Wordsworth’s greatest poetry represents the most fundamental of human volitions. This is the will to achieve a wholeness of experience that is identical to the will to poetry itself. “Yew-Trees” is an exemplary representation of that will. In the 1815 Preface to his Poems Wordsworth, speaking of Milton’s poetry, locates the structure of the will to poetry — the volition for represented wholeness of experience — in “alternations” between the points of view of “unity” and “multitude.” The meanings and usages of these terms are not self-evident. In fact, the provenience of this terminology and structure are profoundly Kantian, likely derived, most immediately, from F. A. Nitsch’s General and Introductory View of Professor Kant’s Principles (London, 1796). Coleridge, who was himself early indebted to Nitsch’s Kant book and other Kantian sources, willfully repressed yet, in spite of himself, vividly, even if obliquely, recorded his recognition of Wordsworth’s will to poetry and, correlatively, of Wordsworth’s Miltonic and Kantian wholeness of experience, in “Yew-Trees.” In Nitsch’s Kantian terms, Wordsworth’s “Yew-Trees” represents an “unconditioned concurrence [that] excludes the conditions of time.” This “mutual concurrence” engenders a simultaneity of effect and cause: (a) The desire or will created by such a whole of experience “inclines to disinterestedness” and “the way to virtue.” (b) The desire or will to form such a “whole . . . may be denominated the grand object of human happiness.” This “happiness” is a fulfillment of the will to the “highest good.” In “Yew-Trees” we encounter, concretely, a will to poetry that is the primary volition to grasp a wholeness of experience. Achieved, as it must be, from the point of view not only of the self but of the coexistence of all the entities of nature, the wholeness of such experience necessarily includes a moral purposiveness aimed at the good of the largest possible community. June 2014: Sanford Budick received his A.B. at Harvard College (1963) and his Ph.D. at Yale University (1966). He was formerly Professor of English at Cornell University and is Professor of English at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he was founding-director (1980-2000) of the Center for Literary Studies. He is the recipient of Guggenheim and NEH Fellowships. He has written Dryden and the Abyss of Light: A Study of Religio Laici and The Hind and the Panther (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), Poetry of Civilization: Mythopoeic Displacement in the Verse of Milton, Dryden, Pope, and Johnson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), The Dividing Muse: Images of Sacred Disjunction in Milton’s Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), The Western Theory of Tradition: Terms and Paradigms of the Cultural Sublime (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). With Geoffrey Hartman he edited Midrash and Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986). With Wolfgang Iser he edited Languages of the Unsayable: The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989; reprinted Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996) and The Translatability of Cultures: Figurations of the Space Between (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). His Kant and Milton was published by Harvard University Press in 2010. He is currently at work on a book entitled How to Achieve Intimacy of Being: Essays on Wordsworth, Milton, Shakespeare, and Sophocles. |
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