ABSTRACT
The word 'Dionysian' means: an urge to unity, a reaching out beyond personality, the everyday, society, reality, across the abyss of transitoriness: a passionate overflowing into darker, fuller, more floating states. In accepting clearly the destructiveness and cruelty of human life in nature and history, the Hellene resembles Hamlet and, in turn, people for whom the consolations of a superintending logos or Providence story are gone. On the surface, Wordsworth's tone is far more optimistic than Nietzsche's. The underlying problem that motivates Wordsworth's continual swerves among expression of feeling, metaphysical pronouncement, conjectures about reception, and recurrent hesitancy and doubt is that of achieving life as a genuinely human subject. David Miall has usefully called attention to the difference between typical loco-descriptive poetry of the picturesque and Wordsworth's writing about his experience of nature. With the fallout of naturalness in affection and activity comes a pressing need for reassurance or grounding.
