Wordsworth and the Thought of Affection: “Michael,” “The Force of Prayer,” “Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle”

Abstract

This essay questions the recent New Historicist and historicist claims that Wordsworth’s poetry is reactionary from well before his alleged “decline” after 1807. We propose that a poem is not simply the linguistic reflection of either the ideological limitations of its author or his time. Through readings of three poems taken from the beginning and the end of the “great decade”—“Michael,” “The Force of Prayer” and the “Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle”—we argue that Wordsworth’s poetry is neither a mimesis of his personal ideology nor of something called “Romanticism.” However, this is not to evacuate the poetry of its mimetic aspect. After Adorno, we argue that Wordsworth’s work is consistently occupied with thinking feeling—in particular, the feeling of affection or love. The thought of affection (the cognitive content of a particular kind of mimesis, as well as the affection vital to his thought) is at the center of Wordsworth’s art and is explicitly theorized in the poet’s 1801 letter to Charles James Fox. The radical locality of Wordsworth’s poems, their close attention to the texture of individual feelings (and the thoughts that make such feelings experience), render the kind of generalized description of his poetry found in historicist commentators unworkable. Wordsworth’s writing, we suggest, is a repeated attempt to marry thought and feeling as aesthetic experience.

Notes

[1] See the quatrain that ends Shelley’s 1816 sonnet, “To Wordsworth”:

In honoured poverty thy voice did weave

Songs consecrate to truth and liberty,—

Deserting these, thou leavest me to grieve,

Thus having been, that thou shouldst cease to be. (10–14)

[2] See David Bromwich’s virtuoso reading of “The Old Cumberland Beggar” (30–43).

[3] It is important to stress here that there is no suggestion that feeling is, at some level, unmediated. As Simon Jarvis argues:

When thinking comes to a halt with an abstract appeal to history, or society, or “socio‐historical material specificity,” of any other form of non‐interrogable givenness, it might as well stop with God. Absolute sheer givenness, whether it is invoked by metaphysicians, “materialists,” historicists, or anyone else, is a chimera. It is the demarcated nothing, the “empty space” of Hegel’s The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate, a nothing which is supposed to permit the most undeluded thinking, yet which itself becomes a fetish—the fetish of nihilism. (24)

[4] In his Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith posits the intimacy of sympathy and pleasure:

A man is mortified when, after having endeavoured to divert the company, he looks round and sees that nobody laughs at his jests but himself. On the contrary, the mirth of the company is highly agreeable to him, and he regards this correspondence of their sentiments with his own as the greatest applause. (10)

[5] In his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1789), Burke argues that continuity of property ownership is essential to the organic constitution of the nation: ‘The power of perpetuating out property in our families is one of the most valuable and interesting circumstances belonging to … [property], and that which tends the most to the perpetuation of society itself’ (102).

[6] See Bromwich 322.

[7] See Susan Buck‐Morss 229–237, for a discussion of Scholem’s impact on Benjamin’s work.

[8] In a discussion of Modernist art, Adorno writes: “Because the spell of external reality over its subjects and their reactions has become absolute, the artwork can only oppose this spell by assimilating itself to it” ( Aesthetic Theory 31). Art cannot resist alienation by boldly asserting its opposite. However, through the “mimesis” of mimesis, the artwork can formally reintroduce mediation—and thus thinking.

[9] Bromwich quotes Shelley’s Peter Bell The Third to argue that “Nutting” wakes ‘ “a sort of thought in sense” ’ (120).

[10] It should be noted that matins and evensong are not sung for the dead.

[11] See Adorno, Aesthetic Theory 131.