Ennobling Interchanges

Abstract

This paper draws on the poetic concept of the oneness of the self and the world, as elaborated through Coleridge’s reading of German romantic philosophers by the poet William Wordsworth. In his poem “Prelude” he rejects simple materialism and simple spiritualism, just as Schelling rejected the extreme views that the spiritual self creates the world or that the material world is created by the self. Wordsworth claims that things are half created and half perceived, and that there are ennobling interchanges between the world and the self. The notion of oneness, of the merging of inner and outer, perceived and the perceiver, has been influential on numerous and diverse poets. In the paper, I compare various modes of vision that attempt to reveal this oneness in Slovenian poets such as Prešeren, Kosovel, Detela and Osojnik on the one hand, and Wright, Oliver, Murray, Stevens and Strand among American writers. The question of influence is at least ambiguous, but what I am suggesting is some likenesses that seem to emerge from the act searching the world through writing.