Lakhasly

24 The earliest poets, writes Wordsworth in this Appendix, used a language that was "daring, and figurative," inspired by powerful feelings and passions. Later poets, however, desiring to reproduce the effects of such language, adopted these figures of speech in a mechanical and automatic manner, applying them to feelings and thoughts with which they had no natural connection. Over time, the language of poetry was largely separated from that of "common life," the use of meter in poetry further deepening this chasm (PLB, 160-162).Wordsworth is indeed lamenting the woes caused by an earlier phase of industrial capitalism, a phase brought into being by "national events" such as the French Revolution and the ensuing wars between France and other nations, as well as the struggles of the bourgeoisie to gain political hegemony. While Wordsworth has acknowledged in the past that the ideals behind these historical tendencies may have been noble, he is now addressing their actual effects: the chief of these is the artificial stimulation of people's passions, the blunting of their imaginations, and the degradation of their moral sensibilities. Wordsworth sees "nature" as harboring the remedy for all of these effects, and he sees part of the poet's task as using nature to enlarge people's original, undistorted sensibilities.Wordsworth's suggestion that rural people speak a more "philosophical" language may have been influenced by the theories of Hartley and Joseph Priestley, who anticipated the formation of a philosophical language among humankind, a language that would be universal and accurate in its expression of human conceptions and emotions. Wordsworth's underlying aim is that the poet returns to the expression of permanent and fundamental human emotions, which are fostered by perpetual communion with nature. He regards both the human mind

28 and nature as possessed of "inherent and indestructible qualities" which have been clouded over and corrupted by recent historical transformations: a multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and, unfitting it for all voluntary exertion, to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor.The ideal held up in opposition to such "urbanity" is the artless simplicity of rural life: people living close to nature experience emotions in their fundamental, unadulterated state, emotions that are capable of clear expression. Such an ideal is of course not original to Wordsworth; the primitivistic theories of such eighteenth-century writers as Rousseau, William Duff, and James Beattie had already extolled the simple manners and passions of earlier peoples living in a state of nature. Hence, the "common life" that Wordsworth claims to portray is hardly the common life of modern industrial society; rather, it is the life of those on the periphery of such a social order, those whose lifestyles are the vestiges of a preindustrial, agricultural era.(PLB, 129, 131) Such a statement has perhaps even more pertinence in our world where the tendencies Wordsworth bemoans have reached an intensity beyond what he might have imagined: the mail coach and the telegraph, recent inventions in Wordsworth's memory, have been ousted by almost instantaneous means of communication and by far more powerful channels of blunting the human senses and imagination.But this is the very society produced by ostensibly democratic ideals.............

24
The earliest poets, writes Wordsworth in this Appendix, used a language that was “daring, and figurative,” inspired by powerful feelings and passions. Later poets, however, desiring to reproduce the effects of such language, adopted these figures of speech in a mechanical and automatic manner, applying them to feelings and thoughts with which they had no natural connection. Over time, the language of poetry was largely separated from that of “common life,” the use of meter in poetry further deepening this chasm (PLB, 160–162). What Wordsworth is calling for, then, is a return to a kind of realism, a descent of poetic language from its stylized status, from its self-created world of metaphorical expression and artificial diction, to the language actually used by human beings in “common life.”

These expressions – “real language,” “common life” – are of course highly problematic, as Coleridge will later point out. In what is perhaps the most striking and important passage of the Preface, Wordsworth states that the central aim of the poems in Lyrical Ballads was:
to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible in a selection of language really

25
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 . . . to make these incidents and situations interesting by tracing in them . . . the primary laws of our nature: chiefly, as far as regards the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement. Humble and rustic life was generally chosen, because, in that condition, the essential passions of the heart . . . are under less restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language; because in that condition of life our elementary feelings co-exist in a state of greater simplicity, and, . . . in that condition the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature . . . Accordingly, such a language, arising out of repeated experience and regular feelings, is a more permanent, and a far more philosophical language, than that which is frequently substituted for it by Poets, who think that they are conferring honour upon themselves and their art, in proportion as they separate themselves from the sympathies of men . . . in order to furnish food for fickle tastes, and fickle appetites, of their own creation. (PLB, 123–125)
In many ways, this statement embodies the aesthetic impulse of Wordsworth’s entire text. If it is a pivotal statement of Romantic doctrine, it is nonetheless a complex statement, fraught with difficulty and irony. Even in the central thrust of its import, the passage appears to harbor conflicting dispositions: the passage reacts fundamentally

26
against urban, industrialized society. By implication, city life promotes vanity, artifice and confusion, and even vulgarity in our feelings. But this is the very society produced by ostensibly democratic ideals. The ideal held up in opposition to such “urbanity” is the artless simplicity of rural life: people living close to nature experience emotions in their fundamental, unadulterated state, emotions that are capable of clear expression. Such an ideal is of course not original to Wordsworth; the primitivistic theories of such eighteenth-century writers as Rousseau, William Duff, and James Beattie had already extolled the simple manners and passions of earlier peoples living in a state of nature.

Hence, the “common life” that Wordsworth claims to portray is hardly the common life of modern industrial society; rather, it is the life of those on the periphery of such a social order, those whose lifestyles are the vestiges of a preindustrial, agricultural era. So, what first appears to be a democratic sentiment on Wordsworth’s part is effectively a desire to return to nature, which is now equated not with republican political ideals but with an externality to the very world in which those ideals might operate, the squalid world of political and economic conflict, the world of reason and

27
calculation, the world of industrialism, factories, and crowded cities, the world bequeathed by Enlightenment thought and bourgeois revolution. Instead of seeking nature within that world, Wordsworth now sees the two realms not as standing outside of each other but as sharply opposed. Nature is viewed as eternal, the repository and projection of what is permanent in human nature; the city is an ephemeral product of ephemeral philosophies and ephemeral political movements.
As for the democratic impulse of Wordsworth’s comments on poetic language, these are somewhat tempered by his view of imagination as well as his conception of a poet. Wordsworth’s suggestion that rural people speak a more “philosophical” language may have been influenced by the theories of Hartley and Joseph Priestley, who anticipated the formation of a philosophical language among humankind, a language that would be universal and accurate in its expression of human conceptions and emotions.

Wordsworth’s underlying aim is that the poet returns to the expression of permanent and fundamental human emotions, which are fostered by perpetual communion with nature. He regards both the human mind

28
and nature as possessed of “inherent and indestructible qualities” which have been clouded over and corrupted by recent historical transformations:
a multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and, unfitting it for all voluntary exertion, to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor. The most effective of these causes are the great national events which are daily taking place, and the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies. To this tendency of life and manners the literature and theatrical exhibitions of the country have conformed themselves. (PLB, 129, 131)
Such a statement has perhaps even more pertinence in our world where the tendencies Wordsworth bemoans have reached an intensity beyond what he might have imagined: the mail coach and the telegraph, recent inventions in Wordsworth’s memory, have been ousted by almost instantaneous means of communication and by far more powerful channels of blunting the human senses and imagination. Wordsworth is indeed lamenting the woes caused by an earlier phase of industrial capitalism, a phase brought into being by “national events” such as the French
Revolution and the ensuing wars between France and other nations, as well as the struggles of the bourgeoisie to gain political hegemony.

While Wordsworth has acknowledged in the past that the ideals behind these historical tendencies may have been noble, he is now addressing their actual effects: the chief of these is the artificial stimulation of people’s passions, the blunting of their imaginations, and the degradation of their moral sensibilities. Wordsworth sees “nature” as harboring the remedy for all of these effects, and he sees part of the poet’s task as using nature to enlarge people’s original, undistorted sensibilities. Hence he calls on the poet to return to an uncorrupted idiom, an idiom that does not pander to the vulgarity of modern taste.