Present here almost entirely as one half of a pair. The line Bob reads out of his own book across three dialogues — that Coleridge and Wordsworth had a letter exchange, and that Coleridge was the first to detect the medium as the message — gives Wordsworth the supporting role in the archive's earliest claimed sighting of McLuhan's thesis. Elsewhere he is a lexical source: Cameron traces McLuhan's "Moorish dance" to Wordsworth's use of the phrase, and dates him to just before the railways, which lets his response to the new cities read as early warning rather than nostalgia. Start at dialogue 65.
Across the dialogues
Enters as a lexical source rather than a poet — the origin of one phrase McLuhan reuses, which is the archive's usual way in to a Romantic
The poet enters as a word rather than a body of work, and the transaction is one-directional — what matters is that a phrase survived into McLuhan's vocabulary, not what Wordsworth meant by it.
"I think it's Wordsworth uses the phrase Moorish dance, and elsewhere McLuhan talks about a Moorish dance,"Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 10 (14 Jan 2021), 6:17
Given a position in time instead of a text, dated to just before industry arrives so that what he sees can be read as early warning
The dating is the whole point of naming him — placing the Romantics thirty or forty years ahead of the railways makes their objection prophetic rather than reactionary, which is what the series needs from them.
"Wordsworth and Coleridge and those people are not too affected yet."Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 19 (25 Mar 2021), 18:30
Recruited into an argument about awareness, one of the English voices who noticed the cost of the new cities while they were still being built
He is enlisted as a witness to a general awareness rather than an author of a position, one of several English voices produced to show that the cost of the new cities was legible while they were still going up.
"people like Wordsworth and Coleridge were already trying to say, well, wait a minute. Yeah, we've got these cities that are exploding, but there's also nature and we can't forget nature."Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 63 (19 Jan 2023), 41:35
Fixed as the junior half of a pair in Bob's own written page, the name that sets up the credit going to Coleridge
The sentence names Wordsworth in order to award the credit elsewhere, and the qualification carries the real argument — a thesis detected "on a very small scale" is one the series can date to 1800 without conceding that McLuhan was anticipated.
"Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth had a letter exchange and debate, but Coleridge was the first to detect the medium as the message on a very small scale."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 65 (16 Feb 2023), 28:00
Absorbed into a two-stage genealogy of symbolism, where the English Romantics become a first wave the French are said to complete
The Romantics are collapsed into a single roster and assigned a slot, first symbolists to the French second wave — a two-stage genealogy that makes English poetry the precondition for the modernism the archive actually cares about.
"the late poets, you know, Keats, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 80 (14 Dec 2023), 1:04:22
Connections
The archive's standing pair — the letter exchange in which Coleridge, not Wordsworth, detects the medium as the message.
McLuhan's "Moorish dance" is traced by Cameron to Wordsworth's use of the phrase.
Placed with Keats and Byron among what McLuhan called the first symbolists, before the French second wave.