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The poetry of Wordsworth seems, at first thought, to draw less from the visual sense than that of Milton, or Shelley, or Keats, or many another. For Wordsworth's manner is not a pictorial manner; his poetic methods are not those of the artist; he was no searcher out of the striking; and beauty, as commonly understood, was not to him the supreme inspiration.
1 The author gratefully acknowledges her debt to Professor A. C. Bradley for his invaluable advice in the arrangement of this paper.
2 It is not intended here to speak of Wordsworth's interest in such visual perceptions as form, mass, motion, light, and colour, but only to consider his faculty of sight in itself, and the relation in him of physical to poetical or spiritual vision.
3 The Early Days of William Wordsworth, 1770–1798.
4 It must be noted, however, that in a letter to “Christopher North,” he declares that “no human being can be so besotted and debased … as to be utterly insensible to the colours, forms, or smell of flowers, the voices and motions of birds and beasts,” and many other appearances of Nature.
5 The Age of Wordsworth, p. 159.
5a An apt illustration of this saying, from one who has lost the sense of sight, occurs in the Red Cross Magazine, April, 1919, p. 60. Sir Arthur Pearson tells his “interviewer”: “It is astonishing, really, how much of a man's life is automatic, depending on sight. A man … really is active most of his life through his eyes. He lets the other senses use themselves, and the eye suppresses most of them. I might say that he lets the eyes do everything and the mind very little; for he sees without actually perceiving. Well, in a blind man the other senses get a chance to exercise themselves, he has conscious perception through them. And of course, at first, that is a great mental strain.”
6 The Age of Wordsworth, p. 150.
7 The Early Days of William Wordsworth, p. 460.
7a Sir Walter Raleigh (Wordsworth, pp. 66–7) says in connection with the above passage, “It was a kind of possession through the eye that became the type of poetic inspiration to him, a possession nowhere better described than in” the lines in question. The whole paragraph from which this sentence is taken bears upon the subject.