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The Power of Distance in Wordsworth's Prelude

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

John T. Ogden
John T. Ogden*
Affiliation:
State University of New York, Buffalo
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Abstract

As Wordsworth views the rustic fair at the foot of Helvellyn (VIII. 1-69), distance in the landscape takes on a poetic function, focusing and harmonizing the sights and sounds, and setting the observer apart in a mood of esthetic detachment. As he continues to gaze, distance seems to belittle the men he is viewing, but suddenly his perspective shifts, so that the distant view reveals the preeminence of man. In contrast to this scene, London (Book VII) brings objects too close, leaving him confused and oppressed. In retrospect, however, the temporal distance of memory provides the order and detachment necessary for understanding, and leads him again to see the sublimity of man. Distance in space and time operates on the poet's mind throughout The Prelude to modify, shape, and compose the scenes of his life. Distance is necessary to Wordsworth's love of man, and it characterizes the philosophical pose he assumes for “The Recluse.” In Wordsworth's poetry distance serves as a power of imagination that elevates the act of perception into the act of poetic creation.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 88 , Issue 2 , March 1973 , pp. 246 - 259
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1973

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References

1 Early comment on memory as a means of distancing appears in H. W. Garrod, Wordsworth: Lectures and Essays, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1927), pp. 103–04, 126, 158–60; and in Willard Sperry, Wordsworth's Anti-Climax (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1935), p. 136. More recently Herbert Lindenberger has treated “the ‘spot of time’ as a distancing device, a way of portraying emotion by refracting it through experiences far distant from the present”—On Wordsworth's Prelude (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1963), p. 147. And Christopher Salvesen discusses Wordsworth's “ ‘sense of time’ . . . —a primary awareness of distance and flux rather than, as with memory, an awareness of event”— The Landscape of Memory (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1965), p. 108.

2 The Unmediated Vision (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1954), p. 27.

3 Wordsworth's Poetry, 1787–1814 (New Haven, Conn.:Yale Univ. Press, 1964), p. 168. David Perkins, The Quest for Permanence (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1959), p. 41; see further pp. 30, 39–44. Perkins later speaks of expression as a distancing of emotion by translating it into language (p. 58), thus suggesting an important parallel between observation and composition, or rather the continuity of the process as observation passes into composition. See also David Perkins, Wordsworth and the Poetry of Sincerity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1964), pp. 114–30, where he discusses how Wordsworth comes to love man at a distance.

4 David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature (1739), Book ii, Pt. in, Sees, vii–viii; Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), Pt. i, Sec. vii; Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 2nd ed. (1761), Pt. iii, Ch. ii (Ch. iii after the 5th ed.). Thomas Campbell, “The Pleasures of Hope” (1799), 1. 7: Lascelles Abercrombie calls this line “a sort of attar of romanticism”—Romanticism (London: Martin Seeker, 1926), p. 36; Christopher Hussey uses it to “epitomize the romantic preference for uncertainty and illusion over knowledge”—The Picturesque (1927; rpt. Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1967), p. 272. See further my essay “From Spatial to Aesthetic Distance in the Eighteenth Century,” JHI, forthcoming.

5 The Prelude, ed. Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1959), p. 265. Subsequent quotations from The Prelude are from this edition. Citations are to the 1850 version except where noted.

6 “Psychical distance” gained the specific meaning of “aesthetic distance” through Edward Bullough's essay

7 ‘Psychical Distance’ as a Factor in Art and an Aesthetic Principle,“ British Journal of Psychology, 5 (1912–13), 87–118, rpt. in his Aesthetics: Lectures and Essays, ed. Elizabeth Wilkinson (London: Bowes and Bowes, 1957). Bullough's essay helps explain Wordsworth's state of mind as he represents himself in many episodes of The Prelude, but I do not mean to limit the term ”psychical distance“ to any narrow definition of esthetic experience, for Wordsworth insists upon the superiority of nature to art. Even more relevant to Wordsworth's poetry is a discussion of the real effects of distance by Hugo Marcus, ”Die Distanz in der Landschaft,“ Zeitschrift fiir Aesthetik und allgemeine Kunslwissenschaft, 11 (1916), 46–60.

8 The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire, 2nd ed., ii (Oxford: Clarendon, 1952), 410.

8 Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, in Poetical Works, II, 400–01.

9 Preface to The Excursion, in Poetical Works, v (Oxford: Clarendon, 1949), 2, 3.

10 21 July 1832, in The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. W. G. T. Shedd (New York: Harper, 1854), vi, 404.

11 Biographia Literaria, Ch. xxii, ed. John Shawcross (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1907), ii, 122–23.

12 Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, in Poetical Works, ii, 393.

13 Wordsworth's note to “The Thorn,” in Poetical Works, II, 512.

14 Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art (New York: Scribners, 1953), p. 212. This essay is based upon my doctoral diss, of the same title, Illinois 1966.