Feeling Authoritative

In 1802, William Wordsworth added a passage to his ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads. Here, he articulated a new objective for literature: to ‘aid the transfiguration’ of science into ‘a form of flesh and blood’ (Wordsworth and Coleridge 1802: xxxix). A commingling of the two not only seems possible to Wordsworth, but may even be the end goal of each. While he celebrates poetry as the ‘first and last of all knowledge’, he also seems to suggest that a true science of feeling might well be indistinguishable from poetry:

Materiality matters most, here. Ideal science – and ideal poetry – should revolutionise ‘the impressions which we habitually receive’, to make the world around us ‘manifestly and palpably material’ in both pleasure and pain. Literature and science can share the same space if they each address both materiality and feeling.

By contrast, in 1924, as he sought to distinguish literary studies as an academic pursuit, I. A. Richards opposed scientific and emotive language in an argument that separates literature from material, lived experience. ‘Science is autonomous,’ he declares, free from ‘distorted references or, more plainly, fictions’ (Richards 1924: 266). While science gathers its references to determine ‘truth’ or empirical accuracy, the ‘obviousness of [literature’s] falsity’ makes it ‘the supreme form of emotive language’ (272–3). And in 1949, William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley wrote that to consider the emotional effects literature has on its readers ‘is a confusion between the poem and its results (what it is and what it does)’ (Wimsatt and Beardsley 1949: 31).