Abstract
Wordsworth and Blake are both inheritors of Enlightenment anatomies of the self (Locke, Hume, Hartley), and each of them writes about divisions within the self, and yet each is also partial to older concepts of the soul, less Christian than Gnostic and Neoplatonic. Instead of opposing them, each poet in his own way draws on these rival legacies in his exploration of selfhood and of the self’s relation to itself. The two legacies come together in the connection Blake and Wordsworth find between self-alienation (the self’s anxious experience of itself as incoherent) and alienation in the world (the self’s feeling