The Concept of Grace in Wordsworth's Poetry
| Autor: | Elizabeth Geen |
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| Rok vydání: | 1943 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America. 58:689-715 |
| ISSN: | 1938-1530 0030-8129 |
| DOI: | 10.2307/458829 |
| Popis: | One sentence in Wordsworth's long letter to Dorothy describing his journey through France and Switzerland in 1790 might very well be used as a datum line from which to chart later utterances of the poet, either in prose or poetry, on God and nature. Wordsworth says, “Among the more awful scenes of the Alps I had not a thought of man or a single created being; my whole soul was turned to him who produced the terrible majesty before me.” When we add to this a sentence from a letter to Mathews written from Keswick late in 1794, “Cataracts and mountains are good occasional society, but they will not do for constant companions,” we can measure more or less accurately the distance Wordsworth had covered between 1790 and 1798, when cataracts and mountains had become “the soul of all his moral being” and He who had produced the terrible majesty a “motion and a spirit” that “rolls through all things.” Both sentences serve a salutary purpose in focusing attention on those formative elements in Wordsworth's early training which we tend under the influence of descriptions in The Prelude and its apostrophes to the “Wisdom and Spirit of the Universe” either to forget or to push into the background. With their outlines sharpened by a proper perspective they support the contention that Wordsworth's later orthodoxy is less a retreat from the naturalism of “Tintern Abbey” and The Prelude than it is a return to an earlier position, which, while all its implications at the time may not have been realized, was more in line with the later Wordsworth than with the pantheist of 1798–1802. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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