Willing Suspense: Life-Writing and the Time of Action

By

Charity Corine Ketz

A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the

requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

in

English

in the

Graduate Division

of the

University of California, Berkeley

Committee in charge:

Professor Ian Duncan, chair

Professor Steve Justice

Professor Karen S. Feldman

Summer 2017

Abstract

Willing Suspense: Life-Writing and the Time of Action

By

Charity Corine Ketz

Doctor of Philosophy in English

University of California, Berkeley

Professor Ian Duncan, Chair

Willing Suspense: Life-Writing and the Time of Action investigates the claims of two Romantic-era poets— William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge—both of whom make the general form of cognition central to their autobiographies (The Prelude and Biographia Literaria respectively), both of whom contend that poetic form reveals and stylizes the temporal manner of our knowing, and both of whom connect the contemplation of poetry’s and cognition’s inner structure with psychic healing and ethical amelioration. When Wordsworth depicts the interpretive significance of an enduring perception changing at regular intervals or when Coleridge argues that our perceptions are a function of the partitions of time in which we perceive, they maintain that perceptual relativity itself indicates species being and the regular act of the mind in relating itself. As perception has propriety, as it relates itself, it also emerges as an affective response to a world that seems turned toward the perceiver or not. This value can in turn be re-described poetically, especially through poetic meter. For both poets, to contemplate temporal form, or the periodicity of thinking as it unfolds, or the symbolic nature of meter is to contemplate and become what we are. For Coleridge, we can describe human identity as a suspense: a continuous movement whose terminus both is and is not included in any description we might give; poetry is a formal means by which we become aware of our form. For Wordsworth, the pleasureable rhythms of our thought indicate the rhythms of the cosmos and our place in it. The suspense of one’s momentary personality induced by reading, and especially by meter’s simulation of cognitive regularity, may catalyze a psychic return to perceptual wholeness which, similarly, belongs to us at all times and yet may be obscured.

Part of what we find in Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s respective autobiographies and broad poetics is a manner of understanding time and its relation to personal identity that runs counter to the medieval, early modern, and postmodern understanding of this relation as expressing loss, contingency, and instability. It also runs counter to a well-established narrative linking the rise of historicism in the eighteenth century with the rise of individualizing forms and an outpouring of personal narratives. In conducting their autobiographies from the point of view of ongoingness—in which the autobiographer has not, so to speak, turned around to see what he once was—and in promoting the recurrent structure of thinking and the various, reiterating shapes in which it emerges, Wordsworth and Coleridge deliberately turn toward the general and instantiate a mode of autobiography radically unlike those autobiographies (from Rousseau’s Confessions to Mary Prince’s History) that give an account of an unique personality or of particular social relations (and abuses).

1

The outpouring of autobiographies in the eighteenth century also coincided with the rise of epistemology as a science; and the double facing of autobiography encapsulates its central question about what knowledge is and how it is known. Willing Suspense contends that there are two major modes of autobiography—retrospective and prospective—which can be distinguished by their temporal orientation, objects, and mood.

Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s autobiographies are prospective in that the parameters of thinking are continually present (for the autobiographers as for their readers) and in that The Prelude and Biographia depict the anticipatory cast of sensation. Their objects are thus common in two senses: for they involve the general finding of relational being in the world. And their mood is one of confidence—that we can understand the world and our manner of harmonizing with it. Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s autobiographies are not, however, anomalies. They share important ground with Augustine’s Confessions and Proust’s À la recherche.

They also emerge as part of a larger response to the figure of thought that dominated eighteenth- century literary culture: that of the disengaged and belated spectator. As a figure based on a rift between thinking and being, this spectator faced backward and sought something categorically different from itself and hence something unknowable.

Opposing this figure, and hence, facing forward, was another figure of knowing, one that understood knowing as an action contemporaneous with itself. Locke equated knowing with the individual’s appropriative act and so with actual and relational rather than possible forms; Baumgarten newly applied the term “aesthetic” to the realm of sensate (present, temporal, anticipatory, and analogic) knowing, describing it as completing logical (or necessary) knowledge. Kierkegaard described all existential interpretation as conditioned by a prior, orienting decision to judge past actions or to hold oneself presently, continuously accountable—which is also to say, he figured interpretation as a manner of temporal orientation. Influenced indirectly by the Romantics, Bergson, like Wordsworth and Coleridge, described the anticipatory, periodic, relational nature of perception and defined the qualitative nature of time in contrast to the over-extension of the spatial law of continuity.

Contemporary theorists of autobiography frequently describe this genre in terms of the creative deployment of available cultural myths, as just one form that the creation of a fictive effect (the feeling that there is an object corresponding with the text) may take, or as the (motivated) possible convergence of aesthetics and history. In so doing, autobiographical theory repeats and enlarges upon the gestures made by autobiographers like Rousseau and De Quincey without thereby grasping autobiography’s essential, equivocal form. For to argue, for example, that autobiography attempts to merge aesthetics and history is merely to repeat that it is a rhetorical construction aimed at something categorically different which cannot be an object of knowledge (and perhaps to add that, as such, it reflects upon the fact that all knowledge is similarly built on a retrojection).

The Prelude and Biographia instantiate a prospective mode of autobiography, and the presence of this mode, in addition to a retrospective one, re-illuminates autobiography’s vantage and shows that it poses a far more complex question than that of the legitimacy or inevitability of our tendency to collapse aesthetic constructing and presumed historical objects. Willing Suspense argues that genre is fundamentally an epistemological rather than an aesthetic or historical category and that autobiography in particular asks us how knowledge shall be known: prospectively or retrospectively,

2 confidently or skeptically, generally or particularly, and as a matter of an individual’s act of harmonizing or as a matter of her free construction.

3

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ii

Preface iii

Chapter One: Autobiography as Premonition in The Prelude 1

Chapter Two: Wordsworth’s Poetics of Suspense 41

Chapter Three: Meter, Music, and the Abasement of Type 61

i

Acknowledgments

I am extremely grateful for the unwavering support of two incredible teachers and mentors: Ian Duncan and Steve Justice. I am likewise deeply grateful to Karen Feldman for her willingness to read scrupulously with limited time. My deepest gratitude goes to my parents—for their love, compassion, and encouragement.

ii

Preface

Willing Suspense: Life-Writing and the Time of Action investigates the claims of two Romantic-era poets— William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge—both of whom make the general form of cognition central to their autobiographies, both of whom contend that poetic form reveals and stylizes the temporal manner of our knowing, and both of whom connect the contemplation of poetry’s and cognition’s inner structure with psychic healing and ethical amelioration. Wordsworth's and Coleridge's demotion of any externalized image of a past self in their autobiographical works (The Prelude and Biographia Literaria respectively) and their promotion, instead, of general structures of thinking—from the periodicity of sensation (as it arises, intensifies, and switches objects), to perception's affective inception in relation to another mind, to the figuring of cognition as a two- part movement—are central to their larger poetic projects. Their work radically reorients our understanding of autobiography and what its unique vantage may be. How does the solution of cognitive form arise in the first place, so that the question of identity—of what it means to write life—may be understood as best answered by rendering common, constant processes of mind? Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s solution runs counter to the well-established narrative that links the proliferation of personal histories in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the rise of historicism (considered as the new, acute sense of change over time and as the application of a new set of scientific principles dealing with mutability to every branch of knowledge, including knowledge of the self). In Friedrich Meinecke's classic account, "the essence of historism" (as he calls it) "is the substitution of a process of individualizing observation for a generalizing view of human forces," "for there is an intimate connection between evolutionary and individualizing thought-forms."1 Philippe Lejeune, whose definition of autobiography as a "pact" between author and reader was, for a long time, the standard one, likewise argues that the discovery of one's personality is the discovery of its historicity.2 Reinhard Koselleck famously contends that "when History is experienced as a new temporality, specific dispositions and ways of assimilating experience will emerge," and that, after the French Revolution, history loses its power as a repository of examples and instead comes to seem "subject to manipulation" and construction.3 More recently, Peter Burke has argued that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries we find two strains of self- narration: a passive model, in which the self is described in terms of (plant-like) development, and an active model, in which the self "controls time" and constructs its identity, although in both cases, he claims, there is a move towards the sudden arrival of the new or towards successive, unrelated selves.4 The story of the rise of “individualizing thought-forms” is too well known to need much attestation. Yet, it is also helpful to remember that as far as this account of the individual’s (literary)

1 Friedrich Meinecke, Historism: The Rise of a New Historical Outlook (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), lv, lvii. Original emphasis. 2 Philippe Lejeune, On Autobiography, tran. Katherine Leary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 63-64. 3 Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: on the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 4, 39. 4 Peter Burke, "Historicizing the Self, 1770-1830" in Controlling Time and Shaping the Self: Developments in Autobiographical Writing Since the Sixteenth Century, ed. Arianne Baggerman et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 19, 26. iii self-unfolding is concerned, “subjectivity, was always already oriented to an audience (Publikum).”5 Commenting on Christian Gellert’s description of the letter as an “imprint of the soul,” and noting that letters were frequently borrowed and copied by strangers, Jürgen Habermas goes on to argue that “the audience-oriented subjectivity of the letter exchange or diary explained the origin of…the domestic novel, the psychological description in autobiographical form.”6 The assumption in Habermas’s discussion—and in virtually every account of autobiography—is that autobiography’s purpose is to display (or to create) the interior personality for an adjudicating audience. Numerous novels of the long eighteenth century—from Richardson’s Pamela to Sterne’s Sentimental Journey and Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling, to Burney’s Camilla or Evelina—turn on scenes in which interiority is supposed to be literally manifested on the skin (in blushing or in tears); correlatively, the novels present themselves as a series of actual documents, actual letters written in the very moments of crisis. While the public nature of this display (as well as the attempt to merge tact and text) seems to proceed in tandem with the spectacular revelations of Rousseau’s or De Quincey’s Confessions, and while in all of these works we find descriptions of the contingencies that make up social character, this novelistic tendency is simply that: one direction that imaginative literature took in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, albeit a direction with epistemic significance. In short, the standard account of how poets and writers understood personal or temporal identity in this period is simply too selective, for it has failed to distinguish an important counter- ethos. Willing Suspense draws out this counter-ethos at the same time that it describes a hitherto unrecognized mode of autobiography: one that is prospective rather than retrospective in its orientation. It does so by focusing on the manner in which Wordsworth and Coleridge, in common with other eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and even early twentieth-century writers, represent the relation between identity and time. While the sense of time is central to both works, The Prelude and Biographia Literaria do not depict it as a series of discrete stages or as a set of material and social effects that correlate with an individual’s constant self-difference. Rather, time appears as the constant, inner pattern of cognition, a pattern that could not emerge if it did not contain a stable principle that serves as the basis for any further perception of self-development. Both poets understand time as a continuum, a spectrum of complete, arcing movements, which reveals itself through cognition’s renewal and prolongation of past sensations and its anticipatory feeling for the immediate future. In portraying the nature and the sensation of time in their autobiographies, accordingly, both poets contemplate the stable aspect of human identity. Wordsworth compares the sense of time to the soul’s ability to recall “how she felt, [though] what she felt/Remembering not.”7 To sense time is to sense perception's anticipatory cast and the “evermore about to be” that drives it.8 Or, as book five of The Prelude suggests, it is to find that perceptions arise from and return to blankness, or that the content of an enduring perception will change at periodic intervals, so that interpretation itself has phenomenal constraints. The cyclical nature of sensations as they emerge, clarify, intensify, or change objects simply is one natural process among others, one that has a healthy rhythm, one we can promote above the overstimulations of

5 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 49. 6 Ibid. 7 William Wordsworth, The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth et al. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), 2.335-36. All citations are from the 1805 Prelude. 8 Ibid., 6.542. iv wartime paranoia, urban overcrowding, and alienated labor, and one through which we might find our place in the cosmos. In Coleridge, to sense time is continually to sense a relation: between present practices of reading poetry and the metrical rationality of the classical tradition, between part and whole, between thinking's active and passive phases, and, above all, between the self that one is and the ideal image toward which all humans reach when and as they develop. Thinking is a two-part movement of active willing and passive yielding to a preexistent reality, or rather, it is the imaginative union of these moments, for thinking is a movement that is one and entire, so that neither the act of recollection nor that of self-reflection may divided up, even though the thinker temporarily regards himself or herself objectively. Thinking is an imaginative union with the real and always brings greater unity; it is a progression. But in order to be what it is, it has to restrict itself to the temporary and even, to some extent, to the felt confines of social typing. The Prelude and Biographia Literaria exemplify a species of autobiography distinguished primarily by its temporal orientation—prospective rather than retrospective—but one also distinguished by its objects and mood. Part of what this means is that the autobiographer has not projected himself into the future in order to turn around and gaze at an objectified image of his past circumstances and character. And part of what this means is that these works aim at the contemplation of the human form through the contemplation of the form of thought, and seek to catalyze greater self-understanding in their readers in the process. Their mood is therefore one of confidence: that our proper role in the cosmos can be known. By contrast, retrospective autobiography offers a genetic account of the self and, hence, seeks to find the totality of material or historical causes supposed to have produced the account’s object. Numerous well-known histories, lives, and personal narratives follow this pattern, from The Life of Giambattista Vico to the Confessions of Rousseau and De Quincey, and from The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano to John Henry Newman's Apologia Pro Vita Sua. A few, like Rousseau’s and De Quincey’s, also stage their own rhetorical position as untenable: material circumstances and an act of fiction can never coincide. The object of this mode of autobiography is interpretive freedom—often from (unjust) social paradigms, sometimes from givenness itself. Retrospective autobiography’s mood is thus one of skepticism (and occasionally melancholy, euphoria, or antagonism toward an audience with a similar freedom to interpret).

The proliferation of autobiographies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries coincides not only with the rise of historicism but also with the rise of epistemology as a science. Tim Milnes has argued that English Romanticism reacted against Hume’s division of fact and value through an alternating pattern of engagement with and abstention from philosophical argument and that its seemingly anti-philosophical turn betrays a deep epistemological anxiety.9 Willing Suspense is in broad agreement with Milnes’s assessment of the English Romantic poets’ concern with a divided life. But it proposes that prospective autobiography itself is an unequivocal response. Or rather, it argues that autobiography indicates at the level of genre and mode an epistemological contest over the temporal orientation of knowledge that extends from the late eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries.

The question of the temporal orientation of knowledge hovers at the back of a number of eighteenth-century discourses. It is obliquely present in a figure of thought that dominated literary culture of the time: that of the disengaged and belated spectator. Personified by Joseph Addison’s

9 Tim Milnes, Knowledge and Indifference in English Romantic Prose (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), see especially 1-24. v

“Mr. Spectator,” whose claim to right reason rested on social, political, and economic nonparticipation, reappearing in Adam Smith’s “impartial spectator,” who concretized Smith’s principle that aesthetic and moral beliefs arise with the gaze of actual spectators, resurfacing in the aloof eye of topographical poetry and travel narrative, and reemerging as the commonplace, exemplified in Schiller’s On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, of an active prehistory and a belated, reflective modernity, this figure insisted on a categorical rift between acting and reflecting, being and knowing. As a figure based on a rift between thinking and being, this spectator faced backward and sought something categorically different from itself and hence something unknowable. In so doing, it continued the project of the conjectural histories of Vico or Rousseau (that posited a fundamentally unknowable but, supposedly, necessary origin of difference) and anticipated Romanticism’s recurrence to the notion of a lost originary moment of encounter and its corresponding transference of the logical concept of immediacy to the existential realm. Opposing this figure, and hence, facing forward, was another figure of knowing, one that understood knowing as an action contemporaneous with itself. John Locke equated knowing with the individual’s appropriative act and so with actual and relational rather than possible forms; Alexander Baumgarten newly applied the term “aesthetic” to the realm of sensate (present, temporal, anticipatory, and analogic) knowing, describing it as completing logical (or necessary) knowledge. Søren Kierkegaard described all existential interpretation as conditioned by a prior, orienting decision to judge past actions or to hold oneself presently, continuously accountable— which is also to say, he figured interpretation as a manner of temporal orientation. Influenced indirectly by the Romantics, Henri Bergson, like Wordsworth and Coleridge, described the anticipatory, periodic, relational nature of perception and defined the qualitative nature of time in contrast to the over-extension of the spatial law of continuity.

Theorists of autobiography frequently insist that this genre cannot indicate a “life as lived” because there is no such thing. Others more quietly argue that, while autobiographic theory must begin from the premise of self-construction, its goal is the analysis of the available cultural myths of a moment and autobiographers’ attempts to exploit them. Others focus on defining the genre in terms of formal features, like the divide between a narrated and narrating “I” (the protagonist and the agent of focalization). All of these positions are weakened by their limitation to only one mode of autobiography, which commits them to the analysis of an ideological position.10 That is, an ideological position is taken as though it expressed the entirety of a genre rather than being one of two, rival positions available through a genre. Towering above these is Paul de Man’s rhetorical account of autobiography, which describes the genre as a form of prosopopeia, the conferring of a face or voice on an improper object. While de Man’s terms have frequently been adopted, and just

10 Jerome Bruner didactically makes the first point in “The Autobiographical Process,” Biographical Research 13 (1995): 161-77. David Herman traces W. B. Yeats’s and Maud Gonne MacBride’s creative use of a set of culturally available allegories in “Autobiography, allegory, and the construction of self,” British Journal of Aesthetics 35.4 (1995): 351-60. Herman usefully begins by noting that “a broadly constructivist view underwrites” recent autobiographical theory; his contention is simply that a constructivist interpretation does not commit us to treating autobiography as fiction. (Herman, “Autobiography,” 351). Helga Schwalm summarizes the formal features remarked by theorists of autobiography in her entry on “autobiography” in the living handbook of narratology. See Helga Schwalm, “Autobiography,” 1-12, created April 9, 2014, revised April 11, 2014 in Peter Hühn et al. (eds.): the living handbook of narratology. Hamburg: Hamburg University. URL: http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/. Accessed: December 7, 2015. vi as frequently criticized (often for the wrong reasons), and while these terms are appropriate to and even echo the arguments made by numerous autobiographers (including Rousseau, De Quincey, and Franklin), they too describe only one form of autobiography, and express an ideological stance that autobiography can and often does take, rather than articulating the fundamental question of autobiography: which is not aesthetic or historical, as de Man contends, but epistemological.

It may be helpful here to elaborate on my title’s less evident terms, “willing suspense” and the “time of action.” Wordsworth and Coleridge periodically describe cognitive form in terms of suspense. And both connect the suspenseful process of thinking and feeling with willing and becoming willing and, hence, with a specific sort of action. Wordsworth’s poetic project, as I argue in chapter two, is aimed at a sense of action that is now probably only common among philosophers of action. In this sense of the term, acting requires not only negative freedom (from physical restraints like chains on bodies, bolts on doors, and the like). That is, it requires not only the agent’s capacity to do as she presently wills (or to do something incompatible with that action were she to so choose) but also the positive freedom to will in a particular way—as she ought.11 The easiest way of explaining such a proposal is by turning (as philosophers of action frequently do) to states of addiction or brainwashing, in which the individual may do something she presently wills, but yet her actions do not appear to express what we may think of as her true will or her total personality, and therefore do not conform to our sense of what true liberty must entail. Wordsworth believes that many of the features of modern life (overcrowded cities, the uniformity of urban occupations, salacious news, wartime paranoia, and melodramatic literature) have alienated us from our whole selves, from the natural tempo of rural living, and from the healthy rhythms of thought that simply do accompany a more harmonious mode of life. And he suggests that poetry of a certain type may intervene to induce healthier cognitive rhythms in its readers. Such poetry simulates the regular movement of perception from increasing psychic expectancy into states of blankness (and temporary suspense), and is able by this means to catalyze a psychic redetermination. Coleridge finds an analogue for all deliberate motions of the body and mind in the two-part process of a leap: in which we first exert active will (in order to resist gravity) and then become willing (passively submitting to gravity, so as to land in a particular place). This two-part process, in which we imaginatively grasp the unity of the voluntary and the involuntary, the active and the passive, also describes the total arc of human becoming. The whole course of an individual life is a suspense—as the manner in which the present self relates to its true (general) telos is continually being formed one way or another: more or less imaginatively. For Coleridge, this leap of willing and becoming willing—that harmonizes in every perception, that actively relates its perceptions to itself and speaks by echoing what is already spoken—must be understood as the ethical and intellectual character of a mind. It is our only action. And it describes the possibility that we might understand ourselves, first, by understanding the divine act at the center of all of our perceptions and capacities, and second, by releasing ourselves to the limitations of cultural and historical forms—so that we may find a landing place. Coleridge understands such suspense, as I argue in chapter three, to be

11 Gideon Yaffe has recently described John Locke’s account of free agency and his account of what is ordinarily (and somewhat misleadingly) called “liberty of the will” in these terms. See Gideon Yaffe, Liberty Worth the Name: Locke on Free Agency (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). vii reflected in poetic meter, in all intellectual activities, and in poetry’s general structure. And Biographia Literaria itself is structured as such a leap. Action, for both poets, has to do with the propriety of our perceptions. Because it is a matter of harmonizing, there can be no action that brings about an anomaly. Above all, for Wordsworth and Coleridge, action is a matter of time and of timing: of realizing in the present what already is the case and of maintaining the proper tempo of our thoughts and proper relation of the present moment to the whole of our lives and our telos.

viii

Chapter one: Autobiography as Premonition in The Prelude

Imagining a miserably self-divided lover who with one ear strains for evidence of intellectual beauty and with the other hears the beloved’s voice, who with one eye scans critically and with the other sees the beloved’s face, Søren Kierkegaard exclaims, “Does a relationship genuinely exist if at every moment one begins anew, as it were, to enter into this relationship?....is it not as if there were a third person always present…who coldly scrutinizes and rejects?”1 In gesturing to the possibility of beginning anew, Kierkegaard's analogy implicitly references a preoccupation of romanticism, namely, that of projecting an origin discontinuous with present forms of human existence, a discontinuity that suggests that, turn in whatever direction we may, all we perceive might have been (and may become) otherwise.2 Whether this origin is understood religiously (as a blessed state before the fall), anthropologically (as a first nature belonging to categorically other humans who, therefore, cannot enter our history), or philosophically (as a plentitude imperfectly expressed by present forms of thinking, science, and culture), the notion, Kierkegaard argues, improperly applies an abstraction from logic—the immediate—to the existential realm and does so with disastrous results for both logic and ethics.3 Apart from the melancholic (and intermittently euphoric) attitude inappropriately

1 Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, trans. Howard and Edna Hong (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 162-63. 2 Fundamentally, this idea is no more than a rejection of givenness and so could potentially be traced to British Empiricism (to Hume in particular), though Kierkegaard responds primarily to post- Kantian philosophy. To the extent that Kant’s description of the mind’s systematic structuring of its representations opens a rift between reality and our ability to know it, it participates in this rejection. Schelling’s attempt to heal this rift through art entails a much deeper rejection of givenness, one exemplified by his prophesy of a new mythology and a new return of science to poetry. See F. W. J. Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), trans. Peter Heath (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1978), 230-33. Among other things, Kierkegaard critiques the Hegelian notion that thought's reality is brought about by a reconciliation of the immediate and the mediate, a reconciliation which is somehow more than or other than either a presupposition or the assumption (by an older philosophy) of the real, grounded nature of thought. See for example, The Concept of Anxiety, ed. and trans. Reidar Thomte (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 11. 3 Kierkegaard objects primarily to a set of theological understandings of the concept of original sin. Foremost among them, he objects to the Catholic idea that Adam lost “a supernatural and wonderful gift bestowed by God” (an idea that he refers to as a melancholic fiction rather than serious consideration of the individual’s sin). For Kierkegaard’s critique of other theological fictions see The Concept of Anxiety, 25-41. Anthropologically speaking, both Giambattista Vico and Jean- Jacques Rousseau describe an original man unlike present humans, one we can only posit, one whose self-creation or, rather, self-transformation must and cannot be thought. Edmund Burke similarly champions the idea of a second nature that obviated the law of the first. Philosophically, the idea that expressions of culture (or nature) are incomplete forms of the reality within man that must continually be brought forth belongs to Schelling. Similarly, the notion of another, made nature appears in the promise and foreboding of the recurrent figure of Prometheus in British and German romantic literature (in Goëthe and both P. B. and Mary Shelley), and, arguably, the (blocked, resisted) desire for a return to a prior state of innocence appears in Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience, in the temporal reversals in many of Keats's poems, and in romanticism's general fascination with the past. 1 pervading metaphysical and dogmatic inquiries, Kierkegaard argues that this confusion of logical and existential categories repeats itself in the anticipated discontinuity between lovers, between individuals and governing authority, between neighbors, and between strangers.4 While (to continue this line of reasoning) it says almost nothing, certainly nothing proper, to say that the nature of the immediate is to be annulled (as the immediate at no time exists and as it could at most be said to come into view as something given up in the establishment of logical presuppositions), when faith, or when innocence, is associated with the immediate, as Kierkegaard suggests it routinely is, faithlessness, religious or otherwise, appears an unremarkable necessity—not properly a choice at all.5 One may judge one's engagements and affections to have been unreflectingly begun and so move away from the supposed simpleness of continuing in faith simply by reflecting that perhaps they should have been otherwise or perhaps their object might not appear worthy to someone else. This someone else is, of course, the lover himself or, to use Kierkegaardian terms, it is a figure for the lover's weakness, or even for his ambivalent desire for sin, for the fact that his freedom is not securely in the good but wavers. And here sin can be understood as a missing the mark that emerges with the accusation that something in the external world has missed the mark and an attempt at accuracy that reveals a greater inaccuracy in the observer: that one could not do the good and imagined instead that it should be rethought. To take up the analogue of the deluded lover a bit more specifically, and in a manner that allows us to approach the topic of autobiography, we might say that, apart from the ethical confusion on display here, Kierkegaard identifies a temporal difficulty in the deluded lover's implied reference to the already confused concept of immediacy (and its existential opposite, reflection).6 When reflection is imagined as a stage that succeeds another stage that has no duration, it becomes not a second stage in our history but the first; and this is the case however the so-called first is projected. As a stage, reflection might contain a present insofar as it endures in some manner, and then we could think the categories of past and future in relation to this manner. The question is

4 Perhaps the relation between lovers is a particularly felicitous example, in that there appears something wrong with treating individuality (not just the individual expression of the universal but unique commitments) as selfishness or thoughtlessness overcome in community. For Kierkegaard's discussion of the misapplication, see The Concept of Anxiety, 10, and 35-39. 5 Kierkegaard strenuously objects to Hegel's equating immediacy and innocence as in: "Man must not remain what he is immediately; he must pass beyond the state of immediacy;" "when he exists in an immediate and uncivilized condition, he is therefore in a situation in which he ought not to be and from which he must liberate himself. This is the meaning of the doctrine of origin sin;" and "upon a closer examination of the myth of the Fall…we find an expression of a universal relation of knowledge to spiritual life. In its immediacy the spiritual life is next qualified as innocence and simple confidence. But the essence of spirit is that the immediate state is to be annulled, for spiritual life differs from natural life, and more particularly from animal life in that it does not remain as being-in-itself" and so on. (Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, trans. E. B. Speirs and J. B Sanderson, [London: Routledge, 1962], 3.47; Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood and trans. H. B. Nisbet [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991] 18; and Hegel's Logic, trans. William Wallace [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975], 24.42-43.) See Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, 10, 35 and passim. Journals and Papers, ed. and trans. Howard V. and Edna H. Hong (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967-78), Paper V B 49:2, 1844. 6 I take immediacy's logical contrary to be something like analysis from presuppositions. As I take “mediacy” to blur the distinction between the logical and the temporal, I avoid it. 2 what gives this stage its endurance or, rather, how it endures. For its duration must be understood as some manner of enduring. The deluded lover of course does not behave as though his decision to become himself by knowing with others (or by knowing in accordance with the social ethos of the day and, essentially, with his own incompleteness) were any sort of stage or mode of being to which he had committed himself. He seems to believe that loving and appraising belong, so to speak, to separate faculties (this eye, that eye) or to separate moments so that he could practice them by turns. But insofar as he alienates his particular vantage as a lover and includes the excluded vantage of some other, an opposed mode of relating has arrived, supplanting the uniqueness of the relation and the continuity of loving. In Kierkegaard's terms, we might say that periodically to adopt the vantage of a spectator who does not know or love the beloved as the lover is to behave as though the relation (and its history) were yet to begin—which is also to annihilate it, to allow it no duration. By vacillating, the deluded lover does not temporarily rise above history (and loving) but acquires another history whose quality is difference, for this history periodically takes on the expression of another who could be anyone. Kierkegaard famously insists that knowledge “is infinitely detached, the infinite indifference in equilibrium.”7 Hence, neither loving nor appraising is more knowledgeable or more reflective than the other. Both actions belong to a present by relating the two individuals (lover and beloved) in some third term which is the manner of their relating. Love involves anticipatory reflection on how to love more perfectly (even if that means releasing the beloved), while appraising involves retrospective reflection on whether love should have been offered in the first place (how this relation appears objectively). Loving thus turns toward the imminent future; appraising turns toward the past. This orienting choice, which conditions perceptions and turns the whole self in one direction or another—to trust or mistrust, to continue or discontinue—gives reflection its character, so that it is misleadingly incomplete to say (as is frequently said with respect to the romantic treatment of the problematic of identity) that an individual's perceptions, thoughts, and self-accounting are his only insofar as they are not.8 Judgment is triadic in Kierkegaard's account; it is formed by reference to a principle of judgement and so not a matter of pure encounter. But judgment is not triadic in the same way for everyone. While the lover relates to the beloved (and to himself) through an idea of love (so that he will remain loving and potentially the beloved’s), the deluded lover relates to the

7 Works of Love, 318. 8 This idea is frequently attributed to romantic thinkers (including poets and cultural critics) and is often applied to the theory of autobiography. It draws, for example, on Hegel’s argument, early on in the Phenomenology, that we know by means of universals, and that as these universal concepts do not belong to us peculiarly, our thoughts and the means by which we perceive ourselves must be able to possessed by others. Recently Jacques Khalip has re-described this sort of open subjectivity as an unmoored or missing one and has attributed the idea of a radically dispossessed self to Keats and Hazlitt as well as to Rousseau, Godwin, Shelley, Hume, Burke, and Adam Smith, arguing that “the virtue of the anonymous yet benevolent subject lies in its failure to be and to possess itself” which in turn allows for a radical leveling of ethical obligations in which there can be no reason to prioritize the living over the nonliving—for example. See Jacques Khalip, Anonymous Life: Romanticism and Dispossession (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 99, 23 and passim. Paul Hamilton describes Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria as invoking this same set of philosophical concerns. See Paul Hamilton, Coleridge and German Philosophy: the Poet in the Land of Logic (London: Continuum Literary Studies, 2007), 70-74. 3 beloved (and to himself) through a sense of his weakness and of others' probable judgments (so that he will remain prudent and potentially socially attuned). The point can be made in several ways with respect to the theory of autobiography. Autobiography is sometimes taken to reveal at a structural level a problem treated in post-Kantian philosophy in which self-identity is progressively (re)formed in the ongoing exchange between an individual consciousness and its social environment. Just as the opening of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit argued (contra Descartes and Kant) that subjectivity is not an abstract position possessed in the same way by everyone but must be described as something more concrete which emerges socially (and so differs with developing conditions and desires while yet possessing reality because its standard is precisely this development), and just as Schlegel and Schelling argued that knowledge is poetic (and so as real as it is ideal) and manifests itself through progressive interpretation, so the contemporary theory of autobiography has frequently argued that the subject of autobiography achieves reality only through its interpretation and that the autobiographer's self-interpretation is neither qualitatively better than any other interpretation nor secure against reinterpretation for in this process the autobiographer is continually dispossessed of a stable self.9 The point is the same whether this theory takes the position that autobiography stages the autobiographer's inability to coincide with himself as language's inability to coincide with itself, whether it moves under the aegis of Marxist or psychoanalytic critique and finds material unrecognized by the author (partly) by virtue of the critique's belonging to a subsequent social moment, whether it investigates the author's use of some socially-available myth of self-formation and analyzes the author's historical negotiations, or whether it belongs to a more general hermeneutics that simply assumes an ever-receding horizon of interpretation.10 In every case, identity is identification with or by an ever-changing other—for

9 Derrida’s The Ear of the Other continues just this line of reasoning. Describing the “contradiction of the ‘double’” supposedly inherent to autobiography, and the autobiographer’s need to step beyond himself and beyond life, he notes that “the autobiography’s signature is written in this step. It remains a line of credit opened onto eternity and refers back to one of the two I’s, the nameless parties to the contract, only according to the annulus of the eternal return.” These nameless parties are both readers and the author’s “second” selves, his means by which to be a self, which is thus thrown forward into a disappearing horizon that also perpetually closes upon him. See Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, trans. Avital Ronell et al. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985), 19. 10 Andrzej Warminski most clearly relates language’s non-coincidence to the autobiographer’s non- coincidence. He draws on Paul de Man’s discussion of autobiography to do so; Cynthia Chase adopts a similar position. See Andrzej Warminski, “Missed Crossing: Wordsworth’s Apocalypses,” MLN 99 (1984): 983-1006 and Andrzej Warminski, “Facing Language: Wordsworth’s First Poetic Spirits,” in Romantic Revolutions: Criticism and Theory, ed. Kenneth R. Johnston et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 26-48; Paul de Man, “Time and History in Wordsworth,” diacritics (Winter 1987): 4-17 and Paul de Man, “Autobiography as De-Facement,” in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 67-81; Cynthia Chase, Decomposing Figures (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 1-31. David Simpson argues that Wordsworth repeatedly portrays characters, including himself, who do not coincide in that they “experience their own past as dead;” for Simpson, Wordsworth’s practice reveals a prescience of the ghostliness of the commodity form. David Simpson, Wordsworth, Commodification, and Social Concern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 221, 4. Joshua Wilner argues that a transferred desire to be thwarted motivates Wordsworth to thwart his own work on The Recluse by expanding The Prelude. Joshua Wilner, “Wordsworth’s Cliff-Hanger,” in Romantic Autobiography in England, ed. 4 example: identification with a language-like self, identification by an endless series of readers. And, though truth is understood as a function of a disappearing now, this identification by and with also appears to be about the past—where the past is understood as a pure projection or understood as complete in at least one sense so that interpretation may view itself as separate from it and hence able to begin the work of analysis. The basic structure of two terms related by means of a third (vividly on display in post- Kantian philosophy or Christian ethics), varies only with respect to how the ground of this relation is understood—whether it is constant or self-differing. For Kierkegaard, there is a constant reality to the universe, but as the individual chooses his mood of response to this reality, and as this mood conditions his judgments about human reality, his thoughts and self-accounting are, in an important sense, entirely his own. We can apprehend the tendency of this choice through a set of characteristic effects, two of which will be of central importance to this chapter, and I will indicate them here. First (to return to the analogue of the deluded lover), the lover's mood of response creates suspense of some sort. When the ground of loving is constant (when there is a constant duty to love), the beloved's alterity may appear because this duty interrupts the lover's tendency to collapse the beloved into an other-I whose reflection he catches on the spectator's face. When the ground differs from moment to moment, the beloved wavers and becomes unreal and, in this case, the beloved's seeming difference is a function of the lover's own dizziness. Only when the lover becomes still can the beloved's difference appear as what it is: an occasion to know (one who is not properly known) and to love (one whom the lover has not yet fully loved). Second, this difference in whether loving or seeking an image of oneself is postponed appears as a matter of temporal orientation.11 Whereas love is ongoing and enduring, the appraising individual splits himself and his temporal vantage. He projects himself in the future in order to turn around and see what this relation was; and he gazes at a past moment as though the moment-by- moment work of loving could not yet begin. While love requires the lover to understand his relation

Eugene L. Steizig (Farnham, U.K.: Ashgate Publishing Group, 2009), 99-116. Arguing that “what speaks in autobiography is a dead man,” Mary Jacobus discovers in many of The Prelude’s scenes a hidden terror of “the letter” and a sense of the threat to the self that is involved in all writing. Romanticism, Writing, and Sexual Difference, Essays on The Prelude (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), 19, 14. Laura Quinney describes Wordsworth’s poetics through a Kleinian framework as one of disappointment. See Laura Quinney, The Poetics of Disappointment: Wordsworth to Ashbery (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999). David Herman argues that we can study past historical moments through the very limits and conditions of autobiographers’ attempts to exploit cultural allegories. David Herman, “Autobiography, allegory, and the construction of self,” in British Journal of Aesthetics 35.4 (1995): 351-60. Tilottama Rajan in her book-length discussion of the reader’s role in the reading process argues that because “literature questions as well as enacts a traditional hermeneutic” she is justified in reading Kierkegaard, Coleridge, and Schleiermacher “against the grain, so as to uncover those aporias in them that result in their emerging as problematic in romantic practice.” Tilottama Rajan, The Supplement of Reading: Figures of Understanding in Romantic Theory and Practice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 4. 11 This choice of prospective or retrospective “facing” reflects an understanding of freedom. In a prospective epistemology, freedom is positive; it requires that we not only do as we will but will as we should. In a retrospective epistemology, freedom is negative; it is concerned with freedom from external restraints and with our ability to make choices contrary to those we have made. It is concerned with all that could have been otherwise. Thus in a retrospective epistemology, freedom appears to belong to reflection rather than appearing through appropriative action. 5 to the beloved subjectively—as something that continuously implicates him and as an ongoing task—the appraising individual understands his relation to the beloved objectively—as something that can be dispassionately (if imperfectly) evaluated because, in being externalized, it now appears to belong to another time and to another self.12

As its title indicates, this chapter investigates a mode of life-writing and, more broadly, a mode of thinking and knowing intermittently on display Wordsworth’s autobiographical poem, The Prelude. I am turning to Kierkegaard in part because his insistence that loving and appraising are conditioned by a prior orienting decision—one that appears in thought's prospective or retrospective cast— illuminates a central feature of Wordsworth’s poetics. While Wordsworth’s interest in cognitive process is well-known, the significance of this interest has not been grasped because it has not been grasped as a matter of temporal orientation. Wordsworth criticism has frequently remarked a feeling of expectancy or anxiety in The Prelude, an “evermore about to be” invading and extending the poet’s self-awareness.13 I am going to argue that this intermittently rising anticipation is the felt correlative of Wordsworth’s promotion of the temporal form of cognition above any particular object to which it might be attached. The Prelude’s apprehensive quality need not refer to some besetting occasion.14 It may more simply be described as the sensation of sensation as it intensifies or changes its object. The Prelude, in other words, offers an oblique glimpse of the form of present thinking.

12 See also Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, 87. “For this reason a sigh, a word, etc. have power to relieve the soul of the burdensome weight, precisely because the burden, when merely expressed, already begins to become something of the past.” And see Søren Kierkegaard Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1992), 74 n.25. “Direct communication requires certainty, but certainty is impossible for a person in the process of becoming….Thus, to employ an erotic relationship, if a maiden in love years for the wedding day because this would give her assured certainty, if she wanted to make herself comfortable in legal security as a spouse…then the man would rightfully deplore her unfaithfulness, although she indeed did not love anyone else, because she would have lost the idea and actually did not love him.” 13 David Simpson describes this feeling as Wordsworth’s intuition of the commodity form. Simpson, Wordsworth, Commodification, and Social Concern, 7. Mary Jacobus links this anxiety with the movement of writing itself, which must always go beyond experience. Romanticism, Writing, and Sexual Difference, 104 and passim. Geoffrey Hartman connects this vertiginous sensation with the poet’s dawning awareness of the apotheosis of imagination. Geoffrey Hartman, “ ‘Was it for this…?’ Wordsworth and the Birth of the Gods,” in Romantic Revolutions, 8-25. See also: Geoffrey Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry 1787-1814 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964). Paul de Man describes the anxiety in Wordsworth’s poetry as a pre-knowledge of mortality and a sense of passing beyond the realm of natural correspondences. Paul de Man, “Wordsworth and Hölderlin,” in The Rhetoric of Romanticism, 47-65. 14 Kierkegaard famously describes anxiety as “possibility’s possibility” and as the something-nothing (the middle term) through which sin manifests itself whenever it does. More broadly, Kierkegaardian angst could be viewed as the contest between our desire to linger with possibilities and the constant necessity of actualizing something. As such, it continually accompanies perception as part of its form. In this sense only, The Prelude’s apprehensive quality anticipates Kierkegaardian anxiety. See Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, 61 and passim. 6

Here it is worth pausing. On one hand, Wordsworth's practice of promoting thought’s ongoing form over its ostensible content radically alters how we may view autobiography. For it demonstrates that autobiography's goal need not be to construct an image of the author's past self but could rather be to describe the temporal form of feeling and, hence, to write life in this general sense. On the other hand, such a practice may appear positionally ambiguous. We might take it to correspond with an interest in showing the accidental nature of thought's content, the impropriety of personal identity, and so on. But, as I have suggested and shall continue to show, a commitment to thought's prospective form (to thinking as it unfolds in a continuous direction) corresponds with a commitment to a stable ground of interpretation and therefore with a certain mood of understanding this form: one of trust or of willingness to believe that this form is significant (good, communicative) rather than insignificant (revealing insignificance or interpreted only to the interpreter's confusion). Wordsworth's project is ultimately an ethical one, and for Wordsworth as for Kierkegaard, freedom (the indispensable condition for ethics) is in the good rather than in reflection. To put the point another way, The Prelude explicitly depicts a triadic structure of thinking and implies that it is securely grounded, though the source of this ground is not for Wordsworth what it is for Kierkegaard. If Wordsworth's poetics court an idea of providence, it remains at the level of natural awe. Wordsworth's poetry and prose repeatedly invoke the fitness of the human mind to the world and of the world to the mind, a fitness that, when contemplated, prompts pleasure and grateful love in the perceiver and, ultimately, through this pleased sense of order, ethical (measured) living. Like many of his contemporaries, Wordsworth (in the 1815 Preface to Poems) flirts with the idea that poetry can indicate something like the immediate or, in his case, that it can present sensations as they are becoming judgments. Yet, Wordsworth's goal, as I shall show, is always to realize the true propriety in cognition—how cognitive form is repeatedly experienced, the pleasure that simply does accompany contemplating it, and the peaceable behavior that emerges as this pleasure becomes habitual. This chapter has two interconnected goals. The first is to demonstrate that there are two major modes of autobiography, retrospective and prospective, and that these differ in the mood with which they grasp the nature of knowledge and its foundation (and so are characterized by mistrust or trust), differ in their object (whether they seek causes for thought, feeling, and behavior and so offer genetic accounts of the self that are turned away from it or whether they discover duty and collective human belonging within the cosmos and so are turned toward the self and what ought to be known through the general manner of knowing), and differ in their temporal orientation (and so are concerned with past, complete images of the particularized, constructed self or, alternatively, are concerned with the moment by moment feeling of feeling and so with the recurringly present experience of thinking as it unfolds). The chapter's second goal is to show that The Prelude's vantage is essentially prospective because it is concerned with the general, recurring form of cognition and also because The Prelude intermittently promotes the mind's sense of its own temporal process over the objects it turns toward in order to glean its process.

1.

As I suggested above, when autobiography is retrospectively oriented, the autobiographer offers an externalized image of a past self and narrates the conditions in which he found himself and his corresponding thoughts, feelings, and actions to an adjudicating audience. The split between the narrating and the depicted consciousness (and the split between the narrator and the reader) figures so strongly in this type of autobiography that we might even say Plato provided its model in 7 recounting Socrates’ defense before an assembly that would almost certainly condemn him, a defense that seems to occur on the point of death and after it. This mode of self-accounting—of writing one's defense—is familiar. Nevertheless, it is worth reviewing an early eighteenth-century representative. Here is the opening of The Life of Giambattista Vico, Written By Himself.

Giambattista Vico was born in Naples in the year 1670 of upright parents who left a good name after them. His father was of cheerful disposition, his mother of a quite melancholy temper; both contributed to the character of their child.15

As the subtitle announces, the work is written (primarily) by Vico himself, though it is presented as a semi-detached, third-person account of how he came to be the scientist and man of letters he was by 1725 (at the point he received the request for such an account from a set of Venetian scholars). A few years later, he appended to the end a section recording how he came to be the scientist he was by 1728; the first section becomes Part A and the second Part B. And still later, he added an additional "Continuation," recording how he came to be the scientist he was by 1731.16 As a result of its layered structure, the narrative repeatedly moves toward an externalized image of the historian and philologist who wrote, in the first case, Universal Right, in the second, The New Science in Negative Form, and, finally, The Principles of a New Science of the Nature of Nations.17 Part A ends with Jean Le Clerc's review of Universal Right; Part B ends both with Vico's own summary of the principles of The New Science in Negative Form and Cardinal Lorenzo Corsini's (initial) endorsement; and the Continuation concludes with a letter of praise from Cardinal Neri Corsini and an elegiac statement of Vico's success, diseased health, pedagogical goals, choleric temper, and application to himself of Phaedrus' description of Socrates: "I would not shun his death to win his fame;/I'd yield to odium, if absolved when dust."18 All three sections thus aim at depicting some other author, or rather, the author of another (and then another) text and conclude with the written approbation of another (and then another) judge. In the case of Vico's use of Phaedrus' statement, there is also the judgment of another about another. Perhaps appropriately, the text with Vico's additions was not published until seventy-four years after his death, and then with the Marquis de Villarosa's addition of yet another section, entitled, "Vico's Last Years," that partly unsettles Vico's self-eulogy and that leads to a description of two series of epitaphs written for him—one by his son in the church where he was interred and the

15 The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico, trans. Max Harold Fisch and Thomas Goddard Bergin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1944), 111. 16 See "Introduction" to The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico, 4-5. The request, headed by Count Gian Artico di Porcía, was part of a larger project aimed at reforming school methods and curricula; hence various scholars were asked to offer detailed accounts of their own studies from childhood, along with accompanying autobiographical material, and to reflect on the good and bad in the current educational system. 17 Vico writes what ends up as "Part A" of his autobiography directly after completing his initial, thousand-page draft of the New Science ("the new science in negative form"); so this portion culminates in the supposed acclaimed publication of a work that was never published. Vico lost his patronage, rewrote a much shorter version of the new science in positive form, and published it at his own expense later that year. See "Introduction," 12, 13, and The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico, 172-73. 18 The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico, 173, 198-200. 8 other on a memorial erected by the Arcadia of Rome (of which Vico was a member under the name Laufilo Terio).19 The point of this description is first to note that this backward-looking orientation corresponds with a genetic account. Vico's autobiography begins with a genetic account of his personality (drawn from his parents' temperaments as well as from the results of an early fall leading to a cranial tumor, a series of surgical lancings, and grim predictions about his adult life); he subsequently gives the same kind of scrutiny to the origins and development of his intellectual pursuits. And, as a genetic account must begin with the settled image it is to explain, it must establish this image somehow—whether through the attestation of general reputation, of some particular authority, or of rhetorical skill. Vico's self-portrait is initially attested by appearing in the scientific journal Raccolta d'Opusculi Scientifici e Filologici and by Jean Le Clerc's praise and later by his fame, by Cardinal Lorenzo Corsini's and Cardinal Neri Corsini's commendations, and (most bizarrely) by Phaedrus's admiring epigram on Socrates' life. And of course, the work's chronological accounting, external focalization, and dry, almost taciturn style are supposed to function rhetorically as a claim to rigor. The point is well known but worth repeating. Genetic accounts must begin with a finalized image and so from a sovereign point of view; that is, they must behave as though the character of the man were not in question but adequately known—at least to the autobiographer—so that the causes of his character might then be investigated. Vico's use of the third person is at once part of his rhetorical strategy and it reflects an explicitly ideological stance, for the very externality of his approach pointedly opposes the quasi- prospective approach of Descartes, and this is the second point of this description. Early on in his autobiography Vico announces,

We shall not here feign what René Descartes craftily feigned as to the method of his studies simply in order to exalt his own philosophy and mathematics and degrade all the other studies included in divine and human erudition. Rather, with the candor proper to a historian, we shall narrate plainly and step by step the entire series of Vico's studies, in order that the proper and natural causes of his particular development as a man of letters may be known.20

Descartes of course famously begins his own philosophical self-accounting (the Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences) by reassessing the value of his (exemplary) education, claiming that, while it had granted him rhetorical and logical facility, it could not offer him the certainty he desired. In indicating the problem of certainty, Descartes makes a form of the gesture of romanticism—that philosophical and value-based sciences do not begin rightly—though unlike many of his successors, Descartes wished to find their true foundation. Vico's disgust at what he takes to be Descartes' disingenuousness flows first from the position that knowledge cannot be grounded on self-consciousness (for such knowledge does not understand its own origin: that it is contingent) and second from the position that Descartes' arguments reflect the very education he now publically disdains. By contrast, Vico maintains across his oeuvre that knowing something entails knowing how to (re)construct it, knowing all of its causes.21 And his

19 The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico, 208-09. 20 Ibid., 113. 21 See Leon Pompa's discussion of Vico's broad philosophy in "Introduction" to The First New Science, xx-xxi. 9 offhand critique of Descartes suggests that propositional knowing—including the knowing that attends to thinking's present form as its very form, that attends to the manner in which perceptions turn around a focal point—fails to produce true self-knowledge because it fails to know with reference to the historical stage or state of the human mind.22 The latter sort of knowing shows finesse because it knows how to know (which includes being appropriate to the moment). It seems more than coincidental that Vico's conjectural history, his First New Science, begins by tracing a projected, inaccessible state—the long night of the non-human in human history. While Vico proposes that humans began "in servitude to the religion of God, the creator of the world and of Adam," those of the gentile nations, he claims, liberated themselves from these bonds, forgot language, and turned back into beasts so that they had to become human all over again—this time, through their own artifice. Vico nods to the problem of individuals losing and regaining their nature. But these leaps, in which individuals are claimed to will the loss of the very possibility of willing (a possibility embedded in language and in law) and then are said to reacquire the possibility accidentally, are necessary to make the account historical in the right way—externally. Rhetorically, these leaps replicate the movement from viewing the form of thinking as internal (something that, for Descartes, grants true knowledge of the basic thing we are) to external (coincidental). While we may doubt how nations could lose their humanity, Vico writes,

all these doubts combined can in no way cast doubt upon this unique truth, which must be the first in such a science…: that the world of gentile nations was certainly made by men. Hence, in this vast ocean of doubt, there appears this one isle upon which we may stand firm: that the principles of this world must be discovered within the nature of our human mind and through the force of our understanding, by means of a metaphysics of the human mind. Hence metaphysics, which has hitherto contemplated the mind of individual man in order to lead the mind to God as eternal truth, which is the most universal theory in divine philosophy, must now be raised to contemplate the common sense of mankind as a certain human mind of the nations, in order to lead the mind to God as eternal Providence, which would be the most universal practice in divine philosophy. Thus, without a single hypothesis, for metaphysics disowns hypotheses, we must search for this metaphysics in fact, among the modifications of our human mind in the descendants of Cain before the Flood, and in those of Ham and Japhet after it.23

Without lingering over this incredibly rich passage we might simply note that Vico imagines a necessary progress from what he calls "the most universal theory," the knowledge that God is, to what he calls "the most universal practice," the knowledge of how God is. The first sort of knowledge arises from the individual's contemplation of her own mind (and the parameters of thinking) and produces a constant, "eternal truth:" the apprehension of an ordered whole. The second sort of knowledge, the contemplation of "the common sense of mankind as a certain human mind of the nations," regards general feeling as particular from another, categorically removed

22 Vico claims that the reason the accounts of the natural law theorists, Thomas Hobbes, Hugo Grotius, Samuel Pufendorf, and John Selden, fail is that "we have hitherto lacked a science that is both a history and philosophy of humanity. For on the one hand the philosophers meditated on a human nature already civilized by the religions and laws from which, and nowhere else, they themselves arose, but failed to meditate on the human nature that gave rise to these religions and laws amidst which they had risen." The First New Science, 18. 23 Ibid., 30-31. 10 vantage. This second sort of knowledge raises itself to contemplate God as providing the stages of history—that is, as resolving what is inexplicable in the positing of historical stages and as being the principle of difference rather than of stability. To contemplate what is under this second sort of knowing becomes to contemplate difference: this and then this. For this reason, for Vico, we cannot search for a metaphysics of mind positively—by contemplating the forms in which we must think or by regarding our ongoing experience of thinking—especially if that leads to any general conclusion. Rather, we must rather project an unknown mind and mode of thinking that must have existed "before the Flood" and perhaps project another one again for the descendants "of Ham and Japhet." And we must do so because the account must be historical; we cannot be what we were; we cannot or must not be self-coincident as a species. Because, for Vico, human identity is socially made as well as historically effected, writing the self must be built on social attestation; because it reflects a common mind at a certain moment, it ought to be historical and genetic in nature. Just as in The First New Science Vico argued that natural law accounts ought not begin with present modes of human thinking and doing but look to their origins, so in his autobiography he suggests that writing the self must not begin with the general form of knowing but with the (now externalized) judgment of the community about the particular man and, from there, explore the origin of this communal construction.24 Particulars triumph over descriptions of cognitive structure here because they provoke retrospective seeking: how did I emerge?, what were the causes of my personality?, my learning?, and so on. Retrospective autobiography's shadowing of a variety of philosophical trends of the late- seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries is worth keeping in mind. Its two central marks—the genetic account and the qualitative break between a narrating and narrated self—also belong to the conjectural histories of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and, as I have indicated, anticipate a central concern of romantic hermeneutics. While scholars have frequently remarked the connection between the rise of autobiography in the long eighteenth century and the rise of a historicizing tendency—especially the manner in which individuals applied periodizing or developmental terms to themselves—the meaning of this connection cannot be grasped unless the choice of how to understand our understanding is itself grasped as a task rather than as a set of discrete images reflecting various historical moments or stages.25 The parallel between the theory of autobiography and a certain strain of eighteenth-century thinking is vital, and I will return to it once more. But as my subject is prospective autobiography—Wordsworth's prospective mode—I will turn to that now.

To register a dawning intuition about anything is to adopt a prospective stance, not so much because the intuition has to do with something “in the future” but because it has to do with the internal and ongoing process of knowing. The observer cannot yet adopt a third-person and temporally- distanced relation to the object of knowledge; she cannot do as those who “class the cabinet/Of

24 Vico, The First New Science, 13, 16-19 and passim. 25 Friedrich Meinecke connects the rise of “historism” (considered as the new application of scientific principles dealing with mutability to every branch of knowledge) with the proliferation of individual narratives. Early on in Historism, he claims that “there is an intimate connection between evolutionary and individualizing thought-forms.” Meinecke, Historism, lvii. Peter Burke follows Meinecke in describes the outpouring of autobiographies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as reflecting a newly acute consciousness of change over time; he adds that there is a general trend toward the depiction of sequential, discrete selves in these “ego documents.” Burke, “Historicizing the Self,” 26. 11 their sensations, and in voluble phrase/Run through the history and birth of each/As of a single independent thing” (2.228—31).26 Wordsworth's explicit rejection of a genetic account of his personality occurs in the second book of The Prelude—the book called "School-time" that takes up the origin of the poetic spirit and how Wordsworth came "to love the woods and fields" (2.5). Wordsworth is making a distinction that may initially appear overfine, though it is one that undergirds The Prelude, and I will quote the passage in full.

Those incidental charms which first attached My heart to rural objects, day by day Grew weaker, and I hasten on to tell How Nature, intervenient till this time And secondary, now at length was sought For her own sake. But who shall parcel out His intellect by geometric rules, Split like a province into round and square? Who knows the individual hour in which His habits were first sown even as a seed, Who that shall point with a wand, and say "This portion of the river of my mind Came from yon fountain"? Thou, my friend, art one More deeply read in thy own thoughts: to thee Science appears but what in truth she is, Not as our glory and our absolute boast, But as a succedaneum, and a prop To our infirmity. Thou art no slave Of that false secondary power by which In weakness we create distinctions, then Deem that our puny boundaries are things Which we perceive, and not which we have made. To thee, unblended by these outward shows, The unity of all has been revealed; And thou wilt doubt with me, less aptly skilled Than many are to class the cabinet Of their sensations, and in voluble phrase Run through the history and birth of each As of a single independent thing. Hard task to analyse a soul, in which Not only general habits and desires, But each most obvious and particular thought— Not in a mystical and idle sense, But in the words of reason deeply weighted— Hath no beginning. (2.204-36)

26 William Wordsworth, Thirteen Book Prelude in The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1979), line numbers are given here and throughout in parentheses. 12

Wordsworth initially describes a process that he will repeatedly invoke in this book and throughout the rest of the poem: love arises indirectly. One way that it does so is by means of pleasurable associations and a quiet associational shift—from sympathy with the apparent kindness of nature to itself or from a general sense of well-being to affection directed at the totality of near objects and presences. In this case, the boy Wordsworth's childhood games were conducted in nature, and as his pleasure in them wanes, he turns fondly to nature as though his feeling had found its source. But then, Wordsworth seems to become impatient with his own mode of narration and to disown the very history of feeling he has been offering. Part of what he objects to must certainly be an atomized view of time and mind. Inner sense, or “intellect” as Wordsworth calls it, unfolds as a continuous whole which cannot be “split like a province into round and square." We can neither portion out the continuous flow of our thoughts ("the river of…mind") nor treat sensations separately from each other or from the totality of experience. Nor can time be cut up so that we might know “the individual hour” in which one habit or another arose. Further, Wordsworth's depiction of the inner quality of experience is closely connected with two other claims that are central to his project, though they are only suggested here. The first can be more easily grasped through his announcement in what he calls a Prospectus to The Excursion (1814) of the goal of his (partly unwritten) great work, The Recluse and thus of its introductory poem, The Prelude.27 I refer to his famous verse statement:

How exquisitely the individual Mind (And the progressive powers perhaps no less Of the whole species) to the external World Is fitted:—and how exquisitely, too, Theme this but little heard of among Men, The external World is fitted to the Mind: And the creation (by no lower name Can it be called) which they with blended might Accomplish:—this is our high argument.28

The individual mind is fitted to nature and nature to the mind—but not because we create a human world or know only that world we create, not because knowledge is tautological. There is, Wordsworth says, a blended creation; we meet the world as it meets us, so that our activity cannot be distinguished from that of nonhuman nature. Every individual may grasp this fitness; it belongs to us as individuals and as part of our common nature. It belongs to us more certainly as individuals than it belongs to us as a species. In the latter case, Wordsworth says that it is possible that our progressive powers are fit to the world, though it is the self-sameness of our individual minds—the self-sameness of the structure of our thinking as it arises in us—that is fit to nature rather than our continual improvement of the body of our knowledge (its content) or the accruing of our history. For this reason, the exploration of the mind moves most appropriately through a first-person vantage—but not so that a particular individual's mind might be observed. To return to the passage from book two of The Prelude, Wordsworth at this point more pessimistically refers to science as a “prop/To our infirmity.” Just as we create distinctions in natural or moral philosophy and forget that these distinctions are unreal, so we objectify our perceptions and reactions, forgetting that any objective image of feeling is unreal. The other side of what

27 Wordsworth makes this claim in his Preface to The Excursion. See The Excursion and The Recluse (Tirril Hall, Tirril, Penrith: Humanities-Ebooks, 2014), 86. 28 Prospectus, 63-71 in Preface to The Excursion. 13

Wordsworth calls our “weak” reliance on science is of course that, were we to recover from our infirmity, our creation would perfectly correspond with nature's. Science is a support for a mind not yet capable of being fully itself. Nevertheless, insofar as we can know our minds as they work (not as we project discrete effects within them or offer explanations for some arbitrarily defined portion of our past lives), we can know nature. I will return to this point shortly, for it is the basis for Wordsworth's formal and ethical project—that is, his concern with what it means to be a flourishing adult. The other claim that I take to be central to the passage concludes it. “But each most obvious and particular thought/Not in a mystical and idle sense,/But in the words of reason deeply weighted—/Hath no beginning.” This statement is potentially more cryptic than the reminder that scientific analysis has a supplemental role in our ability to know the world, and Wordsworth was aware enough of its near occult quality—as though he were gesturing to a kind of cyclical recurrence—to dismiss that charge, though without clarifying his own meaning. Nevertheless, there are several related interpretations we could give. In keeping with the earlier portion of the passage, Wordsworth could be understood to say that to find an origin for thought is to invite a causal reading—why some impression or idea came into being when and as it did. It is also to find a disconnected series of effects in the mind rather than a continuous current of perceiving (to draw on Wordsworth's metaphor of the river in this passage) or rather than a developing melody (to draw on a metaphor he employs in book one: "the mind of man is framed even like the breath/And harmony of music" [1.351-52]). Further, if Wordsworth is arguing both that an individual's mental experience is a continuous whole and that it always reflects nature to a greater or lesser extent, then he is also suggesting that it is continuous with the thought of other individuals. If thought is fit to nature in a holistic way, then we have good reason to hope for some degree of sympathy between all minds. And this sympathy may be increased as individuals become more like themselves and as their minds more perfectly reflect nature. This is also to say that, for Wordsworth, our first nature endures. The longer versions of The Prelude all begin by implicitly reversing the expulsion of Adam and Eve at the conclusion of Paradise Lost.29 As the poet leaves the city and returns to his native Cumbria, he exclaims,

Now I am free, enfranchised and at large, May fix my habitation where I will. What dwelling shall receive me, in what vale Shall be my harbor, underneath what grove Shall I take up my home, and what sweet stream Shall with its murmurs lull me to my rest? The earth is all before me—with a heart Joyous, not scared at its own liberty, I look about, and should the guide I chuse Be nothing better than a wandering cloud I cannot miss my way. (1.9-19)

29 In fact, Wordsworth composed this portion of the poem while on a walking tour of the Lake District with Coleridge, part of which is the Eden district, named for the river Eden. Likewise, Penrith, where Wordsworth went to school, lies in Eden. See The Prelude, xv. 14

In exclaiming that even with “a wandering cloud” as his guide, he cannot miss his way, Wordsworth is not subjecting himself to any and every accident but is rather claiming that, living in the well- ordered cosmos, each element of nature is tied to the whole and could potentially intimate his place in it or inspire him with the philosophic song he hopes to write “On man, on Nature, and on Human Life.”30 While The Prelude's “glad preamble” implies that one simply need follow an element of nature closely in order to find the principle of harmony, the notion is somewhat troubled by Wordsworth's difficulties in finding the present means to compose The Recluse even though he believes he has received all of the appropriate gifts for the work (and enumerates them). Initially blessed with “Eolian visitations,” Wordsworth says, “the harp/Was soon defrauded,” and the promises of his own ability never ripen "into a steady morning" (1.104-05, 136-37). Yet we might think of this initial suggestion of Wordsworth's as a first trial of an ethics based upon the continuity between mind and nature, though the means to achieve a flourishing, ethical existence—eudaimonia—will turn out to be more complex than the simple relation presented in book one. In book two, Wordsworth represents the relation between mind and nature in triangulated form. Here is Wordsworth's famous description of the origin of perception and the "first/Poetic spirit of our human life."

Blessed the infant babe— For with my best conjectures I would trace The progress of our being—blest the babe Nursed in his mother's arms, the babe who sleeps Upon his mother's breast, who, when his soul Claims manifest kindred with an earthly soul, Doth gather passion from his mother's eye. Such feelings pass into his torpid life Like an awakening breeze, and hence his mind, Even in the first trial of its powers, Is prompt and watchful, eager to combine In one appearance all the elements And parts of the same object, else detached And loth to coalesce. Thus day by day Subjected to the discipline of love, His organs and recipient faculties Are quickened, are more vigorous; his mind spreads, Tenacious of the forms which it receives In one beloved presence—nay and more, In that most apprehensive habitude And those sensations which have been derived From this beloved presence—there exists A virtue which irradiates and exalts All objects through all intercourse of sense. No outcast he, bewildered and depressed; Along his infant veins are interfused The gravitation and the filial bond Of nature that connect him with the world.

30 This is the first line of the Prospectus to The Recluse. 15

Emphatically such a being lives, An inmate of this active universe. From Nature largely he receives, nor so Is satisfied, but largely gives again; For feeling has to him imparted strength, And—powerful in all sentiments of grief, Of exultation, fear and joy—his mind, Even as an agent of the one great mind, Creates, creator and receiver both, Working but in alliance with the works Which it beholds. Such, verily, is the first Poetic spirit of our human life— By uniform controul of after years In most abated and suppressed, in some Through every change of growth or of decay Preeminent till death. (2.237-80)

Wordsworth's conjectured description of the “progress of our being” follows directly on what I have described as his rejection of a genetic account of mind (in which there is no one who can “point with a wand and say/‘This portion of the river of my mind/Came from yon fountain’”). Yet here, we certainly seem to have a genetic account of perception epitomized by a genetic (mother- child) relation. The most obvious difference between the genetic accounts to which Wordsworth referred in the previous passage and this account lies in this one's generality. The "infant babe" is any babe who is "nursed in his mother's arms," any babe who "sleeps/Upon his mother's breast." For Wordsworth, this minimal description of the reciprocity of gazing and feeling between mother and child ideally belongs to all. He is not telling the story of his own particular blessing and its effects on his own later life but rather is describing the nature of our blessed condition in the world and the nature of ongoing blessing. If this is Wordsworth's conjectural history—he does, after all, introduce the scene by referring to it as the product of his "best conjectures" on "the progress of our being"—then it is not a mirage dreamily projected beyond all possibility of knowing, though the time of any particular individual's infancy is likely to lie beyond her own recollection. Rather, in being general, this conjectured history is prospective—at least in the sense that it is supposed to recur (to some degree) in every infancy and in the sense that the felt correspondence between perceiver and perceived (infant and mother) is a first element of perception. Wordsworth says that he is tracing "the progress of our being," though he attends almost exclusively to the manner in which infants might be thought to grasp and to receive the phenomenal world. And this history of the origins of perception begins with blessing. "Blessed the infant babe," Wordsworth exclaims, and then after his parenthetical allusion to his own purposes he repeats, "blest the babe/Nursed in his mother's arms, the babe who sleeps/Upon his mother's breast." "Blessed" and "blest" are both past participles and so are grammatically interchangeable; their placement within the blank verse also makes their pronunciation virtually identical. Yet as "blessed" retains its visual connection to its form as a transitive verb, there is a brief hint of something that has been done; nature or the mother has blessed the child. But this momentary sense of a past action cannot be sustained; almost immediately it dissolves into the sense that, before he has done or is able to do anything, the child simply is blessed. If something has been done it appears only in the fullness of the present, the fullness of the "this." Flooding the present, this past gifting allows the present to emerge as it does: coherently, continuously. But of course that does not imply that perception is about the past. The aspects of 16 nature are spread all around the child who turns toward them because his mother's face is toward him. Here we find Wordsworth's first extended description of perception as a triangulated process. There are at least two ways in which to understand this triangulation. First, the mother-child relation is not a self-enclosed one; it leads in other relations and catalyzes other perceptions. From the infant's experience of his mother's passionate regard, "such feelings pass into his torpid life/Like an awakening breeze, and hence his mind,/Even in the first trial of its powers,/Is prompt and watchful." Here, Wordsworth is certainly referencing the poem's opening statement of the double blessing of nature: the blessing of its felt presence and, correspondingly, the blessing of his felt poetic powers.

Oh there is blessing in this gentle breeze, That blows from the green field and from the clouds And from the sky; it beats against my cheek, And seems half conscious of the joy it gives. … For I, methought, while the sweet breath of heaven Was blowing on my body, felt within A corresponding mild creative breeze. (1.1-4, 41-43)

Even if Wordsworth's spontaneous verse-making in the "glad preamble" is understood to be about the scene before him, it is also preparation for the philosophic poem he is to write.31 And in the description of the infant's awakening faculties, the perceptions may similarly be supposed to be trained on the mother (the infant's mind is first "tenacious of the forms which it receives/In one beloved presence"). But the point is that "from this beloved presence—there exists/A virtue which irradiates and exalts/All objects through all intercourse of sense." They—all other objects—are coincidently illuminated by the mother's face which shines on the child. Her regard for him becomes his regard for them. And though the interchange may seem to be purely between mother and child, Wordsworth hints that there is a subtly attended interchange between the child and the surrounding world; there is a continual "intercourse of sense." Second, the affective quality of the mother-child relation conditions the quality that perception ends up having—whether it is "eager" or "loth," combined in "one appearance" or "detached" and, hence, the sort of objects that will be perceived. The relation being described is not primarily genetic, not primarily one of mother and child, but rather is primarily perceptual, one of child and world. And these relations are not dyadic but emerge with reference to a governing principle: "the discipline of love" as Wordsworth calls it here or the intervenient presence of nature as he calls it elsewhere (2.206). It is worth noting that, while the mother's passionate regard may be temporally the first means by which the infant perceives joyfully, it is not the only means of his doing so. Speaking somewhat obliquely about his own mother's early death, Wordsworth will go on to say

From early days, Beginning not long after that first time In which, a babe, by intercourse of touch

31 Wordsworth writes, "Thus far, O friend, did I, not used to make/A present joy the matter of my song,/Pour out that day my soul in measured strains,/Even in the very words which I have here/Recorded." (1.57-59) 17

I held mute dialogues with my mother's heart, I have endeavoured to display the means Whereby the infant sensibility, Great birthright of our being, was in me Augmented and sustained. Yet is a path More difficult before me, and I fear That in its broken windings we shall need The chamois' sinews and the eagle's wing. For now a trouble came into my mind From unknown causes: I was left alone Seeking the visible world, nor knowing why. The props of my affections were removed, And yet the building stood, as if sustained By its own spirit. All that I beheld Was dear to me, and from this cause it came That now to Nature's finer influxes My mind lay open—to that more exact And intimate communion which our hearts Maintain with the minuter properties Of objects which already are beloved, And of those only. (2.280-303)

It is significant that Wordsworth uses the same term to describe the mother-child relation that he used to describe science in the passage dismissing genetic accounts of personality. Science was then "a prop/To our infirmity;" the mother-child relation and all of its "mute dialogues" are now remembered as "the props of [the child Wordsworth's] affections." If science may be thought a support for immature perception, a necessary self-restriction and a training toward a state of being in which the true fitness of mind and world appear, so the mother-child relation can be understood as a restricted form of and a training for mature perception. Wordsworth hints that he had imagined his mother as the necessary support for all of his psychic life and then found her to be something else, for "the building stood." And while he indicates that his perceptions and desires then seemed self-sustaining, if we take seriously the "blessed babe" passage, which denies such a possibility, we might rather say that the mother appears not as the foundation but as a figure for it. Or, to borrow a term from Coleridge, we might say that the mother-child-world triangle is an analogue—a living reality which indicates a higher reality—for the basic form of perception and its conditioning by a third term. She is the primary face toward which perceptions initially reach as they reach toward the world; she promotes the proper mode of perceiving, and her regard indicates, by the difference it makes, the existence of such a proper mode. To the extent that Wordsworth is making an argument rather than simply offering an image of perception's genesis through the "blessed babe" passage (and the passages that bracket it), it appears in ghostly form as the "otherwise" that does not occur. This "otherwise" appears first in the manner that the infant's activity is described. Almost immediately he does something: he claims manifest kindred. This activity has sometimes been understood as a kind of projection—the infant's inscribing himself on the mother's eye—an argument that reduces to the premise that language rather than life comes into being by a leap, specifically, by a self-alienating leap (in which the self is to find itself as the other—mother, world, moment—and repeatingly misses any reference, even its

18 own past desires).32 In the context of the passage's insistence on receptivity—that the infant is first blessed, that feelings flow into his life which is initially "torpid"—Wordsworth of course leads us to think of the infant's act of claiming as enabled by an already manifest correspondence. The mother's eye is already passionately directed; the world, we might say, faces the child and it might not have; it might have remained unillumined, aloof, and radically closed off. The very coherence of the world, Wordsworth suggests, is a sign of a prior relatedness or, even, of a constant presence who accepts. If the infant did not "gather passion from his mother's eye," he would not have been "eager to combine/in one appearance all the elements/And parts of the same object," they would have remained "detached/And loth to coalesce." Or he would have been an "outcast," "bewildered and depressed." Wordsworth seems to offer something like Kant's discussion of the serendipitous correspondence between our faculties and the phenomenal world. But where Kant will not stray beyond the suggestiveness of our delight in things or beyond the intimation of something that simply is unknowable—that the world is fit to us, made for us—Wordsworth allows himself more freedom.33 At this point, he is making a counterfactual argument that relies on the feeling of possibility. Possibility can of course be logical. But that we can feel the possibility of our faculties' misalignment with the world is understood as evidence that perception is neither naturalistically determined nor a pure projection. For the sensation of possibility requires duration: memory and anticipation. At the limit, the ability (mental or linguistic) to move in any direction at any moment corresponds with pure indifference. It is without a past flooding (irradiating) the present. Pure projection, like any naturalistic scheme, lacks an occasion for feeling the possibility of possibility; it lacks an occasion for tenacity. If this feeling of possibility serves as Wordsworth's positive argument, we might also find a negative argument in the sequence of his dismissal of science as that "false secondary power by which/In weakness we create distinctions, then/Deem that our puny boundaries are things/Which

32 See for example: Andrzej Warminski, "Facing Language: Wordsworth's First Poetic Spirits," in Romantic Revolutions: Criticism and Theory, ed. Kenneth R. Johnston et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 26-48, especially 32-38. Warminski subtly indicates in a variety of ways that the argument of articulate imposition is itself simply a position, assuming (for example) that affect is distorting rather than shaping and that a pure perception is free from affect. If that were the case, then Wordsworth's narrator would perpetually be imposing upon his object. But the nature of perception is itself in question, and Wordsworth argues that affect is part of knowing, not an illegitimate synthesis. Again, Warminski assumes that in affective accounts, the subject-object (mother-child) relation is "grounded" on the relation—on the mother's presence, which is to say, not grounded. But that is to assume that there is no foundation in nature or in the mind through which this relation appears as it does. Wordsworth argues that there is a perceptual mode that may be effectually shown to be superior: producing a greater degree clarity, coherence, joy, and ethical practice. 33 I refer to what Kant calls an “a priori principle for the possibility of nature, though only in a subjective respect, by means of which it prescribes a law, not to nature (as autonomy), but to itself (as heautonomy) for reflection on nature, which one could call the law of the specification of nature with regard to its empirical laws, which it does not cognize in nature a priori but rather assumes in behalf of an order of nature cognizable for our understanding in the division that it makes of its universal laws when it would subordinate a manifold of particular laws to these.” Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), Introduction 6.5.186. Original emphasis. 19 we perceive, and not which we have made" followed by the "blessed babe" passage's insistence that knowing arises by means of affect. This sequence appears to be aimed at Hume's fact-value distinction. Wordsworth suggests that if we believe that our interactions with the sensuous world cannot teach us anything about what ought to be—if we concede that the natural world must only be thought in terms of causes rather than ends—or if we imagine that only so-called objective descriptions of phenomenal repetitions and the analysis of sentences produce knowledge, then it is only because we have supposed it so. We have created definitions for a purpose, yet these "props" may come to tyrannize over our lives when we forget our own role in their creation. Just as Kierkegaard will do a few decades later, Wordsworth indicates that how perception emerges—trustingly or mistrustfully—determines its content. Both writers maintain that the sorts of perceptions that emerge from a sense of wellbeing are practically better, but Wordsworth also hints that such perceptions also exhibit qualities we ordinarily link with superior scientific explanations, especially the ability to organize a greater number of details into a coherent whole. In the description of the "blessed babe," the idea remains at the level of an image. The infant who is conscious of his own blessed security presumably is not only "eager to combine/In one appearance all" but also does experience the world as a whole whereas his counterpart (his counterfactual self) allows many of his perceptions to remain "detached." The first child is not only happier and encounters a unified world (there is no danger of some element becoming parasitic on his personality) but, for this same reason, his perceptions are truer. Wordsworth's portrait, in other words, presents a child who is more like himself ("emphatically such a being lives"), whose wishes are directed at the world in a way we are likely to deem intelligent and productive of greater accuracy (beside grasping coherence, he is "watchful," he keeps himself in an engaged "apprehensive" posture, he is more retentive, "tenacious"), and, of course, he is in harmony with the greater world, capable of aligning himself and of working with nature. We might think of this description as Wordsworth's presentation of the pleasing, the good, and the true, where pleasure (in its various forms of eager willing, delight, and the sense of wellbeing) leads in and thus is more fundamental than the other intuitions. Wordsworth concludes with a version of the "one life" philosophy to which he and Coleridge intermittently refer. He, the infant, has a mind—but not as one who is cut off from any larger order. He works as an agent of the "one great mind," in alliance with what he beholds. He is genuinely creative, able to attune himself. And the joy of the whole description rests on the fact of his being "creator and receiver both," that is, of being virtually unable to distinguish what is properly his own action from what is nature's. For Coleridge, as I will discuss in my final chapter, thinking always involves a leap—a synthesis, a harmonizing with an existing principle, a finding of new ground. Considering this scene in terms of a leap might initially clarify what Wordsworth means by describing "the first/Poetic spirit of our human life" as the activity of a mind that delightedly finds itself an agent of the “one great mind.” But Wordsworth shifts the terms of Coleridge's analogue, describing the origin of perception as a synthesis of mine and thine: the child's action and nature's action. That is, where Coleridge depicts the union of opposites (passive and active) or the individual’s union with the (divine) principle of order, Wordsworth seems to guard the strange delight that the child feels in finding that his creations, his perceptions are also the creations of another. The child does not thereby lose his title in creatively grasping the world but receives this creation back as ratified, shared. In keeping with Wordsworth's poetic scene, we might rather say that the givenness of the world may be apprehended at the same moment that it is grasped, but only when it is grasped as a matter of love—as a value.34

34 Tim Milnes argues that for the English Romantics the shadow of Hume loomed larger than that of Kant and that they reacted with fierce indifference to Hume’s division of fact and value or, rather, 20

To put the point somewhat differently, for Wordsworth, cognitive process emerges regularly for everyone but it also has certain variable features. In the "blessed babe" passage, the infant's perceptions emerge more readily and with greater clarity and retentiveness when they flow from a place of wellbeing. When the infant is "subjected to the discipline of love,/His organs and recipient faculties/Are quickened, are more vigorous; his mind spreads,/Tenacious of the forms which it receives." More generally, we might say that the alacrity (tempo), fineness (detail), and unity of our perceptions depends upon the affective mode with which we find the world facing us. There is no knowledge that does not first relate to a "face;" this is knowing's mode. This is also to say that it is somewhat improper to apply ideas of mediacy and immediacy to Wordsworth's poetry. Just as we never get beyond healthful or unhealthful states of the body, so knowing never gets beyond an affective mode of being with the world. And this mode is relational; it is always already between minds and therefore is triangulated. When perception's aspect is trusting, joyful, and securely generous, it fits us more closely to the human and natural world. This aspect is no mere projection of an egoistic desire. Rather, it is the quality and the extent of the unity of the "one great mind" and the individual poetic spirit recognizing its order in nature. So Wordsworth reiterates throughout book two: when we approach the world in a spirit of love we will see it properly, and we when we see it as it is, we will love it. Just as the "blessed babe" passage emphasized the unity of the individual's and nature's creative power in cognition, so Wordsworth depicts the inextricable unity of knowledge and joy— each seeming to allow for greater degrees of the other. The examples of this interchange are numerous. I offer one below.

Many are the joys Of youth, but, oh, what happiness to live When every hour brings palpable access Of knowledge, when all knowledge is delight, And sorrow is not there. The seasons came, And every season to my notice brought A store of transitory qualities Which but for this most watchful power of love Had been neglected, left a register Of permanent relations else unknown. (2.303-12)

Knowledge brings happiness, and the love of things (which, for Wordsworth, is virtually synonymous with happiness) allows permanent relations to appear. Again, Wordsworth quietly makes his argument by reference to a counterfactual. The possibility that these permanent relations could have remained obscure and unobserved is known to exist because it does not happen. And the sense of possibility attests to the conditions in which perception emerges as a unity, as the doubleness of thine and mine which could have gone another way. Sometimes this unity reappears as newly in question. Describing his love of a toil he calls "more poetic," that is, observing "affinities/In objects where no brotherhood exists/To common minds," Wordsworth continues:

with “an alternating pattern of engagement with and abstention from philosophical argument.” Knowledge and Indifference in English Romantic Prose, 1-24 at 3. In light of Milnes’s argument, Wordsworth’s depiction appears aimed at combatting Humean skepticism. 21

My seventeenth year was come, And, whether from this habit rooted now So deeply in my mind, or from excess Of the great social principle of life Coercing all things into sympathy, To unorganic natures I transferred My own enjoyments, or, the power of truth Coming in revelation, I conversed With things that really are, I at this time Saw blessings spread around me like a sea. (2.400, 402-14)35

At this moment, Wordsworth seems to retract his assurance of natural providence and to adopt instead a position we are likely to find more defensible—that he simply cannot know whether his vision of the world's "affinities" is something, a quirk, he has uniquely cultivated, or whether he has been least disturbed by private sensibilities at this moment and has indeed apprehended something of general nature's repetitions. And he cannot know whether he has correctly interpreted the cosmos as resemblance or whether there is mere semblance, the product of his own mind encountering itself. It is worth noting that, although this is Wordsworth's poetic autobiography, he pits what is proper to his mind against "the great social principle of life" and the possibility that he has projected his own desires and enjoyments against the possibility of "revelation" and conversation. The principle applies to the autobiography as to Wordsworth's own philosophy; the goal is to write life (not a life) and to converse with what is rather than to present the particular man as he is or as he was. The goal is inclusive and open—which is to say, aiming at a principle for continual knowing rather than a testimony to one's man's peculiar habit. The question of what this—Wordsworth's philosophy and autobiography is: semblance (pure construction) or resemblance (correspondence with something already given)—is allowed to drop. And Wordsworth gives us ample reason in book two to think the question need not be renewed. I will glance at two passages that make this point. First, and most obviously, Wordsworth gives an answer in the conclusion of the passage I cited above:

From Nature and her overflowing soul I had received so much that all my thoughts Were steeped in feeling. I was only then Contented when with bliss ineffable I felt the sentiment of being spread O'er all that moves, and all that seemeth still, O'er all that, lost beyond the reach of thought And human knowledge, to the human eye Invisible, yet liveth to the heart, O'er all that leaps, and runs, and shouts, and sings, Or beats the gladsome air, o'er all that glides Beneath the wave, yea, in the wave itself And mighty depth of waters. Wonder not

35 It is worth noting that here Wordsworth explicitly contrasts this poetic construction with "analytic industry" (2.398). 22

If such my transports were, for in all things I saw one life, and felt that it was joy; One song they sang, and it was audible— Most audible then when the fleshly ear, O'ercome by grosser prelude of that strain, Forgot its functions and slept undisturbed.

If this be error, and another faith Find easier access to the pious mind, Yet were I grossly destitute of all Those human sentiments which make this earth So dear if I should fail with grateful voice To speak of you, ye mountains, and ye lakes That dwell among the hills where I was born. If in my youth I have been pure in heart, If, mingling with the world, I am content With my own modest pleasures, and have lived With God and Nature communing, removed From little enmities and low desires, The gift is yours; if in these times of fear, This melancholy waste of hopes o'erthrown, If, 'mid indifference and apathy And wicked exultation, when good men On every side fall off we know not how To selfishness, disguised in gentle names Of peace and quiet and domestic love— Yet mingled, not unwillingly, with sneers On visionary minds—if, in this time Of dereliction and dismay, I yet Despair not of our nature, but retain A more than Roman confidence, a faith That fails not, in all sorrow my support, The blessing of my life, the gift is yours Ye mountains, thine, O Nature. (2. 416-62)

As in the description of the "blessed babe," this passage begins with overflowing pleasure at the abundant gifts of nature, specifically those that alter the felt quality of thinking. And, though the poet asks for a great deal (to feel, with bliss, the sentiment of being in all things), he receives more than his faculties can grasp. The simplest and most powerful aspect of Wordsworth's argument is this: that semblance cannot be so complete. The poet claims he finds a basic resemblance in every thing he encounters, the principle of this resemblance is joy, and absolutely everything—every variety of motion in the world—coheres without remainder. Not only is nothing left out, as semblance must always leave out truth (and some of the elements constituting its wholeness), but the poet finds the totality of his mind taken up with the perception. By the time his seventeenth year had arrived, the poet claims he (actively) saw life, felt that it was joy, and (passively) encountered a single song that was audible. And these several perceptions move beyond themselves to what we might think of as a pure intuition, an attendance on something that is the basis of sense (rational and aesthetic). What he calls his "faith," that there is one life whose principle is a joy that can be 23 sensuously and supersensuously known, implies that mind and world have a common intellectual ground, so to know one is the know the other. After this moment, Wordsworth offers what we might think of as a set of elaborations. This "faith," Wordsworth indicates, can be shown to be the basis for goodness. We value things because they offer pleasure, joy, or delight. We do so even, or perhaps especially, when our joy flows from observations only distantly related to us—when our delight flows, for example, from the perception of likeness. There is no way to speak of goodness without speaking of things held dear, and to say that they are dear is to say that they please. Only a misguided hedonism, Wordsworth suggests, leads to egotism; and in his own case, his creed has produced behavior in accord with principles that have been historically held to be ethical: purity (unity) of heart, contentment (and, therefore, a felt unity with the dispensation of things), openness (rather than opposition) to "God and Nature," and aloofness from strife (social unity). In brief, Wordsworth shows that his creed entails what we might think of as the most basic ethics: the turn from egoism toward the sense of the whole as perfect order—and toward the whole not as a fact merely but also as an affective state. In the description of the "blessed babe," affective unity, experienced as pleasure, was the source of truly coherent perceptions. Here, a version of this same unity, the poet's appreciation of the "one life," concerns itself with the good, though we can infer that the jubilant recognition of this principle necessarily involves the sorts of observations—about correspondence, resemblance, and balance—we already employ to form judgments about the true as well.36 Wordsworth concludes with a repeating expression of the gratitude that ought to meet the givenness or giftedness of experience—gratitude that echoes the reality of mountains and lakes and nature, a reality that is not only a fact but also an enlivening and beneficent power. Of course to say that there is communion between mother and child, or correspondence between mind and world, or even that there ought to be some kind of return for giftedness is to deny projection: the two are contrary modes of understanding all that may be understood. This is not to make a circular argument but only to suggest that Wordsworth understands his own terms and is self-consistent. At the same time, there is an additional aesthetic claim in Wordsworth's depiction of a unity so great. The idea of semblance is derived from that of resemblance (which it denies), not the other way around. In listing the moving (leaping, running, shouting, singing, beating, gliding) creatures, and (also the unconceived, untouched, unseen, but affectively intuited) elements, and the (creative and receptive, felt and unfelt) faculties of the mind in one sensuous and intellectual intuition, Wordsworth implies that there cannot be a semblance this great. Any semblance that reconciles so much—especially if it can also reconcile individuals to each other, themselves, and their state—simply must be resemblance. The other passage I shall glance at involves a more familiar Wordsworthian argument. After describing his childhood pastimes as "a boisterous race" purposefully conducted among "the beauteous forms/Of Nature," and as a time of "giddy motion," albeit one naturally turning toward another time with more regular desires, Wordsworth describes his and his companions' repeated boat races (2.48-49, 51-52).

When summer came

36 More recently, Elaine Scarry has derived justice from beauty (and pleasure) through the double sense of the word "fair" and has claimed that beauty calls forth a generally reverential attitude in the perceiver. However, insofar as Scarry's argument involves the individual's subjection to particular things or the desire to be regarded (by a series of beholders), it opposes Wordsworth's. See On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 46-48 but also 76-77. 24

It was the pastime of our afternoons To beat along the plain of Windermere With rival oars; and the selected bourne Was now an island musical with birds That sang for ever, now a sister isle Beneath the oak's umbrageous covert, sown With lilies-of-the-valley like a field, And now a third small island where remained An old stone table and a mouldered cave— A hermit's history. In such a race, So ended, disappointment could be none, Uneasiness, or pain, or jealousy: We rested in the shade, all pleased alike, Conquered and conqueror. Thus the pride of strength And the vainglory of superior skill Were interfused with objects which subdued And tempered them, and gradually produced A quiet independence of the heart. And to my friend who knows me I may add, Unapprehensive of reproof, that hence Ensued a diffidence and modesty, And I was taught to feel—perhaps too much— The self-sufficing power of solitude. (2.55-78)

The point I shall make here is simple. In the case of a passage like this one, the evident difference that arises through the intervening look of nature is supposed to obviate the question of egoistic projection (5.12). The children could have searched for their position in the group on each other's faces. But the imminent threat of such narrow egoism, "the pride of strength/And the vainglory of superior skill," simply vanishes as they look not to each other but to what Wordsworth will later call "the speaking face of earth and heaven" to find their relation—in this case to an island singing forever, or one covered with tiny, bell-like flowers, or one marked with a gothic past (5.12). Through joy or wonder, something is communicated from beyond the purely human frame, and this natural conversation paradoxically produces human independence rather than something else; and it produces a subtle turning aside, a quieting, and a healing, where healing had not been sought or known to be needed.37 Wordsworth makes this gesture repeatedly, and it is one that needs to be understood not simply as a reactionary turn in the idea of "nature" at the end of the century or as an origin for environmental poetics, but as a response to a familiar eighteenth-century trope of finding oneself on

37 I am aware that in making such a statement I am setting aside a set of assumptions—or, rather, of values—that have been entrenched at least since Paul de Man's seminal essays on the subject, particularly, "The Rhetoric of Temporality," "Intentional Structure of Image," and "Wordsworth and Hölderlin." I risk naïveté in order to trace a powerful countercurrent within romanticism: one that faces forward rather than backward and interests itself in finding the form of cognition where form is not purely structural but has some minimal content. See Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” in Blindness and Insight, intro. Wlad Godzich, (London: Routledge, 1983), 187-228. 25 the face of the other.38 Rousseau had described the conjectural origin of society in these terms; humans may have come together initially to satisfy physical needs, but at a certain moment, "everyone began to look at everyone else and to wish to be looked at himself," and this turn toward public esteem "was the first step at once toward inequality and vice."39 Likewise, Adam Smith developed his entire Theory of Moral Sentiments on the principle that moral and aesthetic judgments originate as we find ourselves reflected on the faces of others.40 Of Smith and his denial of "fixed principles in human nature," Wordsworth would later write in his "Essay Supplementary" to Poems (1815) that he was "the worst critic, David Hume not excepted, that Scotland…has produced."41 While Wordsworth's irritation in the "Essay Supplementary" is directed at the local consequence that public opinion must then decide poetic worth, it also represents his radical opposition to an ethics and aesthetics of social regard. I will return to this point shortly. Before I do so, however, it is worth pausing to underscore that Wordsworth's championing the face of nature as the necessary antidote to something like Smith's spectator anticipates Kierkegaard's discussion of loving and assessing.42 Wordsworth repeatedly takes up the question of how perception becomes what it is for us and emphasizes that it is what it is through the intervenient presence of something that quite often is a face of one sort of another—general and fixed or accidental and variable. And it is what it is through a certain affective mode—trusting or untrusting. And in turn, as I suggested at the beginning of this chapter, this "face" and its

38 In the early 1960s Basil Willey locates Wordsworth at the culmination of a divinization of Nature which began in the Renaissance and gradually turned from a revolutionary into a conservative principle. Basil Willey, The Eighteenth Century Background: Studies on the Idea of Nature in the Thought of the Period (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961). More recently, Jonathan Bate has argued that (only) Wordsworth's ecological interest, his calling into question the preeminence of economic growth and material production in society, gives his poetry its contemporary force. Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (New York: Routledge, 1991). 39 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality Among Men 2.15-17 in The First and Second Discourses Together with the Replies to the Critics and Essay on the Origin of Languages, trans. Victor Gourevitch (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1990), 175-76. 40 Not coincidentally, Smith makes this argument by imagining a prior state—a desert island in which a man who had never encountered another would be unable to form value judgments. See for example, Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 3.3. 41 And not coincidentally, Wordsworth makes this claim as part of the extended opening argument of the "Essay Supplementary" that aesthetic judgment must derive from fixed principles and that the public has almost always undervalued great poets: Spenser, Milton, Thomson, and even, to some extent, Shakespeare, sometimes for decades, and, in Milton's case, for a century and a half, while overvaluing lesser poets: Bemerton, Dubartas, Cowley, and so on; true aesthetic judgment has its foundation in constant features of the mind rather than in opinion even though it ultimately has to do with pleasure. William Wordsworth, "Essay, Supplementary to the Preface," in The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, eds. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, 3 vols. (Oxford University Press, 1974), 3.71. 42 Smith frequently speaks of an actual spectator or group of spectators, and it hardly matters that he goes on to speak of ethics in terms of the "impartial spectator" and "the man in the breast." This spectator is no more than the internalization of a cultural ethos or the ethos of one's set, and, for Smith, ethical living always involves a kind of performing for the other based on a projection about how far one could sympathize with another if that other were in similar circumstances. 26 corresponding mood also have a certain facing: a basically prospective or retrospective cast that determines how inquiry is conducted and, in the case of autobiography, when it seeks a genetic (accidental, constructed) account of the individual or whether it seeks the form, process, and what we might even call the general rule of thought. Describing his habitual practice of rising "before the vernal thrush/Was audible" and sitting alone on a hill "at the first hour of morning," Wordsworth asks,

How shall I trace the history, where seek The origin of what I then have felt? Oft in those moments such a holy calm Did overspread my soul that I forgot That I had bodily eyes, and what I saw Appeared like something in myself, a dream, A prospect in my mind. (2.360-61, 363, 365-71)

In a passage like this one, "how" at once means: how can a causal story be found for an experience in which the individuality of the self falls away and continuity is understood to be temporal? If the likeness of inner and outer, mind and world, is perceived to be, it is contradictory to require an account—as though the perception belonged uniquely to the percipient and could be brought about in a certain manner. And "how" may also mean how shall I trace the origin of such habitual feeling if or since this continuity indicates a reality (an original), and how shall I trace the history of these feelings that did occur in time—that is, how shall I do so without transforming them into something else (a causal story)? As the description continues, these habitual feelings become "something in myself" and "a prospect in my mind," and we find here an intimation of Wordsworth's solution: to present the phenomenal appearance in the manner of its appearing and as a prospect. Correspondingly, the "how" also seems to become a quality of feeling or a mode of perceiving—that of unity, a loss of self-consciousness. At least the opening question allows us to hear the "how…/I then have felt" over and above the indications of a misguided mode of inquiry (history, origin) that Wordsworth invokes to dismiss. This guided ellipsis of course echoes the blurring of self- distinctness and suggests that the understanding produced by this couplet and this passage arises in part from the meeting of linguistic placement, poetic or musical duration, and the intermittence of attention. Together—the "how" presented as inner prospect and presented as a feeling of unity or of guided generality (perhaps also enacted in the reader)—become Wordsworth's autobiographical mode. Wordsworth again lingers with this reflexive sense of a mode that is partly an affective quality of feeling and partly an ongoing manner of apprehending in a better-known passage that precedes this more explicit questioning of how to represent this "how" that drives The Prelude. Describing solitary walks "in storm and tempest, or in starlight nights/Beneath the quiet heavens," he writes,

…and I would stand Beneath some rock, listening to sounds that are The ghostly language of the ancient earth, Or make their dim abode in distant winds. Then did I drink the visionary power. I deem not profitless those fleeting moods Of shadowy exultation; not for this, That they are kindred to our purer mind 27

And intellectual life, but that the soul— Remembering how she felt, but what she felt Remembering not—retains an obscure sense Of possible sublimity, to which With growing faculties she doth aspire, With faculties still growing, feeling still That whatsoever point they gain they still Have something to pursue. (2.333—41)

As in the previous passage, Wordsworth begins by insisting on continuing presence of some sort, "sounds that are," though the fact of this reality is grasped through the interrupted stream of sound. The point is worth repeating: Wordsworth stages phenomenal interruption as a way to indicate an obliquely knowable base and he does so through the tension between the wholeness of the line, which happens to correspond with what could be the end of the phrasal unit—"sounds that are"— and the verse's progressive unfolding, as these sounds are in some way, here as "the ghostly language of the ancient earth." The enjambment allows the reader to choose whether or not to hear the poet's declaration of continuing reality, though Wordsworth sets this "are" in the place traditionally reserved for greatest (rhythmic) emphasis. Read on its own, the line itself suggests such emphasis (as the juxtaposition of "rock," and "listening" relatively weaken each other). And, indeed, the historicizing statement, its indication of the far distant and the long past, depends on such continuity—that the "there" and the "then" persist in the whole in a manner that can be known. And as in the previous passage and as in the description of the "blessed babe," we find a kind of euphoria involving a loss of self-distinction and an intimation of belonging. There is a breakdown of the distinctness of the senses and a suggestion of synesthesia as the poet drinks in the "visionary power" that is the sound of the elements coming together as one—wind and earth sounding alike. And there is a "purer mind" and purer "intellectual life" that is collective and connected to the shadowy moods that arise with the near recognition of sounds so wildly unhuman. It is as though, even here, among seemingly alien noises, the poet finds unlooked for capacities and, hence, feels his participation—his place—in the "one life." This "fleeting mood/Of shadowy exultation" may indicate belonging—hearing wind and earth, receiving, drinking in, knowing inwardly through this literal ground. Yet Wordsworth claims that the profit he expects from such exultation is no longer the claim of kindred but, rather, the perception of another mode, one that I believe is connected with the mind's sense of its own motion. In other words, the sublimity the soul senses as its own possibility now arrives through an intimation of process as such rather than process as structure (triangulation) and knowledge of belonging. It arrives through the temporal form of feeling rather than through feeling's content, even though there is still some affective content: "exultation." All of these other perceptions, of "ghostly language," "distant winds," "purer mind," have to do with a totality. Wordsworth is invested in such a totality, in the moment at which "the discerning intellect of Man" will be "wedded to this goodly universe/In love and holy passion" as he announces in the Prospectus to the whole of The Recluse, of which, The Prelude was to be a sort of antechamber. Although I included part of this passage before, I offer a larger swath below. As he says of The Prelude, The Excursion, and the incomplete collection of shorter poems that were to comprise The Recluse:

—I, long before the blissful hour arrives, Would chaunt, in lonely peace, the spousal verse Of this great consummation:—and, by words 28

Which speak of nothing more than what we are, Would I arouse the sensual from their sleep Of Death, and win the vacant and the vain To noble raptures; while my voice proclaims How exquisitely the individual Mind (And the progressive powers perhaps no less Of the whole species) to the external World Is fitted:—and how exquisitely, too, Theme this but little heard of among Men, The external World is fitted to the Mind; And the creation (by no lower name Can it be called) which they with blended might Accomplish:—this is our high argument. (52-54, 56-71)

As we have seen, Wordsworth echoes this vision in The Prelude. I do not believe he is abandoning his poetic project or suddenly offering a version of the Schlegelian proposal that poetry should "forever be becoming and never be perfected."43 Rather, he turns toward the mind's indirect sensation of its own process because this process is the relatively automatic part of judgment, which is essentially fit to the world (however unsound it may become). Contemplating this process, its cyclical regularity, its progress, and so on, may be the means by which the eventual "consummation" will take place. The opposition in Wordsworth's poetics, if there is one, may be between his intermittent desire to declaim "nothing more than what we are" in order to rouse "the sensual from their sleep" and to urge them to conscious response and his more frequent choice of a very different mode of poetic intervention in which the poet's study of feeling's temporal unfolding is supposed to bring about psychic wholeness—first in himself and then in his readers.44 The remainder of this chapter (and much of the next) will take up Wordsworth's intermittent promotion of moment-by-moment sensation over any object of sensation and thus his adoption of a temporally prospective mode in his autobiography.

2.

This chapter began by considering Kierkegaard's analogue of the deluded lover who tears himself in half—this eye, that eye, this ear, that ear—in order to see his relation from an alien vantage and does so because his thinking is essentially mistrustful, unstably grounded on a continual succession of

43 Friedrich Schlegel, Athenaeum Fragments, 116. 44 The opposition to which I refer here has only surface similarity to the one Geoffrey Hartman famously describes in Wordsworth's Poetry. Hartman's Wordsworth essentially oscillates between the desire for a world made by the human, one beyond the given, and a decision to cling to the accidents of nature and culture. Hartman's Wordsworth thus moves from a desire for self-construction to a wondering study of accidents—from one to another expression of anti-foundationalism, which I have identified with a basically retrospective mode of self-understanding. I am arguing for a Wordsworth interested in fixed principles whose poetic goal remains constant, though his strategy shifts as he invests himself in the phenomenal form of thinking and then in the way this form is reflected in poetry. Hartman's Wordsworth still is the one reflected in many contemporary studies and I take up Hartman's argument at length in chapter two. 29 spectators. It continued by considering Wordsworth's use of a complementary analogue, the "blessed babe" whose perceptions about the world emerge quickly and coherently in the light of a loving face or with the sense of the world's similar turn toward him and his own ability to interact with it. For Wordsworth, as I showed, the mother's role in this triangulated situation is not essential. She is a figure that is first in the temporal order of our lives but whose function is itself secured by the fact that Nature's face is continually toward us. At the beginning of the chapter I also suggested that Kierkegaard's analogue is representable in terms of a basic choice of temporal orientation—love is ongoing and continuous (the true lover asks how he may more perfectly love and has no leisure to view himself from the outside) while the deluded lover projects himself beyond the time of love in order to turn around and judge whether the relation truly represented him and the path of his desires. I suggested then that just as, for both thinkers, perceiving is conditioned by the perceiver's mood, which corresponds with a certain temporal orientation, so autobiography has a basic prospective or retrospective cast. It is either retrospective, structured around a rift between a narrating and a narrated consciousness: attempting on the one hand to construct a self rhetorically and on the other projecting an inaccessible material past that haunts it; that is, it offers a genetic account of a particular past self. Or autobiography is prospective, offering a general account of thinking and knowing, one supposed to recur to some degree in every life (as in Wordsworth's description of the "blessed babe") or supposed to recur cyclically in perception, as in the temporal form of feeling (which Wordsworth also depicts and to which I shall turn shortly). On all of these counts, the (un)grounding of perception, the temporality of thinking, and the pivotal nature of some (loving or alien) face, it is difficult not to think of Paul de Man's still influential treatment of autobiography in general and the autobiographical character of Wordsworth's poetry in particular. De Man claims that "the key to an understanding of Wordsworth lies in the relationship between imagination and time," where the imagination is understood as "the persistent power of mind and language after nature and history have failed" and where "the imagination engenders hope and future…as the persistent, future possibility of a retrospective reflection on its own decay."45 More famously, he calls autobiography "a defacement of the mind," describing it as the poisoned coat of Nessus which "deprives and disfigures to the precise extent that it restores."46 It is worth remembering that de Man's description re-illuminates a (presumed) problem with sensuous intuition that occupied Romanticism, one taken up by Hegel at the opening of the Phenomenology of Spirit, in which we are unable to know immediately but only mediately through concepts and in which we find a gap between the sheer presence of any object we apprehend and the abstractions we must use to consider it or to communicate our understanding about it. So, repeatedly, grasping in thought or communicating in speech appears to involve a phenomenal loss; or rather, there is a radical depreciation of the value of (sense) certainty. De Man would thus seem to have taken up the loss of sensuous givenness and to have emphasized the linguistic element within this romantic preoccupation with an inaccessible original (or with a mode of knowing that never was) and to have illustrated it with a set of "lurid figures" (to borrow Neil Hertz's term). De- facement is just a graphic term (and hardly the most graphic term that could have been chosen) to describe the manner in which perception in general is understood to occur—as a rift torn in the self, a rift that opens between speaking (communicating) and seeing (apprehending), a rift that is understood as the condition of social life. From this epistemological vantage, autobiography becomes a site of self-conscious, albeit uncomfortable, knowing that foregrounds this tear in the self

45 Paul de Man, "Time and History in Wordsworth," diacritics 17 (1987): 16, 14. 46 Paul de Man, "Autobiography as De-Facement," in The Rhetoric of Romanticism, 81. 30 and mediates upon it. Hence, de Man chooses to make autobiography not one genre among others but a figure for all writing, the figure of writing, prosopopeia—the conferring of a voice or a set of activities on an object to which they are not proper. In autobiography, the narrating consciousness is presumed to gaze upon a projected past self (an inaccessible, material origin) and to "read" the inscription there. But death itself (the speechless absence represented by the inscription placed upon it) is simply "a displaced name for a linguistic predicament"—which is also to say that in "reading" the articulating consciousness cannot grasp the uniqueness of a fleeting self; it cannot coincide with itself.47 Thus far, de Man takes up a more or less uncontested feature of autobiography, one staged by numerous autobiographers if not always recognized by readers or literary critics. Here it might be worth recalling that Rousseau's Confessions begins with the assertion of absolute uniqueness.

[1.] 1. I am forming an undertaking which has no precedent, and the execution of which will have no imitator whatsoever. I wish to show my fellows a man in all the truth of nature; and this man will be myself. 2. Myself alone. I feel my heart and I know men. I am not made like any of the ones I have seen; I dare to believe that I am not made like any that exist. If I am worth no more, at least I am different. Whether nature has done well or ill in breaking the mold in which it cast me, is something which cannot be judged until I have been read. 3. Let the trumpet of the last judgment sound when it will; I shall come with this book in my hands to present myself before the Sovereign Judge. I shall say loudly, "Behold what I have done, what I have thought, what I have been. I have told the good and the evil with the same frankness. I have been silent about nothing bad, added nothing good, and if I have happened to use some inconsequential ornament, this has never happened except to fill up a gap occasioned by my lack of memory….48

At the outset, Rousseau posits self-coincidence by conflating his text and himself in something like a moment of original unity. His Confessions are without prototype and will not serve as prototype (as no other text has or will show nature), and he is like no other man nor will there be another since "the mold" in which he was cast (a figure that seems to presuppose both precedents and precedence) is already broken. Rousseau, of course, understands himself well enough to know what he is saying: that if no other text has or will show original nature it is because he has made a thing to be apprehended in its sensuous "immediacy" just as he, Rousseau, is the only man (in a feminized, metaphorized society) or, to make the same argument another way, it is because he makes original nature, and this creation is a singular act. But, part of this staged self-coincidence involves his becoming a thing, a text, an occurrence that presupposes a moment that is always past and yet must also be the present moment, one when, as Rousseau says, "I [who stand before you] have been

47 Ibid. 48 The text continues: "I may have assumed to be true what I knew might have been so, never what I knew to be false. I have shown myself as I was, contemptible and low when I was so, good, generous, sublime when I was so: I have unveiled my interior as Thou has seen it Thyself. Eternal Being, assemble around me the countless host of my fellows: let them listen to my confessions, let them shudder at my unworthiness, let them blush at my woes. Let each of them in his turn uncover his heart at the foot of Thy throne with the same sincerity; and then let a single one say to Thee, if he dares: 'I was better than that man.'" Original emphasis. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions and Correspondence, Including the Letters to Malesherbes, trans. Christopher Kelly (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1995), 5. 31 read." In declaring that his text is unreproducible and so unreadable, Rousseau declares that the moment of coincidence between singularity and legibility can never arrive and that he belongs to the first category. Perhaps only "the Sovereign Judge" may determine whether Rousseau is Rousseau— that is, whether the present addressor presenting his book is the read text is the past, sensuous fullness of Rousseau as he occurred. This conformity, Rousseau insists, will be found in God's book (the book of life?), but as he has already assumed God's identity as creator of original nature, the book is his own (his life); and there is no other. Self-coincidence, he has suggested, cannot occur (at least not in society); for Rousseau, this is because, if there is a standard, it must be immediately given and belong to a timeless point of no relation. Unrelated itself, it must somehow govern a thoroughly relative existence.49 Even as the self-proclaimed original in his text and originator of it, he cannot bridge this gap. Rousseau briefly adopts another position, adding that the ornaments in his text merely cover over the deterioration of memory—that is, they are there and he is conscious of creating over the space of something that must have been there, that must be lost. But, as far as the human world goes, he can only be read, judged, and known when the singularity of a single individual in his very individuality can be read. Judgment depends on a missing comparand. All is projection and absence: the repeating need of recognition (to have been read) and the repeating denial of any principle of right understanding (he is original). The point is one Rousseau will reiterate over the course of his career. Goodness is the union of the real (our capacities) and the ideal (our desires), and we need to know more than that this union is missing (pace Hume); we need to know why it is missing.50 While Rousseau's philosophical works argue that, in society, imagination (with its desires and fictions) far outstrips our capacity to know and to do, his fictional works insist that the discrepancy is unavoidable because there is no thing we are. What we are might appear if the coincidence between capacity and desire appeared. On one hand, we must restrain imagination; on the other, what is needed is the presence of an original, perhaps even a posited original to which the relative world could relate once it is able to read an original. And, as the Confessions continue, they expound upon a patternless self—Rousseau's failures to meet standards, to follow advice, to correspond to his self-proclaimed identity as a musical composer, or to continue in a house in which his career is likely to advance rapidly and to be brilliant—and they narrate others' desires for a missing prototype: for a portrait of Julie. Almost as theatrically, Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater stages its own central emptiness. Slightly more than halfway through his account, and shortly after entering upon the section entitled "Introduction to the Pains of Opium," De Quincey pauses to take stock of his narrative options.

This is the point of my narrative on which, as respects my own self-justification, the whole of what follows may be said to hinge. And here I find myself in a perplexing dilemma:— Either, on the one hand, I must exhaust the reader's patience, but such a detail of my malady, and of my struggles with it, as might suffice to establish the fact of my inability to wrestle any longer with irritation and constant suffering: or, on the other hand, by passing lightly over this critical part of my story, I must forego the benefit of a stronger impression

49 I am drawing here both on Rousseau's Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality Among Men and the first book of Emile, or, On Education. 50 It is worth remembering that the reason natural man is good, according to Rousseau, is that he can meet all of his needs: for food, rest, and a female. Any need that is beyond a man's ability to achieve (by the power of his own arms) renders him weak and therefore evil. 32

left of the mind of the reader, and must lay myself open to the misconstruction of having slipped by the easy and gradual steps of self-indulging persons, from the first to the final stage of opium-eating (a misconstruction to which there will be a lurking predisposition in most readers, from my previous acknowledgements.) This is the dilemma: the first horn of which would be sufficient to toss and gore any column of patient readers, though drawn up sixteen deep and constantly relieved by fresh men: consequently that is not to be thought of. It remains then, that I postulate so much as is necessary for my purpose. And let me take as full credit for what I postulate as if I had demonstrated it, good reader, at the expense of your patience and my own. Be not so ungenerous as to let me suffer in you good opinion through my own forbearance and regard for your comfort. No: believe all that I ask of you, viz. that I could resist no longer, believe it liberally, and as an act of grace: or else in mere prudence: for, if not, then in the next edition of my Opium Confessions revised and enlarged, I will make you believe and tremble: and à force d'ennuyer, by mere dint of pandiculation I will terrify all readers of mine from ever again questioning any postulate that I shall think fit to make. This then, let me repeat, I postulate…51

De Quincey begins with the hinge, the pivot of the entire narrative, which, as with Rousseau's Confessions, is none other than the possibility of self-justification which requires a coinciding with a reference that cannot and will not be given. The reason that this reference will not be given is a version of the reason it cannot be: it involves physical particulars that simply are not communicable. Good society will not tolerate their communication, seemingly because they are not to be voiced but actually (according to this epistemology) because attempting to do so conceals the nature of knowledge. De Quincey would make a virtue of necessity by describing himself as unwilling to weary the reader's patience; but his forbearance is also staged as one of a few rhetorical strategies: flattery (the reader is surely not ungenerous—is not uncreative?—and will perform an act of grace— where no reference can merit it?), sarcasm (the image of gored, that is, punctured readers), and a host of vague threats. The threat to himself De Quincey describes as misconstruction—a non- correspondence between the intended and the understood image of the narrator which, he says, is sure to happen. The threat to the reader is finally pronounced to be not physical horror but a partly veiled boredom ("à force d'ennyuer") and a partly veiled yawn ("pandiculation"). De Quincey hints that he has been employing some circumlocution to avoid this dreaded result—that readers will find their demand for a reference leads only to a primal stupor and offense: that they waited for this?. But if that is the case, one might wonder, why take such pains to narrate what, if narrated, would destroy the sense that we have followed the narrator, that understanding is possible, why cause us (according to this logic) to be disappointed in advance by an originary nothingness? The answer is of course that this sort of autobiography—the genetic account of De Quincey's opium addiction—depends on liberating the author from reference, from the "thing he was," even at the cost of submitting him to the construction of an endless stream of readers, spectators, judges. It is as though retrospective autobiography could not get started without a performance of its own lack of origin and without announcing that its ignorance must and yet cannot legitimate its self-creation. Much less theatrically, but with no essential difference in epistemology, Franklin's autobiography offers a textbook life for posterity to imitate. The narrative is constructed around a host of maxims—drawn from Pope, "Men should be taught as if you taught them not/And things

51 Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings, ed. Barry Milligan (London: Penguin, 2003), 58-59. 33 unknown propos'd as things forgot," from Franklin's father, "nothing was useful which was not honest," from the Biblical Proverbs, "Seest thou a Man diligent in his calling, he shall stand before Kings, he shall not stand before mean Men," from English proverbs, "He that would thrive/Must ask his Wife," from common proverbs, "He that has once done you a Kindness will be more ready to do you another, than he whom you yourself have obliged," and so on.52 Anticipating the assumption that something of the man might reveal itself in the difference from these surrounding texts, Franklin pointedly refers to his imprudent decisions, moments of faithlessness, and to one long outstanding debt as "errata," that is, as textual errors he would like to correct in a second edition, one that would produce the ideal "life." He does not insist, as Rousseau had, that the text and the man are fused in the man's non- reproducible singularity but rather that the text and the man are fused in an imperfect copy text whose prototype either is scattered among a host of feeder texts or exists only as a wished-for second edition. The same basic impulses—the attempt to conflate individual and text, the split between communicating and communicated "I," submission to accidental and continuing arbitration—will be found to structure any number of autobiographies. The point is that Paul de Man's significance for the study of autobiography does not reside in his expounding in the critical realm the claims made by any number of autobiographers. His almost visceral term, de-facement, could rather be called a distraction. For the theory of autobiography, de Man's significance lies in his denial of autobiography's generic status. As he claims,

Since the concept of genre designates an aesthetic as well as a historical function, what is at stake is not only the distance that shelters the author of autobiography from his experience but the possible convergence of aesthetics and history. The investment in such a convergence, especially when autobiography is concerned, is considerable.53

Rousseau, De Quincey, and Franklin, as we have seen, insist on just such a convergence of aesthetics and history, though they do so in a spectacular manner that precludes any unacknowledged reliance on categorical confusion. For de Man, the trouble with discussing autobiography as a genre is that it conceals the very canniness of these writers. If the effect of history in and on the representation— even at the level of the resources of language and the figures available—is precisely unknowable, then discussing the genre of autobiography simply repeats at a higher level the problem of autobiography and does so with considerable loss of self-awareness. And in turn, the problem with this argument is that aesthetics and history so conceived are only the "twin horns" (to borrow De Quincey's metaphor) of retrospective autobiography. The genre of autobiography may be better described as an epistemological mode just as tragedy, comedy, epic, elegy, and lyric have a certain epistemological function. Autobiography is unique among these in its emphasis on temporal orientation. And it is the genre in which the coherence of the individual—and how such coherence is to be understood—is fundamentally in question. This coherence need not be the doubtful fusion of the continuing voice and the truncated image or the legible text and its illegible referent but could be one sought beyond the frame of the text with the true image and the stable pivot (as in Augustine's Confessions), a coherence of the good and the

52 Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, ed. J. A. Leo Lemay and P. M. Zall (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1986), 14, 7, 64, 85. Original emphasis. 53 Paul de Man, "Autobiography as De-Facement," 67. 34 givenness of cognitive structures (The Prelude), or the coherence of the accidental look of a moment and the constancy of type (À la recherche). Above all, this coherence is one of continuous time. These three autobiographies, it will be remembered, are those de Man cites in refutation of silly questions sometimes posed when the topic of autobiography's generic status is taken up; (could autobiography exist before the eighteenth century?, could it be written in verse?, how do we distinguish it from fiction?). The silliness, if that is what it is, may emerge not from the claim but the understanding of genre. Augustine's, Wordsworth's, and Proust's autobiographies are all prospective in orientation. Augustine's Confessions neither attempt to get back to something like sensuous immediacy nor do they construct a self in defiance of a presumed past. Rather, Augustine exists in the text as a reader unsure of the unfolding narrative and its interpretation—an uncertainty figured early on by his own faulty interpretation of the story of Dido and Aeneas but one that is never overcome, an uncertainty that is product of confessing (faulty and presumably less faulty self-interpretations) to God, and one that produces trusting wonderment but never mourning for a lost past or a self- fashioning pronouncement. The self simply offers its fictions as such and can do so because its truth, like that of time, memory, and creation, is held in the mind of God. Proust's À la recherche similarly offers a loose outline of a central character potentially identifiable with the work's author, but its goal, despite the title's retrospective pull, is not to recover the particularity of Marcel, but rather, through the involuntary resurgence of certain sensuously full images that lead others in train, to uncover the recurrent actions of the mind and the general periodicity of sensation rather than the immediateness of a first moment. These patterns (of involuntary memory, external perceptions filtering through reading, the prominence and organizing power of certain features of an image) are expected to recur, just as larger patterns of behavior travel across a host of characters, or the characters (Golo or Geneviève de Brabant) cast by the light of the magic lantern in Marcel's Combray bedroom swell, stretch, and shrink but maintain their characters and their star-like paths as they travel across the furniture. In neither case do we find an image of a split self. But this is not because autobiography in these cases is somehow less self-reflective but because such autobiographies treat cognition as an ongoing process and autobiography as a figure that faces forward rather than backward. The point for autobiography is again that prospective and retrospective accounts oppose each other on the questions of how to reflect and toward which authority to orient oneself— decisions that constitute the self-conscious practice of being a self. The question that autobiography poses is how knowledge shall be known—whether its form shall be understood as a constant (as Descartes implies) or only as reflected by thought as the external form of change (as Vico counters) or, again, whether its quality can be grasped by the thinker (as Kierkegaard argued through the lover who reflects on whether he is loving) or only by a subsequent thinker (as much of the literary theory drawing on post-Kantian philosophy maintains). This question could also be phrased as one about what knowledge is for: self-construction (as Franklin's, Rousseau's, and De Quincey's autobiographies suggest) or the apprehension of givenness (as Wordsworth's analogue of the blessed babe indicates) and, again, what knowledge is knowledge of: causes (as genetic accounts maintain) or belonging (as Wordsworth suggests) and duty (as Kierkegaard argues). I have treated de Man’s characterization of autobiography at length because his terms are frequently recycled within contemporary critical circles, certainly when the topic of autobiography arises, and many of his premises treated as somehow unavoidable.54 While these premises draw on a

54 De Man's discussion of autobiography has, however, been largely ignored or summarily dismissed by narratologists. See Helga Schwalm, "Autobiography" in The Living Handbook of Narratology. 35 set of eighteenth-century philosophical and literary concerns, they also could be said to reiterate the logic of a figure of thought that dominated eighteenth-century cultural and art criticism, poetry, and moral philosophy—that of the disengaged spectator whose title to right reason is grounded on his absolute distance from social and temporal participation. Further, an opposing figure of thought emerged in some of the same eighteenth-century discourses, one whose challenge to the model of knowing implied by the disengaged spectator has been all but overlooked by contemporary literary theory. Thinking through this opposing figure reopens the question of autobiography—what it is and what it does. While I have been offering depictions of alternate modes (and moods) of loving, knowing, and reflecting on the self, it may be helpful once more to give a panoramic view of these two figures of thought that oppose one another primarily on the question of the relation of knowing and time—of when knowledge is. The first figure, the disengaged spectator, is personified in Joseph Addison’s “Mr. Spectator,” who claims to be “well versed in the Theory of an Husband or a Father,” and to have made himself a “Speculative Statesman, Soldier, Merchant, and Artizan, without ever meddling in any Practical Part of Life,” and thus to be capable of discerning the errors that “escape those who are in the game.”55 This figure reappears in Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments as “the impartial spectator,” the impersonal element in personality that allows for the proper working of sympathy and judgment. It resurfaces in the exalted eye of topographical poetry and travel literature and appears in the sentimental novels of Burney and Richardson as an injunction to see and remain unseen. While this figure certainly implies that thought must court imaginative participation at the expense of the actual in order to be rational, universal, and just, it also, paradoxically, implies both thought’s temporal abstraction and its belatedness. Thus when Schiller describes ancient poetry as naïve (active) and modern poetry as sentimental (reflective), he argues that thought has developed beyond the time of action. Drawing on the same theatrical metaphor, Rousseau divides the individual life into stages, assigning the stage of action (and of tested and tasted knowledge) to the child and the stage of reflective spectatorship to adulthood. In Emile, a conversion happens at puberty, as a psychological and social about-face (the actor faces in one direction while the spectator faces in another). Just as the actor’s and spectator’s physical orientations are non-interchangeable— one cannot face in two directions at once—so mature thinking reflects on action and is oriented in opposition to it. The disengaged spectator, who gazes at (and thus opposes) action is the most familiar figure of enlightenment thought. But we can find another figure, one ordered to time, in John Locke’s insistence that knowledge only counts as such when the individual may be said to possess it, when he appropriates possible knowledge as an experience of some sort. And we find this same figure of thought in Alexander Baumgarten’s introduction of the term “aesthetics” in his 1735 Reflections on Poetry, where the term is used to describe the science of sensate knowledge, that knowledge which is complementary to and yet unable to be subsumed by concepts because it is perfected or completed in time. Poetry, Baumgarten suggests, allows us to bridge the gap between general knowledge and practice and to say that knowing must also be knowing in some way. For poetry depicts the “approach” to “a thing through a figure.”56 It fundamentally represents “present changes,” offers oblique “presentiments,” and, because it employs metaphor, metonymy, and epithet, points (through doubleness) to the phenomenal lag of all knowing in time (§24, 62, 79). We can find this figure again

55 Joseph Addison, “Thursday, March 1, 1711, no. 1,” The Spectator, ed. Henry Morley (London: Routledge, 1891). 56 Alexander Baumgarten, Reflections on Poetry (Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus), trans. Karl Aschenbrenner et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954), §79. 36 in Kierkegaard, particularly through his use of the saying that “to understand and to understand are two things,” that “for a man to understand what he himself says is one thing, and to understand himself in what is said is something else.”57 For Kierkegaard not only points to the difference of appropriative thought—to the lag between intellectual assent and a set of ongoing physical and psychic practices. He also suggests that a man might catch a glimpse of himself in motion, through the kind of speaking that does not merely precipitate out into another set of statements which could have been made about a third party, thereby becoming "past" and "objective" rather than a task for the speaker. But it is Henri Bergson who has most clearly described thought as having a thoroughly temporal character, such that our feeling progresses in an ever-changing and ever intensifying series and such that it prefigures the responses that are underway in us rather than recording the presence of objects in space. For this reason, Bergson consistently refutes the notion that perception could have wholly speculative interest.58 For where there is no corresponding response begun in us, there is no perception.59 Perception arises only in relation to those actions of ours which we might yet veto; it arises out of suspense and in a “zone of indetermination” between the incapacity to act (as in paralysis) and habit (in which what we will do is already established).60

The Prelude demonstrates such an orientation, offering a form of autobiographical thinking that does not rely on a temporal schism.61 For it does not regard itself, its body, from a floating, spectacular vantage; the narrating consciousness and the perceiving consciousness have not separated out into categorically different selves belonging to categorically different moments. While Wordsworth is describing the past, it is the past returned by imagination to temporal fluidity. The Prelude’s mode of remembering and representing is not essentially reflective—if reflection means gathering a swatch of narrative and turning around to see what was never seen from a forward-facing position or turning to regard one’s life as if from the end of life. Wordsworth, we might say, is the Orpheus who does not turn. In this sense, the poem renders the past in the manner of the present, as something not fully formed by the imagination and capable of revealing imagination’s tentative movements. While this sensation of uncertainty gathers into full force only intermittently in the longer versions of The

57 Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety,142. 58 Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 28. 59 Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will, 22-23. 60 Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, 32, 36-42. See also Time and Free Will, 33-35. 61 Recently Monique Morgan has described The Prelude as prospective, arguing that the poem is “constantly looking forward to a conclusion the reader knows from the very start—Wordsworth’s status as a great poet, fostered by Nature.” This is obviously not the kind of prospective orientation I am discussing. Morgan’s conclusions follow from the premise that narrative orientation is defined by the moment at which the reader may be said to apprehend the whole: at the end (after the reader completes the work) or at the beginning (as a foregone conclusion). In these objective terms, a prospective narrative is no more than an inverted retrospective narrative and there is no possibility of talking about the vantage of time—that is, of incompleteness, uncertainty, and process. Monique Morgan, “Narrative Means to Lyric Ends in Wordsworth’s Prelude,” NARRATIVE 16.3 (October 2008): 299. M. H. Abrams has also described The Prelude as designed to end at its beginning, as participating in the romantic tendency to secularize the “strongly prospective” Christian view of history. M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), 79, 32-37. 37

Prelude, it is Wordsworth’s innovation. The relatively prosaic (explanatory, thematic) sections of the longer versions of the poem do not negate Wordsworth’s insight that, were one to try to write life— not to depict some particular person’s life—one would attempt to write sensation as it is registered and as an excess before it is captured by meaning. This, I believe, is Wordsworth’s unstated insight about autobiography: that it need not retrospectively characterize the writer or some portion of the past. Autobiography’s subject—insofar as it is autobiography and does not teeter into discursive biography—is not character but time. The Prelude thus labors to produce the feeling of feeling as it happens in time. Any intuition of self arrives almost accidentally, through attention to something else, and recedes under the flux of impressions, and any intuition about the manner in which perception occurs is likewise borne along by events before they are quite that, while they exist as the prescience of events. Wordsworth comes closest to offering us the theory for The Prelude’s practice in the Preface to his (1815) Poems—more specifically, in his (now famous) celebration of Milton’s likening Satan to a fleet of ships which appears to hang in the clouds. Here, Wordsworth says, we see “the full strength of imagination.”62 At this point in the Preface, imagination has two functions. It combines (plural things become singular, an aggregate of ships becomes one figure) and it reproduces an early moment in perception before sense fully resolves into “knowledge” (although we know their track is on the water, ships may initially appear to float in the sky). These two functions, the power to resolve and the power to make sensible the still resolving, are those which must routinely operate in the lag time between sense and judgment, either shrinking it or drawing it out. For now, let us to attend to the terms of Wordsworth’s praise. The poet, he says, “taking advantage of [the fleet’s] appearance to the senses…dares to represent it as hanging in the clouds, both for the gratification of the mind…and in reference to the motion and appearance of the sublime object.”63 Any analysis of Wordsworth’s discussion would have to begin with the emphasis on appearance. When Wordsworth claims that imagination “has no reference to images that are merely a faithful copy, existing in the mind, of absent external objects,” it seems clear that a mere “faithful copy” would not be faithful to the senses but rather faithful at an objective or cultural level; it would be faithful to a prior knowledge of the object.64 Imagination in its strength does not present complete objects nor does it transcribe what has commonly been concluded or will be again concluded (I saw a ship sailing in the water) but is most imaginative when the “copy” it produces is faithful to the mistakes of sensation (a fleet “hangs in the clouds.”)65 This fidelity to the mind’s process is pleasing. Twice in quick

62 William Wordsworth, “Preface to the Poems (1815),” in William Wordsworth: The Major Works, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 631. 63 William Wordsworth, “Preface to the Poems (1815),”631. 64 William Wordsworth, “Preface to the Poems (1815),” 630-31. 65 We see the same pattern in Wordsworth’s discussion of the Stock-dove which the poet nearly “dispossesses…of a corporeal existence” in order to render it as perceived by the senses. Ibid., 632. A longer discussion would consider imagination’s presentation of an intermediate moment as the ground for Wordsworth’s subsequent discussion of the intermediate image in “Resolution and Independence.” Celeste Langan makes the opposite argument about the Preface: that not only is etymology dismissed as “a superstitious belief in the relation between word and thing” but “history and sensation” are “new enthrallments.” Langan’s argument connects the liberal subject’s negative freedom with the power of abstract values to represent. So “the world ‘imagination’ here functions as the Romantic image does, as the vagrant does: expropriated from a determinative context, it holds the place of the unimaginable, the abstract.” Celeste Langan, Romantic Vagrancy: Wordsworth and the Simulation of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 35. 38 succession Wordsworth connects the mind’s gratification with the representation of some appearance which is naturally metaphorical, that is, metaphorical through anticipation or perceptual refraction. The point is not that there is no literal counterpart to sensuous mistake but that its reproduction gives the mind, however imperfectly, the feeling of itself in motion. As Wordsworth puts it, in these instances the mind is “in its activity for its own gratification.”66 A vertiginous feeling invests many of The Prelude’s episodes—the boy of Winander, the drowned man, the skating scene, or even the two consciousnesses—just as it invests Milton’s simile. In both cases the poet presents the known as if it were unfolding before us—as an early moment in perception which revises itself. If we take seriously Wordsworth’s claim that imagination can offer the mind an oblique image of itself in motion, we are taking the early moment not (simply) as a previous moment but as the most present moment in sensation. The vertiginous feeling has to do with a categorical incompleteness. Duration is the experience of being in time without the (full) preparation and protection of narrative. It is the ordinary (not traumatic) lack of preparedness, the ordinary lack of fictionalization (of planting one’s snowdrops in the snow) that invests daily life under or alongside the fictions that sustain social intercourse. The anxiety in The Prelude is the product of a mind sensitive to the autobiographical insofar as we understand the autobiographical to be an orientation in time or the capacity for receiving unassimilated sensation. Just as Milton’s description gives us both narrative (Satan is flying) and the accidents of perception and association (the object of sight is multiple, the object of sight is multiple and swift, a fleet), so Wordsworth gives us narrative and an excess of feeling. Milton’s poetic power lies in the sublime, in what is indicated but un-visualizable. Wordsworth’s power lies in anxiety, in the mind’s feeling for what is possible in perception and for the manner in which it acts. I shall turn now to a moment in The Prelude in which Wordsworth gives us the option of reading forward, i.e. in the manner of life. The sudden unfreezing of the reader’s relation to the text (and the corresponding ratification of reading as a necessary counterweight to re-reading) can be expressed as a tension between the sentence and the line as organizing principles of poetic meaning. Poetry always guards the possibility of making palpable the discrepancy between the meaning given to the eye and the meaning given to the ear, between re-reading and reading. Silent (visual) reading lends itself to the recursive; reading aloud (Wordsworth’s manner of composition), in which speaking is continuous with hearing, works against the closed circuit of anaphoric reference. I want to attend to the mild surprise a reader might feel at Wordsworth’s tonal and thematic shifts, to the mistakes we might make while reading. Here is Wordsworth’s famous description of memory as a mode of double-consciousness:

so wide appears The vacancy between me and those days, Which yet have such self-presence in my mind That sometimes when I think of them I seem Two consciousnesses—conscious of myself, And of some other being. A grey stone Of native rock, left midway in the square Of our small market-village, was the home And centre of these joys… (2. 28-36)

66 William Wordsworth, “Preface to the Poems (1815),”631. 39

I have included more of this bit of text than might seem strictly necessary in order to emphasize the generosity of reading and a movement that seems particularly Wordsworthian to me. This movement—from the full stop after “being” to the strange delight seizing on “a grey stone”—is both less and more than a brushing off or a setting to the side—less, since it appears to happen at the perceptual rather than at the deliberative level, and more, since the poet’s interest lies in mimicking the mind’s movement rather than in passing over or retaining any particular idea. Here the thought turns aside so lightly and so entirely within the bounds of textual sense that we can choose to ignore the tension between the punctuation and the enjambment, though the new thought runs in an entirely different course without any motion to account for the previous one. Wordsworth never makes explicit what this “other being” is. Were we to link it to the lines that preceded it, we would gather the familiar yet residually mysterious sense of another consciousness within consciousness.67 Were we to link the “other being” to its nearest referent, we would link it to the grey stone. In either case, we seem to be looking at a representation of immanence. The anachronistic perception divides and binds times; present consciousness feels itself to be gazing at its past and, reassuringly, senses itself as an effect. Such a severing and compression of times must be happening on some level, for, though the poet appears to move from an odd feeling to external matter of fact, we know the stone is a mental matter. Its material referent is long gone and the interior of the mind looks as vulnerable to incident as the objects it perceives. The problem with ending an analysis here is that the poet’s interest in the grey stone goes on so long that it far exceeds the possibility of reference. In the next eleven lines the poet skips back and forth mentally, reconstructing, along with the stone, the former town around it, the stone’s subsequent removal and incorporation into a dance hall, and the “old dame” who was named after it, and so on. By this point, the second consciousness is simply gone, dissolved as an object of thought and displaced by the interest of what comes next. The duration of the poet’s interest in the grey stone resists the object’s full incorporation into a metonymic structure and paradoxically emphasizes the forward propulsion of consciousness. Insofar as the critic ties the stone to the other being, the passage will appear recursive, bound to the closed circuit of anaphoric reference. Insofar as the critic attends to the quiet and total topical shift, the new absorption that springs unpredictably from the old, the passage will appear to move as if in time. The enjambment’s strain against the current of the sentence turns the figure of reading forward. We can read in the direction of a mind (built up like a strain of music) shifting itself as it notices anew. Or we can turn around and attend to the precipitates of anachronistic judgment.

67 While the ethnographic/autobiographic impulse is apparent in many of Wordsworth’s ballads, I am arguing (in contrast to Alan Bewell) that The Prelude, including the “two consciousnesses” does not give us something like Rousseauvian reflection in which the narrator recovers his “other being” on the faces of others, Alan Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment: Nature, Man, and Society in the Experimental Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), see esp. 35 for Bewell’s discussion of the two consciousnesses. 40

Chapter Two: Wordsworth’s Poetics of Suspense

In both recent and established theories of literature, suspense functions as a defining feature of the literary. While one philosophical tradition understands suspense as that literary feature that banishes abstraction and sets the reader at the point of action,1 most critical treatments identify it with literature’s absolute distance from the world and from action or with a linguistic capacity to defer interpretive closure and epistemological certainty. Criticism has frequently made Wordsworth’s poetry exemplary of some version of this latter understanding. Recently, for example, Andrew Bennett has characterized Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads as an account of poetic nescience; Anne-Lise François has described Wordsworth’s poetics in terms of “lyric inconsequence;” and Paul Fry has made Wordsworth’s poetry central to his account of the “meaning-free” moment of literary “ostension.”2 Wordsworthian suspense itself has long been associated with the series of essays Paul de Man wrote from the late 1960s to the late 1980s linking the images and descriptions of suspense we find in Wordsworth’s poetry and prose to the precariousness of our linguistic situation.3 Recently, The Prelude’s apprehensive quality and its scenes of physical instability have also been analyzed as symptomatic of the poet’s psychological motivations4 or as indicating a set of historical conditions obliquely glimpsed—for example, an intuition of the commodity form.5 None of these positions adequately represents how suspense works in Wordsworth's poetics and, consequently, how Wordsworth understands the literary. While my present argument has relevance for Wordsworth studies, its larger aim is to delineate a recently neglected understanding of poetics. To that end, this essay locates Wordsworth within a Lockean tradition of writing about suspense and argues that the images and descriptions of suspense we find in Wordsworth’s poetry and prose bespeak an account of literature’s ability to perform a very specific task: that of reorienting readers’ habits to the good. This understanding of poetry’s aim (and the understanding of action that shadows it) has become alien to modern criticism. It involves metaphysical and epistemological assumptions many of us do not share—for instance, that there is a constant in human thinking and conduct we may call “the good” and that, to paraphrase Wordsworth, by

1 Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 289; Sartre, What Is Literature?, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Routledge, 2001), 29-47. 2 Andrew Bennett, “Wordsworth’s Poetic Ignorance,” in Wordsworth’s Poetic Theory: Knowledge, Language, Experience, ed. Alexander Regier and Stefan H. Uhlig (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 19-35. Anne-Lise François, Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 166-70. Paul Fry, A Defense of Poetry: Reflections on the Occasion of Writing (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 11-13, 99. 3 See: “Time and History in Wordsworth,” “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” and the series of essays, “Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image,” “Wordsworth and Hölderlin,” “Autobiography as De-Facement,” and “Wordsworth and the Victorians” reprinted in The Rhetoric of Romanticism. 4 Wilner argues that a transferred desire to be thwarted motivates Wordsworth to thwart his own work on The Recluse by expanding The Prelude. “Wordsworth’s Cliff-Hanger.” Jacobus attributes The Prelude’s uneasiness to the Wordsworth’s fear of imaginative stasis. Romanticism, Writing, and Sexual Difference, 104. Eldridge describes the anxiety Wordsworth’s poetry exhibits as the concomitant of a certain kind of self-questioning (about whether the poet has achieved life as a genuine human subject). Richard Eldridge, “Wordsworth and the Life of a Subject,” in The Meaning of “Life” in Romantic Poetry and Poetics, ed. Ross Wilson (New York: Routledge, 2009) 65, 67. 5 Simpson, Wordsworth, Commmodification, and Social Concern, 7-11. 41 contemplating the relations of our thoughts we can know what it is. While the expression “reoriented to the good” is not Wordsworthian, the sense is. Wordsworth recurrently insists that his poetry “has a worthy purpose,” that his poems will exalt the taste and ameliorate the affections, that they will “teach the young and the gracious of every age, to see, to think and feel, and therefore to become more actively and securely virtuous,” or will “extend the domain of sensibility for the delight, the honour, and the benefit of human nature” (original emphasis).6 Further, Wordsworth does not merely make claims about the goal of his poems; he discusses how the poet must behave in order to produce such effects and what sort and what features of poetry enable the regenerative process. My contention is that these statements correspond to the total picture of the way suspense works in Wordsworth’s poetry and prose; they find their complement in his depiction of the temporal unfolding of thought in his poetry generally and in The Prelude in particular; and there is a technical correlative for them in Wordsworth’s theory of meter. In this total picture of Wordsworthian suspense, we find a reflective poetics—a poetry turned inward to the form in which we know—that paradoxically indicates that attention to form enables the reader to respond from her (integrated) personality. While we could trace Wordsworth’s attitude toward poetry back to Horace, and the view of action that accompanies it back to Aristotle or Augustine (all actions aim at some good, and those that are most free and most perfectly allow us to achieve our end are determined by the good), there is a nearer equivalent in Locke’s account of action in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Without going into detail at this point, suffice it say that, for Locke, we may determine our actions to the good by temporarily suspending the prosecution of our desires, and this doctrine of suspense may be given a rational or a phenomenological explanation. There are moments in Wordsworth’s prose that hearken back to the rational account that Locke himself provides.7 But it is the (phenomenological) explanation we can derive from Locke’s philosophy of what happens to us when we enter into a state of suspense that I find consistently reflected in Wordsworth’s explicit and implicit poetics and that I will scrutinize. Hence, I will not be arguing that Wordsworth intends to excite his readers to rational deliberation for the purpose of reflective self-correction. The account of poetics that Wordsworth gives is formally distinct from other positive accounts of the relation between literature and action, for suspense in Wordsworth’s poetics is not only the sign of a modal difference. It does not merely provide an occasion for the reader’s activation (as poetry’s special modality provides an occasion for Philip Sidney’s and, later, for Sartre’s reader). Wordsworth believes that when descriptive language is addressed to the conscious choice of readers they respond from the egoism of present habits; readers’ self-conscious preferences need to be circumvented, albeit with their active involvement. Suspense in Wordsworth’s poetry traces the anticipatory form of cognition and offers an occasion

6 William Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads, in The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser. 3 Volumes. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 1.126. Hereafter PLB and included in the main text. William Wordsworth, “To Lady Beaumont” (May 1807), The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. Ernest De Selincourt (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005). Hereafter Letters and included in the main text. “Essay Supplementary to the Preface,” in The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, 3:126. Hereafter ES and included in the main text. 7 Wordsworth’s insistence that thoughts are “the representatives of all our past feelings” and that by repeatedly contemplating them we can “discover what is really important to men” and produce “habits of mind” that benefit us and others parallels Locke’s understanding of the mechanical way that the good will operate on us, provided that we repeatedly contemplate it. Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1.126. 42 for the temporary occlusion of personality. Thus, the following account of Wordsworthian suspense has affinities with formalist and rhetorical criticism, both of which are interested in the breakdown or bracketing of individual identity and both of which intermittently (or inadvertently) offer accounts of literary action, though my account obviously differs in its premises and its ends.8

Any new discussion of Wordsworthian suspense is indebted to Paul de Man’s now classic treatment of the subject; it is equally indebted to a discussion by Geoffrey Hartman. It is worth retracing these accounts, not least because I will be treating some of the same passages of The Prelude and because, in positing a state of linguistic or ethical drift, de Man and Hartman point to what is ordinarily meant in critical circles by “suspense.” I will argue that we find something quite different in Wordsworth’s poetry. At the same time, both critics attend to a feature I believe central to Wordsworthian suspense: its double form. For de Man, suspense may be imaged in Wordsworth’s poetry as a child hanging from a cliff; it may be felt as anxiety and as a premonition of death; but it always indicates an absolute rift between linguistic and phenomenal realms. Here we might pause. The condition described through Wordsworth’s poetry, a fluid expanse of language in which terms have no external or internally determinate reference, is obliquely glimpsed as vertigo; but this seemingly experiential analogue must, in keeping with the argument, be understood as language’s redoubling on itself or non- coincidence with itself. This loss of phenomenal ground is supposed to be vividly on display in autobiography, which allows us to contemplate as an effect of language what we could never grasp as an experience and so offers a figure of (figurative) understanding.9 Thus de Man reads The Prelude’s boy of Winander episode as Wordsworth’s meditation on his own death by way of the fiction of a recollected third person. The substitution of a pronoun, “he” for “I,” allows us to contemplate the ordinarily obscured activity of language, the way it overflows a perennial mistake of consciousness in positing identity.10 The “preknowledge of…mortality” de Man finds here negatively indicates what language is, just as The Prelude’s images of hanging figure its ungrounded nature. Language is primarily described in terms of a (permanent) interruption, though it might equally be described in terms of a continuous movement or anticipation. In any case, interruption and movement indicate the same thing as do the equivocal mode in which we know and the disclosure of that mode.11

8 For de Man, any attention to the linguistic functioning of language becomes a “negative process in which the grammatical cognition is undone.” We may describe this interruption in the smooth working of meaning-making systems as the disclosing of a category error to which we are prone; but, for those who take it up, such disclosing functions as an event that changes the meaning of knowledge. Literariness, in such an account, always carries the potential for action. Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 17. Likewise, whenever formalist criticism values art’s autonomy, it espouses a theory of literary action. Thus Fry writes, “I see the ostensive moment in literature then as a respite, a temporary release from significance, after which, when we return to the workaday world of meaning production, as of course we must, we no longer feel that we are chained to the assembly line.” Fry, A Defense, 204. 9 De Man, “Time and History,” 7-9, see especially n. 9. See also “Autobiography as De-Facement,” 69-71, 73. 10 Ibid. 11 We find the same pattern in studies of Wordsworthian suspense influenced by de Man. See: Warminski, “Missed Crossing, 983-1006. See also: Chase, Decomposing Figures, 1-31. 43

Although he never calls it by this name, Hartman also offers a two-part account of Wordsworthian suspense. There is a presentiment that accompanies the awakening of self- consciousness and its sense of being able to choose and to move beyond nature. The presentiment has to do with what we might call the discovery of ground in the mind, a discovery that establishes one course of action as necessarily better than another and thus potentially justifies imagination’s self-assertion. Sidney famously writes that the poet, “lifted up with the vigour of his own invention, doeth grow in effect another nature.”12 For Hartman, it is this poetic capacity of discerning ground—and an inner ought that does not emanate from culture—which Wordsworth relinquishes, turning instead to a resolutely indeterminate mode of receiving and responding to the world, namely surmise, in which “the actual is in some way the potential” and “a finitude is removed from the verbs as from the action.”13 Hartman’s more famous description of Wordsworth’s tendency in The Prelude to treat moments of apocalypse (the revelation of imagination) as “akedah” (the binding of imagination to nature and culture) repeats the same argument at a higher level. In this case, the poet is not said to treat matter of fact as though it could sink back into the realm of imagination; matter of fact becomes the reality principle that guards against the search for a higher reality. But the end goal is the same; the poet is again supposed to relinquish the search for something beyond the happenstance of culture. For Hartman, Wordsworth’s supposed choice to cling to current expressions of nature and culture is genuinely ethical because revelation never reveals the true and to seek it is merely to disguise one’s own violently antisocial tendencies. Thus for both critics, Wordsworth’s poetry discloses a reversal of our supposed epistemological situation and bespeaks that reversal in the nature of poetics, which must now be understood as negatively linked to action and as disclosing the impossibility of arriving at anything like the stable knowledge which might end in an “ought.” Central to both accounts is their attention to something anticipated and to a condition that has obtained, an ambivalence reflected in the term “suspense,” which indicates both the anxious expectancy of an imminent event and a temporary cessation of some ordinary state of affairs. Both of these modes of suspense appear in The Prelude. Book five foregrounds an oscillation between scenes that draw out the periodicity of sensation and those that depict the insensibility of reading. I am going to look at this oscillation as it plays out in the famous episode of the drowned man. And I will argue that just as the interplay between these two modes of suspense is what action at its most free is for John Locke, whose epistemology was omnipresent in eighteenth-century literary culture, so Wordsworth is developing a complex theory of transformative action, one which returns us to the broad question of poetics: What literature does. In the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke speaks of the train of “voluntary Actions, that succeed one another every moment that we are awake.”14 Most of these—like sitting or standing—we do not consider until we are on the point of performing them and then only with the accompanying sense that we could do otherwise. This formal anxiety, this prefiguring of multiple imminent courses of action, does not benefit or bother us much, for where we are not naturally conditioned to avoid real evils, we have habituated ourselves to be uneasy if we lack other things we believe necessary to our happiness. And we avoid the present uneasiness. Most discussions of Locke tend to conclude here. But for Locke, between the present uneasiness and the determination of the

12 Sir Philip Sidney, “The Defence of Poesy,” in Sir Philip Sidney, The Major Works, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 216. 13 Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry, 9, 8. 14 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 2.21.24, 40. 44 will lies the possibility of entering into a temporary state of suspense. This ability, “to suspend the prosecution of this or that desire,” in order to “judge of the good or evil of what we are going to do,” Locke says, is “the source of all liberty.”15 The statement is somewhat mysterious, but it seems to mean two things. First, for Locke, we simply can know the good, though we may not properly value it, for we do not feel distant discomfort (however great we suppose it to be) as we feel present discomfort, and absent good does not condition our wills. We can, however, suspend the prosecution of present desires in order to remind ourselves of this greater good and to contemplate it until it acts on us as though it were immediately present. In addition to this rational account, we may give a phenomenological one. That is, because all our ideas are conditioned by flowing time, to alter the timing of our responses is already to alter their condition.16 In brief, personality, for Locke, is a suspenseful anticipation, subject to a set of phenomenal constraints. Imagining we can set aside those constraints to consider the greater good, we suspend personality’s enactment and inevitably alter its course. It is this pattern, in broad outline, that The Prelude’s book five exhibits.

1. Book five opens with an anxious meditation on the impermanence of books followed by a friend’s (or, in the 1850 Prelude, the poet’s) crossing into a dream in which an Arab-Quixote attempts to save human knowledge—geometry and poetry—by outracing an advancing deluge. The boy of Winander episode begins as a growing din of responsiveness—boy mimicking owls hooting back—that abruptly turns into a lengthened pause. And the drowned man episode begins as an anticipatory seeking, the boy Wordsworth wandering the area around Hawkshead Grammar School, that seems countered by aesthetic distancing at the very moment that seeking locates its object: a corpse dragged from the nearby lake. Each of these episodes also overspills its apparent parameters. The poet goes on to make the Arab-Quixote’s project (to save books from nothingness by burying them) his own. The boy of Winander episode reaches backward, responding to a prior discussion of the problem of a modern, self-conscious education. Immediately following the episode of the drowned man, the rhythm of seeking and displaced finding is repeated twice: in the boy Wordsworth’s frustrated attempt to procure the rest of The Arabian Nights followed by his access to a store of books at his father’s house and in the narrator’s recollection of his absorbed waterside reading and belated realization that a fish has stolen the bait from his line. This immersive reading produces slight contrition, then a sudden encomium on books that occupies the rest of the book. Broadly speaking, then, book five exhibits a familiar Wordsworthian pattern—of an expressive progress, followed by a state of absorption, and an implicit transformation—which is framed by an opening lament over books’ impermanence and a concluding celebration of their effects on us. This final burst of enthusiasm reflects a response to a question about literature’s function that Wordsworth works out over the whole book and sets up in the episode of the drowned man—specifically, by considering the relation between two modes of suspense. Let us take a look at it.

Well do I call to mind the very week When I was first entrusted to the care Of that sweet valley—when its paths, its shores And brooks, were like a dream of novelty

15 Locke, Essay, 2.21.47. 16 Locke derives our sense of time from the passing of ideas in our minds, each of which lasts an instant. Essay, 2.14.10. 45

To my half-infant thoughts—that very week, While I was roving up and down alone Seeking I knew not what, I chanced to cross One of those open fields, which, shaped like ears, Make green peninsulas on Esthwaite’s Lake. Twilight was coming on, yet through the gloom I saw distinctly on the opposite shore A heap of garments, left as I supposed By one who there was bathing. Long I watched, But no one owned them; meanwhile the calm lake Grew dark, with all the shadows on its breast, And now and then a fish up-leaping snapped The breathless stillness. The succeeding day— Those unclaimed garments telling a plain tale— Went there a company, and in their boat Sounded with grappling-irons and long poles: At length, the dead man, ’mid that beauteous scene Of trees and hills and water, bolt upright Rose with his ghastly face, a spectre shape— Of terror even. (5.450-73)17

As the episode opens, we find a description that is less of Hawkshead than of cognition that has become aware of itself as it gathers and anticipates its own imminent responses. We find, in other words, an intimation of the suspense of continuous enactment. The boy’s thought begins in near blankness—in a dreamlike encounter with the new. It passes to the restless movements of his aimless seeking; gathers intensity as the green fields “shaped like ears” press into the lake and suggest a posture of forward-straining attentiveness; and clarifies itself in the boy’s sighting of the clothes on the opposite shore. The child’s hypothesis—these clothes were left by a bather—and his sense of waiting on something rise into a psychic excitability marked by the half-knowledge of puns: although he continues to watch the clothes we are told that “no one owned them” and that a fish snapped “the breathless stillness.” In the long pause before the man’s clothes can be read, and in the slow progression from the boy’s first spotting them on the far shore to watching them and half-toying with the “plain tale” they will tell a day later, we are made aware of two apparently distinct principles. One of them is the temporal dependence of interpretation. The point seems to be carefully prepared for us by the boy’s observations changing at regular intervals. They leap into being as one hypothesis, which becomes increasingly difficult to sustain as twilight draws on and the lake grows darker, and then shift abruptly into a new understanding after the night has passed. And, secondly, we are made aware, though as an under-suggestion, of the anachronistic elements of this episode, that is, the elements that are generated by the retrospective process of constructing a self-consistent poem. Wordsworth will go on to say that he felt “no vulgar fear” at the appearance of the drowned man because he had seen “such sights before among the shining streams/Of fairyland” (5.473, 475-77). But even before this admission, we may notice that the attentiveness suggested by the ear-shaped peninsulas recalls a passage fifty lines earlier in the poem: when the boy of Winander stretches attentively over a lake.

17 Wordsworth, The Prelude. Here and elsewhere book and line numbers will be given parenthetically in the main text. All citations are from the 1805 Prelude. 46

Likewise, the drowned man who is pulled on grappling-irons “bolt upright/…with his ghastly face” recalls the “discharged soldier” of book four, “upright, lank and lean,” whose “mouth/Shewed ghastly in the moonlight” (4.407, 410-13). And in the child’s punning anticipations, we may say that a narrative effect has obtained, that the poet’s subsequent knowledge overlays the boy Wordsworth’s supposedly evolving awareness. To say that a narrative effect obtains or that this episode is driven by formal exigencies may preclude the possibility of its representing some particular, past line of thought, but it does not preclude the possibility of its representing thought’s general form. Like meter, which accommodates an infinite number of rhythmic expressions of a certain kind, the picture of cognitive organization here is typical, in that it indicates the periodicity of thought and the felt basis for diachronic understanding. Wordsworth is showing us a set of narrative and a set of phenomenal constraints, neither of which may be reduced to the other. To put the point another way, we could say that temporal dependence and narrative come to indicate the “passive” and “active” features of cognition, where “passive” designates the (prospective) organization of sense experience toward enactment that marks the thinker as an existing human, and “active” designates the dynamic aspects of this process: the fact and quality of attention given to produce the scene, as well as the (retrospective) repetitions and simulations that mark the thinker as some particular human. These passive and active aspects of cognition are not fully separable, though Wordsworth intermittently occludes one in order to draw out the other. Hence, as the episode opens, we find that, just as the man who will be dragged from Esthwaite’s lake had shed his garments to swim, the poet has temporarily shed his ability to characterize the scene. The utterly bare description of Hawkshead’s “paths, its shores/And brooks” and equally bare illustration of the way affect compounds itself at intervals culminates in the emergence of a man—a dead man, we might wish to add, but a man considered merely as such. For the man drawn from the lake appears not as James Jackson or as a schoolteacher (information subsequently retrieved by scholars) but simply as a drowned man. We may recall Edmund Burke’s famous discussion of Jacobin reason as a stripping of the decent drapery of life to reveal our “naked shivering nature.”18 Two years before Burke published his Reflections on the Revolution in France, Wordsworth used a similar metaphor in his “Essay on Morals” to blast Godwin and Paley for “attempt[ing] to strip the mind of all its old clothing,” recommending instead writing which contains a description of life, because it alone has power “to incorporate itself with the blood & vital juices of our minds, and thence to…form[] those habits” from which all our actions flow.19 Wordsworth’s “Essay” insists on both senses of the word “habit,” costume and custom, and insists that actions result from the narratives with which we clothe our minds. Yet he does not do so in order to dismiss the notion that we can seek a standard for ethics (and poetics) in the permanent (passive) features of mind. The relation between the episode of the drowned man and Wordsworth’s fragmentary “Essay” is far more complex than, say, the recurrence to some kind of admonition tied to the search for bare human form. There are two principles at work in the prose fragment and book five and we need to examine both principles to explain what Wordsworth is doing. On one hand, Wordsworth’s “Essay” suggests that we only discover dispositions for ourselves when we engage with narratives, pictures of life. The point is vital to our treatment of the function of reading in book five. Book five’s opening gambit rehearses the complex metaphor that links books to habits as things taken on—both as clothing and as the expression or poiesis of our

18 Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 77. 19 Wordsworth, “Essay on Morals,” 1:103. 47 lives. Lamenting that, while the Sovereign Intellect’s work—nature and a deathless spirit—will last, our works—our continual articulation of ourselves to ourselves, i.e. books—will not, Wordsworth says: “Tremblings of the heart/It gives, to think that the immortal being/No more shall need such garments” (5.21-23). These lines have received a great deal of critical attention. In particular, Andrzej Warminski has described the comparison between the Sovereign Intellect’s book, nature, and our books, figured as garments, as hearkening back to an analogy between soul and body.20 The comparison may be stated in these terms, as long as souls are not taken as unique personalities. But the problem of our works’ transience is more precisely stated as a problem of individuation, that is, a problem of how we may treat actions and what our real relation to them is.21 Wordsworth adds that we may survive our works and be “abject, depressed, forlorn, disconsolate” (5.27). If, as immortal or as existing beings, we may be separated from the history of our thoughts and feelings, we are naked and unindividuated souls. The point reads like a problem and a discovery. Although it differs widely from the “naked reasonings” identified with Godwin and Paley, the episode of the drowned man presents something less than a picture of life. It seems implausible that Wordsworth would draw out the general parameters of thought here only to condemn that prospect. Much of Wordsworth’s writing in fact suggests that there is something salutary about contemplating thought (partly) disjoined from its clothing. In linking books with habits, book five of The Prelude and the “Essay on Morals” also link them with the active features of cognition. These active features were shown to depend on the passive features of thought in the episode of the drowned man, where the range of possible interpretations shifts with the temporal unfolding of cognition. An anecdote in the “Essay on Morals” makes a similar point. Noting that all our actions flow from our habits, except “those accidental & indefinite” ones, Wordsworth explains, “a tale of distress is related…relief for the sufferers proposed. The vain man, the proud man, the avaricious man &c., all contribute, but from very different feelings.” In every case, “except in that of the affectionate & benevolent man…the act of giving [is] more or less accidental.”22 Narratives that produce one-time effects, we understand, fail, for narrative is supposed to determine individuals’ inner habits—their characteristic modes of grasping cultural values—rather than to wrest particular actions from them. In doing the latter, narratives do nothing at all. Each of these men gives—but from his current character (the vain man out of vanity, the proud man out of pride, and so on). One obvious conclusion is that descriptions of life are necessary but not sufficient for the formation of inner habits. Wordsworth does not say what else is needed, though it is relatively easy to guess based on what misfires in the tale of distress. First, the tale relies on social awareness to produce its effect. In order for narratives (habits) to form the inner habits by which we could grasp them, our attention must be drawn from ourselves so that we respond indirectly. Second, just as propositional reasoning of moral philosophy does not develop in time, any tale that solicits immediate acceptance or rejection forgoes its only hope of success: the slow process in which feeling forms. Only those descriptions that stay with us, that we linger over and repeat to ourselves, may be incorporated into our bodies (part of the “blood and vital juices of our minds”). Such descriptions become possessions in that we seem to exert active and unique control over them (repeating them), and we are more likely to repeat them if they contain what is fundamentally general and bodily: the experience of time and the compounding of affect.

20 Warminski, “Facing Language,” 26-48. 21 I am working with reference to a Kierkegaardian understanding of individuation. Kierkegaard distinguishes the individual from the instance. See for example, The Concept of Anxiety, 33-34. 22 William Wordsworth, “Essay on Morals,” in Prose Works, 1.103. Original emphasis. 48

The point seems simple enough. Effective poetry must draw readers from social self- consciousness even as it grounds itself on the periodicity of cognition, since heightened sensitivity to immediate context prohibits change (which requires a certain amount of temporal endurance to be change) and neither thought nor society can move in any direction at any point in time. Practically speaking, we may wonder how the poet is to give readers the sense of duration and how he is to enable them to suspend their predilections. I will take this question up in the second half of this paper. For now, I am going to glance at another moment that may shed light on the episode of the drowned man. In a (May 1807) letter to Lady Beaumont, Wordsworth suggests that his patroness’s friend, Mrs. Fermor, has not properly understood his sonnet beginning, “With ships the sea was sprinkled far and nigh,” because she imagines it only to depict an array of ships when, in fact, it depicts mental process. Defending his sonnet, Wordsworth says, There is scarcely one of my Poems which does not aim to direct the attention to some moral sentiment, or to some general principle, or law of thought, or of our intellectual constitution. For instance in the present case, who is there that has not felt that the mind can have no rest among a multitude of objects, of which it either cannot make one whole, or from which it cannot single out one individual, whereupon may be concentrated the attention divided among or distracted by a multitude? After a certain time we must either select one image or object, which must put out of view the rest wholly, or must subordinate them to itself while it stands forth as a Head. (Letters)

At this point, citing a passage from Paradise Lost in which Hesperus comes forth as preeminent among the stars, Wordsworth explains that the Miltonic principle in view applies to his own sonnet. In his sonnet, Wordsworth says, he is represented as casting his eyes over the sea, his mind floating pleasurably and indifferently among the ships; that state is followed by listlessness until one ship comes forward, and his mind is awakened. Although this ship “was nought to [him], nor [he] to her,” he pursues it “with a lover’s look” because, though his mind was in a state of remissness, it is now incited to creative activity (Letters ). Here we find Wordsworth’s clearest statement that at least some of his poems have more to do with the processes of mind reflected in them than with their ostensible content; such content— this is the point of the unremarkable ship—is merely an occasion for showing the form of thought. Although the letter suggests that Wordsworth closely pairs cognitive unfolding and the acquisition of moral feelings—he places these terms in apposition (“there is scarcely one of my Poems which does not aim to direct the attention to some moral sentiment, or to some general principle, or law of thought, or of our intellectual constitution”) and throughout the letter moves back and forth between these ideas—the nature of this pairing is not clear. What we can definitively say is that in the sonnet, as in the episode of the drowned man, cognition appears as a cycle that moves from pleasurable but objectless scanning, through failure, and toward attained pleasure. The indifferent movement of thought between ships quickly exhausts. We must, Wordsworth claims, select a single ship (even if there is no ready criterion for selection) because our faculties can only continue to function when we restrict the range of our speculations. To select is to love—or at least to become like a lover, to be moved from torpor toward a higher state of attentiveness and to find our (individual, active) mental capacities in the first place. Thought naturally—which is to say, passively, for we cannot alter the stream of thought—moves from and toward blankness. In its progress toward torpor, we may meet it with the activity Wordsworth

49 characterizes as passion. Wordsworth’s sonnet ends with such passion, but the episode of the drowned man is more complex. There, the child’s gathering attention is met only with growing darkness and the passing of time. Through this episode, we experience the need for thought’s passive aspect, its continual overflowing and resetting of parameters. Passion—active selection—may be necessary for thought’s awakening—its attending to a heap of garments.23 But by itself, such activity is doomed to the exhaustion of indifference. Passion, like narrative construction, needs to be restricted by the temporal aspect of thought which also selects a set of interpretive possibilities. To contemplate cognitive process, then, is to recognize how passive and active aspects of thought mirror each other and to study the cycle of thought as it regenerates itself and acquires the look of (insular) uniformity or (receptive) directionality.

When Wordsworth turns to books upon seeing the drowned man’s corpse, saying that no “vulgar fear” possessed him, for his “inner eye had seen/Such sights before among the shining streams/Of fairyland,” two things occur. Books reclothe the dead man in history, so that when he is drawn up on poles, he is not a mere instance of the human species, whose bodily destruction would then be nothing to speak of, but an individual in the largest sense—one who still exists historically and poetically and whose destruction can therefore come into view. And the bare compounding of affect that organized a host of fictive elements encounters this sudden overwhelming of narrative reference as a block and flows around it, recommencing as another appropriative progress: the boy Wordsworth’s “hoard[ing] up,/And hoard[ing] up,” “through several months” in order to obtain the rest of the Arabian Tales. The form of The Arabian Nights, a steady stream of stories that forestalls a death, reiterates the look of the entire pattern. Wordsworth’s claim to have “felt no vulgar fear” and to have seen sights like the drowned man amid “the shining streams/Of fairyland” elicits an aesthetic interpretation; story begets story. Yet the series of stories are held together by the passing of time, which does something. Morning overtakes Shahrazad in mid-sentence or at a climatic moment; again, she lapses into silence; and King Shahrayar decides to spare her for another day until, after three years, his murderous intentions change. This mini-narrative following the rising of the drowned man, in which months of saving fail, is likewise resolved by the progress of time, as the boy returns home at the holidays and finds “that golden store of books which [he] had left/Open to [his] enjoyment once more” (5. 503-04). The motif of a continuously progressing stream repeats again, as the boy Wordsworth sets out to fish and becomes entranced by a book. This time Wordsworth literalizes the pattern. The boy lies with a book on the hot stones by the Derwent—the stream that served as muse for book one of The Prelude—“devouring as [he] read[s]” (5.511). This frantically eager reading echoes the previous appropriative progress, the child’s “hoarding up.” It has produced the nothing the boy sitting by Esthwaite’s lake finally encounters and the (inarticulate) blankness the Derwent is said to offer the narrator in book one (“with its steady cadence tempering/… [his] thoughts/To more than infant softness” [1.279-81]). Again, there is a kind of failure; the boy feels the sharp tug of a fish stealing bait from his line. And then there is a burst of praise for books’ ameliorating effects.

23 Wordsworth argues that although “passion” is etymologically linked with “passivity” and “derived from a word which signifies suffering…the connection which suffering has with effort, with exertion, and action, is immediate and inseparable” (original emphasis). ES, 3.81. 50

There is a reason for the praise of books to take the form it does here: praise for their reconciling and morally transformative power. Stepping lightly from the ideal grace conferred upon the dead man to his own treasured (if incomplete) volume of Arabian Nights, Wordsworth resumes his punning mode, calling his volume a “slender abstract,” “a block/Hewn from a mighty quarry,” noting that he now learned that “there were four volumes, laden all/With kindred matter” (5.484, 487-90). The half-suggestion is that as the child cannot but see the drowned man as something straight out of a book, he is in danger of an over-eagerness for further incident. The problem being resolved is not the potential for trauma; the child is not being given time to adjust to what he sees but is being given time so that his desire for “kindred matter,” for event, may be altered. The possibility of visceral disturbance is reserved for adulthood, when, as Wordsworth says in the Two- Part Prelude, “far other feelings were attached” (I.285). The goal of the pauses in the narrative—the interruption in the continuous progress of appropriative thought—is to turn thought aside until its object naturally changes. The temporary suspense of self that reading induces changes the course of thought. We found the same pattern in Locke as part of his explicit account of action: when we temporarily suspend our activities for the sake of rational examination, we find that something in us is already altered. With Locke, there is also a rational explanation; we know the good and need to contemplate it until it operates with the force of a present uneasiness. (“The greater visible good does not always raise Men’s desires in proportion to the greatness, it…is acknowledged to have….till due, and repeated Contemplation has brought it nearer to our Mind…and raised in us some desire; which then beginning to make a part of our present uneasiness…comes in its turn to determine the will” [original emphasis].24) Wordsworth does not give any rational explanation but he gives us something else and something more. He depicts the regenerating quality of thought as it moves into and out of blankness and reading as a synthesized version of this process. When cognition has become overeager for incident for whatever reason (whether because of immaturity or, as Wordsworth suggests in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, because of the overcrowding of cities, the uniformity of occupations, anxiety about foreign wars, melodramatic art, and salacious news made continually available), or when it has swung to the opposite extreme and become unresponsive, books that simulate the stream of thought may supervene, leading us through states of absorption into courses of enactment for which our lives have not prepared us.

2.

As I suggested earlier, influential recent accounts of The Prelude’s suspense describe a Wordsworthian move away from actuality and toward potentiality. Offering a Wordsworth who expresses a Humean skepticism about (rather than a Lockean confidence in) the relative certainty of value, these accounts take indeterminacy in Wordsworth's poetry as the sign of a truly reflective poetics and focus exclusively on the slumber that precedes the spirit’s turning, when the openness of thought seems to deny the essential experience of being in time.25 But in The Prelude we repeatedly encounter movements both into and out of states of entrancement. This state does something, and the poet studies to produce it properly.

24 Locke, Essay, 2.21.44-45. 25 Locke believed we could deduce our duties from the intuitive certainty of our existence (and the deduced certainty of God's existence) with a high degree of certainty; conclusions drawn from natural philosophy are much less certain. See Essay 4.21 and 4.9-10; John Locke, The Second Treatise, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 2.6-7. 51

In all of its longer versions, The Prelude opens as a progress from the poet’s joyous declaration of “trances of thought and mountings of the mind” to further determination; it moves from the expectation of a leap into Wordsworth’s unwritten great work, The Recluse, to frustration and the unfolding of the preliminary poem before us.26 Early on we also find a characteristic movement from a narrow end, theft from a raven’s nest, to a sense of enormity and physical disorientation as the boy Wordsworth becomes aware of his precarious position—clinging to the cliff-side but seeming to hang from the sky. “Nor less in springtime,” the poet recalls,

…was I a plunderer then In the high places, on the lonesome peaks, Where’er among the mountains and the winds The mother-bird had built her lodge. Though mean My object and inglorious, yet the end Was not ignoble. Oh! when I have hung, Above the raven’s nest, by knots of grass And half-inch fissures in the slippery rock But ill sustained, and almost, as it seemed, Suspended by the blast which blew amain, Shouldering the naked crag, oh, at that time While on the perilous ridge I hung alone, With what strange utterance did the loud dry wind Blow through my ears; the sky seemed not a sky Of earth, and with what motion moved the clouds. (1.333, 336-50)

What we find in this event, in which the boy’s relational orientation is doubled, is an image of the reader’s encounter with poetic suggestion in which something like another consciousness keeps pace with the reader’s own.27 Two possibilities open up for the child: that he depends from rock or from air; and we sense that it is in this moment of forgetfulness (or of complicity) that changes occur. The vertigo—the turning of the scene—gives the prefigured movement (what the boy could do) the same look as what he ordinarily would do. Momentarily obviating the difference between “could” and “would,” what philosophy of action sometimes calls possibility and possibility tout court (to distinguish our sense of capability from those actions determined by personal history and desires), such vertigo bespeaks a widening of subjective possibility, a temporary loss of and a need for determination, and a process underway that simultaneously is and is not conscious or rational.28 Vertigo—and poetic suggestion—in other words, offers the experience of choice to an individual where choice is not ordinarily sensed; it offers the possibility of a turn in an individual who is momentarily estranged from his habitual desires and yet feels that a choice is being made that is somehow also his own.29 Poetic suggestion looks like an aberrant movement, but what it offers is an

26 Wordsworth describes The Prelude as a test of his poetic fitness and as the ante-chapel to The Recluse. William Wordsworth, Preface to The Excursion, in Prose Works, 3.6. 27 De Man famously describes this scene in terms of a transition in which we find ourselves related to the sky rather than firmly planted on the ground of natural correspondences. De Man, “Time and History,” 7. 28 Hilary Bok, Freedom and Responsibility (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 92-122. 29 Jackson catalogues the idea of suggestion in the philosophy of common sense (where it signifies a power to draw inferences from sensation), in English literature (where it signifies the insinuation of 52 alternate history, an alternate source for movement. The widening of subjective possibility here corresponds to the overwhelming of a “mean…and inglorious” end by another end that can only be negatively indicated, “it was not ignoble”—and only negatively indicated because this larger end cannot be grasped from the narrower or meaner position. Suspense entails a question—but not about whether one can pass to a realm of pure creativity from which any thought is possible or else relax one’s will and reflect one’s social context. Rather it asks how one can will what one does not will yet. It asks how we may negotiate the gap between current expressions of ego (that may be in harmony with the public “thirst after outrageous stimulation”) and a whole self that really is determined to the good (PLB 1.130). In the remainder of this essay I will be discussing Wordsworthian suspense and indicating by turns the anxious relation to unfolding perception and the possibility that the poet may induce a light hypnosis leading to a turn in thought. We have the clearest glimpse of the question posed by Wordsworthian suspense in the expanded opening that introduces the longer versions of The Prelude. As the poet performs his self- assessment, he finds he lacks nothing for the completion of his great work, The Recluse. He has the poet’s “vital soul” and “general truths,” “forms, images,” and “numerous other aids,” as well as “time, place, and manners” (1.161, 166, 169). We know too he has optimism, gratitude for gifts, reverence for the day, rest, a span of patience and renewed hopes. Yet he cannot bring his imagined great work into being. This new opening, we might say, leaves hanging the question of how one can move from a fully-developed concept to that concept’s actualization and thus of how will transpires. Looking at it in the context of the larger poem, we can infer a process from the slow gathering of the conditions for the poet’s willing some great work, which passes suddenly to the poet’s intimation that he could will such a thing, which passes again to his repeated attempts to bring The Recluse into being. As far as this opening is concerned, if nothing further is needed from the poet, something may be gained from the progress of time. And from then on we see the intermittent desire to collapse time followed by the choice to record the tentative movements of a mind conscious, above all, of being within it. The process I have traced, of a progression from natural promptings to conscious will which looks again to something other than the will to bring about its purposes, exists as a thin shadow in the introductory strain toward actualization. But in book five of The Prelude, and in the episode of the drowned man in particular, it is the path by which understanding comes into being. In tracking the course of suspense as it moves from a level that cannot be interpreted to a state of psychic excitability and the sense that we wait on something, book five suggests that our perception of continual self-difference could be purposive. To be in suspense is not a choice, but to attend to the premonitory quality in feeling (feeling’s anticipatory form) is, and it prefigures the possibility of reproducing such suspense. In other words, book five not only shows how suspense works in cognition, it casts these scenes retrospectively as paradigmatic for the project of Lyrical Ballads. The Preface to Lyrical Ballads articulates its principles in these terms, explaining that the exercise of poetic meter communicates the conditions of possibility to the willing reader who may then act upon suggestion—and find that that action has the efficacy of long habit. Wordsworth does not say so directly. But he makes four statements that collectively indicate how meter organizes

an idea into the mind), and in nineteenth and early twentieth-century aesthetic criticism (where it signifies the ability to point to a clear ideal), and describes Wordsworth’s poetics as suggestive as a way of reconciling their idealist and materialist elements. Noel Jackson, Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 33-44. 53 feeling and, by implication, how it might draw poet and reader into physical sympathy with one another. First he claims that "the language of a large portion of every good poem…must necessarily, except with reference to the meter, in no respect differ from that of good prose" (PLB 1.135). Later on he remarks that while poetic diction is "arbitrary and subject to infinite caprices," "the metre obeys certain laws, to which the Poet and Reader both willingly submit because they are certain" (PLB 1.139). A few pages later, he argues that as poetry's end is to produce excitement tending toward pleasure, powerful or painful images may carry the excitement too far. In such cases, "the co- presence of something regular, something to which the mind has been accustomed when in an unexcited or a less excited state, cannot but have great efficacy in tempering and restraining the passion by an intertexture of ordinary feeling" (PLB 1.147). For this reason, and because meter produces "small, but continual and regular impulses of pleasurable surprise," readers who are reluctant to reread the distressing parts of Clarissa will reperuse the most charged passages in Shakespeare; meter prevents pathetic scenes from affecting us beyond the bounds of pleasure. For the same reason, poetry that fails to interest readers with its language may yet be experienced as pleasurable if its meter is judiciously chosen, for meter simply is pleasurable, and readers will associate the pleasure they customarily receive from poems in a certain meter with any new poem in the same meter. Finally, Wordsworth claims, our pleasure in meter derives from the perception of similitude in dissimilitude, a perception which also directs "the sexual appetite" and which serves as the basis for our taste and moral feelings (PLB 1.149). The first claim, that meter rather than language distinguishes poetry from prose, may be the most significant. If we read this claim through Wordsworth's statements that his poems are primarily concerned with processes of mind, or along with moments in his poetry that foreground the periodicity of sensation and interpretation, we may conclude that poetry's distinction resides its potential for inducing reflexivity. When we apprehend something as poetry, Wordsworth implies, we are simultaneously aware of its ostensible subject and how that subject is temporally grasped; and this awareness invites us to contemplate the general organization of knowledge. Wordsworth's second claim, that meter "obeys certain laws, to which the Poet and Reader both willingly submit because they are certain," extends the earlier claim. It does so directly: as poet and reader submit to the same law, they find themselves no longer opposed but receiving a poem's content in a similar manner. We might say an analogous process is underway in each of them. And it does so indirectly, by way of an ambiguity and an amplification in the term "certain." In the explanatory clause ("because they are certain"), certainty may apply to the laws or to the poet and reader. But here ambiguity tends toward stabilization; to consider poet and reader turning in the same direction is already to consider sure laws. Again, the slight difference in denotation, the movement from an indefinite to an impassioned gesture, from certain, unspecified to unquestionable, absolutely certain laws briefly echoes the incremental intensification in sensation and leaps in interpretive possibility that are on display in the episode of the drowned man. Within the multiple senses of "certain," and hence enacted within the description of metrical law, we find an orderly process akin to the temporal unfolding of cognition. Wordsworth's third claim, that the "co-presence of something regular" offers readers "an intertexture of ordinary feeling," further elaborates the idea of meter as an ordering (rather than a merely ordered) pattern. Part of the argument's force again derives from the multiple senses in which we may understand regularity: as something expected ("ordinary feeling") which still cannot quite be anticipated as it continually produces low levels of "pleasurable surprise" and as something customary even in "unexcited" states (and perhaps then serving as a rule in extra-literary contexts). It is frequently and rightly said that, for Wordsworth, meter functions as a sort of ballast, but the point extends beyond local effects of the heightening or dampening of sensation. Just as books, in book 54 five of The Prelude, simulate the process of sensation as it moves into and out of blankness, so here. Meter deflects readers’ prepossessions, quieting those who, like the child of book five, look for outrageous stimulation and drawing in those who, like the poor auditors of the “Essay on Morals,” mistake narrative’s object. Meter would seem to reflect a typical order of thought. It also has some minimal content, or rather, its templates anticipate the content for which they are fit; it must be judiciously chosen. Meter, so to speak, appropriates our feelings and tempers them and this is a good; it must also be appropriate, and in this sense it has to do with the good. For if meter is well- chosen, it incites an expression that should have appeared anyway. Wordsworth's final point, that our pleasure in meter flows from the perception of similitude in dissimilitude, at once articulates and expands the principle undergirding The Prelude's depictions of cognitive process and each of the former arguments about meter. In tying this principle to sexual and moral feelings, Wordsworth underscores the completion of his argument about poetry. Meter induces reflexivity, prompting us to contemplate the form of knowing. It also produces pleasure and ethical consideration. The turn toward temporal process and cognitive organization—toward the form of knowing—seems to have acquired a charge not entirely proper to it. We can express Wordsworthian suspense, now, in terms of similitude in dissimilitude. Anticipatory suspense involves the unexpected by way of the expected. We might say, at least for the moment, that episodes like the theft from a raven's nest show us the power of an apparent similitude that is really different (when "could" appears as "would"). Wordsworthian suspense, and its vehicle, meter, move poet and reader in the direction of greater similitude, even if a smaller sense of identity is temporarily lost. When Wordsworth speaks of poetic composition as the "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings," he describes a process in which the poet repeatedly contemplates the relation of thoughts (which represent past feelings) so that,

such habits of mind will be produced that by obeying blindly and mechanically the impulses of those habits we shall describe objects and utter sentiments of such a nature and in such connection with each other, that the understanding of the being to whom we address ourselves...must necessarily be in some degree enlightened, his taste exalted, and his affections ameliorated. (PLB 1.125)

As the poet is carried from voluntary acts of reflection to spontaneous utterances, these utterances seem to lose the quality of being about the general and become general. Poet and reader seem to be acted upon. And, for the first and only time in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth moves into the first person plural. Our familiarity with the Preface’s main claim, that the poems it introduces will purify the feelings, may partly block our sense of how the claim grounds itself on the paradoxes of meter. Meter’s very regularity produces an expectancy analogous to the expectancy produced by the constant flux of sensation. We can infer that metrical regularity allows us to anticipate and even half- consciously to mimic its beat. The connection between these two modes of suspense, perceptual and metrical, is vital. It suggests that Wordsworth has applied the Lockean idea that the form of thought has temporal regularity (“our Ideas do, whilst we are awake, succeed one another in our Minds at certain distances”) to the poetic dictum that certain meters are appropriate for certain matters, and that he has done so in order to effect a series of substitutions.30 If the reader sets aside his literary associations and allows himself to be drawn into a state of expectancy by the regular returns of

30 Locke, Essay, 2.14.9. Original emphasis. 55 meter, the poet, through the intervention of that meter, may almost imperceptibly transfer the tone and tempo of mental habits he has painstakingly inculcated in himself through a long history of meditation. The reader may misrecognize that tempo as his own and, by acting with reference to it, experience a conversion. That is, he may act out something for which his own history has not prepared him. Meter’s essential, regulative function is to give time as it cannot naturally be given—to give the reader a new conditioning and a new past. In thinking about this odd gifting, we should remember that Wordsworth chooses subjects for his poems from low and rustic life not primarily because such situations are less distorted by social rules (although he gives that reason) but because they are inherently slow-moving, repetitive, and confined. At a very low level of activity, meter and matter seem almost to touch, but the physical contagion that seems to pass from the stillness of their surroundings into the passions of such men is itself enabled by measured living (PLB 1.124). The redundancy of rustic views replicates itself in the repetitions of rustic speech and passes to the poet who has cultivated the habit of gazing steadily at his subjects and of repeating this act until certain feelings return in force when he turns his attention that way. His many occasions of contemplation compress into a quality of feeling that is abstractly represented, as it will later be phenomenally induced, by the pulse of meter. And because meter is inherently pleasurable it practically guarantees the reader’s desire to repeat reading (PLB 1.126). We see this compression again in Wordsworth’s claim that Shakespeare’s most disturbing scenes will not “act upon us…beyond the bounds of pleasure—an effect which [Wordsworth ascribes] to small, but continual and regular impulses of pleasurable surprise from the metrical arrangement” (PW 1.151, 147). These “regular impulses” occur at the low level of a quality of feeling which reminds the reader of other occasions in which he has felt a similar pleasurable quality. That subtle but steady reminder gives the scene the look of the reader’s own past. As an otherwise agitating passage acquires depth—and a slow, echoing quality that cannot be taken in all at once—so the reader experiences a depth in his accompanying self-perceptions. There is a two-way transfer: the reader links his associations with the images before him, and those images are felt to be incorporable because, metrically speaking, they already seem to belong to him. We know that some sort of transfer is to take place, but what we see is meter’s capacity to represent to the reader the regularity of another’s thought or behavior as if it were the regularity of the reader’s own thought. As the reader moves toward actualization, he in fact moves toward something for which his own history has not prepared him. In The Prelude we repeatedly find vaguely metrical activities followed by a sudden movement, a psychosomatic harmony that comes into focus only as one party pauses and the other careens past. The boy of Winander episode is a case in point. What we find here—and again in the skating scene and in the boat-stealing episode—is some repetitious motion or action that by its very nature induces a deepening expectancy such that when the action ceases in one place, it repeats itself somewhere else. In this case, when the joyous exchange of call and response that echoes across the lake between boy and owls pauses, the sounds and the “solemn imagery” seem to rush forward, or the boy hurtles forward to meet them (5.406-9). Although it is one of The Prelude’s most discussed passages, I offer the episode in full below.

There was a boy—ye knew him well, ye cliffs And islands of Winander—many a time At evening, when the stars had just begun To move along the edges of the hills, Rising or setting, would he stand alone Beneath the trees or by the glimmering lake, 56

And there, with fingers interwoven, both hands Pressed closely palm to palm, and to his mouth Uplifted, he as through an instrument Blew mimic hootings to the silent owls That they might answer him. And they would shout Across the wat’ry vale, and shout again, Responsive to his call, with quivering peals And long halloos, and screams, and echoes loud, Redoubled and redoubled—concourse wild Of mirth and jocund din. And when it chanced That pauses of deep silence mocked his skill, Then sometimes in that silence, while he hung Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprize Has carried far into his heart the voice Of mountain torrents; or the visible scene Would enter unawares into his mind With all its solemn imagery, its rocks, Its woods, and that uncertain heaven, received Into the bosom of the steady lake. This boy was taken from his mates, and died In childhood ere he was full ten years old. Fair are the woods, and beauteous is the spot, The vale where he was born; the churchyard hangs Upon a slope above the village school, And there, along that bank; when I have passed At evening, I believe that oftentimes A full half-hour together I have stood Mute, looking at the grave in which he lies. (5.389-422)

Three times Wordsworth describes a silence or absence that, after a pause, is followed by an alternate movement or by a kind of sympathetic contagion. The owls’ unresponsiveness is followed by the voice of mountain torrents reaching far into the boy’s heart and the visible scene sinking into his mind. The boy’s death is followed by the churchyard’s assuming the boy’s precarious posture above the village school. And the narrator’s muteness is followed by a half hour of gazing at a grave, as if the eye were straining to speak for the tongue or as if the narrator had absorbed the quiet and stillness of stone. Each time, even if the thwarted motion is carried out by a third party, the sense of continuity is heightened rather than broken off. There is an intensified sympathy, an intensified continuation of action that persists through the entire scene. There are other things we could notice. When Wordsworth introduces the boy, we know two things about him: that he existed and does not now—he “was”—and that we neither were nor are the ones who knew him well. He was the familiar of the cliffs and islands. Our subsequent vantage neither gives us special insight nor bars us from carrying forward—or from being absorbed into—a memory that is not properly our own. Wordsworth, it would seem, shifts into elegiac mode for this reason: to shelter the boy (and us) from any distracting notice and to soften by anticipation any interruption in the felt correspondence between boy and natural scene, narrator and boy, or us and either of these characters. We might note too that all of the movements in this episode have the quiet rhythm of regularity. The stars move along the edges of the hills in stately order, rising or setting; the boy 57 stands in a habitual posture “beneath the trees or by the glimmering lake,” blowing “mimic hootings to the silent owls” who shout back; and the vale fills with the owls’ “quivering peals” and “loud halloos” followed by intermittent silence. The “event” itself is routine. We know that the boy is often met by silence that only sometimes leads to a deepening awareness of the sound of water. We know that the narrator has often stood before this grave. This episode is usually described in terms of a series of repetitions that are then interrupted, though we might equally describe it in terms of an effort to make a transition, which looks like a series of endless repetitions. The ritual quality of this scene and the knowledge that a certain set of effects sometimes takes place echoes at a higher level the rhythmic quality of call and response. Perhaps because of its expected nature, because of the gentleness of a shock that has been anticipated and yet comes as a mild surprise anyway, the scene distends. There is minimal difference in this movement from bird sound to silence, or from the removal of the boy in the passive voice to the insistence on the wood’s beauty, a difference Anne- Lise François calls “lyric inconsequence,” and describes as “the precariousness of going on when met with silence and the inevitability of continuing as the ‘pauses’…make the deferral of response a part of its reception.”31 That description is surely right and yet I suggest that, for Wordsworth, the periodic alternation between silence and sound does not lead to inconsequence. In The Prelude, we are not dealing with an aesthetic of representation (with a sharp disjunction between possible and actual realms) but with a very different aesthetic of duration and continuation. Wordsworth’s interest in phenomenological experience suggests that we take silence as part of an accumulating effect or the means by which the unexpected enters. Deferral may be part of a response’s reception because that response is received in time; the tempo of response is essential to its nature. Minimal difference here, as in the drowned man episode, marks the passing of time, a barely felt progress toward a moment of difference—in the latter case, the moment at which the dead man appears, “bolt upright” on grappling irons. The two episodes are separated by a twenty-seven-line interval of children playing. Even if the repetitions and silence initially seem disjunctive in the boy of Winander episode, the echoing (of internal rhyme and irony) and the silence comprise the same moment of near-prescience in the drowned man episode. There, the child, still watching the abandoned heap of clothes, observes that “no one owned them,” and records “the breathless stillness” (5.463, 466). We hear the half-rhymes and the quietness—and the half-knowledge both produce—as part of an intensifying and entrancing process. It is worth pausing at this point to emphasize that Wordsworth’s theory about how meter works resembles Locke’s theory of action at its most free—a theory of how we might not only enact what we will but also alter the fundamental manner in which we will, a process that philosophers of action call second-order willing. Wordsworth’s theory is based on an empirical premise, that sensation is experienced as a progress with a certain periodicity; an epistemological premise, that willing makes up part of sensation and so likewise has periodicity (the mind is “creator and receiver both”); and a poetic conclusion, that an alteration in the felt tempo of our thoughts alters the manner of our willing (2.273). If present willing requires time to transpire, second-order willing (the ability to shift the manner in which we will), by analogy, might require a presence supervening on the manner in which time is experienced. And if Wordsworth is drawing on Locke’s notion that we derive our idea of time from the sensation of the succession of ideas passing in our minds, a sensation which necessarily involves memory and enough continuity to mark iteration, then meter, as a stylization of the form of thought, seems positioned to allow such access. To enact someone else’s history of meditation by entering into physical sympathy is to achieve something like second-

31 François, Open Secrets, 162. 58 order willing, something we may infer is ordinarily unavailable—unless as a kind of random motion, that is, something hardly willed. And even so, enacting another’s history of meditation must surely appear to any bystander as just such a discontinuous movement. I suggested earlier that The Prelude’s skating scene and the boat-stealing episode reiterate the pattern of a vaguely metrical activity followed by a sudden movement and a sense of greater continuity. The skating scene begins with deepening absorption and a hint of rebellion as the boy Wordsworth ignores the tolling of the evening bell and compares himself to “an untired horse/That care[s] not for its home” (1.459-60). It progresses through the sense that the surrounding hills are not mere backdrop, ringing with his and the other the children’s voices, but have also made an impression that can only be negatively indicated; they have “sent an alien sound/Of melancholy, not unnoticed” (1.469-70). It gathers into the boy’s sensation that his and his companions’ skating is caused by the wind rather than by their own regular motions. When the boy stops abruptly on his heels, one party—nature, the solitary cliffs—seems to wheel by as though the connection between boy and earth were momentarily severed and he could watch its “diurnal round” from a place of ultimate suspense (1.486). Then the cliffs’ apparent motion melts into the tranquility of “a dreamless sleep” (1.489). What we find in this scene, in which the mind attempts to maintain the continuity of motion, is a progression from the child’s sense of moving at his own impulse to moving with some other influence and from observing the earth from a point of detachment to observing it (to use a Wordsworthian phrase) as an inmate. As this scene ends, there is a subtle shift in mood and mental object. Not only is the child now absorbed by the stilling image of the hills rather than by his sport, something, Wordsworth insists, has been accomplished. There has been a turn in thought that may not be entirely attributable. It belongs to the child but he has undergone a change, and this difference bespeaks a harmonizing between him and some genuinely other nature. Similarly, in the boat-stealing episode, we find a rhythmic activity—the boy Wordsworth “struck the oars, and struck again/In cadence”—that induces a trace-like state (1.385-86). Again, some not quite articulable presence, “the voice/Of mountain-echoes,” accompanies the boat’s steady progress across the lake, a progress Wordsworth compares to “a man who moves with stately step” (1.387). Fixing his eye on the near crag, the child continues rowing until behind this near eminence “a huge cliff,/As if with voluntary power instinct,/Upreared its head” (1.406-08). Again, one party seems to shoot past the other, or rather, the far hill seems to stride after the child—it, too, moves in cadence. And we find a new continuity produced as the cliff reflects the child’s motion and some of its inscrutability is reflected in the boy’s thought. “For many days,” Wordsworth writes, “my brain/Worked with a dim and undetermined sense/Of unknown modes of being,” “huge and mighty forms that do not live/Like living men moved slowly through my mind/By day, and were the trouble of my dreams” (1.418-20, 424-26). In one sense, the sudden appearance of the cliff belongs exclusively to the child, for his motion has generated its apparent motion and his guilty pleasure has, at least in part, generated its impact on him. Yet the emphatic unfamiliarity of the rock, its blankening effect on the boy’s mind, turns us from the sense that the uprising of the cliff can adequately be articulated in terms of displaced bodily and psychic motions.32 Just as the abrupt

32 Describing an analogous moment in “Michael,” in which Wordsworth tells us that the mountains “have all open’d out themselves,” Charles Rzepka argues that “this optical illusion depends on the traveler’s suspension of his or her ordinary sense of…having a place, or a moment in space and time” and that in losing the intersubjective world, the traveler substitutes the “‘pre’-historical world of waking dream.” Charles Rzepka, “Sacrificial Sites, Place-Keeping, and ‘Pre-History’ in Wordsworth’s ‘Michael.’” European Romantic Review 15.2 (2004), 209-210. Similarly, Michael Simpson describes the boat-stealing episode and “Strange Fits of Passion” in terms of a denial of parallax or a 59 silence of the owls in the boy of Winander episode produces a gentle shock that carries the voice of mountain torrents far into the boy’s heart, so here. A shock carries the image of “huge and mighty forms” far into his mind, leaving his ordinary sense of self temporarily undetermined while the unfathomed in nature passes through his waking and sleeping consciousness. Something has again been accomplished through a repetitious activity, in which the boy sinks into a partial state of self- absence, and then experiences a sudden movement. If the analogy is good, we might see Wordsworth “naturalizing” his metrical theory, reading it back from a set of rural activities in which an absorbing pause or the absorbing quality of meter becomes the means to alter the felt timing of thought and, with it, thought’s content. In any case, in the boy of Winander episode, the correspondence between child and owls, which grows out of the temporary creation of measure between the two, is not terminated but enhanced by the boy of Winander’s psychic hydroplane forward. So we see a pattern emerge: the light suspense of falling into rhythm which turns into the palpable sense of expectancy or even of being carried forward by an impulse seemingly governing only one’s own body, followed by a consciousness not primarily of difference but of self-difference brought about by harmony. We can view this scene alongside the Lyrical Ballads’ Preface as the achievement of meter, as a sign of (barely understood) incorporation rather than of individuation. If we view Wordsworthian suspense in the terms I have proposed, as an aesthetic series whose goal is redetermination, a series that may be imitated and intensified by meter, we find images of Wordsworth’s metrical theory throughout his poetry.

failure of imagination to correct for the projections of desire. Michael Simpson, “Strange Fits of Parallax: Wordsworth’s Geometric Excursions.” The Wordsworth Circle 34.1 (2003), 19-24. Both critics find, as I do not, a danger of solipsism at the heart of Wordsworth’s recurrent exploration of this sort of optical illusion. 60

Chapter Three: Meter, Music, and the Abasement of Type

Working to discover "a more English Music" for a new meter, Coleridge composed the fragment now known as "What is Life" and included it with a series of forty-eight related entries in his Malta notebooks.

Resembles Life, what once was held of Light, Too simple in itself for human Sight?

An absolute Self? An Element ungrounded? All, that we see, all colors of all shade By incroach of Darkness made? Is Life pure act per se (in its own nature) itself by consciousness unbounded And all the Thoughts, Pains, Joys of mortal Breath A War-embrace of wrestling Life and Death?1

This fragment unites several of Coleridge's recurrent interests. Music—Coleridge was particularly drawn to Italian opera during his travels in Italy, studied the librettists, and, while admitting intense delight in and little knowledge of music, speculated on its effects on the mind, its mnemic essence, and moral power over several decades; meter—from 1798-1805 Coleridge made notes on classical, German, English, and Italian meters, probably in preparation for a planned essay on meter that was to accompany Christabel (begun in 1797 and, though never fully completed, finally published in 1816 with the announcement that it was organized on a new metrical principle); and the articulation of life—directly and indirectly taken up in Coleridge's autobiography, Biographia Literaria (1817).2 These interests may seem to tend in opposite directions if we imagine life-writing to assert the unique and meter to exhibit the mechanical and replicable aspects of language.3 There is, however, a common thread that runs through the Malta notebooks’ discussion of metrical propriety and Biographia Literaria’s depiction of genuine self-understanding. Coleridge’s search in the notebooks for the manner in which national type manifests itself in verse form—for "a

1Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn (New York: Bolingen, 1961), vol. 2, 2224 22.15 Text, ƒ25. Hereafter CN and given parenthetically by volume, note, and (for the text of 2224) leaf number and included in the main text. 2 See CN 2.321, 334, and 347. For a discussion of Coleridge’s relation to Italian music, lyric poetry, and meter see: Edoardo Zuccato, Coleridge in Italy (New York: Saint Martin’s Press, 1996), 1-62; for a brief discussion of Coleridge’s planned essay on prosody and notes on German and Italian meters see Michael John Kooy, Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 74-78. The articulation of life is also the subject of Coleridge's Hints Toward the Formation of a More Comprehensive Theory of Life, but this work involves some of Coleridge's most egregious borrowings from Schelling and Henrik Steffens and is not relevant for the present chapter. For a discussion of Coleridge's indebtedness here see Norman Fruman, Coleridge the Damaged Archangel (New York: George Braziller, 1971), 121-34. 3 Margaret Russett begins her essay on the intersection of copyright law and Coleridge's notion of "untranslatableness" by making just this sort of assumption. See Margarett Russett, "Meter, Identity, Voice: Untranslating Christabel," SEL 43 (2003): 773-797. 61 more English music"—tentatively evolves a rule for poetic production. This rule is assumed in Biographia Literaria, where it acquires ethical as well as aesthetic significance. When we attend to its function in the Malta notebooks and in Biographia's discussions of original genius and its antithesis, poetic egotism,4 Coleridge's extended criticism of Wordsworth's poetic theory acquires a single focal point. Biographia appears first to imitate and then to transform the central insight of Wordsworth's autobiographic poem, The Prelude—that autobiography need not characterize the author but may instead render the general form of thought. Coleridge, like Wordsworth, seeks to discover the ongoing form of thinking, but for Coleridge, the study of cognitive form (and the study of poetic process) does not sufficiently deal with the aporia of self. If identification with the “infinite I AM” is to become conscious, as Coleridge believes it should, something more is needed. To put the same point in other terms: when we uncover how the rule for poetic production works within the general project of self-knowing that Coleridge insists upon, we find a central tenet of Biographia that more nearly anticipates Kierkegaard’s handling of the meaning of communication and the intensification of individual action involved in repetition than it resembles repetition’s alter ego in the philosophy of the period.5 This latter tenet comprises the idea of a “progressive universal poetry,” as described in Friedrich Schlegel’s Athenaeum Fragment 116 on one hand and the idea of our necessary reliance on (a continuous stream of) alien perspectives for self-realization, as set forth by Schelling, on the other. If, as I argued in my first chapter, Wordsworth is interested in presenting the form of thinking from the point of view of consciousness rather than from a third-party vantage or from a qualitatively other moment, Coleridge seems interested in re-submitting that first-person vantage to a version of objective restriction as a means of perceiving and consciously enacting the creative act of God. In other words, there is a two-part movement in Biographia that repeats on a grand scale Coleridge's depiction of the two-part movement of thought. Biographia's own double form involves an active moment of apprehending thought's base, "the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM," and a passive moment in which the individual submits to the (potentially humiliating) limitations of his or her supposed social type and does so in order that the first moment of imagination, the active moment, be a true joining with alterity rather than a fanciful imposition. The second and third sections of this chapter respectively explore the first and second moments of this grand-scale process of self-understanding. As this chapter will examine two elements of Coleridge’s oeuvre that have no obvious bearing on one another, it may be helpful to forecast more specifically the path the argument will take. When we glance at the notebook version of “What is Life,” we notice that its content echoes the Romantic (and Platonic) interest in an ultimate grounding that exceeds any representation, and

4 Egotism is my term for a host of neo-classical poetic practices Coleridge discusses that point to the author’s wit. 5 A longer version of this chapter would consider the relation between Coleridge and Kierkegaard in depth. For the present, it is worth remembering that while Kierkegaardian repetition may be considered dialectically, so that it involves what has been and, because this is repeated, also brings about the new, for Kierkegaard, such an understanding tells us too little. For "repetition is an remains a transcendence." Kierkegaardian repetition is best understood as the presence of the paradigm in the individual. For Kierkegaard, that paradigm is Christ, and insofar as this paradigm involves the persistence of the divine image in us and a conscious practice of imitatio Christi— fundamentally involving self-limitation—it parallels the two-part movement of Biographia that I discuss. See Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and Repetition, trans. Howard V. and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 186. 62 the related idea—now primarily a mainstay of autobiographical theory, though important for contemporary phenomenology as well—that we may only represent ourselves by what we are not.6 As the fragment opens, the ontological question of "Life" is translated to the scientific realm in order to be discussed, but even so, its figural stand-in, light, produces only speculation: points of view and hypotheses. It might be that "Life" is as "Light" was once theorized to be: too perfectly simple, beyond all decomposition, for us to perceive. Although some other being might perceive it, we are in the dark and perceive it through darkness. "Life itself" might be like God ("an absolute self") or like matter ("an element ungrounded"); but there is no mark that would identify it with one featureless being rather than another. Turning to color, the poem drops its direct search for the absolute and takes up the several points of view, the individual manifestations of light. But then another hypothetical problem presents itself. To appear may not simply be to forgo perfect identity with Light; colors may preposterously have acquired another foundation, one that violates (encroaches on the essence of) their very nature. The fragment concludes by wavering between two possibilities which we might think of as its Romantic and neo-Platonic strains respectively.7 Either existence manifests its origin through a kind of garbled speech—like color which appears through the activity of darkness or like the experience of thinking and feeling which emerge as "a War- embrace of wrestling Life and Death.” Or, "Life itself" may be what, by definition, is beyond consciousness, so that particular lives articulate only death, and, where they speak, life is not, and where they form conjectures, the informing presence of life is not. All of these heady or melancholy suggestions are brought up short, however, by the fragment’s demotion of its hypotheses from their usual privileged place as formal problems. Likewise, Coleridge’s punning reference to the Romantic idea that poetry (and hence his poem) may serve as a mere poetic instance and the unifying ground of all other poetic instances, showing how all forms emerge, is temporarily suspended. Now these speculations serve as the means by which

6 In Paul de Man’s figural discussion of autobiography, because we differ radically from the linguistic means by which we understand ourselves, we find ourselves defaced; here we might say that we serve as the featureless point of origin. See “Autobiography as De-Facement” in The Rhetoric of Romanticism, 67-81 and “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” 187-228. Judith Butler similarly describes the attempt to account for one’s personality as reducing the narrating self to inarticulacy and anguish; for Butler, the dispossession (aporia) of such an attempt allows one to be born into community and to release any commitment to origin. See Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005). Jean-Luc Marion presents a version of the same problem, but, for Marion, we speak and know because we are first interpellated by God. If I say a word to God, it is because God puts in it my mouth, and indeed, speaking is an attempt of one sort or another to "resay the word of the other." This other, by whom I also know myself in part, is not fully graspable or knowable by me. See Jean-Luc Marion, In the Self's Place: The Approach of Saint Augustine, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), 22 and passim. 7 Nicholas Halmi argues that the Romantics departed from the apophatic tradition and the pseudo- Dionysian concept of the “incongruous symbol” in which the divine was revealed through the profane; the Romantics, he writes, first grounded representation in participation and then made participation into identity whereas for pseudo-Dionysius, image and referent are defined by dissimilarity. If so, “What is Life” appears an exception, expressing interest in Platonic as well as Romantic ideology. For a thorough treatment of Coleridge’s relation to Platonic and neo-Platonic philosophy, and a treatment of the continuity between neo-Platonism and German idealism, see Douglas Hedley, Coleridge, Philosophy and Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), especially 127-36. 63

Coleridge may seek the solution to a very different formal problem, that of finding a more English music and a new English prosody. Perhaps this realization should come as somewhat of a shock— perhaps like the feeling Coleridge associated with an inequality between poetic matter and meter: “like that of leaping in the dark from the last step of a staircase, when we had prepared our muscles for a leap of three or four.”8 There is more going on than bathos and psychosomatic disappointment though. However absurd the connection should appear, external poetic forms (meter, sound) are related to our understanding of the informing of thought. To attend to the notebook's stated goals—a more English music and a new meter—is not to suggest that Coleridge is dismissing the philosophical issues to which he gestures, though there may be a bit of self-mockery in this relegation of speculations that he, by his own account, too frequently takes up. Nor is it to suggest that there is blatant or even ironized chauvinism in Coleridge's decision to funnel his consideration of life's conditions through a deliberately sought Englishness.9 It is rather to understand the central importance of the typical for his developing poetics in the notebooks and across his career and to grasp why, for Coleridge, the search for the typical ought to govern our encounter with any ultimate ground. We might expect the search for beauty—for pure, native language and common sense or for appropriate music (or a harmonizing of elements)—to drive Coleridge’s study as a poet. But it is somewhat unsettling to find that external forms—the characteristics of poetry—become a testing ground for inwardness for Coleridge the philosopher in Biographia Literaria. By all accounts, Biographia is not a standard autobiography; at least, it spends little time chronicling Coleridge’s development as a poet and even less chronicling his development as a particular personality. It takes up the transcendental approach to self-knowledge in the midst of its phenomenal and symbolic presentation of the general form of knowing. In the first half (and the first chapter of the second half), Coleridge compares the mind's self-experience in the process of thinking to the muscular processes of a leap; he likens the ideal act of reading to the motion of a serpent; and he figures the highest form of (philosophic) intuition as at once a foreknowing and a pure attendance upon the unanticipated—like the horned fly's instinctual preparation for antennae while it is yet in a dormant state. In one sense, Coleridge is at his most autobiographic at these moments; he is writing the activity of life in its activity, and its activity is self-knowing. At the same time, I shall argue that, for Coleridge, self-knowing involves far more than self-consciousness’s gathering a glimpse of itself in motion or inferring its origin by intuition. It involves choosing to be in community—first as a matter of self-integration in response to the divine and second in response to social convention. And in some sense, for Coleridge, the second response is the testing ground for the first. In other words, one way of knowing the character of self-knowing—whether or not it is genuine—is to observe whether self-consciousness is willing to enter into restriction, that is, to

8 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 2.66 in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 7, ed. Kathleen Coburn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983). Hereafter BL followed by volume and page number and included in the main text. 9Deborah Elise White argues that “Coleridge often writes as if English were, in fact, the peculiar language of imagination,” and that the portion of Biographia known as “Satyrane’s Letters” reveals a troubling nationalism within Coleridge’s philosophy. While basing itself in the primary positional act of the “I AM,” Coleridge’s philosophy cannot “evade the problem of articulation,” and, hence, Coleridge’s foundationalism becomes a claim that “Englishness is the very type of humanity.” “Imagination’s date: a postscript to the Biographia Literaria,” European Romantic Review 14:4 (2003): 473, 475. 64 crush itself in order to appear through social type. To restrict oneself is to become recognizable; it almost risks becoming thing-like. Yet no one restricts herself without an act of willing (of acquiescence) and without a certain cast of mood. Paradoxically, this act renders the individual as such even while it secures her commitment to understanding the true form of thought. For the Coleridge of Biographia, who alludes to his difficulties with and then conversion to the Christian idea of the incarnation, such self-restriction would seem to allow the individual to imitate the divine more fully than is possible by way of ordinary self-reflection (BL 1.204-05).10 For this reason, Coleridge’s so-called practical criticism, his critique of Wordsworth and his discussion of poetic language, meter, and poetic character in the second half of Biographia, transforms how we may understand Biographia’s philosophical and religious ends. For his critique of Wordsworth is not, at this point, primarily or only aesthetic. Rather, to Wordsworth's proposal that there is something healing about regarding thinking's form, Coleridge adds the additional Aristotelian injunction that poets must rely on the probable and that poets and readers alike must consider themselves through their socially given characters. Doing so ensures that self-reflection never becomes mere self-assertion. According to Coleridge, as we shall see, every act of cognition implies a leap—a transcendence and a landing place—and, a fortiori, so must any intimation of the divine. If book one of Biographia repeatedly analogizes the straining upward process of imaginative transcendence, book two offers a stasis, a landing place. This is the argument in broad outline. Because the relation between meter, music, and the writing of life will be of central importance to this chapter and because the Malta notebook's exploration of meter and music indicates how we might begin to understand this relation, I will begin there.

1.

The version of “What is Life” I began by quoting appears in the midst of an erratically numbered collection of entries on meter in Notebook twenty-two, which Coleridge used over several years and which itself is a compilation of several notebooks.11 The whole is headed by the phrase “New Metre,” which appears on the previous leaf. Roughly a third of these entries cite a stanza or a few lines of German verse (Schiller, J. H. Voss, Friedrich von Hagedorn, and the Stolberg brothers), often without comment or preceded or followed by Coleridge’s scansion of several lines and his comments, “an admirable metre” or “metre better.”12 Some cite lines of Italian verse (most frequently Pietro Metastasio, the librettist), and one includes stanzas from three Morlack verses.13

10 For Coleridge, the problem is repeated on a variety of levels. First he is willing to grant the idea of the trinity as "an esoteric doctrine of natural religion," then as a practical and moral tenet; and first he is willing to admit the logos "as hypostasized" but only later will he take up the tenet of incarnation— and that, initially as a rejection of Unitarian philosophy. 11 Kathleen Coburn, note to CN 2.2224 22.15. 12 Coleridge preferred the meter of Schiller’s Die Ideale to that of his Die Bürgschaft for example. 13 Coburn cites only Metastasio and the "light operas" Coleridge heard during his stay in Italy. In her notes, however, Coburn indicates that Jean Baptiste Fortis's Viaggio in Dalmazia is almost certainly Coleridge's source for the Morlak verses, all of which derive from one poem that appears in Viaggio with an Italian translation on the facing pages. While the Abbé Fortis's travels were translated into English, this poem was not. Kooy also cites Giovan Battista Strozzi il Vecchio and Giambattista Marino. Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education, 75-76. Zuccato notes that Coleridge only analyzed 65

We also find Coleridge's abbreviated descriptions of rhyme schemes in relation to numbers that may represent various meters or line lengths (see footnote) along with brief trials of various meters, in five cases labeled "nonsense verse."14 While Coleridge treats the whole series of metrical entries as a unit, the German entries probably date from 1801-03; the Italian entries can be dated to October 1804, and Coleridge obviously revisited this notebook a year later, commenting on a set of attempts at a meter: "These lines I wrote as nonsense verses merely to try a metre; but they are by no means contemptible—at least, on reading them over I am surprised at finding them so good/16 Aug. 1805—Malta" (CN 2.224 ƒ25). And then on a new line, immediately preceding "What is Life," he writes: "Now will it be a more English Music if the first & fourth are double rhymes; & the 5 & 6th single?—or all single; or the second & 3rd double? Try." "What is Life" is this attempt, and after it Coleridge notes, "Written in the same manner, and for the same purpose, but of course with more conscious Effort than the two stanzas in the preceding Leaf— 16 Aug. 1805—the day of the Valetta Horse- racing—Bells jangling, & stupefying music playing all Day—." In considering "What is Life" as an attempt at a new meter, the obvious question to ask is how Coleridge understands this newness. Edoardo Zuccato has suggested that Coleridge’s experience with Italian poetry, which began in earnest during his stay in Italy and Malta, prompted his gradual reevaluation of and preference for Renaissance “polish” over the early nineteenth- century penchant for the introduction of new meters, a process complete by the time of Biographia. But while Coleridge compares the two verse styles in a note of May-August 1805—right around the time of his composing “What is Life”—and negatively compares the careless diction and mechanical meters of his contemporaries to the pure diction and subtly varied meters of the Italian poets of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, he also remarks that the Italian poets “in a faulty extreme…placed the essence of Poetry in the art of Poetry” (CN 2.2599). Coleridge reproduces the note almost verbatim at the beginning of the sixteenth chapter of Biographia, and it is worth considering a portion of it here. Coleridge had been reading the madrigals of Strozzi and copies out twenty-seven of them in the (1805) note. Immediately before his transcription he writes that,

In the present age the Poet proposes to himself as his main Object & most characteristic of his art, new and striking Images, incidents that interest the Affections or excite the curiosity of the Reader; and both his characters and his descriptions he individualizes and specifies as much as possible, even to a degree of Portraiture/Meanwhile in his diction and metre he is either careless (W. Scott) or adopts some mechanical measure, of which one couplet or

the metrics of Metastasio and the librettists, though he also analyzed poems by Strozzi and Marino. He also notes that Metastasio was popular among literary critics at the end of the eighteenth century and that Wordsworth was an admirer of Metastasio and owned a copy of translations of Italian verse (done by students at Cambridge) which included twenty-six of Metastasio’s poems (and none of Dante’s). Coleridge’s interest in Metastasio was thorough; he annotated a copy of Metastatio’s works and read his letters. See CN 2.2222, 15.89; Coleridge in Italy, 34-39. 14 Here is a common example. Coleridge offers no commentary; Coburn offers no commentary. 6 10 10 10 7 1. old. 2. War. 3. abhor 4. bold 5. Wooing 10 9 10 11 6. Cold. 7. renewing 8. shrouds. 9. ensuing. 12 10. clouds. 66

stanza is an adequate specimen,….Now in the polished elder poets, especially of Italy, all is reversed….The imagery is almost always general, Sun, Moon, Flowers, Breezes, Murmuring Streams, warbling Songsters, delicious Shades, &c—their thoughts seldom novel or very striking, while in a faulty extreme they placed the essence of Poetry in the art of Poetry, that is, in the exquisite polish of the Diction with perfect simplicity, equally avoiding every word which a man of rank would not use in common conversation, and every phrase, which none but a bookish man would use—in the studied position of these words, so as not only to be melodious, but that the melody of each should refer to, assist, & be assisted by, all the foregoing & following words of the same period, or Stanza, and in like labor, the greater because unbetrayed, in the variety of harmony in the metres—not as now by invention of new Metres, which have a specific over-powering tune of their own (such as Monk Lewis’s Alonzo & Imogen, from the German, or Campbell’s Hohenlinden, &c) but by countless subtleties in the common metre of the class of Poetry in which they are composing—.—Of this exquisite Polish, of this perfection of Art, the following Madrigals are given as specimens, and as mementos to myself, if ever I should once more be happy enough to resume poetic composition, to attempt a union of these—taking the whole of the latter, and as much of the former and as is compatible with a poem’s being perused with greater pleasure the second or the 20th time, than the first. (CN 2.2599, original emphasis)15

The differences between this entry and the opening of chapter sixteen in Biographia are minimal and stylistic, with the exception of two adjustments: in Biographia, Coleridge writes that “in opposition to the present age, and perhaps in as faulty an extreme, [the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italian poets] placed the essence of poetry in the art”—that is, Coleridge adds the qualifier “perhaps” to what has become a quantitative assessment, “as faulty a degree.” Although the point may seem slight, he thus takes a further step toward relating the two styles of verse through an implied ideal. And, instead of hoping that he might unite the best of Renaissance and nineteenth-century practices, Coleridge writes that “a lasting and enviable reputation awaits that man of genius, who should attempt a union” (BL 2.34-36). While he divests himself of the poet’s task, he maintains its importance. And then, rather than describing this union in terms of the respective merits of each, Coleridge speaks of it as the reappearance of the classical tradition: as drawing on “the high finish; the appropriateness; the facility; the delicate proportion; and above all, the perfusive and omnipresent grace” of Catullus and Anacreon, whose poetic impulse “with bright, though diminished glories, revisited the youth and early manhood of christian Europe, in the vales of Arno, and the groves of Isis and of Cam.” He then continues the claim that high reputation will accrue to the poet able to unite the deft grace of Catullus and Anacreon with the “keener interest, deeper pathos, manlier reflection, and the fresher and more various imagery” of nineteenth-century poetry (and its immediate predecessors). And he transcribes nine of the twenty-seven madrigals of Strozzi he had copied into his 1805 notebook entry. After praising the madrigals at some length in a marginal note (“I have seldom met with compositions that possessed…more of that satisfying entireness, that complete adequateness of the manner to the matter which so charms us in Anacreon, join’d with the tenderness, and more than the delicacy of Catullus”), he writes that although they were probably elaborated with care, “in the perusal we refer them to a spontaneous energy rather than to voluntary effort.” And, he says, he will not presume to translate them, because of the different genius of the English mind and language (“which demands a denser body of thought as the condition of a high polish”) (BL 2.34n).

15 Coleridge frequently italicizes, and, to avoid confusion, all italics in this chapter are Coleridge's. 67

At this point in Biographia, Coleridge may seem to be echoing the eighteenth-century commonplace describing the difference between ancients and moderns in terms of an energetic past and a reflective present. But not only does he maintain that these opposed spirits ought to be poetically reconciled, he hints that when they are, the result is greater intensity or intellectual rigor: “a denser body of thought as the condition of a high polish.” For now, it should be clear that the newness Coleridge values and attempts in the Malta notebooks has little to do with novelty per se. He faults Campbell’s and Lewis’s inventions because they have a “specific over-powering tune of their own,” that is, they neither refer to traditional expectation nor to their poems’ general or specific subject matter. Because they are arbitrarily chosen by the poet (as a discrete poetic element and a matter of individual willing), these meters dominate the poem’s other elements and are repeated mechanically; the poem’s shifts in affect do not produce corresponding shifts in tone or metrical tune. They are doubly cut off from poetic timing, lacking a connection to history and to the unfolding temporality of affect. The Italians, by contrast, sense the appropriate placement of words, constantly having in view part-whole relations. And, having chosen the meter commonly used for a specific class of poetry (presumably heroic, amorous, satirical, and so on), they vary it “by countless subtleties” (presumably not only to reflect a controlling tone or an historical, regional, or personal style but also in response to the nuances of the poem’s language and the progression of its feeling). Hence, it would not be correct to say that there is nothing new about Italian verse. On the contrary, it becomes the translation and new expression—the rebirth—of Catullus and Anacreon. Further, the Italian meters are continuously new as they unfold, appearing spontaneous effusions because their meter, matter, and poetic class harmonize, while contemporary poetry’s imposition of a meter applied unswervingly to every line gives the poem the look of voluntary effort and of a dull reiteration of the same tune. A meter is new insofar as it develops the tradition from which it arises and insofar as it manifests ongoing modifications and variations of its form; whereas dullness is nothing more than the unvarying expression of mere individuality. Viewed in this sense, it is less surprising that Coleridge calls “What is Life,” which exemplifies iambic pentameter, a trial of a new meter. What is less clear is how exactly the poem references and modifies the larger tradition to which iambic pentameter belongs and how Coleridge understands the relation between meter and music. With respect to this last point, it is worth remembering that, in his earlier (May-August 1805) note on Strozzi, Coleridge describes the meters of Italian Renaissance poets as melodious and then as laboring to effect “a variety of harmony in the meters.” Melody and music here appear evaluative qualities of a meter; meter may be more or less melodious and more or less innovative in becoming so. But in his comments preceding “What is Life,” Coleridge hints that he is treating music not as a term of approval merely but also as a general category that may be further specified; music may be English, Italian, German, and so on. For when he speaks of producing a more English music, he speaks only of “What is Life,” whereas when he speaks of trying a new meter, he refers to “What is Life” as well as the two entries immediately preceding it. A few preliminary observations are possible. In the preface to his 1796 Poems on Various Subjects, Coleridge described the central feature of the sonnet as “oneness of thought,” and, by this definition, “What is Life” is a sonnet, or an attempt at sonnet form, in that it renews the same question by different means over its eight lines. And, whether the poem is fragmentary or not, in spatially bracketing the opening couplet, Coleridge nods to Petrarchan conventions: looked at one way, it consists of an octet, but looked at another way, it consists of an opening couplet and a

68 closing sestet—although the rhyme scheme is Shakespearean.16 Coleridge began studying Petrarch in 1803, made marginal comments on a copy of Petrarch’s Canzoniere he probably bought in Malta or Italy (between 1804 and 1806), and at some point translated (or transformed) “I dolci colli,” again giving it a Shakespearean rhyme scheme.17 There is at least a surface movement toward the Anglicization of Italian Renaissance verse, of Petrarch in particular, although by itself this does not tell us much. Likewise, after the bracketed opening couplet, the first and fourth lines of the subsequent sestet do indeed end in double rhymes ("ungrounded" and "unbounded") and the fifth and sixth in single rhymes ("breath" and "death"), which is to say, the fragment reflects Coleridge's first thought about how to produce a more English music: although why these rhymes should produce this effect is never explained. More pertinently, since Coleridge does not equate stanza form with meter, this Anglicized rhyme scheme should not be taken as marking the development of a “new metre.” Turning to the two fragments that precede “What is Life,” we find that they likewise appear to be well-formed instances of iambic pentameter (see footnote).18 The only deviations in all three, as far as eighteenth-century metrics (and the traditional rules for scansion) are concerned, are permissible: all three tolerate a final extra syllable—a deviation that Edward Bysshe's hugely popular reference book, The Art of English Poetry, which went through nine editions in the eighteenth century and was used (if also decried) by Pope, Richardson, Fielding, Johnson, Goldsmith, Walpole, Blake,

16 In his 1796 “Sheet of Sonnets,” Coleridge called the sonnet’s fourteen-line structure accidental—a way of keeping the sonnet to a length between that of the epigram and that of the elegy. “A Sheet of Sonnets,” in The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912), [Project Gutenberg ebook 29090, 2009], 1139. EHC notes that there is no imprint for the “Sheet of Sonnets,” but that Coleridge sent a copy to John Thelwall in a letter dated December 17, 1796. 17 Zuccato, Coleridge in Italy, 22, 32-33. 18 Upon the mountain’s Edge all lightly resting There a brief while Now on its Edge the Globe of splendor sits, seems a creature of this And a brief while belongs to earth; but soon More changeful than the Moon To Wane fantastic his great orb submits, Or cone or mow A distant Hill of Fire, and till sinking slowly He s Even to a Star at length is lessend wholly.

Abrupt, as Spirits vanish, Earth he is sunk/ A soul-like breeze at once possess’d possesses all the wood; The Boughs, the Sprays all have stood As motionless, as stands the ancient Trunk, But every leaf thro’ all the forest flutters, And deep the Cavern of the Fountain mutters

69 and Scott, required for double rhymes; and six of the seven instances of hypermetricality in Coleridge's fragments involve double rhymes.19 All three likewise contain half lines and conversions of the final accent into something that feels much more like durational stress—a stylistic practice to which Coleridge does not draw our attention. This last point will have to remain somewhat intuitive, though it can be felt in these three trials of a new meter. In the third line of “What is Life”—“an absolute Self? An Element ungrounded?”—“self” is the rhythmic and semantic focus; it is more natural to emphasize it verbally than to emphasize “ungrounded.” And the same is true in the next line, “all, that we see, all colors of all shade.” However much emphasis we give to “all” or to “see,” “shade” becomes slightly ludicrous if it is verbally underscored. And the quick return of rhyme in the following half line, “by incroach of Darkness made?,” further increases attention to the initial half line and amplifies the feeling that the strongest accent falls early on, in the fourth or sixth syllable (on “croach” or “dark”), rather than in the tenth as we might expect.20 The reader’s attention is continually divided between words that are almost certainly rhythmically emphasized and those that, metrically speaking, occupy the places of greatest prominence. The point becomes more complex when we turn to the first of these notebook trials. Take the line, “upon the mountain’s Edge all lightly resting.” It would be more prosaic to write “all lightly resting upon the mountain’s Edge,” and doing so would emphasize the final word. But, as written, the auditor’s attention is split between the two halves of the line, that ending with “edge” and that ending with “resting.” While “edge” becomes the verbal focus, “resting” gathers a different kind of attention—not that of accent but that of position (it is marked by the greater pause of the line-end than the caesura) and that of hypermetricality (as the final syllable seems to extend the quality of the sun’s resting). Prosaic lines, it would seem, draw undue attention to the terminus, the result of the line, while verse that feels intuitively more like verse maintains its initial energy and distributes the reader’s attention more equitably. Again, although it is not hypermetrical, “there a brief while the Globe of splendor sits,” repeats the effect; “sits” acquires its emphatic nature through position. Of the syllables in strong (stressed) positions, it is the second most weakly accented syllable (after “a”), in addition to being a fairly generic word in a line that describes the sun as “the Globe of splendor.” Seeming to have

19 The Art of English Poetry comments upon "double and treble rhyme" in the second section of the first part. A. Dwight Culler, who edits the online reproduction of the third edition, notes that Bysshe's reference work was the first systematic attempt to treat English prosody. It regulated the eighteenth-century understanding of prosody until Coleridge's introductory note to "Christabel" in 1816, which claimed the work was founded on the new metrical principle of counting the number of accented rather than the total number of syllables. See: The Art of English Poetry, ed. A. Culler, 3rd ed., 1708. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/35094/35094-h/35094-h.htm. It is also worth noting that for many contemporary (twentieth and twenty-first century) metrists, those working within the field of generative metrics in particular, these fragments can all be described as metrical, that is, as obeying certain "correspondence rules" that accompany a normative understanding of any particular meter. The features that Coleridge introduces and that I will discuss are not usually treated in these accounts. See, for example, Kristin Hanson, "Generative Metrics: The State of the Art," in Current Trends in Metrical Analysis, ed. Christoph Kueper (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2011), 45-62, see especially 47-50. 20 I am assuming, in line with rules empirically derived by generative metrists, that “by incroach” is to be taken as an iamb rather than an anapest; the “in” is not elided, but it is more weakly accented than “by.” 70 accent without accent, it performs its sense: pausing, letting the splendor of the line ebb, creating emphasis through duration. Again, part of the effect of position emerges through what we might think of as the inversion of a more prosaic rendering of the same line: “the Globe of splendor sits there a brief while.” Coleridge’s more harmonious effect is achieved through the balancing of “while” and “sits”—the latter word seeming to contravene the previous statement of transience and to assert continuing stasis. Coleridge’s second metrical trial beginning, “abrupt, as Spirits vanish, he is sunk/A soul-like breeze possesses all the wood;/The Boughs, the Sprays have stood,” continues the same heightening then hushing trend: granting its final words something that is technically a position though it is experienced as poise—a (with)held note—and something that behaves like accent but is experienced as both less and more than that—a partly swallowed quality. Or we might say: something less vocalized persists. We find some of Coleridge’s least descriptive, most typical language reserved for the end of the line: “wood,” “stood,” “sits,” “soon,” “moon,” “submits.” Generality is linked with finality; and its metrical position balances the initial verbal or rhythmic focus. Here we can make two observations. Metrically speaking, it is probably not wrong to connect Coleridge’s practices with his reading of Italian Renaissance poetry. In Italian hendecasyllable (which roughly corresponds to English pentameter in frequency of use) there must be eleven syllables and there must be primary stress on the tenth syllable and secondary stress on the fourth or sixth. Coleridge did not understand the rules of Italian verse, though he certainly could have absorbed and partially echoed its rhythmic patterns.21 And he seems to be pointedly imitating the feature of Italian verse he connects with its metrical polish. As he says of these poets in his (May-August 1805) note on Strozzi, their “imagery is almost always general, Sun, Moon, Flowers, Breezes, Murmuring Streams, warbling Songsters, delicious Shades.” If Coleridge does indeed deliberately turn to general images and close his lines with particularly generic language, it is reasonable to think that he is continuing Italian and ultimately classical practices—those of Catullus and Anacreon—in his development of a new meter. At the same time, the Italian penchant for the general does not dominate. Noticing the harmonious opposition between rhythmic and positional prominence allows us to notice some other features of “What is Life.” Coleridge seems to identify the rhythmic focus of the line semantically with ideas descriptive of finitude and of the partial: “self,” “made,” “while,” “edge,” “thoughts,” just as he identifies positional prominence with ideas descriptive of a crossing of bounds: “ungrounded,” “unbounded,” “breath,” “death.” If Coleridge is imitating the Italian Renaissance poets’ studied attention to metrical position, he also seems to reserve a central place for the nineteenth-century tendency to individualize—a tendency that carries generality toward “a denser body of thought” and allows for “keener interest, deeper pathos,” and so on. Balance arrives semantically and metrically through a greater vocal intensity before the caesura, followed by the unobtrusive, lingering presence of the general and its assumption of the place of metrical prominence. Coleridge makes no direct claim to be experimenting with shifting the rhythmic focus of the line. But his entries on Italian and English verse immediately prior to “What is Life” suggest a further direction we might take in thinking about how Coleridge’s new meters reference and develop

21 Coburn notes that Coleridge was not familiar with the rules of Italian prosody CN 2224 22.15 ƒƒ 19-20 Notes. Zuccato adds that “Coleridge never developed a proper understanding of Italian metrics” because he “continued conceiving of Italian lines in terms of accents,” and later wrote in an undated note, “The heroic verse of the Italian has been regarded by all Grammarians and Lexicographers hitherto as Paniambic according to its Rule,” and defined Italian “heroic verse,” (hendecasyllable) as “Pan-iambic pentameter hyperacetalectic [sic].” Coleridge in Italy, 36. 71 the tradition of iambic pentameter and how he understands the relation between meter and music. I shall quote fairly liberally from them. After his first citation of Italian verse (eight lines from Metastasio's Isacco figura del redentore and eight from his Come il candore), Coleridge remarks,

I observe in all the Italian Poets the frequent & seemingly unlimited liberty of using Trochees, one, & sometimes two together instead of Iambics,—I imagine that in reading they spondaize the two syllables and sometimes e contra an iambic in a place of the verse where a trochee seems to our ears almost necessary— ∪ — ∪ —— ∪— ∪ — ∪ — Del gran padre Ocean lo speco angusto ∪ — ∪— ∪ — — ∪ ∪ — ∪ Nel piu riposto sen l’onda comprende; ∪ — ∪ —— — — ∪ ∪ — Lo speco, onde il Pastor del marin gregge — ∪ — ∪ ∪ — ∪ —∪—∪ Sulla fronte di Giove il fati legge.

∪ — ∪ ∪— Lònda as it cannot well be read l’onda must be spondaized L’on da—and so del marin must be read — ⁄ — ⁄ del ma rin gregge—& the same way with Sulla fronte. One trochee at the beginning gives a grace to any language—<>

— ∪ ∪ Della piu calda Zon il cerch' accende and two, or more, together may be used to produce some particular effect, once or twice in a long Poem/of many some 1000 lines perhaps—

— ∪ —∪ ∪ ∪ — ∪ ∪ — Downward falling to the bottomless pit.

But to use it as the best Italian Poets almost in every stanza, & often many times in the course of one stanza must be explained from their more spondaic mode of speaking which it is the custom to caricature, as it were, when they read poetry. If you listen to an Italian who speaks with propriety, you cannot but observe this more equable diffusion of accent—words either spondees or pyrrhics (— —, or ∪∪), not as with us all Iambics or Trochees or Anapæsts (II.2224 ƒ20)22

A bit later, Coleridge comments on a meter, ` ´ ` ` ´ ´ 8 10 10 10 10 8. In Italian where all are double rhymes this is a pretty measure: in English 3

22 Coleridge is mistaken here; he is trying to understand Italian verse through English accentual- syllabic rules but his misunderstanding does not affect the point of my citation. 72

double rhymes in one stanza if there were more than two stanzas in the poem would never doe; but the second line might be made rhymeless, tho' isometrical with the 5 & 6th double- rhymed/ endless, gore, sor..row, morrow, lore, sore/or gore, endless, lore, sore, sorrow, morrow. (CN II.2224ƒ24)

Two entries after this, shifting back to the question of English meter, Coleridge writes:

∪ — / ∪ — ∪ / —∪∪ / — ∪ — ∪ — / ∪ — ∪ / —∪∪ / — ∪ — — — / ∪ — — / —∪ —∪ {or —∪ / —∪∪ / —∪—∪ — ∪∪ /—∪∪ / — ∪ — ∪ {or —∪ / ∪ — ∪ / —∪— then a second, the first so as to form one stanza of 8 lines, the 1 rhyming to 5, 2 to 6, 3 to 7, 4 to 8—or 4 to 5, 3 to 6, 2 to 7, 1 to 8.—Try both in semi-nonsense. (CN II.2224ƒ24)

These entries do not seem to give us much, but in them, Coleridge makes several observations that hint at how he understands meter’s connection with music and that in turn extend his comments on metrical originality in the note on Strozzi. In the last entry I cited, Coleridge evidently takes meter to involve grouping as well as syllabic count and relation of accented to unaccented syllables, which is to say, he does not seem to differentiate rhythm from meter.23 Were we, as is usually done, to consider English meter purely as a relation between accented and unaccented syllables, the poetic line "∪ — / ∪ — ∪ / — ∪ ∪ / — ∪ —" would (assuming we would still allow trisyllabic substitution) express iambic pentameter; for we would reduce the line to its simplest expression. By designating a tetrameter consisting of an iamb, an amphibrach, a dactyl and an amphimacer, Coleridge indicates that meter is being used to schematize our reliance on phrasal units to make sense of a verse and to communicate that sense to others. Meter, for Coleridge, marks a rationalizing (grouping) process. Were we to emphasize the sing-song quality of "What is Life’s" iambic structure, we might say, "an abs—lute self—an el—ement—ungrounded," but to emphasize the sense, we would say, "an absolute—self—an element—ungrounded" or, as with the second of the linked fragments, we would say, "abrupt—as Spirits—vanish,—he is sunk." We would pronounce an iamb, an amphibrach, a trochee, and an amphimacer—something nearly identical to the line Coleridge symbolically anticipates. We would, in other words, realize iambic pentameter as a much more complex tetrameter. Bysshe's The Art of English Poetry, which borrowed heavily from Claude Lancelot's (1663) Quatre Traitez de Poësies, Latine, Françoise, Italienne, et Espagnole, begins with the claim: "The Structure of our Verses, whether Blank, or in Rhyme, consists in a certain Number of Syllables; not in Feet

23 The point may seem obvious, though metrists dispute the relation between meter and rhythm. Generative Metrics in particular differentiates between meter and rhythm. See: Hanson, "Generative Metrics," 45-62; Christoph Küperh, “Metrics Today II: An Introduction” in Poetics Today 17:1 (Spring 1996) as well as Derek Attridge’s and Richard Cureton’s essays in the same issue. See also Kristin Hanson and Paul Kiparsky, "A Parametric Theory of Poetic Meter," Language 72 (1996): 287- 335 and Kristin Hanson, "Nonlexical Word Stress in the English Iambic Pentameter: a Study of John Donne," in The Nature of the Word: Studies in Honor of Paul Kiparsky, ed. K Kanson and Sh. Inkelas, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), 21-62, see especially 22-26. See also: Simon Jarvis, “Prosody as Cognition,” Critical Quartery 40 (1998): 1-15. 73 compos'd of long and short Syllables, as the Verses of the Greek and Romans."24 As if in direct response, Coleridge characterizes his verse as comprised of such feet and hence as related to Greek and Latin verse and unrelated to the French syllabic verse on which Bysshe’s rules were based. Coleridge’s practices here anticipate his later observations in the note on Strozzi. In order to become new, meters must first of all discover their participation in an enduring tradition. This participation must be sensible: palpable (rhythmic) and, as Coleridge now hints, logical. If English verse’s Englishness is tied to its use of poetic feet, which represents an initial rationalization of sound, then English and classical traditions possess a generically comparable common sense. Here we encounter a potential doubleness in the significance of meter. On one hand, the search for newness reaches backward to a rational origin, finding the means by which poets from multiple linguistic traditions represent the action of understanding as the organization of a less differentiated pattern, in this case, as the grouping of repeating iambs. At the same time, Coleridge’s symbolic metrical trials appear a kind of proto-speech. To think a meter, for Coleridge, would seem to mean already having particular verses in mind, since the specific poetic feet he symbolizes, feet which vary across the line and whose lines vary as the stanza unfolds, denote specific sorts of sense. These lines represent general rhythmic features, but because their form is not static, they seem to strain toward some particular expression. Coleridge may very well be arbitrarily noting the means by which an overarching pattern (iambic pentameter) could be continuously modified so as to resemble the excellence of Italian verse; he almost certainly is attending to the rhythmic variety he is creating. But as grouping moves toward sense, so do these rhythmic projections. On one hand, meter represents a general mode of articulation; on the other it virtually articulates. In considering the entry that begins "∪ — / ∪ — ∪ / —∪∪ / — ∪ —," I have been considering metrical originality as a mode of genetic and logical self-realization. But Coleridge is also trying to retrieve the feeling of Englishness from the frequency with which certain word sounds recur in a fairly limited rhythmic context—whether the rhymes are consistently spaced four lines apart or the poem moves toward a central rhyme and then moves away from it in progressively distanced rhymes (“the 1 rhyming to 5, 2 to 6, 3 to 7, 4 to 8—or 4 to 5, 3 to 6, 2 to 7, 1 to 8.”) Coleridge is only hazarding speculations here. Nevertheless, it is worth keeping in mind that while Coleridge’s projected verses that scan as pentameters and read as tetrameters show their participation in a proto-logic shared by multiple linguistic traditions and may seem nearly to babble English, Coleridge also sets meter against music—against what, in Biographia Literaria, he will describe as the appropriate spell that commences every time children direct their eyes to a printed page of verse and, accordingly, adopt a special, singing voice to read it (BL 2.60n.). When he makes this latter claim in Biographia, Coleridge is criticizing Wordsworth’s argument in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads that “there neither is or can be any essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition.”25 Turning to Joseph Lancaster’s adoption (or perversion) of Andrew Bell’s educational system in a marginal note, Coleridge comments drily that “it is no less an error in teachers, than a torment to the poor children, to inforce the necessity of reading as they would talk. To cure them of singing as it is called; that is, of too great a difference” between prose and verse,

24 Bysshe, The Art of English Poetry, 1.1 (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/35094/35094-h/35094- h.htm) 25 William Wordsworth, “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” in The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 1.134. 74

the child is made to repeat the words with his eyes from off the book; and then indeed, his tones resemble talking, as far as his fears, tears and trembling will permit. But as soon as the eye is again directed to the printed page, the spell begins anew; for an instinctive sense tells the child’s feelings, that to utter its own momentary thoughts, and to recite the written thoughts of another, as of another, and a far wiser than himself, are two widely different things, and as the two acts are accompanied with widely different feelings, so must they justify different modes of enunciation. (BL 2.60n.)

Coleridge goes on to conclude that the moral effects of “enforcing a semblance of petulant ease and self-sufficiency” are likely to be worse than those of “singing” (BL 2.61n). Without lingering over this passage, we can note that Coleridge attributes moral force to the mode of enunciation, “talking” or “singing,” and that talking individualizes and ephemeralizes (scatters) while singing evokes and disowns (unconsciously recalls). Or again, talking reduces meaning to that of the speaker at the moment; singing announces another speaker and another moment that cannot be more than dimly apprehended. It announces an aporia of meaning and the presence “of another as…another” who is sensed to be “far wiser.” If, in its insistence on comprehension, the rationalizing process of talking risks corruption and mishandling, the move toward all that undergirds comprehension and yet lies beyond it risks senselessness. In the fourth chapter of Biographia, Coleridge proposes that the theory of poetry would be greatly benefitted if the division between imagination and fancy were found to be “no less grounded in nature” than the division between delirium and mania. Music and meter can similarly be thought to exist in an analogous relation. In Coleridge’s description, music bears the poetic line away from the articulacy of poetic feet and toward the pure warbling of sound before it is yet English or French or Italian sense. Music becomes the pre- or non-rational complement to the rational rule of meter. Carried too far from the balancing effect of meter, its defamiliarizing processes turn into delirium in which nothing is connected or perceived just as, carried too far, the appropriating processes Coleridge associates with talking and with meter turn into mania, a continual insistence on present knowledge and on self. And what would a maniacal meter be if not a verse form that rigorously applies a single “mechanical measure, of which one couplet or stanza is an adequate specimen” or a group of verses with a “specific over-powering tune of their own?” The trouble with modern poetry is certainly a lack of historical and musical tact, but from the point of view of Biographia, this lack implies a more serious lack of imagination and an attempt to cover it with a superabundance of fancy or, alternatively, a rationalizing habit begun too early and carried on too long. Coleridge strives to avoid such excess by working toward metrical variation and the right coincidence of sounds. While I have isolated the function of music and of meter for the purposes of analysis, one implies the other. The whole set of entries is organized under the heading “new metre,” and the “more English Music” Coleridge seeks may be necessary for metrical newness. Because he says less about music in this collection of entries, I am going to glance at a few of the surrounding notebook entries and a passage in The Friend in which Coleridge speaks directly about music’s peculiar property before returning to the relation between music and meter in these entries. In a March 1804 notebook entry Coleridge writes:

The generic how superior to the particular illustrated in Music, how infinitely more perfect in passion & its transitions than even Poetry—Poetry than Painting—& yet Genius how marvelous in all implements!! (CN 2.1963)

A month later, he writes:

75

Soother of absence./O that I had the Language of Music/the power of infinitely varying the expression, & individualizing it even as it is/—My heart plays an incessant music/ for which I need an outward Interpreter/—words halt over & over again!—and each time—I feel differently, tho’ children of one family. (CN 2.2035)

In September of the same year he adds:

Thursday Night at the opera, Sept. 27, 1804 in reflecting on the cause of the “meeting soul” in music, the seeming recognizance, &c &c, the whole explication of memory as in the nature of accord struck upon me/accord produces a phantom of memory, because memory is always an accord. (CN 2.2192)

A few years later (sometime in November or December of 1810) Coleridge writes:

Man the only animal who can sing; music is is [sic] his Invention, if not God’s Gift by Inspiration/for unlike painting, it is not an imitative Art—To man alone it is given to make not only the air articulated, and the articulated Breath a symbol of the articulations & actualities of his Heart & Spirit, but to render his gestures, his postures, & all his outward Habiliments symbolical—Are these gifts of God? And dare we despise them, or neglect them? Nothing less than a positive divine precept could justify us—But if to be cultivated, are they to be excluded from God’s service, that which most requires the exaltation of the sum total of our Being, Body & Soul, to him who made, who redeemed, who sanctified, who will raise again both Body & Soul—Are our affections to be raised by Music for an earthly Love, in which we so easily exceed unexcited, & shall it be withheld from aiding his Love on which we cannot feel enough—for sorrow for the absence or displeasure of a friend—of triumph for a bloody Victory, &c—& not for &c &c.

And shortly after the publication of Biographia, in the first of the essays composed for “The Landing Place” that concluded the first volume of the 1818 “riffaciamento” of The Friend, Coleridge writes:26

The Intelligence, which produces or controls human actions and occurrences, is often represented by the Mystics under the name and notion of the supreme Harmonist. I do not myself approve of these metaphors: they seem to imply a restlessness to understand that which is not among the appointed objects of our comprehension or discursive faculty. But certainly there is one excellence in good music, to which, without mysticism, we may find or make an analogy in the records of History. I allude to that sense of recognition, which accompanies our sense of novelty in the most original passages of a great composer. If we

26 Coleridge appended a series of essays to the end of each of the three volumes of the 1818 edition of The Friend. Comparing these essays to the successive landings of a great staircase he remembered from a childhood visit to the mansion of a baronet, landing places that looked out windows and up the rest of the spiraling stairs, Coleridge expected these essays to provide the reader a moment of pause and self-reflection in preparation for the next ascent. The first group of essays in The Friend proper is supposed to be an examination of general principles, the next group deals with political principles. See The Friend, vol. 1 in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Barbara Rooke (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), xciii, and 148-49 for Coleridge’s explanation of the section heading, “The Landing Place.” 76

listen to a Symphony of CIMAROSA, the present strain still seems not only to recal [sic], but almost to renew, some past movement, another and yet the same! Each present movement bringing back, as it were, and embodying the spirit of some melody that had gone before, anticipates and seems trying to overtake something that is to come: and the musician has reached the summit of his art, when having thus modified the Present by the Past, he at the same time weds the Past in the Present to some prepared and corresponsive Future. The auditor’s thoughts and feeling move under the same influence: retrospection blends with anticipation, and Hope and Memory (a female Janus) become one power with a double aspect. A similar effect the reader may produce for himself in the pages of History, if he will be content to substitute an intellectual complacency for pleasurable sensation. The events and character of one age, like the strains in music, recal [sic] those of another, and the variety by which each is individualized, not only gives a charm and poignancy to the resemblance, but likewise renders the whole more intelligible. Meantime ample room is afforded for the exercise both of the judgement and the fancy, in distinguishing cases of real resemblance from those of intentional imitation, the analogies of nature, revolving upon herself, from the masquerade figures of cunning and vanity.27

These entries are wonderfully rich, but for the sake of this argument I shall simply highlight three interconnected claims Coleridge makes that clarify what is happening in his collection of entries on meter. Music is not an imitative art. The reason Coleridge gives for his claim has nothing to do with music’s sensuous being; rather, he proposes that music is symbolical and therefore shows the inner structure of all it could seem to represent, including man’s “gestures, his postures, & all his outward Habiliments.” It does not copy, it illuminates. Music is not one language among many but (so to speak) a key to the natural languages of gesture, movement, attitude, dress, behavior—all that we show to the world as well as those postures and movements of thinking and feeling we experience within ourselves. It is the sensuous expression of (natural) language’s condition which is simply the recognition of continuity. Music, in other words, shows us how we know; at least, it expresses what is fundamental to the activity of knowing by developing its own varying strains over time. When Coleridge writes, “My heart plays an incessant music/ for which I need an outward Interpreter,” he is not merely speaking metaphorically. Music may seem to correspond to the range of human sensations more perfectly than language. And it is analogous to inner feeling in that both continuously renew the strains of past sensations and anticipate those to come. But insofar as it renders all as form, to know that one feels, just to attend to this feeling, is already to attend to music. For as a series of accords, as the ability to make meeting—that is, meaning—music shows the possibility of other accords: memory and so on. All of these functions of music are modes of extending the self into community with others and other times—hence Coleridge’s turning to the principle of accord. Music shows us in the aesthetic realm what it is to resolve multiplicity into unity of effect, especially over time. The language Coleridge uses in The Friend (the last of the passages cited here), in which musical genius consists in the renewing and prolonging of melodies, in the modifying of the present by the past and the straining toward something that is to come, is virtually identical to the language Coleridge will use in Biographia to speak of the effects of imagination on character. Through imagination, genius “lives most in the ideal world, in which the present is still constituted by the future or the past” and, hence, genius is the character least likely to suffer personally from public misunderstanding or spiteful

27 Coleridge, Essay 1 in “The Landing Place…Miscellany the First,” in The Friend, vol. 1, 129-34. 77 reviewers (BL 1.43). If there is a danger to the absolute unity achieved through imagination (and the corresponding diminishment of individuality) it consists in a “diseased slowness to action” (BL 1.31).28 And again, as in his discussion of singing and of talking when reading verse, Coleridge contrasts such slowness—an almost socially detached view of all at once, a copresence of vantages—with the “superstition and fanaticism” displayed by those with too little imagination, who, forced to rely “on the immediate impressions of the senses,” display the anger—panic, maniacal egotism—of conscious inability to ground their own principles or (especially in cases of talent) to make their talents adequate to their own and others’ false conceptions (BL 1.30-31, 38). What is musical accord in the aesthetic realm is memory and insight in the ethical and, applied, becomes the ability to attend to history’s recurrences, to judge between real and illusory themes, and to predict which effects will be repeated. Music is perceived adequacy and the achieved balance of true meeting. It might be the mode through which we intuitively recognize the balance achieved between the verbal and the positional in a line of verse or, analogously, between the expenditure of individual energy and the more general operation of grouping. Music, to anticipate a little, allows us to experience a set of relations that are not the same as but that run parallel to those encoded by meter.

At this point, it will be helpful to recall some previous conclusions. Verse, Coleridge suggests, does not simply contain several kinds of sensory organization; meter and music reflect (or ought to reflect) the modes in which we have historically grasped meaning. Ideally, English verse should carry the reader back toward the most general texture of sound—toward something like the pure alternation of iambic pentameter—the sing-songy nature that marks one’s awareness of pronouncing the language of another (BL 2.60n). Readers who pick up poetry with a feeling for its otherness simply do promote the under-repetition of sound, the incursion of music into meter. At the same time, verse (through its meter) should carry readers toward the gathering sense developed by multiple traditions—the further organization of pentameter. When meter performs this function it is reflectively historical, connecting linguistic traditions and revealing a common mode of forming meaning. Incorporated into this meter, music simultaneously prompts a narrow recognition of the repetitions proper to one’s own verse tradition. English music, for example, may be felt as the poet’s serendipitous knack for varying intervals between sonic recurrences and somehow thereby showing national or cultural character. And metrical newness intuits the rule that gives a verse its near- babbling as well as its generic character (its logical direction); it moves toward articulating the moment. I have described music and meter as alternatively progressing toward further specificity. But they work in two directions; both indicate a more general and a more specific way of grasping meaning. And each balances the other. Thus far I have been focusing on a few of Coleridge’s fairly terse notations on English poetry. His comments on Italian poetry are occasionally more explicit, and much of Coleridge’s developing view on metrical and musical propriety emerges in his comparison of the two traditions. Where Italian will permit double rhymes throughout a poem, he claims, more than three double rhymes in one stanza of a poem longer than two stanzas will not do for English. The point here appears to be one of tact; the poet must simply intuit what his language (and readers) will support. The question, then, is how the poet acquires this tact. Does he gather the correctness of the placement and quality of the rhymes (single or double) as a speaker of English and as a performer of

28 In delirium, the individual’s mind is not present as such; that is, there is no individual activity and the consequence is a total loss of perception and total loss of the ability to make connections. Delirium is as far from genius in one direction as (egocentric) mania is from it in another. 78 his own work, responsive to present audiences, or as a poet familiar with the English poetic tradition? The first of the entries I cited, in which Coleridge writes, "I observe in all the Italian Poets the frequent & seemingly unlimited liberty of using Trochees,” offers some help. As he continues, “I imagine that in reading they spondaize the two syllables and sometimes e contra an iambic in a place of the verse where a trochee seems to our ears almost necessary,” we find again a tension between the meter as it would be scanned and the meter as (Coleridge expects) it would be voiced. While he gives no explanation for his assumption that Italian poets (or readers in general) invert the trochaic rhythm of such lines when they pronounce them, the pattern parallels Coleridge’s note in Biographia on the youthful habit of “singing” verse—a habit over-zealous instructors attempt to eradicate presumably because it returns poetic sense to the level of pure, iambic sound. Coleridge may similarly imagine this performative reversal to spring from the (too great) tension placed upon the Italian line. If the written line obscures its iambic nature or its connection to other iambic lines in the same broad tradition, in pronouncing it, the poet may fall back upon the (half-correct) childish mode of singing or may involuntarily clarify the connection to the broader tradition for his inner ear and in the hearing of the public. Coleridge, after all, frequently depicts the involuntary production of another’s thought and will; ventriloquism is the central trope of Christabel and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and, as I will show, it occupies a central place in Biographia Literaria. Near the end of this entry, however, Coleridge seems to switch tactics and arrives at another conclusion which he then pronounces necessary: Italian poets' continual use of trochaic feet must derive from their spondaic mode of speaking. The suggestion seems to be that daily speech patterns alter these poets' sense of the justness of the traditional form; nothing else could account for the predominance of falling over rising meter. Such provincial misunderstanding would thus give sanction to the English penchant for caricaturing Italian recitation patterns—assuming it is the English (aliens and travelers) who caricature. Or, and at this point Coleridge seems to gather up his previous explanations, since an Italian who speaks with "propriety" speaks with a "diffusion of accent," these poets' metrical choices may reference two moments—present speech practices as well as the larger tradition traced from classical meters. For the obvious question to ask is: if meter is in the line, and the line is greatly obscured, appearing often as falling rather than rising meter, how can it be recognized? One possible answer is that the Italian poets must reveal their verse's relation to its origins and thus serve as intermediaries for the public. By creating tension between their written and recited lines, and by placing their written lines further from rising meter than their recited lines, they show that public modes of expression—recitation and common speech—testify to the broad tradition and uphold it. In accommodating present verbal effects (the common spondaic mode of speaking) and showing the influence of a more original meter even there, these poets are not provincial but resolutely traditional, revealing the continuity between common speech and long-established verse forms. And, in turn, current speech patterns offer an opportunity for meter to expand its boundaries, and they can do so because, in reciting their work, Italian poets will at least partly restore what is idiosyncratic in a verse. I have taken some liberties in interpreting what is, frankly, a cryptic set of observations. But it is telling that Coleridge assumes that the Italian verse he encounters is iambic and, in partial support of that assumption, imagines that the authors must invert the rhythm of their lines in recitation. Something about vocalization—whether it is the consciousness of another’s voice borne on one’s own or whether it is the publicity of reading—prompts an inversion of meter or, as Biographia and the notebooks suggest, prompts a reversionary attention to meter’s (inner and older) basis—its primary, incantatory significance. Then, too, within a single entry on the Italian poets' predilection for trochaic feet, Coleridge moves from tonal amazement to what looks much more like chauvinism and sympathy for those who caricature Italian speakers to an immediate self-correction, 79 commenting that to speak Italian with "propriety" implies “this more equable diffusion of accent.” We seem to witness Coleridge in the process of framing a hypothesis about the larger [historical] meaning of what “the best Italian poets” simply do. And, though the evolving hypothesis is specific to Italian poetry (and of course emerges long before Biographia’s more explicit, though still marginal statements), in lingering over the relation between written and recited meters, Coleridge begins to outline rules for poetic composition, the first of which appears to be that contemporary poetry must show a more original form of meter as investing current reading practices. In doing so, the poet avoids the pitfalls of merely reflecting the happenstance of speech or of drawing on a circumscribed set of poetic phrases. The poet shows the pattern-bound, enduring, and involuntary—vocative and innovative—nature of reading. To read would then be to signal the principle at work in becoming and, potentially, to be uncannily aware of it. Coleridge will later famously describe a symbol as "characterized by a translucence of the Special in the Individual or of the General in the Especial or of the Universal in the General."29 Whatever the importance of image for his overarching poetics, Coleridge’s notebook entries suggest that meter may be a better vehicle for symbol than image. Meter is the under-texture of all poetry and, in an attenuated sense, of all writing. Meter is a second-order symbol, a catalyst for apprehending symbolic structure. If meter shows what symbols do—that they grant present and general (self-reflexive) understanding, that they structure our articulations—music is the feeling of the resolution of the present note with all that has come before and will follow from it. We can find and schematize the sense of historical connectedness in meter; music offers the sensation of connection. In a marginal note of the fourth chapter in Biographia, Coleridge describes a “bull”—“I was a fine child but they changed me”—as offering the sensation without the sense of connection (BL 1.72-73n). Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads, he goes on to claim, did just the opposite. It provided readers the sense without the sensation of solid reason; it demanded, according to Coleridge, that readers admit that, with respect to poetry “they had been all their lives admiring without judgement, and were now about to censure without reason” (BL 1.72). By this token, Wordsworth had secured the rational (or, to speak somewhat figuratively, the metrical) component of his poetics but had not attended to the sonic, that is, to the modes of cultural recognition. To return to a local point within Coleridge’s notebook entries, the origin of the poet’s tact in knowing that an English poem might bear more than three double rhymes in a stanza if there were only two stanzas probably has to be intuitive. For rhyme, in this account, appears less susceptible of rational analysis, and Coleridge says less about it. And there is a further tension embedded in the "more" when Coleridge asks himself, "Now will it be a more English Music if the first & fourth are double rhymes; & the 5 & 6th single?—or all single; or the second & 3rd double?" For in finding the most English-sounding rhyme scheme, we cannot simply turn to Chaucer or Spenser; the music they found is no longer appropriate to the moment. Although Coleridge’s “more” must imply something like, “English lyric at present is something less than truly English—perhaps because contemporary poets have forgotten that they do not speak for themselves—,” the poet is only able to recognize an English music when he hears it. Such music, it would seem, must continually recreate its own depth of connection, its own ancestry.

29 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "The Statesman's Manual," in Lay Sermons, ed. R. J. White (Princeton: Routledge, 1972), 30. 80

I am going to suggest that in at least one powerful sense the potential for this sort of extravagant translation is neither the goal nor a problem for Coleridge. In his comments after "What is Life," Coleridge turns to translation, writing:

The Elegiac Measure adapted to the English may be either, with the preced: Hexam: in all cases, a common pentameter—or else end with —∪∪ / — ∪ / — ∪: just we as we really read (tho' not scan) the ancient Pentameter. — ∪ ∪ ∪—∪ —∪ ∪ — ∪ —∪ Jussit et invitos facta tegenda loqui. the first half left open to all its original varieties as those may be best expressed by English Emphasis—i.e. a syllable more or less— — ∪∪∪—∪∪ Rideat assiduis—&c &c—or finally the last half of the Pentameter may be — ∪ ∪ — ∪ — — ∪ ∪ — ∪ — Treasures of Gold shall boast never to purchase faith.

While Coleridge is ostensibly addressing only a possible situation in which poets draw on elegiac measure for their verses, his comments directly follow the group of fragments that claim to try a new meter and again suggest a connection between metrical originality and the rediscovery of classical forms. And, again, Coleridge distinguishes between the verbalized and the technically correct aspects of meter. Although English speakers familiar with classical forms know that the second (the pentameter) verse of an elegiac couplet always ends in two dactyls and a long syllable, in reading it, they regroup the last two feet and invert the rhythm of the final foot. Translation thus anticipates itself. It begins before any deliberate search for an English equivalent as an involuntary reversal. Here, reading transports the reader to the present—not back to the less differentiated (and the sing-songy). Yet Coleridge suggests that such reading does not efface the classical form; we can still reliably scan the ancient pentameter. And when adaptations of elegiac measure repeat this pattern of re-metering and echo contemporary reading practices, Coleridge claims, they do just what they ought. The more blatant distortion of classical verse lies in English scholars' leveling of the two lines, rendering the first (the hexameter) verse as a pentameter. The situation might seem analogous to that of the Italian poets’ practice of flattening their trochees into spondees when reading their verses, but this time, if English readers’ and English poets’ practices bring them closer to some less marked base, these practices also appear to circumvent the path through classical verse. At least, they do not appear to draw attention to that tradition. Still, Coleridge maintains, representing hexameters as pentameters is appropriate.30 Coleridge offers no justification for these practical rules of adaptation. But the Latin verse he quotes, “jussit et invitos facta tegenda loqui,” suggests that even if poets bungled their verses and scholars confounded the rules of classical scansion, something of the classical tradition would speak out from the mis-trained and unconscious body of verse. The line comes from the ninth part of the first book of Tibullus’s Delia. The poet has charged his lover that it will do him no good to try to

30 Coleridge may have Milton's Paradise Lost in mind (if not also Dryden's translation of the Aenid). If he is thinking about the former, he may also be suggesting that Milton did not need (in the headnote to Paradise Lost) to locate the Englishness of his epic in its "neglect of rhyme," since the representation of hexameters as pentameters already gestures to and transforms the classical tradition. 81 conceal affairs; Venus takes these things seriously, and, moreover, the god has ordered it so that, while sleeping, a voice will force its way out of his inert body, will “speak and tell unwillingly of things better buried.”31 “Treasures of gold shall boast never to purchase faith” is Coleridge’s translation of the (faithless) boy’s reply. Things do not go very well for the older man in this poem; his boy is in love with a girl and he spends the rest of his song multiplying curses against him. Nevertheless, the situation in which a voice forces its way out of a prone or cursed or mesmerized body is one that recurs through the body of Coleridge’s poetry and prose—most notably in Christabel and in Biographia Literaria. I will look at the latter of these instances, which, as I shall show, has to do with the relation between the voice of the present and an originary voice. But for now, the point is that some site of origin cannot be concealed, repressed, or forgotten. To do so is inevitably to betray both it and oneself (in involuntarily speaking on behalf of it). When poets imagine that their meters merely reproduce contemporary diction and semantics, or when they imagine that meter’s relation to prior forms is either inscrutable or a matter of present will (shaped by how poets read), they address readers in a manner that is as ephemeral, as static, and immobilizing as possible. Poets may desensitize their readers; but they do nothing to alter the forms that speak even without their voluntary participation. Coleridge values the music of the moment—perhaps for its odd kinship with iambic’s retrogressive drag toward the irrational and the givenness of bare patterning. He also values the apparently distorted presentation of meters: the Italian penchant for writing trochees and reading spondees and the English habit of altering the meter of elegiac couplets in reading the original languages and adapting this classical form to English by imitating that habit of misreading. But the point of this apparent distortion, which catches and illuminates present habits of articulation, is to reveal the original in the present. To put the point a bit differently, the means to the revaluation of traditional forms, where the historical opens the way for a categorically different kind of engagement, is through the appropriate expression of the moment. This appropriateness is what Coleridge is trying to formulate with some difficulty, for it is decidedly not a copy of the moment considered as (detached) externality (a set of material facts), or as (detached) individual will, or as (detached) public sentiment. It represents, rather, the moment as revelatory of a previous moment or as indicating sources that must be “far higher and far inward,” as Coleridge will later say of those who, in the psychic realm, know how to measure and sound “the rivers of the vale at the feet of their furthest inaccessible falls” (BL 1.239). In the Malta notebooks, Coleridge seeks a culturally typical rhyme scheme and a meter with an historically-doubled sound. In Biographia, the search for the typical and for a double historical referentiality remains an integral component of poetry but it also becomes a propaedeutic for spiritual and ethical life, though in the translation between realms the affective value of the typical and the historical undergoes a seismic shift.

2.

In Biographia’s opening paragraph, Coleridge claims that the least of what he has written concerns him personally and that while the narrative offers continuity to his reflections, his purpose is to

31 Tibullus and Sulpicia (55 BC-19 BC), The Poems, trans. A. S. Kline, (Poetry in Translation: 2001), Tibullus Book 1: Delia, 9, accessed February 2, 2017, http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Latin/Tibullus.htm#anchor_Toc532635315; A Tibullus Reader: Seven Selected Elegies, ed. Paul Allen Miller (Mundelein, Illinois: Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers Inc., 2013), 1.9.28. 82 present his political, religious, and philosophical principles and to deduce from the latter rules for poetry and poetic criticism. While it is no longer a commonplace among literary scholars to argue that Biographia is best considered as a work of practical criticism, the relation between the second half’s extended critique of Wordsworth's poetics and the first half’s mix of philosophical discourse and personal anecdote continues to be treated as presenting a generic challenge. Likewise, Coleridge's insistence at the outset and again at the conclusion that he is not writing a personal autobiography continues to be called "disconcerting" or to be viewed as requiring special explanation (BL 1.88).32 Biographia is said to be a tour de force by an opportunistic and germ-like self,33 a literary spoof,34 or the product of a pathological and deluded self.35 It is supposed to recognize the impossibility of owning one's discourse,36 to reflect Coleridge's personhood (along

32 Paul Hamilton uses this term, Coleridge and German Philosophy (New York: Continuum, 2007), 82; Deborah Elise While calls Biographia "not quite autobiographical" in her discussion of the autobiographical dilemmas on display in Biographia. See "Imagination's Date," European Romantic Review 14(2003), 467-78 at 469. 33 Hamilton argues that while Coleridge's disavowals of personality show Biographia to be participating in the philosophical concerns of the day—in which the ground of our being is impersonal and our differentiating qualities do not indicate us uniquely and in which to personalize is to attempt to fix meaning which is continually being produced—Biographia is “justified” as an autobiography because it reflects an episodic and germ-like self, capable of anticipating and creating historical transformation. See Coleridge and German Philosophy 69-88 at 80. 34 Thomas Vogler argues that Biographia's endless digressions produce a comic and serious work of form rather than content, one that risks turning into "the dithyrambic ode" of the empty Fichtean "I" and that draws readers into its own project of creating an author. "Coleridge's Book of Moonlight" in Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, ed. Frederick Burwick (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1989), 20-46. 35 Norman Fruman suggests that Coleridge's borrowings from German philosophy mean that not only can those passages not be attributed to Coleridge but that, as Coleridge the man cannot be believed, the whole is to be discredited; and "as an autobiography, the book almost ceases to exist after its fourteenth chapter." See Norman Fruman, Coleridge the Damaged Archangel (New York: George Braziller, 1971), 107, 69-107 and passim. William Hazlitt's 1817 review similarly begins by quoting Coleridge's caution that he is not writing a personal autobiography and demanding what "our Auto-Biographer" has offered the public instead, commenting that "there are, in fact, only two or three passages in the work which relate to the details of the author's life," and concluding that Coleridge the individual is undependable; not only has he disappointed our generic expectations, but his political principles have shifted, and his aesthetic and philosophical principles are singular (perhaps betraying an egotistical desire for notoriety); hence, he cannot be believed. See William Hazlitt, "Review of Biographia Literaria," Edinburgh Review 28 (August 1817) 488-515 at 488. 36 Sheila Kearns argues that "The Romantic construction of authorship is carried out in the face of a developing awareness of the disappearance of the author" and the corresponding attempt "to 'author' the 'author-function.'" Kearns claims that Coleridge quotes swaths of his own texts in order to become the ideal reader and thus possess his writing and himself. See Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Romantic Autobiography (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1995), 27-28 and passim. Jerome Christensen similarly argues that while Coleridge wants to save the will from Hartleyan associationism, he never finds anything but "a subfictive trope," which is also to say, an endless production of texts (including himself) and a collapsing of the "sacred distinction between things 83 with the philosophical concerns of its time) through its dejected mood,37 or to serve as the reader's (not the author's) autobiography.38 Its mix of personal anecdote and philosophical argumentation are said to be held together in the Coleridgean symbol—a solution that appealingly turns to Coleridge's own central ideals but unhelpfully guts the symbol’s ability to do more than hold together a work of art or indicate a person behind the text with contradictory desires.39 More pervasive is the assumption that Coleridge fails to make good on his promise to "investigate the seminal principle" of fancy and imagination and "from the kind to deduce the degree" (BL 1.88). Coleridge is said to balk at a deduction of the imagination for religious reasons (he would have to forgo the idea of a personal God), or in order to stage a particular literary effect (that of the ludicrously empty center), or to abandon his project's goal because of a fundamental ignorance or for pathological reasons (a constitutional inability to complete tasks or to keep compacts), or to leave much of the deduction as "a beautifully designed occasion for imaginative response."40

and persons." See Coleridge's Blessed Machine of Language (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 19-20, 25, 30-31. 37 J. H. Haeger argues that the mixture of autobiography and philosophy in Biographia’s central chapters produces its own resolution (of the tension between these genres and the problem of Coleridge’s plagiarisms), for the dejection reflected here reveals a prevailing mood that characterizes Coleridge the man as well as the Romantic period and ironizes the ideas of mental construction borrowed from German philosophy. J. H. Haeger, "Anti-Materialism, Autobiography, and the Abyss of Unmeaning in the Biographia Literaria," in Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, ed. Frederick Burwick (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1989) 75-87. 38 Through her study of Biographia's use of Socratic irony to promote self-understanding, Kathleen Wheeler argues that "for the reader, the genre…implies that his work in reading is to produce an autobiographical work in which his own consciousness and mind is the subject of analysis." Without slighting the power of Wheeler's claim, I would simply point out that it necessitates that Biographia be Coleridge's autobiography first before any readerly self-reflection or conversion—before any conversation—is possible. See Sources, processes and methods in Coleridge's Biographia Literaria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 156. 39 Catherine M. Wallace argues that because Coleridge's purpose is to make readers observe their own minds and to arrive at an idea of imagination, he crafts a narrative version of himself in order to facilitate this process, presenting the expected level of the reader's understanding as a stage in the life of his narrated self. The character "Coleridge" is supposed to be "a gradually-emerging symbol of the fusion of actual human experience and rigorous philosophic inquiry." At least, this character is understood to be temporal (a persona with lived, developing experiences) and philosophic (that is, if the text is understood as a person). [Wallace's account may create the problem she attempts to solve by finding a division between philosophy and life.] See "The Function of Autobiography in Biographia Literaria," The Wordsworth Circle 12 (1981): 216-225.218, 220, 221). H. J. Jackson argues that while Coleridge portrays himself as a Tristram Shandy—as a literary type—he also hopes to set the record straight with respect to his own poetic and political principles. This contradiction, like numerous others, is held together when we view Biographia Literaria as rendering an idea of selfhood in the Coleridgean sense—as a symbol necessarily involving such contradiction. See "Coleridge's Biographia: When is an Autobiography Not an Autobiography?," Biography 20:1 (Winter 1997): 54-71. 40 Both G. N. G. Orsini and Thomas McFarland describe Coleridge as running from a deduction of the imagination for religious or moral reasons. Orsini makes this claim directly; McFarland makes it indirectly, claiming that Coleridge's description of imagination breaks from the long paraphrase of 84

Coleridge, as I shall show, may not produce a transcendental deduction of imagination along the lines of Schelling or Fichte (though his heavy borrowings from German philosophy in chapter twelve lead us to expect such a thing), and he may not offer a deduction in chapter thirteen (though he indicates that he is on the point of doing so when the supposed "letter from a friend" interrupts him and suggests that he save the deduction for another work. But, by this point, Coleridge has already deduced imagination's kind; he has done so in chapter seven (in his first extended discussion of the form of thought and the corresponding refutation of Hartley's disciples' turn to interactionism). And in the second half of Biographia, he will detail imagination's degree of difference from fancy. There is an element of Coleridge's promise that should present some difficulty: that is, that he plans first to establish the qualitative difference between imagination and fancy and then to examine them as though they were generically similar and only quantitatively distinct. This apparent contradiction points to a central motivation of Biographia, one that involves Coleridge's response to Wordsworth's broad poetics, especially the latter's interest in presenting the form of thinking, his insistence that poetry should restore the reader's feelings, and his suggestion that there is a connection between the contemplation of cognitive process and psychic health. Wordsworth's most explicit public statement that poems ought to reflect mental faculties occurs in the Preface to his 1815 Poems, immediately before his comments on imagination connecting it first with the depiction of perceptual process and second with an ennobling effect. Imagination, Wordsworth claims, supports the eternal part of our nature.41 These claims echo his earlier statement in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads that the poet's contemplation of the historical relation of feelings or his representation of cognition somehow communicates a quieting and harmonizing impulse to the

Schelling in chapter twelve and emerges as "a mad dash" from the reconciliation of the "I am" with the "it is." See G. N. G. Orsini, Coleridge and German Idealism (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969), 214-15 and Thomas McFarland, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 156-58 and passim. Vogler argues that argues that Coleridge's project is circular, producing "the story of the growth of his own mind" as a demonstration of the existence of the imagination, while needing to produce himself from the reader's imagination. The few lines describing the imagination after chapters of build-up, follow a well-established literary precedent, from Swift's "Tale of the Tub" to Stern's Tristram Shandy, of staging the central emptiness of the text and of the subject. See Vogler, "Coleridge's Book of Moonlight." Fruman has rigorously described Coleridge in pathological terms and as "having breathlessly unloaded tons of ill-digested metaphysics, all for the sake of 'the deduction of the imagination,' [which] he suddenly breaks off…as if he realized that, after all, he had little to say on the subject." See Fruman, Coleridge the Damaged Archangel, 101 and passim. Hazlitt made similar claims in his 1817 review, See Hazlitt, "Review of Biographia Literaria," 488-515. Wheeler argues that Coleridge's project in Biographia rests on a form of Socratic irony. On one hand, the discussion of primary and secondary imagination neatly sum up the first and second volumes of Biographia (which deal with the nature of perception and of art respectively); on the other hand, the sparseness of the discussion of imagination calls upon the reader's imagination to fill it out (and to do so consciously, thus reversing habits of unselfconscious reading). See Wheeler, Sources, processes and methods in Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, 127-32 and passim. I. A. Richards' understanding of Coleridgean imagination shares ground with Wheeler's in that it understands imagination as its (self-conscious) exercise and as something that appears as the reader discovers her own participation in meaning-making. See I. A. Richards, Coleridge on Imagination (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1960), 72-99 and passim. 41 William Wordsworth, “Preface of 1815,” in The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 3.37. 85 reader. And as I argued in my first two chapters, he stages the moment-by-moment unfolding of cognition, the healthful somnolent effect of books on readers, and the overshadowing of the reader by the poet in his poetic autobiography—with which Coleridge was familiar and which was originally familiarly called "the poem to Coleridge." Wordsworth's newly published statements not only reiterated central elements of his previous poetic creed, emphasizing imagination's role in the rendering of cognitive form, they added a new, more volatile element to Wordsworth's insistence that poetry's purpose is to ameliorate the feelings. The "Essay Supplementary" now argued that the poet establishes "dominion over the spirits of Readers…in order that they may be purified and exalted," that the reader ought to respond to poems with passion (which is not a passive but an active mode of engagement) and that the poet's goal is the "widening the sphere of human sensibility, for the delight, honor, and benefit of human nature."42 It is well known that Coleridge had for years been meditating a response to Wordsworth's claims in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, that in 1811 he had proposed a preface of his own to accompany a new collection of his poems which would explain his poetic principles in relation to his own, Wordsworth's, and Southey's poems, and that, when the project was dropped with one publisher, he took it up again in 1815 with the help of several friends who agreed to sponsor the volume and oversee its publication. The publication of Wordsworth's Poems (1815) with a new preface, an additional essay, and the reprinted Preface to Lyrical Ballads appended at the conclusion, became the occasion for Coleridge's intended preface, which turned into Biographia Literaria. Biographia's response to Wordsworth's (1815) Preface takes up the distinction between imagination and fancy, but it does so by scrutinizing the larger context in which the distinction has meaning: the form of thinking, what that form implies about our nature and our development, how we find it echoed in poetic form, and, hence, its connection with the possibility that poetry might enable our (re)generation. Where Wordsworth discusses imagination's involvement in rendering the appearance to the senses of, for example, a scene of ships, Coleridge turns to the inner organization of cognition—what must be true of imagination based on our experience of perceiving, remembering, composing, and so on, and the inferences we can draw from those experiences. Where Wordsworth emphasizes the poet's work of contemplation and then of communicating healthful cognitive rhythms to a reader (or, later, emphasizes the poet's dominion over the reader), Coleridge argues that the reader may briefly be united with the poet in feeling but it is not the poet who effects this end; and, further, the reader must become active through genius even as genius reflects itself in both poet and reader. Finally, where Wordsworth connects our ethical being to a set of cognitive and communal rhythms that we have lost through our exposure to the consumerist, salacious, and alienating features of modern life, and which we might get back by reclaiming a more regular set of bodily, aesthetic, and perceptual rhythms, Coleridge connects our ethical being to our imaginative development—a development that is first intellectual and creative and then spiritual and social. For Coleridge, our regeneration remains a two-part process which must repeat the divine act in unconscious, expansive moments of reflection as well as in the conscious assumption of our social "type" in moments of self-contraction. All of this is to say that Coleridge's treatment of imagination, his use of the autobiographic genre to inquire into the form of thinking (and his engagement with the philosophic issues of his day surrounding this form and the nature of imagination), and his critique of Wordsworth's poetics all comprise a single response to his former collaborator. Like Wordsworth, Coleridge privileges the structure of feeling and knowing over any particular image of a past self, for it more perfectly reveals our nature than any set of images could. Three times Coleridge takes up this form (along with its

42 William Wordsworth, “Essay Supplementary to the Preface” in Prose Works, 3.82, 84. 86 relation to imagination, its reflection in poetry, and its relation to our intellectual, affective, and spiritual development). Ultimately, however, the substance of Coleridge’s critique of Wordsworth appears through his corrective move back to characterization in the second half of Biographia. Can a person, he could be imagined to ask, simply contemplate the form of thinking and become what he or she should be? Is this growth in self-reflection going to produce sociability (or the empty Fichtean I)?; how do we know that when we relate to this form (and its repetition of “the infinite I AM”) that we are not willfully and episodically coopting it? Coleridge's critique of Wordsworth's poetics is a response to these questions. I am going to look at each of his three discussions of cognitive form and then at two moments in his critique of Wordsworth.

The first instance in which Coleridge scrutinizes the nature of thinking appears in chapter seven. Immediately after discussing his realization, through Wordsworth, that fancy and imagination are generically different—the delineation of which becomes the manifest goal of Biographia—Coleridge begins discussing the law of association as it has historically been presented from Aristotle to Hartley in chapter five, and he devotes chapters six and seven to refuting Hartley's associationist system. Ultimately, Coleridge’s point has to do with personal identity: what it means to perceive or to reflect or to create aesthetically or politically and to do so as something we could call a self. In the process, he directly takes up the law of continuity, arguing that whenever it is understood to describe the blind mechanism by which ideas are associated because of their proximity in space or time it produces absurdities; this is hardly what it means to interpret a more perfect state from the perspective of a lower one. It is helpful here to remember that the law of continuity was introduced by Leibniz in order to justify “well-founded” mathematical fictions (like the infinitesimal) or to justify our ability to calculate the area of the circle as though it were an infinite-sided polygon. He renders it as: “In any supposed transition, ending in any terminus, it is permissible to institute a general reasoning, in which the final terminus may also be included.”43 For Leibniz, this also seems to mean that for fundamentally different states—like motion and rest—in which one approaches the other as a limit, we can include the limit (for example, rest) in our calculation, though it cannot properly ever belong to movement. For Coleridge, the point is twofold. A lower state may describe a higher—or be employed to find a rule that will enable us to do so. When we can do so in our own case—describe a higher mode of being from the vantage of a lower—we may treat the higher, more perfect state as though it were already present even though it is not. At the same time, Coleridge strenuously objects to applying rules of logic to human perception and human becoming. We simply do not perceive in terms of infinitesimal differences but in terms of complete intervals and qualitative progressions. Our perceptions are organized around prominent elements. And they are fit to us, so that it is possible to conclude that the manifest form of our thinking reflects our manifest form. When chapter seven opens, Coleridge is continuing an argument he began in the previous chapter. There he had focused his attack on Hartley’s idea that “any part of any impression might recal [sic] any part of any other, without a cause present to determine what it should be” (BL 1.112). And he had ended that chapter on a lofty note. Remarking a famous case of a fevered woman in “a Catholic town in Germany” who, in her delirium, had spoken an incessant stream of ancient Greek,

43 See, Samuel Levey, “Archimedes, Infinitesimals and the Law of Continuity: On Leibniz’s Fictionalism,” in Infinitesimal Differences: Controversies between Leibniz and his Contemporaries, ed. Ursula Goldenbaum and Douglas Jesseph (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), 128-30. See also, J. M. Child, The Early Mathematical Manuscripts of Leibniz (Chicago: Open Court Publishing Co., 1920), 145-50. 87

Hebrew, and Latin, and who, though unable to read or write, had been raised by a learned Protestant pastor who used to read these works aloud to himself, Coleridge announces:

This authenticated case furnishes both proof and instance, that reliques of sensation may exist for an indefinite time in a latent state, in the very same order in which they were originally impressed; and as we cannot rationally suppose the feverish state of the brain to act in any other way than as a stimulus, this fact (and it would not be difficult to adduce several of the same kind) contributes to make it even probable, that all thoughts are in themselves imperishable; and, that if the intelligent faculty should be rendered more comprehensive, it would require only a different and apportioned organization, the body celestial instead of the body terrestrial, to bring before every human soul the collective experience of its whole past existence. And this, this, perchance, is the dread book of judgement, in whose mysterious hieroglyphics every idle word is recorded! Yea, in the very nature of a living spirit, it may be more possible that heaven and earth should pass away, than that a single act, a single thought, should be loosened or lost from that living chain of causes, to all whose links, conscious or unconscious, the free-will, our only absolute self, is co-extensive and co-present. But not now dare I longer discourse of this, waiting for a loftier mood, and a nobler subject, warned from within and without, that it is profanation to speak of these mysteries.

He concludes by quoting Plotinus in Greek with his own translation:

“To those to whose imagination it has never been presented, how beautiful is the countenance of justice and wisdom; and that neither the morning nor the evening star are so fair. For in order to direct the view aright, it behoves [sic] that the beholder should have made himself congenerous and similar to the object beheld. Never could the eye have beheld the sun, had not its own essence been soliform,” (i.e. pre-configured to light by a similarity of essence with that of light) “neither can a soul not beautiful attain to an intuition of beauty.” (BL 1.112-15)

And he resumes the subject in chapter seven, saying,

We will pass by the utter incompatibility of such a law (if law it may be called, which would itself be the slave of chances) with even that appearance of rationality forced upon us by the outward phaenomena of human conduct, abstracted from our own consciousness. (BL 1.116)

However heady (or potentially distracting) the notion of a dread book of judgment lodged in the collective human mind, by the time chapter seven begins, Coleridge assumes that his audience has (or should have) followed him by means of the anecdote and the reference to Plotinus. We might think that the story of the young, fevered woman furnishes proof for associationism—that her nerves or her organs performed a complex function without her conscious will and that, once stimulated, a partial impression produced other parts of a larger impression at random. But if we think this, Coleridge suggests, we misunderstand ourselves. In other words, Coleridge seems to expect that if we simply attend to the anecdote and to the manner in which we understand it, we will have to acknowledge that what the woman does is not thinking, for she has no knowledge of what she says (nor could she have understood her speech were she able to become conscious in the midst of her delirious echoing of her former guardian). 88

The incidence has the “appearance of rationality” in that the perfect sentences of Greek, Latin, or Rabbinical Hebrew the woman belts out have a rational origin and in that other scholars are on hand to take down the sentences, to recognize that they are Greek or Latin, or Hebrew, and, finally, to trace their textual sources (and the almost certain historical source of the impression made upon the woman’s mental faculties). Were these scholars to be stimulated by any part of the total impression of her speech to recall any part of any impression associated with it in their own minds (and personal histories), they would be in a similar state: unable to grasp the content of their own speech. Knowledge requires some kind of conformity—between knower and known. Abstractly speaking, the woman has the potential to understand what she says simply because it is human language. But this potential is never more than that. And there is no lawfulness to fever. It is here that chapter seven begins. There can be no law of association, Coleridge says, in which chance plays a role. To allow for the operation of chance within this so-called law is simply to admit that the law cannot explain why some portions of an impression will be remembered in preference to others, or how observers move from being sensuously affected to having a perception in the first place, or from having a perception to recollecting other relevant perceptions and being able to compare them. But, leaving all of this aside, Coleridge continues, even if we only consider the subordination of final to efficient causes in Hartley's system (that is, even if we only consider perception’s determination by association), the soul must become a mere “ens logicum” (BL 117). The point seems to be that if the soul exists only to receive impressions—if it is taken to be a purely passive entity—then it is no different from the matter that presses upon it and, hence, it does not exist in its own right. But at this stage in the argument, Coleridge only explicitly rejects Hartley’s notion that the soul is both the recipient of impressions and is categorically different from them—a proposition, he claims, that involves all of the difficulty of interactionism without any of its benefits. Because of this absurdity, Coleridge says, Hartley’s disciples rejected the notion that the soul (and its acts of attention, thinking, and willing) are purely caused and argued instead that consciousness arises as the common product of material causes and the mind. But this concession, he continues, is ludicrous.

For what is harmony but a mode of relation, the very esse of which is percipi? An ens rationale, which pre-supposes the power, that by perceiving creates it. The razor’s edge becomes a saw to the armed vision; and the delicious melodies of Purcell or Cimarosa might be disjointed stammerings to a hearer, whose partition of time should be a thousand times subtler than ours. (BL 1.118) 44

In other words, if we seem to think, we do. And that we do think, that we create relations that do not simply exist outside of us, can be demonstrated by the relative nature of phenomena. A razor’s edge looks sharp to the naked eye but ragged under a microscope. Purcell’s melodies sound sweet to us, but their continuous, graceful unfolding reflects our capacities and our activity as we appropriate what we are fit to hear and what is fit to us. These melodies simply would not exist for another

44 Coleridge alludes first to George Berkeley's metaphysics which turn on the notion that to be is to be perceived; there is nothing that could be without being contained in some mind and, in this sense, Berkeley’s metaphysics is one of constant accord. Whatever is must be known—at least by God. While Coleridge tends to refer to Locke disparagingly, Locke makes a strikingly similar argument in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding about the relative nature of perceptions. See Essay 2.23.13. 89 being who perceived much more quickly, in much smaller partitions of time. And, by implication, if we think of units of time as able to be subdivided indefinitely, then there simply is no harmony at all, for there is no one being to perceive it. Here we should pause. Coleridge’s explicit argument is that there is no coincidental tune co- produced by the mind and by things that simply exist in the world. For, Coleridge implies, who would perceive such a thing? If a tune is perceived, then the mind that perceives it has related it to itself. What this means is that there is no real distinction between more “active” and more “passive” modes of thinking. Even at its most “passive,” the experience of perception implies an action; it relates and experiences the relation. And, more importantly, perception implies a perceiver. The latter point may seem obvious enough, although it also requires something like species being. Coleridge begins this portion of his argument from a position designed to be broadly acceptable. If thinking is caused, then there is no creative activity (he is not writing Biographia Literaria—Saint Paul's church is writing it as much as he is—Lord Byron did not write Childe Harold, Newton's discoveries were not his own), and so on. “Thus,” he says,

the whole universe co-operates to produce the minutest stroke of every letter, save only that I myself, and I alone, have nothing to do with it, but merely the causeless and effectless beholding of it when it is done. Yet scarcely can it be called a beholding; for it is neither an act nor an effect; but an impossible creation of a something—nothing out of it very contrary! It is the mere quick-silver plating behind a looking-glass; and in this alone consists the poor worthless I!

It is all too easy to ascribe a kind of melodrama to Coleridge here. But the rhetorical questions—did Byron not compose Childe Harold!—only partly obscure a sober challenge to his readers to understand themselves. It is one thing to affirm that we only seem to act and that the real source of our deeds is material (or lies in the nerves, or in a fluid in them, or in the particles that compose that fluid, or in the infinitesimal parts of those particles which are continuous with the parts of the particles striking the body, or in the total energy of the universe). It is another to understand this position. If we are to understand the world as a smooth plane of material effects, then there is no reason to speak of the co-production of mind and world and there is certainly no difference between the “inner” and the “outer.” There is no proper bound we can assign to bodies or minds, which are indistinguishable from Saint Paul’s, and there is nothing we can really call a self. Our thoughts emerge from the plane of effects that is, so to speak, continuously effected and is more precisely nothing at all because it does not endure in any way. Part of the oddness of Coleridge’s claim turns on the underscored word, "effectless." I have described a plane of effects, but Coleridge emphasizes that any description of effects is untenable as it relies on difference, prominence, a perceiver. To produce entails effects—entails something new—rather than an empty repetition of the same homogeneous space. Considered as a smooth plane, matter can do nothing; and bounds, as Coleridge has shown, are the gift of a perceiver. A perceiver can never be carved out from the effect-lessness of matter. We may envision perception as though the mind were a mirror or the “quick-silver plating behind it.” Then perception could seem an echoing, but an echoing implies a grasping together and an act of relating. The “striking” of matter against an inactive mind that begins nowhere and ends nowhere is something far less; it is a stasis, a non-echo. To imagine selfhood as purely receptive, as the surface across which matter glances is to imagine nothing at all. As I suggested earlier and as should be apparent, the argument Coleridge advances has to do with personal identity. Personal identity simply is the identity of action and perception—the unity they achieve in relating. Not to be the creative source of one's work is also not be a creator and not 90 to be the active (imminent) source of one’s perceptions is not to perceive; being and doing are inseparable features of the self. If association works as Hartley describes it in the first book of Observation on Man, then there is neither perception nor response by anything that could be called "I." Rather "the real agent is a something-nothing-every-thing, which does all of which we know, and knows nothing of all that itself does" (BL 1.120). This agent is none other than action divorced from perception, which Coleridge takes to be impossible. We will not perceive if we do not relate ourselves, and, a fortiori, to act at a higher level involves relating ourselves, according with. Declaring that Hartley, who affirmed God, did not understand his own claims well enough to be an heretic, Coleridge turns and asks how it is possible for anyone to accept (as he himself once had) Hartleyan principles. The answer, Coleridge says, lies in the confusion of conditions with causes. "We could never have learnt that we had eyes," he says, "but by the process of seeing; yet having seen we know that the eyes must have pre-existed in order to render the process of sight possible" (BL 1.123). In other words, in affirming that the action of seeing comes about as the perception, and the perception comes about as the action, we must understand this seeming leap into sight. We must recognize the precondition in which we find ourselves: having eyes, having all of the conditions for sight including, though Coleridge does not say so here, there being something— not a cause—to perceive, something so that we harmonize with ourselves. Referring, then, to Leibniz's laws of continuity, about which Leibniz wrote "it is one of my great maxims, and one of the most truthful, that nature never makes leaps," Coleridge notes that this law is "the limit and condition of the laws of mind, itself being rather a law of matter, at least of phaenomena considered as material" and that "at the utmost, it is to thought the same, as the law of gravitation is to loco-motion." Then, as though to ensure his readers follow the point about continuity in the context of his own use of the law, Coleridge describes thought in terms of a leap (BL 1.123n3).45

In every voluntary movement we first counteract gravitation, in order to avail ourselves of it. It must exist, that there may be a something to be counteracted, and which by its re-action, aids the force that is exerted to resist it. Let us consider, what we do when we leap. We first resist the gravitating power by an act purely voluntary, and then by another act, voluntary in part, we yield to it in order to light on the spot, which we had previously proposed to ourselves. Now let a man watch his mind while he is composing; or, to take a still more common case, while he is trying to recollect a name; and he will find the process completely analogous. Most of my readers will have observed a small water-insect on the surface of rivulets, which throws a cinque-spotted shadow fringed with prismatic colours on the sunny bottom of the brook; and will have noticed, how the little animal wins its way up against the stream, by alternate pulses of active and passive motion, now resisting the current, and now yielding to it in order to gather strength and a momentary fulcrum for a further propulsion. This is no unapt emblem of the mind's self-experience in the act of thinking. There are evidently two powers at work, which relatively to each other are active and passive; and this is not possible without an intermediate faculty, which is as once both active and passive. (In philosophical language, we must denominate this intermediate faculty in all its degrees and determinations, the IMAGINATION. But in common language, and especially on the subject of poetry, we appropriate the name to a superior degree of the faculty, joined to a superior voluntary controul over it.)

45 Nouveux essais: Opera 1 198, qtd. in BL 1.123n3. 91

It is possible to conclude that Coleridge's point is a kind of pun (even of the irrelevant kind by which James Boswell reported Samuel Johnson to have "refuted" Berkeley's metaphysics). The laws of continuity apply to matter, Coleridge could be imagined to suggest, whereas thought is not material; therefore it can make leaps, and as we can make leaps, we are not material either. In one sense, irrelevant punning is appropriate in that the continuity of action and perception has no real place in a discussion of material continuity, which must be understood in terms of sequence (this and then this and then this). To put the point another way, Coleridge is, at a low level, illustrating properties of mind by a series of phenomenal experiences; he is speaking figuratively. There may seem to be an infinite series of intervenient states when we leap—which would, in a version of Zeno's paradox, leave us perpetually in suspense. But a movement is whole and entire and cannot be subdivided even if its measurable path can be. Here we have a figural complement for the preceding argument that the experience of volition must be real. But the figure does not quite understand itself. It lives and dies in intimation, for it resembles thought, as though showing it from the point of view of perpetual suspense, as though we could really perceive something enacted somewhere else. At a higher level, the point has changed from the union of action and perception—and, hence, the reality of leaping—to the union of the voluntary and the involuntary—that is, to a representation of the process of leaping as a sequence: of conditions met by resistance (energy) and a subsequent aligning with the (new) conditions in which we find ourselves. What makes this terminological shift a higher-order expression of the same mental activity is that we can both choose how to understand this process and, in understanding, enact our understanding. We can understand the leap aesthetically: as a guarantor of significance (an exchange of place, a continual self- translation), iambic meter's figuring of thought as bare differentiation and a recollective energy, a promise of suspense in the temporal disjoining of passivity and activity, and so on. We can understand it formally and, loosely speaking, transcendentally: as the manner in which our thought emerges in response to its conditions of partiality (of memory, of temporal awareness, of energy)— how it must harmonize with its conditions to appear. And we can understand it analogically or, to use Coleridge's term, tautegorically. Coleridge will say in Aids to Reflection:

The language is analogous, whenever a thing, power, or principle in a higher dignity is expressed by the same thing, power, or principle in a lower but more known form. Such, for instance is the language of John iii. 6. That which is born of the flesh, is flesh; that which is born of the Spirit, is Spirit. The latter half of the verse contains the fact asserted; the former half the analogous fact, by which it is rendered intelligible….I have only to add, that these analogies are the material, or (to speak chemically) the base, of symbols and symbolical expressions; the nature of which is always tautegorical, that is, expressing the same subject but with a difference, in contra-distinction from metaphors and similitudes, which are always allegorical, that is, expressing a different subject but with a resemblance.46

Coleridge's rendering of thought begins by establishing a resemblance relation between the experience of leaping and that of composing or trying to remember a name. It ends with imagination. If there is an analogical relation, it is one that relies on the reader's fusing the claims made about primary and secondary imagination later on in Biographia with the two forms of imagination described here. I will explain this statement in a moment. But I have been hovering above the passage, and I am going to indicate some of the features that will appear again in Coleridge's subsequent discussions of thinking's form and acquire increasing importance there.

46 Aids to Reflection, ed. Henry Nelson Coleridge, vol. 1 (London: William Pickering, 1848), 158-60. 92

Volition, specifically, voluntary movement requires resistance in order to emerge as such and in order to complete itself. While it appears to be fully and then only partly itself—only partly voluntary—this partiality is the means by which volition shows that it is and have been willed. There is no volition that is not enacted—just as there is no perception without action. Coleridge emphasizes this point; whether it is the material resistance of gravity or some other sort of resistance, "It must exist, that there may be a something to be counteracted, and which by its re- action, aids the force that is exerted to resist it." Speaking intellectually and aesthetically, Coleridge hints that this resistance may be temporal (an inability to keep our thoughts, actions, and the totality of our history present) or may be like the topical, tonal, stylistic, and formal restrictions necessary for composition. Or speaking psychologically (and perhaps spiritually), it may be an opposed current gently carrying all away from being's upward goal. Coleridge offers us a sequence: leaping, composing remembering, and finally the pulsing movement of a water-insect against the current. While in every case, the voluntary is produced out of the involuntary (and while it stands in the same relation to limitation that mind did to the material or phenomenal, eclipsing it), these expressions of thinking can also be understood as a graded series. To leap is simply to experience the volitional and its necessary self-limitation; to compose is also to produce something new. Remembering unifies times as well as striving to make what is beyond the reach of will in the mind (forgetting) available. It is the basis for composition and, even if a basis and a common activity, it is in some sense a higher form of composition to bring about the past and to undo continually the self-alienation that encroaches on thinking. While the water-insect seems to return to the pure contraction and self-release of the leap, it involves a progress as the leap did not and stands in relation to Coleridge's brief description of imagination here as another set of insects (the air-sylph and the horned fly) stand to Coleridge's treatment of primary and secondary imagination. Before moving on, it is helpful to remember to keep two points in mind. First, Coleridge's discussion of thinking began with the claim that Hartley's (and his followers') error lay in "mistaking the conditions of a thing for its causes and essence; and the process by which we arrive at the knowledge of a faculty, for the faculty itself" (BL 1.123). The conditions of our thinking are the sources of resistance. The cause—the impetus and the being of thinking—is imagination, the "intermediate faculty, which is at once both passive and active." The process appears effortful and voluntary and then less effortful and only partly voluntary. The imagination's power is the resolution of both aspects of thought (which are, after all, characterized in relation to each other). Imagination simply is the unity of thinking—not the act only but also its effects—and we all have it. It is the basis for perception, action, and volition. When we speak of it, we commonly refer to a superabundance of it, which Coleridge describes as a superior degree (of the power of thinking) and a superior voluntary control over it. To have imagination as a statesman, a poet, an historian is to move, perceive, and realize ideals more adroitly than one's peers. And to create can be viewed as resistance to the sluggishness involved in mere egotism and sensuousness or as resistance to the self-forgetting belonging to truisms and provincialism followed by a relaxing of resistance in order to render some of the obscured natural and cultural elements. Like the relation I suggested between composition and remembering, creative activity may require a greater power for thinking (and be the province of a few), but, as will be clear in Coleridge's next two descriptions of thought, the goal of this greater power is to manifest imagination in its common form. The second element in this passage that should be kept in mind is Coleridge's comment that the water-insect's movement is "no unapt emblem of the mind's self-experience in the act of thinking." The link between the insect's progress and the mind's self-experience is not clear at this point. It becomes clearer in Coleridge's second and third descriptions of thinking. The second of these, to which I shall now turn, is folded into a lengthy explanation of the nature of transcendental 93 inquiry. This explanation in turn precedes Coleridge's ten theses, which also take up the nature of the transcendental and include some of his most extensive borrowings from three of Schelling's works, though they also draw on Kant, Fichte, and Jacobi.47 Because this second analogue for thinking pointedly responds to the German philosophy surrounding it, I shall offer a fairly large swath of text. Coleridge first introduces the transcendental:

As the elder Romans distinguished their northern provinces into Cis-Alpine and Trans- Alpine, so may we divide all the objects of human knowledge into those on this side, and those on the other side of the spontaneous consciousness; citra et trans conscientiam communem. The latter is exclusively the domain of PURE philosophy, which is therefore properly entitled transcendental, in order to discriminate it at once, both from mere reflection and re-presentation on the one hand, and on the other from those flights of lawless speculation which abandoned by all distinct consciousness, because transgressing the bounds and purposes of our intellectual faculties, are justly condemned as transcendent.

And then he adds,

The first range of hills, that encircles the scanty vale of human life, is the horizon for the majority of its inhabitants. On its ridges the common sun is born and departs. From them the stars rise, and touching them they vanish. By the many, even this range, the natural limit and bulwark of the vale, is but imperfectly known. Its higher ascents are too often hidden by mists and clouds from uncultivated swamps, which few have courage or curiosity to penetrate. To the multitude below these vapors appear, now as the dark haunts of terrific agents, on which none may intrude with impunity; and now all a-glow, with colors not their own, they are gazed at, as the splendid palaces of happiness and power. But in all ages there have been a few, who measuring and sounding the rivers of the vale at the feet of their furthest inaccessible falls have learnt, that the sources must be far higher and far inward; a few, who even in the level streams have detected elements, which neither the vale itself or the surrounding mountains contained or could supply. How and whence to these thoughts, these strong probabilities, the ascertaining vision, the intuitive knowledge, may finally supervene, can be learnt only by the fact.

Coleridge then concludes by turning to Plotinus,

I might oppose to the question the words with which Plotinus supposes NATURE to answer a similar difficulty. “Should any one interrogate her, how she works, if graciously she vouchsafe to listen and speak, she will reply, it behoves [sic] thee not to disquiet me with interrogatories, but to understand in silence, even as I am silent, and work without words.” Likewise in the fifth book of the fifth Ennead, speaking of the highest and intuitive knowledge as distinguished from the discursive, or in the language of Wordsworth, The vision and the faculty divine;

47 Frederick Burwick argues that critics have not sufficiently attended to the fact that Coleridge draws on three of Schelling's works and that the way Coleridge moves between texts alters Schelling’s argument. Frederick Burwick, Mimesis and Its Romantic Reflections (University Park: The Pennsylvania University Press, 2001), 77-106. 94

He says: “it is not lawful to enquire from whence it sprang, as if it were a thing subject to place and motion, for it neither approached hither, nor again departs from hence to some other place; but it either appears to us or it does not appear. So that we ought not to pursue it with a view of detecting its secret source, but to watch in quiet till it suddenly shines upon us; preparing ourselves for the blessed spectacle as the eye waits patiently for the rising sun.” They and they only can acquire the philosophic imagination, the sacred power of self- intuition, who within themselves can interpret and understand the symbol, that the wings of the air-sylph are forming within the skin of the caterpillar; those only, who feel in their own spirits the same instinct, which impels the chrysalis of the horned fly to leave room in its involucrum for antennae yet to come. They know and feel, that the potential works in them, even as the actual works on them! In short, all the organs of sense are framed for a corresponding world of sense; and we have it. All the organs of spirit are framed for a correspondent world of spirit; tho’ the latter organs are not developed in all alike. But they exist in all, and their first appearance discloses itself in the moral being. How else could it be, that even worldlings, not wholly debased, will contemplate the man of simple and disinterested goodness with contradictory feelings of pity and respect? “Poor man! He is not made for this world.” Oh! Herein they utter a prophecy of universal fulfilment [sic]; for man must either rise or sink. (BL 1.236-42)

In the second half of his theses he writes,

THESIS VI….In this [spirit, self, and self-consciousness], and in this alone, object and subject, being and knowing, are identical, each involving and supposing the other. In other words, it is a subject which becomes a subject by the act of constructing itself objectively to itself; but which never is an object except for itself, and only so far as by the very same act it becomes a subject. It may be described therefore as a perpetual self-duplication of one and the same power into object and subject, which presuppose each other, and can exist only as antitheses. SCHOLIUM. If a man be asked how he knows that he is? he can only answer, sum quia sum [I am because I am]. But if (the absoluteness of this certainty having been admitted) he be again asked, how he, the individual person, came to be, then in relation to the ground of his existence, not to the ground of his knowledge of that existence, he might reply, sum quia dues est [I am because God is], or still more philosophically, sum quia in deo sum [I am because I am in God]. But if we elevate our conception to the absolute self, the great eternal I AM, then the principle of being, and of knowledge, of idea, and of reality; the ground of existence, and the ground of the knowledge of existence, are absolutely identical, Sum quia sum; I am, because I affirm myself to be; I affirm myself to be, because I am. THESIS VII….It has been shown, that a spirit is that, which is its own object, yet not originally an object, but an absolute subject for which all, itself included, may become an object. It must therefore be an ACT; for every object is, as an object, dead, fixed, incapable in itself of any action, and necessarily finite. Again, the spirit (originally the identity of object and subject) must in some sense dissolve this identity, in order to be conscious of it: fit alter et idem. But this implies an act, and it follows therefore that intelligence or self- consciousness is impossible, except by and in a will. The self-conscious spirit therefore is a will; and freedom must be assumed as a ground of philosophy, and can never de deduced from it. …. 95

THESIS IX. This principium commune essendi et cognoscendi [common principle of being and of knowing], as subsisting in a WILL, or primary ACT of self-duplication, is the mediate or indirect principle of every science; but it is the immediate and direct principle of the ultimate science alone, i.e. of transcendental philosophy alone…..In its very idea therefore as a systematic knowledge of our collective KNOWING, (scientia scientiae) it involves the necessity of some one highest principle of knowing, as at once the source and the accompanying form in all particular acts of intellect and perception. This, it has been shown, can be found only in the act and evolution of self-consciousness. We are not investigating an absolute principium essendi [principle of being]; for then, I admit, many valid objections might be started against our theory; but an absolute principium cognoscendi [principle of knowing]. The result of both the sciences, or their equatorial point, would be the principle of a total and undivided philosophy…. In other words, philosophy would pass into religion, and religion become inclusive of philosophy. We begin with the I KNOW MYSELF, in order to end with the absolute I AM. We proceed from the SELF, in order to lose and find all self in GOD. THESIS X. The transcendental philosopher does not enquire, what ultimate ground of our knowledge there may lie out of our knowing, but what is the last in our knowing itself, beyond which we cannot pass. The principle of our knowing is sought within the sphere of our knowing. It must be something therefore, which can itself be known. It is asserted only, that the act of self-consciousness is for us the source and principle of all our possible knowledge. Whether abstracted from us there exists any thing higher and beyond this primary self-knowing, which is for us the form of all our knowing, must be decided by the result. BL 1.273-84)

Despite their methodological differences, both of these explanations of transcendental inquiry make the same gesture, repeatedly arriving at unexpected moments of awaiting, "how and whence to these thoughts… the intuitive knowledge, may finally supervene, can be learnt only by the fact," "man must either sink or rise," "the result of both the sciences [natural and transcendental]…would be the principle of a total and undivided philosophy…in other words, philosophy would pass into religion, and religion become inclusive of philosophy," and "whether abstracted from us there exists any thing higher and beyond this primary self-knowing, which is for us the form of all our knowing, must be decided by the result." And in turn, these statements continue the expectancy of the analogue of the two winged insects, "they and they only can acquire the philosophic imagination, the sacred power of self-intuition, who within themselves can interpret and understand the symbol, that the wings of the air-sylph are forming within the skin of the caterpillar; those only, who feel in their own spirits the same instinct, which impels the chrysalis of the horned fly to leave room in its involucrum for antennae yet to come, [who] know and feel, that the potential works in them, even as the actual works on them" and so on. This gesture toward a possible development in us and in our philosophical (and religious) practice is the driving force of chapter twelve. However much Coleridge has borrowed from German philosophy, the point of his description of the Cis- and Trans-Alpine regions and of his ten theses is that transcendental philosophy has a zone of applicability and already anticipates the science that will follow it. Arguably, Coleridge's goal is enhanced, for example, by his virtual translations and close paraphrases of Schelling's System des transscendentalen Idealismus, Vom Ich Vorrende, and Abhandlungen; he draws us to hear the very language of such philosophy as, with spare additions, it is turned in another direction. In any case, Coleridge repeatedly hints that even though transcendental philosophy divides the principle of being and that of knowing for its investigations, this division is simply an expression of what we at present. And,

96 just as we already have indications of a spiritual realm, so there are indications within philosophy that this division is temporary and, indeed, already resolved at a higher level. In his first presentation of cognitive form (that began with the critique of Hartley and the analogue of the leap), Coleridge emphasized the unity of perception and action. Here, he emphasizes the unity of being and knowing. We know as we are. Transcendental (and empirical) study is based on this principle. This is the meaning of the opening metaphor's discrimination of pure philosophy from "mere reflection and re-presentation on the one hand, and on the other from flights of lawless speculation…transgressing the bounds and purposes of our intellectual faculties." Transcendental inquiry does not deal with mere images of sense or with metaphysical speculations because it acknowledges that we are more than material being subject to external causes but are not (yet) capable of discussing a life beyond this one or the ultimate ground of our being. Yet, just as the horned fly and the butterfly reach their adult phases, become the imago, so we who "must either rise or sink" might anticipate a transformation into our imago. Even now, Coleridge claims, while philosophy confines itself to investigating the ground of our knowing (and to the manner in which perceptions are addressed), "if we elevate our conception to the absolute self," we find "the principle of being, and of knowledge,…the ground of existence, and the ground of the knowledge of existence, are absolutely identical." The ideal of the unity of being and knowing on one level produces the scientific parameters we set for ourselves—the very sense of what is appropriate (to us and what will produce genuine knowledge). Science is thus always already fit and practical (containing an "ought." Empiricism fits inquiry to our bodies and the phenomenal; transcendental philosophy fits it to our minds; another science will fit it to our spirits). Once we acknowledge this principle (of the proper and of the sense of responsibility contained therein), then our care not to indulge in "lawless flights of speculation" or to transgress "the bounds and purposes of our intellectual faculties" argues that the perfect idea of this unity (the absolute self) is already reflected in science. Moreover, were science also to be constrained by the objective—a fact, Coleridge might say, transcendental philosophy already attests in, for example, affirming that material causes for perception are senseless—it would be transformed…into the knowledge at which it aims. Coleridge's initial language playfully makes a slighter version of the same suggestion: some flights of speculation may only transgress the bounds and purposes of our faculties for a period of time—so long as we remain in crawling or dormant states. So far, I have been considering the phase-like aspect of the imago analogue; knowledge is real…and periodic. Knowledge emerges with an ought that progressively reveals its meaning. I am now going to consider the imago analogue from another vantage: that of the whole. Coleridge's discussion begins with the restriction, "they and they only can acquire the philosophic imagination, the sacred power of self-intuition, who within themselves can interpret and understand the symbol." As with the leap, the philosophic imagination must grasp multiple times together. An action is what it is in every part; a leap is always a leap far more than it is a contraction, a release, or a recovery. And what we are is a whole, not what we appear at any one moment. The butterfly is always that even though it begins as a worm and continues dormant for awhile. When philosophy treats identity as something that could be atomistically or materially known, it misunderstands itself. Identity is an action, as Coleridge emphasizes in the theses. "It is a subject which becomes a subject by the act of constructing itself objectively to itself; but which never is an object except for itself, and only so far as by the very same act it becomes a subject." A self may repeat its act in order to become (newly) conscious of itself (as Coleridge affirms in the seventh thesis), but identity does not arise from a series of actions but simply is one. We all have a form of imagination, but we may acquire it philosophically as we find the capacity to interpret the symbol (of becoming the imago) in ourselves. Such imagination is sacred because our identity always refers to the perfect (the complete) act and hence to the absolute self. 97

Yet though we exist on this side of the leap, we cannot go anywhere to look for this capacity—for the interpretation of the symbol within us—for identity is not found somewhere outside of ourselves. We simply must find this capacity in order to understand in our own case what is not manifest in ourselves except as a contradiction.

History, Coleridge says in The Statesman's Manual, is symbolic.48 And while, an Allegory is but a translation of abstract notions into a picture-language which is itself nothing but an abstraction from objects of the senses; the principle more worthless even than its phantom proxy, both alike unsubstantial, and the former shapeless to boot. On the other hand a Symbol (ὁ ἔστιν ἀεὶ κατηγόρικον[which is always tautegorical]) is characterized by a translucence of the Special in the Individual or of the General in the Especial or of the Universal in the General. Above all by the translucence of the Eternal through and in the Temporal. It always partakes of the Reality which it renders intelligible; and while it enunciates the whole, abides itself as a living part in that Unity, of which it is the representative. The other are but empty echoes which the fancy arbitrarily associates with apparitions of matter, less beautiful but not less shadowy than the sloping orchard or hill- side pasture-field seen in the transparent lake below.49

If history is symbolic, it is because it is a qualitative reality; it has a certain character. Or, to use Coleridge's term, history has a principle (or set of principles) we may find re-expressed under different conditions. Although we may mistake it for a quantitative totality, an aggregate of sensuous impressions we may arrange to indicate whatever we please, it does not become anything other than what it already is. Historical understanding presupposes itself or it never occurs. Similarly, our self- understanding must presuppose itself or it never occurs (except as a rhetorical flourish). We know as we are (according to the stage of our development); and we may know insofar as we already are (complete). For Coleridge, part of what this means is that, to be what it is, scientific study must become symbolical rather than allegorical; it must find the translucence of the principle rather than contenting itself with a series of abstractions from phenomena for which we create explanatory metaphors. Here, Coleridge's implied argument challenges transcendental inquiry by appealing to a principle it holds, namely, that, unlike empirical study, the transcendental does not merely reflect on sensuous experience or reproduce it, hence it needs to move from an allegorical to a symbolical mode of understanding. And here, Coleridge's extended metaphor of the Cis- and Trans-Alpine provinces acquires its real import. When Coleridge first introduces the transcendental, his explanation is decidedly allegorical, both according to the parameters set up in Aids to Reflection ("metaphors and similitudes,…are always allegorical, that is, expressing a different subject but with a resemblance") and those in The Statesman's Manual ("an Allegory is but a translation of abstract notions into a picture-language"). The reference to the Roman practice of distinguishing the Cis-Alpine from the Trans-Alpine provinces is a means of illustrating a very different subject, and Coleridge hints that transcendental inquiry currently presents itself as occupied with an abstraction. In making his claim, Coleridge gestures to some of this science's salient features: its division of the objects of knowledge into those on this or that side of the spontaneous consciousness (figured by the natural boundary), its insistence that philosophy is the practice of a few (figured by the sorts of inhabitants of the vale), and its suggestion that our researches must be grounded (figured by the elements deposited at our feet by streams that

48 The Statesman's Manual in Lay Sermons, 10-14 and passim. 49 Ibid., 30-31. 98 cross from that side into this one). At this point, the metaphor's vehicle begins to strain away from its tenor. But, again, Coleridge's goal seems to be to show and to excite this science's real coherence rather than to adhere strictly to its statements of its parameters. Transcendental study teeters on the verge of being fanciful: of being on the one hand derived from sense (as Coleridge's metaphor suggests—the elements at our feet are recognizable, even if the vale could not supply them) and on the other of abstracting from all sense (of being a kind of ultimate materialism, in which the noumenon functions much as matter did in the previous two centuries). By invoking and prohibiting access to what lies beyond the categories, Kant, for example, forbids the possibility of our self- understanding. Our imaginative continuity with an ultimate source is lost; we are left hanging and this adamantine chain of reasoning (as Coleridge elsewhere calls it) can attach nowhere. Rather than denying the force of transcendental inquiry, Coleridge simply suggests that this science might understand itself as a phase and as part of a larger continuity. The ascertaining vision might supervene here he suggests, and transcendental study might present itself as a living reality that parallels another living reality (as the metamorphosis of an insect parallels our own metamorphosis). To grasp transcendental inquiry as a phase is simply to return to the nature of imaginative continuity and the analogue of the leap. Just as the physical leap begins by physical effort and then concludes in releasing the body to gravity, and just as ordinary perception unites active harmonizing and the passive perception, so here. Transcendental inquiry may begin by articulating parameters for this science of science, and articulating what the mind does to produce knowledge. But why should we think, Coleridge suggests, that once we begin constructing we cannot receive. Or rather, if transcendental inquiry harmonizes with something (as perception harmonizes), then self-knowledge is possible (perhaps beginning with the meaning of the appropriate or the very articulacy of the categories). Or, just as leaping, remembering, and the water insect's movements are what they are in virtue of their end, and as their various movements are resolved into one so that they hold times together, so we may think of transcendental inquiry as moving toward a true science of knowing, a science of knowing that is knowledge. Or again, why should we think Coleridge suggests, that the intellectual is the highest realm and there is no other level on which we might understand the leap. We have spiritual organs which necessitate a spiritual realm; an "ought" cannot be understood by pure reasoning alone. If Kant and Schelling, for example, affirm God, moral reasoning, or theological principles in other of their works, the two halves of their philosophy might be held together in another sort of leap—in the religious. Coleridge will insist on this point later in Biographia. As he says at the conclusion, his object and defense for the work must be to show that:

the Scheme of Christianity, as taught in the Liturgy and Homilies of our Church, though not discoverable by human Reason, is yet in accordance with it; that link follows link by necessary consequence; that Religion passes out of the ken of Reason only where the eye of Reason has reached its own Horizon; and that Faith is then but its continuation: even as the Day softens away into the sweet Twilight, and Twilight, hushed and breathless, steals into the Darkness. It is Night, sacred Night! The upraised Eye views only the starry Heaven which manifests itself alone: and the outward Beholding is fixed on the sparks twinkling in the aweful depth, though Suns of other Worlds, only to preserve the Soul steady and collected in its pure Act of inward Adoration to the great I AM, and to the filial WORD that re-affirmeth it from Eternity to Eternity, whose choral Echo is the Universe. (BL 2.247-48)

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That spiritual truths do not contradict speculative reason Coleridge repeatedly affirms.50 Reason and faith have their proper sphere of activity and therefore do not interfere with each other. Nevertheless, this strict division of tasks must be complemented by a more holistic approach or else such activities will distort the nature of knowledge. In this, the conclusion of Biographia challenges transcendental inquiry's self-understanding. Returning to the figure of the boundary by which he (following Kant and others) had depicted the realm of pure philosophy, Coleridge begins with a more familiar claim, that that realm is bordered by one of faith, then describes the two as linked by a continuous chain, part of which is perceived by the eye of reason and the next part by that of faith. If a chain of reasoning is to secure the two (and to preserve each from appearing a species of fancy), its necessary links must be necessary to both realms. And while reason and faith have their proper realms, religion genuinely belongs to both or, more properly, like imagination, passes easily from one to another in a complete movement. The figure of the chain itself is limiting. For it represents an internal reality by way of an external one, repeating the understanding of knowledge as merely territorial and as disunified, not for the purpose of analysis but as though that were our nature which we were compelled to express. This is not to say that reason itself shifts parameters or becomes something other than itself, but that our understanding (a temporal qualification) develops inwardly. There is a categorical difference between the analogue of the butterfly and the horned fly that begin as earth-bound and become aerial creatures, or the analogue of leap that assumes resisting and then relaxing postures in one fluid arc, and the chain that merely adds links. And, indeed, Coleridge quietly abandons the initial metaphor, turning instead to the eye's continuous movement. As Coleridge’s territorial metaphor becomes temporal, it undergoes a shift, unifying the phase-like and the complete. There is, Coleridge suggests, a right time for every form of reasoning; just “as the Day softens away into the sweet Twilight, and Twilight…steals into the Darkness,” so, at a certain point, (religious) thinking must pass into faith. Putting the claim this way makes it more than obvious; the real claim is that as thinking realizes itself, it becomes religious, capable of freer movements than those made by the soul at an earlier stage of its development. This shift into temporal language again holds together the voluntary and the involuntary—the progress begun by the eye is continued by the movement of time. This final movement in which we invariably become ourselves is somewhat ambiguous—at least it is not clear whether there is a cyclical process, as the

50 Eight years later, Coleridge affirms the same principle, "I have elsewhere in the present Work explained the difference between the Understanding and the Reason, by reason meaning exclusively the speculative or scientific power so called, the or mens of the ancients. And wider still is the distinction between the understanding and the spiritual mind. But no gift of God does or can contradict any other gift, except by misuse or misdirection. Most readily therefore do I admit, that there can be no contrariety between revelation and the understanding; unless you call the fact, that the skin, though sensible of the warmth of the sun, can convey no notion of its figure or its joyous light, or of the colours which it impresses on the clouds, a contrariety between the skin and the eye; or infer that the cutaneous [sic] and the optic nerves contradict each other. But we have grounds to believe, that there are yet other rays or effluences from the sun, which neither feeling nor sight can apprehend, but which are to be inferred from the effects. And were it even so with regard to the spiritual sun, how would this contradict the understanding or the reason? It is a sufficient proof of the contrary, that the mysteries in question are not in the direction of the understanding or the (speculative) reason. They do not move on the same line or plane with them, and therefore cannot contradict them." Aids to Reflection, ed. Henry Nelson Coleridge, vol. 1 (London: William Pickering, 1848), 158-59. 100 continuous transition from day to night, or whether the cyclical becomes complete and, as in the earlier analogue of the horned fly and the butterfly, there a certain time (called “Night, sacred Night”) when the individual (or everyone) finds the boundary between realms permanently dissolved. At this time, our sun is hidden but other suns appear. Manifesting only themselves (though inevitably appropriated as stars in our sky, as facing us) they somehow also preserve the soul (of the observer?) in its inward act of worship and so on. Alterity appears and yet confirms that the absolutely inward corresponds with it. What was thinking, religious imagining, and finally becoming is now adoring—as though all of these acts of corresponding were aimed not merely at self-recognition but at an affective intensification. This transformation (in which the act of outward beholding and of self-reflection gives way to adoration of the I AM and to the ordering principle of the universe—to the first and second persons of the trinity) is precisely like the sort of leap Coleridge discusses when he speaks of tautegory in the passage I quoted from Aids to Reflection. Just as we do not find vehicle and tenor in “that which is born of the flesh, is flesh; that which is born of the Spirit, is Spirit,” but same subject transmuted, so here knowing is transmuted. There are two final points I shall make quickly. The first concerns Coleridge's relation to German philosophy. I have been emphasizing his concern that transcendental philosophy sometimes presents itself figurally (allegorically), but Coleridge also seems to stress that it is already more than figural. For example, it is difficult not to think of the conclusion to Biographia as a play on the conclusion to Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason.

Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and reverence, the more often and more steadily one reflects on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. I do not need to search for them and merely conjecture them as though they were veiled in obscurity or in the transcendent region beyond my horizon; I see them before me and connect them immediately with the consciousness of my existence.51

Commenting on this passage, one theorist suggests that part of its power for readers may lie in its hint of transgression—that Kant has set aside the boundaries he established for critical philosophy and strayed into the intelligible worlds of metaphysics.52 Given the possibility of such a reading of Kant, Coleridge may have viewed himself as illuminating a suggestion available in transcendental philosophy from its inception: that its divisions of natural and practical philosophy simply reflect the needs of present inquiry and that imaginative unification will subsequently complement such division. At the same time, the conclusion of Biographia seems to take the conclusion of Kant's second critique a step further, for he refers to the unification of physical and moral law suggested at its conclusion, the logos, as the Logos. And, he subtly maintains that the path between natural and practical philosophy, and of the I AM and the filial WORD is linked by propriety. Apart from the reflectively religious point (in which the unity of the subjective and objective sciences derives from the unity of God), there is also the practical one I suggested earlier—that the very self-regulation of scientific study, its concern for the proper, indicates that it faces outward and aims at describing reality. It must do so, Coleridge has been suggesting, or else it restricts itself to fancy; knowledge requires an imaginative leap—of understanding how to understand itself—or else at a certain point it becomes an endless series of links that seem to attach nowhere.

51 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, ed. and trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 129. 52 Simon Jarvis, Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 13. 101

Second, Biographia's central analogue for thinking directs us toward the leap that absorbs the whole of our existence, that of becoming. For us, this leap is primarily one of awaiting…but awaiting is something for which we prepare. And here Coleridge moves us toward a question that haunts the limit of his discussion of primary and secondary imagination and of fancy and that motivates the second half of Biographia. How do we prepare for a becoming that seems (in the analogue of the winged insects) to happen by necessity? In the passage that is supposed to be the culmination of Biographia's inquiry and which, in response to the fake letter from a friend, Coleridge presents as a mere sampling of what he must adequately treat elsewhere, he writes,

The IMAGINATION then I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead. Fancy, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites. The Fancy is indeed no other than a mode of Memory emancipated from the order of time and space; and blended with, and modified by that empirical phenomenon of the will, which we express by the word CHOICE. But equally with the ordinary memory it must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association.

Imagination, as Coleridge has been discussing it, looks more like secondary imagination when we speak of the grasping together of the realms of pure philosophy and faith (in religious imagining) or of religious effort and the process of time (in spiritual becoming) and more like primary imagination when we speak of ordinary acts of thinking, in which the effort to harmonize and the passive perception are so perfectly and unconsciously fused that we easily take the completed work for its passive element. The primary imagination, Coleridge says, is a "prime Agent of all human Perception" and "a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM." The description hearkens back to Berkeley's notion of a divine visual language (in which phenomena are a language between God and us). The very articulacy of primary imagination as it is involved in seeing, hearing, tasting, and basic acts of cognition echoes back the very articulacy of the divine fiat; it simply is agreement with what is rather than representation of what is. For this reason, it appears not simply as the most basic level of imagining, but as imagining's goal of true correspondence. And part of its superiority over secondary imagination seems to be that the phase-like, the voluntary, and the individual's effort all but disappears into the complete and the already given. Secondary imagination echoes at the distance of consciousness, as well as of the phase-like and so on. Fancy would in this sense seem to adhere more closely to primary imagination in that, in dealing with definites (with the already given) and with a form of memory emancipated from the order of time and space, it is free from the elements that keep secondary imagination from functioning like primary imagination. Yet Coleridge links fancy with association (which earlier implied a material mode of self-understanding). And he links it with the empirical phenomenon of the will, which suggests a power of making arbitrary connections. Fancy may playfully connect images in order to delight or to illustrate the speaker's meaning (as in Coleridge's definition of allegory), but its emancipation from the order of time and space is also an emancipation from the requirement that willing correspond to something we might call given. The resistance and contraction involved in muscular expenditure or in harmonizing or in becoming one thing makes 102 secondary imagination what it is. Secondary imagination depends on what would seem an impediment to its goal of being like primary imagination. In Biographia's central analogue for thinking, that of the air-sylph and the horned fly, being and knowing are imaginatively fused. We know as we finally are and as we currently are. We are a union of times and vantages and our knowing manifests a similar union. Yet it would also seem that to know in the manner of our final being is hidden from us; its vantage is one we cannot simply access in the way the few access pure philosophy or (true) religious imagination. Immediately before Coleridge offers the imago analogue he quotes Plotinus's injunction that we cannot seek the highest intuitive knowledge but must "watch in quiet till it suddenly shines upon us; preparing ourselves for the blessed spectacle as the eye waits patiently for the rising sun." The question remains: how do we prepare for what we may only await? Again, secondary imagination expends itself. It is primary imagination's conscious counterpart; and it is the means by which we develop in self-understanding. But the preparatory work must come about in every case as a leap. Hence, how even religious imagining changes into the desired sort of spiritual becoming may be known only by the event— which is never completed. In every other sort of leap Coleridge discusses, the individual might grasp the end or anticipate it. But in the case of becoming, the whole self is to be fused with its ideal in a partly hidden and involuntary manner. In the leap par excellence, secondary imagination is most vulnerable to mistaking itself and becoming fanciful or allegorical: an abstraction from sense experience explicated pictorially and rhetorically (this time to the self as much as to bystanders). I believe Coleridge offers a partial—and unexpected—solution to the problem in the second half of Biographia, one intimately related to his extended critique of Wordsworth's poetics. Wordsworth repeatedly expresses the conviction that there is something of ethical and salutary benefit about contemplating the form of thought. And I believe Coleridge concurs just far enough to prompt a thorough response in what is by far the longest chapter in Biographia. Before I take a look at Coleridge's odd answer to the question that could also be phrased, how do we know how rightly to understand ourselves at the limit, I am going to look at Coleridge's third description of thinking which opens the second part of Biographia and the long discussion of Wordsworth's poetics.

As book two and chapter fourteen opens, Coleridge offers his famous description of the plan of the Lyrical Ballads: that while he was to portray supernatural or romantic characters, transferring to them a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient "to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith," Wordsworth was to give "the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom" (BL 2.6-7). He then insists that, while this plan was equally his own and Wordsworth's (so much so that he cannot remember who first thought of it), the Preface Wordsworth added to the second edition contains expressions that contradict its own tenets, the volume's poetic practice, and Coleridge's principles. Accordingly, he offers his definition of a poem followed by, and closely entwined with, Biographia's final expression of thinking as a two-part, serpentine movement. Whereas Wordsworth had argued in the Preface that poetry does not use a language essentially different from that of prose and that much excellent verse would be found to differ from the best prose only by the presence of meter, Coleridge responds that while the elements of prose and verse may be the same, they are differently organized because of the different ends proposed. Because compositions are teleological rather than causal products, adding meter will not convert a composition into verse. Even at the lowest level of what might be deemed a poem, a mnemonic like "thirty days hath September," there is a unified organization of language and of sounds to produce one effect: memory. And, Coleridge continues, a poem is not properly opposed to prose. Rather, 103

a poem is that species of composition, which is opposed to works of science, by proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not truth; and from all other species (having this object in common with it) it is discriminated by proposing to itself such delight from the whole, as is compatible with a distinct gratification from each component part. (BL 2.13)

In one sense Coleridge is simply echoing a commonplace of eighteenth-century aesthetics from Hutcheson to Schiller—that beauty involves the unifying of a manifold. Yet, also evident here is a repetition of his interest in the imaginative union of the phase-like and the complete. A poem may be identified by its hologram-like effect: producing pleasure from the whole and from a series of apparently discrete moments. Just as there is a reconciliation (and perhaps intensification through the mirroring) of two means of pleasure, there is a reconciliation of two apparently opposed ends: pleasure and truth. For Coleridge also notes that while the immediate value of a poem must be pleasure, its ultimate end should be "truth, either moral or intellectual" (BL 2.12). This description leads to Coleridge's third expression of thought as the reconciliation of opposites and his redescription of a poem's nature in terms of its end, which does not finally lie in itself (considered as a thing) but in the reader's (real, progressive) self-reconciliation.

The reader should be carried forward, not merely or chiefly by the mechanical impulse of curiosity, or by a restless desire to arrive at the final solution; but by the pleasureable activity of mind excited by the attractions of the journey itself. Like the motion of a serpent, which the Egyptians made the emblem of intellectual power; or like the path of sound through the air; at every step [the reader] pauses and half recedes, and from the retrogressive movement collects the force which again carries him onward. Precipitandus est liber spiritus, [the free spirit must be hurried onward] says Petronius Arbiter most happily. The epithet, liber, here balances the preceding verb; and it is not easy to conceive more meaning condensed in fewer words. (BL 2.14)

Coleridge's likening of cognitive form to the two-part movement of a water insect in chapter seven is clearly repeated here: first as the Egyptian likening of the sideways motion of a snake to the (indirect) movement of intellect, then as the sinuous path of sound, and finally—which we might think of as the union of these—as the reader's snaking cognitive path. In his initial discussion of cognitive form in chapter seven, Coleridge described imagination's work in making available the act of harmonizing with the passive perception and here we find the same imaginative union of act and perception. This point is vital to understanding Coleridge's description of a poem. The reader's leap to harmonize—her indirection—seizes the winding path of poetic sound and becomes her cognition. This is also to repeat that the voluntary disappears into the involuntary as the reader is carried forward and half-recedes, as she is moving and being moved in two directions—out toward the present interest in a line of verse and on toward the idea of the whole—and the end is not a text (produced by author and reader) but a freedom indistinguishable for us from its opposite. This simultaneity of the reader's harmonization with a possibility latent in the text is an analogue for her existential self-understanding. When Coleridge quotes Petronius Arbiter, "the free spirit must be hurried onward," he at once alludes to the circular nature of freedom and to Petronius's critique of Lucan—that, in his Pharsalia, he shows himself too much the historian (presumably by describing carnage and offering a poem in pieces) and too little the poet. "The epithet, liber, here balances the preceding verb," Coleridge says. We might take the point rhetorically; there is a rhetorical harmonizing of freedom with external impetus running alongside a rhetorical critique of poetry's inharmonious encroachment on its own territory (resulting in poetry's self-loss to the immediate historical vantage and the end proposed). We might take the point epistemologically; 104 freedom must be the nature of the spirit that is to be free—that is hurled to freedom. Or we might take the point analogically, as an imaginative union of the rhetorical and epistemological points. The division of a poem's energies expresses the possibility understood by freedom but it only does so for the reader swept up in the twinning, total movement. Freedom is neither freedom from (the painful or pleasurable moments of) actuality nor freedom to some narrow end. Rather, it uses the reader's actuality in order to move her toward her nature as a free being. To say so is not to undermine the powerful sense of impropriety that emerges with epistemological understanding and in which we find what looks like the temporal interruption in a given state of affairs or a disjoining of being and doing coupled with the possibility of freedom maintaining itself. This acute ambivalence goes to the heart of Coleridge's critique of Wordsworth. Something denaturing must appear for the self to remain itself, for freedom to be that, and so on. Coleridge abruptly adds,

If this should be admitted as a satisfactory character of a poem, we have still to seek for a definition of poetry. The writings of PLATO, and Bishop Taylor, and the Theoria Sacra of BURNET, furnish undeniable proofs that poetry of the highest kind may exist without metre, and even without the contradistinguishing object of a poem. The first chapter of Isaiah (indeed a very large proportion of the whole book) is poetry in the most emphatic sense; yet it would be not less irrational than strange to assert, that pleasure, and not truth, was the immediate object of the prophet. In short, whatever specific import we attach to the word, poetry, there will be found involved in it, as a necessary consequence, that a poem of any length neither can be, or ought to be all poetry. Yet if an harmonious whole is to be produced, the remaining parts must be preserved in keeping with the poetry; and this can be no otherwise effected than by such a studied selection and artificial arrangement as will partake of one, though not a peculiar, property of poetry. And this again can be no other than the property of exciting a more continuous and equal attention, than the language of prose aims at, whether colloquial or written. (BL 2.14-15)

Somehow prose that aims immediately at truth (rather than pleasure) and that is not written in rhyme or meter may also be poetry—if it continuously excites a high degree of attention and correspondingly reveals a more virtuosic resolution of part and whole than is ordinary found in prose works. If this sudden expansion of poetry's bounds is unexpected—making the harmonization of elements the sufficient condition for poetry—the even more unexpected claim is that every poem (which Coleridge continues to define more narrowly than poetry) must include alien, unpoetic elements and that this necessity is a consequence of any definition we might give to poetry, though an harmonious whole must still be produced. Coleridge's first claim appears a variation on the Romantic idea that "poetry" indicates the unifying ground of various types of poetry—scientific studies (broadly conceived) as well as aesthetic productions like individual poems. Here, poetry in its broadest sense does not refer to every intellectual product but only to those that reflect to a superior degree what Coleridge describes as the qualification of thinking: the unity of perception and action, of the voluntary and the involuntary, and, we might now add, of immediate and ultimate ends. Just as in leaping we strain away from the ground only to move laterally across it, and just as the water insect's lateral motion is its progress, so with the reader's snaking path of feeling. She is laterally drawn toward one, then another moment of interest and yet, for all that, continually straining forward. If poetic form reflects the form of thought, it is in part because it must be perceived. To grasp a poetic composition is to grasp one's own enduring interest. With respect to particular poems, the expectation is higher. It may not be enough for the parts of a poem to cohere. As in Coleridge's description of the leap, it may be that something must 105 be more forcefully resisted. A condition—the end-oriented nature of prose, or the resistance of the subject-matter to meter, or an absorbing image or couplet—may need to block the path and be prominently caught up in a poem to assist the expenditure of energy and its self-release. Such an interruption is a necessary consequence if poems are to poetry what poetry is to thought—a revelation of form (to use a scopic metaphor) at a higher power of resolution. We might further observe that harmony at the highest level relies on the potential for self-alienation if "a poem of any length neither can be, or ought to be all poetry." Coleridge's point is not essentially different than his point about gravity, which is not a cause of leaping but the condition in which we move and of which we make use in order to do so. Nor is the argument essentially different from the one about reading which resists and makes use of actuality. Leaping and reading are analogues (realities) that reflect the reality under discussion: the nature of knowing in time and of being over time and what it means for these intertwined aspects of us to be free, to be ethical, and to harmonize. The passage concludes with a statement that may seem already to have been articulated but whose significance is vital here: that a harmonious whole is effected from the threat of self- difference only by "a studied selection and artificial arrangement" of the parts of a composition so as to produce "a more continuous and equal attention, than the language of prose aim at." While the sinuous path of sound simply is, and the water-insect's movement and the leap display an instinctual knowledge, poetry's movement is contrived. It approaches conscious simulation of the essence of thought on two fronts. First, it imitates the inner gathering and completion of thought through self- replication as well as through the self-expenditure necessary to meet the risk of self-alienation. Second, it carries out its aim through an (inter)subjective unification: the poet becoming the occasion for the reader to form a whole of thought. Among the elements of a poem's "studied selection and artificial arrangement," meter is the obvious one to examine since Wordsworth had singled it out in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads as verse's defining feature and as capable of affectively transforming an over- or under-wrought poem and an over- or under-stimulated reader. Coleridge, as I noted earlier, disputes with Wordsworth the idea that the presence of meter transforms well-written prose into verse and will spend chapter eighteen directly considering meter's genesis and consequently its relation to thinking as well as its effects on readers. There are two parts of this argument intimately related to poetry's conscious simulation of the essence of thought and, hence, that are worth glancing at now. First, Coleridge writes that the origin of meter can be traced "to the balance in the mind effected by that spontaneous effort which strives to hold in check the workings of passion" (BL 2.64). Passion, which Coleridge a little later says must be understood in the most general sense as "an excited state of the feelings and faculties," is the centrifugal disturbance that alters our stance and carries us out of ourselves. We can think of it as an inverted leap. As our feelings become excited, as moment by moment we become interested here or there, our status is challenged and restored by a self-recollecting balance. The topic under investigation, the relation between cognitive and poetic form, is the same; the analogue, the experience of self-regulation, turns now more directly to our temporal and ethical identity. The opposed force, like gravity, is a condition to which we are subject and which we use in achieving an end, which might be thought as equanimity and self- recovery on one hand and personal identity on the other. As in the leap, Coleridge writes that,

It might be easily explained likewise in what manner this salutary antagonism [maintaining balance] is assisted by the very state, which it counteracts; and how this balance of antagonists became organized into metre (in the usual acceptation of that term) by a supervening act of the will and judgement, consciously and for the foreseen purpose of pleasure. (BL 2.64)

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Meter is the conscious recognition of temporal identity. How does this work? First, our self- harmonization is something we continually achieve by sustaining passions; at its base this activity is not something practiced by the few. It is not yet the virtue of self-management but something underway in us by virtue of our existence. And it may be helpful to note that Coleridge here defines "essence" as "the principle of individuation, the inmost principle of the possibility, of any thing, as that particular thing" over against "existence" or the "superinduction of reality"—a definition which repeats the doubling structure echoed through the entire work. Any essence is (and is first its lawfulness); it may also possess the qualification of temporal endurance [BL 2.62].) We have the qualification of existence, and its felt antagonism—here simply considered in terms of our affective self-differing and the threat of becoming unrecognizable—is salutary. If poetry is ever to have a regenerating effect by way of meter, it is precisely because meter is derived from this opposition of forces implied in the good (in the suspense) of existence. For existence is a leap—seeming to move laterally and yet, cohering with itself, it lands on the same spot, the spot proposed. But this is to get ahead of the present argument. Meter is a simulation or a stylization of the opposite forces involved in the leap of existence. At this point, Coleridge simply says that we organize the texture of our experience into meter; the will and the judgment are now actively involved, and the purpose is pleasure. A little later on, he argues that "as the elements of metre owe their existence to a state of increased excitement, so the metre itself should be accompanied by the natural language of excitement" (BL 2.65). For present purposes, the relevant point is the one implied. If meter is a stylization of the ordinary mental balancing against the continual experience of affective change (curiosity, lassitude, boredom, anxiety, levity), its conscious reproduction seems to require a correspondingly greater force of passion (love, hate, jealousy, jubilation). Otherwise, meter appears an unnecessary counter-force exerted against nothing, and "there must needs be a disappointment felt; like that of leaping in the dark from the last step of a stair-case, when we had prepared our muscles for a leap of three or four" (BL 2.66). Coleridge spends much of chapter eighteen addressing the elements of a poem that ought to correspond to the presence of meter (the subject matter, the language, the attitude of the poet, the figures of speech, and so on). These dictates are frequently cited with the assumption that they are being arbitrarily imposed. For Coleridge, the central point is that meter repeats; and in doing so, it reflects temporal identity as well as the reason readerly regeneration is possible. Meter reflects the mind's repetition of itself over time—its assertion of its identity in response to the modifications of passion. If meter has been, from one generation to the next, an expected part of poetry, there must be a reason, a "mordaunt" Coleridge says, an acid binding it fast to the verse text, and this, he implies, must be passion (BL 2.71). Meter negatively repeats the passion of the subject needing to be contained, eliciting its expectation in the reader. If the passion is not there, there is disappointment—and we do not encounter the working of our own minds; we miss ourselves. Meter reflects phenomenal process but it also reflects the mind aware of itself, maintaining the possibility of self-knowledge. And it makes this activity palpable, carrying it all the way into its own sonic texture. It is what it does. Meter is the pulse of resistance, the pulse, most basically, of an iamb. At the conclusion of chapter seven of Biographia, shortly after describing the harmony involved in leaping, in remembering, and in the water-insects' pulsing movement, Coleridge returns to the subject of mental association and comments that whether a thought is related to another by proximity in time, cause and effect, continuity in space, or resemblance, these thoughts cannot be separated from contemporaneity because doing so would separate them from the mind itself. For, he says, "the act of consciousness is indeed identical with time considered in its essence," that is, "time per se, as contra-distinguished from our notion of time; for this is always blended with the idea of space, which as the contrary of time, is therefore its measure" (BL 1.126). If, as I suggested earlier, poems, through the harmony of contrary movements, bring the unity found in thinking into 107

(imminent) consciousness, they also manifest the nature of time through repetition. We experience our identity as the (repeated) union of action and passion. If the ability to reflect time belongs to poetry in general, it belongs in an even greater degree to verse which employs meter. The second element of Coleridge's response to Wordsworth's poetics that is relevant here has to do with repetition in general. Coleridge's critique begins with a discussion of one of Wordsworth's avowed targets in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads: the contemporary practice of employing a special poetic diction. This critique produced necessary change, Coleridge argues, not because poets ought to find nature in rural scenes and speech rather than through artifice and education, but because contemporary poets had been in the habit of mindlessly repeating the outward characteristics of original poets. But, he hints, one instance of copying the outward (disjoined) elements of others' compositions is not righted by another instance of copying the outward, disjointed elements of others' speech. Wordsworth's proposal to offer "a selection of the real language of men" is contradictory on two fronts: presenting itself as a transcription, Coleridge argues, though the selection implies the presence of the poet, and presenting a set of transcriptions to right the problem of selective transcription (PLB 1.123). The object imitated in both cases is not well chosen because, as a fixed object, it can only be copied; it can only produce a disjoined thing. "The best part of human language," Coleridge adds a little later, "is derived from reflection on the acts of the mind itself," and the suggestion is that only such subjects can be imitated; to reflect on them is to reflect on an ongoing reality which is being produced and therefore cannot be translated to any other context (BL 2.54). True repetition aims at an act of the mind; it reflects what it is. Leaving aside the question of the subject and purpose of repetition, Coleridge takes up that of who repeats. And here his argument returns to poetry's ability to reflect time—in this case, not as a continuous phenomenal process experienced alike by all, but as a phase-like aspect of time that is echoed differently among the social classes. In response to Wordsworth's theory of apparent tautology, Coleridge argues that not every man's garrulous or repetitious speech will produce the sublime effects Wordsworth discusses in his note on "The Thorn," in which repetition appears to accomplish what the representative nature of language cannot. The "song of Deborah," Coleridge maintains (in which we find repetitions like "at her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down; at her feet he bowed, he fell; where he bowed, there he fell down dead") contains beauty of the highest kind (BL 2.57). But this beauty is not one likely to be found in the speech of the rural poor in which the object of repetition is not the production of beauty, or the manner in which the mind reacts to language, seeks meaning from patterning, or encounters its own actions. Among the rural poor, Coleridge says, we are more likely to find "the unmeaning repetitions, habitual phrases, and other blank counters, which an unfurnished or confused understanding interposes at short intervals, in order to keep hold of his subject which is still slipping from him, and to give him time for recollection; or in mere aid of vacancy" (BL 2.57). And in the next chapter he continues,

the intercourse of uneducated men, is distinguished from the diction of their superiors in knowledge and power, by the greater disjunction and separation in the component parts of that, whatever it be, which they wish to communicate. There is a want of that prospectiveness of mind, that surview, which enables a man to foresee the whole of what he is to convey, appertaining to any one point; and by this means so to subordinate and arrange the different parts according to their relative importance, as to convey it at once, and as an organized whole. (BL 2.58)

Coleridge may display class prejudices here. It is difficult not to feel he is doing so, though in justice to him, the argument has consistently had to do with intellectual development which, in keeping 108 with the theory, could be said to occur in the medium and through the use of education. More to the point, when Coleridge describes the twin poles of our doubled temporal situation as characteristic of one social type or another, it may be more than a cultural reflex for us to feel this representation as angering or humbling (even humiliating) in its partiality. I will return to the argument Coleridge makes through partiality in the final portion of this chapter. Keeping with the temporal argument for now, among the uneducated, we find more of the disjunctive quality of passion, of the spacing which holds apart and threatens the wholeness that is the mind's self-maintaining balance. Among them, we find an image of the lateral pull, just as, early on in Biographia, Coleridge had described genius as a state "in which the present is still constituted by the future or the past," that is, just as we find the image of the complete in the mind of genius (BL 1.43). He does not speak of genius here, but only of one of its properties: its ability to foresee the whole and the connections of the parts. To have, through education or genius, the surview of one's discourse is obviously a desideratum. But it is not as though the greater disjunction in the component parts of the discourse of rural men and women is simply an evil. This spacing, this passionate near-distraction from the final image and goal of action also reflects part of the process of individual becoming and poetic being—a part which may not entirely disappear without discourse disappearing. Rural men and women speak within and by means of greater resistance, but they still speak. And they employ a form of repetition to aid in recollection or to fill space which indicates an awareness of the end, albeit not a virtuosic awareness. Directly before describing the reader's affective movement through a poem, Coleridge notes that

the philosophic critics of all ages coincide with the ultimate judgement of all countries, in equally denying the praises of a just poem, on the one hand, to a series of striking lines or distichs, each of which absorbing the whole attention of the reader to itself disjoins it from its context, and makes it a separate whole, instead of an harmonizing part; and on the other hand, to an unsustained composition, from which the reader collects rapidly the general result unattracted by the component parts. (BL 2.13-14)

Leaving aside the social comparison for the moment, we might say that the composition that strings together distichs offers a material image of thought, an endless sequence of this and then this and then this. It is beneath the look of time. The composition that is "unsustained," and from which the reader "collects rapidly the general result," offers an image of thought as it never is—already complete and virtually empty of energy. It is beyond the look (and without the interest) of time. By generating and harmonizing the centrifugal and centripetal impulses, a poem manifests the essence of time: having a general tenor (completeness) and an iterant, attracting quality (resistance to completion which is also the process of being completed). Similarly, a poem's inner repetition cannot be the completeness of no repetition: no resistance, no arcing process of suspense, no harmony of beginning and end, of voluntary and involuntary. Nor can a poem's inner repetition be the aggregate of alternatives, as though an image were to be understood as this, and then as this, or as though a total were formed this way, or perhaps this way. It cannot be a set of interpretive possibilities.53 Coleridge's view of time and of poetry both amount to the same hologram-like effect of contrary movements, "the motion of a serpent, which the Egyptians made the emblem of intellectual power," a lateral interest in the

53 This is I. A. Richards’ general position on Coleridgean imagination which is above all not static and through which the reader is to become aware of her own creative activity, Coleridge on Imagination, 75-99. 109 moment-by-moment that reflects and contains (eventually) the end. As a harmonious whole, a poem is coherent and cohering, and time is not self-loss or obscuring growth but is both given and becoming given and is the harmony of two vantages just as any movement acquires its possibility of being a movement from the certainty of completion—that is, from the obliquely present certainty of its character. If the point is now carried into the social realm, we might say that harmony lies between two extremes—the utterly uneducated individual and the absolute genius—both of which are alike in their isolation. The only failing Coleridge ever associates with the character of absolute genius derives from the completeness of genius's conceptions: "indifference and a diseased slowness to action" (BL 1.31). The genius perceives as if at the end of a leap, the uneducated individual as if there were no leap to be made and everything to be known were known. This is not to say that genius is not desirable, but that, insofar as there is a link between the poetic and the social realm, it lies in the continual relation between part and whole. The genius may see the whole and need to suspend its arrival, to become partial and take part—even by becoming dilatory. The uneducated individual may need to stretch (to suspend) and so unify his conceptions by allowing himself to be taken as part and as partial. At this point I shall return to the possibility that the "studied selection and artificial arrangement" of verse may produce an (inter)subjective unification. Coleridge follows up his discussion of poetry's qualification by turning directly to the relation of poet and reader and poet and poetry. Noting that his conclusions have been "anticipated in the preceding disquisition on the fancy and imagination," he writes,

What is poetry? Is so nearly the same question with, what is a poet? that the answer to the one is involved in the solution of the other. For it is a distinction resulting from the poetic genius itself, which sustains and modifies the images, thoughts, and emotions of the poet's own mind. The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other, according to their relative worth and dignity. He diffuses a tone, and spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it were) fuses, each into each by that synthetic and magical power, to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of imagination. This power, first put in action by the will and understanding, and retained under their irremissive, though gentle and unnoticed, controul (laxis effertur habenis [carried on with slackened reins]) reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities: of sameness, with difference; of the general, with the concrete; the idea, with the image; the individual, with the representative; the sense of novelty and freshness, with old and familiar objects;…and our admiration of the poet to our sympathy with the poetry. (BL 2.15-17)

Coleridge returns to the reader's experience by way of the union of the producer and product. To know what poetry is involves knowing what a poet is, and the reason is not terminological but ontological. The distinction itself, Coleridge writes, results from poetic genius. In other words, the distinction exists because, in being itself, poetic genius communicates itself. Its first quality is that it is repeated into the active and passive correlatives of poet and poetry. And its second, the power to sustain and to modify, to continue and to direct the poet's thoughts, images, and emotions through resistance, is an explication of the first. One who happens to bear such self-extending genius simply will communicate its harmonizing power to others, who now experience imagination's organizing effects. It is easy to read "the poet" as bringing "the whole soul of" the reader "into activity." But insofar as the poet is the relatively active aspect of poetry, the suggestion seems to be that the first 110 soul brought into activity is the poet's own. The natural result of this activation is the right ordering of his faculties—which is emphatically to say that the poet does not attempt to get beyond their differentiation and does not attempt to show them as interchangeable but rather reveals their just relation in himself (and then in others). And then the poet repeats the work of genius in the affective realm. He "diffuses a tone, and spirit" and then "fuses," carries his feeling outward and communicates the power to feel or to view wholeness by the wholeness he feels and views. As if to underscore this progressive self-translation (here we might emphasize "self"), Coleridge reminds us that "this power," that is, imagination, is "first put in action by the will and understanding" and then it reveals itself in the presence of unities. In one sense, the form of this process is none other than that of the two-part form of perception, with the will and understanding harmonizing and the perception appearing.54 Yet the form has become something more; it is a manner of harmonizing and an affective tone of perceiving. Genius diffuses and fuses a "tone and spirit of unity." The individual—poet, reader—does not just spontaneously grasp; she experiences an affective accord—perhaps not only willing the perception but experiencing herself as willing that it be so. And this tonal unity, which reconciles the individual with the representative and so on, seems to have social implications. If the general is reconciled with the concrete and the individual with the representative, and these reconciliations are simply the outward reflections of the mind's self-reconciliation, the activated reader also must recognize herself within the general and the representative (a more narrow category for Coleridge as we shall see) even while experiencing her life as absolutely individual. She must find herself taken to be this or that (a human of a particular sort) even while she becomes herself, the existing, perceiving individual, moving toward a telos. She may suffer the embarrassment of a partial elevation—having left the concreteness of being an isolated instance only to become part of a larger whole and to experience herself as restricted to part. Similarly, admiration must not only be directed back toward the impetus of a poem but also forward into sympathy with the poem. If this final set of opposites, admiration and sympathy, do not seem in tension, we may simply press the point to say that, for Coleridge, admiration requires agreement. To enter into the feeling of a poem, to move with it properly is to wonder at the contrivance and to repeat (to do) its truth. Knowing becomes restricted.

As chapter fourteen begins with Coleridge's partnership with Wordsworth and his critique of the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, it is worth taking up this vantage again. Coleridge's understanding of the poet's function probably comes closest to Wordsworth's here. Both men portray poetry as having an unique ability to show thinking's form and both connect the presentation of this form with poetry's ethical function. For Coleridge, although poet and reader may briefly appear as a (relatively active and relatively passive) whole formed by imagination, and although there may be an intersubjective accord between them, it signals the parallel accord of poet and reader with poetic genius, an accord available in all acts of thinking. For Wordsworth, there is no parallel triadic structure (no genius moving through poet and reader), only the result of the reader's being "inspirited" by his leader as the "Essay Supplementary"

54 Hence, there is a Socratic point to be kept in mind. The poet can only serve as an occasion for the reader's self-harmonization if her whole soul is to come into activity. Kathleen Wheeler has explored Coleridge's use of Socratic irony (or midwifery) in her study of Biographia. See Wheeler, Sources, processes and methods in Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, see especially 6-7, 59-80, 88-89, 126-32 and passim. 111 has it or that of the reader's finding himself somehow repaired as he attends to the poet, who, by contemplating the history of human affections, mirrors back to his readers the harmony and natural rhythms of their own minds, "utter[ing] sentiments of such a nature, and in such connexion with each other," that "the understanding of the Reader must necessarily be in some degree enlightened, and his affections strengthened and purified" (PLB 1.126). While for Wordsworth, the reader either consciously responds to the poet or is phenomenally redirected and, for a time, overshadowed by the poet's mode of thinking, for Coleridge, the reader simply activates and her activation is a response to poetic genius (not to the poet per se). Coleridge subtly insists (here and elsewhere) that Wordsworth's stated poetics endorse materialism. But there is another central feature of his critique that reaches all the way to the center of Biographia's own project, making its second half not an application of poetic principles established in the first half but at once a radical paring down of the potential hubris of the first half and, by that means, an amplification of the principles that appear in the first half. The ideal of self-knowing that Coleridge champions throughout his prose works depends on what we might think of as an impediment to this process. One cannot recognize "the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM" in one's own speech without recognizing social type. This is the major claim Coleridge makes in his critique of Wordsworth, and I shall examine it now.

3.

As I have argued, Coleridge's three depictions of thinking are meant to explore the proposal initiated by Wordsworth that poetry may show cognitive form in general and thereby restore its natural and ethical tone. They do so first by exploring what we may apprehend about thinking's structure (and our nature) when we turn our attention to the lowest, instinctual level of cognition: that of perception, movement, and memory. Second, as these processes each involve a leap (and the union of the voluntary and involuntary), Coleridge's subsequent exploration of higher realms of intellectual activity (and the translation of principles from the instinctual to the deliberate level) is implicitly justified. Finally, Coleridge examines the relation between poetry and cognitive form. The remaining question has to do with the connection between poetry and ethics, which in turn could be broken into a procedural and a proprietary inquiry: how (by what mechanism) could poetry be said to affect its auditors so as to teach ethics and what makes poetry an appropriate genre for practical instruction. Wordsworth, as I have shown, in the preceding chapters, answers both questions, although his published prefaces (and his poetic autobiography) focus almost exclusively on the first one. They indicate the poet's redirection of the reader's attention to semi-permanent features of the landscape and its rural inhabitants, or the poet's reproduction of the (historically) enduring relations between thoughts, and the poet's use of meter to moderate the reader's responses and to induce a trance-like state of susceptibility. Based on Coleridge's extended discussions of thinking, we may safely conclude that he would object with varying degrees of forcefulness to each of these explanations. Nature may be full of symbols (may be a divine language), but human art and scientific studies are no less worthy of contemplation; the form of thinking is available in mundane gestures, in acts of semi-consciousness, and in abstruse research. There may be a level of sympathetic mirroring between poet and reader; if the poet manifests the form of thinking in the ordering of his faculties and the discovery of unity among numerous oppositions, the reader may follow suit; but the process should be understood as a gain in self-awareness, at least after any moment of self-forgetting. More typically, to the extent that the reader grasps the form of thinking, it is because she affectively enacts it through her lateral interest in striking couplets or figures which blends with her progressive 112 apprehension of and interest in the whole. Cognitive form may also be reflected in the meter, but even though the reader harmonizes with the meter, such harmonization (without any further grasp of how meter reflects the mind's acts) remains at an instinctual level of thinking, not one that may properly be called ethical yet. This is all to say that, for Coleridge, the question of mechanism is the wrong one to pursue. Although poems may offer ideal conditions for intuiting thinking's structure, these are just conditions, and our process of self-intuition is always the same, always one of self-expenditure and awaiting. The question of propriety—what qualifies poetry to teach morals—remains. Poetic theorists since Aristotle (or, arguably, since Plato) have taken it up, asking why poetry should be more suited to prompt ethical behavior than the study of philosophy or history. In the (1802) Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth alludes to Aristotle's claim that poetry is the most philosophical form of writing but shifts the focus of Aristotle's claim from probability to the internal testimony of the heart, writing, "Aristotle, I have been told, hath said, that Poetry is the most philosophic of all writing: it is so: its object is truth, not individual and local, but general, and operative; not standing upon external testimony, but carried alive into the heart by passion; truth which is its own testimony, which gives strength and divinity to the tribunal to which it appeals, and receives them from the same tribunal" (PLB 1.139). While the biographer and historian encounter numerous obstacles, Wordsworth continues,

The poet writes under one restriction only, namely, that of the necessity of giving immediate pleasure to a human Being possessed of that information which may be expected from him, not as a lawyer, a physician, a mariner, an astronomer or a natural philosopher, but as a Man. Except this one restriction, there is no object standing between the Poet and the image of things; between this, and the Biographer and Historian there are a thousand. Nor let this necessity of producing immediate pleasure be considered as a degradation of the Poet's art. It is far otherwise. It is an acknowledgment of the beauty of the universe, an acknowledgment the more sincere, because it is not formal, but indirect; it is a task light and easy to him who looks at the world in the spirit of love: further, it is a homage paid to the native and naked dignity of man, to the grand elementary principle of pleasure, by which he knows, and feels, and lives, and moves. We have no sympathy but what is propagated by pleasure: I would not be misunderstood; but wherever we sympathize with pain it will be found that the sympathy is produced and carried on by subtle combinations with pleasure. We have no knowledge, that is, no general principles drawn from the contemplation of particular facts, but what has been built up by pleasure, and exists in us by pleasure alone. The Man of Science, the Chemist and Mathematician, whatever difficulties and disgusts they may have had to struggle with, know and feel this. (PLB 1.140)

Following a long tradition Wordsworth affirms that poetry is superior to history because it deals with general rather than accidental principles. But he interprets poetry's turn to the general as a turn toward what is most basic to our nature and, as such, prior to or distinct from any social identity we may have acquired through education, occupation, or any other habitual practice. Further, Wordsworth suggests that the one universally acknowledged principle—which alone drives our other activities and is their goal—is pleasure. By appealing to this principle, poetry necessarily appeals to us immediately and fundamentally. And, Wordsworth also hints, as poetry works through a process of indirection—discovering the beauty of the world, teaching us to love it, and thereby gradually changing our habitual responses to the beings around us—it works lastingly upon us. These two principles, that poetry reveals and addresses something in our nature apart from social 113 standing and practice and that by making its immediate object pleasure, it produces habits of being pleased which lead to an ethical and healthy cast of mind are echoed elsewhere in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads. Early on, Wordsworth defends his choice of rural characters by claiming that as the language such men and women speak is "less under the action of social vanity," it is one "arising out of repeated experience and regular feelings" and hence "a more permanent and a far more philosophical language than that which is frequently substituted for it by Poets" (PLB 1.124). Poetry's more philosophical language, its address to the general in men and women is also, for Wordsworth, the more philosophical language of rural men and women. Later on in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth insists that where there are "two descriptions either of passions, manners, or characters, each of them equally well executed, the one in prose and the other in verse, the verse will be read a hundred times where the prose is read once" (PLB 1.150). Here, Wordsworth insists that the pleasure of meter is such that a well-constructed poem continues to draw the reader's attention and thus has an enduring quality; in this sense poetry's immediate pleasures are also productive of lasting influence. In taking up the question of propriety, Coleridge does two things. First and most obviously, he engages Wordsworth's poetics directly, asking whether they hold up on their own terms and concluding that they do not. While he agrees that poetry employs a more general language and has an enduring quality, he insists that Wordsworth's account of poetry's connection to the ethical would preclude the very features it invokes through its "the too exclusive attention" to the truths it uncovers (BL 2.119). This aspect of Coleridge's critique (a version of the familiar romantic accusation of one-sidedness) in turn leads him to take up the question of propriety based on the preceding discussion of cognitive form in Biographia and to ask, first, whether poetry does something beyond showing this form and, if so, what the relation of this something to that form is and, second, how we may be certain that the ethics gleaned through a poem are really ethical rather than fanciful. Coleridge has already given one answer to the latter question by pointing to the unities imagination discovers. But he offers a very different, though complementary, answer throughout the second volume of Biographia. This answer is most explicit in chapter twenty-two, and I shall examine it and the question about what else poetry might reveal through Coleridge's claim that Wordsworth's poetics miss the generality they seek by misunderstanding our temporal situation. Chapter twenty-two is glossed "the characteristic defects of Wordsworth's poetry, with the principles from which the judgement, that they are defects, is deduced" (BL 2.121). Coleridge lists five defects; I will begin by looking at the second, what Coleridge calls Wordsworth's "matter-of- factness in certain poems," or, as he categories it,

first, a laborious minuteness and fidelity in the representation of objects, and their positions, as they appeared to the poet himself; secondly, the insertion of accidental circumstances, in order to the full explanation of his living characters, their dispositions and actions; which circumstances might be necessary to establish the probability of a statement in real life, where nothing is taken for granted by the hearer, but appear superfluous in poetry, where the reader is willing to believe for his own sake. (BL 2.126).

Coleridge then immediately turns to the same passage in Aristotle that Wordsworth had referenced and to a passage from Sir William Davenant's Preface to Gondibert, writing,

To this accidentality, I object as contravening the essence of poetry, which Aristotle pronounces to be όὶώές, the most intense, weighty and philosophical product of human art; adding, as the reason, that it is the most catholic and

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abstract. The following passage from Davenant's prefatory letter to Hobbs [sic] well expresses this truth. "When I considered the actions which I meant to describe (those inferring the persons) I was again persuaded rather to choose those of a former age, than the present; and in a century so far removed as might preserve me from their improper examinations, who know not the requisites of a poem, nor how much pleasure they lose (and even the pleasures of heroic poesy are not unprofitable) who take away the liberty of a poet, and fetter his feet in the shackles of an historian. For why should a poet doubt in story to mend the intrigues of fortune by more delightful conveyances of probable fictions, because austere historians have entered into bond to truth? An obligation, which were in poets as foolish and unnecessary, as is the bondage of false martyrs, who lie in chains for a mistaken opinion. But by this I would imply, that truth, narrative and past is the idol of historians (who worship a dead thing) and truth operative, and by effects continually alive, is the mistress of poets, who hath not her existence in matter, but in reason." (BL 2.126-27)

At this point, Coleridge indicates several pages in which Wordsworth enters into minute detail in rendering the local imagery in The Excursion. On one level, he is simply saying that, by doing so, Wordsworth forgets the principle of own his argument—with respect to the general and therefore with respect to pleasure. But the more substantive claim has to do with how we are to understand accidentality. For it is not the study of the past per se that makes history "accidental"—as the Davenant citation indicates. Rather, it is the historian who sets the particulars of what happened here or here before him as a goal who makes history accidental. Accidentality is a logical, not a temporal, category. More precisely, it is logic's contrary, and to seek it (to seek the event apart from its principle of intelligibility) is to turn toward a non-object and hence to bind oneself to a false martyrdom.55 Poetry may situate itself in the past—perhaps it does better to situate itself thus— because it mends; it shows what ought to happen and, by the same token, shows the idea of history (which is fundamentally ethical). To situate poetry in the present or in a known locale as Wordsworth has done is not the way to escape historical idolatry; such situating courts it because it courts false expectations about poetry's object. Although he speaks by means of Davenant (who addresses Hobbes, the materialist philosopher who inspired his epic), Coleridge's charge (against the philosophically uncommitted poet who has inspired his own poetics) is incisive. Wordsworth, he hints, has misunderstood the nature and requirements of form, has substituted an image for an idea—if not everywhere, then here, in these moments of static detail. For poetry, as he argued through Petronius, must be a progress—just as history, rightly understood, is a progress.

55 Coleridge, following Kant and others, differentiates between opposition and contrariety. For example, in his Malta notebooks he writes "Negative Quantities/=opposed forces. Logical by Contradiction ends in absolute nothing, nihil negativum, quod est etiam irrepresentabile—a ball in motion & at the same time not in motion, motion in each sentence having been used in the same sense, is a contradiction in terms/in Nature it is not, or rather say, it isn't so as not to give a moments reality by the use of the word per se, is—but there are oppositions without contradiction, & real— nihil privativum cogitabile—two tendencies to motion in the same body, one to the N. other to S., being equipollent, the Body remains in rest.—the second assumed Tendency is a real negative Quantity—better therefore called, a privative Quantity. ̶ 4 ̶ 5 = ̶ 9 is mere pedantry—there is no real subtraction/it is true addition. ̶ and + have no meaning but as symbols of opposition. (CN 2.2502). 115

Given Wordsworth's repeated emphasis on poetry's ability to reveal cognitive form, Coleridge's charge unsettles even where it does not aim. And, as in the case of religious imagining (which unifies reason and faith), Coleridge seems to imply that there is no sharp division between history and poetry. If, as he argues in The Statesman's Manual, history is symbolic, it is a poem. This is not to say that Coleridge is making a Leibnizian point here (that this is the best of all possible worlds) but that he consistently argues that we know by a double image, that this doubleness implies a principle of intelligibility undergirding our approximations of it, and to the extent that we apprehend the principle, we know the events of history (and hence what should or should not have been). Coleridge is building a far more complex argument than any statement that would define poetry by repeating the familiar dictate that it treats the general while history treats the particular. Understanding generality, he suggests, proceeds in tandem with understanding our temporal situation—which simply is this double form of knowing and is the co-presence of the phase-like and the complete. As the argument unfolds, Coleridge continues to explicate the meaning of generality through a series of temporal illustrations. To describe minutely, he argues is, at best, to work against poetry's virtue and to try to turn it into something else, something even less than illustration.

Such descriptions too often occasion in the mind of a reader, who is determined to understand his author, a feeling of labor, not very dissimilar to that, with which he would construct a diagram, line by line, for a long geometrical proposition. It seems to be like taking the pieces of a dissected map out of its box. We first look at one part, and then at another, then join and dove-tail them; and when the successive acts of attention have been completed, there is a retrogressive effort of mind to behold it as a whole. The Poet should paint to the imagination, not to the fancy; and I know no happier case to exemplify the distinction between these two faculties. Master-pieces of the former mode of poetic painting abound in the writings of Milton, ex. gr.

The fig tree, not that kind for fruit renown'd But such as at this day to Indians known In Malabar or Decan, spreads her arms Branching so broad and long, that in the ground The bended twigs take root, and daughters grow About the mother-tree, a pillar'd shade High over-arched, and ECHOING WALKS BETWEEN: There oft the Indian Herdsman shunning heat Shelters in cool, and tends his pasturing herds At loop holes cut through thickest shade. Milton, P. L. 9, 1100

This is creation rather than painting, or if painting, yet such, and with such co-presence of the whole picture flash'd at once upon the eye, as the sun paints in a camera obscura. But the poet must likewise understand and command what Bacon calls the vestigia communia of the senses, the latency of all in each, and more especially as by a magical penna duplex, the excitement of vision by sound and the exponents of sound. Thus, "THE ECHOING WALKS BETWEEN," may be almost said to reverse the fable in tradition of the head of Memnon, in the Egyptian statue. Such may be deservedly entitled the creative words in the world of imagination. (BL 2.127-29) 116

Coleridge's accusation here, no less than earlier, is that Wordsworth forgets the general in his penchant for accurate depiction, or rather, he fails to fuse the phase-like and the complete parts of our being. This failure expresses itself first in the reader's one-sided effort to construct the poem— one-sided because there is no spontaneity, no merging of the activity of mind with its (textual) condition. The poet's love of the particular produces neither a pleasant illusion, an image, nor a full outline but rather presents the understanding of the reader with two discrete tasks: to add detail to detail while proceeding forward in reading and then to turn around and attempt to view the total produced. These activities are not part of a single movement—as in a leap, in which the spontaneous and voluntary blur—but continue to present two distinct moments of understanding— "when the successive acts of attention have been completed, there is a retrogressive effort of the mind to behold it as a whole"—as in the familiar paradox of autobiography in which knowing is presumed to come after (and to be disjoined from) being. Although, as I have argued in earlier chapters, Wordsworth's poetics aim at overcoming this paradox, Coleridge states that, in swaths of The Excursion, and anywhere the poems sink far into local detail, there is a loss of mind and of communion, which we might think of as the reader's experience of thingification, since to experience a series of partial impressions and then then whole is simply to assemble another's thinking. Further, Coleridge hints that even if Wordsworth has presented the mind in its process (as his Preface to the 1815 Poems made a primary feature of imagination and goal of poetry), his doing so would be no less a fragmentation than an autobiographer's positing of an externalized self. That is, doing so would be no less a species of fancy because it would lack the unifying quality—and hence the doubleness—of imagination. The complete image of knowing must appear with the gradual process of knowing or there is no poem. The excerpt from Paradise Lost (and its juxtaposition with the fable of the head of Memnon) more subtly repeats the argument about generality. In Milton's description of the fig tree, the parent tree is at once also daughter trees—the branch of one becomes the trunk of another in an unbroken continuity that esses in and out of the ground. And the path of sound that is produced by the arcade cannot fully be assigned to parent or child; it is the reverberation between them as occasion sends a herdsman into the produced internality of the fig tree's continuing generation. However significant Coleridge must have found Milton's image of the generic as at once self-repetition and the spread of resembling trees still vitally united, he sets off "ECHOING WALKS BETWEEN" even from this vertiginous image of movement in two directions—as mother becomes daughter while remaining mother. Perhaps he does so because "ECHOING" is repetition carried into another realm. The trees might be said to echo one another in their being, and also to catch external noise up into their mutual reflection. To walk among them would then be to experience a visual and an auditory repetition—the one the effect of the other, the one the product of many years (the presence of many generations) and the other the product of the moment. Perhaps it is worth noting that at this point in Paradise Lost, Adam and Eve enter the fig grove, which is really a single tree, to find a means of hiding from the principle of their being (and of refusing to endure their deed) by becoming particular. So Adam says after eating the fruit, "O might I here/ In solitude live savage, in some glade/Obscur'd" and then proposes to Eve that they at least hide their bodies; (shame accompanies generation on multiple levels).56 In the fable of the broken statue of Memnon, when the rays of the sun first strike the head, it would emit a sound interpreted as the voice of Memnon greeting his mother Eos (BL 2.129 n1). If in that fable of the disjoined head, the image of the child greets the mother repeatingly, in Milton's

56 John Milton, Paradise Lost 9.983-85. 117 description of the great banyan tree, it would be impossible to say who greets whom in the echoing space formed by the tree's repetitions—only that there is a continual greeting. "This is creation," Coleridge says, "rather than painting, or if painting, yet such, and with such co-presence of the whole picture flash'd at once upon the eye, as the sun paints in a camera obscura." In his study of nineteenth-century technologies of seeing, Jonathan Crary remarks of the camera obscura that observers tended to "single out as it most impressive feature its representation of movement," and "frequently spoke with astonishment of the flickering images within the camera of pedestrians in motion or branches moving in the wind as being more lifelike than the original objects."57 While there are several aspects of the camera obscura that make it an apt vehicle for Coleridge's discussion of the passage from Paradise Lost—the sun's general illumination produces a moving image only when it shines through a pinhole, this image is reversed (mirrored) and inverted and then reflected again to appear up-righted—the production of a moving rather than a still image does seem to be the one that most interests Coleridge. Time is imaged through the camera obscura because movement is; both imply the copresence of the enduring and the differing—as does the general, whose nature may be apprehended through a principle of generation (as it cannot be apprehended through abstraction per se).58 Milton's description of the fig tree suggests movement through its vertiginous fusion of orientations—as the horizontal branches dip into the ground and reemerge as vertical trunks—and through the temporal look of a spatial fact—as each tree has its own life and yet is literally the continuation of the parent. Perhaps for this reason—that the general bears the (latent) form of time—Coleridge sets off "ECHOING WALKS BETWEEN" twice over from the rest of the citation. For, though they have a similar structure, generality and time are not hierarchically related. And in Milton's description of the banyan tree, movement and echoing indicate a lateral as well as a vertical set of relations. The daughter trees are (obviously) related to each other as well as to the parent. Coleridge's surprising qualification, "but the poet must likewise understand and command what Bacon calls the vestigia communia [common traces] of the senses, the latency of all in each," his caution that even after the "co-presence of the whole picture flash'd at once upon the eye," something more is needed, might be understood in these terms. If Milton writes with a magical double pen so that seeing is almost hearing, or so that the reader produces a more complete experience, it is because the whole is implied in the parts which therefore may recall each other. Such synesthetic excitement must indicate a truly imitative power. It necessarily also indicates the presence of the analogous or triadic (the visual and the auditory express "the same subject but with a difference") rather than the figural or dyadic (in which the visual would represent the auditory and be understood in alien terms).

57 Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), 34. Crary argues that the camera obscura's culturally relevant feature was its demarcation of an isolated subject position through its enclosure of the observer and that, despite the observer's sense of the images' vitality, the camera could not represent movement or time because movement and time "were always prior to the act of representation." In making this claim, he relies on a form of the autobiographical paradox which separates knowing and being, the general and the particular. 58 To say that the general relies on abstraction does not say anything as we must be able to generalize in order to abstract. Henri Bergson, as part of a longer discussion of the nature of association (in which the whole of memory is always present in every moment of sensation) discusses the history of this problem in Matter and Memory and proposed a physicalized nativism as a solution. See Matter and Memory, 156-63. 118

It is hardly surprising that in illustrating the imaginative interest Milton is able to excite, Coleridge locates a sensuous doubleness (seeing suggests hearing) that echoes the larger doubleness of poetic form. Nevertheless, appearing after his description of Milton's ability to "paint" with the co-presence of the whole flashed at once, his insistence on the sympathetic echoing of the auditory by the visual almost produces a bathetic weakening, as if he said, the poet must "bring[] the whole soul of man into activity" and then added, but he must also address the eye and the ear, or the eye by way of the ear, and so forth. The parts would seem to have been included in the whole. But the passage does not feel bathetic, and Coleridge has made this gesture several times before. It is time to give it a closer look. The most prominent place in which the whole is to be understood separately from the parts I have already examined. It occurs in chapter fourteen, where Coleridge notes that just as we deny the title of being a true poem to "a series of striking lines," so we deny the title to any "unsustained composition, from which the reader collects rapidly the general result." The commonsense nature of Coleridge's comments in that discussion—that the telos of a poem cannot be gained too quickly— enables the acceptance of a principle that must be understood in its own right. It involves an equivocation that must be grasped. But first, it may be helpful to take up another relatively commonplace example Coleridge offers in which an evidently superior degree of power has to work to secure for itself an inferior degree. Chapter fifteen (the second in the second volume), echoes the second chapter of Biographia (part one) in its concern with the distinction between genius and talent. In the earlier chapter, Coleridge had argued that men of literary genius invariably appear to have been "of calm and tranquil temper"—in part as a response to the inward assurance of power and of permanent fame and in part because "the sensation of self is always in an inverse proportion" to the number and the vivacity of thoughts and ideas. Men of talent he linked with a readiness to anger—arising from the (self-deceiving) disproportion between their wishes and their powers, with a (vulgar) propensity to affective coldness and the concomitant need for social incitement (to produce feeling), and with the fanaticism and recrimination resulting from a sense of the "absence of all foundation within their own minds for that, which they yet believe both true and indispensable for their safety and happiness" (BL 1.33, 43-44, 31).59 Although he does not explicitly say so until chapter fifteen, talent is the product of voluntary effort, genius a power far beyond all willing and striving. As chapter fifteen puts it,

Imagery (even taken from nature, much more when transplanted from books, as travels, voyages, and works of natural history); affecting incidents; just thoughts; interesting personal or domestic feelings; and with these the art of their combination or intertexture in the form of a poem; may all by incessant effort be acquired as a trade, by a man of talents and much reading, who, as I once before observed, has mistaken an intense desire of poetic reputation for a natural poetic genius; the love of the arbitrary end for a possession of the peculiar means. (BL 2.20)

Talent—"the love of the arbitrary end"—implies scrupulous study that results in the acquisition of purely external signs that merely cover an internal lack and all of the effort of leaping where it is already self-thwarted. For, insofar as primary imagination is the "prime agent of all human perception" and the involuntary echo of the "eternal act of creation," talent must pit its willing

59 I am, obviously, passing over Coleridge's distinction between commanding and absolute genius and taking the latter (as Coleridge does) as genius's true expression (BL 1.31-33). 119 against its own unconscious participation in the willing of what is. It is self-divided (and self- deceived) by not being properly double; it turns on an image it does not have. Through an examination of Shakespeare, Coleridge goes on to identify genius with musical power—especially the ability to "vary[] the march of the words without passing into a loftier and more majestic rhythm, than was demanded by the thoughts, or permitted by the propriety of preserving a sense of melody predominant"—and with the ability to reduce "multitude into unity of effect" (BL 2.23, 20). In the first place, it is the grace conferred through the poet's inner balance of self-sameness with his adaptation to the subject. It produces the total, objective balancing of capacity and restriction. In the second, it is best seen through the aloofness of the poet's feelings— manifested by his choice of subjects remote from his private concerns and his constant difference from the egotism displayed by his characters. To these (Aristotelian) attributes (which yield "the liveliest image of succession with the feeling of simultaneousness,") Coleridge adds "DEPTH, and ENERGY of THOUGHT," an attribute that must be acquired along with imagery " and hence proper to talent as well as to genius (BL 2.25). Shakespeare himself, Coleridge writes, was "no automaton of genius; no passive vehicle of inspiration possessed by the spirit, not possessing it," for he "studied patiently, meditated deeply, understood minutely, till knowledge become habitual wedded itself to his habitual feelings, and at length gave birth to that stupendous power, by which he stands alone" (BL 2.26-27). Coleridge's statements move through the familiar dictum that a poet is born rather than made and retrace one of Biographia's refrains: the involuntary must become voluntary. Taken together, they usher in two related developments. The larger (always involuntary) capacity must bend itself to (acquire) the lesser. And, though genius seems to realize the two-part process Coleridge has been describing in perception, remembering, reading a poem, and so on, it does so in reverse—by beginning with the telos. It is talent, with its lacking view of its ideal, that most closely reflects the anguished doubleness of existence. The first development becomes the social undercurrent in Coleridge's critique of Wordsworth. Poetic genius must remain recognizably itself and yet adapt to its subject. It restricts itself in order to acquire dominion over language and sensuous and just ideas and restricts itself as a matter of poetic propriety, in order to address the feelings of its public. While he never accuses Wordsworth of a lack of study (and in fact repeatedly praises him for the purity of his diction and the power of his thought), he repeatedly accuses Wordsworth of a lack of propriety—in leaving his characters (and readers) far behind (as though in a rush to collapse the distance between genius and talent) and in casting off the look of genius by clinging too closely to a semblance of their narrow, even maniacal tendencies.  When Coleridge turns to the second kind of matter-of-factness in Wordsworth's poetry, "an apparent minute adherence to matter-of-fact in character and incidents; a biographical attention to probability, and an anxiety of explanation and retrospect," the argument about generality begins from the opposite end (BL 2.129). In presenting characters from the lowest social ranks—a leech gatherer or a pedlar—who make speeches appropriate to philosophers, to men with wide-ranging social opportunities, or to the poet himself, Wordsworth, Coleridge suggests, expects both readers and characters to be beyond the phase-like aspects of their existence. Such a claim lies behind Coleridge's reminder that such a subject might more properly be treated in works of moral philosophy—which is only interested in the final image of what we are, while poetry treats this telos by moving through its temporal expression. It lies behind his statement that

The feelings with which, as christians [sic], we contemplate a mixed congregation rising or kneeling before their common maker: Mr. Wordsworth would have us entertain at all times as men, and as readers….[Yet] till the blessed time shall come, when truth itself shall be 120

pleasure, and both shall be so united, as to be distinguishable in words only, not in feeling, it will remain the poet's office to proceed upon that state of association, which actually exists as general; instead of attempting first to make it what it ought to be, and then to let the pleasure follow. (BL 2.130-31).

And of course, it lies behind Coleridge's argument that in order to make his readers believe him, Wordsworth had to resort to lengthy particular descriptions of all of the accidental circumstances that allowed the pedlar (of The Excursion) to speak as he does. In abandoning the typical—the class characteristics (which are also the phase-like aspects of identity, how we appear at a shared moment)—Wordsworth abandons the general as well. The pedlar is no typical pedlar but a series of accidents with which we cannot sympathize because they will not be repeated. They neither form part of us nor are they proper to the anomalous man they explain. The pedlar does not become the telos within him while his social circumstances fall away into insignificance, but is divided into a set of accidents we may piece together (like a torn map) and a set of (the poet's) professions. Together, they do not suggest a recognizable whole but require a continual effort of the reader's judgment first to sum up and then to turn toward the prospect offered. This potential for continually frustrated effort may lie behind Coleridge's invocation of Aristotle in chapter seventeen.

I adopt with full faith the principle of Aristotle, that poetry as poetry is essentially ideal, that it avoids and excludes all accident; that its apparent individualities of rank, character, or occupation must be representative of a class; and that the persons of poetry must be clothed with generic attributes, with the common attributes of the class; not with such as one gifted individual might possibly possess, but such as from his situation it is most probably before-hand, that he would possess. If my premises are right, and my deductions legitimate, it follows that there can be no poetic medium between the swains of Theocritus and those of an imaginary golden age. (BL 2.46)

The important moment in this passage falls at the end. If there can be "no poetic medium between the swains of Theocritus and those of an imaginary golden age," Wordsworth is not merely inaccurate in his portrayal of rural speech (as reflecting the real in language and so an imaginary golden age after only a few slight modifications by the poet). His ethical project of prompting readers to act out of their whole selves through the intervention of the poet's well-ordered feelings or through the intervention of meter's re-naturing cadences may produce an effect opposite to the one intended. For, like the collapse of Theocritus's pastoral into a golden age pastoral, the project denies the doubleness of temporal identity. Hence, it may produce disbelief and disgust on one hand or fanatical adherence to a presumed creed of simpleness on the other—a fanaticism that would deny the need for ethical development. While we may believe ourselves to view our fellow men and women impartially ("rising or kneeling before their common maker"), our pleasure as readers reflects social attitudes which may not be bypassed. But to say that poetry must treat the typical if it is to move toward a genial vantage neither implies reliance on purely stock characterizations nor does it pander to its audience. Rather, Coleridge comments in a note on his invocation of Aristotle:

Say not that I am recommending abstractions, for these class-characteristics which constitute the instructiveness of a character, are so modified and particularized in each person of the Shaksperian [sic] Drama, that life itself does not excite more distinctly that sense of individuality which belongs to real existence. Paradoxical as it may sound, one of the 121

essential properties of Geometry is not less essential to dramatic excellence; and Aristotle has accordingly required of the poet an involution of the universal in the individual. The chief differences are, that in Geometry it is the universal truth, which is uppermost in the consciousness; in poetry the individual form, in which the truth is clothed. With the ancients, and not less with the elder dramatists of England and France, both comedy and tragedy were considered as kinds of poetry. They neither sought in comedy to make us laugh merely; much less to make us laugh by wry faces, accidents of jargon, slang phrases for the day, or the clothing of common-place morals in metaphors drawn from the shops or mechanic occupations of their characters. Nor did they condescend in tragedy to wheedle away the applause of the spectators, by representing before them fac-similies of their own mean selves in all their existing meanness, or to work on their sluggish sympathies by a pathos not a whit more respectable than the maudlin tears of drunkenness. Their tragic scenes were meant to affect us indeed; but yet within the bounds of pleasure, and in union with the activity both of our understanding and imagination. They wished to transport the mind to a sense of its possible greatness, and to implant the germs of that greatness, during the temporary oblivion of the worthless "thing we are," and of the peculiar state in which each man happens to be, suspending our individual recollections and lulling them to sleep amid the music of nobler thoughts. —FRIEND, Pages 251, 252 (BL 2.46).60

If geometry begins by regarding individuals (this triangle) according to their class characteristics, poetry begins by regarding class characteristics (the yeoman farmer, the proprietor) as they manifest themselves individually. Type involves the situational in that it emerges from circumstance, yet, it is not a mere copy—either of purely ephemeral aspects of language (jargon, slang, occupational metaphors) or of any moral commonplace unilluminated by the presence (and judgment) of the poet. Type is essentially iterable (contrary to all accident) and relational (existing with the shadowing consciousness of an end). As a moment of (or movement within) human becoming it has a characteristic look—with all the voluntary and involuntary modifications of individuality. When we see it, we see a mode of the universal. And, for this reason, it acts on us not as a thing—as an encounter with someone's maudlin tears or with someone else's business jargon or someone else's meanness—but as a form. Addressing us by means of our social moment and the poet's personality which floats aloof (and quietly captions by showing type as a mere stage in existence with an end), it transports the mind. In other words, when we believe we only encounter individuals, or when we believe we only ever encounter a complex series of accidents with remote causes, type becomes less and more than a stage: a nonsense term and the invisible parameter of judgment. We may only encounter individuals—but only insofar as we also encounter types, and to grasp type is to grasp our possible greatness, our complete being. To see an individual (and hence a type) is to forget "the worthless 'thing we are,'" because it is to remember the doubleness of seeing and to see with the poet, even while we see as ourselves. It is to see ourselves seeing—an act of reflection that suggests not only an "otherwise," not only one alternative or another that float as in a reverie, but an "otherwise" that is already characteristic, that intimates a constant ideal. We may not properly grasp this ideal, but we sense its vantage through the order and variety of the poem's music. To find an individual (rather than a series of accidents) is already to locate a type—that is the present look of this. And to locate type is to glean something of the ideal. For this reason, Wordsworth's prompting readers to make the ideal response risks prompting an accidental one. A reader would be tempted to "agree" or to "disagree" with the poet.

60 The Friend 2.217-18 (no 16, 7 December 1809) 122

This argument of Coleridge's partly grounds his fifth and final critique of Wordsworth, which he describes as a kind of "mental bombast" or "thoughts and images too great for the subject" (BL 2.136). The first instance Coleridge cites comes from "I wondered lonely as a cloud." In this poem, Wordsworth famously recollects the impression made by a field of bright daffodils he had seen one day and says that in vacant moods

They flash upon that inward eye Which is the bliss of solitude, And then my heart with pleasure fills, And dances with the daffodils. (15-18)61

If we describe such pleasurable impressions in this sort of high-flown language, Coleridge exclaims, "in what words shall we describe the joy of retrospection, when the images and virtuous actions of a whole well-spent life, pass before that conscience which is indeed the inward eye: which is indeed 'the bliss of solitude?'" (BL 2.136-37). However overstrained Coleridge's complaint may feel, it is consistent with his larger argument. By treating a momentary impression in the same terms as the ideal image of the whole, Wordsworth produces a kind of poetic collapse. The impression is not framed by any consciousness of a telos, which is also to say that there is no other vantage obliquely in view and no difference between the poet's and a poetic character's thoughts. A reader sympathizes or fails to sympathize with the poet's experience as a man but does not access the doubleness of feeling. She does not gather the sense of herself inevitably related to an ideal, shadowy presence. Lyric does not produce a collapse—provided it maintain a sense of a standard within which the poet feels and sings. Coleridge, in other words, objects to moments of (apparently) pure expressiveness in Wordsworth's poetry because they indicate that, for Wordsworth, cognitive form is just one topic among many that a poet may take up, not the essential structure of all poems. Turning to a more obvious (and far more serious) instantiation of the problem, he levies the same critique against the "best philosopher" passage of Wordsworth's "Ode. Intimations of Immortality." There, addressing "a six year's darling of a pigmy size," Wordsworth writes,

Thou best philosopher who yet dost keep Thy heritage! Thou eye among the blind, That, deaf and silent, read'st the eternal deep, Haunted for ever by the Eternal Mind— Mighty Prophet! Seer blest! On whom those truths do rest, Which we are toiling all our lives to find! Thou, over whom thy immortality Broods like the day, a master o'er the slave. A presence that is not to be put by! (109-19)

Coleridge predictably spends some time asking what Wordsworth can possibly mean. In what sense can this six year's child be said to "read 'the eternal deep?' In what sense is he declared to be 'for ever haunted by the Supreme Being? Or so inspired as to deserve the splendid titles of mighty prophet, a blessed seer?'" (BL 2.138). If the child's marvelous abilities were accompanied with consciousness,

61 Coleridge is responding to the first published version of "I wandered lonely as a cloud," which appeared in Poems in Two Volumes (1807). 123

Coleridge continues, why have they all disappeared? Some of us have distinct recollections of ourselves at six years of age, and it is a "pity that the worthless straws only should float, while treasures, compared with which all the mines of Golconda and Mexico were but straws, should be absorbed by some unknown gulf into some unknown abyss" (BL 2.139). But, he concludes, Wordsworth cannot have meant anything so extravagant. But, then, if the child has no consciousness of its godlike faculties (if the thoughts expressed by the poet are indeed too great for the subject), it is difficult to understand how they are the child's peculiar property. Here, Coleridge returns to the problem of "mental bombast" and its flattening of identity. If such "bombast" collapses the ideal into the momentary, and elides the (temporal) distinction between the poet's vantage and the reader's, it also fails to differentiate between the philosophical principle of the divine grounding of being and knowing and the notion that individual consciousness apprehends (as or in the manner of) the divine. "For aught I know," Coleridge says,

the thinking Spirit within me may be substantially one with the principle of life, and of vital operation. For aught I know, it may be employed as a secondary agent in the marvelous organization and organic movements of my body. But, surely, it would be strange language to say, that I construct my heart! Or that I propel the finer influences through my nerves! Or that I compress my brain, and draw the curtains of sleep round my own eyes! SPINOZA and BEHMEN were on different systems both Pantheists; and among the ancients there were philosophers, teachers of the EN KAI ΠAN, who not only taught, that God was All, but that this All constituted God. Yet not even these would confound the part, as a part, with the Whole, as the whole. Nay, in no system is the distinction between the individual and God, between the Modification, and the one only Substance, more sharply drawn, than in that of SPINOZA. JACOBI indeed relates of LESSING, that after a conversation with him at the house of the poet, GLEIM (the Tyrtæus and Anacreon of the German Parnassus) in which conversation L. had avowed privately to Jacobi his reluctance to admit any personal existence of the Supreme Being, or the possibility of personality except in a finite Intellect, and while they were sitting at table, a shower of rain came on unexpectedly. Gleim expressed his regret at the circumstance, because they had meant to drink their wine in the garden: upon which Lessing in one of his half-earnest, half-joking moods, nodded to Jacobi, and said, "It is I, perhaps, that am doing that," i.e. raining! And J. answered, "or perhaps I"; Gleim contented himself with staring at them both, without asking for any explanation. (BL 2.139- 40)

Participation in is not identity with the divine; one may have one's being in God, but that does not mean that one either accesses or is God. Even on a pantheistic scheme in which God is immanent, Coleridge continues, a human subjectivity is only a moment and a part—certainly not the totality. There are, in other words, improper leaps, and Wordsworth's poetics periodically move toward a few of them—namely, by implying that a reader (whatever her level of self-understanding) may immediately lay hold of the telos inside of her and that a small child already is or actively possesses the image of this telos, the image of the whole. Up to this point I have been speaking of the difference between Wordsworth's and Coleridge's understanding of poetry's ethical function as though it turned primarily on the two poets' handling of time and the reader's volition. This is a key difference between them. Poetry, in Wordsworth's various accounts of it, may imperceptibly reorient readers' perceptions over time as they repeat its rhythms and as these rhythms suggest a consistent, even-tempered, and genial outlook. Further, Wordsworth hints that the poet may transfer the tone and tempo of his own habitual meditations to readers almost immediately through the mediation of meter. Coleridge 124 refuses the possibility that there could be a shortcut to the reader's development. Only the activities belonging to primary imagination remain at the threshold of consciousness, instinctively merging the act of perception with the repetition in us of "the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM" or the act with the fact of perception. Any further ethical, intellectual, or aesthetic development of the individual personality requires conscious willing. Coleridge's turn here to the difference between his and Wordsworth's treatments of part- whole relations parallels the difference between their treatment of phase-like and complete aspects of our identity. And, as I suggested earlier, Coleridge frequently shows us that we must consider the whole separately from the parts and that we already understand this principle aesthetically. The parts of a poem are not simply contained in its the general result. Genius must get talent through study. Poets must—as Milton has done—not only paint living images that seem to flash the whole at once upon the reader (who must form this whole) but also draw her to add the auditory to the visual—to feel as though her faculties worked in sympathetic response to one another. I suggested earlier that there is an equivocation that needs to be taken up. It is time to do so. This equivocality invests the whole or the complete which not yet complete. It is especially evident in the realm of ethical and spiritual development, but we may also understand it through the grammatical difficulty Coleridge alludes to in the anecdote he repeats from Jacobi's Über die Lehre des Spinoza. Here we find what we might consider an equivocation within our understanding of the subjective. Lessing's reluctance to equate personality with divinity, in this account, turns on two premises: that personality involves restriction and that to think the divine in such terms is to remove the chasm of difference between the two and thereby consider finite intellect (and its perceptions, desires, and activities) continuous with the foundation of all that is. If the infinite does not simply ground the universe but also creates it (if being is continuous with doing), finite intellect may likewise find itself a source—not simply perceiving (the rain) but finding such events to flow from itself. Whatever other features Lessing's argument might seem to imply, the illustration he is said to use grammatically undermines the second of his premises. For to speak of the activity of raining (in German) is to use an active construction in a middle voice sense. Something that can be described as acting rains. But it is neither the sort of subject position marked by a pronoun that any finite consciousness could assume (it is not the same as human personality), nor is it merely being considered as the support of happening. An action is ascribed to it; it seems to be partly within the province of human understanding even as it appears beyond further characterization. Or, again, in this anecdote (which has become an analogue) we have one form of knowledge (grammatical and formal) but not another (semantic). To speak properly—to say, "it rains"—would not be equivalent to setting divinity beyond the realm of personality (a hard task for anyone), but simply to find knowing split from knowing. The anecdote, after all, is originally Jacobi's, who may have wanted to do more than characterize the persons present, or, rather, to do more by showing the possibilities inherent in a genial response. The anecdote becomes Coleridge's, who, in chapter ten, traced his own gradual conversion to the idea of divine personality first in the philosophical and then in the theological sense—ending his discussion with a note on how to speak German properly, quoting a few sentences from Luther's German letter on interpretation in which he advises the learner to "ask the mother in the house, the children in the lanes and alleys, the common man in the market" (BL 1.206).62 In a section of Biographia attuned to improper leaps, Coleridge suggests that Lessing,

62 Coleridge's discussion of his conversion fits the paradigm I have been tracing and would be well worth exploring in its own right. It begins with the typical (with the Kantian conviction that religion must have a moral origin and depend in part on the will, even as our feelings and the law of 125 paradoxically, may have made one that resembles Wordsworth's. Both men seem to equate the idea of divine with human personality and fail to notice the difference that language itself permits in how we may treat subjectivity. Divine creation need not and, indeed, cannot resemble human wishing, intending, perceiving (which must finally correspond with a ground outside of itself). The difference between knowing and knowing—between a subject that is knowable and one that is not—runs under many of Coleridge's analogues. One way of accessing it lies through Coleridge's description of the fig tree in Paradise Lost. In Milton's portrayal, the daughter trees are the sister trees; the vertical is also the horizontal relation. But in discussing the passage, Coleridge draws a distinction. Milton's ability to write as though he were creating rather than paining, which must finally be called "painting," has "such co-presence of the whole picture flash'd at once upon the eye," and yet, Milton must also suggest in such a way that the reader's eye may activate her ear (which he does). Milton's banyan is in paradise, and Milton himself (according to Coleridge) occupies one of the two summits of poetry. For these reasons, Coleridge's distinction may be more easily accessed here—we grasp the vertical and horizontal relations together—even as it appears odd or redundant. Another way of approaching this equivocality is by asking how the leap is not merely figural—how it is not dyadic but triadic. The leap's various instantiations may be related to each other; reading a poem may be related to spiritual becoming, remembering may be related to perceiving, and so on, but if this is not simply a chain of figures with an arbitrary resemblance (as the comparison of a lover to a summer's day is), we need to consider, as Aids to Reflection has it, how the leap, perceiving, and so on express "the same subject but with a difference." I have shown how they reflect each other and work as a progress—which is to say, how they are implicitly related to a common subject and how they differ in their complexity as well as in their outward look. But, thus far, this subject underlying each of them has remained obscure. It is not the form of thinking, although that may appear a good candidate; spiritual becoming, for example, is aimed at more than showing this form. Nor can the form of time be the subject for the same reason; enduring through resistance is necessary but not sufficient for spiritual becoming. Nor can the general be this subject, though its endurance through resistance requires a mind apart from ours to ensure the "translucence of the Special in the Individual" is (perceived). The subject is in fact the subject-relation—or, the relation of the human to the divine subject, of which, the equivocality in human self-knowing and the partly obscured nature of spiritual becoming are the ultimate analogues. The finite subject actively relates to the fact of creation and passively is the ongoing act of this "filial WORD," echoing it. But there is also an utter barrier between subject and subject, one intimated by the subject's failure to grasp its own telos. Up to this point, I have treated Coleridge's injunction, "know thyself…and this at once practically and speculatively" as though it were simply possible in time (BL 1.252). I shall now suggest that part of the value of Coleridge's twin discussions of genius and talent resides in the fact that the distinction between these two figures is itself an analogue for a self-difference within the subject that is also a matter of willing self-deception and unwilling self-alienation. Genius shows us identity becoming itself. Talent shows us a subject who, in one sense, is merely mistaken about herself and, in another, actively disguises that she lacks the complete and enduring image. From the latter point of view, talent's difference from genius repeats the difference between being able to know the divine subject as acting, creating, and so on and being able to relate directly to or as that subject, so that one's spirit could be said to read "the eternal deep" or to access truths "which we are toiling all our lives to find."

conscience practically demand it and then turns to Augustine's conversion by the book) and ends with the absolutely individual and ultimately unpresentable. 126

Coleridge's critique of Wordsworth's penchant for collapsing the distance between poet and reader, genius and common man has to do (as I have argued) with the obscuring of the temporal form of mind. To an even greater extent it has to do with a loss of circumspection in our grasp of our divine grounding. The presence of genius, insofar as it maintains its character, guards the distinction between the intimation we have of the divine subject and our capacity to speak of it as a subject. And it guards the distinction between the intimation we have of our telos and the real appearance of that telos. Coleridge's first, third, and fourth critique of Wordsworth's poetry echo this critique. There is an "inconstancy of…style;" in moving between "noble" and banal language, Wordsworth disregards the incantatory feeling of verse and the occasion for perceiving the alien—which even children who recite poetry appreciate (BL 2.121). The "undue predilection for the dramatic form in certain of the poems" fails to present the gap between poet and reader and then "one or other of two evils result. Either the thoughts and diction are different from that of the poet, and then there arises an incongruity of style; or they are the same and indistinguishable, and then it presents a species of ventriloquism, where two are represented as talking, while in truth one man only speaks" (BL 2.135). And there is sometimes "an intensity of feeling disproportionate to such knowledge and value of the objects described, as can be fairly anticipated of men in general…and with which therefore few only, and those few particularly circumstanced, can be supposed to sympathize" (BL 2.135-36). Failing to bend himself to the common knowledge of his audience and the manner in which other minds tend to move (now lingering, now needing to progress), he fails in his role as poet and teacher, for he fails to distinguish between his feeling in this role and his feeling as a private individual. Wordsworth, Coleridge argues, needs to restrict himself more fully to the characteristic. He must not only employ the law of probability in the depiction of characters, he must restrict himself to the class characteristics of a poet and do so with the characteristic responses of his audience in view. To do otherwise is to give up the prospect that poetry might prompt toward spiritual becoming even as its shows cognitive form. It is to invite the fanaticism of those without imagination, who know they cannot ground their own principles and yet have not felt the abasement that the presence of genius elicits. The principle of propriety that Coleridge emphasizes in the second half of Biographia at once shows us the (doubled) subject to which the analogues of the whole refer and shows that what, early on, appeared as a perceptual or an aesthetic principle (in which horizontal became vertical movement), or appeared as an historical principle (in which, in Biographia, genius consists in uniting the old and the new and, in the Malta notebooks, meter references two historical moments), or appeared as a matter of intellectual and spiritual becoming (in which the phase-like always references the complete) has become, through the critique of Wordsworth's poetry, a social and ethical principle. This is also to say that the strain toward imaginative union in the first half now encounters a check beyond the caution that becoming waits upon the involuntary or must encounter the resistance of gravity, unpoetic elements, and the self-differing of time to be itself. Through the critique of Wordsworth's poetry, this active strain encounters frustration—the intimated failure of the image and the requirement that poet, poetic character, and reader alike become partial, characteristic. Restriction is certainly not the final word; it is merely a check placed on becoming to ensure that it remains itself. Chapter sixteen, the chapter in which Coleridge compares the genius of the poets of the fifteenth and sixteenth century to the genius of those of the nineteenth, describing the former as treating the general and excelling in the melodious arrangement of their meters and the latter as interested in "descriptions…specific and individual, even to a degree of portraiture" yet comparatively careless in the meter and as excelling in their "keener interest, deeper pathos, manlier 127 reflection, and the fresher and more various imagery," first presents these period characteristics as reflected in the landscape painting of the two historical moments (BL 2.29, 35).

Something analogous to the materials and structure of modern poetry I seem to have noticed…in our common landscape painters. Their foregrounds and intermediate distances are comparatively unattractive: while the main interest of the landscape is thrown into the back ground, where mountains and torrents and castles forbid the eye to proceed, and nothing tempts it to trace its way back again. But in the works of the great Italian and Flemish masters, the front and middle objects of the landscape are the most obvious and determinate, the interest gradually dies away in the back ground, and the charm and peculiar worth of the picture consists, not so much in the specific objects which it conveys to the understanding in a visual language formed by the substitution of figures for words, as in the beauty and harmony of the colours, lines and expression, with which the objects are represented. Hence novelty of subject was rather avoided than sought for. Superior excellence in the manner of treating the same subjects was the trial and test of the artist's merit. (BL 2.32).

Poets and painters of the Renaissance placed the whole of their art in the art—in the manner of treating characteristic subjects Coleridge frequently reminds us. But while nineteenth-century poets individualize their descriptions "even to a degree of portraiture," nineteenth-century painters abandon the classical tradition of portraiture in order to draw the eye toward the far, the forbidding, the merely suggested. Because Coleridge introduces the passage by saying he finds something analogous in the structure of modern poetry and painting, we may conclude that he links the highly wrought interest of poetic portraiture with the tendency in painting to gesture beyond the canvas. "A lasting and enviable reputation awaits that man of genius, who should attempt and realize a union" he goes on to say (BL 2.24). Maintaining the characteristic in poetry may be aesthetically and ethically necessary—to prevent a kind of ahistorical flattening, a disunion between poet and reader, and the presumption that one may move in any affective direction at any point in time or that perception might be creation. But over-attention to the commonplace produced the false poetry of the neo-classical period, which itself needed the "keener interest, deeper pathos, manlier reflection, and the fresher and more various imagery" of the individual striving for self-knowledge and self- unification. The virtue of the nineteenth-century poet acquires the virtuosity of the renaissance poet in order to remain itself. As Coleridge says, Shakespeare's "'Venus and Adonis' seem at once the characters themselves, and the whole representation of those characters by the most consummate actors" (BL 2.21). Playing one's role might assure one—ethically speaking—of the continuity in self- knowing; it might guard against a certain form of hubris that denies the historical (double) quality of being and knowing. But the "heaven-descended" dictum Coleridge never tires of repeating is "know thyself."

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