SOURCE: "George Eliot and Wordsworth: The Power of Sound and the Power of Mind," in Studies in English Literature, Vol. 20, No. 4, Autumn, 1980, pp. 675-94.

In the following excerpt, Mann examines the importance of Wordsworth's influence on George Eliot's poem "The Legend of Jubal, " and shows that both writers consider sound a powerful metaphor for the human imagination.

George Eliot's appreciation for Wordsworth's poetry extends from her earliest evangelical years to the end of her life; and the simplified Wordsworth of nature and rural goodness has often been recognized as an influence upon her work. What is perhaps less noticed is the degree, to which Wordsworth and George Eliot share a similar conception of imagination as the crucial faculty of mind…. [The] Romantic conception of imagination as the central faculty of mind is not so much negated by George Eliot as re-examined in the light of a different aesthetic...