Gerard, I will respond to your points in order, as follows:
“'An unfathered vapour' does not smack of empiricism to me :)”
Wordsworth’s use of the phrase 'An unfathered vapour' is as a simile: an attempt to describe how he sees the imagination operating on him as inspiration. In other words, the image is serving solely a descriptive function, albeit describing an abstract concept. As a simile, like all similes, it is striving to make something more precisely knowable via language. Ted Hughes does this a lot, and he was a fan of Wordsworth and nature poetry.
“I think you are pushing terms (mimesis, empiricism) to the point of meaninglessness, or rather inversion. On your usage Blake, at war with Lockean empiricism, seeing the sun as an army of angels might be described as empiricist and mimetic.”
I’m not sure which Blake poem you are referring to here, but I’m sure the imagery you mention is such that I would not see it as you think I would. Blake was more abstract than Wordsworth. For example in Blake’s ‘To the Muses’ the phrase ‘chambers of the sun’, in the first stanza, does not specifically refer to anything in nature. I can allow that the phrase ‘chambers of the East’ in the previous line, however, does. It refers to the cavernous areas located near the mythical Mount Ida, (represented in line one as ‘Ida’s shady brow’). The phrase ‘chambers of the sun’ does not allow for closure in this way. The word ‘sun’ (a source of light) has no connection semantically with the word ‘chambers’ (a source of darkness). Also the sun is noted for its lack of vacuity, unlike caverns. We see here, a mixture of the types of uses for imagery that Blake employs. I’m not against such a mixture, by the way, but I don’t see it as frequently employed in Wordsworth—certainly not in much of the Prelude, which is more of a philosophical treatise about how Wordsworth mind operates. So I don’t think Wordsworth is doing anything similar to Blake, or even attempting to. He is more concerned with describing his philosophical state of mind and the way nature forms this mind state.
“It is the central concern of the major theoretical statement of the time, Biographia Literaria, to oppose the empiricist theory of mind (Hartley's) with the philosophical idealism-saturated theory of the creative imagination.”
This is a common misconception about the Biographia. It is impossible for me to deal with this here, as it is a very complicated and nuanced area. I do deal with it, though (and Hartleian philosophy in relation to Coleridge), in my article about Coleridge’s early empiricism, which you can find here
http://www.argotistonline.co.uk/COLERIDGES%20EARLY%20EMPIRICISM.pdf“And in all theories of the poetic imagination -- Coleridge, Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley -- the experience of poetic imagination is opposed to the ordinary, individuated sense of self and brings into question the ordinary opposition of subject and object. But, yes, Wordsworth is a discursive poet. He is a philosophical poet. The philosophical poet, whether it be Wordsworth or Eliot in Four Quartets, seeks to give an account of the lyric/visionary moment. But the discursive and the visionary are not in opposition, they are part of the same movement. In a poem like Shelley's Mont Blanc the discursive/analytic is identical with the lyric/visionary, and the kernel is the question of the relation of subject and object - a theme impossible to miss in Wordsworth.
Again, I can’t deal with this here, but have done so in my PhD thesis about Wordsworth, a PDF of which I can send you if you wish.
As I have said in the past to most of my critics here, all their objections to my criticism of Wordsworth can be found in my thesis and other articles. It is simply too exhausting to discuss such things here. So my apologies if I sound evasive.
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Jeffrey
'An unfathered vapour' does not smack of empiricism to me :) I think you are pushing terms (mimesis, empiricism) to the point of meaninglessness, or rather inversion. On your usage Blake, at war with Lockean empiricism, seeing the sun as an army of angels might be described as empiricist and mimetic. It is the central concern of the major theoretical statement of the time, Biographia Literaria, to oppose the empiricist theory of mind (Hartley's) with the philosophical idealism-saturated theory of the creative imagination. And in all theories of the poetic imagination -- Coleridge, Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley -- the experience of poetic imagination is opposed to the ordinary, individuated sense of self and brings into question the ordinary opposition of subject and object. But, yes, Wordsworth is a discursive poet. He is a philosophical poet. The philosophical poet, whether it be Wordsworth or Eliot in Four Quartets, seeks to give an account of the lyric/visionary moment. But the discursive and the visionary are not in opposition, they are part of the same movement. In a poem like Shelley's Mont Blanc the discursive/analytic is identical with the lyric/visionary, and the kernel is the question of the relation of subject and object - a theme impossible to miss in Wordsworth.
Gerard
