Conclusion

As the foregoing chapters have argued, Wordsworth profited from more than a decade of philosophical preparation prior to the advent of Coleridge as his constant companion and, according to long critical tradition, supposed philosophical mentor. A student of the higher geometry at Hawkshead Grammar School and Cambridge University, Wordsworth was exposed from the outset of his poetic career to a philosophical discourse that insisted upon the qualitative difference between the material ideas generated by the senses and the immaterial deductions of the abstract intellect. ¹ This essential opposition was strongly reinforced in the English poetic tradition, in particular in the commanding philosophical epistles of Alexander Pope, who arraigned the passions along with the senses for embodied offenses against the dictates—now moral rather than mathematical—of reason. The young Wordsworth embraced this moral dualism as well, though much less easily thanks to the many poets of sensibility he was simultaneously reading and awkwardly imitating in such poems as The Vale of Esthwaite and the original Evening Walk.