Prophets of nature: Wordsworth, Whitman, and the Romantic call narrative (William Wordsworth, Walt Whitman)

This dissertation explores how a number of romantic writers, Wordsworth and Whitman especially, presented themselves as prophets, claiming to speak for nature. Like biblical prophets narrating prophetic calls, these writers relate how nature called them to poetry, which raises key questions, given the incommensurability of nature and language and the opposition of subject and object: how can nature speak? how can poetry speak for ? In the hands of Wordsworth and Whitman, the biblical call narrative becomes a tool for the romantic attempt to reconcile opposites: art and nature, nature and consciousness, conscious self and preconscious other. The first chapter examines Hebrew prophetic call accounts in terms of the dialogism of Levinas and Blanchot. Chapter Two treats Whitman's attempt to resolve the romantic aesthetic tension between mimesis and self-expression. In Whitmanian call narratives such as "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," the poet is called by nature's self-expressive, creative excess, which Whitman mirrors with his own self-expressive linguistic excess. Chapter Three turns to The Prelude, which recounts the intersubjective drama of how an infant self becomes a self by means of an other who is nature. Instead of being an example of the "egotistical sublime," Wordsworth's poem of encounters with the natural world enacts an ecological sublime. The final chapter considers the poets' revisions and the larger problem of the relationship between prophecy and revision. If a writer has had a calling, why revise? According to one interpretation, revision is at odds with prophetic discourse, because it strips the otherness of the voice of the other. According to another attitude, prophecy is always revisionary, consisting in second thoughts about origins. Revisions of prophetic calls seek simultaneously to resist the otherness of an original call and to keep that experience of a call alive in all its otherness.