The Play of the Line: "Presence Effects" and the Voice of the Latent in Wordsworth's Prelude

Abstract:There is a tradition of Wordsworth criticism that begins with William Empson in 1951, continues with Christopher Ricks in 1971 and Isobel Armstrong in 2000, and concludes with Anne-Lise François in 2008, which considers the disruptive effects of the poet's blank verse lines upon his poetry's semantic or rhetorical function. I seek to revive this tradition by invoking Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht's articulation of the relationship between what he calls "presence effects" and "meaning effects" to emphasize instances where individual lines in Wordsworth's Prelude produce disruptions or ambiguities that subvert the governing rhetoric of the verse structures in which they reside. I revisit several of the poem's most iconic passages to explore how certain suggestive lines and line breaks form an affective and material counter-rhetoric that undermines the poem's narratives of personal growth and redeemed trauma. I also consider the extent to which these disruptions may represent the presentification of "the latent" as Gumbrecht defines it.