William Minto and Hugh Chisholm

“ 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. ”

“ Coleridge says that if he meant this he was only uttering a truism, which nobody who knew Wordsworth would suspect him of doing; but, strange to say, it is as a truism, nominally acknowledged by everybody, that Wordsworth does advance his doctrine on this point. Only he adds—“if in what I am about to say it shall appear to some that my labour is unnecessary, and that I am like a man fighting a battle without enemies, such persons may be reminded that, whatever be the language outwardly holden by men, a practical faith in the opinions which I am wishing to establish is almost unknown.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This, and not adherence to the classical rule of Pope, which had really suffered deposition a good half century before, was the first count in Wordsworth's defensive indictment of the taste of his age. As regards the “poetic diction,” the liking for which was the second count in his indictment of the public taste, it is most explicitly clear that, when he said that there was no essential difference between the language of poetry and the language of prose, he meant words, plain and figurative, and not structure and order, or, as Coleridge otherwise puts it, the “ordonnance” of composition. ”

“ So far is Wordsworth from contending that the metrical order should always be the same as the prose order, that part of the Preface is devoted to a subtle analysis of the peculiar effect of metrical arrangement. What he objects to is not departure from the structure of prose, but the assumption, which seemed to him to underlie the criticisms of his ballads, that a writer of verse is not a poet unless he uses artificially ornamental language, not justified by the strength of the emotion expressed. ”

“ The breeze that met him as he issued from the city gates on his homeward journey brought him the first thought of The Prelude.
At the end of 1790 he was settled at Grasmere, in the Lake District, and seeing much of Coleridge. The second year of his residence at Grasmere was unproductive, he was “hard at work” then on The Excursion, but the excitement of a tour on the Continent in the autumn of 1802, combined perhaps with a happy change in his pecuniary circumstances and the near prospect of marriage, roused him to one of his happiest fits of activity. ”

“ Tired of the wandering unsettled life that he had led hitherto, dissatisfied also with the fragmentary occasional and disconnected character of his lyrical poems, he longed for a permanent home among his native hills, where he might, as one called and consecrated to the task, devote his powers continuously to the composition of a great philosophical poem on “Man, Nature and Society.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ Those Wordsworthians who give up The Idiot Boy, [5] Goody Blake and The Thorn as mistaken experiments have no right to triumph over the first derisive critics of the Lyrical Ballads, or to wonder at the dullness that failed to see at once in this humble issue from an obscure provincial press the advent of a great master in literature. It is true that Tintern Abbey was in the volume, and that all the highest qualities of Wordsworth's imagination and of his verse could be illustrated from the lyrical ballads proper in this first publication ”

“ 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. ”

“ The dramatic setting is merely dead weight, not because the chief speaker is a pedlar—Wordsworth fairly justifies this selection—but because the pedlar, as a personality to be known, and loved, and respected, and listened to with interest, is not completely created.
There can be little doubt that adverse criticism had a depressing influence on Wordsworth's poetical powers, notwithstanding his nobly expressed defiance of it and his determination to hold on in his own path undisturbed. Its effect in retarding the sale of his poems was a favourite topic with him in his later years ”

“ But it contained also the famous Preface, in which he infuriated critics by presuming to defend his eccentricities in an elaborate theory of poetry and poetic diction.
This document (and let it be noted that all Wordsworth's Prefaces are of the utmost interest in historical literary criticism) is constantly referred to as a sort of revolutionary proclamation against the established taste of the 18th century. For one who has read Wordsworth's original, hundreds have read Coleridge's brilliant criticism, and the fixed conception of the doctrines put forth by Wordsworth is taken from that. ”

“ How much longer this time of self-distrustful endeavour might have continued is a subject for curious speculation, an end was put to it by a fortunate incident, a visit from Coleridge, who had read his first publication, and seen in it, what none of the public critics had discerned, the advent of “an original poetic genius.” Stubborn and independent as Wordsworth was, he needed some friendly voice from the outer world to give him confidence in himself. Coleridge rendered him this indispensable service. He had begun to seek his themes in
“Sorrow, that is not sorrow, but delight ”

“ Milton, thou shouldst be Living at this Hour; It is not to be Thought of that the Flood, When I have Borne in Memory what has Tamed, were all written in the course of the tour, or in London in the month after his return. A tour in Scotland in the following year, 1803, yielded the Highland Girl and The Solitary Reaper. Soon after his return he resumed The Prelude; and The Affliction of Margaret and the Ode to Duty, his greatest poems in two different veins, were coincident with the exaltation of spirit due to the triumphant and successful prosecution of the long-delayed work. ”

“ In 1815 he published a new edition of his poems, in the arrangement according to faculties and feelings in which they have since stood; and he sought to explain his purposes more completely than before in an essay on “Poetry as a Study.” In the same year he was persuaded to publish The White Doe of Rylstone, written mainly eight years before. In purely poetic charm The White Doe ought to be ranked among the most perfect of Wordsworth's poems. ”

“ He did not distinguish himself in the studies of the university, and for some time after taking his degree of B.A., in January 1791, he showed what seemed to his relatives a most perverse reluctance to adopt any regular profession. ”