'Radical Difference': Wordsworth’s classical imagination and Roman ethos

Abstract

The subject of this thesis is the character of William Wordsworth, who is widely held to be both a poet of the imagination, and an 'exemplary' Romantic. His greatest poem, "The Prelude" had as its subject matter the growth of his own poetic mind; something that can also be understood as the growth of his 'imagination'. His friend and fellow poet, later turned philosopher, Samuel Taylor Coleridge developed a novel and romantic understanding of 'the Imagination' in the early years of his friendship with Wordsworth. He identified Wordsworth's genius, as a poet, as the product of a particularly gifted imagination, something he conceived of as an innate ability. In this thesis I challenge this 'Romantic' representation of Wordsworth's genius, one that has become canonical, largely as a result of Coleridge's treatment of Wordsworth, Poetry and Imagination in "Biographia Literaria". In making a more detailed analysis of Wordsworth's own claims about his identity, his poetic art, and imagination, I develop an argument that proposes a very different ethos to the one still largely considered normative in English Studies. The argument depends on a better recognition of Wordsworth's Classical Republican sympathies in the 1790s, and the extent to which the example of the famous Roman statesman, orator, philosopher, and poet, Marcus Tullius Cicero captured Wordsworth's imagination. Contrary to those who would romanticise Wordsworth's genius, I suggest his best work was the product of a theory of poetry based on principles that defined a very classical ideology. My argument builds on the work of recent, more detailed, representations of Wordsworth as a historical subject whose ideas were defined by particular historical circumstances, and whose identity developed out of those experiences. In addition to paying more attention to the 'historical' Wordsworth, I have also made a detailed analysis of his language, discovering the existence of a particular idiom. Wordsworth's vocabulary reflects, not only a classical humanist ideology, but also strong Stoic sentiments and an attitude of Socratic, Academic Scepticism. I trace the source of this characteristic idiom back to the influence of Cicero whose works, along with Marcus Quintilian's "De Institutione Oratoria" defined key aspects of Wordsworth's poetic theory in the late 1790s and early 1800s.