William Wordsworth and the Double

Wordsworth's preface to Lyrical Ballads is justly read and reread by generations of literature students. Each time I read it I find more to contemplate; the things I thought I understood develop new complexities. The idea that strikes me this time through the text is Wordsworth's attempt to define what a poet is:

"[...] a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the universe, and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them. To these qualities he has added a disposition to be affected more than other men by absent things as if they were present; an ability of conjuring up in himself passions, which [...] resemble the passions produced by real events [...]."

The part that grabs my attention is Wordsworth's claim that poets are "impelled to create" passions. Poets are naturally expected to be creative, but Wordsworth allows them a level of imagination that borders on fabrication. Poets are "delighted" to recognize the manifestation of their passions in the natural world, and their poems recreate the passions. But what does such a recreation entail?

Wordsworth's use of the term "conjure" is particularly subtle, suggesting one the one hand that something is merely recollected and on the other hand that it is actually brought forth. He says that "the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind." Both the poet, who is temporally separated from the original experience, and the reader, who never experienced it, gain an emotion that actually exists in the mind.

This "existence" can either be viewed as either obvious or radical. I believe it's radical. Those who favor the belief that the existence of emotion in the reader is obvious are perhaps mistaking emotion for "understanding." Language conveys information (in complicated ways, of course), but to encounter something through the distance of the intellect, to confront an idea, is different than to experience emotion.

There's a bit from the second book of "The Prelude" that exhibits how thoroughgoing this creation is:

A tranquillizing spirit presses now
On my corporeal frame, so wide appears
The vacancy between me and those days,
Which yet have such self-presence in my mind,
That, musing on them, often do I seem
Two consciousnesses, conscious of myself
And of some other Being.

This brings me to the double, of course. Two Wordsworths interact with one another, the later shaping the earlier through recollection, but the earlier always shaping the later by the addition of experiences. How often do we see this figuration in literature? It seems foundational to poetry as well as subjectivity itself. Doubling reenacts the process of individuation. And, if doubling is forever occuring, then individuation is not an act safely relegated to the past but an ongoing process. We are not individuals; we are perpetually individuating, experiencing whatever joys or traumas accompany this process.