William Wordsworth
1770 – 1850
Lyrical Ballads, 1798
Poet Laureate, 1843
“Preface” to Lyrical Ballads
•An experiment “fit into metrical arrangement a selection of the real language of men
in a state of vivid sensation…” 263
•Hope to start a poetic movement…
•These poems seemingly have not met the reader’s expectations (“filled the contract”
264) of what poetry should be. “They who are accustomed to the gaudiness and inane
phrasology of many modern writers, if they persist in reading this book to its
conclusion, will, no doubt, frequently have to struggle with feelings of strangeness and
awkwardness: they will look around for poetry, and will be induced to inquire by what
species of courtesy these attempts can be permitted to assume that title.” 264
Why? What is so different about these poems?
Ode to Simplicity by: William Collins (1721-1759)
O THOU, by Nature taught
To breathe her genuine thought
In numbers warmly pure and sweetly strong:
Who first on mountains wild,
In Fancy, loveliest child,
Thy babe and Pleasure's, nursed the pow'rs of song!
Thou, who with hermit heart
Disdain'st the wealth of art,
And gauds, and pageant weeds, and trailing pall:
But com'st a decent maid,
In Attic robe array'd,
O chaste, unboastful nymph, to thee I call!
By all the honey'd store
On Hybla's thymy shore,
By all her blooms and mingled murmurs dear,
By her whose love-lorn woe,
In evening musings slow,
Soothed sweetly sad Electra's poet ear:
By old Cephisus deep,
Who spread his wavy sweep
In warbled wand'rings round thy green retreat;
On whose enamell'd side,
When holy Freedom died,
No equal haunt allured thy future feet!
O sister meek of Truth,
To my admiring youth
Thy sober aid and native charms infuse!
The flow'rs that sweetest breathe,
Though beauty cull'd the wreath,
Still ask thy hand to range their order'd hues.
While Rome could none esteem,
But virtue's patriot theme,
You loved her hills, and led her laureate band;
But stay'd to sing alone
To one distinguished throne,
And turn'd thy face, and fled her alter'd land.
No more, in hall or bow'r,
The passions own thy pow'r.
Love, only Love her forceless numbers mean;
For thou hast left her shrine,
Nor olive more, nor vine,
Shall gain thy feet to bless the servile scene.
Though taste, though genuine bless
To some divine excess,
Faint's the cold work till thou inspire the whole;
What each, what all supply,
May court, my charm our eye,
Thou, only thou, canst raise the meeting soul!
Of these let others ask,
To aid some mighty task,
I only seek to find thy temperate vale;
Where oft my reed might sound
To maids and shepherds round,
And all thy sons, O Nature, learn my tale.
• The principal object, then, 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: chiefly, as far as regards the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of
excitement. (264)
•What is a Poet? to whom does he address himself? and what language is to be expected
from him?—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;
a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men
in the spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as
manifested in the goings-on of the Universe, and habitually impelled to create them where
he does not find them. To these qualities he has added a disposition to be affected more
than other men by absent things as if they were present… (269)
•He considers man and nature as essentially adapted to each other, and the mind
of man as naturally the mirror of the fairest and most interesting properties of
nature. And thus the Poet, prompted by this feeling of pleasure, which
accompanies him through the whole course of his studies, converses with general
nature, with affections akin to those, which, through labour and length of time,
the Man of science has raised up in himself, by conversing with those particular
parts of nature which are the objects of his studies. (271)
•
•I have said that 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 reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an
emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is
gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind. (273)
So… what does all this mean?
“Tintern Abbey…”
Terms:
Synaesthesia
Transcendence
Sublime
Pantheism
Wordsworth:
•Poet of nature
•Looks to transcend the body (and bodily cares) by losing himself to the
sublime aspects of nature…
•Like a greater power or spirit or supreme being that moves through all
things
•It is the poets duty to write (embody, make material) the memory of such
moments for all men to experience.
Therefore, as a product of the enlightenment, Wordsworth attempts to
find spirituality in nature, to capture the unquantafiable (sublime) in
poetry. To do this he must first lose himself (transcend) in the beauty of
nature. This transcendental moment uses but then blurs the senses
(synaesthesia) as they / the poet moves inwards.