One of the things I’ve been doing on sabbatical is reading more widely and deeply in books that I would consider classics, but which are not necessarily of immediate professional interest in my field at the moment.

I always try to do this, but sabbaticals and summer often provide the most expensive opportunities to explore such works. Even so, I do not try to go up them down, but sip them slowly reading a bit every day, slowly chipping away at the mass, and letting it work on my drip by drip.

Because we were in England for this sabbatical, I decided that one of the things I would like to read was Wordsworth’s great poem, The Prelude (in the 1805 edition).  I had read chunks of it before, but never the whole thing entirely straight through. In recent years I have become much more interested in, and somewhat more sympathetic to, the efforts of the Romantics, broadly construed. I’ve been interested in the German post-Kantians, and certain people responding to the French Revolution, and all of this has made me think more seriously about the nature of the Romantic critique of the Enlightenment. I’ve also long been impressed with Jeffrey Stout’s argument that Alastair MacIntyre’s critique of modernity– – which remains for me a touchstone among criticisms of modernity – –is fundamentally Romantic and content and in form. I also have been increasingly aware of the power of Coleridge as an intellectual, not simply a nice writer, and I hope to be able to grapple with his thinking in coming years as well.

Wordsworth’s great poem is indeed amazing. It charts the development of his mind over his boyhood and youth, kind of culminating in his early 30s with a more or less mature reflection on how all this has happened. I expected it to be beautiful, and it was; I expected to find him stylistically jousting with Milton over the character of iambic pentameter, and what that line can do for English sentences, and he does. (His use of the pentameter line, and the pauses it imposes, to allow for longer, more ruminative and serpentine sentences is really interesting, for starters.)  And those are great benefits for me. But I had not realized how deeply philosophical the poem would be; it seems to me to offer a kind of philosophical anthropology, one based around a reflexive subjectivity that grows increasingly aware of itself, and increasingly aware of the way that its own reflexivity is a kind of good that it alone can realize. It is mildly interesting about the autobiographical details of Wordsworth’s own maturation, but it is more powerful in the way that it combines pretty profound philosophical points with the striking retelling of vivid moments of experience for Wordsworth, which serves to illuminate the philosophical story he is trying to unfold.

There's a lot to dissent from here, for me, of course.  (The account of his sister is weirdly secondary, which is not what I think most scholars would say of her nowadays.)  I do not agree entirely with the picture of the human and the human’s end that Wordsworth presents. I find the account too solitary, and committed to the idea that subjective reflexivity is fundamentally a kind of aloneness of the shelf. I think they are good reasons, on Augustinian grounds, to resist this picture. He proposes a kind of pretty clean disjunction between the this-worldly loves of family and beloved erotic partners, and the kind of reflexivity and self-awareness that comes “from the brooding Soul, and is divine.” I think those loves are much more intimately connected than Wordsworth makes them out to me; I think even at our worldly longings, we are participating in a divine love that gratuitously transcends our capacities to apprehend its motivations, or its boundaries.

But this is an amazing poem, linguistically, lyrically, thematically, narratively; I will return to it, many times.