초록/요약

This paper is to reexamine Mill’s own account of his ‘mental crisis’ in his autobiography with reference to Wordsworth’s poetics. How truthful could we take his recollection about what he had gone through 30 years ago? If there were anything he had learnt from Wordsworth at all, what exactly was it? In the introductory section, I went through Mill’s famous tribute to Wordsworth in his Autobiography with a particular attention to its use of Wordsworthian terms such as feelings, pleasure, and sympathy. Mill’s honest acknowledgment of Wordsworth’s beneficial influence left no room for doubt, which however does not provide us with any concrete details about it. In the first main section, I compared Mill’s recollection of Autobiography and his debate manuscript “Wordsworth and Byron” composed a few months later than “the autumn of 1828” when his first impressive encounter with Wordsworth’s poetry was made. The comparison showed that there was a great extent of consistency in basic assumptions and terminology in the two texts, which made Mill’s recollection much more credible than before. Both texts do present Mill’s clear-headed insight into Wordsworth’s anti-Bentham poetics couched within his unexpectedly Benthamite vocabulary. Wordsworth’s idea of “overbalance of enjoyment(pleasure),” in particular, proved very useful to Mill because it reminded him of their shared philosophical foundation of associationism. It was also the most powerful weapon for Mill in his mental struggle ag