<p>Wordsworth is a mythopoeic or mythmaking poet. While the fell-sides, sheep-folds, and mountain roads of Cumberland-Westmorland provide an external reality in which his dramas can unfold, and while the shepherds, fell-folk, and travellers offer him the dramatis personae to people this natural stage, the drama is also, and perhaps even more so, an inner psychological ritual played upon the stage of Wordsworth's psyche, and the actors are just as much gods and goddesses and titans, representing the psychic forces which come into play in the various stages of his spiritual progress, as they are people.</p> <p>If one is to see this drama clearly, then, one must adjust one's eyesight as well to the dark inner landscape of the psyche in order to realize the full scope and quality of Wordsworth's pastoral. As he plainly warns us in the Preface to the 1814 Excursion, we must look</p> <p>Into our Minds, into the Mind of Man-My haunt, and the main region of my song.</p> <p>Those people who, by their own unwitting habit, see only the outer landscape--the outer light of consciousness is so bright that they fail to see the shadows--will have only a one-dimensional view of his poetry, for, like all Titans, Wordsworth is a creature of the caves and mountain bases, and a good portion of him is inside and underground.</p> <p>In the earlier and more real part of his poetic career--the period of Lyrical Ballads, the fell-side tragedies, the 1805 Prelude--Wordsworth knows the true source of his energy, speaks and acts like a true son of Mother Earth, like a Prometheus unbound, and defends her interests as he knows how to do. The poetry is rich, insightful, and positive. There is noticeable, however, even as early as the 1805 Prelude, a conflict of allegiance developing in his work in which he reveals a being at odds with himself because his ego--with its illusions about human perfection and its unrealistic evaluation of himself as an epic poet with mastery over an external and public order of truth--is totally ignorant of another Wordsworth which is sleeping and unconscious--a source from which he needs to find out that life and people are imperfect and from which he could understand that his talents or propensities were better suited to pastoral--an internal and private order of experience.</p> <p>Such a conflict, if not healed by a fruitful communication between the two parts of his personality, can result in unhealthy polarization and even in disaster for his entire being. Wordsworth may have avoided disaster for a time by taking some cognizance of the pressures of his mortal or animal self and by adjusting his viewpoint to some extent to allow for its needs. But, obviously, he has not understood the warning of his unconscious (Dream of the Arab in Book V, and the Simplon Pass passage of Book VI, of The Prelude) soon enough or fully enough, for, instead of compensating for his excess idealism, he turns upon the oracle of his truth as though she were his enemy, and sets up exaggerated ego defences against her, secretly dreading her power. He gains a certain amount of outer security at the price of inner security and the death of his imagination.</p> <p>The Excursion (1814) illustrates the retrogressed and negative view of life he has come to hold as a result of his distrust and fear of the imaginative life, and also reveals him as almost totally unfit for any kind of epic endeavor or poetry aiming at a social and external order of truth.</p> <p>Since Wordsworth, as a poet, presumes to steal fire from heaven while he is grounded in the fire of the inferno-. tries to be an epic poet when he is really a pastoral one-he is caught at the deadly point of opposition between the warring principles of life, is fused and turned into stone, a Prometheus bound for his presumption, no longer having an inner life of his own or fighting for the truth of suffering humanity, but sounding hollowly as the oracle or propagandist of the otherworldly wisdom of the sky gods or aristocrats. For the balance of his long life, he is nothing but a fallen one, a titan groaning under the weight of the world, a "voice of ruin" unable to do anything but echo the barren clich6s of reactionary authority.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:mcmaster.ca/oai:macsphere.mcmaster.ca:11375/14213 |
| Date | 05 1900 |
| Creators | Spalding, Edward Alexander |
| Contributors | Sigman, J., English |
| Source Sets | McMaster University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | thesis |
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