워즈워스의 탈체화된 시각 주체와 미학적 자연

Abstract

The idea of nature William Wordsworth constructed through his exquisite nature lyrics is still repeating itself in our understanding of how we relate to the natural environment, the abnormality of which is becoming an everyday occurrence. The critical arguments this essay makes are, first of all, the Wordsworthian framework of thoughts in which the narrator-traveler, himself remaining a “spectator ab extra,” views a natural landscape as a displaced visual image from its natural geography is indeed borrowed from the Picturesque, the dominant aesthetic framework of the late eighteenth century. Detached from the economic, political reality of landscapes, replacing them with artistic images, the traveler-narrator achieves his autonomy as a poet but becomes disembodied and transcendental, restricting the world to his individual condition of possibility. Second, Wordsworth’s visual representation of the landscape is pivotal to, and bound up with, his claim to be the status of the autonomous poetic self, as in the sublime scenes of “crossing the Alps” and the “climbing of Snowdon” in The Prelude. What is absent from the Wordsworthian framework is rendered more explicit when counterbalanced by John Clare, who more focuses on the inseparable link between the human and the nonhuman through his bodily, phenomenological involvement with surroundings.