Wordsworth’s Affective Materialism

Abstract

This essay aims to analyze Wordsworth’s works from the affective materialist framework, which emphasizes dynamic, affective interactions between a multitude of bodies, real or abstract, and further explain the significance of his works on contemporary ecological-environmental thoughts. As is shown in many poems composed during the Lyrical Ballads project period, particularly “Tintern Abbey,” “Lines Written in Early Spring,” “Goody Blake and Harry Gill,” “Peter Bell,” and poetic fragments, Wordsworth embraces contemporary physiological ideas on human cognition and emotion. He describes a natural world where all entities constitute interdependent relationships, delicately capturing the flow of dynamics operating in such affective, material relationships. In doing so, his poetry presents an awareness of a new form of ontology that breaks away from anthropocentric thinking and the obsession with human exceptionality. Affective materialism presupposes that humans and objects around them are working on, and are being worked upon by, each other. It opts for embodied consciousness rather than the transcendentalist perspective based on the autonomy of imagination through disembodied consciousness. By combining affects and ecology to describe phenomena where humans and nonhumans are connected through the material and physiological processes, his affective materialism helps us understand the accidental, ever-changing, and sometimes chaotic everyday world intertwined with beauty and ugliness more realistically.