An overview of Mr. William Wordsworth’s “Preface to Lyrical Ballads” and Mr. Samuel Coleridge’s “Biographia Literaria”

The task of reading Wordsworth and Colridge suits me perfectly. Little bits of fragmented rendering, signifying nothing. Both Master William and Master Samuel have greatly influenced my paper (surprisingly…huh?). Particularly Master Samuel. “Biographia Literaria” is an autobiography in discourse. But it is not a straightforward or linear autobiography. It is loosely structured and fragmented at parts. ‘It presents Samuel’s theories of the creative imagination, but its debt to other writers, notably the German idealist philosophers, is often so heavy that the line between legitimate borrowing and plagiarism becomes blurred.’ And yes Mr. Samuel and I pray to the same muse too. I will cut my preface to the paper short.

In many ways, “The Preface to the Lyrical Ballads” embodies the poetic manifesto of Romanticism. Mr. William brought the marginalized to the centre stage. He was a revolutionary (don’t we love that word at JNU) who broke free from the strictness and rigidity of the eighteenth century where only the exalted and the glorious could be the subject of poetry. The strictness of the head and reason ruled the poetic diction. Mr. William revolted against the authoritarian subject-language-matter and stressed on the ‘real’ rather than the archaic. His emphasis on emotions was his reaction against the eighteenth century poetry that was intellectual, devoid of feelings and appealed to the head rather than the heart. The aam admi found a voice and an existence in the poetry. The common-man became the subject matter. His language became the language of Romantic poetry.

“All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. It takes its origin from emotions recollected in tranquility.” – Mr. William

This statement shows the importance of ‘feelings’ and ‘emotions’ to him as against reason. But taken separately the two lines may portray a dichotomy in the thought. If poetry is the ‘spontaneous overflow’ then it can have no scope of pre-mediation. The reaction has to be instantaneous and not reasoned out. While the second sentence says that poetry is emotions ‘recollected in tranquility’, thereby evidently an act that requires deliberate thinking. But Mr. William had his reasons. According to him, our thoughts are the representatives of our past feelings and our feelings are modified and directed by our thoughts. ‘The poet is a man of great sensibility whose mentality has already been shaped.’

For oft when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive moods,

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude.

And then my heart with pleasure fills

And dances with the daffodils.

Mr. William notes the four stages of the process of writing poetry, namely, recollection, contemplation, recrudescence and composition. The revision of “The Prelude” is in keeping with this process. He firmly believed that the immediate object of the poet is to give pleasure. Poetry should create a feeling of delight in the readers. The poet has great capacity to perceive and feel. (Mr. Samuel accepts the first as ‘primary imagination’ but refutes the later.) A poet must have the ability to express himself in verse. In ‘Tradition and Individual Talent’ T.S. Eliot criticized Mr. William’s theory of poetry by saying that “Poetry is neither emotion, nor recollection nor tranquility, nor spontaneity”. It is “concentrated” or what he calls “a deliberate process”.

Mr. William chose the incidents and situations from humble and rustic life and adopted the language of the common people to communicate his ideas. According to him, the rural language is permanent and philosophic because it is “less under the influence of social vanity”. The purpose of the poet is to imitate and adopt the very language of men.

“Men hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of language is originally derived.” –Wordsworth

Unlike the idealistic Mr. William, Mr. Samuel is more rational/ practical. (I use the words ‘rational’ and ‘practical’ with no positive or negative connotations.) He found the use of the “low and rustic life” as inadequate substance for creating poetry. According to him, a reader must be familiar with the rustic life in order to empathize with the poetry. The reader need to relate to the language but people such as from the urban middle class would find it difficult to understand that language that is in tune with the rural lifestyle. He also criticizes the theory on the count that many rustics were uneducated and as such incapable of using language to portray feelings. Therefore the language used by the rustics were not suitable for poetic diction.

Mr. Samuel was a theologian and a philosopher. According to him, only the philosophical language was capable of portraying the “processes and results of imagination”. The philosophical language contained the thoughts of universal truth and not specific to any locality as unlike the rustic language. This language alone can provoke deep inner thoughts and reflections. He also criticizes Mr. William’s use of the word ‘real’ to describe language. The language would differ from people to people and from place to place depending on their intelligence and knowledge. Thus Mr. Samuel suggests the use of the word ‘ordinary’ instead of ‘real’.

According to him, poetry is not meant to create passion but to increase the reader’s mental activity. While reading poetry the imagery provokes emotions and thoughts. He upholds intellect over emotion.

“there neither is nor can be any essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition.” –Wordsworth

Mr. Samuel maintains that there are certain modes of expression, a construction, and an order of sentences which are in their fit and natural place in a serious prose composition but would be inappropriate to metrical poetry. He goes on to say that in the language of a serious poem, this may be an arrangement of words and sentences; and the use of figure of speech would be inappropriate. He says that when a poet writes in metre, he means to differ from prose.

Shelley calls the poets as “unacknowledged legislators of the mankind”; whereas Carlyle refers to poet as a ‘prophet’ and ‘hero’. According to Mr. William, the poet is “a rock of defence” for human nature. He binds together the human society.

Mr. Samuel defines the primary imagination as “the living and prime agent of all human perception”. It is the human consciousness in its purest form that allows us to perceive the world around us. Perception whether conscious or unconscious, identifies and gives meaning to something.

Through perception, we are able to utilize the secondary imagination in order to reconstruction what we perceive. The secondary poetic imagination dissolves, diffuses, dissipates in order to recreate. This helps in creating a relationship between the subjects of perception and ones own world. It brings an order out of chaos. According I him, imagination is vital to creation. Fancy, “on the contrary, has no other counters to play with but fixities and definite.” Fancy does nor create meaning out of things and an order out of chaos.

Aristotle, I have been told, has said that poetry is the most philosophic of all writing: it is so; its object is truth, not individual and local, but general, and operative; not standing upon external testimony but carried alive into the heart by passion; truth which is its own testimony… The man of science seeks truth as a remote and unknown benefactor; he cherishes and loves it in his solitude; the poet, singing a song in which all human beings join with him, rejoices in the presence of truth as our visible friend and hourly companion. Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science.

-Wordsworth