‘A Track Pursuing Not Untrod Before’: Wordsworth, Plato and the Cambridge Platonists

In Douglas Hedley & David Leech (eds.), Revisioning Cambridge Platonism: Sources and Legacy. Springer Verlag. pp. 215-240 (2019)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

Wordsworth’s thought was first defined by its relation to Anglicanism, typified in Coleridge’s remark that Wordsworth was a ‘semi-atheist’. A subsequent commonplace associates his poetic decline with his gradual return to Christian orthodoxy. Even if true, his orthodoxy has many missing elements, and Wordsworth implicitly authorized a search for some philosophical or theological coherence in his work when he declared that an attentive reader of The Excursion would have no difficulty in extracting ‘the system’. Careful study has yielded few convincing results. That he has been taken as an Anglican, a Methodist, a pantheist, a Platonist, a Lockean, a Berkelean and even a Kantian indicates how difficult it is to establish Wordsworth’s intellectual antecedents precisely. Nonetheless, Plato’s was the only ‘system’ that he acknowledged, and a brief review of Wordsworth’s Platonism begins this paper. An examination of The Prelude in the light of Cambridge Platonist thought follows, and reveals a surprising degree of affinity across a range of ideas: the primacy of Reason, the unity of the laws of mind and nature, the idea of a plastic nature, as well as Reason delivering moral absolutes, the senses rejected as a form of knowledge, geometry as ‘a leader of the human mind’, the knowability of God, and the notion of an ‘immaterial centre of Immortality within’.

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,616

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Mediation and Excess in "the Prelude".Jeffery Martin Crouch - 1994 - Dissertation, Vanderbilt University
Wordsworth amongst the Aristotelians.Essaka Joshua - 2006 - Journal of the History of Ideas 67 (3):511-522.
Wordsworth's Literary Criticism.William Wordsworth - 1974 - London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
The Meaning of Community Under the Pen of Wordsworth.Yin Qi-Ping - 2020 - Philosophy and Literature 44 (1):158-175.

Analytics

Added to PP
2020-06-17

Downloads
9 (#1,079,720)

6 months
1 (#1,040,386)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Citations of this work

No citations found.

Add more citations

References found in this work

No references found.

Add more references