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Literary Imagination Advance Access originally published online on June 6, 2007
Literary Imagination 2007 9(3):313-333; doi:10.1093/litimag/imm085
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© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. All rights reserved. For permissions please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Wordsworth's Choice of Fiat in "The Old Cumberland Beggar"

Eric Lindstrom*

*Prof. Eric Lindstrom, Eric Lindstrom is Assistant Professor of English at The University of Vermont; please direct email to eric.lindstrom@uvm.edu.

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

The irrationality of sacrifice as so often adduced only reflects the fact that the practice of sacrifice lasted longer than its specific rational necessity—itself already untrue. It is the gap between rationality and irrationality that needs cunning to cover it over. All demythologization is colored by the inevitable experience of the uselessness and superfluousness of sacrifices.
                —Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944)1


   Introduction
 
"The Old Cumberland Beggar" offers a unique testament concerning the role of the human imagination in public life. As the poem develops, a challenge to the idea of meaningful artistic intervention increasingly advances the work's practical claims. Though Wordsworth judged it overtly pressing enough to send (among the rest of the 1800 Lyrical Ballads) with a long letter to Charles James Fox, "The Old Cumberland Beggar" was also genially criticized by Charles Lamb from what is seemingly an opposite perspective, in which the poet's difficult subjectivity blocks any . . . [Full Text of this Article]


   The Fiat and "Useless Fiat": "Let (there) be"
 

   "Let be" and Laissez-Faire, Fiat and Political Economy
 

   "The Old Cumberland Beggar" and Wordsworth's Useless Fiat
 

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