Wordsworth's Causal Poetics of Thought

Abstract: Utility, bugbear of poetics and aesthetics since at least the time of the Romantics, appears as a fraught but constitutive question in modern literature's self-understanding. This essay considers a defining engagement with the question of the useful at a formative moment of modern poetics, arguing that reflection on means-ends relations shapes a form of thought in Wordsworth's lyric poetry. The anti-utilitarian impetus of "The Old Cumberland Beggar" intimates a causal poetics of thought that goes on to stamp the seminal "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey" and define the project of The Prelude .