Wordsworth's Sacrificial Poetics: Rhetoric and Self-Formation, 1791-1801
Restricted (Penn State Only)
- Author:
- Mulligan, Ashley
- Graduate Program:
- English
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- June 06, 2023
- Committee Members:
- Daniel Purdy, Outside Unit & Field Member
Cheryl Glenn, Major Field Member
Robert Edwards, Major Field Member
Mark Stewart Morrisson, Program Head/Chair
Claire Colebrook, Chair & Dissertation Advisor - Keywords:
- William Wordsworth
Romanticism
Poetry
Rhetoric - Abstract:
- Though no evidence exists apart from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s own testimony that he was an integral force in shaping the constitution and ambitions of William Wordsworth’s mind, the Romantic critical tradition has remained committed to an understanding of Wordsworth that leverages Coleridge’s assessment of the extraordinary qualities of his genius. Accepting the Coleridgean conception of Wordsworth’s imagination, while illuminating the bent of his philosophic mind and visionary eye toward gleaning metaphysical truth, obscures his concern for Nature’s representations in the physical world, the suffering people that inhabit it, and the role of his poetry in materially liaising between the two. Further, as it privileges the quality of natural spontaneity in his poetic expression, the Coleridgean version of Wordsworth is one assumed not to have experienced prolonged doubt, suffering, or pain, nor to have viewed the act of writing poetry as having obligations to the public sphere. The corpus of Wordsworth’s biographical writings, however, shows a young man who, from the moment he returned to England from France in late 1792, grappled with pain and doubt that disrupted his writing until he theorized, during his composition of Lyrical Ballads, a way to account for those physiological and psychological disruptions within his poetic process. Attending to the record of Wordsworth’s early exposure to classical rhetoricians and orators, particularly Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, and Horace, opens the possibility of a Wordsworth shaped more significantly by manners and ideals from antiquity than any contemporary eighteenth century neo-classical thinkers, new rhetorical theorists, or Enlightenment aesthetic philosophers. The early arch of Wordsworth’s personal, prose, and poetic writing illuminates that key moments of his self-creation involved an articulation of his own fragility coupled with a reliance on models from classical and literary writers he trusted which, together, allowed him to negotiate a rhetorical career that encompassed his idea of poetry as an ethical duty with obligations to the public sphere. Wordsworth suffered bodily pain and associated that pain with writing. As he continued to manipulate the rhetorical situation of his texts by differently negotiating the terms of his narrated self, his message, and his audience, he began to leverage his suffering as a component of his ethos. By virtue of taking seriously what he articulates in both his public and private writing about his ambitions, revelations, and anxieties, a rhetorical reading of these key texts illuminates the substantial extent to which his poetic development hinges on his engagement with thinkers about morality and communication (particularly Cicero, Aristotle, Quintilian, Horace, Spenser, and Chaucer) who provided him with models he could adopt and amend as he worked to both temper his own feelings and inculcate them in readers. At the rhetorical event of each texts’ composition, Wordsworth renegotiates his relationship with his audience, drawing from and revising Aristotle’s prioritization of ethos and the Stoics’ philosophies of emotion, as well as the method of his address, borrowing from and adapting Ciceronian and Quintilian principles of style and oration. Each renegotiation derives from an exchange between his present perception of bodily fragility and his past classical inheritances. Collectively, they make legible that the poetics Wordsworth commits to by 1801 is distinctly sacrificial.