Wordsworth & Voltaire

Wordsworth & Voltaire: Pleasure as the Ordering of Harmony

As major intellectual forces within the nineteenth century's philosophical culture, living within an age which privileged rationality as the supreme form of thought, William Wordsworth in poems such as "Lines Written a Few Miles above Tinturn Abbey" and "Ode (`Intimations of Immortality')" and Voltaire (born as Francois-Marie Arouet) in Letters Concerning the English Nation contend that the quest for happiness should be understood as a problem of ordering. Harmony, the establishing of a balance both within the self and with the larger community, is what creates contentment. Pleasure is best enjoyed when it is obtained legitimately through compliance with a system which wisely ranks order over chaos. Wordsworth's poetic musings led him to emphasize that an individual's peace follows from an acceptance of the primacy of nature, a submission which simultaneously celebrates its wonder. For Voltaire the force which must rule is the order of society. Contentment belongs to those individuals who can deftly navigate within a community's social, political, and economic dictums, manipulating the environment so that it works advantageously rather than detrimentally against them.

Wordsworth stands as one of Britain's most celebrated poets of the inner life. For Wordsworth an exploration of one's own interiority and a poetic recording of this journey function as the most likely path for achieving serenity, an inner

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mages of separation and enclosure are paramount within Wordsworth's construction of a blessed space where the self can thrive and find contentment. Wordsworth's sense of happiness almost always moves away from what he terms "coarser pleasures" toward a temporary dissolution of self which allows for his replenishing. In his exquisitely crafted "Ode", Wordsworth portrays the natural world as an exemplar, as a space which seems to parallel magically another space, a world infused by the spiritual. "Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting" (1992, p. 209). Wordsworth's gift as a poet and as a seeker of beauty is that he thrives in the midst of ambiguity, profoundly matching an astonishing specificity of poetic detail (here celestial light, rainbow, fresh flowers, and the moon) with a haunting vagueness (there the eternal deep, visionary gleam, obstinate questionings, and shadowy recollections). Wordsworth's stature as a poet resides in the pleasure he affords his reader in sustaining illusion and reality, dream and waking, goodness and corruption at once. His pleasure is in mingling polarities until opposites coalesce, allowing dreams and waking, life and immortality to merge as if one. Exiled from France, Voltaire approached

Category: Literature - W