Such was Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction. Nothing could be more grossly mistaken than the notion that the greater part of Wordsworth's poetry was composed in defiance of his own theory, and that he succeeded best when he set his own theory most at defiance. The misconception is traceable to the authority of Coleridge. His just, sympathetic and penetrating criticism on Wordsworth's work as a poet did immense service in securing for him a wider recognition; but his proved friendship and brilliant style have done sad injustice to the poet as a theorist. It was natural to assume that Coleridge, if anybody, must have known what his friend's theory was; and it was natural also that readers under the charm of his lucid and melodious prose should gladly grant themselves a dispensation from the trouble of verifying his facts in the harsh and cumbrous exposition of the theorist himself.[1]
The question of diction made most noise, but it was far from being the most important point of poetic doctrine set forth in the Preface. If in this he merely enunciated a truism, generally admitted in words but too generally ignored in practice, there was real novelty in his plea for humble subjects, and in his theory of poetic composition. Wordsworth's remarks on poetry in general, on the supreme function of the imagination in dignifying humble and commonplace incidents, and on the need of active exercise of imagination in the reader as well as in the poet, are immeasurably more important than his theory of poetic diction. Such sayings as that poetry “takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity,” or that it is the business of a poet to trace “how men associate ideas in a state of excitement,” are significant of Wordsworth's endeavour to lay the foundations of his art in an independent study of the feelings and faculties of men in real life, unbiased as far as possible by poetic custom and convention. This does not mean that the new poet was to turn his back on his predecessors and never look behind him to what they had done. Wordsworth was guilty of no such extravagance. He was from boyhood upwards a diligent student of poetry, and was not insensible to his obligations to the past. His purpose was only to use real life as a touchstone of poetic substance. The poet, in Wordsworth's conception, is distinctively a man in whom the beneficent energy of imagination, operative as a blind instinct more or less in all men, is stronger than in others, and is voluntarily and rationally exercised for the benefit of all in its proper work of increase and consolation. Not every image that the excited mind conjures up in real life is necessarily poetical. It is the business of the poet to select and modify for his special purpose of producing immediate pleasure.
There were several respects in which the formal recognition of such elementary principles of poetic evolution powerfully affected Wordsworth's practice. One of these may be indicated by saying that he endeavoured always to work out an emotional motive from within. Instead of choosing a striking theme and working at it like a decorative painter, embellishing, enriching, dressing to advantage, standing back from it and studying effects, his plan was to take incidents that had set his own imagination spontaneously to work, and to study and reproduce with artistic judgment the modification of the initial feeling, the emotional motive, within himself. To this method he owed much of his strength and also much of his unpopularity. By keeping his eye on the object, as spontaneously modified by his own imaginative energy, he was able to give full and undistracted scope to all his powers in poetic coinage of the wealth that his imagination brought. On the other hand, readers whose nature or education was different from his own, were repelled or left cold and indifferent, or obliged to make the sympathetic effort to see with his eyes, which he refused to make in order that he might see with theirs.
“He is retired as noontide dew
Or fountain in a noon-day grove,
And you must love him ere to you
He will seem worthy of your love.”
From this habit of taking the processes of his own mind as the standard of the way in which “men associate ideas in a state of excitement,” and language familiar to himself as the standard of the language of “real men,” arises a superficial anomaly in Wordsworth's poetry, an apparent contradiction between his practice and his theory. His own imagination, judged by ordinary standards, was easily excited by emotional motives that have little force with ordinary men. Most of his poems start from humbler, slighter, less generally striking themes than those of any other poet of high rank. But his poetry is not correspondingly simple. On the contrary, much of it, much of the best of it—for example, the Ode to Duty, and that on the Intimations of Immortality—is intricate, elaborate and abstruse. The emotional motive is simple; the passion has almost always a simple origin, and often is of no great intensity; but the imaginative structure is generally elaborate, and, when the poet is at his best, supremely splendid and gorgeous. No poet has built such magnificent palaces of rare material for the ordinary everyday homely human affections. It is because he has invested our ordinary everyday principles of conduct, which are so apt to become threadbare, with such imperishable robes of finest texture and richest design that Wordsworth holds so high a place among the great moralists in verse.
His practice was influenced also, and not always for good, by his theory that poetry "takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.” This was a somewhat doubtful corollary from his general theory of poetic evolution. A poem is complete in itself; there must be no sting in it to disturb the reader's content with the whole; through whatever agitations it progresses, to whatever elevations it soars, to this end it must come, otherwise it is imperfect as a poem. Now the imagination in ordinary men, though the process is not expressed in verse, and the poet's special art has thus no share in producing the effect, reaches the poetic end when it has so transfigured a disturbing experience, whether of joy or grief, that this rests tranquilly in the memory, can be recalled without disquietude, and dwelt upon with some mode and degree of pleasure, more or less keen, more or less pure or mixed with pain. True to his idea of imitating real life, Wordsworth made it a rule for himself not to write on any theme till his imagination had operated upon it for some time involuntarily; it was not in his view ripe for poetic treatment till this transforming agency had subdued the original emotion to a state of tranquillity.[2] Out of this tranquillity arises the favourable moment for poetic composition, some day when, as he contemplates the subject, the tranquillity disappears, an emotion kindred to the original emotion is reinstated, and the poet retraces and supplements with all his art the previous involuntary and perhaps unconscious imaginative chemistry.
When we study the moments that Wordsworth found favourable for successful composition, a very curious law reveals itself, somewhat at variance with the common conception of him as a poet who derived all his strength from solitary communion with nature. We find that the recluse's best poems were written under the excitement of some break in the monotony of his quiet life—change of scene, change of companionship, change of occupation. The law holds from the beginning to the end of his poetic career. An immense stimulus was given to his powers by his first contact with Coleridge after two years of solitary and abortive effort. Above Tintern Abbey was composed
- ↑ Wordsworth was not an adroit expositor in prose, and he did not make his qualifications sufficiently prominent, but his theory of diction taken with those qualifications left him free without inconsistency to use any language that was not contrary to “true taste and feeling.” He acknowledged that he might occasionally have substituted “particular for general associations,” and that thus language charged with poetic feeling to himself might appear trivial and ridiculous to others, as in The Idiot Boy and Goody Blake; he even went so far as to withdraw Alice Fell, first published in 1807, from several subsequent editions; but he argued that it was dangerous for a poet to make alterations on the simple authority of a few individuals or even classes of men, because if he did not follow his own judgment and feelings his mind would infallibly be debilitated.
- ↑
The Prelude contains a record of his practice, after the opening
lines of the first book—
“Thus far, O friend! did I, not used to make
A present joy the matter of a song.
Pour forth,” &c.
