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Wordsworth is both a sensual naturalist and a transcendental mystic. His long poetic career shows the conflict and the unification of the two Wordsworths. Approaching his maturity, the poet gets strongly inclined for the transcendental imagination and the spiritual world of mystical vision. Wordsworth’s mysticism develops through several steps: sensual experience, creative sensibility, philosophical thought, and finally transcendental imagination. The imagination ultimately develops itself towards seeing into “the life of things,” and gets the mystical vision of immortality, ultimately establishing “a second nature” in his own mind. In “Tintern Abbey,” the sensual empiricist Wordsworth precariously conflicts with his transcendental mystic self, yet still remaining typically dependent upon the beauteous forms of nature. But in “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” the poet presupposes the idea of pre-existence, revealing the immortality of human soul; thus his mystic self strengthens all the more. In The Prelude, through the repetitive recollections of “spots of time,” the poet exerts himself continuously to reinforce the transcendental imagination, and finally, in the vision of Mountain Snowdon, incarnates “the type of majestic intellect” in the emblems of nature, showing the tremendous strength of his imagination; his poetic mysticism has become complete.
