The real sublime in Wordsworth's poetry (William Wordsworth)

It is a commonplace of the study of Romanticism that Wordsworth is the Romantic poet of the sublime par excellence. But the criticism has never adequately accounted for the radical ways in which the “wordsworthian or egotistical sublime” (Keats) differs from the notions of transcendence to which Wordsworth was intellectual heir. In the two most prominent eighteenth century theorists of the natural sublime—Immanuel Kant and Edmund Burke—the sublime moment is accompanied by a sense of oppression in the face of the natural object. Those looking for such a menace in Wordsworth's poetry of the egotistical sublime will be hard pressed to find one. In a typical passage such as the Simplon Pass episode from Book VI of The Prelude, it is rather the subject that seems to threaten the natural world, as the Alps fade away before a mind's contemplation of its own destiny.; This study will serve to explain some of the reasons Wordsworth's version of the sublime diverges so radically from his received models. This will be accomplished via a Lacanian reading of certain key texts in the Wordsworth canon, organized around an interpretation of an early work, Adventures on Salisbury Plain, which features a traumatic encounter which is in many respects evocative of the oppressive natural sublime of Kant and Burke. The intensity of this sublime encounter compels the poet in the years following the composition of this work to develop his own unique version of the sublime. In the Wordsworthian sublime the oppressive elements to be found in a typical eighteenth century “sublime” experience disappear, replaced by a powerful but nonthreatening encounter with the imagination. The Simplon Pass episode is one of the most eloquent and moving examples of this version of the sublime. A key innovation of my reading will be the identification of the “sublime” in Wordsworth as a transformation of an earlier and more primal sublime moment. With this perspective I hope to differentiate my own interpretation from the conventional reading of the sublime in Wordsworth.