"That sense of a life in natural objects, which in most poetry is but a rhetorical artifice, was, then, in Wordsworth the assertion of what was for him almost literal fact"
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Pater is doing that very Victorian critic move of praising by narrowing the field: most poets, he suggests, fake it. They drape “natural objects” with borrowed feeling as a decorative technique, a “rhetorical artifice” that flatters the reader into thinking a landscape has a soul because the poem needs it to. Wordsworth, in Pater’s account, isn’t merely better at the trick; he’s not playing the same game.
The sentence pivots on a quiet provocation: “assertion” and “almost literal fact.” Pater frames Wordsworth’s animating of nature not as metaphor but as conviction. That’s a strong claim in an age trying to reconcile Romantic inwardness with scientific modernity. Pater is defending a poet often mocked for simplicity by arguing that the simplicity is earned: it comes from a mind that experienced the world as charged, responsive, morally alive. The “sense of a life” is less a literary device than a psychological datum.
Subtextually, Pater is also staking out his own aesthetic position. He’s not a naive nature-worshipper; he’s too alert to artifice for that. By contrasting rhetoric with “literal” experience, he casts sincerity as a kind of rare perception rather than a sentimental posture. Wordsworth becomes the test case for something Pater cares about deeply: when art feels inevitable, it’s because the artist’s sensibility has already organized reality into meaning. Nature in Wordsworth doesn’t get personified; it gets testified to.
The sentence pivots on a quiet provocation: “assertion” and “almost literal fact.” Pater frames Wordsworth’s animating of nature not as metaphor but as conviction. That’s a strong claim in an age trying to reconcile Romantic inwardness with scientific modernity. Pater is defending a poet often mocked for simplicity by arguing that the simplicity is earned: it comes from a mind that experienced the world as charged, responsive, morally alive. The “sense of a life” is less a literary device than a psychological datum.
Subtextually, Pater is also staking out his own aesthetic position. He’s not a naive nature-worshipper; he’s too alert to artifice for that. By contrasting rhetoric with “literal” experience, he casts sincerity as a kind of rare perception rather than a sentimental posture. Wordsworth becomes the test case for something Pater cares about deeply: when art feels inevitable, it’s because the artist’s sensibility has already organized reality into meaning. Nature in Wordsworth doesn’t get personified; it gets testified to.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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