Invited Talk: “what strange utterance”: Wordsworth’s Auditory Expectation and Surprise

Abstract

The descriptive-meditative process that governs Wordsworth’s Greater Romantic lyric, as M. H. Abrams notes, evokes feelings of strangeness or perplexity in the perception of a familiar landscape. The poet’s newly-established emotions and perspectives in the face of a known and familiar surrounding produce effects of disorientation and uncanniness, where such sudden removal of familiarity further surprises the mind into a new sense of knowing. This constructive form of poetic dissonance confirms the possibilities of creating visionary experiences out of momentary feelings of strangeness and unfamiliarity in the works of Wordsworth. Recognising deviation or unforeseen impulses as part of Wordsworth’s valued poetic experience, I explore, in this talk, his acceptance and acquaintance with the mysterious workings of the mind and the imagination through a study of his treatment of auditory expectation and surprise.