Reading 'The Excursion' with Deleuze and Guattari: ‘The Recluse’ as a ‘Conceptual Persona’

Abstract

The Excursion, by William Wordsworth, has gone down in literary history as Wordsworth’s early Victorian poem, and is often contrasted with The Prelude, which is considered the poet’s true Romantic masterpiece. This article gives a new reading of The Excursion as a genuine Romantic philosophical poem by highlighting Wordsworth’s use of ‘conceptual personae’—a very specific type of character used by philosophers and poets according to Deleuze and Guattari in What Is Philosophy?. While replacing The Excursion within the frame of the project of ‘The Recluse’, the aim of this article is to answer the question ‘who is the Recluse?’, so as to better understand the nature of the characters the reader is presented with in The Excursion. It is argued, in the wake of Simon Jarvis’ seminal work Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song, that Wordsworth tries to solve in The Excursion the traditional dichotomy between poetry and philosophy by resorting to the use of characters who all stem from the figure of the ‘Recluse’, who is Wordsworth’s own version of the Romantic philosophical poet. Relying on recent studies such as The Excursion and Wordsworth’s Iconography, by Brandon Yen, this paper revisits readings of the poem that focus primarily on the dramatic quality and on the dialogic nature of the poem. Through its close analysis of key passages of the poem, the article rather sheds light on the fusion of philosophical concepts and poetic images in the characters’ discourses, so as to underline the blurring of the limits between philosophy and poetry in Wordsworth’s poetry.