True, it is difficult to locate empiricist poetry’s genesis with Wordsworth. It goes back further in history—a lot of the Greek and Roman poets were just as culpable, at least from what I’ve seen in modern translations. But my point is not that Wordsworth invented this mode of poetic expression, but that those who came afterwards were specifically influenced by him (and Coleridge). Again, at the risk of plugging my thesis, I have a chapter in it on this influence, and how it played out in the 20th century, via late modernism, through to the movement, onto the confessional poets and up to Heaney. I don’t go any further, as the thesis was about Wordsworth influences in that century.
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Well Jeffrey there are always different ways of telling the same story, let alone the different stories that can be told about a single occurrence. And when that occurrence is already historical and subject to the vagaries of changing interests and fashions it is even more of a devil to smoke out. Indeed, 'denial' might be part of it, but such a denial can be conditioned by so many different life factors and motivations that it makes it difficult sometimes to distinguish true opinion from expediency. I've talked here before about some of those different shades of opinion/motivation regarding this subject so I won't repeat myself now.
I think that part of the problem of rooting this thing down to Wordsworth is because it is impossible to actually root such a thing in a single person or oeuvre. I believe you are right about Wordsworth in the sense that yes, the kind of limiting psychological realism, and the way such a thing utilises poetic language, does find an echo in some of the things Wordsworth wrote both about and within poems, but other things echo through Wordsworth too, some of them almost saying the opposite. But this is the trouble when talking about poetry, when trying to suck out philosophical abstractions from the slippery actions of language. Romanticism in general was full of contradictions.
In relation to one of my takes on the subject of the split, which is that it is the modern Brit mainstream that is the anomaly, that a lot more unites the wider history of poetry to the poetics of modernism than does the parochial heritage of the movement etc., it could of course be the case that Wordsworth was one of the roots of that difference. This is the case you are making and I think it is a fair case to make, but because of the stuff I've referred to above I don't think you are going to convince anyone - people often see in a poet's work only what they want to see.
Written while watching Federer destroy another hopeful.
Cheers
Tim
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