Psychoanalysis criticism, as it applies to analyzing Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey by William Wordsworth

By Emmaline Sylvester, ENGL 346 British Literature II

William Wordsworth (1770-1850) was one of the most famed poets during the Romantic period. In his Preface to Lyrical Ballads published in 1801, where he discusses his poetic craft and romantic sensibilities, he not only pioneered Romanticism, but also commenced a theory of poetry. He posed the theory that, “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” With the lens of psychoanalytic criticism, we can see Wordsworth projecting meaning onto nature in a way that reflects his psyche in his poem titled Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey (1798).

With the influence of Sigmund Freud, who is considered to be the originator of the notion of psychoanalysis, art is understood to be an expression of an artist’s unconscious self or psyche. By analyzing a poem through a psychoanalytical lens, we can better understand the psyche of the poet which offers a richer layer of interpretation by considering the author’s unintended, subconscious message. Freud argued that we develop defenses, such as selective memory, or projection onto our perception, in response to our fears and needs. Therefore biographical context of the author of a poem helps the reader better understand the subconscious motives behind writing their poem, which offers a much richer interpretation. 

As a child, Wordsworth and his siblings were sent away to stay with his maternal grandparents in their home in Penrith for extended periods of time. Later, his mother died from pneumonia at age eight and his father died at age thirteen. His sister Dorothy, who he was very close with, was then sent to stay with distant relatives for upwards of nine years. 

In William Wordsworth: The Borders of Vision (1982), Jonathon Wordsworth, a descendant of William Wordsworth who studies the Romantic era in literature, analyzed his poem Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey (1798). Upon reading the line, “Knowing that Nature never did betray/ The heart that loved her,” J. Wordsworth posed the idea that nature could be a substitution for Wordsworth’s own Mother who betrayed him by leaving, (qtd. in Christie 88). Wordsworth appears to find consolation in his connection and trust in nature in his poems.  Barbara Schapio, professor of English at Rhode Island College, also supports Jonathon Wordsworth’s interpretation. She explained that, “Wordsworth nevertheless reveals a perpetual struggle in his work to maintain faith in the mother’s reliability and goodness,” (32). Knowledge of Wordsworth adversity-stricken upbringing helps the reader recognize where his intense meditation on his connection to nature in his poems comes from. 

Romantics placed a lot of value in non-material entities such as spirituality, senses, emotions and aesthetics. Instead of reporting exclusively what he observed externally in nature, Wordsworth’s poems served to be meditative on his relationship and association to the nature. Basil Willey, a professor of English literature at the University of Cambridge, explained that, “This protest of the imaginative consciousness against the scientific ‘neutralization of nature’ . . . is one of the deepest meanings of romanticism,” (qtd. In Lyron 246). During the Romantic Era, scientists were trying to understand nature objectively, where as the Romantic poets were using their sensory observations as a “conceptual model for the intellectual powers and faculties they wished to establish and exalt,” (Lyon 247). Mingxin Li, from Henan Polytechnic University, also explained how everyone seeks to “shape, form and interiorize the essence of each moment of experience,” (Li 11). Nature served as an emblem of the Romantic poets exploration of their understanding of reality, experience in life, and relation to the world around them.

In Romantic Poetry, nature imagery and observations often have figurative implications that intertwine with their physicality. This fusion creates the reality that the poet identifies with. Wordsworth himself explicitly stated in The Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth that, “I was often unable to think of external things as having external existence, and I communed with all I saw as something, not apart from, but inherent in my own immaterial nature,” (403). Wordsworth’s subjective world and external world was interwoven into one reality in his poetry as he makes emotional associations with the nature around him. Wordsworth’s, and many other Romantic poets, relationship with nature was very a very intimate one. Nearly partway through his poem Wordsworth expressed that, “The picture of the mind revives again:/ While here I stand, not only with the sense/ Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts,” (66-68). His harmony with nature suggests the eventual harmony he had with himself.

The Romantics held a belief that the mind acts as a ‘lamp’, rather than a mirror, by projecting meaning onto reality. Wordsworth’s good friend and fellow poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge argued that sensory experience did not inform the mind, but rather that the mind, or the psyche, gives meaning to the senses (qtd. in Lyon 248). Without imagination and association Wordsworth recognized the “heavy and the weary weight/ Of all this unintelligible world,” (41-42). Schapio explains how Wordsworth projects meaning onto nature, “Wordsworth’s poetry demonstrates how it is the very solidity and otherness of nature that promotes the full development of subjectivity, allowing for symbolic thinking and imaginative growth,” (29). Essentially, Wordsworth poems are a composition of contemplating and making sense of the insensate natural world, particularly in Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey (1798). Wordsworth expressed, “From this green earth; of all the mighty world / Of eye and ear, both what they half-create / And what perceive,” (110-112). These lines suggest that what he observes in the natural world is only half of what he sees, and the other half is the association he composes internally, or subjectively. Feeling greatly influences perception, as evident with the aggrandization and romanization of nature in the poems of Wordsworth, and many other Romantics poets. Therefore one’s relation to nature is very much a subjective experience. 

A cursory reading of Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey would offer a more reductive interpretation for the extent of Wordsworth imagination. In The Two Romanticisms and other essays (2016) William Christie observed that the poem, “modulat[s] from recollection to meditation and from meditation to inspiration and resolution,” (79). The act Wordsworth creating his poems was ultimately an expression of his psyche and therefore a confrontation with himself. Through the lens of psychological criticism, we can see that many lines from Wordsworth’s poem fuse his subjective association with the objective perception of nature in a way that suggests the state of his psyche. Nature served as an emblem for many of the Romantic poets, such as Wordsworth, as they explored their understanding of reality, experiences in life, and relation to world around them.

Works Cited

Christie, William. “The burden of the mystery’: William Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey” The Two Romanticisms and other essays, 2016, pp. 77-105. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/j.ctt1d10h2h.9.pdf?ab_segments=0%252Fbasic_SYC-5152%252Ftest&refreqid=excelsior%3A1a584d0f0e18d95004bcfac083b5939c.

Li, Mingxin. “An Interpretation of Wordsworth’s Poems from Psycho-Analysis.” World Journal of English Language, vol. 5, no. 1, 2015, doi:10.5430/wjel.v5n1p8.

Lyon, Judson S. “Romantic Psychology and the Inner Senses: Coleridge.” Pmla, vol. 81, no. 3, 1966, p. 246., doi:10.2307/460810.

Schapiro, Barbara. “Wordsworth and the Psychoanalytic Relational Model.” The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, Vol. 25, No. 1 (Winter 1992), pp. 29-
43. JSTOR, https://www-jstor-org.ezproxy.library.ewu.edu/stable/pdf/24780584.pdf?ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_SYC-5152%2Ftest&refreqid=search%3A27a073e1ff155ea44072c1adbfbdd1b2.

Wordsworth, William. The Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth. Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1911.