Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Original Non-conforming Conformists

The Romantic subjectivity of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge—and the sharpened skill of their wordsmithing—draw emotions from me, a woman two centuries their junior with little in common but the English language, humanity, and fervent love of nature. (Also I am, of course, a product of their Romantic philosophy of subjectivity/individuality.) As we study self-care throughout our (western) literary past this semester, my love of Romantic poetry has resurfaced in reading Coleridge’s Dejection: An Ode’s passages such as this: “A new Earth and a new Heaven, / Undreamt of by the sensual and the proud—Joy is the sweet voice, Joy the luminous cloud—We in ourselves rejoice! / And thence flows all that charms our ear or sight, All melodies the echoes of that voice, / All colors a suffusing from that light.”
In this passage, “Joy” becomes the “voice” of the “new Earth” and “new Heaven”: the “voice,” the “luminous cloud,” of Joy (personified) produces “all melodies” through its echoes, and it is a “light” that suffuses “all colors.” In this regard, Joy encompasses all pleasing sights and sounds. To perceive—through “ear or sight”—the “melodies” and “light” of Joy—we must “in ourselves rejoice!” Joy, then, although experienced “in” the self, is experienced simultaneously with other selves. An individual in isolation would in himself—not ourselves—rejoice.
In Dejection: An Ode, the same person’s perception of the same action can produce different emotions when he inhabits different mind states. For example, “Whence Fancy made me dreams of happiness,” “hope grew round me, like the twining vine, and fruits, foliage not my own, seemed mine.” But when “afflictions bow (him) down to earth,” “viper thoughts” “coil around (his) mind.” In both instances, some abstract entity is either growing round him or is coiling around his mind. In the first instance, the speaker experiences “hope” growing around him; in the second, “thoughts” “coil” around not him, but his mind. The language moves from focusing on him as a whole person to simply his mind. This is particularly telling of the Romantic notion of the individual—for the individual is an atomic whole, while the mind manufactures abstractions (see William Blake’s lovely poem, The Human Abstract, for a remarkable example of this Romantic notion). When the speaker is happy, “hope”—something outside his control/domain—grows naturally; the verb coils, on the other hand, denotes not only corruption by the snake in the garden of Eden, but also the coils of an industrial machine, both corrupting his mind.
If the Enlightenment gave birth to the scientific classification system, what with its Newtonian mechanics, Cartesian logic, Galilean astronomy, and mass-produced works of (now copyrighted) text, the Romantic poets gave birth to the modern individual. Unbeknownst to poetic midwives Wordsworth and Coleridge, that very notion of the individual—for Foucault in his Technologies of the Self and other discourses on power, anyway—is mechanized. 1 In Resolution and Independence, Wordsworth writes, “How is it that you live, and what is it you do?” If Foucault were discoursing with Wordsworth in this poem/moment, “individuals” have two options for (1) determining how to live and (2) what to do, it would seem: conform to the conformists, or conform to the nonconformists. Either way, he would live (1) by conforming or not and (2) would determine subsequent actions from the options available—preselected/determined—in the conformist, or nonconformist, box.
If that is the case, then what are “we” to make of Coleridge’s fun-sounding “new Earth and a new Heaven”—how does this individual-yet-simultaneously-communal experience of “we in ourselves” rejoicing work? For Coleridge, it is as simple as physics: the joy emanates melodic echoes, and the joy suffuses all colors of light; by simply hearing and seeing—perceiving—this joy, “we” experience it not as “thoughts”around our mind—but “in ourselves.”

Notes

1 To quote South Park, the “individual” is a non-conforming conformist (http://southpark.cc.com/clips/154322/non-conformist-coffee): “You can’t be a nonconformist if you don’t drink your coffee,” an emo kid tells Stan (who then drinks his coffee).

Works Cited

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Dejection: An Ode.
Wordsworth, William. Resolution and Independence.