ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights several intriguing coincidences. Shortly after his first “solo ride” on Coleridge’s “hobby horse” (the esemplastic faculty) in the 1799 Prelude, Wordsworth gives up on his major projects. In his response to “Dejection,” “Resolution and Independence,” he retreats from the Coleridgean position and assumes, I argue, the Crabbean. He resumes The Prelude and its grand theme of the imagination at the same time as he composes “Ode to Duty.” This evidence allows to formulate the claim that Wordsworth’s “return to Romanticism” in 1804 coincides with his resolute turn from Romanticism. In his attempt to work a way out of the spiritual and intellectual entrapments of his epoch, Wordsworth did not search among the philosophical traditions his contemporaries reached for. (He was not interested in philosophical books: this debatable point is supported by evidence compiled from all his public prose writings.) Instead, Wordsworth’s ultimate method for the imagination and Coleridge was to (re)turn to the “fixities and definites” of the Age of Reason: he was, after all, a poet of the remembrance of things past. This has important implications for the overall argument of The Absent God in the Works of William Wordsworth. A nineteenth-century poet could not effectively locate the God of Pope in his own verse, because his epoch had moved on from that God. Blake regarded that God as Urizen: the abstraction conceived by the mind of man. That God must remain absent from the Present space or time, because he (it) does not exist.
