William Wordsworth Essay

Wordsworth is a split and exiled, yet transcendent and visionary poet who creates community by inserting the idealized Romantic poet into the ideological center interpellating those around him into similar subject positions. But, how can Wordsworth, a separated individual, reveal his heightened awareness to the rest of humanity? He answers in his "Preface to Lyrical Ballads" when he asserts that poets like himself can communicate their alternate awareness "[u]ndoubtably with our moral sentiments and animal sensations, and with the causes which excite these; with the operations of the elements and the appearances of the visible universe [. . .]" (Norton 173). Poets can express their alternate perception through a shared experience of the

Simon Schama argues in Landscapes and Memory, "Landscapes are culture before they are nature; constructs of the imagination projected onto wood, and water and rock" (61). The real world exists but because we can never unproblematically engage with reality, we make it over, re-present it as landscape. In this way, landscape is ideological, is a cultural construct draped over reality. As Wordsworth writes in Tintern, the perceptions of the eye and ear are "both what they half-create and what perceive" (107-108). According to Wordsworth, nature has become the "anchor" (110) of his thoughts, the tether that restrains his creative imagination. But because landscape is based on the real, it can also be used to express an alternate

The individual becomes a part of the community that shares his mental space. This process appears circular, but with the use of the word "influx" defined as the place where one stream joins another, Wordsworth appears to be referring to a more active and influential process whereby this circular process becomes spiral -- revolving around Wordsworth's central politic, the principle of pleasure, and moving through time. Here we have both unity and flux. According to Wordsworth, joy has the chiliastic power to move us from one vision of the world to another, as he