situation, object, experience, or feeling is affiliated with further possible
subject matters and routes of feeling.^8
Here the enterprise of art seems very different from undertaking simply to
please and absorb an audience. Wordsworth claims that only through the
achievement of artistic expressiveness might his contemporaries hope to
overcome the“savage torpor”of his times (a general indifference and cal-
lousness toward life and feeling) and a consequent“degrading thirst after
outrageous stimulation”^9 (an addictive need for vulgar spectacle in order to
feel anything at all). For Wordsworth, talk of works of art as merely pleasing
objects of taste encourages both passivity in the audience and addictive
attachment to passively received spectacle. When all one can say about a
work is“I like it”or“it was fun,”then the task of expressiveness–of working
through how it is appropriate to feel about a difficult, real subject in ordinary
life–is being shirked. As Aristotle held in characterizingcatharsisas the
purpose of tragedy, a working through and clarification of feeling must take
place, in order for there to be genuine artistic expressiveness. But in contrast
to Aristotle’s focus on fixed forms of plot or arrangement through which
catharsismight be achieved, Wordsworth and other theorists of expression
are struck by the changing materials of ordinary life about which feeling is to
be clarified, by the need for new forms of art in order to achieve this
clarification (the genuine poet must“create the taste by which he is to be
enjoyed”^10 ), by the resistances to the work of clarification that are set up by
the common pursuit of spectacle and amusement, and by the crucial role of
the creative artist in overcoming repressiveness and opening up more
authentic routes of feeling on behalf of us all.
Wordsworth’s emphasis on the centrality to art of the task of the expres-
sion of feeling is taken up in a good deal of subsequent theorizing about art.
Tolstoy claims that
To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced, and having evoked it
in oneself, then, by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds, or forms(^8) For an analysis of Wordsworth’s argument in the“Preface,”see Richard Eldridge,
Literature, Life, and Modernity(New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), pp. 75–81.
(^9) Wordsworth,“Preface toLyrical Ballads,”p. 449.
(^10) Wordsworth,“Essay Supplementary to the Preface (1815),”in Wordsworth,Selected Poems
and Prefaces, ed. Stillinger, p. 477.
78 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art