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Wordsworth's Images of Language: Voice and Letter in The Prelude

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

J. Douglas Kneale
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Abstract

In Wordsworth's language a voice as enduring as epitaphic inscription interpenetrates a writing as immediate as the breath of speech. While voice might seem the appropriate linguistic ideal for a poet who saw himself as “a man speaking to men,” Wordsworth's desire for a more durable language produces a competing “insistence of the letter.” “Images of voice” in nature exist in a “strength / Of usurpation” with the written characters that nature imprints. The epitaphic text emerges as the intersection of voice and letter, in which the autobiographical subject attempts to constitute itself in textual form. Wordsworth's meeting with the blind Beggar strikingly illustrates the interpenetration of voice, self, and text. Writing, for Wordsworth, is not the death of voice but the consummation: it is the accomplishment of voice.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 101 , Issue 3 , May 1986 , pp. 351 - 361
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1986

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