Wordsworthian Chance

Abstract

First-generation Romantic poets generally hold a deeply rooted faith in the notion of the limitless nature of possibility, and in reaction to Enlightenment determinism, several of these poets strive for an understanding and representation of nature that is divorced from Enlightenment notions of causality. This essay specifically explores William Wordsworth’s poetic denunciation of such deterministic accounts of causality through an investigation of The Prelude’s (1799, 1805, 1850) complication of the assumption that the natural effect can be traced backward towards a single identifiable cause. I argue that in place of this principle of sufficient reason, Wordsworth embraces the notion of “chance” as possessing the inexhaustible powers of difference. In accordance with his fascination with the potentialities of the novel infinite, the idea of “chance” allows Wordsworth to challenge the notion of “necessity,” or the philosophic claim that steadfast and orderly laws determine all events in space and time. While Wordsworth certainly does not argue with the notion that cause-effect chains can be traced temporally back in time, such a genealogical record, he suggests, can only ever be deduced and constructed a posteriori. Only after the fact of its historical instantiation can the genealogical record of causal relations be deciphered and inscribed, he indicates. Such a genealogy, then, in no way undermines a faith in chance. Rather, according to Wordsworth, the record only makes the idea of chance all the more manifest. Such a posteriori inscriptions provide a distillation of the concept of chance. In this causal record Wordsworth locates the phantom outlines left in chance’s conceptual wake, or perhaps better stated, through the specters of the idea of chance

Chance in Darwinian Evolutionary Theory and British Romanticism

“…Whereas Coleridge develops his shift from chance as event to chance as idea over the course of an entire poem, Wordsworth nimbly skips from ontological to epistemological representations of chance repeatedly throughout The Prelude and especially in its early books. In one of the most famous scenes of Wordsworth's spiritual autobiography – and a scene originally published in the second volume of the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads – “There was a Boy” (“The Boy of Winander”) represents some of the poet's most involved and thoughtful deliberations on the nature and function of chance emergence, as I have argued elsewhere (Burkett). In its 1805 version (as incorporated into Book V of The Prelude ), the heart of the poem hinges on the boy of Winander's experience of a shocking moment of chance “silence” in which the “shout[ing]” owls unexpectedly fail to return his “hootings”:

[The owls] would shoutAcross the wat'ry vale, and shout again,Responsive to his call, with quivering pealsAnd long halloos, and screams, and echoes loud,Redoubled and redoubled—concourse wildOf mirth and jocund din.

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“…As I note in “Wordsworthian Chance,” when “chance” is used as a verb with the chance event as its subject (according to The Oxford English Dictionary ), expressed either by a noun preceding the verb or by a clause following it – as in Wordsworth's usage here in which the verb is preceded by “it” (“it chanced / That pauses of deep silence mocked his skill”) – the usage of “chance” implies a parallel to the German “Zufall” or the notion of an event's “falling out” without any apparent design or traceable causality . Wordsworth's usage of “chance” thus implies that the event – here, the incidental silence of the owls – occurs unpredictably and haplessly.…”

“…Wordsworth thus concludes this stanza with reference to that “uncertain heaven” because, as his poetry reveals, there is no such thing as an absolute necessity behind causes and their effects – whether they be divine or otherwise. “There Was a Boy” suggests that the only constant to causality is, rather, its certain uncertainty, and the poem therefore concludes its representation of chance squarely in the realm of the epistemological (Burkett).…”

“…Accessed 6 September 2014. Also see Burkett. Note: I draw directly from my previously published article throughout this long paragraph concerning Wordsworth.…”