pfau article

8/2/2019 Pfau Article

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"Elementary Feelings" and "Distorted Language": The Pragmatics of Culture in Wordsworth'sPreface to Lyrical BalladsAuthor(s): Thomas PfauSource: New Literary History, Vol. 24, No. 1, Culture and Everyday Life (Winter, 1993), pp.125-146Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/469275Accessed: 26/11/2009 11:14

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"Elementary Feelings" and"Distorted Language":The Pragmatics of Culture in Wordsworth'sPreface to LyricalBalladsThomas Pfau

EW TEXTS of the romantic period are more firmly anchoredin the curricular and pedagogical agenda of current romanticstudies than Wordsworth's Preface to LyricalBallads, a circum-stance as commonplace as it is puzzling given what, for the pasthalf century, criticism has found to say about that text. For not-withstanding its own, high-profile investment in a pedagogy con-cerned with reshaping the sensibility underlying both the productionand reception of poetry, Wordsworth's text has almost universallybeen regarded as marked by internal tensions, inconsistencies, dis-continuous argument, and a confused sense of purpose.' Many ofthe obstacles that seem to compromise the recovery of a "unified"argument in Wordsworth's text are significantly rooted in Coleridge'scriticisms of Wordsworth's "theory."2 The impact of Coleridge'scritique, however pertinent or misguided it may be judged, lies withhis roundabout placement of the Preface within a tradition of "poetictheory," thereby falling squarely into what Coleridge considered hisvery "proper" domain. A second aspect of the Preface, no less firmlyarticulated by Coleridge, concerns the introductory function of theessay for the actual poems of the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads.However, the by now familiar argument, most cogently made byDon Bialostosky, that Coleridge consistently misstates the terms and,indeed, misprisions the very purpose of the Preface, does not yetfree us from Coleridge's paradigmatic reading of the text as anintrinsically contradictory poetic theory that proves also extrinsicallyincompatible with the poems it purports, in Coleridge's view at least,to explain to an audience.3 A less cumbersome and more enablingstrategy of reading this text, which has always been made to bearthe burden of someone else's "romanticism," would be an "aggres-sively" (not regressively) close reading that refuses to invest thepoetic topology of the Preface (style, figurative diction, meter, proseNew LiteraryHistory, 1993, 24: 125-146


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NEW LITERARY HISTORYversus poetry, and so on) with the immanence and autonomy ofthe aesthetic first implied by Coleridge's critique and prolonged bymuch critical concern with the "coherence" of Wordsworth's text.Such a reading, directing the "closeness" of its focus at the "interest"(a term repeatedly deployed by Wordsworth) rather than "unity"of the Preface's argument, will find these two notions to overlapdramatically. An extraordinarily consistent argument takes place, ifonly we acknowledge that it is not the argument insinuated by theaesthetic topology of Wordsworth's operative terms. Such a proposed,pragmatist reading receives unexpected encouragement from an-other "close" reader. Even though in her argument formalist preoc-cupations eventually obscure a highly suggestive thesis, JosephineMiles, refreshingly unconcerned with any Coleridgean ambition ofmaking the Preface "mean" some particular brand of "romanticism,"notes how the "problems of diction, problems of figure, problemsof order, all are subordinated, the usual critique of Wordsworth'sdiction to the contrary, to problems of what Wordsworth calledreality: the literal, sympathetic connection between man and nature,between image, feeling, and thought."4Indeed, Wordsworth himself, at the threshold of a new centuryand eager to propose a romantic vision of modernity, appears fullyaware that "reality" itself is not a correlate of perception but aneffect of definition. That is, to define "reality" is to configure, withthe necessary rhetorical and analytic competence, the diverse in-terpretive and evaluative stances under a visibly coherent paradigmof community, which Wordsworth locates in the "affective." As thetheoretical paradigm and communal "rallying point"5 in which thePreface will anchor its definition of the Real, the affective becomesthe focal point of Wordsworth's persistent and significant metaphoricblending of "essential" and "general" features, a practice that servesto align those concepts specifically remarked by Miles: "feeling,""figurative language," and "the rustic." Their paradigmatic andexemplary force, throughout the Preface, inheres in their simul-taneous capacity to signify a collective meaning and to appear as thevery essence or intuition that "grounds" such meaning, a circum-stance that may help explain why the "affective" (from Wordsworthto post-Freudian psychoanalysis) continually defies critical intelli-gence. Thus, what from Miles's formalist perspective may appearto be "literal" can be seen, from a pragmatist point of view, as atype of rhetorical practice which, while ostensibly "denoting" or"signifying" a certain "object," effectively assumes the communalinterpretive stance and its values on which the objectivity of such"literal" essences remains predicated.

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PRAGMATICS OF CULTURE

My principal contention, then, is that in according centrality tonotions of "feeling," figuration, and the "rustic" Wordsworth's Pref-ace simultaneously performs the ideation of a sweeping, culturaltheory while masking the utility, that is, the situational specificityor "pragmatics," that informs his practice as a theorist. Such anargument, however, were it to be carried out without further qual-ification, would in all likelihood replace the often stubborn andmisplaced criticisms of Wordsworth's Preface with a new, no lesshard-nosed set of terms. Indeed, in what follows I clearly do notwish to rely on the broad strokes and often generic procedures ofa "critique" that might purport to uncover a certain "ideology" inthe text insofar as it has been "displaced" by the text, notably bythe conspicuous centrality of aesthetic notions such as "poetic dic-tion," "meter," "rustic life," and "feeling." An alternative, and in myview more responsive as well as productive approach, will have usscrutinize Wordsworth's persistent efforts at revaluating preciselythese concepts, revealing a rhetorical strategy modestly billed as aPreface to an initially anonymous collection of poems though yieldingnothing short of a landmark document in romantic cultural andsocial theory. For it is here, if not for the first time then at leastto an unprecedented degree, that an intrinsically political theory ofculture is advanced as a theory of discourse, itself bounded by theyet tighter formal constraints of the disciplineof poetics and formalstylistics.6 Indeed, it is precisely this unique tension between theexpansive cultural ambitions and the restrictive disciplinary economyof "poetics" which enables the Preface to invest poetry with para-digmatic value, thereby shaping an argument about the fundamentalcontinuity between discursive, poetic, and cultural transactions.

IToward the end of the Preface, Wordsworth remarks on the

implicit commerce between poetic technique (style) and culturaltheory: "having thus explained a few of my reasons for writing inverse, and why I have chosen subjects from common life, andendeavoured to bring my language near to the real language ofmen, if I have been too minute in pleading my cause, I have atthe same time been treating a subject of general interest."7 Apreliminary understanding of this "general interest," which is toguide the following remarks, will seek to understand the Prefaceas a speculative treatise on the structure and pragmaticsof the poeticsign. "Pragmatics," in the context of this argument, shall denote the

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overarching cultural efficiency or functionality of the Preface, a textwhose often tenuous configuration of seemingly discrete and (inthe views of numerous readers) disjointed technical arguments hasusually preempted the critical articulation of that efficiency. Ratherthan speaking of a "subtext" or its "historicity," a pragmatist un-derstanding of Wordsworth's text is less liable to impute to itconspiratorial or unconscious motives (such as a displacement ofhistory, or an elision of economic, psychological, or cultural "desire")and thus to burden the Preface with an ultimately belated, criticaltheory of the subject.8 Rather, Wordsworth's argument aims at con-structing-albeit at a construction that is consistently troped and thus"naturalized" as a "recovery"-a generalizedand unified theoryof value.In focusing on discursive as well as poetic practice, Wordsworth'stheory visibly aligns its "interest" in the restoration of "consistency"and "sincerity" to rhetorical practice with a larger, eschatologicalhope for the restoration of "homogeneity" to an entire culture.From behind the formally "disciplined" discourse of poetics theregradually emerges the larger, pragmatic-cultural dimension of thePreface, as Wordsworth now persists in demarcating his theory ofvalue from contingent historical transformations characteristic ofthe present rather than from a coherently argued tradition in poeticsand criticism. As he insists time and again, values grounded in andpromoted by the kind of stylistic practice that merits the title of"good poetry" must categorically transcend history. In a rhetoricalmanner quite familiar to Wordsworth's readers, however, the culturalinterest in restoring the "human" to an order of authenticity presentlybesieged by historical contingency is advanced through the rhetoricalconvention of humilitas. While it may be difficult to decide to whatextent the conspicuously humble rhetorical conduct of the Prefaceis "evasive" of prevailing historical and political constraints or, al-ternatively, pragmatically "manipulative" of a skeptical audience,Wordsworth's Preface affirms its sincerity by avowing its strictly localand "technical" application and by disavowing any disruption of theboundaries demarcating the discipline of "poetics":9To treat the subjectwith the clearnessand coherenceof which it is susceptible,it would be necessary to give a full account of the present state of thepublic taste in this country, and to determine how far this taste is healthyor depraved; which again, could not be determined, without pointing outin what manner language and the human mind act and re-act on eachother, and without tracing the revolutions, not of literature alone, butlikewiseof society itself. (PrW 121; 1802 text)

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PRAGMATICS OF CULTUREA fully developed theory of poetry, Wordsworth notes, would man-date an inquiry into the extent to which the poetic sign is determinedby the intellectual resources of the writer and by the hermeneuticframe of reception espoused by its specific audience. Rhetoricallygrounded in a trope of disease ("healthy or depraved")-itself amaster-trope of contingency-Wordsworth's proposed inquiry intothe pathology of "public taste" teems with ideological interest. Hence,notwithstanding its syntax of disavowal, the passage has affirmedthe theoretical link between the primary "subject" of poetics, asecondary sociology of "taste," and the capstone of a totalizing,"transcendental" inquiry ("pointing out in what manner languageand the human mind act and re-act on each other"). Wordsworth'sostensibly humble, formal-technical investment in poetic techniquevisibly understates the political as well as the metaphysical efficiencyof (any) discursive technique, professing to bring into focus merelythe differential and potentially contingent empiricity of a "poeticdiction" which, the Preface claims, has come to erode the criteriafor aesthetic value, the poet's spiritual authority, and poetry's culturalefficiency. Characterizing the passage as "a breathtaking prospectus,"Jon Klancher justly notes how "it has now become impossible towrite the smallest, humblest poem of worth without framing it withan ambitious theory of social transformation, individual and collectivepsychology, literature and the interpretation of signs."1'Indeed, as the characteristically vague allusion to events between1789 and 1793 also makes clear, contingency involves not merely,not even primarily, the variegated spectrum of discursive "taste"but instead is rooted in much vaster historical transformations, suchas the "revolutions . . . of society itself." With its unpredictable andultimately intractable shifts, reconfigurations, and "motions" in thefields of class, economics, demographics, politics, religion, and aes-thetics, history continually threatens the specificity-that is, the nor-mative or "objective" referential value-which Wordsworth is eagerto restore to the poetic sign. Thus the Preface's conflation of "history"with contingency per se amounts but to a recharacterization of apervasive indeterminacy said to vitiate the referential field that hasbeen implicitly deemed "natural" or "proper" to poetic language.In fact, Wordsworth cannot even ascribe the "fickle[ness]" of tasteand of the poetic sign to the instability of the referential field unlessthe "subject" can be identified in some palpable way independentof historical and empirical contingency. Hence, in order to pointup the extent and the purported causes of its corruption, Wordsworthmust trope the field of reference by means of a figure whose

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NEW LITERARY HISTORYrelevance to history and community "goes without saying," so tospeak. What is ravaged by the forces of history, then, is the "humanmind" itself.

Notwithstanding Wordsworth's repeated and conspicuous char-acterization of his poetics as aimed at the recovery of "the primarylaws of our nature" (PrW 122), it will not suffice to point to theabundance of generalization throughout the Preface as evidence forthe text's purported cultural and ideological "interest," since it isprecisely that conceptual generality which simultaneously complicatesour search for specific evidence to support such a thesis.1 Thus,rather than merely asserting that Wordsworth proposes notions ofa somewhat suggestive generality, we may get on better by showinghow his consistently generalizing rhetorical conduct effectively in-stantiates the identification of stylistic and poetic values with socialand communal ones. Thus what the 1798 "Advertisement" haddisqualified as an oppressively aesthetic practice, the "gaudiness andinane phraseology of many modern writers" (PrW 116), now reap-pears writ large as the very spectre of a society marked in everyimaginable way by contingent historical change:[A] multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting with acombined force to bluntthe discriminatingpowersof the mind,and, unfittingit for all voluntaryexertion, to reduce it to a state of almostsavage torpor.The most effective of these causes are the great national events which aredaily taking place, and the increasingaccumulationof men in cities, wherethe uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinaryincident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies.. . . reflecting upon the magnitudeof the generalevil, I should be oppressedwith no dishonorablemelancholy,had I not a deep impressionof certaininherent and indestructiblequalitiesof the human mind, and likewise ofcertain powers in the great and permanent objects that act upon it. ...In spite of difference of soil and climate, of language and manners, oflaws and customs: in spite of things silently gone out of mind, and thingsviolently destroyed; the Poet binds together by passion and knowledgethevast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth, andover all time. (PrW 129, 131, 141; 1802 text)The assertion of great distress at the loss of a stable and meaningfulfield of reference coincides with a somewhat general description ofthe political and social transformations of English society duringthe 1790s.'2 Wordsworth's isolation of "certain inherent and inde-structible qualities of the human mind" does not, therefore, constitutean imaginative faith in the autonomy of human subjectivity; on thecontrary, growing syntactically and logically out of the antecedent

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notations of an entropic disorder, the paradigm of a human andmasculine self-consciousness enters the argument precisely because,and only to the extent that, the erosion of a specific field of referencefor poetic production is experienced at the site of self-consciousness.Not only does historical change "blunt the discriminating powersof mind," however, but it may eventually compromise the ability ofconsciousness to reflect on this erosion of its own, "essentially" humanspecificity itself. Indeed, any notation of "our natural and unalienableinheritance" (PrW 141; 1802 text) and its implicit faith in the"human" as a noncontingent (transhistorical and transcultural) "es-sence" remains rhetorically as well as syntactically dependent on thepresence of vast forces of negation. Hence, with its anaphoric stringof subordinate clauses ("In spite of. . ."), each of which challengesthe idea of a human essence logically prior to the historicity thatpermits its definition, the last passage reveals Wordsworth's eagernessto designate an ideal referent or poetic signified unconstrained bythe shifting economies of time and place.The imbalanced economy between an "essentialist" cultural vo-cabulary and a syntax relentlessly impelled by a desire to disavowthose "differences" threatening that very vocabulary (and therebyexposing once again the contingency of "essentialist" talk) involvesyet another troubling complication. For the same passage also in-timates that, besides eroding the permanence of poetry's desiredsignified (such as those "primary laws of our nature"), historicalcontingency also accounts for the correspondingly fragile, varied,and discontinuous nature of the "poetic" signifier ("in spite of ...difference of language"). For indeed it is discourse itself whichinstantiates the contingency and velocity of historical change. Inshort, the formal conception of a world knowable through stablesemiotic correspondences is threatened at both ends, with Words-worth now recognizing discourse of any form and shape as contingenton interpretation both in a subjective and an objective sense. Indeed,this bilateral instability of the sign-palpably evidenced by shiftingtechniques and "tastes" in signifying practice and by the transfor-mation of the world thus signified-also accounts for Wordsworth'spersistent interfacing of a technical (poetic) and a cultural agenda.Both converge in the subject (to be understood as both the signifyingagency and the "ideal" referent of all signification) of poetry itself,which Wordsworth perceives to be human consciousness, the site ofan ongoing struggle between self-identity and difference, authenticityand distortion, between the inwardness of "feeling" and the alienatingforces of "rapid communication," respectively.If, in the words of the Preface, "the subject is indeed important"

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(PrW 129; 1802 text) and if "my subject" (PrW 133; 1802 text) or"the Poet's subject [must] be judiciously chosen" (PrW 137; 1802text), the conspicuous generality of Wordsworth's use of "subject"is somewhat checked by its consistently gendered representation"Man." Indeed, it can hardly surprise that the pervasive and in-discriminate depiction of the threat posed by historical contingency-perceived to erode and render indiscriminate both the cultural("savage torpor") and economic identity ("uniformity of the occu-pations") of the "subject" ("humanity" as "community")-will beopposed by a figure of poetic redemption whose essence is groundedin its gendered self-identity.13 Hence Wordsworth's recovery of au-thentic poetic speech evolves as an exclusively masculine and, asthe persistent emphasis on self-presence of the poet's essence qua"voice" and "speech" reveals, unmediatedtransaction. The poet "is aman speaking to men . . . a man pleased with his own passions andvolitions" (PrW 138; 1802 text; italics mine). "The Poet writes . . .as a Man" (PrW 139; 1802 text). "He considers man and the objectsthat surround him . .. He considers man and nature as essentiallyadapted to each other" (PrW 140; 1802 text).

IIThe minimal and noncontingent "essence" of the human, those"primary laws of human nature" or those "certain indestructiblequalities," are generally embodied in the concept of the affective,also referred to as "feeling," "passion," or, at the beginning of thePreface, as a "state of vivid sensation" (PrW 118). Here, then, aresome of the pivotal statements wherein the affective is being pro-moted to the status of an a priori, paradigmatic cultural value:

Humble and rustic life was generallychosen because in that condition, theessential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attaintheir maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and moreemphatic anguage.... Accordingly,such a language, arisingout of repeatedexperience and regular feelings, is a more permanent, and far morephilosophical language, than that which is frequently substituted for it.. . . Poems to which any value can be attached were never produced onany varietyof subjectsbut by a man who . . . had also thought long anddeeply. For our continued influxes of feeling are modified and directed byour thoughts, which are indeed the representativesof all our past feelings;. . . feeling therein [in the Ballads] developed gives importance to theaction and situation,and not the action and situation to the feeling. (PrW125-27; 1802 text)

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PRAGMATICS OF CULTUREIf the cultural pragmaticsof Wordsworth's text hinge on the socialadaptability of the affective, the question now becomes how "feeling"relates to "community." Once again, it is the rhetorical conduct ofWordsworth's argument which instantiates at least part of the answer.Thus the "essential passions of the heart" become, within the spaceof a few lines, "elementary feelings," an already more general turnof phrase. Such verbal transference, it appears, serves to avoid asliding back of the affective into the spectrum of contingent meaningsthat extends from the historico-cultural down to the idiosyncraticand private, since it is precisely against these latter meanings thatthe affective is meant to demarcate the "human" as the essence ofcommunity. Presumably for the same reasons, we find Wordsworthrejecting the prevailing, bewilderingly diverse inventory of poeticsubjects ("poems to which any value can be attached were neverwritten on any variety of subjects"), thereby strengthening an ar-gument in which poetic value is restricted to the affective as themost "durable" aspect of consciousness. It is the self-identity andpurportedly inalienable essentialism of those "great and simple af-fections of our nature" (PrW 126) which accounts for their pragmaticvalue in the argument at hand; they serve to reconfigure an un-naturally dispersed economy of discourse into a community char-acterized by a "healthful state of association" (PrW 126), a communitywhose affective center of gravity will necessarily be found "outside"of history.14Hence, in order to preserve the integrity of such a center frombeing once again invaded by the contingent forces of historical andcultural change, the Preface conceives of conscious reflection asbeing, at all times, already the effect of the antecedent dynamicsof "feeling": "thoughts . . . are indeed the representatives of allour past feelings." Poetry itself then is not principally interested inthe local and contextual determinacy and specificity of the affective,but on the contrary seeks to establish this notion as an ontologicaland noncontingent human essence. Wordsworth's long note to "TheThorn" makes this particularly clear when insisting that "a Poet'swords . . . ought to be weighed in the balance of feeling" since"poetry is passion: it is the history or science of feelings; now everyman must know that an attempt is rarely made to communicatefeelings without something of an accompanying consciousness ofthe inadequateness of our own powers, or the deficiencies of lan-guage."15 The function of poetry in relation to the affective is toredeem "every man" from the consciousness of alienation or de-centeredness, a chord likely to resonate among an urban middle-class audience whose affective and socioeconomic identities no longer

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coincide. Prima facie, then, it is the principal and pragmatic interestof the Preface to reinstate the affective as a general, noncontingentontology of sorts, since the intervention of the poet on behalf ofhis community is strictly predicated on a pervasive and generalaffective crisis. The figure of the poet which now enters the argumentseeks to reconstruct a community by "convey[ing] passion to Readerswho are not accustomed to sympathize with men [!] feeling in thatmanner or using such language." Such a general purpose ("com-munity"), redefined around an equally general notion ("feeling"),will require a skillfully calibrated, mediating form of discourse: "Itseemed to me that this might be done by calling in the assistanceofthe Lyrical"(PW II, 512; italics mine).The supplemental function here ascribed to the lyric opens thenext stage in the argument; for in keeping with his well-knowndistrust of abstract notions ("lifeless words, & abstract propositions"merely placate "the spirit of self-accusation" [PrW 104]), Wordsworthappears well aware of the fact that no determination of "feeling"can acquire compelling argumentative value at a purely conceptuallevel alone. As the purportedly "founding" criterion of the human,"feeling" will have to be situated within an ostensibly historical frameof reference that will support the definition of its adequate or"natural" discursive form. Hence, having initially dehistoricized anddissociated the affective from the seemingly boundless spectrum ofsocial, political, and cultural transformations of the urban present,Wordsworth now recontextualizes it within a realm of agrarian,"rustic" past that has proven, ever since Coleridge's probing ex-amination of this idea, proverbial of the obscurity and contradic-toriness of the Preface and its incompatibility with Lyrical Ballads.The avowed proposition, already stated in the "Advertisement," of"a natural delineation of human passions, human characters, andhuman incidents" (PrW 116) is projected onto a largely nostalgic,if not outright imaginary setting of "common life."The highly questionable historical authenticity of such "incidentsand situations from common life" (PrW 123; 1802 text), said tocomprise the general setting of "humble and rustic life" (PrW 125;1802 text), is itself rhetorically hidden from sight by Wordsworth'srepeated and conspicuously inflected claim that the Lyrical Balladsviolate certain inherited and precariously mannered, formal-aestheticconventions of poetic language. That is, the confession (once again,humilitas)of aesthetic transgression smuggles in the assumption thatthe "rural"constitutes a materially and empirically distinct, historicalreality. The poet's ethics, anchored in his conscientious observanceof a faithful and continuous empirical correspondence or communitybetween subject and object-that is, between his own sensibility and

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the "rustic" field of vision ("I have at all times endeavoured to looksteadily at my subject" [PrW 133; 1802 text])-thus legitimates the"interest" or motive of such avowed stylistic transgression.16 Onceagain pivoting on the convention of humilitas("I may have sometimeswritten upon unworthy subjects" [PrW 153; 1802 text]), Wordsworth'sprefatory rhetoric continues to obfuscate the possibility that such"subjects" might not exist, at least not in such schematic form, inthe first place. It is this combined rhetorical thrust of a humblyand visibly understated field of reference and an equally self-effacing,literal model of representation ("plain style") which recasts the issueof the historical authenticity of the referent ("rustic life") as thequestion of stylistic propriety.Our pragmatist reading thus sees the "rural" function as thecontrolling or "founding" allegory (the "other") of a historical con-sciousness, and hence synechdochized as "feeling." It cannot beaccorded autonomous material existence-such facticity belongingnowhere until it is "represented" for the urban reader-but insteadmust be excavated from the conceptuo-historical entanglementswhich, in the view of the Preface, characterize the self-alienatedurban consciousness whose economic and social ambition Words-worth time and again manages to enlist for what purports to be ajourney of affective self-re(dis)covery. Wordsworth's pragmatist po-etics thus intone the referential veracity of the "rural" only by wayof an accompanying, deictic notation of that realm's erosion andimminent disappearance. Thus motivated by the project of recon-figuring an increasingly heterogeneous spectrum of urban middle-class readers, endowed with complex and seemingly incompatibleeconomic, affective, and cultural "interests," the Preface engagesthe question concerning the facticity of the "rural" only vicariously,namely, by assumingit when pondering its appropriate stylistic form.Indeed, despite shrewdly exposing the concept of "rustic life" as ahistorical and stylistic ou topos, Coleridge still followed the fictionfar enough to be drawn into the more technical debate regardingthe extent to which the imagined language of such life would admitof imitation.17 In and of itself, however, the "rural" clearly provesa "critical fiction," which, as remains to be shown, may help usunderstand why Wordsworth persists in linking its affective qualitiesto figural language.

IIITo recall a familiar formulation of Wordsworth's ostensibly agrar-ian poetics: "Humble and rustic life was generally chosen, because,

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NEW LITERARY HISTORYin that condition, the essential passions of the heart find a bettersoil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint,and speak a plainer and more emphatic language" (PrW 125; 1802text). Notwithstanding its programmatic transparency, the statementbrings into focus several of the rhetorical difficulties that continueto preoccupy the Preface as it gropes for an appropriate ratiobetween "feeling" and "style"-that is, between the "immediacy" ofthe affective as origin and its "communicability" as social value. Thusthe delicate balance between a communal language "really used bymen" (PrW 123; 1802 text) and its poetic transformation by a "certaincolouring of the imagination" (PrW 123; 1802 text) begins to crumbleas Wordsworth inadvertently deploys the very conceptof "rustic life"as a metaphorfor "passion" which it is otherwise said to embody.The argument's unexpected sliding toward overt troping of its basicconcepts-here, the "rustic"--points up the next, once again con-spicuously understated, concern of the Preface.Namely, to recover the affective as a communal, "primary law"of a humanity beset by infinite and contingent difference, mandatesa form of expression that can be unfailingly distinguished fromboth the erratic discursivity associated with "rapid" historical trans-formation and from the mechanized application of figural languageby a literary culture frantically trying to outpace contingent changewith sensational innovation; the latter practice, Wordsworth insists,lacks any substantive and "more durable" (PrW 123; 1802 text)poetic subject. Hence, in an effort to preempt the ballads' contam-ination by the insubstantiality of a promiscuously reproductive "po-etic diction," Wordsworth notes, "as much pains has been taken toavoid it as is ordinarily taken to produce it" (PrW 131; 1802 text).'8And yet, to react as vehemently against the hold of his contemporaryculture on the poetic sign invariably reinstates the very artificiality("as much pains has been taken") which it critiques, while at thesame time compromising the latitude of poetic expression: "it hasnecessarily cut me off from a large portion of phrases and figuresof speech which from father to son have long been regarded asthe common inheritance of Poets" (PrW 133).If cultural and social responsibility involves counteracting theapparent corruption of the signifying medium by "bad Poets"through expressions of "feeling" that have been 'judiciously chosen,"the required "principle of selection" appears strangely elusive. In-deed, Wordsworth seems increasingly aware of the extent to whichhis ideation of a language of authentic feeling is already at a removefrom the "rustic"sphere of authentic reference from which it derivesits cultural legitimacy and authority. Hence one is to "imitate, and,

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PRAGMATICS OF CULTUREas far as is possible, to adopt the very language of men," to make"this selection . . . with true taste and feeling" (PrW 131, 137; 1802text), to "describe," "imitate," or "conjure up" passion.19 Havingadvocated up to this point in the Preface a categorical break withthe stale tradition of Augustan poetry, Wordsworth now begins tosense the extent to which the forces of history-literary and culturalalike-may invade the very poetry that seeks to keep them in checkunder the auspices of the affective.20 While he "imitates and describesthe passions" (PrW 138; 1802 text), Wordsworth now acknowledges,the poet's "employment is in some degree mechanical" (PrW 138;1802 text). The principal challenge to the desired, universal homo-geneity of the affective ("the primary laws of human nature") ismounted neither by the historical shifts of poetry's social field ofreference nor by the calcified "phraseology" of "poetic diction."Rather, it is the inevitably supplementary status of the poetic sign,always in an arbitrary and asymetrical relation ("in some degreemechanical") to "feeling," which constitutes the most tenacious im-pediment to Wordsworth's theoretical vision of a socially and cul-turally efficient poetic technique.Between the derivate practice (that is, "poetic diction" as imitationof reference) and the theorized ideal (in other words, figuration ashomologous to "universal passion") there opens up the far moreunsettling prospect of rhetoric as simulacrum. Not surprisingly, then,the resistance of "feeling" to communicability reveals itself, through-out the Preface, in subtle though inconclusive terminological sub-stitutions. The affective shifts from "essential passions" (PrW 125;1802 text) to "elementary feelings" (PrW 125; 1802 text) to "regularfeelings" (PrW 125; 1802 text) to "moral feelings" (PrW 137; 1802text), to "general sympathy" (PrW 138; 1802 text), to "generalpassions and thoughts and feelings" (PrW 142; 1802 text) and,finally, to "the great and universal passions of men" (PrW 145; 1802text). The progressive totalization of the affective, its essentializationunder the auspices of a "rustic life" immunizing it against contingenthistorical difference, inexorably impels the Preface toward com-mitting poetry and the lyric to a paradigmatic ("expressive") andequally universalized theory of style.Shifting from "the subjects and aim of these Poems . . . to theirstyle," Wordsworth again reaffirms his faith in the authenticity of"the very language of men" (PrW 131; 1802 text) which poetry isto "imitate" or "adopt." Constructed as the historical concretion ofthe affective, the superior cultural authority of the "rustic" provesan effect of its purported discursive immediacy: "The Reader willfind that personifications of abstract ideas rarely occur in these

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volumes; and are utterly rejected as an ordinary device to elevatethe style. . . . Assuredly such personifications do not make anynatural or regular part of that language. They are, indeed, a figureof speech occasionally prompted by passion, and I have made useof them as such" (PrW 131; 1802 text). According to Wordsworth,the intrinsically mediating, because substitutive, event of figurationmust itself be, at all times, an "immediate" effect of "passion."21Given the foundational status of the affective throughout thePreface-serving as the ontology that supports the poet's recoveryof a community-it may under no circumstances be subject tocontingent historical shifts in taste and rhetorical practice. Words-worth's rhetorical argument thus employs the trope of personificationitself in synecdochic or paradigmatic manner, meant to illustratethe general susceptibility of figurative diction to use and abuse. Sucha choice is far from accidental, given Wordsworth's overall concernwith recovering an authentic paradigm of subjectivity: "if the subjectbe judiciously chosen, it will naturally, and upon fit occasion, lead[the poet] to passions the language of which, if selected truly andjudiciously, must necessarily be dignified and variegated, and alivewith metaphors and figures" (PrW 137; 1802 text).22It is here that Wordsworth's strategic identification of poetictechnique and cultural practice encounters its most severe problems.They manifest themselves, as so often in Wordsworth's prefatorywritings, in the form of a parenthetical concession that is notconsidered a significant risk for the overriding argument. Speakingof the subject, the poet, Wordsworth notes that in addition to otherqualities, the poet is characterized by "a disposition to be affectedmore than other men by absent things as if they were present; anability of conjuring up in himself passions, which are indeed farfrom being the same as those produced by real events, yet (especiallyin those parts of the general sympathy which are pleasing anddelightful) do more nearly resemble the passions produced by realevents, than anything which, from the motions of their own mindsmerely, other men are accustomed to feel in themselves" (PrW 138;1802 text). The undeniably supplementary relation of the poeticsign to the affective culture of "rustic life" and its corresponding"real language" poses a theoretical dilemma from which Wordsworthseeks to extricate himself by suggesting that the poet is capable ofsupplementing "absent things" and "conjuring up in himself pas-sions" that are not his own. Such an inward appropriation of what,ultimately, is to be social and cultural value (contributing to the"general sympathy" or, as it is stated shortly afterwards, meant to"excite rational sympathy" [PrW 143; 1802 text]) requires figurative

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diction as its corresponding, rhetorical form: "As it is impossiblefor the Poet to produce upon all occasions language as exquisitelyfitted for the passion as that which the real passion itself suggests,it is proper that he should consider himself in the situation of atranslator, who does not scruple to substitute excellencies of anotherkind for those unattainable by him" (PrW 139; 1802 text). Theimage of the translator defines the mediation of the affective witha secondary language, itself but the "imitation" designed to "conjureup" the originary idiom that proves "unattainable" even for thepoet. As "translator," then, the poet is charged with the unenviable,indeed paradoxical task of mediating an unattainable referent (the"passion" of the "rustic") and an unattainable language (that elusive"real language") for the benefit of an urban audience incapable ofdiscriminating between the authoritative, figurative translation of"passion" and the deluge of cognate sensations effected by rhetoricalcounterfeit. In short, the causality between passion and figuration(between essence and telos, inward "feeling" and communal "sym-pathy") is inherently undecidable. If the poet is merely "affected. . by absent things," how are we to know that "metaphors andfigures" are indeed "prompted by passion"? To insist on such acausality, as Wordsworth does, invariably inculcates a competing,far more unsettling theoretical prospect according to which "feeling"only denotes an interest, not an essence, in that it can only appearin figural form, alienated from its putative origin. The essentialquality of the affective, steadily affirmed by the technical concernwith its most faithful "translation," effectively distracts from itsfunctional status throughout the Preface, namely to deduce fromthe essential self-identity and homogeneity of "feeling" the socialexigency of a homogenous (noncontingent and transhistorical) valueof "sympathy" and community itself.23Alluding to the force of convention, Wordsworth notes, "I mayhave sometimes written upon unworthy subjects; but I am lessapprehensive on this account, than that my language may frequentlyhave suffered from those arbitrary connections of feelings and ideaswith particular words and phrases, from which no man can altogetherprotect himself" (PrW 153; 1802 text). The poet's authority thusappears to be simultaneously predicated on and destabilized by theequivalence between "feeling" and "figures." On the positive side,such "equivalence" implies the poet's "originality" or "inevitability"(which Wordsworth missed in Goethe's poetry), whereas, when un-derstood as a translator, the poet's effort at constructing a communalculture depends on "metaphors and figures" whose value and au-thority are irremediably alienated from the affective interiority or

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NEW LITERARY HISTORYessence that legitimizes the poet's social "interest" to begin with.24Meanwhile, if the theoretical exposure of such undecidability appearsoppressively familiar in its "deconstructionist" bent, Wordsworth'ssubsequent remarks skillfully avoid drawing any conclusions thatmight leave the overall argument stranded amidst the smoulderingdebris of some generalized, existential crisis. Quite to the contrary,the Preface appears no less enabled than threatened by this "equiv-alence" between figuration and passion, that is, between its mediatingstructure and the affective immediacy that simultaneously constitutesthe origin ("feeling") and the telos ("community") of poetic practice.Indeed, in order to sustain an argument about cultural and socialvalues Wordsworth will have to balance both a negative causality(figures "conjuring up" the effect of "passion") that illustrates apervasive cultural deterioration (such as Augustan "poetic diction")and a positive causality ("figure[s] of speech . .. promptedby passion"[italics mine]) charged with realigning and homogenizing the cur-rently inflated economy of cognitive, emotive, and material values.

IVThe 1802 Appendix to the Preface recharacterizes the theoreticalpredicament of an undecidable causality between "feeling" andfiguration as the result of a historical deterioration of both readingtaste and poetic practice. As it deplores the absence of a reliablestandard for the employment of figurative diction by characterizingthe currently prevailing, differential and fluctuating economies of

"feeling" and figuration as the endpoint in a historical trajectorythat has all but eroded reliable standards of signification and in-terpretation, the Preface simultaneously "naturalizes" its own cog-nitive procedure by adopting the organic and authoritative form ofa historical genealogy:The earliest poets of all nations generally wrote from passion excited byreal events; they wrote naturally,and as men: feeling powerfully as theydid, their language was daring, and figurative.In succeeding times, Poets,and Men ambitiousof the fame of Poets, perceivingthe influence of suchlanguageand desirousof producingthe same effect withoutbeing animatedby the same passion, set themselves to a mechanical adoption of thesefigures of speech, and made use of them, sometimes with propriety, butmuch more frequently applied them to feelings and thoughts with whichthey had no natural connection whatsoever.A language was thus insensibly

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produced, differing materially rom the real languageof men in anysituation.(PrW 160; 1802 text)What the narrative's genealogical structure effectively masks, how-ever, is the insistent theoretical affinity between a "poetic diction"repeatedly criticized and the (good) poet's inescapably belated andsubstitutive figuration of "passion." For "while he describes andimitates passions," we now recall, any poet's activity will prove "insome degree mechanical," thus staking his cultural efficiency on his"ability of conjuring up in himself passions, which are indeed farfrom being the same as those produced by real events" (PrW 138;1802 text).Historical contingency-itself the cause of the theoretical tensionswithin the Preface and thus continually disruptive of Wordsworth'sideation of a homogenized cultural value-is about to be refocusedor "displaced" once more. Specifically, the previously lamented con-tingent difference or, as the Preface prefers to see it, the historicaldeteriorationof objective standards of value, now manifests itself asa crisisof reading. Indeed, it is precisely this theoretical ension betweenthe intrinsically supplemental figuration of "whatever passions [thepoet] communicates to his reader" (PrW 151; 1802 text) and theavowed essentialism of such affective foundations of culture whichnow accounts for the erratic transformations of aesthetic responseoffered by inherently variational audiences. The Preface's over-arching assertion, namely that there be an essential, identifiable,and representable core-those "primary laws of our nature" linkingthe individual with humanity-proves shaky as long as the bond ofsignifier/signified and figure/affect remains at the mercy of readingas a historically and socially conditioned practice. Though it hasbeen conceived as the very sign and signature that vouches for theauthenticity and durability of "true" culture, poetry remains sus-ceptible of alienation into a contingent otherness by the infelicitoushistorical collaboration of derivative poets and gullible readers. AsJon Klancher remarks, the poems as well as the 1800 Preface"compose the textual countermove against that vast social transfor-mation that since Wordsworth's birth has been turning one (full)culture into another (empty) culture. . . . Thus the increasinglybleak strategy of a writer who casts the act of reading againstineluctible historical development itself."25Referring to the languagethat was "insensibly produced" by the misappropriation of "poeticdiction," Wordsworth thus resumes his historical narrative:

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The Reader or Hearer of this distorted language found himself in aperturbedand unusual stateof mind:when affectedbythe genuine languageof passion he had been in a perturbed and unusual state of mind also: inboth cases he was willing that his commonjudgment and understandingshould be laid asleep, and he had no instinctiveand infallibleperceptionof the true to make him reject the false; the one served as the passportfor the other. The emotion was in both cases delightful, and no wonderif he confounded the one with the other, and believed them both to beproduced by the same, or similar causes. Besides, the poet spake to himin the characterof a man to be looked up to, a man of genius and authority.(PrW 160; 1802 text)If the immigration of private "human" essence into the domain ofsocial and cultural relations requires the personifying "passport" offigurative rhetoric, to flourish that passport is to be at the mercyof an audience (itself to be reformed) whose ability to evaluate anddiscriminate between authentic essences and pragmatic effects, be-tween "true" affect and "false" sensation, is at all times historicallycontingent. There simply cannot exist any "instinctive and infallibleperception of the true" since the reader too is but a historicallydetermined category. While Wordsworth may insist on the poet'sunique spiritual endowment-a being capable of contemplating "or-dinary life . . . with a certain quantity of immediate knowledge"(PrW 140; 1802 text)-both the sensationalist and the authenticforms of "passion" appear to have been "produced by the same, orsimilar causes."

The complexity and significance of Wordsworth's Preface at thethreshold of a new century rests primarily with its unexpectedrecognition of a fundamental incommensurability between ideationaldesires and their discursive realization. A conflict irrupts into anargument whose "interest" lies with a definition of culture and itsfounding value (the affective), yet whose resources derive from thedomain of rhetorical and poetic theory. Wordsworth's managementof this tension between his cultural pragmatics and a corresponding,imagined poetic infrastructure, between value and form, at timesappears to hint at an emergent conservatism. Ultimately, though,the Preface opts for an idiom of rhetorical persuasion rather thandogmatic propositions, thereby suggesting that the motive subtendingWordsworth's entire theory-in other words, the ideation of a com-munity founded on a homogeneous, human, and specifically affectiveessence-has neither been fully realized nor completely failed.To be sure, its realization has been forestalled by a seeminglyirresolvable tension between "essence" and "discourse," a tensionthat merely reappears in the supplemental concept of figuration

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that was invoked to resolve it. Notwithstanding claims such as that"the poet . . . is the rock of defence for human nature" (PrW 141;1802 text) and their somewhat complacent, foundationalist, middle-class version of humanism, Wordsworth does not seek to link theaffective to an absolute or God, preferring instead to explore theresistance of his rhetorical medium to the envisioned goal of areunified culture. In spite of an often overwhelming desire totransfigure societas into universitas,Wordsworth will seek-at least inhis 1798 and 1800 Lyrical Ballads-to achieve community poetically,that is, as the effect of interpretive participation elicited by a complexarray of rhetorical forms rather than being postulated conceptually.For the time being, that is, the troubled hypothesis of a "real languageof men" and its purportedly authentic, if fading, "rustic"communityremains at the center of interpretive rather than definitional practice.The social and, ultimately, moral "interests" or pragmatics of thePreface are thus realized by way of a recharacterization of thevernacular, henceforth to be regarded as "a practice in terms ofwhich to think, to choose, to act, and to utter."26Michael Oakeshott'sportrayal of moral and social conduct as inherently discursive seemsapplicable to the Preface's consistent blending of affective and dis-cursive values. Its openness and flexibility may not always be whatWordsworth's 1800 text fully endorses, but it is a model whichWordsworth, the relatively unknown writer of the year 1800-sotroubled by the conflict between his democratic convictions and hisprofessional ambition-is not yet prepared to surrender on behalfof Wordsworth, the public author. Thus the 1800 Preface implicatesboth romanticism and modernism in the irremediable tension be-tween a language by definition alienated into contingent and un-containable otherness and a desire for "more durable" cultural valuethat threatens to unravel at the very moment of its rhetoricalimplementation.

DUKE UNIVERSITYNOTES

1 See James Heffernan's repeated objections to "crude formulations" that exposethe Preface's "disunity" and "dissonance." James Heffernan, The TransformingImag-ination: Wordsworth'sTheory of Poetry (Ithaca, N.Y., 1969), pp. 47, 92. See alsoW. J. B. Owen, Wordsworth s Critic (Toronto, 1969).2 See Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria,vol. III of The Collected Worksof Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. James Engell and Walter J. Bate (Princeton, 1983),chs. 14 and 17. While skillfully balancing Coleridge's complex and often misleadingreading of the Preface, Don Bialostosky remains, in my view, too committed to

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144 NEW LITERARY HISTORYWordsworth's pivotal concepts of "feeling," the "rustic,"and "speech." Such proximity,it seems, causes Bialostosky to endorse precisely those essential and substantiverealities about "human nature" (individual and collective) that Wordsworth's argumentassumes in order to achieve its larger, cultural and ideological objectives. See DonBialostosky, "Coleridge's Interpretation of Wordsworth's Preface to LyricalBallads,"PMLA, 93 (1978), 912-24.3 For a renewal of the Coleridgean reading of the Preface as "defensive," seekingto redefine the relation (distorted by reviewers) between audience and LyricalBallads,see Anuradha Dingwaney and Lawrence Needham, "(Un)Creating Taste: Words-worth's Platonic Defense in the Preface to LyricalBallads," RhetoricSocietyQuarterly,19 (1989), 333-47. For a similar reading, see James Scroggins, "The Preface toLyrical Ballads: A Revolution in Dispute," in Studies in Criticismand Aesthetics,1660-1800, ed. Howard Anderson and John S. Shea (Minneapolis, 1966), pp. 380-98.4 Josephine Miles, The PrimaryLanguage of Poetryin the 1740's and 1840's (Berkeley,1950), p. 363.5 William Wordsworth, Letter to Charles James Fox, 14 Jan. 1801, The Early Lettersof William Wordsworth, d. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford, 1935), p. 262.6 The political context of the Preface has been explored in considerable detail byOlivia Smith, The Politics of Language, 1791-1819 (New York, 1986), esp. pp. 202-27, and by Nicholas Roe, Wordsworth nd Coleridge:The Radical Years(Oxford, 1988).For Smith, "the two figures of the rustic and the artificial poet embody the Preface'sredefinition of vulgar and refined language. The personification of the rustic makesthe Preface's argument more palatable by his nostalgic value as a representative ofthe pastoral tradition" (p. 216). However, here, as well as when arguing that "by'correcting' the Preface, by refuting its democratic theory of the mind and language,Coleridge intended to depoliticize the text and to reduce it to merely an aestheticargument" (p. 222), Smith reveals an alarmingly unreflected, disjunctive understand-ing of linguistic theory and political ideology as materially distinct and analyticallyseparable.7 "Advertisement, Preface, and Appendix to Lyrical Ballads," The Prose WorksofWilliam Wordsworth, d. W. J. B. Owen and Jane W. Smyser (Oxford, 1973), I, 151.All quotes from the Preface are taken from this edition; hereafter cited in text asPrW.8 My idea of a "pragmatist" reading, as it unfolds below, does not assume thereflexive belatedness and often eschatological confidence of current historicist andmaterialist critiques of ideology, a tendency also criticized by Richard Rorty, Contin-gency, Irony, Solidarity(Cambridge, 1989), esp. pp. 56-69. Nor do I wish to elide thePreface's historical specificity by way of the often schematic contextualism that un-derwrites theories of the performative. A more balanced and positive concept ofthe kind of practice of which Wordsworth's Preface may be said to be an instance,is offered by Michael Oakeshott, On Human Conduct (Oxford, 1975): "An action[soon to be called 'practice'], then, is an identity in which substantive performanceand procedural consideration may be distinguished but are inseparably joined, andin which the character of agent and that of practitioner are merged in a single self-recognition. The so-called 'practical' is not a certain kind of performance; it is conductin respect of its acknowledgement f a practice"(p. 57; italics mine).9 For Olivia Smith, for example, "many of the evasions of the Preface to LyricalBallads can be accounted for by the frightened temper of 1800" (Smith, The Politicsof Language, 1791-1819, p. 208).10 Jon Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790-1832 (Madison,Wis., 1986), p. 139.11 Eventually, Wordsworth will mute and deemphasize his social theory, as is already


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PRAGMATICS OF CULTURE 145apparent in his 1802 letter to John Wilson: "People in our rank in life are perpetuallyfalling into one sad mistake, namely, that of supposing that human nature and thepersons they associate with are one and the same thing. Whom do we generallyassociate with? Gentlemen, persons of fortune, professional men, ladies, persons whocan afford to buy, or can easily procure, books of half a guinea price, hot-pressed,and printed upon superfine paper. These persons are, it is true, a part of humannature, but we err lamentably if we suppose them to be fair representatives of thevast mass of human existence" (William Wordsworth, Letter to John Wilson, June1802, in The Early Letters,p. 295). As Jon Klancher remarks, "the whole sociologyof literature . . . was to prove abortive" by the time of the 1815 Preface (Klancher,The Making of English Reading Audiences, p. 139).12 David Simpson rightly points out how Wordsworth argues "for the negativeeffects of urbanization and the debasing of 'popular' culture" (David Simpson,Wordsworth'sHistoricalImagination: The Poetry of Displacement New York, 1987], p. 64).However, as the letter to Charles James Fox suggests, the focus of the poetic enterpriseof Lyrical Ballads is the redefinition of the actual, present culture of urban life interms of the rustic, which serves "as the rallying point" for "domestic feelings." Sincethe latter are only recuperable a posteriori,the poetic epitaphs commemorating theirdisappearance draw their motive for inscription not from these feelings' "essence"(which remains assumed) but from their pragmatic "force," their ability to uncovera new, thus far unsuspected or unarticulated need in the economically ambitioned,urban middle class. Thus Wordsworth's epistolary rhetoric converts "affections" into"profitable sympathies" (William Wordsworth, Letter to Charles James Fox, 14 Jan.1801, in The Early Letters,pp. 259-62).13 For a lucid discussion of Wordsworth's concept of "humanity" in the context ofThe Ruined Cottage, see Alan Liu, Wordsworth:The Sense of History (Stanford, 1989).Liu contests the traditional "misty-eyed" idea that "humanity can be a timelesspersonality spanning without difference from Romanticism to our own century" (p.312). In fact, Liu insists, "only relations, affiliations, or-conceived semiotically-communications of care can be humanity" (p. 319).14 Writing to John Wilson, Wordsworth states that "a great poet ought to . . .rectify men's feelings, to give them new compositions of feeling, to render theirfeelings more sane pure and permanent, in short, more consonant to nature, thatis, to eternal nature, and the great moving spirit of things" (William Wordsworth,Letter to John Wilson, June 1802, in The Early Letters,pp. 295-96).15 William Wordsworth, Note to "The Thorn," in Poetical Works, ed. Ernest deSelincourt (Oxford, 1944), II, 513; hereafter cited in text as PW II.16 In regarding the word "interest" as an index of the pragmaticsof Wordsworth'sprefatory writings, we must recall the following passage from the note to "TheThorn" which reveals that word's capacity for countering historical contingency withits insistence on the material homogeneity of "rural life." Speaking of "repetitionand tautology," Wordsworth observes that such rhetorical features produce an evi-dently desirable confusion of the domain of rhetoric with the material world: "amongthe chief of these reasons is the interest which the mind attaches to words, not onlyas symbols of the passion, but as things, active and efficient" (PW II, p. 513).17 Notwithstanding his lucid redefinition, in chapter 17 of the Biographia Literaria,of a "real language" as inherently relative to certain communal interests, howeverunstated ("for real therefore, we must substitute ordinary, or lingua communis"[p.56]), Coleridge nevertheless continues to subscribe to the concept of the "rustic" asa regulative fact rather than as the pragmatic fiction that is to enable Wordsworth'spromotion, within an increasingly dispersed urban middle-class culture, of that class's"interest" in collective self-identity. See Biographia Literaria, pp. 40-57.


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146 NEW LITERARY HISTORY18 On the interaction between images of reproduction-both literal (of people)and figural (of books, discourse, poeticisms, etc.)-and Wordsworth's repeated as-sociation of derivative representations with prostitution, see MaryJacobus, Romanticism,Writing, and Sexual Difference (Oxford, 1989), pp. 206-36; and Frances Ferguson,"Malthus, Godwin, Wordsworth and the Spirit of Solitude," in Literatureand the Body,ed. Elaine Scarry (Baltimore, 1986), pp. 106-24. The latter essay points in suggestiveif inconclusive ways to the conceptual affinities between Wordsworth's text andMalthus's Essay on the Principle of Population (1798).19 As Jon Klancher notes, "[Wordsworth] assert[s] that such a language existsontologically apart from the language of the urban middle class, and that the veryframework of representation-where one language 'imitates' another-will at lastreveal yet a third language. Neither peasant nor middle-class, this language is thevery 'music of humanity.' Here the ambitious, profoundly moral act of writingproduces an audience that may escape its unacknowledged prisonhouse of language,its own class-limited cultural position, and gaze into the freer realm of a humanitythat 'suffers' rather than 'craves'" (Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences,p. 140).20 Barbara Herrnstein-Smith has shown how "the pathologizing of the other remainsthe key move and defining objective" for the establishing of an aesthetic hierarchy("axiology"). See Barbara Herrnstein-Smith, Contingenciesof Value (Cambridge, Mass.,1988), p. 38.21 See Stephen Land's concise discussion of figuration, particularly metaphor, ineighteenth-century rhetorical theory, From Signs to Propositions-The Conceptof Formin Eighteenth-centurySemantic Theory(London, 1974). Classical precursors of Words-worth's linkage between metaphor and affect are Robert Lowth's Lectureson the SacredPoetry of the Hebrews, 2nd ed. (1787; rpt. London, 1816) and Hugh Blair's Lectureson Rhetoric and Belles Lettres,(1783; rpt. Edinburgh, 1819).22 Wordsworth's defensive response to widespread figurative discourse echoes Jer-emy Bentham's misgivings about tropes and figures which, in his view, misconstrueassumptions as facts, and about rhetoric in general, which "tends to propagate, asit were by contagion, the passion by which it was suggested." For the quote and adiscussion, see Kenneth Burke, "Rhetorical Analysis in Bentham," in his A Rhetoricof Motives (Berkeley, 1950), pp. 90-101.23 What our pragmatist reading uncovers as a complex of theoreticaltensions inthe Preface can simultaneously be characterized as a historicalambivalence. Thus JonKlancher notes that "these urban and rural cultures were not simply notional oppositesyoked together by the ingenuity of his own Preface; one had been, for the pastgeneration, becoming the other" (Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences,pp. 143-44).24 Wordsworth's comment on Goethe's poetry as not being "inevitable enough" isrecalled by Matthew Arnold, "Wordsworth," in Essaysin Criticism,2nd Series (London,1888), rpt. in SelectedProse, ed. P. J. Keating (Harmondsworth, 1970), p. 381.25 Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, p. 144.26 Oakeshott, On Human Conduct, pp. 78-79; see also pp. 60-81. Oakeshott'sconception of moral conduct as rhetorical practice suggests the possibility of a politicalreading (rather than mere ideological critique) of aesthetic, and specifically literary,form. I have sought to suggest ways in which the by definition "iterable"infrastructureof lyric utterance appears to instantiate the moral and social authority that Wordsworthprogressively claims for his lyrics after 1807. See Thomas Pfau, "The Pragmatics ofGenre: Moral Theory and Lyric Authorship in Hegel and Wordsworth," CardozoArtsand EntertainmentLaw Review, 10 (1992), 397-422 (special issue on "IntellectualProperty and the Construction of Authorship").

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