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Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 October 2009

Celeste Langan
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
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Summary

In the 1805 Prelude Wordsworth offers a retrospective account of how he decided on the form and content of the kinds of rambling stories that make up Lyrical Ballads. Rejecting books of moral philosophy, Wordsworth takes to the “public road” on which he hopes to gather an estimate of

The dignity of individual man –

Of man, no composition of the thought,

Abstraction, shadow, image, but the man

Of whom we read, the man whom we behold

With our own eyes.

(Preludexii.83–7)

Why should an encounter with a stranger on the public road become the empirical paradigm of social knowledge, and the social contract? Not only is the project itself – essentially, the rendering of freedom as sheer mobilization – an historically contingent response to philosophical, political, and economic abstractions of “man”, but the poem presents this project in characteristically Wordsworthian terms. Repeating the word “man”, Wordsworth allows repetition itself to substantialize the abstraction. Indeed, the passage might fairly be paraphrased by the tautology “Man is … man.“ For even as he then proceeds to list the attributes of this positive “man,” Wordsworth can offer at best a negative litany: man is not an abstraction, not a shadow, etc. Moreover, the finally positive definition–“the man of whom we read” (87)–has an entirely recursive logic, especially in the context of Wordsworth' previous renunciation of books of moral philosophy: the man of whom we read is the word “man” of whom we read in the subsequent lines of the poem.

Type
Chapter
Information
Romantic Vagrancy
Wordsworth and the Simulation of Freedom
, pp. 13 - 30
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1995

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  • Introduction
  • Celeste Langan, University of California, Berkeley
  • Book: Romantic Vagrancy
  • Online publication: 19 October 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511553509.002
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  • Introduction
  • Celeste Langan, University of California, Berkeley
  • Book: Romantic Vagrancy
  • Online publication: 19 October 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511553509.002
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Introduction
  • Celeste Langan, University of California, Berkeley
  • Book: Romantic Vagrancy
  • Online publication: 19 October 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511553509.002
Available formats
×