Spots of Time

            Although I had years ago read the “spots of time” section of The Prelude, it must have been done quickly or I must not have thought about it very deeply, because this time it struck me as very odd.  In the preceding stanza, Wordsworth describes how he purified himself of the business of the world through a re-immersion into “Nature’s presence” by which he is made “ a sensitive and creative Soul.”  This theme of revivification carries into the discussion of “spots of time,” which nourish and repair him.  The memory of these spots brings “a renovating Virtue.”  We might expect these experiences to be rapturous, mystical, and/or affirmatory – some kind of Maslowian peak experience. But upon scrutiny, they don’t seem life-affirming – quite the opposite.  They are experiences imbued with fear, death, doubt, discomfort, pain.  Paradoxically, the memory of them brings pleasure. 

            He offers two examples of such spots of time.  In the first, as a six-year-old, he has strayed on horseback from his accompanying servant.  He sees the place where the name of a murderer who was executed has been carved in the ground.  Then, proceeding uphill, he sees a “naked pool,” a beacon on a “lonely Eminence,” and a girl with a pitcher on her head struggling as she walks against the wind.  The scene indicates frailty, loneliness, nakedness, lostness.  Yet when this scene of ineffable “visionary dreariness” comes to mind later, when he is in the same place with his sister and fiancée, it becomes a source of joy and strength.  Why? It is not that the pleasurable feelings of the present have, through association, transformed the memory of the past experience.  Indeed, it is the difference between the feelings of the present and the past that is essential.  The present feeling “comes in aid” of the past feeling and so provides him with “diversity” of strength. So the restoring potential of the spots of time has to do with the overcoming of pain and suffering.  A joy is felt through the awareness of one’s emotional and spiritual strength.  This strength proves that “mind is lord and master,” and therefore we are not entirely subject to contingency. 

That the consciousness of freedom brings pleasure and power is not strange.  However, that Wordsworth – if we can generalized from his two examples – would seek these spots of time as “hiding places of my power” and sources of joy seems strange to me.  The second example emphasizes this strangeness.  Wordsworth and his brothers await a carriage to bring them home for the winter holidays.  They ascend to an eminence.  Like the landscape of the first spot of time, the environment is naked, dreary, and lonely: the day is stormy and windy, there is a single sheep, they shelter behind a “naked” wall, the bare hawthorn bush whistles in the wind, the woods are enshrouded by mist.  Within ten days of returning home, his father dies.  The death seems a “chastisement” and the landscape of a few days before now takes on more articulate meaning.  Wordsworth thanks God “who thus corrected my desires.” He seems to mean that God has taught him not to be overly eager to have his expectations met – that is, to trust more in God rather than follow his own impulses.  One might think that the memory of the landscape, so closely associated with his father’s death and an awareness of his selfishness, would be painful.  On the contrary, he often repairs to those sights and sounds and drinks from them “as at a fountain.”

I am glad to find Wordsworth’s poetry so odd because it shows that he is much more complex than I realized as an undergraduate. These spots of time suggest that for Wordsworth, whatever truth or meaning exists in life, although it may ultimately lead to joy and strength, arises from moments of intense suffering, confusion, doubt, and fear.  His spots of time push up against the limits of our comprehension of experience – or rather the limits of thought and language to interpret experience.

The Prelude: Wordsworth and Solitude

          Being in a class wherein finding the answer to the question "What is Nature?" is the primary focus has significantly modified my reading strategies; I now mostly scan the assigned readings for eco-key words (such as nature, green, environment, etc.) and focus on those, as opposed to approaching the text with as few expectations as possible (as is my custom). Therefore I found myself doing just that when I began reading Wordsworth's The Prelude. That is to say, I sifted through lines and lines of verse in an active attempt to ferret out 1.) what the word "nature" means to Wordsworth, 2.) what is his philosophical viewpoint on the role nature plays in the greater scheme of things (e.g., is it a resource to be used, a deity to be worshipped, a thing to be put on a higher level of importance than man in some cosmological hierarchy, or ultimately a mere canvass for some grand painting of humanity) and what is the proper or ethical relation of human beings to this "natural" world.
          While I found that nature is indeed many things to Wordsworth--such as a "spirit of (wisdom) of the Universe," and a "Soul that art the eternity of thought"--one aspect of his conception of nature that stood out to me was its ability to afford solitude or shelter to one who would seek it. Specifically referring to the beginning of the piece up to around line 500, nature to Wordsworth is the anti-city, the place where others are not. Apparently for Wordsworth this solitude is a good thing: he fetishizes a "lonely scene more lonesome," and relishes the aloneness of the "gloomy hills" through which he walked "homeward ... in solitude." Nature in this way is a sort of escape, a retreat, a lonesome cottage in the woods where the poet can turn down the mental noise of everyday concerns and turn up the volume on profundity and philosophic clarity, hone his craft and in a sense contemplate the bigger picture. What is really being exalted here is the power of the mind and or imagination, and nature is simply the vehicle, or the ideal setting to unleash the mind's full poetic potential.    

Ascent the Negativa

Like Jane (in her first post), I too found Hartman a difficult read. One of the reasons is that he sources the 1850 Prelude instead of the 1805 edition that's in LABL. Plus in its abridgement, LABL omits the Mount Blanc passage that Hartman obliquely refers to as the “unexpected revelation [that] comes almost immediately (ll. 624-40), while the whole is preceded by a parallel instance of disappointment with the natural world followed by a compensatory vision” (219A). I challenge you—not Professor Garrett, of course, and possibly not Dimitrios—to make sense out of this passage without having read those lines in the 1850 edition. Frankly, I had trouble explicating the passage even after downloading the 1850 version on the Internet. But what finally helped me is a March 11, 1965 review in The New York Review of Books of Hartman’s book by Christopher Ricks, Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787-1814, in which his article occupies a prominent chapter, prominent because the reviewer spends most of the time discussing its ideas. (You can access the part about Mount Blanc from the Internet, but you have to pay an access fee of $5 to read the full review. If anyone wants to read it, let me know and I will email it to you.)

Returning to Jane’s post, I find her explanation of the mystical via negativa lucid and informative. I was also prompted by her discourse to give a closer reading to Hartman (and Wordsworth) than I ordinarily would have. My understanding is that for both the mystics and Wordsworth, the via negative foregrounds a way toward something. For the mystics it’s toward God, who can never be known directly, and for Wordsworth it’s toward the Imagination, a concept equally difficult to access (“the Power so called through sad incompetence of human speech”).  As Jane says, for the mystic the experience of the secular world must be eliminated—music, television, and technology, and even the abstract idea of experience itself. In Hartman’s analogue, Nature represents for Wordsworth what the secular represents for the mystic. But Jane argues that in Wordsworth “nothing really is being negated or eliminated . . . [e]verything coexists.” I’m not so sure. 

In Part VI, ll 599-608 of The Prelude (as quoted by Hartman), Wordsworth says that the “invisible world”— where “greatness makes[s] abode—is revealed when, with the “strength of usurpation” the senses are extinguished (“the light of sense goes out”). Therefore, the experience of the senses—Nature—holds the same relationship with the Imagination as the secular world does for the Devine. Granted, when Hartman says that “Wordsworth’s journey as a poet can only continue with eyes,” it suggests a symbiosis between the realms of Nature and the Imaginative. But Hartman qualifies this by saying that “the Imagination experienced as a power distinct from Nature opens his eyes by putting them out” (224B). Is not sightlessness the opposite of sight? And do not both the mystic and the poet have to experience these antipodal realms before they can negate them? 

As we know, Wordsworth poetry is rife with negative imagery—hedgerows that are hardly hedgerows, and a visionary dreariness that colors or words cannot describe. In The Prelude he anticipates post-structuralism by showing in the first of the “spots of time” how form collapses into content. Upon revisiting the sight of the Gibbet and the Beacon many years later with his sister and fiancé, he feels the “spirit of pleasure and youth’s golden gleam” . . . “from the power they [these remembrances] left behind.” This has a doubling effect on Wordsworth, conditioned on the reification of the original experience. (“So feeling comes in aid of feeling, and a diversity of strength attends us, if but once we have been strong.”) Now, as the poet in the midst of composition, he recollects this moment, despite his having been especially endowed with this spiritual vision (“it is from thyself it is that thou must give, else never [the poet] canst receive”), he sees only “glimpses now.” Soon, with age, he will “scarcely see at all.” But while he can he will express through his poetry “as far as words can give, a substance and a life to what [he] feels[s].” His purpose is to benefit posterity (“to enshrine the spirit of the past for future restoration”). 

The symbiotic relationship of man and the environment in Wordsworth's Prelude

Instead of waking up to the usual and annoying sound of my alarm this morning, I woke up to the sound of rain. The rain came suddenly and in a matter of seconds was a pretty fierce down pour, it was beautiful. However, the beauty gave way to fear as the wind picked up and became audible in my bedroom. I don’t know what I was afraid of, perhaps the hearing and imagining the power of Nature. The wind that is benign most days was making its presence known, making it voice heard. Ok, that’s a little anthropomorphic and anthropocentric, but that’s one way and for some the only way we understand Nature. For example, one of my students pointed out on Monday how the gloomy weather was fitting for midterms. I agreed and added that it was fitting for both students and teachers. Both incidents made me think of the Wordsworth’s lines in Tintern Abbey “the mighty world / Of eye and ear, both what they half-create, / And what perceive” (lines 106-108). The symbiotic relationship of man and the environment is paradoxically both real and imagined. We have a real and tangible relationship to nature and the interrelated system, but we also project onto nature our hopes, fears, desires, and emotions. For example, SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) demonstrates the real impacts of the environment on the self. Wordsworth’s Prelude illustrates the symbiotic relationship of man and the environment and the impacts of the environment on the self.

Wordsworth’s describes Nature, specifically the wind, as his muse. Wordsworth apostrophizes the “gentle breeze” and refers to wind as a “[m]essenger” and “friend” (lines 1, 5). Wordsworth’s childhood and adolescence is shaped by Nature and describes his soul as having “[f]air seed time” and growing up “[f]ostered alike by beauty and by fear” (lines 306,307). The coupling of the words fear and beauty allude to moments of sublimity. Wordsworth’s “destroy[ing]” and” plunder[ing]” of nature evokes the feeling of nature responding to his actions. For example, after preying on captive birds Wordsworth states “I heard among the solitary hills / Low breathing coming after me, and sounds / Of undistinguishable motion, steps / Almost as silent as the truft they trod” (lines 330-333). Wordsworth’s conscience causes him to hear footsteps which he imagines are chasing after him. Nature can be a beautiful and gentle muse and can cause terror and fear. Wordsworth acknowledges that Nature “oftentimes, when she would frame / A favor’d being” pursues them “[w]ith gentleless visitation” though to achieve “the self-same ends” “employ[s] /Severer interventions” which Wordsworth states was his experience with Nature (lines 364-366, 369, 371). Nevertheless, these moments of sublimity “[t]he terrors, all the early miseries, /Regrets, vexations, lassitudes” have “infus’d” Wordsworth’s mind with “thoughts and feelings” now make up a  “calm existence” when he is “worthy of [himself]” (lines 357-362). Wordsworth’s Prelude is an example of the symbiotic relationship of man and the environment, both real and imagined.      

Burke vs. Kant in the Battle of the Sublime

“Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime,” writes Burke in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Contrasting Kant’s idea of the sublime, which Hartman echoes in his article “A Poet’s Progress,” Burke theorizes sublimity as being the most connected to a gothic sense of fear. He argues that the sublime is what moves our soul into a state of astonishment, a condition in which all motions of one’s existence are suspended due to some degree of horror. “In this case,” says Burke, “the mind is so entirely filled with its object [of fear or astonishment] that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it.” Therefore, one’s inability to communicate or express this fear points directly to the power of the sublime. Fear, astonishment, and pain, according to Burke, exist as the strongest examples of passions connected directly to the sensation of the sublime. As opposed to Kant’s description of the mind’s continuous alternating movements between repulsion from and attraction to an object, resulting in a feeling of transcendence, Burke describes the sublime as a downward plunging motion into the depths of horror. Instead of feeling a “restful contemplation,” as Kant describes, Burke argues that sublime fear unleashes one’s subconscious anxieties otherwise inexplicable in conscious existence.

Kant’s theory of the sublime seems to touch on Freudian aspects of “unheimlich,” a feeling of anxiety produced by the inability to recognize a thing so seemingly familiar. It’s this feeling of uncertainty that Kant describes in the sublime thought process; it initially creates a feeling of displeasure, which then transitions to a pleasurable admiration as the imagination supersedes logic and reason. Therefore, Kant’s theory of the sublime focuses on the power of the imagination and its ability to produce feelings of gratitude and pleasure. In contrast, Burke theorizes that the sublime is rooted in fear alone. In fact, he argues that psychological pain is far stronger than the feeling of pleasure since the cathartic expressions of fear and danger affect the body and mind more so than “any pleasure could suggest.” Essentially, the only commonality between these two philosophers is the fact that the sublime initiates a psychological sensation.

Still, even though these two theories of the sublime identify distinct psychological responses, they both touch upon this idea of the unknown. In terms of Burke’s sublime, we feel terror because we don’t have an understanding of the thing we’re experiencing. Meanwhile, according to Kant, the sublime unlocks a playfulness of the imagination, evidencing a “faculty of the mind that can transcend every standard of sense.” I don’t necessarily subscribe to one theory or the other, as I believe each concept has an inherent truth. Still, I find it interesting that a concept so incommunicable can be expressed in so many ways. 

Force of Nature: Irritable Bowel Syndrome

The opening paragraph of Geoffrey Hartman’s “A Poet’s Progress: Wordsworth and the Via Naturaliter Negativa” notes that Blake blamed some of Wordsworth’s poetry for an unspecified “bowel complaint” that Blake claimed almost killed him. My first thought was that any poem powerful enough to nearly kill a reader is a poem worth reading. However, after a beat or two, I began to suspect that Blake was insultingly suggesting that Wordsworth’s poetry was so toxic that it had given him dysentery or something along those lines. Naturally, at this point I was extremely interested in the reading the verses in question so I referred to the footnote that documents the source of the information.

 The source was the diary of Henry Crabb Robinson, a man who made a point of becoming intimate with many of the most important English and German writers of the day. Fortunately, Robinson’s diary has been digitized and so I quickly Googled it in hopes that it would provide enough context to determine what Blake meant and also to learn what specific verse Blake found so offensive, or at any rate, so powerful. It turned out to be a few lines from “The Recluse”, one of the feeder poems that evolved into “The Prelude,” the poem our class is focusing on this week. Here’s the line’s in that Blake felt so powerfully:

                     Jehovah,—with his thunder & the choir
                     Of shouting angels, & the empyreal thrones—
                     I pass them unalarmed.
                                   - The Recluse, Part One, Book One – Home at Grasmere (lns 786-788)


 The main complaint that Blake had with these lines is that they indicate that Wordsworth, whom Blake felt was the best poet of the age, was not a Christian. Robinson reports in a private conversation with Blake about Wordsworth, Blake asked if Wordsworth thought “his mind can surpass Jehovah?” Blake then sets his mind on identifying Wordsworth as a pagan. I should add that Robinson places the lines cited above as belonging to the introduction to the “Excursion.”

 According to Robinson, Blake viewed people who believed in the “reality of the natural world” as a type of atheism. Robinson also reports that Blake identified Locke, Bacon, and Newton as the three great teachers of “Atheism and Satan’s doctrine.” I am reminded of St. Augustine’s aligning science with demons in one his works; demons are incapable of revealing Truth but they can assist man with science. This made me realize I have no understanding of Blake whatsoever – I thought he began the “sympathy for the devil” idea. Oops.

 Back to Hartman, who argues that Wordsworth held a “sense of reality in Nature” (Hartman 214). How nicely what I felt was becoming a non sequitur post has dovetailed back to the assigned readings; that is exactly the problem Blake reportedly had with Wordsworth. I wonder if Blake ever read the version of “The Prelude” that we have in our books where Wordsworth is far more explicit about his allegiance with Nature as the foundation of reality, or at least how man interprets this reality. I think Blake would have found Lns 491-502 of “The Prelude” Book First even more offensive as they are particularly aggressive about supplanting the church with Nature - attributing to Nature a “ministry” that employed the “universal earth,” a play on the Catholic church’s status as a “universal church,” as a living Bible that had the advantage of actually being alive. Blake’s poor bowels would have suffered even greater calamities, no doubt worthy of a South Park episode, over that passage.

 By the way, I am pleased to report no bowel complaints during my reading any of this week’s poems, although I agree that this was very powerful poetry, especially for the time when the Western world was still straining under the yoke of Christian religions, both Catholic and Protestant (I mean that during this time religion was still a dominant force in public life, where disagreeing with the official religion of state had very real and legal consequences as compared to our times where religious disputes seem more about the sound and the fury than anything else).

PS - I signed up as "Rabelais" for Blogger a number of years ago. It seems appropriate considering the inspiration for this post was Blake's irritable bowels - Scott Ross

Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood

"Ode to Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood" strongly suggests Wordsworth's ambivalence rather than embrace of nature. As we have discussed in class previously, Wordsworth scholars have long debated if Wordsworth can rightly be called a "nature poet," that is, a poet whose object of imaginative expression are the wonders and beauty of nature. I am of the opinion, as evidenced by "Ode," that the real object of Wordsworth's poetry, as is true with his poetry generally, is himself, specifically his consciousness. "Ode" recalls Wordsworth's days as a child where, as the poem's introduction by Wordsworth himself in the Longman Anthology explains, he says he experienced that quintessential "dreamlike vividness and splendor which invest objects of sight in childhood." His subsequent inability to live the rest of his life with this peculiarly magical relation to the external world proved to be for a significant period of his life a source of consternation. No matter the facts around him that proved otherwise, a certain part of himself refused or had an inability to believe that death's sting would eventually be applied to him one day. As his words suggest, the deepest recesses of his body would scream to him that to believe so about himself represented a kind of blasphemy. However, from one point of view for Wordsworth, his recollections of childhood, as the opening stanza intimates, would become a source of wisdom and knowledge: ("The Child is Father of the Man..."). I am reminded, and perhaps Wordsworth was as well, of how Christ in Matthew spoke of people coming to him like a child, which at that particular time in history, was a perplexing and somewhat revolutionary thing to say. Socially, children were seen as little more than nuisances, that is, as objects not to be taken too seriously from any meaningful philosophical perspective. They had little if any sense of natural rights ascribed to them by society and thus, were treated rather poorly when judged by today's western standards. And one can only guess that it was in part for this reason that Christ decided to use the image of a child as a metaphor for what it means to live one's life by faith alone. A child's love of life has about it a certain purity, and manifests a certain faith that when found in adults tends to ennoble the spirit: "Let the children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these." Wordsworth's child imagery in "Ode," coincidentally (or not), then, would seem to refer to a similar kind of faith, although here, to be sure, of a pagan variety, and as something instinctive to the young. The upshot of all this is that for Wordsworth, adulthood, in the most profound sense of the word, is something that mandates an eventual spiritual detachment in a person from the natural world, a view which for ecocritics and their green aspirations, one can be certain, makes for a perspective of humankind's relationship to nature that is fraught with ethical and philosophical concerns. 

Kant and the World of Reality and Experience

Immanuel Kant is a revolutionary and polemic figure in the history of Western philosophy. His idealism has commonly been seen as a reaction to Enlightenment assumptions that knowledge can only be grounded in human reason and science. Kant, without dismissing either discipline, attempted to place philosophy in dialogue with science, as he was very much moved by people like Rousseau and Hume: praising the former for his emphasis on the senses and the latter for his unprecedented skepticism. By attempting to synthesize our experiences of the world to the demands of reason, Kant believed he was doing for philosophy what Copernicus had done for astronomy.

It may be helpful to give a brief layout of Kant’s philosophy which he lays out in The Critique of Pure Reason in order to better understand his ideas about the sublime in Critique of Judgment. Kant’s beginning premise is that all human knowledge can be based on experience. Whatever data our five senses reports to us about reality is what we can know. But Kant was a skeptic, after the fashion of Hume who had argued that it is simply irrational to presume that our experience of reality corresponds to reality itself. In other words, if my senses report to me that I am seeing a waterfall, that doesn’t mean that in reality, I can know what a waterfall is. All I can know is my experience of the waterfall, as I perceive it through my senses. My experience of such objects is what Kant refers to as the phenomenon. However, besides my experiences of things there are the noumenon—the things as they exist in themselves, which we can know nothing about. In short, the reality we apprehend is not reality in itself. It is merely our experience or “take” on reality (Western Philosophy Russell).

Now, in Critique of Judgement, we can see similar methods of these two categories of knowledge operating at the level of understanding sublimity and beauty. What Kant says about the sublime, in terms of the mathematically sublime, is that its location does not reside in the external world (noumenon), but rather “only in our own ideas” (LABL 45). Speaking of sublimity in nature, Kant is consistent by saying it “does not reside in any of the things in nature, but only in our own mind” (LABL 46). These feelings provoked in us by the sublime, and registered by our senses, are our experiences (phenomenon) of such things, and not of reality. Since Kant was attempting cohesiveness between our reason and our imagination (the former demanding a limit to what we can know, while the latter entertains limitlessness), our mind can apprehend a “reflective judgment” about the object, but not the object itself (noumenon), regarding the sublime. As Kant says, this feeling (experience) of the sublime, arises from our “inadequacy of [our] imagination in the aesthetic estimation of magnitude to attain to its estimation by reason” (LABL 45). Our imagination and reason collide and produces a state of mind in which we place a value judgment on the object that is to be called sublime; but our state of mind is what warrants to be called sublime, not the object, since the object is part of the reality, which our reason can never fully grasp. Our minds can receive the data collected from reality through our senses, but we can only formulate concepts (such as sublimity) according to that data, and this helps us understand our experiences. But, according to Kant, things in themselves are unknowable.

Some critics have argued that Kant therefore denies the existence of reality, since that is the world containing the noumenon which are unknowable. But other critics believe that is not the case: the noumenon exists because it gives rise to the phenomenon which we experience. Perhaps it’s best to think that Kant contends there are two realities: the reality we experience and the reality itself. Because of Kant’s education in Leibnez philosophy and because of his attempt towards a conciliate epistemology between science and philosophy, I like to think the latter is true. Either way, Kant is a figure that continues to be controversial and influential for his profound genius.

“Spots of Time”

It is these “spots of time” (Book Eleventh, 258) that have made indelible impressions on Wordsworth’s mind, a motif (of reliance on the sensory experiences of youth in the “ordinary intercourse” [264] of life) recurrent throughout his poetry.  Wordsworth apparently has spent his first years principally concerned only with himself and unaware of the “fructifying” (1799 Prelude [First Part], 290; [“renovating” (260) in our version]) aspects of nature, those experiences that teach one how to think and feel.  But it is when he views a lowly pool and a heightened beacon providing a background for a lone woman fighting the elements that the reader becomes cognizant of the simplistic grandeur of nature, and hence, existence.  But why does a scene of death (the beacon was an execution site) initiate such an epiphany in Wordsworth?  Is it that he wants to know why the executed man murdered his wife?  A violent end to a domestic relationship is an undesirable occurrence indeed.  But where did the relationship go wrong?  Impatience (as Wordsworth experiences himself later on)?  A lack of understanding or empathy between the two, perhaps?  It is, certainly, Wordsworth’s primary imagination that perceives and records mentally the existence of the young woman, but, more importantly, it is his secondary imagination that struggles to give the whole scene, and thusly, the world, a unifying, coherent meaning.  Here, he is—among other things—attempting to make sense of the wife’s senseless death.  The reader is made to understand that only through empathy—Wordsworth’s idea of “behold[ing] in thee [Dorothy] what I once was” (Tintern Abbey, 120) and of being spiritually renovated when looking into the eyes of a loved one—can we truly see the humanity in one another.  In other words, we are all products (man and beast, all things great and small) of nature.  Only by understanding that fact, can we come to understand ourselves.  Only by viewing the woman backgrounded by the low pool and the high summit, can Wordsworth truly know her plight and, even, his own.  For, having lost his guide, he is as alone as the “Girl” (306) appears to be.  He is as lost and alone as the Mariner and his shipmates are when they drift aimlessly near the South Pole, a wasteland, much like, given the purgatorial significance of The Ancient Mariner, the dismal wood in which Dante finds himself at the beginning of The Divine Comedy:

           When I had journeyed half of our life’s way,

           I found myself within a shadowed forest,

           for I had lost the path that does not stray.

           Ah, it is hard to speak of what it was,

           that savage forest, dense and difficult,

           which even in recall renews my fear:

           so bitter—death is hardly more severe! (Mandelbaum trans., 1-7)

It is only when Wordsworth finds “dear Ones” (317) at side that he can roam in confidence.  Analogously, only when the albatross, a figure, according to G. W. Knight, of “Christ-like force” (English Romantic Poets, 203), appears, does the crew find their way from the “wondrous cold” (52) to a more hospitable clime.  Virgil has a similar significance for Dante, leading him out of the gloomy wood, through the miserable depths of Hell and up to the glorious gates of Heaven.

Works Cited

Alighieri, Dante.  The Divine Comedy.  Trans. Allen Mandelbaum.

            New York: Alfred A. Knoph, 1995.

Knight, G. W.  “Coleridge’s Divine Comedy”.  pp. 202-213.  English 

            Romantic Poets: Modern Essays in Criticism. Ed. M. H. Abrams. 

            New York: Oxford University Press, 1975.

Sublimity and other questions

Response to “Perspectives” - I was amused by Dorothy Wordsworth’s recounting of the incident between Coleridge and another tourist at the Falls of the River Clyde and less so when I read Coleridge’s “reimagining” of the moment. It’s irritating to have the man in the anecdote changed to a woman, and to what purpose? Only, it seems, to be able to poke fun at silly women who are intellectually incapable of discerning the nature of the sublime.

Another point that caught my attention was the use of a Claude glass by those in pursuit of the picturesque. It seemed very like our modern practice of taking pictures on our phones, more preoccupied with sending a post to Facebook or Instagram rather than enjoying what is before us. The use of the Claude glass and the tinted glasses to define and appreciate the picturesque in nature reminded me of what some of the critical readings were saying about the way we package and consume nature. The travel guides and “favored observation points” work together to create and promote a “proper” way to appreciate or be affected by the natural environment. The idea that there must be somewhere within the scene “an interesting object” to “prompt ruminations on personal and historical mutability” served to reinforce the artificiality of these trips. It made me think of people who watch sappy movies because they enjoy crying at the happy endings. Bah!

In reading the Kant and Burke selections on the sublime I noticed that Kant says that “the sublime is not to be looked for in things of nature, but only in our own ideas” (45). I’m wondering why that is? Burke’s idea of the sublime seems to be tied to emotion and this sense of excess, of overflowing but Kant’s ideas seem more tied to rationality. Even if I’m on the right track that still doesn’t explain why. Kant says that the sublime is “absolutely great” and that “reason demands absolute totality”, so is this why sublimity is tied to reason for him? Since he believes that reason has a point of absolute and nature does not, maybe because nature has the connotation of being imperfect, reason would be the true vehicle of the sublime? Although as I read and re-read the Kant section I think I’m understanding his version of the sublime as “residing” in our minds because even though nature is great and has power over us, nature is only sublime in that it forces us to think? The last line of the penultimate paragraph on p. 46 is driving me crazy, especially this part: “of those cases in which the mind can make itself sensible of the appropriate sublimity of the sphere of its own being”. I feel like I have a handle up to that point but after that it doesn’t make sense to me. What is the sphere of the mind’s own being? Is that the aforementioned Reason? And what is the mode or measure of the “appropriate sublimity” of the mind’s sphere? I think I’m going to let these questions about the sublime percolate before I try to take on the picturesque. I’m going to take a break with Wordsworth’s Preface.

Hartman's Problematics in "A Poet's Progress"

Hartman’s essay arguing the “via naturaliter negativa” of Wordsworth’s poetry seemed to me a difficult read, since I’m only familiar with “the way of negation” in terms of God and spirituality. Therefore, using this paradigm to show how imagination exists as Wordsworth’s true muse, as opposed to nature, which is the commonly accepted theory, Hartman confused me as a reader. I understood his overall argument, that nature guides Wordsworth only so much until the power of imagination supersedes and leads him to a moment of sublime ecstasy communicable solely via poetry. However, I understand via negativa as a spiritual philosophy preaching the negation of all things beyond God himself/herself/itself. So, for Hartman to use this concept as the base of his argument, he introduced some clarity issues for me. Of course, I could be reading this completely incorrectly, but I will point out why I found such difficulty with Hartman’s idea of “via naturaliter negativa” as a means to argue the superiority of imagination over nature in Wordsworth’s poetry.

Spiritually, the “via negativa” is an extreme philosophy, and one’s adherence to it proves frustrating in today’s modern culture. It holds that in order to truly understand and recognize the presence and power of God, one must reject everything that is not God. So there’s no music, no television, no technology. Nothing secular in any fashion should be prioritized before one’s faith in the divine. Even the concept of a temporal, material experience should not exist in one’s mind, as it does not point to an idea of God. As a result, the abstract idea of experience must be eliminated as well. Essentially, the “via negativa” promotes the disposal of all secular thought, culture, and experience in order to understand that life’s true meaning lies in its emptiness. God is the end all, be all.

So, my problem with Hartman’s use of the “via negativa” to describe nature’s demotion from subject of worship to pedagogical guardian in Wordsworth’s poetry is that it conflicts with the essential philosophy of negation. In Hartman’s argument, everything still exists in and around nature, and it is Wordsworth’s imagination that allows him to communicate emotions and thoughts, not the presence of nature itself. He says, “When the external stimulus (that being nature) is too clearly present, the poet falls mute and corroborates Blake’s strongest objection: ‘Natural Objects always did and now do weaken, deaden, and obliterate Imagination in me.’” Hence, Wordsworth is not experiencing emptiness at all. It’s quite the opposite. The poet’s imagination and internal experiences are all provoked by the presence of nature, and therefore nature is not a divine presence. Rather, the Wordsworth’s autonomous mind is the celebrated subject. In my opinion, nothing really is being negated or eliminated in Hartman’s argument. Everything coexists, and consequently, the possibility for emptiness is made null and void. Perhaps Hartman could have used another paradigm of thought to describe the reclassification of nature for Wordsworth only because I find the aspect of via negativa to be a weak metaphor.