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Wordsworth's Empiricist Poetic and Its Influence in the Twentieth Century

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Wordsworth's Empiricist Poetic and Its Influence in the Twentieth Century 1 Wordsworth’s Empiricist Poetic and its Influence in the Twentieth Century Jeffrey Side SUBMITTED IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY THE UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS THE SCHOOL OF ENGLISH SEPTEMBER 2006 THE CANDIDATE CONFIRMS THAT THE WORK SUBMITTED IS HIS OWN AND THAT APPROPRIATE CREDIT HAS BEEN GIVEN WHERE REFERENCE HAS BEEN MADE TO THE WORK OF OTHERS. THIS COPY HAS BEEN SUPPLIED ON THE UNDERSTANDING THAT IT IS COPYRIGHT MATERIAL AND THAT NO QUOTATION FROM THE THESIS MAY BE PUBLISHED WITHOUT PROPER ACKNOWLEDGMENT. 2 Abstract Wordsworth’s Empiricist Poetic and its Influence in the Twentieth Century This thesis has two connected aims. Firstly, it claims that it is meaningful to describe Wordsworth’s aesthetic, and his beliefs about the subject-object relationship, as substantially empiricist. However, it is not claimed that Wordsworth is consistently empiricist in the way that a philosopher might aspire to be: indeed, there is a place to be found within this argument for the recognition of his transcendentalism. While it is granted that the word “empiricist” is not always used in the most rigorous philosophical sense, the influence of philosophical empiricism on Wordsworth naturally figures in the argument. Secondly, the thesis demonstrates that the continued influence of Wordsworth in the twentieth century has to be understood primarily as the influence of his empiricist aesthetic. The thesis concludes by suggesting that there are wider possibilities for poetry than are encouraged by this aesthetic. The importance of undertaking this project does not lie only in objections to Wordsworth’s theory or practice, but arises also from a consideration of his continuing influence. Chapter One argues that on the basis of his poetry and criticism of the period 1787 to 1805, the description “The Empirical Wordsworth” is a meaningful one. This is established through an examination of Wordsworth’s writings, his sister’s journal entries, his correspondence, his poetry and contemporaneous literary reviews of The Prelude. Chapter Two, in order to demonstrate the antecedents of Wordsworth’s empiricist beliefs, is a study of his philosophical development from the influences of Hartley, Burke and Berkeley. Chapter Three examines the influence of Coleridge on Wordsworth. This is predominantly an empiricist one contrary to received notions of it being transcendentalist. Chapter Four reviews the reading of Wordsworth in the twentieth century. This has to be understood in terms of the reaction to Romanticism in the twentieth century. Finally, Chapter Five looks at twentieth-century poetry that largely avoids the empiricist influence of Wordsworth. It also introduces the concept of “Empirical Identifiers”: an analytic tool for literary criticism. 3 Table of Contents Title Page 1 Abstract 2 Table of Contents 3 Introduction 4 Chapter One The Empirical Wordsworth 12 Chapter Two The Philosophical Influences on Wordsworth 51 Chapter Three The Influence of Coleridge on Wordsworth 73 Chapter Four The Reading of Wordsworth in the Twentieth Century 106 Chapter Five Empirical and Non-Empirical Identifiers 164 Bibliography 200 4 Introduction The stimulus behind this thesis lies in a question, namely: What is the value of a poem if it does not enable one to identify personally with it to the extent that (to paraphrase Keats): it becomes a wording of one’s own thoughts?1 In other words, why should a person persist in reading a poem if it fails to prompt in their mind images and emotions that specifically are their own? This question, although seemingly naive, if treated seriously, leads to a much wider area of discussion: that of the relationship between the reader and the text. In academic circles, this debate is hardly new and has arguably been the main motivation behind the development of most forms of literary theory—from New Criticism to Post-structuralism. This literary discussion was indirectly influenced by ideas that were present in art during the first quarter of the twentieth century; ideas that in turn had been influenced by discoveries in science and technology during that period. Before that time the predominant philosophical idea in science was that of positivism, which was formulated by French philosopher Auguste Comte who, as Arthur I. Miller says in Einstein, Picasso, ‘advocated progress toward a science cleansed of theology and metaphysics’.2 In the 1880s, Ernst Mach expanded this concept by stating that ‘only phenomena reducible to sense perceptions (or laboratory data) could be considered physically real’.3 The resultant implication was that physical objects existed independently of the senses. However, this view began to be seriously challenged with the appearance of new technologies in science. New inventions such as the aeroplane, the motorcar, and wireless telegraphy were significant in changing people’s ideas about time and space.4 The discovery of X rays ‘seemed to render inside and outside ambiguous, the opaque became transparent and the distinction between two and three dimensions became blurred’.5 In mathematics, new geometries could be conceived of as more than three dimensional, with the implication of movement in time and space.6 5 These new discoveries and their implications had ramifications that were becoming apparent outside of scientific discourse. In painting, the arrival of postimpressionism signalled a reaction against representation and naturalism.7 The pioneering cinematography of Edward Muybridge and Etienne- Jules with their multiple images ‘permitted change with time to be portrayed either on successive frames of film or on a single frame, in addition to depicting different perspectives on serial frames’.8 The new discoveries in science thus led to new ways of thinking about and practicing art. Miller writes: The general line of argumentation among art historians is that the roots of cubism are in Paul Cézanne and primitive art. This view discounts completely how astounding developments in science, mathematics and technology contributed to the very definition of “avant-garde”. It has long been known that the roots of science were never really within science itself. Why then should the roots of the most influential art movement of the twentieth century lie totally within art? 9 Artists who have proven to be influential in the art of the twentieth century were not operating in an intellectual and aesthetic vacuum but were actively engaged in discussing and learning about the scientific ideas surrounding them. For instance, Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon included ideas of four-dimensional space that were introduced to him by Maurice Princet, an insurance actuary in Picasso’s circle who had an interest in advanced mathematics. Picasso ‘listened to his discourses on non-Euclidian geometry and the fourth dimension, which Princet gleaned mostly from Poincaré’s widely read book La Science et l’hypothèse’.10 Princet’s discussions fascinated Picasso and significantly changed his thinking. Poincaré had proposed that the fourth dimension be understood as a sequence of scenes, however Picasso drastically modified this by representing ‘different views of a scene all at once, simultaneously’.11 This resulted in an ambiguous visual representation, which was probably one of Picasso’s objectives.12 Indeed, the geometrical representation of spatial simultaneity that Cubism depended upon necessarily produced visual ambiguities. Furthermore, the geometrical imagery underlying cubism (largely engendered by mathematics13) assisted Picasso in his goal ‘of seeking a representation based in conception rather than perception’.14 This movement away from an empirical representation of phenomena marked a radical shift in the 6 aesthetic of visual art. This aesthetic is described by Thomas Vargish and Delo Mook in Inside Modernism: In Western art before Modernism the principal visual model for representing the world was that of optical similitude or perspective, […]. This model valorized the space of a single- point perspective, […]. Such space is sometimes called “classical” by art historians and sometimes “realist” or “realistic”, […]. As the cubist and other modernist artists were fond of pointing out, […] single-point perspective was not realistic but actually “illusionist,” […]. “Classical perspective” assumes a neutral, homogenous space in which objects exist independently […]. This model of spatial representation employs the same geometric principles as Newtonian space—it is also neutral, homogenous, and in all ways a suitable medium for Newton’s laws of motion, his mechanical worldview. The fundamental goal of the practitioners of linear perspective was the rendering of three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional surface […]. An underlying premise in linear perspective is that light travels in straight lines. This premise is combined with the premisses of Euclidean geometry to formulate rules for the geometric construction of a perspective rendering of a scene as if observed through a window. […] This method of rendering perspective, premised on the validity of Euclidian geometry, may properly be termed “linear” […].15 Einstein’s criticisms of Euclidian geometry and further developments in the field of quantum mechanics helped confirm the validity of the new artistic outlook. As Miller says: Advances in atomic physics, dependent on methods Einstein pioneered for theory building as well as on his relativity theory, led to abstractions in visual imagery and a concomitant break with classical causality.16 He continues: A hallmark of classicism in art and science is a visual imagery abstracted from phenomena and objects we have experienced in the daily world. There is no such visual imagery in quantum mechanics or in highly abstract art. Artists and scientist had to seek it anew rather than extrapolate it from the everyday world. Just as it is pointless to stand in front of a Mondrian or Pollock, for instance, and ask what the painting is of, so it’s pointless to ask what the electron under quantum mechanics looks like.17 We can find echoes of this in Vargish and Mook’s Inside Modernism: Cubism does not pretend to represent the single possible visual conception from a given perspective.
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