Keynote Lecture: “music in my heart”: The Breath and Harmony of Wordsworth’s Poetry

Abstract

Wordsworth’s imagination engages with the unifying, but accommodating, qualities that musical harmony achieves. The resemblance between the organisational principle of Wordsworth’s imagination and the harmonising power of music forms a rhetoric of ‘Harmonic Conceit’ that Jason Snart terms in his reading of The Prelude. This concept of ‘Harmonic Conceit’ considers music as a specifically constructed mediator of nature and the mind; it calls for a more comprehensive appreciation of Wordsworth’s complex understanding of harmony in relation to the balancing act of the mind between inner and outer sources of creativity. Musical metaphors and figurations not only contour the development of a Romantic sense of self-consciousness in Wordsworth’s imagination, but are also self-consciously adopted by his poetry to reflect its own creative process as well as its own status as a product of the imagination. 

Attending to this organised but dynamic sense of musicality that shapes Wordsworth’s poetic theory and practice, this lecture examines how Wordsworth’s preoccupation with harmony and musicality is fundamentally connected to his theory of the imagination as well as his creative process, and how his unique sense of harmony could be defined through analysing his use of musical metaphors and sound imagery.