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Wordsworth’s Crisis of Imagination
Martina Domines Veliki
Sažetak
The article departs from an assumption that in writing The Recluse Wordsworth wanted
to present a single man’s life within the conventions of the classical epic thus elevating
the genre of autobiography to the highest aesthetic status. His autobiographical
endeavour is the result of secularization of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
religious autobiographies grounded in the narrative of confession and conversion
based on the literary models of Rousseau’s and St. Augustine’s Confessions. In writing
about his life Wordsworth aspires to truth as the highest standard and he wants
to traverse the trajectory of his life in order to discover the amplitude of his mind,
the importance of his vocation as a poet. Thus, his autobiography is above all an act
of self-interpretation in which he becomes entangled in the logocentric worldview
believing in the ability of written language to recuperate the emotions found in the
speech of ordinary men and the innocence of childhood experiences. The poet has
two tools to help him out on his way to the past: memory and imagination. Where
memory leaves lacunae in the poet’s sense of the self, imagination is there to draw on
an infinitely repeatable ‘I am’. Imagination accounts for the affirmative self and the
positive sublime arising from the poet’s feeling of unity with nature. However, the
forms of nature are capable of negating the mind, emptying it of all self-awareness,
thus creating a poet of solitary, apocalyptic scenes. These two romantic selves, the
affirmative and the negative one, meet in Wordsworth and they account for the tension
in his poetry.
Ključne riječi
autobiography; self-interpretation; logocentrism; memory; imagination; positive and negative sublime
Hrčak ID:
101811
URI
Datum izdavanja:
2.5.2012.
Posjeta: 3.449 *