The argument against poetic diction, and even against metre.
His object, he tells us, was to choose incidents and illustrations from common life; to relate and describe them, as far as was possible, in a selection of language really used by men; and at the same time to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect—a long but much less forcible appendix examining why the life so chosen was not merely “ordinary,” but “rustic and humble.” The kernel of his next paragraph is the famous statement that all good poetry is “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” and then, after a little divagation, he sets to work to show how such a style as he was using was adapted to be the channel of such an overflow. He utterly refuses Personification: he “has taken as much pains to avoid what is called Poetic Diction as is ordinarily taken to produce it”; he “has at all times endeavoured to look steadily at the subject with little falsehood of description”; and he has not only denied himself false poetic diction, but many expressions in themselves proper and beautiful, which have been foolishly repeated by bad poets till they became disgusting. A selected sonnet from Gray[[351]] is then rather captiously attacked for the sake of showing (what certainly few will admit) that, in its only part of value, the language differs in no respect from that of prose: whence the heretic goes farther and, first asserting that there is no essential difference between the language of Prose and that of Poetry, proceeds in a note to object to the opposition of Poetry and Prose at all, and to the regarding of the former as synonymous with metrical composition. Then he asks what a poet is: and answers himself at great length, dwelling on the poet’s philosophical mission, but admitting that it is his business to give pleasure. He anticipates the objection, “Why, then, do you not write in Prose?” with the rather weak retort, “Why should I not add the charm of metrical language to what I have to say?” A little later comes the other famous definition of poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquillity,” with a long and exceedingly unsuccessful attempt to vindicate some work of his own from the charge of being ludicrous. And the Preface ends with two candid but singularly damaging admissions, that there is a pleasure confessedly produced by metrical compositions very different from his own, and that, in order entirely to enjoy the poetry which he is undertaking, it would be necessary to give up much of what is ordinarily enjoyed.
The appendix: Poetic Diction again.
There is an appendix specially devoted to “Poetic Diction” in which Wordsworth develops his objection to this. His argument is curious, and from his own point of view rather risky. Early poets wrote from passion, yet naturally, and so used figurative language: later ones, without feeling passion, imitated them in the use of Figures, and so a purely artificial diction was formed. So also metre was early added, and came to be regarded as a symbol or promise of poetic diction itself. To which of course it is only necessary to register the almost fatal demurrer, “Why, if the early poets used figurative language different from ordinary, may not later ones do so? or do you mean that Greek shoemakers of Homer’s time said koruthaiolos and dolichoskion?” Again, “How about this curious early ‘superadding’ of metre? Where is your evidence? and supposing you could produce any, what have you to say to the further query, ‘If the metre was superadded, what could have been the reason, except that some superaddition was felt to be wanted?’”
The Minor Critical Papers.
It is proof of the rather prejudiced frame of mind in which Wordsworth wrote that, in some subsequent criticisms of particulars, he objects to Cowper’s “church-going bell” as “a strange abuse”—from which we must suppose that he himself never talked of a “dining-room,” for it is certain that the room no more dines than the bell goes to church. The later papers on “Poetry as a Study,” and “Poetry as Observation and Description,” are also full of interesting matter, though here, as before, their literary history leaves much to desire, and though they are full of examples of the characteristic stubbornness with which Wordsworth clings to his theory. The most remarkable example probably of this stubbornness is the astonishing note to the letter on the last-named subject (addressed to Sir George Beaumont), in which, after attributing to the poet Observation, Sensibility, Reflection, Information, Invention, and Judgment, he adds, with a glance at his enemy, Metre—“As sensibility to harmony of numbers and the power of producing it are invariably attendants on the faculties above specified, nothing has been said upon those requisites.” Perhaps there is no more colossal petitio principii, and at the same time no more sublime ignoring of facts, to be found in all literature, than that “invariably.”