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Name : Ramiz M. Solanki
Course
Name : M.A ENGLISH
Semester : 1
Roll
No : 34
Paper
no : 02 (Literary Theory and
Criticism)
Batch : 2017-2019
Enrollment
No : 2069108420180051
Submitted
to : Smt. S. B. Gardi Dept of
English Bhavnagar University.
Subject : Life of William Wordsworth
and His Theory of Poetry With The
Special Reference
of ‘Preface to The Lyrical Ballads’
William
Wordsworth born
7 April 1770 and died 23 April 1850 was a major English Romantic poet
who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic
Age in English literature with their joint publication Lyrical
Ballads (1798).
Wordsworth's magnum
opus is generally considered to be The Prelude, a
semi-autobiographical poem of his early years that he revised and expanded a
number of times. It was posthumously titled and published, before which it was
generally known as "the poem to Coleridge".Wordsworth was
Britain's poet laureate from 1843 until his death
from pleurisy on 23 April 1850.
life of William
Wordsworth.
Wiliiam
Wordswort was the second of five children born to John Wordsworth and Ann
Cookson, William Wordsworth was born on 7 April 1770 in Wordsworth
House in Cumberland. His sister, the poet and diarist Dorothy
Wordsworth, to whom he was close all his life, was born the following year, and
the two were baptised together. They had three other siblings: Richard, the
eldest, who became a lawyer. John, born after Dorothy, who went to sea and died
in 1805 when the ship of which he was captain, was wrecked off in England.
Wordsworth's
father was a legal representative of James Lowther, 1st Earl of Lonsdale and,
through his connections, lived in a large mansion in the small town. He was
frequently away from home on business, so the young William and his siblings
had little involvement with him and remained distant from him until his death
in 1783.[5] However, he did
encourage William in his reading, and in particular set him to commit to memory
large portions of verse, including works
by Milton, Shakespeare and Spenser. William was also
allowed to use his father's library.
Wordsworth was
taught to read by his mother and attended, first, a tiny school of low quality
in Cockermouth, then a school in Penrith for the children of upper-class
families, where he was taught by Ann Birkett, who insisted on instilling in her
students traditions that included pursuing both scholarly and local activities,
especially the festivals around Easter, May Day and Shrove Tuesday.
Wordsworth was taught both the Bible and the Spectator, but little
else. It was at the school in Penrith that he met the Hutchinson’s, including
Mary, who later became his wife.[7]
After the death
of his mother, in 1778, Wordsworth's father sent him to Hawkshead Grammer School in Lancashire (now
in Cumbria) and sent Dorothy to live with relatives in Yorkshire. She
and William did not meet again for another nine years.
Wordsworth made
his debut as a writer in 1787 when he published a sonnet in The European Magazine. That same year he began attending St John's College,
Cambridge. He received his BA degree in 1791.He returned to Hawkshead for the
first two summers of his time at Cambridge, and often spent later holidays
on walking tours, visiting places famous for the beauty of
their landscape. In 1790 he went on a walking tour of Europe.
Wordsworth’s Preface to His Lyrical Ballads.
Before going to
understand the ‘preface to the Lyrical Ballads’ written in 1800 by William
Wordswoth, It is necessary to understand or have a little information about the
‘Lyrical Ballads’ written in 1798 and in This collection considered to have
mark the beginning of the English romantic movement in the literature. The
immediate effecton critics was modest, but it became and remain the changing
and a landmark in the history of English literature. The ‘Lyrical Ballads’ were
written by both Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth though Coleridge
wrote only four poems.
A second edition was
published in 1800 in which Wordsworth additional poems and a preface which is
describing the principals of poems according to Wordsworth added an titled
‘Poetic Diction’ in which he expanded the characteristics of poetry that its materials are to be found in
every subject which interest the human mind.
Overall analysis of Preface to The Lyrical Ballads
The chief aim in the
composition of poems in the Lyrical Ballads has been to choose ‘incidents and
situations from common life’ and to relate them in a selection of language
really used by men, and at the same time throw over them a colouring of
imagination, whereby the ordinary things would be presented to the mind in an
unusual aspect. WW insists that if the subject is properly chosen, it will
naturally lead the poet to feelings whose appropriate expression will have
dignity, beauty and metaphorical vitality.
He has chosen ‘incidents
and situations from common life’ as subjects of his poetry for the following
reasons: in humble and rustic life feelings are freely and frankly expressed
for these are simple, the manners of the rustics are not sophisticated and
hence are more conducive to an understanding of human nature, in rustic life,
human passions are connected to nature and so they are more noble and
permanent.
He has used the language
of the rustics because such men hourly communicate with the best objects of
nature from which the best part of language is derived, and because of their
low rank in society, they are less under the influence of social vanity. They
convey their feelings in a simple and unelaborated language. Such language is
far more philosophical than the arbitrary language used by the poets of the
day.
The theme which
dominates most of Wordsworth’s criticism, and which he pursues most
consistently is his argument against poetic diction. The immediate object of
his attack was the ‘gaudiness and inane phraseology’ and the ‘vague, glossy and
unfeeling language’ of contemporary poets. Wordsworth is arguing against the
idea of ‘poetic diction’ current throughout the 18th c, the idea that some
modes of diction were best avoided in poetry, but that other modes were
especially suitable. He argues that to separate poetry from ordinary speech is
to separate it from human life. Poets confer honour neither on themselves or
their works by using a sophisticated diction. In fact it alienates human
sympathy. Simple rural people are less restrained and artificial in their
feelings and their utterance, and those feelings are at one with their
environment. Expanding his apologia for his rejection of poetic diction, he
says that there neither is, nor be any essential difference between the
language of prose and metrical composition, and repeats that the language of
poetry should as far as possible be ‘a selection of the language really spoken
by men’. If true taste and feeling are applied to the process of selection then
what results will be firmly distinguished from the ‘vulgarity and meanness of
ordinary life’ and if meter is ‘superadded’ then it will be even better. Acc to
WW, metre is not essential to poetry, but it is an additional source of
pleasure.
What is a poet?
According to Worsworth, a poet is a man speaking to men. He is endowed with
more lively sensibility
has greater knowledge of
human nature a more comprehensive soul greater zest for life, greater powers of
communication
A poet communicates not
only personally felt emotions but also emotions he has not directly
experienced. Role of Poetry: Poetry is not a matter of mere amusement and idle
pleasure; it is a much noble and higher pleasure. It is the most philosophic of
all writings: its object is truth, not individual and local, but general and
operative. It is the image of man and nature. For Ww, the poet’s specialty is
the interaction between man and his environment, the complexities of pleasures
and pain that arise therefrom, and the deep sympathies by which they are
interrelated. Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge…It is by
virtue of this sublime concept of the poet that WW decries verbal artifices and
vague ornamentation in poetic expressions.
Poetry is the
spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings recollected in tranquility. In WW’s
poems, feelings are more important than action and situation.
Theory of
Poetry according to William Wordsworth (with wxample)
Poetry is the thought
and the words in which emotion
spontaneously embodies itself.”
Thoughts on Poetry and
its Variations by Mill.
Wordsworth took the hint
and produced the theory of poetry which is contained in Preface to Lyrical
Ballads wherein, at least two places; he points out: “All good poetry is the
spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling,” and “It takes its origin from the
emotion recollected in tranquility”. At first glance, these two are quite
opposite to each other—the one is coming on a sudden, and the other
deliberately called to memory—but Wordsworth makes no difference between two
and tries to explain one by the other.
In his famous Preface to
the Lyrical Ballads, he enunciated his theories that he was going to use “a
selection of language really used by men”, and this chiefly “in humble and
rustic life” because such men are in hourly communion “with the best objects
from the best part of language is originally derived” and, “at the same time to throw over a
certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented
to the mind in an unusual manner”. He
also adds “there neither is nor can be any essential difference between the
language of prose and verse”.
Poetry “a hopeless
product of intelligence playing upon the surface of life …made out of the
interests of society in its great centers of culture” originates in the heart
and not in the intellect; and a poet cannot write under any pressure, as Keats
says “Poetry should come as natural as leaves to a
tree” and again he says
“We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us”. A poet writes only when he
is inspired because only then his ideas spontaneously flow out of his mind and
he creates poetry of high order and which is: “nothing less than the most
perfect speech of man, that in which he comes nearest to being able to utter
the truth”.
Wordsworth’s own typical
poems—A Moving Sight, Skylark, A Solitary Reaper— were composed in his own
manner. The group of Daffodils was also seen during a walk, stored in the
memory and recalled in the moments of calm contemplation to be bodied forth
into the poem. This is what Wordsworth actually means when he says in
Daffodils:
“For oft, when on my
couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive
mood,
They flash upon that
inward eye
Which is the bliss of
solitude;
And then my heart with
pleasure fills,
And dance with the
daffodils.”
So the end of poetry is
to impart pleasure, this pleasure is not ideal pleasure, but of a profound kind
because poetry “is the breath and finer spirit of all the knowledge, the
impassioned expression that is in the countenance of all the science”. Poetry
aims at winning “the vacant and the vain to noble raptures” and also aims at
evoking a feeling of love for mankind. Wordsworth hoped that with his poetry he
should be able to
“console the afflicted,
to add sunshine to daylight by making the happy happier: to lead the young and
gracious of every age to see, to think, and to feel, and, therefore, to become
more actively and securely virtuous”. The pleasure imparted by poetry ennobles
and edifies the readers.
Conclusion
Thus, “The end of poetry
is to produce excitement in co-existence with an overbalance of pleasure; but,
by the supposition, excitement is an unusual and irregular state of mind; ideas
and feelings do not, in that state, succeed each other in accustomed order”.
For Wordsworth, the first stage of the progress of poetry, which is “unforced
overflow of powerful feelings”, is the spontaneous overflow of powerful
feelings; the next is that of emotion recollected in tranquility; and the last
is of its expression in poetry. He always
composed his poems with
the greatest care, not trusting his first expression which he found often
detestable, in his own words, “it is frequently true.
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