Eye and Ear in Wordsworth's Poetry

Abstract

Cette thèse de doctorat porte sur la phénoménologie visuelle et auditive dans la poésie du poète romantique Britannique William Wordsworth. Je soutiens que l’œil, bien qu’il soit usurpateur, joue un rôle fondateur dans le développement de la conscience chez ce poète. L’oreille, quant à elle, souvent présentée comme organe rédempteur, a aussi des imperfections. Ensemble, l’œil et l’oreille, dépassent leurs imperfections respectives et joignent leurs forces dans la construction du poème et, au- delà de cela, à la construction de la conscience du poète.

This thesis is concerned with the visual and aural phenomenology in Wordsworth’s poetry. It places Wordsworth’s aesthetics between the most immediate embodied experience and the most exalted operations of the mind. My contention in the first two chapters is that one way to understand Wordsworth’s ambivalence toward the eye is to consider that visual perception is not a substratum on which imagination is coated or fabricated. Both bodily vision and imagination constitute characteristic and, strictly speaking, necessary ways of seeing. In the third chapter I deal exclusively with the ear, its status as an “organ of vision” as well as its impairments. The fourth chapter concentrates on the notion of synesthesia and delineates how beyond their negativity the eye and the ear contribute evenly to the growth of the poet’s mind.