"The Excursion" and "The Surfaces of Things"

According to Wordsworth, the signature difference between The Excursion (1814) and the rest of The Recluse project is "the intervention of characters speaking" (II 37). [...]Francis Jeffrey repeatedly quips that The Excursion abounds with "details of preposterous minuteness," &qu...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Wordsworth circle 2014-04, Vol.45 (2), p.99-105
Main Author: Farina, Jonathan
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Geology
Interiority
Literary criticism
Mental objects
Moral character
Philosophical object
Poetry
Preludes
Romantic poetry
Round characters
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Summary:According to Wordsworth, the signature difference between The Excursion (1814) and the rest of The Recluse project is "the intervention of characters speaking" (II 37). [...]Francis Jeffrey repeatedly quips that The Excursion abounds with "details of preposterous minuteness," "useless and most tedious minuteness," and "circumstances of no interest in themselves" (7, 15).2 The Excursion includes all of Wordsworth's stock natural objects: clouds, streams, rocks, turf, and fir trees; lofty elms, mists, crags, who knows how many vales, and shadows - even the rather specific and superficial reflection of a "Shaggy and bold" ram (280). [...]disciplined / All things shall live in us and we shall live / In all things that surround us" expresses an ecological reciprocity, to be sure, in which persons and things commingle and experience life only in their interaction (we are what we sense, and we sense our senses), but this reciprocity depends on the character of "things" itself, the ability of the pronoun to refer to itself, represent itself, substitute for itself. Like personages, in The Excursion "things" often reifies an abstract, ephemeral, dynamic relationship and attitude; it instantiates a posture rather than a fixed possession or identity. [...]the Solitary recounts how, in a rare moment of excursive happiness, This recovery is ephemeral, but it tellingly takes the form of a "mutable array," a changing spread, schema, or superficial pattern. [...]in The Excursion, if not in the rest of his oeuvre, this contact takes place outside of the speaker in common places in a commonwealth of things. [...]the Wanderer does not prescribe a spiritual acknowledgement of the Imagination or the One Life within us and abroad to cure the Solitary's despondency.
ISSN:0043-8006
2640-7310
DOI:10.1086/TWC24045888