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Wordsworth's “Inscrutable Workmanship” and the Emblems of Reality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 March 2021

James R. Baird
James R. Baird*
Affiliation:
Connecticut College, New London
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Extract

In a familiar passage from a letter to W. S. Landor, Wordsworth exposed, as I see it, the central purpose of his art: “Even in poetry it it the imaginative only ... that which is conversant (with), or turns upon infinity, that powerfully affects me.” “Things,” he said, had to be lost in each other and limita to vanish; otherwise he was indifferent. The argument of this essay is intended to suggest an approach to Wordsworth at the poetic level of infinity. This is the realm of pure universals, the insight of poetry which reveals a state of being independent of sensuous limitations. In the sense of Hegel it is the level of reality, possessing a wholly independent being, as opposed to that of appearance, depending wholly in its existence upon the senses. The exact nature of reality remains, of course, a question for pure philosophy; and it is probable that the discipline of philosophy rather than that of literary criticism must judge finally the dialectic of poetry concerned with infinity. Yet the highest attainment of the fine arts is clearly an act of turning upon the infinite, an invocation in the observer or the listener of a sense of endlessness. Medium, form, and technique are the approaches to the ultimate experience inherent in a particular work. As artistic acts from the world of appearance, they may be analyzed and defined by the particular critical disciplines concerned with them. At the end of these functions lies the problem of philosophy. What is the nature of the wholly independent being which all great art attains? Wordsworth implies in his statement to Landor that awareness of the infinite is the final objective of poetry. My purpose is to investigate the method of Wordsworth's thought at the threshold of this objective rather than to define philosophically what the sense of infinity, in itself, contains. It seems clear that nothing more need be said upon the imaginative process as this is explored in Wordsworth's Prefaces or interpreted by his critics.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 68 , Issue 3 , June 1953 , pp. 444 - 457
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1953

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References

page 444 note 1 The Letters, of Wiiiiam and Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. E. de Selincourt (Oxford, 1939), I (1821-30), 134-135. The letter is dated 21 Jan. 1824.

page 444 note 2 See W. T. Stace, The Philosophy of Hegel (London, 1924), p. 13: “Reality, in the philosophic sense, is that which hat a wholly independent being, a being of its own, on its own account, which does not owe its being to anything else. Appearance is that which has only a dependent being.” Hegel's definition is, of course, totally opposed to the doctrine of Protagoras, for example, in which knowledge is sense perception, reality the totality of sensation (cf. Stace, pp. 7-8).

page 445 note 3 William Wallace, trans. and ed. Hegel's Philosophy of Mind (Oxford, 1894), p. 219.

page 445 note 4 Strange Seas of Thought (Durham, 1945), p. 23.

page 448 note 5 The Eye and the Object in the Poetry of Wordsworth,“ in Werdsworth: Centenary Studies Presented at Cornell and Princeton Universities, ed. Gilbert T. Dunklin (Princeton, 1951), p. 33.

page 452 note 6 Op. cit. (see n. 5), p. 24. Pottle uses here Wordsworth's own confession in the epilogue to “The Waggoner”:

Nor is it I who play the part,

But a shy spirit in my heart,

That comes and goes-will sometimes leap

From hiding-places ten years deep;

Or haunts me with familiar face,

Returning, like a ghost unlaid,

Until the debt I owe be paid. (13-19)

page 453 note 7 The Works of Emerson (Cambridge, Mass.: Riverside Press, 1883), I, 97.

page 455 note 8 I.581-586. The beautiful use of “shield” as a symbol for the universal is repeated in a poem of 1819, the lines “Composed during s Storm.” The clearing sky presents an azure disc, a “ahield of Tranquiility.” It is used again in the lines To ... On her First Ascent to the Summit of Helvellyn“ :

And a record of commotion

Which a thousand ridges yield;

Ridge, and gulf, and distant ocean

Gleaming like a silver shield!

page 457 note 9 The Philosophy of Fine Art, trans. F. P. B. Ounuton (London, 1920), IV, 201.

page 457 note 10 An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. T. E. Hulme (London, 1912), p. 7.