If the publication of Lyrical Ballads marks the climax of the Romantic Revolt, it is because of its importance as a gesture of revolt against the existing poetic practices. In his Preface to the second edition Wordsworth explained in detail what his theories about new poetry were and what was to be looked for in his own poems. The immediate purpose of the Preface was to defend his poems against “the charges of lowness and unpoeticalness that had been made against both their subjects and their diction” to use the words of Graham Hough. The overall intention of Wordsworth was two-fold, that is, to relate poetry as closely as possible to common life, by removing it in the first place from the realm of fantasy, and in the second by changing it from the polite or over-sophisticated amusement to a serious art. . According to him, poetry should be “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” not mere satisfaction of a taste for imagery and ornament. Wordsworth’s aim in all this is to show that the poet is a man appealing to the normal interests of mankind, not as a peculiar being appealing to a specialized taste. He says:
“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, who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him; delighted 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.”
In his Preface Wordsworth made four claims: first, “to choose incidents and situations from common life”; second, “to relate or describe them throughout, as far as was possible in a selection of language really used by men”; third, “to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect”; and, last, “above all, to make these incidents and situations interesting by tracing in them, truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature.” The greater part of the Preface is devoted to justification of the first two claims, and this has caused too much stress to be laid on them while the fact remains that it is on the last two claims that the greatness of his poetry rests.
The poetic language of the eighteenth century was unreal, and its substance was far from being an interpretation of the universal spirit of man. Wordsworth did inestimable service in insisting on a new and true orientation. But he went too far; he said that rustic life and language were the simplest and purest being elementary, in close touch with nature, and unspoiled by social vanity. The fact remains that the rustic has little originality, few ideas, and makes almost no attempt to correlate them. It is also true that Wordsworth proposed to prune it of peculiarities but, as Coleridge observed, this would render it the same as the language of any other section of the community similarly treated. Wordsworth also asserted that the language of poetry differs in no way from that of prose, with the single exception of metre. This is the controversy that still rages and Wordsworth’s finest poetry does not show any influence of this idea. Geoffrey H. Crump has stated categorically that “In his greatest poems he forgot his theories, or the poems are great enough to dwarf the theories into insignificance, and in his later works he intentionally discarded them.”
Wordsworth was a complete innovator who saw things in a new way. Those who approach his poetry for the first time notice two peculiarities – its austerity and its appearance of triviality. It is so in the case of those who fail to see the quality of really human sympathy. Besides, Wordsworth himself is responsible for inviting this sort of response, as he had no relish for the present. Shelley said about him that “he was hardly a man, but a wandering spirit with strange adventures and no end to them.” The triviality of manner is the manner through which he could convey the profoundest truths. While reading Wordsworth’s poems, it is impossible not to be struck by two things:
- “ the magical strength of truth” to borrow the words of De Quincey, because “the poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth and over all time” to quote Wordsworth himself, and
- the number of fine phrases that have become the common coin of everyday speech. John F. Danby observed in his book: The Simple Wordsworth that “Words exist not on the page but between people: only people can mean anything.”
