William Wordsworth and the great mother: An object relations analysis of the archetypal feminine and poetry of the sublime

This dissertation adopts key concepts of object relations psychology to analyze William Wordsworth's concept of the sublime. Wordsworth, like other Romantics, sought to reintroduce mythical thought into a world made bereft of a sense of living divinity by the primacy newly bequeathed to scientific are applied to Wordsworth's poetry to illuminate the psychological processes underlying Wordsworth's quest to be a “prophet” of nature. Wordsworth lost his mother when he was eight years old and no doubt felt deprived by her death and abandoned. By identifying himself in the special role of prophet of nature, Wordsworth established an intimate relationship to nature that compensated for the maternal presence he found lacking in his life. Wordsworth's representation of the divine in nature coincides in many respects with the thinking of Burke and Kant, both of whom formulated influential theories of the sublime in Wordsworth's time.; My object relations analysis of Wordsworth's poetry assumes the inherent interrelatedness of poet and nature. The concept of primary identification illuminates the psychological source of Wordsworth's portrayal of nature as a being that pervades his being and resides in his mind. Poems such as “Exposition and Reply” and “The Tables Turned” express his need to relate to a nurturing other whose very being enters him in a way analogous to the infant's incorporation of his mother's breast. By incorporating nature, like the infant psychologically incorporates his mother's breast, Wordsworth establishes an inner object that provides the mirroring essential to his self-identity. However, because of his great dependency on nature for the fulfillment of these needs, Wordsworth's poetry, most strikingly in the Lucy poems, reveals a deep ambivalence towards nature. Wordsworth unconsciously fears the power that he finds in the feminine and defensively contains and controls it by privileging and granting priority to the powers of imagination. In such poetic works as the apostrophe on imagination in Book VI of The Prelude and in “Intimations of Immortality,” Wordsworth envisions the imagination as an autonomous power essentially independent of nature.