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The Evolution of Soul in Wordsworth's Poetry

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Robert Langbaum
Robert Langbaum*
Affiliation:
University of Virginia, Charlottesville
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Extract

When Keats in a letter calls this world “The vale of Soul-making,” he comes close to Wordsworth's way of thinking. For Keats says that we come into the world as pure potentiality or “Intelligence” and that we acquire a “Soul” or “sense of Identity” through “Circumstances.” And it is the main purport of Wordsworth's poetry to show the spiritual significance of this world, to show that we evolve a soul or identity through experience and that the very process of evolution is what we mean by soul.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 82 , Issue 2 , May 1967 , pp. 265 - 272
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1967

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References

1 To George and Georgiana Keats, 14 February–3 May 1819, The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder E. Rollins, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), i, 102–104. Rollins thinks this passage may have been written when Keats was reading John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, especially Book ii, Ch. xxvii, “Of Identity and Diversity.”

2 Essay, collated and annotated by A. C. Fraser, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1894), Book ii, Ch. xxi, Par. 24.

3 Ed. E. de Selincourt, 2nd ed. revised by H. Darbishire (Oxford, 1959). Other poems from The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. E. de Selincourt and H. Darbishire, 2nd ed., 5 vols. (Oxford, 1952–59).

4 Book ii, Ch. xi, Par. 17.

5 Wordsworth's Literary Criticism, ed. Nowell C. Smith (London, 1905), p. 84.

6 Coleridge, too, shows an artistic instinct in advance of his theory. For though he asserts the superiority over The Excursion of Wordsworth's “thirteen books on the growth of an individual mind” (The Prelude), he concludes that Wordsworth possessed “the genius of a great philosophic poet” and “ought never to have abandoned the contemplative position … His proper title is Spectator ab extra.” The virtue of The Prelude, however, is that its view is from inside life; it is concerned with the psychological process of evolving the principles on which an external stance might be taken.

7 Revaluation (London, 1936), Ch. v; Articulate Energy: An Inquiry into the Syntax of English Poetry (London, 19S5), pp. 106–116. Colin Clarke, instead, finds the blurring precisely philosophical (Romantic Paradox, London, 1962). Leavis and Davie cite Prelude ii. 233–254, about the infant at his mother's breast—Leavis preferring the 1850, Davie the 1805, version. Leavis is right. The 1805 version is more abstract and lucid, but the 1850 is more poetical because more blended. After all, the “doctrinal passages of The Excursion … are,” as Leavis observes, “plain enough.”

8 Book ii, Ch. xxvii, Par. 16; Ch. xxxiii.

9 Observations on Man, in Two Parts, 6th ed. corrected and revised (London, 1834), Prop, xiv, Cor. viii.

10 Quoted in N. P. Stallknecht, Strange Seas of Thought, 2nd ed. (Bloomington, 1962), p. 39.

11 Book ii, Ch. xvii, Par. 6; Ch. xxvii, Par. 14.

12 New York, 1963, pp. 42–43. With the “impressions” before him, says Wordsworth in The Excursion,

would he still compare
All his remembrances, thoughts, shapes and forms;
And, being still unsatisfied with aught
Of dimmer character, he thence attained
An active power to fasten images
Upon his brain; and on their pictured lines
Intensely brooded, even till they acquired
The liveliness of dreams. (i.141–148)

13 See Excursion iv.1264–66, written at about the same time:

—So build we up the
Being that we are;
Thus deeply drinking-in the soul of things
We shall be wise perforce.

14 The Unmediated Vision (New Haven, 1954), pp. 33–34.

15 See Geoffrey Hartman's subtle analysis of Wordsworth's sense of place throughout Wordsworth's Poetry 1787–1814 (New Haven and London, 1964).

16 S. T. Coleridge, The Complete Works, ed. W. G. T. Shedd, 7 vols. (New York, 1884), ii. Wordsworth's “Reply to Mathetes” in Introduction, Second Section, p. 362 (see also p. 373); General Introduction, Essay v, p. 46.

17 “The primary imagination,” says Coleridge, is “a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation” (Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Shawcross, Oxford, 1965, Ch. xiii, p. 202).