Sustaining Elegy

Chapter 4 explores Wordsworth’s poems and drafts related to the death of his brother John. It reads these poems with and against prevailing accounts of elegy, showing how Wordsworth’s poems variously accord with and challenge their broadly psychoanalytic logic. The chapter traces critical accounts of elegy back to Freud’s model of mourning, noting both its generative qualities and its limitations. In particular, psychoanalytic accounts of mourning foreclose our capacity to imagine what might be termed elegiac surprise. The chapter goes on to locate in Wordsworth’s writing a distinctly different logic; his grief poems do not abandon or even memorialize John, but uncover in verse fresh traces of a lost brother. Wordsworth reimagines the metapsychology of the elegy and the life of his late brother in the same gesture.

The Infancy of Affection

Chapter 2 considers Wordsworth’s accounts of very early life and its passions, from early drafts of the poem that would become The Prelude to the 1807 ‘Ode’. It reads Wordsworth’s poems as ambivalent narratives of human development, placing them alongside related accounts of genesis and individuation in psychoanalytic writing and criticism. It puts Wordsworth’s poetics of infancy into dialogue with Didier Anzieu’s tactile account of an early ‘skin ego’ and Mutlu Konik Blasing’s developmental theorization of lyric. In this context, Wordsworth’s poems resist normative narratives of development, and testify to a kind of early pleasure spread so widely that it becomes an inseparable element of perception itself, suggesting a formative role comparable to (but pointedly at odds with) psychoanalytic accounts of an ‘original’ trauma.

Metrical Pleasures

Chapter 3 reads Wordsworth’s poetic theory as a far-reaching account of compositional pleasure. It considers the crucial relation between of poetry’s claims to truth and its claims to produce and communicate pleasure, and uses the question of poetic pleasure to explore the tense relation in Wordsworth’s prose between real language and events and the artificial and mechanical operation of verse. It goes on to position Wordsworth’s theory of poetry in opposition to the persistent critical problem of sublimation. In place of the assumption that artistic pleasures must be substitute satisfaction or sheer fantasy, it explores the claim that poetry might disclose existing but unacknowledged pleasure in the world. The challenges and pleasures of metrical verse, it argues, are for Wordsworth constitutive of its retrospective, reparative forms of attention. The chapter concludes by returning to Wordsworth’s poetry and considering how metrical pleasure might function as a form of mourning.

Conclusion

The Conclusion develops some broader claims about unremembered pleasure by considering Wordsworth’s retrospection across his authorship. Beginning from Paul de Man’s concerns over romantic nostalgia, it traces some varieties of nostalgia from the eighteenth century to the present. In opposition to nostalgic longing, it suggests that Wordsworth’s retrospection might be understood as a form of underdetermined attachment, freed from the expectation of possession or recovery. Returning to the comparative questions raised in the Introduction, it reflects on the ways that romanticism and psychoanalysis might continue to inform one another while remaining distinct traditions of writing. Finally, it returns to the question of affective education, tracing the prospect of ‘learning to love’ through Wordsworth’s writing.

Happiness in Time

Chapter 5 considers the broader significance of unremembered pleasure across Wordsworth’s authorship by reassessing the commonly observed decline and dissatisfaction of the so-called ‘late’ Wordsworth. From the 1817 odes to some of Wordsworth’s last poems, it explores non-narrative forms of lateness in Wordsworthian lyric. By refusing a narrative account, these poems can see the pleasures of youth as something other than a rival to satisfaction in old age. The chapter argues that a number of Wordsworth’s later odes add up to an ambitious attempt to re-think happiness itself, an attempt that depends on the possibility of separating the significance of pleasure from the satisfaction of possessing it. Drawing on Anahid Nersessian’s account on ‘adjusted’ utopian thinking, it shows how at its most quietly ambitious moments, Wordsworth’s writing on happiness delaminates pleasure from the exhausting drive to have and retain it, so that pleasure might survive memory.

Introduction

The Introduction explores the intertwined histories of romantic criticism and psychoanalysis and considers how Wordsworth might be productively read with and against the legacy of Freud’s writing. It traces the ongoing role of psychoanalytic concepts in romantic criticism, focusing on the particular prominence of trauma. Yet trauma, and its associated methodologies, are precisely what foreclose the notion of unremembered pleasure. By situating Wordsworth’s thinking within a diverse romantic interest in unconsciousness across the nineteenth century, rather than within a genealogy of psychoanalysis, it reads Wordsworth against Freud as a distinct writer of unnoticed experience. By sketching the aesthetic and ethical significance of such experience, it demonstrates the limitations of understanding Wordsworth strictly as a poet of memory. Finally, it considers some questions of terminology and presents an initial account of Wordsworthian retrospection to be developed in subsequent chapters.

Unremembered Pleasure

Chapter 1 begins from Wordsworth’s frustrations with his own memory while walking in the Swiss Alps, before considering the ways in which Wordsworth’s early loco-descriptive verse works through problems of perception, retention, and representation. Reading Wordsworth against a long tradition which positions him as the poet of memory, it traces a persistent interest in lost and unnoticed images and affects, which are neither consciously experienced nor traumatically repressed. It goes on to study and develop Wordsworth’s use of the term ‘unremembered pleasure’ in ‘Tintern Abbey’, presenting the possibility of unnoticed and retrospectively acknowledged satisfaction as an alternative to the broadly empirical and descriptive way readers have often expected or hoped for the poem to work. Turning to anthropological theory, the chapter develops an account of unregistered experience, and above all lost pleasure, as a form of gift