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MORRIS DICKSTEIN
likening Wordsworth's "Resolution and Independence" to Spenser's
Prothalamion
he goes on to write:
Spenser's refrain ... "Sweet Themmes, runne softly,
till
I end
my song," is the very emblem of literary and natural continuity,
and indicates by its steady return how much time is at man's
disposal, how everything will flow along in order and degree,
and how the world is too well established on the
flood
for any
"end" to be feared. But Wordsworth's greatest lyrics are acts of
a living mind open to the terror of discontinuity. His encounter
with the Leech-gatherer is unrelieved by myth or allegory or
any steadying indulgence.
Here Hartman renders the full force of the poet's attempt to confront
his condition nakedly, without the mediation or consolation of myth.
He frees himself decisively from the limitations of the archetypal critics;
from their erudite stress (in Frye's case) on convention over invention;
from their refusal to deal with what Frank Kermode calls "the personal
presence of a work of art, its existential complexities, all that makes it
mean something
now."
Hartman's book is a deceptive one. Nothing would seem to mean
less
now
than a study of the interplay of Imagination and Nature in
Wordsworth. Nature is a dead word to the modem sensibility, and
such "reciprocity" has long been a cliche of academic criticism. But
Hartman makes us feel for the first time the
contingency
of Wordsworth–
ian reciprocity. His theme is not the dubious myth of the marriage of
mind and nature ("fitting
&
fitted") that so enraged Blake. Instead
Hartman records the "acts of a living mind open to the terror of dis–
continuity," and argues that this sense of terror, which he finds to be
primal to Wordsworth's mind, engenders a dialectic; it makes some
theory of continuity necessary. Hartman's real project is to give a more
complex account of the English Romantics by calling upon terms and
strategies more highly developed in German romanticism and philo–
sophy. The antithetical model for his view of Wordsworth's develop–
ment is a paradigm made explicit in Germany, according to which
alienation from nature is the first condition of the emergence into
consciousness: selfhood implies separation. He argues that the early
Wordsworth himself glimpsed this prospect and saw something even
more terrifying-that the imagination,
his
imagination, not only threat–
ened to sunder him from nature but was an apocalyptic force that sought
no less than the overthrow of nature. What Wordsworth then confusingly
goes on calling "Nature" develops as a response to the threat of aliena–
tion. In "The Ruined Cottage," he says, "at last, consciousness is not a
