'THE INDIVIDUAL MIND AND THE EXTERNAL WORLD': AN ASPECT OF ROMANTICISM IN SELECTED WRITINGS OF WORDSWORTH AND COLERIDGE NORMAN DAVID BERNARD A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of Arts University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg for the Degree of Master oBPTEMBER 1987 DECLARATION I declare that this dissertation is my own, unaided work. It is being submitted for the degree of Master of Arts in the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. It has not been submitted before for any degree or examination in any other University. NORMAN DAVID BERNARD 1 SEPTEMBER 1987 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to acknowledge my indebtedness to my supervisor Professor &.G. Woodward for the help he has given me during the writing of this dissertation. In addition to improving the dissertation stylistically and on many points of detail, he made a suggestion concerning the work's structure and content the importance of which the relevant footnote in Chapter 3 does not nearly convey. TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter 1 p. 1 - Section A p. 1 " Section B p. 9 - 19 Section C p. 20 - 20 Chapter 2 p. 30 76 Section A p. 30 " 41 Section 3 P- 42 - 52 Section C p. 53 - 67 Section D p. 68 - 76 Chapter p. 77 - 197 Section A p. 77 - 109 Section B p. 110 - 150 Section C p. .51 - 197 Epilogue: p. 198 - 215 Appendix* The Dejection Ode p. 216 - 224 Footnotes p. 225 " 256 Footnotes to SuKvttary: P- 225 Footnotes to Chapter Is p. 226 232 Footnotes to Chapter 2: p. 233 " 240 Footnotes to Chapter 3: p. 241 - 253 Footnotes to Epilogue: p. 254 - 255 Footnotes to Appendix: p. 256 Bibliography: p. 257 - 276 JHT ^ TEXTUAL SOTS Unless otherwise stated all references to Wordsworth1 a poetry and the 1805 Prelude are taken from The Oxford Authors Edition, edited by S. Gill. References to the 1850 Prelude come from the Norton Critical Edition of The Prelude, edited by J . Wordsworth, K.H. Abrams and S. Gill. The relevant details concerning these editions are to be found in Section 0 of the Bibliography. SUMMARY Hopkins‘ characterization of imagination as the "widow of an insight lost" hints suggestively at a problem which Schiller * famous Letters on the Aesthetic education of Man had already shown long before to be central to European Romanticism. Imagination and consciousness appear only at the cost of destroying an unproblematic unity of self and world. As Wordsworth's Preface to the Excursion suggests, many Romantic poets and thinkers hoped, paradoxically, to regain through consciousness itself a richer, more comprehensive unity of being than the innocent unreflective unity of self and world that had been lost. A demonstration of the kind envisaged in The Excursion that mind and world were essentially "fitted" to each other could regain, immanently within experience itself, the positives of religious experj ence in purely secular terms I Section B of Chapter 1 suggests that dichotomies of self and world had come to be sharply experienced as a result of the "Cartesian Split". Descartes’ attempts to ground our knowledge of the world by reconstructing it with logical inferences from a certitude, the cogito, given to us in experience indubitably, left the mind at best precariously and contingently connected with the world. The self-defining subject is now central to European thought. Descartes' procedures reflected the methods of a newly emergent and highly successful physics which tended to favour an atomistic and mechanistic conception of experience. These two trends were connected at a deep level, for to the extent that subject and object, mind and matter were thought of as ontoiogicaily distinct, objects were regarded as things to be manipulated and controlled.^ These dualisms were intolerable to Romantic writers and thinkers. To t ft s. at, on the contrary, what seemed to be given in experience was an intuition of the life of things. Schelllng, believing that the world '-as an organism to be understood in terms of the direction of its evolution, came to articulate a metaphysics conceiving of man as the spiritual essence of the world rendered conscious.3- In so doing he became the first notable thinker to try and systematically ground beliefs that roan's relationship to the world was a "fellowship of essence". Section C of Chapter 1 ends with a brief look at seme verse in The Prelude, and suggests that Schelling’s philosophy and Wordsworth's poetry exemplify what Hirsch calls a common "structure of experience".4 The examination ot Coleridge's work starting in Chapter 2, Section A, shows how these concerns came to play a role in English Romanticism. Coleridge's assertions in the Biographia Literaria that "Truth is the correlative ot Being,.. intelligence and being are reciprocally each other's substrate",3 and his recasting of the Kantian notion of "Reason" to make it refer to something like a direct intuition of spiritual truths,^ indicate how he too tried to articulate a conception of the world as embodied spirit. The characterisation of Truth and Being cited above indicates that the "ideas", the spiritual intuitions to which "Reason" gave access strangely resembled potencies and agencies. The identy of subject and objects is the ultimate principle of not merely our knowledge, but of being itself. I attempt to show in Chapter 2 Section B that this attempt to ground the conceptual in the non-cognitive led to Coleridge assigning art in general, and poetry in particular/ enormous importance. The poem, like the faculty of Imagination itself, synthesises and unifies by concretely embodying our intuitions into the "life of things" in images. ^ The symbol, revealingly defined as a "trans]ucence" of the "ideal in the real" and of the "eternal through and in the temporal", is claimed to be part of the reality it simultaneously represents. Section C of Chapter 2 accordingly examines Frost at Midnight and the Eolian Harp to show how the attempt to express the notions mentioned above influenced the structure and language of Coleridge's poems. Coleridge's poems often begin by depicting a state of alienated isolation which is gradually overcome by memories and reflections culminating in an insight into the "One Life" celebrated in tho Eolian Harp. The use of implied auditors to counter the solipsism implicit in the opening of a poem like Frost at Midnight 8 and generalize the significance nf the poem's culminating insight is also fairly frequent. The culminating insight into the "One Life" is given actually in an epiphany which simultaneously certifies the revelation in question. The precariously self-validating nature of the epiphany gives rise to difficulties examined in Chapter 2 Section D . The attempt of "natural piety" - to use Wordsworth's term - to dissolve any sharp distinctions between mind and world in a perception of a supposedly common essence is in danger of relapsing into solipsism. This is shown by one of Coleridge's notebook entries and by some passages in The Prelude such as -V 247-67, where jects are "crossed" with the perceiver's "image11. The ^vatry of Wordsworth and Coleridge accordingly embodies an inconclusive subject/object dialectic. The f.scariousness of the epiphanic moment car aloo result in an attempt, seen in the contradictory cloce of the Rolian Harp, to ground our insight into the "one Life" more aecurely in a "theology" of sorts. This tendency ia seen in The Prelude in the Simplon-Pass passage where objects, "soulless images" in „ 4 j w r a t jJk ..tm themselves, owe their radiance to a "light divine". The connections drawn here indicate that Wordsworth's verse will be dealt with, initially, by examining the central concept of "natural piety", and then the divergent conceptions of mind, imagination and experience arising out of attempts to deal with the precariousness of both "natural piety's" beliefs and the epiphanic moments underwriting them. Chapter 3 Section A deals with those parts of Wordsworth's work - Tintern Abbey and the Invocation to The Prelude are central texts - in which affirmations that mind and world are "kindred streams" are 'relatively unproblematical. Detailed attention to the language of the poetcy shows how calculated verbal and syntactical ambiguities erode hard and fast distinctions between perception and the world perceived. However, ambiguities of diction and syntax present even in the Invocation reveal a latent tension between two strands i.j Wordsworth's work, one in which the mind half-percQives and half-createe, use a phrase of Tintern Abbey, and onein which objecti ars, to a greater degree, constituted as aspects of eel^. One way to deal with the Bolipsiam latent in "natural ?j.esy's" problematical attempt to believe simultaneously \e the independent existence of the world and the n:,?-'' - dependence of perception would be to simply colcbrat ,.e autonomy of mind incipient in many passages of The Pra.f •i^i> ■ This occurs to a dfigrao in IV 247-1)7, analyovd in nomo Untail, ami in a remurknblo colobratitni <>£ tho nind na "linrd ami nnstor of outward sense". Thio in, however, proiilfimafcical, for the! poet is then "ci»Df\rre<i" i;tom "Nature's inagor.". The Hccomi response to the pieuariontmesn of the opiphanic moment has already boon outlined above. In the iiiim.Ion-i'ayia pann.-iqo w/5 soe the emorgenco of an amhiguouoly "autonomous“ imagination, the "unfathered v a p o u r d e t a c h e d from the objects of the natura.’. world to the extent that it seeks participation in the divine. These two divergent responses to the fragility of "natural piety" arc dealt with in Section » of Chapter 3. Soction 0 deals with tho Iircortalifcy Ode, a poem recording a loos of the “celestial light” and '"visionary gleam" which reveals the fundamental precariousnesn of the visionary faculty celebrated in the Sinplon-l’ast? passage.