5.2. William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

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5.2.1. 1800 Preface: Poetic Diction

5.2.2. 1815 Preface: Poetic Imagination

 

 

 

 

5.2.1. 1800 Preface: Poetic Diction

 

Poetic diction had been felt as a problem in English literature at least since the time of Chaucer and the late Middle Ages, when there was a wave of Latinisms in an effort to enrich the English language. Spenser had proposed another solution, the use of archaisms. During the Neoclassical era, the passion for decorum had led to a progressive dessication of poetic diction, which was believed to be apart and above everyday (or "idiomatick") language. The typical eighteenth-century poem is loaded with adjectives which are the heritage of poetic tradition rather than of observation, often neatly coupled with a noun in a stock phrase (for instance, "fresh pastures and singing brooks") which has been called by some the "neoclassical kenning"; a product of imitation and tradition, the kind of expression you would never find outside poetry. Its very immobility is a sign of the world-view which supports this poetic tradition: a belief in order, conservatism, dogmatic immobilism. This existence of a "poetic language" characterized by special words and expressions was felt by many to be a mark of distinction: thus, Gray and Johnson were proud of the English poetic idiom.

The neoclassical "kenning," however praised by Johnson, was a dead weight placed on poetry. The real kenning (in old Germanic poetry) does not present us the individual experience of the poet, but is instead the voice of the community, it is alive in that sense. The neoclassical kenning is a formula inherited from a poetic tradition which is no longer able to voice the experience of its culture; it is a poor substitute for real perception and poetical intuition. Wordsworth writes an "Essay on Epitaphs" in which he criticises Pope's conventional epitaphs, which made a lavish use of classical clichés. He also opposes the conception of words as a "dress" for thought. In the preface to the 2nd edition of the Lyrical Ballads (1800) he states his poetic manifesto, which is at the same time that of English romanticism. Wordsworth will provide "the first thorough-going Longinian criticism of poetic diction in English" (Edinger). He carries further the demand for mimetic truth and the recapturing of experience that is found in the aestheticians of the 18th century, and he separates the concept of verisimilitude from the classical doctrine of the three styles, which is abandoned at last.

Wordsworth calls his poems "experiments," and he presents them as models of a new kind of poetry. His aim, he says, is "to ascertain how far, by fitting to metrical arrangement a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation, that sort of pleasure and that quantity of pleasure may be imparted, which a poet may rationally endeavor to impart" (433). So, an experiment, first of all, in a new poetic diction.

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 the language really used by men, and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain coloring of imagination, whereby things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect; and further, and above all, to make these incidents and situations interesting in tracing in them, truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature: chiefly as regards the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement. (434).

Narrative poems such as "Michael" or "The Two Brothers" in this collection are perhaps the best examples of this experimental diction.

Wordsworth's demands in the field of poetic diction can be related to the "perceptual" or "experiential" standard gradually developed for literature during the XVIIIth century: He proposes that poetic diction be modelled on spoken language, and not previous literary productions. The prevailing norm among poets of his time he calls an "inane phraseology" (434), a set of "arbitrary and capricious habits of expression, in order to furnish food for fickle tastes, and fickle appetites, of their own creation" (435). We may note that this setting of actual (spoken) usage as the norm is already present in Horace, and his advice is repeated by Dryden, Pope, Goldsmith and Swift in the heyday of neoclassicism. But then Wordsworth is reacting against the poetic language of his contemporaries, rather than against Pope or Dryden.

· He also demands that poetic diction be modelled on primitive, passionate and natural utterance, that which is most spontaneous, the product of emotion. This faith of Wordsworth's in spontaneous utterance, this appreciation of what is natural and not elaborated may be linked with the popularistic strain of romanticism, and was prefigured by Ossianism, Vico's theories of mythical thought and to the democratic faith in the people and simple intuition. Let us not forget that Wordsworth writes in the wake of the French Revolution, of which he had been an ardent admirer: he is not far from accusing the earlier poetry of being aristocratic, and far from the real concerns and language of the common people. Goethe, another admirer of the bourgeois revolution, had set in the middle classes his literary ideal of spontaneity. Wordsworth already needs to look further. A very similar brand of popularistic faith will be found later in Tolstoi. In Wordsworth, this is a reaction against the polite and aristocratic side of Neoclassicism. He holds a naturalistic creed according to which emotions are simpler, clearest and purest in the country and among the lower classes: the town and the higher classes are decadent, and are far from the natural poetry which can be heard in the mouth of simple people. Among the higher classes, the passions are restrained by conventionality: among the common people they are less restrained, and so they are "more accurately contemplated, and more forcefully communicated" (434). Wordsworth thinks that the problem of poetic diction is one of urban artificiality, which produces the hackneyed verbal conventions of late Neoclassicism. The preservation of the previous poetic tradition was for Wordsworth a mere instance of social vanity; poetical clichés, personification of abstract entities, etc., are to disappear from the new poetry.

Many of Wordsworth's poems are "dramatic", that is, much of the speaking is not attributed to the poet or his persona, but rather to a character, usually a peasant. It is the emotion of this character which gives its coloring to the diction; and such a diction must not look learned, bookish or "poetic" in any old sense. "Such a language, arising out of repeated experience and regular feelings, is a more permanent , and a far more philosophical language than that which is frequently substituted for it by poets" (434). The voice of the author or that of poetical conventions must not be heard behind that of the characters; elaboration of language is acceptable if necessary only in the poet's own speeches. Near the end of his "Preface," Wordsworth asks for the indulgence of the reader in case he had let slip by "those arbitrary connections of feelings and ideas with particular words or phrases, from which no man can altogether protect himself" ( 442). Indeed, other critics (Coleridge in 1817, and Sir Henry Taylor in 1834) would accuse Wordsworth of falling in the same defects which he had criticised: stock phrases and unnatural language in the mouth of characters ("ventriloquism," as Coleridge puts it ). Lack of both novelty and decorum in his low moments. And, conversely, most later critics have argued that Wordsworth's theory of poetry falls short of explaining his own poetic achievement. It may be noted that Wordsworth always speaks of a selection of the language of the lower classes: this is contradictory with the spirit of the new conception he is bringing forward.

· As a corollary of these views, Wordsworth proposes to suppress the concept of poetic diction altogether. Poetic diction was not true to nature, and so it is suppressed. Indeed, Wordsworth affirms, the language of many sections of good poems differs in no way from that of prose, apart from the question of metre:

a large portion of the language of every good poem can in no respect differ from that of good prose. We will go further. It may be safely affirmed that there neither is, nor can be, any essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition. (436)

The difference between poetry and prose, Wordsworth holds, is that prose works with concepts and poetry with emotions. But this is not a difference in language, he says. The only clear difference in language is meter, and even that is not so clear, if we take into account the rhythm of some kinds of prose.

 

Then, why use verse at all? Wordsworth says that it is a means to contain and refrain passion by means of a mechanical regularity. But then he contradicts himself doubly when he not only admits later on that meter intensifies, rather than diminish emotion, and that metre works through continual and regular impulses of surprise . Coleridge will give a better account of how regularity and surprise can be produced at the same time.

 

 

 

 

 

5.2.2. 1815 Preface: Poetic Imagination

 

 

 

As we have seen, the Romantics stress the expressive and subjective aspects of literary creation. Already in Wordsworth's 1800 preface, the emphasis had fallen on the relationship between the poet and the poem, on the problem of composition, creation, imagination. Emotion, imagination, expression, sincerity, and imagination are among the chief concerns of all other English romantic poets and theorizers of Romanticism (such as Coleridge, Shelley, Blake, Hazlitt, Keats, Mill, Carlyle, Arnold). The German romantics had considered the poetic imagination as the human faculty which is in immediate contact with truth: truth is now a question of feeling, and no longer a question of logic. Already in Wordsworth we find a new valuation of the imagination, and a care to distinguish it from lower faculties of the human spirit. The best known is the antithesis between imagination and fancy. During the 17th and 18th centuries both terms had been rough synonyms, although in some psychological theories (such as Hobbes' in Leviathan ) "imagination" was used for the soberly literal and non-creative settlement of impressions in memory. In spite of this modest claim, imagination held its ground of respectability during the reaction against rhetoric, while fancy, associated with "wit," with fortuitous, non-essential and cold establishment of (false) associations. Following this tradition, William Taylor (British Synonyms Discriminated, 1813) defined fancy as a dynamic faculty, as the power of combining and evoking sensations, while imagination is a lower, static faculty. Wordsworth criticised these definitions in his 1815 preface. He oposes Taylor's sensationalist definition of imagination, defining it in the German way, as a dynamic, creative faculty. Indeed, for Wordsworth, even fancy is creative in a limited way:

Fancy does not require that the materials which she makes use of should be susceptible of change in their constitution, from her touch; and, where they admit of modification, it is enough for her purpose if it be slight, limited and evanescent . . . .

The law under which the processes of Fancy are carried on is as capricious as the accidents of things, and the effects are surprising, playful, ludicrous, amusing, tender or pathetic, as the objects happen to be appositely produced or fortuitously combined. Fancy depends upon the rapidity and profusion with which she scatters her thoughts and images; trusting that their number, and the felicity with which they are linked together, will make amends for the want of individual value: or she prides herself upon the curious subtility and the successful elaboration with which she can detect their lurking affinities.

Finding a witty pun could serve as a typical operation of fancy. Imagination, however, is a higher and more fundamentally active faculty: it does not deal with fortuitous affinities, but with the essential relationships between objects, their underlying unity. This unity which is not perceived by discursive reasoning, but rather by feeling; imagination is a subjective re-fashioning of appearance:

 

[the Imagination] draws all things to one . . . . it makes things animate or inanimate, beings with their attributes, subjects with their accesories, take one one colour and serve to one effect.

 

 

[the Imagination] recoils from everything but the plastic, the pliant, and the indefinite . . . . When the Imagination frames a comparison . . . a sense of the truth of the likeness, from the moment that it is perceived, grows-and continues to grow- upon the mind; the resemblance depending less upon outline of form and feature, than upon expression and effect; less upon casual and outstanding, than upon inherent and internal, properties: moreover, the images invariably modify each other . . . . the Imagination is conscious of an indestructible dominion; æthe Soul may fall away from it, not being able to sustain its grandeur; but, if once felt and acknowledged, by no act of any other faculty of the mind can it be relaxed, impaired, or diminished.

 

The poetic symbol, instead of the pun, could be the emblem of the imaginative faculty: it belongs to a higher order of creation. In Wordsworth's great ode, "Intimations of Immortality," a child is compared to a running brook and set against the images of lambs playing on a field. The relationship between both is essential, and not accidental, because the child participates in the unity of nature in the same way as the brook and the lambs, while the narrator-observer is estranged from this scene and can only approach it as the subject of poetry, at a higher level of consciousness.

 

The concern for imagination is in the case of Wordsworth a German heritage, coming through Coleridge. However, Coleridge did not agree with Wordsworth's definition of the imagination, and would eventually refute it, drawing a sharper distinction between imagination and fancy, which according to Wordsworth had some common characteristics: "To aggregate and to associate, to evoke and to combine, belong as well to the Imagination as to the Fancy."

 

 

Neoclassical "imagination", even in its most comprehensive definitions, is fancy for Wordsworth and Coleridge. Fancy forms casual and fleeting combinations of memories already stored: so, it deals with concepts, not with actual experiences of things. Imagination, on the other hand, acts directly on experience, giving unity to objects, abstracting or adding properties to them. So, the whole 18th-century interpretation of these terms has been displaced:

 

18th century Wordsworth Coleridge

 

Discovery and (Fancy? Wit?) Imagination Imagination

modification of (Fancy?)

essence

 

Discovery and Fancy, Wit,

modification of Imagination Fancy Fancy

appearance

 

Mere reproduc- Memory,

tion of images Imagination Memory Memory

 

Wordsworth's definition of imagination would also be found insufficient by Coleridge on other account. Wordsworth explicitly links imagination only to "gratification," and not to values. But a moral view of imagination is implicit in his poems and in his discussion. The poet does not teach any definite concepts, but he conveys immediate intuitions of nature, which are even more valuable. "The poet thinks, and feels, in the language of human passions" (1800 Preface, 440). This conception we may link to Hazlitt's and John Stuart Mill's observations on poetic imagination. Poetry may not teach us how to think, but it teaches us how to feel. The emotions conveyed by poetry are "of such a nature, and in such a connection, that the understanding of the reader must be in some degree enlightened, and his affections strengthened and purified" (1800 Preface, 435). Poetry adheres to that knowledge which is common to all men, it deals with the sympathies essential to human nature: love, fidelity, nostalgia, etc. "And thus the poet . . . converses with general nature" (1800 Preface, 439). Poetry thus contributes to rescue man from the drabness of the modern world, in which a blunting of the mind and feelings seems inevitable. But then Wordsworth indulges in romantic imperialistic claims and declares poetry the most embracing and discriminating knowledge, as anything can be the object of poetry.

 

Poetry had been defined by Wordsworth in 1800 in this way : "poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings ; it takes its origin form emotion recollected in tranquillity" (441). But the poet does not simply pour out emotion: both memory and contemplation come into play. And the poet has had a long training on how to feel before he can be able to convey valuable emotions. These feelings do not come from an ordinary person: the poet has a superior sensibility, and has cultivated it through long and deep thought, creating some habits of mind which, followed "blindly and mechanically," produce descriptions of sentiments. The poet is more capable than the average of seeing difference in similarity, and similarity in difference, a cognitive ability on which our taste and moral feelings depend. The poet has the ability to conjure up passions in himself and to express them.

 

Nevertheless, in spite of all these cognitive elements, the emphasis is on the subjective emotion. The value of the poem is no longer measured with the Aristotelian norm, the succesful shaping of an action. This action, if indeed it is present, is rather a means to convey the poet's emotion.

 

Both Wordsworth and Coleridge conceive of poetic experience as an active response of the mind to personal perception and experience (more active, though, in Coleridge's account than in Wordsworth's). The observer does not merely record what he sees: he transfigures it when moved. In this way, perceiving with emotion, he may disclose the immanent beauty of things which escapes ordinary perception. These ideas are still influential in our century. They may be linked to the concept of "defamilirization" pur forward by the Russian Formalists, or to Wallace Stevens's conception of poetry as the sense that we can feel reality in itself, not dissolved in the conceptions of our own minds. But Wordsworth's conception is less intellectual, more emotive and sentimental. Through feeling, Wordsworth argues, we sense a unity in nature and a sense in experience, which had been dissolved by reason and the analytic faculty of the human mind.

 

Poetry, which has been the work of feeling, must be judged by feeling alone. Wordsworth forgets his proposal of an objective foundation of taste and asks the reader to judge his poems according to his personal reaction, and not according to the prejudice of others. This appeal to individual feeling against the criterion of authority is also highly romantic.

 

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