Romanticism- Wordsworth and Shelley

소개글

My argument in this essay is that, after the French Revolution, the English Romantic self, as represented in several poems of William Wordsworth, goes through a purifying process for its identification, but as represented in the poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley, it also goes through a purgatorial process for its annihilation in the later Romantic period. The process for Wordsworth is primarily accomplished through acts of remembering, through facing the memory of the past, that is, history, whether personal or public. In the case of Shelley, the process is accomplished through acts of forgetting history. There are thus significant differences between Wordsworth, the major figure of early Romantics, and later figures born after or just before the revolutionary year of 1789 such as Shelley, John Keats and Lord George Gordon Byron, in their presentations of selfhood and in their poetic reactions to revolutionary disillusionment and defeat.
First, I will show how Wordsworth, in the philosophical tradition of John Locke, tries to reestablish his internalized selfhood through poetic, somewhat ritualistic acts of remembering and purification. Then, I will show that Shelley follows the tradition of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and thus his selfhood is presented through a poetics of forgetting and purgation in The Triumph of Life. I will focus on the Wordsworthian self and the “spots of time” in The Prelude, and I will briefly compare his poetically established selfhood with Shelley`s annihilated selfhood. My discussion on the two poets’ Romantic poetics will be confined within Locke’s theory of human identity and Rousseau’s critique of the Enlightenment self.

목차

Title:
The Poetics of Remembering and Forgetting: A Study of the Romantic Selfhood in W. Wordsworth’s The Prelude and P. B. Shelley’s The Triumph of Life

1. Wordsworth’s Poetics of Remembering in the Light of Locke’s Philosophy of Human Identity

2. Shelley’s Poetics of Forgetting in the Light of Rousseau’s Critique of the Enlightenment Selfhood

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Wordsworth’s Poetics of Remembering in the Light of Locke’s Philosophy of Human Identity
Wordsworth’s poetics aims at ritual rebirth, figuration, embodiment, self-identification, subject-production and is accomplished through a process of remembering the past memory and purifying its tainted traces. The following passage from The Prelude implies what Wordsworth means by purification and memory. It shows the delicate fusion of the empirical and rational theories of knowledge which marks Wordsworth’s poetry and poetics.
the soul--
Remembering how she felt, but what she felt
Remembering not--retains an obscure sense
Of possible sublimity, to which
With growing faculties she doth aspire,
With faculties still growing, feeling still
That whatsoever point they gain they still
Have something to pursue.
(1799. II. 364-371)

Locke’s system of philosophy allows two sources of knowledge: external objects leave simple ideas on the human mind through sensory experiences, but the human mind is not without the ability to receive and associate those ideas. The inner operations of the mind—perception, association, reflection, and memory, etc.—are also the source of knowledge. The act of remembering for Locke and Wordsworth is in that sense nothing but the inner a priori property of the mind. It is the act of reflection on the process of transfiguring experience into knowledge through the senses; and the object of remembering is the generation of simple ideas, which are associated together into complex ideas. The above passage poetically shows the unity of the empirical mechanism of knowledge generation and rational reflection. It suggests that Wordsworth’s poetics of purification derive from the reflection on the empirical knowledge generation accompanied by the acts of remembering, thinking, and willing.

참고 자료

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