English Research Seminar --- Professor Adam Potkay (William & Mary) "Concordia Discors at World's End: Pope, Voltaire, Wordsworth"
Concordia discors as a stylistic habit and ordering principle does not effectively end with the poetry of Alexander Pope, as mid-twentieth century philologists contended, but carries through the Romantic era and into the twentieth century. This essay examines concordia discors in two poets who respond to Pope's Essay on Man: Voltaire, who undoes the syntactical capacities of Pope's poetical world, and contests his cosmic optimism; and William Wordsworth, who revisits that optimism in The Prelude (1805) through new syntactic capacities.
To underscore an alleged harmony that seems to outlive a shared world view, I focus my discussion on how world-harmony works, or doesn't, at the end of a world. How can there be concordant ordering in cosmic ending, or what does it mean to exhibit an ending in harmonious verse? The question pertains not only to literary analysis and history, but also to a twenty-first-century obsession: end-of-the-world scenarios, apocalypses religious, ecological, and stochastic, in novels, films and opera. I hope to suggest a new path for the creative understanding of projected endings, and how far concordia discors may be adapted to them, though my own purview ends with the World War II era and the shadow of the atomic bomb.