Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- List of Contributors
- General Introduction
- I Poetic Knowledge and the Knowledge of Poetry
- II Poetic Theories of the Social Self
- III Enlightenment and Romantic Poetologies
- 10 Introduction: Poetry and/or Enlightenment
- 11 James Thomson's The Seasons and the Transformative Potential of Poetry in the Early Scottish Enlightenment
- 12 ‘Furnishing Light’: Wordsworth, Poetry and the Science of Man in Enlightenment Scotland
- 13 Wordsworth, Kant, Fanaticism and Humanity
- Notes
- Index
12 - ‘Furnishing Light’: Wordsworth, Poetry and the Science of Man in Enlightenment Scotland
from III - Enlightenment and Romantic Poetologies
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- List of Contributors
- General Introduction
- I Poetic Knowledge and the Knowledge of Poetry
- II Poetic Theories of the Social Self
- III Enlightenment and Romantic Poetologies
- 10 Introduction: Poetry and/or Enlightenment
- 11 James Thomson's The Seasons and the Transformative Potential of Poetry in the Early Scottish Enlightenment
- 12 ‘Furnishing Light’: Wordsworth, Poetry and the Science of Man in Enlightenment Scotland
- 13 Wordsworth, Kant, Fanaticism and Humanity
- Notes
- Index
Summary
With settling judgements now of what would last
And what would disappear, prepared to find
Ambition, folly, madness in the men
Who thrust themselves upon this passive world
As Rulers of the world, to see in these,
Even when the public welfare is their aim,
Plans without thought, or bottom'd on false thought
And false philosophy: having brought to test
Of solid life and true result the Books
Of modern Statists, and thereby perceiv'd
The utter hollowness of what we name
The wealth of Nations, where alone that wealth
Is lodged, and how increased, and having gain'd
A more judicious knowledge of what makes
The dignity of individual Man …
Wordsworth's attack, in book 12 of the 1805 Prelude, on modern ‘Statists’ and ‘false philosophy’, has become a locus classicus for critics addressing the relationship between Wordsworth's poetry – associated with a ‘more judicious knowledge’ of man – and his late eighteenth-century inheritance of Enlightenment philosophy. Wordsworth's reference to Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776) is both specific and barbed, but the poet has in his sights here not just the emergent discourse of political economy which Smith founded, but the larger field of eighteenth-century human sciences and moral philosophy which Wordsworth imbibed, but against which – in the implied narrative offered here, at least – his poetry turns. That Wordsworth's alternative goal, a ‘more judicious knowledge’ of the ‘dignity of Man’, reiterates the ‘man’ who was the object or construct of the human sciences of previous decades – even whilst it attempts to transmute ‘Man’ as ‘Abstraction, shadow, image’ into ‘the man / Of whom we read, the man whom we behold / With our own eyes’ – already suggests the complexity of his relation to his philosophical forbears.
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- The Poetic EnlightenmentPoetry and Human Science, 1650–1820, pp. 139 - 152Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014