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For Wordsworth, the apocalyptic collaboration of nature and imagination succeeds revolution as our only way to God. Examine the relationship between 'consciousness' and 'redemption' in Wordsworth.

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The period during which Wordsworth wrote his poetry was a time of great social upheaval and political change. The echoes of the French revolution could be heard everywhere, and its revolutionary implications rattled through the Romantic poetry written at the time. Robert Southey remarks that Few persons but those who have lived in it can conceive or comprehend what the memory of the French Revolution was, nor what a visionary world seemed to open upon those who were just entering it. Also, the beginnings of the industrial revolution, and the formations of cities and urbanity was displacing the traditional feudal system. To Wordsworth, this seemed to signal the beginnings of a rift between man and nature that, according to him, was irreconcilable:

...Wild-beasts, Puppet-shews,

All out-o'-th'-way, far-fetched, perverted things,

All freaks of Nature, all Promethean thoughts

Of man

Wordsworth was a poet in this particular revolutionary vein. Stylistically, he was radical because he departed completely from using an objective voice to describe his surroundings. His surroundings were a part of him, projected through his own interpretation, and it is precisely his interpretation or his consciousness that Wordsworth was trying to grapple with in his poems. This is epitomised in his grandly subjective work The Prelude, which, aptly enough for a poem that seeks purely to analyse his life and his redemptive relationship with nature opens with O there is blessing in this gentle breeze, / A visitant that, while he fans my cheek, / Doth seem half-conscious of the joy he brings / From the green fields, and from yon azure sky. The visitant fans his cheek and, according to the narrative voice in the text, he seems to be half-conscious. Thus, the narrative voice (of thoughts, effects, etc.) in Wordsworth is definitely an active, indeed a central part of his poetry. Instead of being above nature, Wordsworth is a part of it. He is (at times) a puppet, subjected to nature's whims and machinations. Indeed, in poetic terms, this shift to the subjective mode had revolutionary implications for the poetry that was to follow:

The critic Harold Bloom has said that in dramatizing the movements of the individual consciousness, Wordsworth made 'the poet's own subjectivity' the 'prevalent subject' of poetry. Wordsworth spurred writers to break free from the authority of neoclassical rules and convention and to find inspiration instead in the emotions, experiences, and speech of ordinary persons [...]. The movement outward into the natural world is really one dimension of an interior journey or quest into what Wordsworth called 'the hiding-places of man's power.

It is well known, even to people who haven't studied Wordsworth, that his poetry is laced with florid descriptions of nature and life. For instance, there is his most famous poem I wandered lonely as a cloud, which is quoted almost everywhere, and contains a number of passages that describe the natural world. However, Wordsworth is not simply offering an untainted and objective view of nature; he is personalising it - he wanders lonely as a cloud. What we tend to get is a synergy of human interpretation and descriptions of the natural world:

...Was it for this

That one, the fairest of all rivers, loved

To blend his murmurs with my Nurse's song;

Thus, Wordsworth is encapsulated by this attempt to combine the natural world - his murmurs, with his own interpretation of nature, along with the effects nature has on his own mind, or, to use the quote from this passage, my Nurse's song. In nature, Wordsworth sees a great redemptive spirit, that which represents the opposite of modern trends such as political revolution and its bloodshed, along with industrialisation and urbanisation of the population, with its shift towards the abject, desperate extrication of the human subject from the natural environment. Nature, to Wordsworth represents something great - a redemptive, Godlike spirit that glows in nature:

With life and nature, purifying thus

The elements of feeling and of thought,

And sanctifying, by such discipline,

Both pain and fear.

Naturally, the pain and the fear could quite easily refer to the developments of society at the time. Wordsworth focuses on certain words, such as feeling and thought; two subjects that he continually hopes to combine in his poetry - that of a learned, established man, but also one in touch with the ordinary man - the farm labourers and rural peasants that punctuate his earlier poetry. The pain and fear that Wordsworth refers to, could be said to be a reference toward such things as mass industrialisation; which represent to Wordsworth the derogation and the atomisation of the self, or the reduction, in his words, of man to dullness, madness, and their feats / All jumbled up together, to compose / A Parliament of Monsters. According to Leitch, Wordsworth was actively concerned about the pressures that impinge on the lives of those living in newly industrialised cities, the pressures that threaten to reduce the mind 'to a state of almost savage torpor' and that lead individuals to immerse themselves in reports and stories of sensational incidents. Indeed, the use of the words parliament have political connotations, and the resultant confusion and chaos of urbanity that spring from the mind in turn represent an irreconcilable cut from the nature that Wordsworth holds so dearly. Wordsworth laments the position of humanity throughout his poetry:

If this belief from heaven be sent,

If such be Nature's holy plan,

Have I not reason to lament

What man has made of man?

So Wordsworth is lamenting here the human abandonment of Nature's holy plan - instead of looking at nature for a source of inspiration, man, at least according to Wordsworth, instead looks upon his fellow man for inspiration, and thus plots his own downfall. Indeed, the line What man has made of man could be seen as an adequate description of the encroachment of industrialisation, dominated by man, on the rural life which is, in a sense, dominated instead by nature, or at least, man in his more natural form. This downfall is symbolised to him in the French revolution. In The Prelude, he questions the integrity of the French revolution, lacing the imagery of his travels to France with horrific visions of human suffering and carnage:

Cheered with this hope, to Paris I returned;

[...]

...the Palace lately stormed

With roar of Cannon, by a furious Host.

I crossed the square (an empty area then!)

Of the Carousel, where so late had lain

The Dead, upon the Dying heaped; and gazed

On this and other Spots, as doth a Man

Upon a Volume whose contents he knows

Are memorable, but from him locked up,

Being written in a tongue he cannot read;

This extract from The Prelude reads like a manifesto. His revolutionary aim to reconcile consciousness, a term which can also be read as humanity or existence, with redemption, or else nature or God, is here given weight and meaning - he has no desire to be exclusive, to write in a tongue he cannot read, nor does he wish to skirt around the issues that plagued the emergence of urbanity; The Dead, upon the Dying heaped, the Roar of Cannon, the Palace lately stormed. It is interesting that the square is empty, seemingly to convey the emptiness of humanity in the urban sprawl. In this passage he outlines his views on the role the poet has to play in exposing the mind and thus instigating a quiet revolution of the mind. Spivak suggests that: Wordsworth offers his own poetry as a cure for human oppression and suffering because it teaches one where to look for human value. This search for human value is presented in an accessible way to people that would most benefit from the subjective knowledge his poetry reveals about the human mind and its link with the natural world.

Additionally, Wordsworth believes that poetry had the quality of reintegrating this link between man and nature: in The Prelude, he heralds the great poets: The great Nature that exists in works / Of mighty poets Therefore, physical acts of revolution don't resolve or change anything, and the answer lies in the hearts of man, expressed according to Wordsworth in the reconciliation of knowledge and nature. Spivak suggests that The position [of Wordsworth] is that social relations of production cannot touch the inner resources of man. The corollary: revolutionary politics, seeking to change those social relations, are therefore superfluous; poetry, disclosing man's inner resources, is the only way. Indeed, Wordsworth believes that traditional labour, as demonstrated by his descriptions of the workers and vagrants that cluttered the countryside during the time of his writing, has an ability to transcend the miseries of urban alienation, and indeed, he emphasises this by choosing to abandon the neoclassical modes taught in the schools that he had become alienated by, instead pursuing a more earthy language relevant to man. In the general preface to his Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth describes what he believes the role of the poet to be:

Taking up the subject, then, upon general grounds, I ask what is meant by the word 'poet'? What is a poet? To whom does he address himself? And what language is to be expected from him? He is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endued with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind; a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him.

So, in championing the language of the ordinary man, Wordsworth in turn changes and revolutionizes the politics of poetry in such a way as to no longer make it the exclusive haven for learned men. Although he still believes in the unique capacities and abilities of the poet, he also believes that it is their greater knowledge of human nature, rather than their intrinsic and learned knowledge from schools or universities, that determine their overall quality. Famously, later in the preface, he calls poetry a spontaneous outpouring, and, in doing so, places subjectivity and consciousness firmly at the centre of his revolutionary politic in trying to find human redemption in the hills and vales of Grasmere and the Lake District.

Wordsworth was a revolutionary poet, and his attempts to reconcile the terrors of industrialisation and the French revolution, and instigate instead a humanity in tune with the laws of its own nature and of the natural world that surrounds it. Wordsworth employs a number of techniques to achieve this. Firstly, he abandons the neoclassical school that taught a deeply conservative curriculum. Wordsworth was not interested in simply rehashing what the poets from previous generations had already done. Instead, he wanted a poetry less hermetic and more deeply rooted in the vernacular of the ordinary man. His poetry frequently uses devices such as sing-song and limerick to achieve this, and the subject matter he describes is not of Gods or heroes, but are instead of ordinary people working and eking out an existence in the dilapidated rural environment of the Lake District. Wordsworth's distrust of urbanity places nature at the forefront of his imaginative palette, believing nature to possess both God, and the redemptive spirit that, in the abandonment of, humanity is seen by Wordsworth as being in slow, inexorable decline. Wordsworth, by using a different voice and tackling an entirely different subject matter, attempted to fuse concepts of consciousness, that human quandary, and redemption, which he saw glittering in both the external and the internal analysis of what was perceived as the natural world.

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