"Elementary Feelings" and "Distorted Language": The Pragmatics of Culture in Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads Author(s): Thomas Pfau

Source: New Literary History, Vol. 24, No. 1, Culture and Everyday Life (Winter, 1993), pp. 125-146 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/469275 Accessed: 26/11/2009 11:14
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"Elementary Feelings" and "Distorted Language": The Pragmatics of Culture in Wordsworth's Preface to LyricalBallads
Thomas Pfau
EW TEXTS of the romantic period are more firmly anchored

in the curricular and pedagogical agenda of current romantic studies than Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads, a circumstance as commonplace as it is puzzling given what, for the past half century, criticism has found to say about that text. For notwithstanding its own, high-profile investment in a pedagogy concerned with reshaping the sensibility underlying both the production and reception of poetry, Wordsworth's text has almost universally been regarded as marked by internal tensions, inconsistencies, discontinuous argument, and a confused sense of purpose.' Many of the obstacles that seem to compromise the recovery of a "unified" argument in Wordsworth's text are significantly rooted in Coleridge's criticisms of Wordsworth's "theory."2 The impact of Coleridge's critique, however pertinent or misguided it may be judged, lies with his roundabout placement of the Preface within a tradition of "poetic theory," thereby falling squarely into what Coleridge considered his very "proper" domain. A second aspect of the Preface, no less firmly articulated by Coleridge, concerns the introductory function of the essay for the actual poems of the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads. However, the by now familiar argument, most cogently made by Don Bialostosky, that Coleridge consistently misstates the terms and, indeed, misprisions the very purpose of the Preface, does not yet free us from Coleridge's paradigmatic reading of the text as an intrinsically contradictory poetic theory that proves also extrinsically incompatible with the poems it purports, in Coleridge's view at least, to explain to an audience.3 A less cumbersome and more enabling strategy of reading this text, which has always been made to bear the burden of someone else's "romanticism," would be an "aggressively" (not regressively) close reading that refuses to invest the poetic topology of the Preface (style, figurative diction, meter, prose
New LiteraryHistory, 1993, 24: 125-146

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versus poetry, and so on) with the immanence and autonomy of the aesthetic first implied by Coleridge's critique and prolonged by much 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 overlap dramatically. An extraordinarily consistent argument takes place, if only we acknowledge that it is not the argument insinuated by the aesthetic topology of Wordsworth's operative terms. Such a proposed, pragmatist reading receives unexpected encouragement from another "close" reader. Even though in her argument formalist preoccupations eventually obscure a highly suggestive thesis, Josephine Miles, refreshingly unconcerned with any Coleridgean ambition of making the Preface "mean" some particular brand of "romanticism," notes how the "problems of diction, problems of figure, problems of order, all are subordinated, the usual critique of Wordsworth's diction to the contrary, to problems of what Wordsworth called reality: the literal, sympathetic connection between man and nature, between image, feeling, and thought."4 Indeed, Wordsworth himself, at the threshold of a new century and eager to propose a romantic vision of modernity, appears fully aware that "reality" itself is not a correlate of perception but an effect of definition. That is, to define "reality" is to configure, with the necessary rhetorical and analytic competence, the diverse interpretive and evaluative stances under a visibly coherent paradigm of community, which Wordsworth locates in the "affective." As the theoretical paradigm and communal "rallying point"5 in which the Preface will anchor its definition of the Real, the affective becomes the focal point of Wordsworth's persistent and significant metaphoric blending of "essential" and "general" features, a practice that serves to align those concepts specifically remarked by Miles: "feeling," "figurative language," and "the rustic." Their paradigmatic and exemplary force, throughout the Preface, inheres in their simultaneous capacity to signify a collective meaning and to appear as the very essence or intuition that "grounds" such meaning, a circumstance that may help explain why the "affective" (from Wordsworth to post-Freudian psychoanalysis) continually defies critical intelligence. Thus, what from Miles's formalist perspective may appear to be "literal" can be seen, from a pragmatist point of view, as a type of rhetorical practice which, while ostensibly "denoting" or "signifying" a certain "object," effectively assumes the communal interpretive stance and its values on which the objectivity of such "literal" essences remains predicated.

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My principal contention, then, is that in according centrality to notions of "feeling," figuration, and the "rustic" Wordsworth's Preface simultaneously performs the ideation of a sweeping, cultural theory while masking the utility, that is, the situational specificity or "pragmatics," that informs his practice as a theorist. Such an argument, however, were it to be carried out without further qualification, would in all likelihood replace the often stubborn and misplaced criticisms of Wordsworth's Preface with a new, no less hard-nosed set of terms. Indeed, in what follows I clearly do not wish to rely on the broad strokes and often generic procedures of a "critique" that might purport to uncover a certain "ideology" in the text insofar as it has been "displaced" by the text, notably by the conspicuous centrality of aesthetic notions such as "poetic diction," "meter," "rustic life," and "feeling." An alternative, and in my view more responsive as well as productive approach, will have us scrutinize Wordsworth's persistent efforts at revaluating precisely these concepts, revealing a rhetorical strategy modestly billed as a Preface to an initially anonymous collection of poems though yielding nothing short of a landmark document in romantic cultural and social theory. For it is here, if not for the first time then at least to an unprecedented degree, that an intrinsically political theory of culture is advanced as a theory of discourse, itself bounded by the yet tighter formal constraints of the discipline of poetics and formal stylistics.6 Indeed, it is precisely this unique tension between the expansive cultural ambitions and the restrictive disciplinary economy of "poetics" which enables the Preface to invest poetry with paradigmatic value, thereby shaping an argument about the fundamental continuity between discursive, poetic, and cultural transactions. I Toward the end of the Preface, Wordsworth remarks on the implicit commerce between poetic technique (style) and cultural theory: "having thus explained a few of my reasons for writing in verse, and why I have chosen subjects from common life, and endeavoured to bring my language near to the real language of men, if I have been too minute in pleading my cause, I have at the same time been treating a subject of general interest."7 A preliminary understanding of this "general interest," which is to guide the following remarks, will seek to understand the Preface as a speculative treatise on the structure and pragmaticsof the poetic sign. "Pragmatics," in the context of this argument, shall denote the

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overarching cultural efficiency or functionality of the Preface, a text whose often tenuous configuration of seemingly discrete and (in the views of numerous readers) disjointed technical arguments has usually preempted the critical articulation of that efficiency. Rather than speaking of a "subtext" or its "historicity," a pragmatist understanding of Wordsworth's text is less liable to impute to it conspiratorial or unconscious motives (such as a displacement of history, or an elision of economic, psychological, or cultural "desire") and thus to burden the Preface with an ultimately belated, critical theory of the subject.8 Rather, Wordsworth's argument aims at constructing-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's theory visibly aligns its "interest" in the restoration of "consistency" and "sincerity" to rhetorical practice with a larger, eschatological hope for the restoration of "homogeneity" to an entire culture. From behind the formally "disciplined" discourse of poetics there gradually emerges the larger, pragmatic-cultural dimension of the Preface, as Wordsworth now persists in demarcating his theory of value from contingent historical transformations characteristic of the present rather than from a coherently argued tradition in poetics and criticism. As he insists time and again, values grounded in and promoted by the kind of stylistic practice that merits the title of "good poetry" must categorically transcend history. In a rhetorical manner quite familiar to Wordsworth's readers, however, the cultural interest in restoring the "human" to an order of authenticity presently besieged by historical contingency is advanced through the rhetorical convention of humilitas. While it may be difficult to decide to what extent the conspicuously humble rhetorical conduct of the Preface is "evasive" of prevailing historical and political constraints or, alternatively, pragmatically "manipulative" of a skeptical audience, Wordsworth's Preface affirms its sincerity by avowing its strictly local and "technical" application and by disavowing any disruption of the boundaries demarcating the discipline of "poetics":9 To treat the subjectwith the clearnessand coherence of which it is susceptible, it would be necessary to give a full account of the present state of the public taste in this country, and to determine how far this taste is healthy or depraved; which again, could not be determined, without pointing out in what manner language and the human mind act and re-act on each other, and without tracing the revolutions, not of literature alone, but likewise of society itself. (PrW 121; 1802 text)

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A fully developed theory of poetry, Wordsworth notes, would mandate an inquiry into the extent to which the poetic sign is determined by the intellectual resources of the writer and by the hermeneutic frame of reception espoused by its specific audience. Rhetorically grounded in a trope of disease ("healthy or depraved")-itself a master-trope of contingency-Wordsworth's proposed inquiry into the pathology of "public taste" teems with ideological interest. Hence, notwithstanding its syntax of disavowal, the passage has affirmed the theoretical link between the primary "subject" of poetics, a secondary sociology of "taste," and the capstone of a totalizing, "transcendental" inquiry ("pointing out in what manner language and the human mind act and re-act on each other"). Wordsworth's ostensibly humble, formal-technical investment in poetic technique visibly understates the political as well as the metaphysical efficiency of (any) discursive technique, professing to bring into focus merely the differential and potentially contingent empiricity of a "poetic diction" which, the Preface claims, has come to erode the criteria for aesthetic value, the poet's spiritual authority, and poetry's cultural efficiency. Characterizing the passage as "a breathtaking prospectus," Jon Klancher justly notes how "it has now become impossible to write the smallest, humblest poem of worth without framing it with an ambitious theory of social transformation, individual and collective psychology, literature and the interpretation of signs."1' Indeed, as the characteristically vague allusion to events between 1789 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, such as the "revolutions . . . of society itself." With its unpredictable and ultimately intractable shifts, reconfigurations, and "motions" in the fields of class, economics, demographics, politics, religion, and aesthetics, history continually threatens the specificity-that is, the normative or "objective" referential value-which Wordsworth is eager to restore to the poetic sign. Thus the Preface's conflation of "history" with contingency per se amounts but to a recharacterization of a pervasive indeterminacy said to vitiate the referential field that has been implicitly deemed "natural" or "proper" to poetic language. In fact, Wordsworth cannot even ascribe the "fickle[ness]" of taste and of the poetic sign to the instability of the referential field unless the "subject" can be identified in some palpable way independent of historical and empirical contingency. Hence, in order to point up the extent and the purported causes of its corruption, Wordsworth must trope the field of reference by means of a figure whose

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relevance to history and community "goes without saying," so to speak. What is ravaged by the forces of history, then, is the "human mind" itself. Notwithstanding Wordsworth's repeated and conspicuous characterization of his poetics as aimed at the recovery of "the primary laws of our nature" (PrW 122), it will not suffice to point to the abundance of generalization throughout the Preface as evidence for the text's purported cultural and ideological "interest," since it is precisely that conceptual generality which simultaneously complicates our search for specific evidence to support such a thesis.1 Thus, rather than merely asserting that Wordsworth proposes notions of a somewhat suggestive generality, we may get on better by showing how his consistently generalizing rhetorical conduct effectively instantiates the identification of stylistic and poetic values with social and communal ones. Thus what the 1798 "Advertisement" had disqualified as an oppressively aesthetic practice, the "gaudiness and inane phraseology of many modern writers" (PrW 116), now reappears writ large as the very spectre of a society marked in every imaginable way by contingent historical change: [A] multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminatingpowersof the mind, and, unfitting it for all voluntary exertion, to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor. The most effective of these causes are the great national events which are daily taking place, and the increasing accumulationof men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies. . . . reflecting upon the magnitude of the general evil, I should be oppressed with no dishonorable melancholy, had I not a deep impression of certain inherent and indestructible qualities of the human mind, and likewise of certain powers in the great and permanent objects that act upon it. ... In spite of difference of soil and climate, of language and manners, of laws and customs: in spite of things silently gone out of mind, and things violently destroyed; the Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time. (PrW 129, 131, 141; 1802 text) The assertion of great distress at the loss of a stable and meaningful field of reference coincides with a somewhat general description of the political and social transformations of English society during the 1790s.'2 Wordsworth's isolation of "certain inherent and indestructible qualities of the human mind" does not, therefore, constitute an imaginative faith in the autonomy of human subjectivity; on the contrary, growing syntactically and logically out of the antecedent

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notations of an entropic disorder, the paradigm of a human and masculine self-consciousness enters the argument precisely because, and only to the extent that, the erosion of a specific field of reference for poetic production is experienced at the site of self-consciousness. Not only does historical change "blunt the discriminating powers of mind," however, but it may eventually compromise the ability of consciousness to reflect on this erosion of its own, "essentially" human specificity itself. Indeed, any notation of "our natural and unalienable inheritance" (PrW 141; 1802 text) and its implicit faith in the "human" as a noncontingent (transhistorical and transcultural) "essence" remains rhetorically as well as syntactically dependent on the presence of vast forces of negation. Hence, with its anaphoric string of subordinate clauses ("In spite of. . ."), each of which challenges the idea of a human essence logically prior to the historicity that permits its definition, the last passage reveals Wordsworth's eagerness to designate an ideal referent or poetic signified unconstrained by the shifting economies of time and place. The imbalanced economy between an "essentialist" cultural vocabulary and a syntax relentlessly impelled by a desire to disavow those "differences" threatening that very vocabulary (and thereby exposing once again the contingency of "essentialist" talk) involves yet another troubling complication. For the same passage also intimates that, besides eroding the permanence of poetry's desired signified (such as those "primary laws of our nature"), historical contingency 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 which instantiates the contingency and velocity of historical change. In short, the formal conception of a world knowable through stable semiotic correspondences is threatened at both ends, with Wordsworth now recognizing discourse of any form and shape as contingent on interpretation both in a subjective and an objective sense. Indeed, this bilateral instability of the sign-palpably evidenced by shifting techniques and "tastes" in signifying practice and by the transformation of the world thus signified-also accounts for Wordsworth's persistent interfacing of a technical (poetic) and a cultural agenda. Both converge in the subject (to be understood as both the signifying agency and the "ideal" referent of all signification) of poetry itself, which Wordsworth perceives to be human consciousness, the site of an ongoing struggle between self-identity and difference, authenticity and distortion, between the inwardness of "feeling" and the alienating forces 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; 1802 text), 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 indiscriminate depiction of the threat posed by historical contingencyperceived to erode and render indiscriminate both the cultural ("savage torpor") and economic identity ("uniformity of the occupations") of the "subject" ("humanity" as "community")-will be opposed by a figure of poetic redemption whose essence is grounded in its gendered self-identity.13 Hence Wordsworth's recovery of authentic poetic speech evolves as an exclusively masculine and, as the persistent emphasis on self-presence of the poet's essence qua "voice" and "speech" reveals, unmediatedtransaction. The poet "is a man speaking to men . . . a man pleased with his own passions and volitions" (PrW 138; 1802 text; italics mine). "The Poet writes . . . as a Man" (PrW 139; 1802 text). "He considers man and the objects that surround him . .. He considers man and nature as essentially adapted to each other" (PrW 140; 1802 text). II The minimal and noncontingent "essence" of the human, those "primary laws of human nature" or those "certain indestructible qualities," are generally embodied in the concept of the affective, also referred to as "feeling," "passion," or, at the beginning of the Preface, as a "state of vivid sensation" (PrW 118). Here, then, are some of the pivotal statements wherein the affective is being promoted to the status of an a priori, paradigmatic cultural value: Humble and rustic life was generally chosen because in that condition, the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphaticlanguage.... Accordingly,such a language, arisingout of repeated experience and regular feelings, is a more permanent, and far more philosophical language, than that which is frequently substituted for it. . . . Poems to which any value can be attached were never produced on any variety of subjects but by a man who . . . had also thought long and deeply. For our continued influxes of feeling are modified and directed by our thoughts, which are indeed the representativesof all our past feelings; . . . feeling therein [in the Ballads] developed gives importance to the action and situation, and not the action and situation to the feeling. (PrW 125-27; 1802 text)

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If the cultural pragmatics of Wordsworth's text hinge on the social adaptability of the affective, the question now becomes how "feeling" relates to "community." Once again, it is the rhetorical conduct of Wordsworth's argument which instantiates at least part of the answer. Thus the "essential passions of the heart" become, within the space of a few lines, "elementary feelings," an already more general turn of phrase. Such verbal transference, it appears, serves to avoid a sliding back of the affective into the spectrum of contingent meanings that extends from the historico-cultural down to the idiosyncratic and private, since it is precisely against these latter meanings that the affective is meant to demarcate the "human" as the essence of community. Presumably for the same reasons, we find Wordsworth rejecting the prevailing, bewilderingly diverse inventory of poetic subjects ("poems to which any value can be attached were never written on any variety of subjects"), thereby strengthening an argument in which poetic value is restricted to the affective as the most "durable" aspect of consciousness. It is the self-identity and purportedly inalienable essentialism of those "great and simple affections of our nature" (PrW 126) which accounts for their pragmatic value in the argument at hand; they serve to reconfigure an unnaturally dispersed economy of discourse into a community characterized by a "healthful state of association" (PrW 126), a community whose affective center of gravity will necessarily be found "outside"
of history.14

Hence, in order to preserve the integrity of such a center from being once again invaded by the contingent forces of historical and cultural change, the Preface conceives of conscious reflection as being, at all times, already the effect of the antecedent dynamics of "feeling": "thoughts . . . are indeed the representatives of all our past feelings." Poetry itself then is not principally interested in the local and contextual determinacy and specificity of the affective, but on the contrary seeks to establish this notion as an ontological and noncontingent human essence. Wordsworth's long note to "The Thorn" makes this particularly clear when insisting that "a Poet's words . . . ought to be weighed in the balance of feeling" since "poetry is passion: it is the history or science of feelings; now every man must know that an attempt is rarely made to communicate feelings without something of an accompanying consciousness of the inadequateness of our own powers, or the deficiencies of language."15 The function of poetry in relation to the affective is to redeem "every man" from the consciousness of alienation or decenteredness, a chord likely to resonate among an urban middleclass audience whose affective and socioeconomic identities no longer

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coincide. Prima facie, then, it is the principal and pragmatic interest of the Preface to reinstate the affective as a general, noncontingent ontology of sorts, since the intervention of the poet on behalf of his community is strictly predicated on a pervasive and general affective crisis. The figure of the poet which now enters the argument seeks to reconstruct a community by "convey[ing] passion to Readers who are not accustomed to sympathize with men [!] feeling in that manner or using such language." Such a general purpose ("community"), redefined around an equally general notion ("feeling"), will require a skillfully calibrated, mediating form of discourse: "It seemed to me that this might be done by calling in the assistance of the Lyrical" (PW II, 512; italics mine). The supplemental function here ascribed to the lyric opens the next stage in the argument; for in keeping with his well-known distrust of abstract notions ("lifeless words, & abstract propositions" merely placate "the spirit of self-accusation" [PrW 104]), Wordsworth appears well aware of the fact that no determination of "feeling" can acquire compelling argumentative value at a purely conceptual level alone. As the purportedly "founding" criterion of the human, "feeling" will have to be situated within an ostensibly historical frame of reference that will support the definition of its adequate or "natural" discursive form. Hence, having initially dehistoricized and dissociated the affective from the seemingly boundless spectrum of social, 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 examination of this idea, proverbial of the obscurity and contradictoriness 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, and human incidents" (PrW 116) is projected onto a largely nostalgic, if not outright imaginary setting of "common life." The highly questionable historical authenticity of such "incidents and situations from common life" (PrW 123; 1802 text), said to comprise the general setting of "humble and rustic life" (PrW 125; 1802 text), is itself rhetorically hidden from sight by Wordsworth's repeated and conspicuously inflected claim that the Lyrical Ballads violate certain inherited and precariously mannered, formal-aesthetic conventions of poetic language. That is, the confession (once again, humilitas) of aesthetic transgression smuggles in the assumption that the "rural" constitutes a materially and empirically distinct, historical reality. The poet's ethics, anchored in his conscientious observance of a faithful and continuous empirical correspondence or community between 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 look steadily at my subject" [PrW 133; 1802 text])-thus legitimates the "interest" or motive of such avowed stylistic transgression.16 Once again pivoting on the convention of humilitas ("I may have sometimes written upon unworthy subjects" [PrW 153; 1802 text]), Wordsworth's prefatory rhetoric continues to obfuscate the possibility that such "subjects" might not exist, at least not in such schematic form, in the first place. It is this combined rhetorical thrust of a humbly and visibly understated field of reference and an equally self-effacing, literal model of representation ("plain style") which recasts the issue of the historical authenticity of the referent ("rustic life") as the question of stylistic propriety. Our pragmatist reading thus sees the "rural" function as the controlling or "founding" allegory (the "other") of a historical consciousness, and hence synechdochized as "feeling." It cannot be accorded autonomous material existence-such facticity belonging nowhere until it is "represented" for the urban reader-but instead must be excavated from the conceptuo-historical entanglements which, in the view of the Preface, characterize the self-alienated urban consciousness whose economic and social ambition Wordsworth time and again manages to enlist for what purports to be a journey of affective self-re(dis)covery. Wordsworth's pragmatist poetics thus intone the referential veracity of the "rural" only by way of an accompanying, deictic notation of that realm's erosion and imminent disappearance. Thus motivated by the project of reconfiguring an increasingly heterogeneous spectrum of urban middleclass readers, endowed with complex and seemingly incompatible economic, affective, and cultural "interests," the Preface engages the question concerning the facticity of the "rural" only vicariously, namely, by assuming it when pondering its appropriate stylistic form. Indeed, despite shrewdly exposing the concept of "rustic life" as a historical and stylistic ou topos, Coleridge still followed the fiction far enough to be drawn into the more technical debate regarding the extent to which the imagined language of such life would admit of imitation.17 In and of itself, however, the "rural" clearly proves a "critical fiction," which, as remains to be shown, may help us understand why Wordsworth persists in linking its affective qualities to figural language. III To recall a familiar formulation of Wordsworth's ostensibly agrarian poetics: "Humble and rustic life was generally chosen, because,

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in that condition, the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language" (PrW 125; 1802 text). Notwithstanding its programmatic transparency, the statement brings into focus several of the rhetorical difficulties that continue to preoccupy the Preface as it gropes for an appropriate ratio between "feeling" and "style"-that is, between the "immediacy" of the affective as origin and its "communicability" as social value. Thus the delicate balance between a communal language "really used by men" (PrW 123; 1802 text) and its poetic transformation by a "certain colouring of the imagination" (PrW 123; 1802 text) begins to crumble as Wordsworth inadvertently deploys the very conceptof "rustic life" as a metaphor for "passion" which it is otherwise said to embody. The argument's unexpected sliding toward overt troping of its basic the "rustic"--points up the next, once again conconcepts-here, understated, concern of the Preface. spicuously Namely, to recover the affective as a communal, "primary law" of a humanity beset by infinite and contingent difference, mandates a form of expression that can be unfailingly distinguished from both the erratic discursivity associated with "rapid" historical transformation and from the mechanized application of figural language by a literary culture frantically trying to outpace contingent change with 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' contamination by the insubstantiality of a promiscuously reproductive "poetic diction," Wordsworth notes, "as much pains has been taken to avoid it as is ordinarily taken to produce it" (PrW 131; 1802 text).'8 And yet, to react as vehemently against the hold of his contemporary culture on the poetic sign invariably reinstates the very artificiality ("as much pains has been taken") which it critiques, while at the same time compromising the latitude of poetic expression: "it has necessarily cut me off from a large portion of phrases and figures of speech which from father to son have long been regarded as the common inheritance of Poets" (PrW 133). If cultural and social responsibility involves counteracting the apparent 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. Indeed, Wordsworth seems increasingly aware of the extent to which his ideation of a language of authentic feeling is already at a remove from the "rustic" sphere of authentic reference from which it derives its cultural legitimacy and authority. Hence one is to "imitate, and,

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as far as is possible, to adopt the very language of men," to make "this selection . . . with true taste and feeling" (PrW 131, 137; 1802 text), to "describe," "imitate," or "conjure up" passion.19 Having advocated up to this point in the Preface a categorical break with the stale tradition of Augustan poetry, Wordsworth now begins to sense the extent to which the forces of history-literary and cultural alike-may invade the very poetry that seeks to keep them in check under the auspices of the affective.20 While he "imitates and describes the 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 homogeneity of the affective ("the primary laws of human nature") is mounted neither by the historical shifts of poetry's social field of reference 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 degree mechanical") to "feeling," which constitutes the most tenacious impediment to Wordsworth's theoretical vision of a socially and culturally efficient poetic technique. Between the derivate practice (that is, "poetic diction" as imitation of reference) and the theorized ideal (in other words, figuration as homologous to "universal passion") there opens up the far more unsettling prospect of rhetoric as simulacrum.Not surprisingly, then, the resistance of "feeling" to communicability reveals itself, throughout the Preface, in subtle though inconclusive terminological substitutions. The affective shifts from "essential passions" (PrW 125; 1802 text) to "elementary feelings" (PrW 125; 1802 text) to "regular feelings" (PrW 125; 1802 text) to "moral feelings" (PrW 137; 1802 text), to "general sympathy" (PrW 138; 1802 text), to "general passions and thoughts and feelings" (PrW 142; 1802 text) and, finally, to "the great and universal passions of men" (PrW 145; 1802 text). The progressive totalization of the affective, its essentialization under the auspices of a "rustic life" immunizing it against contingent historical difference, inexorably impels the Preface toward committing poetry and the lyric to a paradigmatic ("expressive") and equally universalized theory of style. Shifting from "the subjects and aim of these Poems . . . to their style," Wordsworth again reaffirms his faith in the authenticity of "the very language of men" (PrW 131; 1802 text) which poetry is to "imitate" or "adopt." Constructed as the historical concretion of the affective, the superior cultural authority of the "rustic" proves an effect of its purported discursive immediacy: "The Reader will find that personifications of abstract ideas rarely occur in these

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volumes; and are utterly rejected as an ordinary device to elevate the style. . . . Assuredly such personifications do not make any natural or regular part of that language. They are, indeed, a figure of speech occasionally prompted by passion, and I have made use of them as such" (PrW 131; 1802 text). According to Wordsworth, the intrinsically mediating, because substitutive, event of figuration must itself be, at all times, an "immediate" effect of "passion."21 Given the foundational status of the affective throughout the Preface-serving as the ontology that supports the poet's recovery of a community-it may under no circumstances be subject to historical shifts in taste and rhetorical practice. Wordscontingent worth's rhetorical argument thus employs the trope of personification itself in synecdochic or paradigmatic manner, meant to illustrate the general susceptibility of figurative diction to use and abuse. Such a choice is far from accidental, given Wordsworth's overall concern with recovering an authentic paradigm of subjectivity: "if the subject be judiciously chosen, it will naturally, and upon fit occasion, lead [the poet] to passions the language of which, if selected truly and judiciously, must necessarily be dignified and variegated, and alive with metaphors and figures" (PrW 137; 1802 text).22 It is here that Wordsworth's strategic identification of poetic technique and cultural practice encounters its most severe problems. They manifest themselves, as so often in Wordsworth's prefatory writings, in the form of a parenthetical concession that is not considered a significant risk for the overriding argument. Speaking of the subject, the poet, Wordsworth notes that in addition to other qualities, the poet is characterized by "a disposition to be affected more than other men by absent things as if they were present; an ability of conjuring up in himself passions, which are indeed far from being the same as those produced by real events, yet (especially in those parts of the general sympathy which are pleasing and delightful) do more nearly resemble the passions produced by real events, than anything which, from the motions of their own minds merely, other men are accustomed to feel in themselves" (PrW 138; 1802 text). The undeniably supplementary relation of the poetic sign to the affective culture of "rustic life" and its corresponding "real language" poses a theoretical dilemma from which Wordsworth seeks to extricate himself by suggesting that the poet is capable of supplementing "absent things" and "conjuring up in himself passions" 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 impossible for the Poet to produce upon all occasions language as exquisitely fitted for the passion as that which the real passion itself suggests, it is proper that he should consider himself in the situation of a translator, who does not scruple to substitute excellencies of another kind for those unattainable by him" (PrW 139; 1802 text). The image of the translator defines the mediation of the affective with a secondary language, itself but the "imitation" designed to "conjure up" the originary idiom that proves "unattainable" even for the poet. 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 of discriminating between the authoritative, figurative translation of "passion" and the deluge of cognate sensations effected by rhetorical counterfeit. In short, the causality between passion and figuration (between essence and telos, inward "feeling" and communal "sympathy") is inherently undecidable. If the poet is merely "affected . . by absent things," how are we to know that "metaphors and figures" are indeed "prompted by passion"? To insist on such a causality, 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 appear in figural form, alienated from its putative origin. The essential quality of the affective, steadily affirmed by the technical concern with its most faithful "translation," effectively distracts from its functional status throughout the Preface, namely to deduce from the essential self-identity and homogeneity of "feeling" the social exigency of a homogenous (noncontingent and transhistorical) value of "sympathy" and community itself.23 Alluding to the force of convention, Wordsworth notes, "I may have sometimes written upon unworthy subjects; but I am less apprehensive on this account, than that my language may frequently have suffered from those arbitrary connections of feelings and ideas with particular words and phrases, from which no man can altogether protect himself" (PrW 153; 1802 text). The poet's authority thus appears to be simultaneously predicated on and destabilized by the equivalence 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 understood as a translator, the poet's effort at constructing a communal culture depends on "metaphors and figures" whose value and authority are irremediably alienated from the affective interiority or

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essence that legitimizes the poet's social "interest" to begin with.24 Meanwhile, if the theoretical exposure of such undecidability appears oppressively familiar in its "deconstructionist" bent, Wordsworth's subsequent remarks skillfully avoid drawing any conclusions that might leave the overall argument stranded amidst the smouldering debris of some generalized, existential crisis. Quite to the contrary, the Preface appears no less enabled than threatened by this "equivalence" between figuration and passion, that is, between its mediating structure and the affective immediacy that simultaneously constitutes the origin ("feeling") and the telos ("community") of poetic practice. Indeed, in order to sustain an argument about cultural and social values Wordsworth will have to balance both a negative causality (figures "conjuring up" the effect of "passion") that illustrates a pervasive 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 currently inflated economy of cognitive, emotive, and material values.

IV
The 1802 Appendix to the Preface recharacterizes the theoretical predicament of an undecidable causality between "feeling" and figuration as the result of a historical deterioration of both reading taste and poetic practice. As it deplores the absence of a reliable standard for the employment of figurative diction by characterizing the currently prevailing, differential and fluctuating economies of "feeling" and figuration as the endpoint in a historical trajectory that has all but eroded reliable standards of signification and interpretation, the Preface simultaneously "naturalizes" its own cognitive procedure by adopting the organic and authoritative form of a historical genealogy: The earliest poets of all nations generally wrote from passion excited by real events; they wrote naturally, and as men: feeling powerfully as they did, their language was daring, and figurative. In succeeding times, Poets, and Men ambitious of the fame of Poets, perceiving the influence of such language and desirous of producing the same effect without being animated by the same passion, set themselves to a mechanical adoption of these figures of speech, and made use of them, sometimes with propriety, but much more frequently applied them to feelings and thoughts with which they had no natural connection whatsoever.A language was thus insensibly

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produced, differing materiallyfrom the real language of men in anysituation. (PrW 160; 1802 text) What the narrative's genealogical structure effectively masks, however, is the insistent theoretical affinity between a "poetic diction" repeatedly criticized and the (good) poet's inescapably belated and substitutive figuration of "passion." For "while he describes and imitates passions," we now recall, any poet's activity will prove "in some degree mechanical," thus staking his cultural efficiency on his "ability of conjuring up in himself passions, which are indeed far from being the same as those produced by real events" (PrW 138; 1802 text). Historical contingency-itself the cause of the theoreticaltensions within the Preface and thus continually disruptive of Wordsworth's ideation of a homogenized cultural value-is about to be refocused or "displaced" once more. Specifically, the previously lamented contingent difference or, as the Preface prefers to see it, the historical deteriorationof objective standards of value, now manifests itself as a crisis of reading. Indeed, it is precisely this theoreticaltension between the intrinsically supplemental figuration of "whatever passions [the poet] communicates to his reader" (PrW 151; 1802 text) and the avowed essentialism of such affective foundations of culture which now accounts for the erratic transformations of aesthetic response offered by inherently variational audiences. The Preface's overarching assertion, namely that there be an essential, identifiable, and representable core-those "primary laws of our nature" linking the individual with humanity-proves shaky as long as the bond of signifier/signified and figure/affect remains at the mercy of reading as a historically and socially conditioned practice. Though it has been conceived as the very sign and signature that vouches for the authenticity and durability of "true" culture, poetry remains susceptible of alienation into a contingent otherness by the infelicitous historical collaboration of derivative poets and gullible readers. As Jon Klancher remarks, the poems as well as the 1800 Preface "compose the textual countermove against that vast social transformation that since Wordsworth's birth has been turning one (full)
culture into another (empty) culture. . . . Thus the increasingly

bleak strategy of a writer who casts the act of reading against ineluctible historical development itself."25Referring to the language that was "insensibly produced" by the misappropriation of "poetic diction," Wordsworth thus resumes his historical narrative:

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The Reader or Hearer of this distorted language found himself in a perturbedand unusual state of mind: when affected by the genuine language of passion he had been in a perturbed and unusual state of mind also: in both cases he was willing that his common judgment and understanding should be laid asleep, and he had no instinctive and infallible perception of the true to make him reject the false; the one served as the passport for the other. The emotion was in both cases delightful, and no wonder if he confounded the one with the other, and believed them both to be produced by the same, or similar causes. Besides, the poet spake to him in 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 of social and cultural relations requires the personifying "passport" of figurative rhetoric, to flourish that passport is to be at the mercy of an audience (itself to be reformed) whose ability to evaluate and discriminate between authentic essences and pragmatic effects, between "true" affect and "false" sensation, is at all times historically contingent. There simply cannot exist any "instinctive and infallible perception of the true" since the reader too is but a historically determined category. While Wordsworth may insist on the poet's unique spiritual endowment-a being capable of contemplating "ordinary life . . . with a certain quantity of immediate knowledge"

(PrW 140; 1802 text)-both the sensationalist and the authentic forms of "passion" appear to have been "produced by the same, or similar causes." The complexity and significance of Wordsworth's Preface at the threshold of a new century rests primarily with its unexpected recognition of a fundamental incommensurability between ideational desires and their discursive realization. A conflict irrupts into an argument whose "interest" lies with a definition of culture and its founding value (the affective), yet whose resources derive from the domain of rhetorical and poetic theory. Wordsworth's management of this tension between his cultural pragmatics and a corresponding, imagined poetic infrastructure, between value and form, at times appears to hint at an emergent conservatism. Ultimately, though, the Preface opts for an idiom of rhetorical persuasion rather than dogmatic propositions, thereby suggesting that the motive subtending Wordsworth's entire theory-in other words, the ideation of a community founded on a homogeneous, human, and specifically affective essence-has neither been fully realized nor completely failed. To be sure, its realization has been forestalled by a seemingly irresolvable tension between "essence" and "discourse," a tension that 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, middleclass version of humanism, Wordsworth does not seek to link the affective to an absolute or God, preferring instead to explore the resistance of his rhetorical medium to the envisioned goal of a reunified culture. In spite of an often overwhelming desire to transfigure societas into universitas, Wordsworth will seek-at least in his 1798 and 1800 Lyrical Ballads-to achieve community poetically, that is, as the effect of interpretive participation elicited by a complex array of rhetorical forms rather than being postulated conceptually. For the time being, that is, the troubled hypothesis of a "real language of men" and its purportedly authentic, if fading, "rustic" community remains at the center of interpretive rather than definitional practice. The social and, ultimately, moral "interests" or pragmatics of the Preface are thus realized by way of a recharacterization of the vernacular, henceforth to be regarded as "a practice in terms of which to think, to choose, to act, and to utter."26Michael Oakeshott's portrayal of moral and social conduct as inherently discursive seems applicable to the Preface's consistent blending of affective and discursive values. Its openness and flexibility may not always be what Wordsworth's 1800 text fully endorses, but it is a model which Wordsworth, the relatively unknown writer of the year 1800-so troubled by the conflict between his democratic convictions and his professional ambition-is not yet prepared to surrender on behalf of Wordsworth, the public author. Thus the 1800 Preface implicates both romanticism and modernism in the irremediable tension between a language by definition alienated into contingent and uncontainable otherness and a desire for "more durable" cultural value that threatens to unravel at the very moment of its rhetorical implementation.
DUKE UNIVERSITY NOTES 1 See James Heffernan's repeated objections to "crude formulations" that expose the Preface's "disunity" and "dissonance." James Heffernan, The Transforming Imagination: Wordsworth'sTheory of Poetry (Ithaca, N.Y., 1969), pp. 47, 92. See also W. J. B. Owen, Wordsworth Critic (Toronto, 1969). as 2 See Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. III of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. James Engell and Walter J. Bate (Princeton, 1983), chs. 14 and 17. While skillfully balancing Coleridge's complex and often misleading reading of the Preface, Don Bialostosky remains, in my view, too committed to

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Wordsworth's pivotal concepts of "feeling," the "rustic," and "speech." Such proximity, it seems, causes Bialostosky to endorse precisely those essential and substantive realities about "human nature" (individual and collective) that Wordsworth's argument assumes in order to achieve its larger, cultural and ideological objectives. See Don Bialostosky, "Coleridge's Interpretation of Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads," PMLA, 93 (1978), 912-24. 3 For a renewal of the Coleridgean reading of the Preface as "defensive," seeking to redefine the relation (distorted by reviewers) between audience and LyricalBallads, see Anuradha Dingwaney and Lawrence Needham, "(Un)Creating Taste: Wordsworth's Platonic Defense in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads," Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 19 (1989), 333-47. For a similar reading, see James Scroggins, "The Preface to Lyrical Ballads: A Revolution in Dispute," in Studies in Criticismand Aesthetics,16601800, ed. Howard Anderson and John S. Shea (Minneapolis, 1966), pp. 380-98. 4 Josephine Miles, The Primary Language of Poetry in the 1740's and 1840's (Berkeley, 1950), p. 363. 5 William Wordsworth, Letter to Charles James Fox, 14 Jan. 1801, The Early Letters ed. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford, 1935), p. 262. of William Wordsworth, 6 The political context of the Preface has been explored in considerable detail by Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language, 1791-1819 (New York, 1986), esp. pp. 202and Coleridge: The Radical Years(Oxford, 1988). 27, and by Nicholas Roe, Wordsworth For Smith, "the two figures of the rustic and the artificial poet embody the Preface's redefinition of vulgar and refined language. The personification of the rustic makes the Preface's argument more palatable by his nostalgic value as a representative of the 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 aesthetic argument" (p. 222), Smith reveals an alarmingly unreflected, disjunctive understanding of linguistic theory and political ideology as materially distinct and analytically separable. 7 "Advertisement, Preface, and Appendix to Lyrical Ballads," The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. 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 as PrW. 8 My idea of a "pragmatist" reading, as it unfolds below, does not assume the reflexive belatedness and often eschatological confidence of current historicist and materialist critiques of ideology, a tendency also criticized by Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity(Cambridge, 1989), esp. pp. 56-69. Nor do I wish to elide the Preface's historical specificity by way of the often schematic contextualism that underwrites theories of the performative. A more balanced and positive concept of the 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 performance and procedural consideration may be distinguished but are inseparably joined, and in which the character of agent and that of practitioner are merged in a single selfrecognition. The so-called 'practical' is not a certain kind of performance; it is conduct in respect of its acknowledgement a practice" (p. 57; italics mine). of 9 For Olivia Smith, for example, "many of the evasions of the Preface to Lyrical Ballads can be accounted for by the frightened temper of 1800" (Smith, The Politics of 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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apparent in his 1802 letter to John Wilson: "People in our rank in life are perpetually falling into one sad mistake, namely, that of supposing that human nature and the persons they associate with are one and the same thing. Whom do we generally associate with? Gentlemen, persons of fortune, professional men, ladies, persons who can 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 human nature, but we err lamentably if we suppose them to be fair representatives of the vast mass of human existence" (William Wordsworth, Letter to John Wilson, June 1802, in The Early Letters, p. 295). As Jon Klancher remarks, "the whole sociology of 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 negative effects of urbanization and the debasing of 'popular' culture" (David Simpson, Wordsworth's Historical Imagination: The Poetry of Displacement[New York, 1987], p. 64). However, as the letter to Charles James Fox suggests, the focus of the poetic enterprise of Lyrical Ballads is the redefinition of the actual, present culture of urban life in terms of the rustic, which serves "as the rallying point" for "domestic feelings." Since the latter are only recuperable a posteriori, the poetic epitaphs commemorating their disappearance draw their motive for inscription not from these feelings' "essence" (which remains assumed) but from their pragmatic "force," their ability to uncover a 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 of The Ruined Cottage, see Alan Liu, Wordsworth:The Sense of History (Stanford, 1989). Liu contests the traditional "misty-eyed" idea that "humanity can be a timeless personality spanning without difference from Romanticism to our own century" (p. 312). In fact, Liu insists, "only relations, affiliations, or-conceived semioticallycommunications 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 their feelings more sane pure and permanent, in short, more consonant to nature, that is, 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 de Selincourt (Oxford, 1944), II, 513; hereafter cited in text as PW II. 16 In regarding the word "interest" as an index of the pragmatics of Wordsworth's prefatory writings, we must recall the following passage from the note to "The Thorn" which reveals that word's capacity for countering historical contingency with its insistence on the material homogeneity of "rural life." Speaking of "repetition and tautology," Wordsworth observes that such rhetorical features produce an evidently desirable confusion of the domain of rhetoric with the material world: "among the chief of these reasons is the interest which the mind attaches to words, not only as 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, however unstated ("for real therefore, we must substitute ordinary, or lingua communis" [p. 56]), Coleridge nevertheless continues to subscribe to the concept of the "rustic" as a regulative fact rather than as the pragmatic fiction that is to enable Wordsworth's promotion, 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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literal (of people) 18 On the interaction between images of reproduction-both and figural (of books, discourse, poeticisms, etc.)-and Wordsworth's repeated association of derivative representations with prostitution, see Mary Jacobus, 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 suggestive if inconclusive ways to the conceptual affinities between Wordsworth's text and Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population (1798). 19 As Jon Klancher notes, "[Wordsworth] assert[s] that such a language exists ontologically apart from the language of the urban middle class, and that the very framework of representation-where one language 'imitates' another-will at last reveal yet a third language. Neither peasant nor middle-class, this language is the very 'music of humanity.' Here the ambitious, profoundly moral act of writing produces an audience that may escape its unacknowledged prisonhouse of language, its own class-limited cultural position, and gaze into the freer realm of a humanity that '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 remains the 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, in eighteenth-century rhetorical theory, From Signs to Propositions-The Concept of Form in Eighteenth-centurySemantic Theory (London, 1974). Classical precursors of Wordsworth's linkage between metaphor and affect are Robert Lowth's Lectureson the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, 2nd ed. (1787; rpt. London, 1816) and Hugh Blair's Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, (1783; rpt. Edinburgh, 1819). 22 Wordsworth's defensive response to widespread figurative discourse echoes Jeremy Bentham's misgivings about tropes and figures which, in his view, misconstrue assumptions as facts, and about rhetoric in general, which "tends to propagate, as it were by contagion, the passion by which it was suggested." For the quote and a discussion, see Kenneth Burke, "Rhetorical Analysis in Bentham," in his A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley, 1950), pp. 90-101. 23 What our pragmatist reading uncovers as a complex of theoreticaltensions in the Preface can simultaneously be characterized as a historicalambivalence. Thus Jon Klancher notes that "these urban and rural cultures were not simply notional opposites yoked together by the ingenuity of his own Preface; one had been, for the past generation, 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" is recalled by Matthew Arnold, "Wordsworth," in Essays in Criticism,2nd Series (London, 1888), rpt. in Selected Prose, 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's conception of moral conduct as rhetorical practice suggests the possibility of a political reading (rather than mere ideological critique) of aesthetic, and specifically literary, form. I have sought to suggest ways in which the by definition "iterable" infrastructure of lyric utterance appears to instantiate the moral and social authority that Wordsworth progressively claims for his lyrics after 1807. See Thomas Pfau, "The Pragmatics of Genre: Moral Theory and Lyric Authorship in Hegel and Wordsworth," CardozoArts and Entertainment Law Review, 10 (1992), 397-422 (special issue on "Intellectual Property and the Construction of Authorship").