A Mind For Ever Voyaging: Wordsworth at Work Portraying Newton and Science by W.K. Thomas and Warren U. Ober (review)

HUMANITIES 125 worth's knowledge and rejection of an author are quite clear, receives only a single reference in the Index, and that to a quotation from Wordsworth himself. The book would have been easier to use if a full-scale bibliography had been provided; references written into the text, though convenient for familiar works, often require for others a search in the Index and a preceding footnote before they can be traced. I note a few minor misprints: 124, delete the quotation mark closing the first inset quotation; 221, for 'a Day' read 'the Day'; 316, n 20, under Bernhardt-Kabisch, the reference should be to Studies in Romanticism 23 (1984). (W.J.B. OWEN) W.K. Thomas and Warren U. Ober. A Mind For Ever Voyaging: Wordsworth at Work Portraying Newton and Science University of Alberta Press. xii, 328. $30.00 This book has much in common with John Livingston Lowes's The Road to Xanadu. Both books are epics, of a kind with The Odyssey, but where Homer recounted a heroic journey into strange and unknown geographical regions, these books belong to the genre of epic source studies journeys into an unfamiliar world of forgotten words and texts. Both books can be read as adventure stories that tell of the critic's journey into the mind of a poet; both seek to discover what the creative mind is in the very act of composition. Nevertheless, they are quite different books. Where Lowes sought to recover tht> submerged patterns of association informing Coleridge's major work by tracing its images back through his notebooks and reading, W.K. Thomas and Warren Ober focus on two lines of poetry, those that Wordsworth added to his description of Fran~;;ois Roubiliac's statue of Newton in the antechapel of Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1838-9: 'The marble index of a Mind for ever I Voyaging thro' strange seas of Thought, alone.' By recontextualizing these lines, by setting them within a largely forgotten milieu of comments about Newton, science, and philosophy, the authors hope to bring the reader, at the end of the book, to that point where everything crystallizes in these two lines. In many senses, they have turned Cuvier on his head. Rather than using one bone to reconstruct a prehistoric beast, they give us the Age of Newton in order to reconstruct these two lines- not what they mean to us, but what they would have meant to Wordsworth, in the act of creation. 'We shall enter, cautiously, into Wordsworth's mind,' the authors tell us, 'and there, by means of a model, witness the processes by which images presumably came together from a wide variety of sources and, being fused in the crucible of his creativity, emerged in a passage of tributary poetry which has been hailed as rivalling and possibly surpassing , the statue of Newton which it describes.' 126 LETTERS IN CANADA 1989 There is much in this book that is quite old-fashioned, especially the authors' almost obsessive preoccupation with authorial intentions and source hunting. Furthermore, the voyage that is actually described is certainly less conclusively a journey into Wordsworth's mind than into the 'bicameral' consciousness of Thomas and Ober. At a time when the theory of allusion has been made into an extremely sophisticated mode of literary analysis, in Harold Bloom's theory ofallusive misreading, orJohn Hollander's work on the allusive structure of literary texts, the authors' lack of concern for formulating what they mean by allusion will raise many problems. Without either a clear verbal or semantic constraint on what is perceived as a verbal debt or allusion, the authors, in the heat of the chase, all too frequently bag anything that moves. And sometimes, they bag things that have not moved for a long time, like the works of Philo of Alexandria. Although this book deals with material that is probably not of great interest to many readers of Wordsworth, it does represent a valuable, if somewhat specialized, contribution to our knowledge of the poet's relationship to scientific thought, especially to the various poetic tributes written about Newton, and of his friendship with Sir William Rowan Hamilton, Professor of...