Wordsworth's Revolution in Poetic Language

My title intends to link the experimental project of Lyrical Ballads, as advertised and commenced in 1798, with Julia Kristeva's 1974 doctoral thesis, La Révolution du langage poétique, for two reasons: first because Wordsworth's theory and practice, though ultimately very different, can nevertheless be helpfully reviewed as historically prefigurative of the new 'signifying practice' that Kristeva argues was to be fully realised by avant-garde writers in the course of the nineteenth century; and second because Kristeva's engagement in the psychology of language draws out and illuminates Wordsworth's own most self-characterising preoccupation in attempting to invent a modern literary discourse in which to accommodate the revolutionary knowledge of his time. As Michael Mason points out, 'Lyrical Ballads was not a single phenomenon but a sequence of four editions spread over seven years; its appearance in English literature was not a historical moment but a sequence of moments—1798, 1800, 1802, 1805.' Furthermore, instead of seeing Lyrical Ballads as generically or otherwise distinct from Wordsworth's major preoccupation of the same time—the invention of a new poetic language for 'the first & finest philosophical poem', The Recluse or Views of Nature, Man, and Society (towards which he wrote 1,300 lines from November 1797 to the beginning of March 1798 when most of his contributions for the volume were written)—I view them as in important respects part of one comprehensive project. In that way, it might be argued that Lyrical Ballads, 1798, was in effect the first distraction from/substitution for The Recluse project, and that the second edition moved in what was to become the defining direction of oeuvre for opus . Accordingly I see the critical prefaces, 1798-1802, as treating issues that increasingly extend beyond the bounds of the successive volumes under the same title that were his only book publications over those years, even to the point of sometimes seeming misapplied to the volumes themselves, to address core problems in Wordsworth's continuous writing. The more significant dates for the full articulation of a new theory of poetic language I take to be 1800, by which date Wordsworth had for certain become the main author and theoriser, and 1802, with the important evolutions of his thought in substantial additions. I end by examining some thematic intertextualities between Lyrical Ballads and Joanna Baillie's A Series of Plays: in which it is attempted to delineate the stronger passions of the mind; each passion being the subject of a tragedy and a comedy , 1798: in particular, between the 1798 Advertisement and 1800 Preface and her Introductory Discourse, and between 'There was a boy' (the poem through which The Recluse project actually entered the Lyrical Ballads volumes) and her tragedy De Monfort , in which Wordsworth encountered a dramatisation of the singular process of his own language-acquisition that I argue controlled both his analysis and practice of poetic language. Kristeva's proposition is that 'Literature has always been the most explicit realization of the signifying subject's condition', but that historically it was 'in the first half of the nineteenth century, that the dialectical condition of the subject was made explicit, beginning in France with the work of Nerval, but particularly with Lautréamont and Mallarmé.' (RPL, 82) Her account of French literary history is tied to a wider social history of discourse in France that literature offered to unravel, but though occasionally she suggests that similar characteristics of 'the plural, heterogeneous, and contradictory process of signification encompassing the flow of drives, material discontinuity, political struggle, and the pulverization of language' have belonged to the poetic language of other 'revolutionary periods' (RPL, 88), she alludes only passingly to …