In any case–no matter how things stand with his sometime emphasis on
esoteric, iconoclastic modernist works as exemplars of the original –
Adorno’s account of the importance of originality in art as the bearer of a
promesse de bonheur^39 in social life more generally has been widely shared. Not
only are there the briefs in favor of originality already alluded to^40 that have
been put forward by Emerson and Thoreau, as well as the accounts of Kant and
Harold Bloom, there is also Wordsworth’s sense of the redemptive power of
original artistic making in the face of the conformist traffic in commodities.
Ordinarily, for Wordsworth,“The world is too much with us; late and soon /
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.”^41 There is a“tendency, too
potent in itself, / Of use and custom to bow down the soul / Under a growing
weight of vulgar sense / And substitute a universe of death / For that which
moves with light and life informed / Actual divine and true.”^42 But through
participating as an audience in original artistic making–itself carried out in
response to nature, for Wordsworth–we may hope to become“Powers...
mindstruly from the Deity.”^43 The experience of expressed originality, that is to
say, is elevating and empowering for those who receive it–a fundamental
working assumption of the so-called New Criticism in the United States and
Practical Criticism in England, as practiced by Cleanth Brooks, F. R. Leavis,
and their circles. Similar accounts of the value of artistic originality appear in
the structure-oriented and drama-oriented criticism of music, dance, painting,
and sculpture. Even apart from these practices of criticism, original artistic
making canseemimmediately toserveasboth theparadigmand promise offull
human meaning-making as such, blending spontaneity and sensuousness with
reason and intelligibility. W. B. Gallie notes that achieving a“perfect union of
spontaneity and discipline”^44 is a central problem of human life, and he points
to both artistic making in general and Wordsworth’s poetry in particular as the(^39) Adorno,Aesthetic Theory, p. 12.
(^40) “Quiet desperation”is from the section entitled“Economy”in Thoreau’sWalden;“silent
melancholy”is from Emerson’s essay,“New England Reformers.”
(^41) Wordsworth,“The World is too Much with Us,”in Wordsworth,Selected Poems and
Prefaces, p. 182, lines 1–2.
(^42) Wordsworth,The Prelude(1850), inSelected Poems and Prefaces, Book XIV, lines 157–62,
pp. 359–60.
(^43) Ibid., lines 111, 112, p. 359.
(^44) W. G. Gallie,“IsThe Preludea Philosophical Poem?,”Philosophy22 (1947), pp. 124–38,
reprinted in Wordsworth,The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H.
Abrams, and Stephen Gill (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), pp. 663–78 at p. 665.
126 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art