The poet's use of memory details a shift from past to present, from the loss of childhood's "glad animal movements" (line 74) to the "abundant recompense" of a mature imaginative sensibility. half create, and what perceive" (lines 105-7). In this line of thinking, the poet's aesthetic contemplation entails both an objective focus on the natural setting of the Wye Valley, the Abbey's surroundings, and a subjective focus on perception and imagination, between what the "eye, and ear. The romantic critical tradition has read Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" as a poem about aesthetic contemplation, and about the "personal myth" 5 of memory as salvation. Assuming the interrelation of text and context, and the causal relation between commodification and modernity, I suggest that "Tintern Abbey"'s politics of time in fact demonstrates the poet's historiographic consciousness of and engagement with modernity. 48), I suggest it represents equally an unhappy mutation of modern historical experience: the impoverished standardization of the commodity form. I claim that the poem's politics of time in fact suggest yet another alternative: that the text narrates the transformation of time into a commodity in which time "seems to come to be" formless, "measured duration." 4 Where the poem's "abundant recompense" has been taken as the "happy detachment" of "enduring values" (Levinson, p. In particular, I address the poem's "abundant recompense," 3 which tradition and its critics have read alternatively as sublime, aesthetic contemplation, or as a blind "suppression of the social" (Levinson, p. In this respect, I look beyond Levinson (who overlooks the materialist aspects of time to keep her sights on history) and Pfau (who somewhat uncharacteristically addresses the issue of time in exclusive relation to the poem's formal and aesthetic dimensions), to address both aesthetic and social concerns in the context of thinking about the time of "Tintern Abbey." 2 Thus, my approach acknowledges the relevance of time as an issue both which addresses current materialist concerns, and which addresses the contemporary production of the poem. 1 Both materialist approaches address the poem in the context of the issue of time neither approach, however, considers the issue of time from the perspective of materialism.Ĭontrary to what this might seem to indicate, compelling reasons exist for why the issue of time has relevance to the socioeconomic context in which the poem was written-given that the poem itself was first published in the same year as William Pitt's controversial tax on clocks and watches (1798-99), a tax imposed on a nascent industrial capitalist society increasingly reliant on the commodification of time as labor. More recently, Thomas Pfau's pragmatic materialist approach addresses the social dimensions of Wordsworthian poetry, while dwelling also on its formal and aesthetic dimensions. Marjorie Levinson's influential historical materialist approach to William Wordsworth's "Lines: Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey" addresses the sociohistorical dimensions of the poem, often to the exclusion of formal and aesthetic considerations. The Commodification of Time in Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" Karen Hadley In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
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