Wordsworth, Memory Culture and the Ubiquitous Life of Things

Approaching Wordsworth’s poetry from the perspective of contemporary sensibility, two elements stand out as the hinges of his poetics: the power of memory and the qualified use of objective reality. Wordsworth performed that transition from memory as art to memory as power through which Romantic culture reelaborated the legacy of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century empirical psychology and provided correctives to its blind spots. On parallel grounds, he participated in that politics of resistance to the commodification of life that was a major concern of Romantic epistemology and was realized by drawing sharp lines between living ‘things’ and dead ‘objects’. Drawing on current Memory Studies and on recent critical interpetations, the article explores some modes in which Wordsworth’s discourse of memory and discourse of things interact in such a way as to approximate a modern notion of cultural memory.