Wordsworth’s Re-Formation of Individuality: "Spots of Time," the Fragment and the Autobiography

1374
Mikyung Park

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Seeking the very regions which he crossed
In his first outset; so have we, my Friend!
Turned and returned with intricate delay. (9.1-8)
Here, it is evident that Wordsworth emphasizes the difficulty of
broaching the topic of the French Revolution. He is still mindful that he
might be devoured by his memories into the past self, which he views
with much anxiety and the need to establish a firm distance.
Nevertheless, it is imperative to look backward to the past; to be precise,
he cannot go forward anymore without turning to his early days for “life
and food / For future years” (“Tintern Abbey” 65-66). What the persona
owes to those “forms of beauty” (Ibid. 24) is close to what he hopes to
gain from memories: remembering as a part of writing autobiography
confirms the equal importance of beauty and fear to the growth of the
poet’s mind. Afraid of being extinguished, the persona wishes to anchor
his position on the line of continuity joining the past, the present, and the
future. In this regard, it is meaningful to read how the poet’s mind envi-
sions the whole epic poem in the First Book:
I began
My story early,—not misled, I trust,
By an infirmity of love for days
Disowned by memory__fancying flowers where none,
Not even the sweetest, do or can survive,
For him at least whose dawning day they cheered.
Nor will it seem to thee, O Friend! so prompt
In sympathy, that I have lengthened out
With fond and feeble tongue, a tedious tale.
Meanwhile, my hope has been, that I might fetch
Invigorating thoughts from former years;
Might fix the wavering balance of my mind,
And haply meet reproaches too, whose power
May spur me on, in manhood now mature,
To honourable toil. (1.612-26)
Early days, which are raw material for Wordsworth, are “disowned” by
his memory; childhood is already located in the past and thus can be
duplicated only by imagination and language. His childhood is not some-
thing to be appropriated by the poet and to be diminished by any possible
failure of remembering. Even so, this failure to reanimate the past does
not cause only despair but evokes “[in]vigorating thoughts from former
Wordsworth’s Re-Formation of Individuality: “Spots of Time,” the Fragment and the Autobiography 1375

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years,” whose singularity stands irreducible in the scenes of writing and
re-visioning.
In the beginning of Book Twelve, thus, Wordsworth justifies his
attempts to grapple with the French Revolution and to re-assemble the
fragments of his life within an autobiographical poem:
Long time have human ignorance and guilt
Detained us, on what spectacles of woe
Compelled to look, and inwardly oppressed
With sorrow, disappointment, vexing thoughts,
Confusion of the judgment, zeal decayed,
And, lastly, utter loss of hope itself
And things to hope for! Not with these began
Our song, and not with these our song must end. (12.1-8)
The persona is determined not to finish the poem with a literary evalu-
ation of the disrupting aspects of history. “Human ignorance and guilt”
refers to both history and his personal history. Both histories went
through crises during the French Revolution. While history witnessed an
unprecedented chain of violent upheavals, Wordsworth visited the scene
of the revolution in 1792 and met a French woman, Annette Vallon, who
bore him a girl. The war between France and Britain (1793-1802) pre-
vented his reunion with her. For Wordsworth, his relationship with
Vallon remained an incalculable debt even after his marriage to Mary
Hutchinson in 1802. Re-visioning history through the literary process of
writing his life, Wordsworth keeps returning to the intersections of histo-
ry and his concerns. 
The passage quoted above echoes “Tintern Abbey” in the sense that the
persona is troubled by the misgivings and misjudgments forced upon him
in the past. In “Tintern Abbey,” he celebrates the natural landscape that
he believes preserves the memory of passion and innocence he shares
with his “dear, dear sister”:
Nor less, I trust,
To them I may have owed another gift,
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world
Is lightn’d: (“Tintern Abbey” 36-42)
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Mikyung Park

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Understanding the enigma of the world appears too daunting a task for
the poet alone. As illustrated in “Tintern Abbey,” Wordsworth shapes his
identity only through the mediation of genuine and reciprocal sympathy
with others. The inscription of such moments in the body of his poems is
integral to the completion of that process. His individual experience and
solitary writing gains a universal dimension due to his two interlocutors:
Dorothy in “Tintern Abbey” and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in The
Prelude.
In his choice of an autobiographical mode, Wordsworth endorses the
supreme status of individual experience, which becomes significant only
insofar as an individual(’s) experience controls another individual(’s)
experience. In the aftermath of the French Revolution, the self and histo-
ry came to stand inseparable under the rubric of “the idea of freedom,”
which “pertained to the individual just as much as it did the group”: 
Rebellion against monarchical authority and social privilege in the name of
individual rights and universal equality did not mean only the institutional-
ization of collective ideals like popular sovereignty; it meant ideological
rebellion against fundamental general principles of external authority in
favor of a new source of autonomy in the self, which led in turn to a quali-
tatively new kind of autonomy for the self. (Izenberg 13)
Gerald Izenberg finds a new kind of autonomy in the Romantics’ idea
of modern selfhood: the “idea of differences among unique individuals”
that is irreducible to the uniqueness of “collective identity” (5). This
involves the political empowerment of individuality and the persistent
assertion of freedom for unique individuals against any totalitarian
movement in the socio-political context of the French Revolution. The
idea of individual freedom that the Romantics fully endorse is not con-
fined to a specific area but embraces “a striving for infinite freedom, an
open-ended, never ceasing quest for experimentation, exploration, and
self-expansion” (Ibid. 6). This idea of individuality is predicated upon
the Wordsworthian autobiographical preoccupation with creating his
poetic identity as an effect of writing. “Wordsworth’s personal touchi-
ness,” according to Izenberg, “was an inextricable part of his concern for
the validity of his poetry” (140). For the Romantics, the literary form of
the autobiography is by no means “incidental” (15). Rather, as Izenberg
points out, “the finitude of the unique individual, inviolate in his or her
self-contained individuality, is consistent with the individual’s infinity
and fusion with the cosmos in the one great life” (Ibid.). Wordsworth’s
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poetry intends the proposition of “the paradoxical idea that the unique