Collateral Objects: Natural Abstraction in Wordsworth and Rankine

This essay highlights the rise of natural or ontological abstraction in eighteenth-century British empiricism. This natural abstraction differs from our conventional theories about abstraction in being understood as a feature of the world itself, rather than a feature of our relation to the world. The essay then positions William Wordsworth's The Prelude and Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric as significant poetic engagements with the fact of natural abstraction and the indirect or "collateral" modes of apprehension it entails. Focusing on the place in these poems of abstraction and collateral modes of apprehension (like free indirect style) alters our understanding of the history of lyric and romanticism's relation to it.