“Strike not from Law’s firm hand that awful rod”: Wordsworth’s<i>Salisbury Plain</i>and the Penalty of Death

This essay traces Wordsworth's and Baudelaire's attempts to see into the lives of the unknown beggars they encountered on the streets of London and Paris and identifies those occasions on which both writers sought to appropriate the lives of the poor and vagrant for political ends. The essay argues that it is ultimately in those fleeting moments when the ability of the poet to enter into the lives of others is thwarted that the limits of a Romantic poetics can be established. In particular, the essay focuses on those occasions, in the work of both writers, when the process of identification with beggars — so sincerely wished for on account of its socio-political or aesthetic consequences — is interrupted, and the poet is exposed to an almost disabling moment of uncertainty. For Wordsworth, the essay contends, such moments occurred primarily when he moved out of the rural byways of England and into the crowded streets of London; for Baudelaire, they occurred when the “ineffable orgy” of the crowd failed to generate insights into the face of the stranger. For both writers, this failure of the poetic imagination on the streets of the metropolis, evident, for instance, in Wordsworth's encounter with the blind beggar in The Prelude and Baudelaire's with the old man in Les Sept Vieillards, marked the limit of a poetic activity based on identity, recognition, and empathy. The essay suggests that, while these moments were occasional and transitory, they delineate an imaginative terrain whose contours are visible in writers as diverse as Thomas De Quincey and T.S. Eliot.

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William Wordsworth and Philosophical Necessity

Ulmer¹

2013

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Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Hazlitt both testified that William Wordsworth in his radical years believed in the doctrine of philosophical necessity. Prompted by that testimony, this essay undertakes a detailed reconstruction of Wordsworth’s necessitarianism. Wordsworth was most probably converted to necessity by his reading of William Godwin’s Political Justice . As a convert to the doctrine in its Godwinian formulation, Wordsworth would have accepted several ideas implicated in the necessitarian infrastructure of Political Justice : the human mind’s deterministic obligation to reasoned preference, the principle of universal benevolence, a marginalization of human agency and guilt, a prospective approach to ethical questions, and the inevitable triumph of reason and social reform. Wordsworth apparently believed in this complex of ideas only briefly, for the moral pessimism of Adventures on Salisbury Plain intimates a lapsing of the poet’s Godwinism, including his loss of faith in necessity, by late 1795. By 1797, however, Coleridge allowed Wordsworth to reclaim his necessitarianism by introducing him to an alternate version of the doctrine indebted to Hartleyan associationism and freed from its objectionable Godwinian features. Wordsworth grandly expounds this new version of philosophical necessity in 1798 poetry written for The Recluse , but then suddenly seems to lose interest in the idea. In concluding, the essay invokes both Coleridge’s 1799 dissatisfaction with necessity and Wordsworth’s later writing, especially The Excursion , to speculate about the poet’s reasons for finally rejecting the doctrine of philosophical necessity in late 1798.

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“Strike not from Law’s firm hand that awful rod”: Wordsworth’sSalisbury Plainand the Penalty of Death

Cited by 3 publications

References 10 publications

A Perfect Storm: The Nature of Consciousness on Wordsworth'sSalisbury Plain

A Perfect Storm: The Nature of Consciousness on Wordsworth'sSalisbury Plain

Wordsworth, Baudelaire, and the Limits of Poetic Insight

William Wordsworth and Philosophical Necessity

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