THE RHETORIC OF WORDSWORTH AND COLERIDGE: ITS PLACE IN CURRENT COMPOSITION THEORY BY Mark L. Waldo A DISSERTATION Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Department of English 1982 ABSTRACT THE RHETORIC OF WORDSWORTH AND COLERIDGE: ITS PLACE IN CURRENT COMPOSITION THEORY BY Mark L. Waldo Wordsworth and Coleridge were concerned with language use in general and the writing process in particular. Their rhetorical theories reflect an abiding interest in the healthy growth of the personality, as it is promoted through the fruitful union of imagination and language. Through detail- ing the organic growth of this union, they constructed a theo— retical program for the deve10pment of the wholly expressive being, the poet; and they argued that their program be made available to everyman, each to his degree. Their attention to the process of growth included, appropriately enough, writing itself. For composition was to them an organic acti- vity. The language and writing theories of Wordsworth and Coleridge have been incorporated in the work of modern com- position theorists, among them Gusdorf, Piaget, Vygotsky, and Langer; Britton, Elbow, Moffett, and Judy. This incorporation, however, has been left largely un- acknowledged and unarticulated. My purpose is to acknowledge and articulate the relationship between the poets and recent .3 S. :- v. 5. on. . - ' .vvo ‘Ap'- .. .~ op»- .~; .3 .n. :o b u .- ‘§‘ Mark L. Waldo researchers. After describing the poets' revolt against lan- guage convention and discussing their composition training, theory, and practice, I examine the connection between Words- worth, Coleridge, and current "psycho-rhetoricians" in five areas. First, the poets, like the language researchers who followed them, developed an accurate understanding of cogni- tive, affective, and language growth and built their composi- tional philosophy out of that understanding. Second, they prophesied the psychology of personal constructs by asserting the importance of language as a shaper of experience. Third, they argued eloquently for the evolution of a rhetoric of self- understanding prior to and then along with a rhetoric of the world. Fourth, they saw writing as a process, through which substance grows into form, more than a product, in which sub- stance is molded by a predetermined form. Finally, their conceptions of the individual's imagination closely resemble current conceptions of style, especially those of Georges Gusdorf. The dissertation establishes that Wordsworth and Coleridge offer much to the field of composition theory: their insights were, after all, the source of so much of it. Copyright by MARK L . WALDO 1982 DEDICATION To Kate, who calmed me when I felt busy; and to Aaron, who busied me when I felt calm. With love. ii -. R ' . . s . 3 n A ‘ b u. ‘ ‘ g.p-~.q' n - D .- 5v-\v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I want to thank Ken Macrorie for writing Uptaught, which initiated my reformation as a teacher of writing. I would also like to thank the members of my Doctoral Committee, especially Stephen Judy, my dissertation director; Jay Ludwig, director of the English Department's writing programs; and Victor Paananen, the nineteenth century connection, for con— tinuing and enriching that reformation. The fullness of my experience with writing theory in the program at Michigan State accounts for the creation of this dissertation, which reflects not only my understanding but my belief. iii .\ -Q - o‘.. . . ~ I ‘. _. I a g v 7 . ‘3 Q C ‘ A i U. ‘ § - a ‘ b 1. ‘ I ."'. .--.. ‘ \ I . h..~~ --“‘- I - . .v_ i.- h... h ‘ . '.~-. (I) TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION. 0 O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O l l. EXPRESSIVE DISCOURSE VERSUS IMITATIVE DISCOURSE: THE COMPOSITION "OF MAN, NO COMPOSITION OF THE THOUGHT" . . . . . . . . . . . 4 2. "THE EXCELLENCE OF WRITING": "A CON- JUNCTION OF REASON AND PASSION" . . . . . . . . . 49 3. COLERIDGE'S "NOMENCLATURE OF COMMUNICATION": AN AMBIVALENCE OF THEORY AND PRACTICE . . . . . . 94 4. FINDING THE EXPRESSION TO FIT THE SITUATION: A PSYCHO-RHETORICAL APPROACH. . . . . . . . . . .148 STYLE, IMAGINATION, AND THE STRUGGLE WITH THE FORCES OF DISINTEGRATION. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .195 BIBLIOGRAPHY. O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O .203 iv A 5.- b 5.. ‘ s K ‘ ‘ ‘g‘ .fiu L. :C .N« .2 n: INTRODUCTION The writer of the Book of Genesis describes the crea- tion: In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and dark— ness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. (I, 1—2) Without form, and void, the earth was chaotic, meaningless-- a jumble of matter strewn about nonsensically. Symbolically at least, the divine imagination, the spirit of God, shaped things into the grand design; and language called them into being in accord with the dictates of that design, realizing the recreative power of the imagination. The importance of words in this process is attested to by many of the verses in the first chapter of Genesis, in which creation is the activity of God's saying and things becoming: "And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so" (ll). As Georges Gusdorf remarks God speaks, and things are, the Word is in itself creative.... And Jesus Christ, the Son of God who brings about a spiritual rebirth of humanity, is pre- sented as the Word made flesh. He is the Word of God made man, at work on the l «Nd . a v ---1 Q Q “I. '7‘ .1 . . . . we. A. u». :n ‘14 :v a s .2 ~ . u‘i .s\ earth, in the fullness of His power opening the eyes of the blind and resurrecting the dead. 1 God's act of ordering universal chaos through words, of constructing a world of relationships through the language of his vision, is the initial and ultimate emblem of the composing process. Drawing order out of chaos, discovering meaning in the void, building a relational vocabulary, all of the acts of human composition are microcosmic reflections of that macrocosmic act. Jesus Christ himself becomes, in Gusdorf's assess- ment, a direct result of God's composing process; he is "the Word made flesh." Christ's rhetoric brings about a "spiritual rebirth of humanity," setting in motion a revolt against religious convention. And his discourse is an on— going call for the regeneration of human language, since spiritual, intellectual and emotional rebirth demands the discarding of spiritual cliches and the evolving of a lan- guage which fits the individual into the cosmic situation. Metaphorically, language which formerly blinded must recreate vision; language which deadened must resurrect life. The degree to which a person can use language to re- surrect life depends upon a variety of complex factors. And few writers expended more energy detailing them than William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. They were two who characterized the regeneration of language--and the 3 consequent rejuvenation of the individual and society-—as a spiritual quest. Their attention to psychological and language development, to language as a constructor of ex- perience, to the rhetoric of self-exploration and under- standing, and to the writing process itself demonstrates their recognition of the importance of the act and result of composition. They made it a large part of their work to present an organic pattern for "poetic" growth because they believed that such growth would do much to triumph over the forces of disintegration active in the world. Like Wordsworth and Coleridge, many of today's composition and language theorists assert the relational significance of expression. They, too, see discourse as recreative and regenerative. I am interested in explaining the connection between the theories of Wordsworth and Coleridge and those of current researchers. Developing this connection will show, I think, the striking relevance of the poets' rhe- torical philosophy to today's work in the field. lGeorges Gusdorf, Speaking (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1965), p.57. CHAPTER I EXPRESSIVE DISCOURSE VERSUS IMITATIVE DISCOURSE: THE COMPOSITION "OF MAN, NO COMPOSITION OF THE THOUGHT" Contemporary ambivalence about the place of expres- sive discourse in a comprehensive theory of discourse is re- flected by James Kinneavy in his exhaustive work A Theory of Discourse. He declares that if his book had been writ- ten a number of years ago, there would have been no chapter on expressive discourse.l He implies his attitude toward "expressionism" in the curious observation that he "felt the expressionistic theory of literature to be an unfortu— nate historical error of nineteenth century Romanticism" (Kinneavy, 394). Next, he offers four reasons for barring expression as a specific aim of discourse: First, the ex- tremists in post-Dewey progressive education, who made self- expression the dominant aim in composition assignments, im- pelled “many in the field to reject what was valid in the movement" (394). Second, there "was a violent reaction to Romantic expressionism." Third, even if one did admit the existence of expressive discourse as a distinct kind, Kin- neavy suggests, "there did not seem to be much to say about it. Most of the theorists who provided for it treated it as equivalent to literature——Romantic expressionism was a t. .6. .P.» 5 literary phenomenon.... Removed from a literary context, there did not seem to be much to say about emotional dis- course. One cannot give a course in 'Advanced Swearing 346.'" Finally, "it is easy to take the expressive com— ponent of language for granted precisely because it is so fundamental." What he means by the last is that expres- sive qualities are necessarily an important part of every form of discourse and often an indistinguishable part of each. In Kinneavy's View, concern for the expressive func- tion of language is a modern phenomenon. Despite Kinneavy's reservations and qualifications, he observes that expressive discourse is prior psychologi- cally "to all other uses of language." He goes on to make a statement which has a Romantically rebellious flavor it- self: The ignoring, by the disciplines of speech and English, of the very kind of discourse by which an individual or group can express his personal or its societal aspirations, is certainly a symptom, if not an effect, of the impersonality of the university machines of the present day. The high schools are prob- ably even more culpable in this regard. If ignoring the study of persuasion begets a gullible populace, ignoring the study of ex- pression begets rebellion, sometimes justi- fied, sometimes irresponsible. A democracy which ignores expression has forgotten its own roots. (Kinneavy, 396). It is probable that Kinneavy's description of the consequences-— justified or irresponsible rebellion-—of ignoring expressive discourse stems in part from the period during which he wrote the book: the late 1960's and early 1970's. But beyond the 6 historical influence, Kinneavy has made a forceful comment on one of the reasons for promoting expressive discourse in the schools. Since it "gives all discourse a personal signi- ficance to the speaker or listener," the expressive compon- ent provides the human element in communication. It aids in the development of human beings aware of themselves in their relation to others. Because of this awareness, they become capable of making their positions not only understood but felt by others. This ability to communicate personally, ac- cording to Kinneavy, begets an expressively democratic society. Expressive discourse has been similarly defined by a variety of contemporary language theorists. In Language and Learning, for example, James Britton describes expres- sive discourse as language close to the self of the speaker or writer; it tells a good deal about the speaker and relies heavily for its interpretation on the situation in which it occurs. It allows the user in his personal way "to call into existence, to draw out from nothingness" the world around him.2 Britton, in another work, characterizes such language as informal and casual, loosely structured.3 Janet Emig divides expressive discourse into two general kinds. The first is reflexive, which she labels essentially contempla— tive: "What does this experience mean?" The second is ex- tensive, in which the user's role is basically active: "How, because of this experience, do I interact with my environ- ment?"4 Her model of expressive discourse makes it the —\~ .u. .11 .‘5 2. .5. ~._ source from which all other forms of discourse grow. David Holbrook views expressive language as the vehicle through which the child develops his capacity for inner symbolism, builds bridges between the subjective and objective, and tackles "the backlog of psychic problems inherited from the darkest ages of infancy."5 With Kinneavy, Holbrook is con- cerned about the consequences, both to the individual and society, of our general incapacity "to explore and organize experience, from inward sources, symbolically" (Holbrook, 19). According to Stephen Judy, expressive language helps us work out, confirm, shape our thoughts and beliefs, dis- cover identity, and please ourselves.6 Expressive language, he observes, is enormously important in helping people to structure and to order past experiences, to frame a picture of the world and to invest personal meaning in it. John Dixon, whose Growth Through English summarizes the philo- sophical and practical proceedings of the Dartmouth Confer- ence, asserts that expressive discourse serves to recall ex— perience and get it clear, to give it shape and make connec- tions, to speculate and to build theories, to celebrate (or exorcise) particular moments of our lives.7 In Geoffrey Summerfield's terms, expressive discourse fosters an ade- quate capacity to be on good terms with oneself, and to find an inward order.8 He contends that the development and main- tenance of a satisfactory sense of self depends on an effort to work by symbolization. 8 The emphasis on the symbolic function of expressive discourse reflects two fundamental principles of cognitive development. First, the perceiver must create a system by which he is able to make sense of what he perceives; or as Suzanne Langer puts it: "material furnished by the senses is constantly wrought into symbols, which are our elementary ideas."9 This conversion into symbols of the matter per- ceived by the senses must occur, man must attune his ear to the recurrent themes in the monotonous flow, if his uni- verse is to make sense to him.10 After one is able to create a representation of his world so that he may oper- ate within it, a second order of cognitive activity is open to him: he may operate directly upon the representation it- self.11 The point at which man begins to shape his represen- tation of the world is critical to his growth as an individ- ual. It is then that J.W. Patrick Creber would have the lan- guage user respond to things individually before his responses became stereotyped.12 Creber suggests, in a general way, that at this stage the growth of a personal style--the way an in- dividual will see and express what he sees--begins. The language user becomes, to paraphrase Wordsworth's distinc- tion, the "child of Joy," admirably sensible, imaginatively expressive, clear minded; or the "model of a child," who is in every way the pinfold of his master's conceit. .u int" I 1‘ I‘ III a! .l n I .1 .1 . . .9. «C An .. «1. n. .. W.» n .. .- .v nu :s . a «e o. C. e. ml ‘t .bu IQ :s L. .h. a v. F 5 "II“ -F\ 9 Style, examined from this point of View, encompasses much more than concern for surface matters in language. It is, as Susan Sontag characterizes it, the essential quality of the self: The matter, the subject, is on the outside; the style is on the inside. As Cocteau writes: 'Decorative style has never existed. Style is the soul, and unfortunately with us the soul assumes the form of the body.'... In almost every case, our manner of appearing is our manner of being. The mask is the face.13 Because of the inclination to associate style with the dress- ing of language, its decorative aspects, it may be difficult to accept the term as Sontag offers it. In this context, style is the individual, after he has developed the capacity to form the language of his experience. It is the way in which man operates on his representation of the world. It is how he molds experience, how he understands it, how he presents it to others; it is also, in large part, how he experiences, since thought and language and experience flow together in an interconnected process.l4 Given this defini- tion of the term, style and expressive discourse become in— extricably bound. The ability to interpret life clearly, coherently, and imaginatively results from a rich, open, and personal encounter with language. The singular style created out of such an encounter will mirror a personality well- integrated and original. The interpretation of life which shows limited awareness of self and experience, stereotyped responses to people and situations, and strict adherence to the conventions of discourse stems from a rigid, controlled, ([1 cl: -., ~ .. -n b . 5.“ ~., 1.4. O., 0.- A (II I lO debilitating encounter with language. The style created out of this type of encounter demonstrates a personality dis- jointed and imitative. Style, in short, is the psychology of the individual. This context for the use of the term style is clearly the one intended by Georges Gusdorf, in his work on the philoso- phy of language Speakim (La Parole). According to his con- ception, style expresses the thread of life, "the movement of a destiny according to its creative meaning."15 He con- tinues, "The struggle for style may here stand as a defini- tion of the whole personality since it is the undertaking of giving an appropriate value to each moment of self-affirma- tion" (Gusdorf, 75). The being works up his representation of the self in the world, and then he works upon it. Each of us, Gusdorf asserts, "is charged with finding the expres- sion to fit his situation. Each of us is charged with real- izing himself in a language, a personal echo of the language of all which represents his contribution to the human world. The struggle for style is a struggle for consciousness" (Gusdorf, 76). The development of an appropriate style has as one of its requisites the overcoming of language conventions, Since the discipline of a style corresponds to a need for precision "that removes the creator from all the ready-made formulas of the established language" (Gusdorf, 89). The transition from a common to an individual meaning sometimes 11 results in a heroic struggle. But the revolt against con- verrtional language is necessary if one is to know himself: the life of the mind ordinarily begins not with the acquisition of language, but with the revolt against language, once it is acquired. The adolescent dis- covers values in the revolt against the language he had until then blindly trusted and which seems to him, in light of the crisis, destitute of all authenticity. Every man worthy of the name has known that crisis of appreciation of language which causes one to pass from naive con- fidence to doubt and denial.(Gusdorf, 89) :It vv<>uld be gratifying to think that the adolescent to which Gusdorf refers represents all adolescents, that indeed every rnaxa j.s worthy of the name because every man has experienced "tkiaat: crisis of appreciation of language," and its consequent doubt and denial. Such, lamentably, is not the case. The concern of modern discourse theoristsl6 that there is too much unifor- mity of expression and too much stereotyping reflects the rueeuj for an environment in which the growth of a language pre<-‘-:i.sely of the self is possible. An environment of this Sort rarely exists at present, particularly in American pub- ]*i<3 aschools. There are those who argue, in fact, that the ed‘4'1'2ational system is responsive not to the needs of the in- <33“Vixflual but to the needs of the economic system, and that trle’ educational system will support the ideas of the domin- arltl group in society. Knowledge, they contend, is imparted f . . . . . . (3:; profitable use. Teachers of Englisn in America, far fdrc) in combating this arrangement, actually promote it. Thus t‘ . . . . . . . [16’ teaching of discourse has helped to instill the rhetoric .p. 11. a- .— e. a» .o. I o. .5 .. 12 of the bureaucrat and technician rather than the rhetoric of self-expression. If composition training in the past was meant to teach students to think, Speak, and write as gentlemen, it is now meant to teach them to do the same as company men.17 In this atmosphere, a revolt against the "ready made formulas of the established language" could be no less than disastrous. It is therefore aggressively dis— couraged. Gusdorf's apparent optimism is nonetheless re- freshing. And his point about expression creating a style :vhich becomes the being himself is central to the expressive tflneory of art begun nearly 200 years earlier. Gusdorf offers the example of the poet as particularly srignificant "insofar as it carries to its maximum the striv- irng for expression in language": The writer is a man who speaks in the sense that he must establish himself by the use he makes of speaking, the impersonality of the established tongue giving way to the power of suggestion of personal being. But the language of the poet in his mastery is not a regres- sion to infantile egocentrism, where com- munication gives way completely to ex- pression. In the case of the poet, it is necessary for expression to have the support of others, and to establish a new communication between an author and his readers. The writer, to be under- stood, must start with the language of everyone else; but, if he has genius, he will use this language as no one before him has used it. This reconquest of lan- guage corresponds to the creation of a style in which the personality of the poet is created at the same time that it is ex- pressed. (Gusdorf, 73—74, his emphasis) _-—— o .. u. -v be .P iv A» U... l|' 13 The poet is a man who "rediscovers speech thanks to a dis- cipline that returns him to himself." He is a man who brings "about the restitution of the word." By offering each word in a new situation, a situation linked to and in essence creating his personality, the poet restores the word to its original power. The notion of "the tongue giving way to the suggestion cof personal being" is at the core of an artistic theory of <:reation which traces the thoughts and feelings of the writer tdirough the synthesizing processes of his imagination to the ccnnposition itself. This way of thinking M.H. Abrams labels time expressive view of art, "in which the artist himself be- ccunes the major element generating both the artistic product arnd the criteria by which it is to be judged."18 He summar- izes the central tendency of the theory: A work of art is essentially the internal made external, resulting from a creative process operating under the impulse of feeling, and embodying the combined product of the poet's perceptions, thoughts, and feelings. The primary source and subject matter of a poem, therefore, are attributes and actions of the poet's own mind; or if aspects of the exter— nal world, then these only as they are con— verted from fact to poetry by the feelings and operations of the poet's mind.(Abrams,22) “Hie audience for this art form is meant to receive pleasure aruj profit from the synthesized flow of thought and feeling 'the writer produces; and thus a necessarily new form of com- munication is established between writer and audience.’ With- in this form, the writer creates according to the dictates 14 of his perception of experience, not according to the pre- ordained rules of mimetic art” the form in vogue through most of the 18th century. Abrams makes the general distinction between mimetic theory and expressive theory in the following way: the poet- ry of the former "departs from fact principally because it reflects a nature which has been reassembled to make a com- posite beauty, or filtered to reveal a central form or the (nommon denominator of a type, or in some fashion culled and carnamented for the greater delight of the reader"; the poet- ry? of the latter departs from fact in that "it incorporates ok>jects of sense which have already been acted on and trans- formed by the feelings of the poet" (Abrams, 53). Expres- sinve theory, as Abrams traces it, has its partial origins it! the ideas on the sublime of Longinus, who suggested five Sources of the sublime: "the power of forming great con- czeptions," "vehement and inspired passion," "figurative launguage," "noble diction," and "elevated composition." Of true five, the first two are of greatest importance, according tC> Longinus, because they stem from the psychology of the PCHEt. Though they may produce a flawed product, they are tC> be preferred "to that impeccable mediocrity which can be acthieved by art alone" (Abrams, 73). The tendency in Longi- ITl-ls'theory is to move away from poetry as an imitative art a“dtoward the processes of thought and emotion in its author. The supreme quality of a work turns out to be the reflected qufility of its author: "Sublimity is the echo of a great 15 soul."19 Because of this movement toward the mental and passionate nature of the writer, Longinus prefigured what were to become familiar themes and methods in romantic cri- ticism.20 Longinian theory was slow to make its presence felt in the criticism of English literary theorists, perhaps because his theory was incorporated into the imitative and pragmatic theory of art which dominated literary criticism 'through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The mi- nuatic theory of art had at its base the concept of Aristotelian iJnitation of nature, not nature as she is exactly, but "na— ture improved to that degree, which is consistent with pro- bability, and suitable to the poet's purpose." Imitation ressed the thought itself rather than a "composition of 2 thought." As it was, however, Pope became more the per- :t craftsman than the poet of men. What makes.PopeVs de- ent very serious in Wordsworth's opinion is the fact that ne's brilliance at crafting poetry made his poetic forms, (listic devices, and rhetorical techniques nearly sacrosanct the literary world. Thus his poetry became the basis-—at ast in part--for poetic practice and critical law. In 27 Wordsworth's terms, Pope "corrupted the judgment of the nation through all ranks of society." That "corruption" had shaped the poetry of England at the close of the 1700's. In Pope's hands poetry was, though imitative, "finished," "spark- ling," and "tuneful"; in lesser hands it was artificial and debasing. And all of the Popian poets practicing in the late 1700's were, in Wordsworth's view, lesser than Pope. The language and purpose of poetry became, consequently, increas- ingly perverse. An example of this perversion may be taken from Erasmus Darwin in his popular and influential theory of poetry, The Botanic Garden: ...the English language serves the purpose of poetry better than the ancient ones; I mean in the greater ease of pro- ducing personifications, for as our nouns have in general no genders affixed to them in prose compositions, and in habits of con- versation, they become easily personified only by a masculine or feminine pronoun, as 'Pale Melancholy sits, and round her throws A death-like silence, and a dread repose.‘ Pope's Abelard And secondly, as most of our nouns have the article a_or thg_prefixed to them in prose writing and in conversation, they become per- sonified even by the omission of these arti- cles, as in the bold figure of Shipwreck in Miss Seward's "Elegy on Captain Cook": 'But round the steep rocks and dangerous strand Rolls the white surf, and Shipwreck guards the / Land.‘ 48 28 Darwin contends here that a principal purpose of poetry is the production of personifications, and that the English lan- guage is better suited technically than ancient languages for personifying nouns. He supports his point by quoting Pope, who personifies "Melancholy," first by animating it through the verb "sits" and then by referring to it with the feminine pronoun "her." Darwin becomes even more particular in his anaylsis of the suitability of English for the creation of these figures by describing how the mere removal of articles required in prose brings forth personifications in poetry. His example is from one of Anna Seward's poems in which she personifies "Shipwreck" by leaving out the article "a." The approach to poetry Darwin suggests in this pas— sage is undeniably cerebral and mechanical in its emphasis. That is, Darwin displays a means of manipulating the surface of language through a knowledge of forms and devices in order to achieve a technically pre-determined end. What he illus- trates is a tool of the poetic craftsman, and the end he esteems is a rhetorical effect of the poetic trade. Neither the means nor the end need come from the "heart in the mind" of the writer. More often than not, in fact, the use of such devices produced poetic cliches and/or extraordinary, gaudy originality. The poetic cliches appeared because these de— vices could be achieved by any literate person,49 and would often be similar in similar contexts, no matter who the writer was. Extraordinary, gaudy originality became common because the writers, though they followed prescribed forms, 29 used rhetorical embellishments shockingly extravagant.50 Thus one writer, in attempting to call attention to himself and his art, would try to outdo in device another writer. It is a Darwinian "purpose of poetry" and a mechanical concern for the surface of language which Wordsworth and Coleridge discussed at Alfoxden and which Wordsworth argued against in the "Preface" to the Lyrical Ballads (1800). On personification he states, The reader will find that personifications of abstract ideas rarely occur in these volumes; and are utterly rejected, as an ordinary device to elevate the style, and raise it above prose. My purpose was to imitate, and, as far as is possible, to adopt the very language of men; and assured- ly such personifications do not make any natural or regular part of that language. They are, indeed, a figure of speech oc- casionally prompted by passion, and I have made use of them as such; but have endeavoured utterly to reject them as a mechnical device of style, or as a family language which writers in metre seem to lay claim to by prescription. I have wished to keep the reader in the com- pany of flesh and blood, persuaded that by doing so I shall interest him. 51 Wordsworth rejects all personification which does not grow out of the passions, which is not the natural result of emo- tive communication within the self or between human beings. He implies that personifications are part of an artificial language, a language mechanical, unnatural, inhuman. His own intent in the Lyrical Ballads, "to adopt the very lan- guage of men," distanced him from those who used personifi— cation as a device of style, and completely cut him off from those who considered personification as a purpose for poetry. 30 In the course of offering a brief history of the de- .opment of poetic language, Wordsworth traces the growth "extravagant and absurd diction."52 Wordsworth believed it the language of the earliest poets stemmed "from pas— >n excited by real events; they wrote naturally, and as 1" (Appendix 465). Their powerful feelings produced a iguage that was daring and figurative. Sounding very much Eluenced by Hugh Blair in a passage already cited, Words- rth goes on to describe poets in succeeding times, who, arceiving the influence of such language, and desirous producing the same effect without being animated by the me passion, set themselves to a mechanical adoption of ese figures of speech, and made use of them, sometimes with opriety, but much more frequently applied them to feelings d thoughts with which they had no natural connection what- ever. A language was thus insensibly produced, differ- g materially from the language of men in any situation" ppendix, 465, his emphasis). This remarkable passage-- ke Blair's in its suggestion that poets who did not feel emselves imitated feeling, but unlike Blair's in its in- stence that a language altogether of art was produced out this situation--stresses the mechanicality of expression language which has no connection to the mental and emo- onal conditions it describes. It also prepares for an equally remarkable passage ich follows closely thereafter. The circumstance of the 31 first poets speaking in a language, which, though unusual, was still the language really used by men, Wordsworth re- peats: was disregarded by their successors; they found that they could please by easier means: they became proud of the modes of expression which they themselves had in- vented, and which were'uttered only by themselves. In process of time metre be- came a symbol or promise of this unusual language, and whoever took upon him to write in metre, according as he possessed more or less of true poetic genius, intro- duced less or more of this adulterated phraseology into his compositions, and the true and the false were inseparably inter- woven until, the taste of men becoming grad- ually perverted, this language was re- ceived as a natural language: and at length, by the influence of books upon men, did to a certain degree become so. (Appendix, 466) To summarize both of these passages, when poets were no longer connected to the elemental feelings experienced and expressed by their predecessors in a language real, daring, and figurative, they imitated those feelings in a language half invented, half borrowed. This bastardized language, as replete with both extravagance and mimesis as it was, became so used to become, to a degree, natural. Its users, in ef- fect, lost sight of the language of genuine expression. The poets Wordsworth depicts had lost touch with their roots in human feeling and thought. Their diction and style, conse- quently, could only approximate, exaggerate, and stereotype genuine experience; it could not express it. Even so, their language came not only to reflect but to represent personal— ity and reality because it replaced the language of the real self. 32 Though the context and terms are different, Words- worth's observations here seem similar to those of some of the modern composition theorists discussed earlier. James Britton, for example, warns thatforeshortening the growth of expressive discourse will create a psychological "short- circuit" in an individual. The result of such short-cir- cuiting will be form without personal substance in writing and in personality.53 As we have seen, Kinneavy suggests that a nation of vague, disjointed, disgruntled people sus- ceptible to a variety of schemes will ensue if expressive discourse is misdirected or left out. Gusdorf asserts that the struggle for style is a definition of the whole person- ality; knowing one's style is a way knowing oneself. The consequences of adopting an artifical style rather than strug- gling for an individual one are profound since the person- ality itself may become, in a metaphoric sense, artificial. To be sure, Wordsworth's primary focus in these pas- sages is on the artistic character of this language, its artifice. He reserves for other works his detailed descrip- tion of the effects of growing up the "model of the child," as I shall examine latter. Here the psychological implica- tions are secondary. Even though that is the case, he draws an intriguing psychological portrait of the reader receiving pleasure from knowing and emulating the poet through his "extravagant and absurd diction." The self-love of the reader, Wordsworth argues, is flattered "by bringing him nearer to a sympathy with [the poet]; an effect which is 33 accomplished by unsettling ordinary habits of thinking and thus assisting the Reader to that perturbed and dizzy state of mind in which if he does not find himself, he imagines that he is balked of a peculiar enjoyment which poetry can and ought to bestow" (Appendix, 466). The reader is drawn into sympathy with the poet, not into sympathy with his own elemental feelings and thoughts. He is also brought to a "perturbed and dizzy state of mind," far from the clearer perception of self poetry can provide; and he actually feels cheated if he does not achieve this state. "Ordinary habits of thinking"--which, according to Wordsworth, are themselves disconnected from the real self--are unsettled and replaced by even more extraordinary intellectual habits. The reader, in his desire to use poetry as a vehicle for escape, becomes caught up in poetic artifice, and moves closer to the con- trived character of the poet. Because the reader wants to experience the dizziness and because the poet wants the emu- lation, abusive poetic diction perpetuates itself. That ordinary habits of thinking are disconnected from the elemental self, that the reader wants to escape through outside stimuli his own situation in life, and that Words— worth conceived of his own time as the best and the worst for combating these conditions through art, he makes clear in a passage from the "Preface" to the Lyrical Ballads (1800). The service of producing or enlarging the discerning activity Of the human mind, "without the application of gross and 34 violent stimulants," Wordsworth views as one of the princi- pal purposes of the poet. He continues, ...this service, excellent at all times, is especially so at the present day. For a multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting with combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor. The most effective of these causes are the great national events which are daily taking place, and the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident,which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies. To this tendency of life and manners the literature and theatrical exhibitions have conformed them- selves. (Literary Criticism of William Wordsworth, 43-44). The theatrical and literary productions of the time are part of the gross and violent stimulants which draw men away from themselves. They aid in numbing the mind. Thus art becomes a means not for man's regeneration but for his degradation. That poetry is a part of the problem and not the solution is a bitter pill for Wordsworth, who wants to return to poetry the role of increasing the discriminating powers of the mind and who wishes to reconquer for style its place in the language of man. Coleridge was less adamant than Wordsworth in his condemnation of the conventional poetic practice of the eighteenth century, the practice which shaped that in his own time. Even so, he found much to criticize in that poet- ry. He considered Pope a master of his "kind" of poetry; but because he undervalued the kind, he "withheld from its 35 masters the legitimate name of poets" (Biographia Literaria, I, 18). Along with Wordsworth, he objects to the artificial- ity of the matter and manner of the poetry: I saw, that the excellence of this kind [of poetry] consisted in just and acute observations of men and manners in an artificial state of society, as its matter and substance: and in the logic of wit, conveyed in smooth and strong epigrammatic couplets, as its form. Even when the sub— ject was addressed to the fancy, or to the intellect, as in the Rape of the Lock, or the Essay on Man; nay, when it was a con- secutive narration, as in that astonishing product of matchless talent and ingenuity, Pope's Translation of the Iliad; still a pgint was looked for at the end of each second line.... (Biographia Literaria, I 18, his emphasis). I In Coleridge's opinion the best products of this poetry-- the works of Pope, for example--consist of artificial sit- uations and characters. It is tighly structured and pre- dictable. A reader always knows that a point is to be looked for at the end of each second line. Coleridge char- acterizes this poetry not as poetic thoughts but as thoughts translated into the language of poetry, which means, within this context, that it does not grow out of the processes of native genius, the language capturing the thought as it springs out of the passions; rather it is intellectual per- ception systematized in poetic language. Darwin's Botanic Garden, which Coleridge laments was greatly extolled by both the readinggnufljt:and men of genius, he labels "painted mists" and a "Russian palace of ice, 36 glittering, cold and transitory" (Biographia Literaria, I, 18). It is a theory of poetry which remembers the intellect without the emotions, the head without the heart. This theory and the style of poetry out of which it grew Cole- ridge traces to "the custom of writing Latin verses, and the great importance attached to these exercises, in our public schools" (Biographia Literaria, I, 20). What makes this exercise particulary repugnant in the hands of most practitioners is that they cannot, because they can no long- er think in Latin, rely on themselves for the "force and fitness" of their phrases. Rather they must rely on the authority of the author--Virgil, Horace, Ovid-~from whence the phrases came. Coleridge, with Rousseau and, for that matter, Wordsworth, believed in language training in the mother tongue.54 Coleridge adduced the metre and diction of the Greek poets such as Homer and Theocritus, but especially of the elder English poets from Chaucer to Milton, in his defence of the lines running into each other, in- stead of closing at each couplet; and of natural language, neither bookish nor vulgar, neither redolent of the lamp, or of the kennel, such as 'I will remember thee'; instead of the same thought tricked up in ——-Thy image on her wing Before my FANCY'S eye shall memory bring. (Biographia Literaria, I, 21) E.- t; "I W. 37 He would not go so far as Wordsworth in insisting that poetic diction adopt exclusively the language of, and express the thoughts and feelings of humble men in common life. In fact he offered compelling arguments against such a practice.55 But he certainly favored the middle style for poetic diction: between the bookish and the base. He therefore held up for praise in a later chapter of the Biographia Literaria, "the neutral style, or that common to Prose and Poetry," which he saw exemplified by Herbert, Chaucer, and Wordsworth him- self (See Chapter 20). In his view, England's older poets, from Donne to Cowley, wrote "the most fantastic out-of-the-way thoughts, but in the most pure and genuine mother English. Contempor— aries, on the other hand, wrote "the most obvious thoughts, in language the most fantastic and arbitrary." He explains, Our faulty elder poets sacrificed the passion, and the passionate flow of poetry, to the sub- leties of intellect, and to the starts of wit; the moderns to the glare and glitter of a per- petual, yet broken and heterogeneous imagery, or rather to an amphibious something, made up, half of image, and half of abstract meaning. 56 The one sacrificed the heart to the head, the other both heart and head to point and drapery. (Biographia Literaria, I, 23—24) The metre of contemporary writers, he complains, ...is either constructed on no previous system, and acknowledges no justifying principle but that of the writer's conven- ience; or else some mechanical movement is adopted, of which one couplet or stanza is so far an adequate specimen, as that the occasional differences appear evidently to arise from accident,or the qualities of the 38 language itself, not from meditation and an intelligent purpose. (Biographia Literaria, XIV, 24) The diction, he observes, may be "too faithfully character- ized, as claiming to be poetical for no better reason, than that it would be intolerable in conversation or in prose" (XIV, 24). Though Wordsworth and Coleridge disagreed about what the nature of poetic metre and diction should be, they were united in their opinion that contemporary trends were deplorable and that true poetic expression stemmed from passion-~the intellect stimulated by the emotions. That flow, they felt, was tampered with only at tremendous ex- pense to work, writer, and reader. They revolted, each to his degree, against a poetic rhetoric devoted to "point and drapery," against a rhetoric which was enamoured of itself and ignored--lost sight of—- "the plain humanities of nature." They promoted, and in an important sense invented, a rhetoric of the self. The de- velopment of this rhetoric was not achieved without consid- erable struggle on the part of the poets, particularly Words- worth, and not without substantial pain suffered as a result of the struggle. The intensity of the struggle is implied in Coleridge's description of the criticism which met the Lyrical Ballads: "criticism which would of itself have borne up the poems by the violence with which it whirled them round and round" (Biographia Literaria, XIV, 5). He 39 notes that the "Preface" was greeted with "aversion to [its] opinions" and "alarm at [its] consequences." For his part, Wordsworth anticipated an attack on the form and content of his poetry: "They who have been accustomed to the gaudi- ness and inane phraseology of many modern writers, if they persist in reading this book to its conclusion, will, no doubt, frequently have to struggle with feelings of strange- ness and awkwardness: they will look round for poetry, and will be induced to inquire by what species of courtesy these "57 attempts can be permitted to assume that title. Despite the casual sarcasm in this prediction, Wordsworth was very sensitive to criticism and took negative criticism bitterly.58 Yet his proposals for the restoration of poetry led him in- to a literary harm's way. In forming an individual style, in creating a particular meaning that was theirs, Wordsworth and Coleridge experienced a type of "heroic struggle" which Gusdorf contends is the consequence of the revolt against linguistic convention. Their revolt was not to end in doubt and denial, however, but in a rhetoric which was itself to become a tradition. The sources and substance of this rhetoric, for each of them, makes up the content of the next two chapters of this study. What they rebelled against and what they pro- posed, however, is succinctly summarized by Wordsworth in the following passage, again from the "Preface" to the Lyrical Ballads: 40 It has been said that each of these poems has a purpose. Another circumstance must be mentioned which distinguishes these Poems from the popular Poetry of the day; it is this, that the feeling therein de- veloped gives importance to the action and situation, and not the action and situation of the feeling. 59 In other words, Wordsworth's poetry grows from the inside out; action and situation, external elements of the artis- tic product, are created out of the feeling developed by the poet. They result necessarily from the poet's process of creation. Coleridge, too, supports this idea, explaining that the organic form of composition is innate; "it shapes as it develops itself from within, and the fullness of its development is one and the same with the perfection of its outward form."60 The popular poetry of the day, on the other hand, is written from the outside in, action and sit- uation determining feeling (if feeling exists at all). The rules of Wordsworth's and Coleridge's poetry stem form their perceptions of the operations of the mind and imagination. The rules for the poetry of the day, in contrast, reflect a concern for manner, balance, and language rarified. The form of such poetry is mechanic; the shape of the material is predetermined, and the matter is made to fit the form (Coleridge, Shakespearean Criticism, 223). Kinneavy's declaration that "Romantic expressionism was a literary phenomenon" needs qualification. The phenome- non did begin within a literary context: the theory of 41 organic composition was initially applied to the poetic pro- cess, and expressionism meant either that the poet was the primary source and subject matter of the poem or that aspects of the external world were converted from fact to poetry through the combined workings of the poet's intellect and emotions. But its implications soon stretched beyond poetry and the poet. We find Wordsworth suggesting that every man may ripen into a poet, at least metaphorically, if he is allowed to de- velop his innate gifts: "Why is this glorious creature to be found / One only in ten thousand? What one is, / Why may not millions be?" (The Prelude, XIII, 86—89). He makes no distinction between the poet and other men, except in de- gree: "The sum of what was said is, that the Poet is chiefly distinguished from other men by a greater promptness to think and feel without immediate external excitement, and a great- er power in expressing such thoughts and feelings as are pro- duced in him in that manner. But these passions and thoughts and feelings are the general passions and thoughts and feel— ings of men ("Preface" to the Lyrical Ballads, 457, my empha— sis). A poet, Wordsworth declares, is a man speaking to men. Men may become as poets through the wholesome growth of their full expressive powers. As William Walsh points out, Coleridge insists that an essential means of attaining reflective self-knowledge is 42 through an active understanding of language.61 He quotes Coleridge: Reflect on your thoughts, actions, cir- cumstances and--which will be of especial aid to you in forming a habit of reflection-- accustom yourself to reflect on the words you use, hear or read, their truth, der— ivation and history. For if words are things, they are living powers, by which things of most importance to mankind are activated, combined, and humanised. "The best part of human language," according to Coleridge, "is derived from reflection on the acts of the mind itself." This reflection, he notes, is of critical importance to the development of the whole being; and he argues for the cen- tral place of reflective use of language in the schools. To Coleridge's way of thinking, abundant self-knowledge and accurate self-expression are not just qualities necessary for the poet. They are necessary for everyman. Thus Kin- neavy's claim does not capture the breadth of expressive theory, which, rising out of its literary foundation, re- presents organic growth not only in written and oral com- munication, but in the psychology of the individual himself. 43 NOTES l'James Kinneavy, A Theory of Discourse (New York: Prentice Hall, 1971), 394. 2James Britton, Language and Learning (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1972), 168-179. 3James Britton, "The Composing Processes and the Functions of Writing," in Research on Composing, ed. Charles Cooper and Lee Odell (Urbana: NCTE), 18. 4Janet Emig, The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders (Urbana: NCTE, 1971), 37. 5David Holbrook, Children's Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 19. 6James Miller, Jr., and Stephen Judy, Writing in Reality (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), 20. 7John Dixon, Growth Through English (Urbana: NCTE, l975),7. 8Geoffrey Summerfield, Creativity in English (Urbana: NCTE, 1968), 2. 9Suzanne Langer in Britton, Language and Learning, 21. 10George Kelly, A Theory of Personality: The Psycho- logy of Personal Constructs (New York: W.W. Norton, 1963), 52. llJames Britton, Language and Learning, 20. 12J.W. Patrick Creber, Sense and Sensitivity (London: University of London Press, 1965), 24. 13Susan Sontag in Walker Gibson, Persona (New York: Random House, 1969, 84. 14 Stephen Judy, Writing in Reality, 115. 44 15Georges Gusdorf, Speaking (LaParole) (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, l965),75. 16See, for example, Emig on the "fifty-star theme" in The Composing Process of Twelfth Graders, 97; Dixon on the need for a variety of language experiences and contexts in Growth Through English, 15; Holbrook on the necessity of parroting in order to survive academia in The Exploring Word (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 102; Creber on stereotyping in Sense and Sensitivity, 24. l7Richard Ohman, English in America (New York: Oxford 1974), 301. See also Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner, Teaching as a Subversive Activity (New York: Delacorte, 1969), 14. 18M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 22. 19Longinus in Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, 73. oAbrams, The Mirror and the Lamp,73. 21James Beattie in Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp,36. 2Richard Hurd in James Malek, The Arts Compared: An Aspect of Eighteenth Centupy British Aesthetics (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1974), 85. 23C. Hugh Holman, A Handbook to Literature (Indiana- polis: The Odyssey Press, 1975), 267—268. 24Dennis in Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, 75. 5Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, 75. 6Bishop Lowth in Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, 77. 27Lowth in Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, 77. 28Blair in Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, 95. 29Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783), Vol. II, ed. Harold F. Harding (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965), 312. 45 30Blair in Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, 96. 31Blair from the title to Lecture XXXI, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, 156. 32Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, vol. I, Lecture XIX, 405. 33T.J. Wise, A Bibliography of the Writings of William Wordsworth (London, 1916), 31. 34Oliver Elton, A Survey of English Literature, 1780- 1830. 4th imp. (London, 1933), II, 64. 35Helen Darbershire, The Poet Wordsworth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950), 35. 36Arthur Beatty, William Wordsworth: His Doctrine and Art In Their Historical Relations (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1960), 20. 37Mayo's important and influential article is "The Contemporaneity of the Lyrical Ballads," in PMLA, LXIX (1954), 486-522. For critics who continued the revolution- ary fervor see, for example, M.H. Abrams in The Mirror and the Lamp, 53: the publication of the Lyrical Ballads is "a convenient index to a comprehensive revolution in the theory of poetry, and of all the arts"; or Margaret Drabble, who calls the poems "a revolution in poetry; they were com- pletely new....They were different in language, in inten- tion, and in subject matter, Wordsworth (London, 1966), 20-21. 38Hazlitt in Darbershire, The Poet Wordsworth,7-8. 39William Wordsworth, The Preludg: A Parallel Text, ed. J.C. Maxwell (Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1972), Book X, Lines 414-415. All quotes will be from the 1850 text unless otherwise dated. ' 0Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lecture XVI in The Friendy ed. Barbara E. Rooke (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 329. 46 1Raymond Dexter Havens, The Mind of a Poet: A Study in Wordsworth's Thought With Particular Reference to the Prelude (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1941), 129. 42Gene Ruoff, "Wordsworth on Language: Toward A Radical Poetics for English Romanticism," in The Wordsworth Circle (III), 4, Fall, 1972. Ruoff's comment is "Whatever other discoveries The Prelude shows Wordsworth to have made, it demonstrates that he found that there were two ways of using language, one which destroys and unsouls, another which unites and reveals the soul. The binding property of lan- guage is manifested in the language of ordinary conversa- tion, the language in which men speak to men" (209). 43Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. I (London: The Scholar Press, 1971), IX, 144. 44Helen Darbershire remarks: "What survives of Words- worth's youthful verse is of two kinds: formal exercises, like his lines written in Popian couplets for the centenary of the foundation of Hawkshead School, and some translations from the classics; secondly, freer verse either in ballad- form or in octosyllabics with subject matter partly natural, partly romantic" (The Poet Wordsworth, 13). 4SBiographia Literaria, I, 17. 46Essay upon Epitaphs, II, in Literary Criticism of William Wordsworth, ed. Paul M. Zall (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966), 113. 7"Essay, Supplementary to the Preface" (1815), in Literary Criticism of William Wordsworth, 1971. 8Darwin in Beatty, William Wordswprth: His Doctrine and Art in Their Historical Relations, 62. 49See John E. Jordan, Why the Lyrical Ballads? The Background, WritingJ and Character of Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads (Berkeley: UC Press, 1976), for a description of the "flood of verse"--near1y every literate person dabbled in poetry--appearing in the late 1700s. 50Here are two examples of this extravagance, one from Erasmus Darwin in his The Economy of Vegetation. It is called "The Birth of KNO3": 47 Hence orient Nitre owes its sparkling birth, And with prismatic crystals gems the earth O'er tottering domes the filmy foliage crawls, Or frosts with branching plumes the mould'ring walls; As woos Azotic Gas the virgin Air, And veils in crimson clouds the yielding fair. The other from Mary Robinson's sonnet "The Temple or Chastity“: High on a rock, coeval with the skies, A temple stands, reared by immortal powers Tb Chastity devine! Ambrosial flowers, Twining round icicles, in columns rise, Mingling with pendant gems of orient dies: Piercing the air, a golden crescent towers, Veiled by transparent clouds; while smiling hours Shake from their varying wings celestial joys! In The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse, ed. Wyndham Lewis and Charles Lee (New York: Capricorn Books, 1962). 51"Preface" to the Lyrical Ballads in Literary Criticism of William Wordsworth, 44-45. 52William Wordsworth, "Appendix to the Preface" (1802), in William Wordsworth: Selected Poems and Prefaces, ed. Jack Stillinger (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), 466. 53James Britton, Explorations in Children's Writing, ed. Eldonna Evertts (NCTE, 1970), 48. 54A. Charles Babenroth, Epglish Childhood, (New York: Columbia University, 1922), 171. Babenroth details the con- flict between the traditional forces of classic education-- the Latinists--and the forces of a more child-centered ap- proach such as Rousseau, Wordsworth, and Coleridge. 55Seethe Biographia Literaria, XVII, 36. S6Coleridge's amusing example of this "amphibious something" is the following couplet by a young tradesman: "No more will I endure love's pleasing pain, Or round my heart's leg tie this galling chain." 57"Preface" to the Lyrical Ballads (1802), in Literary Criticism of William Wordsworthy 40. 48 58Wordsworth was, for example, disappointed by Southey's criticism of the Lyrical Ballads. Since Southey knew that Wordsworth had published the Ballads because of his need for money, Southey should not have, Wordsworth felt, reviewed them at all, let alone negatively. 59"Preface" to the Lyrical Ballads (1802), in Selected Poems and Prefaces, 448. 60Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Shakespearean Criticism, ed. Thomas Raysor (London: Constable and Co., 1930), I 223-224. I 61William Walsh, The Use of the Imagination (London: Chatto & Windus, 1959), 61. CHAPTER II "THE EXCELLENCE OF WRITING": "A CONJUNCTION OF REASON AND PASSION" Wordsworth's practice and theory of composition rose out of his rejection of the political, philosophical, and poetic rhetoric of the late 17005. But it had its base in his own education, particularly at Hawkshead Grammar School and in the surrounding Windermere countryside. In The Pre- lpdg, he praises that education in the highest terms, while condemning the traditional analytic education to which the majority of English school children were subjected: yet I rejoice, And, by these thoughts admonished, will pour out Thanks with uplifted heart, that I was reared Safe from an evil which these days have laid Upon the children of the land, a pest, 1 That might have dried me up, body and soul. Not only did Hawkshead provide a background in the letters and sciences,2 but it also stimulated what to Wordsworth was essential to growth, "right, sound, active, vital feeling." James Fotheringham, in his work on The Prelude as a study of education, focuses on the principle of the "vital soul": 49 50 In a phrase...that is in true sympathy with the best naturalism of his age, the "vital soul" is the ground of all real education, and the expansion of the "vital soul" is the true end of education.... In The Prelude ...and in other poems of his great period it is a leading idea. There is no real and right growth for the human mind with- out depth and cordiality of feeling. The culture that does not give this is barren, and in large degree a failure.3 It is the growth of the emotive quality of the personality with the intellectual which Wordsworth found so praiseworthy in his education at Hawkshead. Customs such as granting abundant time for wandering freely in the countryside; having the students live in the homes of the villagers instead of at school; emphasizing companionship between the boys, but allowing for solitary pursuits; providing time for school projects and for individual projects; encouraging intellec- tual and emotional independence; all helped to foster af- fections and human sympathies, and placed in the context of the whole being the use of the intellect. Thus is Wordsworth brought to characterize the pupils, "with whom he herded," as A race of real children; not too wise, Too learned, or too good; but wanton, fresh, And bandied up and down by love and hate; Not unresentful where self-justified; Fierce, moody, patient, virtuous, modest shy; Mad in their sports like withered leaves in winds; Though doing wrong and suffering, and full oft Bending beneath our life's mysterious weight Of pain, and doubt, and fear, yet yielding not In happiness to the happiest upon earth. (The Prelude, V, 411-425) 51 The qualities which 'a race of real children" possesses are those Wordsworth considered essential to the fruitful develop- ment of the vital soul. The young must be allowed full play physically and emotionally. Feelings of love and hate are to be promoted in experience rather than repressed; the en- tire range of emotive possibilities, in fact, should become realities in the children's lives. Of particular importance are pain, doubt, and fear, similar to Holbrook's "backlog of psychological problems inherited from the darkest ages of infancy,"4 because drawing them out is the first step in helping to order the darkly mysterious aspects of person- ality. With these qualities of the heart go Simplicity in habit, truth in speech, Be these the daily strengtheners of their minds; May books and Nature be their early joy! And knowledge rightly honoured with that name-- Knowledge not purchased by the loss of power! (The Prelude, V, 411-425) While these children grow with and experience the passions in- herent to their membership in the race of men, their intellect is stimulated by "good books, though few"5 and by nature. Feeling is not cultivated separately from the intellect. Each matures with the other. As feeling ripens the intellect, it in turn interprets feeling and explores the environment. In these children, there is no mimetic or grandoise style. Their expression, in effect, is the image of themselves: "Simpli- city in habit, truth in speech." This personal and verbal style, because it so honestly represents thought and feeling, 52 assumes the function of the "daily strengthener of their minds." Through self expression, they are able to define and shape experience; they use language, Wordsworth implies, to know and become themselves. Since the vital soul is sus- tained by their "education," they learn without losing them- selves in the process. They consequently gain knowledge without "loss of power." The product of the typical school education, the "model of the child," is, on the other hand, a specimen "Full early trained to worship seemliness." Copying the attitudes and qualities which would please the adult, he manipulates and receives approval by adopting the virtues thought culturally appropriate: He never shows selfishness, is never afraid ("except in dreams"), recognizes immorality in the world, feigns innocence and can in fact "read lectures" upon the subject. His training is cerebral: memorization and analy- sis become his principal tools: he can read The insides of the earth, and spell the stars; He knows the policies of foreign lands; Can string you names of districts, cities, towns, The whole world over, tight as beads of dew Upon a gossamer thread; he sifts, he weighs; All things are put to question; (The Prelude,V,317-323). Like the modern psychologists who followed him, Wordsworth insists that the child is not to be blamed for this "unnatur- al growth." Rather blame the "trainer." Every time the in- nate emotive qualities arise in the child I'to lead him toward a better clime,/ Some intermeddler still is on the watch/ To S3 drive him back, and pound him, like a stray, / Within the pinfold of his own conceit" (The Prelude, V, 334-337). The child is obliged to assume the colorless character of those who mold him. Because the tendency to express thoughts and feelings in truthful language is blocked, those genuine thoughts and feelings become repressed. These two "developments" occur simultaneously, to Wordsworth's way of thinking, one because of the other. Each person, Wordsworth observes, is born with the "poetic spirit," a condition which unites feeling and "the growing faculties of sense" with the facility to re- present and to shape the environment. In his ability to per- ceive, to represent, and to shape, the child assumes a God- like role; he receives an object through the senses, and then brings it into being--creates it--for himself by placing it in relation to the other things of his perception and exper- ience. In this operation, he systematizes and synthesizes the objects of his environment according to the pattern that makes sense of the world for him. He performs the function microcosmically, which God has performed macrocosmically. Wordsworth puts it this way: For feeling has to him imparted power That through the growing faculties of sense Doth like an agent of the one great Mind Create, creator and receiver both, Working but in alliance with the works Which it beholds. (The Prelude, II, 255-260) The "first poetic spirit," a giving—receiving process, is Wordworth's label for the initial operations of the imagination. 54 As the mind matures, it projects life, meaning, and value onto the external world,6 and language, important from the start, takes on progressively greater consequence. All youth are poets to begin with; they draw into being the world around them and eventually locate themselves within it mainly through language. As long as language growth occurs naturally; as long as they are able, to use Gusdorf's phrase, to find the expression to fit their innate situation, they may ripen into fully attuned human beings. Unfortunately, as Wordsworth so emphatically declares, this expressive capa- bility is quickly and decisively wrested from the children by outside agents in their homes and in the schools: "the first / Poetic spirit of our human life, / By uniform control of after years [is], / In most, abated or suppressed" (The Prelude, II, 260-263). As a result, "Shades of the prison-house begin to close / Upon the growing boy."7 The child soon loses contact with his "poetic" self and adopts a variety of roles to meet expectations and receive support: Filling from time to time his "humourous stage" With all the Persons, down to palsied Age, That Life brings with her in her equipage; As if his whole vocation Were endless imitation. ("Intimations," 103-107) Sadly, this process of distancing the individual from his genuine self grows in complexity until that self eventually disappears and the imitative self becomes, in a sense, the "real" self. 55 The process of losing the self in imitation is very like the process Wordsworth describes as having occured t0‘ poetic diction. That is, the poets of the eras preceding his, unable to produce a language which stemmed from their own powerful feelings, mechanically appropriated the figures without the feeling of that language. Gradually, it became difficult to tell the natural language from the adulterated, and the adulterated was subsequently taken for the natural. The real voice of men in poetry, thus displaced, was buried under successively thicker layers of contrived diction and metre. The language parallel in the child to whom Wordsworth refers is important. Should the child be obliged, in meeting his psychological needs, to assume linguistic roles other than those which reflect his true expressive growth, that expressive capacity will be swallowed up in automatic, mech- anical, stereotyped responses to environment and experience. Along with producing a "little Actor," this transformation creates, at the least, a less than full life and, at the most, numerous psychological problems. Conventional education practice both at home and in the school, according to Wordsworth and Coleridge, was at the core of this superimposition of character. Coleridge laments that he saw ...how many examples of...young men the most anxiously and expensively be-school mastered, be-tutored, be-lectured, anything but educated; who have received arms and ammunition, instead of skill, strength, and courage; varnished 56 rather than polished; perilously over- civilized, and most pitiably uncultivated: And all from inattention to the method dictated by nature herself...that as the forms in all organized existence, so must all true and living knowledge proceed from within; that it may be trained, supported, fed, excited, but can never be infused or impressed. Attaining knowledge is a process which grows from within, as the individual grows; it cannot be imposed on the learner through models-~not, that is, with any positive results. He continues with the same theme: It was a great error to cram the young mind with so much knowledge as made the child talk much and fluently: what was more ridiculous than to hear a child questioned, what it thought of the last poem of Walter Scott? A child should be child-like, and possess no other idea than what was loving and admiring. 8 Traditional education of the late 1700s and early 18005 con- sisted partially of cramming into its object, the pupils, facts about natural science, mathematics, and English verse, which students often translated into Latin. The major emphasis was on the acquisitionof classical languages, taking up an abundance of instructional time morning and afternoon. Train- ing in the use of the mother-tongue was limited basically to horn books containing the alphabet, words for spelling, some grammar, and stories with religiously moral content intended to improve the character of the reader. This was education, as Coleridege points out, from the outside in. It did nothing for the maturation of the boy's 57 personality, the growth of his intellectual and emotional being. Rather it stunted and perverted, in the opinion of the poets, painting the shell of the individual without cul— tivating his internal nature. The result was a child who talked much and fluently about matters connected to him only in a very superficial way. Expressions of fear, desire, frus- tration, and joy, presumably, were nowhere a part of his con- versation; since the language of the self was unused because it was discouraged, the aspects of personality it shapes and explains were left unexplored. The individual subjected to this education was consequently incomplete, his language arti- ficial, and his character disjointed. One of the reasons why Wordsworth selected from "the language really used by men" for the Lyrical Ballads was his thorough distaste for the contrived condition of the language of the "educated." And one of the purposes for.se1ecting situations from "low and rustic life" for the content of the Ballads stemmed from his conviction that too many of the edu- cated had lost touch with their expressive base: Low and rustic life was generally chosen, because in that condition, the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language; because in that condition of life our elementary feelings co-exist in a state of greater simplicity, and, consequently, may be more accurately contemplated, and, more forcibly communicated. 58 Wordsworth implies here that emotive development is far health- ier in a rustic atmosphere than it can be in the atmosphere typical of most formal educational environments. The basis for this claim lies in Wordsworth's observation that rustics grew into maturity relatively untampered with by institutions outside of nature and their loved ones, and that their "or- ganic growth" is reflected in the clarity and power of their language. He continues shortly thereafter: The language, too, of these men is adopted (purified indeed from what appear to be its real defects, from all rational causes of dislike or disgust) because such men hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of the language is originally derived; and because, from their rank in society and the sameness and narrow circle of their intercourse, being less under the influence of social vanity they convey their feelings and notions in simple and unelaborated expres- sions. 9 Wordsworth chooses the language of these men because it is the language closest to nature and, more relevantly, because it is a language unadulterated by rhetorical tricks, passion- less analysis, or pressures on the individual to conform to societal conventions. It is, in short, a language purely, simply, and forcefully of its users, whose style reflects the elemental and genuine quality of their personalities. These are the poets of the mind, whom Wordsworth describes in The Excursion: 59 men endowed with highest gifts, The vision and the faculty divine; Yet wanting the accomplishment of verse, (Which, in the docile season of their youth, It is denied them to acquire...) 10 It is clear from the passages in the "Preface" quoted above that Wordsworth perceived the interrelationship between cognitive and language development. He distinguishes between the individual who expands psychologically at the pace in- nately appropriate to his character, and the individual whose growth is influenced by the agencies of social vanity. The one is able to communicate his thoughts and feelings in ”sim- ple and unelaborated expressions.” The other employs a lan- guage which veils feelings and exposes, in Coleridge's terms, the varnish of the overly civilized. The distinction Words— worth draws is between the illiterate and the literate, the illiterate faring far better because of his freedom to mature as he is. That the illiterate's rhetoric was to become one of the sources for a new poetic language has, of course, been cause for considerable critical controversy from Wordsworth's own era to the present. I think, however, if Wordsworth had more systematically qualified his position or if critics had taken into account more than the comments in the "Preface," some of the controversy's heat would have been cooled. Even in the "Preface," for example, Wordsworth de- clares, however parenthetically, that he had purified the language of the rustics, removing from it the dialectic 60 idiosyncracies and base phrases which might make it incom- prehensible or offensive to readers. The language is, by Wordsworth's qualification, a cleansed and correct form of the real thing. But it is not exactly the real thing. More importantly, Wordsworth does not hold up illiteracy for emu- lation. He holds up, instead, a psychological condition of being which is represented dynamically in oral speech; the speech displays the full and fruitful status of the person- ality of its user. Wordsworth implies that the vast majority of school-educated and literate people have,unfortunately, lost their capacity to find and express themselves in language because of, in good part, their literacy training. Not un- dertaking the training and not being constrained to fit a mold, illiterates have the advantage over literates in that they speak the language really used by men. But it is much more the training which he condemns than the literate individ- ual himself. After all, the "glorious creature" of Book XIII of The Prelude, the "one only in ten thousand," is simultane- ously literate and expressive; if he is a rustic, then he is one who reads and writes: --my theme No other than the very heart of man, As found among the best of those who live, Not unexalted by religious faith, Nor uninformed by books, good books, though few, In Nature's presence. (XIII, 240-245) 61 Such an individual does not paint matters of the outside world with rhetorical eloquence, thereby looking for praise from his reader or listener. Rather he is his own upholder, and expresses "liveliest thoughts in lively words / As native passion dictates" (XIII, 256-265). This individual is "a sensitive being, a creative soul" who retains and refines the poetic spirit most lose as they grow older. Wordsworth's description of the sustenance of this spirit in man exactly parallels that in the genuine poet; the same types of prob- lems exist in the discourse of both men and poets who abided by the traditions of the eighteenth century: extravagance, imitation, analysis. The rhetoric of the self can be every- man's rhetoric, but only if conditions exist which allow for the organic growth of the personality in conjunction with the same growth in expressive power. What are these conditions? Simply and idealistically put, the reading of good books, living in nature's presence, and undertaking an education which granted the freedeom to grow intellectually and emotionally as an individual. But there were also certain practical matters which permitted Wordsworth to formulate the writing theory and follow the writing practice he did. In 1780, when he was ten years old and had been a year at Hawkshead, Wordsworth began to apprec- iate "the charm / Of words in tuneful order, found them sweet / For their own sakes, a passion, and a power" (The Prelude, V, 552-556). He describes the experience of strolling along a lake path with a dear friend, "repeating favorite verses 62 with one voice" (The Prelude, V. 564). The experience lifted them "above the ground by airy fancies, / More bright than madness or the dreams of wine" (V, 567-568). As a discerning thinker and maturing writer, who had discovered the vacuity and vanity of conventional rhetoric, he looks back upon the quality of the poetry he read and judges it negatively: though full oft the objects of our love Were false, and in their splendour overwrought, Yet was there surely then no vulgar power Working within us,--nothing less, in truth, Than the most noble attribute of man, Though yet untutored and inordinate, That wish for something loftier, more adorned, Than is the common aspect, daily garb, Of human life. (V, 569-577) More often than not, Wordsworth confesses, the poetry was of the sort he condemns in the "Preface" to the Lyrical Ballads for its absurd and extravagant diction. The corrup- tion of the poetry was not, however, the corruption of Words- worth and his companion; while there may have been a vulgar power working in the poems, there was none working in the young readers. And the sound and rhythm in these poems helped to stimulate and sustain what in the infant was the "first poetic spirit," in the youth is "untutored and inordinate" creative sensibility, and in the adult will become the Imagi- nation, "Right reason in its most exalted mood." That Wordsworth did not find the poetry of the eight- eenth century initially offensive and that his own training in the classical languages had influenced his development are _[L 63 reflected in the poetry of his grammar school and Cambridge days. At Hawkshead, he wrote one piece, which has not sur- vived, about his summer vacation of 1784; another piece, which did survive, was written in honor of the school. At fifteen, Wordsworth was asked, along with some of the other poetically inclined boys, to compose a poem celebrating Hawks- head's bicentenary. He wrote over one hundred lines of hero- ic couplet, personifying the Spirit of Education as a goddess who addresses the pupils on the merits of the modern, scien- trfin: approach to knowledge. The poem, written in conventional rhyme and metre and employing the common rhetorical devices such as an abundance of personifications, shows the sway of the classics on the young poet's mind and demonstrates his 11 Composed before his ability to imitate the Popian style. revolt against rhetorical convention, which Gusdorf says typifies the development of an individual style, the poem displays Wordsworth as an imitative more than original artist-- generally offering stereotypes rather than self-expression. Nonetheless, the creation of this early work is quite important, primarily for two reasons. First, as it helped to promote his craft and to suggest his calling as a poet, writing these technically adroit pieces also brought him close to the rhetoric of poetry he would subsequently at- tack. He came to know his enemy, so to speak, by living in the trenches with him. Second, and more significant, he re- ceived much support for his efforts, both from his headmaster 64 William Taylor and from his fellow pupils. He states, in fact, that "School Exercise" was "much admired, far more than [it] deserved, for [it was] but a tame imitation of Pope's versification and a little in his style."12 What bound Wordsworth to becoming a poet stemmed from two sources in his youthful education: his introduction to the literary and intellectual culture of his age and the sympathetic and encouraging reception for his writing from his audience, "a prototype of those smaller enclaves of trust and dedication he would seek to find at Nether Stowey and Grasmere."l3 This audience support was inestimable to his career as a writer. Without it, he may never have become a poet. With it, he was heartened to write fairly constantly from 1785 onwards. In a manuscript book covered in brown leather, he says, he began to compose verse, "and so got into the habit of reduc- ingtx>shape the thoughts which had been vaguely haunting his brain, like to body-waiting souls, which wandered to the Lethean pools."l4 Wordsworth apparently used private writing as a means of ordering his experience, giving it a shape from which he could make sense of it. His public writing, however, con- tinued to reflect eighteenth century influences. In an in- teresting and telling analysis of a portion of "An Evening Walk" (1787), Ben Ross Schneider points out Wordsworth's con- sistent use of Latinisms: 65 (displaced Brightening the cliffs between modifier) where the sombrous pine, And yew-trees o'er the silver rocks recline, (suspended verb) I love to mark the quarry's moving trains Dwarf pannier'd steeds, and men, and numerous wains: (no verb) How busy the enormous hive within (inversion) (personifi- While Echo dallies with the various cation) din! Some, hardly heard their chissel's clinking sound, (ablative absolute) Toil, small as pygmies, in the gulph profound; (displaced Some, dim between the aerial cliffs modifier) descry'd; O'erwalk the viewless plank from side to side; These by the pale-blue rocks that ceaseless ring (displaced Glad from their airy baskets hang modifier) and sing. (suspended verb) 15 By using displaced modifiers, verbless and suspended sentences, and numerous participiad.phrases, inversions and personifica- tions, Wordsworth followed the poetic fashion of adhering to classic niceties, a fashion he was to heartily condemntnni years later. Even so, Wordsworth's classical studies, as Schneider shows, probably helped more than hindered his poetic develop- ment.16 In the Aeneid,for example, Wordsworth found the idea that beneath nature's appearance lies "something far more deeply interfused"; he also discovered there the concept of the Soul which, after rising in glory at birth and through childhood, becomes dulled and imprisoned by life's "shades of the prison house." In Horace he read, among other things, 66 that only the "highest good" was expedient, that man's duty was to live agreeably with nature, and that the best way to live in harmony with nature was to live in the country. Read- ing Tacitus, whose comparison of the upright and virtuous behavior of the primitive German tribes to the sophisticated and licentious behavior of the haughty Romans put the latter to shame may have amplified Wordsworth's already unfavorable impression of Cambridge culture when compared to that of the north country. From De Moribus Germanorum, he may have learned about the sources of British freedom. And Cicero would have suggested to him how nature provides the means for developing frictionless human relationships by cultivating (l) the in- stincts--of self-preservation, gregariousness, independence, hunger for and love of beauty; (2) the reason--by which one can foresee the consequences of an act and judge its right- ness or wrongness; and (3) the moral sense--by which one can detect the propriety of an act. Wordsworth's summary in 222 Prelude best clarifies his discerning powers as a poet and student of the classics: he was, by his own account, a "bet- ter judge of thoughts than words" (VI, 124). Indeed such seems to be the case. For the words which Wordsworth wrote were stylistically affected, replete with "quaintnesses" and "heiroglyphics." They presented a style he was to despise later. Many of the "thoughts," however, were approved of by the mature poet and found way into his best poetry. 67 In the poems of the late 17805, the rendering of the object was blurred by the frippery of the diction and syntax. In the early 17905, on the other hand, a dramatic change took place in Wordsworth's style and in his approach to description. He began, as Paul Sheats observes, "to discipline his language on behalf of the object, attempting to clarify the relation- ship between word and thing and in general to render the lin- guistic surfaces of his style as unobtrusive as possible."17 Instead of connotative and general, nouns became denotative and concrete: "winter's shock" gave way to "driving snow," and the "bird" saluting the rising moon in 1788 became an "owl" in 1794. Wordsworth moved toward simpler words: a "dilated" sun became a "big” sun. He remade or removed images in order to clarify structural and perceptual relationships: 1788: Cross the calm lakes blue shades the cliffs aspire 1794: Beyond the lake the opposing cliffs aspire He corrected some of the inversions and absolutes--faults he would later label as the worst that poetry can havel°-in "An Evening Walk": 1788: Some, hardly heard their chissel's clinking sound Toil, small as pigmies, in the gulph profound. 1794: Some in the gulph profound like pigmies ply 19 Their clinking chissel hardly heard so high. In each revision, Wordsworth shows a shift toward his style of 1798, demonstrating an increasing ability to look steadily at his subject, and an expanding awareness of the language really used by men. 68 Coming at the time it did, the sharp change in style d diction is not surprising. Wordsworth had returned from ance despairing over the Reign of Terror and over Britain's claration of war against France. His political ideals had llapsed. His courtship with Godwinism went unfulfilled. s crisis, thorough and profound, brought about "the soul's st and lowest ebb; / Deeming our blessed reason of least e / Where wanted most" (The Prelude, x1, 307;309). This isis also initiated Wordsworth's revolt against the poli- cal and poetic rhetoric of his contemporaries, which he amed in great part for his breakdown. Little wonder than at upon his return to Dorothy and to the countryside of his uth he began, in his early twenties, the reformation of his n poetic voice in particular and the reformation of poetic etoric in general. The major elements in Wordsworth's youthful education-- 5 training at Hawkshead in the classics, in mathematics d Newtonian science (which provided him with a vision of iversal, if mechanical, order); his free play among the ods and mountains; his open capacity to feel and express eling; his reading and writing of poetry from an early age, d the support for both; his continued study at Cambridge, jection of the class-conscious culture there, and distaste r the University's emphasis on analysis;20 his support r the ideals of the French Revolution and for a rationally ral political and philosophic system; his discovery of the 69 emotional vacuity of the rhetoric of such a system; and his return to and affirmation of his expressive roots at Windy Brow with Dorothy and at Alfoxden with Dorothy and Coleridge-- all combined to cause in Wordsworth a growth from the "first poetic spirit" to the "philosophic mind." A crucial event in this pattern occurred when Wordsworth, as he climbed the ladder of abstraction, recognized the need for a firm base in the language of the self. He had, in his own opinion, explored the highest levels of abstract thought; and, after they proved to be more form than substance, he was able to recover his strayed sensibility through the adoption of a rhetoric in which thought grew out of feeling. He was one of those who, in a grand way, repaired what James Britton has termed the unfortunate "short-circuit" between the ex- pressive and the expository modes.21 During Wordsworth's extremely productive decade, from 1797 to 1807, nearly everything he wrote reflected his vigour and personality, and was expressed in a language at once per- sonal and public. The poetry is undeniably expressive. But even the prose of the Prefaces, in which he explained the complex functions of the poet and poetry, has the unmistake- able style of a man who has found his voice. He became what he defines as "poet": ...a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endued with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind; a man pleased u D He’ll" r‘ .1935 A5. “555‘s QC e "7 ‘11 .77 ’D .‘1 ’r’ L). All i ). 0") D) H (I) i.) '4 '1 '1') *1 ') /_ 70 with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions manifested in the goings-on of the Universe, and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them. The poet, according to Wordsworth, is distinguished from other men in his acuteness of apprehension and feeling. Because of his greater self-understanding, he is capable of a larger vision of the human experience than are other men: he makes his own part in life represent the whole, his individual soul becoming "comprehensive." He delights in the exercise of choice for which life provides ample opportunity and re- vels in the interplay of passions within the individual, and between man and nature. Where he does not himself discover "volitions" and "passions," he creates them through the pro- cesses of his imagination. With regard to creating what he does not himself see or experience, Wordsworth continues To these qualities [the poet] has added a disposition to be affected more than other men by absent things as if they were pre- sent; an ability of conjuring up in himself passions, which are indeed far from being the same as those produced by real events, yet (especially in those parts of the general sympathy which are pleasing and delightful) do more nearly resemble the passions produced by real events, than anything which, from the motions of their own minds merely, other men are accustomed to feel in themselves:--whence, and from practice, he has acquired a greater readiness and power in expressing what he thinks and feels, and especially those thoughts and feelings which, by his own choice, or from the structure of his own mind, arise in him without immediate external excitement.(Selected Poems and Prefaces, p.453) ' ILtY Cr "5 n' 8". L.” fi'h."‘ b.l~'d 1 ”Adv " .454.- p A. .. .rtn's ...- I A: V4» 9336 “‘7‘. the. . 0.. n‘fi «4: a . .'4 vs! 'I'. fit to 1 '63 i S tne S’ w... .655 v. a.“ “‘ m. . ' med 5 :g; ~ .‘ of: :I A. ‘4. I“ ~, ”t' It_ 71 Clarity of perception, sharpness of memory, and discipline of meditation produce in the poet the ability to place him— self not only in the heart of his own experience but also in human situations in which he has played no part. Words- worth's choice of the term "conjuring" is significant. The term means, in this context, to raise or call up emotional states of being which may not exist within the personal ex- perience of the writer. But it also carries the added weight of a magical connotation. A wizard working with the mater- ials of the real world, the poet creates out of nothing but words the substance and form of human experience. Though the written representations of the absent passions are not equal in power to the passions themselves--because words never ex- 22--they come actly or fully capture what they are meant to closer to being equivalent in the poet's work than they can be in the mind of the ordinary person. The poet's art, con- sequently, is justified, even when the poet plays no more than an imagined spectator's role in the "real events" which gener- ate the passion, because that art leads the readers to--at the least--an approximation of thoughts and feeling they could not otherwise achieve. Because of this disposition to be "af- fected more than other men by absent things" and because of "practice," the poet possesses greater ability than ordinary men to express what he thinks and feels, especially if those thoughts and feelings arise in him during the course of quiet reflection. 72 The poet's capacity to transfer his intellectual and emotional attention to events, objects, and individuals out- side himself and to color them within the bounds of reality is one of the primary functions of the imagination as Words- worth views it. He describes his principal goals in the Lyrical Ballads, for example, as the following: ...to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible in a sel- ection of language really used by men, and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect; and further,anuiabove all, to make these incidents and situations inter- esting by tracing in them, truly though not ostentatiously, the laws of our nature. (Selected Poems and Prefaces,447). Thus was Wordsworth able to assume the attitude of Betty Foy, who has just found her lost son,her beloved "Idiot Boy," and to color that reunion with the emotional pathos and energy (the "laws of our nature" in such a situation) which will ex- cite an empathic response in the reader:23 She looks again--her arms are up-- She screams--she cannot move for joy; She darts, as with a torrent's force, She almost has o'erturned the Horse, And fast she holds her Idiot Boy. 24 Thus was he able to adopt the psychological and linguistic state of the "simple Child" in "We Are Seven," for whom the imagined connection between herself and a dead brother and sister makes those siblings living presences in her life; and who cannot acknowledge the matter-of-fact statements of the adult questioning her: o-' I ,.o'" .e“-' ‘0. ‘8 x ‘A . 73 But they are dead; those two are dead! Their spirits are in heaven! 'Twas throwing words away; for still The little maid would have her will, And said, 'Nay, we are seven1'25 The poet is also capable, of course, of focusing imagi- native attention on his own experience. Thus was Wordsworth able, in reflecting on the pattern of his growth in "Tintern Abbey," to establish and shape the relationship between nature and self at what, in his assessment, were the three important stages in his life. As a child fostered by beauty and by fear, Wordsworth bounded Wherever nature 1ed--more like a man Flying from something that he dreads than one Who sought the thing he loved. 26 Wordsworth's projection into this period in his past, the age of sensation, suggests his sense of the child's unity with his natural surroundings. Nature was to him, at that point, "all in all." He had no discriminating or abstracting powers, nor did he need them. Indeed such powers would have been out of place: 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. From childhood he matured into Youth, the age of simple ideas, ideas which are drawn from impressions of sensation and re- flection. He learned O ,1‘1‘ “.193 h .1 151 ~ 4 ..- 14 L36 r\\ u of p no?! . I 4., l « «lv‘vyldqu ri ,. J: '9”) or atlo ‘ ‘1‘ g , 74 To look on nature, not as in the hour Of thoughtless [childhood], but hearing often times The still, sad music of humanity, Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power To chasten and subdue. Human communication and continued communion with nature evolve in him the condition in which he exists at the time of writ- ing the poem. He as reached maturity, the age of complex ideas, and has become a moral being: And I have felt The 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 the mind of man: A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things. This condition of being, in which the intellect and sensi- bilities are fused and act upon the world (while being acted upon by the world) to give everything a comprehended unity, is, really, the highest achievable in the Wordsworthian pat- tern of psychological growth. Arriving at this height, the individual may be termed a "philosophic Mind" ("Intimations Ode") or a "creative soul" (The Prelude, XII 207). His I imagination is, "but another name for absolute power / And clearest insight, amplitude of mind, / And Reason in her most exalted mood" (The Prelude, XIV, 190-192). The pattern of psychological development expressed in "Tintern Abbey" suggests two interesting aspects of the 0 ”new? 5" cribv‘b .1 (I) ?' all. r ...e Imagb", at assme a me.a the ”f r 1» 1.5,; A’.~' ."‘~.e:e ser he ‘~ ' vecame' m sressed Spir 1‘ ‘Q them lite Man belffg 5993:)" the use have ha .ltfied ”it h 539 O . f the W 23 ‘ De Urf‘enp ‘\ ‘9“- ”estrra, 75 imaginative function: one concerns the structuring of the pattern itself; the other concerns the synthesizing power of the imagination described in the passage above. In order to structure the pattern, Wordsworth had to generalize the events of his past, combining a wide variety of similar and sometimes very personal experiences—-which he details in The Prelude-- into a blend of experience on successive levels. Through the imaginative lense, life's seemingly disjointed occurences assume a meaningful progression--in Wordsworth's case from the "first poetic spirit" to the “philosophic Mind", from concrete sensations to abstract ideas. In The Prelude,he recalls "spots of time"--specific moments in the course of his life which exercised a profound influence on shaping who he became, moments which upon recollection renovate the de- pressed spirit and elevate the buoyant one--and weaves many of them into the intricate account of his development as a human being and writer. Through the imagination's coloring agency, the events take on a significance they could not other- wise have had; through its synthesizing faculty, they are linked with a multitude of other influences to create an im- age of the whole being. No detail within The Prelude seems to be unnecessary to the growth of the poet's mind, to the representation of the complete person. "Tintern Abbey," which may be viewed as a before-the-fact summary of The Prelude, offers not so much individual moments of growth as a unified portrayal of the result. The imagination, then, operates in '- ..3‘ en a p 1" .,‘ H -..t“ .w-“'3 In." nil-l- '- s ‘1‘. .1 <4; v ~ ‘ «3 ‘3 ‘,\ A: 76 two principal ways: it shapes, modifies, and amplifies mo- ments in the life of the writer or aspects of his subject; and it provides a vision of the whole into which these mo- ments and aspects evolve, "a sense sublime / Of something far more deeply interfused." Wordsworth defined the imagination succinctly in a conversation with Christopher Wordsworth: The imagination is that intellectual lens through the medium of which the poetical observer sees the objects of his obser- vation, modified both in form and colour; or it is that inventive dresser of the dramatic tableaux, by which the persons of the play are invested with new drapery, or placed in new attitudes; or it is that chemical faculty by which elements of the most different nature and distant origin are blended together in one harmonious and homogeneous whole. 27 Imagination is the necessary ingredient in the writing of poetry: "...by the imagination the mere fact is exhibited as connected with that infinity without which there is no poetry ...that imagination is the faculty by which the poet con- ceives and produces--that is, images--individual forms in which are embodied universal ideas or abstractions".28 But it is important to reiterate that the imagination is not some- thing Wordsworth sees as limited to the poet: his wish--more than wish, his demand--was that the expansion of the imagina- tive faculty be promoted in everyman. Believing that educa- tion was a vehicle particularly suited to the stimulation of the imagination, he complains in a letter about one of the _F A“ ‘“ jIQW E '5:C-~. a1 -51 n-vlfl‘ U. r O. a p? 'p ...n- ' v‘ I‘v-O-‘H v4 1?; Ge A1;- i ~ 77 "innovative" proposals for educating Britain's youth: "where- in does it [the Bell System of education] encourage the im- aginative feelings, without which the practical understanding is of little avail, and too apt to become the cunning slave of the bad passions."29 Wordsworth's immediate concern, as Jack Stillinger asserts,was to show that the imaginative op- eration, man's creative sensibility, was not mystical but psychological. Even in Wordsworth's relation of those signi- ficant "spots of time"--the climbing of Mount Snowdon in Book XIV, for example--no direct religious experience is involved. As potentially a powerful part of each person's life, the imagination "images" the_part within the whole: it fos- ters in the individual the capacity to envision the pattern of his growth, and it centers him in a universal context. It can only perform thesefunctions, however, if it is allowed to grow organically from the initial "poetic spirit" to the full "creative soul." It expands as the intellectual and emotional qualities expand, and those qualities increase in fullness as linguistic capability develops. All of these processes are interrelated, and interference with any one of them has a potentially debilitating effect on another. Thus, to return to a theme discussed earlier, an individual whose cognitive, emotive, and expressive growth is least inter- fered with by the mechanical, analytical, and imitative forces in society is likely to develop into a deeply imaginative human being. K v 5 n‘ ‘4 4 .— up 9 be]. 4 r n‘ .\-~4- use-v .\. \us vVi L. ‘ \I‘ saw \ ..l 78 Again, imagination in the humble folk is a potent char- acteristic: a Man so bred (Take from him what you will upon the score Of ignorance or illusion) lives and breathes For nobel purposes of mind: his heart Beats to the heroic song of ancient days; His eye distinguishes, his soul creates. 30 Noble purposes of mind, a distinguishing eye, and a creating soul result from an "organic education," an education in which the child is nurtured by love, by beauty, and by fear, in ac- cord with his innate pattern of maturation. Such an education grants the principle that substance should ripen in stages in- to form, rather than form artificially influencing the process of development from the outside. Such an education also recog- nizes that the child will create an impression of his environ- ment as he receives it. His mind operates, in other words, both passively and actively; perceptions are received through the senses, but what is seen is also shaped by the individual's way of seeing. It is,consequently, of great importance to the individual that his expressive powers be stimulated fully since those powers are the primary means through which the individual forms a self and world view. Wordsworth has written in the "Preface" to the Lyrical Ballads that the genuine poet is "endued" with a greater cap- acity to know and feel, and to imagine than is "supposed com- mon among mankind." Yet Wordsworth's own qualifiers are again appropriate. The poet is better equipped only in degree. Each perset. :15 pOZEEtl- inch 15 at 1: gives ex; 3f manipuia' gage need r‘ 51331: rather :ally zepwg 79 Each person,