WORDSWORTH AND
THE SUBLIME:

AN ESSAY ON

WORDSWORTH'S
EMAGENATION ‘

' Thesis for thé Degree of PH. D

MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY
ALBERT O. WLECKE

I969

 

This is to certify that the

WORDSWORTH AND THE SUBLIME: AN ESSAY
ON WORDSWORTH'S IMAGINATION

ALBERT O . WLECKE

has been accepted towards fulfillment
of the requirements for

Ph.D.

Date __.

0-169

thesis entitled

presented by

degree in E“ liSh

 

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Michigan Staw
University

     
     

 

ALBERT OTTO WLECKB 1969

©

 

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

ABSTRACT

WORDSWORTH AND THE SUBLIME:
AN ESSAY ON WORDSWORTH'S IMAGINATION

by Albert 0. Wlecke

Body of Abstract

The thesis of this essay is that central to Wordsworth's act of
imagination is an act of self-consciousness in which the mind directly
intuits its own activity as the ground of the phenomenal world. The
statement of this thesis is developed out of an analysis of that pas-
sage in "Tintern Abbey" where Wordsworth claims to have felt a "sense
sublime" of "something far more deeply interfused." Various critical
identifications of this visionary "something" are examined and shown to
be inadequate, and the hypothesis is offered that this "something" can
be best understood as the activity of Wordsworth's own consciousness as
this activity is implicit or "interfused" in every act of perception.
Thus, the thesis is advanced that at the heart of Wordsworth's so-
called visionary moments is a dramatic act of self-consciousness in
which the mind apperceives its own agency as the transcendent and uni-
fying principle of the world of perception.

The argument in support of this thesis proceeds by placing the
initial analysis of Wordsworth's "sense sublime" within a variety of
contexts. The first of these contexts is the entirety of the poem

"Tintern Abbey." The poem is read as a meditation which consistently

Albert 0. Wlecke

describes Wordsworth's imaginative act as involving the introspective
exploration by the poet of his sense of the immanence of things--the
sense that the "life of things" is to be found deep "within" both the
surface of the landscape and his own mind. This sense of immanence is
characterized phenomenologically: as a projection of the fusion of the
underworld of apocalyptic self-consciousness with the world of percep-
tion and memory.

The central portion of the essay contextualizes the description
of Wordsworth's imaginative act with reference to certain English theo-
rists of the sublime, including Coleridge. There is an examination of
the phenomenological implications of the eighteenth-century habit of
discussing the mind in the experience of the sublime as if it were a
kind of expanding Space. It is argued that if we assume the experience
of the sublime to be a distinguishable type of conscious experience,
notes toward a phenomenology of the sublime can be written. These notes,
in turn, can be shown to be illuminating in understanding both Words-
worth's preoccupation with the landscape and his habit of using the
landscape as a paradigm for consciousness--of indeed using the "language
of the sense," the "beauteous forms" of nature, as a way of stating and
exploring the mysteries of a visionary self-consciousness. It is finally
argued that what is now referred to in the essay as "sublime self-
consciousness" is the ultimate source of imaginative activity for Words-
worth, and that imagination itself is the power whereby the mind sustains
a creative tension between the ego intuited in its "metaphysical Sub-
limity" (Coleridge's phrase) and the world of nature.

The essay concludes with an extension of this description of

Albert 0. Wlecke

Wordsworth's imaginative act to a consideration of the following
problems: 1) the form of Wordsworthian space; 2) the nature of Words-
worthian time and the relationship between the act of memory and the
act of creation; 3) the relationship between the structure of Words-
worth's imaginative act and his declared poetic program: to extend
the kingdom of the sublime, to take the humblest phenomenon of nature,
such as the "meanest flower that blows," and use it as a vehicle for

visionary poetic statement.

WORDSWORTH AND THE SUBLIME:

AN ESSAY ON WORDSWORTH'S IMAGINATION

BY
«*0
Albert 0. Wlecke

A THESIS

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Department of English

1969

Copyright by
ALBERT OTTO WLECKE

1969

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wish to indicate my deepest gratitude, first of all, to Lore
Metzger who directed this dissertation from its inception, whose thought-
ful corrections and suggestions saved me from many an embarrassing turn,
and whose continuing confidence in me helped me to sustain my own con-
fidence in the worth of what I was doing; second, to Bernard Paris whose
lectures on Coleridge's "The Eolian Harp" first prompted my interest in
the subject of this essay and whose always available friendship and wise
counsel have been valuable to me in ways he can never imagine; third, to
Hazard Adams who has deeply influenced me by his example and who, as my
academic superior during the writing of most of this, made possible those
circumstances which encouraged me to finish; finally, to John Huddleston
who had the dubious task of reading every page as it came fresh from my
pen and who never complained while showing me how much there was to com-
plain of, how much that needed correction in those early and very im-
perfect pages.

These four, above all the others who helped, may claim a share in
whatever quality this work exhibits. Its lack of quality I claim as en-

tirely my own.

ii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Chapter
I. INTRODUCTION
II. A POEM ABOUT INTERIORS
III. THE EXTENSIONS OF CONSCIOUSNESS
IV. THE INTUITION OF EXISTENCE

V. SOME CONCLUSIONS

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

iii

ii

28
66

107

191

CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION

When readers of William Wordsworth speak of his "natural
mysticism" or of his "pantheism," they almost invariably have in mind,
as the principal support of these impressions, that famous passage
from Wordsworth's meditation "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern
Abbey":

And I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thoughts,

And rolls through all things.1
That these lines are conducive to an impression on even a wary reader
of "natural mysticism" is evident enough.2 If by mysticism we simply
understand an experience of direct contact with some kind of transcend-
ent "spirit," then we have here Wordsworth's unmistakable testimony to
his mysticism. There is also a suggestion in the first two lines of
the passage that Wordsworth is susceptible to recurring transcendent
encounters: the shift in tense from "have felt" to "disturbs" inti-
mates a mental action rising out of the past and flowing into the
present, almost as if Wordsworth, remembering his previous contacts

with the "presence," is re-experiencing that "presence" and the accom-

panying "joy/ Of elevated thought" in the very act of composing these

lines.

That this mysticism is "natural"--and one way of taking "natural"
is to understand "not supernatural"--can be seen if, first of all, we
observe that Wordsworth's transcendent "something" is clearly not the
supernatural and highly personal God of the Old and New Testaments,
nor any other personal God of whatever tradition. Second, this blank
but existent "something" is ubiquitous within nature; not a word is
given of its having any existence "outside of," "beyond," or "above"
nature--three usual prepositional ways of paraphrasing some sense out
of the word "supernatural." Wordsworth's insistence that the "presence"
is universally "interfused" and his catalogue of its dwelling-places,
albeit none of them especially confining, suggest that he wishes to
keep the location of the ubiquitous "presence" thoroughly within the
natural world--despite the flight of elevated thoughts. He makes no
claim of having been rapt away to a seventh heaven or having been
Beatrice-led to a culminating vision of an unfolding celestial rose.

' as other passages in "Tintern

In addition, this "sense sublime,’
Abbey" make quite clear, is one of the "gifts" (line 86) nature her-
self provides to compensate Wordsworth for the sadness he experiences
as he recognizes the encroachments of his mortality. And, without at
this point questioning this theme of compensation, we might wonder how

nature can bestow something unless it is hers to bestow. As the

schoolmen used to phrase it: nemo dat quod non habet.

 

The use of this passage to support an assertion of Wordsworth's
"pantheism" is far less tenable.3 The four, insistently climactic

"all's" of the last two lines might suggest a Spinozistic vision of

the Single Substance. But if we look more closely, we see that

Wordsworth's language, even as it surges toward a statement of absolute
cosmic oneness, is still capable of making kinds of distinctions inimi-
cal to a thorough-going pantheism. The interfused "something" may be
an activity which is ubiquitous--"rolls through all things"--but its
relationship to the specific objects of the universe Wordsworth names

in this passage--"light of setting suns, round ocean," "living air,"

" "mind of man"--is one of neither identity nor that lesser

"blue sky,
degree of identity, consubstantiality. The relationship is rather one
of dweller to dwelling-place. The metaphor whereby Wordsworth prevents
his ”something" from being located in a supernatural dimension also
preserves distinctions within the natural. The dweller, we remind
ourselves, is not the same thing as the dwelling-place. And a reader
seeking to make Wordsworth appear vaguely orthodox (and certainly,
therefore, not pantheistic) might claim that the relationship remotely
resembles the old scholastic notion of God's immanence "within" crea-

4 This

tion as a Power continuously sustaining all things in being.
notianprompted another nineteenth-century poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins,
to some of his finest poems.5 Or this same reader, focusing upon this
transcendent something's activity within the mind of man, might be
reminded of the Augustinian discipline of searching for an awareness
of God within the depths of the soul.6 But of course Wordsworth is
neither a scholastic nor an Augustinian. Nor is he a doctrinaire
pantheist. A meditation like "Tintern Abbey," wrestling as it does
with the reality of change and with the necessity of finding succor

beneath the riddling weight of mortality, hardly can have as its doc-

trinal base the premise of the Single Substance. For from the per-

spective of such a premise real change is, in the last analysis,
illusory. And such a premise, extrapolated from this single passage
by a reader anxious for recognizable doctrine, would make the rest of
this brooding poem irrelevant.

There is still another way in which the characterization of
this passage as an expression of "natural mysticism" can be seen as
superior to the characterization "pantheism." The latter term fails,
not only because of the reasons already given, but also because of the
approach its use implies. Its use takes an expression of a certain
kind of experience as an expression of a commitment to a certain philo-
sophical or, if you will, theological position. This kind of critical
"taking" or reductio ad doctrinam tends to ignore that major charac-
teristic of Wordsworth's best introspective verse: an almost Adamite
empiricism before the rich ambiguities of experience, a desire to be
so strictly honest in recording the full and often contradictory range
of these experiences that no amount of position-naming or doctrinal
labeling by the critic can provide an adequate account of the basis of
his poetry, least of all these lines.

For this reason an interpretation of these lines as an expres-
sion of a purported belief in an anima mundi also fails.8 Whether
Wordsworth entertained such a belief at times in his poetry, or wheth-
er indeed this belief is in some way involved here in his testimony of
an encounter with a transcendent "presence," is a question that finally
misses the point. Such a belief did not produce the experience for
Wordsworth. Nor would, I imagine, the most passionate intellectual

commitment to the notion of the existence of an anima mundi ever

necessarily put anyone into direct, feeling contact with an ubiquitous
"something." If anything, such a notion might have provided Wordsworth
with a conveniently traditional myth--certainly not explicit in "Tin-
tern Abbey"--useful for expressive purposes. But expressive of what?
The quality of his own experience of the world. We are reminded of
his use of the myth of pre-existence in the "Immortality Ode."
Wordsworth explicitly tells us in the Fenwick note to the poem that

he does not recommend the myth for our belief but uses it, as a poet
is presumably entitled to, to provide a structure for his investiga-
tion into the mysteries of his changing perception of the world as he
passes from youth to maturity.

The moral, it seems to me, is this: for Wordsworth experience,
mystical or otherwise, tends to precede doctrine. And therefore we
best approach his testimony to a "presence" by taking it as the result,
quite simply, of the fact that he has indeed "felt" this presence--
and perhaps is feeling it again at the very moment of composition. We
might, if we choose to, characterize this way of feeling as "natural
mysticism." But we must remember that Wordsworth's testimony is not
the result of obeisance to any intellectual position or commitment but
emerges out of an empirical act; out of, as he tells us in lines 108
and 109 immediately following the passage under scrutiny, "nature and
the language of the sense" which for him is the "anchor" of his "purest
thoughts." And his awareness of "something far more deeply interfused"
is a function of a "sense sublime." Surely if this awareness were
related to, and perhaps determined by, a previously held and articulated

doctrine, Wordsworth might have supplied us with an epithet more inform-

ative than the groping something."

_-2-_
My primary purpose in this study is to investigate that struc-
ture of Wordsworth's experience which he refers to in "Tintern Abbey"
as a ”sense sublime." I take this "sense sublime" as a certain mode of
consciousness or, to borrow a word from the phenomenologists, as an
"intentionality." "Intentionality" has been described by Franz
Brentano as an essential characteristic of any psychic phenomenon (as
opposed to physical phenomenon). This characteristic is, quite simply,
the fact that consciousness in any of its acts always exhibits "direc-
tion towards an object."10 There is never merely consciousness but
always consciousness of. Now the intended object of Wordsworth's
"sense sublime" is, as he tells us, "something far more deeply inter—
fused." To what extent, by investigating the nature of the intention-

' can we come to an

ality characterized in the phrase ”sense sublime,‘
understanding of that "direction" of Wordsworth's consciousness which
puts him into contact with his transcendent "something"? To what
extent, also, can such an investigation put us in a position to clari-
fyrand deepen our understanding of the poet's terribly empty yet
terribly provocative term "something"?

One of the first things to notice is that the poet's description
of his intended object supplies us with clues as to the nature of his
intentionality. The fact that his consciousness is directed for the
moment toward nothing more explicit than a "something"--not toward a

traditional and therefore namable God, not toward the Single Substance

of Spinoza, not toward the mythic anima mundi--suggests an intention-

 

 

... - _.._.._—‘.i

ality which has moved beyond the possibility of discovering a precise
name for its object. The poet, attempting to describe this kind of
consciousness, cannot specify it with reference to an explicit object.
It is not that Wordsworth here is engaging in a cheap rhetorical ges-
ture, a gesture seeking to provoke through the cultivation of inexplic-
ability. Nor is it that Wordsworth himself feels any doubt about the
reality of his intended object. Indeed, the fact that the poet, in-
stead of refining this awareness of "something" into a specific x or y,
chooses to express himself as encountering simply a "something" inti-
mates that his consciousness is caught up in the act of recognizing the

sheer existence, the sheer "presence, of its intended object--to the
extent perhaps of finally making it impossible for the mind to confine
and control its activity of recognition through the imposition of a
single characterizing name. Whatever the "something" is, it most
especially is. And consciousness, at this groping moment in the medi-
tation, principally intends that act of existence.

Next we note that this "something" is "interfused," a word

which I take in its root sense, "to be poured between" (L. interfusus,

 

p.p. of interfundere, to pour between).12 The something's activity of

 

interfusion, as the rest of the passage makes clear and as has already
been indicated, is ubiquitous throughout the cosmos. It is, like a
universal ether, both poured out between all things and, since its
"dwelling" is everywhere including the ”mind of man," poured out
within all things. The catalogue of dwellings suggests an activity of
consciousness in which the mind can find no solid purchase upon the

visible cosmos. The dwellings of the interfused "something" are vari-

ously transparent ("living air," "blue sky") or suggestive of depths
("round ocean") or in the process of dissolving away ("light of set-
ting suns"). Even the "mind of man," the last mentioned dwelling-
place, becomes, through its partnership in this grammatically parallel
list, suggestively transparent, dissolving, full of depths. The
action of consciousness, therefore, which intends this universally
interfused "something" is an action whereby the mind itself moves
beyond a fixed attachment to a specific location, pours and spreads
itself throughout the space of the visible cosmos (and finds express-
ive form for this action through a catalogue of dwellings, the terms
of which, first of all, do not really localize and, secondly, tend to
become interchangeable). We might say then that one of the character-
istics of the "sense sublime" is that its "direction" is paradoxically
to wander, to move always beyond, to move toward an encompassing vi-
sionwmf the totality of things. The mind itself becomes universally
interfused with the ubiquitous "something," almost as if the mind had
totally identified with the "motion" and the "spirit" dwelling within
itself as well as throughout the cosmos. Another, perhaps more pre-
cise way of putting this is to say that that intentionality which
Wordsworth refers to as a "sense sublime" tends to become indistin-
guishable from its intended object: we note that almost at the con-
clusion of this passage the poet describes the "something" as that
which "impels" (L. impellere, to drive on) "all objects of all.thoughts."
In our terminology, the intended object is identified with its own in-
tentionality, the very activity wherein Wordsworth's consciousness ex-

hibits "direction towards an object." It would not seem amiss, there-

fore, to say that the poet's "sense sublime" refers to a very special

form of self-consciousness.

We are now in a position to expand our earlier statement about
the scope of this essay. If it is indeed true that the phrase "sense
sublime" refers to a structure of Wordsworth's consciousness in which
the act of intention and the intended object tend to become indistin-
guishable, then cannot we say, shifting into a Coleridgean idiom, that
a "sense sublime" indicates a fusion of "subject" and "object”?13
In other words, that the "sense sublime" refers to an activity of the
esemplastic power of the imagination during which consciousness becomes
reflexively aware of itself as an interfusing energy dwelling within
the phenomena of nature? That this is the case is the general thesis
of this essay, a thesis which I hope to show has relevance far beyond
"Tintern Abbey." To supply a preliminary indication that Wordsworth
himself was not unaware, in theory as well as in practice, of the re-
lationship between imagination and self-consciousness, I point to a
sentence from his "Preface to Poems (1815)" where the poet, in dis-
cussing the "dissolving" and "separating" functions of the imagination,
observes that these "alterations" proceed from, and are "governed by,

a sublime consciousness of the soul in her own mighty and almost divine
powers."14

But to develop convincing answers to these questions, that is,
to argue my thesis in detail, I obviously cannot depend upon a single

sentence from Wordsworth's prose; nor upon a limited reading of the

phrase "sense sublime" as it appears within a context already selected

10

out of a much larger context, the entirety of the meditation
"Tintern Abbey." Thus, without abandoning my initial understanding
of the phrase and using the phrase as the still point of these turn-
ing speculations, I shall proceed centrifugally around it and pro-
gressively exchange and extend the contexts within which we might
examine its import. Since William Empson has already delivered the
news with regard to the word "sense" in Wordsworth and has concluded,
with somewhat of a sad perplexity, that the word is used by the poet
to refer to everything from the simplest act of sense perception to the
most visionary of experiences,15 I shall cast my emphasis upon the
word "sublime"--or, to be more precise, upon those structures of
Wordsworth's consciousness which might be characterized as "sublime."
I do not mean to confine myself to an elaborate gloSs on a few lines
from a single poem by Wordsworth; that would be a purgatory blind
indeed. Rather, I hope to so extend the question of what exactly is
the place of the "sublime," sense or otherwise, in Wordsworth's work
that I shall be writing, as I have already suggested, an essay on
Wordsworth's theory and practice of the imagination. If my thesis is
correct, then this larger discussion should in addition corroborate
my reading of the phrase "sense sublime" as it appears in "Tintern
Abbey."16
That poem will be the first larger context to be investigated,
and in the next chapter the principal question explored will be: to
what extent can we see reflected in "Tintern Abbey," examining its
theme, its imagery, its meditative progressions, that activity of

imaginative consciousness in which the object of the mind's "direction"

11

tends to become indistinguishable from the very act of the mind's
"direction"; and in which, therefore, the mind discovers itself in
the position of reflecting upon its own operations--though perhaps
without acknowledging that discovery? Insofar as we can trace echoes
of such a tendency throughout the poem, then of course we have opened
up a perspective whereby to view, in a different and distinctly phenom-
enological light, the organic unity of the poem. But note that the
principle of organic unity which this kind of approach postulates is
a certain activity of consciousness reflected throughout the poem,
an activity which, in my judgment, surfaces most explicitly in Words-
worth's encounter with the transcendent "something." Some of the
theoretical implications of reading a poem in this fashion I shall
consider subsequently. At this point I am content to rest on a pass-
ing implication of Coleridge's provocative observation that the creation
of a poem brings the full soul of man into activity.17 Why not, there-
fore, explore a poem for traces of this activity, this imaginative
consciousness, even when it is not, properly speaking, the overt sub-
ject of the poem?

In the next two chapters I shall turn to certain theories
about the nature of the "sublime," and shall attempt to evolve a con-
text in terms of which the general relationship between WOrdsworth
and the "sublime" might be examined.18 It is well known that the
sublime was one of the primary categories of eighteenth-century
aesthetics and was deeply involved in the evolution of certain char-
acteristics of that century's taste in natural scenery; I mean its

cultivated fondness for "awful prospects": large mountains, angry

12

oceans, apocalyptic storms, stupifying chasms, horrid rocks, and so
sublimely on.19 I shall first of all examine, in a highly selective
way, a number of the period's speculations about the experience of
the sublime (I exclude discussion of the "literary sublime"). Then

I shall turn to Coleridge's speculations upon the subject and shall
try to suggest their relevance to Wordsworth. My purpose throughout
these two chapters will not be to write a history of the aesthetics
of the sublime--that work has already been nobly accomplished by
Professor Monk20--nor even directly to suggest that Wordsworth can

be seen in any way emerging from this critical tradition. I am not
concerned with the history of ideas, and am certainly not concerned
with ferreting out "sources" of the Wordsworthian sensibility, always
a dubious pursuit with so original a poet. Instead, I hope, by sifting
some of these theories, to come up with notes toward what I call a
"phenomenology of the sublime." I assume, along with Burke and Kant,
that the sublime is a distinguishable category of conscious experi-
ence; and to try and evolve my own descriptive generalities about the
nature of this special experience will be useful in advancing my the-
sis. Though it may at times appear so, I shall not in these chapters
be writing an essay in formal aesthetics. Rather, the generalities
or the "phenomenological notes" should be taken as nothing more than
the results, occasionally idiosyncratic, of an attempt to provide for
myself more sophisticated perspectives upon the import of my thesis.
In other words, my assumption that the sublime is a distinguishable
category of conscious experience is a useful fiction I employ to

mediate between the implications of certain historically given theo-

l3

ries of the sublime and my own exploration of Wordsworth--for the

enrichment, as I hope to show in these two chapters, of the latter.21
In my final chapter I shall concentrate exclusively upon
Wordsworth, and shall attempt briefly to indicate how some of the
phenomenological perspectives developed in the preceding chapters
might be useful in evolving solutions to certain problems faced by
any reader of the poet. The experience of the sublime, as will be
abundantly clear at this point in the essay, is frequently involved
with a certain experience of space. And since my thesis is concerned
with a moment in Wordsworth's poetry when he feels an identification
between his mind and a spatially extended "something," it seems a
related task to attempt a general description of the traffic between
the poet's imagination: and the images of space his eye encounters.
While much of this description will have been adumbrated in the pre-
ceding chapters, it will be useful, especially in a concluding chapter,
explicitly to present a summary sketch of the nature of Wordsworthian
space. But where there is a discussion of space, can a discussion of
time be far behind? Thus in this final chapter I shall also examine
Wordsworth's very special sense of time, involved as it is with an
act of memory so crucial to many of his best poems. I shall also
examine the relationship between his act of memory and his own crea-
tive process. I hope to show how both the nature of Wordsworthian
space and the nature of Wordsworthian time can be significantly clari-
fied if we accept the thesis of this essay as correct. Finally, I
shall examine what Meyer Abrams calls the "central paradox in the
oracular passages of Wordsworth's major period: the oxymoron of the

humble-grand, the lofty-mean, the trivial-sublime . . . ."22 If

14

the "sense sublime" of "Tintern Abbey" is for Wordsworth his deepest
intuition of the enduring nature of things, then perhaps he has the
right to assume the potential sublimity of everything, even of the
most trivial phenomena; for the universally in-dwelling "something,"
like Hopkins' "grandeur of God," can shine out of the "meanest flower
that blows" as well as out of more likely places such as the sublime
vistas of ocean and sky. But I believe that the paradox of humilitas-

sublimitas can be taken as descriptive, not only of Wordsworth's

 

deepest sense of the nature of the real, but also of his explicitly
formulated poetic program. And, in addition, if my thesis is correct--
namely, that the poet's "sense sublime" of a universally in-dwelling
"something" is indeed a function of consciousness becoming reflexively
aware of its own interfusing energies--we can then say that in the last
analysis the "central paradox" of Wordsworth's major period is a re-
flection of a recurring structure of his imaginative consciousness.
This structure of consciousness is like that described by the poet as
belonging to the Pedlar of "The Ruined Cottage," who "in the mountains
did feel his faith" and directly saw that
All things there
Looked immortality, revolving life,
And greatness still revolving, infinite;

There littleness was not3 the least of things
Seemed infinite . . . .2

 

Such a power of consciousness--to make the least seem infinite, the
humble seem sublime--I take as one of the essential characteristics
of Wordsworth's imagination. It is also a power, as I hope to show,
closely related to a "sense sublime" capable of transcendent encoun-

ters .

15

--4_-

Now, as quickly as possible, a few words about my critical
approach: I carry no brief for any one critical method and am will-
ing to exploit any means that offers aid in advancing my thesis. I
promise in subsequent pages to engage in close-in reading of the text,
to step abruptly back for long-range thematic generalizations, to
use when I can the testimony of other critics, to apply where I can
the insights of certain philosophers, even to enjoy the help of an
etymology when a point can be so nailed--in short, to be as prag-
matically syncretic as many good critics of Wordsworth have been when
facing up to the enormous complexities of that poet's work. I think
especially of the example of Geoffrey Hartman--to whose revealing work

this study is deeply indebted24

--who does not hesitate to employ in-
sights taken, without apology, from contemporary European phenomen-
ology; perspectives developed by myth criticism; psychoanalysis;
traditional literary history; even such old-fashioned disciplines as
textual examination and biography. I do not mean to suggest that

this essay will exhibit the range of critical techniques that Hartman's
work exhibits; my focus upon WOrdsworth is much more narrow than his.
But I do wish to make it clear at the outset that the unity of my study
is to be detected, not in the consistent use of a single carefully
articulated, rigorously applied critical method, but in the cumulative
force of an argument expanding around a single thesis. I seek a single—
ness of argument, not a singleness of method.

All this is not to say that there is not a general emphasis in

how I choose to look at the poetry, an emphasis already suggested in

16

in the earlier discussion of my preference for the term "natural
mysticism." This emphasis emerges from a tendency, implicit in any
expressive theory of art, to look upon the poem as an "exfoliation"--

t25--of a certain

the organic metaphor is based on Coleridge's preceden
state of the poet's consciousness. Such a way of reading tends to
overlook the poem as, for example, a ”well wrought urn," a structure
in language possessing its own immanent verbal laws; and it instead
seeks to discover a way of characterizing the movement of the poet's
mind as it engages with its materials and as this movement is em-
bodied in the language of the poem. Thus, from this point of view,
the proper subject of "The Solitary Reaper" is not the solitary,
singing lass but the drama of the evolving structure of Wordsworth's
conscious reactions to his memory of the girl. And thus the proper

study of this changing reaction begins, and sometimes ends, with an

effort to describe this actio mentis. In other words, my emphasis in

 

this study might be called "phenomenological": I am concerned with

describing certain structures of Wordsworth's consciousness as these

 

are exhibited or implied in his poetry.

In his essay "Upon Epitaphs (3)" Wordsworth observes that
words are to be ideally "an incarnation of the thought."26 This
metaphor rejects the curious distinction between word and thought
implied in the popular eighteenth-century metaphor of words being
the "clothing" of thought.27 The metaphor also intimates, I believe,
that a sequence of words in a poem by Wordsworth can be taken as an
enactment of a certain sequence of thought or, better, of thinking.

The word is not an overt statement of an already conceived thought,

l7

somehow separable from that thought as clothing is from a body. Rather,
the relationship between word and thought is analogous to the relation-
ship between body and soul: words "body forth" an otherwise hidden
activity of the mind, they are one with that activity, and their pro-
gression is expressive of a certain progression in consciousness. I
say "activity of the mind" and "progression in consciousness" because

I wish to avoid the suggestion that the thought, or thinking, is ex-

’ o o . 2 o
c1u51ve1y or even necessarily discur31ve. 8 AS Wordsworth tells us In

the same essay, the "excellence of writing . . . consists in a conjunc-

tion of Reason and Passion,"29

and it is presumably this conjunction
which finds embodiment in language. The metaphor of incarnation also
seems to reject the highly rhetorical, audience-directed implications

of the metaphor of clothing, implications perhaps most clearly seen in
the locus classicus of this metaphor in eighteenth-century poetry, name-
ly, Pope's observation that "True Wit is Nature to advantage dress'd,/
What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd."3o The metaphor of
incarnation, on the other hand, points back in the direction of the
poet's mind. The efficacy of a word in a poem is to be judged not so
much by the kind of "impression" it makes upon the reader but by its

power to "ex-press," to "body forth" a certain "conjunction" of the

poet's "Reason and Passion."
My point is not to defend Wordsworth's position on the always

perplexing question of the relationship between thought and language.

The organicism of his position is evident--certainly his metaphor in-

dicates an organic relationship-~and perhaps can best be examined

within the context of a study of the Romantic period's general com-

mitment to the use of organic metaphors in analyses of the poetic

l8

process. I seek merely to suggest the grounds of my assumption that
one of the productive ways of reading certain poems by Wordsworth is
to take them as documents descriptive, explicitly and sometimes im-
plicitly, of evolving structures of consciousness. What is The
Prelude if not, among other things, just such an explicit document?31
I make no theoretical defense of this approach--the subject is far too
elaborate for the scope of this essay--but recall, first, Hartman's
exemplary success in treating the poems in this wise, his describing
single dramas of Wordsworth's mind in individual poems as well as
developing a history of the poet's consciousness through a series of
poems. Second, I think of Wordsworth's own practice in explaining his
sonnet "With Ships the sea was sprinkled far and nigh." In a letter
to Lady Beaumont he provides a reading which in fact regards the poem
as essentially a description of a progression of conscious states.
His commentary deserves to be quoted at length:

I am represented in the sonnet as casting my eyes over the

sea, sprinkled with a multitude of ships, like the heavens

with stars. My mind may be supposed to float up and down

among them, in a kind of dreamy indifference with respect

either to this or that one, only in a pleasurable state of

feeling with respect to the whole prospect. 'Joyously

it showed.’ This continued till that feeling may be

supposed to have passed away, and a kind of comparative

listlessness or apathy to have succeeded, as at this line,

Some veering up and down, one knew not why.
All at once, while I am in this state, comes forth an
object, an individual; and my mind, sleepy and unfixed,

is awakened and fastened in a moment.

Hesperus, that led
The starry host

is a poetical object, because the glory of his own nature
gives him the pre-eminence the moment he appears. He calls
forth the poetic faculty, receiving its exertions as a

19

tribute. But this ship in the sonnet may, in a manner

still more appropriate, be said to come upon a mission of the
poetic spirit, because, in its own appearance and attributes,
it is barely sufficiently distinguished to rouse the creative
faculty of the human mind, to exertions at all times welcome,
but doubly so when they come upon us when in a state of
remissness. The mind being once fixed and roused, all the
rest comes from itself; it is merely a lordly ship, nothing
more:

This ship was nought to me, nor I to her,
Yet I pursued her with a lover's look.

My mind wantons with grateful joy in the exercise of
its own powers, and, loving its own creation,

This ship to all the rest I did prefer,
making her a sovereign or a regent, and thus giving body
and life to all the rest; mingling up this idea with
fondness and praise--
where she comes the winds must stir;
and concluding the whole with,
On went she, and due north her journey took;
thus taking up again the reader with whom I began, letting
him know how long I must have watched this favourite vessel,
and inviting him to rest his mind as mine is resting.32
We can note in this "interpretation" how Wordsworth invites his
reader to make a number of suppositions, all of them about the action
of his mind, and none immediately explicit in the text of the poem.
The first supposition we are to make is that the poet's mind is
floating "up and down“ among the ships in almost a Keatsian state of
empathy. The poet's mind is "in a kind of dreamy indifference with
respect either to this ship or that one, only in a pleasurable
state of feeling with respect to the whole prospect." This supposi-

tion is to be based upon the first quatrain of the sonnet:

With Ships the sea was sprinkled far and nigh,
Like stars in heaven, and joyously it showed;

20

Some lying fast at anchor in the road,
Some veering up and down, one knew not why.

32

Only two statements in the quatrain seem to allow for any immediate
inference about the state of mind of the observer: "joyously it
showed" and "one knew not why." The impersonal phrasing of these two
statements hardly indicates the strong presence of an individual on-
looker. Yet Wordsworth asks his reader to suppose that the words of
the quatrain, in addition to their descriptive function, suggest,
through the objects named in the description, an activity of the poet's
own consciousness. These words, then, have a double function; they
point simultaneously in the directions of the observer and of the ob-
served. For in naming the ingredients of the scene they also pre-
sumably express a certain activity of the mind, an activity which does
not include--precisely because the mind is floating with "dreamy in-
difference"--a strong sense of personal identity. Hence, we might
also infer, the impersonal phrasing of "joyously it showed" and "one
knew not why."

The second supposition Wordsworth invites his reader to make
would have us take this quatrain as an indirect description, not sim-
ply of a fixed state of consciousness, but also of a progression in
consciousness. In the fourth line we are to surmise WOrdsworth's open-
ing "pleasurable state of feeling" to "have passed away, and a kind of
comparative listlessness or apathy to have succeeded." Whether we are
to surmise this apathy from the image of the ships "veering up and
down" or from the vaguely perplexed and emotionally flat tone of "one
knew not why," is a difficult question to decide. Perhaps from both.

Wordsworth sees the next quatrain as illustrative of the will-

21

‘E\1l exercise of the creative imagination:

A goodly Vessel did I then espy

Come like a giant from a haven broad;

And lustily along the bay she strode,

Her tackling rich, and of apparel high.
Wordsworth's commentary would have us understand that this ship, its
appearance amplified through the elaborate and sustained simile of the
striding giant, was in fact "barely sufficiently distinguished to rouse
the creative faculty of the human mind." Strangely, however, it is
precisely for this reason that the ship may be said to have "come
upon a mission of the poetic spirit." In other words, the highly
figurative vision of the second quatrain is to be taken as the re-
sult of the sudden intrusion of a ship "barely sufficiently distin-
guished" upon the point of view of an observer who is "in a state of
remissness," "sleepy and unfixed." The abrupt fixation of Words-
worth's eye upon the single ship awakens the "I" of the poem--the
personal point of view is named for the first time in the poem in line
S--and triggers a release of the imagination, an exercise of creative
power "doubly" welcome to the poet because of the immediately pre-
ceding state of "apathy" and "listlessness." (We might also note in
passing the oblique suggestion of reflexive imaginative conscious-
ness in WOrdsworth's observation that his stated preference for this
"ship to all the rest" in line 11 is the result of the fact that his
"mind wantons with grateful joy in the exercise of its own powers";
the value of the ship is a function of the poet's recognition in the
ship's imaginatively transfigured appearance of his own creative

mind.) Thus, behind the overt statements of the first eight lines

of this sonnet, Wordsworth asks his reader to envisage a progressive

22

activity of consciousness in which the mind passes from a state of
pleasurable passivity to a state of near torpor to a state of exul-
tant creativity. The words of these lines, in addition to their
obvious descriptive functions, finally are supposed to tell a tale
of the poet's mind, a tale which, Without the commentary of the poet
himself, would certainly not be immediately apparent.

Wordsworth's invitation in his letter to Lady Beaumont to sup-
pose in this fashion is the final justification I offer of that way
of reading his poetry which I plan to emphasize in this study. And
with this invitation in mind, we can turn to his "Lines Composed a

Few Miles above Tintern Abbey."

23

NOTES: CHAPTER I

1The Poetical Works 9f_William Wordsworth, eds. E. de Selin-
court and Helen Darbishire, 2nd edn. (Oxford, 1954), II, 261-262, 11.
93-102. Hereafter this five volume edition will be cited as Poetical
Works, with the appropriate volume number always given.

2For a statement of the traditional interpretation of "natural
mysticism," see the introduction to Wordsworth's poems by Russell
Noyes in his anthology English Romantic Poetry and Prose (New York,
1956), pp. 239-240.

3ErnestBernbaum observes that these "lines are commonly con-
sidered pantheistic." See his notes to the poem in the 3rd edn. of
his Anthology g£_Romanticism (New York, l948),p. 1107. Noyes combines
the reading of "pantheism" with his reading of "natural mysticism."
The two characterizations are, of course, not §_priori irreconcilable.

4St. Thomas Aquinas, for example, writes: "God is in all things,

not, indeed, as part of their essence, nor as an accident, but as an
agent is present to that upon which it acts. For an agent must be
joined to that on which it acts immediately, and reach it by its power

. Now, since God is being itself by His own essence, created
being must be His proper effect; as to ignite is the proper effect of
fire. But God causes this effect in things not only when they first
begin to be, but as long as they are preserved in being; as light is
caused in the air by the sun as long as the air remains illuminated.
Therefore, as long as a thing has being, so long must God be present
to it, according to its mode of being. But being is innermost in each
thing and most fundamentally present within all things . . . . Hence
it must be that God is in all things, and innermostly." Summa Theo-
logica, Part I, Q. 8, Art. 1. Basic Writings 9: Saint Thomas Aquinas,
ed. Anton C. Pegis (New York, 1945), I, 63-64. The translation, as
Pegis notes in his preface, is a revision by the editor of the English
Domincan Translation by Father Laurence Shapcote.

 

5Hopkins' version of immanence is mediated by Ignatian spirit-
uality and by a belief in the eternal fact of the Incarnation. See
his "Hurrahing in Harvest" for a good example of this mediation. For
an interesting comparison of HOpkins' approach to nature with WOrds-
worth's, see John Crowe Ransom's "William Wordsworth: Notes toward
an Understanding of Poetry," Wordsworth, Centenary Studies Presented
2; Cornell and Princeton Universities, ed. Gilbert T. Dunklin (London,
1963), pp. 106-108.

 

6St. Augustine, for example, writes: "Recognize in thyself
something within, within thyself. Leave thou abroad both thy cloth-
ing and thy flesh; descend into thyself; go to thy secret chamber,
thy mind. If thou be far from thine own self, how canst thou draw
near unto God? For not in the body but in the mind was man made in
the image of God. In his own similitude let us seek God: in his own

24

image recognize the Creator." In Joannis Evangelium tractatus,
XXIII, 10. Quoted in A§_Augustine Synthesis, ed. Erich Przywara
(New York, 1958), p. 18. No translator indicated.

7William Empson, in his Seven Types gf Ambiguity (New York,
1955), finds these lines "muddled" and "shuffling" (p. 174). But
perhaps Empson is led to this conclusion by his search for Wordsworth's
"doctrine": "It is reasonable, then, to try to extract from this pas-
sage definite opinions on the relations of God, man, and nature, and
on the means by which such relations can be known" (p. 172).

8For a discussion of the anima mundi in WOrdsworth's thought,

(Baltimore, 1941), I, 190-198.

9The Fenwick note reads in part: "To that dream-like vivid-
ness and splendour which invest objects of sight in childhood, every
one, I believe, if he would look back, could bear testimony, and I
need not dwell upon it here: but having in the Poem regarded it as
presumptive evidence of a prior state of existence, I think it right
to protest against a conclusion, which has given pain to some good
and pious persons, that I meant to inculcate such a belief. It is
far too shadowy a notion to be recommended to faith, as more than an
element in our instincts of immortality. . . . Archimedes said that
he could move the world if he had a point where on to rest his machine.
Who has not felt the same aspirations as regards the world of his own
mind? Having to wield some of its elements when I was impelled to
write this Poem on the 'Immortality of the Soul,' I took hold of the
notion of pre-existence as having sufficient foundation in humanity
for authorizing me to make for my purpose the best use of it I could
as a Poet." Poetical Works, IV, 463-464. As Wordsworth protests that
he never "meant to inculcate such a belief," we hear, among other
things, the voice of the orthodoxy of his old age. But the important
point to note is how Wordsworth speaks here of the belief as a kind
of symbolic form useful for structuring his experience of the "world
of his own mind."

 

10Quoted by Pierre Thevenaz, "Reflexion and Consciousness of
Self," What i§_Phenomenology? and Other Essays, ed. James M. Edie,
trans. James M. Edie, Charles Courtney, Paul Brockelman (Chicago,
1962), p. 116. Here and occasionally elsewhere, where I use technical
philosophical terms, I want it understood that I mean no more by them
than what I make explicit in my text. I certainly do not mean to
carry into my essay the systematic demands or implications these terms
might have in their original context. I also reserve the right to
extend somewhat the meaning of these terms, always with explicit ac-
knowledgment, when it suits my purpose.

 

111 assume of course that a memory has passed into a re-
experiencing. See my comments above (p. 1) upon the implication of
the shift in tense from "have felt" to'Histurbs." For a discussion
of this way of reading WOrdsworth--of finding in a poem an immediate-

25

1y enacting consciousness-~see the fourth section of this chapter.
Donald Davie, in his Articulate Energy (New York, 1958), has a rele-
vant observation. Speaking of the syntax of The Prelude--a syntax
quite similar to that of "Tintern Abbey"--he notices that it "seems
to be explaining, while in fact it is meditating, ruminating, at all
events experiencing more fully than one does when one explains"

(p. 111).

 

 

12From time to time throughout this study I shall support a
point with an appeal to an etymology. I have no special theoretical
case in support of this practice, merely a suspicion than an increas-
ing sensitivity to the Latin origins of Wordsworth's occasionally
Latinate diction will be illuminating--a suspicion which I hope will
be pragmatically supported by the results of my practice. Certainly
Wordsworth, with his classical training, was more sensitive to these
roots than the average reader of today.

13Coleridge's object ggg object always requires a subject, and
thus can be identified with "intended object" which is always that
which consciousness is conscious gf. The question of whether this ob-
ject, "intended" or Coleridge's object of a subject, is extra-mental
is beside the point.

14Wordsworth's Literary Criticism, ed. Nowell C. Smith (London,
1905), p. 16l--hereafter cited as Literary Criticism. Italics mine.

 

15The Structure 9: Complex WOrds (Norfolk, Conn., 1951), p. 304.

16The question of the relationship between WOrdsworth and the
sublime has often been explored--and in a variety of contexts. See,
for example, James Benzinger, Images gj_Eternity (Carbondale, I11.,
1962), pp. 52-64; J. T. Boulton, in the introduction to his edition of
Burke's A_Philosophica1 Enquiry into the Origin 9f.gg£ Ideas 9§_£hg_
Sublime and Beautiful (New York, 1958), pp. xcvi, xcix-cii, lxxviii;
A. C. Bradley, Oxford Lectures 23_Poetry (London, 1909), pp. 125-145;
E. F. Carritt, The Theory gtheauty, 4th ed. (London, 1931), 220f.;

 

 

Scoggins, Imagination and Fancy (Lincoln, Neb., 1966), pp. 139-190.
Other studies which have proved specifically helpful in my treatment
of this question are noted, when appropriate, throughout the essay.

17"The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole
soulm of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to
each other, according to their relative worth and dignity. He dif-
fuses a tone and spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it were) fuses,
each into each, by that synthetic and magical power, to which we have
exclusively appropriated the name of imagination." Biographia Liter-
aria, ed. J. Shawcross (Oxford, 190», II, 12.

18Hereafter I omit quotation marks around the word "sublime".
except when the word is used precisely as a word. By "sublime" I
generally refer to the structure of consciousness which this essay
investigates. Sometimes, however, the word will be used without

26

quotation marks as an adjective to refer to the "sublime" object
toward which consciousness is directed. The context should make
clear when this is the case.

19An excellent study of the development of this taste is
Marjorie Hope Nicolson's Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The
Development gf the Aesthetics gf the Infinite (New York, 1963).

 

 

 

20Samuel H. Monk, The Sublime: A Study 9f_Critica1 Theories
lg Eighteenth-Century England (New York, 1935). This work, the stan-
dard treatment of the subject, has proved invaluable in the prepara-
tion of this study.

 

21For additional comments upon the methodological assumptions
of these two chapters, see Section I of Chapter 111. See also nn.
1 and 2 of that chapter.

22"English Romanticism: The Spirit of the Age," Romanticism
Reconsidered, ed. Northrop Frye (New York, 1963), p..64.

 

 

23Poetical Works, V, 382-383; 11. 149-154. Italics mine for
"the least of things/ Seemed infinite"; the rest Wordsworth's.

24Wordsworth's Poetry 1787-1814 (New Haven, 1964).

25Meyer Abrams observes that "it is astonishing how much of
Coleridge's critical writing is couched in terms that are metaphori-
cal for art and literal for a plant; if Plato's dialectic is a wilder-
ness of mirrors, Coleridge's is a very jungle of vegetation." Th3
Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition
(New York, 1958), p. 169.

 

 

26Literary Criticism, p. 129. I say "ideally" because Words-
worth in the same passage says that words can also be used as "only
a clothing" for thought. But when so used, he goes on, they will
"prove an ill gift."

27In a very popular work of the late eighteenth-century, Hugh
Blair's Lectures 22_Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783), we find for
example: "Simple expression just makes our idea known to others; but
figurative language, over and above, bestows a particular dress upon
that idea; a dress, which both makes it to be remarked, and adorns
it" (Lecture XIV, "Figurative Language"). Quoted in Essays gn'Rhet-
oric, ed. Dudley Bailey (New York, 1965), p. 108.

 

28John F. Danby, in his William Wordsworth: The Prelude and
Other Poems (New York, 1963), has puzzled over the meaning the word
fithought" ought to have in discussions of Wordsworth. He observes
that for Wordsworth "a 'thought' is a movement of the mind when the
mind is entering into and upon the self-constituting order-of—things"
(p. 48). I accept the genus of Danby's definition: "thought" to be
understood as "a movement of the mind."

 

 

 

27

29Literary Criticism, p. 130.

30"An Essay on Criticism," 11. 297-298.
31And sometimes just such an implicit document. See Donald
Davie's observation quoted in n. 11 above. In the poem, in other

words, we can see Wordsworth consciously reacting to, even re-
experiencing, the history of his mind.

32Literary Criticism, pp. 51-53.

33Poetical Works, III, 18.

CHAPTER II
A POEM ABOUT INTERIORS

"Tintern Abbey" resembles the classical religious meditation
in that it begins with a careful description of a scene, with what St.
Ignatius would have called "the composition of place." It also shows
Wordsworth employing those three powers of the mind designated by the
ultimately Augustinian psychology from which the religious meditation
was derived: memory, understanding, and will. In the poem we find
Wordsworth struggling to understand what his memory so poignantly re-
veals--that his perception of nature has irrevocably changed with the
passing of years. We also find him making certain promises: that he
shall continue to turn to nature as the "guide, the guardian of my
heart, and soul/ Of all my moral being? (11. 110-111). But despite
these similarities with the religious meditation, the atmosphere of
Wordsworth's poem is vastly different. The scene which is "composed"
is significant only because of the private resonances Wordsworth dis-
covers in it. It carries in its texture none of the traditional
dimensions of meaning that the classical scenes from scripture had
for the disciple of St. Ignatius. Moreover, as Louis Martz has point-
ed out, the kind of understanding which is "applied" is associative
rather than, as in a meditation by Donne, dialectic.1 And the moment
of illumination toward which this ruminating understanding gropes
lacks the benefit of an orthodox theology by which to guide itself.
Finally, the resolution which Wordsworth makes, his pledge of contin-

uing fealty to nature, is based exclusively upon his past experience.

28

29

His wish derives none of its force or point from any traditionally
sanctioned moral directive.

Perhaps it is this complete absence of any perspective other
than the private which makes the total impression of Wordsworth's
poem so different from the impression left by a classical religious
meditation. We may, for example, find Donne struggling in his medi-
tations with grave doubts about his own possibilities for salvation;
but the fundamental coordinates of his universe are secure. And his
precisely defined orthodoxy more often than not provides the alembic
in which his doubts are resolved. In "Tintern Abbey," on the other
hand, Wordsworth's universe and his resolution are far more tentative.
The essential elements of his vision of nature are questioned a num-
ber of times in the poem. And his wish to find continuing sustenance
in nature, a wish which grows out of his tentative vision, has none of
that certainty of fulfillment which Donne can feel in the Christian
promises. In the concluding lines of the poem, Wordsworth even finds
it necessary to project his sister Dorothy into the uncertain future:
§h2_will, he hopes, sustain the necessary relationship with saving
nature even if he no longer can do so. In other words, both the poet's
faith in nature and the version of "salvation" that faith implies are
shot through with ambiguities. We might even go so far as to agree with
what one critic of "Tintern Abbey" has suggested, namely, that the "dom-
inating mood of the greater part" of Wordsworth's meditation along the

banks of the Wye is "one of perplexity."2

This perplexity quietly in-
trudes into what appears to be the most affirmative passage of the

poem: Wordsworth can find no better name for the principle of cosmic

30

oneness which he intuits than "something."

The purpose of this chapter is to investigate the sources of
Wordworth's perplexity. I believe that these sources can be in-
directly approached by posing the following question: to what extent
can we see in the whole activity of mind which the meditation de-
scribes reflections of that moment of sublime consciousness when Words-
worth undergoes an encounter with an interfusing cosmic presence; an
encounter which dissolves distinctions between the activity of con-
sciousness and the activity of its intended object; an encounter which
finally, I have argued in my introductory chapter, is a manifestation
of imaginative consciousness becoming reflexively aware of its own
ubiquitous energies? This thesis, it is now relevant to admit, sug-
gests that Wordsworth, even at that moment when his rhetoric indicates
a mind at the highest pitch of intuitive certitude, is still strug-
gling unawares with a perplexity: a consciousness of transcendence
without the proper name for what is indeed the transcendent agent--
his own mind. To put this another way: the tentative quality of
Wordsworth's vision and hope in "Tintern Abbey" is not simply the re-
sult of the privacy of that vision and hope--their lack of sanction
in terms of a traditional orthodoxy. Within the poet's very privacy
there is a failure of recognition. He displaces his "sense sublime"
of the power of his own imaginative consciousness into a "something"
dwelling throughout the universe. And this displacement is but the
most extreme of a series of displacements of the recognition of imag-
inative activity which pervades the entire meditation.

These generalities will, it is hoped, be clarified and sup-

31

ported in the following pages by a consideration of the poem from

two points of view: 1) as a poem about interiors; 2) as a medita-
tion which proceeds as a continuing exploration of the sense of in-
teriors. The first point of view will bring us up against Werdsworth's
persistent characterization of imaginative activity as a creation of

a sense of immanence, of a "within," in phenomenal nature; and also

up against the question of how indeed this activity itself proceeds
from a "depth" of the mind far below the surface of ordinary conscious-
ness. The second point of view will enable us to see the associative
progressions of the poem as controlled, in part at least, by an explor-
ative movement of the poet's mind from one "interior" of consciousness
to the next--a journey through a variety of mental depths. These two
approaches, while not adding up to a total reading of the poem, and
while probably raising more spectral questions than solid answers, will
at least bring us closer to a means of describing the grounds of Words-

worth's perplexity.

--2--
"Tintern Abbey" is a poem preoccupied with the insides of
things or, to put this more exactly, with a sense of immanent power
lurking beneath the surface of phenomena.3 The "something," of course,
is "deeply interfused" and dwells within all things. But even in
Wordsworth's opening "composition of place" (11. 1-22), the poet's eye
and ear encounter a landscape redolent with immanence. The mountain
springs 0f the Wye are heard as rolling with a "soft inland murmur,"

the word "inland" not only supplying a reason for the softness of the

32

murmur but also obliquely evoking a much more extensive region than

that seen in the poem, a region within which the immediate landscape

 

around Tintern Abbey is located. The "wild secluded scene" of this
landscape is seen by the poet as somehow impressed by "steep and

' as if the ele-

lofty cliffs" with "Thoughts of more deep seclusion,‘
ments of the scene were in themselves enacting the poet's sense of
intensifying solitude. Wordsworth finds himself located in a kind of
interior: "I again repose/ Here, under this dark sycamore." He ob-
serves "orchard-tufts" which because of their "one green hue" seem
almost to be submerging as they "lose themselves/ 'Mid groves and
copses." The "pastoral farms" of the scene barely emerge from the
lush, enclosing landscape: they are "Green to the very door." The
poet, noticing suggestive "wreaths of smoke" drifting up from among
the trees with "some uncertain notice," begins to shape hypotheses
about the immanence of the woods. Perhaps the uncertain notice is of
"vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods." The quiet oxymoron"va-
grant dwellers" prefigures the curious way in which Wordsworth will
later attempt to fix the location of the "something": its "dwell-
ing" turns out to be everywhere. Here, at the opening of the medi-
tation, the "dwellers" of the woods, perhaps gypsies, are in fact
wandering (L. vagari, to wander); and it seems only fitting that they
be located where there are no fixed human locations. Their potential
ubiquity within the "houseless" woods resembles the ubiquity of the
"something" within its universal dwelling-places.

Finally Wordsworth surmises a "Hermit" sitting alone at the

quiet heart of the landscape. This surmise completes the centripetal

33

movement of the poem's first verse paragraph. The Hermit's presence
is envisaged as not only within the landscape (itself surrounded by

a larger, unseen region) but also within an enclosure itself contained
by the woods--a "Hermit's cave." This last interpretation by WOrds-
worth of the "uncertain notice" is also the last refinement of his
"Thoughts of more deep seclusion." The "Wild secluded scene," at

the moment when Wordsworth is about to turn away from a direct con-
templation of it, is thus sensed as possessing an immanence--and is
perhaps not so wild after all. For the solitude enclosed within the

landscape is surmised as a human solitude.

We might also characterize the progression of Wordsworth's
mind in his initial meditative act as a movement downward and inward:
from the sight of "steep and lofty cliffs" to a sense, beyond the
reach of sight, of an immanent human presence deep in the woods. And
if we try to characterize this progression in terms of a larger con-
text of metaphorical implication, we find useful Northorp Frye's ob-
servation that the "metaphorical structure of Romantic poetry tends
to move inside and downward instead of outside and upward, hence the
creative world is deep within, and so is heaven or the place of the
presence of God."4 Thus, we are tempted to ask of Wordsworth's com-
position of place whether it in fact is symbolic of a movement of his
mind toward the sources of his creativity; whether the poet's pre-

occupation with the immanence of phenomena is not really a preoccupation
with the power of imagination immanent within his own mind; and
whether, finally, the movement downward and inward does not prefigure

the poet's later encounter with his transcendent "something." To

provide the context necessary for an investigation of these ques-

34

tions, we must step momentarily away from "Tintern Abbey" and con-
sider at large Wordsworth's metaphorical geography of introspection.

I say "geography" because Wordsworth consistently tends to
speak of his mind in metaphors implying spatial extent; and thus the
acts of introspection, of memory, of consciousness in general, all of
which take place within this spatialized mind, can be likened to a
movement within a Special kind of spatial dimension or even to a jour-
ney through a certain region.5 What, then, are the main (physical and
psychological) features of Wordsworth's interior landscape? We might
say, first of all, that since Frye's observation suggests a metaphor-
ical equation between the place where imaginative power is to be found
and the place where--to borrow a term from Rudolf Otto--the "Holy" is
to be encountered,6 the journey into what has been referred to in
Wordsworth as the "abysses of the subjective consciousness" is simul-
taneously a journey toward the numinous, the transcendent, even the
awful.7 And in terms of this geography of introspection Wordsworth at
times approaches his power of imagination with something of the same
mixture of dread and desire that a soul of an earlier tradition might
have experienced in feeling himself translated to the otherworld.

In the fragment of The Recluse which Wordsworth includes in the

 

preface to the 1814 edition of The Excursion, the poet deliberately
recalls the Christian tradition of vision, only to express, with a cer-
tain bravado, his emotional indifference to it:

Jehovah--with his thunder, and the choir

Of shouting Angels, and the empyreal thrones--

I pass them unalarmed.8

Instead, Wordsworth discovers his terror of the "Holy" in the journey

35

"inside and downward"--in the visionary act of introspection. In
lines immediately following his almost contemptuous dismissal of
Jehovah's "shouting Angels," he writes:
Not Chaos, not

The darkest pit of lowest Erebus,

Nor aught of blinder vacancy, scooped out

By help of dreams--can breed such fear and awe

As fall upon us often when we look

Into our'Minds, into the Mind of Man--
My haunt, and the main region of my song.

9

Wordsworth's otherworld is thus an underworld, not that created by
Miltonic vision but that discovered by consciousness turning inward
upon itself. The negative comparisons of these lines curiously sug-
gest that this underworld, while totally devoid of form or shape, is
still a space, a "haunt," an almost sacred spot filled with the pres-
ence of awesome power. Since, in terms of Wordsworth's metaphors,
there is nothing to be £222 in this haunt--no palpable shape upon
which the mind can establish a purchase--ref1exive consciousness dis-
covers no limiting contours to its introspective plunge and thus finds
itself upon a fearful journey into an open-ended abyss.

This kind of interior space is quite different from the con-
fining space of Locke's camera obscura. This earlier metaphor of the
mind reflects both Locke's rejection of the theory of innate ideas,
which were often described by the Cambridge Platonists as kinds of
inner light, and his restriction of the sources of knowledge to the
not always certain reports of the senses.10 WOrdsworth's metaphor of
the mental abyss, on the other hand, intimates a theory of the mind

which goes far beyond Locke's careful empiricism. For immanent

throughout the poet's interior space is the numinous power of the

36

imagination--sometimes referred to by him as a mist or vapour, some-
times as a stream, sometimes as nothing more than the sound made by an

unseen stream. In Book XIV of The Prelude, for example, Wordsworth

 

characterizes his history of the growth and development of his imagin-
ation as the tracing of a "stream/ From the blind cavern whence is
faintly heard/ Its natal murmur."11 Earlier in the same book, where
Wordsworth discovers in the mountain vision (also a vision of depths)
from the top of Snowdon a "perfect image of a mighty Mind," he sees in
a "blue chasm" in the outspread mist below a "breach/ Through which
the homeless voice of waters rose." And in this "dark deep thorough-
fare," he goes on, "had Nature lodg'd/ The Soul, the Imagination of

the whole."12

We might note in these lines, incidentally, a suggestion
of the same oxymoron of home/homeless--the "vagrant dwellers" of the
"houseless" woods, the something's "dwelling" ubiquitously--which we
saw in "Tintern Abbey": here the "homeless voice of waters" is
"lodg'd" as an auditory emblem of the "Imagination" in the "blue

chasm" in the mist.

In Book VI of The Prelude, after Wordsworth describes his dis-
covery of having crossed the Alps without realizing it, the poet is
suddenly confronted directly by his imagination:

here the Power so called
Through sad incompetence of human speech,
That awful Power rose from the mind's abyss
Like an unfathered vapour that enwraps,
At once, some lonely traveller.13
The imagery here is especially involved. Not only does the imagination

rise from the by now familiar subjective abyss; but the mind itself,

confronted suddenly by its immanent power, is enclosed (imagination

37

"enwraps" the traveller) by the intensity of its reflexive awareness.
Consciousness is both the container which in its depths contains
imagination and, now that imagination has leapt forth from these
depths, the contained. Imagination is described as this confining,
enclosing mist because so potent is its abrupt intrusion into aware-
ness that the phenomenal world is lost. As Wordsworth tells us a
few lines later: ”the light of sense/ Goes out."14 The phrase
"light of sense" recalls of course the Lockean epistemology and his
notion of the mental camera obscura into which sensation, as it were,
beamed its message, But when this light is extinguished for Words-
worth, there is discovered by the poet an innate power of the mind
undreamt of in Locke's philosophy.

This direct, unmediated confrontation with imaginative power
is rare in Wordsworth. The poet's primary aim, he tells us in the
preface to The Excursion, is to sing a "spousal verse" celebrating the
marriage of his mind to nature.15 Such a marriage would inevitably
have to avoid a prolongation of that state of mind brought about when
the light of sense has gone out; for this kind of awareness necessar-
ily involves a break with nature, a divorce of consciousness from the
phenomenal world. Nature, the chosen partner of Wordsworth's mind,
demands that the light of sense be maintained. The obvious difficulty
in meeting this demand--from the point of view of the metaphors we
have been examining--is that the imagination, that power whereby
Wordsworth seeks to blend his mind with nature, includes a tendency
to force Wordsworth's awareness back toward the abysses of subjective

consciousness, to halt and enwrap the mental traveller. Reflexive

38

imaginative consciousness tends to be the antithesis of the awareness
of nature. And even when the power discovered in the abysses of the
mind has been somehow synthesized with consciousness of nature, it
threatens always to destroy nature by its own exuberance. Wordsworth

complains in The Prelude:

 

Oh! why hath not the Mind
Some element to stamp her image on
In nature somewhat nearer to her own?
Why, gifted with such powers to send abroad
Her spirit, must it lodge in shrines so frail?

In these lines we again see Wordsworth's concern with a dwell-
ing: his "spirit" of imagination is to "lodge" in nature, however
"frail" its "shrines" may prove to be. (The lodges of nature are
appropriately "shrines" because the imagination is a numinous power.)
In these lines we also see a metaphorical paradigm of how Wordsworth
attempts to solve the problem posed by his scheme of marriage. Re-
flexive imaginative consciousness is to be mediated by awareness of
nature. The poet will transfer ("stamp") the image of his mind as a
place wherein lurks an immanent power onto nature. Nature now must
become a dwelling, a lodge, a home--and also, therefore, a place of
,immanence. We might say that the sense of the abyss of the mind is
converted into a sense of the depths of nature; but of course nature
exhibits these depths only insofar as imagination has been sent
abroad, as it were, to deepen nature. Reflexive imaginative con-
sciousness is to be experienced sub specie naturae; or as Hartman
has put it, in commenting upon Wordsworth's "obsession with specific

place," "consciousness of self" is to be "buried in nature."17 Con-

sciousness allows itself to become aware of imagination's power by

39

displacing that power into a shrine (or lodge, or home, or house, and
so on) in the phenomena supplied by the light of sense. This relation-
ship between consciousness and nature is inevitably oxymoronic: the
"homes" provided by nature, although limited in terms of their phenom-
enal surface, must simultaneously possess an immanent open-ended

space adequate to the nature of the numinous power of imagination
whose original dwelling-place was the infinite underworld of WOrds-
worth's mind. The poet's "natural mysticism," therefore, might be
characterized as a consciousness of this underworld opening out be-
neath the surface of the natural world.

I have attempted in the preceding paragraph to describe one of
the essential metaphorical structures of WOrdsworth's marriage of mind
and nature. Obviously a more precisely philosophical account of this
marriage--of the grounds of this displacement of reflexive imaginative
awareness into lodges provided by nature--is required; and will be
given in Chapters III and IV of this study. But by now it should be
apparent toward what conclusions about the opening landscape of
"Tintern Abbey" this brief account of Wordsworth's metaphors of im-
manence is leading. The sense of interiors which so fascinates the
poet in his composition of place is in fact a sense of the power of
his own imagination enclosed within nature. This sense of interiors,
of something far more deeply interfused, is what Wordsworth's eye
attempts to resolve as it scans a landscape shot through with unseen
presence and as the landscape itself seems to dissolve into the per-
vasive green of the season. The gradual focus of his eye upon the

"uncertain notice" of the wreaths of smoke, and then the passing of

40

his mind beyond the reach of sight into the depths of the green woods
where he postulates "vagrant dwellers" in the "houseless" forest and
a Hermit Sitting alone in a cave,18 are actions which recall in a re-
markably distilled and naturalistic fashion the metaphors of conscious-
ness we have been tracing: the imagination as a mysterious vapour
rising from the depths, the oxymoronic dwelling in an unconfined
space, the mind as a cave wherein lurks a secret power. And just as
in the Alps the imagination enclosed Wordsworth's awareness like a
mist and extinguished the light of sense, so here the rising smoke
from the depths of the landscape leads Wordsworth beyond the phenom-
enal world into the immanence of the forest, into the underworld of

his own mind.19

--3--

We are now in a position to analyze what Professor Martz has
described as the "associative" understanding of Wordsworth's medita-
tion. After the composition of place of the first verse paragraph, the
poet turns away from a direct contemplation of his scene and begins to
explore the significance for himself of the "beauteous forms" (1.22)
of the landscape, an exploration which brings him to thoughts of both
his past and his future-~and also to an encounter with "something far
more deeply interfused."

The language of this exploration suggests a continuing sense
of the mind as a kind of interior space, a Space into which the poet
seeks to sink, escaping from the "heavy and weary weight/ Of all this
unintelligible world" (11. 39-40). For the most part this escape,

this inward Sinking, is mediated through a vision of phenomenal na-

41

ture, a vision which requires sensation or at least the memory of
sensation before the poet can turn inward upon himself. At the end
of the fourth verse paragraph phenomenal nature, the nature revealed
through the "language of the sense," is described by WOrdsworth as
the "guide, the guardian" of his heart, and finally as the "soul" of
all his moral being (11. 108-111). We might understand this charac-
terization as the poet's recognition of nature's role in restoring
him to a sense of his own heart, his own soul--to a sense of what is
most essentially inward in himself. That nature is granted the epi-
thet "soul," as if WOrdsworth were saying that nature at least in one
respect was his very essence, is but another manifestation of his
habit of displacing his own inwardness into nature. But this dis-
placement turns out to be reciprocal for Wordsworth: having trans-
ferred his sense of self into nature, he finds that nature made im-
manent leads him back toward himself.

At the beginning of the second verse paragraph we find an
example of such a backward turning. After having surmised an unseen
Hermit at the heart of the landscape, Wordsworth continues his move-
ment beyond the immediacies of the scene by directing his conscious-
ness toward his past: he transforms his sense of a human presence
enclosed in the woods into an explicit memory of himself "in lonely
rooms, and 'mid the din/ Of towns and cities" (11. 25-26). The cave
of nature becomes a room in London, the identity of whose inhabitant
is now no longer disguised. The poet's envisaging of hidden solitude
is converted, through a process of association, into an overt memory

of his own past solitude. This transformation makes more understand-

42

able the grounds of the sense of pervading immanence of the opening
landscape. Consciousness of self is lodged through the scene because,
as Wordsworth's eye passes over it, he is Simultaneously aware, how-
ever Subliminally, of the previous encounters of his mind with the
scene--a direct encounter in the year 1793, the time of his first visit
to Tintern Abbey; and then a series of indirect encounters made possi-
ble by his recalling through the agency of affective memory, the
"beauteous forms" during the period between 1793 and July 13, 1798,
the day of his return and his meditation. The landscape, therefore,
so strangely immanent, is not simply being seen, but is being seen
"again"--the word is repeated four times in the first 22 lines. And
so it is filled with an implicit history of the poet's past conscious
experiences with its forms. We might say that it is the richness of
the sense of "being seen again" which is, as it were, spatialized in-
to the immanencies of the scene. We might also say, from this point
of view, that Wordsworth's image of himself in a lonely city room is
an image which was, up to a point in the poem, buried in the unseen
spaces of the landscape: one of his earlier undefined thoughts of
"more deep seclusion." The image now becomes emergent and explicit.
The seclusion of the city, as Wordsworth remembers it, also
was characterized by movements of consciousness describable in terms
suggesting a movement into an interior. Since Wordsworth apparently
found in the phenomena of the city nothing more than "many shapes/
Of joyless daylight" (ll. 51-52)--an oppressive experience of the
"burthen of the mystery" of things (1. 38)--he would turn for "tran-

quil restoration" (1. 30) to his memories of the phenomena of the

43

landscape around Tintern Abbey. He tells us that he owed to these
remembered forms
sensations sweet,

Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;

And passing even into my purer mind,

With tranquil restoration . . . .

(11. 27-30)

The language of these lines suggests a movement of awareness from a
purely sensory state ("sensations sweet/ Felt in the blood") to a
State of more diffused emotion ("felt along the heart") and finally
to a state which seems to transcend the physicality of sensation and
emotion: the "sensations sweet" are said to somehow pass "even" into
Wordsworth's "purer mind"--as if these sensations were penetrating a
region of interior consciousness where sensation is not normally
found. These lines become more intelligible if we take them as de-
scriptive of a movement of consciousness, by means of a contemplation of
the remembered "beauteous forms," from a State which is almost ex-
clusively sensory to a state which, though dependent upon remembered
sensation, is more enclosed, more self-contained, more inward than the
state of sensory awareness in which consciousness is principally di-
rected toward the remembered objects of sensation. In other words,
I take this description of sensations passing into WOrdsworth's "purer
mind" as suggesting a movement of consciousness implicitly analogous
to the movement of the poet's mind described in the first verse para-
graph: from the surface of phenomena (though in "lonely rooms," a
remembered surface) to a sense of enclosed immanence. And this medita-

tive recall by the WOrdsworth of 1798 of his earlier acts of remember-

ing continues the process of inwardly deepening consciousness implicit

44

in the poem from its very inception.

An even more intense form of this kind of consciousness is
delineated in the final lines of the second verse paragraph. Words-
worth claims that he owes to his memories of the "beauteous forms"
"another gift,/ Of aspect more sublime" (11. 36-37). This "aspect"
is a certain kind or power of vision (L. aspectus, a seeing, a looking,
a power of vision), and is described in language intimating an encoun-
ter with an immanent presence. This encounter occurs in

that serene and blessed mood,

In which the affections gently lead us on,--

Until, the breath of this corporeal frame

And even the motion of our human blood

Almost suspended, we are laid asleep

In body, and become a living soul:

While with an eye made quiet by the power

0f harmony, and the deep power of joy,

We see into the life of things.

(11. 41-49)

Wordsworth shifts in these lines into the first person plural, a
rhetorical heightening which seems to universalize the availability
of the kind of vision he is describing: "we," all of us, are poten-
tially capable of such an "aspect," such a power of vision. But this
shift in point of view also suggests that it is of the nature of this
kind of encounter with "the life of things" to convert the sense of
"I" into a sense of "we"--to attenuate the awareness of the self as a
Single, isolated ego. Such an awareness is thus analogous to the
poet's awareness later in the poem of a ubiquitous, all-pervading
"something" which lies in the innermost space of all things, includ-

ing the mind of man: all identities tend to be lost in the univer-

sally immanent "something." Here the "aSpect more sublime," this

45

vision of "the life of things," is, we note, a seeing "into." And

the language describing the movement of consciousness toward the
moment of such seeing "into" indicates an awareness which passes be-
yond bodily sensation ("we are laid asleep/ In body") toward an
intensity of inward vision ("and become a living soul"). The eye
which then sees "into" is of course not the corporeal eye--that along
with the body has been "laid asleep"--but the inward eye of meditative
introspection, an eye which has been made tranquil by a "power/ Of
harmony" and a "power of joy" which, we also note, is "deep." This
word which Wordsworth uses to describe the sense of joy accompanying
his vision suggests not Simply the intensity of the joy but, more
importantly from the point of view of the poem's language of immanence,
the interior of consciousness in which harmony, joy, and a vision
"into the life of things" is to be experienced. Finally, we might
observe that this "aspect" is "more sublime" than that state of aware-
ness in which he felt "sensations sweet" passing into his "purer
mind." The comparative form of the adjective tells us that 2252
structures of inward consciousness described in the second verse
paragraph are "sublime"--a characterizing term which appears elsewhere
in the poem only in Wordsworth's account of a "sense sublime" of
"something far more deeply interfused." We might say, therefore, that
whatever else "sublime" awareness, or "sublime" intentionality, is in
"Tintern Abbey," it seems to involve an act in which consciousness
senses itself penetrating an interior. And implicitly, we might also
conclude, Wordsworth's surmise at the end of his composition of place

of a hermit enclosed within the landscape is a movement of his mind

46

toward sublimity .

Now the question might be asked of the conclusion of the
second verse paragraph what exactly is this "life of things" into
which Wordsworth claims he has seen? The difficulty in answering
this question has already been indicated by the analysis of the
preceding paragraph. Wordsworth's emphasis in his retrospective
account is almost entirely upon the state of consciousness which
sees "into" rather than upon the intended object of.that state of
consciousness. It is this structure of awareness which he claims is
one of the principal gifts of his memories of the "beauteous forms."
Moreover, as the third verse paragraph tells us, while the poet is
certain both of having undergone this visionary experience and of
the "method" of moving toward such a vision, the precise content of
that vision, the presumed encounter with the "life of things," is
not so certain after all:

If this
Be but a vain belief, yet, oh! how oft--
In darkness and amid the many Shapes
Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir
Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,
Have hung upon the beatings of my heart--
How oft, in Spirit, have I turned to thee,
O sylvan'Wye! thou wanderer thro' the woods,
How often has my spirit turned to thee!

(11. 49-57)

These lines come as a dramatic turn in the poet's meditative

action. (In a note to the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads, Words-

 

worth claims that the poem roughly resembles an ode in its "impassioned
music" and in "the transitions"; it might be said that here is an impas-
sioned example of the "antistrophe," or the "turning against," of

that form.20) Until this point Wordsworth's awareness--first as

47

he scanned the scene, then as he recalled the quality of his retro-
spective encounters with the scene--had been growing progressively
more inward. But now it appears as if the very language of his
meditation--the very articulation of this deepest intuition--has
triggered a seizure of doubt. Certitude is abruptly converted into
the uncertainty of a hypothesis. It is not the experience itself
which might be "a vain belief." Instead, the question is whether he
can characterize this vision as indeed a seeing "into the life of
things." That phrase, though ringing with an almost metaphysical
assurance, is at the same time so vague and extensive in its refer-
ence as to be potentially meaningless. What exactly, Wordsworth
suddenly seems to inquire, am I to make out of this "aspect more
sublime"? Can I base such a sweeping claim on such a private exper-
ience? Wordsworth's perplexity here prefigures the later perplexity
hidden in his use of the groping term "something" to designate the
indwelling spirit of all the cosmos. The poet's deepest intuitions
can make no clarifying appeal to traditional myth or to a discur-
sively worked out set of dogmatic formulations. And as he leaves
behind the concrete sources of these intuitions, his memories of the
"beauteous forms" of the landscape of Tintern Abbey, and as he retro-
spectively works his way through his memory of these memories toward
a statement of his vision, his language grows progressively more ab-
stract, more generalized, and finally, even to himself, dubious.21
Yet this experience of doubt is momentary. The "antistrophe"

of the third verse paragraph almost as quickly becomes an "anti-

antistrophe." Lacking the support of a traditional myth or dogma,

48

Wordsworth again turns to the undeniable facts of his experience and
finds support against his doubts by recalling the genuine solace of
his memories when he was oppressed by the "fever of the world" in the
midst of "joyless daylight." But this appeal to the past is simul-
taneously an appeal to the present and to the immediate locale of his
meditation. For out of this new memory of his acts of remembering,
he apostrophizes the "Sylvan Wye" flowing directly before him in the
landscape. His appeal, in other words, combines the experiential
testimony of both the past and the present. His second-person address
to the Wye as "thou wanderer thro' the woods" evokes yet another image
of immanence--but an image which draws the poet's eye back into the
specific scene and recalls him from the wavering expressed in his
suddenly intruding hypothesis. This return to the concrete as an
anodyne for doubt is an action which the poet later formulates as a
fundamental requirement of his consciousness: Wordsworth writes in
lines 107-109 that he is "well pleased to recognize/ In nature and the
language of the sense/ The anchor" of his "purest thoughts." An an-
chor, of course, achieves a purchase upon stability by sinking into
the depths of the sea; and here Wordsworth stabilizes himself, es-
capes from the wavering hypothesizing of one of his "purest thoughts,"
by addressing his awareness to an immediately given image of an action
proceeding through an interior.22 Vision is to be preserved by an
adhesion to sensation, and his eye returns to an image of the imma-
nence of the woods.

At the end of the third verse paragraph Wordsworth has thus

completed an almost circular movement of his consciousness: from

49

present to past back to present; from landscape to a history of the
relationships of his mind to that landscape back to landscape; from
outward awareness to inward awareness back to outward awareness. The
phenomenology of this circular movement might almost be compared to
an exploration of Chinese boxes: Wordsworth "opens" the strangely
immanent landscape and discovers himself in the "box" of a room in
the city. He recalls, almost seems to re-experience, the exploration
by his past mind (trapped within that city box) into the remembered
"beauteous forms." Immanence leads to deeper immanence. At the
moment of deepest penetration, there occurs a vision "into" something
he terms ”the life of things." And immediately, at this moment of
climax, the lid of this ultimate interior slams shut; and Wordsworth
is left wondering whether he is guilty of a "vain belief." His
anxiety is dispelled, or at least he attempts to dispel it, by a
return through his memories to the surface of the landscape. This
action of consciousness is similar in part to that poignant moment of
introspection in Book XII of The Prelude where Wordsworth also uses
the language of immanence to delineate an intense moment of perplex-
ing introspection:

Oh! mystery of man, from what a depth
Proceed thy honours. I am lost . . . .
The days gone by
Return upon me almost from the dawn
Of life: the hiding-places of man's power
Open; I would approach them, but they close.23

In "Tintern Abbey" Wordsworth's search into the depths of sub-
jective consciousness, a downward and inward journey which seems to

carry him to a sight of what Frye, we have noticed, has called "the

50

creative world” or the "place of the presence of God," is terminated
by a scrupulous hypothesis. We have already suggested that one rea-
son for the poet's sudden worry about a "vain belief"--as if a ques-
tion of doctrine were at issue--was the fact that Wordsworth's

poetic articulation of his vision, his rendering of his "aspect more
sublime" into statement, exposed the vision to the kinds of questions
that can be asked of any statement, but are especially likely to be
asked of any affirmations about the "life of things." But perhaps a
still more fundamental reason can be offered to explain Wordsworth's
abrupt upsurge of anxious uncertainty. Perhaps his anxiety is a
displaced, brief, and somewhat muted expression of the "fear and awe"
which, according to his preface to The Excursion, he claims to exper-
ience when he approaches the "haunt" and "main region" of his song,
namely, his own mind. In other words, the "life of things" is the
numinous presence in the creative underworld of his mind--a presence
I have already called the power of "imagination"24--and his fearful
turning for comfort to the "sylvan Wye" wandering through the woods
is but another attempt to find a lodge for his imagination in the
phenomena of nature. Going too far beyond, or rather within, these
phenomena can lead to a "serene and blessed mood"; but the "Holy"--
the "life of things"--is also "awful," and can breed anxiety and

confusion.

--4_-
In the fourth verse paragraph Wordsworth plunges again into
the past, but to a time even prior to the period of his solacing

introspection "in lonely rooms." The poet attempts a picture of what

51

he "was when first" he "came among these hills," that is, on his
walking tour of 1793 (11. 66-67). But what he was in that year, at
least as "Tintern Abbey" describes it, was essentially a certain
structure of consciousness immersed in the depths of the phenomenal
world, a mind almost totally one with nature. He claims that "like
a roe" he
bounded o'er the mountains, by the Sides

Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,

Wherever nature led: more like a man

Flying from something that he dreads than one

Who sought the thing he loved.

(11. 67-72)

We have here another image of depths ("deep rivers") and of seclusion
("lonely streams"). We also have a curious implication in the simile
which concludes the passage: Wordsworth seems to be suggesting
through the comparative form of the figure that though hisrelation-
ship to nature at that time might be compared to the pursuit by a
lover (himself) of his beloved (nature), a better characterization
of this relationship is the simile of himself as the pursued fearing
and flying from an unknown pursuer ("something"). But of course if
the pursuer is only a vague "something," how can this simile be
taken--as it indeed seems to offer itself--as delineating the rela-
tionship between his mind and nature? That this dreadful "something"
was Eg£_nature, although at first reading it might be taken as such,
is indicated by line 70 which tells us that it was nature who "led"
the young poet, and therefore was in a certain sense at least not

"behind," the proper place for all pursuers. Perhaps even the "thing

he loved" cannot be taken to refer to nature. These lines really do

52

not provide enough to solve the puzzle, and all we can safely infer
is that at this time Wordsworth's consciousness was a curiously am-
bivalent and contradictory mixture of the sense of being led (by
nature), of the sense of his own loving pursuit (of nature?), and,
most strikingly and memorably, of the fearful sense of being pur-
sued. Perhaps it iS his awareness of these riddles of his past state
of mind which prompts Wordsworth to say in lines 75-76: "I cannot
paint/ What then I was."

What he immediately proceeds to paint instead is a picture of
nature in which the phenomena of the landscape are almost identical
with certain Structures of consciousness:

The sounding cataract

Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,

The mountain, 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, nor any interest

Unborrowed from the eye.

(11. 76-83)

Wordsworth's language presents a world in which there is no distinc-
tion to be made between his intentionality and his intended objects.
The "directions" of consciousness at this time were totally equiva-
lent to the ingredients of the landscape. These "forms" quite Simply--
and the equation is Startling--"were" for Wordsworth an "appetite;
a feeling and a love." Thus there logically would be no need fer
"any interest/ Unborrowed from the eye." The simple act of sensation,
the mere act of looking, would be sufficient to involve Wordsworth's

awareness in a range of conscious experiences far richer than the

experience of ordinary seeing. To see, in other words, is not to

53

produce an occasion for possible emotion; to see is in itself to

feel emotion. Phenomena Egg feelings, and feelings EEE phenomena.
And to hear a "sounding cataract" is directly to be "Haunted" by a
"passion," as if the "sounding cataract" in itself were a certain
structure of consciousness (the experience of a "passion") impinging
upon awareness. This image of the "sounding cataract"--an image of

a dislocated sound--I take to be another image of immanence: it is
analogous to the "soft inland murmur" of line 4 in that because its
source is unseen, it suggests something hidden away from sight, an
interior behind the surface of phenomena. It is precisely this

sense of an interior which enables Wordsworth to describe the "sound-
ing cataract" as if it were in itself a structure of consciousness.
For, as we have already seen, the sense of immanence is for Wordsworth
the sense of his own mind hidden in the landscape. And insofar as
phenomena convey this sense of immanence, he is made dimly aware, in
this case "Haunted," by the underworld of his mind which he has dis-
placed into nature.

The previously noticed riddles of Wordsworth's curious com-
parative simile can now be unravelled. Both the term "something" and
the term "thing" belong to the poem's language of perplexity (the most
obvious example of this language is of course the poem's only other
"something," that which is "far more deeply interfused"). This per-
plexity, I have been arguing, relates to Wordsworth's reflexive
consciousness of the activity of his own mind; a consciousness which
is interfused with his awareness of the phenomena of nature; a con-

sciousness which in Book XIII of the 1805 Prelude is the "highest

54

bliss" of those poetic minds whose
consciousness

Of whom they are £I§7 habitually infused

Through every image, and through every thought,

And all impressions . . . .25
The precise grounds of Wordsworth's perplexity in "Tintern Abbey" is
the fact that, though the entire meditation is an exploration of how
his mind is immanent in nature, infused through every image, every
thought, and all impressions, he never can quite bring himself to
recognize this infusion. To be sure, the landscape makes him think
a great deal about his mind, its transactions with itself and with
nature in the past, the present, and the future. But during this

"thinking about," which constitutes the action of the meditation,

Wordsworth does not seem explicitly to recognize that the Special

 

resonance of his perceptions, both in the present and in the chambers
of memory, resides in the fact that frequently these acts of per-
ception are simultaneously acts of apperception; or, to put this in
terms used in my introductory analysis of the "sense sublime," that
frequently the intended objects of his consciousness tend to become
indistinguishable from the intentionality, the direction of conscious-
ness, which graSps them. Apperception, the reflexive sense of the
mind's activity, is lodged in perception; and thus nature becomes
immanent.

Now, as we also have seen, Wordsworth is afraid of staring
too directly at his mind--afraid, in other words, of too unmediated
an act of apperception. His mind is a "haunt," a sacred region
filled with a numinous presence, and thus it fills him with awe and

dread. But this mind which is experienced as a "haunt," as the place

55

of the "Holy," is not the mind which he thinks abggg, the mind which
he constitutes as the direct object of his meditation; it is rather
the immediately "living" mind which he encounters more or less
obliquely in the act of apperception, in the activity of reflexive
self-awareness. While the Wordsworth of 1805 may have decided this
structure of consciousness was "highest bliss," the Wordsworth of
1793 was flying from "something" that he dreaded--in much the same

way a soul of an earlier tradition might flee from the awful majesty

0f GOd-26 And just as this soul might also pursue his God with love,
so the Wordsworth of 1793 was pursuing the numinous presence of the
underworld of his mind in a landscape where phenomena and structures
of awareness were identical. But, of course, as the comparative form
of Wordsworth's simile indicates, the sense of fear predominated.
Perhaps the image of the "sounding cataract" haunting him like a passion
most adequately summarizes the paradoxical doubleness of WOrdsworth's
relationship to his act of reflexive self-awareness infusing itself
throughout the phenomena of nature. To be haunted by a passion is to
be haunted by his love, his desire to encounter the visionary under-
world of apperception. And he is simultaneously afraid of this love,
of apperception, of staring too directly into the awe-engendering
underworld of consciousness--an underworld from which, however, he
cannot turn his face away in the patent "deep and gloomy wood" of
Tintern Abbey.

The Wordsworth of 1798, looking back at this time of "aching
joys" and "dizzy raptures" (11. 84-85), does not quite know what to

make of it ("I cannot paint"), except finally to say it is "now no

56

more" (1. 84). Certainly the immediate intensity of the 1793 exper-
ience is past. But has the experience been completely lost, as
Wordsworth indicates, or has it Simply been attenuated? The very
power of the poet's description of the experience suggests that, in
the words of the "Immortality Ode," in the ”embers" of his memory

"Is something that doth live."27

Perhaps the difference between his
consciousness of 1793 and his consciousness of 1798 can be metaphor-
ically depicted as the difference between the sound of the "sounding
cataract" of the past and the sound of the "soft inland murmur" of

the present. In other words, attenuation, not total loss. For
Wordsworth Still senses the landscape as immanent, though it is no
longer seen and at the same time felt as a structure of consciousness.
What appears to have happened is that he has so deeply lodged his
self-awareness inside nature, that when he encounters it, as he does
again shortly in the so-called "pantheistic" lines of the fourth verse
paragraph, he does not know what to call it--especially Since this
"something" is "far more deeply interfused" than any of the other im-
mancies of the poem.

We must look upon the metaphor of "dwelling" of these lines as
not only Wordsworth's most succinct description of the relationship of
his mind and nature--a metaphor of extraordinary tension, yoking into
a single precarious focus unbounded objects of perception (sky, air,
ocean) with an apperception ubiquitously interfused. The metaphor
can also be taken as Wordsworth's most explicit attempt in the poem

to define his strangely immanent "something." Kenneth Burke has ob-

served, in A_Grammar gf_Motives, that to "tell what a thing is, you

57

place it in terms of something else. This idea of locating, or
placing, is implicit in our very word for definition itself: to
define, or determine a thing, is to mark its boundaries, hence to

use terms that possess, implicitly at least, contextual reference."28
That Wordsworth feels he has resolved his perplexity--using the en-
tire universe as a vehicle for contextually defining the unrecognized
immanence of his consciousness--is indicated by his surprising "There-
fore" which begins the sentence immediately following his vision of
the "spirit" that "rolls through all things" (11. 100, 102). Why, we
might ask, a ”Therefore"? Is a hidden syllogism being brought to a
finish? What are the grounds of this apparent conclusion? Why,
suddenly, this rhetoric of resolution?

The answer to these questions seems to be that Wordsworth has
convinced himself that he has uncovered a way out of his difficulties.
His experience of transcendence, of the hidden "life of things," is
not a "vain belief," so long as he can contextually define, mark the
boundaries of, this experience by reference to the phenomena of na-
ture--a strategy of definition which uses the "language of the sense."
Nature will provide what traditional myth or religious dogma no longer
provide: both a way of making intelligible the visionary world and a
way of mediating its terrors. Wordsworth is "still/ A lover of the
meadows and the woods,/ And mountains"--the polysyndeton of these
lines (102-104) expresses the intensity with which he feels his solu-
tion--because these "beauteous forms" will continue to serve not only
as vehicles of vision but even more crucially as the means of resolv-

ing the haunting perplexities of that immanent vision. In fact, of

58

course, Wordsworth's "religion of nature" is a means of providing
symbolic form to the underworld, darker and more chaotic than

"lowest Erebus,” which is opened up by reflexive self-awareness. And
his "Therefore" emerges from the practical reason, not the theoreti-
cal. For his solution is to be almost exclusively experiential, de-
rived from the "language of the sense." But at least in one respect
his "religion of nature" will be Pauline: his "God," like Paul's, is
a hidden God, that is to say, hidden from the discursive eye of specu-

lative reason.

--5--

I have not presented in this chapter a complete reading of
"Tintern Abbey." But my ambition, as I indicated in Section 1, was
not to offer a total explication, but only a supporting context for
the interpretation of the "sense sublime" presented in my introductory
chapter. My aim was, as I stated there, to trace echoes of the struc-
ture of consciousness I saw in Wordsworth's "sense sublime" through-
out the poem. This tracing involved us in the problems posed by the
poet's metaphors of an interior space of the mind, by the connections
he intimates between the act of visionary imagination and the act of
reflexive self-awareness, and by the question of the grounds of his
perplexity in "Tintern Abbey." Another way of approaching this last
question might have been to see it from the perspective of Words-
worth's calculus of loss and gain, a calculus elaborately worked out
in the poem and deeply involved in the poet's brooding sense of past
and present. But this theme of compensation did not really fall

within my focus. I have also ignored, for limits of space as well

59

as limits of focus, many other things, including the entirety of the
fifth verse paragraph, in a discussion of which I might have said a
few words about Wordsworth's characterization of Dorothy's future
mind as a "mansion for all lovely forms" and her memory as a "dwelling-
place/ For all sweet sounds and harmonies?" (11. 140-142). But there
would have been no way of dealing with this metaphorical projection--
again in the language of immanence!--without raising the question of
the poem's theme of hope; and that question in turn is enmeshed in
the calculus of loss and gain.29

Some readers might feel that in my discussion of Wdrdsworth's
perplexity I have given the impression that the poet really did not
know what he was writing about--always an ungrateful impression to
be left by any critic. The reply to this objection, however, is
very simple: Wordsworth knew very well that he was wrestling with
the significance of encounters with a "something" he could find no

better name for; and his meditation is an explicit and deeply moving

account of that struggle.

60

NOTES: CHAPTER II

1The Poetry gf Meditation, rev. edn.(New Haven, 1962), p. 329.

 

2Albert 8. Gerard, "Dark Passages: Exploring Tintern Abbey,"
glg, III (1963), 22. David Ferry, in his The Limits gf_Mortality
(Middletown, Conn., 1959), observes of the poem that it is "hard not
to mistake for a confusion of feeling what may be a complexity of feel-
ing, a contemplated and contained ambivalence" (pp. 110-111). Others
who have proved helpful to me in preparing this reading are: Harold
Bloom, The Visionary Company: A Reading 9f_Eng1ish Romantic Poetry
(New York, 1963), pp. 149-159; Roger N. Murray, Wordsworth's Style
(Lincoln, Neb., 1967), pp. 25-32; Christopher Salvesen, The Landscape
pf Memory (Lincoln, Neb., 1965), pp. 38-39; Carl Woodring, Wordsworth
(Boston, 1965), pp. 59-64; and especially Geoffrey Hartman, gp,gi£,,
pp. 26-30, 175-176, E; passim.

 

 

 

 

 

3I use the word "immanent" in two slightly different senses
throughout this essay: 1) to indicate "being within," as in "mind is
immanent in nature"; 2) to indicate "having a 'within' or interior,"
as in "nature made immanent," i.e., made to have mind inside of it.
This second usage (far less frequent than the first) is prompted by
Wordsworth's habit of obscuring the distinction between container and
contained, indeed of reversing the roles without warning. See my com-
ments below on Wordsworth's encounter with his imagination in Book VI
of The Prelude. Which of the two senses is intended Should be clear
from the context. In my analysis of what I later call Wordsworth's
"language of immanence" I have been especially helped by C. C. Clarke's
Romantic Paradox (New York, 1963), pp. 44-53.

4"The Drunken Boat: The Revolutionary Element in Romanticism,"
Romanticism Reconsidered, ed. Northrop Frye (New York, 1963), p. 16.

5The term "geography" was suggested to me by Lane Cooper's "A
Glance at Wordsworth's Reading, II," MEN, XXII (1907), 116. Cooper
uses the term in his study of Wordsworth's interest in travel books,
and characterizes the poet as "in the truest sense a poetical geogra-
pher, a spiritual interpreter of observed phenomena on the earth."

62h; Idea pf ghg Holy, trans. John W. Harvey, 2nd edn. (London,
1950). I introduce Otto's term for the sake of corroborating my con-
nection between Wordsworth's act of visionary introspection (Frye's
journey downward and inward) and the experience of awe and dread. Ac-
cording to Otto's phenomenology of religious consciousness, one of the
essential characteristics of an encounter with a "numinous object" is
the experience of "mysterium tremendum." See Otto's analysis of "The
Element of Awfulness," pp. 13-19. Wordsworth himself corroborates
this connection in The Recluse lines cited in the text. The experi-
ence of "mysterium tremendum" is closely related to the feeling of a
special kind of fear which many commentators have observed is a char-
acteristic of the experience of the sublime, a relationship Otto him-
self notes (p. 42).

 

61

7G. W. Knight, The Starlit Dome (London, 1959), p. 11.
Knight's study of "The Wordsworthian Profundity," pp. 1-82, is a
brilliantly suggestive treatment of the poet's fascination with
depths, dwelling-places, and, in his later poems, architectural
structures of all kinds; and in this respect corroborates the point
of view taken in this chapter, i.e., regarding "Tintern Abbey" as a
poem about interiors.

8Poetical Works, V, 4, 11. 33-35.
9Ibid., 11. 35-41.

10For a discussion of Locke's metaphors of the mind, see The
Mirror and the Lamp, pp. 57-58. Also see Ernest Lee Tuveson, The

 

11L1. 194-196.

12All references to The Prelude are, unless otherwise indica-
ted, to the 1850 version, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, 2nd. edn. rev.
Helen Darbishire (Oxford, 1959). Here I quote from the 1805 version
of Book XIV, i.e., Book XIII, ll. 69, 56, 62-65. In the 1850 version
the explicit connection between imagination and the blue chasm dis-
appears; the Snowdon scene is

 

All meek and silent, save that through a rift--
Not distant from the shore whereon we Stood,

A fixed, abysmal, gloomy, breathing-place--
Mounted the roar of waters, torrents, streams
Innumerable, roaring with one voice!

Heard over earth and sea, and, in that hour,

For so it seemed, felt by the starry heavens.
(11. 56-62)

In an early ms. version of this passage given by de Selincourt (The
Prelude, p. 483), the relationship between the subjective abyss and
the visionary world is quite explicit. Wordsworth speaks

of a mighty Mind
That while it copes with visible shapes hears also
Through vents and openings in the ideal world
The astounding chorus of infinity
Exalted by an underconsciousness
Of depth not faithless, the sustaining thought
Of God in human Being.

13Ll. 592-596. See Hartman's analysis of this episode, pp.
cit., pp. 45-48.

14L1. 600-601.

15Poetical Works, V, 4. This paragraph is especially indebted
to Hartman's central thesis that Wordsworth, throughout his major

62

poetry, exhibits a fear of what Hartman calls "apocalypse," i.e., the
"death of nature."

16Book V, 45-49.

17Hartman, pp. cit., p. 173.

18Gaston Bachelard, in his The Poetics p£_Space, trans. Maria
Jolas (New York, 1964), analyzes what he calls the "phenomenological
reverberation" of the image of the hermit's but as it is used in poe-
try. He offers a suggestive corroboration of the visionary implica-
tions I have been arguing attach to Wordsworth's image of the Hermit's
cave: "The hermit's but is an engraving that would suffer from any
exaggeration of picturesqueness. Its truth must derive from the in-
tensity of its essence, which is the essence of the verb 'to inhabit.'
The but immediately becomes centralized solitude, for in the land of
legend, there exists no adjoining hut. . . . The image leads us on
towards extreme solitude. The hermit is alone before God. His hut,
therefore, is just the opposite of the monastery. And there radiates
about this centralized solitude a universe of meditation and prayer,
a universe outside the universe" (p. 32). In Wordsworth, of course,
the "universe outside" is a "universe inside," and "centralized soli-
tude" is the condition of the mind's encountering its own powers.

19Wordsworth's sense of, and language of, space is not confined
to his own practice but seems to be one of the commonplaces of the
Romantic Period. Thomas De Quincy, for example, offers what could al-
most be taken as a paradigm for the kind of reading I am pursuing:
"Great is the mystery of Space, greater is the mystery of Time. Ei-
ther mystery grows upon man as man himself grows; and either seems to
be a function of the godlike which is in man. In reality, the depths
and the heights which are in man, the depths by which he searches, the
heights by which he aSpires, are but projected and made objective ex-
ternally in the three dimensions of space which are outside of him.
He trembles at the abyss into which his bodily eyes look down, or look
up; not knowing that abyss to be, not always consciously suspecting it
to be, but by an instinct written in his prophetic heart feeling it to
be, boding it to be, fearing it to be, and sometimes hoping it to be,
the mirror to a mightier abyss that will one day be expanded in him-
self" Zhollected Writings, ed. David Masson, l4 vols. (London, 1896,
1897), VIII, 15/.

20Poetical Works, II, 517. I use the term “antistrophe” (Gk.
antistrephein, to turn against or opposite) in somewhat of a Romantic
way: to refer to a movement of the mind rather than to a stanza in the
traditional "sublime ode." The usage is suggested by Wordsworth's
note.

 

 

21The introspective act described by Wordsworth in the second
verse paragraph is, in certain respects, similar to one of the ways in
which a man might pursue, in Addisonian terms, the "pleasures of the
imagination." Addison writes in The Spectator, No. 411, how by "this
Faculty a Man in a Dungeon is capable of entertaining himself with

 

63

Scenes and Landskips more beautiful than any that can be found in the
whole Compass of Nature." Addison of course would probably disallow
Wordsworth's claim that in his city dungeon he saw into the "life of
things": the imagination, to be sure, can give great pleasure, but

to say that it is capable of such metaphysical insight is to allow the
pursuit of imagination's pleasures to turn into a dangerous form of
enthusiasm. Is Wordsworth here vaguely troubled by the possible
charge of enthusiasm? In any case, Wordsworth's "antistrophe" is re-
lated to what Robert Langbaum, in "Romanticism as a Modern Tradition,"
A Grammar pf_Literary Criticism, ed. Lawrence Sargent Hall (New York,
1965), has said is a recurring problem of many Romantic moments of
"illumination": "As an experience, the illumination is undeniably
valid. But once the perception of value is abstracted from the immedi-
ate experience and formulated for application elsewhere, it becomes
mere theory and therefore problematical" (p. 255). For a recent study
of the Romantic problem of experience vs. formulation, as this problem
is worked out in a Single poem, see Bernard J. Paris, "Coleridge's
'The Eolian Harp'," PMASAL, LI (1966), 571-582.

22An anchor is also the traditional symbol of hope. St. Paul
establishes the equation in Hebrews 6:19: ". . . hope we have as an
anchor of the soul, both sure and steadfast, and which entereth into
that within the veil" (King James Version)..In English poetry exam-
ples of this traditional emblem can be found in George Herbert's "Hope"
and in Spenser's portrait of Speranza in Book I, Canto X, xiv, of IRS
Faerie Queene. In "Tintern Abbey," just as Wordsworth meditates his
way toward a pledge of continuing faith in nature, so also he is seek-
ing grounds for a continuing sense of hope: he dares "to hope" in
line 65. In terms of traditional symbolism to "anchor" one's "purest
thoughts" in "nature and the language of the sense" is to posit a
purely sensationalistic ground for hope--an extraordinary reversal of
the Christian grounding of hope in the world beyond. Note also how
St. Paul's metaphor of hope as that "which entereth into that within
the veil" suggests a movement into a transcendent interior (his vehi-
cle, of course, is the veil of the Jewish temple). Likewise, in
Herbert's poem personified Hope presents the poet with an "optick" or
telescope, a means of penetrating otherwise hidden spaces. These
associations become even more provocative if we regard Wordsworth's
counting of the "gifts" he has received from nature as a secularized
version of a traditional meditation recommended for those tempted by
despair. Jeremy Taylor, for example, gives as his ninth "remedy"
against despair the directive: "Gather together into your spirit and
its treasure-house the memory, not only all the promises of God, but
also the remembrances of experience and the former senses of the
Divine favours, that from thence you may argue from times past to the
present, and enlarge to the future and to greater blessings. For al-
though the conjectures and expectations of hope are not like the con-
clusions of faith, yet they are a helmet against the scorching of
despair in temporal things, and an anchor of the soul, sure and stead-
fast, against the fluctuations of the spirit in matters of the soul"
TThe Rule and Exercises pf_Holy Living, ed. Thomas S. Kepler (New York,
1956), p. 1697. I am not suggesting "source" or "influence"; but cer-
tainly Wordsworth's oblique echoing of these traditions suggests that

 

64

an illuminating reading ah the poem.might be developed by regarding it
as a meditation principally concerned with the problem of hope--a
suggestion enforced when we recall that the longest poem published

by Wordsworth during his lifetime, The Excursion, has as its central
theme the correction of despondency or despair. Two final observa-
tions: 1) the prevailing color of the landscape of Tintern Abbey is
green, another traditional emblem of hope; 2) in Book VI of Th5
Prelude, at the moment of Wordsworth's unmediated contact with imag-
ination rising from the mind's abyss, the poet claims to see, among
other things, that

 

our being's heart and home,
Is with infinitude, and only there;
With hope it is, hope that can never die . . .
(11. 604-606)

The vision provided by his encounter with imagination, in other words,
reveals the grounds of hope. In "Tintern Abbey" Wordsworth decides
that "nature and the language of the sense" will be his anchor immedi-
ately after his encounter with the transcendent "something." It goes
without saying that the parallel is striking: in "Tintern Abbey"
Wordsworth searches through the dwelling-places of nature to a "sense
sublime" of the activity of his own consciousness, i.e., the act of
imagination.

23L1. 272-273, 277-280.

24In Section 4 of this chapter I deliberately abandon the use
of the term "imagination." Up to this point I have been employing the
term freely because I have been attempting to trace indications of
certain features of what I have called Wordsworth's “geography of
introspection"; and from that point of view it seemed necessary to say--
led on by the example of Wordsworth's own metaphors--that imagination
is encountered by the act of introspection in the depths of subjec-
tivity. In the concluding analysis of Section 4, however, I try to
shift my terms away from metaphor toward greater precision. The
reader is asked to assume that I intend a rough equation between "the
act of reflexive self-awareness" and "the act of imagination." The
grounds of this equation, which I explore in the next chapter, are
exceedingly intricate, and cannot be faced now without muddling some-
what the analysis of the poem. To avoid this muddle, I momentarily
suspend my use of the term "imagination," and ask my reader's patience.
Hartman occasionally uses the term "imagination" as almost a synonym
for "self-consciousness." He does not, in my judgment, sufficiently
distinguish between what I call in Section 4 "thinking about" the
self, i.e., constituting the subject as an object for thought, and
what I call "reflexive self-awareness" or "apperception," i.e., be-
coming consciousness of the activity of the subject's consciousness
without the subject's constituting this activity as an object of con-
sciousness. This distinction is related to one of the central ques-
tions of modern phenomenology: whether the subject can become aware
of the subject app subject without losing itself as an object of

65

thought. See Pierre Thevenaz's discussion of this "Charybdis and
Scylla" of introspection in What ii Phenomenology?, esp. pp. 113-115.

2511. 107-111.

26Cf. the implication of Donne's "Who sees God's face, that is
self life, must die" ("Good Friday, 1613," 1. 17).

27Poetical Works, IV, 283, 11. 130-131.

 

28A'Grammar pf Motives and A Rhetoric pf Motives (New York,
1962), p. 24. From this Burkean point of view we might also suggest
that the previously noticed complaint by Wordsworth about the in-
adequacy of the frail lodges of nature is, among other things, a
complaint about the inadequacy of nature as a language whereby to
express the reality of his mind. In Book V of The Prelude Wordsworth
sees the language of poetry as a "mansion" (like the dwelling-places
of nature?) which embody "Visionary power" and the "host of shadowy
things" (11. 595-600). We noted in the introductory chapter how
words, according to Wordsworth, ideally should be an "incarnation"
of thought. If nature is also to provide a "language," then of
course it too ideally Should be an "incarnation" of thought, i.e.,
of the visionary underworld.

 

 

29See n. 22 above. See also the discussion of the relation-
ship between Wordsworthian time and the problem of hope in Section 3
of Chapter V.

CHAPTER III

THE EXTENSIONS OF CONSCIOUSNESS

The analysis of "Tintern Abbey" in the preceding chapter was
prompted by a desire to trace echoes of Wordsworth's "sense sublime"
throughout that poem's history of his mental operations. In this
analysis I suggested that for Wordsworth the activity of reflexive
self-awareness or the act of apperception is closely related to, if
not identical with, the activity of his imagination. By "appercep-
tion" I do not mean a constitution by the mind of its own nature or
activity as a direct object of consciousness. To "think about" one's
mind is not the same thing as apperceiving its operations. By the
term, rather, I mean a more or less indirect sense of the mind's own
activity as that activity is immediately present in every act of per-
ception. My analysis of the language of immanence in "Tintern Abbey"
was designed to Show, among other things, how Wordsworth seems pecul-
iarly fascinated by the content of apperception latent in his percep-
tions; how indeed this latent content most explicitly surfaces in his
encounter with a universally interfused "something."

My purpose in the remainder of this essay is further to con-
textualize my analysis of Wordsworth's "sense sublime" by exploring
the poet's work as a whole for echoes of this reflexive Structure of
consciousness. My immediate purpose in this chapter and the next is
to examine the ways in which we can engage in such an exploration
from the points of view provided by certain theories of that category

of aesthetic experience traditionally discussed under the rubric "The

66

67

Sublime." I hope to Show that some of these theories offer a rich set
of perspectives upon my subject.

In this chapter I examine certain eighteenth-century theories
of the sublime which describe the mind as a spatially extended entity
and as especially so when the mind is undergoing the experience of the
sublime. That such theories seem suggestively relevant Should be ob-
vious at this stage of my argument. In the next chapter I Shall ex-
amine Coleridge's speculations upon the sublime, and shall try to trace
relationships between these speculations and his theory of the imagin-
ation. Since I am arguing in this essay a close relationship between
Wordsworth's "sense sublime" and the activity of his imagination, the
relevance of this Coleridgean investigation should appear even more
immediately obvious than the relevance of my examination of certain
eighteenth-century theorists. In both chapters, after having developed
certain perspectives out of the theoretical material, I turn to Words-
worth, and try to see what I can see.

A word must now be said about the methodological assumptions of
these two chapters. I offer no claim that the kind of study I am mak-
ing here ought to be taken as a "source Study" or as an "influence
Study." As tempting as such a claim might be--especia11y as a way of
characterizing my pursuit of Wordsworth armed with the vision and the
infinitely suggestive categories of Coleridge--I cannot pretend to
demonstrate that any part of the ennobling interchange between
Wordsworth's mind and nature was structured either by his reading in
eighteenth-century aesthetics or by his prolonged and undoubtedly

shaping contact with Coleridge. The question of such historical cau-

68

salities simply does not interest me, and I am content to leave the

question to the investigative talents of others.1 My rejection of

historical bridge-building, however, leaves me with the task of offer-
ing some explanation and justification of the way in which I hope to
use historically given theories for the sake of opening up lines of
vision upon Wordsworth. How do I plan to mediate between poet and
theory if indeed I am not mediating in the time-honored way of arguing
"source" and "influence"?

My answer is this: I assume, along with Wordsworth, Coleridge,
Kant, Burke, and a host of other theorists of the eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries, that the experience of the sublime is indeed a dis-
tinguishable type of conscious experience--what I Shall henceforth
call "sublime consciousness"--and therefore deserves to be described
as if it were Such a distinguishable type. This assumption has the
virtue of establishing the possibility of a mediation which is not
dependent upon the mediation of historical cause and effect. No longer
is it a matter, for example, of showing how Burke influenced Kant who
influenced Coleridge who influenced Wordsworth, and so on. Now, with
the assumption of a really distinguishable and recurring type of con-
scious experience, we can also assume that each theorist in his own
way has made a contribution--however incomplete and inconclusive and
perhaps even incorrect in some respects--to an emergent theory of the
nature of sublime consciousness. And thus we are set free to ask the
following questions: can we examine the various theories of the sub-
lime with an eye open, not for their differences in emphases, vocabu-

laries, philosophical presuppositions, and so on, but for their agree-

69

ments? Can we emerge with a typification of sublime consciousness
through this search for consensus? Can we, through the use of a
phenomenologically oriented and mediating vocabulary, gather notes
toward a phenomenological archetype, notes toward a description of
what seem to be the fundamental structures of consciousness in the
experience of the sublime?2 Can, finally, such notes be useful in
approaching Wordsworth?

I believe that such a phenomenological archetype can be con-
structed, and the next two chapters are offered both in support of
this belief and as my contribution toward such a result. I believe
also that this archetype can be extremely heuristic for my treatment
of the poet. In fact, I am concerned with describing sublime con-
sciousness primarily for the sake of mediating between theory and
Wordsworth. This priority in my intention suggests to me the neces-
sity of imposing certain limitations. Thus in this chapter, where I
move toward Wordsworth out of certain eighteenth-century theories of
the sublime, I omit discussion of the theories of Burke and Kant, and
instead confine myself exclusively to those theorists who Speak of the
experience of the sublime in metaphors implying the spatialization of
the mind. Obviously any Study which is primarily concerned with de-
scribing the phenomenological archetype of sublime consciousness as
completely as possible cannot overlook these two thinkers. But in
this chapter and the next I am concerned with gathering notes toward
the archetype only to the extent of including, and thereby illumin-
ating, Wordsworth's own version of sublime consciousness; and I feel
that I can do what I want to do in this matter without evoking the

theories of either Burke or Kant.3

70

Now I must be even more specific about the limits of my inves-
tigation and about the way in which I plan to mediate between theory
and poet. In this chapter and the next I consider certain theorists
of the sublime from the angles of vision suggested to me by my reading
of "Tintern Abbey"--a meditation which, I have argued, has as its cli-
mactic moment an intense experience of sublime consciousness. I shall
be examining these different theorists for the implications of their
characterization of the mind as a Spatially extended entity; for dis-
cussion of the experience of the sublime as, in some sense, an encoun-
ter with transcendence, either in nature or in the mind itself; finally,
and most importantly, for recognition that in the experience of the
sublime the mind becomes deeply aware of its own powers. It should be
obvious from this statement of the limits of my investigation that,
even with respect to the theorists I evoke, I am not at all concerned
with presenting a systematic or comprehensive summary of their think-
ing upon the subject.4 It Should perhaps be also obvious from this
statement of my limits that my phenomenological focus is ultimately
upon Wordsworth, and that in this chapter and the next I continue my
task of uncovering support for the central thesis of this essay. That
is to say, I continue to gather evidence for my contention that for
Wordsworth the act of apperception is the foundation of his most vision-
ary moments and that it is therefore at the heart of the activity of
his imagination.

The remainder of this chapter is divided into two sections. In
Section 2 I discuss the theorists of the sublime with only an occasion-

al aside in the direction of Wordsworth. In Section 3 I attempt to use

71

some of the perspectives evolved in Section 2 for a sustained dis-

cussion of the problem of sublime consciousness in Wordsworth.

--2-_
Ernest Lee Tuveson has observed that according to "eighteenth-
century theories of the imagination, the contemplation of a physically
vast object, or one suggesting vastness, somehow increases the physi-
cal extent of the mind . . . . Awareness, it would seem,occupies a
room whose walls can be pushed back. Behind the concept lies a spa-
tial image of the mind . . . ."5 John Baillie, for example, in his
Ap_§§§3y pp the Sublime, writes that "every Person upon seeing a grand
Object is affected with something which as it were extends his very
Being, and expands it to a kind of Immensity. Thus in viewing the
Heavens, how is the Soul elevated; and stretching itself to larger
Scenes and more extended Prospects, in a noble Enthusiasm of Grandeur
quits the narrow Earth . . . ."6 The same spatializing of the mind is
repeated, albeit with more restraint of phrase, by Joseph Priestley:
"The mind . . . conforming and adapting itself to the objects to which
its attention is engaged, must, as it were, enlarge itself, to conceive
a great object."7 Alexander Gerard, in his Ag Eppgy pp Eggpgn is so
bluntly literal in his presentation of the same idea that he sees no
need of the qualifying "as it were" of Baillie and Priestley: "We
always contemplate objects and ideas with a disposition similar to
their nature. When a large object is presented, the mind expands it-
self to the extent of that object, and is filled with one grand sen-
sation . . . ."8 Even the fastidious prose of David Hume does not

escape a trace of this metaphorical habit: ". . . 'tis evident that

72

the mere view and contemplation of any greatness, whether successive
or extended, enlarges the soul, and gives it a sensible delight and

pleasure."9

The tendency of these spatializing metaphors, if we choose to
take them literally, is to bestow upon the mind what Descartes had
declared to be the essential and distinguishing characteristic of
matter alone, namely, extension. The mind, like a balloon of remark-
able elasticity, expands and enlarges itself in order to accommodate
the extension of the "grand Object" under contemplation. If indeed
this "grand Object" appears to be immense or infinite--as, for example,
Newtonian space appeared to be to many eighteenth-century observers--
then the expanding mind finds itself in the paradoxical position of
trying to accommodate an object which finally can be apprehended or
grasped only by an equally infinite extension of the mind. I say
"paradoxical" because from the point of View of strict logic this
accommodation would be impossible: that the mind might grasp, or
somehow contain, the immensity of a "grand Object," its own extension
must become slightly mp£g_infinite, and by definition there can be no
such thing as one infinity of extension larger than any other. This
paradox is embedded in the language of Addison's description of one of
the "pleasures of the imagination": "Our Imagination loves to be
filled with an Object, or to g£§§p_at any thing that is £22.Elfi.E2£.lE§
Capacity. We are flung into a pleasing Astonishment at such unbounded
Views, and feel a delightful Stilness and Amazement in the Soul at the

Apprehension of them."10 How the imagination can "grasp," or achieve

 

an "Apprehension" of, an "unbounded" object is really not explainable

73

in spatial terms. The unbounded precisely as unbounded can never be
contained no matter how capacious the container. Still, to testify
that such an "Apprehension" does somehow occur, we have feelings of
being "flung into a pleasing Astonishment" and of a "delightful
Stilness and Amazement."

The moral of course is that we ought not take these metaphors
of the expanding space of mind as they never were intended to be taken,
that is, literally, They are intended to describe not the nature of

the mind but the experience of consciousness when consciousness is

 

directed toward the "larger Scenes and more extended Prospects" of
nature. These metaphors in fact describe the mind as it is subjective-
ly apprehended in the experience of the sublime, in the feeling of what
Gerard calls "one grand sensation." But to use spatial metaphors to
describe this experience is deceptive in that such language tends to
visualize the process, to convert it into an object of sight, and hence
to give the impression that the mind itself is being discussed as an
object from an outside point of view.11 The proper interpretation of
these metaphors requires that we treat them as expressive of a sub-
jective process which like any subjective process is quite invisible.
What, then, does it mean to say that the mind "expands" when
confronting a "grand Object"? We might begin to construct a partial
answer by proceeding from the already mentioned Cartesian premise that
the "essence" of matter is extension; from, in the words of Ernst
Cassirer, one of "the basic presuppositions of the Cartesian meta-
physics," namely, that "the thing, the empirical object, can be clear-

ly and distinctly defined only through its purely spatial determina-

74

tions. Extension in length, breadth, and depth is the only objective
predicate by which we can determine the object of experience."12 From
the point of view of this presupposition, we might say that in the ex-
perience of sublime consciousness, in the confrontation by the mind
with a "grand Object," there develops an awareness of the mind's having
been granted the "only objective predicate" whereby to determine em-
pirical objects, namely, extension in length, breadth, and depth
throughout material space. Insofar as the mind is fplp to expand, it
is sensed as possessing an increaSing amount of extension, as Spread-
ing itself outward into space; and thus it is sensed as developing in
at least one fundamental respect a resemblance to matter which, despite
the bewildering variety of its manifestations, always exhibits exten-
sion. In the experience of the sublime, we might say, there is devel-
oped a Structure of awareness in which the radical Cartesian divorce
between mind and matter is £21; to have been overcome.13 The mind, by
subjectively sensing itself as extended, simultaneously senses itself
pg if it were an empirical object spread, like the material atmosphere,
throughout space. In Coleridgean terms we might characterize this
structure of awareness as one in which there occurs the potentiality of
a mediation between subject and object, assuming in this case mind to
be subject and matter to be object. The grounds of this mediation
would of course be the phenomenon of the simultaneous possession by
both mind and matter of the common attribute of extension. And in
Wordsworthian terms, I might add, sublime consciousness seems to offer
suggestive possibilities for the marriage of mind and nature, especial-

ly for a marriage by the mind to nature in its more extended prospects.

75

These possibilities become clear if we remember that the extension of
the mind throughout space tends to become infinite insofar as the
"grand Object," to which consciousness is struggling to accommodate
its capacity, is in itself unbounded. Consciousness thus moves into
a State of potentially becoming aware of itself as an oxymoronic
psychical-empirical entity ubiquitously spread out through nature; or,
in the words of Gerard, the mind at the moment of sublime conscious-
ness "sometimes imagines itself present in every~part of the scene
which it contemplates."14 The potential gloss which these words by
Gerard provide for my reading of Wordsworth's "sense sublime" needs,
at this point in my argument, no elaboration--except the remark that
at that dramatic moment of sublime consciousness in "Tintern Abbey"
Wordsworth fails to recognize that it is his own mind which is ubi-
quitously in-dwelling throughout the vistas of sky, ocean, and air.
It must also be said that sublime consciousness, precisely
because it can "sometimes" in some way imagine "itself present in
every part of the scene" under contemplation, runs the risk of a pro-
found sense of dislocation. Addison, for example, writing on the
pleasures of contemplating the Newtonian heavens, gives us a hint of
this risk. He comments on how we can feel ourselves "lost in such a
labyrinth of suns and worlds, and confounded with the immensity and
magnificence of nature"; the mind, or more precisely the imagination,
can find "her self swallowed up in the immensity of the Void that
surrounds it."15 We might say that sublime consciousness, though in-
,volving a sense by the mind of its own increasing extension and there-

fore a sense by the mind of itself as a quasi-empirical object--this

76

sublime consciousness does not seem Simultaneously to permit a
Cartesian use of the newly acquired predicate of extension to define
or determine the mind in the objective manner appropriate for an
empirical object. The mind, in its encounters with sublimity, can
become "lost" and "confounded," unable to define itself in terms of
its "spatial determinations." It almost seems as if the very inten-
sity of the sense of the spatialization of the mind carries within
itself a potential sense of a kind of "aspatiality," of passing over
into a dimension of being where no localization of the self is possi-
ble. Precisely because consciousness moves toward an awareness of its

being "every-where, it paradoxically exposes itself to the risk of an

' of being "swallowed up in the im-

awareness of its being "no-where,‘
mensity of the Void." "Sublime space," the phenomenological space
created by the mind's sense of its own infinite extension, is thus
quite different in its effects from Cartesian space. Though both
spaces are extended, the extension of Cartesian Space creates the
potential for both the determination and the localization of an ob-
ject. But the extension of sublime Space, the space that is phenom-
enologically generated by the mind's sense of itself spreading outward,
establishes the possibility of both the indetermination and the dis-
location of a subject. It follows, then, that if this sense of dis-
location becomes too intense, the subject moves toward an awareness

of "transport"--a favorite word in commentaries on the sublime--of
being carried quite away from the world of ordinary, always confining

localizations; of indeed, in the words of Baillie, quitting "the

narrow earth" or of, in the words of Wordsworth, passing over into

77

"strange seas of Thought, alone."16

And if at this point we accept the justice of equating
Wordsworth's state of imaginative consciousness with the state of
sublime consciousness, we can arrive at a richer understanding of
Hartman's contention that imagination in Wordsworth exposes him to
the terrors of "apocalype"--to the phenomenological possibility of the
destruction and loss of the world. Wordsworth's ambition to "lodge"
his mind in nature's phenomena, an ambition discussed in the previous
chapter, can thus be seen as an effort to conserve the world, as an
antithetical attempt to localize a consciousness which as it becomes
imaginative or sublime moves toward the possibility of become so pro-
foundly dislocated that it can experience a sense of "transport" out
of the ordinary world of things in their places. The irony of this
frightening possibility is that it is set up initially by the mind's
acquisition of a sense of coming to possess the "only objective predi-
cate" of the world of matter, namely, extension. The paradox of this
structure of awareness can be even more sharply stated: too great a
fusion by consciousness with the material world--too great an abolition
of the sense of the dualism of mind and nature--can lead to a phenom-
enological destruction of that world. From the point of view of this
paradox, the famous Fenwick note to the "Immortality Ode" takes on an
added significance. There Wordsworth observes that as a child he "was
often unable to think of external things as having external existence,
and I communed with all that I saw as something not apart from, but
inherent in, my own immaterial nature. Many times while going to

school have I grasped at a wall or tree to recall myself from this

78

abyss of idealism to the reality."17 Wordsworth's grasping "at a
wall or tree" can be seen as analogous to his later, more explicit
poetic ambition to "lodge" his mind in nature's phenomena: both are
acts of localization and both are attempts to overcome the vertigo
caused by an encounter with the open-ended space ("abyss") of con-
sciousness. Both acts are attempts to avoid apocalypse.

Now if the sense of dislocation experienced by sublime con-
sciousness threatens the sense of the loss of the ordinary world of
things in their places, it also exposes the mind to radical altera-
tions of the sense of its own identity. Cassirer has observed that
each "single, real thing bears witness to its reality above all by
occupying a segment of Space from which it excludes everything else.
The individuality of the thing rests ultimately on the fact that it
is in this sense a Spatial individua1--it possesses a sphere of its
own, in which it is and in which it asserts itself against every other
reality."18 Cassirer here suggests that the sense of the individual
reality of a thing is "abOVe all" a function of its Spatial identity.
We might ask the following questions: what witness is borne to the
reality of a mind by the fact that as it senses itself expanding out-
ward into space, it comes to occupy a "segment of space" which is not
exclusive at all, but indeed universally inclusive? What becomes of
the spatial individuality of such a mind when its expanding "Sphere"
does not permit it to assert "itself against every other reality"
precisely because its Sphere is moving toward an inclusion of every
other reality? Answers to these questions are suggested in Tuveson's

observation that the radical alteration of the mind's sense of its

79

spatial identity during the experience of the sublime is, according

to eighteenth-century theorists of the imagination, a "means of
making the mind godlike."19 What other mind but a quasi-divine mind
could be so universally inclusive? We must understand of course that
the god, to which sublime consciousness can feel a resemblance, is
neither the Jehovah of the Old Testament nor the Heavenly Father of
the New. This god is rather like the peculiarly spatialized being
suggested by Newtonian theology; the god necessarily immanent through-
out all of space Since he is a being who, in the words of the "General

Scholium" of the second edition of Newton's Principia, "constitutes

 

. space."20 This god also resembles the "Being . . . boundless,
unsearchable, impenetrable" who is apostrophized in Shaftesbury's
"The Moralists" as the "active Mind, infus'd thro all the Space," an
interfusing presence who "Unites and mingles with the Mighty Mass!"21
In other words, sublime consciousness, when interpreted in the light
of certain eighteenth-century versions of the nature of divinity, is
a structure of consciousness in which, through a violent alteration in
the sense of Spatial identity, the sense of a distinction between
creator and created being is potentially overcome. The mind experi-
ences itself as having expanded to a state of divinity.

And even if consciousness does not quite attain such a majestic
alteration in the sense of self, there still seems to be in the exper-
ence of the sublime ample ground for self-congratulation. In fact,
according to many theorists, one of the characteristic pleasures of

sublime consciousness apparently involves the recognition, either

explicit or implicit, that the mind is indeed capable of experiencing

8O

sublimity. This recognition in turn seems to lead to an improvement
in one's self-esteem. Longinus, as is to be expected, was the first
to take notice of this phenomenon of sublime consciousness, and no
doubt established such notice as a commonplace for English commenta-
tors of the eighteenth century. He writes that the "soul is naturally
uplifted by the truly great; we receive it as a joyous offering; we
are filled with delight and pride as if we had ourselves created what
we heard.”22 Of course Longinus is here speaking of the rhetorical
sublime, or the sublime in writing. But we can, disregarding the
occasion of the experience, still note that Longinus suggests a state
of reflexive self-awareness, a looking inward with pride--even though
this state of awareness, paradoxically enough, does not seem to ex-
clude the theoretical recognition at least that what has occasioned
the experience of sublimity was in fact created by someone else and
that, in all justice, any self-congratulation belongs to that author
alone.

In John Baillie's Ag Essay pp the Sublime the theme of the

 

improvement in self-esteem is quite explicit, though not directly
attached, as it is in Longinus, to the "truly great" in composition.
Baillie assumes, along with Longinus, that the pride of consciousness
is a natural consequence of an encounter with sublimity, a consequence
not necessarily dependent upon any subsequent rational analysis of the
experience. (The least bit of rational analysis would of course dis-
pel the grounds--the sense that "we had ourselves created what we
heard"--of the Longinian "delight and pride" in the self.) Baillie's

account is in the Lockean tradition of empiricism and even suggests,

81

with unintentional irony no doubt, a certain passivity of the mind

as it is endowed through sensory impressions with a better recogni-
tion of its own active excellence. Thus Baillie writes that "vast
Sensations give the Mind a higher Idea of her own Powers," and that
these sensations are given by ”Vast Objects."23 Baillie also goes

so far as to establish the improvement in self-esteem as one of the
necessary tests of genuine sublimity, and sees a newly acquired pride
of consciousness as one of the specific traits of sublime conscious-
ness. He observes that that "only can be justly called Sublime
which in some degree disposes the Mind to an Enlargement of itself,
and gives her a lofty Conception of her own Powers."24 Given
Baillie's commitment to the use of metaphors of the mind's extension,
it is almost inevitable that he explains the "Exultation and Pride"
of sublime consciousness as emotions which "the Mind ever feels from
the Consciousness of its own Vastness."25 And, to be sure, this ex-
ultation can sometimes be the result of the mind's recognition of its

own approximation of the extensio Dei. Baillie writes that just as

 

one of the "sublime Attributes of the Epipy" is "Universal Presence,"
so the mind, when "contemplating the Heavens" and taking in the
"mighty Qgpg of the Planets," becomes consciously "present to a Uni-
verse" through its expansion; and thus can feel a "noble Pridej'as it

recognizes itself "nearer advancing to the Perfections of the Univer-

 

2 . . .
sal Presence." 6 It would seem that Baillie's commitment to meta-

 

phors of the mind's extension also commits him, in his description of
how the mind comes to think better of itself in an encounter with

sublimity, to the proposition that the quantity of the mind's expan-

82

sion is somehow a revelation of its quality; or, to put this another
way, the bigger the mind's capacity for extension, the better that
mind is.27
This proposition can easily be converted into a program for
increasing the powers of the mind. Edward Young, in his Night
Thoughts, writes that certain phenomena, such as starry night Skies,

which are "ample of dimension" or "vast of size" can "

an aggrandizing
impulse give”; and that "vast surveys, and the sublime of things,/
The Soul assimilate, and make her great."28 In other words, the
proposition that in matters of sublimity quantity of the mind's ex-
tension is a revelation of its quality is a proposition which suggests
a certain path toward psychological progress: namely, the more the
mind is exercised through an expanding confrontation with the "sub-
lime of things," the better that mind somehow shall become. Sublime
consciousness thus might be described as an experience in which the
mind can improve not only its awareness of its own excellence, but
even the very object of that self-applauding awareness, even the very
grounds of its self-esteem. Gerard writes how the mind "finds such a
difficulty in Spreading itself to the dimensions of its object, as

."29 And Hume, commenting

enlivens and invigorates its frame
upon the difficulty or "opposition" the mind faces in attempting to
conceive a great object, observes that in "collecting our force to

overcome the opposition, we invigorate the soul, and give it an ele-
vation with which otherwise it wou'd never have been acquainted."3O

Especially is this true, according to Hume, when the consciousness at-

tempts to move backward through a "great removal" in time to grasp the

83

"relicts of antiquity": the mind "being oblig'd every moment to
renew its efforts in the transition from one part of time to another,
feels a more vigorous and sublime disposition, than in a transition
thro' the parts of space, where the ideas flow along with easiness
and facility." The greater difficulty of the "transition" backward
through time is based, according to Hume, upon the phenomenological
fact that "space or extension appears united to our sense, while time
or succession is always broken and divided."31

Finally we might note that Joseph Priestley connects the dif-
ficulty in achieving sublime consciousness with the special pleasures
of the experience. To conceive a great object, Priestley writes,

"requires a considerable effort pf the imagination, which is also

 

attended with a pleasing, though perhaps not a distinct and explicit
consciousness of the strength and extent of our own powers."32 In
other words, in the severe exercise of its capacity for expansion,

the mind can indirectly and somewhat paradoxically experience its own
straining but successful powers as a source of pleasure. We might
also observe, in terms used earlier in this essay, that Priestley's
phrasing ("though perhaps not a distinct and explicit consciousness")
seems to suggest the possibility of a structure of awareness in which
the subject becomes aware of itself 323 subject, not constituting its
activity as a direct object of thought, but experiencing itself, as it
were, from within--through the very intensity of its activity. It
thus might be said that sublime consciousness, precisely because of
the difficulty in achieving such a structure of awareness, establishes

the possibility of a vivid act of apperception.

84

--3--

The theme of sublime consciousness both as inducing a Special
kind of self-consciousness and as increasing, in some way, the powers
of the mind is a theme which seems to be involved in Wordsworth's
various descriptions of the development and the workings of the poetic

mind. In The Prelude, for example, the poet sees a special formative

 

virtue in the fact that the circumstances of his boyhood provided him
with "early converse with the works of God," especially in a region
H . . . . "33 .
where appear/ Most obv1ously Simp11c1ty and power. Now if we re-
member that "simplicity" and "power" are, according to many eighteenth-
century theorists, characteristic features of those natural phenomena
most likely to produce a sense of sublimity,34 we can interpret
Wordsworth's praise of an "early converse with the works of God" as a
tribute paid to a youth Spent among nature's sublime forms. Thus it
should not seem unusual that Wordsworth illustrates the advantages of
this kind of "early converse" with a reference to a mountain:

By influence habitual to the mind

The mountain's outline and its Steady form

Gives a pure grandeiug, and its presence shapes

The measure and the prospect of the soul

To majesty; such virtue have the forms

Perennial of the ancient hills . . . .

This passage subtly echoes a theme we have already examined at
length: the way in which the extension of a sublime object is in some
way transferred to the mind. Wordsworth's version of the theme, how-
ever, avoids an emphasis, which is found in many commentaries, upon
the violence and the uniqueness of the experience. For Wordsworth the

mind is given a sense of its own "pure grandeur" by an "influence

habitual," a constantly recurring encounter with the mountain's "out-

85

line" and its "steady form." Sublime consciousness, Wordsworth
suggests, is not necessarily a sudden intrusion into ordinary con-
sciousness, accompanied by the profoundly felt emotions of abrupt
astonishment and amazement. Such a consciousness is rather--at

least in the circumstances of his youth in the Lake Country--a Struc-
ture of awareness which can be gradually elicited by nature. And in
this respect it is as important for the mountain's "form" to be
"steady" as it is for the mountain's "outline" to possess, and there-
fore be capable of conferring, "grandeur." The mind, habitually ex-
posed to the enduring sublimity of such a phenomenon, thus comes to
recognize itself as possessing, like the mountain, an "extension," not
so much through space, but through time. The "virtue" or power "of the
ancient hills" to alter self-consciousness resides in the Special fact
that these phenomenal "forms" are "Perennial." Through constant "con-
verse" with these hills, through a deepening comprehension of their
eternity--what Hume might call a grasp of infinite "succession"--the
mind somehow grows into an awareness of its own enduring qualities; an
awareness of how indeed the "soul" has a "prospect" of "majesty" pre-
cisely because the mind is eternal.36 In the manner in which he
stresses the temporality of this process of self-recognition, Words-
worth goes far beyond Baillie's somewhat mechanical account of the
origin of sublime self-consciousness. Baillie, as we have noted, sees
the awareness of the "vastness" of the mind as Simply engendered by
the "vast" sensations conferred by "vast" objects. But WOrdsworth,
eschewing here such a literal reliance upon spatial metaphors, chooses

to emphasize the organicism of the process: the mind is not suddenly

86

"expanded" into a certain kind of self-consciousness; rather,

through a gradual assimilation of the sublime phenomena of nature,

it comes to recognize these phenomena as almost paradigmatic of its
37 . .

own powers. And these phenomena can be so paradigmatic because

they elicit, in the act of habitually apprehending them, a conscious-

ness of these powers.

In the first book of The Excursion Wordsworth describes an

 

education at nature's hand of the mind of the Pedlar. This solitary
and wandering figure, one of Wordsworth's alter egos in the poem,
grew up among the Scottish "hills of Athol," surrounded by a land-
scape very Similar to Wordsworth's Lake Country. He is characterized
as one of the many
Poets that are sown
By Nature; men endowed with highest gifts,

The vision and the faculty divine;
Yet wanting the accomplishment of verse . . . .

38
Wordsworth tells us that this mute, yet not inglorious visionary
many times as a child "saw the hills/ Grow larger in the darkness,"
and in complete solitude "Beheld the stars come out above his head."
In the midst of these sublime phenomena, Wordsworth observes, "the
foundations of his mind were laid." At a very early age the Pedlar
had
perceived the presence and the power

Of greatness; and deep feelings had impressed

So vividly great ObjeCtS that they lay

Upon his mind like substances, whose presence

Perplexed the bodily sense.39
Wordsworth here suggests that an early encounter with "great objects"

leaves an indelible impression upon consciousness, at least with

respect to its capacity to constitute phenomena through the powers of

87

sensation. The sensory memory of these "great objects" enabled the
Pedlar, "as he grew in years," to establish a comparative perspective
upon all Subsequent objects of consciousness: "With these impressions
would he still compare/ All his remembrances, thoughts, shapes, and
forms . . . ."40 And out of this continual activity of comparing his
haunting memories of "great objects" with subsequent phenomena,
he thence attained

An active power to fasten images

Upon his brain; and on their pictured lines

Intensely brooded, even till they acquired

The liveliness of dreams.

We might say, then, that for Wordsworth an early encounter with
"the presence and the power/ Of greatness" in nature can induce in a
developing mind a capacity to endow phenomena with a visionary reso-
nance. The impressions left behind by "great objects" become, as it
were, constitutive forms of perception which can significantly alter
the content of subsequent acts of sensation. This effect is even more
clearly suggested in one of the early drafts of this account of the
Pedlar's mental history. In these lines, which de Selincourt supplies
in the notes to his edition of The Excursion, the "great objects" are
described as having been impressed so vividly upon the child's memory
that they become "almost indistinguishably mixed/ With things of
bodily sense."42
Now what is important to observe in this history of a growing

consciousness is, I believe, Wordsworth's emphasis on how early ex-
posure to nature's sublime phenomena triggers a process which finally

enables a mind to regard subsequent phenomena as if indeed they pos-

sessed the "liveliness of dreams"; that is to say, as if in one

 

88

respect at least they were a Special kind of subjective event. Whether
we take the "images" upon which the child "intensely brooded" as
images directly perceived in nature (such a usage is not uncommon in

Wordsworth's poetry),['3

or as images conjured up out of the memory,

the point is that as objects of consciousness, they come to appear,
through their acquisition of the "liveliness of dreams," less and less
as images pf nature--Significant for what they might mirror of an ex-
ternal world detected through ordinary sensation. Instead, they more
and more appear to take on the character of images specially con-
structed by the mind itself--images resembling in their very vividness
those kinds of psychic entities engendered by the mind in the intense
subjectivity of the act of dreaming.44 We might formulate the medita-
tive transformation in this fashion: phenomena come peculiarly to
appear as if they had their origin in the mind and were not necessarily
to be found outside the mind, that is, in objective nature. The world
of ordinary sensation takes on the character of a world that is dreamt.
The objects of consciousness come to appear as functions of subjectiv-
ity-~and as Somehow therefore revealing the activity of mind.

It follows that in this Structure of awareness, ultimately
growing out of an early encounter with nature's "great objects,"
natural phenomena can simultaneously be seen §§_menta1 phenomena.
Nature is brought to the edge of the "abyss of idealism." Wordsworth
goes on to tell us of how the boy, spending "many an hour in caves
forlorn,/ And 'mid the hollow depths of naked crags," could trace in

the "fixed and steady lineaments" of these phenomena "an ebbing and a

flowing mind,/ Expression ever varying!“+5 Wordsworth's description

89

of this paradoxical vision, in which the fixity of phenomena seen pp-
natural phenomena stands in opposition to, yet is somehow blended
with, the fluidity of these same phenomena simultaneously seen pg
mental phenomena, is subtly related, I believe, to a theme which was
discussed earlier in this chapter: how in the experience of the sub-
lime there is developed a structure of awareness in which the dualism
of mind and matter is experientially overcome. In Wordsworth's ac-
count of the developing consciousness of the Pedlar, the mediating
force is not a Sudden experience of the mind's extension into "vast-
ness," but the haunting memories of youthful encounters with the
sublime, with the "presence and the power/ Of greatness." These lin-
gering impressions provide the psychological foundation of a medita-
tive process in which nature's phenomena can become expressive of
mind--can be seen p§_mind--while at the same time remaining nature's
phenomena in their "fixed and steady lineaments." Wordsworth's medi-
ation, in other words, is not accomplished through the annihilation of
matter. Nature is not lost in the "abyss of idealism." On the con-
trary, as in "Tintern Abbey," a vision of mind is obtained by an ex-
plorer of nature's immanent places: "'mid the hollow depths of naked
crags."

Perhaps the culmination of the Pedlar's education at the hand
of nature occurs in the way in which nature corroborates the Christian
doctrine of immortality. Commenting on the boy's youthful exposure
to the Bible-centered orthodoxy of the Scottish Church, Wordsworth
writes:

Early had he learned
To reverence the volume that displays

90

The mystery, the life which cannot die . . . .46

But, Wordsworth immediately goes on, the truth of the Book of God and
its "written promise" of man's immortality is authenticated for the
Pedlar by his direct experience with nature's sublime objects. For
in the mountains did he feel his faith.

All things, responsive to the writing, there

Breathed immortality, revolving life,

And greatness still revolving; infinite:

There littleness was not; the least of things

Seemed infinite; and there his spirit shaped

Her prospects, nor did he believe,--he saw.

What wonder if his being thus became

Sublime and comprehensive!47

We can distinguish in this passage two related ways in which

nature assists in the corroboration of the Christian doctrine of im-
mortality. Both of these ways seem to involve the kind of self-
consciousness evoked in the experience of the sublime. First, there
is the corroboration of the article of faith by the feelings engen-
dered in the Pedlar by his being "in the mountains." Wordsworth
suggests that the written promise of God is in some way "Breathed"
again by nature's phenomena. These phenomena Speak, as it were, of
"revolving life,/ And greatness still revolving"--and buried in
Wordsworth's twice repeated participle here in the traditional symbol
of eternity: the circle. (Of course nature's testimony, as already
indicated, has to be understood as its power to elicit in the Pedlar
certain feelings. These feelings, Since they bear witness to the
immortal nature of man's soul, can be characterized as feelings
"about" the self or as a form of self-consciousness. We also note

that the Pedlar's vision is directed outward, upon "All things" which

are described as "responsive to the writing," that is, corroborating

91

and answering to the Bible's promise of immortality. The precise
nature of this act of corroboration thus can be understood as related
to that characteristic of sublime consciousness we have already dis-
cussed: how the mind, in the act of apprehending sublime phenomena,
comes to feel, explicitly or implicitly, the extent and nature of its
own powers. In the act of comprehending the eternal greatness of the
mountain landscape, the Pedlar grows aware of his own eternal great-
ness.

But not only is nature "responsive to the writing" of the
Christian Bible. The Pedlar himself actively answers to nature's
initial responsiveness. Out of the structure of consciousness which
nature's sublimity induces in him, the Pedlar becomes creative: "his
spirit shaped/ Her prospects, nor did he believe,--he p31." This
Shaping into visibility of man's immortal prospects can be distin-
guished as the second way in which the "written promise" is corrob-
orated. The grounds of assent have moved from the word to the emo-
tions to the eye. Not only, to begin with, does the Pedlar believe
in his immortality; not only is he then given feelings of his im-
mortality by nature's phenomena; but indeed, through his own creative
response, he finally comes to Egg in nature's phenomena an image of
his immortal nature. Sublime self-consciousness, in other words, is
displaced into nature and therefore becomes visible. The eternity
of mind is seen under the aspect of nature: the eternity of the
mountains is sensed as an image of the eternity of the self. And in
turn faith, which according to St. Paul is the substance of things un-

seen, is no longer necessary: "nor did he believe." The Pedlar moves

92

beyond the necessity of faith because his intuition of his own nature
takes on the character of an empirical act, a sensory encounter with
an externally existing objective world. Apperception, prompted by
perception, is "shaped" back into perception.48
Wordsworth suggests, in this account of how the Pedlar's "being"
became "sublime and comprehensive," a very close relationship between
sublime self-consciousness and the activity of the imagination--almost
as if such a Structure of consciousness were the source of imagina-
tion's operations.49 This connection is quite explicitly made by
Wordsworth in his "Preface to Poems (1815)." There,discussing the
shaping and creative functions of the imagination, the poet writes that
that power finds its greatest "delight" in the acts of "consolidating
numbers into unity, and dissolving and separating unity into numbers
. . ." Wordsworth goes on to observe that these actions are "alter-
nations proceeding from, and governed by, a sublime consciousness of
the soul in her own mighty and almost divine powers."50 Without at
this point going into the question of what Wordsworth exactly means by
his description of imagination's operations of consolidating numbers
into unity and of dissolving unity into number, we should note that
both transformations, or "alternations," find their source for Words-
worth in an act of self-consciousness which he designates as "sublime."
Now we cannot logically assume that this special structure of con-
sciousness is initiated by the mind's awareness of its imaginative
activity (though, to be sure, such an awareness may augment the sense

of self as sublime); for Wordsworth explicitly tells us that imagina-

tion's activity proceeds from--a1most as an effect proceeds from its

 

93

source--sublime self-consciousness. Thus we cannot assume that when
Wordsworth speaks of the "mighty and almost divine powers" of which
the mind becomes aware in the creative act, he is necessarily refer-
ring exclusively to the powers of the imagination to consolidate and
to dissolve. It would seem that the mind becomes reflexively aware
of its powers in a different, perhaps more inclusive way; and that
it is out of this initial and "sublime" self-awareness that imagina-
tion arises and proceeds to the delightful labor of shaping and cre-

"alternations" in phenomena.

ating
What then, in Wordsworthian terms, is sublime self-consciousness?
Answers to this question have obviously been suggested in the analysis
of the last few pages. But a more precise answer, and one which is
more immediately useful in a consideration of the question of the re-
lationship between imagination and sublime self-consciousness, can be
constructed, I believe, by examining Wordsworth's remarks, in the
"Preface to Poems (1815)," about what he considers to be the "grand
storehouses" in literature "of enthusiastic and meditative Imagina-
tion." These "storehouses" (and the metaphor seems to belong to that
family of dwelling-place metaphors examined in the preceding chapter)
are for Wordsworth "the prophetic and lyrical parts of the Holy Scrip-
tures, and the works of Milton; to which I cannot forbear to add those
of Spenser." Wordsworth explains that he selects these writers "in
preference to those of ancient Greece and Rome, because the anthropo-
morphitism of the Pagan religion subjected the minds of the greatest

poets in those countries too much to the bondage of definite form;

from which the Hebrews were preserved by their abhorrence of idolatry.

94

'This abhorrence was almost as strong in our great epic Poet, both
from the circumstances of his life, and from the constitution of his
mind. However imbued the surface might be with classical literature,
he was a Hebrew in soul; and all things tended in him towards the
sublime."51

Wordsworth's reasoning in this passage seems based upon a pro-
vocative series of equations. Reading these backwards, we might first
of all say that to have a mind like Milton's which tends "towards the
sublime" is to be a "Hebrew in soul? But to be a "Hebrew in soul" is
to have an "abhorrence of idolatry." And to have an "abhorrence of
idolatry" is not simply to reject the "anthropmorphitism of the Pagan
religion," but more generally it is to have a mind which refuses to be
"subjected . . . to the bondage of definite form." Telescoping these
equations, we might then say that, according to Wordsworth, a mind
which like Milton's tends "towards the sublime" is a mind which in its
conceptions and its imaginings tends to go beyond the limitations or
the "bondage" of any "definite form." Consciousness tending toward the
sublime experiences the freedom of having the indefinite as its direct
object of awareness.

Now Wordsworth writes in the same "Preface" that imagination,
the power which proceeds from sublime self-consciousness, "recoils from
everything but the plastic, the pliant, and the indefinite."52 Imagin-
ation, in other words, will exercise its shaping and creative functions
only with reference to those phenomena which likewise tend "towards the
sublime," that is to say, those phenomena which possess the potential

of escaping from the "bondage of definite form“’as they are grasped by

95

imaginative consciousness. And thus it Should be no wonder why in
"Tintern Abbey" Wordsworth experiences a "sense sublime" in an en-
counter with nothing more definite than a "something"--certainly as
plastic and as pliant an entity as imagination might wish. But, of
course, I have argued in the preceding chapter how this "something"
can be interpreted as the activity of Wordsworth's own mind ubiquitous-
ly interfusing itself with the images of the visible cosmos; and how,
therefore, Wordsworth's "sense sublime" of this "something" can
properly be described as an act of reflexive self-awareness.

We are now in a position to attempt a more precise description
of what sublime self-consciousness is for Wordsworth. It seems to be
an act of reflexive self-awareness in which the self becomes conscious
of the self without being "subjected . . . to the bondage of definite

form"; the self becomes aware of the self as nothing more precise than

a "something,"

as an entity neither defined for consciousness in any
fixed conceptual way, nor delineated for consciousness by means of any
specific, in-forming image. Sublime self-consciousness involves an
intuition of the self without a principle whereby this self-awareness
might be limited, either by a concept of the self or by an image of the
self. Translating this structure of consciousness into grammatical
terms, we might say that it is a self-awareness which lacks a predicate
complement. The fact of the self's reality is intuited, its presence
and existence are asserted; but this fact is in no way limited by any
simultaneously grasped and defining assertion about the nature of the

self: "I am," but not "I am x" or "I am y." My Coleridgean echo here

is not accidental, for in this structure of awareness we have a perfect

96

fusion of subject and object. Just as consciousness cannot limit its
awareness of self through a concept or an image, so it cannot consti-
tute itself as a distinct object of thought through a concept or an
image. The self is present to the self in a thoroughly unmediated
fashion: it is, in other words, apperceived. Minds which possess the
potential for such a structure of awareness are, in Wordsworth's words,
"truly from the Deity,/ For they are Powers." They possess a "con-
sciousness/ Of whom they are" which is "habitually infused/ Through
every image, and through every thought,/ And all impressions."53

These minds also possess an almost godlike liberty, for as long as
they remain in such a state of self-awareness, they will never find
their consciousness subjected to the bondage of any definite image,

or confining thought, or restricting impression. Latent in any spe-
cific act of sensation will be the indefinite reality intuited in the
act of apperception. Hidden in any definite perception will be the
sublime presence of a nearly divine "something" universally inter-
fused.

From this perspective it should not be surprising that sublime
self-consciousness is sometimes described by Wordsworth in metaphors
Suggesting an encounter with a completely blank, thoroughly open-
ended Space--a plunge into the "abyss of idealism" or a glimpse into
a "haunt" which is a "blinder vacancy" than the mythological "Chaos"
or the "darkest pit of lowest Erebus." We might also note that
Wordsworth's metaphors of self-consciousness are, in one fundamental
respect, directly in the tradition of those metaphors of the mind's

infinite expansion which are so frequently found in the eighteenth-

97

century commentaries on the sublime. Both sets of metaphors are ex-
pressive of a dissolution of the mind's sense of itself as a fixed

and limited entity.54

Both sets of metaphors are also expressive of
the vertigo of sublime self-consciousness, a vertigo brought on by
the intrusion into awareness of a sense of the mind's "mighty and
almost divine powers."

Nor should it be surprising why imagination for Wordsworth
"recoils from everything but the plastic, the pliant, and the in-
definite." In this act of recoil imagination shows that it is indeed
"governed by" a "sublime consciousness of the soul" of its own un-
defined and therefore unlimited nature. In this act of recoil imagi-
nation, reflecting the structure of awareness in which it finds its
origin, refuses to submit the mind's freedom to the bondage of defi-
nite form. More precisely, we might say that imagination is the power
whereby the mind does not lose its undefined sense of self in any act
of specific perception. Imagination is the power whereby the mind
sustains and marries its undefined sense of self with the phenomena
provided by nature; these phenomena are immanent and are filled, as it
were, with sublime self-consciousness. The Wordsworth of "Tintern
Abbey" discovers the most intense fruition of imagination's mediating

power in his encounter with a "something" in-dwelling throughout the

vast expanses of Sky and ocean. The Pedlar of Book I of The Excursion

 

shapes his intuition of his immortal nature into the visibility of the

sublime landscape of the hills of Athol.

98

NOTES: CHAPTER III

1I might also argue that the pursuit of such historical causal-
ities is but another version of the reductio pd doctrinam, the dangers
of which approach in the case of Wordsworth I discuss in my introduc-
tory chapter. To expand on those remarks: the attempt to view the
poet's work gpp specie doctrinae historicae seems to me to express a
certain unwillingness to face Up to the full implications of the kind of
claim Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," and certain of his other poems,
make upon the reader; a claim by the poet that he has indeed "felt,"
not read about, a "sense sublime," and that the sublime is a distin-
guishable category of his conscious experience--regard1ess of whose
theories he may have read or heard about. Furthermore, as The Prelude
clearly tells us, many of the poet's encounteniwith what he himself
characterizes as the "sublime" occurred at an age in his life when he
was not likely to have been familiar with, let alone influenced by,
contemporary aesthetic speculation. I do not mean to suggest that
Wordsworth's use of the term "sublime," either in his poetry or in his
prose, does not indicate a familiarity with the fashionable critical
discourse of his age. But I do reject the notion that Wordsworth's
actually felt "sense sublime" was primarily constituted by his know-
ledge of a certain theory of the sublime and therefore can be "ex-
plained," as an effect can be "explained" in terms of its cause, by
reference to the original categories of this theory--if only we can
find the right one!

For an instance of the way in which too great a preoccupation
with showing historical "source" and "influence" can lead to distor-
tion, see Arthur Beatty's William Wordsworth: His Doctrine and Art 32.
their Historical Relations (Madison, Wisc., 1927). This book attempts
to explain, on the premise of direct historical "influence," Wordsworth
in terms of the associational psychology of David Hartley. Without
denying a relationship between Hartley's thought and Wordsworth's poe-
try, I nevertheless submit that the poet who emerges in Beatty's pages
frequently bears little resemblance to the Wordsworth a more careful
reader can discover in the poetry; and this distortion, it seems to me,
is the direct result of Beatty's anxiety to perform a reductio 29.E2£'
trinam historicam. This charge, I might add, is now a commonplace in
Wordsworthian studies and needs no great specification here. For an
instance, however, I might point out that Beatty never really faces the
problem of the absolute incompatibility between Hartley's necessitari-
anism and Wordsworth's frequent claims of the mind's autonomy and rad-
ical freedom.

 

 

 

 

2I owe the term "phenomenological archetype" to Murray Krieger
who suggested it to me in conversation as a way of characterizing my
mediating assumption in this and the next chapter. Obviously Professor
Krieger is in no way responsible for the results of my assumption. I
know of no explicit study of the use of the concept of a phenomeno-
logical archetype in literary studies--a1though the practise of Georges
Poulet is clearly based upon the concept. The general notion of type,
as this notion can be used for purposes of criticism, is discussed by

99

E. D. Hirsch, Jr., in the introduction to his Wordsworth and

Schelling (New Haven, 1960), pp. 8-14. In that book, of course,

Hirsch is concerned with describing what he calls a "Weltanschauung
type." He points out, in defense of his method, that the study and
description of types is a common procedure in many disciplines. My
stipulative assumption of a really distinguishable type of conscious-
ness which can be called "sublime consciousness" also grows out of this
common procedure. I am willing to admit that any phenomenological
archetype may be nothing more than a useful, organizing fiction--a way of
provoking revealing analogies.

3Discussions of the relationship between Wordsworth and Kant can
be found in James Benziger's Images pf Eternity (Carbondale, 1962),
pp. 53-54; and in James Scoggins' Imagination and Fancy (Lincoln, 1966),
pp. 154-160. Neither discussion, in my judgment, probes into the sub-
ject as deeply as it might; neither really attempts a precise phenom-
enological mediation between the poet and the Critigue pf Judgment--
in which work of course Kant develops his theory of the sublime. I
resist the temptation to introduce Kant into this chapter principally
to avoid complicating even further an already complicated terminology;
besides, the subject could easily be developed, and deserves to be so
developed, into a separate study.

Brief discussion of the relationship between Burke's theory of
the sublime and Wordsworth can be found in Raymond Dexter Haven's Thg_
Mind pf‘g Poet, I (Baltimore, 1941), 47-48, 52-53; and in J. T.
Boulton's introduction to his edition of Burke's A Philosophical
Enquiry into the Origin pf_pp£ Ideas pf the Sublime and Beautiful
(New York, 1958), pp. xcix-cii.

My exclusion of Burke from this chapter is not intended to deny
the possibility of a phenomenological mediation between Burke's "aes-
thetics of terror" and Wordsworth's experience of the sublime; certain-
ly my discussion of Wordsworthian "awe" in the previous chapter is ~
suggestive in this direction. Such a mediation, however, can only be
made on a very high level of phenomenological abstraction, a level
which will enable us to overlook the explicit sensationalism of
Burke's theory. I suggest that an approach to the problem might be
developed out of a careful analysis of what Burke means when he speaks
of a "delightful terror" which for him is the essential ingredient of
the experience of the sublime. This terror, according to Burke, is of
a very Special kind; it ought not to be confused with the terror
aroused because of an immediate and seemingly inescapable threat to
one's well-being. Burke indicates this distinction in his observation
that when "danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of
giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain distances,
and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are delightful

." (Ed. gi£,, p. 40). In other words, the terror of the sublime
must be mediated by a simultaneous recognition that the self is not
really about to be destroyed: the terror ought not to be "conversant
about the present destruction of the person" (p. 136). .Such a
terror is thus related to those "Passions belonging to self-preservation'
which Burke claims to be the "strongest of all the passions" (p. 51).
And such a terror can be characterized by Burke as "delightful" because,

 

 

100

as he tells us early in his Enquiry, he thinks the word "delight"
ought to be used "to express the sensation which accompanies the re-
moval of pain or danger . . ." (p. 37). For Burke, it would there-
fore seem, the experience of the sublime is curiously double, in-
volving both a painful sense of the potential destruction of the self
and a delightful sense of security, a sense of the self's "removal"
from the imminence of death.

Now,if we go on to characterize this structure of consciousness
as essentially dialectica1--a curiously intense mixture of a sense of
personal danger and mortality with a sense of personal transcendence--
we are in a position, I think, to approach Wordsworth. The dialectic
of this phenomenological polarity seems to be involved in a number of
the poet's more memorable experiences. I think especially of the
"spots of time" passages in The Prelude which so often tell of
Wordsworth's encountering the terrible and the threatening and p£_phg
same time somehow finding implicit in these encounters a sense of the
power of his own mind to attain to a visionary state in which the fear
of personal danger is overcome. One way of looking at "Resolution and
Independence" might be to see it as a poem which tells of the move-
ment of the poet's mind from an anguished preoccupation with thoughts
of death to a state in which, because of the strangely visionary
resonances of the leech-gatherer, the fear of death is transformed into
a triumphant sense of man's ability to live in spite of the encroach-
ments of mortality. Perhaps the leech-gatherer, as a living emblem
both of the terrible ravages of time and of a man's power to resist
these ravages, might be taken as a visible expression of that dialec-
tical structure of consciousness in which the terrors of annihilation
are transformed into a sense of secure endurance. And perhaps, there-
fore, it is Wordsworth's chance meeting with the leech-gatherer which
provides the poet with what might be called a living emotional para-
digm in terms of which he can organize his own emotions and finally
stabilize himself in the face of his own fear of death.

Obviously in the preceding paragraph I merely sketch a possible
way of mediating between Burke and Wordsworth; the subject deserves
much further analysis than I can here give to it. I use this note
principally to indicate that the notion of a structure of conscious-
ness in which there is a paradoxical combination of a sense of per-
sonal mortality with a sense of personal transcendence, is a notion
which can be elicited out of Burke's analysis of the "delightful
terror" of the sublime,znd which, in turn, might prove to be dia-
grammatically useful in approaching some of Wordsworth's poems.

 

4For such a systematic and comprehensive summary, the standard
work remains Samuel H. Monk's The Sublime, A Study pf_Critical Theories
ip'XVIII-Century England (Ann Arbor, 1960).

 

 

 

5The Imagination a§_a_MeanS pf Grace (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1960)
p. 105.

 

9A3 Essay pp the Sublime, The Augustan Reprint Society, No. 43
(Los Angeles, 1953), p. 4. Originally published in London in 1747.

 

7A_Course pf Lectures pp_0ratory and Criticism (London, 1777),

 

101

p. 151.

8Ap_Essay pp Taste, 3rd ed. (Edinburgh, 1780), p. 12.

%A Treatise pf Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford,
1888), p. 432.

 

10The Spectator, No. 412; italics mine. Monk points out that for
Addison greatness "is identical with sublimity" (p. 57).

11Walter J. Ong, S. J., would probably see in this use of spa-
tial metaphors but another manifestation of the tendency to conceptu-
alize mental operations in terms of visual and Spatial analogies, a
tendency which he argues begins to dominate western thinking about
thinking with the quantification of late medieval logic. See his
"System, Space, and Intellect in Renaissance Symbolism," The Barbarian
Within (New York, 1962), pp. 68-85. Certainly British eighteenth-
century empiricism is dominated by the Lockean conception of thinking
as a kind of seeing. This analogy can be seen explicitly working in
Hume's description of the moral judgment: "It has been observ'd, that
nothing is ever present to the mind but its perceptions; and that all
the actions of seeing, hearing, judging, loving, hating and thinking,
fall under this denomination. The mind can never exert itself in any
action, which we may not comprehend under the term of perception; and
consequently that term is no less applicable to those judgments, by
which we distinguish moral good and evil, than to every other operation
of the mind. To approve of one character, to condemn another, are only
so many different perceptions" (A Treatise pf_Human Nature, pp. 315.,
p. 456). For Hume, it would seem, the metaphor of thinking as a kind
of seeing is universal in its applicability to the analysis of con-
sciousness: "For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I
call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other,
of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I
never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can
observe any thing but the perception" (ibid., p. 252). It might be
argued that implicit in this last statement by Hume--and perhaps im-
plicit in the whole British empirical psychology committed as it was to
the Lockean analogy of thinking as a kind of seeing--is the impossibili-
ty of any adequate theory of apperception, of any theory of the subject
grasping the subject 923 Subject. Reflexive consciousness for Hume
would logically always have to be thought of as an object being seen.
In the act of introspection, in other words, the self would always have
to be perceived; it could never be apperceived. Now from this point of
view--and granting the thesis of this essay, namely, that for Words-
worth the activity of his imagination is grounded in an act of apper-
ception--we should not be surprised to find the poet moving toward the
visionary as he moves from images of the eye to "images" of the ear:
precisely the action of the first stanza of "The Solitary Reaper."
Nor should we be surprised that Wordsworth is frequently preoccupied,
as he tries to explain poetic consciousness, with dark, open-ended
spaces or with unseen, dislocated sounds. Both sets of phenomena might
be taken as the poet's expressive vehicles of a consciousness grasping

 

 

102

itself as an active subject, and refusing to transform itself into a
"visible" object of perception. Wordsworth's preoccupation with
"immanence"--discussed in the previous chapter--thus might further be
understood as a search for a way of conceptualizing consciousness in
a manner undreamt of in Locke's philosophy: the unseen depths of
visible things are emblematic of those operations of the mind which
cannot be explained according to Locke's basic analogy without their
being explained out of existence. From this point of view we might
further understand why, as I state at the conclusion of the previous
chapter, Wordsworth's "God" must be as hidden, i.e., as unseen, as
St. Paul's.

12The Philosophy pf Symbolic Forms, Volume Three: The

Phenomenology pf_Know1edge, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven, 1957),
p. 144.

 

 

 

 

13For a discussion of the theoretical difficulties of Cartesian
dualism, see Basil Willey's The Seventeenth Centupy Background (New
York, 1953L pp. 89-91. Of course sublime consciousness, as described
at this point in my essay, offers no theoretical solution to the problems
of dualism.

 

14Gerard,‘_c_)p. cit., p. 12.

15The Spectator, No. 420.

 

16The Prelude, III, 63. From the point of view of the history of
ideas, it is indeed appropriate that Wordsworth applies these words to
Newton who of course, more than any other thinker, "created" the infinite
Space explored by many theorists of the sublime.

 

17Poetical Works, IV, 463.
18Cassirer,‘gp..gi£., p. 143.

19Tuveson, pp. £15., p. 105.

ZQgripeipis (Berkeley, 1946), p. 544.
21Characteristics (London, 1787), II, 345, 343.

22Qp’Great Writing(gn the Sublime), trans. G. M. A. Grube, The
Library of Liberal Arts, No. 79 (New York, 1957), p. 10

 

 

23Baillie, 9p: ci£:, p. 7.
24Ibid., p. 4.
251bid.

26Ibid., p. 6

7
The same tendency to explain the quality of a mind in quanti-

103

tative terms can be found in the following remarks of John Dennis:
"Men are mov'd for two Reasons, either because they have weak Minds
and Souls, that are capable of being mov'd by little Objects and
consequently by little and ordinary Ideas; or because they have Great-
ness of Soul and Capacity, to discern and feel the great ones; for the
Enthusiastick Passions being caus'd by the Ideas, it follows, that the
more the Soul is capable of receiving Ideas whose Objects are truly
great and wonderful, the greater will the enthusiasm be that is caus'd
by those Ideas. From whence it follows, that the greater the Soul is,
and the larger the Capacity, the more will it be mov 'd by religious
ideas" 7The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry, in Critical Works, ed.
Edward Niles Hooker (Baltimore, 1939- -1943), I, 340/

 

28Night Thoughts, 1x, 11. 913-914, 1013-1014.

 

29Gerard, pp. £15., p. 12.
30Hume,.gp.lpi§., pp. 433-434.
3¥ip3g., p. 436.

32Priestley, 2p..gi£., p. 151.

33The Prelude (1805), VII, 718-720.

 

34Certainly for Baillie simplicity is a desired characteristic
of the sublime: "The Sublime, when it exists simple and unmixed, by
filling the Mind with one vast and uniform Idea, affects it with a
solemn Sedateness; by this means the Soul itself becomes, as it were,
one simple gpand Sensation" (9p: pip,, p. 33). Burke states quite
categorically that he knows "of nothing sublime which is not some
modification of power" (9p. gi£., p. 64).

 

 

35The Prelude (1805), VII, 721-729.

 

36Since Wordsworth so often Speaks of the eternity of the mind,
I see no distortion in equating, as I do here, the term "mind" and the
term "soul." It can generally be said that "mind" in Wordsworth, when
seen under the aspect of its own eternity, is frequently characterized
by the poet as "soul."

37The paradigmatic and revelatory function of natural phenomena
is quite explicitly described in these lines from the 1850 Prelude:

Think, how the everlasting streams and woods,
Stretched and still stretching far and wide, exalt
The roving Indian, on his desert sands:

What grandeur not unfelt, what pregnant show

Of beauty, meets the sun-burnt Arab's eye:

And, as the sea propels from zone to zone,

Its currents; magnifies its shoals of life

Beyond all compass; spreads, and sends aloft
Armies of clouds,--even so, its powers and aspects

104

Shape for mankind, by principles as fixed,
The views and aspirations of the soul
To majesty.

(VII, 745-756)

(DeSelincourt--or perhaps it was Wordsworth--mispunctuates in l. 748.
The colon seems properly to belong after "roving Indian," leaving "on
his desert sands" to the sun-burnt Arab.)

38The Excursion, I, 108, 77-80. All references to this poem
are to the version appearing in Volume V of Poetical Works.

 

 

39L1. 127-129, 132, 135-139.
4011. 141-142.
41L1. 144-148.

42Poetical Works, V, 13.

 

43The ambiguities of the term "image" in Wordsworth's poetry is
one of the central preoccupations of C. C. Clarke's Romantic Paradox
(New York, 1963).

 

44DeSelincourt's note is helpful here: "It is generally stated
that the images of dreams are vague and indistinct and lack colour. W.'s
experience was the opposite" (Ppetical Works, V, 411).

45L1. 160-163.
46L1. 223-225.

47L1. 226-234.

48Another way of understanding how the Pedlar finds "evidence"
for his immortality by contemplating the mountains' sublime forms might
be developed through an analysis of the phenomenological affinities
between sublime consciousness and what Cassirer calls "mythical con-
sciousness." Such a consciousness, according to Cassirer, "refuses to
draw a distinction which is not inherent in the immediate content of
experience, but which results only from reflection on the empirical
conditions of life, that is, from a specific form of causal analysis.

. . all reality is taken only as it is given in the immediate impres-
sion. . . ." Thus, for such an "undifferentiated" and "unreflecting"
consciousness, it "is not immortality, but mortality that must be
'proved,' i.e. that must little by little be ascertained theoretically,
through dividing lines whigh progressive reflection draws in the content
of immediate experience" /The Philosophy pf_§ymbolic Forms, Volume Two:
Mythical Thought, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven, 1955), p. 32]. Now,
if we recall that according to eighteenth-century theorists one of the
principal effects of the sublime is "astonishment," and if we accept
Burke's not untypical description of astonishment as that "state of the
soul" in which "the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it

 

 

 

 

 

 

105

cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object
which employs it" (92;.Eifs: p. 57), then we might argue that sublime
consciousness is similar to mythical consciousness in at least this
one respect: both involve structures of consciousness in which, in
the words of Cassirer, "all reality is taken only as it is given in
the immediate impression." For neither kinds of consciousness, there-
fore, is there the possibility of those "reflections on the empirical
conditions of life" which can lead to the judgment that beyond the
vividness of the "immediate impression" is the prospect of death. The
Pedlar in the mountains, in other words, is "astonished" into a mythi-
cal structure of consciousness in which the idea of his own death is
impossible. Likewise, the mountains are seen as"eterna1" because the
reflective judgment that they might indeed have an end in time is not
possible for that state of subjective awareness which these mountains
elicit in consciousness. Obviously the analogies that might be drawn
between sublime consciousness and mythical consciousness deserve care-
ful analysis, especially with reference to Wordsworth whose most sin-
cerely felt religious pronouncements quite frequently grow out of
mental experiences he himself characterizes as "sublime." Obvious also
is the necessity of finding some way of accommodating the analogy
sketched here to the Burkean position that the experience of the sub-
lime involves a vivid intuition of the mortality of the subject. See
n. 3 above.

 

49The notion that in the experience of the sublime the fancy or
the imagination is stirred to some sort of answering action is a common-
place found in many eighteenth-century commentaries. Perhaps the notion
grows out of Longinus' remark that one of the tests of the rhetorical
sublime is whether the passage in question provokes in the mind of the
reader "reflections which reach beyond what was said . . ." (pp. pip.,
p. 10). In Archibald Alison’s Essays pp the Nature and Principles pf
Taste, 5th ed. (Edinburgh, 1817), we find the observation that the true
experiencing of sublime emotion is not possible unless "our imagination
is seized, and our fancy busied in the pursuit of all those trains of
thought" which Should have been awakened by the original perception of
the sublime object (I, 5).

 

50Literary Criticism, p. 161. We can note how for Wordsworth these
actions of the imagination are themselves productive of the sublime. He
writes, in his Guide through the District pf_£pp_Lakes, ed. W. M. Merchant
(London, 1951), that "sublimity will never be wanting, where the sense of
innumerable multitude is lost in, and alternates with that of intense
unity. . ." (p. 123).

 

51Literary Criticism, p. 162. Coleridge sees a Similar relation-
ship between the Hebrews and sublimity: "Could you ever discover any-
thing sublime in our sense of the term, in the classic Greek literature?
Sublimity is Hebrew by birth." Table Talk and Omniana,ed. T. Ashe
(London, 1884), p. 174.

 

 

52LiterapyCriticism, p. 163.

 

106

53The Prelude (1805), x111, 106-107, 108-111.

 

. 54And insofar as WOrdsworth's metaphors are of a space which is
dark and open-ended (or immanent), they in fact present a mind which
cannot be visualized, or converted into an object of thought as if it
were an object of some inner "perception." See n. 11 above.

CHAPTER IV
THE INTUITION OF EXISTENCE

Samuel Taylor Coleridge has not bequeathed to us a perfectly
developed theory of the sublime. We must instead be content with what
he has scattered throughout his often fragmentary work--a legacy com-
posed of a number of extraordinarily provocative comments on the sub-
ject, comments which at times seem to be suggestively involved with
his deepest researches into the nature of the mind and the power of the
imagination.

My purpose in this chapter is to consider these random specula-
tions of Coleridge, not so much in order to pull them together into an
appearance of consistency and encompassing range-~an appearance which
perhaps they do not finally deserve--but in order to explore the ways
in which these speculations will help me to extend my own analysis of
sublime consciousness in Wordsworth.1 I plan to mediate between the
theory of Coleridge and the practice of Wordsworth in much the same way
I mediated between theory and poet in the preceding chapter: not by
arguing "source" or "influence," but on the basis of the assumption
that the experience of the sublime is indeed a distinguishable type of
conscious experience and therefore deserves to be described as such.
This assumption enables me to formulate and pursue the following ques-
tions: what contribution has Coleridge made toward a description of
what seem to be the fundamental structures of consciousness in the ex-
perience of the sublime? How does Coleridge help us to deepen and

extend our understanding of the phenomenological archetype delineated

107

108

in the preceding chapter? And, finally, in what ways is Coleridge's
analysis of the sublime heuristic for a treatment of the question of
the relationship of self-consciousness and imagination in Wordsworth?
What I hope principally to show through a consideration of these
questions is that Coleridge, in his own theoretical way, seems to
corroborate my analysis of the Wordsworthian "sense sublime" so far
developed in this essay, especially with respect to my central asser-
tion that Wordsworth's testimony of an encounter with a ubiquitously
in-dwelling "something" is in fact testimony descriptive of an intense-
ly visionary act of apperception in which the poet dramatically encoun-

ters his own subjectivity.

--2--

Just as many eighteenth-century theorists of the sublime argue
that sublime consciousness is induced in an attempt by the mind to
"comprehend” or "grasp" something which is too large for its capacity
(the infinite space of the Newtonian heavens, for example), so
Coleridge sees sublime consciousness as necessarily involving an en-
counter between the mind and, in the words of Clarence DeWitt-Thorpe,

a "form lwhich7 escapes successful apprehension."2 In his marginal
notes to Herder's Kalligone Coleridge remarks that a ”whole (a visual
whole, I mean) . . . cannot be sublime. A mountain in a cloudless sky,
its summit smit with the sunset, is a beautiful, a magnificent object:
the same with its summit hidden by clouds and seemingly blended with
the sky, while mists and floating vapours igncompass it, is sublimé7."3
Coleridge's point seems to be that it is not the vastness as such of

the mountain which functions as an occasion for the experience of sub-

109

limity. Instead, it is the fact that the perceptual boundaries of
the mountain are obscured which allows for the experience and which
permits him, as an aesthetician concerned with the precise use of
terms, to designate the mountain as "sublime." We might generalize
from Coleridge's observation and say that for Coleridge the intended
object of sublime consciousness must be in some way undefined, lacking
in observable limits, and therefore not exhibiting a precisely deline-
ated spatial identity. Such an object may not, in the words of
Cassirer, ”bear witness to its reality . . . by occupying a segment of
space from which it excludes everything else."4 On the contrary, its
status as the intended object of sublime consciousness involves an
experience of a space which is open-ended. Or as Coleridge puts it in
one of his numerous attempts to distinguish the beautiful from the
sublime: "Nothing not shapely . . . can be called beautiful: nothing
that has a shape can be sublime except by metaphor §b_occasione §§_gfgy
So true it is, that those objects whose shape most recedes from Shape-
liness are commonly the exciting occasions."5
Coleridge indicates that he found a number of such "exciting
occasions" in the gloomy and receding spaces of the Gothic cathedral.
He observes that "Gothic art is sublime. On entering a cathedral, I
am filled with devotion and with awe; I am lost to the actualities
that surround me, and my whole being expands into the infinite; earth
and air, nature and art, all swell up into eternity, and the only sen-
sible impression left is, 'that I am nothingI'"6 This passage is
extraordinarily rich and even puzzling in its implications. First of

all, we might speculate that this experience of the sublime depends

110

upon a situation—-an architecturally enforced and controlled obscurity--
in which shapes tend inevitably to recede from shapeliness. Second,
the "actualities" of the cathedral, precisely insofar as they recede
from shapeliness and can no longer therefore "bear witness" to their
reality by occupying an excluding and exclusive segment of space, be-
come "lost" to the observer. That is to say, he can overlook--simply,
in some way, look beyond--these "actualities" insofar as they appear
spatially diffused and open-ended. Their identity, as it were, pours
out through the gaps in their spatial boundaries. Third, the dis-
solution of the spatial identities of the objects of perception seems
to lead to a dissolution of a sense of a fixed spatial identity on the
part of the subject. Insofar as these objects or "actualities" phenom-
enally dissolve into the Gothic gloom, they no longer "surround" the
subject and thus no longer provide a means whereby the subject might
generate a sense of his own spatial exclusiveness and identity. By
becoming "lost to the actualities that surround" him, he also loses
his sense of the way in which his presence is delimited in space.
Hence the subject can feel his "whole being" expanding "into the in-
finite." It is now the turn of the subject to feel his spatial iden-
tity, as it were, pouring out through the gaps created in his spatial
boundaries by his losing his awareness of the "actualities that sur-
round," and therefore spatially define, him.

We see of course in Coleridge's use of the term "expands" an
echo of the habit of eighteenth-century theorists to speak of con-
sciousness in spatial metaphors. And with respect to Coleridge's use

of the metaphor we can remark that he seems to be indicating the same

lll

phenomenon spoken of, in one way or another, by so many eighteenth-
century theorists; namely, that sublime consciousness involves a
radical alteration in self-consciousness. One way of characterizing
this alteration is to say that the self now becomes aware of itself,
potentially at least, as deserving to be designated as "sublime"
according to the way in which Coleridge himself insists that term be
applied. Insofar as the self feels itself expanding "into the in-
finite," quite obviously it senses itself as approaching, in some
metaphoric way, a state in which it may no longer sense itself as in
any way possessing a "shape." The notion of an infinite shape, like

the notion of an enclosed infinite space, is a contradiction in terms.
Thus, by sensing itself as having expanded into infinity, the self will
have fulfilled one of the necessary conditions for a Coleridgean desig-
nation of itself as "sublime": it will have developed a sense of it-
self as having infinitely receded "from shapeliness." (In this para-
graph, the reader should note, I am not trying precisely to describe

the structure of consciousness behind Coleridge's metaphor of the mind's
expansion, but am simply attempting to suggest, through a kind of meta-
phoric logic, the possible applicability to that structure of conscious-
ness of the term "sublime.")

Another way of characterizing this alteration in self-conscious-
ness is to say that it seems to include a growing sense of the self's
becoming, in one fundamental respect, identical with what is not the
self: "all swell up into eternity." Subject and object can become one
in the act of swelling into eternity because, from a phenomenological

point of view, both subject and object no longer possess a delimited

112

spatial identity. Precisely because the phenomenal space of both
subject and object does not exclude everything else, a potential is
established for consciousness whereby the mind might sense everything
as merging into or including everything else. Thus a structure of
awareness is induced in which contraries can be resolved: not only do
subject and object become one through corresponding losses of their
spatial exclusiveness and identities (i.e., from the point of view of
the observer in the Gothic gloom), but even "earth and air, nature and
art" can move toward a reconciliation of their traditional conflicts
insofar as these phenomena become caught up in a consciousness by the
self of itself expanding "into the infinite." It would seem, there-
fore, that sublime consciousness for Coleridge--at least the kind of
sublime consciousness provoked in him on "entering a cathedra1"--is a
structure of awareness in which phenomena tend to undergo the same

sort of changes that, according to the theory of the Biographia, they

 

undergo when exposed to the esemplastic power of the imagination:
they are dissolved, diffused; and phenomenal contraries move in some
way toward reconciliation.

Finally, the passage suggests that for Coleridge the experience
of the Gothic sublime confines the range of awareness to nothing but
self-consciousness--and that of a very special kind: " . . . the only
sensible impression left is, 'that I am nothing!"" Since Coleridge in-
dicates that this "only sensible impression" is the culminating inten-
sity of his whole encounter with Gothic sublimity, we are free to
characterize this sense of the self's nothingness as, paradoxically

enough, a version of sublime self-consciousness. And now of course

113

we are struck by a puzzle. How can a sense of the self expanding
"into the infinite" develop into a sense of the self as "nothing"?
Why does Coleridge not go the way of so many eighteenth-century
theorists and characterize the culminating intensity of sublime self-
consciousness as a kind of phenomenal apotheosis--an exhilarating in-
trusion into awareness of a sense of the mind's quasi-divine power and
capacity? Why instead does he use language which could be taken to
indicate a kind of self-awareness at the furthest possible remove from
a sense of self as godlike or nearly so? Certainly to feel vividly
and exclusively that the self is "nothing" hardly seems to be an
appropriate sentiment for a creature who, just prior to this "only
sensible impression," experienced his "whole being" expanding "into
the infinite" and therefore expanding, from an eighteenth-century point
of view, into a resemblance to the deity diffused throughout the in-
finite reaches of Newtonian space. Another, more diagrammatic way of
characterizing the puzzle here would be to say that sublime self-
consciousness undergoes a simultaneously centrifugal and centripetal
action: the sense of the self centrifugally expanding "into the in-
finite" is accompanied by a centripetal constriction of awareness to
the self alone, indeed to a self of which there is finally no predica-
tion possible beyond the term "nothing." In other words, sublime self-
awareness is reduced to a statement about the self to the effect that
there is nothing to be said about the self.7

The resolution of this puzzle obliges us to take an analytical
look at some of Coleridge's other comments on the sublime. This anal-

ysis will, I believe, corroborate in many respects the description of

114

the Coleridgean sublime so far presented. More significantly, it will
enable us gradually to move beyond an undue reliance on spatial meta-
phors for the development of our analysis, and thus to move toward a
more precise statement of the phenomenological structure of the
Coleridgean experience of sublimity. Throughout what follows the pri-
mary focus of investigation will be upon the question of what relation-
ship this experience has to self-consciousness. In working out an
answer to this question, I hope to show that the sense of the self as
"nothing" can be taken as an important characteristic of what sublime
self-consciousness seems to be for Coleridge--that indeed the sense

of self as "nothing" might be taken with certain qualifications as the

tenor of the metaphor of the expanding self.

--3_-

In one of his essays for The Friend, Coleridge lays down the

 

postulate that "deep feeling has a tendency to combine with obscure
ideas, in preference to distinct and clear notions . . . ." He goes

on to speak of certain "deep feelings which belong . . . to those
obscure ideas that are necessary to the moral perfection of the human
being . . . ." And he insists that these feelings ought to be reserved
"for objects, which their very sublimity renders indefinite, no less
than their indefiniteness renders them sublime,--namely, to the ideas
of being, form, life, the reason, the law of conscience, freedom, im-
mortality, God."8 Coleridge here suggests that the experience of the
sublime is derived from an encounter with obscurity and indefiniteness.
Such an encounter is also the occasion of "deep feelings," which pre-

sumably cannot be so successfully occasioned by whatever is "distinct

115

and clear."9 Here, I believe, we see Coleridge postulating for the
world of ideas what we have already seen him postulating for the world
external to the mind--the proposition that "nothing that has a shape

can be sublime,"

and this proposition's corollary that "those objects
whose shape most recedes from shapeliness are commonly the exciting
occasions." Now of course an idea cannot be said to have a "shape" if
we take the term to apply exclusively to the physical contours of an
object. But by an easy and obvious metaphoric extension, an idea can
be said to have a'shape" insofar as it possesses the Cartesian virtues
of clarity and distinctness. Conversely, therefore, to the extent that
an idea becomes obscure and indistinct, it takes on a metaphorical re-
semblance to those objects in the physical universe "whose shape most
recedes from shapeliness . . . ." And just as these shapeless objects
(a cloud-draped mountain, for example) are "exciting occasions" of
sublime emotion, so certain obscure and indistinct ideas (the idea of
God, for example) have "a tendency to combine" with "deep feelings."
But what I believe to be most worthy of notice in this passage
is Coleridge's suggestion of a reciprocal relationship between the
quality of being indefinite and the quality of being sublime. He says
that not only is it the "indefiniteness" of certain ideas which "ren-
ders them sublime," but also it is "their very sublimity" which "ren-
ders" them "indefinite." I think that we can generalize from
Coleridge's statement of this reciprocity the proposition that for
him the kind of "indefiniteness" he proposes as a necessary character-

istic of the sublime object (whether this object be an idea or some-

thing in the external world) is not necessarily a characteristic of

116

that object taken in itself; rather, this ”indefiniteness" is largely
a function of the relationship between subject and object, or between
thinker and idea, or between observer and observed. To put this an-
other way: whenever anything is grasPed as sublime, it necessarily
takes on the characteristic of appearing "indefinite," whether or not
it possesses this characteristic in itself apart from any relationship
to a subject. The quality of "indefiniteness" possessed by the sublime
object thus might be exclusively phenomenal, an "appearance" consti-
tuted by the way in which that object stands in relationship to the
subject. And when we find Coleridge categorically stating that "nothing
that has a shape can be sublime," I suspect that we best understand him
as saying that nothing can be sublime which cannot, in some way, be
made to take on a kind of phenomenal shapelessness or indefiniteness.
What all this suggests is that for Coleridge the true source of
the sublimity of anything, physical object or idea, is always the sub-
ject. Thus Coleridge writes: "I meet, I find the Beautifu1--but I give,
contribute, or rather attribute the Sublime. No object of Sense is
sublime in itself; but only as far as I make it a symbol of some Idea.
The circle is a beautiful figure in itself; it becomes sublime, when
I contemplate eternity under that figure . . . ."10 Now we can easily
see, from the point of view of Coleridge's previously cited distinction
between the beautiful as necessarily shapely and the sublime as neces-
sarily shapeless, why the circle can be taken by him as a "beautiful
figure in itself." The circle is found to be, of and by itself, a
figure of exact proportions. (And Coleridge here suggests that beauty

is an objective property of things, at least insofar as the beautiful

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object does not seem to require the subject to add anything to that
object.) But how this same circle can also become sublime for Cole-
ridge is not so immediately evident. Clearly the circle, even as
symbol of the idea of eternity, remains an eminently shapely figure in
a purely objective sense. The resolution of this problem, I believe,
requires us to understand that Coleridge's use of the term "shape," in
the proposition that "nothing that has shape can be sublime," finally
refers not to the objective shape of a thing, but rather to the phenom-
enal shape a thing may assume when regarded by the subject from a cer-
tain point of view. The circle, precisely because of its function as
a symbol of the idea of eternity, is now involved with an idea which,
as we have already seen, Coleridge would regard as "obscure" and "in-
definite"--and therefore sublime. We might say that the circle, though
retaining its purely objective shape, does indeed recede from shapeli-
ness to the extent that it comes to function as a phenomenon symbolic
of the obscure and indefinite idea of eternity. For consciousness the
image of the circle as objectively shapely recedes, as it were, into
the obscurity of the idea of eternity. The circle comes to be seen
not for what it is, but for what it represents as a symbol; and as a
phenomenon, therefore, its objective shape sinks away into the in-
definiteness of its symbolic dimension. To the extent the circle
functions as a symbol, its objective shape simultaneously takes on a
kind of subjective shapelessness, and thus the circle is rendered

sublime.11

Now, in facing the question of what exactly Coleridge means when

he speaks of attributing the sublime to an object of sense, we might

118

say that the object must somehow become caught up in a purely sub-
jective awareness of something obscure, indefinite, shapeless. Con-
sciousness bestows upon that object of sense an appearance which in
fact has been generated in a purely subjective encounter. Sublime
consciousness is somewhat Janus-faced: though directed outward toward
a sublime object in the external world, it is simultaneously directed
back toward the self, toward a source of obscurity and indefiniteness
discovered within the realm of subjectivity. It follows from this
that the sublime in literature is essentially a record of a poet's
subjectivity. All poems, even epics, insofar as they are taken as
sublime poems, are at the same time being taken as expressive docu-
ments, revealing the inner history of the poet's mind. Thus Cole-

ridge can write that in "Paradise Lost the sublimest parts are the

 

revelations of Milton's own mind, producing itself and evolving its
own greatness; and this is so truly so that when that which is merely
entertaining for its objective beauty is introduced, it at first seems

a discord."12 Paradise Lost, from this Coleridgean point of view, is

 

to be read as a document allowing all to see Milton's mind in the act
of discovering the sources of sublimity within itself. When the poem
is read from this perspective, the discovery of images of "objective
beauty," presumably images possessing the quality of shapeliness,
appeansat first glance to be at odds with the poem's projection of the
obscurity and indefiniteness of Milton's own sublime subjectivity.
Also, we might note, Coleridge regards Christianity as especially
conducive to sublime consciousness because it provides a way of think-

ing about reality whereby "the Imagination is kept barren in definite

119

Forms and only in cooperation with the Understanding labours after an
obscure and indefinite Vastness."13 Sublime consciousness, in other
words, is for Coleridge a structure of awareness in which all con-
ceptions tend to recede from shapeliness or distinction, and the mind
is left groping in the darkness of its own subjectivity for an "in-
definite Vastness."

We might now ask the question in what way the subject can attri-
bute the sublime, not to an object of sense, but to those "objects" of
the world of ideas, that is to say, to ideas themselves. Earlier, in
explaining how a distinctly shaped object of sense such as a circle can
be rendered sublime, I argued that the phenomenal shape of the circle,
insofar as it comes to function as a symbol of the idea of eternity,
sinks away, as it were, into the obscurity of its own symbolic dimen-
sion. This analysis assumes that the subjective source of the sublime
in this instance is the idea of eternity as such--that such an idea is
inevitably indistinct and therefore sublime. But now might it not be
more accurate to locate the subjective source of the sublime, not so
much in the ideas which are entertained by sublime consciousness, but
in the very way in which sublime consciousness entertains or "labours
after" such indefinite ideas? Might it not be more precise to regard
the subjective source of the sublime, not as an encounter by the mind
with certain of its own ideational contents (ideas of eternity, God,
immortality, and so on), but as an encounter with its own subjective
action in attempting to come to terms with such ideas? I am arguing,
in other words, that the subjective source of the sublime is in fact

an act of apperception in which consciousness becomes vividly aware of

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itself because of its inability to define its intentionality, or
direction of consciousness, with respect to any precisely delimited
conception or idea. Consciousness, labouring after the "obscure and
indefinite Vastness" suggested by such an idea as the idea of God, is
thrown back upon itself, becomes self-conscious with respect to its
own labouring. Precisely because of its inevitable failure to achieve
the "rest" or stasis of a perfectly adequate image or conception of
an "obscure and indefinite Vastness," consciousness becomes vividly
aware of itself as an indefinitely dynamic agent, as possessing an
intentionality in pursuit of an intended object which infinitely re-
cedes from adequate comprehension. Sublime consciousness for Cole-
ridge reveals itself to be, in the last analysis, sublime self-
consciousness; and those ideas which he designates as sublime are in
fact ideas which throw the mind back toward an awareness of its own
indefinite activity. Reflexive consciousness discovers the "shape-
lessness" of the sublime in its own structure of awareness--a struc-
ture unable to "close itself off" with respect to any clear and
distinct object of consciousness.

Obviously I cannot insist that this version of the Coleridgean
sublime is necessarily the correct one. There is simply not enough
evidence upon which to base such a firm conclusion. But I can indi-
cate that the position described in the previous paragraph is at least
plausible, and that the relationship between self-consciousness--
indeed a version of self-consciousness which could be characterized
as an act of apperception--and the experience of the sublime is a

relationship which seems to have been recognized by Coleridge. And

121

to remind my reader that I have not forgotten the puzzle left un-
solved at the end of Section 2 of this chapter, let me say that the
following exploration of this relationship in Coleridge's writings
will bring us to a way of understanding the statement "I am nothing!"
as a valid characterization of that state of self-consciousness ar-

rived at in the experience of the sublime.

-_4_-

In his Notebooks Coleridge observes, " . . . let me think of
myself--of the thinking Being--the Idea becomes dim whatever it be--
so dim that I know not what it is--but the Feeling is deep & steady--
and this I call If-the identifying the Percipient & the Perceived."15
Coleridge here seems to be describing an act of apperception in which
the subject intuits the subject qua subject. Consciousness, in turning
back to focus exclusively upon the self, loses whatever distinct con-
ception it might have had of the self ("the Idea becomes dim"), even
to the extent of becoming finally unable to formulate any conception
adequate to the intutied reality ("I know not what it is"). But a
feeling without a concept remains; and it is this feeling, this un-
mediated sense of self, which Coleridge designates as the "If. In
this feeling, also, there is an identification of "the Percipient &
the Perceived." In other words, the self as "Perceived," as con-
stituted as an object of reflexive consciousness, merges into the sub-
jectivity of the "Percipent." Because the idea of self has become
"dim," consciousness can no longer constitute itself as a direct object
(or as something "Perceived") of thought. The sense of self as object

is converted into a sense of self as subject, into a feeling which is

122

"deep & steady."

The question now is to what extent might this structure of
treflexive awareness be designated, from a Coleridgean perspective, as
"sublime"? In answer we can say, first of all, that the act of think-
ing "of the thinking Being" seems to lead to an ideational "dimness"
‘which is in certain respects phenomenologically similar to Coleridge's
encounter with the gloom of a Gothic cathedral. There, it will be
recalled, Coleridge described himself as feeling as if his "whole
being" were expanding "into the infinite.“ We understood this meta-
phor of expansion as an expression of a radical alteration in the sense
of identity: no longer could the subject define himself in terms of an
exclusive spatial identity. Self-awareness developed a sense of the
self as having infinitely receded “from shapeliness." Here, in this
passage from the Notebooks, we find Coleridge also describing an al-
teration in the sense of identity: the idea of self, "whatever it be,"
recedes from whatever "shapeliness" it might have had. The idea of
self is rendered obscure and indefinite. Furthermore, just as in the
Gothic gloom the subject's sense of its own expansion led to a sense
of the fusion of subject and object and a sense of reconciliation
between contraries, so here we find the growing obscurity and in-
definiteness of the idea of self leading to a fusion of subject and
object--in this case the identification of the "Percipient and the
Perceived" within a context of introspection. The contraries of self
as subject and self as object are resolved, and the "I? is completely
one with itself by means of a feeling which is "deep and steady."
Finally, this passage from the Notebooks suggests that insofar as the

0

123

sense of self becomes, as it were, deconceptualized, the self can no
longer introduce a division into the immediate sense of identity by
thinking about the self by means of a distinct idea of the self. Those
versions of the self which are presented in distinct ideas of the self
are all of them obliterated, annihilated. We might characterize this
structure of reflexive awareness as one of which from the point of view
of the "I? no predication is possible; or, if predication be demanded,
as one which the "I? might describe in the sentence "I am nothing!"--
here, of course, using the term "nothing" not to deny the existing
reality of the "I," but to suggest the special nature of that structure
of consciousness in which all distinct concepts of the self have dis-
appeared. The self feels itself as "nothing" because it now lacks the
means whereby to define itself as any precisely limited "thing."

A second answer to the question of how the act of thinking "of
the thinking Being" might be designated, from a Coleridgean perspec-
tive, as "sublime" can be developed if we take note of Coleridge's
observation that something can be called "sublime in relation to which
the exercise of comparison is suspended . . . ."16 Clearly to the ex-
tent that consciousness loses all distinct conceptual grasp of its own
nature and is reduced exclusively to nothing more than a feeling of the
”I? which is "deep & steady," the possibility of exercising the powers
of comparison is reduced. Any act of comparison, it seems logical to
say, requires that consciousness be able to direct its attention back
and forth between at least two objects of thought. Any act of com-
parison taking place within a context of introspection in which the
"thinking Being" is thinking exclusively about itself, would therefore

require consciousness to constitute itself as a direct object of

124

thought in at least two different ways (whether by a concept of the
self or by an image of the self is a question not immediately rele-
vant). This act in turn necessarily involves the introduction of an
element of division into the mind's sense of identity, into the mind's
sense of being one with itself. The exercise of the powers of com-
parison within a context of introspection in which the "thinking Being"
is thinking exclusively about itself, would entail a structure of
awareness in which consciousness alternately constitutes itself as a
direct object of thought in either thig way or that way. But such an
alternation in intentionality is impossible when the "thinking Being"
finds its consciousness of self reduced exclusively to a feeling of
the "I? which is "deep & steady." In this state of awareness the sense
of identity precludes any sense of division. The subject is perfectly
one with itself qua subject and thus cannot, so long as this feeling of
the "If is sustained, constitute itself as a direct object of conscious-
ness in at least two different ways (or even in any one way for that
matter). In other words, this structure ofawareness is one in which
the exercise of the mind's powers of comparison is suspended. And
therefore this structure of awareness, this act of apperception, can
be characterized, from a Coleridgean perspective, as "sublime."

Another way of exploring the question of the relationship for
Coleridge between self-consciousness and the experience of the sublime

will be opened to us if we take a look at "Essay XI" from The Friend,

 

an essay in which, according to Clarence DeWitt Thorpe, we might find
"the clue to the nature . . . of Coleridge's experience of the sub-

lime."17 In this essay Coleridge asks his readers the following ques-

125

tions: "Hast thou ever raised thy mind to the consideration of exis-
tence, in and by itself, as the mere act of existing? Hast thou ever
said to thyself thoughtfully, It is! heedless in that moment, whether
it were a man before thee, or a flower, or a grain of sand,--without
reference, in short, to this or that particular mode or form of exis-
tence?"18 Coleridge's questions are of course rhetorical; they pro-
‘Vide him with a way of initiating an account of this "consideration
of existence, in and by itself," this way of regarding reality which
later in the same essay he characterizes as an "opening of the inward
eye to the glorious vision of that existence which admits of no ques-
tion out of itself, acknowledges no predicate but the I AM.IN THAT I
AM!" This "glorious vision" is for Coleridge an "intuition of ab-
solute existence."19

Now let us assume that Professor Thorpe is correct when he ob-

serves that Coleridge's account, in this essay from The Friend, of an

 

"intuition of absolute existence" provides us with a way of under-
standing the "nature . . . of Coleridge's experience of the sublime."
The question for my argument then becomes: what relationship does this
very special intuition have to the act of apperception, the act in
which, I have been arguing, Coleridge discovers the subjective source
of the sublime? Before we can meaningfully face this question, how-
ever, we have to consider exactly what Coleridge might mean when he
speaks of an "intuition of absolute existence," and exactly how his
account of this “glorious vision" might be taken as Professor Thorpe
indicates it can be taken.

It would seem that a "consideration of existence" without

126

‘reference "to this or that particular mode or form of existence" is
in fact a way of looking at the universe which prohibits the use of
any predicate but the predicate of existence. From the point of view
of this intuition consciousness becomes absolutely "heedless" of the
possibility that the universe might be envisaged as a universe com-
posed of essences. I use this last term in a Coleridgean sense; he
writes in the Biographia: "Essence, in its primary signification,
means the principle of individuation, the inmost principle of the
possibility of anything, as that particular thing. It is equivalent
to the idea of a thing . . . ."20 Paradoxically, therefore, all
things are especially seen as exhibiting the "mere act of existing"
only to the extent that they are ggt seen as individuals. The sense
thgt a thing is stands in opposition to the sense of 223$ a thing is
as this or that particular individual. Consciousness, in forming dis-
tinct ideas of individual things, engages in a contemplation of es-
sences, of principles of individuation. Only to the extent that it
disengages from all such contemplation--only to the extent that it
abandons all distinct ideas of individual things can consciousness
move toward an intuition of absolute existence. In short, this"glo-
rious vision“ is a vision of existence without essence.

Perhaps all this can be made more clear if we observe that what
Coleridge seems to be describing is a structure of consciousness which
is directed toward something rather like what certain scholastic theo-

logians would have called "actus purus." For these theologians of

 

course the actus purus is none other than God. Gilson points out that

 

Aquinas, for example, conceives of God as nothing more and nothing less

127

tfliari ar1 "absolute act of being"; God is "the being whose whole nature

it ii; to be such an existential act." Therefore, to "say that God

'is tflnis,' or that he 'is that,’ would be to restrict his being to the
essennces of what 'this' and 'that' are. God 'is,' absolutely."21

From the point of view of this analogy we might say that Cole-
ridge seems to be suggesting the possibility of a kind of vision for
nmnn on.earth which most scholastics would have permitted men to obtain
cnnly in.heaven--a vision which is indeed "beatific" or like the tra-
ctitional vision of God because, as Coleridge puts it, existence so
irnniited reveals itself to be "an eternal and infinite self-rejoicing,
self-loving, with a joy unfathomable, with a love all-comprehensive."22
Coleridge's version of the actus purus is not of an absolutely existing
'being veiled from men's eyes because it exists only in some eternal
otiuarworld, in some dimension of uncreated reality far removed from the
world of time and created being. On the contrary, this act of "exis-
tence incomprehensible and groundless" is thoroughly immanent through-
out the world of discrete temporal phenomena; it is, according to
Coleridge, a "life-ebullient stream which breaks through every momen-

tary embankment, again, indeed, and evermore to embank itself, but

within no banks to stagnate or be imprisoned."23 (We can observe be-

hind Coleridge's metaphors here a reality provocatively similar to
Wordsworth's "something" ubiquitously interfused throughout the far-
thest reaches of sky and ocean.) The vision of absolute existence
might be lost at those times when consciousness is directed toward the
"momentary embankment" of the "£223" or essence of a particular thing,

but so powerful and free is absolute existence that these embankments

128

xvill eventually dissolve. The ideational world of essences will al-
ivays give way before the intuition of absolute existence.

I believe, along with Professor Thorpe, that in this descrip-
tion of a "glorious vision" of existence Coleridge has presented us
‘Jith his most valuable, indeed most philosophically precise, account
of what constitutes for him the experience of the sublime. We have
seen how he postulates that "those objects whose shape most recedes
from shapeliness are commonly the exciting occasions" of the experi-
ence of the sublime, and we have interpreted this postulate as having
reference, not simply to objects possessing a physical shape, but more
significantly to certain ideas which as it were lose their "shape" by
becoming obscure and indistinct. Now we have also seen that an object
contemplated without reference "to this or that particular mode or
form of existence" is in fact an object contemplated without reference
to its "essence," to the "tdga? of the thing as that particular thing.
From the perspective of the "glorious vision," nothing may be conceived
of as an individual thing. To the extent, therefore, that conscious-
ness intuits existence "heedless" of essence, to that same extent does
consciousness intuit a world in which all things lose their ideational
"shape" as individual things, a world in which all the ideas of individ-
ual things must necessarily grow obscure and indistinct. The "consider-

ation of existence, in and by itself" necessitates, in other words, a
structure of consciousness absolutely lacking any means whereby any
particular thing may be conceived as this or that particular thing.

Nor is this absence of a principle of particularization simply a mat-
ter of an inability to conceive of an individual. Certainly, from the

perspective of the "glorious vision," the individual thing may still be

129

contemplated. But precisely because it is contemplated solely under
the aspect of existence, and precisely because the existence so re-
vealed is absolute, the individual thing 323 individual is simply
not seen. Thus, everything loses whatever "shape" or distinctness
it might have had as an individual; everything becomes an "exciting
occasion" of the experience of the sublime. To put all this in con-
crete terms provided by Coleridge: neither a man, nor a flower, nor
a grain of sand can be either conceived or even seen as an individual.
Each is but a "momentary embankment" of the "life-ebullient stream"
of absolute existence; and as consciousness directly intuits this
stream, the embankment dissolves away. Both idea and image of the
individual "recede from shapeliness."

There are at least two other ways of suggesting that Coleridge's
description of this intuition might be taken as an account of what is
for him the basic nature of the experience of the sublime. First, we
have already observed how according to Coleridge an encounter with the
sublime leads to a suspension of the exercise of the comparative powers.
It goes almost without saying that "the glorious vision of that exis-
tence which admits of no question out of itself" entails a structure of
consciousness in which individuals cannot be distinguished one from
another, let alone conceived as individuals. But when consciousness
cannot make such distinctions, it obviously has been precluded from
the possibility of making any comparisons. To put this another way:
insofar as consciousness is directed exclusively toward any absolute, in

this case existence gua existence, it cannot establish for itself a

130

chmparative point of view; the absolute totally confines its attention;
‘the intuition of absolute existence "admits of no question out of it-
:self." Even the individual, when contemplated exclusively from the
'perspective of this intuition, becomes as it were a kind of phenomenal
absolute; and as consciousness grows increasingly "heedless" of the
individual as individual, it likewise discovers that the exercise of
its own powers of comparison has been suspended.24
Second, we can take note of Coleridge's observation in one of

his letters that when the sublime is felt "neither whole nor parts" are
seen and distinguished "but unity as boundless or endless allness . .

."25 Coleridge offers this puzzling formulation in a context where
he is attempting to distinguish, among other things, the "grand" and
the "majestic" from the sublime. Thus with respect to the "grand" he
writes: "When the parts are numerous and impressive, and are pre-
dominate, so as to prevent or greatly lessen the attention to the
whole, there results the grand.“26 And with respect to the "majestic"
he writes: "Where the impression of the whole, i.e. the sense of
unity, predominates so as to abstract the mind from the parts--the
majestic."27 We see in these formulations Coleridge's tendency to
locate the meaning of aesthetic terms in the subjective effects certain
kinds of aesthetic objects have upon the mind of the observer. These
formulations thus have phenomenological implications and call attention
to the way in which consciousness is directed in the experience of
either the sublime or the grand or the majestic. It would seem that
the distinction between the grand and the majestic is largely one of

emphasis--an emphasis, that is, in the intentionality of the observer.

131

A11 object, in order to be characterized as either grand or majestic,
:is presumably "impressive" in some way. But it can be called "grand"
«only when its "parts are numerous and impressive," and consciousness
is thereby directed toward these parts and away from "attention to the
*whole." And the object can be called "majestic" only when the mind is
so caught up in the "impression of the whole" that the parts of the
‘whole tend to recede from consciousness. Now in the case of the sub-
lime, consciousness is directed toward neither the parts nor the whole
but toward a kind of "unity" which Coleridge cryptically explains as a
"boundless or endless allness." Apparently the term "unity" here is
not being used in the same way that it is used in the explanation of
the majestic, where "the sense of unity” is equated with "the impres-
sion of the whole." It seems reasonable to say, therefore, that the
"unity" encountered in the experience of the sublime is not to be in
any way confused with the "unity" of the whole--obviously it cannot be
so taken since in this experience the whole is not even seen. What
then is consciousness directed toward when it intends the "unity" of
a "boundless or endless allness"? What indeed, with respect to the
object deserving the designation "sublime," is the mind attending to
when it is attending to neither the whole nor the parts of that object?
An answer can be developed, I believe, if we understand that the
experiencing of a "unity as boundless or endless allness" is the equiv-
-alent, in Coleridgean terms, of an ”intuition of absolute existence."
Obviously this intuition of the "life-ebullient stream" of existence
323 existence is an intuition of an absolute which is by definition

"boundless or endless" and which, precisely because it is nothing but

132

sun act of existence or actus purus, possesses a perfect "unity." Now
xvith respect to an object, neither the whole nor the parts of which
are seen and distinguished, the subject is caught up in a structure of
awareness which lacks a principle of individualization, a way of seiz-
ing upon any particularized object of awareness. The intended object
‘neither can be particularized with reference to its parts nor can it be
apprehended as an individual whole. The phenomenon is "shapeless," ob-
scure and undefined; it imposes no distinct phenomenal limits upon the
attention. The intentionality of consciousness is thereby enabled to
become "heedless" of the "particular mode or form" it has before it, and
can as it were pour through and beyond a form which escapes successful
apprehension. In the very escape of this form, both as a whole and with
all of its individual parts, consciousness intuits existence without
"essence." To put this another way: the open-ended form of, say, a
mist-shrouded mountain dislocates consciousness out of a consideration
of "essences," a consideration of either the individual whole or the
individual parts. The open-ended form becomes, we might almost say,
"transparent": a structure of consciousness is now elicited which
penetrates through the opacities, the obscuring "momentary embankments,"
of defined and individuated phenomena. Consciousness now intuits exis-
tence as such, the "life-ebullient stream"; and this absolute can Prop-
erly be designated, as we have just seen, as a "unity of boundless and
endless allness."

We are now in a position to consider the question of what rela-
tionship this very special intuition might have to the act of self-

consciousness or, more precisely, to that kind of self—consciousness I

133

have been calling "apperception." An answer can be constructed as
follows: insofar as we take Coleridge's account of this intuition as
also providing an account of the basic nature of the Coleridgean ex-
perience of the sublime, and insofar as we recall all the evidence
already presented that for Coleridge the source of the sublime is to
be located in the subject, then we must say that the source of the
intuition of absolute existence is also to be located in the subject.
Consciousness opens its "inward eye to the glorious vision"; it in-
tuits the act of existence first of all within itself; it intuits its
own existent reality without a "principle of individuation," without
simultaneously considering itself from the point of view of "essence."
Thus we have a structure of consciousness in which the subject cannot
constitute itself as a distinct and individuated object of thought; a
structure of consciousness, in terms borrowed from Wordsworth, "un-
profaned" by "form or image" of the self; a structure of consciousness
in which the subject intuits itself in a way which "acknowledges no
predicate but the 'I AM IN THAT IN THAT I AMI'" Consciousness intuits
its own activity without reference "to this or that particular mode or
form of existence," and thus consciousness intuits its own activity as
an absolute. The subject intuits the subject 323 subject as an act of
existence without an essence, a principle of individuation. The func-
tion of the open-ended form (or, for that matter, the obscure and in-
distinct idea) in eliciting this act of apperception, this state of
sublime self-consciousness, is to throw consciousness back upon it-
self, to make it aware of itself as an indefinitely dynamic agent un-

able to "close itself off" with respect to any clear and distinct

134

(ibject of consciousness. As the intended object indefinitely escapes
:from successful apprehension, consciousness becomes immersed in its
cnnn indefinitely striving intentionality. Consciousness intuits itself
aussimply'an act, an undefined energy of being, a "boundless or endless
allness." In other words, Coleridge's metaphor of the "life-ebullient
stream" breaking through the "momentary embankments" of discrete phe-
‘nomena I finally interpret as a metaphor expressive of that structure
of consciousness in which the act of apperception, latent in any spe-
cific act of perception, suddenly becomes explicit and thus makes it
impossible for consciousness to specify its intended object. (Or, in
terms again borrowed from Wordsworth, when the light of sense goes out,
we see into the life of things--here understanding "life" to refer to
that fundamental activity of consciousness which makes possible the
entirety of the phenomenal world.) And since the act of apperception is
implicit in all acts of perception, an open-ended form in the phenomenal
world is not necessarily required to provoke sublime self-consciousness.
Even a circle, clearly a perfectly closed form, can become, as we have
seen, an "exciting occasion" for the experience of the sublime. And so
can "a man . . . or a flower, or a grain of sand."28
Finally, we might ask how Coleridge's account of this intuition
helps us to understand the assertion made earlier in this chapter,
namely, that the statement "I am nothing!"--Coleridge's characterization
of that state of sublime self-consciousness elicited in him by the
gloom of a Gothic cathedra1--might be taken as the tenor of the meta-
phor of the expanding self. Coleridge writes in "Essay XI" that if

"thou has mastered this intuition of absolute existence, thou wilt have

135

lxaarnt likewise, that it was this, and no other, which in the earlier
aages seized the nobler minds, the elect among men, with a sort of
asacred horror. This it was which first caused them to feel within
‘themselves a something ineffably greater than their own individual
Iiature." It was this intuition which raised "them aloft . . . pro-
jecting them to an ideal distance from themselves . . . ."29 In the
phrase "sacred horror" we find an echo of many eighteenth-century com-
Inentaries on the sublime, preoccupied as they were with explaining the
"delightful horror," the "pleasing terror," the "awful astonishment,"
and so on, of the experience. And I take Coleridge's spatial metaphor
of the "elect among men" being projected "to an ideal distance from
themselves" as perhaps the most subtle version we have seen so far of
that habit of eighteenth-century theorists of describing the mind dur-
ing the experience of the sublime as a kind of expanding space. Of
course Coleridge makes it plain that this "distance," to which "nobler
minds" are projected, is "ideal," that is, only a "distance" of con-
sciousness. The metaphor is to be taken in much the same way that the
metaphors of the expanding mind are to be taken in eighteenth-century
commentaries: expressive of a radical alteration in self-consciousness.
Those who have been "seized" by the "intuition of absolute existence"
feel within themselves a "something ineffably greater than their own
individual natures." Suddenly the "elect among men" intuit a reality
within themselves which simply cannot be explained in terms of their
sense of themselves as individuals. In fact, the intuition of absolute
existence stands in total opposition to any ideas they might have of

themselves as individuals; and only to the extent that all such ideas

136

grow obscure and indistinct, can they move toward the "glorious

vision." The intuition and the projection of consciousness "to an
ideal distance" entails the focusing of awareness into a visionary
sense of "I AM IN THAT I AM!" And from the perspective of this in-

tuition, the individual as individual can only say, "I am nothing!"

 

The metaphor, then, of the mind's expansion "into eternity," as well

as the metaphor of the mind's projection "to an ideal distance" from
itself, are metaphors expressive of a visionary.act of apperception,

in which consciousness directly intuits its own activity as if it were
the incomprehensible ground of the being of the entire phenomenal world.
And this act of sublime self-consciousness entails the annihilation of
any sense of self as an "individual nature." No wonder, then, that it

is felt with "a sort of sacred horror."

--5-_
One of the important conclusions suggested by this analysis of
sublime self-consciousness is that the act of apperception can be inter-
preted as in some way revealing the universe in its metaphysical depths--
as somehow providing contact with ultimate principles of reality. Keep-
ing this conclusion in mind, we are in a better position to come to
terms with those experiences of Wordsworth which can be genuinely char-
acterized as visionary, experiences which he presents both as special
states of consciousness and as revelations of metaphysical truths which
are nonmally not available to non-visionary states of consciousness.
Of course at this point in my essay the phenomenological similarities
between Coleridge's "life-ebullient stream" and the universally inter-

fused "something" of "Tintern Abbey" need no elaboration. What I now

137

wrish to concentrate upon is a passage from Book II of The Prelude

 

‘where Wordsworth gives testimony of having received from nature an
intuition which induced in him an exultant state of mind and which
enabled him to detect a transcendent principle of unity binding the
phenomenal world together into an organic whole:

From Nature and her overflowing soul

I had receiv'd so much that all my thoughts

Were steep'd in feeling; I was only then
Contented when with bliss ineffable

I felt the sentiment of Being spread

O'er all that moves, and all that seemeth still,
O'er all, that, lost beyond the reach of thought
And human knowledge, to the human eye

Invisible, yet liveth to the heart,

O'er all that leaps, and runs, and shouts, and sings,
Beneath the wave, yea, in the wave itself

And mighty depth of waters. Wonder not

If such my transports were; for in all things

I saw one life, and felt that it was joy.

One song they sang, and it was audible,

Most audible then when the fleshly ear,

O'er come by grosser prelude of that strain,
Forgot its functions, and slept undisturb'd.3O

In these lines Wordsworth describes a structure of awareness in
which there develops a progressively more intense intuition of the "one
life" in "all things." Even though he says that he "saw" this "one
life," the language of the passage makes it clear that this intuition
is realized in its purest form when the mind in some way moves beyond
the reports of the senses; that, in short, this "one life" is really
not to be seen at all but can only be somehow "felt" as consciousness
moves progressively beyond the phenomenal world. Thus as Wordsworth
feels the "sentiment of Being spread/ O'er all that moves, and all
that seemeth still," there develops a structure of consciousness which
is radically open-ended: the feeling of the "sentiment of Being" in-

duces a kind of centrifugal awareness in which consciousness can

138

ruaither conceptualize its contents ("lost beyond the reach of thought/
Axui human knowledge") nor even locate itself with respect to distinct
(abjects of sight ("to the human eye/ Invisible"). And, as Wordsworth
Inakes it clear at the end of this passage, this intuition is most
'vivid (or, characterized as a "song," "Most audible") when the "fleshly
ear" no longer reports sounds of the phenomenal world. The song of the
"one life" is a spiritual ditty of no tone. We might also note that
this intuition is partially characterized in metaphors of fluidity.
'WOrdsworth suggests that it finds its origin in nature and "her over-
flowing soul." Nature in some way gives him "so much" that "all" his
thoughts become "steep'd in feeling"--as if to say Wordsworth's own
soul begins to overflow with certain feelings which come to dominate
his awareness. And the "sentiment of Being" itself is a feeling which
somehow spreads, like an overflowing fluid, throughout the entirety of
the phenomenal world.

I think we best interpret this passage as a description of an
act of apperception in which consciousness comes to a progressively
more intense intuition of its own activity as the ground of the phenom-
enal world. Wordsworth's "sentiment of Being“ is, in Coleridgean terms,
an intuition of absolute existence; an intuition of the mind's own ubi-
quitous activity as it constitutes the world of perception. To the ex-
tent that the subject becomes progressively aware of its own subjective
energy of consciousness, to that same extent is the phenomenal world
intuited as possessing a transcendent principle of unity--in this case,
that activity of a single mind which enables the phenomenal world to

"exist" as an object for a single consciousness. The subject gradually

139

diescovers itself as "spread/ O'er all that moves, and all that seemeth
stxill." Consciousness gradually intuits itself as interfusing "all
tflnat leaps, and runs, and shouts, and sings." Thus "all things" can
hug seen as exhibiting "one life": for all things indeed possess-~and
cnnly possess--this unity insofar as the conscious activity which per-
'vades them all is directly intuited by the mind. The fluid "sentiment
of Being" can "spread" throughout the phenomenal world in much the same
‘way that Coleridge's "life-ebullient stream" can break through the
'hhomentary embankments" of discrete perceptions: the subject turns
inward upon itself; the act of apperception latent in any act of per-
ception begins to grow explicit; a "something" is inutited as univer-
sally interfused. The mind begins to intuit a reality which cannot be
reported to it by the senses: this reality is indeed "to the human
eye/ Invisible," and yet it "liveth to the heart." The mind begins to
intuit a reality which cannot be conceptualized; for the direct en-
counter by the subject with its subjective energies is, by its very
nature, "beyond the reach of thought/ And human knowledge." And this
experience is, as so often in Wordsworth, an encounter with the depths,
an exploration of the immanent: for the "sentiment of Being" finally
spreads "Beneath the wave, yea, in the wave itself/ And mighty depth of
waters."

It should also be noted that these lines suggest that for Words-
worth sublime self-consciousness is not necessarily a structure of
awareness which abruptly displaces all other kinds of awareness. The
"sentiment of Being" here spreads only gradually, progressively. We

can extrapolate from this fact and generally observe with respect to

140

the question of the nature of Wordsworth's visionary experiences

that although there are moments in his poetry when he seems suddenly
and totally to be rapt away from the phenomenal world--to be trans-
ported, with the light of sense gone out, into "strange seas of
Thought, alone"--what is far more usual is a description of a

process of consciousness which is more or less visionary; a de-
scription of a series of acts of perception in which the latent con-
tent of apperception is successively more or less explicit. The
"fleshly ear" may sleep at times "undisturb'd" and the phenomenal
world may sometimes be lost; but the primary ambition of WOrdsworth,
as I suggested in my analysis of "Tintern Abbey," is to write a poe-
try celebrating the way in which the visionary mind may discover
dwelling-places in nature. The intuition of the "one life" is not to
be purchased by the annihilation of the phenomenal world. Rather,
this world, or nature, is somehow to be sustained and made to partic-
ipate in the visionary dimension disclosed in the act of sublime
self-consciousness. In the infinitely delicate task of adjusting his
visionary consciousness to nature, Wordsworth's emphasis is largely
upon mediation, upon marriage. The "sources of sublimity," he writes
in "Essay Supplementary to Preface (1815)," are "in the soul of Man";
but poetry, no matter how "ethereal and transcendent," is "yet in-
capable" of sustaining "her existence without sensuous incarnation."31
Thus the act of apperception and the act of perception must be ad-
justed one to another. For the sake of poetry itself, the centrifugal
awareness of feeling the "sentiment of Being" may only be gradual,

progressive; and to preserve the possibility both of a true marriage

141

between mind and nature and of the celebration of that marriage in
poetry, centrifugal awareness must be balanced against a centripetal
awareness which clings to the discrete phenomena of nature--in much
the same way that the boy of the Fenwick note on the "Immortality
Ode" grasped "at a wall or tree to recall" himself from the "abyss of
idealism." A visionary mind with ambitions toward poetry cannot over-
look the requirement of "sensuous incarnation," and thus must be dis-
ciplined in precisely the way Wordsworth claims to have disciplined
himself in the "Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800)": "I have at all
times endeavored t9 look steadily at my subject . . . ." The vision-
ary poet must attempt to sustain for his consciousness "an atmosphere
of sensation in which to move his wings."32 In other words, there must
be embankments of the "life-ebullient stream."

I believe that for both Wordsworth and Coleridge the power which
mediates between sublime self-consciousness and the phenomenal world is
what both men call imagination. I noted in the preceding chapter that
imagination for Wordsworth is a power which proceeds from’in his own
words, "a sublime consciousness of the soul in her own mighty and al-

most divine powers."

And I went on to argue that imagination is the
power whereby the mind sustains and marries its undefined sense of

self with the discrete phenomena provided by nature; these phenomena
are thus made immanent and are filled, as it were, with sublime self-
consciousness. We might now say in Coleridgean terms that imagination
is the power which mediates between the intuition of absolute existence

and the world of essences, of discrete particulars. Or, as Coleridge

himself remarks provocatively enough in the Notebooks, "Imagination

142

.L'§_ tflne laboratory in which Thought elaborates Essence into Exis-

txnnce.‘"33 That is to say, imagination is the power whereby the world

of iJndividual objects--objects which in themselves, in the words of
tfiuaIBiographia Literaria, "are essentially fixed and dead"34--is re-
created into a living and organic whole through involvement with an act
<3f selchonsciousness in which the mind directly intuits its own un-
defined.and living energies. we might say that the generic image in
Vfixrdsworth's poetry of such a recreated world--a world in which thought
is elaborating essence into existence, a world in which imagination is
struggling "to idealize and unify"35 phenomena into a vision of the one
life--is the image of nature to be found in "Tintern Abbey," a nature
suggestively disclosing an underworld of open-ended depths in which the
poet gradually discovers the organizing ground of being of that phenom-
enal world: his own consciousness. Imagination is the power which
inter-fuses these depths into the surface of nature, and at the same
time prevents nature from being swallowed up in them. The world of
objects is ideally to be transformed by imagination; it is not to be
annihilated in the "abyss of idealism." Sublime self-consciousness,
though in itself a structure of visionary awareness in which the mind
experiences the "bliss ineffable" of being transported beyond the
phenomenal world, is to be married to that phenomenal world by the
power of imagination. And though imagination is a power which proceeds
from "a sublime consciousness of the soul in her own mighty and almost
divine powers," it must, as the creative principle of a poetry of "sen-
suous incarnation," return to the world of individual objects, the

world which at the same time sublime self-consciousness progressively

143

strives to leave behind.

‘We might say all this in another way by observing that the pure
freedom of visionary consciousness--a consciousness we have already
seen Wordsworth characterize as one which is "by form or image un-
[nuafaned"--is to be progressively tempered and mediated by the rela-
tional power of the imagination. The "something" is to be envisioned
as ubiquitously interfused throughout the world disclosed by the senses;
it is not to be embraced, as it were, in an act of solipsistic autonomy.
The world of dead, discrete objects is to be transformed and organized
into a community of living dwelling-places. Unless imagination so
mediates between sublime self-consciousness and the phenomenal world,
that world must remain fixed and dead, without value or meaning. It is
this crucial labor of mediation, I believe, which Coleridge was think-
ing of when he reminded himself in his Notebooks to write "to the
Recluse that he may insert something concerning Egg] its metaphysical
Sublimity-—& intimate Synthesis with the principle of Coadunation--
without tt_every where all things were a waste--nothing . . . ."36
The ego, directly intuited in its "metaphysical Sublimity," is the
ultimate source of Wordsworth's vision of the "one life" and the "joy"
pervading all things. But this metaphysically sublime ego must at the
same time be synthesized with the "principle of Coadunation," with that
power of the imagination whereby the mind transforms the phenomenal
world into an organic whole. Without this intimate synthesis, the
world of discrete objects would remain fixed and dead: "a waste--

nothing."

144

--6--

I shall conclude this chapter with an analysis of what is per-
haps Wordsworth's most complex and dramatic account of imagination's
mediation between sublime self-consciousness and the phenomenal world:
the Simplon Pass episode of Book VI of The Prelude. Just prior to his
descent through this apocalyptic landscape, Wordsworth experienced an
intensely vivid moment of apperception:

Imagination--here the Power so called

Through sad incompetence of human speech,

That awful Power rose from the mind's abyss

Like an unfathered vapour that enwraps,

At once, some lonely traveller.37
In these lines Wordsworth describes a moment in which the power of
imagination has suddenly erupted into consciousness. Now we may assume
that if this power has abruptly risen in the mind, then that structure
of sublime self-consciousness out of which imagination proceeds has
also overtaken the mind. Thus we can understand why, in the lines
immediately following, Wordsworth characterizes this moment of imagi-
nation's birth as one in which "the light of sense/ Goes out, but with
a flash that has revealed/ The invisible world."38 Imagination has
risen out of the "mind's abyss," those depths of sublime self-awareness
in which the subject directly intuits its own transcendent energies.
Such an unmediated intuition leads to an abrupt loss of the phenomenal
world. It is a moment in which, Wordsworth asserts, "doth greatness
make abode."39 It is a moment in which apperception overwhelms per-
ception. And to stress the seemingly gratuitous way in which ordinary

consciousness is thus snatched away, Wordsworth describes imagination

as having coming upon him like "an unfathered vapour." Visionary con-

145

sciousness is suddenly there, without apparent reason or justification;
and the mind has moved beyond the world of ordinary sensation.
Immediately after this visionary act of apperception WOrdsworth
makes his descent through the "narrow chasm" of Simplon Pass. There
he comes upon a landscape riddled with opposites:
The immeasurable height
Of woods decaying, never to be decayed,
The stationary blasts of waterfalls,
And in the narrow rent at every turn
Winds thwarting winds, bewildered and forlorn,
The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky,
The rocks that muttered close upon our ears,
Black drizzling crags that spake by the way-side
As if a voice were in them, the sick sight
And giddy prospect of the raving stream,
The unfettered clouds and region of the Heavens,
Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light--
Were all like workings of one mind, the features
Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree;
Characters of the great Apocalypse,
Of first, and last, and midst, and without end.40
It would seem that in this abyss provided by nature Wordsworth's imagi-
nation discovers a dwelling-place or a "sensuous incarnation" for the
visionary thrust of his own sublime self-consciousness--that structure
of awareness elicited in him just prior to his descent through the Pass.
Thus nature's abyss becomes simultaneously a mental abyss; the contra-
dictory phenomena of the chasm appear to be "all like workings of one
mind." Indeed, we might take Wordsworth's act of descending as in
itself suggestive of that labor of imagination whereby the visionary
mind, in which the light of sense has gone out, reestablishes contact
with the phenomenal world. Through the mediating energy of imagination
the transcending consciousness at the same time descends from the "in-

visible world" into the depths of nature, there only to discover itself

now made immanent and nature herself becoming symbolic of the "invisible

146

world" of visionary consciousness. The apocalyptic features of

Simplon Pass are therefore to be taken as generally expressive of the
dialectical relationship that imagination sustains between sublime
self-consciousness and the phenomenal world. Putting this more pre-
cisely, we might say that the discordant phenomena of Simplon Pass

are expressive of one mind working in two dialectically opposed di-
rections. First of all, they are expressive of the movement of con-
sciousness beyond the phenomenal world; thus they appear to be "Char-
acters of the great Apocalypse" and "types and symbols of Eternity."
Second, they are expressive of imagination's labor of preserving that
phenomenal world for consciousness--of infusing the act of apperception
into the world of perception: imagination saves nature, in other words,
by creating an underworld.

This double direction of consciousness is suggested in complex
images of flux and stasis, destruction and preservation, height and
depth. The "immeasurable height/ Of woods" appear to be "decaying,"
passing toward that obliteration which sublime self-consciousneasim-
poses upon the phenomenal world. Yet at the same time these woods are
"never to be decayed"; they are expressive of how imagination sustains
nature. Waterfalls plunge downward into the chasm, yet their "blasts"
appear to be "stationary"--as if to suggest imagination's rescue of
the world from an annihilating plunge into the abyss of immanent
visionary consciousness. Likewise, "torrents" of winds are "shooting"
downward from "the clear blue sky" into the underworld which has been
opened up by imagination's infusion of the act of apperception into

the world of perception. Yet in the "narrow rent" of the Pass, winds

147

are "thwarting winds"; and presumably the destructive movemenngof
these winds and torrents (expressive of the destructive thrust of
visionary consciousness) are thereby checked and fixed into a pre-
carious stasis. Nature seems indefinitely suspended in the movement
toward apocalypse. Nature hangs over the abyss.41
There is a further complexity in the fact that the descending
traveller himself feels the threat from that structure of visionary
consciousness which he is displacing into nature through the agency
of imagination. Rocks mutter close upon his ears, and "Black driz-
zling crags" speak: as "if a voice were in them." The imagery suggests
how, to the extent the apocalyptic act of apperception is confined in
the world of perception, that world in itself takes on an appearance
of being dangerous. The paradox of course is that it is nature which
is herself endangered. The descending traveller also feels a threat
at "the sick sight/ And giddy prospect of the raving stream." The
underworld of displaced visionary consciousness opens beneath his
feet. Yet Wordsworth maintains his astonishing balance; the dialec-
tical relationship between sublime self-consciousness and the phenom-
enal world is somehow sustained by imagination. The poet remains
poised between the abyss below and the "unfettered clouds and region
of the Heavens" above--an emblem of that "invisible world" of pure,
transcendent vision from which his consciousness has been descending
as it becomes progressively more displaced into nature. And the
chasm grows progressively more contradictory as it comes to appear
more and more as a mental abyss: the tumult and darkness of a world

moving toward destruction are mingled with the peace and light of

148

pure visionary consciousness.

Finally, Wordsworth comes to stand at the very center of an
organic universe, the phenomena of which, no matter how contradictory
and discordant, are all like "blossoms upon one tree." In Coleridgean
terms we might say that the world of essences has been elaborated into
an intuition of absolute existence. The dialectical relationship that
imagination has sustained between sublime self-consciousness and the
phenomenal world permits the poet to see a universe in which the dis-
crete events of nature are inextricably mingled with, and unified in
terms of, an intuition of one transcendent mind. All the discordant
phenomena of nature exhibit themselves as expressions of a single struc-
ture of consciousness, that structure of consciousness in which the
subject has an intuition of the activity of his own mind as the ground
of being of the phenomenal world--but an intuition which simultaneously
poses the ultimate threat to the continued existence of that world.
This paradoxical vision sustained by imagination is extraordinary: in
order that the universe might be seen as an organic whole it must be
brought to the very brink of apocalypse. Consciousness by the ego of
its own metaphysical sublimity is indeed a consciousness "Of first, and
last, and midst, and without end"--a consciousness of, again in Cole-
ridgean terms, a "boundless or endless allness." Such sublime self-
awareness is indeed an intuition of a dynamic "something" universally
interfused. But it is only by the miracle of imagination's triumph
that nature can be sustained as symbolic of this intuition and thus
transformed. Imagination preserves nature as a "face" expressive of

a single transcendent mind.

149
NOTES: CHAPTER IV

1The most helpful general treatment of the Coleridgean sublime
is Clarence DeWitt Thorpe's "Coleridge on the Sublime" in Wordsworth
and Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs (New York, 1962), pp. 192-219.
This chapter covers much of the same evidence Thorpe examines. But my
focus is much narrower than his in that I am primarily concerned with
working out the phenomenological implications of the fact that for
Coleridge, as Thorpe himself points out, sublimity is inherently sub-
jective. Thorpe's article should be consulted for the sake of the
broader perspective he brings to bear upon the whole question of the
Coleridgean sublime.

 

21bid., p. 212.

3J. Shawcross, "Coleridge Marginalia," Egg, IV (October 1905),
342. Words in brackets suggested by Shawcross to fill a hiatus in the ms.

4The Philosophy 9t_Symbolic Forms, Volume Three: The Phenomeno-
logy gt Knowledge, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven, 1957), p. 143.

 

 

 

5"Unpublished Fragments on Aesthetics by S. T. Coleridge," ed.
Thomas M. Raysor, NCUSP, XXII (1925), 533.

6Coleridge's Miscellaneous Criticism, ed. Thomas M. Raysor (Cam-
bridge, 1936), pp. ll-12.

7It might be argued that the statement "I am nothing!" should be
taken to mean very simply: "I feel very small when confronted with the
infinity and vastness suggested by a Gothic cathedral. By comparison I
feel very small." The reading, however, is at odds with the spatial
implications of Coleridge's statement that he feels himself, his "whole
being," expanding "into the infinite." More importantly, this reading is
at odds with Coleridge's observation discussed later in this chapter that
the experience of sublimity suspends the comparing powers of the mind.

8The Friend, 4th ed. (London, 1850), I, 134-135.

 

9In this matter Coleridge echoes Burke who in his Enquiry speaks
of "the force of a judicious obscurity" in evoking feelings of sublimity,
and who also remarks that "there are reasons in nature why the obscure
idea . . . should be more affecting than the clear. It is our ignorance
of things that causes all our admiration, and chiefly excites our passions

. The ideas of eternity, and infinity, are among the most affect-
ing we have, and yet perhaps there is nothing of which we really under-
stand so little, as of infinity and eternity" (22. tits p. 59, p. 61).

10"Unpublished Fragments on Aesthetics," 92, cit., 532-533.

11Another way of putting all this is suggested by Coleridge's
general description of a symbol as characterized "above all by the

150

translucence of the eternal through and in the temporal /The State-
‘man's Manual, in Works, ed. W. G. T. Shedd (New York, 1884),I, 431/.
The sublime circle might be said to exhibit a translucence of the
shapeless through and in the shapely. But the "shapelesf'which be-
comes translucent in this instance is, paradoxically enough, the
obscure and indefinite idea of eternity.

Perhaps we can come closer to an understanding of this paradox
if we generally characterize the Coleridgean symbol in Miltonic lan-
guage as a kind of "darkness visible." For Coleridge the idea of the
"eternal" would always have to be an "obscure" idea since it is in-
evitably an "indefinite" idea. Extending his metaphor of "translucence,"
therefore, we might say that the symbol is characterized by a shining of
the darkness of the idea of the eternal through and in something tem-
poral and visible. Now it seems to me that these paradoxes partially
grow out of the habit of British empirical psychology after Locke of
discussing thinking as a kind of seeing, and therefore of discussing
ideas as if they were somehow objects of sight. (See n. 11 of the pre-
ceding chapter.) Coleridge himself, in his attack on Hartley in the
Biographia, complains of the "despotism of the eye" and of how "under
this strong sensuous influence, we are restless because invisible things
are not the objects of vision; and metaphysical systems, for the most
part, become popular, not for their truth, but in proportion as they
attribute to causes a susceptibility of being seen, if only our visual
organs were sufficiently powerful" (QR-.El£-: I, 74). Yet when Cole-
ridge uses the term "translucence" in his explanation of the symbol, it
would seem as if he has not quite escaped the Lockean habit. Or per-
haps--to put this more precisely--we might say that his metaphor of
"translucence" is an attempt to mediate between the Lockean way of dis-
cussing ideas as if they were objects of sight and his own belief that
certain ideas cannot be so explained, that certain ideas ought not to
be submitted to the "despotism of the eye." In phenomenological termi-
nology, we might say that consciousness, when it is directed toward a
Coleridgean symbol, simultaneously intends two ideas in a single act:
one idea may be discussed in terms appropriate to an object of sight
(as, for example, the idea of a circle); the other cannot be so dis-
cussed (as, for example, the idea of eternity). One idea might be said
to have a "shape," the other is "shapeless." According to Coleridge,
therefore, the symbol-making power of the mind implicitly refutes a
basic methodological assumption of Lockean epistemology; but his use of
the term "translucence" almost conceals this refutation.

Likewise, when I speak in my text of how the "image of the cir-
cle as objectively shapely recedes, as it were, into the obscurity of
the idea of eternity," I engage in a somewhat Lockean manner of speak-
ing: attempting to discuss a certain act of consciousness in language
appropriate to the act of seeing. Since, finally, this act cannot be
fully analyzed in such language, my phrasing becomes as implicitly
paradoxical as Coleridge's use of the term "translucence."

 

12Coleridge's Miscellaneous Criticism, 92. cit., p. 164.

13Unpublished Letters gt Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. L.
Griggs (London, 1932), I. 117.

151

14In this sentence I explicitly fall back upon spatial meta-
phors in an attempt to make myself clear. Sometimes it seems impos-
sible to discuss these matters without such verbal strategies. The
methodological problem is recognized by Coleridge himself in his com-
ments on Wordsworth's "Immortality Ode"§1 . . the ode was intended for
such readers only as had been accustomed to watch the flux and reflux
of their inmost nature, to venture at times into the twilight realms
of consciousness, and to feel a deep interest in modes of inmost being,
to which they know that the attributes of time and space are inapplica-
ble, and alien, but which yet can not be conveyed save in symbols of
time and space" (Biographia Literaria, gp, ttt., II, 120).

15The Notebooks gt Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn
(New York, 1962), I, 921.

16"Coleridge Marginalia," 92, ttt., 341.
17Thorpe, _p, ElEz: p. 215.

18The Friend, 92, gig,, 111, 192-193.
19lggg , 200, 193.

2092, cit., II, 47.

21Etienne Gilson, History gt Christian Philosophy 12 the Middle
Ages (New York, 1955), pp. 368-369.

 

22The Friend, 92, E££°: III, 202. Coleridge himself finally
grounds the intuition in God himself: "And the manifesting_power, the
source and the correlative of the idea Li.e., the intuition/ thus mani-
fested--is it not God? Either thou knowest it to be God, or thou hast
called an idol by that awful name" (196). I do not mention this in
my text because my concern has not been to present Coleridge as an
idealistic metaphysician but as a student of the kinds of experiences
available to consciousness. I pursue the emphasis Coleridge himself
pursues in this essay: a description of the intuition as a phenomeno-
logical reality rather than as means of establishing metaphysical
postulates. Thus the question of whether finally the "source" and the
"manifesting power" of the intuition of "absolute existence" is called
"God" by Coleridge is a question not relevant to my interests. It
might be argued that my approach has been suggested to me by what seems
to be a premise of German idealistic philosophy after Kant: namely,
that the analysis of consciousness will reveal a true metaphysical
knowledge of reality. In any case, I prefer to read Coleridge--here
obviously under the sway of Schelling--simply as a phenomenologist; and
I choose to ignore the metaphysical claims. My treatment of Coleridge,
in other words, is similar to my treatment of Wordsworth elsewhere. I
am concerned with showing how certain statements which might be taken
as statemenfliof doctrine about thenature of things can be more meaning-
fully taken as statements about the phenomenological structure of cer-
tain conscious experiences.

23Ibid., 201.

152

24Coleridge's notion that the experience of sublimity suspends
the comparative powers of the mind seems to be a refinement of the
commonplace assertion by eighteenth-century theorists that one of the
principal effects of the sublime is a feeling of "astonishment." Burke
describes this "state of the soul" as one in which "the mind is so en-
tirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor
by consequence reason upon that object which employs it" (Enquiry, 92.
tit., p. 57). We might also say, therefore, that Coleridge's intuition
of absolute existence provokes astonishment; it is an intuition which
"admits of no question out of itself."

25Cited by Shawcross in the notes to his edition of the Biogra-
phia, _p. cit., II, 309.

261bid.
271bid.

28Further corroboration of my assertion that the intuition is
derived from a special form of introspection is implied in the follow-
ing. Coleridge is wondering about the origin of the intuition: "In
vain would we derive it from the organs of sense: for these supply
only surface, undulations, phantoms. In vain from the instruments of
sensation: for these furnish only the chaos, the shapeless elements of
sense. And least of all may we hope to find its origin, or sufficient
cause, in the moulds and mechanism of the understanding, the whole pur-
port and functions of which consist in individualization, in outlines
and differencings by quantity and relation. It were wiser to seek sub-
stance in shadow, than absolute fulness in mere negation. . . . To no
class of phenomena or particulars can it be referred, itself being
none; therefore, to no faculty by which these alone are apprehended.
As little dare we refer it to any form of abstraction or generalization;
for it has neither co-ordinate nor analogon; it~is absolute one; and
that it is, and affirms itself to be, is its only predicate" (QB. 2152:
III, 194).

291bid., 193.
30L1. 416-434 (1805 version).
31Literary Criticism, p. 199, p. 173.

321bid., p. 18, p. 28. Italics mine.

33Notebooks, _p, cit., II, 3158.
3492a cit., I, 202-
351bid.

36E252222E§g 22; gig., II, 2057. The "Recluse" of course is
Wordsworth.

37L1. 592-596.

 

 

153

38L1. 600-602.

39L. 602.
40L1. 624-640.

41Another significant moment of "hanging" can be found in Book
I of The Prelude. And here again, I believe, we have a description
suggestive of a dangerous balance between the phenomenal world and
visionary consciousness:

 

Oh! when I have hung

Above the raven's nest, by knots of grass

And half-inch fissures in the slippery rock

But ill sustained, and almost (so it seemed)

Suspended by the blast that blew amain,

Shouldering the naked crag, oh, at that time

While on the perilous ridge I hung alone,

With what strange utterance did the loud dry wind

Blow through my ear! the sky seemed not a sky

Of earth--and with what motion moved the clouds!
(11. 330-339)

It is significant that such experiences should have been part of the
education of the mind of that poet whose imaginative task is, as he
himself defines it, to provide "sensuous incarnation" for the "ether-
eal and transcendent." Wordsworth's hanging here "on the perilous
ridge" can be seen as emblematically analogous to the grasping by the
boy of the Fenwick note on the "Immortality Ode" to a wall or tree to
preserve himself from the abyss of idealism. The task of imagination
is to preserve the phenomenal world from the destructive thrust of
visionary consciousness.

 

CHAPTER V

SOME CONCLUSIONS

It might be said that this essay has faced throughout a single
question: what is the "something" Wordsworth claims to have felt, with
a "sense sublime," in "Tintern Abbey"? The answer to this question was
stated in the opening chapter: the "something" is nothing else than
Wordsworth's own consciousness directly intuited in an act of apper-
ception. In subsequent chapters my task has been not simply to defend
the correctness of this answer, but to explore its full meaning as well.
In this exploration I turned first of all to the poem "Tintern Abbey"
and tried to show how it was essentially a meditation concerned with
the perplexities created for the poet by his failure or unwillingness to
recognize the immanence of his consciousness in nature. Then I examined
certain theories of the experience of the sublime, invoking for this
examination the unifying concept of a phenomenological archetype and
progressively trying to refine with the help of this concept the mean-
ing of such terms as "apperception" and "sublime self-consciousness."
Finally, in this exploration I have developed a description--especially
in the last chapter-~of the relationship between such a form of con-
sciousness and the vitalizing act of imagination. This relationship
was seen to be inevitably oxymoronic: the mind experiences an open-
ended sense of its own ubiquitous activity within the limited forms and
shapes provided by the phenomenal world. An absolute "something" is
intuited as indwelling within the finite. The "shapeless" is dis-

covered to be immanent in the "shapely"; the "sentiment of Being" is

154

 

155

felt as "spread" universally, and the world comes to exhibit "one
life."

In this final chapter I propose to sketch out a number of con-
clusions which I hope will prove suggestive for future students of
Wordsworth. My intention now is not to proceed in the lingeringly
analytical manner of the preceding chapters: I assume, perhaps too
easily, that the answer to my single question needs no such further
elaboration. Instead, my intention now is to range freely across a
number of Wordsworthian problems on a deliberately high level of
provocative generality. I shall attempt to show how we might edge these
problems toward their solution by setting them within the phenomenolog-
ical context developed in this essay. The specific questions I face are
three: 1) What is the form of Wordsworthian space--that very special
kind of space which his mind and nature come simultaneously to inhabit
through the power of imagination? 2) What is the form of Wordsworth-
ian time? Another way of asking this same question: how does the act
of imagination, proceeding as it does from an act of sublime self-
consciousness, transform the temporal reality of the phenomenal world?
3) What is the relationship between the structure of Wordsworth's
imaginative act and his explicitly formulated poetic program?

It should be understood that in what follows there is no attempt
to provide complete answers to these enormously complicated questions;
no insistence that these problems, once they have been caught in the
light of my analysis of the structure of Wordsworth's imaginative con-
sciousness, have been in any final way "solved." What follows is to

be taken as nothing more than a set of relatively abstract sketches--

156

a drawing out from my thesis of some sets of coordinates which may or
may not help other readers of Wordsworth to achieve a critical pur-
chase upon a specific problem in a specific poem. In other words, I
now offer, as economically as possible, certain hypotheses which are
intended to suggest how the somewhat narrow focus of this essay might

be significantly broadened.

--2--

What is the form of Wordsworthian space?

The poet asserts that in "nature everything is distinct, yet
nothing defined into absolute independent singleness."1 The space
occupied by any individual phenomenon is likewise not an absolutely
closed space. Though things may be distinctly located in space, they
cannot claim exclusive possession of their location. As Alfred North
Whitehead observes in his Science and the Modern World, Wordsworth's
"theme is nature 12 solido, that is to say, he dwells on that myster-
ious presence of surrounding things, which imposes itself on any separ-
ate element that we set up as an individual for its own sake. He
always grasps the whole of nature as involved in the tonality of the
particular instance."2 It is of course the power of imagination which
creates this oxymoronic "tonality," this sense of an individual phenom-
enon as somehow having "involved" in itself, or rolled up into itself
(L. involvere, to roll into), or contained within itself the whole of
nature. For imagination is the faculty, according to Wordsworth,
whereby "things are lost in each other, and limits vanish."3 Not only
do phenomena in themselves tend to become intermingled, their presences

interfusing with one another; but their spatial "limits" as well tend

 

157

to be obliterated. The individual form comes no longer to be seen as
4
a "punctual Presence," existing at a defined point in space which ex-
cludes all other points in space. Rather, the place of any one thing
exhibits the potential of including all other places.5 The locations
of Wordsworthian space are thus somewhat deceptive: though they are
special places seemingly isolated from the rest of the world, they can
also be, at the same time and in a certain way, so interfused with the
presence of all surrounding things that these special places tend to
be radically open-ended, indeed sometimes functioning almost like a
point of view, rather than a point of space, through which the mind
might pass toward a vision of the totality of things. The places of
Wordsworthian space are thus capable of being transformed by imagina-
tion into a series of mutually immanent locations, each of which simul-
taneously contains and is contained by the other. "Surrounding things"
are at the same time "involved" or rolled up into the "tonality of the
particular instance"; they can in some way be both around and within.
An example of such a peculiarly immanent place or location is

the hill-enclosed lake in the vale of Grasmere:

Behold the universal imagery

Inverted, all its sun-bright features touched

As with the varnish, and the gloss of dreams;

Dreamlike the blending also of the whole

Harmonious landscape; all along the shore

The boundary lost, the line invisible

That parts the image from reality;

And the clear hills, as high as they ascend

Heavenward, so piercing deep the lake below.
Wordworth's imperative "Behold" directs the eye toward a single phe-

nomenon, the lake of Grasmere. But we immediately discover that con-

tained in that lake is "the universal imagery/ Inverted." The "clear

 

158

hills" surrounding the lake are simultaneously immanent within the
lake, and in that state of immanence assume a suggestively visionary
«appearance: they seem to be "touched" with the "varnish, and the
gloss of dreams." We cannot assume that this appearance of "varnish"
and "gloss" is merely the result of the phenomenal difference between
the hills when seen directly and the hills when seen "Inverted" or
reflected upon the surface of the lake. For, as Wordsworth tells us,
the "line" which "parts the image from reality" is "invisible," not
only inciicating the invisibility of the lake's shoreline but also sug-
gesting, the difficulty of making phenomenal distinctions between the
hills in themselves and their reflected image. The hills, at the same
time ascending into the sky and "piercing deep" into the lake, are seen
in both actions as "clear Hills." Is it, then, simply this "blending"
of image and reality--simultaneously a doubling of appearances--which
accounts for Wordsworth's assertion that the overall impression is
"Dreamlike"? I suspect that a better reason for Wordsworth's charac-
terization can be developed if we recall that for the poet the act of
imagination fuses that open-ended sense of self experienced in the act
of apperception with the phenomena of nature revealed by the act of
perception. Here in the lake of Grasmere Wordsworth beholds almost a
paradigm of that oxymoronic fusion--an emblem of imaginative con-
sciousness. We notice that the lake, through its reflection of the
hills which "ascend/ Heavenward," is endowed with an open-ended space;
for the hills also appear to be "piercing" heavenward into its depths.
Not only is the lake indistinguishable along its shoreline from the

surrounding and ascending landscape, it is also inwardly dilated and

 

159

deepened by its reflection of that ascending landscape. Thus the lake
takes on the appearance of a potentially infinite expansion in all
directions. It is precisely in this expansion that the lake becomes
suggestively emblematic. Just as in the experience of imaginative con-
sciousness, the spatial limits of the self are felt to be dissolving,
so the spatial limits of the lake appear to be dissolving. Yet also I
here, as for imaginative consciousness, the phenomenal world is not 5

lost. The blending of the "whole/Harmonious landscape" into an open-

 

ended focus does not lead to an apocalyptic confusion or destruction of 1 b
that landscape. Though the "universal imagery" may be "inverted" in a
lake which appears to be bottomless, that "imagery" is not obliterated
in that space: the hills remain "clear." Thus, taking this scene as
emblematic, we might say that the phenomenal world has been tranquilly
married to the "abyss of idealism." The sense of the infinite is
quietly discovered to be immanent in the sense of the finite.

What all this generally suggests, I believe, is that the mutual
immanence of the special locations in Wordsworth's landscape are to be
taken as expressive of the ubiquitous energy of consciousness inter-
fused by the power of imagination throughout the phenomenal world. No
single location can be "defined into absolute independent singleness"
because each location, as an object of perception, is potentially ex-
posed to the dilating power of the act of apperception. Imagination,
Wordsworth observes, deals "with objects not as they are, but as they
appear to the mind of the poet."7 The places in Wordsworth's landscape
are thus dependent for their poetic appearance upon a mind which is

capable of acts of sublime self-consciousness, acts in which all limits,

160

spatial or otherwise, are felt to be vanishing. All places have the
potential for mutual immanence to the extent that the "sentiment of
Being" spreads through phenomenal Space. The mind's perception of any
specific location can be transformed into an experience of the mind's
simultaneously moving beyond that location insofar as the act of apper-
ception, the Coleridgean "I AM IN THAT I AM" latent in any act of per-
ception, becomes explicit. For in this structure of self-consciousness,
when experienced in its purest form, the mind feels itself to be con-
fined to no particular place. Also, the oxymoronic appearance of the
"particular instance," into which according to Whitehead the whole of
nature has been somehow "involved," is expressive of imagination's
gathering into a single focus in phenomenal space of that ubiquitous
activity of consciousness which, as we saw in "Tintern Abbey," "rolls
through all things." When the sense of unlocalized self is fused,
through imagination, with a location in the phenomenal world, that fixed
location begins to take on the appearance of being filled, in some bare-
ly describable way, with other locations.
According to the Wanderer of The Excursion, there is an "active
Principle" which "subsists/ In all things." This "Spirit" is one which
knows no insulated spot,

No chasm, no solitude; from link to link

It circulates, the Soul of all the world.

This is the freedom of the universe . . . .
The mind, in moving toward an intuition of this "Spirit," achieves a
sense of its own spatial "freedom" as well as of the spatial "freedom"
of the phenomenal universe in which there comes to appear "no insulated

spot." Wordsworth re-interprets the principle of the continuity of the

Great Chain of Being into a principle of immanence: a single ubiquitous

$1

 

161

"Soul" strangely "circulates" through the links of the Chain. The
"active Principle" disclosed in sublime self-consciousness is the
force which breaks down all limits and tends to destroy all sense of
isolated points in space. The "freedom of the universe" depends upon
the power of consciousness to escape the tyranny of feeling itself
confined to a "punctual Presence." And Wordsworth's preoccupation with
special places in the landscape, a preoccupation which Hartman refers
to as the "spot-syndrome" and which he traces through the poetry of
Wordsworth's major period, is, in the terms of this essay, a pre-
occupation with the immanence of apperception in perception, an imma-
nence which can be brought to a peculiarly visionary focus in phenom-
enal space by the power of imagination.9 There are indeed "Souls of

lonely places."10

--3__

What is the form of Wordsworthian time?

The question is closely related to one-of Wordsworth's major
themes: the problem of human hope. The despondent Solitary in Book

III of The Excursion raises the problem in "bitter language of the

 

heart":

what good is given to men,
More solid than the gilded clouds of heaven?
What joy more lasting than a vernal flower?--

Oh! tremble, ye, to whom hath been assigned
A course of days composing happy months,

And they as happy years; the present still
So like the past, and both so firm a pledge
Of a congenial future, that the wheels

Of pleasure move without the aid of hope:
For Mutability is Nature's bane:

And slighted Hope will be avenged; and, when
Ye need her favours, ye shall find her not;

162

But in her stead--fear--doubt--and agony!11
The Solitary's words are interesting, not because of the traditional
complaint about nature's mutability which they echo, but because of the
special warning he directs toward those who live a life of "happy years"
in which the present is "So like the past" that both seem to "pledge"
an equally happy or "congenial future." In such a state there appears
to be a virtual identity between past, present, and future; indeed, such
a state might almost be called changeless or timeless. The virtue of
hope, irrelevant in a world which is felt to be pleasantly changeless,
is therefore never practiced. And when the inevitable reality of de-
structive change erupts into such a world--as it did for the Solitary--
hope, the virtue that was slighted because there seemed no need for it,
will be found lacking. In other words, the experience of human change-
lessness is both dangerous and ironic. The fact is that the "good .
given to men" is only as substantial as the fool's gold of the "gilded
clouds of heaven"; and if we experience too many identical days in
which "the wheels/ Of pleasure move without the aid of hope," we will
fall into despair when mutability intrudes with its baneful reality.
To live without hope, even when appearances seem to permit such a life,
is to prepare oneself for the "agony" of hopelessness.

The Wanderer, in one of his many attempts in the poem to "correct"

the Solitary's despondency, projects a vision in Book IV

Of Life continuous, Being unimpaired;

That hath been, is, and where it was and is

There shall endure,--existence unexposed

To the blind walk of mortal accident;

From diminution safe and weakening age;

While man grows old, and dwindles, and decays;

And countless generations of mankind

Depart; and leave no vestige where they trod.12

163

The Wanderer does not urge hOpe upon the Solitary by denying the reality
of change. For that would be to urge the same trap which the Solitary
had already warned against, and into which he had fallen. Hope cannot
be purchased by a refusal to face mutability. Indeed, the Wanderer
stresses the sad facts of the "blind walk of mortal accident." Man not
only stumbles blindly ahead in time, not knowing what "accidents" of
violent change he will encounter in his journey. He also is "blind" to
those who have lived before him: decay and death so absolutely over-

take "countless generations" of homines viatores, that "no vestige" of

 

their human existence is left "where they trod." Time and change, it
would seem, enforce upon man a sense of irremedial discontinuities.

In the case of the Solitary it was a number of experiences of such
discontinuities--of violent snappings of the expectations which had
bound him hopefully to the future--which occasioned his despair. How,
then, is the Wanderer advocating hope in these lines? By suggesting
that there is available to man a vision of an "existence unexposed" to
mutability, a vision which transcends the blindness of the "walk of
mortal accident." This vision is not of a frozen eternity standing out-
side the temporal world, nor even of a state of timelessness to be some-
how achieved within this world. It is rather of a dimension of reality
where "Life" is "continuous" and "Being" remains "unimpaired." In this
dimension there is a past, a present, and a future. And "Being" pre-
sumably appears to "become" in the sense that it is seen as moving from
a past through a present and into a future. But this becoming is char-
acterized by a continuous endurance of what "Being" essentially is as

it moves through time: "That hath been, is and, where it was and is/

164

There shall endure." The Wanderer seems to be suggesting, then, that
hope is possible in an apprehension of a becoming distinguishable from,
indeed "unexposed" to, change. The feeling of destructive discontinu-
ity which occasions despair can be overcome if man somehow grows aware
of the temporal process in such a way that the sense of becoming can
be disengaged from the sense of a change. Hope is possible when the
flow of time is no longer seen as exclusively producing the "bane" of
mutability. Within the very flow of time itself, upon the surface of
which is scattered undeniable evidence of man's "diminution" and "weak-

ening," there can be intuited, in Wordsworth's words, "the great moving
spirit of things."13 Hope is to be rooted in the enduring heart of the
temporal process--in a vision of a duration which subsists beneath all
discontinuities.

How is this saving vision to be achieved? We recall from Chapter

III of this essay how the Wanderer (there discussed under his other name
in the poem, the Pedlar) was "endowed" by an early and prolonged expo-
sure to the sublime forms of nature with the "vision and the faculty
divine"; that is, with the power of sublime self-consciousness.14 We
might say, then, that his vision of a duration which subsists beneath all
discontinuities--a vision which is also Wordsworth's--is the result of
imagination's infusing the perceived world of mutability with that sense
of time experienced in the act of apperception. This structure of aware-
ness not only releases consciousness from the sense of being confined to
a particular location in space, it also releases consciousness from the
sense of being confined to a particular moment in time. The subject in

directly intuiting itself achieves a structure of consciousness which

165

absolutely lacks any principle of limitation--any means, with respect
to time, whereby the self might define itself as existing exclusively
at this particular moment. The sense of the self's expansion outward
into space is paralleled and accompanied by a sense of the self's "ex-
pansion" backward and forward in time. Consciousness feels itself,
therefore, not only interfusing all space but also interfusing all time.
As Wordsworth observes in The Prelude, after having recalled the parti-
cularly visionary quality of his first encounter with London:

Such is the strength and glory of our Youth.

The Human nature unto which I felt

That I belong'd, and which I lov'd and reverenc'd

Was not a punctual Presence, but a Spirit

Living in time and space, and far diffus'd.

In this my joy, in this my dignity

Consisted . . . .15
Sublime self-consciousness evokes a sense of a self which is "far dif-
fus'd" throughout time as well as space; in both dimensions conscious-
ness feels itself to be much more than a "punctual Presence."

We might thus say that the perceived moment of the world of muta-
bility, once it has been invaded by the act of apperception through the
mediation of imagination, becomes an immanent moment. It now appears to
be filled with both past and future. The sense of the self's diffusion
throughout time is displaced or focused by imagination into the phenom-
enal moment and redeems it, as it were, from being merely an exclusive
instant in the world of mutability, that world of absolute and frequently
violent discontinuities. Such an exclusive instant would in itself appear

to be absolutely discontinuous, severed from past instants and future in-

stants, resembling nothing more than a mathematical point without exten-

sion. A succession of such mutually exclusive instants constitutes the

166

time in which deSpair flourishes. But the moment invaded by sublime
self-consciousness appears at the same time to be invaded by moments of
the past and moments of the future. There is thus possible a vision of
a continuous duration "whose heterogeneous moments," in the words of

"16 This is the characteristic intuition

Bergson, "permeate one another.
of a man who leads, in Wordsworth's terms, a "life where hope and memory
are as one."17 All of which is to say that hope is a function of an in-
tuition of an essentially continuous flow of time within the often frag-
mented time of the world of mutability. Imagination, by projecting into
this fragmented time a sense of the self's simultaneous existence at all
inoments of time, endows the temporal process with the appearance of
possessing a continuous duration. Consciousness is now enabled, in the
words of Poulet, "to travel through time in order to feel its continuity."
It is in this feeling--what Poulet might call the "romanticism of gtpgtf
ienced continuity"--that hope resides.18 The heart, having overcome the
oppressive sense of time's irremedial discontinuities, can now begin to
hope. The heart can now project its desire into a seemingly limitless

future. It is no wonder, then, that Wordsworth's remembering in Book VI

of The Prelude of his Alpine encounter with imagination's power causes him

“19

 

to feel a "hope that can never die.
We are now in a position briefly to consider the function of mem-
ory in Wordsworth's poetic process. According to the well known formu-
lation of the "Preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1800)," poetry "is the
spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from
emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till,
by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an

emotion kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation is

167

gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind."20

I have argued in this essay that Wordsworth's act of imagination pro-
ceeds from an act of apperception. How are we to reconcile this posi-
tion with Wordsworth's assertion here that poetry "takes its origin
from emotion recollected in tranquillity"? Can we say that the "spon-
taneous overflow"--which appears to be the result of a "species of
reaction" by the mind to its originally tranquil and contemplative
memory of an emotion--is likewise the result of an act of apperception?
The answers to these questions obviously depend on our interpretation
of this "species of reaction." What is this ttgd of reaction by con-
sciousness to its own activity which according to Wordsworth triggers
the "overflow" of emotion into poetic form?

Let us first of all notice that the metaphor of "overflow," one
of the constituting metaphors of Wordsworth's expressive theory of art,
is suggestive, when taken merely as an image and not as a metaphor, of
an act of spreading or diffusion of some liquid substance in space. We
can next recall how the song of the Solitary Reaper, producing in Words-
worth an intense imaginative reaction, is described as "overflowing" the
"Vale profound" in which the harvesting girl is seen.21 In this image of
a spatialized sound, a sound which spreads and expands like a growing
body of water, there is to be detected, I believe, another instance of
that spreading and expansion so characteristic of sublime self-
consciousness. Can we also detect in Wordsworth's metaphor of the "over-
flow of powerful feelings" an echo of the act of apperception? Are we
permitted to say that the metaphor is but another version of those meta-

phors of apperception we have already seen: of a self "far diffus'd" in

168

time and space; of the "sentiment of Being" spreading throughout the
phenomenal world?

We should also notice that these "powerful feelings" which "over-
flow" are "kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation."
That is, they resemble that original "emotion recollected in tranquil-
lity." It might be asserted, then, that the contemplative act which
leads to poetry also leads to a "re-feeling" of a past emotion. Can we
not go further and say, therefore, that Wordsworth's contemplative act
brings back a feeling from the past into present consciousness, and that
in this respect the psychological genesis of poetry for Wordsworth is
an act of consciousness in which the mind overcomes any sense it might
have of feeling itself confined to the emotions of the present? The
emotions of the past can be made to rise up again in present conscious-
ness; and in this experience--what we would now call the act of "affec-
tive memory"--consciousness discovers itself no longer confined to an
emotive "punctual Presence." The invasion of the present by feelings
from the past seems to provoke, in other words, a sense of the self as
"far diffus'd" in time. The "powerful feelings" which "overflow" into
poetry proceed from a "far diffus'd" subjectivity which has discovered,
through affective memory, its ability to transcend its location in the
present. Apperceiving consciousness in turn powerfully "spreads'itself
into poetry. Just as such a structure of awareness becomes interfused
throughout the phenomenal world, so language becomes, in Wordsworth's
terms, "an incarnation of the thought."22

I cannot insist upon the inescapable correctness of this inter-

pretation both of Wordsworth's unexplained "species of reaction" and

of the key metaphor in his formulation of an expressive theory of art.

169

The language of Wordsworth's description of the psychological origins
of poetry is finally more provocative than definitively and precisely
illuminating. But the power of the affective memory to induce an act
of sublime self-consciousness is clearly suggested in a passage from

Book II of The Prelude where, recalling how as a child he would wander

 

through nights "blackened with a coming storm," Wordsworth observes:

Thence did I drink the visionary power;

And deem not profitless those fleeting moods
Of shadowy exultation: not for this,

That they are kindred to our purer mind
And intellectual life; but that the soul,
Remembering how she felt, but what she felt
Remembering not, retains an obscure sense
Of possible sublimity, whereto

With growing faculties she doth aspire,
With faculties still growing, feeling still
That whatsoever point they gain, they yet
Have something to pursue.23

The value Wordsworth finds in memories of certain "fleeting moods/ Of
shadowy exultation" is that they enable the "soul" to retain "an obscure
sense] Of possible sublimity." This introspective and potentially vi-
Sionary traffic with the past-~and here Wordsworth makes a curious dis-
tinction--depends upon the soul's remembering, not "what she felt," but
"how she felt." The special concern of this act of memory seems to be
not so much with the exact content of a certain past feeling, but with
what we might almost call the "feeling" of that past feeling--a "feeling"
detached from any of the specific circumstances of the past surrounding
the original feeling. To put this more precisely: what is to be re-
covered from the past is a "how," a mode of pure subjectivity; not a
"what," a subjectivity defined with respect to any specific past object
d.24

of consciousness. The feeling is to be re-felt, not to be re-calle

The feeling is to be dislodged from its location in a remembered past

170

and therefore permitted to be re-felt in the present. The labor of
memory which accomplishes this recovery is in itself an open-ended
activity: there always remains "something" of the subjectivity of the
past "to pursue." This labor of memory also and significantly induces
a form of self-consciousness in which the soul feels its "faculties" or
powers to be "growing" in a similarly open-ended fashion: the subject
intuits itself in such a way that its powers seem to be potentially
infinite. The language of Wordsworth's account of this act of affec-
tive memory subtly weaves together both a description of an infinite
regression by consciousness into its past subjectivity and a descrip-
tion of a simultaneously intensifying act of self-consciousness in which
the soul comes to a progressively incremental sense of its own powers.
Indeed, Wordsworth's loose and open syntax, permitting him to pass al-
most unnoticeably from a discussion of an act of memory into a dis-
cussion of an act of self-consciousness, finally suggests that both
acts are in essence identical. The "point" which the powers of the soul
may "gain" can be taken to refer both to a stage in the retrospective
apprehension of a past mode of subjectivity and to a stage in the in-
tensification of self-consciousness. And for both acts there remains
a "something" to be pursued, a provocative "something" which is latent--
or can we say interfused?--in the mind's "obscure sense/ Of possible
sublimity." In other words, these lines seem to suggest that for Words-
worth one of the principal means for inducing sublime self-consciousness
is the act of affective memory.

Thus it should not be surprising that Wordsworth uses metaphors

of depth and of immanence to describe the act of memory. In one of the

171

‘more elaborate similes of The Prelude, Wordsworth characterizes the
activity of his mind in writing that autobiographical poem:
As one who hangs down-bending from the side
Of a slow-moving boat, upon the breast
Of a still water, solacing himself
With such discoveries as his eye can make
Beneath him in the bottom of the deep,
Sees many beauteous sights--weeds, fishes, flowers,
Grots, pebbles, roots of trees, and fancies more,
Yet often is perplexed and cannot part
The shadow from the substance, rocks and sky,
Mountains and clouds, reflected in the depth
0f the clear flood, from things which there abide
In their true dwelling; now is crosSed by gleam
Of his own image, by a sun-beam now,
And wavering motions sent he know not whence,
Impediments that make his task more sweet;

Such pleasant office have we long pursued
Incumbent o'er the surface of past time . .

25

The act of memory is here compared to an exploration of an immanent
space--a comparison produced by Wordsworth's spatialization of time:
"past time" has a "surface." Thus the act of looking backward into

time is analogous to the act of looking downward into space. Just as

in "Tintern Abbey" Wordsworth's memory playing over the surface of the
landscape gradually brings his consciousness HQEB.£EE2 the heart of

the landscape, there to postulate the presence of an unseen hermit, so
here memory is depicted as a search for "such discoveries" as can be
made in the "bottom of the deep." But what is discovered in the "deep"
of this simile is not a direct vision into the "life of things," but a
world remarkably like the world created by the power of imagination, one
of whose functions, we have already observed, is to produce a state of
appearances in which "things are lost in each other, and limits vanish."
Here, in the depths of this "still water" of time, "shadow" cannot be

parted from "substance"; and the "rocks and sky,/ Mountains and clouds"

cannot be distinguished "from things which there abide/ In their true

172

dwelling." In other words, images from the present are confused with
images from the past. The suggestion is that Wordsworth's act of
memory elicits in him the power of imagination, the power which pre-

sumably enables him to write The Prelude and which in this simile is

 

implicitly described as mingling perceptions from the past with per-
ceptions from the present. But if imagination is stirred by memory,
then memory must also in some way provoke that act of sublime self-
consciousness out of which imagination proceeds. Here imagination's
mingling of past and present within the "deep" of retrospection might
be taken as an expression of the implicit presence of that structure of
consciousness which knows no location in time. And the simile as a
whole suggestively projects an image of the extraordinarily complex
relationship in Wordsworth's psychology of creation between the act of
memory, the act of imagination, and that latent act of apperception
which collapses hard and fast distinctions between past and present.
Perhaps nowhere in Wordsworth is the power of memory to elicit
imaginative consciousness more clearly recognized than in his comments
on the "spots of time." These "locations" in the past--again Wordsworth
spatializes his sense of time--are special memories to which he explicit-
ly repairs for the purpose of inducing in himself a certain state of
self-consciousness: a sense that the mind is "lord and master" of the
phenomenal world, and "that outward sense/ Is but the obedient servant
of her will."26 But is not such a state of self-consciousness exactly
that required for the activity of imagination as it "dissolves, diffuses,
and dissipates, in order to recreate" the world into art?27 Thus we

might say that the "spots of time" are certain remembered perceptions

173

in which there is a latent content of apperception, a content which is
recoverable by the affective memory. These locations in the past are
the "hiding-places of man's power"--mysteriously immanent places in
which there lurks the presence of visionary consciousness. The mind,
in repairing to these "spots of time," seeks a"vivifying Virtue," the
power ultimately of transforming the universe into a vision of vital
wholeness.28 The mind seeks for itself a sense of "how" it felt rather
than a sense of "what" it felt. It pursues an explication of that
"obscure sense/ Of possible sublimity" buried in certain haunting
images from the past.

One such "spot of time” in The Prelude is the famous boating
episode of Book I. Wordsworth recalls how after his terrifying vision
of a "huge Peak" uprearing "its head" above the "horizon's bound," a
vision of a "grim shape" which seemed to stride after him "with purpose
of its own," there ensued a period of "many days" in which his mind

Worked with a dim and undetermined sense

Of unknown modes of being; o'er my thoughts

There hung a darkness, call it solitude

Or blank desertion. No familiar shapes

Remained, no pleasant images of trees,

Of sea or sky, no colours of green fields;

But huge and mighty forms, that do not live

Like living men, moved slowly through the mind

By day, and were a trouble to my dreams.29
This encounter with an almost numinous presence, suddenly and provoca-
tively rising up out of the depths of the phenomenal world, seems to
have provoked a sustained act of apperCeption in which there was a
total loss, or apocalypse, of the phenomenal world: "No familiar

shapes/ Remained." Subjectivity was thrown back upon itself in an

intuition of "unknown modes of being." The intuition itself is char-

174

acterized as a "dim and undetermined sense"; that is, consciousness
was unable to define its intentionality with respect to any precisely
intended object of consciousness. In Coleridgean terms, the "shape-
less" had overwhelmed the "shapely." The sustained condition of apper-
ception was for Wordsworth a "solitude/ Or blank desertion." And the
poet's language gropes incrementally through a series of negations to
express that same structure of consciousness which in "Tintern Abbey"
he attempts to define through the use of the metaphor of dwelling-
places.

But what I believe to be most significant about this "spot of
time," haunting as it is when taken by itself, is the "species" of
Wordsworth's reaction to his remembering of this episode within the

context of that unfolding act of memory which is The Prelude. For

 

immediately after his recounting of this episode, we find the poet re-
acting--as he does frequently in the poem--to what his memory has just
brought forth. Here, suggestively enough, he breaks out into an apos-
trophe to the
Wisdom and Spirit of the universe!

Thou Soul that art the eternity of thought,

That givest to forms and images a breath

And everlasting motion . 30
I interpret this apostrophe as evidence of a recovery, through an act of
affective memory, of the content of apperception latent in the remem-
bered perceptions of the boating episode. Suddenly WOrdsworth addresses
a "Soul" which is both an "eternity of thought" and a power which endows
the "forms and images" of the phenomenal world with a "breath." The

act of apperception both induces a sense of the self's presence through-

out all time and almost de-substantializes nature, endowing it through

175

the agency of imagination with the appearance of "Spirit" (L. spiritus,
breath). I believe, in other words, that the boating episode, when
read in conjunction with Wordsworth's immediately succeeding apostrophe,
is to be taken as a significant gloss upon the theory of the psychologi-
cal origins of poetry set forth in the "Preface to the Lyrical Ballads."
The highest function of recollection for Wordsworth is to induce a
state of sublime self-consciousness out of which the creative activity
of imagination might proceed. Memory is the means whereby the poet
might recover a vivifying sense of his identity as a poet, a means of
returning through the past to his visionary possibilities in the present.
Wordsworth concludes his apostrophe with testimony of a renewed recog-
nition of the "grandeur in the beatings of the heart."31 The sense of
possible sublimity has been transformed into a sense of actual sublimi-
ty.

And, as we have already seen, it is precisely in this trans-
formation of self-consciousness that hope resides. The intuition of
a "grandeur" in the depths of one's subjectivity is also potentially an
intuition of a continuous duration in the phenomenal world--a vision of
a presence eternally interfused by imagination throughout the images of
despair, the bleak evidences of discontinuity, which are strewn across
the surface of time. Hence one of Wordsworth's most persistent and
poignant fears is that the passing of time will introduce an irremedial
break between his present consciousness and those memories which con-
tain "power," those "spots of time" out of which he can educe a sense
of himself as "far diffus'd" throughout all of time.

But he fights against this fear by conceiving of poetry as a

176

means of insuring the possibility of continuing hope. The poet writes,
according to the "Preface to the Lyrical Ballads," out of a "deep im-
pression of certain inherent and indestructible qualities of the human

mind."32

The eternity of consciousness is somehow to be given "incar-
nation" in the language of poetry; and poems themselves can thereby
become dwelling-places for the "something" which knows no fixed loca-
tion in time. To the extent that they become such embodiments of
sublime self-consciousness, they serve the end of "future restoration."
Affective memory, Wordsworth discovers, is not sufficiently reliable;
and language is to be summoned to its aid:
The days gone by

Come back upon me from the dawn almost

Of life: the hiding-places of my power

Seem open; I approach, and then they close;

I see by glimpses now; when age comes on,

May scarcely see at all, and I would give,

While yet we may, as far as words can give,

A substance and a life to what I feel:

I would enshrine the spirit of the past

For future restoration.33
The writing of poetry is for Wordsworth a human strategy designed to
overcome both the sense of temporal discontinuity and ultimately the
sense of despair which such discontinuity provokes. If affective mem-
ory is someday to fail--here Wordsworth suggests how his very "approach"
to the immanent spaces of the past causes them paradoxically to "close"--
then perhaps the content of apperception latent in the perception of the
past can somehow be enshrined in language for the end of "future restor-
ation."34 Thus to write poetry is for Wordsworth to cultivate a "life
where hope and memory are as one." It is also to cultivate the possi-

bility of future poetry. And it is finally to make an implicit con-

fession of the genuine danger that his sense of self may someday be

177

confined to a "punctual Presence," and that the expectations which bind
him hopefully to both past and future may be broken in an irretrievable

loss of the power of visionary apperception.

--4--

What is the relationship between the structure of Wordsworth's
imaginative act and his explicitly formulated poetic program?

If in the "lonely places" of nature there can be detected "Souls"
which permit the mind to transcend the isolation of these places, and
if at any single moment in time there can be experienced a sense of the
self's diffusion throughout all moments in time, then it should not be
surprising that even in the "meanest flower that blows" there can be
discovered thoughts that "lie too deep for tears." The visionary act
of apperception not only can alter dramatically Wordsworth's sense of
time and space, it can also invade and transform 32y phenomenon, even
the most insignificant, into a source of possible sublimity. Thus the
poet is entitled to discover visionary possibilities in whatever he
chooses to look at, even in a lowly daffodil. As imagination fuses
sublime self-consciousness with the "meanest flower that blows," that
flower begins to take on an appearance of immanence and thereby can
begin to serve as a source of thoughts that "lie too ggtp for tears."35
The finite and mortal world can be made to reveal a dimension of reality
in which the "tears" produced by the mortality of things are made irrel-

evant: sublime self-consciousness, a structure of awareness which
lacks any principle of limitation, an intuition of "existence" without
any principle of "essence"--this act of self-consciousness induces in

the subject a sense of itself as an "eternity of thought"; the idea of

178

the possible death of the subject is thereby absolutely excluded.36
And when this sense of self is projected by imagination into the phe-
nomenal world, even the mortality of that world appears to have been
somehow overcome. The "noisy years" come to seem but "moments in the
being/ Of the eternal Silence."37 And any phenomenon within those

"noisy years,"

even the humblest flower blossoming toward its own ex-
tinction, can become mysteriously suggestive of the "eternal Silence"
discoverable in the depths of subjectivity.

That a single phenomenon can serve as an oxymoronic emblem of
mortality and immortality is an expression of what Meyer Abrams has
called the "central paradox" lurking "in the oracular passages of
Wordsworth's major period: the oxymoron of the humble-grand, the lofty-
mean, the trivial-sublime . . . ."38 This paradox is also implicit in
both Wordsworth's descriptions of the poetic mind and his own formula-
tions of his mission as a poet. In the "Essay Supplementary to the
Preface (1815)," he discusses the difficulty some readers might have in
appreciating his poetry, and observes that "if we consider . . . how
remote is the practice and the course of life from the sources of sub-
limity, in the soul of Man, can it be wondered that there is little
existing preparation for a poet charged with a new mission to extend
its kingdom, and to augment and spread its enjoyments."39 In the words
"extend" and "spread" we see still another echo of those metaphors used
to describe sublime self-consciousness: the sense of sublimity encoun-
tered by the poet in his own soul is to be "spread" through the language

of poetry into the minds of his readers. But first of all the poet,

whose mission is "to extend the kingdom" of the sublime, must interfuse

179

his own visionary self-consciousness with areas of experience where
previously there was not even an obscure sense of possible sublimity.
The poem thus becomes the expression, the verbal image of this para-
doxical transformation of the phenomenal world. And as such it can
serve as a hiding-place o fthe power whereby the reader himself can
begin to discover possible sublimity where once none was thought to
exist--but only on the condition that he does not pursue a "practice"
and a "course of life" which makes it impossible for him to recover

the "sources of sublimity" in his own soul. The ideal reader of Words-
worth, in other words, has to be potentially capable of an act of apper-
ception similar to that which the poet presumably experienced in
endowing, by a "certain colouring of imagination," the humblest "in-
cidents andsdtUatibns from common life" with an "unusual aspect."40

The ideal end of the poem is to induce in the reader that structure of
consciousness which makes it possible for the mean and the trivial to
appear sublime.

Wordsworth's ambition is staggering, not only with respect to
his readers, but also with respect to the entire universe of perception,
every last phenomenon of which can become transfigured. But this am-
bition ought to be seen as an explication of his own experience of
imaginative consciousness; the programmatic result, we might say, of
his undeniable encounter with the facts of his own consciousness. It is
his own power of imagination which he describes, in his note to "The
Thorn," as "the faculty which produces impressive effects out of simple
elements . . . ."41 And because of this power, the supernatural powers

of earlier orthodoxies no longer need be invoked. Imagination, he

180

writes in a letter to Southey, "does not require for its exercise the
intervention of super-natural agency, but . . . may be called forth as
imperiously, and for kindred results of pleasure, by incidents . . . in
the humblest departments of daily life."42 And Wordsworth's experience
of the act of apperception latent in every act of perception is the
ultimate source of that hope for a vision of a paradise to be regained
in the "common day," a hope which he describes in the "Prospectus" to

The Excursion:

 

Paradise, and groves

Elysian, Fortunate Fields--like those of old

Sought in the Atlantic Main--why should they be

A history only of departed things,

Or a mere fiction of what never was?

For the discerning intellect of Man,

When wedded to this goodly universe

In love and holy passion, shall find these

A simple produce of the common day.43

No divine intervention is required for the "common day" to be

transfigured into a vision of paradise. And the poet's labor is to
sing of "this great consummation" in words which "speak of nothing more
than what we are."44 Thus we might also say that the paradox of
humilitas-sublimitas extends even into Wordsworth's conception of the
language appropriate for poetry--a language which ought to be derived,
according to the well-known argument of the "Preface to the Lyrical
Ballads," from the "real language" of humble and rustic men "in a state
of vivid sensation."45 WOrdsworth's attack on "poetic diction" might
be seen as an inevitable corollary of his ambition to transform the
light of "common day" into the light of paradise. Such gaudy and "inane

phraseology" is the analogue in language of those gaudy fictions "of what

never was," those fictions of possible sublimity which are now to be

181

dismissed.46 The poet, through the power of his own unaided mind, no
longer needs to rely upon either discredited myth or discredited lan-
guage from the past. Just as he can endow the humblest phenomenon with
the appearance of sublimity, so he can use the humblest, most common-
place words in order to project his vision of a new Elysium of the here
and now. Indeed, such language is far more appropriate for such a task
since presumably in its very plainness it speaks "of nothing more than
what we are." The vision of the new paradise of the "common day" re-
quires a poet who will use the language of that day. Ideally, any word
whatsoever, the "simple produce" of the common tongue, can become an
"incarnation of the thought," an expressive embodiment of the act of
sublime self-consciousness. For imagination has the power to produce
"impressive effects" out of the simplest of words.

In The Prelude, the story of the education of Wordsworth's mind

 

at the hands of nature, the poet attributes to nature herself the power
which he feels in his consciousness to make the humble sublime:

Nature for all conditions wants not power

To consecrate, if we have eyes to see,

The outside of her creatures, and to breathe

Grandeur upon the very humblest face

Of human life.47
These lines are but another result of that displacement of consciousness
into nature which is so characteristic of wordsworth and which we have
already examined in "Tintern Abbey." The unrecognized immanence of mind
in nature allows WOrdsworth to speak as if nature herself functioned in
much the same way as his own creative mind. Nature can be taken as al-

most paradigmatic of poetic consciousness; and therefore, in a curious

reversal, WOrdsworth can explicitly hope that the effect of his poetry

182

will be similar to the effect that nature has upon those who "have
eyes to see"--the effect which the displacement of his own conscious-
ness into nature makes possible in the first place! Shortly after these

lines in The Prelude he tells Coleridge of his desire that a work of

 

his

Proceeding from the depth of untaught things,

Enduring and creative, might become

A power like one of Nature's.48
Wordsworth hopes for a poetry, in other words, which has that power,
"like one of Nature's," to breathe "Grandeur upon the very humblest
face/ Of human life." But this breathing, this transforming function
both of nature and of poetry, ultimately proceeds "from the depth of
untaught things" inside the poet himself. That is to say, the paradox
of humilitas-sublimitas takes its origin in that "depth" of subjectivi-
ty, that abyss of idealism, which is immediately intuited in the act of
apperception. And such an intuition by its very nature can never be
taught.

Not only is Wordsworth preoccupied with those "unassuming things,
that hold/ A silent station" in the wor1d49--a concern prompted by his
mission to extend the kingdom of the sublime--he is also preoccupied
with the human virtue of humility as in itself a necessary condition for
the transfiguring act of the creative mind. The vision of a paradise of
the here and the now is, to be sure, the result of the power of imagina-
tion projecting into the finite world the sublimity discovered "in the
soul of Man“; but the very possibility of that discovery seems in turn

dependent upon the humility with respect to himself that the poet man-

ages to sustain. Werdsworth.like St. Bernard,seems to believe that

183

humility is "the way which leads to truth"50 and that the pursuit of
vision depends, first of all, upon a continuing moral act. Hence
Wordsworth's sustained fascination with those "among the walks of home-
ly life" who are "men for contemplation framed"51--a group which includes

the Wanderer of The Excursion, the leech-gatherer of "Resolution and

 

Independence," and the blind beggar of Book VII of The Prelude. All

 

these "Meek men" seem to Wordsworth to possess, or in some way to embody,
that attitude toward the self which makes the act of vision possible.
For, as he observes,

How oft high service is performed within

When all the external man is rude in show,--

Not like a temple rich with pomp and gold,

But a mere mountain chapel, that protects

Its simple worshippers from sun and shower.

Again we see Wordsworth using images of dwelling-places--by now
we have come to understand them as essentially images of immanent space--
but here to characterize the humility of those natural visionaries, men
always of lowly station, who populate his poetic landscape. For these
meek men, totally devoid of any "pomp" about themselves, are able to
engage in acts of "high service" within the mountain chapels of their
own minds:

Theirs is the language of the heavens, the power,

The thought, the image, and the silent joy:

Words are but under-agents in their souls;

When they are grasping with their greatest strength,

They do not breathe among them . . . .53
Humility seems to be the necessary condition for acts of sublime self-
consciousness, acts in which the mind intuits an infinite reality which

transcends the limits of language itself. The "joy" of such a structure

of consciousness is "silent" when that structure is not mediated by

184

imagination's power toincarnate the "thought" of the visionary mind in
the inevitably limited and finite bodies of words themselves. But why
should humility so dispose the mind toward vision? Perhaps because the
act of apperception is one in which the self, no longer constituting
itself as an object of thought, becomes absolutely unconscious of any
specific identity in terms of which the self might define itself as
distinct or separate from other identities. Pride therefore is not only
the antithesis of humility, it is also the antithesis of apperception.
The proud man clings to himself as the special object of his own thought;
he is fascinated with the "temple" of self which is "rich with pomp and
gold." And in this fascination with an objectified self, he perpetually
prevents the active presence of his own consciousness from diffusing it-
self into the meanest flower that blows in the phenomenal world. Pride
cuts the mind off from possible sublimity.

Thus we might say that Wordsworth's astonishing ambition as a
poet is ultimately rooted in an equally astonishing act of self-
forgetfulness. The poet shall gain his own life, and indeed a vision
of the one life pervading the entire phenomenal world, only by losing
his life, only by giving up any sense of himself as a distinct and
separate life among other lives. The echoes of centuries of Christian
teaching upon the paradoxical means of self-transcendence are obvious.
But what finally marks Wordsworth as distinctly beyond Christianity in
both his poetic and human hopes is his insistence upon the absolute
isolation in which the visionary mind must work. The revelation of the
new paradise must be won without the help of divine intervention, with-

out the ministry or sacraments of any church, without finally the help

185

of his fellow man. As Wordsworth exclaims in the last book of The
Prelude,
Here must thou' be, 0 Man!
Power to thyself; no Helper hast thou here;
Here keepest thou in singleness thy state:
No other can divide with thee this work:
No secondary hand can intervene
To fashion this ability; 'tis thine,
The prime and vital principle is thine
In the recesses of thy nature, far
From any reach of outward fellowship,
Else is not thine at all.54
The act of visionary apperception is by its very nature beyond the help-
ful intervention of any "secondary hand." And only insofar as the poet
intuits the "prime and vital principle" in the isolated "recesses" of
1118 own mind, can he begin that work of transforming the humblest of
appearances into a vision of a new paradise. In that work he also
displays the autonomy of his own mind, a mind which by itself can under-
take the labor of redemption without the "extraordinary" call of a
Christian vocation. For poets, according to Wordsworth, are men who
build up greatest things
From least suggestions, ever on the watch,
Willing to work and to be wrought upon,
They need not extraordinary calls
To rouze them, in a world of life they live,
By sensible impressions not enthrall'd,
But quicken'd, rouz'd, and made thereby more fit
To hold communion with the invisible world.55
In "Tintern Abbey" we saw Wordsworth puzzling over the meaning
of certain remembered acts of "communion with the invisible world"--
attempting to derive the proper conclusion from the undeniable fact

of his having encountered a "something far more deeply interfused."

In the oracular passages of the concluding book of The Prelude we find

 

Wordsworth insisting upon the power of unaided consciousness to elicit

186

such "communion" out of the "least suggestions" provided by the world
of perception. But, as this essay has argued throughout, this "com-
munion" must finally be understood as indeed a form of self-communion
whereby the poet apperceives the presence of his own consciousness at
the very heart of every act of perception. Wordsworth is therefore by
"sensible impressions not enthrall'd." His freedom is the freedom of
a solitary mind to discover in the depths of his own subjectivity an
infinite reality which far transcends the reality revealed in the act
of perception. Like the hermit at the center of the landscape of
"Tintern Abbey," Wordsworth's visionary mind sits alone, in a solitude
of sublime self-consciousness which is both the ultimate threat to the
world of perception and the exclusive source of that world's trans-

figuration.

187
NOTES: CHAPTER V

1Literarngriticism, p. 191.

 

2Science and the Modern World (New York, 1948), p. 80.

 

3The Letters gt William and Dorothy Wordsworthy_The Later Years
(1821-50), ed. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford, 1939), I, 134-135.

 

 

4The Prelude (1805), VIII, 763.

 

5I here assume an identity between the "place of any one thing"
and the spatial limits of that thing. Its spatial limits, in other
words, define its place. For the sake of clarity I concentrate in this
section upon the question of the nature of the "location" in Words-
worthian space. But my remarks, mutatis mutandis, can be applied to the
spatial limits of phenomena within that space.

 

6Poetical Works, V, 332.

 

7The Prose Works gt William Wordsworth, ed. Alexander B. Grosart
(London, 1876), III, 464.

 

 

8Poetical Works, v, 286-287; Book 1x, 11. 3-5, 11. 13-16.

 

gflartman, op. cit., pp. 84-87, 120-123, gt passim.

10The Prelude, I, 466.

 

11Poetical Works, v, 88-89; 1. 462, 11. 437-439, 11. 452-461.

 

12Poetical Works, V, 133; 11. 755-762.

 

13The poet's task, Wordsworth writes in a letter to John Wilson,
is "to rectify men's feelings, to give them new compositions of feeling,
to render their feelings more sale, pure, and permanent, in short, more
consonant to nature, that is, to eternal nature, and the great moving
spirit of things" (Literary Criticism, p. 7). The poet thus helps men
to sustain hope.

14Poeriea1 Works, v, 10; Book 1, 11. 78-79.

15Book VIII (1805), 760-766. Significantly, the emotional quali-
ty of this same entry into London is characterized in an elaborate simile
describing an entry into a mysterious cavern; see 11. 711-751. Again,
as so often in Wordsworth, the act of apperception is described in terms
suggesting an encounter with an abyss or open-ended space.

16Time and Free Will, trans. R. L. Pogson (London, 1910), p. 128.

 

17Poetical Works, V, 87; The Excursion, III, 400.

 

188

18Studies tn_Human Time, trans. Elliott Coleman (New York, 1959),

 

19L. 606. See also n. 22 of Chapter II.

20Literaljy,Criticism, pp. 34-35.

 

21Poetical Works, III, 77; 11. 7-8.

 

22LiteratyCriticism, p. 129. See also Section 4 of Chapter I
for a consideration of some of the implications of Wordsworth's incar-
national theory of language.

23L. 307, 11. 311-322.

24I here echo Madame de Stagl ("It is to re-feel, not recall")
who is cited by Poulet in his discussion of romantic affective memory,
gp. cit., p. 28.

25Book IV, 256-272.

26The Prelude (1805), XI, 272-273.

 

27Biqgraphia Literaria, 92. cit., I, 202.

 

28The Prelude (1805), XI, 260.

 

29L. 378, 1. 381, 1. 383, 11. 391-400.
30L1. 401-404.
31L. 414.

32LiteraryCriticism, p. 17.
33The Prelude (1805), XI, 334-343.

 

 

34The paradox might be explained in this way: the purpose of
affective memory is, as we have seen, to re-feel, not to recollect the
past; to recover the "how" of what was felt, not the "whafl'of what was
felt. But the only way to move toward the "how" is through the "what."
To recover a mode of past subjectivity requires, therefore, a constitu-
tion of the past self as an object of remembering consciousness. Thus
the very search through the past for a sense of subject 323 subject
stands in paradoxical opposition to the means of this search. That
Wordsworth felt he could, and indeed did, overcome this paradox is in-
dicated by his testimony to the "vivifying Virtue" of the "spots of
time."

35Italics mine. The quotation, of course, is from the last two
lines of the "Immortality Ode," Poetical Works, IV, 285.

 

189

36See n. 48 of Chapter III for a discussion of the relation-
ship between the sense of immortality experienced by sublime self-
consciousness and the sense of immortality experienced, according to
Cassirer, by mythical consciousness.

37"Immortality Ode," 11. 155-156; Poetical Works, IV, 284.

 

38"English Romanticism: The Spirit of the Age," Romanticism
Reconsidered, ed. Northrop Frye (New York, 1963), p. 64.

 

 

39Literary Criticism, p. 199. One such poorly prepared reader [-
seems to have been Anna Seward, who characterized Wordsworth's poetry
as the "egotistic manufacture of metaphysical importance upon trivial
themes." Cited by Samuel H. Monk in his "Anna Seward and the Romantic
Poets: A Study in Taste," Wordsworth and Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie
Griggs (New York, 1962), p. 132.

 

 

40Literary Criticism, pp. 13-14. The notion of the poet's
mission to extend the kingdom of the sublime is implicit in Wordsworth's
description of genius: "Genius is the introduction of a new element
into the intellectual universe: or, if that be not allowed, it is the
application of powers to objects on which they had not before been ex-
ercised, or the employment of them in such a manner as to produce
effects hitherto unknown. What is all this but an advance, or a con-
quest, made by the soul of the poet" (ibid., p. 198)?

 

 

41Poetical Works, II, 512.

 

421bid., II, 331.

43Ibid., V, 4; 11. 45-55. For a discussion of the "terrestial
paradise" in Wordsworth see Hartman's The Unmediated Vision (New Haven,

1954), pp. 26-35.

 

 

44Poetical Works, V, 5; 11. 58-59.

 

45LiteraryCriticism, p. 11.

 

46lbid., p. 13.
47Book x111, 283-287.

48Book XII (1805), 310-312. Book XII of the 1805 version becomes
Book XIII in the 1850 version.

49Book x11 (1805), 51-52.

592E54§tgg§ gt Humility, trans. George Bosworth Burch (Notre
Dame, 1963), p. 123.

51The Prelude, x111, 266-267.

52Book x111, 269, 227-231.

190

53Book x111, 271-275.
54Book x1v, 209-218.

55Book x111 (1805), 98-105.

 

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1The publication date given here is of the paperback edition.
Where a paperback edition is cited either in the body or the notes
of this essay, the publication date of that edition is given in the
bibliography.