Country Slights

Frankly, I’ve always felt that the reason Wordsworth gives in the Lyrical Ballads for choosing subjects of a “low and rustic life” is a bit condescending. He says that it’s easier for him to “contemplate” these feelings because they “co-exist in a state of greater simplicity.” But it seems to me that, just because country folk forgo the hustle and bustle of city life, they don't necessarily escape the emotional ambivalences that define the human condition. (If this be error, and upon me proved, please forward my mail to the High Sierras.) I’m reminded of the verse of an earlier poet, who, in contemplating a country churchyard, writes, “Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid/Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire;/Hands, that the rod of empire might have sway'd,/Or wak'd to ecstasy the living lyre.” It's possible that Wordsworth would have found it as difficult to read the emotions of Gray’s rural subjects as he did to read the strained language of Gray’s poems.

Writing over 100 years following the Lyrics, Simmel can relate to Wordsworth's valorization of the country condition, although he unearths some redeeming qualities about city life, namely the nurturing of the intellect. He argues that the metropolis bombards the senses with vastly more stimuli. This has several consequences, but the one that intrigues Simmel (and me) the most is the blasé attitude. This mental state is caused by the nervous system shutting down in reaction to the overload of the senses, like a sort of safety valve. The blasé attitude is manifest in the city dwellers’ habitual reserve in their interpersonal relations and in their reliance on price in assessing the value of material objects. However, current research shows that people placed in situations of sensory deprivation, such as prisoners in solitary confinement, compensate by developing hypersensitivity to the most minimal stimuli.[1] I find Simmel's rigid environmental determinism a little hard to swallow. I wonder what Wordsworth would say about Simmel's social theory. He might like the idea that rural people become much more emotionally engaged.   

---

[1] Grassian Stuart. “Psychiatric Effects of Solitary Confinement.” Wash. UJL.( 2006): 345-46. Google Scholar.