Wordsworth’s Tautological Poetics

This article brings together the philosophical concept of tautology and the study of prosody in disclosing how William Wordsworth’s metrical practice introduces into the phenomenology of language tautological structures that yield a new dimension of poetic truth. The model that the article adduces through meter is then generalized to other aspects of Wordsworth’s poetics in order to explore the broader aesthetic and ethical affordances of a tautological poetics.