Description
Book SynopsisThis study views the early work of William Wordsworth as partaking in a general Western European cultural movement in which the realm of the numinous is translocated from heaven to earth -- grand Nature -- and from there further on into Man's inner Nature. In this metaphysical implosion the concept of the Sublime gradually comes to signify the mental, godlike powers of Man.
Table of ContentsForeword - the metaphysical implosion. Part 1 Paradise and paradigm 1787-1794: that other eye; the sublime track. Part 2 The nature of the sublime: the ugly and the beautifu; the book of nature; nature as landscape; the nature of the sublime. Part 3 The inner light 1798-1800: the inner expansion; an ebbing and a flowing mind; introspection is retrospection; the mind of man; there is creation in the eye; the time of unrememberable being; the beatings of the hearth; the sublime pattern of experience; the starting; place of being fair; throwback; two consciousnesses; that false secondary power; an obscure sense of possible sublimity; an auxiliar light; the uncertain heaven. Part 4 The light that never was 1800-1805: poetry's "Perpetuum Moblie"; the poetics of the sublime; internal brightness; the child of the father is a man; the genealogical inversion; from phenomenal to spiritual nature; the revision of "The Prelude"; the moving soul; a correspondent mild creatine breeze; breathings for incommunable powers; acknowledging dependency sublime; imagination restored; the perfect image of a mighty mind; of female softness shall this life be full; the light that never was.
