...I admit, fortuitous that I picked up the Wordsworth straight upon the heels of Stephen Levinson's definitive new treatise on Space in Language and Cognition. (1) Having Levinson's study in the background no doubt helped to foreground for me what is on any view a remarkable passage of spatial representation early in Book 7, in which Wordsworth bids London, "Rise up" and "Before me flow!" (149-50) and then proceeds to escort his readers (note the shift to the first person plural pronoun at line 169) through the streets and districts of the city thus conjured. (2) This seventy-line imitation of the phenomenal experience of London is unusually thorough-going and consequently absorbing; the obliging reader feels, for the duration at least, in the midst and on the move, advancing through a streaming scene of buildings, people, and objects, with attention shifting here and there among clusters of visual and auditory images that give way one to the next in steady succession--much as they appear to do when one is really walking in the city. (3) The passage thus provides an exemplary instance of what cognitive linguists like Levinson call a body or driving tour, that is, a mental or linguistic representation of embodied movement through a spatial array, such as one pictures to oneself in wayfinding or speaks to another when giving directions. For obvious reasons, body tours and route descriptions tend to be scrupulously and single-mindedly realistic, and that Wordsworth's passage is no exception in this regard should suggest at once how exceptional it therefore is with respect not just to the bulk of his verse but indeed to the better part of English romantic verse in general. (4) By happy conjunction, then, I found myself possessed of a deviant text, a new descriptive apparatus, and two substantial and potentially related questions (and if that's not a recipe for a scholarly article, I don't know what is): first, how exactly does this or indeed any text work its mimetic magic in the mind of the reader? And second, what is the function and status of this and other orders of mimesis in Book 7 specifically and Wordsworth's poetics generally?

Though simply fortunate in the event, I might have found my way to these important cognitive and mimetic matters more intentionally and systematically. As long ago as 1958 M. H. Abrams in The Mirror and the Lamp traced the development of a new psychology of art in romantic criticism and philosophy, especially the English variety, which, though typically idealistic in its interpretation of psychological data, was nevertheless habitually empirical in their pursuit. As Abrams puts it, in language that suggests how deep the foundations of contemporary cognitivism lie,

A salient aspect of the romantic era in general was the sharpened 'Inner Sense,' as Coleridge called it, for the goings-on of the mind, and a new power, by these poets and critics who are 'accustomed to watch the flux and reflux of their inmost nature, to venture at times into the twilight realms of consciousness.' Coleridge himself had no equal as a microscopic analyst of the interplay of sensation, thought, and feeling in the immediate cross-section, or 'fact of mind.' ... In this aspect, English criticism, of course, participated in the tendency of English empirical philosophy, which characteristically tried to establish the nature and limits of knowledge by an analysis of the elements and processes of the mind. (5)

Wordsworth, of course, is the poet foremost in Coleridge's mind when he speaks of watching "the flux and reflux of [our] inmost nature," and though Wordsworth writes in The Prelude that it is a "Hard task, vain hope, to analyze the mind,"

... to range the faculties In scale and order, class the cabinet Of their sensations, and in voluble phrase Run through the history and birth of each As of a single independent thing[,]

(2.223-28)

these lines nevertheless make a fair description if not of the purpose of The Prelude then at least of its procedure and achievement, (6) as Frederick Burwick suggested just a few years ago in an important successor to and in certain respects corrective of Abrams' study. Because of the generic diversity of its evidence--not only critical-theoretical prose of the period but also poetry of all kinds, novels, creative non-fiction, etc.--Mimesis and Its Romantic Reflections reveals how romantic literary practice itself constituted an influential working out of the new psychologically focused poetic theories of the period. Wordsworth here takes his central place in the discussion, most notably for my purposes in Burwick's analysis of the poet's widely illustrated tendency to represent reflective and optical misrepresentations of external reality, in order to advance "a truth that may well reside in illusion but is nevertheless the truth of the reciprocity between mind and nature." (7) This characteristic form of Wordsworthian mimesis, memorably attested in the lines from Book 4 of The Prelude beginning "As one who hangs down-bending from the side / Of a slow moving boat" (256 ff.), involves, as Burwick has it,

a meticulous verbal account of visual details and typically implicate[s], as well, details of perceptual and psychological response. This latter movement ... takes advantage of the dedoublement of reflection to represent both the objective and the subjective. Optical reflection ... is [thus] a model for visual perception as well as an analogue for mental reflection. (148)

We will return to the idea of the mimetic interpenetration of object and subject, what Wordsworth himself terms "A balance, an ennobling interchange / Of action from without and within" (13.375-76); for the moment we may simply notice Burwick's drawing of the analogy between visual perception and mental reflection. For cognitive scientists, as we shall presently see, this essentially spatial analogue is more or less foundational to many (if not all) forms of cognition, especially the sorts prompted by verbal and other kinds of representation. In the ensuing consideration of spatial imaging in the processing of Wordsworth's text, I shall thus be following Burwick in fathoming the significance and limitations of this analogy, only in this case considering the matter as much as possible from the reader's perspective.

In the nearly half century between Abrams and Burwick, a number of other critics have anticipated various aspects of my focus, of whom for space considerations I'll at this juncture mention only two. In his richly nuanced study of Wordsworth's development, The Borders of Vision, Jonathan Wordsworth observes of Book 7 that "the pictorial vision ... is given unusual scope. We are treated to a panorama of London life, a word-painting that has much in common with the giant contemporary Eidometropolis of Thomas Girtin." (8) Indeed, the poet himself explicitly thematizes this parallel between the unusually vivid scenic descriptions of Book 7 and the kinds of realism practiced by Girtin and other visual and plastic artists, who fashion "mirror"-like "sights" that, in Wordsworth's appreciative but nonetheless carefully evaluative description, "ape / The absolute presence of reality" (7.232-34). The logical backbone of the paragraph containing these lines is a hierarchy of aesthetic values descending from the "subtlest craft" of refined means and pure ends through various kinds of "imitations" of the external world to the still "more mechanic" art of scale replicas, which reproduce in exacting detail "All that [the eye] sees" in the object of imitation itself (236-38, 248, 259). Given the density of key terms from contemporary discourse about the nature of original or genuine art--"ape," "mirror," "craft," "imitation," "skill," "mockery," "mechanic"--surely Wordsworth here invites our evaluation on a similar scale of the verbal scene-painting that surrounds and indeed partly constitutes this crucial passage. (9) Such is the contention of Ross King, who likewise takes Jonathan Wordsworth's cue concerning the significance of the panoramic to the book as a whole:

The introduction of the panoramas is in some respects ironic here, for these exhibitions purport to accomplish what Wordsworth himself attempts but ultimately fails to execute in Book Seventh, namely a panoptic view, in his case one of the city of London. But if the panorama is in this sense an aesthetic model for Wordsworth's poetic aspirations, it also represents an example of representation gone disastrously awry and as such becomes an analogy or type ... for a language which improperly designates its object. Book Seventh consists in part of an exploration of the relationship between nature and reality and its figurative representation in which the graphic image corresponds to, but distinguishes itself from, its referent in the world of nature. (10)

I disagree with King's sense of Wordsworth's panoptic aspirations and ultimate failure, but his study rightly describes the chief fault of "panoramic representation": it "faithfully catches the outward shape but neglects the insubstantial inward spirit--the ideal form which for Wordsworth ... was the noble object of artistic representation" (63). Fortunately, I suppose, for me, King never gets round to analyzing where and how specific passages of Wordsworth's own "figurative representation" of London either aspire toward or significantly depart from the aims and effects of panoramic representation. This, considered through the specific lens of spatial representation and cognition, will be the burden of the following comments.

2. Spatial Processing in Literary Cognition

Let me begin, however, by briefly introducing the key assumptions and terms, mostly derived from Levinson, that will inform my reading of Wordsworth's...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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