ABSTRACT
Nature and solitude are the primary sources of the Wordsworthian imagination and the creative energies of his mind and heart. The significantly historical aspect of the Wordsworthian selfhood does not then so much reside in its coherence as in its incoherence. William Wordsworth was subject, as many others must have been, to a series of fairly standard conflicts accompanying the passage from a counter-cultural youth to a middle-class maturity. Matthew Arnold disavowed a philosophical coherence to Wordsworth's poetry in order to highlight its truth to nature, and the urgency of its invitation to share in nature's 'joy'. There may be a certain potential in viewing John Milton as some sort of anxiety-provoking father-figure in the Wordsworthian psyche; but such a universalizing approach does little to explain satisfactorily the complex level at which Paradise Lost functions in Wordsworth's writing as the major setting-forth of the cultural and theological syndrome that Wordsworth too continues to inhabit.
