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 happiness. Defining poetry as emotion recollected in tranquility, Wordsworth sought to record some of the most nuanced workings of any poet's development in his celebrated serialized poem, The Prelude, sometimes loosely subtitled as "The Growth of a Mind." In the multiple stanzas of The Prelude, tracing his experiences as a child in nature and a citizen of a changing political landscape, Wordsworth expounds upon those occasions where he found tranquility as...