5. The Eye/I of the Other: Self and Audience in Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads

Abstract

Written at about the same time as the conversation poems and even incorporating two of them, the Lyrical Ballads initially seem an expansion of the former to include people from all walks of rural life in a community of sympathetic conversants . Wordsworth's project can be paralleled with that of Dilthey , who begins with a sense of hermeneutic difference but who concludes that a common substratum of human nature allows us to understand the other by translating what is external to us out of our "own sense of life . " Many of the poems represent people who differ in terms of age , class, or occupation talking to each other. The preface in effect announces a hermeneutic program : in turning to a popular form purged of poetic diction, it seeks to bind such people together by creating a common language based on the "elementary feel­ ings" that we share (LB , p. 245) . In other words, it enlists poetics in the service of hermeneutics by arguing that poetry can facilitate understand­ ing across social boundaries. More specifically , it expands hermeneutics in a social direction by making the sharing of f eelings the foundation for the establishment of transcultural values. Not only does the preface develop traditional hermeneutics in an explicitly ideological direction; the poems themselves seem to work out , through such hermeneutic figures as 'tradition' and 'circulation, ' the cultural mechanisms necessary to universalize that ideology . Yet it is significant that for Wordsworth the hermeneutic project emerges at a linguistic site : that the ideal of complete understanding is linked to an awareness that language must be purged of its social mark­ ings for such hermeneutic transparency to occur. Coleridge was later to question whether Wordsworth had succeeded in this goal (BL , I l ,30-