William Wordsworth and Philosophical Necessity

Abstract

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.

Nature as the Source of Psychological Resilience: A Comparative Reading of William Wordsworth and Sohrab Sepehri

“…In many respectsincluding significance of nature, individuality, sublime emotions, emphasis on poetry as an organic whole, and rejection of old and rigid poetic forms -Sepehri is comparable to William Wordsworth (KarimAbadi & Eyvazi, 2015). Wordsworth is more of a pessimist, but "moral inspirations" help him move away from this bleak viewpoint to a brighter one (Ulmer, 2013). "Acceptance" is visible in his elegies (Clucas, 2016).…”