Literary Imagination Advance Access originally published online on December 5, 2008
Literary Imagination 2009 11(3):335-348; doi:10.1093/litimag/imn063
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Spots of Slime: Wordsworth, Roethke, Loss, and Lyric
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
There are in our existence spots of time
Which with distinct preeminence retain
A fructifying virtue, whence, depressed
By trivial occupations and the round
Of ordinary intercourse, our minds—
Especially the imaginative power—
Are nourished and invisibly repaired;
Such moments chiefly seem to have their date
In our first childhood.1
Six months after writing "Tintern Abbey," Wordsworth composed the passage that articulates his dominant strategy in The Prelude and, more generally, the poetic focus associated with the technique of the Wordsworthian lyric. Though this passage was moved to the end of Book XI (given the Lockean title, "Imagination, How Impaired and Restored") in the 1805 Prelude, Wordsworth's "spots of time" are at the core of the project, the scene of return that characterizes lyric loss and obsession, the repetition enacted by refrain. As both a method of mediating loss and of creating poetry, the "spot of time" is a