12/10/07 - English Literature - Wordsworth and Coleridge

Lyrical Ballads was a collection of poetry published in Bristol by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Wordsworth being the main contributor. Neither of the men were known publicly at the time. They were overshadows by Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott. The 'Preface' to the Lyrical Ballads was not written until the second edition was published. The poems were of a new species, and were considered at the time to be experiments.

"The majority of the following poems are to be considered as experiments. They were written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure. Readers accustomed to the gaudiness and inane phraseology of many modern writers, if they persist in reading this book to its conclusion, will perhaps frequently have to struggle with feelings of strangeness and aukwardness: they will look round for poetry, and will be induced to enquire by what species of courtesy these attempts can be permitted to assume that title. It is desirable that such readers, for their own sakes, should not suffer the solitary word Poetry, a word of very disputed meaning, to stand in the way of their gratification; but that, while they are perusing this book, they should ask themselves if it contains a natural delineation of human passions, human characters, and human incidents; and if the answer be favorable to the author's wishes, that they should consent to be pleased in spite of that most dreadful enemy to our pleasures, our own pre-established codes of decision."
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A pre-Enlightenment society about mythologizing, fear and superstition was founded by Adorno and Horkhim. But during the age of Enlightenment science overtook all that. However, the Enlightenment was not a way of opening a window on the world, it was simply a new way of thinking; another system of ordering the world.

Wordsworth wrote about this kind of scientific and rational methodology. He wrote about what the fundamental principle of 'experience'. This was the beginning of rational thinking: he explored the relationship between the mind and the world in his work. For example, to what extent can we change the world with our perception, rather than experience it?

"While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deeper power of joy,
We see into the life of things."
[William Wordsworth, from "Tintern Abbey"]

The above is a bold statement. Wordsworth says that we can "see into the life of things". It sounds like the rationality of the Enlightenment, casting aside myth to see things as they really are. But it is very different from the model of enlightened science, for two reasons. The first is that what enables the moment of insight is not the apparatus of science, but “an eye made quiet by the power of harmony”. It’s when we suspend active perception, the scientific pursuit of truths, that we can understand the world. And secondly, the life of things accords “things”, nature, a life of their own, with which we can only partially connect. Nature is not a scientific object, but something we can only experience as a structure of feeling. It is not a collection of things in the world that we can know through detached observation, we can only start to know nature if we think about the way we experience it through the senses and our imagination. Thus, experience cannot be directly recreated in language. This is one of the reasons why Wordsworth can seem difficult to read. It is because he is not just describing objects as they appear to the rational mind; he tends to use language that generates new experience rather than reflecting them.

To a readership in 1798 the idea of a ballad was rather different from the ones that appeared in Wordsworth and Coleridge’s collection. Ballads were not the stuff of Enlightenment. They were a primitive, form of poetry that was associated with uneducated people. At best they were a curiosity for antiquarians that gave an insight into earlier forms of social organisation, they were “relics”, which the name given to them by Thomas Percy in his collection of 1765. Percy felt he had to apologise for them.

"In a polished age, like the present, I am sensible that many of these reliques of antiquity will require great allowances to be made for them. Yet have they, for the most part, a pleasing simplicity, and many artless graces, which in the opinion of no mean critics, have been thought to compensate for the want of higher beauties, and, if they do not dazzle the imagination, are frequently found to interest the heart."
[Thomas Percy, Reliques of English Poetry, 1765]

Notice that Percy says that the poems do not “dazzle the imagination”. This was precisely what Wordsworth was going to refute. Wordsworth claims that the ballad uses a form that does engage the imagination. This is partly because in nearly forty years the idea of what imagination was had changed. In the mid-eighteenth century the imagination was thought be encompassed by elegant writing and stylish imagery: ‘taste’ was the governing principle. Poetry should present agreed truths in elegant and stylish new ways.

"True wit is nature to advantage dressed
What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed."
[Pope, Essay on Criticism]

Typical nature descriptions before Romanticism are exemplified by John Dyer's poetry.

"To mend thy mounds, to trench, to clear, to soil
Thy grateful fields, to medicate thy sheep,
Hurdles to weave, and cheerly shelters raise,
Thy vacant hours require: and ever learn
Quick æther's motions: oft the scene is turn'd;
Now the blue vault, and now the murky cloud,
Hail, rain, or radiance; these the moon will tell,
Each bird and beast, and these thy fleecy tribe:
When high the sapphire cope, supine they couch,
And chew the cud delighted; but, ere rain,
Eager, and at unwonted hour, they feed:
Slight not the warning; soon the tempest rolls,
Scattering them wide, close rushing at the heels
Of th' hurrying o'ertaken swains: forbear
Such nights to fold; such nights be theirs to shift
On ridge or hillock; or in homesteads soft,
Or softer cotes, detain them. Is thy lot
A chill penurious turf, to all thy toils
Untractable? Before harsh winter drowns
The noisy dykes, and starves the rushy glebe,
Shift the frail breed to sandy hamlets warm:
There let them sojourn, till gay Procne skims
The thickening verdure, and the rising flowers.
And while departing autumn all embrowns
The frequent-bitten fields."
[John Dyer, "The Fleece" (1757)]

"The Fleece" was a popular eighteenth-century poem about nature. It uses a precise form of poetic diction, at the time thought to be good. For example, it could not use rude or unpleasant language, but only poetic language such as "turf" rather than grass and "fleecy tribe" rather than flock of sheep. Latinate language was also essential.

Wordsworth was obviously quite concerned about the importance of language in poetry. He reacted against the values that inspired the taste for poetic diction. Language was a big philosophical issue throughout the eighteenth century. There were a lot of ideas, some of them contradictory, centring on the history of language. Was it getting better or worse? Some people thought it was at its peak already and should supply “fixed” projects for dictionaries and grammars. Language was also a social matter and a way of distinguishing class. Radical petitions to Parliament were regularly dismissed because of the language they were written in. People even went so far as too assert that grammar was the most important part of language because it was the most abstract, i.e. the least grounded in time and space. Words like “therefore” and “because” were better than “horse” or “walk”. The ‘best’ languages were the most inflected, like Greek and Latin.

So a distinction was being made between uncivilised people who experienced immediacy and emotions tied to time and place, and elevated people who could achieve universality and abstraction, and reflect on language rather than reliving experience. Hugh Blair said that the language of immediate experience was the province of children and savages.

"If speech be the vehicle or interpreter of the conceptions of our minds, an examination of its structure and progress cannot but unfold many things concerning the nature of progress of our conceptions themselves, and the operations of our faculties."
[Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, 1780]

Wordsworth was completely against this model of what poetry should be, and said so in the advertisement to Lyrical Ballads.

"It is desirable that [….] readers, for their own sakes, should not suffer the solitary word Poetry, a word of very disputed meaning, to stand in the way of their gratification; but that, while they are perusing this book, they should ask themselves if it contains a natural delineation of human passions, human characters, and human incidents; and if the answer be favorable to the author's wishes, that they should consent to be pleased in spite of that most dreadful enemy to our pleasures, our own pre-established codes of decision."
[Advertisement to Lyrical Ballads]

We can see how Wordsworth practises the new language in one of his ballads.

"Strange fits of passion have I known:
And I will dare to tell,
But in the Lover's ear alone,
What once to me befell.

When she I loved looked every day
Fresh as a rose in June,
I to her cottage bent my way,
Beneath an evening moon.

Upon the moon I fixed my eye,
All over the wide lea;
With quickening pace my horse drew nigh
Those paths so dear to me.

And now we reached the orchard-plot;
And, as we climbed the hill,
The sinking moon to Lucy's cot
Came near, and nearer still.

In one of those sweet dreams I slept,
Kind Nature's gentlest boon!
And all the while my eyes I kept
On the descending moon.

My horse moved on; hoof after hoof
He raised, and never stopped:
When down behind the cottage roof,
At once, the bright moon dropped.

What fond and wayward thoughts will slide
Into a Lover's head!
"O mercy!" to myself I cried,
"If Lucy should be dead!"
[Wordsworth, "Strange Fits of Passion"]

Wordsworth shows that poetry can be written in simple language with monosyllables, e.g. "horse". Poetry might seem strange, or make you uncomfortable. Even the first line is singular rather than universal, with connotations of madness. Poetry does not have to tell you everything: we do not find out about Lucy’s fate. According to the poem, superstition might be meaningful. The relationship between the lover’s feelings and the moon may tell us something about human experience. But meaningful does not simply mean serving up bits of information; it can be experience itself—the poem traces the speaker’s unaccountable experience. Poem repeats the state of not knowing in "Tintern Abbey" and tries to convey a sense of interiority: it imitates the progress of the lover. The important thing about the lover is his feelings, not the information about the story. The poem offers abstraction (returning to earlier experiences and reflecting on them) but does not see this as being reflected in grammar. Rather, language can recreate, and add to the total experience of how the lover feels now and how he felt then. The speaker's fear and superstition is juxtaposed with his embarrassment about telling the story.