To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.
I do not wish, however, to talk to-night of Wordsworth's attitude towards Nature. It is with just two aspects of the Romantic Revolt that I have to deal, one relating to subject matter, the other to form.
The poet's eye in Shakespeare's time
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
With Pope, poetry was confined mainly to man as he exists in society, and was largely concerned with satirizing social defects; Wordsworth dealt with men as human beings, as mysterious manifestations of the infinite, creatures trailing clouds of glory, coming we know not whence, going we know not whither. To him, as to Burns, rank and station were nothing. Any human being, however humble, was worthy to be the poet's theme. He claimed for the misfortunes of Lucy Gray or the miserable mother, the Idiot Boy or Peter Bell, the same consideration as Sophocles for the sorrows of OEdipus and the lofty line of Thebes.
Gray, an eighteenth century poet in whom romantic tendencies are found, shows the same spirit in the Elegy when he writes of the humble dead who lie beneath the soil:
Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,
Their homely joys, and destiny obscure;
Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile
The short and simple annals of the poor.
Wordsworth, then, enlarged the scope of poetry to include any human experience, however humble.
There was another side to Wordsworth's revolt. He revolted not only against the limitations of subject imposed on the poets by eighteenth-century ideals, but also against the limitations of form. Pope and his followers had been poets of practically a single metre, the heroic couplet. Their tricks, mannerisms, and phraseology had been exalted into a poetic diction, or, rather, jargon, by countless imitators, and poems written in any other style were not allowed admission to the best company. A field, for example, had to be either a verdant mead or a grassy sward, or it could not decently make its appearance in poetry. As late as the beginning of the nineteenth century a rainbow is to Campbell Heaven's ethereal bow, and a musket becomes, in poetical dress, a glittering tube. Wordsworth claimed for the poet the right of using the language of everyday life, plain, simple, and unadorned.
Such is a very brief and insufficient outline of the two main points in Wordsworth's poetic theory, which were developed at great length by Wordsworth himself in his prefaces and by Coleridge in the Biographia Literaria.