Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
Discuss.
The choice of style is one of the most important factors in the pursuit of artistic
creation and one of the most difficult goals for an artist to attain is the discovery of a
personal style. The success of a particular stylistic mode of expression depends not so
much on originality as in the successful conveyance of the artist’s goals and notions. The
title of the essay implies that there is a contradiction between simple diction and
theoretical thinking. What I will try to show in my essay is that Wordsworth’s use of
see the development of his theoretical framework. Wordsworth was an ardent supporter of
the French Revolution but he grew terribly disappointed with it after the atrocities of the
Terror. Then, there followed a period of great emotional stress, which led him to become
an ardent supporter of Godwin’s theory. Godwin believed that society could change not
through revolution but through the rule of reason unimpeded by emotion and without the
Alfoxden, where his communion with nature helped him to recover, he came to realise
that his healing had not been achieved through any conscious effort but it was the nature
which enabled him to ‘see into the life of things.’ Now it was Hartley who could provide
him with an explanation of what had happened to him. According to Hartley the human
mind is like a blank page where the external world writes its impressions. He also claimed
Wordsworth expounded his theory on the Preface for the 1800 edition of Lyrical
Ballads. There he asserted that ‘Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’
and that ‘it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.’ The recollected
emotion may not be exactly the same with the original one. The original emotion may
have been a painful one but its recollection can be pleasurable and can bring about a kind
of catharsis in the poet and the reader as well. Another central concept of his is that
communion with nature brings out the best of feelings in men. Connected with the former
is his belief that feelings and ideas are more important in poetry than the stories.
Explorations 1
Paraskevopoulos Panos
Considering his main concepts it is not difficult to see why he chose to deal with low
and rustic life where there is ‘a plainer and more emphatic language’. For him ‘the
manners of rural life germinate from ... elementary feelings,’ and ‘the language of these
men is adopted ... because such men hourly communicate with the best objects from
which the best part of language is originally derived’. What is more, these people ‘convey
their feelings in simple and unelaborate expressions’ which is ‘a far more philosophical
language than that which is frequently substituted for if by Poets’. So it is not difficult to
understand why his ‘principal object ... was to make the incidents of common life
interesting by tracing in them ... the primary laws of nature chiefly as regards the manner
of association.
His choice to deal with simple, rustic people led him to adopt certain stylistic features.
According to Stephen Parish the ‘Lyrical Ballads were experiments less in poetic diction
rather than ... in narrative technique. So most of the ballads are of a dramatic or
semidramatic form where the characters are allowed to speak for themselves (e.g. in ‘The
Idiot Boy’). Second, the narrators of the some poems are rustic characters themselves,
which enables them to identify with the characters and the situations described in the
poems. In ‘The Thorn’, for example, the effect of the poem would be completely different
if Wordsworth had not used the persona of the gullible, superstitious captain as the
narrator. On the whole there is a stress on speech, visual observations and states of
emotion.
Now it would be interesting to see how Wordsworth used simple language and rustic
people to convey his philosophy. According to Parish ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill’ is a
deceptively simple poem which, on a first reading, might be said to recount a story about
painful idea - in the specific poem, a curse, - can impress forcibly upon the mind and
become a real sensation. On another level the rustic narrator, because of his inability to
perceive the power of the human imagination, clearly believes in the truth of the story:
‘Now think, ye farmers all, I pray, / Of Goody Blake and Harry Gill.’ This shows how his
own imagination works, which makes the poem a study of Hartley’s theory of association.
2
Explorations 1
Paraskevopoulos Panos
Parish also argues that ‘The Thorn’ is another complex poem, although it may not seem
superstition can act upon a gullible narrator - a retired sea captain, who is clearly in a
state of excitement. As we read on we realise that the story is not an account of factual
events but an account of what the narrator thinks has happened, influenced by local
gossip. However, Albert Gerard claims that the real subject of the poem is suffering and
stoicism, which are reflected both in the woman’s and the thorn’s plight. Both have
undergone cruel experiences: the thorn is threatened by the wind and the moss around it
strive to drag it down; the woman has been abandoned by her lover with a child and the
village community does not provide her with any comfort. Nevertheless they do not yield.
Finally the importance of the poem is found in the fact that we, as readers, suspend our
disbelief in the truth of the supernatural events of the story - the reflection of the boy’s
face in the pond, the miraculous intervention of the nature to save the woman from being
seems that it did not fare well. Robert Southey, for example, who was Coleridge’s brother-
in-law, commenting on ‘The Idiot Boy’ supported: ‘No tale less deserved the labour that
appears to have been bestowed upon this.’ This shows that it was difficult for Wordsworth
contemporaries to see through the simple, rustic characters and the apparently simple
literature along with other writers (e.g. Blake). It helped to bring literature down to earth
and literary language stopped being the privilege of an elite coterie. It showed that simple
language can delve into philosophical matters despite its deceptively style.