WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

The principal object... proposed in these poems was to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible in a selection of language really used by men, and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect; and, further, and above all, to make these incidents and situations interesting by tracing in them, truly though not ostentatiously, the, primary laws of our nature .... Humble and rustic life was generally chosen, because, in that condition, the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity.... The language, too, of these men has been adopted (purified indeed from what appear to be its real defects, from all lasting and rational causes of dislike or disgust) because such men hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of language is originally derived.

An earlier critic would have found nothing objectionable in Words­worth's declared aim of 'tracing... the primary laws of our nature'. It is the ways in which he sought to do it that are new: concentrating on "common' and 'rustic life' in the proper language of such situations and throwing over is a certain colouring of imagination'. All this is far removed from the polite conversation of gentlemen on man's role as a ;social being, which is the starting-point of a Dryden, Pope or Johnson in the quest for 'the primary laws of our nature'. - Wordsworth is recommending not only a new style of poetry but a whole new definition of what poetry - and poets - should be:

Let me ask, what is meant by the word Poet? What is a Poet? To whom does he address himself?.... He is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind.

To the neoclassical critic the poet had been a craftsman - a gifted one, no doubt, but essentially a man like any other, observing and  reproducing general nature with the help of ancient precedent and the 'rules'. To Wordsworth, the poet, despite some half-hearted protesta-Itions to the contrary, is a man apart, with special sensibility and enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is no longer a term of abuse but one of praise. The poet purveys a special insight into the human condition: 'The Poet writes under one restriction only, namely, the necessity of giving immediate pleasure to a human being possessed of that information which may be expected from him, not as a lawyer, a physician, a mariner, an astronomer, or a natural philosopher, but as a Man.' Here again there is nothing that would immediately be objectionable to Pope or Johnson; the difference is that 'Man', for Wordsworth, is the newly ennobled creature described by Rousseau,* with the liberated spirit of the American and French Revolutions; hence Wordsworth's determina­tion to study Man in the most natural circumstances possible. He is anxious also to write in the language of men, stripped admittedly of its vulgarities but falling into neither artificial poetic diction nor the jargon of lawyers, doctors or similar specialists. Hence Wordsworth's egalitarian wish to believe that his poet is a man like any other, but it is clear that anyone able to 'trace the primary laws of our nature' as he intends must have special gifts: 'the Poet is chiefly distinguished from other men by a greater promptness to think and feel without immediate external excitement, and a greater power in expressing such thoughts and feelings as are produced in him in that manner.' Nevertheless, he insists 'these passions and thoughts and feelings are the general passions and thoughts and feelings of men.'

  Where Wordsworth reveals his true Romantic colours, and begins - for all his protestations - to make the poet a man apart, is in his attempt to describe the creative process, making that the key to authentic poetry:

  poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of re-action, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which before was the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind. In this mood successful composition generally begins ...

  Virtually all earlier criticism starts from the ancient Greek assumption that art is a mimetic activity, imitating, copying or mirroring nature in some form; in discussing the creative process in this way Wordsworth begins to suggest that poetry may derive not so much from imitating nature as from imaginatively re-creating it. (Notice the earlier suggestion about throwing 'a certain colouring of imagination' over 'incidents and situations from common life'.) The poet himself, with his special sensitivity and powers of imagination, becomes the focus of attention.

The chief problem with Wordsworth's definitions of poetry and his description of how it operates is that they leave out two essential factors. The first is what we might call the craft of poetry: how does the 'spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings' actually find a form of words? The second is a recognition that the form of words which is found is ultimately different from, and independent of, both the emotions from which it derived and those it may create in a reader. Wordsworth seems to imply that if the poet feels deeply enough, the right words will somehow come - a sentiment which has inspired some very immature and self-indulgent poetry - and that they will be capable of inspiring similar feelings in a reader. These weaknesses are most apparent when he tries to explain why he, or any other poet, writes in verse which, after all, seems a long way removed from the natural language he had earlier advocated: he starts by suggesting that metre limits the intensity of emotion, preventing it from becoming too painful or powerful (though later in the same essay he suggests that metre actually intensifies emotion) and ends lamely by asking: 'Why should I be condemned for attempting to superadd to such description the charm which, by the consent of all nations, is acknowledged to exist in metrical language?' In laying such stress on the naturalness of poetry, concentrating on its emotional force and content - rejecting the old mechanical rules and the artificial language of much neoclassical poetry - Wordsworth has not come up with any convincing argument for why he writes in verse at all.

For all its confusion and special pleading, Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads marks a crucial turning-point in the way critics look at poetry. There is more than a touch of puritan self-conviction about his thinking: the poet is sufficiently different from other men in his deep sensitivity and powers of expression as to be a law unto himself; no one can lay down laws as to how he must write. Although he is 'a man speaking to men', his poetry is forged by a specially gifted consciousness. Here are the seeds of one of the great modern myths;

poets as men apart, subject only to self-imposed constraints, outsiders both mentally and socially, Shelley's 'unacknowledged legislators of the world' (in A Defence of Poetry, 1821, published 1840).

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