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Despite adopting the language of men, the Lyrical Ballads are mainly philosophical.

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

unelaborate language reflects successfully his main philosophical premises.

Firstly, I think it would be interesting to examine Wordsworth’s social background to

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

interference of religious and sociopolitical institutions. However, after a prolonged stay in

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

that sensation is the origin of both our knowledge and morality.

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.
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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

in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement’, which is based on Hartley’s theory

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

folk superstition. However, if it is closely examined, it illustrates how a powerful and

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.

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Paraskevopoulos Panos
Parish also argues that ‘The Thorn’ is another complex poem, although it may not seem

so on a superficial reading. On one level the poem is a psychological study of how

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

exposed - and in the credulous, loquacious narrator because according to Wordsworth it is

not the story that is important but the feelings.

As far as the contemporary critical reception of the Lyrical Ballads is concerned it

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

diction. In my opinion I think that Lyrical Ballads was a significant breakthrough in

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.

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