Against the Uprooted Word by Wolff Tristram;

Author:Wolff, Tristram;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

—WORDSWORTH, “ESSAY, SUPPLEMENTARY TO THE PREFACE” (1815)

Writing in 1810, Wordsworth suggested that language could be either an ambient force “like the power of gravitation or the air we breathe,” guaranteeing “communion with the inner spirit of things,” or it could be that “counter-spirit” that like “poisoned vestments” would slowly eat away at an “individual or people.” Curiously, by then, this imperceptibly contaminating weight on thought—this bad gravity—seemed to Wordsworth to “dissolve” the integrity of communal feeling, and to “alienate [the victim] from his right mind.”95 I say curiously because, as we have seen, both he and Coleridge viewed dissolving and melting as part of the poet’s job. I turn now to the ways the early radical Wordsworth narrated the poetic act of melting down associations as performed not only by “the genius of the poet,” as in the epigraph to this section, but also upon the linguistic agent; and I close by thinking about how an outside linguistic force, for Wordsworth, may also be aligned with alienation.

In drawing out the moment both he and Coleridge take as disintegrative, Wordsworth spends much more energy than his friend modeling this negative stage of association. Wordsworth did, however, compose for Lyrical Ballads a series of poems “on the naming of places,” which hint at his version of Coleridge’s coinages, tending to express how arbitrary names occur to the namer in relay with natural (involuntary) circumstances under various passions or compulsions. Wordsworth frames the sphere of arbitrary linguistic “fluctuations” within a shared indebtedness to the impersonal temporalities of nature—with the reciprocal effect, as Kevis Goodman and Alan Bewell have shown, that nature itself bears the legible traces of historical layers, in histories that mix with the “earth” artifice, passion, violence, love, and loss. For Wordsworth, mind and nature interact as “temporal structures, built up layer upon layer like a geological formation”; a striking linguistic version of this comes in “Hart-Leap Well,” to which I will turn shortly, and which constitutes a kind of mythic kin to the “Poems on the Naming of Places.”96

I have said that Wordsworth’s “nature” might be understood as the name of a relationship to time’s passage. Setting in motion what Coleridge called the “influxes” from the “shifting elements” of nature, Wordsworth dwelt on its “low breathings” and “indisputable shapes,” allowing the receptivity celebrated by both poets to leave a much deeper impression of the gray language of nature always already in motion, until we hum physically with that “ghostly language of the ancient earth” (1799 Prelude). If Coleridge emphasizes the “growth” of language in its temporal progression by way of active reform, Wordsworth’s defense of the “common” pauses on the idea of re-formation as a passive procedure of imaginative disintegration. Perhaps what is called in the Preface the signature human pleasure in “recognizing similitude in dissimilitude” expresses differently the thought that imagination’s animating force breaks down distinctions to find what is held in common. Far from deriving the legitimacy of words from natural roots, Wordsworth suggests that words are more

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