THE SIMPLEST DESCRIPTION OF WHAT I PROPOSE IN THIS ESSAY IS SOURCE study. source question is the thought Benedict de Spinoza, (1) which I would characterize as submerged philosophical context number nineteenth-century poetries. (2) My immediate goal is to identify and activate resonance once triggered, I believe, by certain words, gestures, and claims that occur throughout William Wordsworth's poetry but that loom especially large the early verse. Because Spinoza's thought carried clear political valence the age's climate ideas, (3) hearing the Spinozistic echo words such as joy, nature, affection, appetite, and motion (and claims such as And 'tis my faith that every flower / Enjoys the air it breathes) is to feel the presence an active and pointed cultural engagement poems that seem to lack polemical element and several cases to lack propositional content altogether. More interesting at this moment the history Romantic studies (now that situating literature within its cultural contexts and contests has become part of our operating program the humanities), we may use this resonance to close upon some key Romantic themes that have thus far eluded us. (4) [Appendix A] We are beginning to recover and to develop frames reference for those themes--the work Timothy Morton and Alan Richardson stands out now, as has Alan Bewell's all along (5)--and I offer this essay as contribution to that discussion. Let me suggest more specifically what is at stake exploring the Spinoza connection. Throughout Wordsworth's early poetry, my reference point this essay, there is an insistence on the body and its motions as being at the heart of, if not simply being, individual identity. Simon Lee, Man Travelling, Resolution and Independence, and The Ruined Cottage are good examples this. (6) At the same time, and tension with that insistence, the poetry foregrounds the workings relational dynamics (such as ownership, commerce, and conversation) as strong sense constituting individual identity rather than merely characterizing it. Here, think Michael, The Last the Flock, The Old Cumberland Beggar, and Anecdote for Fathers. Think too the first set poems, but focus on the formation the narrator-interlocutor's identity rather than that the central character (e.g., the leech gatherer, Margaret). Spinoza's theories the individual and its composability, endeavor, and both power and pleasure help us negotiate these tensions, giving new purchase on these Wordsworth-effects and thus new kind access to the many poems that foreground them. Similarly, Wordsworth's statements unmediated body-knowledge (as in: One impulse from vernal wood / May teach you more man ...), his equation pleasure with increased activity (viz, the distinction between a wise passiveness and savage torpor), his signature narrative effect, which I call fatalism without finalism, his figurations immortality, and, the spots time, his treatment emotion in terms lines, planes, and bodies (7) come alive and they cohere conceptually when read against le spinozism. Although I will not be able to explore these many thematic convergences this essay, I try to indicate range by pairing definitions from and short discussions Spinoza with resonant excerpts from Wordsworth's poetry. In part three, by way fuller demonstration, I offer reading famous problem-poem, A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal. I very much regret the disproportion between ground-laying and building this essay, required by the relative obscurity Spinoza's thought within the discourse Romanticism. genre what follows is better considered as an introduction to full-length study Spinoza and for Romanticism than as free-standing demonstration that connection. key figures that study will be William Blake, Wordsworth, S. …
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