Certainly, Wordsworth's empiricism is tempered by his
transcendentalism in the minds of most people, but my thesis argues
that it was his transcendentalism which, seemingly paradoxically,
inspired his empiricism. It is a closely argued issue and many
commentators come down on one side or the other--he is an empiricist,
he is a transcendentalist. My thesis takes note of these positions and
accommodates both but in doing so offers a third possibility, that
philosophically he was a transcendentalist but that for him to convey
the insights he gathered from this view of reality he had to adopt an
empirical writing mode, as he saw this as the only way these insights
could be communicated.
Yes, the dividing line between romanticism and modernism is not clear-
cut. Yes, Pound and Williams are empiricist, as much of what they say
and wrote would have pleased Wordwsworth. What us Imagism, after
all, but a focusing on phenomena? Where the modernists differ from
Wordsworth is in the use of fragmentation and elision, which renders
imagist elements less concrete or descriptive.
As I have said it is a convoluted topic. That’s why I can't argue it
effectively in the context of a forum such as this.
On Thu, 27 Aug 2009 08:53:01 -0700, David Latane
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>I'm put off I think by the notion of "development of high modernism."
And that this development is "significant." Isn't it part of the
impossible narrativity of literary history. (See perhaps David Perkins,
_Is Literary History Possible?_) By empirical measurements (e.g.,
representation in anthologies and textbooks) the high modernists in
America are getting smaller and smaller each year. Pound is banned;
Zukofsky nonexistent; Eliot a man of two poems; H. D. and Stein
factors mostly because of gender.
>I don't see why Wordsworth should have a "sell by date"--a cliché that
doesn't make sense to me. Good poets will always cycle back into the
mix; rotten milk, never.
>Wordsworth's writings about poetry, especially (perhaps) the essay
supplementary, are foundational for modern and modernist poetry--he's
a shrewd one, keenly aware of language as poetry's medium, "a thing
subject to endless fluctuations and arbitrary associations." In this he
might be read alongside Coleridge--including late works like the Aids to
Reflection.
>I have in fact read Wordsworth critically, and every which a way else
too. It appears to me that Jeffrey has sided with certain Modernists
without having really gotten Wordsworth (which is separate from the
question of whether his influence was deleterious or not).
>Jeffrey seems now to be saying that British poets have followed
W's "man speaking to men" notion and write clearly and descriptively
when they should be doing something else--and that American poets
cottoned on to this something else. But is this true? No ideas but in
things, etc. In those things of the here and now, "in the very world,
which is the world / Of all of us,--the place where in the end / We find
our happiness, or not at all!"
>As for your sensory train wrecks--I can't say Rimbaud has much to do
with American modernism. It's true Pound's American History Cantos
can give one a good whack, but it's a different thing. Unfortunately. And
why doesn't Jeffrey like Sordello? And why should he like Keats? More
happy love, more happy happy love?
>David Latané
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