Poet as Prophet
Brenda Garrett
October 29, 2001
When I spoke last, I ended with the image of Wordsworth as a monk or priest-like figure zealously converting Dorothy and, by extension, the reader into a position within his vision of the world. But even more than priest, Wordsworth often depicts the romantic poet as prophet. This depiction is demonstrated more clearly in "The Prospectus to the Recluse" than in "Tintern Abbey." In the 1814 version of the "Prospectus" he writes:
Paradise, and groves
Elysian, Fortunate Fields -- like those of old
Sought in the Atlantic Main -- why should they be
A history only of departed things,
Or a mere fiction of what never was?
For the discerning intellect of Man,
When wedded to this goodly universe
In love and holy passion, shall find these
A simple produce of the common day. (47-55)
Similar to his vision in "Tintern" where perceptions are both half created by the imagination and half perceived by the senses, here Wordsworth declares that for those who recognize its power, the human mind, or imagination, can meld with nature, can heal the split between nature and mankind, the sublime and the beautiful, to re-create an edenic heaven on Earth.
Wordsworth then goes on to assert:
-- I, long before the blissful hour arrives,
Would chant, in lonely peace, the spousal verse
Of this great consummation -- and by words
Which speak of nothing more than what we are,
Would arouse the sensual from their sleep
Of Death, and win the vacant and the vain
To noble raptures (56 - 62)
Wordsworth, as the romantic poet-prophet, has a preview of the millennial state, has access to its creation in the here and now, and is charged with educating the desires of sense-bound others in order to bring about its imaginative creation.
Like Christianity, the romantic utopian ideologeme is an individual or solitary quest. Perhaps because of the failure of the French Revolution to materialize a fitting political agent, this ideological transformation is depicted as an individual task. Although Wordsworth traverses this faulted earth and "Must hear Humanity in fields and groves / Pipe solitary anguish" ("Prospectus" 76-77), he claims, "... even these/ Hearing, I be not downcast or forlorn!" ("Prospectus" 82). Where Wordsworth finds Fortunate Fields and groves Elysian, others find anguish and alienation. He repeats this assertion at the end of The Prelude where he writes to Coleridge that even though the rest of mankind "to ignominy and shame / By nations sink together" (14.438-439), he and Coleridge "shall still / Find solace" (14.439-440). This individual millennial utopia is an escapist vision, and although he writes that as "Prophets of Nature" (14.446), they become redeemers of mankind, it is deliverance through singular transcendence no longer through any real revolutionary change in the material conditions of existence.
However, also like Christianity, the individual romantic quest takes place
within a community of similar others. This singular transcendence explains
why in "Tintern" Dorothy's growth is depicted as a 
"solitary walk" (136). Yet this solitary quest ends in closer communion with
and understanding of her brother. This concept of a singular quest creating
and ending in community gives added meaning to the last few lines of "Tintern"
where Wordsworth declares to his sister:
|
these steep and lofty
cliffs And this green pastoral landscape, were to me More dear, both for themselves, and for thy sake. (158 -160) |
Wordsworth's journey, too, must end in community. As much as a lost flock
needs a guiding priest or prophet, a prophet needs a flock to avoid becoming
the solitary hermit, whose visionary knowledge is hermetically sealed from
the rest of the world. The hermit here becomes symbol of the end result of
Wordsworth's transcendence without community -- a transcendence that leaves
the rest of humanity as
vagrant dwellers alienated in the houseless woods.
But how does Wordsworth, the transcendent and visionary poet, create community with the rest of ordinary mankind? As he does with Dorothy in "Tintern," he creates an ideologeme. He inserts the idealized romantic poet into the ideological center as conversional prophet, interpellating those around him into similar subject positions, resulting in what he believes to be universal unity, the romantic utopia. As I will look at later, this vision is both created through and reflected in the landscape.
Although unable to label it as such, Wordsworth attempts to establish Althusser's specular interpellation with the romantic poet as absolute other. Because the aim of the romantic subject is unity with the entire universe including all of mankind, the poet, although a heightened and therefore exiled (separated) individual, is seen to differ from regular man not in kind, but in degree. Wordsworth proclaims, "the poet is chiefly distinguished from other men by a greater promptness to think and feel without immediate external excitement, and a greater power in expressing such thoughts and feelings as are produced in him in that manner. But these passions and thoughts and feelings are the general passions and thoughts and feelings of men" ("Preface" 172). The heightened poet perceives and transmits a universal consciousness. The romantic poet is seen as unique yet as one who can speak to all, as one of a kind, yet universal, himself both subject and Subject. He becomes an interpellating absolute other, a subject par excellence.
By placing a representation of themselves at the centre, unity is created through Althusser's specular interpellation. Althusser writes:
The duplicate mirror-structure of ideology ensures simultaneously:
1. the interpellation of 'individuals' as subjects;
2. their subjection to the Subject;
3. the mutual recognition of subjects and Subject, the subjects' recognition of each other, and finally the subject's recognition of himself;
4. The absolute guarantee that everything really is so, and that on condition that the subjects recognize what they are and behave accordingly, everything will be all right (168-69)
With an ideal image of themselves at the centre the romantics find a reflection of self in the absolute other's reflection of the romantic subject. They also find reflections of themselves in similar subjects. Althusser describes this three part interpellation as "universal recognition" (169), everyone recognizes their similarity to each other and to the centre and agrees that if they remain similar and in their prescribed subject positions, everything will be as it should be. By inserting an idealized image of themselves in the centre, the romantics experience universal recognition, creating what they believe to be universal unity. The romantic ideal presents itself as the One, the only whole and authentic Subject.
With the romantic centre interpellating the romantic poet into an enabling subject position, and the entire interpellary relationship being reflected in the landscape, the universe appeared unified but it was an illusion. Because any ideology necessarily creates a cultural unconscious, or that which is not allowed in that ideology's imaginative representation of the world, there can be no universal consciousness.
Wordsworth says of the poet:
He is the rock of defense of human nature; an upholder and preserver, carrying everywhere with him relationship and love. In spite of difference of soil and climate, of language and manners, of laws and customs, in spite of things silently gone out of mind and things violently destroyed, the poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time. The objects of the poet's thoughts are everywhere; though the eyes and senses of man are, it is true, his favourite guides, yet he will follow wheresoever he can find an atmosphere of sensation in which to move his wings. Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge -- it is as immortal as the heart of man. ("Preface" 171)
Poet becomes prophet, and in the end, equivalent to the holy spirit itself, flying out over the sublime void and transforming the world in his own image. The poet binds together the empire of human society in his image, but lost is any recognition, any appreciation of difference. Narrowed to one reigning perspective, all others were hegemonically repelled. Subjects are narrowed and representationally cut off from "othered" experience, ironically creating even greater fragmentation. Without an appreciation of difference, an understanding of exclusion as well as similarity, the romantic era ends with the sublimated subject removed from any experience outside that reflected by the romantic centre -- an ironically alienating end to a movement that began in an attempt to unite with the universe.
Bibliography
Abrams, M.H, General Ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 4th ed. Vol. 2. New York: Norton and Company, 1979.
Althusser, Louis. "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses." Lenin and Philosophy and other essays. Translated from the French by Ben Brewster. London: New Left Books, 1971. 121-173.
Wordsworth, William. "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey." Abrams, Gen. Ed. 155-158.
---. Preface to Lyrical Ballads." Abrams, Gen. Ed. 160-175.
---. "Prospectus to The Recluse." Abrams, Gen. Ed. 227-230.
---. The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet's Mind. Abrams, Gen. Ed. 257-313.