The Synthesizing Wordsworth: A Jungian Reading
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Date
2011
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Departmentof English & Applied Linguistics, University of Peshawar
Abstract
The Synthesizing Wordsworth: A Jungian Reading
May, 2011
Ph.D. UNIVERSITY OF PESHAWAR
Supervised by: Nasir Jamal Khattak, Ph. D (Amherst)
The world that we live in today is given to realities, practicalities, and pragmatic experiences. The result is that we have grown too practical to accept the value of something poetical and imaginative. We usually discard such things as unverifiable. Using Jung as a tool, this study focuses on reading Wordsworth’s poetry to reassess our priorities for self-knowledge.
Wordsworth’s poetry provides us with a rich ground for exploring symbolic messages especially coded in his treatment of Nature. Nature for Wordsworth is what a Jungian would call the unconscious. Wordsworth’s assertion to stay close to nature amounts to accessing the unconscious for individuation. His poetry shows that in their pursuit of adjusting themselves to the social environment and the world surrounding them, humans distance themselves from ‘Nature’, i.e., the unconscious. In the blind pursuit of the outer world, they become persona-possessed to the utter neglect of the inner one.