| This is a study of poetic method and psychological paradigm in three of the most prominent English poems of mixed genre in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, namely James Thomson's The Seasons (1726-1746), William Cowper's The Task (1785), and William Wordsworth's The Prelude (1805).;Chapter one addresses the historical and conceptual relationship between digression and association in Aristotle, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jonathan Swift, and Laurence Sterne. Digression came to be identified with the poet's thought processes in the eighteenth century, rather than as a form of ethical transgression, a fault of style, or incoherent thinking.;Chapter two classifies digressions in Thomson's Seasons and links his use of digression to the Great Chain of Being paradigm, which was wedded in Thomson's poem to an early associationist account of dynamic and progressive mental processes, contrasting Pope's interpretation of the Chain of Being and mental processes as static and finished in his Essay on Man. Northrop Frye characterized this distinction as a shift between process and product literature.;Cowper's rejection of a product theme in chapter three, and his corresponding methodological shift through the use of digression, is explained by R. G. Collingwood's distinction between craft and art. The poem is exploratory and definitional in nature, and is consonant with the logic and psychology of Abraham Tucker, Alexander Gerard, and James Beattie.;In chapter four, the two-part digressive practice of memory and reflection in The Prelude is an effect of Wordsworth's response to Godwinian rationalism. The dynamic though non-dialectical relationship between memory and reflection foreshadows William James' theory of consciousness as a stream, and is closest to Tucker's account of mental processes.;In all three poems, there is a tension between preexisting and spontaneous structures which is resolved through their associative, digressive method. Lord Byron's Don Juan would be an appropriate extension of this study, and it also provides a pre-history to later developments in stream of consciousness writing. |
