Wordsworth and Voltaire

Wordsworth and Voltaire

Introduction

Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century social contract philosophy altered the relationship between the individual and society. In this period, society shifted from the previous model of the body politic, to a new concept whereby a diverse group of individuals unite to protect their private rights by forming a social contract. Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau all struggle to develop a model of society which places the individual first (Cousins et al., 2011). Empiricist critics of this tradition such as Hume and Smith were also influenced by the social contract's revolutionary individualism, but more skeptical of its model of community. The social contract perspective and its problems directly influenced the French Revolution, and - by extension - British Romantic literature. However, the social contract has received little attention in a critical tradition dominated by an interest in German idealism, and by a firm belief in Romanticism's avoidance of socio-historical context (Bejenaru, 2012). The comparison of English poet William Wordsworth and French philosopher François-Marie Arouet who is commonly known as Voltaire provides an insight of romanticism in relation to nature and individualism.

Discussion

William Wordsworth

At the prime of his career Wordsworth came to regard social retreat as a viable political stance. In his autobiography of political coming of age, The Prelude in 1805 and the subsequent Excursion in 1814, he sets out to redefine the relations among “Man, Nature, and Society” in response to a novel foregrounding of the individual in recent political thought. Wordsworth presents withdrawal as an active form of political involvement; he is “sheltered, but not to social duties lost/ Secluded, but not buried” (Wordsworth & Gill, 2000). By isolating himself from “the passions of the world,” he develops the highly individualized identity characteristic of empiricist political thought. Wordsworth's notion of personal freedom as the fulfillment of social duty echoes the peculiar double standard of Rousseau's Julie. Like Rousseau's protagonist, Wordsworth struggles to reconcile a radically individualistic notion of volition with sociability. And like Julie, he discovers a fundamental conflict between individualism and its ensuing social vision - a conflict which dictates both the form and thematics of his poetry (Gill, 1990).

This formative dialogue with individualist social philosophy has been largely neglected from studies of Wordsworth's work, exposing him to charges of social, historical and political evasion. Over the last twenty-five years, critics have taken the view, here voiced by Marjorie Levinson, that Wordsworth's “primary poetic action is the suppression of the social”. Researchers suggest that “the proper title of The Prelude, we might say, is History Lost” (Wordsworth & Gill, 2000). To a similar effect, some researchers classify Wordsworth's post-Revolutionary conservatism with Voltaire's pro-enlightenment instance arguing that The Prelude is “another masterpiece of another common human frailty: bad faith”. In fact, it is essential to seek an alternative to the critical consensus that Wordsworth withdrew from political responsibility fairly early on in his career (Gill, 1990). By extending existing studies of Wordsworth and empiricist epistemology to consider his relationship to social contract theory, it is argued that Wordsworth's poetry ...