Wordsworth's Literary Sublime

The argument

Empson called "Tintern Abbey" a muddle. This chapter treats the poem's competing accounts of the sublime as the philosophy. The young speaker's frightened meeting with nature does not give him the later speaker's sense of "the life of things"; that comes after absence and return. Returning does not bring the first experience back unchanged, because the present perception now holds memory, poetic predecessors, and Dorothy's presence. The sublime turns into an achievement of time. The speaker learns to live more fully in the here and now and does not escape embodied life for a timeless, disembodied insight. The poem's form makes the experience shareable and keeps the speaker's difference from Dorothy intact. Its muddle revises Burke and Kant by showing what a theory misses when it treats experience as one self-contained event.

Publication details

Author

Katherine Elkins

Publication

In Garry L. Hagberg, ed., Fictional Worlds and Philosophical Reflection. Palgrave Macmillan, 2022, pp. 227–244.

DOI

10.1007/978-3-030-73061-1_10

Wordsworth's Literary Sublime at the publisher →

Key concepts

Wordsworth; "Tintern Abbey"; sublime; Burke; Kant; time; return; repetition; Dorothy Wordsworth; embodied perception; literary form; shared experience.

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