In this book, I enter two apparently divergent contemporary critical discussions of Wordsworth—discussions centering on the concepts of “ecology” and “rhetoric”—and suggest some ways in which the two can be productively related. The text explores a central epistemic problem that informs both of these contemporary discussions, offers a multilevel history of that problem and its effect on Western culture and literary criticism, and positions that problem at the heart of Wordsworth’s poetic project. The problem, simply stated, is our uncritical acceptance and application of a Cartesian/Newtonian model of knowledge that can no longer be considered valid.

Our culture—and our critical discourse—have been built upon fundamentally Cartesian dichotomies: spirit/mind versus body/matter, individual mind versus social and natural worlds, feeling versus thinking. These dichotomies are at the foundations of our language; they form some of the most recalcitrant of what Wordsworth called our “preestablished codes of decision” (“Advertisement” to Lyrical Ballads). Even when a critical discourse explicitly questions them, they have a tendency to creep back into the text and to undermine efforts to escape them. The seriousness of this problem is embodied in the effort of David Bohm, a well-respected contemporary physicist, to create a “rheomode” of language that might help us to overcome the subject-verb-object orientation that limits our conceptions of the human/nature interface.  If we do not have a language that allows us to talk about relationships and interactions without dividing them into reified things and consciousnesses, then it is hard to conceive of them as primary characteristics of our world.

Contemporary scientists understand now the difficulty—and the essential falsehood—of dividing and subdividing the many processes of life into tidy and manageable categories. In physics, advances that illustrate that this difficulty is “built in” at the atomic level have been current since the early twentieth century. In biology and environmental studies, advances that clearly articulate the interdependence of living systems have emerged in the past few decades. But as Kroeber claims in Ecological Literary Criticism, scholars engaged in literary criticism have typically worked from the epistemic assumptions that guided nineteenth-century, rather than twentieth-century, science. These assumptions have created significant critical “blind spots” in the study of Wordsworth and British Romanticism. In spite of the many critical explorations of Wordsworth’s philosophy (Grob, Rader), his reaction to science (Durrant, Stallknecht), and his views of the relation between the individual mind and the social and natural worlds (Clarke, Garber, Jones, and Rzepka)—subjects that encourage an investigation of Wordsworth’s epistemology—no one has explored the possibility that his writings might represent an epistemic experiment in which poetry plays a key role.

The history of Wordsworth criticism shows that efforts to read his writing within the framework of Cartesian oppositions inevitably make his thinking seem obtuse, paradoxical, and even naive. If we assume that Wordsworth offered a doctrine of personal experience that was meant to replace science and technology—even “objective” thinking—then it becomes nearly impossible to take his thinking seriously. Matthew Arnold took this position, insisting that we should celebrate the personal power of Wordsworth’s poetry and simply dismiss his rather muddleheaded philosophy from consideration.

While no one reads Wordsworth from the Arnoldian position today, my point is that Wordsworth has been read, and continues to be read, through what might be called a “Cartesian filter.” And as a result, his complicated statements in the Prefaces concerning the connections between thinking and feeling, mind and “Nature,” and body and spirit have been either (1) ignored completely or (2) oversimplified by being recast in dualistic terms. Critics who analyze them typically “murder to dissect” by demanding that Wordsworth’s thinking conform to their own assumptions. They strive to make them falsely clear rather than richly complicated.
 In order to illustrate the unfortunate implications of reading Wordsworth through a “Cartesian filter,” I will briefly examine some important positions taken in Wordsworthian scholarship and show how Cartesian assumptions have repeatedly shaped our readings of Wordsworth. We must begin, of course, with M. H. Abrams’ account of Wordsworth’s “literary theory” in his milestone book The Mirror and the Lamp. In this book, Abrams claimed that the 1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads had “something of the aspect of a romantic manifesto” (100), and effectively established that Wordsworth’s writings were central to the development of romantic theories of poetry and literature in England. As a result, this text has served as a point of departure for, and has set the terms of, much subsequent scholarship. Unfortunately, Abrams relied on Cartesian oppositions when reading Wordsworth, reducing many of the complexities of the Preface to simple dichotomies. For example, he began from the premise that for Wordsworth (and later romantics) “Poetry is the expression or overflow of feeling, or emerges from a process of imagination in which feelings play the crucial part” (101).  His assumption was that “feeling” could only be seen as a category opposed to “thinking.” He neglected to examine the difficulties of interpreting just what Wordsworth meant by “feeling,” a term that Wordsworth sometimes used in the Preface to indicate “sensation” or “perception” as well as “emotion.” And he did not attempt to enter into the complexities of Wordsworth’s discussion of how “feeling” and “thinking” are related—complexities that qualify Wordsworth’s now famous statement that “poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.”

Starting from this assumption, Abrams articulated further “propositions about the nature and criteria of poetry” (100–01) that Wordsworth supposedly set forth and his contemporaries adopted. He framed Wordsworth’s opposition between the language of Poetry and the language of Science in terms established by late Romantic and early Victorian critics—“the difference between expression and description, or between emotive language and cognitive language” (101). He even went so far as to quote an 1835 source that carried this distinction to its far extreme: “‘Prose is the language of intelligence, poetry of emotion’” (101). By this time, Abrams was already far removed from Wordsworth’s complex and thoughtful struggle to articulate a different view of poetry in the Preface, and he was able to state the nature of Wordsworth’s contribution in terms that seem straightforward but are really far too simplistic:
 

Wordsworth, then, the first great romantic poet, may also be accounted the critic whose highly influential writings, by making the feelings of the poet the center of critical reference, mark a turning point in English literary theory. (103)

Typical of critics working in the Cartesian mode, Abrams sought clarity by reducing the difficulties of Wordsworth’s Prefaces to a workable formula. And by offering a framework built on simple dichotomies, he has contributed to the field of pervasive assumptions about Wordsworth that began with Coleridge, came down to us through Arnold, and has informed Wordsworth scholarship ever since. Two of the most powerful assumptions that Abrams crystallized are:
 

1. Wordsworth developed an “expressive” discursive stance centered on his own utterances and feelings rather than on any substantial rhetorical engagement of subjects or audiences, and

2. Wordsworth was more concerned with issues of “feeling” than with issues of thinking, and he set a course for poetry that followed this path.

Both of these assumptions are framed by Cartesian dichotomies between “mind” and “world” and between “feeling” and “thinking”—dichotomies that Wordsworth confronts directly and vehemently in the evolving Preface to Lyrical Ballads.

These two assumptions have made it very hard to deal with Wordsworth’s self-proclaimed moral and social purposes—his clearly stated urgency to make a difference for his culture—and his “philosophy.” How can a man who centers his work on his own feelings and expressions be effective at changing anything? And how can a romantic poet, whose focus is feelings, be an effective thinker and philosopher? Many critics have been aware of and have stressed the fact that Wordsworth was attempting to rescue poetry from its own artificiality and to bring it back to terms with “real life” (Sharrock, for example). But they have found his philosophy inconsistent (if not incoherent) in dualistic terms, and they have found it difficult to examine his social and moral purposes within the domain of his seemingly subjective and expressive stance.

A frustrating example is Robert Langbaum’s The Poetry of Experience. In this text, Langbaum implied that for Wordsworth, and for “romantic” poets, knowledge was an ongoing process that started with and was sustained by individual perception and personal experience. These individuals, he claimed, worked from the conviction that

formulation itself must never be allowed to settle into dogma, but must emerge anew every day out of experience. It must be lived, which is to say that it must carry within it its subjective origin, its origin in experience and self-realization. (20)

But Langbaum read Wordsworth with Cartesian assumptions, and as a result his analysis could not take such a direction. He claimed that romanticism was “a doctrine of experience, an attempt to salvage on science’s own empiric grounds the validity of individual perception against scientific abstractions” (27). The key word here is “against”—as if somehow we could throw out all of what scientific abstractions have offered and replace them by a doctrine of purely personal experience. And that, of course, is both impossible and undesirable. By cleaving the world into the “individual” and the “scientific,” Langbaum again placed Wordsworth and romantic poets at large in the camp of “subjectivity,” implying that their “doctrine of experience” could have no real import beyond the perceptual world of a few poets (and critics).

In the contemporary discussions of Wordsworth, this problem remains. New Historical readings of Wordsworth again assert his tendency to secure “subjective” retreats by overlooking or obfuscating the history of his times. Even efforts to take Wordsworth’s poetic project seriously—to see it as socially-engaged—often fail because of the “Cartesian trap.” For example, in The Supplement of Reading, Rajan claims that the Preface to Lyrical Ballads

Enlists poetics in the service of hermeneutics by arguing that poetry can facilitate understanding across social boundaries. (136)

More specifically, it [the Preface] expands hermeneutics in a social direction by making the sharing of feelings the foundation for the establishment of transcultural values. (136)

But in contemporary discussions of Wordsworth, we also have the arguments of Bate, Kroeber, and Hewitt.  And they offer new approaches to Wordsworth that are very promising. They take issue with the limitations imposed by critics who presuppose that Wordsworth is, above all else, “subjective,” and begin to frame ways in which we can see the seriousness of Wordsworth’s poetic project and—perhaps—even use Wordsworth’s ideas today. I wish to extend their efforts by looking back to the sources of the problem that has plagued both our culture and the critical discourse about Wordsworth: to show that what Bate and Kroeber call “cold war criticism” emerged from a philosophical tradition that has its roots in ancient Greece.

In this text, I propose that Wordsworth’s writings represent a carefully considered and disciplined effort to recast or replace the Cartesian/Newtonian model of knowing. I show that by exploring the ways Wordsworth attempted to subvert and remake Cartesian assumptions, we can enter a frame of reference in which personal identity, social structures, and the natural world are all interrelated rather than exclusive of each other. And we can begin to “see Wordsworth whole” without reducing the multiplicity of his work to a few simple rules.

I am not the first to attempt an extended non-Cartesian reading of Wordsworth. John Rudy’s Wordsworth and the Zen Mind nicely illustrates the critical shortcomings of approaching Wordsworth with Cartesian assumptions, and very effectively moves discussion of Wordsworth outside the bounds of Cartesian dualism.  The “idiom of Zen” provides him with a different paradigm for examining Wordsworth’s compositions, and his account captures the movement away from simple oppositions in Wordsworth’s thinking. But Rudy overstates his case when he claims that

Much of Wordsworth’s poetry … labors to hide or to obliterate the felt presence of a separate organizing or opposing self in favor of a prejudgmental, prereflective consciousness so deeply aligned with a perceived matrix of creative forces that it is impossible to say where the world’s energies leave off and those of the poet begin. (12)

Like Rudy, I utilize a different paradigm to recontextualize Wordsworth’s poetic project in non-Cartesian terms. But I ground my project in what Wordsworth would have known—the language and concepts of classical rhetoric that were at his disposal—and attempt to show how Wordsworth sought to extend rhetorical thinking into the domain of what he called “the language of the sense.” In order to achieve this goal I offer some extended discussion of some lesser-known principles of Quintilian—which include, interestingly enough, the importance of meditation in the act of composing—and integrate some of the seminal ideas of twentieth-century scientists—particularly Gregory Bateson, who instigated cybernetic and systemic inquiries in the fields of biology, psychology, anthropology, and communications , and Antonio Damasio, a neurologist who has illustrated the necessary connection between “emotion” and “reason” and offered a non-reductive way to link physical and mental processes into a continuum —to show that Wordsworth’s efforts to establish connections between mind and body, mind and world, and feeling and thinking were coherent and powerful rather than “muddleheaded” or simply “paradoxical.”  The rhetorical tradition articulates the interrelationships that Wordsworth explored: between language and the world being represented, between speaker and audience, between feeling and thinking, and between thinking and acting. As I state in my postscript, a revitalization of rhetoric can complement the “systems thinking” that has become predominant in contemporary science—particularly biology and ecology—and perhaps offer a much-needed and meaningful new role for the study of literature and composition. I hope that others will pursue the connections that I suggest in this book.
 

In the 1790s Wordsworth was setting out to do more than simply rescue poetry, though that is undoubtedly part of what he sought to do. As an author, he entered a culture that was putting the final touches on a model of knowledge that treated “reality” as an ontological category and “language” and “perception” as epistemological categories. Language could be used to represent reality, or to distort the perception of reality, but it had no impact on reality itself (because, in Locke’s formulation, the essential forms of reality existed prior to both perception and language).  Knowledge had been claimed by the scientists and philosophers, who asserted that they used language transparently to convey reality. Orators and poets were left with an uncertain role in the culture, because their discourse could make no such claim.

In general terms, the discourses of philosophy and science had attained the status of knowledge because they purported to deal with fact and logic and truth in clear, non-affective language. “Rhetoric” was seen as a discourse of persuasion, “interest,” and “enthusiasm”—highly loaded terms of the time—which might generate revolution but which had nothing to do with knowledge. And “Poetry” had been placed in the role of speaking the truths of science and philosophy with the grace and beauty of art. This division between the discourse of knowledge and the discourse of art is stated elegantly in Alexander Pope’s much-repeated dictum:

True Wit is Nature to Advantage drest,
What oft was Thought, but ne’er so well Exprest.

But despite the growing confidence in Newtonian science and its explanation of the world as “matter in motion,” difficult questions about the nature and limits of human knowing were in the air. What was the source of authoritative knowledge? Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France deals with this question, and in fact can be seen as a treatise on “cultural epistemology” as well as on politics.  If moral philosophy cannot produce working systems for understanding and effecting human behavior, where will human behavior go? (Framed by the French Revolution, this question was indeed terrifying!) If science does not deal with issues of value and affect, what will? What are the technical or instrumental limits on human knowing? And is it worthwhile to philosophize about them (one of Hume’s final questions)?

By the late eighteenth century, the answers to these questions that had been—and were being—offered were cementing into place a scientific epistemology like the one described by Morris Berman in The Reenchantment of the World. That epistemology was technology-centered, emerging from the belief that “mind” and “spirit” were “internal” features of human beings, and that the world (including the human body) was “external,” consisting of “matter in motion” to be shaped and used as humans saw fit. In effect, the faculty of reason had gradually been reduced from Right Reason, which was a faculty capable of judging morality as well as veracity, to instrumental reason, which was seen simply as a tool for building both systems of thought and new industries.  In this epistemology, “to know something is to control it” (Berman 40). Issues of personal value and meaning were not being clearly addressed, except perhaps in limited utilitarian and capitalistic terms.

Berman claims that this epistemology represents nothing short of a cultural madness—the purposeful dismissal of entire dimensions of human experience and knowing in the name of utility and a myth of objective knowledge. My claim is that Wordsworth enters the scene at just the right time to sense this development clearly enough to battle it, but that he lacks the critical vocabulary to articulate it fully and the support to beat it. His repeated references in his Prefaces and letters to the problems of his culture should have a direct bearing on the way we approach his work. In fact, he was trying desperately to rescue his culture from a killing epistemology—one that, by implying that matters of fact (seen as “objective knowledge”) can and should be separated from matters of value (seen as “subjective” or “personal” choices), has brought us to the brink of destruction in the twentieth century.

His tools for grappling with this underlying cultural problem were primitive in some ways—partly drawn from, and limited by, what Abrams calls “an amalgam” of “eighteenth-century speculations” and “prevalent ideas” (104).  But as a student of classical rhetoric, and a participant in the broader processes of the natural world he grew up in, he was better equipped than we might think to respond intelligently to the epistemic problems of his day and age. This text attempts to step outside the confines of the killing epistemology that he sought to balance and correct, and to place the central terms and patterns of his work within a broader context framed by the ancient and ongoing battle between philosophy and rhetoric on one hand and an alternative epistemological stance—an “ecology of mind” offered by Gregory Bateson in our own century—on the other. Employing his knowledge of classical rhetoric, particularly Quintilian’s Institutes of Oratory, and his own developing sense of the complexities of perception and representation, Wordsworth developed an epistemological stance that was founded on personal experience, representation, relationship, and revision rather than on the establishment of “demonstrable” or “objective” knowledge. He centered his epistemology on what he perceived to be a continuum connecting perception, feeling, thinking and acting, and on the integrative relationship between individual minds and what he saw as larger mindlike processes (particularly “Nature”).

What this means, of course, is that Wordsworth chose to view epistemology in terms of “composition” rather than in terms of “correctness” or “error.” The title of this text—Wordsworth and the Composition of Knowledge—comes from his convictions that human meaning and value are composed by mental processes and representations and that knowing is a state of relationship rather than an accumulation of data. He seeks to return poetry to its origins, not in “primitive utterance of feelings” but in “poesis” or making. He views knowing as an ongoing process of representing experience both biologically, in perception, and intellectually, in mental models. Perception—what he calls the “language of the sense”—and language itself are both processes of representation. The aim of knowing cannot be to ascertain a final, absolute “Truth” or to attain a “correct” representation of an “external” reality. Instead, the aim of knowing is to tune and develop both perception and cognition in such a way as to develop good habits of thought and action. Knowing should not be limited to individual perceptions, to cultural traditions and prevailing opinions, or to a mystical “oneness with the world.” It should be a dynamic engagement of all three. And language, when used appropriately, can help initiate and sustain that engagement rather than closing it by asserting the final validity of mental models or systems of thinking.

Wordsworth frames his views of poetry and the poet in these terms, recognizing that composition embodying real events and feelings can become part of the field of experience for a reader who engages it. As a result, we can both compose experience in life and experience composition in poetry. And knowing in both cases is always artful, charged with creative possibilities and with the moral imperative not to misuse them.

Wordsworth’s interest in travel, his recurrent use of borderers (social outcasts and misfits) as the subjects of his early poetry, and his effort to engage readers with “the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation” (1802 Pref, PW 1: 119) all spring from this epistemology. He recognized that we tend to approach new experiences with a firm set of “pre-established codes of decision” (Adv, PW 1: 106) and that those mental models can trap us. Yet he also believed that our habits of perception, thought, and action could be improved by way of new experiences. This text argues that the keys for him were engagement and participation, which were both initiated and sustained by what he calls “pleasure” in the Preface. As he writes in the Preface, “we have no knowledge … but what has been built up by pleasure, and exists in us by pleasure alone” (Pref,  PW 1: 140). Learning can only take place when the individual opens him or herself to new experiences. And that openness may not be purposive in rational terms, which tend to reduce new experiences to what we aim to get out of them. Excursions, encounters with unfamiliar viewpoints, and surprising moments can be a source of significant learning—if approached with the right state of mind. Wordsworth’s rhetorical task was to create that state of mind in himself and in his readers.

This text makes no attempt to complete or close the discussions of Wordsworth that it opens. Instead it seeks to provide a helpful context and useful critical tools for further inquiry. By articulating the representation-based model of knowing that informs Wordsworth’s discourse experiments, and grounding it in his obviously powerful personal engagement with the natural world and the rhetorical tradition that formed the center of his education, I aim to provide a starting point for more fruitful discussions of his literary theory, his philosophy, his educational ideas, his social and moral purposes, and his poetic and rhetorical strategies for reaching an audience. And within the broader context provided by Berman, I also suggest that Wordsworth’s insights are worth considering as we reshape academic and cultural views of knowing in our own day and age.