워즈워스, 아담 스미스, 에드먼드 버크: 감정성의 정치학

Abstract

This paper, by examining the two works, “The Old Cumberland Beggar” and “The Ruined Cottage,” tries to analyze the nature of sentimentality in the poetry of William Wordsworth. In that analysis, Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments and Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France are also discussed along with the poet’s moral philosophy. The positions of those two contemporaries provided the parameters Wordsworth’s poetry worked upon after his political apostasy from the French Revolution. Wordsworth’s conservative turn in the Revolutionary politics, this paper concludes, invoked his interests in the moral sense theory which sentimental literature in the period relied on. Smith and Burke emphasized the role of ‘habits’ in the making of the modern enlightened self. Their line of thinking, Wordsworth views, is in open opposition to the French theory of reason, which levels all the ‘prejudices’ and ‘customs,’ releasing the destructive energies to rend the fabrics of the human society. “The Old Cumberland Beggar”, when we read it in Smith’s views in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, seems to argue that the free circulation of moral sentiments premises the harmony of a society, which the French Revolution failed to recognize. Wordsworth wanted to achieve the moral hygiene in the English society by providing the stimuli in the tales of Lyrical Ballads, which precede and induce moral consciousness and sympathy. “The Ruined Cottage” exemplifies that procedure in telling Margaret’s tragic story in the form of the ‘framed narrative’ with the separation of the narrator and the listener.