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  • Paul Fry’s Wordsworth, and the Meaning of Poetic Meaning, or Is It on-Meaning? Letter to a Colleague and Friend
  • Geoffrey Hartman

“The ontic, unsemantic, self-identity of things”

(Fry 2008: 7)

“the ontological unity of human and nonhuman things appears in the moment when the differential significance we confer on things is bracketed by the under-determination of significance in lyric utterance”

(23)

“not attaching significance to an object is not the same as seeing the insignificance of things to be their fundamental unity”

(104–105)

“No one writing before had ever tried not to mean”

(20)

“surely ‘poetic feeling’ is not a meaning but an aura of cosmicity. . . . The new element then must be, in Wordsworth’s case, the exhilarated feeling of unity inspired by the indifference, the lack of meaning, in all the registers of nonhuman being”

(21)

A fearless litterateur ventures with this book into the thought-thicket of the meaning of non-meaning, a subject, some may feel, as close to mysticism as to nihilism, yet which illuminates Wordsworth’s poetry and even perhaps lyric poetry in general, especially its intense defamiliarized images as well as thoughts about the cosmos and our place in it.

I would like to by-pass most philosophic com- or perplexities. But not without admitting that I cannot always tell what in Paul Fry’s commentary bears on philosophical and what on poetical issues — which is not necessarily a defect since it points to matters at once hermeneutic and existential, as it does in the writings of Heidegger.

Perhaps it is best to describe the aim of this major study as not only a redefining of Wordsworth’s poetry but also clearing the way toward a [End Page 1] better definition of the place or function of poetry in general. Neither mysticism nor nihilism play a part in this but rather what my colleague once characterized as an “a-theologic astonishment” (1995: 7).

This negative (“a-theologic”) move is directed at more than a speak-easy type of religious or transcendental appropriation of a literary medium that remains enigmatic in its anthropological function. Yet precisely because we long for something more positive and bracing, something to rescue poetry, and the aesthetic dimension in general, from Limbo, it is risky to define a great poet by a seeming understatement, the “poetry of what we are.”

Wordsworth’s lines, moreover, from which Paul Fry extracts this subtitle for his book, could be ambiguous. For the unabbreviated text reads: “words / Which speak of nothing more than what we are.”1 This could imply that the poet’s words (which continue in a high-prophetic tone) are not exaggerated, that what we are is greater than we know. They remain, therefore, part of a virtual overstatement rather than understatement, part of a rhetoric of transcendence. Compare the final line of the “After-thought” closing the River Duddon sonnet sequence: “We feel that we are greater than we know.”

I am not convinced, then, by my friend’s claim that the “nothing more” in the original sentence is a “curtailment” serving to emphasize that Wordsworth, also by writing “what we are” instead of “who we are,” conveys a “depersonification, or reification of the human as a thing in itself” (2008: ix–x). Revealing a contrarian streak, Fry praises qualities which are usually dispraised, and not associated with Wordsworth. But I agree that the poet envisions an expansion of the relatedness of non-human and human being, a relatedness fundamental and at times rock-bottom like. Talking about the “ground” of being is no longer only a curious metaphor.

For Fry the recurrent analogy to cosmic and mineral connects with Wordsworth’s challenge, in his major early poetry, to hierarchic modes of thinking and imaging. He habitually stresses “the one Presence,” the “life within us and abroad,” and specifies how by his seventeenth year (he is precise about numbers) he felt the “sentiment of Being spread / O’er [End Page 2] all that moves, and all that seemeth still” (1805 Prelude 2.420f, my italics). So also, in a remarkable passage of The Excursion, Wordsworth depicts a boy (the Wanderer as a child) sitting among...

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