Anatomy Of Primal Trauma In Wordsworth's Poetry

Since Mathew Arnold acclaims Wordsworth as one of the three greatest poets in English poetic agones after Shakespeare and Milton, Wordsworth has long been regarded as the leader that starts the momentum of English Romanticism. Though his early poems reflect the influence of numerous writers, it is widely accepted that Wordsworth, with his genius balance among consciousness, emotion and poetic creation, conducts a literary revolution on English poetic tradition as well as literary criticism. Harold Bloom comments:"Increasingly we recognize that something like a continuum runs from Homer to Goethe, and that something else begins with Wordsworth, something that keeps on beginning, despite all the waves of modernism, postmodernism, or what you will."Some will say it is a too huge task to locate the genesis of a genius's creation scientifically and rationally, yet the glories of genius always appeal to the curious mind. It is not of the total impossibility to get some hints of Wordsworth's distinctiveness from the abundant historical documents and the large body of poems he leaves behind. Through a close reading of Wordsworth's major works, the dissertation wishes to trace the inner struggles of Wordsworth's self-conception as a poet, revealing how the primal trauma sheds light on the essential qualities contributing to Wordsworth's ingenious creation.The introduction begins with a postulate of a primal trauma underlying Wordsworth's poetry, which grievingly quests for a voice. Within the context of psychosynthesis conceived by Italian psychologist Roberto Assagioli (1888-1974) and developed by his followers, among others, John Firman (1945-2008), the primal trauma is defined as the intense spiritual suffering from the threat of nonbeing or annihilation caused by the break of the empathic relations between"I"and"Self". Meanwhile my support also comes from the views of Freud, Jung, Heidegger, Aristotle, Wittgenstein. Based on this psychosynthetic conception, this dissertation furthers that despite the ubiquity of the primal trauma, death is the extreme and ultimate form of the primal trauma, which actualizes the threat of nonbeing into factual annihilation. Thence, the primal trauma of Wordsworth is the spiritual bleakness inflicted by his early loss of his parents, which enacts the poet's lifetime grief and turbulence that shapes him as a great English romantic poet. Chapter One follows the primal trauma in Wordsworth's early poems as the cause of terror and turmoil. Based on the interpretations of the three poems including The Vale of Esthwaite, An Evening Walk, and Adventures on Salisbury Plain, the paper holds that the grief-stricken poet, without his knowing precisely what his trauma is and how it works, resorts to gothic ghosts and storms to express his childlike desire to reclaim his parents from the world of death. The atmosphere of mystery and horror is the proof that Wordsworth is groping for a scheme to vent his inner alienation and terror. Yet Adventures on Salisbury Plain shows that Wordsworth is turning away from his individual grief and giving thought to human suffering as a whole, thus prefiguring the peak period of his poetic creation.Chapter Two discusses the profound equilibrium established in Wordsworth's poems of the Great Decade (1798-1807),indicating the redemption and recuperation of his primal trauma. The intimate moments of union with deeper Self can be found in peak experiences of joys and beauty, as well as the abyss experiences of loss and pain. Four poems are selected to affirm this observation including The Ruined Cottage, The Old Cumberland Beggar, The Two-part Prelude of 1799 and Ode: Intimations of Immortality. The paper argues that Wordsworth finds empathic resonances with those struggling for survival at the bottom of the society, which include beggars, mad women, female vagrants, dying infants, collapsed farmers and hunters and the like. The poignant narratives of human suffering could imply the poet's intention to immerse his primal trauma in the wide sea of humanist tragedy in the hope of cathartic redemption and final healing of his inner desolation. Meanwhile, the Lake District endowed with the natural beauty nurtures an occult rapport with the traumatic poet, shielding him from over-indulgence in his personal tragedy. Therefore, the prime time of Wordsworth witnesses an all-round maturity of his thought and arts exhibited in The Prelude and Ode.Chapter Three attempts to decipher the primal trauma as a source of human's disillusion and submission. It covers three poems Wordsworth composed in his mid and late period including Elegiac Stanzas, The Excursion and The White Doe of Rylstone. The new bereavements lay the old primal trauma bare again and another round of spiritual afflictions attacks him, bringing about the consequent change in his poetic creation. The optimistic notion and sublime imagination once flourished in The Prelude and Ode disappear. The idea that he is capable of immersing himself in the wide sea of humanist tragedy to heal his primal trauma now turns out to be a delusion. Confronted with the new crisis of his life, the poet reconciles himself with the stoic stance and final submission to a Christian God. The gradual combination of religious meditations and imploration into his poem debilitates the profound equilibrium inherent in his poems. However, the plaintive yet solacing relations between the White Doe and Emily in The White Doe of Rylstone still confirm the unmatched poetic genius of Wordsworth.The Conclusion summarizes and emphasizes the essence and significance of Wordsworth's primal trauma, one of the noteworthy elements contributing to Wordsworth's uniqueness and virtuosity. The persistence of Wordsworth's lifetime primal trauma manifested in his poetry, while admitting development and change as substantial and inevitable, also converts it into an evidence of a universal continuity concerning the nature and perplexity of human existence in terms of its psychological spectrum. The dissertation ends with the enquiry for the author's future study: In the post-Wordsworthian era, human's traumatic alienation and fragmentation is remarkably further exacerbated than those presented in the poems of Wordsworth, a fact that is manifested in the literary works of modernism and postmodernism. Thence, in today's world where the enlightenment demystification and industrial psychology of self-hardening is infiltrating into almost every layer of human mind, is Wordsworth's Counter-Enlightenment stance of empathetic imagination and his ultimate submission to awesome divinity an obsolete subject? Or is it an exhaustive topic that can be lightly snubbed?...