Wordsworth's Dropsy: Flux and Figure in The Excursion

This essay traces how William Wordsworth engages with both Romantic medical discourse and aesthetic theory by insisting that the mind is physically embodied, and finds his most complex and compelling treatment of this subject in his long poem of 1814, The Excursion. Adapting the formal model of poesis as a hydraulic process that he had theorized in the ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads, the Wordsworth of 1814 considers minds as embodied brains governed by the influx of both liquid and language: the discovery of a waterlogged Voltaire corresponds to the shape of the Solitary's psychology through the formal mechanisms of intake, excess, and outflow. In this poem, however, Wordsworth's well-established hydraulics take on a newly pathological function, as his characters employ the imagery of the dropsy of the brain, or hydrocephalus, as they investigate and attempt to treat the Solitary's morbid state of being. What emerges throughout The Excursion – and, in turn, in ‘Simon Lee’ – is that the physical register of disease stands in for the characters' emotional states as a sylleptic structure of feeling. Ultimately, Wordsworth's dropsical brains bring into focus the Romantic idea of poetry as organic form, to ask how mechanistic and organic models might be reconciled in his notion of the hydraulic mind.