while its challenge of
the norm expresses its aesthetic strength. Adena Rosmarin’s view of genre also endorses
Jauss’s argument”: she suggests a metaphor or a trope as the model of genre, claiming
that such an appraoch helps understand that thinking about genre always involves such
notions as change and difference. A metaphoric act, which deﬁnes likeness in difference,
effectively reveals the nature of speaking generically about a given text. Metaphors,
crossed by contrast as they are conﬁrmed by similarity, parallel genres that lead the
reader to perceive the similarity between the schema and an individual text, and
ultimately to unpack the difference between them as well.

Tzvetan Todorov’s genre theory, which has become the most inﬂuential one in the
recent rethinking of genre, agrees with the above position. In The Fantastic: A Structural
Approach to a Literary Genre, he states, “we must understand that a text is not only the
product of a pre-existing combinatorial system; it is also a transformation of that system”
(7). Todorov also attends to contradictions arising from a clash between two or more

competing genres in a single text:

We would have to say that a given work manifests a certain genre, not that this
genre exists in the work. But this relation of manifestation between the abstract
and the concrete is of a probabilistic nature; in other words, there is no necessity

that a work faithfully incarnate its genre, there is only a probability that it will

 

'3 While largely endorsing Jauss’s genre theory, Rosmarin nonetheless expresses her discomfort with
Jauss’s tendency to “deﬁne” genres in his practical criticism that conﬂicts with his theoretical position.
Rosmarin views this conﬂict as an example showing the difﬁculty inherent in thinking about genre.

58

 

do so. Which comes down to saying that no observation of works can strictly
confirm or invalidate a theory of genres. If I am told: a certain work does not ﬁt
any of your categories, hence your categories are wrong, I could object: your
“hence” has no reason to exist: works need not coincide with categories, which
have merely a constructed existence; a work can, for example, manifest more

than one category, more than one genre. (21-22, my emphasis)

Wolfson’s and Curran’s afﬁnity with Todorov is confirmed in their exploration of the
possible co-existence of generic characteristics in Romantic poetry, which exhibits a
tendency to combine generic conventions in order to generate a “modern” kind of poetry
under a new set of social, political, and literary circumstances.

Recently, aware of the importance of generic experimentations in Romanticism,
Tilottama Rajan and Julia Wright edited Romanticism, History, and the Possibilities of
Q9319, a collection of essays that revolve around the diversity of literary forms and
genres in Romantic literature. In its “Preface,” the editors articulate their afﬁliation with
Todorov’s genre theory by emphasizing “the essential ﬂuidity” of genres. Since genres
necessarily reﬂect historicity and social conditions that produce and identify them as
such, Rajan and Wright focus on generic reforms and intergeneric conversations rather
than attributing ﬁxed identities to genres. Their conception of genre as a mobile category
opens up fruitful discussions surrounding the Romantics’ strenuous efforts toward
generic renegotiation and hybridization. Moreover, the editors recognize that the
Romantics themselves often envisioned their attempt to revise genres as a way to alter
human perception and thereby transform society. In fact, for the Romantics, genre was a
powerful instrument for renewing human understanding and a revolutionary tool for

social reform.

59

Yet, despite this radical recognition of signiﬁcant generic experimentations in
Romantic literature, Rajan and Wright’s collection does not provide much for the
discussion of the conversation poem. As the editors mention in the “Preface,” the essays
contained in this collection are limited in their scope to non-canonical writers in the
Romantic period. While illuminating William Godwin, John Thelwall, Eliza Genwick,
Mary Hays, and the likes, the authors of the essays intentionally overlook the six
Romantic poets, whose works have been celebrated as the ultimate Romantic canon. The
only exception might be Don Bialostosky’s Bakhtinian exploration of Wordsworth’s
experimental ballads in the Lyrical Ballads, but his attention to Wordsworth’s
marginalized poetry leaves little room for the poet’s conversation poems.

My attempt to theorize the conversation poem in this dissertation certainly parallels the
recent revival of generic discussions in Romantic criticism, but rather than focusing
exclusively on marginalized writers and works, I choose to revisit canonical poetry
through the renewed lens of generic reading and also investigate complex relationships
between canonical and non-canonical poems. In conceiving this project, I am especially
indebted to two critical works that stimulated my interest in the “conversation poem” as
an experimental poetic form.

The ﬁrst work that I need to mention here is Paul Magnuson’s remarkable book
Coleridge and Wordsworth: A Poetic Dialogue. In this book, Magnuson’s ﬁne close
reading of the poetry scrupulously documents the process by which Coleridge and
Wordsworth appropriated each others’ poetry in order to relocate it within the new
structure of their own writing. This process was simultaneously that of continuous

generic experimentations geared toward the discovery of an “original” poetic mode that

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could best manifest the poet’s creativity. Magnuson’s reconstruction of the process
succeeds in situating the conversation poem in relation to other poetic forms adopted by
the Romantic poets and exposing the ﬂuidity of generic categories in Romanticism.
Moreover, he highlights the most important generic characteristic of the conversation
poem, using Bakhtin’s theory in a highly creative way. Magnuson suggests the
Coleridge-Wordsworth dialogue as a prominent poetic example of Bakhtin’s “double-
voiced discourse” (Coleridge and Wordsworth 19). By providing the conversational
contexts behind the two poets’ acclaimed poetry, he resists the usual monologic reading
of the poems and restores the location of the bearer/interlocutor within the poetic space.
The second work that inspired my project is Rajan’s essay “Romanticism and the
Death of Lyric Consciousness,” which I already mentioned in the “Introduction.”
Although Rajan does not provide a detailed discussion of the conversation poem as a
genre, her general ideas that point to conceiving Romanticism as a period of innovative
attempts to break away from the closed domain of lyrical consciousness offer precious
insights to the discussion of the conversation poem. Not only does her theory reveal
narrative elements that are crucial for the construction of the poetic form, but it also helps
identify the limits of the experimental introduction of those elements into the poetic
space. As Rajan speaks of other Romantic genres that display similar tendencies, the
conversation poem remains as a contradictory poetic form, pressured by its own narrative
desires that wish to reach toward “other,” and simultaneously troubled by the inescapable

lyrical binds that attempt to contain its existence within the “self.”

61

6. Intertextuality as Conversation

My argument that deﬁnes the conversation poem as a contradictory poetic form and
also as a product of generic experiments extends to the reading of many later poems that
continue the tradition of the poetic form. As the Romantics’ innovative poetic mode
indicates a combination of different generic conventions, various poets in the later
periods revise and transform the conversation poem through the use of many formal
devices that denote their own ethical stances. In this sense, the history of the
conversation poem constitutes another dimension to the notion of the conversation
occurring in the poetic mode. The following chapters in this dissertation investigate this
intertextual history of the conversation poem, each focusing on a thematic issue and its
formal manifestation.

I choose to apply the concept of“intertextuality” rather than that of “inﬂuence” to the
scrutiny of the interconnection between various poems, for I detect the following two
problems residing in so-called “inﬂuence” studies: ﬁrst, I intend to distance my argument
from the Bloomian “inﬂuence” theory, which tends to reinforce the central position of a
few charismatic ﬁgures in literary history. Of course, it is true that some poets do exert a
more lasting “inﬂuence” than others on the literary production of the later periods. Yet,
as Foucault argues, the cultural force of certain texts needs to be qualiﬁed with the
thorough examination of social/historical conditions that restrict the free circulation of
the text. The role of power is always involved in the process by which textuality is
socially (re)created, but the concept of “inﬂuence” tends to conceal the function of power

and represent the “inﬂuential” text as inherently superior to other texts. Although my

62

dissertation revolves around Coleridge and Wordsworth, two canonical poets of the
Romantic period, it is by no means true that Dorothy Wordsworth is a lesser poet than
them. As my argument will conﬁrm later, the real focus in mapping the intertextual
connection between various texts is partially on unearthing obscure texts that revisit the
poetic genre in their own ways and thereby resist the power of cultural forces that have
only assigned a marginal position to them.

Secondly, and accordingly, I propose to avoid assuming the undeniable superiority of a
parent text to its offspring, the notion implied in the Bloomian concept of “inﬂuence.”
While the modern era’s anxiety about originality certainly brings about the burden of the
past, it does not necessarily follow that a later poet approaches the text of his/her
predecessor as a completely enclosed system. My view of intertextuality positions a text
as an open-ended entity, which awaits a rejoinder that can alter its meaning and cultural
signiﬁcance. In relation to other texts, a text stands as a question rather than a statement.
Bahktin’s dialogic theory captures this point quite convincingly: as he writes, “every
word is directed toward an answer and cannot escape the profound inﬂuence of the
answering word that it anticipates” (The Dialogic Imagination 280). In Bahktin’s view of
the dialogic network of signs, “inﬂuence” is not a one-way ﬂow from the past; rather, the
past and the present are engaged in a conversation that alters texts from both temporal
moments.

My choice of “intertextuality” over “inﬂuence” is grounded upon the above problems
that are implied in the current use of the term “inﬂuence.” Yet, simultaneously, I am
aware of the existence of various ways in which the concept of “intertextuality” is

understood and utilized, and I intend to distinguish my own way of discussing

63

intertextual connections from a certain way of addressing them. More speciﬁcally, I will
attempt to preserve the notion of ethical agency in the investigation of intertextuality,
differentiating my view from the postmodern theory of the “inﬁnite circularity of
signifying codes.” Although, following Barthes, one can argue that a literary text
consists of its continuous reference to numerous textual codes, I still see that some of the
referential connections than others are more effective and useful for the critic and that the
notion of ethical agency remains signiﬁcant as the mediator of those connections. I agree
with Rajan in believing that “it is hard to see how the transformational and reﬂexive
potential of textuality can be brought out without the presence of a subject position which
will facilitate a new articulation of the thetic” (“Intertextuality” 67). Therefore, in
constructing the history of the conversation poem, I envision various poets across
historical periods as participants in a long communicative process that seeks to actualize
the latent possibility of modernity. The poets’ ethical stances are reﬂected in both the
content of their utterance and the way in which they transform formal aspects of the
poetic mode.

Of course, I do not believe that each and every intertextual link I examine in this
dissertation is the result of its author’s conscious revision of another text. Whereas
Shelley’s allusion to Wordsworth and Charles Tomlinson’s invocation of Coleridge are
examples of “actively” intertextual texts, many of the connections are “passively”
intertextual.l4 Yet, even in those “passively” intertextual cases, the presence of an ethical
agent intervenes in the contact between his/her text and other social discourses, and the

shape of this intervention, to some degree, provides the critic with points of reference by

 

 

N For the distinction between “actively” intertextual texts and “passively” intertextual ones, see Rajan,
“Intertextuality” 68.

64

which (s)he can compare and contrast the given text with others. This view of the ethical
agent is grounded upon the conception of a subject position in a twofold sense: the author
attempts to express his/her interiority and ethical ideas through poetic utterance, but
simultaneously, (s)he is also subject to the operation of various social discourses.

The awareness of these social discourses inserts the dimension of historicity into the
discussion of intertextuality. As Jay Clayton and Eric Rothstein correctly observe,
Kristeva’s use of Bakhtin in the development of the term “intertextuality” marginalizes
the latter’s emphasis on the historical uniqueness of the context of every utterance (19).
The postmodern usage of the term “intertextuality” that highlights “endless
dissemination” and “aporia” in textual contacts takes a risk of obliterating speciﬁc
historical circumstances that condition the particular utterance. Keeping Clayton and
Rothstein’s perceptive comments in mind, I will be sensitive to the social/historical
contexts surrounding each instance of revisionary approach to the conversation poem.
Thus constructed, the geneology of the poetic form will eventually embody the history of
modernity, providing an account of its long process toward the realization of its latent

ethical potential.

65

II. Conversing with Nature: A Revision of the
“Teleological” Model

Many Romantic conversation poems scrupulously construct the mind’s movement in
response to the changes and motions of natural objects. Such an intense appeal to
“nature” as a source of intellectual energy is widely regarded as a Romantic phenomenon,
and thus, scholarly works dealing with the Romantics’ preoccupation with “nature” are
simply abundant. Since the Victorian period, many critics of Romantic literature have
industriously studied how the Romantics yearned for unalienated life in traditional
agrarian communities and how “nature” for them stood for a potent locus of imagination.
“Nature” as an important theme in Romantic poetry has always been emphasized, but in
rethinking the Romantic man-nature relationship in this chapter, I depart from the
traditional view of “nature” as an entity to be reﬂected in the isolated consciousness of an
individual. In lieu of the teleological model of epistemology, I propose to view “nature”
as an environment shared between human beings and recognized collectively by them.
Thus envisioned from the perspective of intersubj ectivity, “nature” provides a communal
experience without which the linguistic basis of communication simply cannot exist.

Speciﬁcally, I am interested in illuminating ways in which various Romantic views of
subject-object relations are indivisibly connected with intersubjective contexts
surrounding particular poems. In this respect, my discussion in this chapter is in line with
Habermas’s efforts to ground epistemology in a linguistically based notion of
intersubjectivity rather than in the constitutive powers of a transcendental subject. By

abandoning the paradigm of individualist reﬂection in favor of a concept of

66

intersubjectivity, Habermas strives to heal the rift between ethics and epistemology.
Summarizing Habermas’s position on epistemology, Eva Knodt explains that, instead of
focusing on the individualized exploration of ontological truth, Habermas’s discourse
theory regards an epistemological project essentially as a “collaborative enterprise
undertaken in the spirit of open rational debate and mutual understanding” (82). As
another important theorist who foregrounds the notion of intersubjectivity, Levinas also
interprets the world primarily as a shared space between human beings and thereby
attempts to overturn the anti-ethical exclusivity inherent in the ego-centered epistemology
of the European tradition. Although such a paradigmatic shift toward intersubjectivity
might pose some challenging problems for the construction of social/philosophical
theories,ls their suggestion that the issue of epistemology should be located within the
domain of the communal still provides a valuable insight into the understanding of the
Romantic conversation poem.

In fact, Habermas’s and Levinas’s epistemological view is partially reﬂected in
ecological and feminist approaches to Romantic literature, both of which are resuscitating
critical interest in the theme of “nature.” For ecologists, who fundamentally question the
division of man from nature, man’s ethical attitude toward nature should be valued
equally with the relationship between human beings. Ecologists oppose the
Enlightenment division between nature and human society and also revoke various
versions of modern theories that reproduce the division. This explains why ecological
critics such as Jonathan Bate attempt to challenge the New Historicist assumption that

regards nature as a safe harbor in which one can escape from the social/political turmoil

‘

’5 For example, Knodt thinks that Habermas’s epistemology founded upon the principles of linguistic
Coherence and consensus inevitably results in self-referentiality and paradox (87-88).

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of the human world. In place of the New Historicist scheme, Bate suggests an alternative
approach to Romantic literature, which appreciates the linguistic process of linking,
bonding, and networking between different things and humans. For example, Keats’s
“To Autumn,” a representative document of Romantic escapism for the New Historicists,
becomes a quintessential Romantic poem to Bate as it refuses the Cartesian dualism,
which splits apart “thinking mind” and “embodied substance,” and therefore rejects the
New Historicist division of nature and human affairs.16 According to Bate, Keats’s poem
is about social and environmental networks that enable the life of our species (“Living
with the Weather” 441 -44).

Feminists also suppose a parallel between one’s stance on nature and one’s relationship
with other human beings. The ﬂexible ego that feminists assign to women is
characterized by its openness toward outward objects as well as fellow humans. For
example, Anne K. Mellor’s deﬁnition of the feminine subjectivity foregrounds “a self
that is ﬂuid, absorptive, responsive, with permeable ego boundaries” (“A Criticism” 31)
in contrast to the masculine model of “the transcendental ego standing alone.” In Bearing
the Word, Margaret Homans further theorizes this issue, relying on psychoanalytic
theory. She observes that our culture as a whole depends on the absence of the
“mother,” the ﬁgure that represents both the real woman and Mother nature. According
to Lacan’s scheme of human development, a son needs to end his attachment to the
mother when he embraces the Law of the Father and enters into the symbolic order, the

linguistic system that enacts the function of culture and society. Thus, the masculine act

k

’6 Despite Bate’s criticism of the New Historicism from the ecological perspective, Greg Garrard observes
that materialist criticism and ecological criticism in fact share common elements. Speciﬁcally, Garrard
mentions their shared affiliation with Raymond Williams, whose The Country and the City can be situated
at the origin ofecocriticism (451-54).

 

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of writing poetry is not possible unless the poet is distanced from Mother nature.
Homans contrasts Lacan’s theory with an alternative story of human development written
from a daughter’s perspective: when the father’s phallus interrupts a mother-child dyad in
which the child is a daughter, the daughter discovers that she is the same as her mother
and different from her father, so she does not experience desire in the Lacanian sense.
Instead, she continues her preoediapal symbiosis with her mother, not having to entirely
renounce the presymbolic form of communication. The daughter’s continued symbiotic
relationship with her mother, in turn, models her connection with Mother nature and
other human beings.17 Thus, in Susan Levin’s words, only the feminine self can create
“an equipoise of self and the phenomenal world” (“Romantic Prose” 183), which, in fact,
sums up the Romantic idea].’8
As is evident from my above explanation, feminist critics share many critical premises
with their ecological counterparts. However, the feminist assessment of the masculine
Romantic canon is sharply distinct from that of ecological critics. While ecologists such
as Bate, Karl Kroeber, and Timothy Morton generally regard Romantic poetry as a

valuable proto-ecological example, feminists criticize most of the male writers’ texts for

their desire toward mastery and domination. As I am aware that this discrepancy indeed

 

’7 Although I admit that Mellor’s and Homans’s critical view is certainly useful in understanding the
female Romantics’ texts, I see two problems latent in their rigid distinction between masculine
Romanticism and feminine Romanticism: ﬁrst, while Mellor and Homans are quite accurate in delineating
the forms of mastery over nature and other human beings enacted by male poets, they seem to forget the
fact that the poets themselves are (often painfully) aware of such tendencies in their poetry. Although
establishing harmony with the outer world constituted an impossible task for the male Romantics, they
nonetheless yearned for the unattainable ideal, at times in pains. Second, Mellor’s and Homans’s
distinction between masculine Romanticism and feminine Romanticism seems to transform the gender
distinction eventually into a generic distinction between the male Romantics’ poetry and the female
Romantics’ prose. This, in turn, results in an unhappy outcome in which the women writers’ poetry does
not receive critical attention it deserves.

’8 Levin’s phrase, which suggests a convergence between feminist and ecological projects, is conﬁrmed in
many studies dealing with ecofeminism that include Kolodny, Gray, Merchant, Plant, and Warren.

69

attest to the complexity of the issue, in this chapter, I do not attempt to side with one
particular position or construct an alternative theory. Rather, I intend to further
complicate the issue by revealing the co-existence of both tendencies---the one that longs
for connection with the outer world and the other that asserts the dominant self--- in male
Romantics’ texts.

In the outset of this chapter, I argue that the conversation poem is a poetic form that
seeks harmonious relationships with fellow human beings as well as nature. Yet, the
imagined harmony between the poet and the outer universe is often momentary and hard
to sustain, and, as a result, the text reveals epistemological shifts that reconsider the
relationship between the perceiving subject and natural objects. Interestingly, these
epistemological shifts seem to parallel crucial changes occurring in the text’s
intersubjective context. In turn, since a transformation in the intersubj ective dimension
of a conversation poem naturally involves a generic transition, my discussion in this
chapter will also address the geneology of relevant poetic modes. More speciﬁcally, I
argue that the Romantic lyric, which modeled much of modern lyrical poetry, is a product
of an epistemological shift from the conversation poem. This epistemological shift, in
turn, can be situated in relation to the poem’s intersubjective contexts, suggesting a
fusion of ethics and epistemology in the Habennasian sense.

Later in the chapter, I will turn to Charles Tomlinson’s poems that revisit the tradition
of the Romantic conversation poem. Although these poems do not assume the formal
aspects of the conversation poem (i.e., the existence of a silent hearer, etc.), they are
clearly indebted to the conversation poem in more thematic and philosophical ways. This

intricate intertextual connection will attest to the vital legacy of the conversation poem,

70

which, in a sense, still provides a model of poetry for the contemporary world.

1. Toward an intersubjective epistemology:

Coleridge’s “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison”

M. H. Abrams’s inﬂuential view of British Romanticism foregrounds the Romantics’
attempt to “join together the ‘subject’ and ‘object’ that modern intellection had put
asunder, and thus to revivify a dead nature, restore its concreteness, signiﬁcance, and
human values, and re-domicilate man in a world which has become alien to him” (The
Corresponding Breeze 96). As Abrams observes, Romantic poetry is ﬁlled with language
of sensory perception (i.e., seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling, and tasting); for the
Romantics, connecting with nature through acts of sensory perception is the ﬁrst step
toward recovering the lost harmony between man and nature. Inﬂuenced by Abrams’s
emphasis on “Natural Supernaturalism,” many critics have been diligent in studying the
Romantic aspiration to an epistemological renewal of man-nature relations.

What has not been sufﬁciently recognized, however, is the fact that this Romantic
attempt to reconcile with the external world is, from the very beginning, tied with its
endeavor to connect with other human beings. For Coleridge, who provides the
theoretical foundation of Romanticism, a positive connection with the external world of
natural things is inherently intertwined with intersubjective relations that supply contexts
for the given encounter with nature. Coleridge’s view of the senses, which constitute
indispensable tools for man’s link with nature, conveys his profound interest in

intersubjective connections with others. Commenting on the senses, for example,

71

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1, SI

Coleridge states the following: “The ﬁrst education which we receive, that from our
mothers, is given to us by touch; the whole of its process is nothing more than, to express
myself boldly, an extended touch by promise. The sense itself, the sense of vision itself,
is only acquired by a continued recollection of touch” (The Philosophical Lectures 115).
As Kerry McSweeney persuasively argues, in this passage, Coleridge is opposed to “the
traditional hierarchical division of the senses into higher (sight and hearing) and lower
(smell, taste and touch) and to the valorization of sight as the supreme sense that occurred
in the late seventeenth century following the impact of Newton’s Opticks and the
empirically-based psychology of Locke” (8). He is also opposed to the contemporary
aesthetic theory that regarded sight as the primary sense upholding the power of
imagination. According to McSweeney’s interpretation, Coleridge fears that the
privileging of sight can lead to a separation of subject and object. Among the senses,
sight and hearing posit objects at a distance from the perceiving mind. In contrast, touch
“combines with the perception of the outward Object a distinct sense of our own life”
(The Philosophical Lectures, 36).

Especially, the ideal model of touch, and therefore, of all kinds of sensory perception,
is suggested as the infant’s touch of her mother. This view tinges Coleridge’s entire
contemplation of nature; for example, in The Stateman’s Manual, Coleridge offers the
following comment on his own feelings associated with observing natural objects: “For
never can I look and meditate on the vegetable creation without a feeling similar to that
with which we gaze at a beautiful infant that has fed itself asleep at its mother’s bosom,
and smiles in its strange dream of obscure yet happy sensations” (71). In this passage,

Coleridge expresses the idea that epistemological meditation on the natural object reach

72

its highest point when it leads the meditator to the dimension of intersubjective
relationship.

If so, it is appropriate that Coleridge invents the poetic form of the conversation poem,
which evokes the existence of Other, in order to explore the mind’s relation to nature.
Jonathan Bate argues that, in Coleridge’s poem such as “Frost at Midnight,” the dialectic
of subject/object is replaced with an intercourse of I and thou (“Living with the Weather”
447). In fact, in the case of “Frost at Midnight” and in his many other conversation
poems, this replacement process turns out to be much more arduous than Bate assumes,
but “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” is a conversation poem in which Coleridge
achieves the fusion of intersubjective relations and man-nature relations in the most
unproblematic way.

“This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” begins with the speaker’s sense of deprivation. At
the time of its composition, Coleridge had an accident that disabled him from walking
with his friends. One evening, he was left alone while his friends were taking a walk for
several hours. The beginning lines of the poem are fraught with the speaker’s angst over
his inability to spend his time appreciating natural scenes with his friends. Appropriately,
Coleridge’s language in the ﬁrst stanza of the poem conveys a strong sense of loss and

frustration:

Well, they are gone, and here must I remain,
This lime-tree bower my prison! I have lost
Beauties and feelings, such as would have been
Most sweet to my remembrance even when age
Had dimm’d mine eyes to blindness!

(11. 1-5)

73

From the epistemological perspective, it may be notable that the poem presents the
absence of sensory perception (i.e., sight) even before it starts to describe imaginary
scenes of the friends in nature. In this poem, the author’s isolation from a social
community (“Well, they are gone, and here must I remain”) leads to the fear of future
blindness, a physical condition in which his connection with natural objects gets
jeopardized. In the ensuing lines, this dark vision is transferred to the scene of his

friends’ imagined journey into natural surroundings:

They, meanwhile,
Friends, whom I never more may meet again,
On springy heath, along the hill-top edge,
Wander in gladness, and wind down, perchance,
To that still roaring dell, of which I told;
The roaring dell, o’erwooded, narrow, deep,
And only speckled by the mid-day sun;
Where its slim trunk the ash from rock to rock
F lings arching like a bridge; --- that branchless ash,
Unsunn’d and damp, whose few poor yellow leaves
Ne’er tremble in the gale, yet tremble still,
F ann’ed by the water-fall and there my friends
Behold the dark green ﬁle of long lank weeds,
That all at once (a most fantastic sight!)
Still nod and drip beneath the dripping edge
Of the blue clay-stone.

(11. 5-20)

Again, Coleridge underscores his separation from his friends (“F riends, whom I never

74

more may meet again”), and this rupture in his relation with others conditions the man-
nature relations that he envisions. The imaginary natural scene in which Coleridge
situates his friends is characterized by darkness and conﬁnement; words such as

99 6%

“narrow,” “deep, unsunn’d,” and “damp” dominate the entire scene. Moreover,
although the humans are physically located in the middle of the natural setting, the
interaction between them and nature is minimal. After the friends’ “winding down” to
the “dell,” the passage contains only one verb that denotes human action: “Behold” in
line 17, which is, syntactically, buried within the structure of the long sentence that
foregrounds natural forces and their dark power utterly indifferent to the spectators.

The dismal vision of the ﬁrst stanza, however, is overtumed in the second stanza, at the

ultimate turning point that occurs in the following lines:

Yes, they wander on
In gladness all; but thou, methinks, most glad,
My gentle-hearted Charles! for thou hast pined
And hunger’d after Nature, many a year,
In the great City pent, winning thy way
With sad yet patient soul, through evil and pain

And strange calamity!
(11. 27-33)

In the above lines, Coleridge directly addresses Charles Lamb and realizes the fact that,
while the condition of conﬁnement and separation from nature is only temporary for
himself, it has been a prolonged situation for his friend. This moment of sympathy brings
tenderness to his imagination and fundamentally alters the way in which he envisions the

man-nature interaction in the ensuing lines:

75

Ah, slowly sink
Behind the western ridge, thou glorious sun!
Shine in the slant beams of the sinking orb,
Ye purple heath-ﬂowers! Richlier burn, ye clouds!
Live in the yellow light, ye distant groves!
And kindle, thou blue ocean! So my friend,
Struck with deep joy, may stand, as I have stood,
Silent with swimming sense; yea, gazing round

On the wide landscape, gaze till all doth seem

 

Less gross than bodily, a living thing
Which acts upon the mind --- and with such hues
As clothe the Almighty Spirit, when he makes

Spirits perceive His presence.
(11. 32-43)

Departing from the previously detached way of delineating natural scenes, the poet
directly addresses natural objects such as the “sun,” the “clouds,” and the “blue ocean,”
using the language of “thou” that connotes a renewed intimacy between himself and
nature. As McSweeney observes, the imperative verbs such as “sink,” “shine,” “burn,”
“live,” and “kindle” register the shift from “onlooker consciousness” to “participatory
consciousness,” which suggests the sense of the oneness with the external world (80). In
turn, his friends’ epistemological connection with nature shifts from the mere passivity of
“beholding” natural surroundings to an intense “gaze” upon them. Furthermore, by
envisioning the presence of “a living thing/ Which acts upon the mind” in nature,
Coleridge suggests the reciprocity in the interaction between humans and nature.

This dramatic shift in Coleridge’s view occurs precisely at the moment he crosses the

76

boundaries of the ego. Thus, after the vision of the renewed relationship between human
beings and nature, the poet declares, “A delight/ Comes sudden on my heart, and I am

'99

glad/ As I myself were there (11. 44-46). The completion of emotional empathy in this
passage is even conﬁrmed by feminist scholars who usually do not admit the presence of
empathy in the text of the male Romantics. For example, commenting on this passage,
Anne K. Mellor states that “Coleridge is emotionally united with Charles Lamb,” for “the
distance between the alienated self and the other has been annihilated by Coleridge’s
imaginative capacity to emphathically become his friend” (“This Lime-Tree Bower” 133,
Mellor’s emphasis).

In the last section of the poem, Coleridge delineates a natural scene in which the

sunlight of the twilight hour “touches” the entire world:

Pale beneath the blaze
Hung the transparent foliage; and I watch’d
Some broad and sunny leaf, and lov’d to see
The shadow of the leaf and stem above
Dappling its sunshine! And that walnut-tree
Was richly ting’d, and a deep radiance lay
Full on the ancient ivy, which usurps
Those fronting elms, and now, with blackest mass
Makes their dark branches gleam a lighter hue
Through the late twilight:

(11. 48-57)

The sun imagery of these lines goes further than simply indicates the presence of the light

illuminating the scene; rather, it implies the warmth and richness with which the sun

77

 

uniﬁes humans and natural objects alike. Joining this vision in a willing manner, the poet
discovers his own image in “the solitary humble-bee” who “sings in the bean-ﬂower” (11.
59-60). In the poem’s ﬁnal part, Coleridge also blesses a “rook” and thereby actively
engages himself in the interaction with the external world. The moment of reconnecting
with nature, which occurs only after a painful journey in “The Rime of Ancient Mariner,”
is achieved by an effort of mental traveling in “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison.” This
achievement bears on the conversation poem as a discursive instance, though it is by no
means typical. As a poem that connects the self with the outer world, “This Lime-Tree

Bower My Prison” attests to an important possibility inherent in the poetic mode.

2. The “Dejection” Dialogue and the Birth of the Romantic Lyric:

Wordsworth’s “Intimation: Ode” and “Resolution and Independence”

While the above reading of “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” attempted to
underscore its blissful achievement rather than the shadow of apprehension still lingering
between the lines, upon close analysis, Coleridge’s poem reveals the poet’s anxiety that

cannot be completely overcome until the end:

And sometimes
’Tis well to be bereaved of promised good,
That we may lift the soul, and contemplate

With lively joy the joys we cannot share.
(11. 64-67)

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These lines located near the end of the poem compares his previous experience of
deprivation to death by using the word “bereaved.” Moreover, “sometimes” preceding
the description of the experience implies that such a painful loss could come at any time.

While many of Coleridge’s conversation poems such as “Frost at Midnight” manage to
overcome this anxiety despite the underlying sense of fear, “Dej ection: An Ode,” written
in 1802, ﬁnally confesses his inability to mitigate the dismay that haunts him
continuously. Paul Magnuson and Marlon Ross both View Coleridge’s “Dejection: An
Ode” as a conversation poem, considering its dialogic context involving Coleridge’s
friendship to Wordsworth. The “Dejection” dialogue between Coleridge and
Wordsworth is extremely important to understanding the conversation poem for the two
related reasons: ﬁrst, the “Dejection” dialogue between the two Romantic poets becomes
their last poetic dialogue. Wordsworth’s disappointment at Coleridge’s endless
depression problem puts an end to their friendship and also to their poetic conversation.
Second, when Wordsworth abandons his poetic dialogue with Coleridge, he
simultaneously turns away from the Coleridgean conversation poem and invents his own
poetic mode through the “Immortality Ode,” which becomes the ultimate model of the
Romantic lyric for later writers.

According to Magnuson’s meticulous documentation of the “Dejection” dialogue,
Wordsworth wrote the ﬁrst four stanzas of the “Immortality Ode” in the spring of 1802
before Coleridge composed his “Dejection: An Ode” (Coleridge and Wordsworth 288).
In those beginning stanzas of the “Ode,” Wordsworth deplores the loss of his creative
energy. Feeling alienated from the joyous natural scene, he raises questions: “Whither is

ﬂed the visionary gleam? / Where is it now, the glory and the dream?” These questions

79

 

 

that conclude the ﬁrst four stanzas of the “Ode” initiated Coleridge’s writing of
“Dejection: An Ode,” as Magnuson explains (Coleridge and Wordsworth 289). Then,
after Coleridge’s poem, written originally as a verse letter to Sara Hutchinson and then
published as a conversation poem addressed to Wordsworth, expressed his deep anxiety
and the lack of consolation, Wordsworth completes his own ode by answering his own

questions and thereby creating an internalized conversation:

What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now for ever taken from my sight?
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the ﬂower,
We will grieve not, rather ﬁnd
Strength in what remains behind,
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be,
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering,
In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind.
(11. 178-89)

Wordsworth’s internalized conversation in the “Immortality Ode” is a formal reﬂection
of the poem’s content, which presents self-sufﬁcient afﬁrmation. By eliminating dialogic
elements in the conversation poem, Wordsworth completes his Romantic lyric. The
“Ode” is also a break away from the conversation poem in the epistemological sense: the
intensive attempt to participate in nature through acts of sensory perception such as

seeing and hearing is not present in the poem. Instead, Wordsworth declares that the

80

 

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power of memory located within the self should be “the fountain-light” (l. 154) and “a
master-light” (I. 155) of the self’s existence.

A close review of the disparity between the previously completed four stanzas in the
poem’s beginning and the rest of the poem reveals that Wordsworth’s philosophy of self-

reliance is in the making in the “Ode.” As David Bromwich’s recent Disowned by

 

Memog suggests in a persuasive way, Wordsworth’s poetry composed in the early 18003
expresses his evolving conviction that the individual should discover power and guidance
from within. Unlike his poems in the 17905, which attempt to seek a way to bond with
fellow human beings, the “Ode,” especially its latter part, appears to place intersubjective
relations in a negative view. Even familial relations, the ultimate social ties between
human beings, fail to convey an entirely positive sense. For example, Stanza 7 describes

the newborn child’s relationship to its parents in the following way:

Behold the child among his new-born blisses,
A four years’ darling of a pigmy size!

See where mid work of his own hand he lies,
Fretted by sallies of his mother’s kisses

With light upon him from his father’s eyes!

See at his feet some little plan or chart,
Some fragmant from his dream of human life
Shaped by himself with newly-learned art---

A wedding or a festival,

A mourning or a funeral,

And this hath now his heart,
And unto this he frames his song.
(11. 85-96)

81

The mother’s affection in line 88 “frets” the infant; although the word “fret” in this
context may mean “decorate” or “adorn,” its strong suggestion of “gnaw” or “irritate”
lingers beneath the apparent meaning. The use of “sallies,” which implies aggression,
also appears problematic. The “light upon him from his father’s eyes” in the next line
functions as the “Law of the Father,” the oppressive power of society that advocates
imitation and subsequent socialization. In contrast to the innocent celebration of the
mother-child relationship in Stanza 4 (“the babe leaps up on his mother’s arm;” I. 48),
these later lines designate parental relations as the ﬁrst step toward one’s subordination to
1.19

social contro

The mother ﬁgure in Stanza 6 is also far from benevolent:

Earth ﬁlls her lap with pleasures of her own;
Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind,
And even with something of a mother’s mind
And no unworthy aim,
The homely nurse doth all she can
To make her foster-child, her inmate man,
Forget the glories he hath known
And that imperial palace whence he came.
(11. 77-84)

“Earth,” which represents nature in the physical sense conﬁnes man, making him “her

 

'9 In different contexts from mine, Fred Hoemer and Daniel W. Ross both observe conﬂicts in
Wordsworth’s attitude toward the child and his relation to parents and society. Hoemer’s emphasis falls on
Wordsworth’s ambivalence regarding the domination of social structure, leading to the suggestion that
Wordsworth uses the nostalgia for the idealized child as a strategy for afﬁrming (and internalizing)
structural rules. Ross focuses on the mother-child relationship in the “Ode” in psychoanalytical terms and
concludes that the poem “reveals a conﬂict between the poet’s desire to merge or incorporate himself with
the mother and the desire to be completely independent of her” (633).

82

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inmate”; thus, instead of seeking an epistemological unity with natural objects, the poet
of the “Ode” chooses to rely on his own power of memory for salvation. It is a break
from the epistemology of Coleridge’s “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” and
Wordsworth’s own “Tintern Abbey,” the conversation poem modeled after Coleridge’s
poetic mode. As Ross Woodman argues, the shift from the “nurse” of the poet’s moral
being in “Tintern Abbey” to the “homely nurse” in the “Ode” reﬂects an ideological shift
that has occurred between the two poems. While the nurse in “Tintern Abbey” “binds”
man to the vision of eternity, “Earth” in the “Ode” “binds” man to mundane life, isolating
him from visionary bliss.

Wordsworth’s radical departure from the C oleridgean conversational model of poetry
may have been another source of Coleridge’s frustration, as Coleridge’s subsequent
search for an appropriate listener for his “Dejection: An Ode” indicates. As Coleridge
revises the poem, he changes Wordsworth’s name into a more general masculine name
(“Edmund”), and then finally ends with a mute feminine listener (“Lady”), erasing the
traces of his friend from his discourse. As Ross discusses at length in one of the chapters
in The Contours of Masculine Desire, when Wordsworth and Coleridge converse again
with each other through The Prelude and “To Wordsworth” in 1807, the poetic dialogue
between them exposes their rivalry more than their friendship.

Yet, in the meantime, Wordsworth further develops his poetic form of internalized
conversation in “Resolution and Independence.” Although the poem features an
interlocutor whose speech is reported within the poem, the conversational situation
depicted in it is far from realistic. Unlike Wordsworth’s earlier poems that contain much

more realistic encounters with others, “Resolution and Independence” treats the

83

interlocutor as a trope rather than an actual human being. The passage that introduces the

leech-gatherer is crucial to understanding the point:

As a huge stone is sometimes seen to lie

Couched on the bald top of an eminence,

Wonder to all who do the same espy

By what means it could thither come, and whence;
So that it seems a thing endued with sense,

Like a sea-beast crawled forth, which on a shelf

Of rock or sand reposeth, there to sun itself ---

Such seemed this man, not all alive nor dead,
Nor all asleep, in his extreme old age.
(11. 64-72)

The poem places the old man at the borderline between life and death, between human
and nonhuman, through the use of the similes that compare the leech-gatherer to “a huge
stone” and “a sea-beast.” He is a ﬁgure for endurance that resists change and mutation.
When the leech-gatherer answers the speaker’s question, the poem resorts to another pair
of similes: “And the whole body of the man did seem/ Like one whom I had met with in a
dream,/ Or like a man from some far region sent/ To give me human strength, and strong
admonishment” (11. 113-19). The leech-gatherer’s existence as a ﬁgure in the poem
informs that he is a nominal interlocutor merely deployed in the poem’s enactment of
internalized dialogue. Simultaneously, it ﬁgures as a landmark of late-Wordsworthian

poetics that increasingly abandons the intersubjective dimension of his poetry.

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3. Reactive Lyric:

Shelley’s “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” and “Mont Blanc”

While Wordsworth’s “Immortality Ode” and “Resolution and Independence” exemplify
one type of the Romantic lyric, Shelley’s poetry that consciously reacts to Wordsworth’s
verse constitutes another kind. Many of Shelley’s poems grew out of the poet’s struggle
with his powerful predecessor, but especially, the cases of “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”
and “Mont Blanc” merit close attention as the two poems document Shelley’s own way
of solving epistemological questions through the creation of yet another poetic mode.
Shelley’s revisionary relationship with Wordsworth’s “Immortality Ode” is evident in
“Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” composed in 1816. The presence of the Wordsworthian
Ode in Shelley’s text is the most visible in the second stanza, where Shelley raises

questions resounding Wordsworth’s in the “Immortality Ode”:

Spirit of Beauty, that doth consecrate

With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon

Of human thought and form --- where are thou gone?
Why dost thou pass away and leave our state
This dim vale of tears, vacant and desolate?

(11. 13-17)

The selection of poetic diction in these lines unmistakably echoes Wordsworth’s poem,
but as soon as he asks these questions, Shelley annihilates the Wordsworthian answer that
was available in the “Ode”: “No voice from some sublimer world hath ever/ To sage or

poet these responses given” (11. 25-26). By denying the efﬁcacy of Wordsworth’s

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response to these questions, Shelley rejects Wordsworth’s solution that locates the
epistemological center within the self and declares that his own way of approaching the
questions will be distinct from Wordsworth’s. Appropriately, his poem ends with a
prayer to a mystiﬁed presence that can govern subjectivity and the outer world alike.
While “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” aims at posing questions rather than providing
answers, “Mont Blanc,” written within a month after “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”
exempliﬁes Shelley’s way of resolving epistemological questions and the poetic form
that accompanies his solution. As in the conversation poems and the “Ode,” in “Mont
Blanc,” the central problem revolves around epistemology. In fact, the poem presents the
most conscious and purposeful attempt to tackle the issue of epistemology among various

Romantic poems. From its ﬁrst stanza, “Mont Blanc” announces its main issue:

The everlasting universe of things

Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,
Now dark, now glittering, now reﬂecting gloom,
Now lending splendour, where from secret springs
The source of human thought its tribute brings

Of waters, with a sound but half its own,

Such as a feeble brook will oft assume

In the wild woods, among the mountains lone,
Where waterfalls around it leap forever,

Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river
Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves.

(11.1-11)

As Robert Brinkley explains at length in his essay “Spaces Between Words: Writing

Mont Blane,” the water imagery in this stanza recalls the Ode’s “mighty waters rolling

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evermore” (l. 170). This resemblance in imagery becomes more significant, for both
poems deploy the water metaphor in order to describe “the source of human thought.” In
the “Ode,” Wordsworth locates the “source” within his subjectivity by designating the
power of memory as the ultimate “master-light” of one’s well-being. Shelley’s “Mont
Blane,” however, adopts the same water metaphor in a revisionary way: “the rapid
waves” in the second line point to the fusion between material reality and human mind,
which become syntactically dissolved by the pronoun “its.” Then, gradually, the
apparent echoes of the “Ode” give way to a series of borrowed phrases from “Tintern
Abbey,” Wordsworth’s earlier poem that posits an epistemological unity between man
and nature. “A sound but half its own” is an obvious allusion to Wordsworth’s famous
phrase, “the mighty world/ Of eye and ear, both what they half-create,/ And what
perceive” (11. 106-8) in “Tintern Abbey.” The description of “waterfalls” in line 9 also
recalls “the sounding cataract” in “Tintern Abbey.” Through these lines that weave the
“Ode” and “Tintern Abbey” in a seamless fashion, Shelley annuls the epistemological
distance between Wordsworth’s two poems and thereby invalidates the affirmation of the
self in the “Ode.”

Then, in the next stanza, Shelley presents a direct reversal of the epistemological view

of the “Immortality Ode”:

Dizzy ravine! --- and when I gaze on thee

I seem as in a trance sublime and strange
To muse on my own separate fantasy,

My own, my human mind, which passively
Now renders and receives fast inﬂuencings,

Holding an unremitting interchange

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With the clear universe of things around;

(11. 34-40)

In these lines, “Mont Blanc” points to the materiality of the outer world; the
confrontation between perceiving mind and material objects in this poem appears to
designate the latter as the ultimate center of epistemology. The “human mind” only
assumes a “passive” function in an “interchange” with the “universe of things.”

Thus, Shelley turns to the mountain at the end of Stanza Ill and listens to its solemn

words:

Thou has a voice, great mountain, to repeal
Large codes of fraud and woe --- not understood
By all, but which the wise, and great, and good
Interpret, or make felt, or deeply feel.

(11.80-83)

Humans are to “interpret” the “mountain,” which apparently possesses the ultimate
potency in the man-nature exchange. Thus, the poem appears to designate “things” rather
than the “human mind” as the locus of its epistemological quest.

However, the poem’s use of language contradicts such a conclusion. According to
Frances Ferguson’s essay on “Mont Blanc,” the poem converts epistemological language
into the language of domesticity and human relationship. She argues that the poem’s
epistemology can be read very differently depending on whether it is correlated with
ontology or with “love.” When one aligns epistemology with ontology, one’s act of

knowing always struggles to coincide with the real existence of the epistemological

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object. Yet, if the epistemology in question is aligned with love, its main concern is
emotional assurance that continues to assume the presence of an interlocutor; matching
one’s knowledge with the real existence in this case becomes a minor issue. Then, the
epistemological complexity of “Mont Blanc” is precisely that, while its meaning process
appears to concern one kind of epistemology, the language of the poem turns to the other.

Ferguson argues that the language of the poem humanizes the world of natural objects
by addressing the ravine and the mountain as “thou” and providing them with
companionships in the persons of “thy giant brood of pines, “those “children of elder
time” (11. 20-21). Thus, although the logic of the poem points to the ontological
conclusion about the material presence of things, the linguistic effect continually
undermines the logic and succumbs the material world to the power of human
imagination. The ambiguous questioning at the end of the poem ultimately completes
such humanization and declares the human mind’s indispensable position in the
epistemological process: “what were thou, and earth, and starts, and sea,/ If to the human
mind’s imaginings/ Silence and solitude were vacancy?” No matter how passive the
human mind may be, the existence of material objects becomes only meaningful when
the mind summons them and thereby establishes connection with them.

Richard Isomaki’s sophisticated argument concerning the meaning of “power” in
“Mont Blanc” partially supports Ferguson’s view of the poem. Instead of understanding
“power” in a metaphysical sense on the ontological plane, Isomaki proposes an
alternative way of conceiving the central concept of the poem. He discovers the proper
meaning of the word in Hume’s usage: for Hume, “power” means “necessary

connection.” According to Hume, the causal connection we attribute to objects is not

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necessarily inherent in them, but simply subject to the habit of human imagination, which
moves from one object to the next and develops the notion of connection out of such
movements. Hume’s skepticism does not allow human mind to reveal the real causation
itself, but without the power of interpretation given to human mind, no connection
between objects can hold any kind of meaning. Thus, although the “Power” of Mont
Blane is inaccessible, the likeness of it is available to human imagination. Isomaki’s

argument provides a way to read one of the most problematic passages in the poem:

One legion of wild thoughts, whose wandering wings
Now ﬂoat above thy darkness, and now rest
Where that or thou art no unbidden guest,
In the still cave of the witch Poesy,
Seeking among the shadows that pass by
Ghosts of all things that are, some shade of thee,
Some phantom, some faint image; till the breast
From which they ﬂed recalls them, thou art there!

(11. 41-48)

The Platonic cave that contains “ghosts” and “shades” is not the world of originals, but of
simulacra. Yet, when the witch Poesy imagines the natural world, the only entity that
exists in the poetic realm is the imagined world, no matter how distant it is from the real
world. Thus, by pronouncing “thou art there,” Shelley declares that the phenomenal
scene becomes the “power” that resides in the compositional space.

Again, in this passage, Shelley’s strategic use of the “thou” language empowers the
function of human imagination engaged in an epistemological task. Interestingly, the

language of relationship that plays such a crucial role in the poem bears close

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resemblance to the language of the conversation poem. Shelley’s use of“thou” and
intimate idioms in “Mont Blanc” duplicates the linguistic features of the conversation
poem and thereby reproduces the power dynamics between speaker and auditor in the
conversation poem. Since the auditor in the conversation poem often functions as a
passive listener rather than an actual interlocutor, situating the ravine and the mountain at
the position of the auditor through the use of similar speech acts is an effective way of
enhancing the power of the speaking subject. In a sense, the Shellyean Romantic lyric is
doubly indebted to the conversation poem: ﬁrst, in terms of its continued concern with
epistemological issues, and second, with regard to its creative use of the conversation

poem’s language, through which it resolves its own epistemological question.

4. The Afﬁrmative “Encounter”:

Charles Tomlinson’s Poetry

Commenting on major influences on his own poetry, Charles Tomlinson, one of the
leading British poets of the contemporary period, says, “the distinguishable American
presences in my own work, so far as I can tell, were, up to then, Pound, Stevens, and
Marianne Moore, and yet, if through them the tonality sounded American, the tradition of
the work went back to Coleridge’s conversation poems” (qtd. in Goodson, yer—beg
Imagination 119). The speciﬁc reference to the conversation poem in his comment seems
somewhat puzzling, as it is difﬁcult to discover the formal apparatus of the conversation
poem in Tomlinson’s poetry. Although some of his poems contain the second-person

singular pronoun, “you,” who it refers to in his individual poems often remains obscure,

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and thus the poems do not necessarily convey a sense of a speciﬁc addressee. Moreover,
many of his poems do not even record any trace of the interlocutor. Since many of
Tomlinson’s poems do not ﬁt smoothly into the formal deﬁnition of the conversation
poem, his statement that clearly acknowledges the inﬂuence of Coleridge’s conversation
poems on his own work bafﬂes an attempt to characterize the shape of the inﬂuence in
merely formal terms.

Rather, the intertextual connection lies with the thematic elements shared between
Coleridge and Tomlinson, especially those which concern the human’s epistemological
exploration. Among many of Tomlinson’s poems that possess Coleridgean echoes,
“Descartes and the Stove” is a particularly revealing example that may serve an

introductory purpose:

Thrusting its arrnoury of hot delight,
Its negroid belly at him, how the whole
Contraption threatened to melt him
Into recognition. Outside, the snow
Starkened all that snow was not ----
The boughs’ nerve-net, angles and gables
Denting the brilliant hoods of it. The foot-print
He had left on entering, had turned
To a ﬁrm dull gloss, and the chill
Lined it with a fur of frost. Now
The last blaze of day was changing
All white to yellow, ﬁlling
With bluish shade the slots and spoors
Where, once again, badger and fox would wind

Through the phosphorescence. All leaned

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Into that frigid burning, corded tight
By the lightlines as the slow sun drew
Away and down. The shadow, now,
Defined no longer: it ﬁlled, then overﬂowed
Each fault in snow, dragged everything
Into its own anonymity of blue
Becoming black. The great mind
Sat with his back to the unreasoning wind
And doubted, doubted at his ear
The patter of ash and beyond, the snow-bound farms,
Flora of ﬂame and iron contingency

And the moist reciprocation of his palms.

In this poem, Tomlinson intentionally reproduces the Coleridgean environment of “Frost
at Midnight.” The word “frost” is actually named in the poem, and as in Coleridge’s
poem, the inside is framed by what is going on outside. The stove in Tomlinson’s poem
alludes to Coleridge’s “the thin blue ﬂame (that) / Lies on my low-bumt ﬁre, and quivers
not” (11. 13-14). By evoking Coleridge’s conversation poem and titling his own poem
“Descartes and the Stove,” Tomlinson exposes his understanding of Coleridge’s poetic
mode essentially as the literary venture geared toward solving the epistemological
dilemma of the Post-Cartesian era. Unlike “This Lime-Tree My Bower,” “Frost at
Midnight” fails to re-connect Coleridge with nature, leaving the prospect of harmonious
communion only for his infant son, Hartley. Aware of this reserved approach to the
matter of epistemology in “Frost at Midnight,” Tomlinson supplies a witty answer to
Coleridge’s painful dilemma through “Descartes and the Stove.” Thus, while the turn

from outside to inside in Tomlinson’s poem duplicates the movement of Coleridge’s

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poem, Tomlinson refuses to separate human consciousness from its environment and to
provide the content of the human mind’s meditation. Instead, the witty ﬁnal line of the
poem directs attention to the “reciprocation” of Decartes’s palms, which ridicules the
great philosopher’s doubt that leads him to regard his doubting mind as the only ﬁrm
basis for knowledge. In a way, the conclusion of Tomlinson’s poem sums up all the
efforts of the conversation poem that attempted to reunify the mind and the universe
separated by Cartesian dualism.

Writing on Tomlinson’s poetic achievement, Michael Kirkham uses the phrase “an
ethic of perception” to characterize his poetry. Without exception, Tomlinson’s poems
reveal the poet’s developed habits of receptivity and minute attention. Although
Tomlinson’s poetry has been criticized for its extreme concern for natural landscape
rather than human affairs, Kirkham opposes the widespread critical view that divides his
poems into two groups: poems of the natural world (the world of objects) and poems that
deal directly with the human world. Instead, Kirkham proposes to recognize the fact that
the records of sense experience in Tomlinson’s poetry always have an analogous human
content (3). As an admirer of Cezanne, Tomlinson attempts to recreate the “uniﬁed”
vision of a natural-human world expressed in Ce’zanne’s paintings. Tomlinson’s notion
“manscapes” denotes the poet’s belief that human scenes and natural landscapes
inherently belong to one “uniﬁed” vision.

Tomlinson’s view of the participatory relationship between subject and object is
apparent in many of his poems, including his aesthetic manifesto, “A Meditation on John
Constable.” The focus of the poem appears to be on the commendation of Constable’s

artistic virtue, that of minute observation, but in its ﬁnal lines, Tomlinson underscores the

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inﬂuence of such an observation on the observing self and draws attention to the

reciprocal relationship between subject and object:

for what he saw
Discovered what he was, and the hand---unswayed
By the dictation of a single sense---
Bodied the accurate and total knowledge
In a calligraphy of present pleasure. Art
Is complete when it is human. It is human
Once the looped pigments, the pin-heads of light
Securing space under their deft restrictions
Convince, as the index of a possible passion,
As the adequate gauge, both of the passion
And its object. The artist lies
For the improvement of truth. Believe him.
(11. 40-51)

For the artist-observer, the careful observation of natural landscape simultaneously
becomes the discovery of the self (for what he saw/ Discovered what he was). Thus, a
successful artwork creates an aesthetic realm in which it combines the artist’s passion and
the object of representation. As the words such as “index” and “gauge” suggest, the
artwork does full justice to both the artist and the object and ultimately reaches the
domain of “higher truth.”

Tomlinson’s celebration of the moment that renews subject-object relations is also
apparent in “Snow Signs.” The speaker of this poem, who attempts to discover the signs

of nature hidden beneath snow, utters the following lines:

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Walking, we waken these at every turn,
Waken ourselves, so that our walking seems

To rouse some massive sleeper out of winter dreams
Whose stretching startles the whole land into life,

As if it were us the cold, keen signs were seeking
To pleasure and remeasure, repossess

With a sense in the gathered coldness of heat and height.

(11. 13-24)

When the observer of nature turns to the object, one’s attentiveness also “wakens” one’s
self. As Kathleen O’Gorman succinctly explains, the increase of alertness and
awareness also means an intensiﬁcation and expansion of self (1 57). Therefore, in the
lines from 21 to 24, a reversal of subject-object relation occurs: now, the “signs” of
nature discover the human, taking on the initiative in the relationship.

In order to fully discover such a renewal in the relationship with nature, Tomlinson
suggests that one should immerse oneself into the space of nature. In “Swimming

’9 6‘

Chenango Lake, swimming” becomes a metaphor for such an immersion. (“For to
swim is also to take hold/ On water’s meaning, to move in its embrace/ And to be,
between grasp and grasping, free.” 11. 25-27) The wordplay in the phrase “between grasp
and grasping” highlights the reciprocal ties that bind the swimmer with the water.

In Tomlinson’s other poems, the self’s relationship with the other extends toward the
dimension of intersubjective communication. In this context, the motif of “encounter”
becomes signiﬁcant to Tomlinson’s poetry, as it denotes the meaningful confrontation
between self and other in which the self experiences a radical transformation. Tomlinson

frequently uses an analogy between natural and human experiences, as the example of

“The Atlantic” shows beautifully:

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The sun rocks there, as the netted ripple
Into whose skeins the motion threads it
Glances athwart a bed, honey-combed
By heaving stones. Neither survives the instant
But is caught back, and leaves, like the after-image
Released from the ﬂoor of a now different mind,
A quick gold, dyeing the uncovering beach
With sunglaze, That which we were,
Confronted by all that we are not,
Grasps in subservience its replenishment.

(11. 15-24)

In the lines from 15 to 19. the sun “encounters” the earth through the water. This
meeting of natural elements, in which contraries interpenetrate each other, is comparable
to the human experience that enables one to open oneself toward the other and ultimately
replenish the self. Although this kind of human experience may sound rare and difﬁcult
to achieve, Tomlinson asserts that it always exists in all the aspects of everyday life. The

following lines from “Winter Encounters” conveys this point in a convincing way:

In this rufﬂed air, where all moves
Towards encounter. Inanimate or human,
The distinction fails in these brisk exchanges----
Say, merely, that the roof greets the cloud,
Or by the wall, sheltering its knot of talkers,
Encounter enacts itself in the conversation
On customary subjects, where the mind

May lean at ease, weighing the prospect

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Of another’s presence.

(11. 13-21)

The everyday “conversation/ On customary subjects” becomes a signiﬁcant “encounter”
in the ﬁnal lines of this passage. When the interlocutors affirm each other’s presence, the
Habermasian “communicative ethic” comes alive in the conversational scene, and the
latent possibility of modernity finally gets realized.

The ways in which Tomlinson envisions the epistemological relationship between
subject and object and its implication for intersubjective relations border on Harbermas’s
philosophical view, which attempts to heal the rift between ethics and epistemology.
Simultaneously, Tomlinson’s poetry provides long-awaited answers for questions raised
in Romantic conversation poems. As Tomlinson comments on his own poetry, he
successfully “situates all he’s learned from Romanticism within reach of a distrust of the
ego, within reach of a ﬂexible awareness that you must respect what is other than you as
you respect people in conversation” (qtd. in Kirkham l7). Exposing the narrow
boundaries of the ego and placing subjectivity in constant contact with other beings,

Tomlinson’s poems tell us to seek an afﬁrmative encounter with the other.

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III. Conversing with the Auditor: Rethinking the
Consensus in the “Norm-Guided” Model

For Habermas, who refuses to understand individual utterances as isolated events, the
validity of those utterances rests on the way they observe consensual norms involved in
intersubjective communication. However fragmentary a given utterance may appear, it
can be located in its own contexts, which necessarily entail the speaker’s connection with
others. As members of a social group, the speaker and others recognize the “binding
force” of societal norms and feel “mutually obliged to observe these norms” (The Theory
1: 190). Moreover, through the coordination of their individual utterances, the
communication process ultimately searches for a further establishment of the consensus,
by which the participants in the verbal exchange may achieve a synchronization of action.

The Habermasian model of the communicative ethic offers valuable insights into the
reading of the conversation poem. The overwhelming effusion of emotions and feelings
that characterizes the poetic mode was formerly illuminated only as the sign of self-
absorption, but a critical approach infomted by Habermas’s communication theory
enables one to detect the way in which the presence of the auditor conditions the poetic
utterance. Through its invocation of the auditor, the conversation poem situates itself in a
communal space, where certain consensual norms involved in intersubjective
communication are in operation.

Furthermore, Habermas’s theory helps reveal that, in the process of poetic utterance,
the conversation poem seeks a point of consensus between the speaker and the auditor.

This desire toward an agreement between self and other attests to the historicity of the

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poetic mode by exposing how the conversation poem responds to the crisis of lyricism in
the Romantic period, when various social forces compel the lyric to gradually open up its
space to narrative elements. Acutely aware of the dilemma of the times when an
individual articulation can no longer be regarded as a representative universal statement,
the conversation poem signals the insertion of the public into the private domain of the
lyric by allowing traces of a potential interlocutor to enter the poetic space and by
establishing a consensual vision between the speaker and the auditor.

Viewed as a poetic mode that uses the presence of the auditor as a signiﬁcant apparatus
and thereby engages the consensual dimension of intersubjectivity, the conversation
poem raises an interesting, yet complicated series of questions, which formerly seemed
simply irrelevant when the mode was understood essentially as a document of personal
meditation. The questions concern the nature of intersubjective relationships suggested
through the poetic utterance and involve a scrupulous investigation of both consensual
norms upon which the utterance rests and a mutual agreement at which it aims. Although
Habermas’s theory suggests that the kind of ideal “consensus” invoked in his theory of
the communicative ethic is egalitarian, a careful scrutiny of the conversation poem
reveals that an uneven distribution of power between participants in a given
communication process may jeopardize the ethical desire implied in the conception of the
poetic mode.

For the problematic intersubjective relationship delineated in the conversation poem,
one may simply blame the monologic structure of the poetic form, which displays the
utterance of only one of the two (or more) parties engaged in the conversation, and

conclude that the structure is doomed to yield such an undesirable picture of

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intersubjective relations. However, there do exist monologues that offer more respect to
the function of the auditor and even undermine the authority of the speaker, and a
comparison between the conversation poem and those other forms of monologues may
indicate limits of the Romantic poets’ project geared toward a narrativization of their own
poetry. Among various forms of the monologues that contrast with the Romantic
conversation poem, the dramatic monologue might be the most representative and most
convenient to use, as numerous critical studies of the genre readily provide an excellent
overall understanding of its intersubjective implication.

A good point of contrast between the two poetic modes can be located at the end of the
poem, where the poetic modes display diverging attitudes toward the auditor’s role as an
interlocutor. As many critical readings of the dramatic monologue suggest, the ending of
the Victorian poetic form remains open, awaiting the interlocutor’s response to the
speaker’s utterance.20 Although the poem ends before it shows the auditor’s response,
the reader can imagine a dialogic interchange between the speaker and the auditor. In
contrast to this “open-endedness” of the dramatic monologue, the conversation poem,
which usually presents a sense of closure at the end, does not leave much room for the
auditor’s response.

This contrast between the two poetic forms is grounded upon their respective
understanding of temporality. The temporality of the conversation poem is relatively
independent of the logic of causality. The past and the future do exist in “Tintern
Abbey,“ but temporal concepts are brought into the poem only through the mediation of

the speaker’s consciousness. On the other hand, the dramatic monologue is caught within

 

20 For the discussion of the dramatic monologue as an “open” form, see Armstrong, Victorian Poetry:
Howe; Langbaum; and Shaw.

lOl

a temporal process dominated by the logic of causality. The opening lines of “My Last
Duchess” provide a good example: “That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,/
Looking as if she were alive. I call/ That piece a wonder, now” (11.1-3). As soon as the
poem opens, the reader encounters a deﬁnite article and the two deictics (“that”), which
imply that a conversation is in progress. In addition to the implication of an immediate
past, a more distant past appears through the adjective “last” and the phrase “looking as if
she were alive.” Moreover, the closing passage of the poem projects the reader’s
attention into the immediate future beyond the termination of the poem. Just as the
Duchess’s death in the past caused the present conversation, the Duke’s utterance and the
auditor’s response to it will determine the shape of the future. In this sense, although the
dramatic monologue only captures a short moment, it implies a consequence affecting a
larger temporal sequence.

As the dramatic monologue succumbs completely to causality and temporal progress
beyond individual consciousness, the speaker’s power at the moment of utterance is
always relative. Although the Duke in “My Last Duchess” appears to be a formidable
presence, the envoy’s action following the Duke’s utterance ---what he would say to the
Duke and what he would tell his master--- can have an impact on the Duke’s course of
life. Since this kind of narrative logic does not operate in the text of the conversation
poem, the speaker can maintain the stable authority in the poem that refuses to await the
auditor’s response. Thus, the silence of the auditor in the conversation poem, unlike that
of the dramatic monologue, is perpetual silence.

Recently, this relatively powerless condition of the auditor in the conversation poem

has repeatedly been noted by many feminist critics, for the poetic mode usually addresses

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a female member of the poet’s household. Marlon B. Ross attends to ways in which
Dorothy in “Tintern Abbey” is written into her brother’s poem, and Daniel P. Watkins
similarly observes that Sara in “The Eolian Harp” functions precisely in the manner
prescribed to her by the poet (97). The feminist readings of the conversation poem
question the kind of “consensual” norms used in the speaker’s encounter with the auditor
and, above all, the nature of ﬁnal “consensus” reached at the end of the poem. In this
respect, these feminist studies of Romantic poetry share many points with recent feminist
ethical theories, which critique Habermas’s seemingly universal theory of communicative
ethics. As I have suggested, Nancy Fraser, Seyla Benhabib, and Marie Fleming attend to
Habermas’s failure to discuss communicative problems arising from asymmetrical gender
relations.

Interestingly, contemporary feminists are not the only ones who have detected
problems involved in the uneven distribution of power between participants in the
conversation. Since the Romantic period, many poets have also recognized these
problems inherent in the original examples of the conversation poem and have revised the
poetic form, attempting to establish a more egalitarian relationship between speaker and
auditor. In a way, these later poets modify Habermas’s discourse theory by exposing the
structure of power that inhibits a genuinely dialogic exchange between the interlocutors.
Even in their most optimistic moments, the revisionary conversation poems are acutely
aware of difﬁculties inherent in their pursuit of communicative dialogism.

The purpose of this chapter is to analyze the nature of the speaker-auditor relationship
in Coleridge’s and Wordsworth’s conversation poems and also to delineate the process by

which later poets transform the poetic form in order to create more egalitarian

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intersubj ective relations. In fact, such a revision already starts with Dorothy
Wordsworth’s re-writes of her brother’s poetry. In the Victorian period, Browning
responds to his precursors’ inﬂuential poems in his own way, pointing to the problematic
nature of the encounter with the female auditor in the Romantic poets’ conversation
poems. In the twentieth century, poets continue to offer a more critical view of the
asymmetrical power structure between the speaker and the auditor: among many modern
examples, I will discuss Thomas Hardy and Ted Hughes’s conversational poems that
rethink the condition of the female auditor. Although these interesting poems often place
a satirical distance between themselves and the Romantic conversation poem by
indicating their awareness of gender inequity in Romantic poetry, they simultaneously
reveal the arduous nature of the project aimed at creating and maintaining a harmonious
intersubjective relationship. Interestingly, Both Hardy and Hughes are capable of gaining
a genuinely intersubjective vision only when the female auditor has passed away and
disappeared from the compositional scene, leaving their achievement largely unﬁnished.
Thus, rather than providing a ﬁnal answer, these modern poems derive their poetic
energy from their quarrel with the Romantic conversation poem, the poetic mode that
displays its desire for a communion with other, yet often falls short of actually achieving

one.

1. Questioning the Consensus:

Coleridge’s “The Eolian Harp”

Composed in 1795, Coleridge’s “The Eolian Harp” became the very ﬁrst poem of its

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kind, the conversational blank-verse poem addressed to a silent auditor. The poem has
been critically analyzed mainly in the context of Coleridge’s pantheistic philosophy,
which could be summed up in the famous phrase, “the one life within us and abroad” (I.
26). Yet, the revision history of the poem tells us that this well-known line was not
added until 1817 and that, without the phrase and the lines surrounding it, the original
version of “The Eolian Harp” contained only ﬁve lines of Coleridge’s theological
argument. Unlike the revised poem of 1817, which displays a relatively well-established
set of ideas, “The Eolian Harp” composed as a verse-letter in 1795 focuses on
documenting the “process” of meditation rather than providing a particular viewpoint as a
ﬁnished “product.”

In this process of contemplation, the silent auditor, Sara Coleridge, performs an
indispensable function. In the beginning of the poem, her presence and Coleridge’s
contact with her create a warm atmosphere that sustains the poet’s extended meditation.
Moreover, although Sara does not speak, at the climactic point of the poem, her eyes
convey her disapproval of Coleridge’s argument bordering on Pantheism and lead him to
conclude the poem with a humble praise for God. Noting this important role of Sara in
“The Eolian Harp,” Anthony John Harding regards the poem as an excellent example that
helps us “to avoid too exclusive an emphasis on the ‘subjectivity’ and ‘solipsism,’ which
is so often found to be the distinguishing characteristic of Romantic poetry” (43). As
Harding observes, Sara occupies a position much more central and important than a mere
recipient of Coleridge’s meditational verse; her presence conditions the content of poetic
utterance, directing the speaker to conform to the set of consensual norms that uphold the

“communicative ethic.” Thus, at the end of the poem, instead of continuing his own

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philosophical contemplation, Coleridge appears to modify his position and return to a

point of agreement between him and his wife:

Meek daughter in the family of Christ,

Well hast thou said and holily disprais’d

These shapings of the unregenerate mind,

Bubbles that glitter as they rise and break

On vain Philosophy’s aye-babbling spring.

For never guiltless may I speak of Him,

Th’ INCOMPREHENSIBLE! save when with awe

I praise him, and with Faith that inly feels;

Who with his saving mercies healed me,

A sinful and most miserable man,

Wilder’d and dark, and gave me to possess

PEACE, and this COT, and THEE, heart-honor’d Maid!
(11. 54-64)

The consensus reached at the end voices the traditional Christian doctrine that Sara,
depicted as “a meek daughter in the family of Christ,” would have endorsed without
question. Advocating the consensual agreement, the ending of the poem generates a
vision of peace and harmony, which Harding relates to “the bower of Adam and Eve
before the Fall” (46).

However, despite the overall structure of the poem that allows Sara to function as an
active participant in the communication process moving toward a consensual vision, a
series of metaphorical ﬁgures employed in the poem undermine and counter the structural

progress. First of all, the Eolian harp, the dominant trOpe in the poem, highlights the

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receptive rather than aggressive characteristic of women. Essentially feminized and

eroticized, the “harp” is depicted to succumb to the masculine forces that “caress” it:

And that simplest Lute,
Plac’d length-ways in the clasping casement, hark!
How by the desultory breeze caress’d,
Like some coy Maid half-yielding to her Lover,
It pours such sweet upbraidings, as must needs

Tempt to repeat the wrong!

(11. 12-17)

The imaginary “maid,” to which the poem compares the “harp,” yields herself to her
“lover,” and her gesture of resistance is merely interpreted as a disguised “temptation,”
which prompts the masculine control over her body. Despite her seemingly resilient
reaction to the male touch, the “maid” turns out to be a willing participant in the “Lover”s
conquest of her. The connection between Sara and this female ﬁgure is not hard to
establish: the above lines remind the reader of the poem’s beginning moment, when
Sara’s affectionate motion toward her new husband sets the overall atmosphere of the
poem. Anticipating the “maid,” who half-yields to her lover, Sara reelines her “soft
check” on Coleridge’s arm.

The parallel between the two female figures does not end there; just as the “maid”s
resistant gesture paradoxically reinforces the masculine power over her, Sara’s “reproof”
later in the poem also brings about an unexpected outcome. After acknowledging the
validity of Sara’s reproach, in his ﬁnal lines that praise God for His mercy and

benevolence, the speaker states that God allowed him to “possess” Sara, along with

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“peace” and the “cot.” Sara’s active participation in the communication process diverts
the direction of the speaker’s argument and engenders a consensual agreement between
her and her husband, but Christian doctrine, which she advocates through her
admonishing gaze, only assigns her a subordinate position in relation to her male
counterpart. Implicated within the male-dominant discourse, Sara expresses her opinion,
but only to be subsumed under masculine control.

The fundamental problem revealed in this reading of “The Eolian Harp” is that even a
seemingly unproblematic exchange of speech in a communication process is susceptible
to the structure of power embedded in a particular discourse, which provides “consensual
norms” for communication. In Coleridge’s poem, the speaker’s Pantheistic idealism is
judged and challenged on the basis of Christian doctrine, which both Sara and her
husband acknowledge as the dominant cultural discourse of the time. Yet, the
“consensual norms” sustained in the Christian doctrine of the iate eighteenth century are
far from egalitarian principles; rather, they reproduce gender inequity, suggesting a
hierarchical relationship between male and female as the “norm.” For Sara, other kinds
of discourse that can fundamentally challenge her husband simply do not exist. Thus, the
only way for her to counter Coleridge merely results in reinforcing the subordinate role of
the feminine.

As some critics have noted, the problem of gender inequity in Coleridge’s poetry is
complicated by the poet’s later turn to the notion of the “androgyny,” to which Virginia
Woolf attaches a great value in A Room of One’s Own. In 1820, Coleridge states, “the
truth is, a great mind must be androgynous” (The Table Talk 191), and Woolf interprets

his provocative remark as a well-known male author’s support of her own ideas reaching

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toward deeonstructing socially established sexual stereotypes. Coleridge’s idea of
“androgyny” is already touched upon in “The Eolian Harp,” although the poem’s

ﬁgurative approach to it does not render it too conspicuous:

And thus, my Love! as on the midway slope
Of yonder hill I stretch my limbs at noon,
Whilst thro’ my half-clos’d eyelids I behold
The sunbeams dance, like diamonds, on the main,
And tranquil muse upon tranquility;
Full many a thought uncall’d and undetain’d,
And many idle ﬂitting phantasies,
Traverse my indolent and passive brain
As wild and various, as the random gales
That swell or ﬂutter on this subject Lute!

(11. 34-43)

In the above passage, Coleridges places himself in the feminine position embodied in the
musical instrument in relation to a variety of “thoughts” and “phantasies” that pass
through his mind. As Camille Paglia observes in Sexual Personae, “the poet is a passive
instrument played upon by the masculine Muse-force of nature” (318). Essentially
feminized, the poethood described in “The Eolian Harp” calls for indolence and passivity
as ideal qualities for poetic creation, for, in Paglia’s words, indolence is “a drowsy dream
state into which the unconsious releases images uncensored by intellect” (319).

Yet, it is still doubtful whether Coleridge’s endorsement of indolence and passivity
points to the revision of the hierarchical gender relationship. While he certainly appears

to appreciate the positive function of “androgyny,” the notion is only applied to the

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masculine context, as H. J. Jackson correctly notes (599). The male poet may
temporarily usurp the feminine quality and incorporate it within his inherently masculine
endeavor in order to boost his creative energy, but a female appropriation of masculine
attributes is strongly prohibited and scandalized. In this respect, Coleridge’s idea of
“androgyny” follows the cultural pattern, which Diane Long Hoeveler examines at length

in her Romantic Androgyny: The Woman Within. Hoeveler argues that male Romantic

 

poets self-consciously employs the feminine as an alternative source of value in order to
engage in a ﬁctional completion of their own psyches and names the appropriation of
feminine qualities by male poets “the metaphoric tradition of literary absorption/
cannibalization” (xiv). As Hoeveler remarks, the idea of “androgyny” is strictly limited
to the masculine context and far from reciprocal in terms of gender relations. Thus, male
poets respond to a possible female usurpation of masculine traits with great fear and
animosity, conﬁrming that the two genders are situated in completely separate planes of
existence.

In Coleridge’s case, the two following notebook entries attest to his dread of a

masculinized woman, a ﬁgure he dramatizes in the form of fearful Geraldine in his poem

“Christabel”:

I was visited by a most frightful Dream of a Woman whose features were
blended with darkness catching hold of my right eye & attempting to pull it out--
-I caught hold of her arm fast---a horrid feel. . . the Woman’s name Ebon Ebon

Thalud---When I awoke, my right eyelid swelled (entry 848).

I was followed up & down by a frightful pale woman who, I thought, wanted to
kiss me, & had the property of giving a shameful Disease by breathing in the

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face/ & again I dreamt that a ﬁgure of a woman of gigantic Height, dim &
indeﬁnite & smokelike appeared---& that I was forced to run up toward it---&
then it changed to a stool---& then appeared again in another place---& again I
went up in great fright---and it changed to some other common thing---yet I felt

no surprise (entry 1250).

The source of the “great fright” that these women engender might be their forbidden
“incorporation” of masculine features: the ﬁrst woman possesses a male name, the
second threatens the male psyche with sexual aggression, and the “gigantic Height” of the
third suggests an archetypal masculine body. These anomalous women, who terrorize
men by appropriating their traits, should be controlled and regulated, and therefore, the
notion of “androgyny” should be applied only to the strictly masculine context,
precluding the subversion of the gender hierarchy.

In “The Eolian Harp,” as elsewhere in the period, gender involves hierarchy. The
Coleridgean system of metaphors, which appears to complicate the issue of gender
relations, resembles traditional Christian doctrine that preaches the subordination of the
female to the head of the household. Sara’s participation in the communication process
and the subsequent “consensus,” then, question the nature of consensual norms used in
the communication rather than conﬁrm the pseudo-harmonious vision expressed through
the ﬁnal phase of the poem. Despite the democratic potential contained in the poetic
form, which allows the perspective of the “other” to enter the poetic space and challenge
the dominant lyrical voice, Coleridge’s poem ends up supporting the authority of the

speaker, frustrating the narrative desire of the conversation poem.

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2. Lyricizing Narrative:

Wordsworth’s Poems to Dorothy

Within the scope of feminist criticism devoted to British Romanticism, Wordsworth has
been repeatedly denigrated for his tendency to suppress the female voice and to
appropriate feminine qualities for his own poetic enterprise. Alan Richardson observes
that Wordsworth “locates the source of his sensibility” in the childhood experience
shared with his sister and then incorporates her feminine qualities for his poetics (16). In
a similar vein, Marlon B. Ross argues that Wordsworth promotes a strictly masculinist
concept of the self and that Dorothy serves the function of “a source of inspiration and
leverage for his will to self-possession” (“Romantic Quest” 30).

While these observation are accurate in that women in Wordsworth’s poetry usually
perform a functional role for the sake of the poet’s imaginary project, they seem to risk
overlooking the fact that the kind of “incorporation” or “appropriation” found in
masculine Romantic poetry is actually a sign of extreme vulnerability and dependency.
In other words, brilliant critical works analyzing the shape of male dominance in
Romantic poetry tend to neglect the complexity and contradiction inherent in male poets’
attitudes toward women. In this sense, the fact that Wordsworth is the most prominent
ﬁgure for his egotistical manipulation of females tells us that he is simultaneously the
most dependent on women among the Romantic poets. Recognizing this, John Powell
Ward suggests that “the power in Wordsworth’s poetry lies not merely in cultural
authority claimed over (feminine virtues), but in precisely the tension between such
claims and the poet’s clear vulnerability toward women and the feminine, which marks

his poetry from start to ﬁnish” (612). Thus, he urges critics to consider “the tangles of

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Wordsworth’s attitudes to women” that include not only “his condescension to them” and
“his employment of their labor” but also “his need for them” and “his sensitivity yet
uncertainty to them.” In a similar vein, Judith W. Page says that “in Wordsworthian
egotistical sublimity,” which recent feminist readers critique, she sees “a paradoxical
yearning for relationship” (6).

The conversation poem, the form of which enables the poet/speaker to enter into a
relationship with the auditor, turns out to be a good example that helps understand the
above complexity. By locating conversational moments that express the poet’s intense
desire toward relationship and also by examining the way in which those moments
operate in the larger project of his poetry, one can gain a glimpse of the complicated
contradiction between the Wordsworthian myth of “self-possession” and his paradoxical
reliance on women. Poems such as “Nutting” and “Tintern Abbey” are especially
revealing because their partial employment of the conversational form allows one to
detect the precise textual/emotional points, where the poet turns to the female auditor and
invokes her participation in his poetic project. Unlike “The Eolian Harp,” which
addresses Sara from the very outset, many of Wordsworth’s poems to Dorothy start out in
the monologic form and do not reveal the auditor’s presence until the climactic crunch.

In the case of “Nutting,” the poet’s evocation of “the maiden” is limited to the ﬁnal
three lines, but the context in which it appears merits close analysis so that one may fully
comprehend the indispensable nature of the maiden’s function. The poem’s use of
ﬁgurative language suggests that, although the maiden is not introduced until the end, her
presence is already signaled in the earlier parts of the poem; as is often noted, the natural

setting itself is metaphorically designated as “virginal,” creating a clearly gendered

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dimension in the text and anticipating the maiden’s arrival:

O’er path-less rocks,
Through beds of matted fern, and tangles thickets,
Forcing my way, I came to one dear nook
Unvisited, where not a broken bough
Dropped with its withered leaves, ungracious sign
Of devastation; but the hazels rose
Tall and erect, with tempting clusters hung,
A virgin scene!

(11. 14-21)

The wood, still intact and untouched by the civilization, is described as a “virgin” scene.
Accordingly, the speaker who enters into the wood “forces” his way toward plucking the
virginity of the formerly unvisited “nook.” The masculine ﬁgure literally penetrates the
virginal landscape and then destroys it, ﬁrst with his eyes, and ﬁnally with his action.
The forceful sexual violence culminates in the following lines, virtually suggesting a rape

and also, a feminine mutilation:

Then up I rose,
And dragged to earth both branch and bough, with crash
And merciless ravage: and the shady nook
Of hazels, and the green and mossy bower,
Deformed and sullied, patiently gave up
Their quiet being: and, unless I now
Confound my present feelings with the past,
Ere from the mutilated bower I turned

Exulting, rich beyond the wealth of kings,

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I felt a sense of pain when I beheld
The silent trees, and saw the intruding sky.---

(11. 4353)

Here, the consummation of sexual desire is complete, but the expected masculine
pleasure is simultaneously tinged with a psychological burden. Hence, the sense of guilt
constitutes another kind of consciousness in this ﬁnal part of the poem. Whereas the
speaker’s emotional state in the earlier part of the poem only suggests the surge of blind
sexual desire, his feelings after the event are much more complicated and thus need some
kind of redemption. The ensuing address to the human “maiden,” then, is meant to

mitigate the guilt that haunts the speaker:

Then, dearest Maiden, move along these shades
In gentleness of heart; with gentle hand
Touch---for there is a spirit in the woods.

(11. 54-56)

As David Watkins puts it, the “maiden” at this juncture of the poem is instructed in “the
proper relation of the human to nature” (58). The speaker expects her gentle, nurturing
presence to provide a healing “touch” for the woods, which are unequivocally humanized
in this poem. Feminine qualities are exalted as the necessary antidote for masculine
violence, and the speaker’s evocation of those qualities indicates his guilt-ridden self-
eonsciousness accompanying the destruction of feminine nature. Although the shadow of
violence still lingers as a threat that can potentially harm the virginity of the human

“maiden,” the poem ends before a conversion of the threat into an impending danger,

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without confirming a clear vision of male dominance.

In contrast, “Tintern Abbey” entraps the female within the contours of masculine desire
in a more systematic fashion. While the poem’s turn to Dorothy discloses the speaker’s
need for a female presence similar to that shown in “Nutting,” the way in which “Tintern
Abbey” employs the assistance of the poet’s sister reveals precisely the process by which
Wordsworth’s yearning for relationship turns into a desire for hegemony over the female
“other.” As is in “Nutting,” Dorothy in “Tintern Abbey” is ﬁrst introduced at the
moment of crisis, when the poet’s continuing efforts toward reconnecting with nature
have repeatedly failed. The entire stanza preceding Wordsworth’s turn to his sister is
ﬁlled with his painful attempts to rationalize the passage of time, which, in fact, has
deprived him of his ability to establish an instinctive, unself-conscious relationship with
nature. Striving to overcome his profound sense of loss, the poet resorts to the spiritual
gain that has followed his maturity into adulthood, but the “abundant recompense” (l. 88)
falls short of offering him the much needed comfort. Thus, just before he addresses
Dorothy, Wordsworth expresses his doubt about the value of his adult experience: “Nor,
perchance,/ If I were not thus taught” (ll. 1 12-13). Despite his earlier declaration that he
has learned to appreciate “the still sad music of humanity” (1. 92) during the lapse of
time, the distressing sense of isolation from nature drives him to search for a way to
return to his former self.

In this context, Wordsworth’s turn to Dorothy bespeaks his emotional dependency on
her: Dorothy’s feminine qualities, her relational, non-intrusive ego and her ability to exist
in harmony with nature enter into the poetic space in order to cure the poet’s deprived

soul. However, while celebrating her positive features. the poet denies Dorothy her own

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subjectivity. Instead, as soon as Wordsworth summons his sister, he sets out the project

of transforming her identity into his former self, erasing Dorothy’s self from the poem:

thou, my dearest friend,
My dear, dear friend, and in thy voice I catch
The language of my former heart, and read
My former pleasures in the shooting lights
Of thy wild eyes.
(11. 116-120)

As Watkins perceptively remarks, the verbs in this passage --- “catch” and “read” --- are
extremely problematic. To “catch” suggests to “ensnare”; thus, in Watkins’ words,
“Dorothy is caught in the poem and hence in the structures of ideas, values, and authority
that are set down by the poet alone” (37). Her identity is signiﬁcant only to the degree
that the poet employs it to reconstruct the lost story of his younger self. The other verb,
to “read,” further illuminates the problematic nature of the Wordsworthian project. When
she is “read” by the poet, Dorothy is subject only to his interpretation, not allowed to
retain her own identity. Thus, Wordsworth inscribes his sister within his autobiography,
regarding her only as a text that awaits his analysis.

This process of inscription, in turn, aims at resisting pressures of temporal progress.
Unlike “Nutting,” in which the adult consciousness does exist, but not in conﬂicted terms
with the boyhood experience, Wordsworth’s mature consciousness in “Tintern Abbey” is,
to say the very least, envious of his former self. Due to this contradictory distance within
the poet’s self-consciousness, he chooses to create his own alternative narrative rather

than succumb to the narrative logic of temporal progress imposed upon him. In the

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Wordsworthian narrative, Dorothy becomes a central character, who re-lives the poet’s
sweet past and may retain her close contact with nature in the future as well. In other
words, Wordsworth deﬁes temporal changes by conﬁning his sister within the image of
the “young maiden.” Yet, his project is doomed from the outset: as soon as the poet
attempts to transform his sister into his former self, he has no choice but to sacriﬁce the
intersubjective dimension of his narrative. Thus, by erasing Dorothy’s identity and
prescribing her future life, Wordsworth reduces his narrative to lyric, in which the poet’s
monologic voice dominates in isolation. The irony of “Tintern Abbey” is that
Wordsworth invokes intersubjectivity only to return to the enclosed sphere of lyric, and
that the poet himself is, in fact, the one who is the most aware of the precarious nature of
this return. Among other things, Wordsworth appears to realize that Dorothy as a text
could escape his interpretation at any time and claim her own subjectivity; the extremely
complicated syntactical structure of the poem’s last lines reveals the poet’s anxiety and
uncertainty over his project.

The conﬂict between lyric and narrative that burdens “Tintern Abbey” re-appears in
Wordsworth’s another poem addressed to Dorothy, yet in a much simpler, and plainer
manner. “To My Sister” (1798), which continues the traditional theme of carpe diem,
bluntly asks for Dorothy’s participation in the poet’s project, aimed again at defying the

logic of temporal progress and creating his own lyricized narrative:

My sister! (‘tis a wish of mine)
Now that our morning meal is done,
Make haste, your morning task resign;

Come forth and feel the sun.

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Edward will come with you; --- and, pray,
Put on with speed your woodland dress;
And bring no book: for this one day

We’ll give to idleness.

No joyless forms shall regulate
Our living calendar:
We from to-day, my Friend, will date
The opening of the year.
(11. 9-20)

In the above passage, Wordsworth urges his sister to abandon her social, domestic duty
and instead partake of his poetic universe. Along with her, the poet hopes to challenge
the progress of time and construct a new version of temporality. He literally denies the
efﬁcacy of the existing calendar and proposes to create a personal calendar, which starts
with the very day of his poem. In order to sanction his project, Wordsworth invokes an
intersubjective consensus through the repeated use of the ﬁrst-person pronoun, “we.”
However, despite his attempts to make his account appear “consensual,” the phrase in the
parenthesis in line 9 discloses the fact that the poet’s project is merely “a wish of mine.”
Beneath the repetition of “we” and “our,” the speaking voice of a single individual
prevails, informing that the pseudo-narrative, which presents a consensual vision, is in
fact hopelessly lyrical and monologic.

Interestingly, instead of silencing Dorothy completely as in “Tintern Abbey,”
Wordsworth in “To My Sister” allows her partial resistance to enter the poetic space.

The ending of the poem, which still waits for her to join his outdoor excursion, reveals

119

that, at least in this poem, Dorothy’s subjectivity survives Wordsworth’s lyricization.
From the uneasy manner in which the poet prompts Dorothy’s surrender to his request,
one can read his extreme vulnerability that has paradoxically led him to construct the

myth of the egotistical sublime.

3. Conversation as Liberation:

Dorothy Wordsworth’s Rewrites of “Tintern Abbey”

In “Tintern Abbey” and Wordsworth’s other poems, Dorothy is invoked to complete
her brother’s poetic project, but Wordsworth does not allow the reciprocity between him
and Dorothy to fully enter his poetic realm. As Elizabeth Fay states, “her status as
maiden in William’s mythic scheme makes her muse and complement to his creative
endeavors” (115). If so, it is by no means an accident that Dorothy obsessively returns to
“Tintern Abbey” in her later poetic career. Subdued to silence, Dorothy could not voice
her self in Wordsworth’s poem; now in her poetry, she ﬁnally starts to articulate her
formerly erased identity and thus truly dialogize “Tintern Abbey.” Time and memory,
the two important themes of “Tintern Abbey,” surface as recurrent themes in many of her
later poems, and by grappling with these themes, Dorothy supplies a critique of her
brother’s poem and simultaneously proposes another possibility for the conversation
poems.

For example, “Lines Addressed to Joanna H.” (1826) resembles “Tintern Abbey” in the
speaker’s evocation of the past triggered by the revisited natural scene and also in the

emphasis on memory as the bridge between past and present:

120

Now at the close of fervid June
Upon this breathless hazy noon
I seek the deepest, darkest shade
Within the covert of that glade

Which you and I ﬁrst named our own
When primroses were fully blown,
Oaks just were budding, and the grove
Rang with the gladdest songs of love.

Then did the Leader of the Band,
A gallant Thrush, maintain his stand
Unshrouded from the eye of day

Upon yon beech’s topmost spray.

Within the self-same lofty Tree

A Thrush sings now --- perehance tis He ---
The lusty, joyous, gallant Bird,

Which on that April morn we heard.

Yet Oh! how different that voice,
Which bade the very hills rejoice!
--- Through languid air, through leafy boughs

It falls, and can no echo rouse.

But in the workings of my heart
Doth memory act a busy part;
That jocund April morn lives there,

Its cheering sounds, its hues so fair.

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Why mixes with remembrance blithe
Which nothing but the restless scythe
Of death can utterly destroy,

A heaviness a dull alloy?

(Levin, Dorothy Wordsworth 188-89)

While both “Tintern Abbey” and Dorothy’s poem address a change between past and
present, what each poet understands as the source of the change differs radically. Unlike
Wordsworth, who assumes that his initiation into adulthood has caused the change,
Dorothy believes that the absence of J oanna, the addressee of the poem, is the major
source of the change. In the present scene, the thrush’s song, which used to offer her
great joy, fails to console her who laments the loss of a communal experience of nature.
This emphasis on the communal way of interacting with nature is almost entirely absent
from Wordsworth’s poetry. As many of his readers and critics have noted, Wordsworth’s
successful interaction with nature often presupposes his solitary existence in the natural
scene.21 Then, when he cannot possibly achieve a reciprocal relationship with nature,
Wordsworth enacts the other’s presence for facilitating his encounter with nature. In
contrast to such a self-centered tendency of Wordsworth, Dorothy shares nature with the
other from the very beginning of her poem and thereby provides a corrective to her
brother’s egotistical appropriation of nature.

Furthermore, the last part of “Lines Addressed to Joanna H.” signiﬁcantly alters the

 

2' In a similar vein, Wordsworth’s poetry often transforms experiences of nature shared by him and
Dorothy into his exclusively solitary experiences. The opening of his daffodil poem can function as a
prominent example here: he writes, “I wandered lonely as a cloud,” whereas Dorothy’sjoumal entry
records, “when we were in the woods beyond Gowbarrow Park we saw a few daffodils close to the water-
side” (Levin, Dorothy Wordsworth 192-93; my emphases).

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ending of “Tintern Abbey”:

And, if my timid soul might dare

To shape the future in its prayer,
Then fervently would I entreat

Our gracious God to guide thy feet
Back to the peaceful sunny cot
Where thou so oft has bless’d thy lot
Where lonely Nature led thy soul

To brood on Heaven --- where no controul
Of fashion check’d thy steadfast aim
To satisfy whatever claim

A tender conscience might suggest
Of faithful cares leading to pious rest.

(Levin, Dorothy Wordsworth 190)

Whether it was Dorothy’s intention or not, the speech act constituting these last lines is
precisely the one concluding “Tintem Abbey”: a prayer. This similarity, however, only
highlights the different ways in which the two poets employ the same speech act. In its
essence, Wordsworth’s prayer is a command in disguise: through the prayer, he
repeatedly assigns Dorothy a speciﬁc task, that of “remembering” him, and thus attempts
to forge her identity. Then, in the context of Wordsworth’s lines, Dorothy’s scrupulous
approach to her prayer may indicate her careful refusal to subordinate the other to the
self’ 3 will: even before starting her prayer, Dorothy says, “if my timid soul might dare/
To shape the future in its prayer.” This revision liberates the addressee, tellingly “the
maiden” in this poem, from the conﬁnes of the speaker’s desire. Simultaneously, in a

rather vicarious way, it liberates Dorothy herself from her brother’s control that has been

123

exerted over her for almost 30 years.
Several years later, in “Thoughts on My Sick-Bed” (1832), Dorothy confronts “Tintern

Abbey” in a more aggressive way:

When loving Friends an offering brought,
The ﬁrst ﬂowers of the year,
Culled from the precincts of our home,

From nooks to Memory dear.

With some sad thoughts the work was done,
Unprompted and unbidden,
But joy it brought to my hidden life,

To consciousness no longer hidden.

I felt a Power unfelt before,
Controlling weakness, languor, pain;
It bore me to the Terrace walk

I trod the Hills again; ---

No prisoner in this lonely room,
I saw the green Banks of the Wye,
Recalling thy prophetic words,

Bard, Brother, Friend from infancy!

No need of motion, or of strength,
Or even the breathing air:
--- I thought of Nature’s loveliest scenes;
And with Memory I was there.
(Levin, Dorothy Wordsworth 220)

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Without doubt, the verbal echoes of “Tintern Abbey” in this poem are deliberate.
Dorothy’s revision process, which increasingly contains echoes of “Tintern Abbey,”
conﬁrms that she was conscious of her brother’s poem while composing “Thought on My
Sick-Bed.”22 Especially, the reference to the “lonely” room and the poet’s appeal to

memory point to Wordsworth’s following passage:

Though absent long,
These forms of beauty have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye;
But oft, in lonely rooms, and mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,

Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart,

And passing even into my purer mind
With tranquil restoration.
(11. 23-31)

Comparing these two passages, Pamela Woof denigrates Dorothy’s poem in the
following terms: “unexplored by the understanding, unmodiﬁed by the aware
imagination, (the exact, despotic eye and the precise memory) could not save her from

the weary weight of the unintelligible world” (109). Through this comment, she stresses

 

22 In a fragmentary form, Dorothy ﬁrst wrote “A Prisoner in this quiet Room,/ Nature’s best gifts are mine-
--/ Friends, books & rural sights & sounds,/ Why should 1 then repine?” Then, she changed “this quiet
room” into “this lonely room,” the phrase directly echoing “Tintern Abbey.” Later, the fragment became
“No prisoner in this lone room/ 1 saw the green Banks of the Wye,/ Recalling thy prophetic words,/ Bard,
Brother, Friend from infancy!” For a more detailed look at the revision process, see Levin, Dorothy
Wordsworth 221-22.

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Dorothy’s inferiority to her brother, who “could half-create as well as perceive” natural
objects (109). Yet, such a partial way of comparing the two writers is simply inaccurate;
Woof not only subscribes to the so-called Wordsworthian ideology about poethood, but
she also misreads Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” which in fact reveals that, to
Wordsworth, the mind’s ability to partly create objects of perception is a source of
tension and trouble as much as a blessing. Instead of providing an accurate replica of the
outer world, the mind too often becomes susceptible to self-projection and thus renders
the process of sensory perception utterly unreliable. The case of memory is even more
troubling, since the mind, already distanced from the sensory objects, is not able to
reproduce the former experience of perception. Many of Wordsworth’s poems convey
his acute awareness of this problem residing in sensory perception and memory, and the
real value of “Tintem Abbey” lies in the fact that it visibly documents Wordsworth’s self-
questioning of his ability to perceive and remember nature.

In Wordsworth’s above passage, for example, he appeals to memory in order to recover
his past self, yet the ensuing lines immediately disclose his doubt about the faculty of
memory: as soon as he utters the above passage, Wordsworth repeats the word
“unremembered” twice, and it undermines his dependence on memory which should
present a comforting vision to him. By contrast, Dorothy’s assertion, “I thought of
Nature’s loveliest scenes;/ And with Memory I was there,” does not struggle with such a
doubt. Memory, to her, is not deluding nor unreliable as it is to Wordsworth.

Perhaps, when Wordsworth pronounced the “prophetic words” (“Thy memory be as a
dwelling-place/ For all sweet sounds and harmonics”) in “Tintern Abbey,” he may have

recognized Dorothy’s secure exercise of memory, but what he failed to acknowledge was

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that her memory should serve her own self before her brother. “Thoughts on My Sick-
Bed” responds to Wordsworth’s “prophetic words” by reclaiming Dorothy’s selﬂiood not
subsumed under the control of her brother. The last stanzas of the poem generate a
striking impression, as, unlike her normal mode of writing, they contain Dorothy’s
continual assertion of “I” that usually does not intrude into her other poems.
Interestingly, this repeated use of the ﬁrst-person pronoun starts precisely at the moment
when she begins to recall “Tintern Abbey.” Then, in the very last stanza, when her
memory ﬁnally brings “Nature’s loveliest scenes” to her, Dorothy envisions herself alone
in those scenes, instead of being together with her brother. Openly summoning William
Wordsworth and responding to his words that formerly shaped her identity, Dorothy’s
conversation with her brother accomplishes her act of liberation and ultimately

emancipates her selfhood from Wordsworth’s overpowering rule.

4. A Victorian Comment on the Conversation Poem:

Browning’s Pauline

As I examined above, the dominant lyrical voice, which frequently overturns the
narrative desire inherent in the poetic form of the conversation poem, becomes a problem
when it permanently silences the auditor and prescribes a future for her. Instead of
opening the poetic space to the narrative logic, Romantic conversation poems impose a
lyrical closure that apparently assumes an achievement of a consensual vision, yet in fact,
only expresses the will of a single individual. Dorothy Wordsworth’s re-writes of

“Tintern Abbey” correct and tackle this problem effectively, but unfortunately, left in the

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state of obscurity, her poems have hardly influenced other poems. Then, for the
Victorian poets, the problem of self-dominance becomes a major hurdle in the way of
their own poetic production, which they should overcome under the new set of social
circumstances.

Browning’s ﬁrst response to this hurdle is Pauling, the poem that Isobel Armstrong
reads as a document of Browning’s growing disapproval of the Romantic poetic form in
her inﬂuential Victorian Poetry. Unlike the Romantic conversation poem, the text of
EMILE contains an intriguing formal device, the female auditor’s own comments on the
speaker’s monologic effusion addressed to her. In the footnote that consists of Pauline’s
annotations in French, she asserts that she cannot “grasp” the speaker’s idea.

J eopardizing the speaker’s assumption that Pauline is his only soul mate and confidante,
Pauline’s footnote offers yet another view of the text. As Isobel Armstrong observes,
Pauline here assumes a double role: “she is both the addressee and object, and an editor,
of the same text, a writing subject and annotator who appears to be both in and outside

the text’s control” (Victorian Poetry 117). Her double role places the entire text under

 

intense interrogation and introduces a second consciousness into the poetic space, which
would otherwise suggest the speaker’s outlook as the only viable one. Armstrong’s use

of Pauline in her Victorian Poetry points to the fact that Browning’s ﬁrst published poem

 

already indicates his discomfort with the Romantic poetic form and his subsequent
departure from it through the invention of the dramatic monologue. Marking the limits of
the narrative desire expressed through the conversational poetic form, Baum displays
the process by which Browning distances himself from the Romantic poetic mode and

approaches a new form of his own.

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Using Armstrong’s insightful comments as a starting point, I intend to offer an
expanded discussion of Pauline, which I regard as a powerful commentary on the
conversation poem. For this purpose, I intend to focus on its deliberately incoherent
structure that embodies contradictory motives and impulses. In fact, the sparse critical

attention that Pauline has received from Browning scholars is precisely due to the charge

 

of incoherence, as Thomas J. Collins’s following comment on the poem suggests: “The
absence of mental and emotional discipline ...... is apparent in the very structure of the
poem itself---a series of moods and mental states strung together with little coherence”
(4). The speaker in Browning’s ﬁrst published poem is engaged in an extremely
confusing process of self-fashioning, and his repeated attempts to deﬁne his own self
drive his utterance into a more and more chaotic juncture, where various identities the
speaker assumes appear in total conﬂict with each other. Such an inconsistent self-
expression may not seem to share anything with the apparently reﬁned statements made
in the Romantic conversation poem, but a closer look reveals that the incoherent
utterance of Railings speaker in fact provides a magniﬁed version of the typical
contradiction inherent in the conversation poem. The dilemma of Browning’s speaker
reproduces precisely that of the Romantic poets, who are painfully trapped between their
desire to reach toward the other and the opposing impulse to reinforce self-will through
the mastery of the other. In varying tones and moods, the speaker of Pau_line confesses
the seductive forces of self-indulgence and also expresses his wish to get beyond the
dark, enclosed sphere of the self.

At one point, the speaker delineates the image of his own self in the following terms:

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I am made up of an intensest life,
Of a most clear idea of consciousness
Of self, distinct from all its qualities,
From all affections, passions, feelings, powers;
And thus far it exists, if tracked, in all:
But linked, in me, to self-supremacy,
Existing as a centre to all things,
Most potent to create and rule and call
Upon all things to minister to it;
And to a principle of restlessness
Which would be all, have, see, know, taste, feel, all---
This is myself; and I should thus have been
Though gifted lower than the meanest soul.
(11. 268-80)

In this description, the speaker describes the heuristic quest of his restless ego as an
extremely self-centered manipulation of the outer world. Conﬁned within its own notion
of self-supremacy, the self cannot form any meaningful bonds with anything outside
itself; instead, the self exerts highly destructive inﬂuence on any entities that come in
contact with it, whether they are humans or things.

While the above passage displays the speaker’s knowledge of his own propensity for
self-dominance, in other parts of the poem, he also mentions an inexplicable “impulse” in

himself, which drives him to seek a way to escape the narrow vision of the ego:

Souls alter not, and mine must still advance;
Strange that I knew not, when I ﬂung away

My youth’s chief aims, their loss might lead to loss
Of what few I retained, and no resource

Be left me: for behold how changed is all!

I cannot chain my soul: it will not rest

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In its clay prison, this most narrow sphere:
It has strange impulse, tendency, desire,
Which nowise I account for nor explain,
But cannot stiﬂe, being bound to trust
All feelings equally, to hear all sides:

(11. 588-98)

The strange inner desire prompts the speaker to eagerly search for links with the outer
world, castigating his earlier tendency to reside within the walls of his own ego as an
“imprisonment” and “enchainment.” Now, the speaker’s self is engaged in an outward
movement, through which it expects to discover genuine connections with some entities
outside its own existence.

Painfully aware of his past in which the destructive power of self-imprisonment ruled
over all other human qualities in himself, the speaker declares: “No more of the past! I’ll
look within no more] I have too trusted my own lawless wants,/ Too trusted my vain
self, vague intuition---” (11. 937-39). Subsequently, at this point, the speaker reaches for
his lover, Pauline, hoping that she may function as a link between him and the outer
world. This move is reminiscent of the motivation behind the turn to the auditor in the
conversation poem, the poetic mode that aspires to a comforting consensual vision, which
may provide an antidote for the self-centered imagination of an isolated individual.
Railings speaker evokes Pauline and asserts, “as one just escaped from death/ Would
bind himself in bands of friends to feel/ He lives indeed, so, I would lean on thee”
(11.1021-23). Virtually locating the meaning of life in the context of intersubjective
bonds, this passage urges Pauline to remain faithful to him and continue to offer the

fundamental human connection he needs desperately.

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However, unlike the conversation poem, which usually conveys a sense of resolution at
the end, Pauline reveals rather than conceals that the poem’s ﬁnal vision is fundamentally
ﬂawed and that the two participants --- the speaker and Pauline --- do not equally beneﬁt
from the communal future described in the poem. In this sense, Thomas P. Walsh’s
reading of the poem as a movement “from an isolated splinter of consciousness to
psychic integration, from fearful, defensive introversion to aggressive extroversion, from
the self to the not-self, from himself to God and man” (10) appears somewhat limited.
Through a series of dark, sinister images, Browning leads the reader to suspect the
seemingly “communal” vision and detect the disturbing operation of the speaker’s

masculine will:

I’ll sit with thee while thou dost sing
Thy native songs, gay as a desert bird
Which crieth as it ﬂies for perfect joy,
Or telling me old stories of dead knights;
Or I will read great lays to thee---how she,
The fair pale sister, went to her chill grave
With power to love and to be loved and live:
Or we will go together, like twin gods
Of the infernal world, with scented lamp
Over the dead, to call and to awake,
Over the unshaped images which lie
Within my mind’s cave:

(11. 959-70)

The speaker’s utopian vision, sustained as long as the role ofa singer/storyteller is

assigned to Pauline, starts to vanish when the speaker is imagined as a narrator. The

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._ _--.n_—.—.__ __._.

“lays,” which he will “read” to Pauline, contain the story of Antigone, who sacriﬁces
herself for her brother’s sake; invoking the tragedy of the sister’s plight, Browning’s lines
unequivocally question the efﬁcacy of the speaker’s ﬁnal vision, in which the speaker’s
manipulation of language commits a symbolic murder of the prominent feminine ﬁgure.
Despite all her talents and her willingness to “live” and “love,” the sister arrives only at a
grave, denying her own identity. As Pauline in Browning’s poem is a stand-in for
Wordsworth’s Dorothy in “Tintern Abbey,” the tragic implication suggested through the
Antigone myth carries more weight. Then, the ensuing lines convey an even stronger
sense of doubt, as the couple’s future journey is described to take place “within the cave”
of the speaker’s mind. Duplicating sinister images associated earlier with the speaker’s
self-imprisonment, Browning hints at a more than probable incarceration of the feminine
within the conﬁnes of masculine desire. Even at the moment of a seemingly consensual
resolution, a truly reciprocal intersubjective connection is utterly invisible on the horizon.
Browning’s disagreement with the speaker’s problematic project is expressed through
the insertion of Pauline’s comments on the poem. The female auditor’s irreverent look at
the speaker prevents the reader from identifying with him and objectiﬁes the speaker’s

consciousness. Exposing dangers inherent in lyrical desire, Pauline revises the Romantic

 

conversation poem and resuscitates the female auditor.

5. A Guilt-Ridden Yearning for a Conversation:

Thomas Hardy’s Poems for Emma

Thomas Hardy’s “Poems of 1912-1913” were written after Hardy’s ﬁrst wife, Emma

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Gifford Hardy, passed away suddenly. The couple’s married life was by no means a
blessed one, despite the romantic, passionate courtship that preceded their marriage.
Hardy’s atheism and repeated affairs with younger women as well as Emma’s
antipathetic manners supposedly alienated the two from each other, deteriorating their
relationship to the point where it became a bitter experience of mere cohabitation. Yet,
Emma’s unexpected death brought Hardy pangs of grief, which he expressed in his
“Poems of 1912-1913” in a beautifully reﬁned manner.

Although many commentators have said that Hardy’s sudden revival of passion for his
ﬁrst wife was mainly a ﬁctional device for self-comfort, the recurrent invocation of
Emma in the “Poems of 1912-1913” nonetheless retains a great value as documents of
Hardy’s repentant afterthoughts regarding certain problematic aspects of his own married
life. In their ceaseless efforts to heal the emotional wounds from the estranged
relationship, the poems also search for ways to reach the level of genuine
communication, which was entirely missing from the couple’s marriage. Radically
rethinking his own faults that ended up degenerating his relationship with Emma, Hardy
seeks a vision of harmonious reciprocation in his Emma poems. As a result of the poet’s
painful efforts, the “Poems of 1912-1913” contain certain moments that alter the male-
dominant outlook of the conversation poem and establish an egalitarian relationship
between genders.

For example, the ﬁrst stanza of “After a Journey” presents an intriguingly reversed

version of male-female relationship:

Hereto I come to view a voiceless ghost;

Whither, O whither will its whim now draw me?

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Up the cliff, down, till I’m lonely, lost,
And the unseen waters’ ejaculations awe me.
Where you will next be there’s no knowing,
Facing round about me everywhere,
With your nut-coloured hair,
And gray eyes, and rose-ﬂush coming and going.
(11. 1-8)

Emma’s “voiceless ghost” in this passage is characterized by its whimsical, ceaseless
movement that averts the poet’s approach to it. In the biographical context, Emma’s
extreme mobility, which keeps frustrating the poet’s desire for union, functions as a foil
for her immurement in real life. As U. C. Knoepﬂmacher shows perceptively, the theme
of a “female enclosure” haunts Hardy’s poetry and ﬁction; their mobility utterly denied,
feminine ﬁgures and characters in his works resemble the real-life Emma Hardy, whom
Hardy conﬁned in Max Gate (152-53). Subsequently, Emma became a mere co-dweller
in the Hardy household, having lost her capability of free movement. Then, the lively
female ghost of “After a Journey,” who regains mobility and ﬂoats freely in elemental
natural scenes, reﬂects Hardy’s excruciating awareness of his own act of female
imprisonment.

In a more ﬁgurative sense, the truant ghost of Emma Hardy also offers a critique of
numerous Romantic images of women, conﬁned within the “contours of masculine
desire.” Sara Coleridge in “The Eolian Harp” is described as an inhabitant of the cottage,
which the male poet “possesses.” Although Dorothy Wordsworth in “Tintern Abbey”
appears more mobile than Sara in that she roams and wanders in nature, her brother’s

prescription of her future days nonetheless imprisons Dorothy in his own poetic project.

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In a way, Wordsworth even assigns her a specific physical boundary, generating
Dorothy’s everlasting image as a daughter of the Lake district. Given that the female
auditor of the Romantic conversation poem is conﬁned within the scope of masculine
power, Emma’s dynamic movement, which impedes the poet’s approach repeatedly,
renews the poetic form by instilling feminine energy in it.

With the freedom of movement, the ghost of Emma Hardy also gains the initiative in
the relationship with the poet, who utters, “whither will its whim now draw me?” (I. 2)
Similar expressions also appear in the following lines: the poet confesses, “I have tracked
you,” in line 10, and also, “you are leading me on,” in line 17. Such a reversal of male-
female relationship is even more signiﬁcant, as the poem alludes clearly to the experience
of sexual intercourse. Through the use of phrases like “the unseen water’s ejaculations”
and “rose-ﬂush coming and going,” the poem strongly implies that the poet’s passionate
connection with Emma’s ghost involves a sexual dimension. Yet, the respective roles
assigned to the male and female ﬁgures in the poem overturn the traditional depiction of
sexual intercourse as an act of masculine mastery over a female body. Instead, the poem
repeatedly postpones the fulﬁllment of male desire, granting the female ghost the ability
to lead the relationship and control her unseen body.

The power of Emma’s ghost is also apparent in the communication process; although
she remains silent and never utters a word, Hardy’s Emma poems are saturated with her
presence and the poet’s endeavor toward connecting with her. One of the poems is even
titled “The Voice,” situating his deceased wife’s unheard utterance at the center of its

text:

Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,

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Saying that now you are not as you were
When you had changed from the one who was all to me,

But as at ﬁrst, when our day was fair.

Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,
Standing as when I drew near the town
Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,

Even to the original air-blue gown!

Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness
Travelling across the wet mead to me here,
You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness,

Heard no more again far or near?

Thus I; faltering forward,
Leaves around me falling,
Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,

And the woman calling.

(11. 1-16)

Unlike some original examples ofthe conversation poem, the absence of the woman’s

voice in Hardy’s text does not lead to her powerless silence and the subsequent

reinforcement of masculine dominance. On the contrary, it drives the male poet to listen

more carefully so that he can capture the woman’s calling voice. Thus, ironically, the last

stanza of the poem foregrounds the female ghost’s unheard utterance, situating the

staggering poet in the background. By privileging the act of listening over that of

speaking, Hardy’s poem attempts to reverse the male-centered tendency of the

conversation poem and explore the possibility of genuine intersubjectivity within the

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poetic form.

However, Hardy’s brilliant achievement exposes its own limitations, which render his
poems less than capable of fully exemplifying the Habermasian ethic of intersubjective
communication. After all, Hardy’s genuine encounter with Emma as “other” occurs only
after her death, when the actual being of the woman is absent. As Cathy Caruth implies
in Unclaimed Experience, one may only realize another as fully “other” and entirely
separate from one’s self when another is irrevocably lost (101-104). Yet, Caruth’s
theory, which appears to rebuke Habermas’s optimistic belief in communicative ethics
prevalent in everyday discourse situations, simultaneously shows how these belated
moments of genuine intersubjectivity can be read in a positive light. Caruth values the
experience of the “awakening” that leads one to ﬁnally recognize another as “other,” as it
constitutes a “transmission” rather than an “understanding” (106). In other words, the
moments of the “awakening” are “passed on” as an act that “passes the awakening on to
others” (107). Within its own textual space, Hardy’s Emma poetry tells a love story that
is exceptionally beautiful, but hopelessly overdue. Yet, the real value of Hardy’s love
poems lies with their redemptive qualities, which communicate to the reader the urgent

need to rethink and renew her own intersubjective relationship with the “other.”

6. Toward a Glimpse of Intersubjectivity:

Ted Hughes’s Birthd_ay Letters

Since Ted Hughes published Birthday Letters, a series of verse letters addressed to his

late ﬁrst wife, Sylvia Plath, in 1998. numerous reviews and comments on the volume

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have criticized Hughes’s self-defensive gesture shown in the poems. Especially for the
American public and critics, who tend to side with Plath in envisioning the bitter,
estranged relationship between the two poets, the image of Hughes is often cast in the
form of an oppressive male tyrant that Plath invokes many times in her poetry. Naturally,
Hughes’s long-awaited responses to Plath’s accusation are interpreted essentially as a
move toward self-j ustiﬁcation. Although such an interpretation may reﬂect part of the
motivation behind the writings of Birthday Letters, in my View, the central theme of the
volume appears to lie elsewhere: rather than attempting to publicly refuse the
responsibility for the failed marriage, the conversational poems in Hughes’s last volume
of poetry strive to confront a bleak reality that frustrates the individual’s efforts toward
communication and mutual understanding. While some poems provide a gloomy
observation of repeated miscommunication in a pessimistic tone, others display a glimpse
of Hughes’s aspiration to establishing a genuine intersubjective relationship, which
protect the individual’s identity, but simultaneously, respect the presence of the “other.”
Although there exist several poems that reveal moments of hope, scenes of
miscommunication and misunderstanding dominate the entire volume. To Hughes, Plath
represents a bafﬂing “other,” who always overturns his scheme of interpretation. As a
text, she somehow escapes Hughes’s reading of her and thereby continues to bewilder
him. For example, in “Visit,” Hughes conveys his sense of recurring miscommunication
through a symbolic event in their early courtship days; in front of Plath’s dormitory,
Hughes and his friend mistake a window of a neighboring student’s for Plath’s and throw
“soil-clods” at it. Unaware that the “dark window” is far from the path leading to an

intimate knowledge of his would-be lover, the poet takes sterile efforts toward connecting

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with her. Appropriately, the stanza following the description of the event expands the

frustrating experience into the general theme of failed communication:

Drunk, he was certain it was yours.

Half as drunk, I did not know he was wrong.

Nor did I know I was being auditioned

For the male lead in your drama.

Miming through the ﬁrst easy movements

As if with eyes closed, feeling for the role.

As if a puppet were being tried on its strings.

Or a dead frog’s legs touched by electrodes.

1 jigged through those gestures---watched and judged
Only by starry darkness and a shadow.

Unknown to you and not knowing you.

Aiming to ﬁnd you, and missing, and again missing.
Flinging earth at a glass that could not protect you

Because you were not there.

(11. 23-36)

Through the analogy of an actor in a play and the two similes that respectively compare
Hughes to a puppet and a dead frog, the poet suggests that his own involvement with
Plath started without a plan on his part; rather, Plath’s intent and Hughes’s unawareness
of it conditioned the outset of their courtship. While this kind of rewriting their personal
history appears to designate Plath as the mastermind of the doomed scenario, line 33,
“Unknown to you and not knowing you,” emphasizes the fact that she was also utterly
susceptible to the dilemma of misunderstanding. Without accurate knowledge of

Hughes, the “male lead,” Plath’s ﬁgurative act of script-writing was also ignorant of its

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own tragic future.

The mutual web ofmiseommunication renders the “other” well beyond intimate
connection. Alienated from each other, the lovers only remain as certain images rather
than concrete individuals. In her excellent essay on Hughes’s Birthday Letters, Anne
Whitehead states that many poems in the collection center on the theme of the “absence
of the real” (234). Instead of providing access to the “other” as the entirety of a person,
the static, isolated images that saturate Hughes’s addresses to Plath only display certain
abstract dimensions of the individual, despite their seemingly vivid qualities. For

example, in “St. Botolph’s,” Hughes describes his late wife in following terms:

And the face---a tight ball of joy.

I see you there, clearer, more real

Than in any of the years in its shadow---

As if I saw you that once, then never again.
The loose fall of hair-«that ﬂoppy curtain
Over your face, over your scar. And your face
A rubbery ball of joy

Round the African-lipped, laughing, thickly
Crimson-painted mouth. And your eyes
Squeezed in your face, a crush of diamonds.
Incredibly bright, bright as a crush of tears
That might have been tears of joy, a squeeze of joy.

(11. 38-49)

At their famous ﬁrst meeting, Plath’s face made a lasting impression on Hughes, and as
he confesses in the above passage, to him, her look at that very moment remained as the

clearest, most real image of her. However, there exists an undeniable distance between

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the image and the concrete individual whom Hughes married, the distance revealed by
the ways in which the poet employs a series of ﬁgures in order to delineate Plath’s face.
Inanimate objects such as “that ﬂoppy curtain,” “a rubbery ball,” and “diamonds” create
a ﬁxed image as in a still life artwork, depriving her face of free movement and also signs
of temporality. Thus, separated from the rest of the world and most importantly, Plath
herself, the image lives on and haunts the poet’s memory.

Hughes’s use of the above metaphors in “St. Botolph’s” is informative of the reasons
behind Levinas’s determined opposition to ﬁgurative language in the context of
intersubjective relations. Levinas argues that ﬁgures tend to reduce the living
relationship between people to abstraction. Mobility, which he designates as the most
crucial feature of the “face” disappears when one attempts to understand the “other” in
ﬁgurative terms; instead, the “face” gets petriﬁed, losing its ability to move and change.

Hughes’s other poems, however, illustrate an alternative way to posit the image of the
“other.” For example, “1 8 Rugby Street” attempts to counter the tendency to transform
Plath into an abstract image and aim instead at reconstructing her as a more concrete
individual. Speaking of her face, Hughes’s following lines repudiate his earlier petriﬁed

form of representation:

It was never a face in itself. Never the same.
It was like the sea’s face---a stage
For weathers and currents, the sun’s plays and the moon’s.
Never a face until that ﬁnal morning
When it became the face of a child---its scar
Like a Maker’s ﬂaw.
(ll. 1 15-20)

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In the above passage, Plath’s “face” gains mobility and changeability. In fact, the
moment it loses those essential qualities is equated with ﬁnality, which means the death
of the “other.” Hughes’s view of intersubjectivity in these lines overlaps signiﬁcantly
with Levinas’s and signals the poet’s awareness that, in order to overcome the dilemma
of miscommunication, one should respect the existence of the “other” as an utterly
separate individual who cannot be subsumed under the representational control imposed
by the self. When he attributes to Plath’s “face” its own ability to move and change, she
becomes an ultimate “other,” whom he cannot possess nor restrain.

Hughes’s struggle for an escape from the grip of possessive desire continues in
“Robbing Myself.” In this poem, which tells the story of his visit to the Devon Cottage
that used to be shared by him and Plath, Hughes rethinks his experience of loss in the

following terms:

I listened, as I sealed it up from myself
(The twelve-hour ice-crawl ahead).
I peered awhile, as through the keyhole.
Into my darkened, hushed, safe casket
From which (I did not know)
I had already lost the treasure.

(II. 56-60)

Apparently, the “treasure” in the ﬁnal line refers to Plath, whose death brought the poet
the overwhelming sense of loss. However, the poem’s title, “Robbing Myself,”

challenges a merely elegiac reading of the passage, as it strongly denotes his own

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culpability in the experience of loss. Multiple interpretational possibilities co-exist:
Hughes may be admitting his partial responsibility for the suicide of his late wife. Or,
better yet, he may be suggesting the violence inherent in the very act of possessing the
“other.” Not only does possessive desire lead to the death of the “other,” but it also
“robs” the self, as one cannot properly conceive one’s own existence without the ethical
connection with the “other.” Thus, looking inside, the poet chastises himself, and despite
the excruciating experience of loss, the ﬁnal line of the poem conveys a sense of reaching
a certain level of wisdom. Perhaps, at this moving moment, Hughes ﬁnally grasps the
ethical responsibility toward the other for the ﬁrst time in their troubled relationship.

In its painful recitation of many episodes that exemplify the dilemma of
miscommunication and misunderstanding, Hughes’s Birthday Letters attests to
difﬁculties in realizing the communicative ethic, which Habermas values as the ultimate
potential of modernity. Simultaneously, however, the volume of poetry also supplies
certain moments of epiphany in which the reader glimpses a genuine vision of
intersubjectivity, albeit ﬂeetingly. Alternating between bitter memories of frustrated
communication and rare, yet precious moments of intersubjective connection with the

“other,” Hughes’s Birthday Letters continues the legacy of the conversation poem.

 

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IV. Conversing with the Self: The “Other”
Consciousness in the Dramaturgical Model

As Peter Dews convincingly argues in his essay on the question of subjectivity,
Habermas’s paradigm shift from consciousness to communication does not exclude the
central philosophical problem of the previous paradigm from the scope of his theory
(“The Paradigm Shift” 502). On the contrary, Habermas attempts to demonstrate that the
problem of subjectivity can be successfully transposed into an intersubjective framework.
In the communicative process delineated by Habermas, self-exhibition --- a dramaturgical
presentation of subjectivity --- constitutes one of the important dimensions. The speaker
reveals her opinions and emotions through her utterances and expects her interlocutor(s)
to understand them. As this display of the self occurs concurrently with the awareness of
the “other” engaged in communication, to a certain degree, the speaker internalizes the
perspective of his interlocutor, who can support and/or critique his utterances.
Throughout this process, the speaker becomes the “subject” through participation in
linguistic interaction. In developing this point in his theory, Habermas, who is inﬂuenced
by Mead’s intersubjective philosophy, concludes that there is no individuation without
socialization, and no socialization without individuation.

The conversation poem, which has traditionally been analyzed as a document of the
speaker’s inward meditation, also exposes traces of the internalized “other”
consciousness that complicates the notion of subjectivity. The presence of this “other”
consciousness may potentially rescue the Romantic conversation poem from

degenerating into a merely solipsistic effusion. Instead, it supplies social elements for the

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conversation poem even in its most private moments. The insertion of this internalized
“other” consciousness into the text becomes clear when one applies Mead’s distinction
between “I” and “me”: Mead’s concept “me” describes the socially constructed self,
created as a result of ongoing interaction with others and participation in the social
process. At a dialectic distance from “me,” the concept “I” is situated, denoting the
spontaneous, impulsive aspect of human agency. According to Mead, there exists an
unclosable gap between “I” and “me,” as self-reﬂection is the very activity that endlessly
reproduces this gap.23 In the conversation poem, which captures moments of self-
reﬂection engaged in the communicative process, normative elements of the “social”
enter into the apparently private text via the speaker’s anticipation of the auditor’s
intersubjective reaction to his utterance.

However, in formal terms, the internalized “other” consciousness in the conversation
poem hardly occupies a ﬁrm position in the textual space. As I already discussed in the
previous chapter, the auditor, who embodies social forces in the conversation poem, is
usually cast as a sympathetic ﬁgure who does not possess sufﬁcient power for a critical
gaze at the speaker. This lack of power on the side of the auditor does not necessarily
arise from the silence of the auditor. Although the dramatic monologue also leaves the
auditor silent, its formal device lends more power to the auditor by allowing the reader to
identify with the auditor and judge the speaker from the auditor’s standpoint. Yet, unlike

the dramatic monologue, which visibly distances the speaker’s utterance from the poet’s

 

2" As Dews discusses, Habermas’s response to Mead’s distinction between “I” and “me” is ambiguous and
complicated (“The Paradigm Shift” 507-10). While accepting the discrepancy between “I” and “me” as a
historical condition, Habermas still assumes that this discrepancy would disappear in an ideal society,
where the principle of “uncoerced and mutual recognition” is in full operation. Yet, I believe that such a
metaphysical ideal in Habermas mainly performs the function of “critical ﬁction” and thereby helps
illuminate the internalized power structure within one’s identity formation process.

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consciousness and thereby discounts the reliability of the speaker, the convergence of
poet and speaker in the conversation poem tends to reinforce authorial power and
subsume the auditor under its control.

A contrast between Browning’s “Porphyria’s Lover” and Wordsworth’s “Tintern
Abbey” provides a good example. In Browning’s poem, the speaker’s solipsistic account
of his manic delusion in “Porphyria’s Lover” provokes the reader’s criticism and invites
her to side with the auditor. Browning displays the process by which the speaker
increasingly indulges in his own sexual fantasy. At the climactic point of the poem, the
speaker gains total power and mastery over his mistress in imagination by transforming
the woman into his object. The depersonalized feminine body in the speaker’s sexual

fantasy is utterly objectiﬁed and referred to “it”:

I propped her head up as before,

Only, this time my shoulder bore

Her head, which droops upon it still:

The smiling rosy little head,

So glad it has its utmost will,

That all it scorned at once is ﬂed,

And 1, its love, am gained instead!
(11. 49-55)

This kind of solipsistic soliloquy positions the auditor and the reader at a critical distance
from the speaker. According to Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor’s thorough examination of

the textual dynamics of the dramatic monologue, at ﬁrst, the auditor’s reaction is

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indicated only through silence, the highly ambiguous form of communication.24 Due to
the speaker’s aggressive, threatening self-fashioning, the auditor is forced to remain in
the state of a “silence of intimidation.” However, this ambiguous silence, which actually
implies the tension between consensus and resistance, soon clariﬁes into the active
silence of dissent, as the reader participates in the meaning process of the text and passes
an ethical judgment on the speaker’s utterance. In the dramatic monologue, the reader
may become “impolite” in relation to the speaker, free to express her disagreement with
the content of the latter’s speech. Through her interpretive efforts, the reader may
transform the monologic text into a kind of dialogue, which operates on the basis of
difference and dissent.

By contrast, the speaker of a conversation poem such as “Tintern Abbey” seeks the
reader’s sympathy and understanding. In fact, the conversation poem usually situates the
reader inside the speaker through its scrupulous exposition of the mind’s activities. The
opening lines of “Tintern Abbey,” for example, supply a vicarious sensory experience for

the reader:

Five years have passed; ﬁve summers, with the length
Of ﬁve long winters! And again I hear

These waters, rolling from their mountain springs
With a sweet inland murmur. Once again

Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,

Which on a wild secluded scene impress

Thoughts of more deep seclusion, and connect

 

2" As Wagner-Lawlor summarizes conveniently, recent works on “silence” have showed that, far from a
mere absence of speech, silence is heavy with communicative value (288). See. for example, Jaworski,
C iani, and Tannen and Saville-Troike.

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The landscape with the quiet of the sky.

The day is come when I again repose

Here, under this dark sycamore, and view

These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts,
Which, at this season, with their unripe fruits,
Among the woods and copses lose themselves,
Nor, with their green and simple hue, disturb

The wild green landscape. Once again I see
These hedgerows --- hardly hedgerows, little lines
Of Sportive wood run wild.

(11. 1-17)

In addition to presenting a detailed description of the landscape, Wordsworth uses four
verbs that point to the process of sense perception: “hear,” “behold,” “view,” and “see.”
This repetitive deployment of sensory verbs situates the reader at the very position of the
speaker and leads the reader to create a mental picture from the standpoint of the speaker.

Once the conversation poem establishes the identiﬁcation between the reader and the
speaker, the reader ﬁnds it extremely difﬁcult to judge the speaker’s utterance from a
critical distance. Due to this lack of distance, the conversation poem becomes an
essentially closed form, which could perform an ideological function of conﬁning the
reader within a particular type of subjectivity. When the reader is thus positioned inside
the consciousness of the speaker, the potentially critical function of the “other”
consciousness virtually disappears, situating the auditor as a powerless recipient of the
speaker’s utterance.

The dramatic monologue critiques such an ideological positioning of the reader by

providing an alternative form of conscionsness. In the most mature dramatic

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monologues of Browning, the text of the poem performs a double function: it is
simultaneously a record of a particular form of consciousness and a critical gaze at that
consciousness. Loy D. Martin resorts to Bakhtin in order to highlight the democratic
possibility inherent in the “dialogical” discourse of the dramatic monologue. According
to Bakhtin, the monological is the univocal discourse of deﬁnition, denotation, logical
analysis, whereas the dialogical is a “doubled” discourse in which utterance takes its
meaning in relation to two different subjective positions (56). Isobel Armstrong’s
understanding of the dramatic monologue as a “double” poem is also based on similar
ideas: the dramatic monologue is “the objectiﬁcation of consciousness that describes and
analyses the manifestations of consciousness” (Victorian Poetg/ 13). The very form of
the dramatic monologue suggests the existence of another consciousness that can
function as a corrective to the particular type of consciousness displayed in the poem.
As I already discussed above, the critical “double” consciousness of the dramatic
monologue is not formally implicated in the conversation poem. Thus, although the
Romantic conversation poem internalizes the consciousness of the auditor to some
degree, the potentially critical function of this “other” consciousness is not fully in
operation. In my discussion of Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight” and Wordsworth’s Tm
Prelude below, I will show where exactly in the text one can situate the presence of the
“other” consciousness and how it stops short of turning into a completely separate voice.
However, the history of the conversation poem reveals that, since the later Romantic
period, many poets have attended to the problems inherent in the myth of the coherent
self and attempted to deconstruct it through formal experiments. Shelley’s Julian and

Madalo is a good early example: the complexity of its doubly framed form is a testament

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to the younger Romantic poet’s ambivalence toward the inherited poetic form. In a
similar vein, Clough continues Shelley’s project and pushes it further through a series of
verse letters that simultaneously display several versions of subjectivity. These
nineteenth-century responses to the conversation poem lead to Yeats’s poetry, the theme
of which centers precisely on the inner conversation between two halves of the self. In
the last part of this chapter, I will read Yeats’s poetry and discuss ways in which the
twentieth-century poet’s works speak to the issues and problems concerning the notion of

subjectivity.

l. The Deferral of Self-Objectification:
Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight”

Anticipating Habermas’s theorization of subjectivity formation within the structure of
intersubjectivity, Coleridge’s emphasis on the function of human communication strives
to situate the self in a dialogic context. In “Coleridge on Human Communication,”
Denise Degrois observes that “genuinely efﬁcient communication is not only practical
necessity in the eyes of Coleridge, but also a spiritual need, a condition of human
survival” (100). As is shown in his naming of hisjournal as The Friend, and in the
mariner’s obsessive search for a listener in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,”
Coleridge perceives one’s interpersonal connections as the fundamental basis for the
construction of subjectivity. His constant experimentation on the speaking voice in his
conversation poems and prose works attest to his belief in “the signiﬁcance of the

originary inter-subjective relation constituting the self” (Degrois 104). In this respect,

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Coleridge resembles 20th-century theorists of intersubjectivity, who attempt to locate the
notion of subjectivity in dialogical relations with other.

Yet, as Degrois rightly observes, Coleridge’s preoccupation with human
communication and intersubjective connection is always tinged with a profound sense of
estrangement, the origin of which is probably found in his alienated childhood experience
(103). Thus, despite his desire for communion with others, Coleridge’s poetry often
displays his ambivalence toward the possibility of genuine intersubjective
communication, not entirely fulﬁlling his own wish for interpersonal connections. The
frustrated desire for intersubejctivity, in turn, generates a return to the solipsistic self,
which then restarts the arduous journey for a human connection all over again.

For my purpose in this chapter, the value of Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight” lies with
its simultaneous revelation of both the poet’s eager search for contacts with the other and
the profound sense of isolation. The poem’s project of self-presentation suggests
subjectivity as an entity fundamentally shaped by its intersubjective connections.
However, painfully aware of the alienated condition of the self, the poem abandons its
own project and engages instead in the exaltation of the “other,” whose extreme otherness
becomes a foil for the isolated self. As the possibility of genuine communication with the
other evaporates, the process of self-objectiﬁcation, which can be enabled by the
utilization of the internalized “other” consciousness, remains in an endlessly suspended
state in “Frost at Midnight.”

My interpretation of Coleridge’s poem, however, differs from the prevalent
understanding of it as an essentially monologic text that merely deploys the technique of

apostrophe for the sake of dialogic appearance. Although the auditor of the poem,

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Coleridge’s infant son, Hartley, is well under the age of verbalization and therefore
remains silent without the ability to talk back, “Frost at Midnight” nonetheless presents
the infant’s unheard response as an important component of the text. For instance, in
concluding, Coleridge describes ways in which Hartley’s presence is intertwined with the

progress of the poet’s meditation:

Dear babe, that sleepest cradled by my side,
Whose gentle breathings heard in this dead calm
Fill up the interspersed vacancies
And momentary pauses of the thought:

(11. 49-52)

Far from being extraneous, the sleeping infant participates in the communication process
and conditions the content of Coleridge’s self-reﬂection. As Hartley’s breathings literally
ﬁll up the gaps between clusters of thoughts in the poet’s mind, the infant continues to
steer Coleridge’s self-scrutiny in a certain direction. The poet’s evocation of his own
childhood experience is obviously triggered by the awareness of Hartley’s presence, and
the picture of the young Coleridge as a lonely, alienated child is presented as a stark
contrast to the peaceful image of his son.

Curiously, however, instead of naming the infant as a medium through which the poet
enacts a journey into his past, the poem suggests an inhuman object as such a transitional
device. Overwhelmed by the “calmness” of the sleeping infant, which “disturbs” and
“vexes” his “meditation,” Coleridge seeks to identify instead with the “ﬁlm,” the only

moving entity in his surroundings:

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The thin blue ﬂame
Lies on my low-burnt ﬁre, and quivers not;
Only that ﬁlm which ﬂuttered on the grate
Still ﬂutters there, the sole unquiet thing.

Methinks its motion in this hush of nature
Gives it dim sympathies with me who love,
Making it a companionable form

With which I can hold commune.

(11. 13-20)

In a sense, Coleridge’s turn to the “ﬁlm” already indicates his anxiety about the inability
to maintain harmonious intersubjective relationships with human beings in his world.
Afraid to confront the extreme otherness of humans, the poet chooses to ﬁnd sympathies
with the ﬂuttering “ﬁlm” in the path toward self-objectiﬁcation. Yet, rather than offering
much needed comfort, this move only intensiﬁes the poet’s desire toward intersubjective
connections, as is shown in his ﬁgurative equation of the “ﬁlm” with a human stranger in
the following note attached to the poem: “In all parts of the kingdom these ﬁlms are
called strangers and are supposed to portend the arrival of some absent friend.”
Denoting both the “absence” of affectionate human bonds and an intense wish for an
expected “arrival” of those absent bonds, the ﬁgure of the “ﬁlm” re-inserts the dimension
of intersubjectivity into the text.

Appropriately, the next lines of the poem, in which Coleridge describes his childhood
experience, are saturated with a profound sense of alienation and fervent desire for

intersubjective connections:

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So gazed I till the soothing things I dreamt
Lulled me to sleep, and sleep prolonged my dreams!
And so I brooded all the following morn,
Awed by the stern preceptor’s fact, mine eye
Fixed with mock study on my swimming book;
Save if the door half-opened, and I snatched
A hasty glance, and still my heart leaped up,
For still I hoped to see the stranger’s face---
Townsman, or aunt, or sister more beloved,
My playmate when we both were clothed alike!
(11. 39-48)

As Jan Plug suggests in a convincing way, the “ﬁlm” in this passage serves as the means
of a series of identiﬁcations that are increasingly familiar and complete (30). In line 47,
the personiﬁcation of the “ﬁlm” points to an acquaintance, then a close relative, and
ﬁnally, the poet’s own sister, with whom he can imagine primitive connections that
precede gender differentiation.

However, despite the child’s heightened expectation, the abrupt transition back to the
present that immediately follows the above passage implies an endless deferral of the
eager anticipation; in other words, the “stranger” never arrives. Thus, the poem strives to
achieve an intersubjective face-to-face experience, but only returns to the alienated self
once again. The frustrated desire for human connection begets an even deeper sense of
isolation, which the poem reveals through its overt emphasis on the difference between

Coleridge and his infant son:

My babe so beautiful, it ﬁlls my heart

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With tender gladness thus to look at thee,
And think that thou shalt learn far other lore
And in far other scenes!

(11. 53-56)

David Haney argues that the child’s “otherness” in these lines becomes an occasion for
promise and attestation: “the poet promises the child a better life and attests to the child’s
potential relation to God and nature” (2001, 208). Yet, my reading of the poem departs
from Haney’s more optimistic interpretation: although the focus of this passage appears
to be on Hartley’s bright future, in which man and nature are engaged in mutually
beneﬁcial relations, its seemingly bright tone is profoundly stained with the poet’s own
prediction of his alienation from the son’s positive experience. In the ﬁnal lines of the
poem, the poet imagines the mother’s role in raising the infant son in nature (“then make
thee shout/ And stretch and ﬂutter from thy mother’s arms,” 11. 83-84), but the father
remains absent from the joyful scene. To Coleridge, Hartley becomes an ultimate
“other,” whose stark difference from the self thwarts any attempts toward affectionate
bonds.

This ﬁnal loss of intersubjective possibilities, in turn, leads him to abandon the project
of self-objectiﬁcation, which cannot go on without an intersubjective relationship and the
internalization of another perspective gained through such relationship. Alienated from
his infant son, the poet fails to situate himself within the text, just as he fails to discover
his proper location in relation to Hartley’s future. Thus, despite its attempts to scrutinize
the self engaged in intersubjective connections, “Frost at Midnight” arrives only at the

juncture of isolated selﬂtood, anticipating and then deferring the creation of genuine

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human bonds.

2. Self-Mockery/Self-Vindication:
Wordsworth’s The Prelude

Usually read as an autobiographical poem, Wordsworth’s The Prelude is often

 

designated as a Romantic text that indulges in the quest for selfhood. Its deep concern
with the notion of Bildzmg or self-formation, modeled to a degree after Rousseau’s

Confessions, certainly places The Prelude among autobiographical texts. Yet, for my

 

purpose, it is vitally important to note that Wordsworth’s long poem is simultaneously a
conversation poem, in which the function of the auditor should be deemed signiﬁcant.
Although direct addresses to Coleridge, the intended recipient of the poetic conversation,
do not appear frequently, the poem is nonetheless acutely conscious of the presence of
the auditor. More importantly, Wordsworth’s awareness of the poem’s dialogic contexts
leads to its complex positioning of the discursive “I,” which at times displays a certain
critical distance between the experiencing self and another consciousness that objectiﬁes
it. Through internalizing Coleridge’s perspective, The Prelude renders its construction of
selﬂrood essentially “double-voiced,” although it is often extremely difﬁcult and nearly
impossible to demarcate the two voices.

From the very outset of The Prelude, Coleridge’s presence shapes not only the content

 

of Wordsworth’s utterance, but the ﬁgurative rendering of the content as well.

Especially, in Book I of The Prelude, Wordsworth re-introduces many of the important

 

tropes that appeared in Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight,” making it clear that he is

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overtaking the deferred task of self-objectiﬁcation through the composition of the poem.
The theme of freedom, which functions as an overarching idea of Book I and, in fact,
dominates the whole poem, is situated in a clearly dialogic relationship with “Frost at
Midnight,” the poem that laments the lack of freedom. In a way, Wordsworth positions
himself as an adult version of Hartley, whose freedom in nature is in stark contrast to
Coleridge’s childhood conﬁnement in “Frost at Midnight.” The following passage in the
beginning of The Prelude revises Coleridge’s poem through the deliberate use of similar

ﬁgures and images:

Oh there is blessing in this gentle breeze
That blows from the green ﬁelds and from the clouds
And from the sky --- it beats against my cheek,
And seems half-conscious of the joy it gives.
Oh welcome messenger, oh welcome friend!
A captive greets thee, coming from a house
Of bondage, from yon city’s walls set free,
A prison where he hath been long immured.
Now I am free, enfranchised and at large,
May ﬁx my habitation where I will.

(11. 1-10)

Although the evocation of the “breeze” is a traditional way of summoning artistic
inspiration, the ﬁgure in this passage denotes unrestrained freedom, as it does in “Frost at
Midnight,” where Coleridge wishes his son to “wander like a breeze” (I. 59). In lines 6-8,

metaphors of city life---“captivity,” “bondage, imprisonment,” and “immurement” also

reproduce Coleridge’s lines: “For I was reared/ In the great city, pent mid cloisters dim”

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(11. 56-57). Yet, unlike Coleridge, who despairs at the extreme “otherness” of the breeze-
like freedom, Wordsworth embraces the breeze, designating it as a “welcome messenger”
and “friend.”

Moreover, at the culmination of the preamble, Wordsworth situates the “breeze” within

his own subjectivity and thereby deﬁnes himself as a child of nature:

For I, methought, while the sweet breath of heaven
Was blowing on my body, felt within

A corresponding mild creative breeze,

A vital breeze which travelled gently on

O’er things which it had made, and is become

A tempest, a redundant energy

Vexing its own creation.
(11. 41 -47)

This assertive afﬁrrnation of the “corresponding breeze” within the self overcomes
Coleridge’s troubled experience in “Frost at Midnight” in a two-fold sense: ﬁrst,
obviously, Wordsworth becomes the “breeze,” which, in Coleridge’s poem, merely
ﬁgures as an utterly unattainable ideal. On top of locating the “breeze” within his
creative mind, Wordsworth speciﬁes it as a “corresponding” one, willfully connecting his
subjectivity with natural forces around him. Such a correspondence is precisely what
Coleridge yearns for in “Frost at Midnight,” but cannot choose but doubly defer its
arrival by assigning it to his son and temporally situating it in the future.

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly for my purpose, Wordsworth’s description of

the increasing force of the “breeze” leads to an intriguing metaphor in lines 46 and 47.

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The creative energy, turned into a powerful “tempest,” is described to be “redundant” that
is, in other words, superﬂuous and excessive. Moreover, this surplus portion of
subjective energy “vexes” the creation of the self, suggesting the multiplicity of
subjectivity and its contradictory operation that will emerge in the textual construction of
the discursive self. The word “vex” also echoes Coleridge’s poem, in which the calm
sleep of the infant is said to “vex” and “disturb” the poet’s meditation. Yet, instead of
succumbing to the sense of vexation as in “Frost at Midnight,” Wordsworth chooses to
embrace the contradiction. Thus, in a way, he becomes simultaneously a Hartleyan child
of nature and a self-reﬂexive poet, and the distance between the two distinctive halves of
subjectivity promises to accomplish the project of self-objectiﬁcation, the project
certainly suggested in “Frost at Midnight,” but hopelessly abandoned in its course.
Appropriately, in the next lines, the Wordsworthian “tempest” is depicted to “break up a
long-continued frost” (l. 49), asserting the superior quality of Wordsworth’s poem that
surmounts challenges posed by Coleridge’s poem and ﬁanlly “brings with it vernal
promises” and “the hope/ Of active days” (11. 50-51).

The complex dialogic relationship between Wordsworth and Coleridge is also
indicated in the last part of the poem, where Wordsworth names his poem as a “gift”
(XIII. 411) designed for his friend. As David Haney suggests in his essay on Il_te_
m, “gift-giving is a form of dialogue that recognizes a fundamental difference as it
hopes for a unity” (“Incamation” 552). By designating his own autobiography as a “gift”
positioned in a dialogic context, Wordsworth willingly enters into a self-reﬂexive
evaluation of his subjectivity and starts to internalize the perspective of the intended

recipient of the “gift.”

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Yet, at the same time, as is implied in the usual function of the “gift” as a memento of
the giver rather than the receiver, in the ﬁnal analysis, the kind of dialogism invoked by
The Prelude serves to enhance the power of the self in relation to the other.
Wordsworth’s further speciﬁcation of the “gift” as essentially therapeutic may be useful
to note in this context, for this nature of his poetic gift tends to determine the way in
which the self is positioned in the dialogic context. In his book on Wordsworth’s

subjectivity, Ashton Nichols argues that The Prelude is a present designed to help return

 

Coleridge, its recipient, to health (79). This purpose of the poem, which Wordsworth
clariﬁes only in the very last part of Book XIII, nonetheless shapes the textual dynamics
by which the poem constructs a particular view of selﬂrood. Dark passages and
irreparable mistakes in one’s life are primarily situated within the process of spiritual
recovery, the process that allows one to improve and develop through experiences.
While Nichols tends to underline Wordsworth’s benevolent motivation behind the
presentation of his own life as such, my emphasis falls on some other point: in a way,
Wordsworth’s designation of The Prelude as a therapeutic gift performs the function of
conﬁrming that the discursive self, presented in the autobiographical poem, possesses a
kind of moral authority in comparison to the recipient of the poem, who has not been able
to convert similar challenges in life into creative energy. Thus, although the poetic
project of self-objectiﬁcation discloses certain moments of self-critique, those moments
succumb to a generally self-vindictive tendency of the text as a whole. Through his
strategical description of the poem as a present intended to help recover Coleridge’s
mental and physical health, Wordworth accomplishes the contradictory task of the

simultaneous endorsement of both self-mockery and self-vindication.

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If so, it is by no means a coincidence that addresses to Coleridge, which do not exactly
constitute a conspicuous feature of The Prelude, appear frequently in Book X, where
Wordsworth offers an account of his previous infatuation with revolutionary radicalism.

As Richard Gravil perceptively observes, the tenth book of The Prelude is saturated with

 

double-voiced narration, which conveys both “the truth of enchantment and the truth of
disenchantment” (130). The following passage is one of the numerous examples that

display a subtle balance between the two speaking voices:

But (speaking more in charity) the dream
Was ﬂattering to the young ingenuous mind
Pleased with extremes, and not the least with that
Which makes the human reason’s naked self
The object of its fervour. What delight!
How glorious, in self-knowledge and self-rule,
To look through all the frailties of the world!
And, with a resolute mastery shaking off
The accidents of nature, time and place,
That make up the weak being of the past,
Build social freedom on its only basis,
The freedom of the individual mind,
Which (to the blind restraint of general laws
Superior) magisterially adopts
One guide, the light of circumstances, ﬂashed
Upon an independent intellect.

(11. 814-29)

Writing of the above passage, Brooke Hopkins states that, “more than a straightfoward

mockery of the Godwinian ideology, these lines constitute a mockery of the ideological

162

position held by the speaker himself at the time of his enchantment by Godwin’s thought”
(280). He goes on to add that “they constitute a piece of self-parody characterized by

9”

what Bakhtin calls ‘double-voiced discourse (281). Deploying the device of free
indirect speech, the poet quotes and recites his former voice, which expresses his
enthusiasm for Godwinian rationalism. As is usually the case in the dramatic monologue,
the dramatization of subjectivity in this passage invites judgment on the part of the
audience by opening up the textual space.

Yet, this dialogic space soon comes to an end when, about sixty lines later,
Wordsworth starts to assume a didactic voice and says, “Time may come/ When some
dramatic story may afford/ Shapes livelier to convey to thee, my friend,/ What then I
learned, or think I learned, of truth” (11. 878-81). As a counselor and therapist who can
offer a curative moral fable to his friend, Wordsworth subordinates his former experience
to his claim to “truth,” which is supposedly in his possession. Converting the energy of
self-mockery into that of self-celebration, this move shuts down the formerly open textual
space and provides a self-induced summary for his own account of life experience, the
account previously characterized by a dialogical dramatization of selﬂtood. Through his

strategic use of the speciﬁc speaker-auditor relationship, Wordsworth manages to create a

multi-dimensional view of subjectivity and also to retain the voice of authority.

3. A Meta-Poetic Look at the Formation of Subjectivity in the Conversation Poem:

Shelley’s Julian and Maddalo

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Connecting Julian and Maddalo to the tradition of the conversation poem revives
daunting critical questions concerning the poem’s generic qualities. Constructed as a
mixture of descriptive lyric and dialogue and simultaneously as a multi-framed narrative,
Julian and Maddalo appears to resist rather than endorse generic classiﬁcations.
Consequently, critics have characterized the poem in highly varying ways: Vincent
Newey called it a “psycho-drama,” while Bernard A. Hirsch attempted to interpret it as a

“dramatic monologue.” More recently, Marjorie Levinson included Julian and Maddalo

 

in her category of the “Romantic fragment poem,” and Stuart Curran described it as an
“eclogue” in his Poetic Form and British Romanticism.

Charles H. Rzepka’s insightful reading of Julian and Maddalo continues the tradition
of reading the poem with focus on its generic qualities and attempts to solve the problem
in an unprecedented way. Attending to the poem’s subtitle, “A Conversation,” Rzepka
suggests that Julian and Maddalo might be generically indebted to the Coleridgean
conversation poem (128). According to his analysis, the Maniac’s imaginary
conversation with his absent lover reproduces the ﬁrst-generation Romantics’
“conversation” poem in a rather ironic way. At the same time, the poem indicates
Shelley’s growing uneasiness about the disjunction between conversational elements and
the highly personal lyric form that surrounds them.

The persuasive power of Rzepka’s argument relies on the fact that Shelley represents
the Maniac as a poet ﬁgure, whose passionate eloquence much resembles that of the ﬁrst-
generation Romantics. In fact, from the moment when the Maniac ﬁrst appears in the
text, he is introduced as a musician/singer, the very ﬁgure that stands for the poet in

Shelley’s own theory of poetry:

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There the poor wretch was sitting moumfully

Near a piano, his pale ﬁngers twined

One with the other, and the ooze and wind

Rushed through an open casement, and did sway

His hair, and starred it with the brackish spray;

His head was leaning on a music book,

And he was muttering, and his lean limbs shook;
(11. 273-79)

Although twisted in a grim and bleak way, the Maniac as a “solitary singer” alludes to the
Shelleyan “nightingale” who sits in darkness and sings in solitude. As the audience of

the Maniac-nightingale’s song, Julian and Maddalo become “entranced” by the melody of
the musician. Thus, after listening to the Maniac’s effusive words, the two friends deﬁne

the Maniac essentially as a poet:

The colours of his mind seemed yet unwom;

For the wild language of his grief was high,

Such as in measure were called poetry;

And I remember one remark which then

Maddalo made. He said, “Most wretched men

Are cradled into poetry by wrong,

They learn in suffering what they teach in song.”
(11. 541-46)

Yet, despite Shelley’s depiction of the Maniac as a poet ﬁgure, the second-generation

Romantic distances himself from the Maniac through the unrelenting presentation of his

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extreme self-pity that leads to the state of insanity. As a “conversational soliloquist”
(Rzepka 133), the Maniac exposes problems associated with the original project of the
conversation poem, which attempts to combine two opposing generic conventions of lyric
and narrative. The conversation poem’s ethical desire toward human community needs
narrative elements, but when the need gets subordinated to the ego-centered desire for
self-afﬁrmation, the hybrid form returns to a lyrical construction of subjectivity, with a
merely apparent consensual vision. The Maniac’s “conversation,” which excludes rather
than engages the auditor, aims only at indulging in self-compassion, disclosing his own
limitations as a participant in socialized communication.

The Maniac’s failure in conversing with the intended auditor is reﬂected in the way in
which Julian and Maddalo, readers of his text, relate to his story. Although they are
visibly affected by the Maniac’s impassioned monologue, the two friends nonetheless
leave him in the conﬁned space of his own subjectivity, refusing to function as potential
interlocutors. In this sense, Shelley’s complex framing device offers a meta-poetic look
at the reader’s expected response to the conversation poem, which seeks emotional
identiﬁcation rather than ethical confrontation from its reader. Julian’s following remark
shows both the effect wrought on him by the Maniac’s text and his subsequent reaction to

it:

But I imagined that if day by day

I watched him, and but seldom went away,
And studied all the beatings of his heart

With zeal, as men study some stubborn art

For their own good, and could by patience ﬁnd

An entrance to the caverns of his mind

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I might reclaim him from his dark estate:
(11. 568-74)

Instead of engaging in communication with the Maniac, Julian imagines himself in the
position of a sympathetic scholar of his mind, which is currently shut up from the outer
world and only holds his own subjectivity within the “caverns” and the “dark estate.” As
a reader of the Maniac’s text, Julian recognizes that the Maniac’s conversational
soliloquy is essentially a closed form, despite its ethical gestures that invoke
intersubjective communication. Moreover, Julian’s abrupt departure from Venice,
described a few lines later, indicates that even his affective readerly response to the
Maniac’s text is only momentary and transitory. When the text fails to engage the reader
in discursive terms, it is ultimately left behind, conﬁned in the lonely, isolated space
within the tower.

If so, Shelley’s presentation of the other kind of “conversation” in Julian and Maddalo
reveals the poet’s lingering doubts about the formal limitations of the conversation poem
and his subsequent search for an alternative form that allows an ethical construction of
the self in the communicative context with other. As is well known, Julian represents the
poet’s own self to some extent, but nevertheless, Shelley places the character in a highly
ironic light by dialogizing his belief and ideas in relation to the other’s. Yet, the irony is
deliberately subtle and suggestive, unlike the Wordsworthian critique of his previous self
that results in reinforcing the authority of the lyrical voice.

As Vincent Newey analyses, the poem accomplishes its project of self-analysis through
the presentation of two distinct Julians, the youthful idealist and the mature commentator.

Julian’s younger self, presented in the earlier part of the poem, argues for optimistic

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meliorism. Believing that the shape of the world relies on the way one perceives it, he
argues that one’s hope or despondency may alter one’s fate. The poem’s opening
passage exempliﬁes Julian’s tendency to ignore a possible gap between reality and

human perception:

This ride was my delight.--- I love all waste
And solitary places; where we taste

The pleasure of believing what we see

15 boundless, as we wish our souls to be:

(11. 14-17)

The phrase “believing what we see” underlines the youthful idealist’s trust in his own
power of perception, and the Shelleyan wasteland functions as a ﬁt setting for Julian’s
heuristic vision. Absorbed in his melioristic ideal, the young Julian regards the desolate
land as a symbolic ground for sublime quests.

In contrast to the younger self of his own, the mature Julian displays a much more
pessimistic view of the world. While describing Maddalo’s daughter, formerly the baby
whom the young Julian called a “lovely child, blithe, innocent, and free” (I. 167) and took
as an example for his optimistic argument, Julian’s mature self praises her virtues but
also mentions that she is “a wonder of this earth, / Where there is little of transcendent
worth” (11. 590-91). In a similar vein, upon hearing from her the Maniac’s history after
the two friends’ visit upon him, the older Julian refuses to tell the story, unable to trust
the “cold world” (1. 617).

This clear distance between the two selves enables the reader to qualify and critique

any of the ideological positions suggested in the text. While the poem does not fully

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support Maddalo’s dark philosophy of despondency, it also refuses to entirely approve
Julian’s idealistic meliorism. Unlike the Maniac’s “conversation” that seeks sympathetic
identiﬁcation from its audience, Shelley’s framing text situates itself in a dialogic
relationship with the reader. By creating multiple views of subjectivity and exposing
them to possible censure and disapproval from the reader, Shelley completes his meta-
poetic analysis of the conversation poem and demonstrates a way to overcome the formal

limitations of the poetic mode.

4. In the Flux of Identity:
Arthur Hugh Clough’s Amours de Voyage

Shelley’s Victorian heir in poetic subjectivity formation is Arthur Hugh Clough, who
is no longer treated as a major poet of the Victorian period. Despite Clough’s
evaporating fame, his poetic achievement in The Bothie, Amours de Voyage, and
Dipsychus certainly deserves great critical attention. Clough’s modern voice, which
questions rather than endorses literary norms of the time, deconstructs many notions such
as “time,” “writing,” and “self,” almost anticipating the postmodern reassessment of
those notions. Especially, Amours de Voyage (1858), a long travel poem about the
adventures of an Englishman in Rome, centers on the issue of self-reﬂexivity situated in
its unique context of intersubjectivity and also provides a complex formal structure well-
suited to the investigation of the central issue.

In Amours de Voyag, Claude, the protagonist of the poem, travels to Rome and

studies the city’s arts and antiquities. In the course of his trip, he falls in love with Mary,

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a middle-class English woman, and faces a dilemma of whether or not to pursue her.
Oscillating between his undeniable attraction to the woman and his more philosophical
denunciation of the present for the sake of the Absolute awaiting him in the future,
Claude produces a series of letters addressed to his friend Eustace in England. While

these letters constitute the major portion of Amours de Voyage, the poem also contains

 

other people’s letters that display different perspectives on the ongoing events and the
anonymous narrator’s comments that begin and end each Canto.

The tone of Claude’s letters is much reminiscent of that of the conversation poem.
Although they take the form of “epistles” rather than a spoken utterance, the letters
nonetheless position their recipient as a clear presence in the text and invoke his
responses more directly than traditional epistolary travel narratives do, partially due to
recent innovations in European postal services. From the outset, Claude states, “Dear
Eustatio, I write that you may write me an answer,/ Or at the least to put us again en
rapport with each other” (11. 11-12). Such an emphasis on interpersonal connections
continues to inscribe Eustace’s invisible presence as a signiﬁcant part of the text. For
example, in Canto II, Claude engages in dialogic exchanges with Eustace, whose absent

voice gets heard through Claude’s responses:

I am in love, meantime, you think; no doubt you would think so.
I am in love, you say; with those letters, of course, you would say so.
I am in love, you declare. I think not so; yet I grant you

It is a pleasure, indeed, to converse with this girl.
(1. 250-53)

Despite Claude’s denial, Eustace recognizes that his friend is deeply in love with Mary.

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Marking the limit of Claude’s self-knowledge, Eustace functions as a sensible, reasonable
commentator on Claude’s affairs.

As a link between Claude’s ordinary life in England and his adventures in foreign
lands, Eustace also offers a relatively stable reference point in this otherwise chaotic
account of subjectivity. “Travel” in Clough’s poetry is a ﬁgure for the continuous
production of multiple viewpoints on the self; instead of occupying a ﬁxed space where
one can assume a steady, secure version of identity, the traveling self moves about and
embraces constant changes. Claude in Amours de Voyage is engaged in this process of

endless self-fashioning, as he himself confesses in the early part of the poem:

It is a blessing, no doubt, to be rid, at least for a time, of
All one’s friends and relations, ---yourself (forgive me!) included,---
All the assujettissement of having been what one has been,
What one thinks one is, or thinks that others suppose one;
(I. 28-31)

Leaving behind his social identity and even his self-knowledge, Claude attempts to
reinvent himself through his traveling experience.

Claude’s refusal to admit his growing attraction to Mary is partially due to the fact that
the connection with the Englishwoman will determine his identity in a certain form and
prevent him from further adventures. To Claude, who does not subscribe to the idea of
permanence, any kind of commitment is suspicious because it is only momentary and
transitory. In his infamous lines on “juxtaposition,” Claude discusses his philosophy,

which views life as a series of accidents and coincidences:

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J uxtaposition, in ﬁne; and what is juxtaposition?
Look you, we travel along in the railway-carriage, or steamer,
And, pour passer le temps, till the tedious journey be ended,
Lay aside paper or book, to talk with the girl that is next one;
And, pour passer le temps, with the terminus all but in prospect,
Talk of eternal times and marriages made in heaven.
Ah, did we really accept with a perfect heart the illusion!
Ah, did we really believe that the Present indeed is the Only!
Or through all transmutation, all shock and convulsion of passion,
Feel we could carry undimmed, unextinguished, the light of our
knowledge!
(111. 107-17)

Based on his theory that compares life to an extended journey, nothing remains
deﬁnitive. Even the most permanent-looking choices in life such as marriages are merely
tentative and ultimately subject to change and “transmutation,” as the self, who makes
those choices, is in a constant ﬂux, resisting a ﬁxed form of identity.

Thus, instead of seeking a “ﬁnal” and “perfect” form of identity (III. 156), Claude
accepts multiple features of his own subjectivity, declaring that he possesses varying,

altering “afﬁnities” (III. 152) with diverse species in nature:

All that is Nature’s is I, and I all things that are Nature’s.

Yes, as I walk, I behold, in a luminous, large intuition,

That I can be and become anything that I meet with or look at:
I am the ox in the dray, the ass with the garden-stuff panniers;

I am the dog in the doorway, the kitten that plays in the window,

On sunny slab of the ruin the furtive and fugitive lizard,

Swallow above me that twitters, and ﬂy that is buzzing about me;

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Yea, and detect, as I go, by a faint but a faithful assurance,

E’en from the stones of the street, as from rocks or trees of the forest,

Something of kindred, a common, though latent vitality, greet me;
(111. 160-69)

Refusing to impose a certain shape on his own self, Claude announces that he is a
“ﬂoating existence” (V. 66) without roots in any soil. It might be possible to interpret
Claude’s endorsement of his own ﬂuid identity as an ironic rendering of Romantic self-
expression. However, it seems to me that the focus of the above passage lies with the
total absence of deﬁnitive selﬂrood, unlike Romantic writings that tend to transfer the
image of the self to the outer world. Claude’s ﬂuid subjectivity, freed from a ﬁxed
version of identity, relates to any object it encounters, albeit temporarily in its endless
journey.

Moreover, Claude’s self-declared lack of identity is even more qualiﬁed and
complicated by the poem’s complex formal structure, in which Claude’s letters stand in a
web of intersubjective connections. In this sense, Clough’s poem succeeds in the
objectiﬁcation of subjectivity, the task desired, but often unachieved by the Romantic
conversation poem. First, the presence of Eustace, the recipient of the letters, functions
as an inaudible voice that can provide comments and criticism for Cluade’s own
presentation of his subjectivity. In addition, Amours de Voyage deploys the device of an
anonymous narrator in order to scrutinize Claude’s subjectivity from another perspective.
Especially intriguing is the fact that Clough’s narrator in this poem is not a separate third-
person narrator nor a confessional ﬁrst-person narrator. Deﬁning Amours de Voyage as a

highly “reﬂexive” text, Suzanne Bailey mentions that “it is not possible to determine

I73

 

 

whether the voice of the italicized stanzas is that of Claude or of a different narrator”
(160). While the narrator’s voice sometimes offers a summary or a gloss on Claude’s
letters, at other times, it opposes and undermines Claude’s stance on various issues.
Although it is extremely hard to characterize this voice in a few words, the narrator
appears to be a more conventional, socialized version of Claude’s subjectivity: for
example, in Canto IV, in which Claude follows Mary’s footsteps in great confusion and

lingering hesitation, the narrator supplies a different account of the same event:

Italy, farewell I bid thee! for whither she leads me, I follow.
Farewell the vineyard! for I, where I but guess her, must go.

Weariness welcome, and labour, wherever it be, if at last it
Bring me in mountain or plain into the sight of my love.

(v. 7-10)

The decisive tone of the narrator is in contrast with C laude’s angst-ridden response to the
situation. Stating that he “must” follow Mary, the narrator underscores that it is his
“obligation” to pursue her. Interestingly, the narrator’s view in this respect resembles
that of Eustace, who resorts to the discourse of “obligation” in order to persuade Claude
to give in to his undeniable attraction to Mary. In a way, the narrator represents the
Meadean social self, constructed through a process of communal interaction, whereas
Claude, the author of the letters, stands for the spontaneous, impulsive aspect of human
subjectivity.

The distance between these two halves of the self increases in Canto V, in which
Claude faces the dilemma of whether or not to continue his journey. The narrator’s gloss

in the beginning of the Canto implies that he may return to England, “which may after all

174

 

 

be for its children the best” (V. 8). In England, where both Mary and Eustace await
Claude, his identity would be shaped in a certain mold within the boundary of social
interaction. However, in the letters, Claude denies such a conclusion and declares that he

will resume his trip:

Ah, no, that isn’t it. But yet I retain my conclusion.

I will go where I am led, and will not dictate to the chances.

Do nothing more, I beg. If you love me, forbear interfering.
(V. 178-80)

Instead of returning to England, Claude chooses to start for Naples and then for Egypt (V.
203-205), in search of “the Truth,” which is “ﬂexible, changeable, vague and multiforrn,
and doubtful” (V. 101-102).

After the display of these two forms of subjectivity, the text refuses to favor one or the
other. Rather, at the very end of the poem, the narrator orders the book to “go forth to the
world” (V. 217) and thereby indicates that the ultimate meaning of the poem will be
determined through the process of textual circulation, the process that will involve the
active participation of the reader. In this ﬁnal juncture of the poem, the theme of “travel”
surfaces once again. As the textual status of the poem always “travels” and thus gets
suspended in ﬂuctuation, any sense of a singular consciousness that can provide a reiﬁed
meaning also disappears. According to E. Warwick Slinn’s brilliant reading of the poem,
“within the letters, Claude’s name acts as a sign which conﬁnes the sense of identity to a
singular subject.” However, the poem also “exposes the contrary movement of the letters

whereby they fragment into ﬂuctuating moments of converse responses and shifting

175

images” (114). Thus, deeonstructing the idea of subjectivity as the stable center of
meaning, Amours de Voyage remains as an open poem, which continuously enacts

dialogic interaction with its audience.

5. A New Conception of the “Self”:

Yeats’s Conversational Poems

The notion of the fluid self that surfaces in Clough’s poetry becomes a main issue for
20th-century poets. For example, D. H. Lawrence underlines shifts and changes within
subjectivity, abandoning a search for the uniﬁed, consistent self. When he published his

Collected Poems in 1928, Lawrence arranged his poems according to the chronological

 

order. Then, in his “Note” to the Collected Poems, Lawrence advises his reader that he
has placed his poems in “chronological order” to form an “emotional and inner
biography.” Lawrence’s conversational poems that deal with his early experience of
emotional crisis are located in the opening pages of the volume so that the reader may
view each poem as a tentative reﬂection of shifting subjectivity rather than an
authoritative rendering of a uniﬁed self.

W. B. Yeats also embraces this view of subjectivity as a ﬂuid entity. In The Problem of
Consciousness in Modern Poetry, Hugh Underhill suggests that Yeats’s theme of
particular concern lies with the plurality of consciousness (122). Yeats’s conversational
poems addressed to Maud Gonne, the poet’s lifelong beloved and also his ﬁgure for
perfection, expose this concern in an intriguing way. Instead of composing the poems as

dramatic monologues, Yeats chooses to write conversation poems and then indicate the

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existence of alternative consciousness by commenting on the poems through their titles.

Most of the love poems contained in The Wind Among the Reeds (1899) follow the same

 

pattern:

Were you but lying cold and dead,
And lights were paling out of the West,
You would come hither, and bend your head,
And I would lay my head on your breast;
And you would murmur tender words,
Forgiving me, because you were dead:
Nor would you rise and hasten away,
Though you have the will of the wild birds,
But know your hair was bound and wound
About the stars and moon and sun:
0 would, beloved, that you lay
Under the dock-leaves in the ground,
While lights were paling one by one.

(11. 1-13)

The above poem expresses the masculine desire that wants to possess his lover but keeps
getting frustrated by the woman’s “will of the wild birds.” The speaker wishes his
beloved lay dying so that he could ﬁnally contain her strong will and control her.
Without doubt, this is an autobiographical poem that displays aspects of Yeats’s own
emotion, and the description of the lover as a strong-willed woman suits Maud Gonne’s
image. Yeats does not deny the autobiographical element in the poem. Instead, he adds
his comment on the poem in the form of the title: “He Wishes His Beloved Were Dead.”

The use of the third-person pronoun in the title signals the arrival of another

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consciousness that provides the terse summary of the poem. If the reader was
temporarily deluded by the speaker’s melancholy declaration of his unrequited love and
feeling sympathetic toward him, the title’s unemotional tone stops her from identifying
with the speaker by relentlessly revealing the morose nature of the speaker’s confession.
In later poems, Yeats explores the plurality of consciousness by attending to dialectics
between two opposite tendencies within subjectivity. One of the examples is “Ego

Dominus Tuus,” in which one speaker represents the modern “objectivity” and

 

materialism, whereas the other one is a spokesperson for anti-materialism. While the
poetic form resembles a classical pattern in that it displays an imaginary dialogue
between inhuman objects or ideas, Yeats departs from the traditional form by indicating
that the two conﬂicting impulses co-exist within a single consciousness.

Similarly, “A Dialogue of Self and Soul” enacts a conversation between the “Soul”
that argues for detachment and the “Self” that stands for commitment. As is apparent
from the ﬁrst stanza, the emblem for the “Soul” is the tower, which often symbolizes

egotistical solipsism in Yeats’s system of metaphors:

My Soul. I summon to the winding ancient stair;

Set all your mind upon the steep ascent,

Upon the broken, crumbling battlement,

Upon the breathless starlit air,

Upon the star that marks the hidden pole;

Fix every wandering thought upon

That quarter where all thought is done:

Who can distinguish darkness from the soul?
(11. 1-8)

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"TIT

With its disdainful attitude and conceited voice, the “Soul” commands one to focus upon
the act of ascension toward overpowering selﬂtood, which transcends all worldly matters
only afﬁrms its own “dark” existence.

In contrast, the “Self” looks upon an “ancient blade” (1. 10) as its emblem, especially
emphasizing the “ﬂowering, silken, old embroidery” (l. 13) that still offer “protection” to
the “blade.” The embroidery “bound and wound” (l. 15) around “the wooden scabbard”
(l. 15) highlights the signiﬁcance of the relational self, which shields the sharp edge of an

isolated individual. Thus, the “Self declares the following:

My Self. Montashigi, third of his family, fashioned it
Five hundred years ago, about it lie
Flowers from I know not what embroidery ---
Heart’s purple --- and all these I set
For emblems of the day against the tower
Emblematical of the night,
(11. 24-29)

Although the persuasive power of the “Self”s argument does not necessarily overshadow
the eloquent claim of the “Soul,” the “Self’ still secures the ﬁnal triumph, mainly due to
the “communicative” limitations of the “Soul.” However majestic the “Soul”s assertion
may be, it is the kind of knowledge that cannot be communicated: “But when I think of
that my tongue’s a stone” (1. 40).

In the second section of the poem, the “Self” occupies the central stage, while the
petriﬁed “Soul” remains silent. Also, in this transition from Section I to Section II, a

major shift in formal apparatuses occurs: unlike the ﬁrst section, in which the two

179

opposing tendencies within subjectivity present essentially monological arguments in an
apparently dialogic form, the second section attempts to enact conversational dialogism
despite its seemingly monologic form. The main problem of Section I is that, as David
Lynch observes, “the interlocutors are both equally lonely and self-absorbed” (67). Thus,
although the poetic structure displays the two speakers’ alternating utterances, there are
no genuine exchanges between them; instead, the interlocutors merely voice their
respective opinions without connecting to each other. Despite the “Self”s afﬁrmation of
the social, relational dimension of subjectivity, it exposes its limits by failing to
communicate with its own counterpart within a single consciousness. If Yeats’s “Self” is
the Meadean notion of “me,” the socially constructed self in the ﬁrst section of the poem
is hopelessly separated from “I,” the other half of subjectivity. In contrast, the “Self” in

Section II transforms itself into a more relational subject:

I am content to follow to its source
Every event in action or in thought;
Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot!
When such as I cast out remorse
So great a sweetness ﬂows into the breast
We must laugh and we must sing,
We are blest by everything,
Everything we look upon is blest.

(11. 66-72)

The sudden shift from “I” to “we” in the last part of the above stanza indicates that the
“Self” has broken free from its own self-conﬁnement and enacted the task of connecting

with other. The formerly monologic form starts to embrace the awareness of other,

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evoking dialogic possibilities that will ultimately alter the existential condition of the
“Self.” In a sense, Yeats’s “Dialogue of Self and Soul” is a genuine return to the
conversation poem, the poetic form charged with the desire for the communal despite its
monologic appearance. The mutual connection between subject and object suggested in
the last lines of the poem expands the notion of the “self” and afﬁrms the plurality of
consciousness. Essentially characterized as a relational entity, Yeats’s notion of the
“Self” expresses the poet’s wish to create a version of subjectivity engaged in dialogic
contexts, anticipating in a way Habermas’s attempt to transpose the problem of

subjectivity into an intersubjective framework.

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V. Conversing with the Audience: The Ultimate
Challenge of the Communicative Model

As Elizabeth W. Harries notes, the translation of Habermas’s Structural
Transformation of the Public Sphere in 1989 inspired inquiries into the matter of literary
production and the wider social context surrounding it. According to Habermas, the
privatized individual by no means exists in isolation; rather, the bourgeois subject is
primarily a participant in critical discourse that characterizes the public sphere. Although
he does not offer clear statements about the status of “literary” utterances, Habermas’s
detailed look into the social/political structures of the public sphere still enables one to
envision individual literary texts as contributors to this highly participatory system.
Thus, instead of viewing literary texts as self-sufﬁcient artifacts, Habermas’s theory
provides insights into their dialogic aspects, which include clear rhetorical purposes and
intense audience-consciousness.

Yet, while praising the role of Habermas conducive to the task of contextualizing
literary texts in social terms, Harries comments on problems that one needs to address in
order to use his theory as a tool for positioning the status of literature within the complex
web of social structures. Speciﬁcally, her question centers on the relation between the
so-called “literary marketplace” and Habermas’s public sphere. As Nancy Fraser puts it,
the public sphere is essentially “an arena of discursive relations” (5 7) rather than market
relations, as open debates and interchanges of opinions typify the public sphere in its
most proper form. Then, although it is true that literary texts participate in this social

communication process, the “literary marketplace” occupies an intersection of the public

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sphere and the economic sphere, given that the circulation of texts always involves
numerous economic factors, which mediate the author-audience relation in various ways.
Harries attempts to interrogate this complex correlation between the public sphere and the
economic sphere by looking at the ways in which “class and economics, positions of
dominance and subordination, complicate and inﬂuence cultural positions” (461).

As Harries argues, Habermas’s theory exposes certain weaknesses in considering
complex cultural positions in the discussion of the “literary marketplace.” For example,
Harries suggests that one should be more sensitive to gender roles within the cultural
ﬁeld. While male writers of the eighteenth century kept the kind of cultural authority
traditionally assigned them, the general shape of the literary ﬁeld was increasingly
feminized. Hardly occupying privileged positions of cultural dominance, female readers
nonetheless exerted great inﬂuence on literary production of the time, as they gradually
became the main consumers of texts. Especially, by the end of the eighteenth century,
when the public sphere, formerly an open space for democratic debates and exchanges,
has been transformed into one for advertising and commercialized competition, the image
of the woman as a purchaser of cultural products starts to haunt Romantic imagination.

Sonia Hofkosh’s recent Sexual Politics and the Romantic Author foregrounds this
recurring image of a reading woman, embodied in the engraving accompanying Mary
Shelley’s short story “The Invisible Girl” (1). Hofkosh’s basic claim in this excellent
book is that “women, as both historically speciﬁc and ﬁgural bodies, impel the Romantic
author’s negotiations for empowered position within a burgeoning market economy”
(13). This fundamental shift in the cultural position of women is prompted by the

apparatus of the circulating library, which “markets the work as a fungible merchandize”

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Hm~ﬂ ~

and “transforms the private activity of reading into conspicuous consumption” (17).
Catering speciﬁcally to women’s pleasure, the circulating library generated fear and
anxiety among male writers, who were partially afraid to lose their own cultural
hegemony and simultaneously apprehensive about the predictable degeneration of the
literary ﬁeld due to the indiscriminate promotion of sentimental and sensational literature.
Wordsworth’s attack on the current state of “literature” in the “Preface” to the Lyr_ic_a_l
m is a well-known example of the Romantics’ response to the situation: he suggests
that “the literature and theatrical exhibitions of the country have conformed themselves”
to “a craving for extraordinary incident” (64). As Hofkosh quotes in part, Coleridge
expresses much deeper concern about the “circulating library” phenomenon in the

footnote attached to Chapter 3 of Biographia Literaria:

For as to the devotees of the circulating library, I dare not compliment their
pass-time, or rather kill-time, with the name of reading. Call it rather a sort of
beggarly day-dreaming during which the mind of the dreamer furnishes for itself
nothing but laziness and a little mawkish sensibility; while the whole material
and imagery of the doze is supplied ab extra by a sort of mental camera obscura
manufactured at the printing ofﬁce, which pro tempore ﬁxes, reﬂects and
transmits the moving phantasms of one man’s delirium, so as to people the
barrenness of an hundred other brains afﬂicted with the same trance or
suspension of all common sense and all deﬁnite purpose. We should therefore
transfer this species of amusement ...... from the genus, reading, to that
comprehensive class characterized by the power of reconciling the two contrary
yet co-existing propensities of human nature, namely indulgence of sloth and

hatred of vacancy. (28)

Distinguishing “proper” reading from the kind of reading practice promoted by the

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circulating library, Coleridge equates the latter with a mindless activity that does not
involve any mental faculties. His comparison of the “circulation library” reading to
“gaming, swinging or swaying on a chair or gate, spitting over a bridge, etc....” attests to
the Romantic poet’s distrust of the popular cultural institution and the so-called “taste”
of the audience.

Wordsworth and Coleridge’s negative responses to the circulating library and popular
literature of the time arise from the complex combination of multiple motivations: as E7
social critics, they genuinely lament the overall erosion of cultural values and attempt to 1
recover the sensibility of the public through their writing. Yet, simultaneously, the
Romantic poets’ critique of the current state of “literature” is profoundly tinged with their
own frustration over the slow sale and lukewarm reception of their own works. Although
Wordsworth and Coleridge are now retrospectively celebrated as the cultural icons of the
Romantic age, their contemporary readers did not necessarily react enthusiastically to
their poems. What is clearly at stake here is a (relatively) new cultural variable called
“feminine sensibility”; without catering to it, writers would not be able to sell their works
and ultimately inﬂuence the cultural values of the audience.

The recurrent image of women in Romantic literature is partially due to the male poets’
preoccupation with the audience in this increasingly feminized literary market. In a
sense, the sympathetic female auditor of the conversation poem serves the function of
mitigating the masculine poets’ intense fear about the reception of their poetry. A
representative example might be Dorothy in Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey”: in this
poem characterized by the poet himself as an afterthought to the “Lyrical Ballads”

project, Dorothy plays the role of the “ideal reader” who will complete the project by

185

“remembering” it. Yet, more unruly, disruptive images of women also emerge in some
other poems, and the Romantic poets’ angst-ridden treatment of these images may
constitute an important topic for further research, as it illuminates the anxiety of the male
writers situated at the junction of the masculine public sphere and the increasingly
feminized literary market.

My purpose in this chapter is to investigate various conversation poems with particular
attention to the ways in which they deal with the image of the reading woman. In some
instances, the image replaces the typically sympathetic female auditor of the conversation
poem, generating the male poets’ violent strategies geared toward subordinating the
dreadful ﬁgure of femininity to masculine control. In other instances, the image exists
elsewhere in the text and threatens masculine imagination so forcefully that the Romantic
poets need to rely upon the compassionate rapport with the auditor in order to alleviate
their fear of the recurring image.

My inquiry starts with Coleridge’s “The Nightingale,” a conversation poem that
addresses the matter of poetic production and reception in a speciﬁcally gendered way.
After that, I will read Wordsworth’s “To Joanna,” focusing on the ways in which the
poem presents the ﬁgure of the feminine reader and also the poet’s endeavor toward an
escape from the powerful grasp of the ﬁgure. Keats’s conversation with Moneta in If);

Fall of Hyperion is also highly informative in this line of inquiry; for Keats’s historical

 

consciousness makes it clear that this kind of feminine image represents a cultural force
of the time rather than a speciﬁc individual. In the Victorian period, Matthew Arnold
struggles with the same kind of anxiety about the female reader, as is apparent in

“Resignation,” a conversation poem that closely resembles Wordsworth’s “To Joanna” in

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1,..."qu

many ways. Lastly, I will look at T. S. Eliot’s twentieth-century version in “The Love
Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” in which the speaker is in search of an auditor who will
provide comfort to his fear of the contemporary civilization that is embodied in the ﬁgure

of the “modern” woman.

1. Defining the Conversation Poem as 3 “Father’s Tale”:

Coleridge’s “The Nightingale”

As is evident from its preoccupation with the traditional association of the poet ﬁgure
with the “nightingale,” Coleridge’s “The Nightingale” is a poetic exploration of the
daunting question, “what is a poet,” which motivates the composition of numerous
Romantic writings. The foremost value of “The Nightingale” for my purpose lies with
the fact that the poem endorses the view of poetic production primarily as a
communicative endeavor. Resisting most images of the Romantic poet as an isolated
individual, the poem attempts to locate the poet ﬁgure in relation to the audience, who
ultimately possesses the power of interpretation. In other words, in “The Nightingale,”
the meaning process of poetic utterance is supposed to rely essentially on its reception.
The audience delineated in Coleridge’s poem is also socially and historically speciﬁc: as
Timothy P. Enright investigates at length in his essay on “The Nightingale,” temporality
as an indicator of changing historical times constitutes a signiﬁcant dimension in the
poem, strongly inﬂuencing the way the poet envisions his own identity with regard to the
audience.

In its intense search for an idealized mode of communication between poet and his

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‘0 .. . _ .

audience, “The Nightingale” suggests four different kinds of models delineating the
process of poetic production and reception. Although none of those four models is
entirely satisfactory for Coleridge’s literary project, he ﬁnally settles for the last one
mainly for the virtue of a comforting vision it allows. Coleridge’s rejection of the other
three models is highly informative, for it attests to the poet’s profound anxiety about the
shape of the contemporary literary marketplace and his poetic identity within it.

The ﬁrst model of poetic communication concerns the ancient, classical understanding
of poethood and its limits in Coleridge’s view. Displaying the process by which the
notion of the “poet” is originally constructed through arbitrary interpretive activities of
the audience, Coleridge expresses his wish to avoid merely reproducing outdated modes

of ﬁgurative language in the name of poetic composition:

And hark! the Nightingale begins its song.
“Most musical, most melancholy’ bird!
A melancholy bird? 0 idle thought!
In nature there is nothing melancholy.----
But some night-wandering man, whose heart was pierced
With the remembrance of a grievous wrong,
Or slow distemper, or neglected love,
(And so, poor wretch! ﬁlled all things with himself,
Made all gentle sounds tell back the tale
Of his own sorrows) he and such as he
First named these notes a melancholy strain:
And many a poet echoes the conceit;
(11. 12-23)

In the above lines, Coleridge observes that the “melancholy” feeling usually associated

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with the nightingale’s song in fact has nothing to do with its innate quality; rather, the
feeling should be located in the mind of the audience, whose act of “naming” determines
the ultimate meaning of the song. Yet, once established as a culturally dominant mode of
association, the arbitrary “conceit” replaces poetic imagination, reinforcing its position

among so-called literary tropes that uphold the whole tradition of poetry. In this passage,

 

Coleridge’s description of certain habits of metaphorical association parallels ‘

Wordsworth’s famous denigration of ﬁgurative language in the “Preface”: although there

 

is nothing inherently wrong about such use of language, its mere repetition paralyzes the
faculty of imagination and degenerates the taste of the general public. The linguistic
hurdles produced by the habitual use of dominant tropes pose challenges even to Milton,
the great poet who wishes that “his song/ Should make all nature lovelier, and itself/ Be
loved, like nature!” (11. 32-34). Instead of facilitating the audience’s appreciation of
nature, poetry becomes an artifact, due to the petriﬁed form of poetic diction, which
inhibits the lively operation of the mind’s ability to connect with nature. Thus, Coleridge
denies Milton’s wish by simply stating “But ’twill not be so” (I. 34)

While the above lines voice Coleridge’s opposition to the traditional way of poetic
production and its effect on the audience, the following passage expresses his antipathy

against the contemporary mode of reading and writing:

And youths and maidens most poetical
Who lose the deep’ning twilights of the spring
In ball-rooms and hot theatres, they still
Full of meek sympathy must heave their sighs
O’er Philomela’s pity-pleading strains.

(11. 35-39)

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As many commentators have noted, in these lines, Coleridge displays his disapproval of

the sentimental or melancholy school of poetry.25

Along with the opening lines’ allusion
(“no relique of the sunken day,” l. l) to the hugely popular poetry collection, Religues of
Ancient Enﬁglish Poetg by Bishop Percy, the above lines offer an implicit critique of the
contemporary audience’s tendency to seek mawkish pleasure from reading materials.
Also, the naming of the nightingale as Philomela inserts a gendered dimension into the
text. Speaking of this passage, David Watkins suggests that the melancholy behind the
nightingale’s song is inextricably bound to the story of sexual violence and thus
expresses a speciﬁcally feminine experience (90). While Watkins criticizes Coleridge for
replacing Philomela with the “merry Nightingale” later in the poem and thus effacing the
feminine experience, in my view, the Romantic poet’s opposition to such a melancholy
representation of the nightingale points more to the reading audience’s morbid
sentimentalism rather than the speciﬁc subject matter. The bourgeois “youths and
maidens” who frequent “ball-rooms and hot theaters” respond to the tales of human
suffering with pseudo-sympathetic attitudes, rendering the effects of those tales ethically
suspect.

Then, Coleridge’s ensuing assertion that he and his friends “have learnt/ A different
lore” (11. 40-41) indicates his intent to make his own poetry accomplish something
entirely different. Above all, at this point, in order to break away from the prevalent

understanding of the poet as a lonely, gloomy nightingale, he invokes the power of the

“communal”:

 

2’ See, for example, Hopkins, Gene M. Bernstein, and Luther.

190

 

 

 

But never elsewhere in one place I knew

So many Nightingales: and far and near

In wood and thicket over the wide grove

They answer and provoke each other’s songs ---
And murmurs musical and swift jug jug

And one low piping sound more sweet than all---

 

Stirring the air with such an harmony,

(11. 55-62)

 

Now, the poetic voice arises from a harmonious community of poets rather than an
isolated individual. Also, as if formally exemplifying his own representation of this
artistic community in which the nightingales “answer and provoke each other’s songs,”
Coleridge addresses William and Dorothy Wordsworth at this very juncture and creates a
communal space within his own text as well.

Yet, although this vision of a poetic community appears to solve the problems

 

associated with the two earlier versions of poethood, Coleridge encounters yet another set
of problems when he pictures the relationship between the poetic community and the

audience outside of it in the next stanza:

A most gentle maid
Who dwelleth in her hospitable home
Hard by the castle, and at latest eve
(Even like a lady vowed and dedicate
To something more than nature in the grove)
Glides through the pathways; she knows all their notes,

That gentle maid! and oft, a moment’s space,

191

What time the moon was lost behind a cloud,
Hath heard a pause of silence: till the moon
Emerging, hath awakened earth and sky
With one sensation, and those wakeful birds
Have all burst forth with choral minstrelsy,
As if one quick and sudden gale had swept
An hundred airy harps!

(II. 64-77)

Lass—‘- ‘

As soon as the “gentle maid,” the feminine audience arrives at the scene, Coleridge’s
rendering of the collective song of the nightingales starts to lose its previously positive
elements. In lieu of the formerly harmonious dialogism, Coleridge now turns to the

9“

nightingales choral minstrelsy”: as Enright perceptively comments, “minstrelsy” is “a
key term in the fetishization of poetic identities,” recalling Percy’s resuscitation of them
in his “Essay on the Ancient English Minstrels” (495). Then, while the communal
conversation of the nightingales in the earlier stanza expresses the virtue of dialogism in
the production of poetry, the above lines reveal Coleridge’s increasing anxiety about the
fusion of poetic identities and the subsequent loss of proper individuality. In a desperate
attempt to reach the audience, poets “burst forth” their songs, but the abruptly
competitive voicing of their own individual notes only creates the notion of “minstrelsy,”
the commercialized version of poethood that does not allow individual poets to sustain a
genuine connection with their audience.

Coleridge’s delineation of this scene also displays his sense of historical changes: the

abandoned castle that provides a setting for the nightingales’ song symbolically shows

the collapse of the antiquated social order and the subsequent development of the

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capitalistic system. With this change, the ﬁeld of literary production gets growingly
reliant upon factors such as advertising and marketing. The reader is transformed to a
certain degree into the consumer, whose power within the market system subsumes that
of the poet. As I already stated, the image of this consumer often takes the form of a
reading woman in Romantic imagination, just like Coleridge’s “gentle maid” who clearly
holds a vantage point, from which she overlooks all the nightingales. The maid presides
over the poets/nightingales, refashioning herself as the consumer of literary goods, who
ultimately determines their artistic values within the market system.

Once this disturbing image comes into the text, Coleridge’s vision of the communal
poethood starts to evaporate: soon, Coleridge bids farewell to his friends, whom he
invoked a few moments earlier in order to construct the scene of collective literary
production that can resist the fashionable lure of melancholy poetry. Although the
Wordsworths are his friends and colleagues, their presence provokes a certain kind of
anxiety as they are simultaneously his competitors in the literary marketplace. Thus,
denying conversational dialogism he previously aspired to, Coleridge now resorts to yet
another model of poetic production. In this ﬁnal version of the poet-audience
relationship, Coleridge designates his baby son Hartley as the ultimate recipient of his
poetry. Hartley, who is “capable of no articulate sound” (I. 87), does not talk back and
threaten the poet’s realm of artistic creation; rather, the infant “mars all things with his
imitative lisp” (l. 88), enabling the poet to hold a vision of supremacy in which the poet
instructs the audience, who, in turn, simply repeats and imitates the poet’s utterance.
This highly docile image of the audience is also gendered in a speciﬁc way: as Coleridge

declares, “it is a father’s tale” (1. 101), based upon the power dynamic of the (adult)

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father-(infant) son relationship. Instead of the image of a reading woman whose choice
in the market system exerts great inﬂuence on the shape of poetic production, Coleridge
seeks the image of an artistic/ linguistic heir as the idealized form of the audience. Thus,
ultimately, Coleridge envisions the audience as an extension of himself in essence,
discovering temporary comfort in the lack of readerly challenges, yet sacriﬁcing part of

the dialogic dimension in his poem.

 

2. Undoing the Psychological Impact of the Feminine Gaze:

Wordsworth’s “To Joanna”

Wordsworth’s “Preface” and poems added to the revised edition of the Lyrical Ballads
in 1800 spell out Coleridge’s vision of his ideal audience in an expanded form. Wishing
to deny the cultural force of the feminine audience in the contemporary literary market,
Wordsworth also turns to an imaginary way of preserving literary authority via the trope
of the father-son relationship. While his poem that concludes the 1798 edition of the
Lyrical Ballads is “Tintern Abbey,” which portrays Dorothy Wordsworth as a
sympathetic audience, in 1800, Wordsworth seeks to deﬁne his own poetry essentially as
a masculine project, placing “Michael,” the patriarchal tale of inheritance and ﬁlial
obedience, at the very end of the poetic collection.

Ironically, this move emanates from Wordsworth’s acute awareness of his own
dependence on the culturally feminized form of sensibility as the source of poetic
imagination. As Susan J. Wolfson argues persuasively in her essay “Lyrical Ballads and

the Language of (Men) Feeling: Wordsworth Writing Women’s Voices,” Wordsworth’s

I94

poetics of “feeling” questions, confuses, and destabilizes the necessary differentials and
hierarchies that have traditionally applied the distinction between reason and passion to
the account of gender demarcation (29-31). Not only does he resort to impassioned
feminine voices in order to convey a sense of human language in a state of excitement,
but Wordsworth also delineates his male characters as capable of being emotionally
stimulated, at times even to the extent of bordering on “hysteria,” the psychological
condition generally associated with the feminine psyche.

Yet, for all those poetic experiments geared toward the expansion of the reader’s
sympathetic power, Wordsworth expresses discomfort with a possible subversion of
authority within the ﬁeld of literary production. His fear is grounded on two separate, but
related bases: ﬁrst, as an author who takes great pride in his role in cultural education,
Wordsworth does not want to merely cater to the ﬁckle taste of the contemporary
feminine audience, who often seek superﬁcial pleasure from reading materials. As he
puts it in the “Preface,” Wordsworth’s avoidance of “gross and violent stimulants” (64)
and his pursuit of a “worthy purpose” (62) in the composition of each poem grow out of
his belief that the poet needs to perform an instructional function in relation to his
audience. Secondly, Wordsworth as a male author appears somewhat reluctant to expose
himself and his works to the female audience and thereby become the object of their
gaze. Thus, while he invokes the willing participation of the reader in many passages in
the “Preface,” Wordsworth still designates the poet as a “man speaking to men,”
characterizing his view of the poet-audience relationship as a sort of brotherhood rather

than a gender-neutral connection.

“To Joanna,” one of the poems contained in “Poems on the Naming of Places,”

195

 

emphatically shows how Wordsworth’s fear of the feminine audience of the time is
translated into his dealings with a female character who threatens to subvert the authority.
In an apparently affectionate tone, the poem describes an incident on a walk taken by the

poet and Joanna on one summer morning:

And when we came in front of that tall rock
Which looks towards the East, I there stopped short,
And traced the lofty barrier with my eye

 

From base to summit; such delight I found

To note in shrub and tree, in stone and ﬂower,

That interrnixture of delicious hues,

Along so vast a surface, all at once,

In one impression, by connecting force

Of their own beauty, imaged in the heart. ---

When I had gazed perhaps two minutes’ space,

Joanna, looking in my eyes, beheld

That ravishment of mine, and laughed aloud.
(II. 42-53)

In the above lines, the poet’s lofty, sublime vision is abruptly shattered by Joanna’s
laugh, which trivializes and almost derides his poetic project. This moment is the more
embarrassing for the poet because it obviously situates the poet under the gaze of the
woman, reversing the usual pattern of objectiﬁcation in terms of gender. Speaking of this

passage, Wolfson observes the following:

The ambiguous grammar of ‘that ravishment of mine” holds a number of

possibilities of agent and object, ravisher and ravished: the poet is ravishing the

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landscape; his eyes are being ravished by it (“mine” refers to “eyes”); or his
entire self is in a state of ravishment. This ﬂuidity, as well as its objectiﬁcation
in Joanna’s gaze, shifts the erotics of seeing into the embarrassment of being
seen. Ravished by nature, he is ravished all over again by J anna’s look and

laugh (“Lyrical Ballads” 49).

 

Suddenly and utterly subject to the feminine interpretation of himself, the poet reveals the
reverberating shock from this humiliating experience in the next lines. In his
imagination, the woman’s laugh is powerful enough to evoke echoes from the entire
natural scene and thereby transform the poet from the subject of appreciation to the object

of derision:

The rock, like something starting from a sleep,
Took up the lady’s voice, and laughed again;
That ancient woman seated on Helm-crag
Was ready with her cavern; Hammer Scar,

And the tall steep of Silver How sent forth

A noise of laughter; southern Loughrigg heard,

And F airﬁeld answered with a mountain tone;

Helvellyn far into the clear blue sky

Carried the lady’s voice --- old Skiddaw blew

His speaking-trumpet; --- back out of the clouds

Of Glaramara southward came the voice;

And Kirkstone tossed it from his misty head.
(11. 54-65)

As the poet acknowledges later, this choral laughter is perhaps a wok “touched/ With

dreams and visionary impulses” (11. 70-71). The point here is that the psychological

197

impact of the woman’s laughter is so great as to provoke a hallucinatory response from
the poet. In fact, the poet’s strangely exaggerated embarrassment is symptomatic of the
unwilling awareness of his own susceptibility to the female power within the cultural
space. Despite his derisive comments on the utterly feminized literary forms,
Wordsworth simultaneously realizes the painful fact that his identity as an author is also
contingent upon the cultural force of the female audience.

The rest of the poem’s text contains Wordsworth’s efforts to escape the inﬂuence of

rum
0

the feminine and to reclaim his cultural authority. The ﬁrst move he takes is to diminish
and trivialize Joanna, who formerly threatened his poetic project: right after the poet
describes the “loud uproar in the hills” (1. 73), he states, “while we both were listening/ to
my side/ The fair Joanna drew, as if she wished/ To shelter from some object of her fear”
(11. 74-75). Now, the lines portray the woman as weak enough to need the poet’s
protection, revealing the process by which the masculine incorporation of the feminine
into the text affects the identity of women. The phrase “as if” in line 74 signals that the
terriﬁed representation of Joanna is partially the poet’s construction. As Laura Claridge
analyses, “the very nature in which Joanna as woman felt at ease as a proper subj ect
frightens her as it becomes appropriated by a male voice that will inscribe her against her
will in a text she did not want to write” (50).

Next, Wordsworth excludes Joanna from the poem’s discursive structure by adding
another formal component to the poem’s conversational mode. As a conversation poem,
“To Joanna” starts out designating the woman as the recipient of the poetic utterance.
Yet, in the second stanza, the poem introduces another interlocutor, the vicar, and

subsequently, renders Joanna, who is the former auditor of the poem, subject to the

198

masculine interpretation of her identity that arises from a dialogic exchange between the

two male speakers:

While I was seated, now some ten days past,
Beneath those lofty ﬁrs, that overtop
Their ancient neighbour, the old steeple tower,

The vicar from his gloomy house hard by

-— --I

Came forth to greet me; and when he had asked,
‘How fares Joanna, that wild-hearted maid!
And when will she return to us?’ he paused;

(11. 17-24)

Commenting on this passage, Wolfson notes, “Within the community, the poet implies,
Joanna is a problematic other, seeming to need government by ‘us”’ (“Lyrical Ballads”
48). Identiﬁed as such, she loses her textual function as the recipient of the poem and
becomes the mere subject-matter of a discussion between the poet and the vicar. Once it
departs from a conversational address to Joanna, the poem never returns to its previous
format, denying the woman her former role as a potential interlocutor.

The last lines of the poem indicate that the rock, upon which Joanna burst out a
laughter, is called after her name: “And I, and all who dwell by my ﬁreside,/ Have called
the lovely rock, JOANNA’S ROCK” (11. 84-85). This inscription of Joanna’s name
occurs via a collective agreement among the poet and the people in his community, yet it
excludes her own consent. Nonetheless, the form of a reported speech signals that the
naming procedure constitutes a “fact” standing on its own, regardless of Joanna’s opinion

on it. Thus, transforming her into a passive reader of the poem utterly unable to

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challenge or threaten the poetic project, Wordsworth arrives at claiming the ﬁnal

authorial voice.

3. A Deferral of a Readerly Judgment:
Keats’s ﬂre Fall of Hyperion

While Coleridge and Wordsworth attempt to establish themselves primarily as

-u‘liuj AH

masculine authors who defy the cultural force of the contemporary feminine audience,
Keats’s stance on this matter is highly complicated. His reputation in the contemporary
period always involves the issue of effeminacy, and, although Keats continues to struggle
with such reputation, it simultaneously constitutes an important factor for his fame and
even a marketing strategy for his poetic works. As Ellen Brinks explains, while Keats
appears to assume that poetic maturation is aligned with physical maturation as a male
subject and an inclusion within the elite masculine culture, in his poetic composition, this
assumption appears to constantly ﬂuctuate between desire for masculinity and refusal to
embrace it wholly (428-29). In her essay on Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion, Brinks
goes on to examine both poems as documents of a “rite of passage,” “one that confers
upon its poet-narrator the ability to speak from a position of discursive dominance” (428).
Yet, Brinks also suggests that the acquisition of symbolic power does not quite occur in
either text, in which a male body is subjected to pain and domination (429). Although I
do not focus on the issue of sadomasochistic dynamic located at the center of Brinks’s
argument, her essay is certainly helpful in investigating the two Hyperion poems as

Keats’s ambivalent responses to the contemporary cultural ﬁeld and its complex gender

200

politics. As fragmentary poems, the two texts highlight the male poet’s inability or
reluctance to enter into the condition of mastery, the condition culturally associated with
a masculine ideal.

In what follows, I intend to analyze The Fall of Hyperion with attention to its
complicated view of the contemporary audience. While aware of the intertextual
connection between the two Hyperion poems, I choose to primarily discuss The Fall of
Hyperion, as its formal departure from the earlier poem displays poetic strategies similar
to those employed in the conversation poem. Instead of aspiring to the grandeur of epic
as in Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion exposes the speaker’s consciousness and thereby
connects with the audience on the basis of sympathy and compassion. Simultaneously,
The Fall of Hyperion activates dialogism, a formal component largely missing in
Hyperion despite the earlier poem’s use of multiple characters and speakers. As Joel
F aﬂak cleverly observes, Bakhtin’s distinction between epic and novel might be to the
point here: according to Bakhtin, unlike novel, which is formally grounded upon the
notion of “heteroglossia,” epic is essentially a monologic form that represents a relatively
static worldview (310). In a way, Hyperion’s entire narrative assigns the form of epic to
the lost world of Titans, identifying, yet not wholly fulﬁlling the task of inventing a new
poetic form that corresponds to the transformed world order. The Fall of Hyperion’s
formal break from Hyperion, then, aims at taking up the very task left unﬁnished by its
fragmented parent text. The unique combination of lyricism and dialogism, which much
resembles the formal experimentation of the conversation poem, cancels out the epic
form as an outdated mode and attempts to create an innovative poetic form in the new

cultural condition.

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Primarily as a lyrical speaker, the poet-narrator of The Fall of Hyperion seeks
sympathetic responses that can sustain his authorial voice and annihilate the harsh
comments on him provided by Moneta, the interlocutor and the poem’s own ﬁgure of the
female audience. Yet, this process is only “partially” complete: not only does the poem
end without offering conclusive statements about the poet-narrator’s status within the
cultural sphere, but from the very outset, The Fall of Hyperion asks its reader, yet another
subject of dialogism, to suspend judgment on the value of the poem and its author. As I
will explain later, this move expresses Keats’s ambivalent view of the contemporary
feminine audience, which recognizes the commercialistic tendencies involved in their
literary evaluation, but still refuses to provide a completely distinct image of an ideal
audience that can replace them. Unlike Coleridge, who chooses to bond with Hartley, or
Wordsworth, who introduces the Vicar as the ultimate auditor of the poem, Keats merely
invokes some unknown audience of the future and manages to have his poem remain
open without depicting his version of an ideal poet-audience relationship.

The lack of a deﬁnitive authorial voice also characterizes the way in which Keats
portrays the poet-narrator’s confrontation with Moneta. In many historical readings of
The Fall of Hyperion, critics have often associated Moneta’s name with “money.”26
Then, Moneta, who is supposed to possess a ﬁnal answer to the troubling question
regarding the deﬁnition of the poet, embodies the cultural force of capitalism and the
poet-speaker’s inevitable dependence on the material means. When one considers that
Moneta’s identity may be explained as such, her enigmatic speech regarding the

distinction between the poet and the dreamer becomes highly problematic:

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‘They whom thou speak’st of are no vision’ries.’
Rejoined that voice, ‘They are no dreamers weak,
They seek no wonder but the human face,
No music but a happy-noted voice,
They come not here, for thou art less than they.
What beneﬁt canst thou do, or all the tribe,
To the great world? Thou art a dreaming thing,
A fever of thyself.

(11. 166-74)

In the above passage, Moneta refuses to include the poet-narrator within the boundary of
poethood, arguing that he does not offer any “beneﬁt” to society. While this utilitarian
deﬁnition of the poet appears to emphasize the social function of arts and literature, it
simultaneously points to the notion of “proﬁt,” which constitutes the ultimate operating
principle of the market system. Then, the differentiation between the poet, who “pours
out a balm upon the world” (1. 206), and the dreamer, who “vexes it” (1. 207), also
becomes dubious; it almost seems that, in order to gain a proper recognition as a poet,
one needs to uphold the whole ideological apparatuses of the existing social system and
to refrain from creating any artistic vision of a subversive kind.

The poet-narrator’s following reply to Moneta expresses his doubts about her

suspicious deﬁnition of the poet:

‘Apollo! Fade, far-ﬂown Apollo!
Where is thy misty pestilence to creep

Into the dwellings, through the door crannies,

 

2" The etymological origin of “Moneta” is conveniently summarized in Hoagwood I36.

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Of all meek lyrists, large self-worshippers,
And careless hectorers in proud bad verse?
Though I breathe death with them it will be life
To see them sprawl before me into graves.

(11. 209-15)

Summoned alone to this terrifying altar of death and singled out as a “dreamer” rather
than a “poet,” the poet-narrator wonders how the so-called “poets” of the world have
acquired that name. After all, what is the nature of the “beneﬁt” and the “balm” that
Moneta associates with the deﬁnition of the poet?

Yet, despite the doubts, the poet-narrator does not pursue an alternative deﬁnition of
the poet. Rather, he becomes utterly silent, realizing that he lacks a linguistic means to
dispute Moneta’s claim: “I had no words to answer, for my tongue,/ Useless, could ﬁnd
about its roofed home/ No syllable of a ﬁt majesty/ To make rejoinder to Moneta’s
mourn” (11. 233-36). Thus, instead of struggling directly with Moneta, the ﬁgure
standing for the cultural force of the time, the poet-narrator chooses to frame his narrative

with a prelude that rebukes Moneta’s designation of himself as a “dreamer”:

Fanatics have their dreams, wherewith they weave
A paradise for a sect; the savage too

From forth the loftiest fashion of his sleep
Guesses at heaven; pity these have not

Traced upon vellum or wild Indian leaf

The shadows of melodious utterance.

But bare of laurel they live, dream and die;

For Poesy alone can tell her dreams,

With the ﬁne spell of words alone can save

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”1

EL“
6‘

Imagination from the sable charm

And dumb enchantment. Who alive can say
‘Thou art no poet; may’st not tell thy dreams’?
Since every man whose soul is not a clod

Hath visions, and would speak, if he had loved
And been well nurtured in his mother tongue.
Whether the dream now purposed to rehearse
Be poet’s or fanatic’s will be known

When this warm scribe my hand is in the grave.
(11. 1-18)

In order to counter Moneta’s notion of poethood and to regain the authority of his own
poetic vision, the poet-narrator invokes another kind of audience. Yet, the audience, who
will provide the ﬁnal artistic judgment on the merit of his poetic works, belongs to the
future tense, and thus the actual judgment is inevitably postponed. Thus, questioning the
efﬁcacy of Moneta’s accusation of him, yet falling short of constructing an alternative
principle of poetic evaluation, The Fall of Hyperion remains as an unﬁnished poem, the

fragmentation of which formally represents its thematic ambivalence and uncertainty.

4. In Search of “Lyrical” Centrality:

Matthew Arnold’s “Resignation”

In the Victorian period, when the reading audience becomes an even more inclusive
category than it has been before, poets such as Tennyson and Browning respond to the

new demands of their audience by creating “open” forms of poetry that allow its readers

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to become partial participants in the poetic process. As I discussed earlier, the creative
energy of the dramatic monologue derives largely from the fact that the poetic form does
not attempt to reinforce the central authority of the speaker and instead to enable the
audiences to exert their own judgment. Yet, it is not true that all Victorian poets are
comfortable with such a democratic poetic form; Matthew Arnold, the cultural critic who
represents the elite literary group of his times, chooses a path in the opposite direction
and composes lyrical poems that foreground the authorial voice of the speaker. Even
Arnold, however, is not entirely free from the pressure of narrative and dialogism in the
period when, according to Bakhtin, all genres get increasingly “novelized.” Thus,
reproducing the strategy of the Romantic poet, Arnold deploys narrative elements
through the use of a potential interlocutor, but refuses to allow the effect of those
elements to undermine the central authority. Instead, by maintaining a clear sense of
lyrical closure, he seeks to redeﬁne the poet’s status as a representative man who assumes
the responsibility of setting and upholding the standards of the contemporary cultural
ﬁeld.

Arnold’s “Resignation,” his version of the conversation poem that much resembles
“Tintern Abbey,” exempliﬁes the way in which the Victorian poet utilizes dialogism for
the sake of his own lyrical centrality. “Resignation” also provides an excellent overview
of Arnold’s troubled relationship with the reading audience, which appears in the form of
his sister Jane, named “F austa” in the poem. As Mary Ellis Gibson notes, Jane often
ﬁgures as an example of “ordinary women” in Arnold’s early poetry, marking the
discrepancy between Arnold’s lofty poetic project leaning toward the cultural world of

Oxford on the one hand, and the everyday life of the general reading public on the other

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(Critical Essays 32-33). While Arnold clearly feels the urgency to communicate with the

 

audience out there, he simultaneously wishes to speak from a privileged position in the
culture’s very center. This complex notion of his own poethood in relation to the
audience shapes the formal aspects of “Resignation,” which turns dialogism into a
pseudo-consensus between the poet and Fausta in order to establish the voice of
authority.

For my purpose, the most important moment in the poem occurs when the poet averts
F austa’s potentially dialogic participation in the poetic process, but the passage
immediately preceding that moment is worth considering here, as it contains Arnold’s

reﬂections on the poet’s exceptional qualities and his position in the greater world:

The poet, to whose mighty heart

Heaven doth a quicker pulse impart,
Subdues that energy to scan

Not his own course, but that of man.
Though he move mountains, though his day
Be pass’d on the proud heights of sway,
Though he hath loosed a thousand chains,
Though he hath borne immortal pains,
Action and suffering though he know---
He hath not lived, if he lives so.

He sees, in some great-historied land,

A ruler of the people stand,

Sees his strong thought in ﬁery ﬂood
Roll through the heaving multitude;
Exults---yet for no moment’s space

Envies the all-regarded place.

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(11. 144-59)

In the above lines, the poet is primarily described as a person who possesses an
extraordinary power of perception. The poet’s special talent is distinctive enough to
separate him from the rest of the humanity, who generally live the life of action. Rather
than sharing ordinary pursuits of everyday people, the poet is supposed to engage himself
in another kind of endeavor, that of observing and understanding the world. Deﬁning

poethood as such, Arnold assigns to the poet the task of “scanning” the course of man.

r. “7—
ﬂ 0

Yet, Arnold’s above reﬂections get interrupted when he turns his attention to his
auditor. Utterly uninterested in his monologic effusion, Fausta only offers the poet a

blank smile:

You listen-«but that wandering smile,

F austa, betrays you cold the while!

Your eyes pursue the bells of foam

Wash’d, eddying, from this bank, their home.
(11. 199-202)

As a ﬁgure for the ordinary audience, F austa afﬂicts an unbearable psychological pain on
the poet. Thus, when her indifference and “wandering smile” interrupt the progress of
Arnold’s poem, he refuses to allow her to appropriate the textual space. Instead, he

silences her by assuming the role of her mouthpiece:

Those gipsies, so your thoughts I scan,
Are less, the poet more, than man.

They feel not, though they move and see;

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Deeper the poet feels; but he
Breathes, when he will, immoral air,
Where Orpheus and where Homer are.
In the day’s life, whose iron round
Hems us all in, he is not bound;
He leaves his kind, 0 ’erleaps their pen,
And ﬂees the common life of men.
He escapes thence, but we abide---
Not deep the poet sees, but wide.

(11. 203-14)

The poet repeats the verb “scan” in line 203, after using the same verb in line 146. Yet,
this time, the verb conveys a much stronger sense, as it actually connotes the process of
textual appropriation: his sister is there only to be interpreted by the poet. This distorted
dialogism renders the poet’s earlier argument about his role of representing the
humankind equally problematic, signaling that the notion of “representation” in fact leans
toward the selfs appropriation of other. Yet, as if totally unaware of this problem, after
this moment, Arnold consistently uses the ﬁrst-person plural pronoun, “we,” and thereby
creates the illusion of consensus between the interlocutors. Through this dubious use of
“we,” he silences his auditor and maintains his textual authority.

In a way, the masculine mastery of the female auditor in “Resignation” constitutes the
ﬂip side to the angst-ridden denunciation of the lover in Arnold’s Marguerite poems. In
“To Marguerite-Continued,” he delineates the isolated life that results from the
unavoidable separation between men and women. Despite a brief moment when he
realizes “we were/ Parts of a single continent” (11. 15-16), he cannot overcome the bitter

sense of loneliness in “the unplumb’d, salt, estranging sea” (I. 24). The Marguerite

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poems express Arnold’s inability or reluctance to enter into a love relationship in varying
tones and manners. The reason for this aborted relationship remains ambiguous:
Marguerite is accused of not returning his love to him in “Isolation: To Marguerite,” and
in “Parting,” she is described as a prostitute-like ﬁgure who has been touched by other
men. In any case, Marguerite stands for an unruly woman that cannot be wholly
possessed nor controlled by masculine desire. Thus, as Thais E. Morgan observes,
Arnold’s representation of masculinity as a lost, unattainable identity informs much of his
poetry.”

As I suggested earlier, Arnold’s nostalgic desire for masculine authority appears
intricately connected to his anxieties about the contemporary reading audience.
Especially, in Arnold’s case, the development of a powerful lyric voice and the
subsequent abandonment of narrative elements appear to signify the poet’s culturally
superior position in relation to ordinary men and especially women. Recent studies of
nineteenth-century literary journalism reveal that reviewers and literary critics in the
period responded to the feminization of the literary market by dismissing the narrative as
a feminine mode and maintaining poetic genres as forms of truly elite literature that only
men can produce. Judith Newton shows that Edinburgh Review deﬁned the novel as a
predominantly domestic and feminine genre (9), and Ina Ferris also argues that the novel
was inextricably entangled in gender codes in the nineteenth-century cultural politics
(21). For example, Richard Holt Hutton, one of the important reviewers of the period,
said that “women novelists are better able than their male counterparts to construct the
ﬂow of event.” However, Hutton adds that “women have not produced ﬁrst-rate poetry,

because the poet must penetrate... far beneath the surface of life, in order to create ﬁne

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poetry” (qtd. in Ferris 27).

Matthew Arnold’s desire for lyrical centrality and his resistance to narrative shown in
poems such as “Resignation” parallel Hutton’s gendered distinction between lyric and
narrative. In the cultural atmosphere of the 18403, Arnold chooses to defend the cultural
authority of elite literature by refusing to open up the lyrical space of his poetry, while
utilizing selective components of dialogism, which are, in the ﬁnal analysis, subordinated

to the poet’s authorial voice.

5. The Lost Conversation (Poem):

T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock and Other Observatiorls

T. S. Eliot’s poems contained in his ﬁrst poetic volume, Prufrock and Other

’9

Observations, are usually classiﬁed as “dramatic poetry. This classiﬁcation,
presumably inﬂuenced by the poet’s later theorization of “impersonality poetics,” is
partially accurate in that the poems’ anonymous speakers do not necessarily perform the
function of enhancing the central authority of the poet. Yet, on the other hand, the overt
emphasis on the “dramatic” characteristic of those poems tend to overlook the subtle
ways in which Eliot expresses his own poetic dilemma through his speakers’
predicament. In other words, these early poems document Eliot’s “observations” of the
circumstances surrounding his own poetic creation, frequently displaying the speakers’

emotional crises arising from linguistic/communicative frustration. In this sense, Eliot’s

poems in Prufrock and Other Observations are “mask lyrics” in Adena Rosemarin’s terms

 

of classiﬁcation; unlike the dramatic monologue that records both a particular form of

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consciousness and a critical gaze at that very consciousness, these poems present the
speakers’ agony as deeply tinged with the poet’s own suffering.

The ﬁrst poem in the volume, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” appears
particularly signiﬁcant in understanding how the speaker’s problem overlaps with the
poet’s artistic dilemma. J. Alfred Prufrock, whose naming alludes strongly to “Alfred,”
Lord Tennyson, the poet laureate of the earlier period, is simultaneously a middle-aged
ordinary man unable to establish a sexual relationship and a poet ﬁgure utterly incapable
of communicating his feelings to the audience. Thus, the failure of this “Love Song” also
occurs on two separate, but related planes: the “women,” whom Prufrock pursues but
ultimately loses in this poem, are objects of love and sexuality, but at the same time,
those women, “who come and go/ Talking of Michelangelo” (11. 35-36), are the cultured
reading public that continues to frustrate the poet’s artistic communication.

The outset of the poem contains a shift from communicative desire to its frustration in

its most dramatic form:

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument

Of insidious intent
(11. 1-9)

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Along with the title, “The Love Song,” the invocation of a lover-interlocutor in the ﬁrst
lines generates the readerly expectation of a conversational poem. However, as soon as
the expectation comes in, the following lines annihilate it, utilizing the famous simile
comparing the cityscape of the evening time to “a patient etherized upon a table” (I. 3).
The almost violent image of paralysis foreshadows the theme of the entire poem, the total
absence of sensitivity. The evening is potentially the time of the day when people
become emotionally alert and attentive to inner life, but in “Prufrock,” it is only
dominated by the petriﬁed apathy of the urban life. Accordingly, the second simile of the
poem introduces a hopelessly bleak view of the linguistic/communicative process by
comparing “half-deserted streets” (1. 4) to “a tedious argument/ Of insidious intent” (ll. 8-
9).

The poem’s pessimism about communicative possibilities is also apparent in the way
in which Eliot starts to erase traces of the lover-interlocutor from the poetic space. After
the ﬁrst stanza, the second-person pronoun, “you,” disappears, only to return a few more
times when the speaker addresses general humanity rather than the speciﬁc auditor
invoked in the beginning of the poem. Due to the evaporation of the conversational
situation, the “you” in the poem remains without further speciﬁcation, engendering one
of the bafﬂing interpretive problems surrounding the poem. For example, Martin
Scoﬁeld states, “The poem is a ‘Love Song’ ---- and that gives the clue to the source and
direction of feeling (however thwarted) ---- but a love song of a peculiar kind. For who is
the “you” of the ﬁrst line?” (60) Then, after observing that “you” becomes largely
absent in the later part of the poem, Scoﬁeld concludes that Prufrock is addressing

himself or a kind of alter ego in his song (61). Although such an interpretation certainly

213

stands, instead of following Scotield’s argument and understanding the poem as a purely
inner monologue, I propose to read the poem as a deliberate attempt to expose a failure of
intersubjective communication. The interlocutor is ﬁrst invoked, but lost a few moments
later, and the conversational poem turns into a document of a single isolated
consciousness, formally exemplifying the poem’s thematic concern.

After the loss of conversational possibilities, the poem repeatedly demonstrates why
these possibilities have disappeared as such. Above all, Prufrock/the poet is afraid that,
even if he succeeds in creating a linguistic construct with a great amount of artistic

energy, it will not be received with much interest and understanding:

Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it towards some overwhelming question,
To say: ‘I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all’---
If one, settling a pillow by her head,

Should say: ‘This is not what I meant at all.

That is not it, after all.’

(11. 90-98)

The women, totally immersed in “social” dialogues, would merely deride any attempt to
establish a genuine kind of communication. Thus, Prufrock/the poet abandons the
attempt and eventually turns inward, declaring that “It is impossible to say just what I
mean!” (I. 104)

“Conversation Galante,” another poem contained in the same volume, illustrates a

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disastrous failure in communication, so dreaded by Prufrock/the poet, but never

actualized in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”:

I observe: ‘Our sentimental friend the moon!
Or possibly (fantastic, I confess)

It may be Prester John’s balloon

Or an old battered lantern hung aloft

To light poor travellers to their distress.’

She then: ‘How you digress!’

And I then: 'Someone frames upon the keys
That exquisite noctume, with which we explain
The night and moonshine; music which we seize
To body forth our own vacuity.’

She then: ‘Does this refer to me?’

‘Oh no, it is I who am inane.’

‘You, madam, are the eternal humorist,

The eternal enemy of the absolute,

Giving our vagrant moods the slightest twist!
With your air indifferent and imperious

At a stroke our mad poetics to confute ----’

And ---- ‘Are we then so serious?’
(11. 1-18)

The speaker, who strives to achieve poetic communication, continues to encounter his
auditor’s misunderstanding. While the ﬁrst stanza displays the inefﬁcacy of metaphorical

language, the second stanza demonstrates how the speaker’s attempt to discover an

215

adequate analogy fails hopelessly when the auditor’s interpretation does not grasp its
meaning. Even when the speaker ﬁnally resorts to irony as his last resource in the third
stanza, the woman’s extreme literalism overturns his intent, leaving the conversation
essentially “lost.”

Prufrock’s fear of such a dreadful scenario renders him utterly unable to approach his
potential auditor. In fact, Prufrock/the poet ﬁnds it impossible even to perceive his
audience in their totality. Instead, the dreadful women are fragmented and represented

only by a few body parts:

And I have known the eyes already, known them all----
The eyes that ﬁx you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?

And how should I presume?

And I have known the arms already, known them all----
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare

(But in the larnplight, downed with light brown hair!)
(11. 55-64)

The “eyes” and “arms” are body parts that are signiﬁcant in intersubjective contexts: eye
contacts and embraces constitute important physical ways of connecting with the other.
Simultaneously, the “eyes” and “arms” are precisely the body parts engaged in the

reading process. Yet, instead of performing the function of establishing intersubjective

216

connections with the other, whether in reality or in the textual form, the “eyes” “ﬁx” and
“formulate” the other, using interpretational violence.
Then, how can one communicate with such unforgiving, relentless audience? Is it

possible at all? T. S. Eliot’s poems in Profrock and Other Observations ultimately

 

concern these questions. Although they appear to express extreme pessimism about
linguistic/communicative possibilities at times, my contention is that Eliot nonetheless
pursues a renewal of the reader’s consciousness. While he does not trust the cultured
reading public who “come and go talking of Michaelangelo” and unemotionally discuss
Chopin’s Preludes, Eliot still searches for his ideal reader on an individual basis; for the
lost “you” in the beginning of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” would be found in
someone who might make efforts to comprehend his fragmentary poems and who might
be willing to participate in his poetic project of “purifying the dialect of the tribe” (“Little

Gidding”).

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Conclusion

At the end of this dissertation, it might be reasonable to raise the question of why we
need to apply the paradigm of intersubjectivity and communicative ethics to the study of
poetry, the literary genre usually associated with the prevailing notion of isolated modern
selfhood. The existence of the lyrical speaker of modern poetry ceaselessly creates the
illusion of a private world somehow removed from the public life, and the cultural
labeling of poetry as part of the elite literary tradition also serves the function of
designating the genre as an exclusive emotional/intellectual entertainment of educated
individuals. Unlike ﬁction and drama, which tend to reach broader social groups and
thereby participate in the exchange of opinions, poetry appears to occupy a distant realm,
where the rules and conventions regulating everyday speech do not seem to be in clear
operation.

The assumptions underlying this dissertation are that most of these notions about
“poetic autonomy” are widely supposed to be the legacy of Romanticism and that one
needs to revisit the Romantic period in order to verify those notions. In most versions of
literary history, it is a standard belief that the separation of poetry from everyday life and
the audience occurred in the Romantic period, when an overt emphasis on individual
talents besieged social/ethical functions of literature. Thus, by returning to the Romantic
period and reclaiming the signiﬁcance of the conversational form that embodies the
intersubjective orientation within Romanticism, my dissertation attempts to rethink the
idea of “poetic autonomy.”

Although it is true that poetry has gradually been disconnected from the ordinary

218

world, much of the process is due to combined cultural forces that have designated the
aesthetic as a category independent of morality and knowledge. Yet, some of the poems,
which develop and maximize the intersubj ective possibilities in the Romantic
conversation poem, fundamentally challenge such an ideological view of poetry. Instead,
they endorse an “open” form of poetry, which allows the operation of dialogism in its
most profound sense. The poems recognize the fact that the natural world is primarily
signiﬁcant as a shared space between human beings. The poems also value the
interaction between self and other and sometimes master the difﬁcult task of respecting
the other. Thus, in lieu of envisioning self as a uniﬁed entity that dominates the outer
world, the poems display the existence of a critical consciousness, which intemalizes the
other’s view of the self. Also, keenly aware that they are part of the contemporary
culture, the poems invoke the audience and ceaselessly attempt to connect with them,
Yet, these dialogic elements in the conversational poems are often deeply tinged with
an opposing kind of desire, that toward lyrical centrality. In the “modern” cultural
atmosphere that equates originality with marketability, the poems continue to search for
an authorial voice, which may dominate the literary ﬁeld. At times, the evocation of
intersubjectivity itself becomes a device by which the poems reinforce the central
authority expressed through the poets’ dominant voices. While this complexity calls for
an extremely careful look at the shape of the power structure within the poems, it is also
important to note that the desire for lyrical centrality is not altogether a negative
phenomenon; for the very desire sometimes indicates the existence of social
consciousness, with which the poets assess the current state of the cultural ﬁeld and

provide ethical criticism for the whole society. In this sense, even in their most lyrical

219

 

 

moments, the poems actually converse with the outer world.

Paul Magnuson’s recent book, Reading Public Romanticism, recognizes poetic

 

dialogism in this deepest sense and extends discussions of poetry to include its relevance
to the public sector. Magnuson convincingly argues that “evasions (of social issues) are
possible in private writing, but not in publication, because to publish is to become public,
to enter a mediated discourse that resonates with public issues” (7). Then, as long as
these poems are “published works” in some ways, they invariably participate in the
communication process that constitutes the essential function of the public sphere.
Although my study does not investigate the resonance of speciﬁc public discourses
within these poems, I am certainly in agreement with Magnuson’s critical position, which
endorses and expands conversational possibilities latent in the poetic genre.

When these conversational possibilities are not sufﬁciently recognized, poetry
becomes fetishized and loses its connection with the rest of the world. Poets may be
celebrated, but only as aloof artist ﬁgures, not as the ultimate “legislators” of the world in
Shelley’s famous words. This danger, which in fact constitutes part of reality, is wittily
described in a poem by Geoffrey Hill, one of the contemporary poets who digest the
Romantic tradition in the most creative way. The poem is titled “Elegiac Stanzas,”
echoing Wordsworth’s poem that bears the same name, and the subtitle, “On a Visit to
Dove Cottage,” also suggests its intertextual link with the Romantic poet. Dove Cottage,
in Hill’s eyes, is an international tourist attraction, frequently visited by admirers of
Wordsworth. Yet, Hill’s perceptive look at the Cottage accurately captures the fact that
the famous Romantic poet’s old residence is utterly out of touch with the outer world

surrounding it. Despite the constant presence of the crowd, the Cottage is somehow

220

A ‘JML. _-

exempt from changes and processes that constitute the public life and history:

Mountains, monuments, all forms
Inured to processes and storms
(And they are many); the fashions

Of intercourse between nations:

Customs through which many come
To sink their eyes into a room
Filled with the unused and unwom;

To bite nothings to the bone:

And the daylight between facts;
And the daylight between acts;
Groping of custom towards love;
Past loving, the custom to approve:

(11. 1-12)

Even the natural landscape, which Wordsworth usually associated with the notion of
constancy, is by no means immune from temporal progress, but the Romantic poet’s
room, preserved with great care, contains seemingly timeless objects. The tourists who
pay tributes to this venue may nonetheless gain pleasure from this isolated world of the
eternal past, utterly blind to the fact that their appreciation of such a secluded artistic
space is conditioned by the logic of market economy, which turns their trips into proﬁts.
Hill’s voice, however, displays a clear satirical distance from the tourists’ way of
appreciating the Cottage and the poetic world: just as the “daylight,” Wordsworth’s trope

for self-reliance and inner strength, is not beyond “facts” and “acts,” but always

221

“between” those ordinary pursuits, the poetic universe is also part of this mundane world,
and to believe otherwise is a mere illusion.
Thus, the last two stanzas of the poem openly mock the tendency to separate poetry

from human affairs:

Greatly-aloof, alert, rare
Spirit, conditioned to appear
At the authentic stone or seat:

0 near-human spouse and poet,

Mountains, rivers, and grand storms,
Continuous proﬁts, grand customs,
(And many of them): O Lakes, Lakes!
0 sentiment upon the rocks!

(11. 17-24)

In these lines, Hill derides the kind of poetry utterly divorced from human contexts.
However spiritual it may seem, such poetry seeks to commune only with inanimate
objects and fails to address issues arising from intersubjective connections. The
successful poet is therefore a pseudo-human spouse, unable to establish a genuine
relationship with the other. The last stanza contrasts the two separate worlds by inserting
a colon between them: in the ﬁrst world, nature and culture are interconnected with a
series of commas, but the second world of poetry exists in isolation. The emphatic
celebration of natural objects in the ﬁnal two lines becomes a pathetic exclamation of
self-conﬁnement.

While somewhat exaggerated, Hill’s analysis reveals the gap between poetry and the

222

public sphere, the gap continuously reproduced in the contemporary cultural ﬁeld. My
claim throughout this dissertation is that one may begin to close the gap when one
discovers an alternative tradition of poetry, which strives to socialize with other human
beings and thereby partake of everyday life. Although the poems discussed in my
dissertation sometimes fail to establish genuine interpersonal connections, even their
failure stories are valuable precisely because they document their dialogic potential in
their own ways. Above all, the poems inform us why modernity remains as an
“unﬁnished” project, awaiting our responses that might start to complete the project of

communicative action.

223

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