Romantic Ken : time and perspective in the poetry of Coleridge and Wordsworth

This dissertation focuses on the connection between representations of time and representations of sight in the poetry of Coleridge and Wordsworth. These poets often use descriptions of their narrators' views as means of marking and measuring time's progress.This study argues that the technique of perspective depiction allows both poets to demonstrate the reconciliation of the philosophical tensions which are imbedded in their poetry.When speaking of Coleridge and Wordsworth, one might generalize about two of their chief concerns as follows. First (and as many critics have observed), the poetry of each of these men reflects an inconsistency regarding the relationship between the external and internal realms. For Wordsworth, this issue is manifested in his ambivalence about the degree of nature's influence (or lack thereof) on the mind. For Coleridge, a similar dilemma appears in his constant wavering between a Hartleian materialism and a Berkeleyan Idealism. Second, it is also generally acknowledged that the art of each poet often seems to alternate between two different conceptions of time: one is objective and successive, and the other is subjective and durational. Throughout the works of both poets, one may recognize the tensions that arise due to frequent dalliances within conflicting epistemological and temporal schemes.Numerous critical studies have considered the issues of perspective and time in this poetry; often, these topics appear in slightly modified form in discussions of landscape and memory, respectively. However, few have touched on the interactive relationship between sight consciousness and time consciousness. This thesis argues that these poets utilize the connection between one's visual field and one's conception of time. Through ingenious narrative presentations of temporal and visual data, each author is sometimes able to mediate between his conflicting philosophical tendencies. Surprisingly, both Coleridge andWordsworth achieve this by grounding their narrators in landscapes that contain particularistic time-space details. One finds that such dense fields of vision allow for the convergence of divergent strains within their epistemological and temporal systems.