European Romantic Review,

Vol. 15, No. 3, September 2004, pp. 463–480

Beyond New Historicism: Adorno

and Wordsworth
Sung-Joong Kim

0Sung-JoongKim
sk74718@hotmail.com
00000September
European
10.1080/1050958042000240325
gerr041020.sgm
1050-9585
Original
Taylor
32004
15 and
& Article
Francis
Romantic
(print) 2004
FrancisLtd
Ltd
Review

Must I keep thinking about those other people, whatever I am doing? And if I want to
laugh about something, should I stop myself quickly and feel ashamed that I am
cheerful? Ought I then to cry the whole day long? No, that I can’t do. (Anne Frank,
The Diary of a Young Girl)
Theodor W. Adorno is one of the late Marxists, and for this reason a New
Historicist—whose principles are based mainly on Marxist and Foucauldian theory—
could plausibly take some of his ideas to strengthen his/her polemical position.
Marjorie Levinson often uses Adorno’s theory for her New Historical arguments. She
quotes the following passage from his Aesthetic Theory as a headnote to her essay ‘Back
to the Future,’ in order to emphasize the power of the social ideology: ‘ … works of art,
and that includes the so-called individualistic ones, speak the language of a “We”, not
of an “I”, and they do so to the extent to which they refrain from conforming in some
extrinsic fashion to that “We” and its idiom’ (633). And in her recent essay ‘Pre-And
Post-Dialectical Materialisms,’ Levinson employs Adorno’s remark again to support
her attack on the traditional historicism ‘governed by ethics and agendas based on
empirical observation’ (113). She regards his theory as an effective tool for her
argument: ‘I take my first coordinate from Dialectic of Enlightenment. Here, Max
Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno describe their task “not as the conservation of the
past but as the redemption of the hopes of the past”’ (112). Jerome McGann also puts
Adorno in the same category of a structuralist Marxist, Althusser: ‘I have—correctly, I
believe—associated the work of Adorno, Althusser, Macherey, and Eagleton’ (158).
These critics construe Adorno as a New Historical figure who would embed an author
within an overwhelming system of ideology and power and believe that his/her subject
is evaporated under the unavoidable gravity of an object.1
Inserting Adorno’s philosophy into the rubric of New Historicism appears to be
plausible on the surface since Adorno does share some basic ideas with Foucault. His
willingness to offer the primacy to an object is congruous with New Historicism, which

ISSN 1050–9585 (print)/ISSN 1740–4657 (online) © 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/1050958042000240325
464 Kim
views poets in relation to social ideology: ‘Society precedes the subject’; ‘society comes
before the individual consciousness and before all its experience’ (Negative Dialects
[hereafter ND] 126, 181). His emphasis on the object leads him to criticize Kant for his
‘fallacy of constitutive subjectivity,’ which dissolves the heterogeneity of subjects
created in the various historical moments through the universal categories of subjects
(xx). He maintains that German idealism ‘turns the character of thought, the historic
evolution of its independence, into metaphysics,’ and ‘eliminates all heterogeneous
being’ (26). Like Adorno, Foucault reproaches idealism for its ‘modes of objectification
which transform human beings into subjects’ (‘Subject’ 777). He rebuts Kant’s descrip-
tion of ‘Enlightenment as the moment when humanity is going to put its own reason
to use, without subjecting it to any authority’ (Foucault 38). As we know, for Foucault
all individuals are subject to the system of power: ‘It is a form of power which makes
individuals subjects’ (‘Subject’ 781). Both Adorno and Foucault realize the predomi-
nant function of the object in the constitution of a subject and seek to recover the heter-
ogeneity that was dismissed by the Enlightenment.
In this light, Lois McNay appears to be right to parallel Foucault with Adorno:
‘Even when individuals think that they are most free, they are in fact in the grip of an
insidious power which operates not through direct forms of repression but through
less visible strategies of “normalization”. In this respect Foucault’s work resembles
the critique … continued in the work of Lukacs, Adorno …’ (5). Given the close
connection of Foucault and New Historicism, it is understandable that Ralph Cohen
points out Adorno’s influence on New Historicism: ‘New historicists draw upon the
ideological studies of members of the Marxist revisionist Frankfurt school.… The
influential study, Dialectic of Enlightenment, by Adorno and Horkheimer, indicts the
ideological premises of the Enlightenment for subverting the practices of reason that
it sought to defend’ (44). While it is true that Adorno and Foucault do not believe in
the idea of the constitutive subject and offer the primacy to the object, they have a
completely different view on the function of a subject. Without noticing the signifi-
cant difference between the two critics, the New Historicists tend to coopt Adorno
into their group to reinforce their polemical idea that Wordsworth evades historicity
in his poetry. In the following discussion, I will use Adorno’s theory instead to
criticize the limits of New Historicism and to defend Wordsworth’s poetry that is
grounded in historicity.
Despite their similar views on the function of an object, Foucault and Adorno differ
on the function of a subject. Although Foucault acknowledges the possibility of defi-
ance of a subject, it is impossible for it to be outside of the system of power: ‘Where
there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is
never in a position of exteriority in relation to power’ (History 95). Foucault creates
another closed system when he criticizes the Enlightenment system for not allowing
heterogeneity inside itself. As Axel Honneth claims, Foucault’s idea is based on ‘a
systems theory that views the history of society solely as a process of the augmentation
of social power’ (Critique 200). Since Foucault does not posit the possibility of human
conceptions beyond the system of social power, he takes a positivist position. His
theory fits David Held’s definition of positivism, which does not allow ‘alternative
 European Romantic Review 465
forms of reason and imagination’ other than ‘the authority of observation’; it ‘concep-
tualizes the world as a field of objects open to manipulation’ because it believes that
‘human activity is subsumed under the category of objective necessity’ (167, 162). We
can conclude that for Foucault all subjects are manipulatable by social power, as
Honneth puts it: ‘Because of his structuralist beginnings, Foucault … portrays subjects
behavioristically, as formless, conditionable creatures’ (Critique 199). For him, it is
impossible for an inner self to exist beyond social power.
Adorno’s basic premise, however, is that human beings should not be put under any
kind of generalizing system. Unlike Foucault, he condemns ‘a closed system [that]
tolerate[s] nothing outside its domain’ (ND 27), because it does not allow any room for
individuals to defy the system, and this can be used as a tactic for rulers to control
others. He does not believe that any totalitarian methodology can embrace all the
heterogeneity of human minds, and thus he anticipates that ‘systematic unanimity
would crumble’ (27). Thus, it is no surprise that he is against positivism: ‘Positivism, to
which concepts are nothing but accidental, interchangeable tokens, took the conse-
quence and honored truth by extirpating truth’ (86). For him, human concepts cannot
be manipulated by any sort of system, and this, as Honneth remarks, is the point that
differentiates him from Foucault: ‘Whereas Adorno criticizes the modern age from the
standpoint of a possible reconciliation of the subject with his drives and imagination
split off by civilization, Foucault attacks the idea of human subjectivity itself’
(‘Foucault’ 57). Adorno does not accept the presumption that ‘the objectivity of value-
free positivistic knowledge is superior to supposedly subjective aesthetic standpoints’
(Aesthetic Theory [hereafter AT] 250). Unlike Foucault, he is not so cynical as to believe
that every subject is tainted by social power or any kind of institutional system.
Adorno’s criticism of Kant’s idealism should be viewed in a different sense from
Foucault’s criticism of it. In his ‘The Actuality of Philosophy,’ Adorno declares that his
fundamental principle of philosophy is to reject the illusion that ‘the power of thought
is sufficient to grasp the totality of the real’ (120). His idea of the primacy of an object
over subjective thoughts would naturally refute Kant’s idea that all human beings
possess a priori categories of abilities that are universal beyond the limits of time and
place. Thus, he attacks Kant’s effort ‘to ground aesthetic objectivity in the subject rather
than to displace the former by the latter’ (AT 164). Given Kant’s achievement of
‘Copernican Revolution,’ he can be seen as a philosopher who places the individual at
the center. Interestingly, Susan Buck-Morss maintains that what Adorno complains
about is not that ‘the Kantian subject’ is ‘too individualistic’ but rather that it is ‘not
individualistic enough’: that is to say, ‘the universality of the transcendental subject
ignored historical particularity and implied the inter-changeability of every subject’
(83). Adorno disapproves of Kant’s metaphysics because it does not consider historical
moments of the subject. For him, a subject cannot exist without a particular historical
moment to which it belongs. Thus, he concludes that Kant’s aesthetics ‘aims not at the
fulfillment of the particular but rather at unbound possibility, though that would be no
possibility at all without the presupposition of the fulfillment of the particular’ (AT 12).
Here we should remember that what Adorno refutes is the transcendental subject, not
the subject itself as an agent within history.
466 Kim
Clearly, for Adorno ‘[s]ociety precedes the subject’ (ND 126), but we should not
take this in the Foucauldian sense because he does not assume the meaninglessness
of the subject as an agent but rather its subordination to historicity. The relationship
of subject/object is dialectical, as he writes: ‘But it is not the purpose of critical
thought to place the object on the orphaned royal throne once occupied by the
subject. On that throne the object would be nothing but an idol’ (181). He does not
want to make the same mistake that idealism made and to endow one of the two—
whether it is the subject or the object—with an unbalanced power. In ‘On Subject
and Object’ Adorno illustrates the relationship of the two, warning us to be careful
about his notion of the preponderance of object: ‘[t]he insight into the primacy of
the object does not restore … the slavish confidence in the external world.’ Rather,
the primacy of the object means that ‘subject for its part is object in a qualitatively
different, more radical sense than object, because object cannot be known except
through consciousness, hence is also subject’ (Critical Models [hereafter CM] 249).
For him, ‘subject is the agent, not the constituent of object’ (254). He puts as much
emphasis on the function of the subject as he does on that of the object: object ‘also
is not without subject. If object itself lacked subject as a moment, then its objectivity
would become nonsense’ (257). Buck-Morss accurately summarizes the relationship
of subject/object in Adorno: ‘The individual’s capacity for refusing to identify with
the status quo, while at the same time dialectically acknowledging his own depen-
dence upon the present and its determining conditions, was the prerequisite for true
philosophical experience’ (84). Obviously, Adorno’s subject is far different from
Foucault’s subject: it can function as an agent independently against the system of
power.
In light of the dialectical relationship of subject–object in Adorno’s theory, we can
see how Marjorie Levinson was misled in taking advantage of his theory. The quote
she takes as the headnote in her ‘Back to the Future’ should be viewed in its whole
context. Her decision to use the quote is probably intended to emphasize the power of
the social ideology in artworks: ‘this is key to art, even out of so-called individual
works it is a We that speaks and not an I—indeed all the more so the less the artwork
adapts externally to a We and its idiom’ (AT 167).2 What Adorno denies here, though,
is not the function of a subject as an agent but a subject without its historicity. We
should note that the artwork adapts to a ‘We’ only externally but not internally. That
is to say, the internal part of the artwork does not belongs to the ‘We.’ His whole idea
of the relationship of ‘I’ and ‘We’ becomes clearer when we look at the sentence that
comes immediately before the passage: ‘The labor in the art work becomes social by
way of the individual, though the individual need not be conscious of society’ (167).
Adorno continues that what speaks out of art ‘is truly its subject insofar as it indeed
speaks out of it’ because the artwork becomes objective ‘by virtue of the subjective
mediation of all of its elements’ (168). Contrary to Adorno’s view of ‘I,’ for Levinson,
‘I’ is not independent enough to act as an agent: ‘what I own—my consciousness as
content or object—must be maintained as ‘not me’’’ (‘Back’ 643). For her, ‘I’ does not
possess a subjectivity that can function against social power. We can see that Adorno’s
idea of ‘I’ and ‘We’ is not close to what Levinson thinks it would be.
 European Romantic Review 467
Adorno’s idea of the autonomous ‘I’ in the process of producing artworks reflects his
optimistic view of a subject as a resisting agent in society. He believes that art ‘has
always desired dissonance, a desire suppressed by the affirmative power of society’ (AT
110). Naturally, he praises lyric poems as a genre in which a subject can express auton-
omously what s/he feels against the status quo. In his essay ‘On Lyric Poetry and Soci-
ety,’ he says, ‘My thesis is that the lyric work is always the subjective expression of a
social antagonism’ (Notes to Literature [hereafter NL] 1: 45). Lyric poetry has ‘a
moment of discontinuity in it’ in the sense that ‘the ‘I’ whose voice is heard in the lyric
is an ‘I’ that defines and expresses itself as something opposed to the collective, to
objectivity’ (1: 41). Even a Romantic poem, which tends to indulge in an imaginary
world, is not considered socially evasive because ‘in its protest the poem expresses the
dream of a world in which things would be different’ (1: 40). For him, the autonomy
of art does not mean that art transcends the limits of time and space, but that as Peter
Hohendahl claims, it can instead have ‘negative, critical force’ to resist becoming ‘a
mere instrument for either political activism or affirmative decoration of the status
quo’ (Prismatic 210). Adorno attributes to art an ability to emancipate itself from
reified capitalist society in order to present an alternative world: ‘art becomes social by
its opposition to society, and it occupies this position only as autonomous art’ (AT
225). Hence without autonomy art can become a means to maintain the status quo.
Considering the different views on a subject of the New Historicists and Adorno, we
can anticipate their different views on ideology. For the New Historicists, it is ideology
that constitutes a subject. As Levinson suggests, it is nothing less than a myth to
prescribe a poet as ‘a nonideological subject in an ideologized world’ (‘Back’ 649).
Jerome McGann perceives Romantic works only as ‘products at the ideological level’
(3). Adorno, however, warns critics not to see everything in art under the operation of
ideologies:
To repeat mechanically, however, that great works of art, whose essence consists in
giving form to the crucial contradictions in real existence, and only in that sense in a
tendency to reconcile them, are ideology, not only does an injustice to their truth
content but also misrepresents the concept of ideology. That concept does not main-
tain that all spirit serves only for some human beings to falsely present some particular
values as general ones. (NL 1: 39)
This is the hallmark that separates Adorno from New Historicists and other Marxists,
as Hohendahl claims: ‘Adorno, unlike structuralist Marxism (Althusser), did not treat
the subject as a moment of pure ideology’ (‘Introduction’ 7). Adorno does not accept
the view that subsumes an artist’s individuality under the totalitarian concept of ideol-
ogy. He asserts that artworks possess some special ability to transcend the ideology
imposed by their society: they can ‘give voice to what ideology hides’ and move ‘beyond
false consciousness’ (NL 1: 39).
For Adorno, nature is the place where an individual can be free from social ideol-
ogy. In her ‘Pre- and Post-Dialectical Materialisms,’ where Levinson declares that she
would ‘take [her] first coordinate from’ Adorno and Horkheimer’s work Dialectic of
Enlightenment, she argues that ‘nature worship’—the discourse of the Romantic
period—is outdated because we are now ‘within a cultural formation that is not
468 Kim
dominated by the commodity form’ (112, 118). Paradoxically, however, Adorno is
himself a nature worshipper and Levinson’s attitude toward nature is exactly what he
anticipates as a symptom of the mistaken view that comes in the aftermath of late
capitalism. He writes that ‘natural beauty is close to the truth but veils itself at the
moment of greatest proximity. This, too, art learned from natural beauty’ (AT 74).
Adorno believes that we have lost the ability to appreciate nature since the Enlight-
enment. According to him, the Enlightenment, which he saw as based on the princi-
ples of self-preservation and reason, brands everything that does not fit into its
principles as mythical or superstitious: ‘Whoever resigns himself to life without any
rational reference to self-preservation would, according to the Enlightenment …
regress to prehistory’ (Dialectic of Enlightenment [hereafter DE] DE 29). As primitive
men create myth to overcome the fear of natural power, civilized men create rational-
ity to raise themselves out of the same fear. Unlike the medicine men, however, who
see nature as an animate partner within a reciprocal relationship, the enlightened
men, who see everything as an object to be dominated, treat nature as an inanimate
object to be controlled: ‘The disenchantment of the world’ has brought about ‘the
extirpation of animism’ (5). In the view of the Enlightenment, Paul Connerton
explains, ‘a successful relation with nature can be achieved not by way of communica-
tive interaction but only by control through instrumental transformation’ (66). In the
enlightened society everything is defined and treated by the measure of rationality,
and as a result ‘in exerting its analytical capacity, reason opens up the breach between
man and nature’ (Dallmayr 217). The rationalized minds cannot accept the mythical
idea of the interaction with nature.
The main reason Adorno criticizes industrialism is that it ‘objectifies the spirits of
men’ (DE 28). He believes that the primitive society did better than the enlightened
society in appreciating subjectivity. The primitive magic has ‘specific representation’
because the sacrifices like the hind that is offered for the daughter, and the lamb for the
first-born, cannot be exchangeable. In the enlightened society, however, the rabbit in a
laboratory is merely ‘a specimen of matter’: ‘Representation is exchanged for the fungi-
ble—universal interchangeability’ (10). Industrialism precipitated the tendency to see
subjects as interchangeable: ‘The barter principle, the reduction of human labor to the
abstract universal concept of average working hours, is fundamentally akin to the prin-
ciple of identification.… it is through barter that non-identical individuals and perfor-
mances become commensurable and identical’ (ND 146). As Martin Jay argues, reason,
which initially arose to destroy mythical ideas, ironically becomes ‘a new form of myth’
in that the rationalized identifying principle reduces ‘concrete acts of human labor into
abstract units of labor time and the transformation of use values into interchangeable
commodities in the market place’ (262, 268). As a result, bourgeois society has become
a society which ‘is ruled by equivalence’ (DE 7). For Adorno, this is another myth
because it illusorily equalizes things that are not equal.
In order to defy the principle of identification, Adorno introduces the concept of
negative dialectic, which means ‘the consistent sense of nonidentity’ (ND 5). Hauke
Brunkhorst defines the concept of ‘identifying thinking’ as three meanings: ‘the
subsuming of single events or objects under general concepts’; ‘metaphysics or
 European Romantic Review 469
idealism’; ‘instrumental reason,’ which is used to ‘dominate the object and the world’
(1–5). It seems to me, however, that the first meaning is what Adorno is most concerned
with. He explains that dialectic thinking ‘seeks to say what something is, while identi-
tarian thinking says what something comes under, what it exemplifies or represents, and
what, accordingly, it is not itself’ (ND 149). In other words, negative dialectic is to negate
any attempts to subsume a particular being under a system, which generalizes that being
by its positivist conceptions and norms. He pits nature against the identifying principle
of Enlightenment: ‘Natural beauty is the trace of the nonidentical in things under the
spell of universal identity’ (AT 73). He sees nature as the place where the instrumental
reason is not prevalent, and where we can redeem our human nature.
Adorno’s interest in nature leads him to realize the significant function of our sensi-
bility in perceiving it. He locates the origin of our loss of sensibility to feel animate
nature within the Enlightenment, which premises the primacy of a subject: idealism,
which ‘was the first to stress vigorously the spiritual as against the sensual element of
art’ equated ‘art’s objectivity with spirit’ and ‘identified the sensual with the accidental’
(AT 90). For this reason, he criticizes Kant for prioritizing the spirit, instead of sense.
As the result of a ‘domination over the senses,’ we suffer a regression of ‘the experience
of the sensuous world bound up with the circumambient animate’ and consequently
end up with ‘the impoverishment of thought and of experience’ on the whole (DE 36).
Thus, recovering our sensibility toward nature is a way to disenchant us from the
misguided identifying principle of our society. Adorno laments today’s reality, in
which ‘Nature poetry is anachronistic not only as a subject: Its truth content has
vanished’ (AT 219). He concludes that when nature is ‘no longer oppressed by [the]
spirit’ of idealism and frees itself from its ‘subjective sovereignty’ this change in orien-
tation will bring ‘the return of nature’ (AT 197). The New Historicists, who have,
according to this view, lost their sensibility, criticize Romantics for turning to nature as
a means to support social ideology, but Adorno sees nature as the place where the ideol-
ogy does not exist.
‘Aura’ is the atmosphere which Adorno suggests we can feel with our redeemed
sensibility. He writes that ‘[n]ature is beautiful in that it appears to say more than it is’
(AT 78). When we perceive nature we need to sense the ‘more’ from what nature offers
us, as in the case of the shaman, who approaches a tree, not ‘merely as tree, but as
evidence for an Other, as the location of mana’ (DE 15). We can feel aura at the
moment when we feel nature as more than it really is. And this is the moment that
Adorno wants to draw from artworks too: ‘Artworks become artworks in the produc-
tion of this more; they produce their own transcendence, rather than being its arena.
… Art fails its concept when it does not achieve this transcendence’ (AT 78). He
believes that art can have its own aura, one that we cannot usually feel from the ordi-
nary world. He writes that ‘Just as in the ceremony the magician first of all marked out
the limits of the area where the sacred powers were to come into play, so every work of
art describes its own circumference which closes it off from actuality’ (DE 19). As in
magic, in artworks ‘the thing appeared as spiritual, as the expression of mana’ and he
denounces the bourgeois world for its being reluctant to have ‘such confidence in art’
(19). New Historicism does not seem to have that confidence in art.
470 Kim
Adorno’s belief in subjective sensibility as a means to discover the truth leads him to
emphasize the principle of spontaneity in art. As Lambert Zuidervaart points out, ‘The
object’s precedence means that conscious cognition cannot do without sensation, a
preconscious and spontaneous corporeal feeling’ (108). Spontaneity is not an inner
operation but an instant reaction from sensation to the external phenomena; at the
same time it is the moment when a subject can react independently from any external
authority. Adorno explains that although ‘[s]ociety destines the individuals to be what
they are’ we do have a moment of freedom, that is, ‘an instant of spontaneity, a histor-
ical node’ (ND 219). He construes the freedom to the spontaneity as ‘what distin-
guishes them[artists] from dilettantes’: ‘What is bad in artworks is a reflection that
directs them externally, that forces them; where, however, they immanently want to go
can only be followed by reflection, and the ability to do this is spontaneous’ (AT 174).
Spontaneity is a dialectical moment in which a subject observing an object reacts
according to its own instinctive desire. Thus, he criticizes the materialist theory which
‘denies the spontaneity of the subject’ (ND 205). It is noteworthy that the moment of
spontaneity is not beyond the limit of its historicity; rather it ‘is temporal in itself and
it participates in time that is individualized in the particular’ (AT 193). As Andrew
Edgar argues, for him ‘[t]he appearance is the particular structuring of human percep-
tion of and in society’ (52). The spontaneous reaction to the appearance also will be
historical; Adorno writes that the freedom of spontaneity is ‘entwined, not to be
isolated’ and ‘a historical node’ (ND 219). In this light, Wordsworth’s phrase, ‘For all
good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,’ does not preclude histo-
ricity as it may seem to some (Poetical Works [hereafter PW] PW 735).
Although Levinson pits Adorno’s theory against Wordsworth’s poetry, we know that
Enlightenment, nature, sensibility and spontaneity are the important issues for Word-
sworth too, and it is therefore worth comparing their views on these issues. It is difficult
to spell out precisely how Wordsworth reacted to the Enlightenment, but, like Adorno,
he was concerned about the Enlightenment’s tendency to regard nature as an object of
domination. A.S. Byatt explains precisely Wordsworth’s situation in this respect:
There was the reaction against the eighteenth-century ideals of order in civilization—
neo-classical harmony, hierarchic society, the rule of Man over Nature … There was
also a concurrent reaction against the anxiety about the later versions Man’s Control
over Nature which appeared in industrial defilement of the landscape and what
Wordsworth called ‘the increasing accumulation of men in cities’: these men’s minds
were being blunted to ‘a state of almost savage torpor.’ (241)
Like Adorno, Wordsworth deplores our blunted sensibility in the aftermath of the
domination of nature. This is the situation that the poet portrays tragically in ‘Michael’;
the tragedy is caused when Luke is sent to an industrialized city and separated from
nature. The poem suggests at the end that Michael’s land is sold to ‘a Stranger,’ who
does not have the sensibility to communicate with nature and who therefore only sees
nature as an object to dominate: ‘great changes have been wrought/ In all the neigh-
bourhood’ (487–488). The loss of sensibility is what Wordsworth is mainly concerned
with in his poems. As John Jones points out: ‘the gradual dulling of sensibility in the
face of natural world, is one of the themes of the Immortality Ode, and is hinted at in
 European Romantic Review 471
The Prelude’ (50). We can see the same antithesis of the sensibility to nature against
Enlightenment in both Adorno and Wordsworth.
When we consider Wordsworth’s deep interest in sensibility, it is no surprise that his
philosophical orientation turns toward empiricism rather than idealism, at least until
around 1805. It is indisputable that Wordsworth was deeply influenced by Coleridge’s
philosophy, but many critics agree that he was not as much affected by German ideal-
ism as Coleridge was. Rene Wellek points out that in England, Schelling and August
Wilhelm Schlegel were important for Coleridge but that the German influence on
Wordsworth was ‘negligible’: ‘The only major writer who propounded a coherent
‘idealistic’ system was Coleridge’ (168, 192). Melvin Rader also differentiates the two
poets in this respect: ‘Coleridge was more visionary and romantic, Wordsworth more
naturalistic and tough-minded’ (37). The former’s resort to vision and the latter’s to
nature are among reasons that the two grew distant from each other in their later lives.
In his memoirs Christopher Wordsworth reveals Wordsworth’s complaint about
Coleridge’s German transcendentalism: ‘Mr. Wordsworth went on to say, that in his
opinion Coleridge had been spoilt as a poet by going to Germany. The bent of his mind,
which was at all times very much to metaphysical theology, had there been fixed in that
direction’ (443). And he does not agree with his friend’s idea of nature as a secondary
source for the human mind: ‘Coleridge was not under the influence of external objects’
(444). On the other hand, Coleridge complains about Wordsworth’s indulgence in
appreciating nature: ‘After cautioning “dear William” against pedantry, Coleridge went
on to talk about the dangers of nature-worship’ (Notebooks entry 1616). He does not
agree with Wordsworth’s idea that human souls depend on their time and place
because he believes that ‘we receive but what we give’ as he says in ‘Dejection: An Ode’
(47). Thus, Arthur Beatty is right to claim that, unlike Coleridge, Wordsworth bases
‘his whole theory on the assumption that thought originates in experience’ (108).
Keith Thomas distinguishes empiricism and idealism in terms of the subject–object
relationship: ‘while empiricism turns the object, nature, into a subject so that it can
constitute the self as a subject, transcendentalism counters … by having the self as
subject constitute the object—and constitute it as a subject’ (18). In this light, it would
be fair to say that Wordsworth gives the primacy to an object, and Coleridge to a
subject. When the primacy is given to an object, historicity cannot be eliminated
because an object is located in the limits of time and place. Indeed, as David Simpson
claims, whereas ‘Coleridge liked the poems in which “the attributes of time and place
are inapplicable and alien,” Wordsworth ‘seldom reaches this transcendental ideal’
(224). When we compare Coleridge’s poems like ‘The Rime of Ancient Mariner,’
‘Christabel,’ ‘Kubla Khan,’ or ‘Ode on Dejection’ with Wordsworth’s poems like ‘The
Ruined Cottage,’ ‘Michael,’ or The Prelude, we can see that the latter’s poems are placed
in physical and temporal nature, which involves the historical moments.
When we consider Wordsworth’s willingness to acknowledge the primacy of an
object and his emphasis on sensibility, we should recognize that there is more sensual
than transcendental nuance in his idea of imagination. He writes that a poet is different
from ordinary people only because he is ‘possessed of more than usual organic sensi-
bility’ ([PW] 735) and is ‘endowed with more lively sensibility’ (737). Just as Adorno
472 Kim
believes that the primitive man approaches a tree, not ‘merely as tree, but as evidence
for an Other, as the location of mana’ (DE 15), Wordsworth remarks that ‘they [super-
stitious men] have a reasonable share of imagination, by which word I mean the faculty
which produces impressive effects out of simple elements’ (PW 701). As Adorno
regards aura as an ability to see things as more than they really are, the poet sees imag-
ination as an ability to see ‘not as they are, but as they appear; not as they exist in them-
selves, but as they seem to exist to the senses, and to the passions’ (PW 743). Adorno also
focuses on how things appear rather than what they really are: ‘Artworks become
appearances … as the appearance of an other—when the accent falls on the unreality
of their own reality’ (AT 79). Wordsworth explains that the process of imagination is
like ‘conferring additional properties upon an object, or abstracting from it some of
those which it actually possesses’ (PW 754). In The Prelude (1805), Wordsworth
describes his childhood as the period when he could see nature for more than it is.
When he was a boy and rowed someone’s boat alone, nature seemed to be alive to him:
‘I struck, and struck again,/And, growing still in stature, the huge cliff/Rose up between
me and the stars, and still/With measured motion, like a living thing/ Strode after me’
(1.408–412). Similar to primitive magicians, the boy could feel the cliff as more than it
really is. Just as Adorno’s aura is not historically transcendental, Wordsworth’s imagi-
nation can be seen on a sensual level.
Wordsworth’s view of nature as an animate being is apparent in The Prelude (1805):
‘A child, I held unconscious intercourse/With the eternal beauty’ (1.589–590); ‘Along
his infant veins are interfused/The gravitation and the filial bond/Of Nature that
connect him with the world./Emphatically such a being lives,/An inmate of this active
universe’ (2.262–266). H.W. Piper’s classic view of Wordsworth’s emphasis on nature
reinforces this view: ‘through imagination, a real communication was possible between
man and the forms of nature’ (4). The process involved in Wordsworth’s imagination
is passive rather than active because we need to resign ourselves to the primacy of an
object and let our sensibility to lead us to communicate with nature. This is the
moment of what Wordsworth calls ‘wise passiveness’ in ‘Expostulation and Reply’:
‘The eye it cannot chuse but see …./Nor less I deem that there are powers,/Which of
themselves our minds impress,/That we can feed this mind of ours,/In a wise passive-
ness’ (17–24). We need to be wisely passive enough to depend on our sensibility,
instead of on our inner abilities. For modern critics, who are subject-centered and thus
have lost their sensibility to sense an object sensitively, the idea of animate nature may
sound outdated, as Levinson argues, but Adorno and Wordsworth believe that nature
can be a shelter, not from historicity, but from the rationality of the enlightened society.
The New Historicists’ arguments are heavily dominated by the principle of identifi-
cation. They suggest that everyone can be explained equally according to the principle
of power, and this fallacy is what Adorno anticipated in the late capitalist society: ‘all
men are decided on adaptation as the means to self-preservation.… What was different
is equalized’ (DE 12). The theory of power is similar to that of self-preservation in that
it presupposes that human beings are subject to the desire to dominate others. Adorno
anticipates this situation by remarking that ‘In the culture industry the individual is an
illusion’ because of ‘the standardization of the means of production’ (154). As New
 European Romantic Review 473
Historicism is produced in the society where the agencies of mass production and its
culture are prevalent, it is not surprising that they believe every single person is subject
to the principle of power. In the bourgeois society, as Adorno claims, ‘Being is appre-
hended under the aspect of manufacture and administration. Everything—even the
human individual, not to speak of the animal—is converted into the repeatable,
replaceable process, into a mere example for the conceptual models of the system’ (84).
The New Historicists believe that all individuals are interchangeable and thus identify
them under the principle of power and leave no room for heterogeneity for them.
The New Historicists’ interpretation of Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’ is a good
example of how their identifying principle can mislead. I began my essay with the quote
from the diary of Anne Frank, who suffered unbearable terror under Nazis rule, and yet
cried that she would not always write about the cruel situation. It seems, however, as if
the New Historicists would say that she should always write about it: otherwise, she
might be considered to be evading historicity. The New Historicists’ suspicion of
Wordsworth’s integrity in ‘Tintern Abbey’ derives from the poet’s choice not to
mention things that would reveal the unpleasant situation in his society.3 Levinson’s
suspicion, for example, stems from a question about its title, which any undergraduate
student might ask. She remarks that her undergraduate students wondered why ‘in a
poem commonly known as ‘Tintern Abbey’ and, by its title, very concretely situated
with respect to time and place of composition, there is no mention of an abbey’ (Word-
sworth 2). While Levinson turns her doubt to the poet’s integrity, my response to the
students would be that if ‘Lines Written At a Small Distance From My House’ is called
by ‘My House’ for convenience’s sake, they should not expect that the poem should be
about a house because it is actually about nature. This is also the case with ‘Lines Writ-
ten A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey.’
What is often offered as compelling evidence for Wordsworth’s evasive tendency is
Mary Moorman’s remark: ‘Gilpin describes its [the Abbey] condition; the grass in the
ruins was kept mown, but it was a dwelling-place of beggars and the wretchedly poor’
(402). She continues that, in spite of Wordsworth’s probable debt to William Gilpin’s
guidebook, Observations on the River Wye, unlike Gilpin the poet does not mention the
beggars in the poem. Although Moorman contrasts the two writers without making
any value judgment, the New Historicists endow Gilpin with more credibility without
providing convincing grounds. Kenneth Johnston declares in ‘The Politics of “Tintern
Abbey”’ that his own interest is ‘in the use Wordsworth did not make of Gilpin’ (8). We
should remember, however, that Gilpin’s guidebook is designed to offer a configura-
tion of the area of Wye, as he declares: ‘The descriptive part however of this little work,
I can only offer to the public, as a hasty sketch’ (v). It is surprising, therefore, that
Johnston expects the poet to depend on the guidebook, not his own direct experience,
to portray the scene in his poem when he himself was there.
The New Historicists seem to have an illusion about the significance of the abbey and
they are suspicious about why Wordsworth does not show what they want him to
show.4 The abbey was not, however, praised by Gilpin, either. A thorough look at
Gilpin’s comments about the abbey will explain why Wordsworth was not interested in
addressing it:
474 Kim
Such is the situation of Tintern-abbey. It occupies a gentle eminence in the middle of
a circular valley beautifully screened on all sides by woody hills.… A more pleasing
retreat could not easily be found. The woods, and glades intermixed; the winding of
the river; the variety of the ground; the splendid ruin, contrasted with the objects of
nature.… Every thing around breathes an air so calm, and tranquil; so sequestered
from the commerce of life … a man of warm imagination, in monkish times, might
have been allured by such a scene to become an inhabitant of it.
No part of the ruins of Tintern is seen from the river, except the abbey-church.…
Though the parts are beautiful, the whole is ill-shaped. (32)

Gilpin’s description reveals how strongly he was impressed by the beautiful scenery
around Tintern Abbey, rather than by the abbey itself. Although the abbey looked
lovely up close (the parts are beautiful) it was disappointing at a distance (the whole is
ill-shaped). Wordsworth, who might have had the same impression, expresses the same
reaction to the beautiful scenery through the poem: ‘But oft, in lonely rooms, and mid
the din/Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,/In hours of weariness, sensations
sweet,/Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart,/And passing even into my purer
mind/With tranquil restoration’ (26–31). Both writers feel tranquility and the separa-
tion from the city life in the presence of natural beauty, not of the abbey itself.
Another important point in Gilpin’s description is that the abbey could not be seen
from the river, not to mention from somewhere a few miles away from the abbey. If
Wordsworth had been on the same spot where Gilpin was standing, he could not have
but entitled his poem as ‘a few miles above Tintern Abbey’ because that beautiful spot
had no name and thus could only be indicated by reference to a famous place; on that
spot the abbey was out of sight. Thus, Gilpin’s description of the natural scenery
around the abbey shows that Levinson’s envisioning of the area around the abbey is
exaggerated: ‘The forests around Tintern—town and Abbey—were peopled with
vagrants, the casualties of England’s tottering economy and of wartime displacement’
(Wordsworth 29). Gilpin clarifies that he saw beggars around the abbey, but not in the
forest.
Johnston’s interpretation of Gilpin’s interest in the beggars is also misleading: ‘These
beggars made a very strong impression on Gilpin; nearly half of the pages he devotes to
Tintern Abbey are given over to them, in a sort of unwilling digression’ (8). The pages
devoted to Tintern Abbey in the guidebook are from 31 to 38, but the actual pages
about the beggars cover less than two pages (from the middle of page 35 to the top three
lines of 37). One must also question Johnston’s claim that Gilpin has a ‘very strong
impression’ of the beggars because he fails to recognize that the picture in the guide-
book portraying Tintern Abbey in a close range does not have any figures of the
beggars. Gilpin seems to omit the beggars for the sake of picturesqueness. Wordsworth,
however, actually mentions the existence of the beggars, although in an indirect way,
by introducing ‘vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods’ for the sake of picturesqueness
in his poem. Although Johnston asks, ‘In what sense can a “dweller” be a “vagrant”?’
(8), for the poet’s contemporary readers, who were familiar with Tintern Abbey’s situ-
ation, there would be little difference between ‘vagrant dwellers’ and ‘beggars’ because
they surely knew what the poet was talking about.
 European Romantic Review 475
Even if the New Historicists take Wordsworth’s failure to mention the beggars in
‘Tintern Abbey’ as significant evidence for his evasion, one can hardly fail to see that
they are predetermined to regard the poet as a power seeker. They pay little attention
to beggars, retired soldiers and wretched people in the other poems in Lyrical Ballads.5
They do not in fact care about what kinds of materials a poet chooses because there
exists no subject who can claim the authority in choosing them. Consequently, for the
New Historicists the poet’s materials are natural or involuntary in the sense that they
do not carry any historicity and have nothing to do with an author’s intentions since
the author who made the original willful decision to choose the material is dead.
Thus, it would be fair to say that Adorno has a more historical perspective than the
New Historicists: for him, the poet’s material is not natural, but ‘thoroughly historical’
(AT 148).6 He regards a change of the material from the literary conventions not as an
artist’s personal ambition for a new kind of literature but as a reflection of potential
disharmony in the society: ‘The rejection of the ideal of classicism is not the result of
the alternation of styles … it is, rather, the result of the coefficient of friction in
harmony itself, which in corporeal form presents what is not reconciled as reconciled
and thereby transgresses the very postulated of the appearing essence at which the ideal
of harmony aims’ (AT 110). The New Historicists, who are suspicious of Wordsworth’s
artistic integrity, have depreciated his announcement of ‘experiment’ in the Preface to
Lyrical Ballads where the poet declares that his poems are ‘so materially different from’
conventional poems (PW 734).7 Adorno claims, however, that an experimental
attempt should not be interpreted on an individual, but instead on a social level: ‘The
violence of the new, for which the name “experimental” was adopted, is not to be
attributed to subjective convictions or the psychological character of the artist’ (AT 23).
He sees experiment as the reflection of the subjective action of an agent against the
status quo, not as the result of the arbitrary choices by an individual.
Adorno believes that reality is full of dissonance and suffering and thus to express
suffering in artworks is tantamount to telling the truth against the status quo: ‘The need
to lend a voice to suffering is a condition of all truth. For suffering is objectivity that
weighs upon the subject’ (ND 17–18). In bourgeois society the identifying principle
does not allow anything non-identical: everything must look harmonious. Thus, the
expression of suffering can imply resistance against identification: ‘The smallest trace
of senseless suffering in the empirical world belies all the identitarian philosophy that
would talk us out of that suffering’ (203). He asserts that artworks have an ability to
disillusion the false consciousness by ‘seek[ing] to aid the nonidentical, which in reality
is repressed by reality’s compulsion to identity’ (AT 6).
Adorno maintains that to present ugly materials in art is a way to reveal disharmony
in society: ‘in the ugly, art must denounce the world that creates and reproduces the
ugly in its own image’ (AT 48–49). He sees an interconnection of the ugly images in art
with social dissonance: ‘Dissonance is the ethical term for the reception through art of
what aesthetics as well as naiveté calls ugly’ (46). He thinks that the ugly images reflect
an artist’s resistance against the status quo since those images in poems remind readers
that the society is not in harmony. He presents a specific example of socially implicated
ugly material: ‘The motive for the admission of the ugly was antifeudal: The peasants
476 Kim
became a fit subject for art.… The repressed who sides with the revolution is, according
to the standards of the beautiful life in an ugly society, uncouth and distorted by resent-
ment, and he bears all the stigmas of degradation under the burden of unfree—more-
over, manual—labor’ (48). Wordsworth’s ‘Michael’ can be seen in the same
perspective. When Michael and his son Luke work their land, they are ‘free as is the
wind’ (246). But Luke suffers alienation from nature in the end because of the unfree
labor in the industrialized city: ‘He in the dissolute city gave himself/To evil courses:
ignominy and shame/Fell on him’ (444–446). Since the poet declares that for his poetry
‘Humble and rustic life was generally chosen’ (PW 735), the ugly materials such as a
discharged soldier, a mad mother, a widow and a peasant should not be treated as natu-
ral but as intentionally chosen to reflect the dissonance existing in the society.
The New Historicists, since they consider the poetic material natural, do not seem to
appreciate the social significance of Wordsworth’s choice of ‘language really used by
men’ (PW 734). In The Politics of Language 1791–1819 Olivia Smith envisions the possi-
ble risk that the poet could face by declaring that ‘the best part of language’ derives from
that language (PW 735). In the eighteenth century, according to her, society was
divided into two classes by the ways they used language: ‘the vulgar and the refined’ or
‘the barbaric and the civilized.’ Only those who spoke the refined language were
believed to be ‘rational, moral, civilized, and capable of abstract thinking,’ and those
who could not speak in that way were believed to be otherwise (3). Smith concludes
that in Wordsworth’s society to ‘write a clear argument in favour of the intellectual
capability of the lower and middle classes and to criticize roundly an élitest tradition of
literature might well have been considered risky’ (208). Considering the close connec-
tion between the material and its historical context, we can come to understand how
politically subversive was Wordsworth’s idea that the vulgar language is best. As
Adorno argues, ‘liberated form is anathema to the status quo’ (AT 255). Now we can
also see how unhistorical New Historicism’s view of the material is.
Indeed, the criticism in the Edinburgh Review (October, 1802) against Wordsworth’s
use of everyday language proves that his material is in fact historical. The journal differ-
entiates social classes on the ground of how they use language: ‘The love, or grief or
indignation of a different language, but is in itself a different emotion from the love, or
grief, or anger of a clown, a tradesman, or a market-wench’ (66). It describes the emerg-
ing experimental poets as ‘dissenters from the established systems in poetry and criti-
cism,’ and criticizes them for ‘[t]he antisocial principles,’ and ‘discontent with the
present constitution of society’ (63–64). As Stephen Gill points out, the journal is
concerned that the poet’s ‘linguistic radicalism … subverts social order’ (224). The late
eighteenth century and early nineteenth century was politically sensitive because of the
revolutionary atmosphere, and even the poetical material could be implicated politi-
cally. Scott Boehnen emphatically refutes any attempt to overshadow historicity in
Wordsworth’s poems: ‘Wordsworth had no reason to doubt that his volume would be
read in such political terms according to the well established eighteenth-century tradi-
tion of self-consciously partisan “literary” reviews. Historical evasion, in other words,
would prove nearly impossible for the poet writing to an audience of the 1790s’ (291).
This is why Wordsworth’s contemporary critics considered Lyrical Ballads politically
 European Romantic Review 477
radical, and yet, ironically, after two hundred years, it is often considered conservative.
If he were the conservative the New Historicists believe him to be, he would not have
chosen material that could be possibly seen by his contemporaries as a resistance
against the status quo.
As the name ‘New Historicism’ implies, and as Levinson defines the New Historicists
as the critics who ‘trust to [their] contextual and retextualizing procedures’ (Rethinking
18), they appear to be interested in seeing literature in a historical perspective. The
contexts recomposed by them, however, cannot help but conflict with historical facts.
Because of their ideology, they are likely to see Wordsworth as a conservative as early
as possible in his life,8 but the attack of Edinburgh Review on him for being a dissenter
clearly contradicts their argument. And when they encounter historical evidence
contrary to their retextualized literary works, they do not hesitate to dismiss that
evidence.9 This is why Steven Cole complains that New Historicism is ‘unable to iden-
tify the agent of any imaginable ethics’ (48). For them, a subject can never function as
an agent according to its own ethical value, but only as a slave to the system of power.
Levinson declares that the aim of New Historicism is to ‘de-mystify’ the Romantic
myth that a poet can constitute his own subject transcendently (Rethinking 5). She may
have succeeded in demystifying that myth, but she has created another myth that iden-
tifies what is not identical: it is only ideology that can explain all human activities. Inter-
estingly, Adorno points out that ‘the rulers themselves disavow thought as mere
ideology’ (DE 37). The rulers, whether in politics or in the literary academy, do not
want any idiosyncrasy that defies their identifying principles because the objectification
of subjects will be an effective and powerful way to dominate others.

Notes
[1] I am using the term ‘subject’ in the meaning of an individual with the consciousness of
agency. As Paul Smith puts it: ‘The ‘subject’ is generally construed epistemologically as the
counterpart to the phenomenal object and is commonly described as the sum of sensations, or
the ‘consciousness,’ by which and against which the external world can be posited’ (xxvii).
[2] I am using the newly translated version of Aesthetic Theory.
[3] James Chandler and Jerome McGann complain about the poet’s evasion of any political
comments in ‘Tintern Abbey’: ‘Although 1793 marks the center of his revolutionary phase,
the poem makes no mention of political affairs’ (Chandler 9); ‘In the course of the poem not a
word is said about the French Revolution, or about the impoverished and dislocated country
poor. … [the poem’s]method is to replace an image and landscape of contradiction with one
dominated by ‘the power/Of harmony’ (McGann 85–86).
[4] Levinson’s suspicion is based on her presumption that the poet does not pay any attention to
the Abbey that deserves much attention: ‘Why would a writer call attention to a famous ruin
and then studiously ignore it …?’ (Wordsworth15). Johnston also argues that ‘But we must
also recall that Tintern Abbey was the focus of all such tours up the Wye, for Gilpin as well as
Wordsworth’ (9).
[5] McGann concludes that ‘The Ruined Cottage’ is far from ‘a work of social protest’ because
‘Margaret’s cottage will collapse under their “neglect,” which Wordsworth sees as inevitable,
indeed, as a function of the social rerum natura’ (83–85). Chandler sees ‘the Old Cumberland
Beggar’ in the same way, arguing that ‘Yet the analogy between the beggar’s dependence on
the village dames and the mountain birds’ dependence on him is inescapable, and we cannot
fail to see the Beggar’s status as midway between them on the great chain of being’ (92).
478 Kim
[6] Adorno uses the term ‘material’ in a broad way. It means ‘what is formed’ or ‘everything that
artists encounter about which they must make a decision,’ including ‘words, colors, wounds,
associations of every sort and every technique ever developed.’ See AT 147–148.
[7] For instance, James Chandler refuses to believe not only what Wordsworth said in the preface
of Lyrical Ballads, but also what William Hazlitt said about his poetry: ‘My account here …
rejects Hazlitt’s claim about the motive for Wordsworth’s poetical experiments.… I will be
arguing that certain views of Wordsworth’s changing poetic ideology go wrong precisely
because they take his own autobiographical remarks at face value’ (6). Hazlitt finds that the
revolutionary quality of the collection is related to Wordsworth’s political orientation: ‘It is
one of the innovations of the time. It partakes of, and is carried along with the revolutionary
movement of our age: the political changes of the day were the model on which he formed
and conducted his poetical experiments’ (139). About the issue of ‘experiment’ of the Lyrical
Ballads, Robert Mayo’s essay ‘The Contemporaneity of the Lyrical Ballads’ has been influen-
tial: ‘Revolutionary they unquestionably were, but not in every respect. Except that they were
much better than other poems published in 1798, the Ballads were not such a ‘complete
change’ as some writers would have us believe’ (486). However, Mayo acknowledges their
revolutionary aspects and clarifies that ‘The student who approaches the Lyrical Ballads by
way of the magazines may be struck first by differences rather than by resemblances.… In his
attacks on Pope, Gray, Prior, and Dr. Johnson in the 1802 Appendix Wordsworth was not
exactly beating dead horses. These poets … were still the accepted masters for many verse-
writers’ (488–489). He is convinced that the collection was unconventional and also it is note-
worthy that he compares them with magazine poetry, not with poetry books, whose readers
were expected to be more conservative.
[8] James Chandler argues that ‘Wordsworth’s major work, his programmatic poetry of second
nature, is conservative from the start’ (xviii). Levinson considers wrong the critics who ‘have
documented Wordsworth’s defiance of the government as late as 1798’ (Wordsworth 21).
[9] Wordsworth clearly manifests his intention of ‘Michael’ in his letter to Charles Fox in 1801 by
saying that he writes the poem because of his concern about the rapid disappearance of
‘proprietors of small estates, which have descended to them from their ancestors’ due to ‘the
spreading of manufactures through every part of the country’ (Letters 313–315). Despite this
obvious context, Levinson dismisses the letter by arguing that ‘The concrete material empha-
sis of Wordsworth’s letter finds no determined, thoroughgoing correspondence in the poem.
The elements of a stringent critique are there, but they are arranged in such a way as to valo-
rize a wise passiveness in the face of circumstantial … misfortune’ (Wordsworth 59).

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