Within the depth-psychology and Romantic-studies corpus, William Wordsworth functions as the cardinal exemplar through whom the inner life of the modern subject is theorised, historicised, and contested. M. H. Abrams, who provides the most sustained engagement, constructs Wordsworth as the inaugurator of a secularised Romantic theodicy: the crisis-autobiography of The Prelude enacts a circuitous journey from primal unity through alienation to imaginative recovery, translating theological categories — Fall, redemption, apocalypse — into the growth of a human mind. Abrams also reads Wordsworth as the central practitioner of 'natural supernaturalism,' restoring wonder to the common world by reinvesting ordinary phenomena with the luminosity that analytic reason had stripped away. Iain McGilchrist recruits Wordsworth as evidence for hemispheric asymmetry: the 'spots of time,' the use of linguistic 'betweenness,' and the paradoxical 'active passivity' of Wordsworthian attention all index right-hemisphere modes of knowing — retrospection, vigilant openness, the reciprocal constitution of self and world. Harold Bloom's perspective is more anxious, treating Wordsworth as the overwhelming precursor whose influence contaminates Arnold and against whom Frost manoeuvres obliquely. Key tensions run through the corpus: whether Wordsworth's 'mystical' withdrawal from sense represents plenitude or revulsion; whether his philosophical parallels with German Idealism are genetic or merely structural; and whether the Prelude's autobiographical form constitutes a genuinely new literary genre or a secularised spiritual autobiography.
In the library
17 passages
Wordsworth brings about poetic formulations that are often the counterparts of the positions that I believe Heidegger strove laboriously to express in discursive prose.
McGilchrist argues that Wordsworth's linguistic strategies — double negatives, connectors of 'betweenness,' emergence from luminous absence — enact in poetry the very ontological positions Heidegger could only reach through laborious philosophical prose, aligning both thinkers with right-hemisphere modes of apprehension.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009thesis
unity with himself and his world is the primal and normative state of man, of which the sign is a fullness of shared life and the condition of joy; analytic thought divides the mind from nature and object from object.
Abrams identifies Wordsworth's central philosophical axiom — primal unity disrupted by analytic division — as the Romantic commonplace that structurally parallels German Idealist thought, even though Wordsworth denied reading German metaphysics.
M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971thesis
in all things I saw one life, and felt that it was joy. Some recent critics of Wordsworth interpret his penchant for 'mystic' experiences, when the light of sense goes out, as a symptom of his unconscious revulsion from life and nature.
Abrams defends Wordsworth's ecstatic 'one life' vision against reductive psychologising, arguing that the transcendence of sense arises not from revulsion but from an overflow of participatory immersion in the world's vitality.
M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971thesis
The initial effort of close attention is needed, but, its work done, it must give way to an open receptivity, a sort of active passivity. There is a combination of factors at work that points to the right hemisphere being the mediator of the revivifying power he refers to.
McGilchrist interprets Wordsworth's 'spots of time' as evidence that the revivifying power of memory and perception is mediated by the right hemisphere's vigilant, open receptivity rather than by left-hemisphere focal attention.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009thesis
the biography of the Pedlar, then, is the first sketch of what I have called the controlling 'idea' of The Prelude, and in it Wordsworth, in some 250 packed lines, describes the growth of the Pedlar's mind from early childhood, through a spiritual crisis.
Abrams establishes the Pedlar narrative in The Ruined Cottage as the originary template for The Prelude's governing developmental schema: childhood primal unity, spiritual crisis, and imaginative recovery.
M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971thesis
Wordsworth did not merely level the Neoclassic order, but turned it upside down, by preferring in his subjects the last over the first and by transforming the humble and the passive into the heroic, the low into the sublime, and the petty into the numinous.
Abrams reads Wordsworth's poetic programme as a deliberate transvaluation of Neoclassical hierarchy, elevating the marginalised and the ordinary into vehicles of the sublime and the numinous.
M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971thesis
In the Ode I found that he too had had similar experience to mine; that he also had felt that the first freshness of youthful enjoyment of life was not lasting; but that he had sought for compensation, and found it.
Through Mill's autobiographical testimony, Abrams demonstrates the therapeutic cultural power of Wordsworth's Intimations Ode as a model of crisis, loss, and compensatory imaginative growth that could be internalised by later readers.
M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971supporting
The cardinal doctrine which he read in the language of nature was that of the magnitude of the most trivial things, and the moral effect of this way of seeing was to inform his own being with a sublime humility.
Abrams shows that Wordsworth's 'natural supernaturalism' — reading cosmic significance in trivial phenomena — issues in a moral disposition of sublime humility rather than mere aesthetic wonder.
M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971supporting
in its passion for whatever is seen to be living, and its perception of the relation between what Wordsworth called the 'life of the mind' and the realm of the divine.
McGilchrist cites Wordsworth's 'life of the mind' as paradigmatic of the Romantic right-hemisphere preference for the living, the relational, and the spiritually immanent over the abstractly categorical.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009supporting
Wordsworth's account of his imaginative recovery in Book XII of The Prelude has brought him to that point in his life at which, during a walking tour on Salisbury Plain, he had composed the very poem … to which Coleridge was to allude.
Abrams traces the reciprocal testimony between Wordsworth and Coleridge as co-witnesses to a shared perceptual power — the higher imaginative way of seeing — that both poets confirmed through cross-reference in their mature works.
M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971supporting
Both are admirable poets but so contaminated by Wordsworth that the reader of Empedocles on Etna or The Woods of Westermain can be made uncomfortable. Arnold rarely achieves his own voice: Wordsworth and Keats crowd him out.
Bloom figures Wordsworth as an overwhelming precursor whose influence is experienced as contamination by subsequent poets, enacting the anxiety-of-influence dynamic in which the stronger poet forecloses authentic voice in the epigone.
Bloom, Harold, The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime, 2015supporting
Almost every sentence of the Prospectus rings with echoes of Milton's voice in Paradise Lost, beginning with the phrase at the opening, 'Musing in solitude,' which recalls Milton's assertion that he sings with unchanged voice.
Abrams establishes Wordsworth's Prospectus as a deliberate revoicing of Milton — inheriting the prophetic bard's mantle while relocating the 'heroic argument' from cosmic theology to the mind of man.
M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971supporting
the landscape below Simplon Pass had symbolized for Wordsworth the coincidence of all oppositions … Here the past and future / Are conquered, and reconciled.
Abrams uses Wordsworth's Simplon Pass epiphany as the prototype for subsequent Romantic and Modernist figures of the 'illuminated Moment' in which temporal opposites are transcended and unified.
M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971supporting
Wordsworth, like his great innovative predecessors, is faced with the supremely difficult 'task of creating the taste by which he is to be enjoyed.'
Abrams presents Wordsworth as a genuinely revolutionary poet whose extension of the sublime to new objects demanded not merely new techniques but the creation of an entirely new readerly sensibility.
M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971supporting
Wordsworth's famous lines from the Tintern Abbey ode referring to 'the mighty world / Of eye, and ear, – both what they half create, / And what perceive', were themselves half-created, half-remembered from a phrase in Edward Young's Night Thoughts.
McGilchrist discovers a performative irony in Wordsworth's most celebrated formulation of co-creative perception: the lines themselves enact the principle they state, being half-created out of a half-remembered precursor.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009supporting
We recognize something approximating the high argument of the Romantic poet who proclaimed the power of the mind of man to realize an equivalent of 'Paradise, and groves / Elysian, Fortunate Fields,' by the 'consummation' of a union with the common earth.
Abrams reads Wordsworth's 'high argument' — the mind's power to realise paradise through union with common earth — as the Romantic secular translation of theological eschatology that Stevens and later poets inherit.
M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971supporting
A few years after he had completed the first version of The Prelude in 1805, Wordsworth inserted into the narrative a passage which transfers to this occasion an event which, in historical fact, did not occur until two years later.
Abrams notes Wordsworth's retroactive interpolation of the dispossession of the Chartreuse monks into The Prelude as an instance of his reconfiguring historical experience to serve the poem's symbolic architecture.
M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971aside