-
Felix Bernstein uploaded William Wordsworth and the Crisis of the “Belle Âme”: Solipsism and Communicability in Expressivist Poetics James Mark Shields to
Introduction to Doctoral Studies in English: English 70000 9 years, 2 months ago This essay argues that Wordsworth is not merely the egocentric subjectivist poet he is often thought to be, but rather sought to transcend his own poetic subjectivity. In this way, Wordsworth foreshadowed Heidegger’s assertion that language speaks, and then Lacan’s notion of the unconscious structured like a language. By de-centering the authorial expressivity, a larger structure of symbolic communication can occur. To the author, Wordsworth nearly escapes the fate of the solipsistic expressionistic Romantic poets, who cannot give up their own subjective perfection in the face of the Other. This essay interests me because it links philosophy (Heidegger), psychoanalytic thought (Lacan), and poetry (Wordsworth), yet remains fairly historical in it’s delineation of a sensibility’s progression.
