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Wordsworth and Dennis: The Discrimination of Feelings
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
Students of wordsworth's criticism have long recognized that he conceived of poetry as the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. But commentators on Wordsworth often remind us that he was no aesthetic libertine. If he thought of poetry as a river of emotion, he did not wish it to become a flood; in the well-known passage from the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads of 1800, he voices the hope that “habits of meditation” have disciplined his feelings, and he declares that good poets are made such only by deep, sustained, habitual contemplation. These are commonplaces of Wordsworthian scholarship. Curiously enough, however, the full meaning of these commonplaces remains unexplored. The conjunction of thought and feeling in Wordsworth's poetic is all too readily accepted; for the most part, critics have failed to define the terms or the precise relationship between them. Yet the materials for such a definition are very much at hand. Wordsworth himself received them from John Dennis, who helped him to see that the effect of thought upon feeling is qualitative. It produces a feeling different in kind from ordinary emotion—a feeling Wordsworth came to regard as indispensable to the exercise of imaginative power.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1967
References
Note 1 in page 430 PW designates The Political Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1940–49). I quote the major critical essays from the latest edition of Volume ii, revised by Helen Darbishire (Oxford, 1952).
Note 2 in page 430 MY designates The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Middle Years, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1937). The pagination is continuous.
Note 3 in page 430 Letter of 30 July 1842 to A. Blackwood, quoted in The Critical Works of John Dennis, ed. Edward Niles Hooker (Baltimore, Md., 1939), ii, lxxiii.
Note 4 in page 430 Critical Works, i, 338–339; italics mine. It may be noted that this remarkable passage anticipates not only Wordsworth but Blake, who contrasts the ordinary notion of the sun with his celestial view of it in A Vision of the Last Judgement. See The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman with commentary by Harold Bloom (New York, 1965), p. 555.
Note 5 in page 431 Having been “recollected in tranquillity,” the past emotion “is contemplated till, by a species of re-action, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind” (PW, ii, 400–401; italics mine). The full import of this passage is often overlooked.
Note 6 in page 432 I intend here simply to illustrate Wordsworth's views on imaginative exertion from two of his poems—not to explain or justify the entire system of his arrangements and classifications; even if this were possible, it would require a separate examination of every poem in every class. Unfortunately, Wordsworth's letter to Coleridge does not shed much light on the system ultimately adopted. “To the Cuckoo” precedes “I Wandered Lonely” in the last edition, so that the final order no longer corresponds to the “scale” of imaginative power he once intended. Further, by 1845 he had determined to increase considerably his Poems of the Imagination, lest he “imply … that the faculty [which] is the primum mobile in Poetry had little to do, in the estimation of the author, with Pieces not arranged under that head.” Wordsworth & Reed: The Poet's Correspondence with his American Editor: 1836–1850, ed. Leslie N. Broughton (Ithaca, N. Y., 1933), p. 152. The consequence is at least a partial erosion of whatever specific criteria he once had for poems strictly “imaginative.”
Note 7 in page 433 Frederick A. Pottle, “The Eye and the Object in the Poetry of Wordsworth,” Wordsworth: Centenary Studies, ed. Gilbert T. Dunklin (Princeton, N. J., 1951), pp. 31, 39.
Note 8 in page 433 See PW, ii, 216, and Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt (New York, 1941), i, 131–132.
Note 9 in page 433 This is the definition given by the NED, based on citations which include one from the Philosophical Transactions of 1786. Wordsworth doubtless acquired the phrase “ocular spectrum” from Coleridge, who used it in a letter of 1803, and whose familiarity with the Philosophical Transactions has long been known. See John L. Lowes, The Road to Xanadu (Boston and New York, 1927), pp. 14, 457; and Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, ii (Oxford, 1956), 961.
Note 10 in page 434 In 1808, Wordsworth told George Beaumont that “the very object of my poem is the trouble or agitation, both of the flowers and the Water” (MY, i, 170).
Note 11 in page 434 The Prelude, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, 2nd ed. revised by Helen Darbishire (Oxford, 1959).
Note 12 in page 434 Hartley's associationism is, I believe, more relevant to this poem than his “social sympathy.” Cf. Coleridge on “the streamy Nature of Association, which Thinking=Reason, curbs & rudders” (Notebooks, Entry 1770).
Note 13 in page 435 EL designates Early Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, 1787–1805, ed. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford, 1935).
Note 14 in page 435 S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Shawcross (Oxford, 1907), ii, 178.
Note 15 in page 435 Mary Moorman, William Wordsworth: A Biography. The Early Years, 1770–1803 (Oxford. 1957), p. 582.
Note 16 in page 436 CR designates Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and their Writers, ed. Edith J. Morley, 3 vols. (London, 1938).