@article{oai:nagoya.repo.nii.ac.jp:00027932, author = {Koguchi, Ichiro}, journal = {IVY}, month = {Oct}, note = {One of the odd features of William Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" is that this poem has two climactic points. Those two climaxes, both centred on the aesthetic concept of sublimity, have been regarded as expressions of the same kind of mystical experience. This view, however, fails to account each passage's independent significance expected from the poem's dialectic structure. In this paper I attempt to establish intrinsic differences between the poem's first and second climax, and, by doing so, to describe a crucial turn in Wordsworth's poetics inscribed in the transition between those two passages. I specially focus on the poem's usage of the term "sublime." In "Tintern Abbey" and other related writings of Wordsworth, this concept forms an important key to explicate the poet's philosophical shift from the older pantheist doctrine to a new subjectivism close to Immanuel Kant's transcendental idealism. The first climactic lines of the poem are a direct product of Wordsworth's collaboration with Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1797 and 1798. At that time, Coleridge held a pantheist view that the universe was filled with a divine presence called "One Life," and he claimed that the highest human achievement, or "sublime of man," was to fuse into the divine order by recognizing this pervading presence. When Wordsworth describes his "sublime" experience in the first climax of "Tintern Abbey," he inherits Coleridge's doctrine. This passage's central line, "seeing into the life of things," is his own version of the Coleridgean sublime, or the recognition of the pantheist "One Life." The second climax appears to be a repetition of the first. However, in describing the divine presence," something far more deeply interfused," Wordsworth subtly shifts his focus from the "One Life" itself to the psychological process of attaining this pervading presence. In this shift, he ascribes sublimity to the mental state rather than to the perceived presence. The phrasal construction of "sense sublime" in the second climax illustrates the internalized locus for the new Wordsworthian sublimity. This new development is also found in other writings of Wordsworth: a verse fragment written at Alfoxden in 1798 adumbrates the psychological mechanism of the new sublimity; and this mechanism is further elaborated in a fragmentary essay, "The Sublime and the Beautiful." Wordsworth's redefinition of sublimity marks the birth of a radically new sensibility. The psychological mechanism of sublimity described in Wordsworth's writings has a close resemblance with Immanuel Kant's conception of the sublime in his philosophical system. Delineating the processes that produce sublime feelings in the mind, Kant, too, locates the seat of sublimity inside the human mind. Wordsworth was not directly indebted to Kant, but this coincidence shows that Wordsworth in "Tintern Abbey" was taking up a new subjectivist position that shared important features with Kant's transcendental idealism. As well known, Coleridge, too, later in his life converted to the Kantian philosophy and came to theorize on the creative roles of human consciousness. As early as in 1798, Wordsworth already embodied a later development of the Romantic literary theory.}, pages = {1--27}, title = {Two Sublime Moments in "Tintern Abbey"}, volume = {30}, year = {1997} }