Conclusion

Abstract

Though it recalls Hamlet, Pope’s philosophical summing-up of man as the glory, jest, and riddle of the world is not ironical; it reflects the age of reason and considerably less optimistic expectations of the human race than those of Wordsworth inspired by ‘reason in her highest mood’. Both poets thought the cosmos beyond scientific explanation, but Wordsworth’s view of God as the soul of universal nature was no rationalization like his predecessor’s. To him the ‘something far more deeply interfused’ was an elevating presence. Man’s highest being was spiritual; it depended not merely on intellectual growth, but on the development of imagination, feeling, intuition, and love. Wordsworth’s ‘converse with the spiritual world’ (the highest reach of the imagination) was the offspring of seventeenth-century Christian Platonism and eighteenth-century reason; and Pope’s vast chain of Being remained central to it (Pr.viii.485–94):

In the midst stood man,

Outwardly, inwardly contemplated,

As, of all visible natures, crown, though born

Of dust, and kindred to the worm; a being,

Both in perception and discernment, first

In every capability of rapture,

Through the divine effect of power and love;

As, more than anything we know, instinct

With godhead, and by reason and by will,

Acknowledging dependency sublime.