Simplicity, Otherness, and Poetic Language

SIMPLICITY, OTHERNESS, AND POETIC LANGUAGE David Palumbo-Liu Stanford University "I cannot paintlWhat then I was."-Wordsworth, "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintem Abbey on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour. July 13, 1798," lines 75-76. The usual interpretation of this pronouncement, made about half way through this exemplary English Romantic poem, is that it is an admission of a failed project. It is merely a pretext for an elaboration of what really concerns Wordsworth-the valorization of his "lapsed" state that provides him with the opportunity to go beyond the immediate, fmite and transitory aspects of mortality and into the eternal realm of the creative imagination. This prior state is endowed with a naive and immediate being-in-nature that is absolutely irretrievable; 1 however, Wordsworth ultimately argues for the superiority of the abstract intelligence mediated by art. Despite the shift of focus, this unrepresentable ontology of innocence is endowed with a subtextual persistence, this prior state remains a necessary counterpoint to the portrayal of what the poet is now, and what he hopes to remain to be via the proper reading of the words he leaves behind. And it is precisely this resistance to representation that makes the naive a particularly alluring and elusive concept. As the portrayal of "now" relies on the instantiation of an absent and unrepresentable past, the constitution of the speaking Self relies on an opposite Other-while there is no question but that the poet's voice, as Wallace Stevens will write a century later, has "[taken] dominion everywhere," 2 the complex 1 Here I am using the term as conceived by Friedrich von Schiller in his Naive and Sentimental Poetry, trs. Julias A. Elias (New York: Ungar Publishing, 1966). For Schiller, the naive describes a state of innocent being wherein the split between the subject and the object does not exist; one has no consciousness of being essentially separate from the phenomenal world. 2 "Anecdote of the Jar," in Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems (New York: Vintage Books, 1982), 76. CHINOPERL Papers No. 20-22 (1997-99)© 1999 by the Conference on Oral and Performing Literature, Inc. CHINOPERL Papers No. 20-22 project of representing the past, present, and future involves an expanded cast of characters-the poem asserts a necessary intersubjectivity upon which to make its moral and aesthetic claims. Two "others" are co-occupants of Wordsworth's poem, each one representing a different aspect of the poet's former state of immediacy with Nature. First, there is the possibility of the Hermit: ... Once again I see These hedgerows, hardly hedgerows, little lines Of sportive wood run wild; these pastoral farms, Green to the very door; and wreathes of smoke Sent up, in silence, from among the trees! With some uncertain notice, as might seem Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods, Or of some Hermit's cave, where by his fire The Hermit sits alone. (lines 14-22) As the poet's eyes sweep over the landscape, he makes various attempts to represent the scene; each one modified, reapproached, approximated, charting the vectors of the poet's imaginative language. Ultimately, the scene becomes an index to a space outside the poem, which in tum is filled in by fictionality. The smoke is an index to a purpose, the purpose to an agent: in the midst of this (admitted) indeterminancy ("some uncertain notice"), which "might seem" to be coming from "vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods," we have the solitary, but nonetheless distinct figure of the Hermit. Yet just as suddenly as he is evoked, the Hermit disappears-we quickly move to another tableau-Wordsworth turns his gaze to himself, "in lonely rooms," recollecting these "beauteous forms." The parallel between the Hermit and the poet could not be clearer, nor the parallel dynamic of index, referent, and agent-the smoke signals the absent Hermit, who gazes into the fire. Yet there the parallel ends, for while the Hermit is mute, the poet speaks. And it is this will to speak, to articulate an intelligence, that marks the critical difference between the other and the poet. In "painting" himself now, Wordsworth takes recourse to a fictionalized totality...