Wordsworth

Wordsworth applies a philosophy bearing traces of Locke and Kant to the practical problems of poets, influencing the line that runs through Emerson, Whitman, and Williams through the Objectivists and Beats. He lays the principles out concisely in his Preface to the Second Edition of Lyrical Ballads,

He sees his work as "fitting to metrical arrangement a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation" (437 Adams). Or, again, ". . . all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" (438). He sees poetry not as an attempt to "explain the ways of God to men," as per Milton, but a rendering of human emotional percept. Accordingly, he holds plain-ish language essential to this task: ". . . such a language, arising out of repeated experience and regular feelings, is a more permanent, and a far more philosophical langauge than that which is frequently substituted for it by poets" (438). This particularly reflects upon deliberately and falsely decorative language:

"The reader will find that personifications of abstract ideas rarely occur in these volumes, and are utterly rejected, as an ordinary device to elevate the style, and raise it above prose" (439).

And, further, " --It is not . . . to be supposed that anyone who holds that sublime notion of poetry which I have attempted to convey, will break in upon th sanctity and truth of his pictures by transitory and accidental ornaments, and endeavor to exite admiration of himslef by arts the necessity of which must manifestly depend upon the assumed meanness of his subject" (443).

A key theme underlying these observations can be drawn from assumptions of commonality of perception articulated distinctly by Kant and Locke. Wordsworth's version, while less extensively articulated, reads with admirable clarity:

" . . . 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 producedin him in that manner. But these passions and thoughts and feelings are the general passions and thoughts and feelings of men" (443).

He extends this universality to an insistence that poetry should most properly be engaged in other disciplines:

"The remotest discoveries of the chemist, the botanist, or the mineralogist, will be as proper objects of the poet's art as any upon which it can be employed . . . " (442). His appreciation of the basis for this observation is subtle, and deserves a longer passage:

"We have no sympathy but what is propagated by pleasure: I would not be misunderstood; but wherever we sympathize with pain, it will be found that the sympathy is produced aand carried on by subtle combination with pleasure. We have no knowledge, that is, no general principles drawn from the contemplation of particular facts, but what has been built up by pleasure, and exists in us by pleasure alone. The man of science, the chemist and mathematician, whatever difficulties and disgusts they may have had to struggle with, know and feel this. . . . What then does the poet? He considers man and the objects that surround him as acting and reacting upon each other, so as to produce an infinite complexity of pain and pleasure" (442).

So here we have a central position not only for the poet in recognizing Truth, but even a central role for the emotions in recognizing even the most technical of information. Wordsworth refuses the distinctions -- including, I must add, since I have referred the reader to Kant -- at least some of the distinction between pleasure and beauty accorded by Kant.

Pretty radical for a guy out sniffing daffodils.

Page #'s are from Hazard Adams' anthology, Critical Theory Since Plato.