The Poetics And Practice Of William Wordsworth

2520 Words11 Pages
William Wordsworth (1770 - 1850) William Wordsworth wrote a Preface to Lyrical Ballads. The Lyrical Ballads is a collection of poems which he co-authored with his lifelong friend; Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In the preface, he made his beliefs and views about poetry and poetic language known to his audience. There he defined good poetry as “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” which takes its origin from “emotion recollected in tranquility”. Wordsworth explains his reasons for choosing to write as he had, and proposes a personal poetics that has remained influential and controversial to the present day. In essay, he wrote a creed of romantic poetry or what he calls “a defence of the theory” upon which his poems were written, so that this new style of writing poetry would not be a rude shock to the reading audience, because it is ”so materially different from those upon which general approbation is at present bestowed”(P.142). In it he made the following statements on what he set out to perform in his works, and some of the chief reasons for choosing to write in such a manner. They include: • “To choose incidents and situations from common life” • “To relate or describe them … in a selection of language really used by men;” • “And at the same time throwing over them certain colouring of imagination, so that ordinary things would be presented to the mind in an unusual way.” • “To make these incidents and situations interesting by tracing in them truly though, not ostentatiously the primary laws of our nature. • Low and rustic life became the subject of poetry, in other words, the ordinary people became the subject of poetry instead of the aristocrats who used to be the subject matter of the neoclassic poets who were their predecessors. He believes that in that rural environment man is closer to nature; the essential passions of the heart find a better
Open Document