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THE SILENT POET: AN ASPECT OF WORDSWORTH'S SEMANTIC THEORY STEPHEN K. LAND A general drift in semantic theory through the eighteenth century from representational to organic models has long been recognized, but the way in which Wordsworth's important statements on diction and expression relate to this tradition remains to be defined. There is initially some reaSOn to suppose that he shared with Coleridge the general view that the words in any (poetic) utterance are (or should be) integrally related to the state of mind that gives them birth, but a closer look at Wordsworth's theoretical statements and poetic practices will bring this supposition into question. In the eighteenth century, language was seen as structurally organic or semantically organic. Structural organicism derives from genetic considerations of language and results in the idea that a given language is built up from a relatively small number of roots with fixed but general meanings. Such theories clearly depend upon a concept of etymology and generally owe much to Locke's briefly-stated etymological principle: It may also lead us alittle towards the original of all our notions and knowledge, if we remark how great a dependence our words have on common sensible ideas, and how those which are made use of to stand for actions and notions quite removed from sense have their rise fram thence, and fram obvious sensible ideas are transferred to more abstruse significations, and made to stand for ideas that come not under the cognizance of OUI senses.... Spirit, in its primary signification, is breath; angel, a messenger; and I doubt not but, if we could trace them to their sources, we should find in all languages the names, which stand for things that fall not under our senses, to have had their first rise from sensible ideas.' Locke's principle is echoed in the mid century by Anselm Bayly2 and subsequently adopted as a basis for such etymological systems as those of de Brosses, Court de Gebelin, and Home Tooke.' The structural appli· cation of Lockean etymology is made clear by Lord Monboddo, who suggests that all significant words in classical Greek are etymologically derived from verbs and that all the Greek verbs can be etymologically derived 'from combination in duads of the '" with the other five vowels a, E, ", 0 , v, the w always being last; so that aw, {,W, LW, OW, VW, are the UTQ, Volume XLU, Number 2, Winter 1973 158 STEPHEN K. LAND radical sounds from which the whole Greek language, various and copious as it is, may be deduced." Monboddo's theory of organic structure, which owes much to the abstract but impressive formulations set out by Adam Smith in his Considerations concerning the First Formation of Languages (1759), is applied to Sanskrit by Friedrich Schlegel and so passed On to the philologists of the nineteenth century. Semantic organicism is somewhat more nebulous and therefore less easy to trace historically. Its classic eighteenth-century statement occurs in Herder's Ueber den Ursprung der Sprache (published 1772) which posits the virtual identity of linguistic and rational processes. For example , Herder shows that 'not even the least use of reason, not even the simplest distinct recognition, not the most primitive judgment of human reflection is possible without a distinguishing mark (Merkmal), for the difference between one and another can never be recognized through anything but a third. Precisely this third, this characteristic mark, becomes thus an inner characteristic word (inneres Merkwort): so that language follows quite naturally from the initial act of reason." Semantic organicism at its simplest consists in the view that language is not distinguishable from the mental events it serves to communicate but is, on the contrary, an essential part of those events. An important corollary of semantic organicism should be observed at this point. Just as the language is indistinguishable from the rational process, so we should logically expect from the model the rational process (or thought) to be indistinguishable from the language. This would be the case in Herder's formulation of the theory, but we shall see that it is not true of semantic models suggested by Wordsworth. Structural and semantic organicism are conceptually distinct, but in...

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