wordsworths theory of poetic diction a study of the historical and personal background of the

YALE STUD IES IN ENGLISH

ALBERT S . COOK, EDITO R

LV IL

WORDSWORTH ’

S THEORY OF

POET IC DICT ION

A STUDY OF THE H ISTORICAL AND P ERSONALBACKGROUND OF THE LYRICAL BALLADS

MARJORIE LATTA BARSTOWINSTRUCTOR IN ENGLISH IN CONNECTICUT COLLEGE

NEW HAVEN : YALE UN IVERSITY PRESS

LONDON : HUMPHREY M ILFORD

OX FORD UN IVERSITY PRESS

MDCCCQXVH

YALE STUD IES IN ENGLISHW

ALBERT s . COOK, ED ITOR

LV I I

WORDSWORTH ’

S THEORY OF

POET IC DICT IONK

A STUDY OF THE H I STORICAL AND P ERSONAL

BACKGROUND OF THE LYRICAL BALLADS

\BY

“

MARJORIE LATTA BARSTOW i

ii’nfi/

INSTRUCTOR IN ENGLISH IN CONNECTICUT COLLEGE

A Diss ertat lon p re sented to the Faculty of the Graduate Schoo lo f Yale Univer sity, inCandidacy fo r the Degree o f

Do c td?§ orf” "

P hfiOSOphy

NEW HAVEN : YALE UN IVERSITY P RESS

LONDON : HUMP HR -EY M ILFORD

OX FORD UN IVERS ITY P RESS

MDCCCCX V I I

PREFACE

The following study was undertaken as a doctoral dis

ser tation under the direction o f P ro fessor Albert 5. Cook

o f Yale Univers ity . To P rofessor Cook I em especiallyindebted, not only for stimulat ing guidance in the field o f

the English language in general, but for a most m inute and

painstaking cr itic ism of the proof . To P ro fessor Lane

Cooper of Cornel l Univefsity I owe a debt less easy of

definition. A lthough he has not read the manuscript of

this book, and is not responsible for particular statements

herein, the inspiration and the direction that I receivedfrom him in

,m y reading of Wordsworth as an under

graduate at Cornel l has been the most Vital elem ent in my

study of the poet ; i f there is anything good in this workof m ine, it is ultimately der ived from him . I also wi sh to

m ake gratefu l acknowledgm ent to P rofessor Charlton M .

Lewis for critic ism received from him in his course on

nineteenth-century poets in the Graduate School of Yale

University .

My indebtedness to books I have tried to indicate in

the footnotes . But, l ike m any other students of Words

worth, I wish to record my especial appreciation of the

Early Life of William Wowdsww th by P ro fessor Em i leLegouis . Although, inmany instances, I have been forcedto disagree With the conclus ions o f M . Legouis, I feel thatWithout the stim u lating example o f his beauti ful work,this study would have been im poss ible . In acknowledging

m y special indebtedness to books, I w ish to make grateful

m ention o f the beauti ful col lection of Wordsworthiana in

the possession o f Mr s . Cynthia Morgan St . John of Ithaca,New York,Which she generously placed at my disposal .

iv WORDSWORTH ’S THEORY OF POETIC DICTION

In citing quotations from the prose of Coleridge and thepoetry of Wordsworth, I have tried to retain the original

punctuation and spell ing, because they represent the usage

of the authors themselves . In most other cases it has seemed

best to standardize the spel l ing and punctuation for the sake

of greater clearness and smoothness of reading .

INTRODUCT ION

Tothose who read the poetry o f Wordsworth in the l ight

of Matthew Arnold’s critic ism, with the enthus iasm of all

good Wordswor thians, the poet i s prim ari ly a teacher, aphilosopher, a pure soul with a message of heal ing for a

fever ish world . So, indeed, he regarded himsel f .

‘I w isheither to be considered as a teacher, or as nothing,

’1 he

writes and his wish has been fulfilled . But too o ften he

is so considered to the exclus ion o f a proper interest inhis merits as a . stylist, as a great and pecul iarly sel f- con

sciou s artist ‘

in a kind abso lutely unborrowed and his

own.

’

To’

the two most finely gi fted critic s of his own generation he presented himsel f in a quite different l ight . It wasnot W’

ordsworth ’

s philosophy that primarily interestedColeridge and Lamb ; it was his style . To his philosophy

they were both more or le ss antagonisti c . Coleridge

obj ected to the‘misty, rather than mysti c, confusion of

God with'

the world’2 in poem s l ike T intern Abbey, thoughat the same time he bel ieved Wordsworth capable of writ

ing the fir st genuine philosophical poem in English . Lambwas inclined to make merry over Wordsworth ’

s devotion

to stocks and stones, and other inanimate obj ects,and to

ce lebrate the superior attractions of the London streets .

3

But both immediately gave ful l recognition and hom ageto Wordsworth ’

s unique gi ft of imaginative express ion‘

the original gi ft of spreading the tone, the a tm ospher e,and with it the depth and height of the ideal world aroundform s, incidents, and situations, of which, for the common

view, custom had bedimmed all the lustre, had dried upthe sparkle and the dew drops .

’4

L . W. F . 1 . 3 3 1 .

Biographia Epis tolam’

s 2. 195.

3 Letter s of Char les Lam b I . 190- 191 .

4B . L. 1 . 59.

vii i WORDSWORTI—I ’S THEORY OF POETIC DICTION

This gi ft, they felt, expressed i tsel f in a d iction‘

highlyindividualized and characteristic

’l—a‘diction pecul iarly

his own, a style which cannot be imitated, with

out its being at once recognised as or iginating in M r .

Wordsworth .

’2 This style both Coler idge and Lamb

bel ieved they could distinguish without hes itation, wher

ever they encountered it .

‘

That

Uncertain heaven rece ivedInto the bosom o f the steady lake

I should have recognised anywhere,’ writes Coleridge,3

‘and had I m et these l ines running wild in the deserts

of Arabia, I should have instantly s creamed out,“Words

Lamb seems to hold a s imilar opinion . In

his characteri stic remarks on the edition of 18 15, in

which he proceeds from poem to poem, commenting

wi th the r efined Epicurean enj oyment of a connoisseur

in language on the l ines and phrases that most please

his taste, he continually implies that Wordsworth has

a distinct and recognizable manner .

“Laodamia” is

a very original poem,

’

he writes .

‘I mean originalwith reference to your own manner . You have nothing

l ike it . I shou ld have seen it in a strange place, and grea tlyadmired it, but not suspected its derivation .

“ Again, inspeaking of the extracts from An Evening Walk and theDescrip tive Sketches included in the volumes of 18 15, he

remarks5 : ‘

All the rest of your poems are som uch of a

piece, they might have been written in the sam e week ;these decidedly speak o f an earlier period . They tel l moreof What you had been reading .

’

1B . L . 1 . 77 .

2B . L . 1 . 80 .

8 M em oirs 1 . 1 3 9.

Letters of Char les Lam b 1 . 3 53 .

5I bid. 1 . 3 54.

INTRODUCTION ix

This highly individualized diction always tem pted Coleridge’s powers of analys is . Indeed he was fir st led to his

speculation on the difference between imagination and

fancy by his attempts to dehne the peculiar qual ity of

Wordsworth’s poetry, a s distinguished from verse that

m ight seem more brill iant or clever or obviously skil ful . 1

Th is analys is he carries further in his fam ou s cr itic ism of

Wordswor th’

s style, and theory o f sty le, in the BiographieLiteram

'

an. 2‘Wo uld any but a poet—at least could any one

w ithout being conscious that he had expressed him sel f with

noti ceable tvivacity—have described a bird s inging loud

by,“The thrush is busy in the wood,

”or have spoken o f

boys with a str ing o f club—moss round their ru sty hats, a sthe boys “

with their gr een coronal?”—or have translated a

beauti fu l May day into“Both ear th and shy keep jubilee

” ?

or have brought all the different marks and circumstances

of a sea - loch before the mind, as the actions of a l iving and

acting power ? or have represented the r eflection of the sky

in the water, a s“Tha t uncer tain heaven r eceived into the

bosom of the s teady lake?”

Even the grammatical con

struction is not unfrequently peculiar ; as“The wind, the

tem pes t roaring high, the tum ult of a tropic s ky, m ight

wel l be dangerous food to him , a youth to whom was given

etc . Ther e is a pecu l iarity in the use of the dow dprm ov

( that is the om iss1on of the connective parti cle before thelast of severa l words, or several sentences used gram m ati

cally as s ingle words, all being in the sam e case and govern

ing or being governed by the sam e verb ) and not less in the‘construction o f words by apposition (

“to him , a

But Coleridge’s br il l iant and suggestive analys is of the

characteristic features of Wordsworth ’

s style—the unique

and im aginative m etaphor s, the ri ch and o ften curiously

fel i citous diction, and the peculiar gram m atical structure

1B . L . 1 . 60 .

2B . L . 2 . 83 -84.

x WORDSWORTH ’S THEORY OF POETIC DICTION

is, after all, rather fragmentary . Every remark i s a seed

thought which needs development . Moreover, there i s

someth ing exasperating and even misleading in the atti tude

that he chose to assume to the theory of di ction which liesat the bas is of the Lyrical Ballads . Coleridge, rather thanWordsworth, had been responsible for the criti cal propa

ganda1 which, a s he says, was the real'

cause of Words

worth ’

s unpopularity .

2 The P reface that he does not

understand was hal f a child of hi s own brain,3 written by

Wordsworth to please him, and super intended l and cor

rected by him .

4 Forgetting all this, he proceeds to adopt

the hesitating manner o f a stranger to statements that

partly originated in his own fertile brain, and fail s to supplythe one invaluable th ing that he only could supply—a more

detailed account of the thoughtful and eager dialogues that

were behind Wordsworth ’s somewhat inadequate utter

ances in print. Hence, though this criti cism by Coleridgeis the necessary start ing—point for any investi gation of

Wordsworth ’s theory and practice, he was far from sayingthe last word on the subj ect . Wordsworth had more r ea

sons than wounded vanity for his dissatis faction with the

remarks of his former coll aborator .

Despite the natural unwill ingness of lesser m en to enter

into competition with Coleridge and Lamb, it i s astonishing

1L . W. F . 3 . 121, 152.

2B . L . 1 . 50 -53 .

3 ‘Although Wordsworth’s P reface is half a ch ild o f m y own

brain, and arose out o f conversations so frequent that, With few

exceptions, we could scarcely e ither o f us, perhap s, pos itively say

which fir st started any thought ( I am‘

speak ing o f the P refaceas it stood in the second volum e) , yet I am far from go ing all

lengths with Wordsworth .

’—Letter to Southey, July 180 2. (Lettersof Sam uel Taylor Colem

'

dge 1 . Coleridge speaks as i f the fir stconsciousness o f this d ifference in Op inion were felt in 180 2.

Letters 1 . 3 75.

4Ah A ccount of the Wordswor th and Coleridge MSS . in the

P oss ession of Mr . T . Nor tonLongm an, p . 19.

INTRODUCTION xi

that this analys is of Wordsworth’

s theory of poetic diction

as i l lu strated inhis style, so ably begunby them in the poet’s

ownf lifetim e, should not have been carr ied on m ore sys

tem atically by the many cr itics who have praised Words

worth so wel l . We find, indeed, a cons iderable num ber of

scattered observations and brie f studies of Wordsworth’sstyle which are highly illum inating . F or instance R . H .

Hu tton’

s l ittle paper onWordswor th’

s Two S tyles is reallydiscrim inating . So also are P rincipal Shairp

’

s del icate

appreciation of the style of The White Doe of Ryls tone, andBagehot

’

s essay on P ur e, Orna te, and Gr otesque Ar t. The

various rem arks o f Hutchinson and Dowden—the accom

plished students of Wordsworth ’

s text—in their editions of

the whole or parts of his work ar e always valuable . Moreover, the definitive text of Wordsworth ’

s complete poems

in the Oxford edition, and the Concordance of P ro fessor

Lane Cooper, have furnished the indispensable basis for amore scientific study o f Wordsworth ’

s poeti c diction and

P ro fessor Emile Legouis has set a shining exam ple in the

detailed analys is of the Early P oem s in The Ear ly Life ofWilliam IVordswor th. But these m ore scholarly efforts,added to the bril l iant com m ents of Wordsworth ’s innum er

able cr iti cs from Aubrey de Vere to P ro fessor Harper, havebeen insufficient to dispel the popular misconceptions inherited from the reviewers . Wordswo-r th

’

s readers to—day

have more sympathy for his ‘philosophy’ than the MonthlyReviewer of 18 15, but they hold much the sam e opinions

concerning his sty le, and have scarcely m ore foundation forthem .

The principal reason for this neglect is that the worldhas never taken Wordsworth’

s so- called theory of poetic

diction seriously . Havm g Jumped to the conclus ion that

Wordsworth’s practice was incons istent with his principles,most of his readers have failed either to recognize the

scholarly background of much that he has to say, or to

perceive the real comprehens iveness of his complete ideal

xii WORDSWORTH ’S THEORY OF POETIC DICTION

o f expression . In point of fact,Wordsworth is not incons istent . His most dignified and elaborate style i s incon

s i stent only with a s ingle clause of his definition of the

proper language of poetry, when that is detached from its

context and arbitrarily taken to represent the whole .

The notion that poetry in general should em ploy the

language of the film erm eails raidd. lem gl.asses p f Sgfiietyim was

never Wordsworth’s ideal at any time . I t is only his deh

nition of an experiment1 that he chose to try in thirteen

out of the nineteen poems by him in the fir st edition of the

Lyrical Ballads ; and the famous P reface is l ittle more than

a somewhat unwill ing and frankly inadequate attempt toexplain this sam e experiment .

2 Wordsworth him sel f sug

gests that an expos ition o f the whole theory would involve

a complete history of l iterature and a social psychology .

3

After modi fying his original suggestion until the ‘ language

of conversation in the lower and middle classes of society ’

became, in 180 0 ,‘a selection o f the real language of. m en

in a state of vivid sensation,’ and after so ftening this, in

180 2, by a further emphas is upon the selective power of

the poet,Wordsworth finally merges his special ideal in a

The m aj ority o f the followm g poem s ar e to b e cons idered a s

experim ents .

’ Advert isem ent to Lyrical Ba llads, 1798.

2 ‘

I was st ill m ore unwilling to undertak e the task [o f writinga system at ic de fense o f the theory upon wh ich the Lyrical Ba lladswere written] b ecause adequately to d isplay the op inions, and fullyto enforce the argum ents would require a space wholly dispro

portionate to the nature o f a pre face . I have there forealtogether declined to enter regularly upon th is defense.

’—P re faceto the Lyrical Ballads o f 180 0 .

3 ‘

Fo r to treat the sub j ect with the clearness and coherence, o f

wh ich I b elieve it suscept ible, it would be necessary to give a fullaccount o f the present state o f public taste in th is country, and to

determ ine how far th is taste is healthy or depraved ; wh ich againcould not be determ ined without po inting out in what m annerlanguage and the hum an m ind act and react on each other, and

w ithout retracing the revolut ions, not o f literature alone, butlik ewise o f society itself . ’ -I bt

°

d .

INTRODUCTION xiii

general respect for the purity and integrity o f the Engl ish

language—a new and m ore vital interpretation of that

correctness so cherished by the eighteenth century . In

the fir st co llected edition of his poems in 18 15 (which

included the Lyrical Ballads and the poem s of 180 7 , w ith

a few additions o f later origin) , he relegates his originalpreface to the Appendix as containing

r‘ l ittle o f special

application to the greater part, perhaps, of the collection.

’1

Why has Wordsworth’

s own stri ct l imitation of his‘

theory ’

to a few poems been so systematically ignored ?

But i f t he theory, in its more l imited form, was m erely

an explanation o f a small group of poems, much more wasmeant by it than commonly meets the eye of the casual

The ob servations prefixed to that portion o f these volum es

wh ich was published m any years ago, under the t itle o f“Lyrical Bal

lads,” “

have so little o f special application to the greater part, perhaps, o f the collect ion as sub sequently enlarged and diversified, thatthey could not with any propriety stand as an introduction to it .

Not deem ing it, however, exped ient to suppress that expos ition,slight and im perfect as it is, o f the feelings wh ich had determ inedthe cho ice o f subj ects, and the principles which had regulated the

com pos ition o f those P ieces, I have trans ferred it to the end o f the

second volum e, to be attended to, or not, at the pleasure o f the

reader.’ In all the com plete ed itions b etween 18 15 and 1845 th isform ed the fir st paragraph o f the P reface whi ch was reprinted fromthe volum es o f 1815, a s an introduct ion to the continually increasing collection o f Wordsworth’

s poem s . When thi s pre face was

trans ferred to the Append ix in the ed it ion o f 1845, the paragraphj ust quoted was replaced by the following note : ‘

Ih the succeed ingeditions, when the collection was m uch enlarged and diversified,this P re face [the P re face to the Lyricai Ba llads ] was trans ferredto the end o f the volum es, as having little o f special appli cat ion to

the contents .

’

In the reprints of the P reface o f 1815 by Grosart,Knight, George, and Nowell Sm ith, the last edition has naturallybeen followed ; and for th is reason the im portant introductory paragraph is known only to those who have access to an early ed ition.

When the critical edition o f Wordsworth’

s literary criticism , which,desp ite the efforts o f Nowell Sm ith, is still a des ideratum , shallappear, it is to b e hoped that so im portant an utterance will berestored .

WORDSWORTH ’S THEORY OF POETIC DICTION

reader .It was not a single i solated utterance. I t had the

wide background of English poetry and critic ism for two

centur ies, and the narrower background of some very ear

nest l iterary experiment and study on the part, not of

Wordsworth alone, but o f an entire group of writers who

were publishing in that open-minded periodical, The

M onthly M agazih e. Chie f among these were Coleridge andLamb . Not t ill we realize what Coleridge brought with

him from Lam b to those memorable conversations in which

the Lyrical Ballads originated do we begin to understand

what was behind the curt sentences of the Adverti sement o f

1798 .

I t i s not in their casual appearances in print that the

most vital criti cal reflections of Wordsworth and Coleridgeare to be sought, but in that remarkable oral discussion,begun by them in their long walks among the QuantockH il ls, and continued day after day and year after year, notonly by them, but by a larger circle, which included at

var iou s tim es Lamb, Southey, De Quincey, Haz l itt, Scott,Landor, and others .

‘I have never felt incl ined to write

critic ism ,

’ said Wordsworth,‘

though I have talked and am

daily talking a great deal . ’1 And the echoes of this talkare everywhere heard in the critic ism of the period—inScott

’

s edition of Dryden, in De Quincey’s distinction

between the l iterature of knowledge and the l iteratureof power, which was original ly Wordsworth ’s, in Coler idge’s lectures, and later in chance remarks by Sara

Coler idge and Aubrey de Vere . In order to understandthe true relation of Wordsworth ’s criti ci sm to his poetic

c reation, and to the l iterature of the past, we must, in

imagination, continually supply this background of Vividconversation . And the beginnings of this are to be soughtin the development of Wordsworth and Coleridge, in relation to their respective c ircles of friends and critic s

,long

before they ever m et.

1 L. W. F . 3 . 152.

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CHAPTER 1

POETIC DICTION IN ‘OUR ELDER POETS .

’

A great poet mu st create or recreate, not only the taste

by which he is enj oyed,1 but the language in which he

wr ites . Like all artists, he mu st inform a m edium already

developed by others w ith the new spir it and the new l i fe

w ithin him , thereby renewing and m odi fying the outwardform also . But, unl ike other artists, he derives his m ediumfrom two so

fi

ur ces —from the written words o f poets, who

have thoughtfully adapted itx to the purposes of beauty and

del ight, and from the l ips of his daily associates, who havem ade a Swi ft and haphazard adaptation of it to the pur

poses of im mediate u til ity . Between these two—the wr itten and the oral tradition— the po et,

‘

s inging a song in

which all other hum an beings j o in with him,

’2 must m akehis own synthes is, so that the art ist and the plowman may

both hear the m essage, each in his own tongue .

Of this duty the inher itors of the fert ile English tonguehave never been wholly neglectful . But their efforts havebeen com plicated by a certain individualism in the English

character . The Englishm an, whether poet or plowm an,l ikes to speak as he chooses . Between the characteristi c

phraseology o f bards who invented their own language, anda r ich popu lar speech, fond o f short cuts, and uncr iti callyhospitable to new locutions, the plain and open path o f a

generally intel l igible and beauti fu l poeti c diction has not

always been easy to hnd . Nevertheless, it was not forwant of sel f- cr iti cism , and the unremitting efforts of many

1A rem ark attributed by Wordsworth to Coleridge. I t is quoted,

in slightly different form s, in the fam ous letter to Lady B eaum ont

(M ay 21 , 180 7 : Wordswor th’

s Liter ary Criticism , p . and in the

E s say Supplem entary to the P r eface .

2P re face to Lyr ica l Ba llads ( in a passage added to the original

pre face in


generations, that the typical English style seemed to

M atthew Arnold wi l ful, barbarous, and Vio lent . So i t had

seemed to the most del i cate spirits of E l izabethan England,wistfully looking to pol ished Italy and ancient Rome, and

to their own wel l of English undefiled in Chaucer,'

and in

the l ight of those standards discovering in their contem

porary style some want o f measure and grace . So it had

seemed to the poets of the eighteenth century, scorning the

rich and various language into which this E l izabethan dic

tion had flowered as a luxuriant wi ldwood growth, whichit was their task to reduce to F rench correctness and

elegance . So it had seemed to Wordsworth, inwhose eyesthe effort of a century had resulted only in a phraseologyso gaudy and ‘

licentio-us,’

so lacking in the naturalness

and good sense which had been constantly preached, thatthe discovery of a standard o f expression which would

protect the reader from the caprice o f the poet seemed a

matter of immediate and paramount importance .

1

The most power ful and original of all these efforts was

that o f Wordsworth ; yet its original ity consisted, not inthe creation o f a new ideal of poeti c diction, but in the

Vitality with which he inform ed an old one . Wordsworth

was not the first to seek his poeti c diction in a selection o f

the real language o f m en, as opposed to a traditional

l iterary dialect . Chaucer, had done it before, and Chaucer’

s

master, Dante ; and the method of Chaucer had remainedthe accepted one in English poe try, consciously imitatedby Spenser, and received by others from Chaucer ’s own

source—the vernacu lar literatures of the Continent, especially the Italian and F rench . Indeed, the modern poetryof Europe, in every tongue, is the resu lt o f a choice s im ilarto that of Wordsworth on the part of poets, when Latinwas stil l the speech of the cultivated . In England a power

l . Bagehot, Literary S tudies 2 . 3 89 :‘A dressy literature, an

exaggerated literature, seem to be fated to us ; these a re our

curses .

’

POETIC DICTION IN‘

0 UR ELDER POETS 3

ful l iterary impu lse from abroad, l ike that received from

Italy in the s ixteenth century, or that from F rance in

the seventeenth century, ha s resulted in a new em phasis

on a ‘

selection o f the real language’ of Englishmen who

were not too deeply learned, as the only possible basis o f

poeti c express ion. Not ti l l the latter hal f of the ei ghteenth

century did the ideal of a special vocabulary for poetrybecom e widely prevalent in England through the powerfulinfluence of Gray ; and even then it was opposed by theprecepts and exam ple of Goldsm ith, Cowper, and Burns .

Hence, when Wordsworth began his attack on the‘gaudiness and inane phraseolog

‘y’ o f contemporary versew ith the statement that his practi ce was in a ccord w ith that

of‘

our elder writers, and those in modern times who

have been the most success ful in painting manners and

pass ions,’1 he was m aking a claim easily established by that

survey o f English poetry which he invited his readers toundertake . S ince a review o f this sort throws W

'

ordsworth ’

s own cr itic ism into its proper perspective, and

emphas izes the new and vital elements in it, it will be wel lto let it introduce an exam ination of his own theory and

practi ce . In so do ing we‘may have the advantage of a

running com ment by Wordsworth him sel f on the work of

his predecessors, s ince one of the excellences o f his

rem arks, as c om pared with those of many poets before him,

was their better cr iti cal basis in a study and del iberateappraisal o f English literature in the variou s stages of its

developm ent . Ther e are not m any m en o f im portance inthe poeti c history o f England concerning whom Wordsworth has not left some i l lum inating com m ent ; and whathe left unsaid was generally said by Co leridge, whosestudies were som etim es the source the

result, of the Vital thinking o f his ish friend .

Accordingly, we m ay proceed to bu i ld upon the foundationwhich they have already laid for us .

1 Advertisem ent to the Lyrica l Ba llads o f 1798.

4 WORDSWORTH ’S THEORY OF POETIC DICTION

Wordsworth and Coleridge divided English l iterature

after Chaucer into two great periods—the age o f our

elder poets,’

and‘modern times,

’

or the periods before and

after Dryden’s consc ious break w ith the traditions of the

past . For m ore than a century it had been the custom to

date all l iterary civil ization from the reign of Charles I I,and to speak o f the few great, unto-rgotten poets who hadthe m is fortune to wr ite before that tim e, a s the rude forefathers of English verse, pre—em inent for the mighty forceof thei r natural genius, but sadly lacking in ar t . Chaucer,Spenser, Shakespeare, and even M i lton, had all been c on

descendingly rewr itten into ‘

our language as it is now

refined.

’

As a late development from this pecul iar habit

o f refining, there had arisen the conception of a special

dialect for poetry—a col lection of phrases too del icate for

ordinary use, or for the express ion of vu lgar real emotionsthat had a substantial existence outs ide of books . Against

al l this sel f—com placent criti ci sm, Wordsworth vigorou slyappealed to the histori cal facts . The ideal of a special di c

t ion, or of any r efinem ent except that o f pure natural feel

ing, was not the ideal of the great age of Engl ish poetrybefore Dryden, he said, nor did it correspond to the

best practi ce o f poets a fter him . Was he right in thiscontention ?

I . Chaucer and Spenser .

Concerning the practi ce of Chaucer,‘

the fir st finder of

our fair ‘ language,’

and Wordsworth ’

s special ,

m odel in

respect to language, there can be no doubt . With the wel ldeveloped literary and courtly medium of F rench at his

command, he had turned to the m ongrel vernacular, the

real language o f his countrymen, and had found an adequatepoetic diction in a selection from that . F ol lowing here thefooting of Chaucer ’s feet, Spenser had labored to restore,‘

as to their r ightfu l heritage,’ ‘

such good and natural Eng


0 UR ELDER POETS’

5

l ish words as have been long t ime out of use and almost

c lean disher ited .

’

To him, or to his apologist‘

E .

it appeared sham eful that his countrym en should have‘

so

base regard and bastard j udgment’

o f their own‘

natural

speech wh ich together w ith the i r nurse’

s m ilk they sucked,’

that they wou ld not labor to garnish and beauti fy it by adevelopment of its native resources . S ince such

‘

old and

obso lete words’

as Spenser em ploys were ‘most used of

country- fo lk,’

the reform o f the young poet o f the Shepherd

’

s Calendar had som ething in com mon with that of

the young poet o f the Lyrical Ballads . As Wordsworth’

s

interest in the language o f\the m iddle and lower classes

o f soc iety incidentally invo lved a return to the speech of‘

our elder poets,’

so Spenser ’s return to the language o f

the one glor ious ‘

e lder poet’ inc identally involved an

approximation to ru sti c dialect .

2

2 . Classicis ts and P uris ts .

But Spenser did not stand alone . The purification andenrichment of the English language constituted one of the

burning questions o f the day . S cholars, poets, univers ityw its, churchm en, and travelers —all had their contribution

to make, a contr ibution immediately subj ected to the criti

cism o f the others . Sir Humphrey Gilbert anti cipated

1Ep istle addressed to Gabriel Harvey p refixed to the Shepherd

’

s

Ca lendar by E . K . I assum e that E . K. represents the op inionso f Spenser him self, whoever the writer o f this apology m ay b e.

2 Coleridge includes pract ically all the F aerie Qu eene in his listo f the poetry whi ch illustrates Wordsworth’

s ideal o f a b eauti fuldi ction which is, a t the sam e t im e, the language o f conversat ion.

‘

Sp ite o f the licentiousness with wh ich Spenser occas ionally com

p els the orthography o f his words into a sub servience to his rhym es,

the whole F aery Queen” is an alm ost continued instance o f th isb eauty’—i. e. the beauty o f verse ‘

inwh ich everything was expressedj ust a s one would w ish to talk , and yet all dignified, attractive, andinteresting .

’ —B . L. 2 . 7 1 .


Dryden and Matthew Arnold in planning an English acad

em y, for the purpose of developing the resources of the

vulgar tongue .

1 Under the influence of s imilar efforts on

the Continent, Englishmen began to consider the develop

ment of the national speech a patrioti c duty . Al l flourish

ing states and pol iti c commonwealths, remarks Gabriel

Harvey,2 have made the most of their own languages . Italy,

Spain, and F rance have spared no efforts to exalt their

own tongues over those of Greece and Rome ; only the

English are backward in this respect . And“

A scham

observes that when a nation ceases to care for its own

speech, its strength and moral integrity decl ine . A rude

and disorderly style i s a s ign o f a rude and disorderlycharacter .

3

The desired improvement had been partly attained

through the del iberate importation o f words from other

languages, especially Latin . In 1542, at a meeting of

Convocation, Bishop Gardiner had presented a list of abouta hundred Latin words which he wished either retained in

their original form, in the proposed revis ion o f the GreatBible,

‘

for their genuine and native meaning, and for themaj esty of the matter in them contained,

’

or‘fitly Eng

lished with the least alteration .

’4 Som e of the proposedadditions ar e such familiar words a s contrite ( contrita s ) ,idiot (idiom ) , baptize ( baptizare ) ,martyr, ceremony ( cer em onia ) , etc . Equally familiar to a reader of to-day are

many of the words ‘

new made of a Latin 0 r

F rench word’ employed by Sir Thomas E lyot inThe Govem our, where he takes great care to provide a gloss in thetext itsel f by coupl ing with them words of the sam e mean

1 Moore, Tudor—S tuar t Views, pp . 96, 168-169.

2Gregory Sm ith 1 . 123

-124.

3I bid. 1 . 6 . Cf . Tim ber, cd. Schelling, p . 3 2.

Tudor-S tuar t Views, pp . 89-90 . Moore quotes from Mom bert,English Versions of the Bible, 190 7, pp . 23 0

-23 1 .

8 WORDSWORTH ’S THEORY 0 1" POETIC DICTION

mother English ; in the modern poets the most obvious

thoughts in language the most fantasti c and arbitrary .

’1

The ideal of loquendum ut m ulti was appl ied to verse a s

wel l as to prose . Nothing was more sacred to the s cholarlycriti cs of verse in the s ixteenth century, who were prepar

ing the way for the marvelous flowering of the English

genius in Shakespeare and his brother poets, than the idiomof the vernacular—those character istic turns o f speech

which own no law but the habit o f the people, what a

Wordsworth of that day might have meant by‘ language

actually used by m en.

’ ‘

E schew strange words,’ says

Gascoignef'

‘

or obsolete et ih usita, unless the theme do give

j ust occas ion . You shall do very wel l to use yourverse after the English phrase, and not after the manner

of other languages Even as I have advised youto place all words in their natural and most com mon or

usual pronunciation, so I would w ish to fram e all sen

tences in their mother phrase and proper idiom ai. S imilarlyHarvey obj ects to Spenser’s altering the quantity o f anyone syllable otherwi se than as

‘

our common speech and

general received custom ’

wi l l hear him out .

‘We are not

to go a little farther than we are l i censed andauthorized by the or dinary use, and custom, and propriety,and idiom, and, as it were, the maj esty o f our speech,which

I account the only infall ible and sovereign Rule o f allRules,

’

he says, referring Spenser to Horace’s penes m um ,

and ius, and norm a loq’tteh ali. 3 This philosophy was

expressed in more vio lent term s in the famous controversy

between Nash and Harvey, inwhich each sent his ofiponenta list o f his offenses against the sacred ‘maj esty of our

1B . L . 1 . 15. Cf . Schopenhaur,

‘A poet should th ink lik e a genius,but talk the sam e language as any one else

’ —a say ing used by A . J.

George to illustrate Wordsworth’

s ideal o f express ion. See Words

wor th’

s P r efa ces, pp . 1 0 5-1 0 6 .

2Gregory Sm ith 1 . 52-53 .

3I bz

'

al. 1 . 1 17 - 1 19.

POETIC DICTION IN‘OUR ELDER POETS’ 9

speech,’ and loudly accused him of being that most

detestable of all literary cr iminals—an inkhornist .

1

Nevertheless, these defenders of the idiom are the clas

sicists o f the day, oppos ing to every innovation not only

the law of their own language, but the shining examples

o f antiqu ity . Yet theirs is a Vital and who lesom e class i cism ,

which looks, not to the letter, but to the spir it, of the law,

and really succeeds in translating the advice o f Cicero,Horace, and Qu inti l ian into term s of their own needs

and experience . What could be m ore sens ible than

Ascham’

s remarks on the style o f the Latin class ics ? He

reminds his countrym en that the excel lence of Ci cero ’

s

language!was not som ething pecu l iar to him sel f— a l iterary

a chievem ent ; it was the reflec tion o f the conversat ion o f

the cu ltivated m en of his tim e . The style o f Cicero ’

s let

ters, he observes, differs very little from the style o f those

Who wrote to him. Behind the eloquence of C icero, and

the chaste and s im ple diction o f Terence, l ies a good habito f daily speech,

‘

the pure fine talk of Rom e, which was

used by the flower o f the worthiest nobility that ever Rom e

bred .

’2 Sir Philip S idney represents the sam e class i cal

good sense, before it had becom e so r igid and sel f- com

placent that it had ceased to be sens ible at all . I t leads

him, not only into a m i ld obj ection to Spenser ’s archaism s,

but to an anticipation o f two o f the leading pr inciples o f

Wordsworth ’

s cr iti cism. Quite in the spirit of the Appen

dix on Poetic D iction, he censures im itators of the classi csfor reproducing the pecu l iar ities whi ch, in C i cero a re the

natural expression of genu ine pass ion, when there is nopassion to be expressed . And so, he says,

‘

they do thata r tificially which we see m en do in choler na turally .

’3 Had1I bid . 2 . 275.

2Gregory Sm ith 1 . 28.

3I bid . 1 . 20 2 . Cf . Wordsworth :

‘

The earliest poets o f all

nat ions generally wrote from pass ion excited by real events ;they wrote naturally, and as m en : feeling powerfully as they did,the ir language was daring and figurative . In later t im es, P oets,

1 0 WORDSWORTH ’S THEORY OF POETIC DICTION

critics and poet s always retained this vivid consciousnes s

that the class ical writers were m en l ike themselves, speak

ing ‘naturally and as m en,’ instead of dead model s of a

per fect excel lence, the utterances of Wordsworth would

have been less necessary, and would have seemed les s

revolutionary . Again, S idney ant ic ipates Wordsworth inhis method o f testing verse by writing it into prose .

Besides Chaucer’

s Tr oilus, the M irror of M agis tm tes, and

the Shepherd’

s Calendar, he remembered few verses that

had poeti cal s inews in them ;‘

for proo f whereof,’

he says,‘

let but most of the verses be put in prose, and then ask

the meaning ; and it will be found that one verse did but

beget another, without ordering at the fir st what shou ld beat the last ; which becomes a confused mass of words witha tingling sound o f rime, barely accompanied with reason.

11

However,we cannot say that the two doctr ines especially

assoc iated with the name of Wordsworth appear in E l iza

bethan l iterary critic ism in quite the form in which they ar egenerally understood by his readers . The

‘common use’

or‘

common speech’

so o ften referred to is not stri ctly thelanguage of conversation in the lower and middle c lasses .

Though W i lson seems to obj ects

to the formation o f a

l iterary language, as opposed to the language of countryfolk,

2 and Spenser impl ies that the wel l of Engl i sh undefiled may be sought, in some instances, among the

peasantry, Puttenham’

s definition of standard Engl ish—a

selection of the real language of wel l-bred m en within a

radius of s ixty miles around London 3—seems to be the

and Men am bitious o f the fam e o f P oets, perceiv ing the influenceo f such language, and des irous o f producing the sam e effect without b eing anim ated by the sam e pass ion, set them selves to a m echani cal adopt ion o f these figur es o f speech, and m ade use o f them ,

som etim es with propriety, but m uch m ore frequently applied themto feelings and thoughts w ith whi ch they had no na tural connexionwhatsoever. ’—Append ix to Lyrical Ballads o f 180 2 .

1Gregory Sm ith 1 . 196 .

2Ar te of Rhetorique, p . 164.

3Gregory Sm ith 2 . 150 .

POETIC DICTION IN ‘

0 UR ELDER POETS’ 1 1

accepted one . But these wel l-bred m en are not pedants or

university wits . They are m en of affairs who speak clearlyand intel l igently, w ith m ore regard for m atter than for

words . Hence what Wordsworth perhaps was really

seeking—a speech whi ch was universally intel l i gible, and

not the arbitrary creation o f poets—was also the goal of

these stout defenders o f the‘com m on use

’

and the‘generally received cu stom .

’

Again, though Dr . Johnson1 says that before Drydenthere was no poeti cal diction,no system o f words especially

refined and appropri ated to poetry, it is generally im pl iedin E l izabethan cr itic ism that there I S some difference, apartfrom m etre, between the language of prose and the lan

guage o f verse . Verse, says P uttenham,

2 is‘a m anner o f

utterance more eloquent and rhetor ical than the ordinaryprose which we use in our daily talk, because it is deckedand set out w ith all m anner of fresh colors and figures,which m aketh that it sooner inveigleth the j udgement of

m en, and carr ieth their opinion this way and that, whither

soever the heart by the im press ion o f the ear shall be most

affectionately bent and directed .

’

Nevertheless, though a s

much difference a s this definition suggests is generallytaken for granted, the efforts to puri fy the l iterary languageare apparently directed toward prose and verse alike, andthe sam e standard is u sually applied to both .

3 This stand

ard is to be found both in Horace’s Ar t of P oetry, and in

Cicero ’

s Ora tor and Qu intil ian ’

s Ins titu tes of Ora tory .

4

The transference to verse o f the ideal of a pure and

universally intell igible dictionwhich the greatest o f Rom an

1 D ryden (Lives , e'

d. H ill, 1 .

2Gregory Sm ith 2 . 8-9 .

3Gasco igne says : ‘

You m ay use the sam e figures or tropes inverse whi ch a re used in prose .

’—Gregory Sm ith 1 . 52.

4The references to these authorities in Elizab ethan criticism ar e

too num erous to reproduce here . They m ay b e found by consulting the excellent index at the end o f the second volum e o f E liza

bethan Cr itica l E ssays .


orators had acquired from a study of the Greek class i cs,on the one hand, and from his own experience a s a

‘daily

orator among the common people,’

on the other hand,tended to maintain a wholesome relation between poetryand prose .

The peculiar Vital ity of the E l izabethan class ic i sm, crude

as it was— this sense of a l iving contact of man with m an

in discipleship—enabled the critics o f the age to approach

more near ly to the spirit of their teachers than did manywho felt themselves better instructed . Their faith in the

necess ity of preserving the native idiom at all costs, and o f

modi fying the method of the Latin writers to serve their

own purpose, nearly resembled the attitude of their masters

to Greek—the attitude of Ci cero, especially . He had

always emphas ized the necessity o f fo l lowing the law of his

own language, infer ior as it was by nature, and of admit

t ing no foreign splendor incompatib le w ith it . Those who

had learned this lesson from him had learned something

far better than a servile regard for correctness, and the

disposition, not whol ly unknown in antiquity, to plunderthe class i cs o f every figure of speech and every flower of

poesy, and deck out their own verse in the unnatural spoils .

This vital relation to Greek, and especially to Latin, poetryand l iterary critic ism also enabled the E l izabethan critics to

reproduce without too much exaggeration the classical

attitude to verse and prose . This had more and moretended to em phasize the essential com munity between the

two types of express ion, w ithout, however, fail ing to

recognize the differences resu lting som etim es from a di f

ference in purpose, and always from a difference in the

associations and the external effect of the m edium . Thusthe relation o f the m ore scholarly E l izabethans to their

ancient m odels was som ewhat l ike the relation of S idney’s

ideal poet to Nature . Li fted in the glory of their own

freedom , they were preparing them selves to go hand in

hand with the class i cs, not bound within the narrow war

POETIC DICTION IN ‘OUR ELDER POETS’ 1 3

ranty o f their m asters ’ gifts, but freely ranging only w ithin

the zodiac of their own wit .

3 . The H eirs of the E lizabethan Tradition in the

S eventeenth Century .

In the seventeenth century this who lesom e E l izabethan

tradition com es to a rather vio lent end—not to be revivedagain unti l the days o f Co leridge and\Vordsworth ; and

what Coleridge calls the second per iod o f our languagebegins with the cr iti cism and poetry o f Dryden. During

the earl ier part of the century the E l izabethan ideals weremaintained, not only by the plain and manly classi cism of

Ben Jonson, whom Dryden regarded as his m aster, but bytwo lesser poets, Drayton and Daniel,who m ade a pecu l iarappeal to Wordswor th and Coleridge, and were consciouslyimitated by them : Ben Jonson was apparently less attrac

t ive to the poets o f the Lyrical Ballads, because he lackedthe tenderness o f heart that was associated w ith Wordsworth’

s ideal ~ of sim ple express ion; but he, too, battled

bravely with the besetting s ins o f English style, and

sought, in his own incom parable phrase, to‘redeem arts

from their rough and braky seats, where they lay hid and

overgrown w ith thorns, to a pure, open, and flowery light,where they m ay take the eye and be taken by the hand .

’1

But in this effort he did not strive to l i ft the l iterarylanguage too far above the understanding of the vu lgarmu ltitude, whom , nevertheless, he frankly scorned .

‘

Pureand neat language I love,

’

he says,‘

but plain and cus

tom ary .

’2 This plain and cu stom ary style, which resu ltedfrom the striving after the golden m ean in speech a s wel las in the rule o f l i fe, in Jonson

’

s own tim e did not whollyescape the censure directed against simpl i city in Wordsworth ’

s day .

‘

The true ar tificer w il l not run away from1Tim ber, ed. Schelling, p . 7 .

2I bid ., p . 59.


GNature as i f he were afraid of her, he observes, or

depart from life and the l ikeness of truth, but speak to thecapacity of his hearers . And though his l anguage differ

from the vulgar somewhat,it shall not fly from all humanity,with the Tamerlanes and the Tamer—chams o f the late age,

which had nothing in them but the s cenical strutting and

voci feration to warrant them to the i gnorant gapers .

In the meantime, perhaps, he is called barren, dull, lean, a

poor writer, or by what contum el iou s word can come in

their cheeks, by these m en who without l abor, j udgment,knowledge, or almost sense, are rece ived or pre ferred before

him . He gratulates them and the ir fortune . Another

age or j uster m en will acknowledge the virtues o f his

studies . ’1 This suggests the very tone of Wordsworth

w ith reference to the more popular and showy graces of

Scott and Byron . Jonson’

s scorn o f rhetoric ‘

that cannot

suiter the sun or a shower, nor bear the open air,’ his

l iking for ‘

strength and s inews ’ in verse or prose, echo

S idney, and anti cipate the emphas is of Wordsworth and

Coleridge on poeti c substance—that substratum o f fact and

sense in verse which remains when it i s turned into prose,or subj ected to the test o f intel lectual analys i s .

Meanwhile Drayton,too, was looking back with some

complacency to the pass ing of the vio lent splendors o f the‘

Tamerlanes and Tamer- cham s of the late age,’ and the

banishing of superfluous all iteration, forced antitheses,and far- fetched sim il itudes from a ridiculous natural history, which Euphues had m ade popular, and Sir Philip

Sidney had striven to laugh out of existence . Sidney,writes Drayton,2

throughly pac ’d our language, a s to show

That plenteous English hand inhand m ight goWith Greek and Lat in, and d id first reduceOur tongue from L illie’s writing theninuse.

1 Tim ber, ed. Schelling, pp . 26-27 .

2Sp ingarn 1 . 1 3 7 .


‘

genuine language of pass ion .

’1 Nevertheless, in their pursuit of far- fetched s imiles and out-of-way thoughts, theydisplayed an intel lectual power and a clearness o f conception

which kept Wordsworth and Coleridge from a who lesale

condem nation of them .

‘

Read all Cowley he is ver y valu

able to a col lector o f Engl ish sound sense,’

said Words

worth, who nevertheless condemned the taste o f an age in

which the booksel lers’

stalls in London swarmed w ith the

fol ios o f this ‘able writer and am iable m an’

, while M ilton

was neglected .

2 But in Cowley’s own age the metaphys icalschool did not escape the censure that always awaits

offenders against Nature and s impl i ci ty, popular as they tooo ften are . The rough ver sification o f Donne, of whom

BenJonson said that ‘

for not keeping the accent he deserved

hanging,’3the wild metres of Cowley’s P indari c odes, and

what Addison called the general Gothicism o f taste

among these curious thinkers, began to weary the gay

spirits of the Restoration ; and they turned w ith rel ief tothe easy and m ellifiuous couplets o f Waller, which

dem anded no effort on the part of the reader either to

scan them or to com prehend their meaning . Thence came

that mighty reform which in a s ingle generation rendered

the sty le of all English poetry hitherto hopeless ly anti

quated, and in 1675, the year after M i lton’s death . had

produced an almost c0 m plete silence of al l s ingers ‘beyond

the verge of the present age .

’4

4. Milton.

B ut before we consider this new schoo l of poetry and

poeti c diction,whi ch prevailed down to the t ime o f Wordsworth, and against which his criti cism was chiefly directed,

B . L . 1 . 15.

Essay Supplem entary to the P r eface.

3Sp ingarn 1 . 21 1 .

4I bid . 2 . 263 .

POETIC DICTION IN ‘OUR ELDER POETS’ 1 7

we mu st turn as ide for a moment to do honor to the

splendid and lonely figure of M i lton . I t is not inappro

priate that this br ief mention o f him should seem like adigression, an interruption of the main course of the dis

cussion. Despite his mani fold relations to l iterature and

the pol itical l i fe of his own tim e, he seems to stand apart

to represent ideals which are pecu l iarly his own, and not,a s in the case o f Spenser and Shakespeare, s imply the

most glor iou s expression o f a spir it com m on to a whole

l iterary group . But this appearance of lonel iness is due

to the fact that M ilton’

s proper background is not Englandalone, but the Continent . In spite o f his intense patr iotism,

he thinks of himsel f as one of a European comm onwealth

o f scholars and poets . As su ch he is not only an English

m an, but a representative of England . Whenwe place himwhere he consciously belonged, in the main stream o f the

European Renaissance, we discover that he too i s express

ing, in term s of his continental relationships, the ideal

which we have discovered in the most fruitful E l izabethancr itic ism , as wel l as in the pre faces of Wordsworth . Likehis Italian m asters, he thinks o f the cu ltivated and l iterarylanguage at his com m and as being, not a certain kind of

English, but Latin and the speech of the people a s being,not the language of the country a s opposed to that o f the

town, or the language of unaffected, wel l—bred m en as

opposed to the language of wits or pedants, but the wholeof the English language as com pared with the universall iterary m edium of Europe . When the choi ce between this

l iterary language and the spoken vernacu lar is thus pr esented to his m ind, he unhes itatingly elects the latter . ‘Iapplied mysel f to that resolution wh i ch Ar iosto fol lowed

against the persuasion of Bem bo,’

he says,1 ‘

to fix all theindu stry and a r t I could unite to the adorning of my nativetongue ; not to m ake verbal curiosities the end ( that werea toi lsom e vanity ) but to be an interpreter and relater o f

1Spingarn 1 . 195.


the best and sagest things among mine own citizens

throughout this isl and in the mother dialect . That what

the greatest and cho icest w its o f Athens, Rome, or modern

Italy, and those Hebrews of old, did for their country, I ,in m y proportion, w ith this over and above of being a

Christian,might do for mine ; not caring to be once named

abroad, though perhaps I could attain to that, but content

with these British islands a s my world .

’

This sentiment

was read and echoed by Wordsworth,who consciously triedto take up the work of M i lton, and to carry out some of his

plans for relating the best and sagest things among his

own citizens .

1 Hence, even M i lton, whose diction is the

very antithesi s o f the‘ language of conversation in the

lower and middle classes,’ and who certainly was respon

sible for some of the dulcia v itia in the poetry of the e igh

teenth century, proves upon examination to hold an idealnot altogether different from that of Wordsworth . The

diff erence in their appl ication of i t was due to the immense

range o f M ilton’s historical and geographical imagination,and to his cosmopo l itan culture . What a little group of

l akes and hills was to Wordsworth,‘

these British islands ’

were to M ilton . He could local ize his conceptions no

further . As Wordsworth m odifies the language of con

versation in order to give it the melody and grace of the

English poets whom he loves, so M i lton raises and harmonizes the homely or over- luxuriant vernacular to the

dignity of Greek and Latin .

1See P r elude 1 . 168- 169, and the brief preface to Ar tegal and

E lidur e .

CHAPTER 2 .

POETIC DICTION IN‘MODERN TIMES .

’

M ilton was the l ast of the elder poets . Even in his

own l i fetim e, a reform had begunwhich was to render himalmost as obso lete as Spenser and Shakespeare . Despite

the efforts of the E l izabethan class i cists and purists, Engl ish poetry hitherto had never attained to that even sim

plicity which had been the ideal of many . There were stil l‘rough and braky seats ’ between its purple patches of

flowery bloom . In Shakespeare there is no such relation

between taste and genius, inspiration and moderating goodsense, the glowing inner l i fe and the gracious external

manner, as that which we hnd in the tragedies o f Sopho

cles even in M i lton there is an occcasional harshness and

irregularity o f style which seems crude bes ide the bright

and l impid verse of Hom er .

1 As the fir st flush o f the won

der ful creative energy of the Renaissance died away, this

disproportion became more and more evident .

2 I t wa s

1F rom the s tandpo int o f the new school o f poeti c di ction, Phillip s,

M ilton’

s nephew, refers to‘

Spenser, w ith all his rusty, ob solete

words’ and his‘rough hewn, clouterly verses,’ and Shakespeare

‘

w ith all his unfiled express ions ’ and his‘ram bling and indigested

fancies ’ ( Sp ingarn 2 . Dryden speak s in a s im ilar tone,

though in som ewhat less p icturesque term s :‘

Yet it m ust be allowedto the present age that the tongue in general is so m uch refineds ince Shak espeare’s t im e that m any o f his words, and m ore o f his

phrases, are scarce intelligible . And, o f those which we understand,som e a re ungram m at ical, others coarse, and his whole style is so

pestered w ith figurative express ions that it is a s affected a s it is

ob scure’ (Ker 1 .

2Sprat’s analys is o f the influence o f the C iv il Wars upon the

language is interesting in this connection: ‘

The truth is, it has

h itherto b een a little too carelessly handled, and, I think , has hadless labor spent about its polishing than it deserves . T ill the t im e

o f King Henry the E ighth, there wa s scarce any m an regarded itbut Chaucer, and no th ing was written in it wh ich one would b e


then di scovered that, while poets had been singing so

sweetly, and speak ing so clearly and wel l, the laws of

English prosody and grammar had never been reallydefined .

1 Each m an had found them out for himsel f . The

treatises of Gascoigne and P uttenham had been individual

willing to read twice but som e o f his poetry. But then it beganto raise itself a little, and to sound tolerably well. From that age

down to our late Civil Wars, it wa s still fash ioning and b eauti fy ingitself . In the wars them selves (wh ich is a t im e wherein all lan

guages use, i f ever, to increase by extraord inary degrees, for in

such busy and act ive t im es there arise m ore new thoughts o f m en

Which m ust be signified and varied by new express ions ) , then, I say,

it received m any fantastical term s, Wh i ch were introduced by our

religious sects, and m any outland ish phrases, wh i ch several writersand translators in that great hurry brought in and m ade free as theypleased, and withal it was enlarged by m any sound and necessaryform s and idiom s . And now,whenm en

’

s m inds are som ewhatsettled and their pass ions allayed, i f som e sober and j ud ic iousm en would tak e the whole m ass o f our language into their handsas they find it, and would set a m ark on the ill words, correct thosewh ich are to be retained, adm it and establish the good, and m akesom e em endations in the accent and gram m ar, I dare pronouncethat our speech would quickly arrive at as m uch plenty as it is

capable to receive, and at the greatest sm oothness wh ich its derivat ion from the rough Germ anwill allow it .

’—Sp ingarn 2 . 1 1 3- 14.

1See William Wotton

’

s review o f English gram m ar down to

1694 (Sp ingarn 3 . 224 H e says very sens ibly : ‘

For, in the

first place, it ought to be'

considered that every tongue ha s its own

peculiar form as well a s its proper words, not com m unicable to,

nor to be regulated by the analogy o f another language ; wherefore he is the best gram m arian who is the perfectest m aster o f

the analogy o f the language wh ich he is about, and gives the truestrules by which another m an m ay learn it. Next, to apply th is toour own tongue, it m ay certainly be affirm ed that the gram m aro f English is so far our own that sk ill in the learned languages isnot necessary to com prehend it . Ben Jonsonwas the first m an thatI know o f that d id anything cons iderable in it ; but Lyly ’

s gram m arwa s his pattern, and for want oi. reflecting upon the grounds o f alanguage which he understood a s well as any m an o f his age, he

drew it by violence to a dead language that wa s o f a difierent m ak e,and so left his work im perfect .

’

Som e years before th is (in 1679 )Dryden had written: ‘

In the age o f that poet [ ZE schylus ] the

POETIC DICTION IN ‘MODERN TIMES, 2 1

efforts only ; there had been no general and consistent

attempt .on the part o f the whole l iterary world to discoverexactly

'

what constituted the virtues and vices o f poetic

style . I f the class i cal and pur istic cr itic ism , which had

h itherto been the organiz ing and restraining influence inEnglish verse, was not to fai l entirely, it m ust cease to begeneral and spasmodic . I t was now necessary to descendto m inutiae, and to develop a standard so narrow and deh

nite that its demands shou ld be always quite unmistakable .

I t was not enough to say that poets should make a j udicious

selection from the spoken language . All the l iteraryexpress ions that did not occur in that language must be

interdicted one by one, specifically and by name ; and the

interpretation o f the phrase,‘j udiciou s selection’

, must notbe left to the j udgm ent o f every scr ibbler . The w ild

individualism of the m etaphys ical schoo l had shown that

pr ivate judgm ents were not to be trusted .

Hence cam e the reform o f Dryden and his school . They

did not invent a new standard ; they m erely tried to makethe Latin standard inh er ited from S idney through Ben

Jonson as specific and practical a s poss ible . I t was the old

war , condu cted with s l ightly different tactics, on the old

enem y in a new gu ise, with substanti al re—enforcem ents

from F rance . Even before the Revolution the sons of Ben,

with their doughty s ire, had begun to anti cipate the con

ception of a m ore chastened style and a sm oother versificationfiL Ben Jonson seem ed to Dryden to i llustrate the

Greek language was arrived to its full perfection; they had am ongstthem an exact standard o f writing and speak ing . The Englishlanguage is not capable o f such certainty ; and we a re so farfrom it that we are wanting in the very foundat ion o f it, a perfectgram m ar’ ( P re face to Tr oilus and Cr es sida, Ker 1 . In 1693

he wro te : ‘We have yet no English pr osodia, no t so m uch a s

a tolerab le d ictionary, or a gram m ar ; so that our language is in am anner barbarous ’ (ibid . 2 .

1See Schelling, ‘

Ben Jonson and the Class ical School,’ P ub . M od .

Lang . Ass oc . 1 3 . 23 5.


ideal of correctness which was to dominate the ei ghteenth

century .Jonson, he said,

‘ i s to be admired for many

excellencies ; and can be taxed with fewer fail ings thanany English poet .

’1 But to the Horati an critic ism of the

royal Ben was now added the Horatian critic ism of Mal

herbe and Bo ileau and the new F rench Academ y,2 which

insi sted on the need of discarding the tawdry and outworndecorations o f the old poetic di ction, in favor of a j udi cious

selection from the spoken language . In England, as in

F rance,‘

an attack was directed against distortions and

intr icac ies in all forms of l iterature . The substitution of

general for techni cal terms and imagery, the el imination of

the Latin co inage of Browne and his s chool, the

attempt to make l iterature approximate more and more to

conversation, the trend toward precis ion o f word and

idea—these are d ifferent phases of the same movement,

and all hnd reasoned expression in the criti ci sm of the

period .

’3 A certain sobriety and externality in the new

criti cism was mainly due to the loss of ener gy which had

made the reform necessary and possible . The splendor and

bravery of the old l awlessness was gone, and with it some

of the freedom and spir it which had animated the stout

defenders of the l aw . But the vivid animation was nolonger necessary . Henceforth there was to be a steady and

peaceable conquest.The relation of the critic ism of Dryden and P ope to the

age of Shakespeare and the aberrations o f the metaphys icalschool may be best described in the language o f P etit de

Julleville concerning the relation of Malherbe and Boileau1 Ker 1 . 1 3 8. Dryden notes also that Jonson ‘

did a little too

m uch Rom anize our tongue .

’—I bid . 1 . 82 .

2 ‘La principale fonction de l’

Académ ie sera de travailler avectout le so in et toute la d iligence po ss ible, a donner des regles cer

taines a notre langue, et a la rendre pure, éloquente et capable detraiter les arts et les sciences .

’—Quoted by P etit de Julleville fromthe statutes o f the Academ y,H is toir e 4. 1 3 8.

3Sp ingarn, p . xlvi i i .

24 WORDSWORTH’S THEORY OF POETIC DICTION

arti sti c P ope took up the good work that the triumph of

the new style was complete . In the development of the art

and fame of P ope, and the reaction against P ope, are

summed up the whole history o f English literature betweenM ilton and Wordsworth . The period ended in a wholesale

abol ishment of poeti c di ction, and a return to the spokenlanguage as the source and standard o f l iterary expression .

We do not usually recall that i t began in exactly the same

manner .

I . The Developm ent of the S chool of P ope.

Although Dryden and P ope were later celebrated as thediscoverers of those elegances and flower s of speech on

which the eighteenth century especially plumed itsel f,1

these were an indirect result of their practice, rather t hana direct aim of their criti cism . The po int was not to

develop a new poeti c diction, but to get r id of an old one ;

and the attempt was chiefly d irected against what all mustadmit to be Vi ces in any sty le—careless workmanship, anda system of antiquated words or forms of words which

did not correspond to the l anguage as it was actuallyspoken. In both cases the effort was negative rather than

pos itive, characterized by Thou shalt h ots rather than byThou shalts .

The desire to avo id careless workmanship—to trust nothing to the caprice of the poet—led to the development of

a standard metre, the heroi c couplet, which had been a

There was, there fore, be fore the t im e o f Dryden no poeticald iction, no system o f words at once refined from the grossness o f

dom esti c use, and free from the harshness o f term s appropriatedto parti cular arts . Those happy com b inat ions o f wordswhi ch d ist inguish poetry from prose had rarely b een attem pted ;we had few elegances or flowers o f speech ; the roses had not yetbeen plucked from the bram ble, or d ifferent colors had not yet

been j o ined to enliven one another. ’—Dryden (Lives 1 .

POETIC DICTION IN ‘MODERN TIMES’ 25

favor ite w ith Ben Jonson ! and had become increas inglypopular through the century . The rules for the m anipu

l ation of this type o f verse becam e so strict that the ar t of

packing thoughts and feel ings o f every sort into these

neat l ines without any apparent difficu lty m ight seem to

dem and a miracle o f ingenu ity .

2 In the fir st place, thepoet must close the sense w ith the couplet . These couplets

he m ust m ake m etr ically readable, w ithout depart ing fromthe normal character and relation of words in prose . He

m ust invert the order as l ittle as possible,3and m ust avo id

the use of words‘

unnecessary to the sense, or form s that

had becom e'

obsolete . Under~ this latter type were includedthe expletive a

’o,4and the old ending of the second and

third person of the present indicative es t5

and eth.

Moreover, the ver sification must be not only readable, but

distinctly m elodious to the ear .

6 There must be no hiatu s,7

no wearisome repetition of the sam e vowel, no clash of

As ide from his strictly lyrical verse, in which Jonson shared them etrical inventiveness o f his age, the decasyllabic rim ed coupletwas all but his constant m easure .

’

Schelling, ‘

Ben Jonson and the

Class ical School,’ P ub . M od . Lang . Assoc . 1 3 . 23 5.

2See P ope’s letter on ver sification,Letter s 1 . 56-59.

3Cf . the Earl o f Musgrave’s Essay upon P oetry (Sp ingarn 2 .

Th’

express ion easy, and the fancy h igh,Yet that not seem s to creep, nor this to flyNo words transpos ’d, but in such j ust cadenceAs though,hard wrought, m ay seem th

’

effect o f chance .

“Dr . Johnson censures Waller fo r us ing the expletive do very

frequently, ‘

though he lived to see it alm ost universally ej ected .

’

Waller (Lives 1 . Cf . P ope, E ss ay on Criticism 3 47 . Drydenis not care ful to avo id the explet ive ; there a re four exam ples o f it

in the fir st fifteen lines o f Absa lom and Achitophel.ls ‘

He som etim es uses the ob solete term ination o f verb s,’ saysD r . Johnson o f Waller, m entioning this a s another ‘abatem ent

’

o f

his‘

excellence in ver sifica tion.

’

6P ope,E ssay on Cr iticism 3 64.

7I bid . 3 45:

‘

Though o ft the ea r the open vowels t ire .

’

But c f .

his rem ark s on h iatus, Letter s 1 . 58. P ope says that in all Mal

herbe’s poem s he found but one exam ple o f h iatus .

—Letter s 1 . 78 .


consonants ; the mus i c must be full, clear, and continuallyvar ied .

1 The rhyme must be exact,2

and must fall on

naturally accented syllables, not onweak words l ike of, to,etc . I f to all these virtues the poet could add the sweetness o f all iteration, for which Waller was famed, and theonom atopoeic skill displayed by Dryden in his song for

St . Cecil ia’

s day, and by P ope in his Essay on Criticism ,

he was in a fair way to escape the censure that awaitedthe careless craftsman. To be a good craftsman, a thor

ough master of the technique of rhym ing, was“

the chie f

ambition of the poets o f the new generation. For it theywere wi l l ing to surrender al l claim to those rarer graces

that lie beyond the reach o f art .

While this emphasi s upon correctness and pol ish in

ver sification naturally led to a sim i lar emphas i s in the

choice of words, the reform began in F rance w ith a notable

antic ipation of Wordsworth ’s preference for the l anguageof the lower and middle classes . Of the l iterary principlesof Malherbe, P etit de Julleville write5

3z'

‘

E lle se réduit aun petit nombre de préceptes, plutot négati fs ; com m e de

décrire les choses par leur traits les plus généraux ; de

relever seulement, par une harmonie savante et un habile

arrangement, des idées et express ions si s imples qu’en des

mains m oins adro ites el les sembleraient purement pro

sai'

ques . Cette s impli cité presque banale des termes

1 ‘

T is all we can do to give sufiicient sweetnes s to our languagewe m ust not only choose our words for elegance, but fo r sound ;to perform wh ich a m astery in the language is required ; but thepoet m ust have a m agaz ine o f words, and have the art to m anagehis few vowels to the best advantage, that they m ay go further.H e m ust also know the nature o f the vowels, wh ich are m oresonorous, and wh ich m ore so ft and sweet .

’—Ker 2 . 215-216 .

2See Johnson’

s rem arks on Waller’s rhym es .

—Wa ller (Lives I .

P ope’s rhym es were not always exact ; see the list o f inexactrhym es in the concordance to P ope . Klop stock rem ark ed uponDryden’s carelessness in th is respect to Wordsworth, who defendedDryden.

—B . L . 2. 178.

3H is toire 4. 9

-1 0 .

POETIC DICTION IN ‘MODERN TIMES’ 2 7

employés lu i faisait dire que les crocheteurs du P ort au

F o in étaient ses maitres en fait de langage .

”As M al

herbe sought his language among the‘crocheteurs,

’

the

Royal Society in England turned to the l anguage of‘arti

sans, country-m en, and merchants ’ for clear and effective

expression.

1 Although the Royal Soc iety was interested inthe sim plification of English prose style for the sake of

scientific clearness, rather than o f artistic beauty, it helped

to establish a new ideal . The s ins o f English prose werethe s ins o f English verse also ; and Sprat

’

s cri tic ism o f the

misuse o f ornament in the one was equally appli cable to

the other .

The ornam ents o f speech have m u ch degenerated fromthei r original use, wr ites Sprat .

2 ‘

They were at fir st, nodoubt, an adm irable instrum ent in the hands o f wise m en

when they were only em ployed to descr ibe goodness,honesty , obedience, in l arger, fairer, and more m oving

im ages, to represent truth clothed w ith bodies, and to bringknowledge back again to our very senses, from whence it

was at fir st der ived to our understandings . But now they

are generally changed to worse u ses ; they are in open

defiance to reason, pro fess ing not to hold much correspondence with that .

’

F inding this bad habit of speech utterlyat variance with al l scientific honesty, the Royal Society‘

is most r igorou s in putting into execution the only rem edythat can be found for this extravagance .

’

A ccordingly itexacts from all its m em bers a ‘close, naked, natural way

o f speaking ; pos itive expressions, clear senses ; a nativeeasiness, br inging all things as near the mathem ati cal

plainness a s they can; and pre ferr ing the language of

artisans, country-m en, and m erchants be fore that o f witsand scholars .

’

1The parallel with the Lyrica l B a llads is recognized by P ro fessor

Raleigh, who com m ents on the difference in purpose also .

—Introduction to the selections from Sprat, in Craik , English P r os e 3 . 27 0 .

2Sp ingarn 2 . 1 17—1 18.


Of course the language of artisans, country—m en, and

merchants’ played l ittle part in the verse o f Dryden

’

s day

but a ‘

natural way o f speaking’

was rel igiously cultivated .

Every rem nant o f the older diction which had persisted in

poetry, but not in the spoken language,was unconditionally

banished . This vehement obj ection to words and phrases

that had become purely l iterary was due to the causes that

inspired a sim ilar reform on the part o f Wordsworth . By

a j udicious combination of the turns o f speech especiallyconsecrated to verse, an i gnorant or uninspired rhymester

could conceal his own lack o f invention or skill, and could

fill up a line With som ething which looked l ike poetry, butwas not . The

‘dism al sl aughter ’ of this time—honoredpoeti c diction is humorously described by Robert Wo lseleyin 1685

1:

‘

The eds went away w ith the for tos and the

untils in the general rout that fel l on the whole bodyo f the ther eons, the ther eins, and the therebys, when

those useful expletives, the althos, and those most con

venient synalaephas,’

m ids t,’

m ongs t,’

gains t, and’

twixt,

were every one cut off ; which dismal sl aughter was fol

lowed by the utter exti rpation of the ancient house of the

ther ebys and the ther efrom s, etc . Nor is this reform ationthe arbitrary fancy of a few who wou’d im pose their own

private opinions and practi ce upon the rest of their coun

trym en, but grounded on the authority of Horace,who tel lsus in his Epistle D e Art e P oetica that present use i s thefinal j udge of l anguage (the verse is too wel l known to

need quoting ) , and on the common reason o f mankind,which forbids us those antiquated words and obsolete

idiom s o f speech whose worth tim e has worn out, how wel lso ever they m ay seem to stop a gap in verse and suit ourshapeless imm ature conceptions, for what is grown pedanticand unbecoming when ’

t is spoken w i ll not have a jot thebetter grace for being wr it down.

’2

1Sp ingarn 3 . 27 .

2Malherbe said that ‘

ce qui est banni du langage, do it l’etre del ecriture .

’-P et it de Julleville,H is toir e 4. 679.

POETIC DICTION IN ‘MODERN TIMES’ 29

In this attem pt to m ake verse approxim ate to the spoken

language, D ryden even goes so far as to obj ect to any

departure in verse from the norm al order of words inprose, and particularly condem ns a manner i sm frequent inthe F em ele Vagrah t

l in thefir st volume of Lyrical Ballads

the habit of so inverting the order that the rhyme falls on

the verb .

‘

And therefore I adm ire that some m en shou ldperpetually stum ble in a way so easy, he remarks,2

‘

and,

inverting the order o f words, constantly close their l inesw ith verbs, which, though comm ended som etim es in wr iting Latin, yet we were whipt at Westminster i f we u sedit twi ce together . I know Some who, i f they were to writein blank verse, Sir , I ask your pardon, would think

it sounded m ore hero i cally to write,“Sir , I your pardon

ask .

” 3 I shou ld j udge him to have l ittle com m and o f

Engl ish whom a necess ity o f rhym e would force upon thisrock ; though som etim es it cannot eas ily be avo ided ; and

indeed this is the only inconvenience w ith w hich rhym e

can be charged . This is that which m akes them say rhyme

is not natural, it being only so when the poet m akes aviciou s choi ce of words, or places them, for rhym e

’

s sake,so unnaturally as no m anwou ld in ordinary speaking ; but

when it is so j udic iously ordered that the fir st word in the

verse seems to beget the second, and that the next, til l that

becomes the last words in the l ine which in the negligenceof prose would be so, it mu st then be granted that rhym e

has all the advantages o f prose, besides its own.

’

Thissounds very much like Wordsworth ’

s suggestion that poetry

1 No joy to see a neighboring house, or strayThrough pastures not his own, the m aster took ;My F ather dared his greedy wish gainsay .

The F em a le Vagrant, lines 41 -43 .

1Ker 1 . 6 .

3But com pare the preface to the works o f Waller, 1690 , which

expresses the new ideals also . There Waller is praised for givingfirm ness and po int to his lines by clos ing them w ith verb s, ‘

in

which we know the li fe o f language cons ists .

’


is only the language of prose w ith metrical beauty superadded, though every reader must be aware o f a subtle

difference which cannot now be defined .

A lthough Dryden did not often succeed in preserving the

order of prose in rhymed couplets, he was careful to do so

in his blank ver se . The result of his attempt may be seenin the fo llowing passage from Antony ’

s dying speech to

Cleopatra,1 which has the simpl ic ity and pathos too often

lacking inDryden’s dramas :

But grieve not, wh ile thou stayest

My last d isastrous tim es .

Think we have had a clear and glorious day,And Heav

’

n d id kindly to delay the stormJust till our close o f evening . Tenyears ’ love,And not a m om ent lost, but all im provedTo the utm ost j oys,—what ages have we lived !And now to die each o ther’s ; and so dy ing,While hand inhand we walk ingroves below,

Whole troop s o f lovers ’ ghosts shall flock about us,And all the train be ours .

But Dryden did not accept the ideal o f Malherbe w ithoutquestion . H e m ade certain m odifications which al l tendedin the direction of greater freedom and expressiveness .

A lthough M alherbe was content with the speech of the‘crocheteurs,

’

he also bel ieved in the abol ishment of allspecial terms ; he would employ only so much of the vocab

ulary o f the porters a s was generally intel l igible . This,of course, was a good principle, but it was subj ect to

mis interpretation and abuse . Onthis account Dryden scorn

fully oppo sed it . Dr . Johnson, the most notable r epresen

tative of this F rench ideal in England, i s forced to devote

several paragraphs to the refutation of Dryden’s statementthat the use o f general terms

2serves only to conceal the

1 A ll for Love 5. I (Works 5.

10 1 course the type o f language opposed to general term s was

not specific descriptive adj ectives, etc ., but the cant term s, the

slang o f particular pro fess ions . But the phrase wa s o ften given awider application.


and censure,1o ften led to a temporary reaction against the

new standard of good sense and regular ver sification—inhis defense o f poeti c l icense in the preface to the F all ofM an, for example, and in hi s attempt to recapture some

o f the ri chness of the old blank verse in All for Love.

There is o ften a kind of wistfulness, a s wel l as a manlyand unaffected reverence, in his apprec iation of Shake

speare and M ilton . He was not altogether unconscious of

the ancient l iber ty and power which were departing fromEnglish verse,not to be recovered until the days of Words

worth . For the loss of this l iberty, and the creation of a

substitute poetry more obnoxious than all the unpruned

growths of the metaphys ical imagination, Dryden himsel f

was respons ible, as we shall see ; but this was largely theindirect result of some deficiencies in his own poetic gi fts .

Hi s precepts, l ike his most characteristi c practi ce, were in

favor of that selection of the‘language actually used by

m en’

which he called ‘plain Engl i sh .

’

But Dryden’

s blunt, heedless, vigorous spirit was naturally incl ined to those very sins against which his criti cismwas often directed . He knew how to be simple, and s imple

in so homely and manly a style that one o f the fir st sym p

toms of the reaction against P ope was a preference for the

bolder rhythms and plainer language of Dryden .

2 But he

did not know how to be pol ished

1Dr . Johnson speaks o f Dryden’s favorite pleasure o f d iscred it

ing his predecessors . D ryden (Lives 1 . A s im ilar com plaintseem s to have been m ade in Dry den’s li fet im e.

‘

I am m ade a detractor from m y predecessors, Whom I do confess to have been m y

m asters in the ar t,’he writes .

—I bid . 1 . 3 49,note 4.

2In speaking o f the advantage o f us ing s im ple and hom ely lan

guage,Warton says : ‘

Dryden o ften hazarded it, and gave by it asecret charm and a natural air to his verses .

’

As an exam ple, hequotes

Sir Balaam now, he lives like other folks,He takes his ch irp ing p int and cracks his j okes .

‘Live like yourself ’ was now m y Lady’s word,And 10 ! two puddings sm oked upon the board .

—Essay 2. 175.


M ODERN TIMES’ 3 3

Even cop ious Drydenwanted or forgotThe last and greatest a rt, the a rt to blot .

The importation of this somewhat alien virtue into Engli shverse requ ired an artist of more patience and address .

Such an artist was P ope. He completed the work of

reforming and refining the l iterary language by the standard of wel l-bred conversation in England, som ewhat as his

master,Boileau, completed the work of Malherbe in F rance .

In his hands the conception of a ‘

selection of the reallanguage of m en

’ lost the more universal character thatDryden was incl ined to give it, and was more regu larlyassociated with the ideal of correctness, and the avoidanceo f everything vulgar .

P ope, indeed, was j ust the man to finish such a work,after it had been inaugurated by a m an of greater intel

lectual initiative than he . Although endowed w ith little

originality of m ind,he was by nature a poet and an artist

m ore of a poet, perhaps, than the world was ever permitted

to discover, more exclusively an artist than any other Engl ish poet .

’ In him the purely artisti c im pulse seem ed to

predom inate over every other . All his joy and ambitionlay in the skil fu l adaptation of m eans to the attainment of

a des ired end . But he readily accepted the end proposed

to him by others . In an age which emphasized good sense,he devoted a l i fetim e to bringing reason and rhyme

together . 1 WhenWalsh told him that the only virtue yetto be attained in English poetry was the virtue of correctness, he determ ined that, before his death, the English

shou ld boast this Virtue also . While poets were strugglingwith an unper fected m edium , he dem onstrated how bri lliantly and eas ily a m ere lad could do what they onlytr ied to do . In his hands the couplet was condensed to

the l ast degree o f condensation, and pol ished to the highestbeauty that pol ish alone can confer . In this del ight inskil l —ih the exercise o f it, and the fine and astonishing

resu lts of it— lay the secret of his whole activity .

1P reface to the M is cellaneous Works of P ope, 17 16 .


But in all this he really made no original m odification ofwhat he received from others . The ideal had been com

pletely defined before he adopted it . His cr itic ism , m uch

more than his poetry, is summ ed up in his own fam ous

words :‘What o ft was thought, but ne

’

er so wel l express’

d .

’

His critic ism ,m ore than his poetry, we say, because in

poetry he seems to have pos sessed a del i cate and original

ve in of his own that in a different age might have madeo f him a very different poet . In his willingness to let

others do his criti cal thinking for him, he unconscious lystifled impu lses which might have resu lted in something

bes ides the m ost airy and subtly m al i cious o f satires . The

forms that his imagination took when the carefully cl ippedwings happen to attain to som e brief fl ight—as in the fairymachinery o f the Rape of the Lock, or the m ediaeval back

ground of E loisa and Abelard— reveal a grace ful and

romantic spirit; He had a gi ft o f pathos, too . Under all

the glossy language of Eloisa and Abelard and the E legyon the Dea th of cm Unfor tuna te Lady, there is a real substance o f patheti c thought . The impress ion derived from

these deviations from the normal course o f satiri cal and

didacti c verse IS strengthened by num erous instances o f hisrom anti c taste in his letters, by his l i felong love o f the

F aerie Queene, and by the quality and m usic o f his early

verses on sol itude . Had his artisti c am bitions and his

wonder ful skil l in imitation been inspired by other modelsthan Waller, and Dryden, and Bo ileau, England m ight havelost a sparkling satirist, and gained a lyr i cal poet .

This Wordswor th always realized . To P ope he never

denied what he denied to Dryden-l—the possess ion o f the

true poeti c gi ft . Had P ope trusted more to his nativegenius, and less to the praise which his boyish display inthe pastorals brought him , said Wordsworth, he could

never have descended to the pos ition o f an im m ediately

popular poet . This descent Wordsworth ascribes to his

boyish inexperience when he began to write, and to his

POETIC DICTION IN(MODERN TIMES, 3 5

inordinate love o f praise .

1 P erhaps it m ay be a s j ustly

ascr ibed to that strong artisti c and histr ionic instinct

which led him to take m ore del ight in a character del iberately adopted or created than in the qual ities that were hisown. Such a dispos ition is sufficiently obviou s in his

plotting li fe .

However this m ay be, Pope threw all his artistic am bi

tion into the per fection of the F rench ideal already naturalized inEngland by Dryden, and partly suggested to P opehimsel f by Bo ileau . This ideal was the Horatian doctrineof a po l ite and well—bred mean in language a s in l i fe . The

poet m ust be.

fam i l iar, but not vu lgar,2 careful ly avo idinglow and r u sti c express ions on the one hand, and bom bast on

the other hand, j ust a s a gentlem an avo ids pom po s ity and

constraint o f m anner w ithout being coarse or awkward, orfail ing to do the r ight thing at the r ight time . The pleasant

ease o f the m an,

to the m anner bo rn, the elegant and

unadorned s im pli city o f the wel l -dressed lady—these correspond in l i fe - to the ideal of pol iteness in l iterary expres

s ion. Just a s the wel l -bred m an does what the rest of thecom pany are doing, qu ite naturally and grace fu l ly, neverpretending to invent m anners and cu stom s for him sel f so

the poet must use the language that other people talk, givingit only the inconspicuous, yet all-pervading charm of an

exqu is ite propr iety in the cho ice and application of it .

This gentlemanly scorn for unseem ly ornam ent is expressedby the you thfu l P ope in the E s say on Criticism .

3

Words a re lik e leaves ; and Where they m ost aboundMuch fruit o f sense beneath is rarely foi md .

False eloquence, lik e the pri sm at ic glass,I ts gaudy colors spreads on every p lace ;

1E ss ay Supplem entary to the P r efa ce .

1 ‘

A s there is a difference b etw ixt s im plicity and rustic ity, so the

express ion o f s im ple thoughts should b e p lain, but not clownish .

’

P re face to the P a s tor a ls .

3E s s ay on Criticism 3 19

-

3 3 3 . In a letter to Caryll, P ope givesexpress ion to his pre ference fo r s im plicity, in term s that a re m uch


The face o f Nature we no m ore surveyA11 glares alik e,without d istinct ion gay .

But true express ion, lik e the unchanging sun,

Clears and im proves whate’er it sh ines upon;I t gilds all ob j ects, but it alters none.

Express ion is the dress o f thought,1 and stillAppears m ore decent a s m ore suitableA vile conceit in pom pous words expressedI s lik e a clown in regal purple dressedFo r different styles with d iff erent subj ects sort,As several garb s with country, town, and court .

The difference between this ideal of simpli city and that ofWordsworth is not easy to define . Like the difference

between the courtesy of a kindly, well -bred man and the

passionate gentleness of a Bernard of Clairvaux, it is not

so much a matter of outward conduct as of degrees o f

intens ity and purity in the spirit that suggests and control sthe outward action .

In his attempt to attain this urbane simpli city, P openeither spared the file nor shunned the flames that Horace

so mer cilessly recommends to young writers .

‘Wi ththe unwearied application of a plodding F lemish painter,who draws a shr imp with the most minute exactness,

’

saysCowper,

2 ‘

he had all the genius of one of the fir st masters .

Never, I bel ieve, were such talents and such drudgeryunited .

’

He found as much pleasure in correcting as in writ

m ore like Wordsworth : ‘

I have o ften found by experience thatnature and truth, though never so low and vulgar, are yet pleas ingwhen openly and without ar tifice represented ; insom uch that itwould be d ivert ing to m e to read the very letters o f an infant, couldit write its innocent incons istencies and tautolog ies j ust a s it thoughtthem .

’-Letters 1 . 190 .

1 ‘Language is the apparel o f poesy .

’-Sir William Alexander, in

Sp ingarn 1 . 182 .

‘Language is the dress o f thought .

’—D ryden (Lives1 . Wordsworth told DeQuincey that it wa s h ighly unphi10 50 phical to call language the

‘dress o f thought .

’

He would call it the‘ incarnation o f thought .’

2 Cowper, Letters 4. 168-169.


M ODERN TIMES ’ 3 7

ing,

1and not in correcting once, but many t imes .

‘

A fter

writing a poem , one should correct it al l over with one s ingle

view at a tim e,

’

he told Spence .

2 ‘

Thus for language, i fan elegy ,

—“these l ines ar e very good, but are they not in

too hero i cal a strain ‘

In translating both the I liad and

the Odyssey my usual method was to take advantage of

the fir st heat ; and then to correct each book, fir st bythe original text and then by other translations ; and lastlyto give it a reading for the ver sification only .

’3 But after

he had thus used the file, he did not always spare the

application of the flam es .

‘ I have prevented not only manymean things from seeing the l ight, but many which Ithought tolerable. For what I have published I can only

hope to bepardoned ; but for what I have burned I deserveto be praised .

’4

The result of this unwear ied effort was that, within the

sphere which he had made his own, he set an exam ple o f

fine and conscientious wordmanship that might be appliedwith advantage to other types of poetry . But this sphere

was a very l im ited one . When he carried the ideal o f‘

what oft was thought, but ne’

er so wel l expressed’ outs ideof the field of experience of which he himsel f was a proper

j udge, the badness of the thought or the lack of thoughtwas m ade only m ore perni cious by that pol ished grace withwhich he uttered it . Nothing cou ld be more different, forinstance, than P ope

’

s‘ inter iors ’ and his

‘ landscapes ’ —toborrow term s from painting . The s implicity, the exactness, the use of familiar and specific term s to des ignatefam i l iar and specific things, in the fir st, are only equaledby the glossy vagueness o f the second . As an exam ple of

this difference we may com pare the reference to

I corrected because it wa s a s p leasant for m e to correct as to

write .

’—P re face to the M is cellaneous Wor ks of P ope 17 16 .

2

Spence’

s Anecdo tes, p . 27 0 .

3I bid ., p . 23 .

‘P ret

'

ace to the Miscellaneous Wor ks .

3 8 WORDSWORTH ’S THEORY or POETIC DICTION

The dark som e p ines that o ’

er yon rock s reclinedWave h igh, and m urm ur to the hollow wind,The wandering stream s that shine between the h ills,The grots that echo to the tinkling rills,The lak es that quiver to the curling breeze,1 etc .

with the fo l lowing

In the worst inn’s worst room ,with m at half-hung,The floor o f plaister, and the walls o f dung,On once a flock—bed, but repaired w ith straw,

With tape-t ied curtains,never m eant to draw,

The George and Garter dangling from the bed

Where tawdry yellow strove w ith d irty red,

Great V illiers lies .

2

I f, as Joseph Warton said,with a disapproving glance at

some of P ope’s work,‘

The use, the force, and the excel lenceof language certainly cons ists in raising clear, com plete,and circum stantial im ages, and in turning readers into

spectators,’3 Pope o ften succeeds in writing very forcibly

and excel lently . I t i s inthis mali cious cho i ce and assemblage

of specific and character isti c circumstances, in the a irys impli city w ith which he calls a spade a spade, that his

power as a satir ist l ies . This power, of which he gives so

few i llu strations in landscape and ideal ‘

h istor i cal ’ paint ing,i s always conspicuous in his genre pictures . He does not

name or characterize the blossoms in a ‘

flowery mead’

;

but he does nam e the contents o f Bel inda’s to ilet—table .

The tasks of the shepherds in the pastorals are indicated in

the vaguest terms, but the game of cards in the Rape of theLock is descr ibed in all its com plicated technical details .

In Wordsworth ’

s patheti c use of‘natural l ittle circum

stances ’ in his narrative of the ru ined cottage, he is putting to nobler uses the ar t of being specific which he

m ight have learned from P ope, or from P ope ’

s disc iple,Goldsmith .

1E lois a to Abelard 155- 160 .

2M or a l E s s ays 3 . 299-

3 0 5.

3Essay 2. 165.


naturally take in fall ing from the l ips of an extemporaryspeaker, yet without meanness, harmoniously, elegantly,and without seeming to displace a syllable for the sake of

rhyme, i s one of the most arduous tasks a poet can undertake . He that could accomplish this task was P rior .

’

Where could we turn for better examples o f verse which

speaks the language o f. prose without losing its own proper

charm, than to the beginning of the eighteenth century

to the sparkl ing bans m ots of P ope,the co lloquial negligenceo f P rior, the naivete

’

and occas ional tenderness o f Gay, and

even the‘close, naked,natural way o f speaking

’

that Swi ft

carried into rhyme from his prose ? But beyond their ownl imited field their taste and imagination become less sure,and various elements corrupt the bright simplic ity .

In the fir st place, there is the universal ignorance o f or

indifference to natural phenomena, combined w ith the arti sti c

ambition to do what other poets had done before them, and

do it better . The beauty of the external world has always

held an important place in poetry, because m en in general

are interested in it . Storm and sunshine, the clouds andthe stars above our heads, and the famil iar flower s at ourfeet, have been the universal and permanent background of

all human experience, and are inevitably associated w iththe memory and express ion of it . P oets s ing the ‘glories

of the rol l ing year ’ as naturally a s we all begin a soc ial

conversation with a remark about the weather . Hence a

generation which was interested in writing good and effec

tive verse, but whose own experience was mainly associated

with the streets of London, naturally made use of this

traditional matter of poetry ; but, s ince it was used as a

traditional element for the sake o f an artisti c effect, and wasnot brought to the test of exper ience by either the writeror the reader, the consequence was that the style in

which these things were described was usually affected bythe lack of genuine knowledge and feel ing behind the style .

Sometimes, when Wordsworth condemns the language of

POETIC DICTION IN ‘

M ODERN TIMES ’ 4 1

his'

predecessors, he is re fer r ing only to the fals ity of the

substance . I t is as easy to tel l a lie in the language o f the

lower and middle classes as in the language of the court .

Bad descriptions of nature were not always written in

phraseology in itsel f gaudy and inane .

This, perhaps, is true of the famous description by

Dryden which Wordsworth parti cularly condem ns 1

All things a re hushed a s Nature’s self lay dead ;The m ountains seem to nod the drowsy head .

The little b irds in dream s their songs repeat,And sleep ing flowers beneath the night dews sweat .

EvenLust and Envy sleep ; yet Love deniesRest to m y soul, and slumber to m y eyes .

2

Here is no poeti c diction . The language is s imple, con

crete, and touching . The only trouble is that it does not

tel l the truth . No one who ever really saw the solemn

outl ines of the mountains at night could write or enjoy the

second verse . Yet the l ines are, in some respects, so

artistic that it is not difficult to see how such writing as

this could lull not exceedingly vigilant powers o f observationto s leep along with the drowsy mountains, and could

encourage lesser m ortals to imitate the falsehood, wherethey could not rival the ar t. Just as the moonl ight on our

gaudy modern stage, flooding trees and flowers that are

l ike no trees and flower s that ever grew, somehow producesan effect analogou s to that produced by the peace and sil

very beauty o f actual moonl ight, so these words suggest

the quiet and lonel iness o f the sleeping world . The effecto f any given passage depends on m uch besides the truthof the separate details . The cadence, the associations of

the words, the var ious arts o f repetition and em phas is, haveal l their own share in the general im pression. In this case,for instance, the m ind under the spel l o f the soft flow o f

the metre and the refrain- l ike recurrence of the word sleep1Essay Supplem entary to the P r eface.

1The IndianEm per or 3 . 2 (Works 1 .


and its synonyms, is as l ittle incl ined to question the

drows iness of. the mountains as it is to inqu ire how these

plural mountains came to be provided with only one head .

I t is only a counter fe it poetry, cheating the unwary ; but it

has an artfu l appearance of‘

nature and s impli city .

’

But Dryden himsel f seems to have been unable to dis

tinguish the genuine metal of poetry from the gilded sub

stitute, at least in his own productions— as a glance at the

example of imaginative boldness that he cites in the P re

face to the F all of M an wi ll show .

1 His criti cal instinct

was r ight, but his imaginative feel ing was not .

‘I admirehis talents and genius highly,

’

wrote Wordsworth to S cott,2

when Scott was getting out his edition of Dryden,‘

but

his is not a poetical genius .

3 The only qualities I can hndin Dryden that ar e essentially poetical a re a certain ardor

and im petuos ity of m ind w ith an excel lent ear . It may

seem strange that I do not add to this great command o f

language ; that he certainly has, and o f such language too,as it is most des irable that a poet should possess, or ratherthat he shou ld not be without . But it i s not language thatis, in the highest sense o f the word, poetical, being neithero f the imagination nor of the pass ions—I mean of the

amiable, the ennob-l ing, or the intense passions . I do notmean to say that there i s nothing of this in Dryden, but a sl ittle, I think, as is poss ible cons idering how much he has

1He cites the following as his own m ost success ful attem pt to

im itate the im aginative boldness o f M ilton:Seraph and cherub, careless o f their charge,And wanton, in full ease now live at largeUnguarded leave the passes o f the sky,

And all d issolved in halleluj ahs lie .

This, he says, is im itated from V irgil : Invadunt ur bem , s om no

wih ogne s epultam .

‘A city’s b eing buried is j ust as proper an occas ion as an angel’s b eing d issolved in case and songs o f trium ph ! ’

Ker 1 . 188.

2L . W. F . 1 . 20 8-210 .

3 W'

ordsworth agrees with M ilton, who said Dryden was a goodrhym ist, but no poet .

—P re face to Newton’s M ilton, p . 8.

POETIC DICTION IN ‘MODERN TIMES’ 4 3

written . You w il l easily understand m y m eaning when Irefer to his ver sification o f P alam on and Ar cite,

1as com

pared w ith the language of Chau cer . Dryden has neithera tender heart nor a lo fty sense of m oral dignity . When

ever his language is poetically im pass ioned, it is m ostly on

unpleas ing subj ects, such as the foll ies, vices, and crim es

of m en or o f individuals . That his cannot be the language

o f im agination m u st have necessar ily followed from this

that there is not a single im age from nature in the whole

body of his wor ks ; and in his transl ation from V i rgil,whenever Virgil can be fairly said to have his eye on the

obj ect, Dryden always spoils the passage .

"2 AlthoughDryden was not essentially a poet, his energy and even

grandeur o f m ind, the natural sw i ftness and fir e whichwere really intellectual qualities, but which o ften sim u latedthe glow o f real passion, together with a rem arkable facility , enabled him to produce an excel lent substitute for

poetry . This seem ed to be qu ite satis factory to an age

1Wordsworth’

s statem ent m ay be illustrated by com paring the

linesArcite, false traytour wikk e !

Now a rtow hent, that lovest m y lady ao,

Fo r whom that I have al th is peyne and wo,

And a r t m y b lood, and to m y counseil sworn.

>z< >r< a:

I wol b e deed, o r elles thou shalt dye,Thou shalt not love m y lady Em elye,

w ith Dryden’

s vers ion,where struggling tenderness has wholly givenway to self-com placent and oratorical wrath :

F alse traitor,Arcite, traitor to thy blood,Bound by thy sacred oath to seek m y good,Now a r t thou found forsworn fo r Em ily,And dar est attem pt her love fo r whom I die .

Hope not, base m an, unquest ioned hence to go,F o r I am P alam on, thy m ortal foe.

2As an illustration o f this com pare ZEneid 4. 522

-

527 with Dry

den’

s vers ion.


which had lost the old gi ft of song, and was cutting itsel f

off from the springs o f imaginative feel ing in nature and

common li fe .

I t was due to this natural lack of at least one type of

imaginative feel ing, rather than to any theory of poetic

diction, that Dryden became the creator o f the elegances

and flower s of speech so dear to the heart of the eigh

teenth century, so obnoxious to the taste of the nineteenth .

As far as can be discovered from his numerous prefaces,his only purpose with respect to language was to give a s

clear and correct and melodious a reproduction of the cur

rent speech as poss ible. I f his ambition o ccasionally soaredhigher, it showed itsel f only in the w istful effort to writewith some of the splendor and spirit of his less refinedpredecessors . Hence the fal sity o f such a description as

that j ust quoted seems to be due to some unconscious bl ind

ness, rather than to del iberate intention . The same is true

of the elegant phrases which Dr . Johnson takes to representa new achievement in verse . Most of them are singularlyuninteresting ; but, for som e reason, they took hold of the

poetical imagination of his successors . For instance, there

is the adj ective ‘

watery .

’ ‘

To him the ocean i s a “waterydesert,

” a “watery deep, a “watery plain,

” a watery

way,” a “

watery reign.

”The shore is a “

watery brink,or a “

watery strand .

”F ish are a “

watery l ine, or a“watery race . Sea -birds are a watery fowl .” The

launching o f ships is a “watery war .

”Streams a re

“watery floods .

” Waves are“watery ranks . The word

occurs with wearisome iteration in succeeding poets .

’1

Such manneri sms seem to be due to the heedlessness o f

a man writing with great facil ity, but i gnorant o f, or indifferent to, the phenomena he mentions . He seizes upon them ost obvious, and, at the sam e time, the most matter—of—factand uninteresting detail, and then, when he perceives the

1 Myra Reynolds, The Tr ea tm ent of Na ture in English P oetry,

D 3 9

POETIC DICTION IN ‘MODERN TIMES, 45

necessity for varying his expression, he acts l ike the cleverwr iter . that he is rather than the sympathetic observer that

he is1

110 1 : instead o f m entioning a new detail, he merelythinks of a synonym for the expression that he has already

used . In this way all the tiresome array of stock phrases

that mean nothing cam e into being . Most of them r ingmonotonous changes upon the m ost obvious features o f

things, such as the fact that the ocean is composed of

water, that birds have feathers and fish have fins . To cal l

fish the ‘finny race’

is not to say anything new or interesting about them to vary the express ion to the ‘

scaly tr ibe’

is only to m ake matters wor se . Yet it is easy to see that

all these atrocities might be produced, w ith no intention of

thus distinguishing poetry from prose, by any m anwho was

trying to write wel l without knowing what he was talking

about . In fact, the sam e kind of diction occurs in prosewhich attempts to deal with the same kind o f subj ect

m atter .

These two characteristics of Dryden’

s treatment of

natural phenomena— the pervers ion o f the facts for the

sake o f heightening a s ingle im press ion, and the use of set

phrases indicating, as Wordsworth said, nothing more thanthe knowledge that a bl ind man could pick up concerning

the fam il iar but ever- changing aspects o f Nature— these

Vi cious tendencies were also strengthened by the gallantryof Waller and his im itators, who m ade all the m ighty

powers of earth and sky subservient to the glory of som e

fair lady or som e all-power fu l nobleman.

In prais ing Chloris, m oons, and stars, and sk ies,A re quick ly m ade to m atch her face and eyesAnd gold and rub ies, with a s little care,To fit the color o f her lips and hair ;And, m ixing suns, and flower s, and pearl, and stones

M ak e them serve all com plexions at once .

1

‘

At the death o f any il lustrious m an or fair lady all naturewas convulsed w ith grie f . When Caelestia died the rivu

1Butler, Sa tir e on a Bad P oet; quoted by M iss Reynolds, p . 3 1 .

46 WORDSWORTH ’S THEORY 0 17 POETIC DICTION

lets were flooded by the tears o f the water-gods, the browsof the hills were furrowed by new stream s, the heavens

wept, sudden dam ps overspread the plains, the l i ly hung itshead, and birds drooped their w ings . WhenAmaryllis hadin formed nature o f the death of Am yntas, all creation“began to roar and howl with horrid yel l .” When ThomasGunston died j ust before he had finished his seat at New

ington,Watts declared that the curling vines would in griefuntwine their amorous arms, the stately elms would dropleaves for tears, and that even the unfinished gates andbuildings would weep . In love-poetry nature i s frequentlyrepresented as abashed and discomfited before the superior

charms of some fair nymph . Aurora blushes when she sees

cheeks more beauteous than her own. Li l ies wax pale withenvy at a maiden’

s fairness . When bright Ophel i a comes,l i l ies droop and roses die before their lo fty rival . So the

sun, when he sees the beauti ful ladies in Hyde P ark,

Sets inblushes and conveys his firesTo d istant lands .

And when that m odest luminary is aware of the presenceo f the fair Maria

,he

Seem s to descend w ith greater careAnd, lest she see him go to b ed,

Inblush ing clouds conceals his head .

Nature i s thus constantly compelled into admiring subm is

s ion to som e Del i a or Phyll is or Chloris . Even furtherthan this do the poets go . They m ake all the beauty of

nature a direct outcome of the lady’s charm s . In the gardens at P enshurst the peace and glory of the alleys wasgiven by Dorothea’s m ore than hum an grace . No spotcou ld res ist the civil iz ing effect o f her beau ty .

The extravagance o f speech stood a s the s ign o f an intensity o f feel ing that did not exist . The poet wa s not sweptaway by overwhelm ing pass ion. He worked out his verseswith consc ious del iberation . A lady—love was one of the


cleverly as he could . But this easy manipulation of all themighty fram e o f Heaven and earth, of the changeless stars

and the wayward winds, to suit the purposes of everygallant poetaster, served, l ike Dryden

’s rhetoric about the‘drowsy mountains,

’

to cultivate an indifference to the

facts . Scribblers soon fel l into the way of tell ing the same

kind of falsehoods when there was no reason for so doing,and this despite their inabil ity to do it as cleverly as theirunscrupulou s masters—though perhaps they did not knowthat . We shall have an example o f the ridi culous results

o f this habit later .

7 But meanwhile it is obvious that, in all this fine writing,dulness o f vis ion i s o ften matched by deadness o f heart .

And this brings us to Wordsworth ’s second indictmentagainst the language of the period . I t is heartless, he

says . Here again the real fault i s something greater and

deeper than the choice of a certain type o f vocabulary but

it resulted, almost unconsciously, or at least unintentionally,in the habits of speech that became poetic diction .

Uncontrol led by a true sens itiveness of heart, the language

of pass ion (which i s the language of poetry ) suffered the

same fate that attended the natural imagery . As the cleverwriter varied his descriptions, not by adding a new detail,but by finding a new synonym, so he varied the metaphor

i cal del ineation of feel ing, not by recurring to the original

em otion, but by finding parallel and analogous express ionsfor what had already been said by himsel f or some other

poet . It was a process of building bricks without straw .

When he did go abroad for his material, he naturally wentto the writers that preceded him,especially to the Latinwr iters . There he could find the best material from

Nature already selected and arranged—poeti cally pre

digested, as it were. Why shou ld he confuse himsel f, andwaste time and energy, re—examining the original crudeand unmethodized source, when poets that he could trusthad already done so, and had reported upon what they had

POETIC DICTION IN‘MODERN TIMES, 49

seen ? Why should he not devote his talents to improvingthe use of what they had chosen ? To us Blair

’

s statement1

that Milton’

s L’

Allegro and [ l P enseroso were storehouses

of natural imagery from which all later poets had drawn,immediately suggests the question ? But why did they not

go to the greater storehouse that l ay at their very doors ?

Why did they not m erely do as M i lton had done—take awalk some fine morning, and tel l what they saw ? How

cou ld they dream of assuming the dignity of poets merelyby ‘descr iptions copied from descriptions, by imitations

borrowed from im itations, by traditions, imagery and

hereditary s imiles, by readiness of rhym e and volubil ity

of syllables .

’

But, after all, the fault lay neither w ith the

habit of im itation, nor w ith the laudable am bition to write

wel l from which this habit proceeded . P ope ’

s Im ita tiom ofH oruce ar e not lacking in or iginality or appropriate sim

plicity of language . W ithin their own proper field all theseideals o f expression, which we are so ready to condem n,worked excellently . The fact that the poets of the age

were less success ful in the wider fields beyond was partlytheir fau lt, but partly also their mis fortune . When theyventured away from the fam i l iar streets and pol ite circlesof London, they left behind them

‘

the hearing ear and the

seeing eye,’ and ‘

the feel ing heart also . And without theseeven the standards o f Wordsworth would be useless .

To the type o f diction that inevitably developed wherepoets lacked the touchstone of personal observation and

genu ine feel ing, P ope m ade som e special contributions o f

his own. Since he really had a better eye for natural

beauty , and m ore rom antic tenderness o f feel ing, than som e

of his predecessors,his imagery is o ftenm ore exact, and hisl anguage of pass ion less frigid than theirs . In him we

rarely hnd the shameless and absolute prevari cations of

which D ryden and Waller were capable . Yet his s ins in

this respect were bad enough . His motto—which, to fit his

1Blair, Essays onRhetoric, p . 3 19.


case, may be varied to‘What oft was tried, but ne

’

er so

wel l per formed’ —o ften led him to commit all the sins of

his age . The result i s a s ingular unevenness . In one l ine

of the P as torals he remarks, quite grace fully and s imply,1‘Now hawthorns blossom and now daisies spring’ in

another he inanely announces2

The turf with rural daint ies shall be crown’

d,

While opening bloom s ditIuse the ir sweets around .

In Windsor F or es t we hnd such couplets as these3:

See P anwith flocks,with fruit P om ona c rown’

d,

Here blush ing F lora paints the enam ell’

d ground,Here Ceres’ gi fts inwaving prospect stand,And nodd ing tem pt the j oy ful reaper’s hand .

But these are shortly fol lowed by des criptions of tolerable

concreteness :4

See ! from the brake the whirring pheasant springs,And m ounts exulting on trium phant wings :Short is his joy ; he feels the hery wound,F lutters in blood, and pant ing beats the ground .

Ah ! what avail his glossy vary ing dyes,H is purple crest, and scarlet—circled eyes,The vivid greenhis sh ining plum es unfold,His painted wings, and breast that flam es with gold ?

But, even in the passage where he is employing thi s moreconcrete language, we noti ce an ar tificiality in the style,which proves, upon closer analysi s, to consist mainly in

the habit of balancing one hal f of the l ine against,

the

other .

‘

Now hawthorns blossom’

exactly balances ‘now

dais ies spring’ ;‘

See P anwith flocks’ i s paralleled by ‘

w ith

fruit P omona crown’

d’

; and‘his purple crest’ is paired

with ‘s carlet—circled eyes .

’

This antithes i s i s o ften

achieved at the expense of truth and grammar .

‘I could

1Spring 42.

2

Mid. 99-1 0 0 .

3 Winds or F ores t 3 7-40 .

4I bid. 1 1 1-1 18.

POETIC DICTION IN‘MODERN TIMES’ 51

never get the blockhead to study his gram m ar,’ said Swift .

In the . l ine,‘

See P an with flocks, with fru it P omona

crown’

d’

, he suggests that P an is crowned with flocks .

Even E loisa has enough sel f—possess ion for a few neat

antitheses .

‘I mourn the lover, not lament his fault,’

she

says, adding very shortly 1

How happy is the blam eless Vestal’s lot !The wor ld forgetting, by the wor ld forgot

Eternal sunshine on the spotless m ind !Each prayer accepted, and each wish r esign

’

d;

Labor and rest that equal periods keep ;Obed ient slum bers that canwak e and weep ;D eszr es com pos ed, affec tions ever even;

. Tea7‘s tha t delight, and s ighs tha t waft to heaven.

This mannerism was emphati cally condem ned by Wordsworth a s one of the worst features o f the sty le of Pope‘

These intellectual operations (while they can be conceived

o f a s operations of the intel lect at all, for in fact one hal f ofthe process is mechanical,words do ing their ownwork andone hal f of the l ine manufactur ing the rest ) remind m e of

the motions o f a posture master, or of a man balancing a

sword upon his finger whi ch m ust be kept from falling a t

all hazards . Why was not this s imply expressed

without playing with the reader ’s fancy, to the delu s ion and

dishonour of his understanding, by a trifling epigram m ati cpo int

When to the regular antitheses and epigram m atic pointsof Pope were added the flower s and elegances o f speech

already invented by Drydenand Waller, and when the

unscrupulous falsification o f the obvious facts of naturewas encouraged by a popu lar obj ection to everything ‘

Vul

gar, the poetic diction which Wordsworth was later to

E loisa to Abelard 20 7 -212 .

See Wordsworth’

s detailed analys is o f an ep itaph by P op e,in Upon, Epitaphs, P art 2, Wordswor th

’

s Literary Cr iticism , pp .

1 18- 122.

52 WORDSWORTH ’S THEORY or POETIC DICTION

abol i sh was already fairly wel l developed . But the theoryof it was not . While it was everywher e stated that poetrymust be refined, there is, with the s ingle exception of a

notable utter ance by Addison, to be quoted later, virtuallyno evidence for bel ief that verse should be distinguishedfrom prose, or from cultivated conversation o f the same‘

refined’

type, by a special vocabulary or l i censes of gram

mar and syntax . In 1 7 0 0 Wordsworth ’

s declaration that

there ne ither is nor ever can be any essential difference

between the language of prose and the language of verse

would probably have seemed less strange than it seemed

in. 18oo .

As far as difference was recognized, it is the differencethat Wordsworth himsel f was willing to concede . P oetry,being the language of pass ion, naturally reproduces the

peculiarities of emotional speech in a freer syntax and

order of words, and in a more highly figurative express ion,than is necessary in prose . This was especially emphas ized,though not happily il lustrated, by Dryden,

1 who derived his

ideas from Longinus, and by John Dennis,who, more than

any other critic of the time, o ften anti cipates Wordsworth ’s

point of view .

One other distinction was commonly made : poetry, evenmore than prose, must speak a general language, a lan

guage intel l igible to all . A failure to perceive in what

the universality o f language cons i sts led to the monstrous

doctrine that poetry must employ only general terms .

This principle, so unhappily applied in the ei ghteenth cen

tury, was later adopted by Wordsworth and Coler idge,with very different results, as we shall see .

Moreover, cr itic ism in the early ei ghteenth century wasnot wholly bl ind to the merits o f a s im pli city that wasnot also refined . Steele l iked the directness and concreteness o f unlearned col loquial speech

z; Addison remarks that

1Ker 1 . 185- 186 .

1Guardian 23 . Cf . Ham elius, Die Kritik in der Englisrheh

Litera tur des I 7 . and 1 8 . Jahrhunder ts, p . 99.

POETIC DICTION I N‘MODERN TIMES, 53

there is m ore in'

com m on between the plain language of the

popu lar ballads and the maj esti c s im plic ity o f V irgil, thanbetween the style of V irgil and that of such fanci fu l writersas Cowley1 P ope thinks that he would l ike even the style

o f an infant if it cou ld write down its thoughts with alltheir innocent redundancies j ust as they com e

2 Sw i ft

doubts the wisdom of the boasted reform o f the language

after the Restoration, and thinks that only the influence of

the Bible and the P rayer Book upon the speech of the simple

people‘

keeps the English tongue from utter degeneracy .

3

These are only tem porary reactions, perhaps, but they are

not w ithout significance .

Hence it m ay be seen that the cr itic ism of the per iodwas not the source of the false ideals which Wordsworthand Co ler idge were later to com bat . The age o f P ope did

not develop the conception of a special language for poetry,although it alm ost unconsciou sly produced such a language .

F or the theory of a special diction for poetry we mustsearch among the confused and various utterances of the

generation suc ceeding P ope, and almost unconsciously

beg1nn1ng to react aga1nst him .

2 . The Reac tionAgains t P op e.

In the per iod between the publication of P aradise Los t

and the appearance o f the S easons, the cr itic ism and the

practice o f poetry had been of a definite and sel f- consistent

character . To draw pos itive conclusions concerning it i s

not difficult . But this can hardly be said o f the rest of

the century . There is a breaking up o f the old cr itic1sm ,

w ithout a very definite form ulation o f a new . The only

notable exceptionto this sta tem ent is Joseph Warton’

s Essay

on the Genius and Writings of P ope . Warton stands

1Spec ta tor 7 0 .

1 Letters 1 . 190 .

3A P r oposa l for Cor r ec ting , Im pr oving, and As cer taining the

English Tongue (The P r os e Works of Jona than Swift 2 .


fairly and squarely for an ideal of poeti c express ion in all

essential respects different from the practice, i f not from

the critic ism, of the early eighteenth century ; and his

brave rebel l ious remarks in 1 756 becom e the source o f the

most vital discussion of poetic style for the next fifty years,and lead directly to the reform of Wordsworth . But the

Opinions o f the other criti cs are more difficult to classi fy .

Doctor Johnson, the great exponent o f the so- called class i cal

ideal, is as loud in his obj ection to the‘

exploded deities ’

of Greece and Rome as he is Latinized in vocabulary ; and

he ins ists upon a respect for the usual grammar and forms

of spoken discourse in verse as warmly as he defends the

use of general term s, and the elegances and flower s o f

speech . Johnson’s disciple, Goldsmith, recommends the

hero i c couplet and the device of per sonification,1 while allhis own natural sym pathies and his own practice are in

favor o f a patheti c and even homely s impli city unknown tothe pol ished generation

'

of P ope, to which he looks backwith some regret . On the other hand, Gray,

‘

who was at

the head of those who, by their reasonings have attemptedto widen the space o f separation betwixt prose and metrical

composition,’2 was also the centre o f a new and regenera

tive influence which revealed itsel f in a more picturesqueim agery, and a free and beauti fu l cadence; in the later

poetry of the century .

S ince this is so, it will be wel l s imply to quote the notableindividual utterances on poeti c diction, and then proc eedto exam ine the resu lt of the rather chaoti c ideals of the

century as revealed in the average verse of Wordsworth ’

s

own time—the sort o f verse that‘

was appearing in the

magaz ines of 1 796 .

S ince the ‘poetic diction’ of the English Augustan age

was the outcom e of the practice, rather than the del iberatetheor ies, of Dryden and his fol lowers, the expression of the

1Oh M etaphors (Works 1 .

1P re face to the Lyrica l Ba llads .

56 WORDSWORTH ‘S THEORY OF POETIC DICTION

obj ects themselves . Thom son was accustomed to wander

away into the country for days and for weeks, attentive to“each rural sight, each rural sound, while many a poet whohas dwelt for years on the Strand has attempted to describefields and rivers, and generally succeeded accordingly.

Hence that nauseous repetition o f the same circumstances

hence that di sgusting impropriety o f introducing what maybe called a set of hereditary images, w ithout proper regardto the age, or climate, or occasion in which they were

formerly used . I f our poets would accustom

them selves to contem plate fully every obj ect before theyattempted to describe it, they would not fail o f giving theirreaders more new im ages than they generally do .

’1

Not only does he obj ect to the fals ity and vagueness of

im agery in the poetry o f the eighteenth century ; he i s al sodisposed to scoff at stilted refinem ent, and to recommend

language more natural and touching . He praises as‘pathetic to the last degree’ the l ines from Jane Shor e :

Why dost thou fix thy dy ing eyes uponm e

With such an earnest, such a p iteous look,As i f thy heart were full o f som e sad m eaningThou couldst not speak,

adding that the few words,‘

Forgive m e, but forgive m e’

in this play exceed the most pompous declamation o f Cato .

2

Of course Warton’s critic ism was not only the cause butthe effect of a change in taste . Everywhere there were

indications of this change—of an increasing interest in

nature and common l i fe and the romanti c past beyond theage o f refinem ent . Almost all the poetry of note in the

generation preceding Wordsworth heralded his coming, and

gave the impulse to his genius . But Joseph Warton i sespe cially noteworthy, as clearly and distinctly formulating

1Cf . Wordsworth, P re face to the Lyrical Ba llads : ‘I have at all

t im es endeavored to look steadily at m y sub j ect ; consequentlythere is, I h0 pe, in these poem s little falsehood o f description.

’

1Essay 1 . 27 3 -274.

POETIC DICTION IN‘MODERN TIMES’ 57

the new ideal Whi ch was var iously illustrated in the poem s

of Thom son, Go ldsm ith, Cowper, and even Gray .

Warton’

s good work was carr ied on by a much less intelligent person— John Scott o f. Amwell, who is of interestto us because his E ssays were read by Wordswor th in his

youth . Although his rem arks are vitiated by a ratherund1scr 1m inating em phasis on what he believes to be ‘

cor

r ectness,’

he ins ists, even m ore earnestly than Warton, onclear and character istic imagery ; and he has no mercy on

the old periphrastic diction.

‘

Blushing F lora,’

he says,1

‘

is the quaint and indistinct language o f. a schoolboy ; for

why F lora s hou ld blush no i g ood reason has ever beendiscovered .

’

But while the criti cism was thus underm ining the influence o f the poeti c diction, the conception of a special

usage for poetry, which had been incidentally suggested

by Addison, began to becom e w idespread .

‘

3 . Theories of P oetic Dic tion.

The theory of a special diction for poetry was the resultof the em phas is placed by Dryden and P ope upon the selec

t ive power of the poet, and upon the value of im itation.

The poet must employ the current speech, but he m ust also

avoid everything vulgar or unintel l igibly specific . Moreover,-he was perm itted, even advised, td incorporate into hisverse the happiest inspirations o f his predecessors . The

resu lt was the developm ent of the notion that there is a

special language of poetry— a treasure of fine phrasesdescending from bard to bard, and especially consecratedto the u ses o f the im agination. In general, the term poetic

diction was applied only to these ‘

hapv

py com binations’

o f

words . T ranspositions o f words from the order of prose,the co ining o f new words, the u se o f strange form s, etc . ,

1Essays on the Writings of S everal English P oets , p . 72.


were all condemned by m en l ike Dr . Johnson and Goldsmith, who represent the purest class ical ideal in this

respect, and whose critic ism is echoed in the reviews of

Wordsworth ’s day .

But there was a less popular conception of the special

language of poetry which permitted a slight departure from

the stri ctness o f prose in the matter of vocabulary and

syntax, provided this did not obscure the intell igibil ity of

the verse . Oi this conception Addison’s analys i s of the

style of M ilton, according to the standards of Ari stotle, i sperhaps the best example .

Hence there arose two types o f poetic diction, represent

ing the class i c and the rom antic traditions— if we may em

ploy those vague but convenient terms . The one, imitat

ing the exam ple o f Dryden and P ope, retained the grammarand syntax, and, for the most part, the vocabulary of prose,but em ployed the happy combinations of words recom

mended by Dr . Johnson ; the other, imitating M i lton and

Spenser, the poeti c m odels in the reaction against P ope,rejected the phrases and ver sification of the hero ic couplet,but made use of the old words and ‘ l icentious transposi

tions’ so emphati cally condem ned by Dr . Johnson and

the reviewers . The various m odifications o f this ideal of

a special language for poetry may be seen in the followingtypical quotations

°

1 . Add ison1 : I f clearness and p ersp icuity were only to be con

sulted, the poet would have noth ing else to do but to clothe histhoughts in the m ost plain and natural express ions . But s ince it

o ften happens that the m ost obvious phrases, and those wh ich a re

used in ord inary conversation, becom e too fam iliar to the ear,

and contract a k ind o f m eanness by pass ing through the m ouths of

the vulgar, a poet should take particular care to guard h im selfagainst id iom ati c ways o f speak ing . M ilton has but few fa ilings in thi s kind, o f which, however, you m ay m eet with som e

instances, as in the following passages

1 Criticism s of P aradis e Los t, ed. Cook, pp . 21-23 .

POETIC DICTION IN‘MODERN TIMES, 59

Em bryo s and idiots, idiots and friars,White, black , and gray,with all their trum peryHere p ilgrim s roam .

A while d iscourse they hold,No fear les t dinner coot—when thus beganOur author.

Who o f all ages to succeed, but feelingThe evil on him brought by m e, will curseMy head ? I ll fare our ancestor im pure,For this we m ay thank Adam .

The great m asters in com pos ition know very well that m anyelegant phrase b ecom es im proper , fo r a poet or an orator when it

has been debased by com m on use . The j udgm ent o f a poetvery m uch discovers itself in shunning the com m on roads o f express ion, w ithout falling into such ways o f speech as m ay seem stittand unnatural ; he m ust not swell into the false sub lim e by en

deavo ring to avo id the other extrem e.

Addison then proceeds to enum erate the ways by which,according to Ari stotle, the language o f verse m ay be dis

tinguished from that of prose, and il lu strates them by

reference to P aradis e Los t. They a r e

1 . The use of m etaphor . (But the poet is not to have

recourse to this when the proper and natural words wil l doas wel l . )2 . The use of idiom s of other tongues .

‘Under this

head may be reckoned the placing the adj ective after thesubstantive, the transpos ition o f words, the turning the

adj ective into a substantive, with several foreign modes of

speech which this poet has natural ized to give his versethe greater sound, and throw it out o f prose .

’

3 . Use of several old words or words new ly co ined

(m is cr ea ted, hell—a’oom ed,

However, Addison bel ieves that M ilton has taken thesel iberties rather too frequently, and has thereby stiffened

and obscured his sty le . But he adm its that this l i cense is

perhaps m ore necessary in blank verse than in rim e .

‘

Rim e,


without any other ass istance, throws the language off from

prose.

’

2. Gray1 : The language o f the age is never the language o f

poetry ; excep t am ong the French, whose verse, where the thoughtand im age does not support it, differs in nothing from prose . Ourpoetry, on the contrary, has a language peculiar to itself, to wh ichalm ost every one that has writtenhas added som eth ing by enrich ingit with fore ign id iom s and derivat ions : nay, som etim es words o f

their own com pos ition o r invention. Shak espeare and M ilton havebeen great creators this way ; and no one m ore licent ious thanP ope or Dryden, Who perpetually borrow express ions from the

form er. Let m e give you som e instances from Dryden, whomevery one reckons a great m aster o f our poetical tongue z—full o fm useful m opings, unlik e the trim o f love, a pleasant beverage, aroundelay o f love, stood s ilent in his m ood, with knots and knares

deform ed . But they a re infinite and our language not beinga settled thing (like the French ) has an undoub ted right to wordso f a hundred years old, provided ant iquity have not rendered themunintelligible. In truth, Shak espeare’s language is one o f his principle b eauties . Every word inhim is a p icture.

3 . Johnson1 : Language is the dress o f thought ; and as the

noblest action o r the m ost graceful action would be degraded and

ob scured by a garb appropriated to the gros s em ploym ents o f

rustics or m echanics, so the m ost hero i c sentim ents would lose theirefficacy, and the m ost splend id ideas drop the ir m agnificence, i fthey are conveyed by words used only upon low and trivial occas ions, debased by vulgar m ouths, and contam inated by inelegantapplications . Truth is indeed always truth, and reason is alwaysreason; they have an intrins ic and unalterable value, and constitutethat intellectual gold wh ich dehes destruct ion: but gold m ay be so

concealed in baser m atter that only a chem ist can recover it ; sense

m ay be so h idden in unrefined and plebeian words that none butph ilosophers can d ist inguish it .

There was therefore be fore the tim e o f Dryden no poetical diction: no system o f words at once refined from the grossness o f

dom estic use, and free from the harshness o f term s appropriated topart icular arts . Words too fam iliar o r too rem ote de feat the purpose o f the poet . F rom those sounds wh ich we hear on sm all o ron coarse occas ions we do not eas ily rece ive strong im press ions o r

delight ful im ages ; and words to which we a re nearly strangers,

1 Letter to Richard Wes t, April 4, 1742 (Letters 1 .

1 Life of Cowley (Lives 1 . 58) Life of D ryden (Lives 1 .

POETIC DICTION IN(MODERN TIMES,

whenever they occur, draw that attention to them selves which theyshould transm it to th ings . Those happy com b inations o f wordswhich distinguish poetry from prose had b een rarely attem pted we

had fewelegances or flower s o f speech .

4. Goldsm ith1 : I t is indeed am az ing, a fter what has b een doneby Dryden,Addison, and P ope, to im prove and harm onize our nativetongue, that their successors should have tak en so m uch pains toinvolve it into pristine barbarity. These m isguided innovators havenot been content with resto r ing antiquated words and phrases, buthave indulged them selves in the m o st licent ious transpositions, andthe harshest construct ions, vainly im agining that the m ore the irwritings a re unlike prose, the m ore they resem ble poetry ; they haveadopted a language o f their own, and call uponm ank ind for adm irat ion. All those who do not understand them a re s ilent, and those

Who m ak e out their m eaning a re w illing to praise to show theyunderstand. From these follies and affectations the poem s o f

P arnell a re entirely free ; he has cons idered the language o f poetrya s the language o f li fe, and conveys the warm est thoughts in the

s im p lest express ion.

The var ious opinions here so strongly expressed wereweakly echoed in the average criti cism s of the last

decades o f the century— in Bl air ’s E ssays on Rhetoric, for

exam ple, and in the Critical Review . It becam e a tru ismthat ‘

our language has a special diction for poetry’

; but

this special dictionwas u sually definitely l im ited by the tasteo f the cr itic, and o f the parti cular poets whom he chose

to regard as m odels . The fo l lowers o f Spenser and the

fol lowers of P ope each regarded the poetic diction o f the

other as entirely w ithout ju stification, and were incl ined to

appeal to the standard o f spoken language to reenforcetheir argum ents . But meanwhile Burns and Cowper hadbeen s ilently preparing the way for another ideal— the one

by employing the language o f the lower and m iddle classesin his own land, and the other by illu strating his own ideal

of expression—‘

to m ake verse speak the language of prosewithout being prosaic, to m arshal the words of it in such

an order as they m ight naturally take in fall ing from the

1 Life of Thom as P arnell (Works 4.


lip s of an extemporary speaker, yet without meanness,harm oniously, elegantly, and w ithout seeming to displace a

syl lable for the sake of rhyme .

’

4. P oetic Diction in 1 7964 797 .

But, as Coleridge says, in order to understand the reform

of Wordsworth, we must also make ourselves acquaintedwith the sort of verse that was appearing when he began

to write. I t happens that some o f the most typical examples

o f such verse a re to be found in the M onthly M agazine,

which was also publishing the revolutionary efforts of Coleridge and his friends . Apart from the productions of

these young innovators, and apart also from a few del iberat-e imitations of Cowper and Coll ins and Gray, this versedivides itsel f into two types, or two variations upon one

type . The d ifference consists in the ver sification rather

than the language.

On the one hand, we find examples of the hero i c couplet

and all the periphra sti c elegances associated therewi th . Of

this type the fol lowing translation from Lucretious i s a

good example

For thee the fields their flowery carpet spread,And sm iling Ocean sm ooths his wavy bed ;A purer glow the k indling poles d isplay,Robed inbright effluence o f ethereal day,When through her portals bursts the gaudy Spring,And genial Z ephyr waves his balm y wing.

F irst the gay songsters o f the feather’

d tra inF eel thy keen arrows thrill in every vein.

1

On the other hand, we hnd a large number o f effusions

in verse which,without materially differing from this spec im en in language, reveal the influence of Coll ins, Gray, andthe Wartons in a sweeter and freer ver sification borrowedchiefly from M i lton’

s minor poems . These poems (ifpoem s they may be cal led ) are characterized by a s l ightlysim plified, though hardly more specific, diction, and by a

1F ebruary, 1797 .


Now and then we hnd examples of natural imagery thati s not only hopelessly general but absolutely false—the false

ness consi sting in the unnatural personification displayedmost conspi cuously in those eighteenth- century verses inhonor of

‘nymphs’ before whom lofty trees bow in rever

ence, and roses blush to find their beauties rivaled by the‘ lovely fair .

’

The bad habits inculcated by this extravagant

gallantry lead poetasters into the most ridi culous falsificat ions—even when they are celebrating a Nature that doesnot suffer from competition with these distracting goddesses .

In the fol lowing effus ion the coming of the sun (Apol lo ) i sdescribed in the terms form erly used of the advent of some

lovely lady or dazz l ing lord

See ! As he com es,with general vo ice,All nature’s liv ing tribes rej o i ce,

And ownhim as the ir k ing ;Ev

’

n rugged r ocks their heads advance,

And for es ts on the m ountains dance,

And hills and valleys sing

Such verse in a magaz ine of good character gives point toWordsworth ’s rather sarcasti c reference to the school o f

good sense : ‘ I have at all times endeavored to look steadilyat my subj ect consequently there is, I hope, in these poems

l ittle falsehood of description, and m y ideas are expressed

in language fitted to their respective importance . Some

thing m u st have been gained by this practice, a s it is friendlyto one property of good poetry, namely, good sense .

’

This latter type has been quoted at som e

‘

length to show

that M . Legouis is hardly correct in saying2 that the influ

ence o f the l andscape school was respons ible for the poeti c

diction against which Wordsworth ’s efforts were directed .

This poeti c diction he describes as cons isting in those devia

tions from the order and syntax of prose which he finds inWordsworth ’s own early work . But, obviously, the one

1 June, 17971 The Ear ly Life of William Wordswor th, pp . 127- 1 3 4.

POETIC DICTION IN ‘MODERN TIMES, 65

thing that is not character isti c of contem porary verse is thisdeparture from the ordinary usage o f spoken language,e ither w ith respect to gram mar or cho i ce of words, i f we

regard the words separately, and not in com bination . Of

course there are a few examples of harsh constructions,such as the im itation o f the ablative absolute, rather com

m on in the poetry o f the later eighteenth century, and never

whol ly dis carded by Wordsworth . But, for the most part,the gram mar and syntax are correct and easy—as may beseen by looking back at the exam ples already quoted . Inthe fir st exam ple there is a s l ight departure in the first,third, and fifth l ines from the stri ct order of prose but we

do not feel the inversion to be so awkward as it is in the

l ines from Wordsworth cited by M . Legouis . Moreover,the gram m atical construction is quite s im ple and regular .

In the second extract only the clause,‘

Give m e to

taste,’

seem s rather unusual in the spoken language . In thenext two poem s, however, the order is stri ctly that of

prose, and, apart from the word ‘ incense-breathing,’

ther e

is not a word which might not be heard in fairly cultivatedconversation.

‘

This, with one or two exceptions, is true

o f the other verses . On the whole, one could hardly

expect in any age to hnd verse of the average characterwhich was less unmusi cal, or m ore s imple and clear in

construction, or which em ployed fewer words not heard inordinary speech . That these character istics are typical

may be seen by any reader who takes the trouble to examine

the m i scel lanies and magaz ines of the day . The boast

of the ei ghteenth century that it had at last made English

verse metri cally and grammati cally correct is borne out by

such an exam ination .

What then is it that removes the language of this verse

so far from nature and truth— for obviou sly this is not

the way in which sensible m en express themselves ? Whilesens ible m en use these words separately, they do not use

these combinations o f them . They m ay employ the words

genial, waves, balm y, and wing, at different times and for


d ifferent purposes, but, in order to indicate that a so ft andgentle breeze is blowing, they do not say that

‘genial Z ephyrwaves h is balmy wings .

’ In other words, the poetic dictionconsists, not in th e separate words, but in those ‘happycombinations ’ which, as Dr . Johnson says, d istinguishpoetry from prose . The peculiarity of these elegances of

speech is that they suggest an image,not by us ing the wordor words a ssociated with it in everyday experience, but byusing, in its stead, another image associated w ith it only inverse—a kind of accepted symbol for the image . Hence,instead of the clear and coherent pictures suggested simplyby a l ist of the commonnames of the phenomena that actu

ally occur together in nature—green grass, sunshine, andviolets, for instance, -we are given a heterogeneous mass

o f substitute images, which cannot be actually visual izedwithout somewhat r idi culous results . To such an end had

one attempt to make the language of verse approximate to

the language of typical conversation arrived ! Yet i t mustnot be forgotten that there had been such an attempt, even

at the bas is of this monstrous development .

F rom this long review it may be seen that, on the whole,the authors of the Lyrical Ballads were justified in believing that their theory and practice were in accordance w iththe best traditions of Engli sh poetry . I t may also be seen

that the question o f poeti c diction was exceedingly com

pl i cated, because it involved not only matters o f vocabulary

and grammar, but the far more diffi cult problems of rhet

oric, and the ultimate bas is of rhetori c inhum an psychology .

The special contribution of Wordsworth and Co leridge con

s i sted in their recognition o f these problem s o f psycho logy,and the ins ight and personal experience which they broughtto bear upon them . The bold young poets of the LyricalBallad s were merely restating an old propos ition; but theterms of the restatem ent were so striking, and the i l lustrations so or iginal, that the old ideal seem ed like a discoveryof their own. But how they them selves happened to m ake

the rediscovery we have yet to learn .

CHAPTER 3 .

WORD SWORTH ’S POETIC DEVELOPMENT PREVIOUS TO TH E

MEETING WITH COLERIDGE .

To trace the different pa ths by which the vigorous and

independent mountain—lad, and the dreamy but sociable

young phi losopher of Christ’s Hospital, arrived a t the same

ideal of s implic ity is not one of the least interesting of

l iterary inqu iries . I t is the more interesting because

s im pl icity was as l ittle characteristi c of the natural geniusof the one as of the other . The only poet of the age who

was normally as sel f—conscious and elaborate as S . T

Coleridge was W i l l iam Wordsworth . And yet, as Wordsworth said,

Though m utually unknown, yea, nursed and rearedAs i f in several elem ents,we were fram edTo bend a t last to the sam e d iscipline,P redest ined, i f two b eings ever were,To seek the sam e delights, and have one health,One happ iness .

1

The final character of this discipl ine was determined a s

m uch by the youthful development o f Coleridge as by thato f Wordsworth ; but s ince Wordsworth is, a s i t were, the

hero o f this tale, we m ust beginwith his early experim ents

in poetry and cr iti cism , and use those of Coler idge only

a s supplem entary and i l lustrative materialWordsworth ’

s l iterary career was rather precocious . H e

was something o f a critic before he was ten, and a really

skil fu l m aker of verses a t the age o f fourteen.

“ But even

before this he had unconsciously begun to lay the tounda

1P r elitde 6 . 254-259.

1The I diot Boy 3 3 7 - 3 3 8 .


tion of hi s future theory of poetry in those curious

imagina tive experiences described in the P r elude. No one

who l ives among the grand and lonely forms of nature

i s free from a touch of primitive superstition—from a

tendency to start at the sudden rustl ing of leaves in a forest,or to feel a strangenes s in the blowing of the wind, or themotion o f the sky above some unfrequented mountain

height . The facing of these inexpli cable but unconquerable

fears was the grand adventure of Wordsworth ’s boyhood .

Somet imes he was ignominious ly vanquished by them, a s in

that nocturnal experience when he seemed to feel the darkshape of the mountain at night stride after him ‘with

measured motion like a living th ing,’

and‘with trembling

oars ’ rowed back to the safe covert of the willow .

1 Moreo ften they entered suddenly into his consciousness in the

midst of the excitement of some physical explo it :

Oh ! when I have hungAbove the raven’

s nest, by knots o f grassAnd half-inch fissures in the slippery rockBut ill sustained, and alm ost ( so it seem ed )Suspended by the blast that blew am ain,Shouldering the naked crag, oh, at that t im e

While on the p erilous ridge I hung alone,With what strange utterance d id the loud dry windBlow through m y car ! the sky seem ed not a skyOf earth—and with what m otion m oved the clouds ! 1

To the haunting sense of strangeness in hi s contact with

nature were added many other d im and undeterminedfeel ings . Long a fterwards, in his talks with Coleridge

among the Quantock H i l ls, the -these .-thr .ew a

sudden light upon the old question of the character and

source of poeti c pleasure, showm g him that the poet might

be, as nature had been to him , the‘

teacher of truth through

joy and through gladness’ —a creator o f ‘

the faculties by

1P r elude 1 . 3 57-40 0 .

1P relude 1 . 3 3 0 -3 3 9.

WORDSWORTH ’S POETIC DEVELOPMENT 6 9

a

‘

process . and del i ght .

’1 This early del ight~ m

had been m ani fold in its. chara cter . Sometimes it was only

an eager and inquis itive interest in the actual forms and

appearances of things, a phys i cal del ight alm ost a s pure a s

it wa s violent. Som etim es it was a dim , hal f-pagan

sympathy with li fe 1n all things

a sense sub lim e

Of som eth ing far m ore deeply interfused,Whose dwelling is the light o f sett ing suns,And the round ocean and the liv ing air,And the blue sky, and in the m ind o f m an,

1

r ising at t im es into a stil l c ontem plative consciousness of

a world beyond the world of sense— of something which

had power to m ake our‘

no isy years seem mom ents in the

being of the eternal S ilence’3— in the l ight of which all the

so l id m aterial universe seemed to becom e a dream, a prospeet in the mind . H e wa s fam i liar, too, with the magicalworks of l ight and storm and mist and darkness among thehill s . He says o f the mountain shepherd :

When up the lonely brooks on rainy daysAngling I went, o r trod the trackless h illsBy m ists bewildered, suddenly m ine eyesHave glanced upon him d istant a few step s,In s ize a giant, stalk ing through thick fog,

H is sheep lik e Greenland b ears ; o r, a s he steppedBeyond the boundary line o f som e h ill—shadow,

H is form hath flashed upon m e, glorifiedBy the deep rad iance o f the setting sun

Or him have I descried in d istant sky,A solitary ob j ect and sub lim e,

Above all height ! lik e an aerial crossStationed alone upon a sp iry rock0 1 the Chartreuse, for worsh ip .

‘1

Letter to the Friend, Wordswor th’

s Literary Criticism , p . 68.

1 Lines com pos ed a F ew M iles Above TinternAbbey, 95-99.

3 lntim a ti0 1is of Im m or ta lity 159- 160 .

‘P r elude 8 . 262-275.


And such phenomena, produced by natural causes, had all

thfl

e'

im aginative boy, glori fying and transfiguring the com

monest things o f ever y day with the l ight of Vis ions and

strange dreams . Later , the transfigurationwas a conscious

a ct of his own imagination, stimulated as it was by muchreading among fairy tales and ‘

old rom ances .

1 1 A‘diamond

l ight,’ shed by the setting sun upon a wet rock in front of

the cottage,would make the boy’

s fancy as restless as itsel f

’

T was now for m e a burnished s ilver shieldSuspended over a knight’s tom b,who layInglorious, buried in the dusky woodAn entrance now into som e m agic caveOr palace built by fairies o f the rock .

1

These transpo rts and pure del i ghts of his boyhood, andthe renovation of spirit due to hi s memory of them andreturn to them, must have been recalled in the memorable

conversations which gave ri se to the Lyrical Ballads . Itthen occurred to the two friends that the effect of poetrywas quite analogous to the effect of these visionary appearanec s of nature—that i t was the function of the poet to fixtand retain for ever these momentary exaltations whi ch

a s fleeting as the phenomena which occasioned them .

Thus poetry—such an enshr ining of these experiences as

lThe Daffodils, The S olitary Reap er, or S tepping Wes t

lwaed~ m ight become what these memories were to Wordsiworth, a fountain of refreshment to which he returned

again and again

There are in our existence spots o f t im e,

That with a d istinct p re-em inence retainA renovat ing virtue,whence, depressedBy false op inion and content ious thought,Dr aught o f heavier or m ore deadly weight,

1

Cf. P r elude 8. 40 6-420 .


Down by thy s ide, 0 Derwent ! m urm uring stream ,

On the hot stones, and in the glaring sun,

And there have read, devouring as I read,De fraud ing the day’s glory, desperate !T ill with a sudden bound o f sm art reproach,Such a s an idler deals w ith in his sham e,

I to the sport b etook m yself again.

1

When he was s carcely ten years old, this joy in readingbegan to develop into a conscious del i ght in metri cal lan

guage, and he had learned to select from the passages his

father taught him, and the poss ibly more gaudy verse hechose for himsel f, the l ines and phrases that pleased himfor their lovel iness or pomp . He draws a charming pi cture

of himsel f and a ‘dear friend’ circling the l ake in a dewyearly morning befor e any one was abroad, and repeating

their favorite verses aloud with one vo i ce, a s happy, he

says, as the birds whose songs a ccompanied them . This

per formance would o ften l ast ‘

for the better part of two

del ightful hours .

’

One i s tempted to inquire whether theten-year-old Wordsworth had already memorized enough

verse to last through a two-hour rec itation, or whether hesaid his favorites over and over .

2

However th i s may be, his favorites were not such as hi smature r taste approved :

And, though full o ft the ob j ects o f our loveWere false, and in their splendour overwrought,Yet was there surely thenno vulgar powerWork ing w ith in us,

—nothing less, in truth,Than that m ost noble attribute o f m an,

Though yet untutored and inord inate,That wish for som ething lo ftier, m ore adorned,Than in the com m on aspect, daily garb,Of hum an li fe . What wonder, then, i f soundsO f exaltation echoed through the groves !Fo r, im ages, and sent im ents, and words,

1P r elude 5. 480 -490 .

2l bi

‘

d. 5. 552 ff .

WORDSWORTH ’S POETIC DEVELOPMENT 7 3

And everyth ing encountered o r pursuedIn that delic ious world o f poesy,Kep t holiday, a never-ending show,

With m us ic, incense, festival, and flowers 11

There could be no nobler tribute than this to the false idealsof poetic ornam ent which he was later to combat ! But

all the poeti c ideal s of the eighteenth century seem to have

influenced Wordswor th in succession. One reason why his

developm ent is so interesting is that, unlike Coleridge andLamb, he found his poetic inspiration, and the seeds of a

progressive growth toward the ideal he was eventually to

adopt, chiefly in the l iterature that was popu lar in the age

preceding him . Beginning a s a disciple o f P ope, he pro

ceeds, through an interest in the landscape- poets, to all the

s ins o f the revolutionary young writers of his ownday . He

therefore seems to represent in him sel f a whole period of

l iterary development .

I . A Dis ciple of P ope .

P erhaps som e of the‘

several thousand ’ l ines from P opewhich\Vordswor th cou ld repeat long after his attack on

P ope’

s language had begun to prove success ful,2 helped to

swel l his youthfu l recitations for in hisfir st attem pt at verseat the age o f fourteenhe shows him sel f to be a very cleverpupil o f the school of the her o i c couplet .

‘I was calledupon, among other scholars,

’

he said,‘

to wr ite verses uponthe com pletion of the second centenary from the founda

t ion of the school [at Hawkshead ] in 1585, by ArchbishopSandys . The verses were m uch adm ired, far m ore thanthey deserved, for they were but a tam e im itation of P ope’sver sification, and a little in his style . This exercise, however, put it into m y head to com pose verses from the

im pu lse of m y own m ind, and I wrote, while yet a school

1P r elitde 5. 569-583 .

1L. W. F . 3 . 122.

74 woanswom ‘

H’

s THEORY or POETIC DICTION

boy, a long poem running upon my own adventures, andthe scenery of the country in which I wa s brought up .

The only part of that po em which has been preserved is theconclus ion of it, which stands a t the beginning of my col

lected P oems .

’1 Although, as far as poeti c substance and

ori ginal ity are concerned, the Lines written as a S chool

Exercise a t H awhsheaa’2 deserve Wordsworth’s d i sparaging

remarks, the apparent ease with which he manipulates the

metre, without transgress ing the numerous rules laid downby the criti cs of the ei ghteenth century, is remarkable .

F ew passages of verse produced in the palmy days of the

couplet show so very l ittle variation from the ideal stand

ard, already described in these pages, as this effort of the

country schoolboy . There i s no unnecessary expletive in

the whole production, and hardly a single example of

hiatus 3 ; no wrenching of the a ccent, no unusual form of

a word . The rhymes are all exact, w ith the exception of‘driven’

and‘heaven,

’ and ‘grove’ and ‘move,’4 which are

usual in the hero i c couplet . There are only two alexan

drines,sand no tr iplets . Moreover, the construction of the

sentences is clear, and shows less departure from the normal

order o f prose than is common in this type o f verse ; for,despite D ryden’s stri ctures, there was always a tendencyto inve rt the order in a l ine, in such a way that the rhym e

fel l on the verb—a mannerism which was cons idered bysome an elegant improvem ent . There is a natural break

1 M em oirs 1 . 1 0 - 1 3 .

1Reprinted in the Ox ford ed it ion, pp . 618-619.

386 :

‘

And learn from thence thy own defects to'

scan’

is an

exception. Wordsworth was always care ful to avo id h iatus—m orecare ful than m ost poets o f the nineteenth century, to whose ears itwas less o ffens ive than the poets o f the preced ing century felt itto be.

11 -2, 1 3

-14.

5

40 , 62. Inboth cases the alexandrine is used with som e clim acticeffect at the end o f a period .

WORDSWORTH ’S POETIC DEVELOPMENT 75

at the end of every couplet . Th is easy, though somewhat

oratori cal, style m ay be i llu strated by the fol lowing extract1 °

No j arring m onk s, to gloom y cell confined,With m azy rules perplex the weary m ind ;No shadowy form s entice the soul as ide,Secure she walk s, P h ilosophy her guide .

Britain, who long her warriors had adored,And deem ed all m erit centred in the sword ;Britain, who thought to stain the field wa s fam e,

Now honour’

d Edward’s less than Bacon’ s nam e.

Her sons no m ore in listed fields advanceTo ride the ring, or toss the beam y lance ;No longer steel their indurated heartsTo the m ild influence o f the finer artsQuick to the secret grotto they retireTo court m aj est ic truth, o r wak e the golden lyre .

2 . A Dis ciple of the Lands cape-S ehool.

About this t im e Wordsworth ’

s newly awakened poetic

am bition received an im pulse which resu lted in som ething

better than this facile reproduction of the conventionalities

of the heroi c couplet, and the empty and gaudy im ageryassociated w ith it . On the way between Hawkshead and

Ambleside, he happened to noti ce the darkening boughs and

leaves of an oak—tree, outl ined clearly and strongly againstthe sunset sky . L ike so many of the things that he hap

pened to see for him sel f, the discovery o f this change in the

famil iar appearance o f things, wrought by the evening

l ight, cam e to him with the freshness and power o f a greatrevelation.

‘

The m om ent was im portant in m y poeti cal

history for I date from it m y consciousness o f the infinitevariety of natural appearances which had been unnoti cedby poets o f any age or country, so far a s I wa s acquaintedwith them ; and I m ade a resolution to supply, in som e

degree, the deficiency . I could not have been a t that tim e

1

49-62.


above fourteen years of age .

’1 The direction thus given to

his ima ginative energies seems to have determined h ischo i ce of read ing, and the nature of his experiments in

verse, unti l the end of his schooldays . Then the ‘stil l, sadmusi c of humanity’ entered his poetry as an even deeper

and more powerful impulse than this fir st vis ion o f the

marvels of the external world .

The fir st result o f this discovery o f his ownpowers seems

to have been a style o f much grace and s impli city, which

gradually developed into a morbid pecu l iarity of expres

s ion, and was regained only by a del iberate effort . The

only example s of this earl ier pur ity of d i ction that we

have ar e the extract,‘

Dear Native Regions,’ mentioned

by Wordsworth in the remark j ust quoted apropos of the

S chool Exer cise; the sonnet Written in very Early You th;

and the Lines written while sailing in a Boat, which with

the Rem em brance of Collins originally formed one piece .

None of these survives in its original form . For this reason

M . Legouis,2 com pa ring them with the

‘genuine sam ples’

o f Wordsworth ’

s early work, supposes thei r s impl i city tobe entirely the result of later correction. They are

‘

early

poems only in respec t of their subj ect-m atter,’

he says .

Thi s might seem probable—on the supposition that Wordsworth had but one early style—if it were not for two

important circum stances .

In the fir st place, Wordsworth prints the fir st two a s

Juvenile P oem s, along with the Evening Walk and the

D escrip tive S ketches ; and, with his usual scrupulous

honesty, prefixes to the group the following note 3 : ‘

Of

the P oem s in th is class, the Evening Walk and Des crip tiveS ketches were fir st published in 1 793 . They are reprintedwith some alterations that were chiefly made very soon a ftertheir publ i cation . I t would have been easy to amend them,

1 M em 0 i7's 1 . 67 -68 .

1The Ear ly Life of William Wordswor th, p . 121 .

3The M iscellaneous P oem s of William Wordswor th [ 1820 ] 1 . 64.

WORDSWORTH ‘S POETIC DEVELOPMENT 7 7

in m any passages, both a s to sentim ent and expression,and I have not been altogether able to resist the tem pta

t ion, as w i ll be obviou s to the attentive reader, in som e

instances ; these are few, for I am aware that attem pts

of this kind are m ade a t the risk of inj uring those chara cteristic features which, after all, wi l l be regarded as theprincipal recom mendations of j uveni le poems .

’ When heis temp ted into further alterations he adds to this com m ent

a further qualification1 :‘

This not ice, which was written

some time ago, sca rcely applies to the P oem )

“Descriptive

Sketches,”

as it now stands . The corrections, though

numerous, are not, however, such as to prevent its retaining w ith propriety a place in the class o f Juvenile P ieces .

’

But in neither of these notes does he mention the poem s

which M . Legouis considers early only in respect to sub

ject—m atter . Hence he m ust have cons idered his correctionsso sl ight and unim portant as not to detract in the least fromthei r original character . I t is inconceivable that a man who

applies the term ‘Juveni le P oems’

with such scrupulousaccuracy shou ld have s ilently included under that title piecesthat were early in substance only,not in style .

Moreover, it is not difficult to determ 1ne approximately

the degree of alteration in the case o f these poems . At

least, a detailed study of the nine different vers ions can

leave very l ittle doubt in the mind of the one who makesthe exam ination, though it is not very easy to condense theresults into a convincing proo f .

In the fir st place, these nine vers ions may be cla ssifiedas fo l lows :

1 . A poem of fourteen lines in octosyllabi c couplets,preserved in

(a ) The group o f j uvenile pieces, pr inted in the editionof 18 15, and reprinted w ith alterations in the editions o f

1820 , 1827, 183 2, 183 6, 1841 , and 1845.

1The P oetica l Works of William Wordswor th [ 183 6 ] 1 . 46 .

78 WORDSWO 'RTH ’S THEORY OF POETIC DICTION

(b ) A manuscript vers ion reprinted by Knight from a

notebook containing parts of Laodam ia, Ar tegal and Eli

ditre, Black Com b, the Dedication of The White Doe, etc .

(Wordswor th’

s P oetical Works 6 .

2 . The paraphrase in blank verse of the original poem

in P r elude 8 . 467-

475.

So many d ifferent versions, all purporting to represent theoriginal production, do suggest that the only permanentelement in the poem is the subj ect—matter . But a closer

examination sim plifies the matter . The variations are then

discovered to a ffect less than hal f the poem, and to be l imited, for the most part, to a wavering cho i ce between two

possibil ities . One source of the two possibil ities then

becomes obvious . An original poem in o cto syl labi c couplets

wa s paraphrased in blank verse for the P r elude; and thealterations suggested by the a ttempt to avo id rhyme, and

to expand tetrameters into pentameters, were then experi

mentally transferred to the original, and, in some cases,finally rej ected . The result i s that the latest version, which

now stands at the beginning of Wordsworth ’s collectedworks in the Oxford edition, probably represents the

earl iest form a s wel l as any except the first printed versionThe doubtful l ines in it may be eas ily indicated,

and the extent o f the doubt determined, by a comparison of

this w ith the paraphrase in the P r elude, and with the other

vers ions .

1 . The F inal Version ( that of (The doubtful

words or phrases are printed in italic s . )

Dear nat ive regions, I foretell,F rom what I feel a t this farewell,Tha t, wher es o

’

er m y s teps m ay tend,

And whenso’

er by course shall end,I f in that hour a single tie

Survive o f local sym pathy,My soul will cast the backward view,

The longing look alone on you .

8 0 WORDSWORTH ’S THEORY 0 1? POETIC DICTION

Since so much of the final version seems to represent theoriginal,we might be justified in taking it as character i sti cof Wordsworth

’s youth ful style without further ado . But

i f some of the l ines in itali cs can be proved to be less doubtful than they seem, this corroboration of our judgm ent will

be welcome . P erhaps the best way to decide thi s will be

to examine the questionable phrases one by one .

1 . Line 3 . The only reason for doubting this verse, andthe two other words in this stanza printed in italics, is fur

h i shed by the manuscript vers ion, in which lines 3 and 4read :

That, when the close o f li fe draws dear [sic ] ,1

And I m ust quit th is earthly sphere,

and in which tender tie oc curs instead of sm gle tie. In all

the printed vers ions, the fir st ei ght l ines are as they stand

in the last edition. The relation of these two variants to

each other, and to the original, cannot be determined . S ince

neither o f the rhyme-words occurs in the blank verse, ands ince the word close does occur there as wel l as in the manuscript vers ion, it is not unlikely that close originally stood

for end, and that the couplet had a different rhyme . This is

the more l ikely because there is nothing in the blank versewhich seems to stand for the l ine,wher eso

’

er m y s teps m ay

tend. This might have been added to furnish a rhyme for

end, i f the rhym e o f the couplet was altered from an earlier

form upon which the passage in the P r elude was based .

Concerning the variants, tender and single, no conclus ion

can be drawn . Tender looks l ike one of those experimental

and not very happy changes that Wordsworth o ften madeupon second thought, only to return at last to his ori ginal

inspiration . Whatever may be the truth concerning the

sl ight var iations in the fir st eight l ines, however, they do notseriously affect the character and style of the poem .

1I s th is a m isprint fo r whi ch P ro fessor Knight,not Wordsworth,

is respons ible ?

‘WORDSWORTH ’S POETIC DEVELOPMENT 8 1

2 . Lines 9—12 underwent m ore change than any other

part o f the Extract. In the edition of 18 15 they stood a s

fo llowsThus when the Sun, prepared fo r rest,Hath gained the precincts o f the West,

Though his departing radiance failTo illum inate the hollow Vale .

Al l the vers ions except the last present sl ight m odificationsof this phraseology ; but the instabil ity of the var iousgram mati cal relations in virtually the sam e group of words

seem s to indicate that there was som eth ing in the construc

t ion of the original with which Wordsworth was not quitesatisfied . This opinion is strengthened by the fact that l ine1 1 is incom plete in the manu scr ipt vers ion,where it is written, Though no can fail. P erhaps the truth is thatthe original rhyme-words were fail and vale, and Words

worth, after struggling in Vain to remove some blem i sh

w ithout altering the rhyme, finally imported the beauti fu lphrase m em orial gleam from the blank verse, and changedthe other l ine in the couplet to correspond with it . I t is

very likely that the word pr ecincts stood for the word

r egions in l ine 1 0 , s ince this occurs in all the other versions .

P erhaps, on the whole, the l ines in the edition o f 18 15

com e as near the ori ginal a s any . In any case, the sam e

idea and the sam e group of words seem to be present in allthe versions until, in the final edition, the puzz l ing twel fthl ine is mater ially changed .

3 . In l ines 1 3—14, the variants represent the tem porary

influence o f the blank verse . In the editions 1820 —1840 the

l ast l ine reads : Oh the dear m ountain- tops wher e firs t her ose, and in 183 2

- 1840 lus tr e is substituted for light . In

both cases the change in m etre in the blank verse m ay have

made necessary the change from a m onosyllabi c word,which was then trans ferred for a tim e to the original ver

s ion. The last l ine 1n the passage from the P r elude is

obviously the or iginal tetram eter expanded to a pentameter


by the easy substitution of m ountain—tops for hills . When,there fore,we hnd that the octosyl labic poem sometimes ends

with this decasyl labi c line,we may consider it a tempora ryintruder ; and bel ieve that the first printed version, themanuscript vers ion, and the last version, represent the

original when they read

A lingering light he fondly throwsOh the dear h ills where first he rose,

as opposed to

A lingering lustre fondly throwsOn the dear m ountain-top s where first he rose,

which so obviously echoes the blank verse . Hence the more

s imple and patheti c form, in this case, seems to be the

original .

The result of this examination seems to be z ( 1 ) that,of the words in itali cs, light and hills, and probably single,

represent the original ; (2 ) that in two of the couplets there

may have been a different rhyme, and a corresponding d i fference in phraseology ; and ( 3 ) that, while the rhymes inl ines 9- 1 0 seem to be permanent, there i s a s l ight variation

otherw ise . I f we ar e right in suppos ing that the part of

the poem which shows no fluctuation probably survivessubstantially as i t was first written, these changes reallyaffect its essential character very l ittle . Of course it may

be said that the comparison of a poem of 1 786,fir st printedin 18 15, with a paraphrase probably written between 1 799and 180 5, but not printed until 1850 , does not give verytrustworthy evidence concerning the original style . F or

aught we know, the passage in the P r elude may have beenrem odeled in accordance w ith the printed vers ion ofBut s ince, in all the public appearances o f the production,there is no trace whatever of a form essentially differentfrom the form printed by Wordsworth a s a juvenile poem,

there seems to be no reason for doubting the word of so

84 WORDSWORTH ’S THEORY or POETIC DICTION

s impli city of thought and feel ing in the Extrac t and theSonnet. But these latter poems seem to be productions o f

Wordsworth ’s school-days at Hawk sh-ead,while the earl iest

date for the other poem s i s 1 787, the yea r Wordsworthentered the university . Of these poems, the S onnet on

seeing M is s H elen M aria William s weep,1 publi shed

Ma rch, 1 787,while curiously exaggerated in thought, showsless departure from grammar and good usage than Ah

Evening Walk and the D escrip tive S ketches ; and, o f these

two, the l ater and more power ful poem is also “

the most

faulty with respect to style . Hence, for a time, Wordsworth ’s sins seem to increase with hi s increase in vigor andoriginal ity .

But, a s we learn from the P r elude,2

that fir st poeti c facultyOf plain Im agination and severe

was greatly impaired by the influx of new and alien expe

riences between the time that Wordsworth left, or wa s pre

paring to leave, his own na tive hills for the busy world,and the time when he returned to them, and found peace

of mind, and the lost s implicity of l i fe and style, among

the a ssociations of hi s boyhood . This unwholesome period

of hi s l i fe seems to correspond w ith the dates of the poem s

on which M . Legouis bases hi s study of Wordsworth ’

s

early style ( 1 787 I t i s distingui shed from his

vigorous and healthy childhood by the same marks thatdi stinguish the verse written at thi s t ime from the pro

ductions which we have taken to represent the work of his

school-days .

10 1

’ course it is not absolutely certain that Wordsworth wroteth is poem . The reasons for attribut ing it to him a re well stated byP ro fessor H arper (William Wordswor th I . 148 S ince the

authorsh ip is uncertain, I do not th ink it can furnish m uch evidenceconcerning Wordsworth’

s early sty le.

1P r elude 12. 89- 147 .


Ou the one hand, there is the loss o f the s impli city andunity o f imaginative feel ing associated w ith his del ight inexternal nature, and his unquestioning acceptance o f the

only type o f experience that he knew . The adaptation to

a new environm ent and to a new world o f ideas meant atem porary disorganiz ing o f his whole intel lectual l i fe, and

the growth o f a sel f—consciou s and analytic habit of mind,whi ch also showed itsel f in a disorganization of an earl ierand s im pler style .

Oni

the other hand, there is a distinct increase in intellectual power . F rom his gracefu l schoo l-boy work we

shou ld der ive very little notion o f the real m agnitude and

strength o f Wordsworth ’

s genius . H e seem s to be only

another disciple o f the [ l P ens eroso landscape—school of Coll ins,Warton, and Bowles, w ith a distinct vein o f his own,

perhaps, and occas ional fel ic ity of m elody or phrase, but not

essentially different or m ore power fu l . W ith the D escripive S ketches it is otherwise .

‘

Seldom , i f ever,’

wrote

Coleridge,1

,

‘

was the emergence of an original poetic geniu sabove the l iterary horizon more evidently announced . Inthe form, style, and manner of the whole poem , and in the

structure o f the parti cular lines and periods, there is a harshness and acerbity connected and com bined with words andim ages all aglow, which might reca l l those products o f the

vegetable world, where gorgeous blossoms rise out o f the

hard and thorny rind and shel l,w ithin which the rich fru itwas elaborating . The language was not only pecu l iar andstrong, but at tim es knotty and contorted, as by its own

im patient strength while the nove lty and struggl ing crowdso f im ages, acting in conj unction w ith the difficulties of the

sty le, dem anded always a greater closeness o f attention, than

poetry, ( at all events than descr iptive poet ry ) has a rightto claim .

’

Thi s correspondence o f the known dates o f one groupo f early poem s w ith a period o f unrest and unequal develop

1B . 56 .


ment o f new energies, described in the P r elude, explains

the immense difference between this verse and that which

seems to have been produced before hi s disturbing sally

into the world beyond his northern hill s . ‘

The poeti c

P syche,’

says Coleridge,1 ‘

in its process to full developm ent, undergoes a s many changes as its Greek name-sake,the butterfly .

’

It is not remarkable, therefore, that theyoung Wordsworth should have had more than one earlystyle . His development in thi s respect is not unique .

‘

P er

haps a similar process has happened to others,’ writes

Coleridge,2 ‘

but my earl iest poem s were marked by an ease

and simplic ity, which I have studied, perhaps w ith inferiorsuccess, to impress on my later compositions .

’

The words

in which he describes his later efforts to prune the luxuriance

and peculiarity of phrase which succeeded this earlier

simplic ity might be appl ied w ithout change to Wordsworth ’

s

ineffectual attempts to alter~ the f Descriptive S ketches3:

‘

In

the after editions, I pruned the double epithets w ith no sparing hand, and used my best efforts to tame the swel l andgl itter both o f thought and diction ; though in truth, these

paras ite plants of youthful poetry had ins inuated them selves

into my longer poems with such intricacy of union, that Iwas often obliged to om i t disentangl ing the weed, from the

fear of snapping the flower .

’

The apologeti c description o f

this unwholesome stage in a young poet’s development pre

fixed by Keats to Endym ion is wel l known: ‘

The imagina

t ion of a boy is healthy, and the mature im agination o f a

man is healthy ; but there i s a space of l i fe between, inwhich

the soul i s in a ferment, the character undecided, the way o f

l i fe uncertain, the ambition th i ck—s ighted : thence proceeds

mawki shness, and all the thousand bitters which those m en

I speak of must necessarily taste in go ing over the fol low ingpages . It i s in thi s space of l i fe between boyhood and man

13 . L. 1 . 57 .

1I bid . 1 . 4.

3I bid . 1 . 3 .


Cowper,1 Lady W inchel sea,2 and Bowles . A l ater recur

rence to the same style, in the Lines written on the Tham es

in 1789, i s frank ly imitative of Col l ins . This reveal s the

source of the simpli city . I t i s not the simpli city of Words

worth ’

s later style, trans ferred thither by a j udicious cor

recting hand . I t i s as clearly the result of imitation as the

more ora torical and conventional ease of the S chool Exer cise

in the manner of P ope .

But the poeti c development of these years cannot be

measured by the finished achievem ents alone . Much of the

verse com posed at Hawkshead never saw the l i ght in its

original form but i t became the foundation of many of the

poems of Wordsworth’s later years . F rom thi s early timedates the substance of the Lines left upon a S ea t in a Yew

Tr ee, and part of the expression . I t is not usually recog

nized that these l ines are a kind of prel iminary sketch of

the Sol itary in the Excur sion; and that one of Words

worth ’

s most mature and subtle studies o f character has

thus a certain bas i s in the writing and observation of his

schoo l-days . The P r elude may have a similar foundation inhis fir st autobiographical effort—a

‘long poem running onmy own adventures, and the scenery o f the country in whichI was brought up,

’ and containing ‘

thoughts and images,most of which have been dispersed through my other

writings .

’

S ince Wordsworth paraphrases the conclus ion

of th is poem for the P r elude, he may also haye used descriptions of hi s ‘adventures’ in his curiously Vivid reproductionof the fears and spiritual dramas of childhood . His

account of the black crag that seemed to stride after him,

3

1With the line, ‘

Calrn is all Nature as a resting wheel,’ c i. Cow

per, The Task 1 . 3 67 ff., and F ragm ent 14- 17 by Lady Anne Win

chelsea (P oem s and Extracts, chos en by Wordswor th, pp . 1 3

See a s im ilar figure in the sonnets beg inning, I f thes e brief Rec

ords 9-1 1 . (The P oetica l Works of Wordswor th, Ox ford ed it ion,p .

1 Wordswor thiana, p . 3 3 0 .

3P r elude 2. 3 57 -40 0 .


and of his impatient waiting on the w indy height for the‘pal freys that should bear us hom e,

’1suggest an experience

consciously heightened by a youthful poet, and a super sti

tious com punction which or iginally may have had a m oreconventionally rel igious color ing .

2 Several youthful poem s

also seem to be reproduced in the e i ghth book of the

P r elude,3 in the l ines ending w ith the paraphrase of D ear

na tive Regions . I f only he had preserved the or iginal,describing the wet rock sparkling in the evening radiance

l ike the burnished shield of som e dead knight, or the glitter

ing entrance to a fairy cave ! I t m ight have been an

interesting contrast to som e o f the Lyrical Ballads .

Although the romanti c substance o f m ost of the verses

did not please Wordsworth ’

s m ature taste, he him sel f

declares that all of them had a basis in truthful observat ion—that his most airy fancies revo lved around a sub

stantial center . T his is certainly true of the only specim ens

of his work at Hawkshead that he preserved . Imitationsas they are, they are at the sam e t ime genuine express ionso f unified knowledge and feel ing ; and hence they have acharm and an arti stic com pleteness that a re lacking in hism ore power ful D es crip tive S ketches . The S onnet, especially, does not suff er by its pos ition in the edition o f 180 7 ,

s ide by s ide w ith some o f Wordsworth’

s finest efforts inthis type o f verse .

4 I t is so clear- cut, so unique in its own

fel i city o f observation and phrase, that it seems to precludecomparisonw ith its m ore power fu l neighbors . This charm

1l bid . 12 . 287 - 3 16 .

1

Note especially 3 14-

3 16 .

1P r elude 8 . 3 65-475.

4Wordsworth him self says that, in his schooldays a t H awkshead,F ancy

could feed a t Nature ’

s callSom e p ens ive m us ings wh ich m ight well b eseem

M aturer years .

P r elude 8 . 456-458 .


of Wordsworth’s j uveni le efforts wa s recognized by the

cr it i c of the vo lumes of who, in the tone of pious

exhortation made fashionable by Jeff rey, remarks that theyshow what Wordsworth might have done, had he not beenled astray by his lam entable theories . But Wordsworth

had gone astray long before he gave any public expression

to his theor ies . He was not born to stop with the develop

ment of s ixteen, even i f this did make him a pensive land

scape—poet of the fir st order . The energy so character i sti c

of his childhood had to shape for itsel f new and greaterforms, even at the expense of harshness, and crudity, andfailure .

3 . The Cam bridge P eriod .

Between 1 787 and 1793 Wordsworth ’

s boyi sh interest inthe poeti c expression of what was novel and wonderful inhis own experience took a more ambitious form .

Those were the daysWh ich also first em boldened m e to trustWith firm ness, h itherto but slightly tou chedBy such a daring thought, that I m ight leaveSom e m onum ent b eh ind m e wh ich pure heartsShould reverence . The inst inct ive hum bleness,Maintained evenby the very nam e and thoughtOf printed book s and authorship, beganTo m elt away ; and

,further, the dread awe

O f m ighty nam es was so ftened down and seem edApproachable, adm itting fellowsh ipOi m odest sym pathy . Such aspect now,

Though not fam iliarly, m y m ind put ou,Content to observe, to achieve, and to enj oy .

2

But with growing power came a temporary difficulty in themanipulation of language, which was in notable contrast

with hi s earl ier facil ity, and a wil fulness of fancy and con

1 M onthly Review 78. 23 3 .

1P r elude 6 . 52-65.

9 2 woanswoarn’

s THEORY OF POETIC DICTION

from color, and shade from shade, as wel l as the English

language w i l l permit . S imilarly, he takes onomatopoeic

words express ing sound from every source—col loquial orl iterary . He speaks of the chisel ’s clink ing sound .

1 1

‘

E ach clanking mill, that broke the murmuring streams,

‘

The d i stant forge’s swinging thump pro-found’3; and makes

l ibera l use o f the suggestions that he finds in the poetry of

Gray or M i lton—such as the phrase ‘drowsy tinkl ings,"1

the word ‘complain ’5a s appl ied to the note of the owl, the

‘droning fl ight’ o f the beetle,6and the curfew ‘ swinging

low w ith sullen roar .

17 The same desire to add to his

vocabulary leads him to adopt any unusual epithet which he

discovers in reading . Like Wa rton, he speaks of the‘

embattled clouds .

’8 Like Cowper, and unlike his own latersel f, he finds the note of the owl

‘bod ing .

’9 Where M i ltonhad spoken of

‘rocking w inds,’

he speaks of‘rocking

shades’1 0 in imitation o f the l ine,‘minute drops from off

the eaves,’

he creates the compound,‘minute—steps’1 1 the

express ion ‘hudd l ing brook’ becomes ‘huddl ing r i ll ’12 ;‘d im

rel i gious l i ght’ i s copied in the phrase ‘dim rel i gious

groves,’1 3

etc .

15 . W. 145.

1D . S . 766 .

1B . W. 445.

4Gray, E legy 8 . D . S . 43 5, 50 8 ; E . W. 3 54 ; ci. Waggoner I . 26 .

‘That far-o ff t inkling’s drowsy cheer. ’5B . W. 443 . Cf . E legy 1 0 .

6E . W. 3 14. A rem iniscence o f E legy 7 and Lycidas 28 com bined .

Cf . a s im ilar union o f suggest ions from M ilton and Gray in the

line (E . W.

‘

The wh istling swain that p lods his ringing way .

’

711 P ens er oso 76 . Cf . E . W. 3 18 :

‘

The solem n curfew swinginglong and deep .

’

8 E . W. 55. Cf . Warton, P leasur es of M elancholy 294.

9B . W. 3 92. C f . The Task 1 . 20 5.

1°E . W. 23 8. Cf . [ l P enser oso 126 .

I l P ens er oso 1 3 0 .

E . W. 7 1 . Cf . Cam us 496 .

D . S . 60 4. Cf . l l P ens eroso 160 .

WORDSWORTH ‘S POETIC DEVELOPMENT 93

This practice is wel l described by M . Legouis1:

‘LadyW inchelsea said that children’

s tears a re m erely April

drops, but Wordsworth, speaking o f his own childhood,writes,

When Transport k issed away m y April tear.

Thom pson invoked inspiration from her herm it seat,

(Sum m er butWordsworth,to whom the epithet appear san ingenious one, boldly applies it to the wave o f a so l itarylake (

“hermit or to the door of a humble Swisscottage hidden among the m ountains (

“herm itWhereas Gray spoke of the

“cock’

s shr il l clarion,Wordsworth speaks of his

“clarion throat .

”Gray repre

sented the Nile as brooding “o’

er Egypt w ith his waterywing” ; Wordsworth pictures the wave of Liberty as brooding

r the nations o’

er w ith N ile- l ike w ings .

”P ope

calls the second(

son of W il l iam the Conqueror his second

hope Wordswor th descr ibes the eldest son of a poor vag

rant as her “elder gr ief .

” W ith P ope the repose of death is

the“Sabbath of the tomb for Wor dsworth the canton o f

Unterwalden,with its s i lent sum m its, is a“Sabbath region .

”

But the occas ions on which Wordsworth has borrowed are

so numerous that a special edition would be requ ired to

exhau st the l ist . Suffice it to say that, bes ides the poets

already mentioned, many others of the eighteenth centurya re laid under contribution by him, whether the fact is

a cknowledged in his notes, and by quotation marks, or not,su ch as Young,Hom e, Sm ol lett,Beattie . To these m i ght be

added two F rench nam es, Del i l le and Rosset, the author o f

L’

Agricultm'

e ou les Georgiques a gaises, the m ost awk

wardly per iphrasti c of our descriptive poets . Of courseWordsworth ’

s im itations are not str ictly l im ited to e igh

teenth century bards ; som e incrustations from Spenser,Shakespeare, and especially M ilton, ar e to be discovered in

his m osaic—work ; he even m akes use o f passages from the

1The Ear ly Life of William Wordswor th, p . 140 ff.


Bible,which look very strange in the form of his elaborate

couplet . To contemporary poets he seems to owe very l ittle ;only a Scotch word to Burns, whom he names, a touch to

Langhorne, more perhaps to Cowper’s Task, and most to

Sam uel Rogers’

P leasur es of M em ery, o f which he makes

no mention .

’

Not only does he make use of all words and phrases thathe can acquire in reading ; he also attempts to widen theappli cation of famil iar words by a daring metaphori cal

use z—‘

He tas tes the meanest note that swel l s the gale .

’1

the crash ing woodGives way, and half its p ines torm ent the flood.

2

H i s compounds are equally bold : ‘ l ip-dewing Song,’3 ‘ring

let-tossing Dance,“ ‘

oar—forgotten fioods,’5 day-deserted

home,

’6etc .

Many of these expressions are exaggerated enough, a s

Wordsworth soon discovered ; but the imaginative enter

prise that they d i splay i s remarkable . This is not the

remnant of an old style i t is the crude but vigorous beginning of the new . To say that these poems a re in the

‘poeti c

diction’

o f the eighteenth century is to speak, apparently,without having undergone the sad experience of reading themiscel lanies of that period . Wordsworth does not j ugglethe old familiar expressions —‘balmy zephyrs,

’ ‘blushing

F lora,’ ‘paint the dewy meads,

’

etc .

—into a s l i ghtly d ifferent pos ition, and imagine he has made a new poem . He

finds a new expression for a new image—even a t the cost

of being ridiculous ; and in this lay the hope and the

beginning o f a new poetry .


used in an obsolete sense, at times with a somewhat pedanti cregard for etymo logy ,

1or of words exceedingly rare,2 i f

not newly coine-d3 ; abnormal constructions, for instance,the imitation of the ab la tive absolute, to which M i lton was

very partial4 ; misuse of the inversion which consists in

making the subj ect fol low the verb, by employing i t withoutbeginning the sentence with any of the adverbs that justifyits use5; separation of relative and antecedent for the sakeof elegance“; nouns in oblique cases placed before those

M . Legouis believes to be its m odern representat ive.

‘A poet icalshortening o f illum ine,’ says the N . E . D . L ike other poet icform s, this wa s later abandoned by Wordsworth . Outs ide o f the

poem s o f 1793 , there is but one exam p le o f its u se—in the line‘

An aspect tenderly illum ined,’ in the poem beginning ‘

Depart ingsum m er,’ Ox ford ed ition, p . 498.

1 M . Legouis cites, as exam ples, ruining for fa lling down (D . S .

haply for perhaps (D . S . hapless for unhappy (E . W.

aspir es for ascends (D . S . The use o f m ining is probably a rem iniscence o f P . L. 6 . 868. Of haply the N E . D . say s,‘

Now archaic o r poet ic . ’ But the word hapless is not so des ignated ;it is not infrequent inm odern prose.

1As exam ples M . Legouis c ites viewless for invisible (E . W 148

D . S . 3 6,92, 227,548, 648) m oveless for m otionless (E . W. 1 0 4,20 6,

D . S . 226, s om br ous for dark (E . W. Viewless and

m oveles s are words to wh ich Dorothy Wordsworth especiallyob j ected in her critic ism s o f the poem s o f 1793 (L. W. F . 1 .

Viewless im m ed iately suggests Shak espeare’s line, ‘

To be im prisonedin the viewless w inds’ (M eas . for M eas . 3 . 1 . It also o ccursin the poetry o f M ilton (P . L. 3 . 518 ; Cam us 92, The c itat ions in the N. E . D . illustrat ing the use o f s om br ous do not

suggest that it is an obsolete word, or a word confined to verse.

InWordsworth’

s poetry it is used only in the Evening Walk .

3As exam ples, M . Legouis c ites unbeea thih g (D . S . and

i mpa thway’

d for pa thless (D . S .

‘E . W. 145. F or the use o f the ablat ive ab solute in English

see Ross,‘The Absolute P art iciple inM iddle and Modern English,

P ub . M od. Lang . Ass . 8 . 245 ff.5M . Legouis cites E . W. 44, 7 0 , 123 , 23 0 , 280 , 3 65, 3 77 , 428 ; D . S .

18 62, 65, 146- 147, 217, 229, 287, 555, 566, 7 0 1 .

E . W. 189.


which govern them , a construction which Wordsworth m an

ages with especial awkwardness, and never entirely discards

'

1

; violent displacem ent of the direct com plem ent,

which is too short for the purpose, to m ake it precede theverb2 invers ionof the direct pronom inal obj ect,w ith all thecharacteristi cs of one of M ilton’

s Latin constructions,3 var i

ous uncom m on ell ipti cal constru ctions,1 or odd invers ions ofdifferent kinds5 adj ectives arbitrari ly m ade to do duty a s

adverbs6 substantives used a s adj ectives 7 and com pound

words either very rare or of the po et’s own invention.

8

This curious style may be i l lustrated by the fol lowing

passage" :

An idle vo ice the sabbath regionfillsOf Deep that calls to Deep acro ss the hills,Brok e only by the m elancholy soundOf drowsy bells for ever tinkling round ;F aint wail o f eagle m elting into blueBeneath the cliffs, and p ine—woods steady sughThe solitary hei fer’s deepen’

d low

Or rum bling heard rem ote o f falling snow.

W. 3 21,-D . S . 268, 3 90 -

3 91, 50 2 .

122, 255.

1D . S . 45

-

47 .

5D . S . 1 1 - 12, 794.

6E . W. 149, D . S . 3 77 . Cf . Wordsworth’

s ob j ection to fruitless

for fruitless ly—Appendix on P oet ic D ict ion.

715. W. 1 3 7, 153 ; D . S . 177, 299, 43 2, 558, 581 , 697, 7 18, 720 , 77s,

cited by M . Legouis . Cf . Wordsworth’

s later ob j ection to th ishab it (Ox fo rd

'

edition, p . vi i i ) .

8C1. The Ear ly Life of William Wordswor th, p . 1 3 5, foot note

‘

Every writer, whether o f prose o r o f poetry, has a right to formnew com pound words, and it is needles s to po int out any but those

wh ich a re som ewhat ob scure, o r dem and som e investigation i f theya re to be understood . F o r exam ple ; ‘

hot‘low—par ting oa r,

’

i. e .

fo rm ing a hollow in the water a s well a s d iv iding it (E . W.

‘

hollow- blus tering coas t,’

i. e . sound ing hollow beneath the suddensquall. Thom son had applied the sam e ep ithet to the m ind(Winter

9D . S . 43 22445

.


Save that, the stranger seen below, the boy

Shouts from the echo ing h ills with savage joy .

Whenwarm from m yrtle bays and tranquil seas,Com es on, to wh isper hope, the vernal breeze,Whenhum s the m ountainbee inMay’s glad ear,

And em erald isles to spot the heights appear.

Here, as may be seen a t once, the fault l ies, not in the

cho i ce of words, but in the syntax . The young poet i s trying to employ in English the less restri cted order of Latin

verse . The awkward use of the parti ciple in l ines 43 4, 43 9,and 44 0 of this passage ; the separation of a word from its

m odifier in lines 43 2 and 43 3 ; and the placing of the verb

before the subj ect, and the adverbial phrase before the verb

which it completes, in l ines 444 and 445 -these are all the

result of d i srega rding the familia r conventions of the spokenEnglish sentence, on which the intel l igibil ity of our unin

fiected speech i s so largely dependent . Most of them maybe para l leled in the poetry of M i lton, from whom, indeed, avery l arge number of peculiar words and forms in these

poems a re directly borrowed . M i lton, rather than the landscape- school which M . Legouis ass i gns as the model of

these poems, seems to be d irectly responsible for most ofthe vaga ries of language in them . Despite Wordsworth ’s

obvious indebtednes s to his predecessors in the latter part

of the eighteenth century, neither the faults nor the virtueso f these descriptive poems are really representative o f thetype of poeti c diction preva lent before him . As we havepointed out, the best achievement of the e i ghteenth centurywas a clear and natural order and syntax ; its worst a chievement was a set o f periphrasti c phrases, which did duty fors imple words and original observations . Neither of thesea re characteristi c o f Wordsworth ’s Cambridge poems . A

com parison of the verses already given a s a specimen o f the‘

gaudiness and inane phraseology’ o f Wordsworth’s timewith the passage from the Des crip tive S ketches just quotedwill establish the truth o f this statement . The former i s as

1 0 0 WORDSWORTH ’S THEORY OF POETIC DICTION

Their ris ing all at once was as the soundOf thunder heard rem ote

1

;

the frequent use of the phrase,‘

bosom’

d deep, in imitation

of M i lton’s‘

bosom’

d high in tufted trees,’

etc .

3

Although the influence of M ilton, and the practi ce of

writing in Latin, seem to be respons ible for the mannerisms

of the descriptive poems, this early difficulty with syntaxi s characteri sti c of Wordsworth . It i s due to the same

tendency that makes his criti cal utterances obscure—thetendency of hi s intel lectual ideas to become involved w ith

intense emotional and imaginative assoc iations, which his

readers do not always share . Sometimes, in hi s later blankverse, it was as difficult for Wordsworth to go straight tothe point in a sentence a s i t was for him to go straight to

the climax in a narrative . The thought was sufficientlyclear and energetic ; it did not lose sight of the final goal ;but it carried so much wei ght that the movement was some

what impeded . I t i s necessary to recognize this difficultyin making use of the clear but l imited sentence—structureof the ei ghteenth century, when it first appears in Words

worth’s poetry, because it explains some of hi s later experi

ments . Dryden and his fol lowers had rendered an essential

service, by making the written language correspond morenearly to the structure of the spoken language ; but thei rsyntax was too impass ioned, too inexpressive, for Wordsworth ’s freer and bolder genius . He needed a more flexibleinstrument, and, in the end,he found it .

But i f Wordwor th’

s syntax is peculiar, his figures o f

speech are more so .

‘Instances of personification, which inCol l ins and Gray are a lready plenti ful, swarm in the Eve

ning Walk and the Descrip tive S ketches . Im patieiice,“pant

ing upward,” cl imbs mountains4 obsequious Geace pursues

1P . L. 2 . 477 .

1B . W. 1 3 ; D . S . 8 1 ; c f . L

’

Allegro 78.

1The use o f er r oneous,D . S . 689, suggests M ilton, P . L. 7 . 20 .

‘E . W. 3 5.

WORDSWORTH ’S POETIC DEVELOPMENT 1 0 1

the male swan on the lake,while tender Car es and dom es tic

Loves swim in pursuit of the fem ale1 ; P ain has a sad

fam ilyz; Independence is the child of Disdaiii 3 ; H ope leans

ceaselessly on P leasur e’

s funereal urn1 ; Consum ption,“with cheeks o

’

er spread by smiles of baleful glow,

” passes

through the villages of F rance on a pale horses ;“Oppr es

sion builds her thick—ribb ’d tow’

r s”

; M achina tion flees“

panting to the centre o f her mines P ers ecu tion decks

her bed (o f torture ) with ghastly sm iles ; Am bition piles

up mountains, etc .

6 The poet’s fancy becomes sti l l

m ore whim si cal when he attributes hum an or anim al charac

teristics, not to abstractions which he can endow with any

form he pleases, but to obj ects or phenomena so familiar to

us that our knowledge of their nature protests against

such a travesty . The blood which flows from the wounded

feet of the chamois-hunter i s “Lapp

’

d by the planting tongue

of thirsty skiesi” 7 The mountain-shadow creeps toward the

crest of the hill with tor toise foot.

” 8 “S i lent stands th’

admiring vale”

(i. e . the Villagers ) .

9 F requently false

pathos i s m ingled w ith these effects . An old man’s lyre i s

itsel f not old,but aged .

1 0 The Grand Chartreuse,hoary w ithsnow,weeps “beneath his chil l of mountain gloom .

” 1 1 Andthese constantly recurring personifications extend even to

the gram m ar . The neuter gender tends to disappear,1 2 and

1B . W. 20 0 , 20 6-20 7 .

1D . S . 2 ( tak en from P ope,Essay onM an2 .

3 23 -3 24.

518 .

788- 79 1 .

792-80 4.

3 97

1 0 5.

1E . W. 188 .

”D . S . 17 1 .

11 D . S . 54.

11 B ea con (E . W. s teep (E . W. m ountain

3 3 6 etc ., a re m asculine .

e

h

wwwa

h

1 o 2 WORDSWORTH ’S THEORY OF POETIC DICTION

the genitive case,1 comm only used only in reference to l iv

ing beings, i s curiously appl ied to words of every sort .

’

This a ttempt to present everything by an image M .

Legouis a scribes to the influence o f Da rwin . This may betrue ; but it is doubtful whether the passage in the Bio

graphia Literaria onwhich M . Legouis bases this conclus ion

can refer to Wordsworth . Coleridge i s speaking of

admirers of Darwin wi th whom he used to dispute in hisearly Cambridge days .

2 At this time he d id not knowWordsworth ; and when the two young m en m et,Wordsworth had a lready recovered from any infatuation for verseof the type o f the Botanic Gardeh—if he ever felt it .

Besides, in the note to the Descrip tive S ketches, which ishi s only criti cal utterance before the tim e of the Lyrical

Ballads, he protests against Darwin’s favorite term, pic

turesque, with considerable energyBut whether Wordsworth i s influenced by Da rwin or not,

his per sonifications a re very different from most con

temporary figures of th is sort, including those of the

Botanic Garden. To find anything really parallel to them

we must go back to the metaphysi cal poets . As Coleridge

noti ced, the chief difficulty with the per sonifications of the

ei ghteenth century i s that they remain abstractions . The

only s ign of the supposed humanity (or divinity in the

shape of humanity ) o f all these figures—F loras, Cynthias,Hopes, and Loves—of the period is the conventional sym bol

of the capital letter and some equally conventional adject ive—pale Cynthia, blushing F lora, etc . Though Darwinmakes a special effort to give human personalities to all

hi s vegetable lovers, he does so mainly by a more l iberal

1E . W. 76, 51 ; D . S . 274, 153 , 225. Wordsworth never d id share

Coleridge’s ob j ect ion to this use o f the genit ive. See the m anyawkward exam ples o f it under with words like edge (

‘

lake’

s edge,’

etc . ) in the Concordance .

1B . L. 1 . 12 .


to the lady i s more happy—a s in that beauti ful passage

from the Evening Walk, whi ch may be quoted in full,because in it are concentrated many of the finest characteristics of these poems

The bird,with fad ing light who ceas’

d to threadS ilent the hedge o r steam ing rivulet’s bed,F rom his grey re-appearing tower shall soonSalute with bod ing note the ris ing m oon,

F rost ing with hoary light the pearly ground,And pouring deeper blue to ZEther ’s bound ;Rejoic

’

d her solem n pom p o f clouds to foldIn robes o f azure, fleecy wh ite, and gold,Wh ile rose and poppy, as the glow-worm fades,Checquer with paler red the th icket shades .

Now o’

er the eastern h ills,where Darkness broodsO

’

er all its vanish’

d dells, and lawns, and woodsWhere but a m ass o f shade the s ight can trace,She lifts in silence up her lovely face;Above the gloom y valley fl ings her light,F a r to the western slopes with ham lets white ;And gives,where woods the checquer

’

d upland strew,

TO the green corn o f sum m er autum n’s hue.

But the arti sti c original ity of thi s early work i s not tobe measured by its quaint exaggerations . In the passage

j ust quoted (and this i s thoroughly typi cal ) there is something that at once explains the passionate enthus iasm with

which Coleridge hailed the new genius . In the fir st placethere i s the accurate observation of the natural features,not a s dead or stati c, but in their l iving and changing relations to each other—in the image of the grey r e—appearing tower, the fading of the glow-worm, the appearance

of the pale-red roses and poppies in the thicket, etc .

H i s first poeti c impulse had come to him when he noti cedhow the sunset radiance changed and glorified the famil iarface of common things . The arti sti c motive thus suggested

to him at fourteen i s everywhere present in these early

1E . W. 3 89-40 6 .


poems, not only in the subtle observations o f the Evening

Walk, but in the splendid cl imaxes of l ight and color in the

Descrip tive S ketches .

P erhaps i t was this same experience that fir st stim ulatedWordsworth’s special interest in color, characteri sti c of thetime when he was

Bent over m uch on superficial things,P am pering m yself with m eagre noveltiesOf color and proport ion.

Later, as M iss P ratt says of Wordsworth ’

s mature poetry,1‘

in contrast with the vo i ce of wind and stream, forms and

colors were to him external qualities, Nature’s dress rather

than the utterance of her l i fe ; and for thi s reason, though

they appealed to Wordsworth’s eye and were mingled with

happy m em ories, they meant less and less to him a s his

m ind becam e more mature and more watchful for ‘

the

latent qualities and essences of things .

”

This is true ; but it becomes stil l more significant whenwe note, a s M iss P ratt has failed to do,

2the remarkable

splendor and variety o f co lor in these poems, whose lavish

ness in this respect can be paralleled only in the early work

of Keats . Purity and sel f—restra in—t are the m ore notable

where the energies are warm and powerful ; and Words

worth’s later preference for the quiet green tints o f fieldand wood is the more interesting when we perceive how his

early poems flame with scarlet and gold—how he loves the

l i ght and fire of the setting sun m ore than all the secret

and shadowy beauties of nature .

1Color in English Rom antic P oetry, pp . 55-56 .

2She notes that the early poem s o f Wordsworth em p loy color

a s lavishly as do the early poem s o f Keats (p . who‘

in wealtho f color stands w ithout a peer’ (p . but she fails to note the

effect iveness and the originality o f the color. The color o f the

young Wordsworth is im aginative, where that o f the young Keatsis m erely decorat ive .


Thi s interest in color is paralleled by an interest in

sound—vis ible not only in success ful attempts to differ

entiate the various notes and voi ces, but in an effort to

make the sound an echo to the sense. In later years,although Wordsworth a lways tried to give melody andharmony to his verse, and was almost painfully consciouso f an unpleasant j arring o f sounds, he was not incl ined touse the device of onom atopceia . In these early poems,how

ever, there are many interesting examples of it . One of the

most original of these i s the l ine : ‘

Glad in their airy baskets,hang and sing“; but there are many more obvious efforts

the silver’

d k iteIn m any a whis tling cir cle wheels her flight.

2

With pens ive step to m easure m y s low way .

3

Sound o f clos’

d ga te across the water borne.

4

Hurrying the feeding har e thr ough rus tling com .

5

The d istant forge’s swinging thum p pro found .

6

To achieve such effects in the metre of the heroi c couplet

was something of a triumph . Like everything el se in the

poems, they a re not so much an imitation of an old formas the promise of a new, and po int to the emergence above

the horizon, not only of a new and Vita l genius, but o f avery sel f-conscious arti st .

4. S tudy and S elf-Criticism .

No sooner had these efforts appeared than Wordsworthbegan to see their defects . In thi s he was greatly a ss istedby the candor of his family—not only of Dorothy, but ofChr istopher—then an undergraduate at Cambridge, who

115. W. 150 .

1B . W. 90 .

3D . S . 165.

‘E . W. 441 .


tinguish mysel f at the univers ity,’

he says,1‘I thought these

l i ttle th ings might show that I could do something . Theyhave been treated with unmerited contempt by some of the

periodi cal publi cations, and others have spoken of them in

higher terms than they deserve .

’

According to Wordsworth ’s own statement, the result of

these corrections is embodied in the version printed in 1820 .

Because of the poet’s tendency to be a l ittle inaccura te with

regard to dates, and to keep retouching all his work even

while it wa s going through the pres s, i t i s the custom to

doubt hi s word in such matters . But i t happens that the

faults corrected in the vers ion of 1820 are exactly the faultswhich he carefully avo ids in hi s next effortu Guilt and

Sor row; and for the o riginal form of this l atter poem we

have the testim ony of Coleridge . Hence we seem to be

justified in accepting Wordsworth ’

s own statement. In theversion of 1820 the structure of the language is somewhat

improved ; a few obj ectionable words or forms ( such as

gaze used as a trans itive verb ) are omitted ; and someexcel lent l ines are added . But the really notable featureis the uncompromising ej ection o f almost everything in the

nature of a per sonification. In the first seventy l ines of

the Evening Walk, for instance,M ir th,M em ery, so ft A[feetion, and Quiet all d isappear . Som etimes several l ines are

forced to disappear with them . Sometimes the change i s

more easily effected . Instead of‘

soft Affection’s ear’

Wordsworth merely says ‘unreluctant ear’

; for the l ine‘

Then Quiet led m e up the huddling rill,’

he wr ites ‘

Then,while I wandered up the huddling rill,

’

etc .

But while he was thus im prov1ng his technique,Wordsworth wa s also developing a theory of hue a r t . To the

M onthly M iseellcmy, which he and M athews were planning

to edit, he was wil l ing to contribute‘criti cal remarks upon

P oetry, etc ., etc . upon the arts of Pa inting,Gardening, and

1L . W. F . 1 . 67 .


other subj ects o f am usement .

’1 I f only these remarks hadbeenwritten ! We have almost no means of knowing what

the substance of them would have been. Wordsworth ’

s few

early letters a re notably lacking in l iterary cr iti cism . All

that is known is that he read John Scott of Amwell,whose

em phas is upon clear and distinct im agery and des ireto enr i ch poetry with new rural im ages m ust have coin

cided w ith Wordswo rth’

s own boyish am bition . Bes ides

the reference to Scott in the notes to the Evening I/Valh,2

there is only one other indication tha t Wordsworth hadbeen r eflecting on the nature o f fine a r t . In a note to the

D escrip tive S ketches he makes an em phati c protest against

the Darwinian theory that poetry is painting in words, of

whi ch M . Legouis seem s to cons ider him an adherent at thistim e :

‘

I had once given to these sketches the t itle o f Pic tur

esque but the Alps ar e insu lted in applying to them that

term . Whoever, in attem pting to describe their sublim e

features, shou ld confine him sel f to the cold rules of paint

ing would give his reader but a very im perfect idea of

those emotions which they have the irresistible power of

communi cating to the m ost im pass ive imaginations . The

fact is, that controul ing influence, which distingu ishes theAlps from all other scenery, is derived from images which

disdain the pencil . Had I w ished to m ake a picture of this

scene I had thrown much less l i ght into it . But I con

sulted nature and m y own feel ings . The ideas excited by

the storm y sunset I am here descr ibing owe their sublim ity

to that deluge of l ight, or rather of fire, inwhich nature hadwrapped the imm ense form s around m e ; any intru sionof shade, by destroying the unity of the impression

,had

necessar ily dim inished its grandeur . ’3

P erhaps this is the beginning o f the theory o f im agina

t ion which he and Coleridge later developed together . He

1L . W. F . I . 66 .

1 Ox ford edition, p . 595.

1I bid . p . 60 8.

1 1 0 WORDSWORTH ’S THEORY or POETIC DICTION

had already begun to a ssert the right and power of the

imagination to modi fy and combine visual images in

accordance with the di ctates of impassioned feel ing.

But, whatever Wordsworth ’

s theories may have been at

thi s time, the result of all this criti cal effort is vis ible in

his next poem, which m ay best be described in Coleridge’s

glow ing words 1 : ‘

I was in my twenty- fourth year, when Ihad the happiness of knowing M r . Wordsworth personally,and while memory lasts, I shall hardly forget the suddeneffect produced on my mind by hi s recitation of a manu

s cript poem, which stil l remains unpubli shed, but of whichthe stanza, and tone of the style, were

'

the same a s those

o f the“F em ale Vagrant, a s originally printed in the fir st

vo lume of the“Lyri cal Ballads .

”There was here no mark

o f stra ined thought, or forced diction, no crowd or turbu

lence of imagery ; and, as the poet hath himsel f wel l

described in his l ines“ou revisiting theWye,

” manly r eflec

tion, and human associations had given both variety and

additional interest to natural obj ects, whi ch in the pa ssion

and appetite of thefirst love they had seemed to him neither

to need\or permit . The occas ional obscurities, which hadar isen from an imperfect controul over the resources o f

his native language, had almost whol ly disappeared,together w ith that worst defect of arbitrary and i l logicalphra ses a t once hackneyed and fantasti c, which hold so

distinguished a place in the technique of ordinary poetry,and w i l l, more or less, alloy the earlier poems of the truest

genius, unless the a ttention has been specifically directed tothe worthlessness and incongruity . I didnot perce ive anything parti cular in the mere sty le of the poem alluded to

dur ing its rec itation, except indeed such difference a s wa s

not separable from the thought and manner ; and the

Spenser ian stanza, which always, more or less, recall s tothe reader ’s mind Spenser ’s own style, would doubtless

1 B . L. 1 . 59.


lication of the descriptive poems and the meeting with

Coleridge he had apparently turned back to the Latin

authors, especially Horace and Juvenal . One of the pa s

sages added to the Evening I/Va'lle1 i s based onHorace and

the special l iterary enterpri se of thi s period was a

'

transla

tion of Juvena l which he and Wrangham were making

together .

2 P erhaps M athews also took some interest in

this ; at least a copy o f Juvenal was presented to Words

worth by M athews .

3 But of the special l iterary model s ofthe Lyrical Ballads—the poetry of Chaucer, the Reliques

of Ancient P oetry, and the l iterature before Dryden—wehear not a word . However, the source of th is new influence

at once becomes clea r when we consider what Lamb andColeridge had been doing up to this time .

1See the final vers ion of the Evening Walk, 72-85 (Ox ford edi

t ion, p . This appears in the ed it ion o f 1820 as it is here written.

I t wa s probably one o f those add itions ‘m ade shortly a fter publi

cation’ in 1793 .

2L. W. F . 1 . 87-89, 92-98.

1 Th is is now in the library of M rs . Henry St. John, Ithaca,N. Y.

CHAPTER 4 .

COLERIDGE AND H I S CIRCLE .

"

Whi le Wordsworth was thus attaining to the practice of

s impli city, Coleridge and Lamb had been developing the

theory of it ; and were rel igiously seeking out l iterary

models of a style more pure and plain. The beginnings of

this effort, which ended in the Lyrical Ballads, a re to be

found in the teaching of their doughty old s choo lmaster

at Christ’s Hospital—the Rev . James Boyer .

1 ‘

He earlymoulded my taste to the preference of Demosthenes to

Ci cero,of Hom er and Theocrites to Vi rgil, and again of

Virgil to Ovid,’

writes Coler idge .

2 ‘

He habituated m e to

compare Lu cretius (in such extracts a s I then read ) ,Terence, and above a ll the chaster poems of Catullus, notonly with the Roman poets o f the, so called, s ilver and

brazen ages ; but with even t hose of the Augustan era ;

and on grounds of plain sense and universal logic to see

and assert the superiority of the former in the truth and

nativeness, both of their thoughts and diction . In

our own English compos itions, (at least for the last threeyears of our school education,) he showed no m ercy to

phrase,metaphor, or im age, unsupported by a sound sense,

or where the same sense might have been conveyed w ith

equal force and dignity in plaine‘r words . Lute, harp, andlyre, Muse, Muses, and inspirations, P egasu s, P arnassu s,and H ippocrene, were all an abom inat ion to him . In fancy

I can alm ost hear him now, exclaim ing “H arp ? H arp ?

Lyr e? P en and ink, boy, you m ean! M us e, boy, M use ?

Lam b speak s o f h im self as only a Deputy Grecian, and yet thereis no doub t that he enjoyed the advantage of Boyer’s tuition, evenalthough that m asterful instructor reserved his h ighest enthus iasmfor Grecians ab solute .

’-Lucas, The Life of Char les Lam b I . 74.

1B . L. 1 . 4-5.


Your nurse’

s daughter, you m ean! P ieriaii spring ? Oh

aye ! the clois ter -pum p, I suppos e ! ”

Although for a time the youthful Coleridge neglectedl iterature for philosophy, he did not forget the teaching of

these ear ly days . When the sonnets. of Bowles appeared,he

at once hailed them as models of simplicity and tenderness,and quite forgot the mysteries of Neoplatonism in his

proselyting enthusisam for what seem ed to him a new type

of poetry .

1 As a matter of fact, Bowles was not very new .

His verse alternately echoes M ilton’s minor poems and thesweeter cadences of

~

Shakespeare—not to mention hi s

master, Warton . But his pure and slender m elodies fel l

gratefully upon the ear after the couplets of P ope andErasmus Darwin .

Naturally Coleridge, with the conversational zeal for disseminating knowledge which marked him even then, enthu

siastically recommended Bowles upon all occasions . In so

do ing he developed a whole theory of criti c ism, in which

we a lready find dim intimations of the P reface to the

Lyrical Ballads . The l ively discuss ions begun then, and

continued with renewed vigor after he m et Wordsworth,are best described in his own words2 : ‘Among tho se withwhom I conversed, there were, of course, very many whohad formed their taste and their notions of poetry, fromthe writings of P ope and his fo llowers or to speak moregenera l ly, in that school ‘

of F rench poetry, condensed andinvigorated by Engl ish understanding, which had pre

dominated from the last century . I was not blind to the

merits o f th i s school, yet, a s from inexperience of the

world,‘

and consequent want of sympathy with the generalsubj ects of these poems, they gave m e l ittle pleasure, Idoubtles s undervalued the kind, and w ith the presumptionof youth withheld from its masters the legitimate name of

poets . I saw that the excel lence of this kind cons isted in


With over-weather ’d ribs and ragged sails,Lean, rent, and beggar’d by the strum pet w ind !1

so the imitation in The Bard ;

Fair laughs the m orn, and so ft the zephyr blowsWh ile proudly rid ing o

’

er the azure realmIn gallant trim the gilded vessel goes,Youth at the prow and P LEASURE at the helm ;

Regardless o f the sweep ing whii/lwind’s sway,That hush’

d in grim repose, expects its eveningprey .

1

(inwhich, by the by, the words realm and sway are

rhymes dearly purchased ) . I preferred the original on the

ground, that in the imitation it depended wholly on the

compositor’s putting, or not putting, a sm all Capital, bothin this, and in many other passages of the same poet,whether the words should be per sonifications, or mere

abstractions . I mention this, because, in referr ing various

lines in Gray to their original in Shakespeare and M i lton,and in the clear perception how completely all the proprietywa s lost in the trans fer ; I wa s, a t that early per iod, ledto a conj ecture, which, many years afterwards, was

recal led to m e from the same thought having been started

in conversation, but far more ably, and developed morefully, by M r . Wordsworth ;—nam ely, that this style of

poetry, which I have characterized above, as translationsof prose thoughts into poeti c language, had been kept upby, i f it did not whol ly arise from , the custom of writing

Latin verses, and the great importance attached to theseexercises in our publi c s chools . Whatever might have beenthe case in the fifteenth century, when the use of the Latintongue was so general among learned m en, that Erasmusi s said to have forgotten his native l anguage ; yet, in the

present day it is not to be supposed that a youth can think

1 M er chant of Venice 2. 6 . 14- 19.

2The Bard 7 0 -75.

COLERIDGE AND H I S CIRCLE 1 1 7

inLatin, or that he can have any other rel iance on the forceor fitness o f his phrases, but the author ity of the writerfrom whence he has adopted them .

1 Consequently he m ust

fir st prepare his thoughts, and then pi ck out, from V irgi l,Horace, Ovid, or perhaps more compendious ly from his

Gradus, halves and quarters of l ines, in which to em body

them .

‘

I never obj ect to a certain degree o f dispu tatiousness ina young man from the age of seventeen to that of four or

hy e and twenty, pr ovided I hnd him always arguing on one

s ide of the question. The controvers ie s, occas ioned by myunfeigned zeal for the honor o f a favorite contemporary,then known to m e only by his works,were of great advan

tage, in’

the form ation and establishm ent of my taste and

critical opinions . In m y defence o f the l ines running intoeach other, instead of clos ing a t each couplet, and of

natural language, neither bookish, nor vulgar, neitherredolent o f the lamp, nor of the kennel, such as I will

r em em ber thee; instead of the sam e thought tri cked up 1n

the rag- fair‘

finery of,thy im age onher w ing

Be fore m y !

F ancy’s eye shall Mem ory bring,

I had continually to adduce the metre and diction of the

Greek poets from Homer to Theocr itus inclusive and stil lm ore of our elder English poets from Chaucer to M i lton .

Nor wa s this all . But as it was m y constant reply to

authorities brought against m e from later poets of greatname, that no authority could avail in oppos ition to Truth,Na tur e, Logic, and the Laws of Universal Gram m ar ;

actuated too by m y former passion for metaphys ical investigations ; I labored at a sol id foundation, in which

permanently to ground my opinions, in the com ponentfacu lties o f the hum an m ind itsel f, and their com parativedignity of im portance .

’

1Ci. P r elude 6 . 1 0 5- 1 15.


We might be tempted to think that Coleridge was trans

ferring hi s later opinions to these earl ier days were it notfor an abundance of contemporary testimony concerningthese enthusiastic conversations .

‘Coleridge talked Greek,’

remarks Christopher Wordsworth 1 (in describing a meet

ing a t which‘

Dr . Darwin, M iss Seward, M r s . Smith,Bowles, and my Brother

’

were discussed ) ,‘and spouted out

of Bowles .

’ ‘My poeti cal taste was much mel iorated by

Bowles,’ writes Southey in

‘

and the constant com

pany of Co-leridge,’

who probably ‘

spouted out of Bowles’

in Southey ’s presence a l so . But it is in the letters of Lamb

to Co leridge, j ust before the close a ssociation between

Wordsworth and Coleridge began, and in the new M orzthly

M agazine, for which this group of ambitious young poets

were writing, that we find the clearest indi cations of the

theories of the Lyrical Ballads .

‘Cultivate s impl i city, Coleridge,’ i s the burden of Lamb ’s

letter s .

‘

Banish elaborateness ; for simpli city springs

spontaneou s from the heart and carries into daylight itsown modest buds, and genuine, sweet, and clear flower s

of expression . I allow no hot—beds in the garden of

P arnassus .

’3 The simpl i city which he so much admired inBowles, Lamb found also in Burns and Cowper, and in thegenuinely imaginative figures and per sonifications o f

‘

our

elder bards,’

whom he wished Coleridge to strive to bring‘ into more general fame .

“ The simpl icity he loves is not

the elegant simpli city of P ope ; it i s naive and quaint and

homely . At one time he remarks, apropos of a sonnet o f

hi s own:‘

Your ears are not so very fastidious ; many

people would not l ike words so prosaic and familiar in a

sonnet as I slingto-n and Hertfordshire .

’5 But Coleridge

1See the d iary o f Christopher Wordsworth, in the Append ix to

S ocia l Life a t the English Universities .

1 Life and Cor r espondence I . 247 .

11Letters, 1 . 48.

1I bial. 1 . 4. 24-26, 28.

1‘I bid. 1 . 4.

1 20 woaoswoa'

rH’


sometimes cannot even be read as verse . Thi s i s exactly

the atti tude of the ei ghteenth century—no l iberties with

order, grammar, and syntax ; but a vocabulary raised aboveprose, and verse that always scans in the one approvedfashion . The critic al so doubts whether Southey and

Co leridge are justified in seeking variety of metre, citing

for disapproval the l ines ;

Now was the noon o f night, and all was st ill,Save where the s entinel paced on his wa tch

Hum m ing a br ok en tune .

Such liberties, says the criti c,‘grate on a correct ear .

’

He

hopes M r . Southey and M r . Coleridge will be more care ful

in the future .

To such critic i sm as this Coleridge made a saucyreply . In the M onthly M agazirie, whose aim was to print

good articles that no other periodical would take, and to

improve the quality of verse, he prints a rather charmingl ittle idyl l, and entitles it : Reflec tions on entering Active

Life, A P oem which affects not to be P oetry .

1 Though

affecting not to be poetry, the poem is cer tainly worthy o fquotation in full . But only the fir st few l ines of it can be

given here

Low was our pretty cot ; the tallest roseP eep

’

d at our cham ber-window. We could hear(At s ilent noon, and eve, and early m orn)The sea’s fa int m urm ur ; in the open airOur m yrtles blossom ’

d, and across the porchTh ick j asm ines twin’d : the little landscape roundWas green and woody, and re freshed the eye .

Here i s the s impli city of style that Wordsworth was laterto m ake famous !

About the same time there appeared in the M onthly

M agaeirte a brief but very able arti cle,2 in which the sub

1The M onthly M agazih e 2 . 7 3 2.

1 ‘

I s Verse Essent ial to P oetry’ ? (2.

COLERIDGE AND H I S CIRCLE 1 2 1

stance of the P re face to the Lyrical Ballads and the

Appendix on P oetic D i ction is plainly antic ipated .

Whether Coleridge was responsible for it or not, it cer

tainly r eflects his opinions a t this time . Verse, the writerdecides, is not essential to poetry . The arguments with

which he supports this thesis must be quoted a t some length :‘

Those writers appear to have approached nearest to a true

definition of poe try,who have understood it to be the imme

diate offspring of a vigorous im agination and quick sens i

bility, and have called it the language o f fancy and

pass ion.

1 In a rude state of nature, before the ar t

of ver sification was known, -m en felt strong passions and

expressed them strongly .

2 Their language would be boldand figurative ; it wou ld be vehem ent and abrupt ; some

tim es under the impulse of the gentle and the tender, or

the gay and joyous passions, it would flow in a kind of wi ld

and unfettered melody, for under such impress ions, m elodyis natural to m an. The character of poetry, whichmay seem most to require that it be l im ited to verse is its

appropr iate diction. I t wi l l be adm itted that m etaphorical

language, being more impressive than general terms, is bestsuited to poe try . That excited state of m ind, which poetry

supposes, naturally prompts a figurative style . But the

language o f fancy, sentim ent, and pass ion is not peculiarto verse . Whatever is the natural and proper expressionof any conception or feel ing in m etre is its natural andproper express ion in prose .

3 All beyond this is a departure

For all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow o f powerfulfeeling .

’- P re face to the Lyrica l Ba llads .

1 ‘

The earliest poets o f all nat ions generally wrote from pass ionexcited by real events . F eeling powerfully a s they did, the irlanguage was daring and figurative .

’—Append ix to the Lyrica lBallads, 180 2 .

3 ‘

A large portion o f every good poem can in no respect differfrom that o f prose . I t m ay b e sa fely affirm ed that thereneither is nor can b e any ess ential d iff erence between the languageo f prose and m etrical com pos ition.

’—I bid . 180 2 .

1 22 woab swoa '

rH’


from the true principles of taste . I f the ar tificial dictiono f modern poetry would be improper on s imilar occasions

in prose, it i s equally improper in verse . In support of this

Opinion, the appeal may be made, not only to the genera l

sense o f impropriety, but to those most perfect model s of

fine writing, the Greek poe ts . The language of these great

masters is always so consonant to nature, that, thrown out

of rhythm, it would become the proper express ion of the

same sentiment in prose . I f modern poetry will seldom bearto be brought to the same taste [test ? ] it is because the tasteof the modern has been refined to a degree of fastidiousness which leads them to prefer the meretri cious ornaments

of ar t to the genuine s impl icity o f nature I t

obviously fol lows from the po int established in this paperthat the terms poetry and prose are incorrectly opposed to

ea ch other . Vers e is properly the contra ry of prose ; and

becau se poetry speaks the language of pass ion and senti

ment, and philosophy speaks the language of reason, these

two terms should be cons idered as contraries, and writingshould be divided,not into poetry and prose, but into poetryand philosophy .

’1

This is obviously the germ o f the P reface to the LyricalBallads . But there is another interesting connection

between the M onthly M agazine of 1 796 and the LyricalBallads . In March of this year appeared W i l l iam Taylor ’s

translation o f Biirger’

s Lenor e into the language of P ercy’sReliques . Lamb, always on the lookout for poetry that m et

hi s ideal of imaginative simpl icity, eagerly cal led Coleridge’s

attention to it : ‘

Have you seen the ballad called Leonore”

in the second number o f the M onthly M agazine?’

he

I here use the word P oetry ( though against m y own j udgm ent ) a s opposed to the word P rose, and synonym ous with m etricalcom pos ition. But m uch confus ion has been introduced into erit icism by th is contrad istinction o f P oetry and P rose, instead o f the

m ore ph ilosoph ical one o f P oetry and M atter o f F act, or Science.

The only strict ant ithes is to P rose is Metre.

’—Note to the P refaceto the Lyr ical Ballads .


criti c triumphed, the legendary imitators were deservedlyd i sregarded, and, as undeservedly, their i ll - imitated model ssank, in this country, into temporary neglect ; while Burger,and other able writers of Germany, were compos ing with

the aid of inspiration thence derived, poems which were

the del ight o f the German nation .

’

Then fol lows a com

parison between the style of Burger and that of P ercy’scol lection .

But whether Lam b, acting through Coleridge, gave the

first impulse to Wordsworth ’s interest in the popular balladsor not, the influence upon the new ideals of his del i cate

1nstinct and out—of- the-way readings m ust not be ignored .

H i s interests at this time were m uch more exclusivelyl iterary than those of Co leridge, who could not help deviating into pol iti cs and philosophy . He was always ready

to bring his adventurous friend down from the cloudwrapped hei ghts of Neoplatonism to a practi cal question

of style, and to po int out, not the courses of the stars, but

del ightful l ittle bypaths among old and forgotten books .

Thus, while he did not provide a theory of sty le, he con

tinually furnished the material s and the standard for it .

He would flit from poem to poem, choosing w ith a lmos t

unerring tact the ‘genuine, sweet, and clear flower s of

expression,’

and avoiding by instinct the blooms of the

hot—house . Being thus sens i tive, he possessed a naturepeculiarly ‘capable o f excitement w ithout the appl i cation

o f gross and violent stimulants,’ and loved what was s imple

and natural with the immed iate response o f a fine temperament . Hence he s carcely needed to look beyond himsel ffor the principles of criti cism . What shocked or displeasedhim or le ft him cold was probably bad or fal se ; what

del ighted him was probably good and genuine . In all hi sremarks there i s this del i cate egotism—this consciousnes sthat he carries the touchstone within himsel f . The idea lof s implicity in accordance w ith which he criti cised Coleridge

’

s early poems was a matter o f taste, not the result of

COLERIDGE AND H I S CIRCLE 1 25

philosophical thought . Such an ideal cou ld m ake no

perm anent appeal either to Coler idge or to Wordsworth ;but it furnished a guide and a check to their bolder and

m ore philosophical genius . The interest in the elder poets,especially, seems to have been Lamb ’s contr ibution to

the cause . I t was he who furnished Wordsworth w ith thel ibrary of old poems and plays which was, perhaps, the

strongest and p urest influence upon his work between 180 0

and To the sim pli city of Coleridge and Southey,which wa s beginning to disturb the per iodicals of the day,he added his own modest contributions, in the form o f

sonnets after the manner of Bowles . Some of these wereappear ing in the M onthly M agazirte about the time Words

wor thi

went to Br isto l2 to m eet those ‘

two rem arkableyouths, Southey and Coleridge .

’

Thus it may be seen that, from the stim u lating centrefurnished by C oleridge’s argum entative and contagiou sspeech and m anner, there were radiating l ines of influence,

in Southey, in Lam b, in the M onthly M agazine—not to

m ention m inor disciples l ike Thelwell and Lloyd—whi chall tended to spread the ideal of a more s imple and truly

poeti cal express ion. P oetry m u st no longer be distingu ishedfrom prose by external marks of l anguage its beauty m u stbe som ething higher—not dress and j ewelry adorning it

from without, but a spirit i lluminating and transfiguringit from within . This spirit had as yet no nam e . Coleridgeand Lam b called it pass ion, or im agination, or fancy, butwithout being quite sure of the term that m ost clearlyexpressed it . However, they both thought they could distinguish it when they found it, and sought for it alwaysin their enterpris ing reading . But when Coleridge m et

Wordsworth,he a t once recognized inhim the quality which

he cons idered the nam eless essential of poetry ; and thenand there began the second stage in this noble discu ss ion.

1 Letters of Char les Lam b 1 . 160 .

1The Letters of Sam uel Taylor Coleridge .

CHAPTER 5.

COLERIDGE AND WORDSWORTH .

What Wordsworth brought to the discuss ion already so

wel l begun we can only guess from the character that it

immediately assumed . H e seems to have interpreted the

more abstract reasoning of Coleridge in the l i ght of his

old imaginative love of nature, and his more recent interest

in the psycho logy and the sorrows of the poor and lowly .

Of this‘

sti l l, sad mus i c of humanity’ there are many

echoes in the verse written after he left Cambridge . Indeedthere i s already a hint of it in the Evening Walk and theDescrip tive S ketches—a hint more fully developed in the

two poems, The F em ale Vagrant and Salisbury P lain,

which were later combined in Guilt arid Sorrow. The Old

M'

ah Travelling1and the narrative o f the Ruined Cottage

1 ‘

have a similar motive . In the Borderers, composed asWordsworth tel ls us in 1 795

- 1 796, he had also exploredthe more strange and curious processes in the mind whichlead to the sor rows that so troubled him ; and had, for thefir st time, endeavored to make his syntax reflect the move

ments of impassioned thought . The best thing in the

Borderers is the l anguage ; it i s a fine, clear, flexible imitation of actual speech, and, as such, anti cipates the more

special effort of the Lyrical Ballads . In this ‘

selection of

the real language of m en,’

and, incidentally, of the languageo f Shakespeare, he seems to have attained, for the firsttime,

3 a per fect command of the English idiom . The

1P rinted a s Anim a l Tranquillity and D ecay in the Ox ford ed it ion,

which follows the last ed it ion printed inWordsworth’

s li fetim e .

1 Incorporated in the first book o f the Excur sion.

1The translation o f Juvenal ( reprinted in Letters of the Words

wor th F am ily 1 . 94-

98 ) is m ore id iom at i c than anyth ing Wordsworth had written h itherto . No doubt this im itat ion o f the

‘reallanguage o f m en,

’

as em ployed by the sat irists, also helped him to

attain a com m and o f English phrase and syntax .

1 28 woaoswoar a’


appropriate marks, functions, and effects, matured my con

jecture into full convi ction ) that fancy and imagination

were two distinct and widely differing faculties,’ writes

Coleridge .

1 This presupposes a whole theory o f p sychologyas a basi s for a theory of poetry—a theory which Words

worth developed and util ized in his classification of hi s

poems in accordance with the human faculties, and their‘

appropriate marks, functions, and effects’ therein il lus

trated . But Wordsworth’s own indications of the scope

of the talk that inspired the Lyrical Ballads go even further .

He presupposes a historical survey of social psychology,as wel l as a thorough investigation o f the development oflanguage and l iterature .

‘

For to trea t of the subj ect with

the clearnes s and coherence of which I bel ieve it sus

ceptible,’

he says,‘

it would be necessary to give a full

account o f. the present state o f publi c taste in this country,and to determine how far this taste is healthy or depraved ;which again could not be determined without pointing out

inwhat manner language and the human mind act and reacton each other, and without retracing the revolutions not

of l iterature alone but l ikew ise of society itsel f .

’2 Thisambitious outl ine m ust always be borne in mind in criticiz

ing any s ingle statement concerning the l anguage. of poetrym ade by Coleridge or Wordsworth . Their utterances werenot casual or arbitrary . They were part of a great, and, ingeneral, a sel f—consistent whole,which was never completedin detail, but which always formed the background for any

ind ividual remark . The separate fragments o f Wordsworth ’

s l iterary criti cism bear much the sam e relation to

each other, and to an unwritten whole, as the shorter poems,

the P r elude, and the Excursion bear to the proj ectedRecluse .

This unwritten inquiry certainly included

18 . L. 1 . 60 .

1P reface to the Lyrical Ballads .

COLERIDGE AND WORDSWORTH 1 29

1

1 . An analysis of the poeti c facu lty in all its manifestations, w ith som e inqu iry not only into the nature of the

feel ing induced by poetry, but into the character of all

natural phenom ena which accidentally, a s it were, producea spir itual reaction analogous to that which the poet aim s

to produce or to reproduce .

2 . The observation o f the m anner in which the poetic

facu lty expresses itsel f in unprem editated speech— in those

spontaneou s associations of im ages, and deviations from the

normal order and structure of language, for the sake of a

special em phasis, which are called figures o f speech .

3 . The determination of the kind of words and phrasesthat have been the most universal and pe rm anent expressionof this facu lty in English .

These three elements in the discussion ar e all suggestedin the definition of the purpose of the Lyrical Ballads whichWordsworth gave in 180 2—

‘

to choose incidents and s ituat ions from com m on l i fe, and to relate or describe them,

throughou t, as far as was poss ible in a selection of languagereally u sed by m en, and, at the same tim e, to throw overthem a certain colouring of im agination, whereby ordinarythings shou ld be presented to the mind in an unusual

aspect ; and, further, and above all, to m ake these inci

dents and situations interesting by tracing in them truely

though not ostentatiously, the pr imary laws of our

nature : chiefly as far as regards the m anner in which

we ass ocia te idea s in a s tate of excitem ent.

’

This is farfrom being a narrow definition of poe ti c style . Whetherwe say with Dryden, or Dryden’

s m aster, Longinus, or

w ith John Dennis, that the language of poetry is the language of passion; or whether, with Aristotle, or Shel ley,or Walter P ater, we em phasize the

‘

strangeness added to

beauty’ in the poet’s style ; or whether, w ith Horace, andthe whole school o f Latin-F rench criti cism represented byP ope, we especially insist on the selective power o f the

poet, we can stil l find our definition included in that o f


Wordsworth . But, while thes e three elements were all

suggested in his critic i sm from the fir st, and implied in itto the last, there was a distinct shi ft of emphasis . The

poeti c developm ent that began in 1 798 with a defense of

the language of the lower and middle classes o f society ends

with the preface on the language o f im agination and fancy

in 18 15; and it is the last which is allowed to stand as an

introduction to the poet’

s complete works for the rest of hisl i fe . The language of the Lyrical Ballads wi ll not be

entirely understood unti l we fo l low it to its maturity inLaodam ia and the P rim ros e of the Rock .

This, unfortunately, we cannot do within the narrow

limits of these pages . Nor can we trace the indebtedness

o f Wordsworth to the formal psychology and philosophy

to which Coler idge introduced him—the theory o f the asso

ciation o f ideas and the phys iological origin of them in

Hartley’s Obs erva tions on M an and Darw in’

s Z ob'

iiom ia,

and the discuss ions of Spinoza which so troubled the

inquis itive spy . The effect of this new read ing onWordsworth’s diction alone wa s so extens ive and remarkable thatit demands an entirely separate treatment in connection

with the P r elude, where the style so bril liantly exem plifiedin the Lines written a F ew M iles above Tintern Abbey is

carried to its height .

1 I t i s one of the miracles of poetry

that l ines which have taken such a hold on the popular

imagination as these should be merely the result o f settingto music the semi-techni cal vocabulary of treatises on

physiology and p sychology . But while it must not be forgotten that T intern Abbey, no less than the true LyricalBallads, i s an offshoot of the new effort and criti cism,

and that the style there displayed was developing s ide bys ide with the style of The Thorn, nevertheless we mustconfine ourse lves, for the present, to the theories i l lustratedin the latter .

1See Beatty, ‘Wordswor th and H ar tley

’—The Na tion 97 . 51 E.


that the Greeks in the ir rel i gious poems address always theNumina Loci, the Geni i, the Dryads, the Naiads, etc ., etc .

Al l natural obj ects were dead, mere hol low statues, but

there wa s a Godkin or Goddessling included in each . Inthe Hebrew poetry you hnd nothing o f th is poor stuff, as

poor in genuine imagination as it is mean in intel lect . At

best it is but fancy, or the aggregating faculty of the mind,not imagination, or the m odifying and coadunating faculty .

This the Hebrew poets appear to m e to have possessed

beyond a ll others, and next to them the Engl ish . In the

Hebrew poets each thing has a li fe of its own, and yet theyare all our l i fe .

’

These distinctions a re undoubtedly Coleridge’s ; but thei l lustration of the effect of imagination could only haveoriginated with Wordsworth .

‘

During the fir st year thatM r . Wordsworth and I were nei ghbours,

’ writes Coleridge,1‘

our conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal

po ints of poetry, the power of exciting the sympathy of thereader by faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the

power of giving the interest of novelty by the modi fyingcolors of the imagination. The sudden charm , which acci

dents of light and shad e, which m oon—light or suu-set,

difiused over a known and fam iliar landscape, app ear ed to

r epr es ent the prac ticability of com bining both .

’

This at

once recalls the recognition of the transfiguring power of

the l ight of sunset which had been Wordsworth’s fir stpoeti c inspiration a t fourteen, as wel l as the theme of much

of his descriptive writing, and the subject o f his only piece

of literary”

c riticism"

hitherto . No doubt, as he spoke to

Coleridge of these things, he remem bered the curious experiences of his boyhood—how the lonely figure of the

shepherd on the hilltop, ennobled by mist and light, had

flashed upon hi s eye, a strange and godlike form how the

unexpected sight of the black crag had stirred and troubled

1B . L. 2 . 5. The italics a re m ine.

COLERIDGE AND WORD SW'ORTH 1 3 3

him for days w ith thoughts o f huge and m ighty form s that

do noto

m ove l ike l iving m en. H e knew that the shepherd

was but a poor, inglor ious creature, and that the black cragwa s only a ‘rocky protuberance,

’

as Dr . Johnson would

say ; but such experiences were l ike the waking o f old

m em or1es, or the sudden vis ion of strange spiritual worlds

beyond the vei l of sense . These shadowy exaltations were

m oments of fear and joy and astonished sel f—revelation .

I f his poetry could produce on other minds the effect that

the‘poetry of nature’ produced on his—then the great

problem of the source and end of im aginative a r t was

solved . This new interpretation of the boyhood experiencethatfir st made him a poet is the theme of the P r elude,which

was begun shortly after this time, and is throughout an

illustration o f the new conception of im agination . Much

that he there writes down for Coleridge he must alreadyhave said in the autobiographi cal outpourings natural in the

beginning o f an enthus iastic friendship .

The different phases of the new theory of imagination

a re i llustrated in The Thorn.

‘

This,’ Wordsworth said,

1

‘grew out ofmy observing on the ridge of Quantock H i ll,on a stormy day, a thornwhich I had often passed, in calmand bright weather, without noti cing it . I said to mysel f,“Cannot I by som e invention do as m uch to make thi s Thorn

permanently an impressive obj ect as the storm has made itto my eyes this mom ent In attempting to do this he

chose, as a medium of communi cation to the reader, thes im ple m ind that he descr ibes a s im aginative rather than

fanci ful—a mind in which a s ingle overwhelm ing emotion,uniting with al l the dim sense of wonder characteristi c of

childrenand unlearned m en, gives unity and intens ity to itsim pressions, as the storm seems to uni fy and transfigurethe outstanding features of a landscape . This s ingle em o

t ion expresses itsel f in a tendency to recur to the one absorb

1See M em oir s 1 . 1 1 0 .

1 3 4 woap swoarfi’


ing idea, and to bring everything e lse into relation with it ;hence the elaborate repetitions in the poem .

To hei ghten the color ing of imagination, ‘Nordswor th

does not hes itate to mak e use of distinctly rom anti c sug

gestions—such as the stirring of the moss on the child’

s

grave beneath the spade, and the haunting v ision of the

baby ’

s face . Such associated ideas, borrowed from litera

ture very different from that which he essayed to write,ar e also used in The Idiot Boy and P eter Bell, where all the

artisti c effects o f moonlight,wel l known to cheap romancers,and images of horseman ghosts and bloom ing wood-bov s

and ‘

spires and mosques and abbey windows’

ar e made to

attend on the lowly figures of the poor idiot boy and thedisreputable potter .

2 . F igures of Sp eech .

On the subject o f imag ination, Wordsworth and Coleridge seemed to be in agreement from the first . W ithlanguage it was not so . As early a s 180 2 Co leridge began

to suspect that ‘

somewhere or other there i s a radical di f

ference in our theoreti cal Opinions concerning poetry .

This radi cal difference seems to consi st in thei r respective

use of the term language. To Coleridge language meantwords considered in themselves, and especially in their

syntacti cal relationsz ; to Wordsworth it meant the whole

imaginative express ion of the thought—which, in most

cases, meant figures of speech . This he probably did not

at first realize . Before 180 2 his use of the terms language,

phras eology, dic tion, etc . , seems to be rather loose . No

doubt,

he was continually influenced by Co leridge’s m ore

distinct interpretation of these words .

But when, in the Appendix on P oetic D iction, he really

undertakes to define his terms, several difficulties in the

1 Letters of Sam uel Taylor Coleridge 2 . 3 86-3 87 .

1B . L. 2. 3 9

-49.


that the peasant daily communes w ith the best obj ects

from which the best part of language i s usually derived,and that ‘

the language aris ing out of repeated experience

and regular feel ings is a more permanent and a far morephilosophical language than that frequently substituted fori t by poets .

’

As Hartley had taught him, the language o f

m en is vitally metaphori cal . We continually express one

idea in terms of another, and explain images by other asso

ciated images . In the figurative express ions and illustra

tions that m en daily use—especially when strong feel ing

puts a strain on the ordinary resources of language—are

found the germs o f poetic art .‘

S imiles, fables, parables, allegories, writes Hartley,1‘

are al l instances of natural analogies improved and set off

by ar t . And they have this common to them all, that the

properties, beauties, per fections, desires, or defects andaversions, which adhere by association to the simile,parable, or emblem of any kind, are insensibly, as it were,trans ferred upon the thing represented . Hence the passions

are moved to good or evil, speculation i s turned into practi ce, and either some important truth felt and realized, orsome error and vice gilded over and recommended .

’ We

cannot speak of a ‘rosy face,’ or a ‘ friendly greeting,

’

or

a ‘cool manner’ wi thout speak ing metaphor ically ; and the

most permanent and express ive metaphors a re those which

are founded upon the most universal phenomena—uponthose which a re connected with ‘

our moral sentiments and

animal sensations, with the operations of the elements, and

the appearance of the vis ible universe ; with storm and sunshine, w ith the revolutions of the seasons, with cold and

heat, with loss of friends and kindred, with inj uries and

resentments, gratitude and hope, fear and sorrow .

’2

When Wordsworth ’

s term, language, is interpreted to

mean m etaphor, prim arily— the express ion o f one exper i

1Oh M an 1 . 297 .

1P re face to the Lyrica l Ballads 180 2.

COLERIDGE AND WORDSWORTH 1 3 7

ence in term s o f another—we begin to understand where inthe language of the present has the advantage over that o fthe cheap poet . The poet talks about the ‘fiam es

’

of love and

the‘ l ightnings ’ o f the fair lady’s eyes ; but both the popular

poet and his readers, according to Wordsworth in his earlyrepubli canism , are too busy w ith ‘routs, dinners, morningcalls, hurry from door to door, from street to street, on

foot or in carr iage,11to give m ore than a passing glance to

any actual flam e or l ightning . They take these phenom ena

on faith ; the im ages are handed down from poet to poet,growing a little m ore general and more faded with each

transm ission: But the peasant, even the peasant of l ittle

imagination, l iving in the presence of storms and l i ghtnings,s itting without em otion, hope, or aim ,

in the loved presenceof his cottage fire, rece ives into his heart a clear im age of

these things through long observation and association and

hence, i f he com pares a feel ing to a flam e, he associates a

distinct image with the idea o f flam e, and the metaphor istrue and was this clearness and reality of imagerythat Wordsworth was trying to br ing back into poetry)‘

I do not know how to give m y reader a more exact notion

o f the style inwhich it was my wish and intention to write,’

he says,2 ‘

than by informing him that I have a t all t im es

endeavored to look steadily at m y subj ect .

’

Of course the poet’s choi ce o f words is vitally aff ectedby the choice o f metaphors, and by the rigorous exclusionof figures of speech which do not really represent the obj ectdescribed, or the nature o f the feel ing which, inm om ents o f

excitem ent, colors and even distorts the perception of the

obj ect . And when the poet is speaking in the character ofan excited peasant, dram ati c fitness also l im its the vocabu

lary . The observationo f the speech of s im ple m en certainlyaffects the words, and especially the syntax, o f the LyricalBallads, as we shall see . Nevertheless, so little has Words

1 Letter to Lady B eaum ont,M ay 21, 180 7 (L . W. F . 1 .

1P re face to the Lyr ica l Ba llads .

1 3 8 woap swom ‘

H’


worth ’s famous theory to do with words in themselves thatit may be questioned whether it fairly excludes the use o f

such a word as incom m unicable in Margaret’s lament,1so

o ften cited as an example o f the incons istency of his theorywith his practi ce :

P erhap s som e dungeon hears thee groan,M aim ed, m angled by inhum an m en;

0 1 thou upon the desert thrownInheritest the lion’

s den;

Or hast been sum m oned to the deep,Thou, thou and all thy m ates to keepAh incom m unicable sleep .

This i s not Margaret’

s language, the criti cs point out with

glee,‘incommuni cable’ not being in that s imple woman’

s

vocabulary . But i f the association of ideas is true andvital—if the words a re a real expression of the mother

’

s

wi stful thought : ‘

They are

'

a sleep ; but they cannot givetheir sleep to m e or to any one

’— then the auriosa felicitasof the adj ective in this connection, its m o-urnful sonority,its vague Shakespearean sugges tions, have nothing to do

with the matter . There is nothing implying wide experience

or intel lectua l culture in Margaret’s thought ; it i s one of

those strange intuitive a ssociations of ideas that come to

children and poets and the s implest hearts . I t i s truly hermethod o f expres sion, although the poet’s vocabulary sup

plies the word .

While this extens ion of the word language undoubtedlyexplains much of Wordsworth’s criti cism and practi ce, i t

cannot be asserted that he always used the term in this

sense . In the Lyrical Ballads o f 1 798, in particular, he was

del iberately imitating the speech of the lower classes, with

all its pecul iarities of vocabulary and syntax, a s we shal l

see . He never could dehne his terms to the sati s faction of

his friends . Coleridge did not know what he meant by

1The Afflic tion of M argar et 50 -56 (Ox ford ed ition, p .


body of words common to Chaucer and to almost anyEngli shman of the year 1 797 . He who can use th is con

crete, emotional, and id iomati c speech with all the power

of which it i s capable has found the true and lasting basis

o f poeti c diction .

This theory both Wordsworth and Coleridge tried to

i l lustrate, but with one characteristi c diff erence ; for in

the Ancient M ariner Coleridge contrives to retain a fewromanti c archaisms, and Wordsworth, in the Lyrical Ballads, keeps som e special real i sti c features of the speech of

the lower and middle classes of society . W ith The AncientM ariner we a re not here concerned . But Wordsworth ’s

effort must be carefully analyzed .

CHAPTER 6 .

TH E LYRICAL BALLAD S .

A lthough Wordsworth ’

s theory of poetic di ction had a

sounder basis in l iterary tradition and in psychology than

an ignorant world of letters was prepared to adm it, his ownappli cation of it, in its fir st extreme form,wa s very l im ited

in time and in extent . Only in the Advertisem ent to the

LyricalBallads of 1 798 does he say that he m eans to em ploy

the‘language oi

‘

conversation in the middle and lowerclasses of soc1ety

’

; and only in this vo lume doe s he a ctuallysucceed in do ing so . But even here he m akes use o f this

language s im ply as an‘

experiment,’

and clearly indi catesthat the experim ent applies only to a part—though a maj orpart—of the collection.

The poem s com pos ing the m inority, not included underVJ

ordswor th’5 definition of his purpose, are easi ly determ ined . Apart from the contributions of Coleridge, and

apart from T intern Abbey, which, as Wordsworth himsel f

indi cates,was com posed in the loftier and more im pass ioned

strain of the ode,1they prove to be the poems wr itten before

1 797—the Lines left upona S ea t ina Yew—Tr ee, The F em ale

Vagrarit, the Lines wr itten near Richm ond, and the Con

vic t—none of which show any trace o f the ballad - l iterature .

One other poem in the volum e shows virtually nothing o f

this influence . This is the Old M art Travelling, whichoccupies a unique place in the fir st edition. I t is the only

representative o f a type of del ineation o f rusti c l i fe in

blank verse which developed side by side with the Lyrica lBallads, but which does not otherwise appear in print til lthe Volumes of 180 0 . The rem aining poem s in the first edit ion form a hom ogeneou s group, clearly r eflecting the

1See note on T intern Abbey in the Lyrical Ba llads, 180 2- 180 5,

reprinted by Hutchinson in the Oxford ed ition, p . 90 1 .


literary influence suggested in the title, and the theory of

poetic diction suggested in the Advertisem ent . They are

the real experiment—the attempt to co—ordinate the artlessa r t o f the ballads w ith Wordsworth ’

s own observation of

the psychological processes underlying the speech of simple

m en; the rest a r e merely poem s wr itten in var ious moodsand in various styles .

This group of the true Lyrical Ballads falls into four

main divi sions

1 . Philosophi cal and narrative poems in the metre, and,to a certain extent, the style of the ballads, but who l ly

d iffering from them in substance .

(a ) Philosophical and reflective poems, in which thenarrative elem ent i s at a minimum

Lines written inEarly SpringLines written a t a Sm all Dis tance fr om m y H ous e

Expos tula tion and ReplyThe Tables Turned.

(b ) Narrative poems in the nature of simple anec

dotes des igned to i l lustrate a philosophical truth thatis far less simple

We ar e S even

Anecdote for F a thersSim onLee.

2 . Narrative and lyri cal poems, less recondite in thought,but written in a

‘

more impressive metre than i s usual inthe Ballads“ :

(a ) P oems more narrative than lyri calGoody Blake and H arry Gill

The Idiot Boy

(P eter Bell) .

(b ) P oems in which the lyrical element tends to pre

1P re face, 180 0 , p . xxxv .


crete words, neither more nor less simple than the languageof the maj ority of poems in the Oxford Book of English

Verse. But when we examine it in the l ight of the di s cuss ions of Wordsworth and Coleridge, even this fact becomesinteresting .

As has already been said, the two poets had some notionthat there was a permanent body of English words —thenames of common things and universal emotions—whichhad remained compa ra tively unaltered since the days of

Chaucer . This was the generally intel l i gible language o f

poetry which the eighteenth century had always endeavoredto discover—a language ‘s imple, sensuous, and passionate .

’

This contention is fully justified by the Lyrical Ballads .

Although Wordsworth’s avowed effort i s to imitate the

l anguage that he daily hears on the l ips of unlearned m en,

stanza a fter stanza of the most typical Wordsworthianverse in thi s volume contain only words that may be foundin Skeat’s glossary to Chaucer . This is true, for instance,of the description of the l ittle cottage girl

I m et a little cottage girl,She was eight years old, she said

Her hair was thick with m any a curl1That clustered round her head,2

and of‘

the wonderful l ines—quam uihil ad genium

uaucleri’ which Hutchinson chooses a s the supreme example

of a ca se in which the‘

l ineaments of the poet peep out

through his clumsy disguise’3

At all t im es o f the day or nightThis wretched wom an th ither goes,And she is known to every s tar,

And every wind tha t blows .

1

1 Occurs in Chaucer’s poetry a s crul, crulle, m eaning cur ly .

‘

1 We are S even 5-8.

3 Lyrica l Ba llads, ed. Hutch inson, p . 240 .

1The Thorn 67 -7 0 .

TH E LYRICAL BALLADS 1 45

Even when the poet is writing m ore philosophically, hestil l seem s to hnd the vocabulary of Chaucer not inadequate .

In the stanza,

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings ;‘Our m eddling intellectM isshapes the beauteous form s o f things—We m urder to d issect,1

only the word ‘dissect is entirely unknown to his master .

Of course there a re m any cases in which this is not so .

Rus tic 3 in the l ine,‘

She had a rus tic woodland air,’

and

interm ittea"1 in the l ine,

‘

And held such iuterm ittea’ talk,’

a re not Chaucerian . The rem arkable thing is that he shouldhave come so near the vocabulary of the

‘fir st finder of our

fair language,’

when he was writing in accordance with atheory in which the 1m 1tation of Chaucer was merely an

incidental suggestion by Coler idge . I t is certainly a proo fof the essential soundness of thi s new conception of the

universal language of poetry that, after so m any centur ies,some of the

,

most characteristi c expressions of an imagination so individual a s that o f Wordsworth should be str i ctlyin the vocabula ry of Chaucer fiWhile this attempt to find the really permanent element in

the English language was undoubtedly the m ost valuable

1The Tables Turned 25-28.

1The earliest occurrence o f th is word noted in the N E . D . is in

Topsell, S erpents 6213The earliest occurrence o f th is word noted in the N . E . D . is

in P alladadius OnH usbandry 1 . 1 0 27 ( c .

“The earliest occurrence o f the word in this sense noted in the

N . E . D . is in Wyatt, D ea th of the Countess P em br oke 42 1-422

5Oi the words in

'

the Concordance to the poem s o f Wordsworth,I est im ate that about 60 per cent occur, in som e form , in the poetryo f Chaucer ; about 68 per cent . in the poetry o f M ilton; about 80per cent in the poetry o f Spenser ; and 90 per cent in the poetryo f Shak espea re.


feature of the new theory, there i s abundant evidence thatWordsworth himsel f was more especial ly interested in the

a rtisti c possibil ities of exclusively colloquial turns of express ion . These occur chiefly in the poems in which there i s a

somewhat dramatic attempt to imitate the manners, as wel la s the emotions, of humble characters . 1 By far the l argest

proportion of them is found in Goody Blake and Harry

Gill and The Idiot Boy, as wel l as in the later, unpublished

poem of The Tinker, which belongs to the same type, andin the first ed ition of P eter Bell, which, though not printed

unti l 18 19, i s a true lyri cal ballad . Where the emotional andlyri cal element begins to predominate, these col loquial i smstend to d i sappea r, a s in The Thorn and The Las t of theF lock . Thi s i s a rather interesting fact—a possibly unintentional i l lustration of Wordsworth ’

s own bel ief that theuniversal language i s the l anguage of the heart . One wouldnaturally expect to hnd co lloquial isms in a dramati c lyric,where the poet i s speaking through the mouth of a humblecharacter, rather than in a narrative, where he speaks inhis own person . But the hal f—humorous observation of

external manners lowers the sty le,while emotion raises anduniversal izes it . Thi s i s especially true in the case of TheM ao

’ M other, whose patheti c song is not sullied by any ofthe curious importations from vulgar speech that are sofrequent in The Idiot Boy .

The col loquiali sms are of two sorts . There are wordswhich are chiefly confined to speech and there are words

which, though frequent in literature and capable of beauti

ful and noble uses, are employed in the Lyrical Ballads in amanner not common outside of conversation . The col

loquialism s of thefir st type have generally an onomatopoetic

value . In the earlier descriptive poems, Wordsworth hadalready showed a special interest in words expressive of

sound . To those which he there employed he has nowadded a choi ce col lection of more homely creations of thiskind


there i s a touch of honest vulgarity Which i s characteri stic

of The Tinker throughout. Nothing in hi s publ ished workso completely reveal s the stra in of rusti c good nature in

Wordsworth, unm odified by any higher touches of poetry,as this piece, with its cheer ful rude metre and unpoli shedphrases1

Who leads a happy li feI f it

’

s not the m erry T inker ?Not too old to have a wi fe ;Not too m uch a thinker.

Right before the F arm er’s doorDown he s its ; his brows he knitsThenhis ham m er he rouzes ;

Batter ! batter ! batter !He begins to clatter ;And while the work is go ing on

Right good ale he bowzes .

2

But thi s poem was Withheld from print, and the styleemployed in it was seldom allowed to appear in Wordsworth’s poetry after the Lyrical Ballads . In Benjam in the

Waggoner, his most success ful attempt at humor, some

thing of a broadly, rudely playful sympathy with the foiblesof a humble sinner is retained ; but it i s expressed inlanguage so pure and l impid that it would not d i sgraceChaucer’s own wel l of Engl ish undefiled . Many of the

colloquial words just l isted were omitted in correctionf”and

do not appear in the Concordance a t all . Others were never

used after the appearance of the Lyrical Ballads! Words

1Reprinted in A D es cription of the Wordswor th and Coleridge

Manuscripts in the P ossession of Mr . T. Nor tonLongm an, pp . 6768 ; c f . Knight, Life of Wordswor th 1 . 3 1 0 .

2The Tinker 1 -15.

c m g,fiddle-faddle, tinder, etc ., were om itted in revis ion, and

never em ployed again.

‘Burr, curr, hob-nob, hur ly-bur ly, flurry (in the phrase in a

flur ry ) , etc ., are em ployed only in the Lyrical Ba llads . Bowzes,batter, bum m ing, etc ., occur only in the unpublished poem , The

Tinker .

TH E LYRICAL BALLADS I 49

wo rth el iminated the over- co l‘

loquial elements from his

vocabulary, a s care fu lly a s he removed the pedanti c or

bookish expressions from the early descriptive poem s . The

former a re a s l ittle characteristi c of his mature style as

the latter .

Most of'

the col loquial words had some artisti c justificat ion in their onomatopoeti c value ; but this can hardly be

said of many phrases of the same type —‘not a whit the

better he,’ ‘I fear you’re in a dreadful way,

’ ‘

in a m ighty

fr et,’ ‘

in a m ighty flurry,’

Sad cas e, a s you m ay think,For very cold to go to bed,And then for cold not s leep a wink,

etc . Most of these also were rej ected by Wordsworth ’

s

m ature taste .

1 Nothing cou ld give a better idea o f the

alm ost uni form nobility of his style than to look up wordsl ike dreadful, fr et, m ighty, etc ., in the Concordance, and tofind the quotation from the Lyrical Ballads standing out

lonely contrast to such l ines a s

Im plores the dr eadful untried sleep of death .

2

Dim dreadful faces through the gloom appear. 3

I love the brook s wh ich down their channels fret.4

And see the ch ildren sport upon the shoreAnd hear the m ighty waters rolling everm ore .

E5

And these perennial bowers and m urm uring p inesBe gracious a s the m us ic and the bloomAnd all the m ighty ravishm ent o f spring .

6

1 None o f the express ions here m entioned occurs inWordsworth’

s

poetry outs ide o f the Lyrical Ba llads .

2D . S . Quarto 643 .

3I bz

'

d . 650 .

‘Im m or tah

’

ty 196 .

5I bz

'

d . 17o- 17 1 .

6 Lady ! the songs of Spring wer e in the gr ove 12-14.


This fullnes s of content, this imaginative d ignity, are the

really typical features of Wordsworth ’s style, whether hei s borrowing hi s actual words from a peasant or from

Shakespeare . This he himsel f realized more and more .

1

However, a t the beginning, his interest in the poor and

lowly m ade him forget that he was using them as types,and their language as a universal expression of universal

feel ings, rather than a s an external mark of a single class,and a single stage of culture . When he takes a l ine of

genuine poetry—oi pure and emotiona l Engl i sh—d irectlyfrom the l ip s of a peasant,

2a s he sometimes does, we are

grateful indeed for the gi ft ; but where this essential lypoeti cal character i s lacking, the language of the countryvillager i s not in itsel f preferable to that o f the pol ite Lon

doner . The real value of the l anguage of the LyricalBallads i s not that i t i s the speech of

‘

the lower and middleclasses of society,

’ but that i t is universal language of theheart in permanent and universal Engli sh words .

2 . Syntax.

When we turn from the study o f words per se to their

logical relation to each other in the sentence—i. e ., the

syntax,we find that the combined influence of the Reliques

and of Wordsworth’s new principles had a much moredi stinct, and possibly a deleterious, influence upon hi s poeti c

1Cf . M em oirs 1 . 129.

2Of Sim on Lee Wordsworth says : ‘

The express ion when the

hounds were out, I dearly love their vo ices” [Sim onLee 48] wasword for word’ from the lips o f the 0 111 m an who served as the

m odel for the superannuatefl huntsm an [M em oirs 1 . The

beauti ful lines in The Solitary Reaper,The m us i c inm y heart I boreLong a fter it was heard no m ore,

a re alm ost word for word from the j ournal o f Wordsworth’

s

Quaker friend, Thom as Wilkinson. See the passage from the

j ournal, quoted inHarper’s William Wordswor th 2. 66 .


and, a s Wordsworth noticed, he expresses this emphasis

simply by repeating the important idea again and again

not by any attem pt to subordinate the less important thingsto it . The result i s that hi s speech has exactly the qual itiesthat Coleridge di scovered in too much of Wordsworth ’s

poetry—‘prol ixity, repetition, and an eddying instead of a

progress ion of thought .

’1 Yet this emotional rather than

intellectual syntax has its worth for the poet ; and for one

who had sought a greater flexibility in the imitation of

classical Latin, the di scovery of the poss ibil ities of variety

and expressiveness in his own native idiom was inva luable .

The result of reproducing the syntax of the unlearnedwas not unlike the result of imitating their vocabulary .

As the words that Wordsworth uses are the wo rds of

Chaucer, so his syntax is the syntax of a stil l earlier period .

What Kel lner says2 of the prose of Al fred exactly describesthe construction of sentences in the Lym

'

cal Ballads :‘Al fred

changes his construction in consequence of every changegoing on in his mind, while in a modern author the flowof the ideas is checked by the ready pattern of the syn

tactical construction . The syntax of older periodsi s natural, na

'

if—that i s, it follows much more closely thedri ft of the ideas, of mental images ; the diction, therefore,looks as i f i t were extempori sed, as i f written on the spur

o f the moment, while modern syntax, fettered by logi c,is a r tificial, the result of l iterary tradition, and therefore,far from being a true mirror o f what i s go ing on in the

mind ’2 To fol low more closely ‘

the dri ft o f ideas, of

mental images,’

to make his language a true mirror of whatis go ing on in the mind, espe cially of the manner in which

we a ssociate ideas in a state of excitement—th i s was theobj ect o f Wordsworth in some of the much derided mannerism s in the Lyrical Ballads . As he himsel f said, he

always had ‘a worthy purpose.

’

1B . L. 2 . 1 0 9.

2H is torica l Outlines of English Syntax, p . 9 .

TH E LYRICAL BALLADS

T he effect of emotion (or lack o f thought ) on syntax i s

mani fest in various types of sentences in the Lyrical

Ballads, from the struggling attempt to relate subj ect topredicate to the unavail ing effort to create structures a t

once complex and unified. Even the most s imple sentence

is an intellectual achievem ent . The fus ing of the ideas o f

subj ect and predicate in one organi c whole often presents

an almost insuperable difficulty to the uncultivated or

excited mind . ThlS is i l lustrated in one o f the most fre

quent m anner isms of uneducated speech, whi ch is also a

special feature of the style of the popular ballads . Whenit occurs in l iterature, it is often copied from them .

The dynt y t wa s both sad and sa r .

1

The yerlle o f Fyfi'

e, withowghten stry ffe

H e bowynd hym over Sulway?

Then forthe Sy r Cauline he was ledcle .

3

And Scarlette he was flyinge a t'

oote .

4

The mind, in its interest in the subj ect, tends to lose s ight

of the predicate, and to cling to the im age suggested by thesubstantive . In order to proceed, it has to take a freshstart, so to speak, with the pronoun representing the sub

stantive, and so qu ickly pass to the verb . Exam ples o f thissyntactical pecu l iarity are very frequent in the LyricalBallads,

5 whe re it appears for the fir st time inWordsworth ’

s

poetry .

The eye it cannot chuse but see.

6

But the least m otion wh ich they m ade,I t seem ed a thrill o f pleasure .

7

1 Chevy Chase 85.

2The Ba ttle of Otter bourne 5-6 .

3Sir Cauline, P art I I 17 .

‘Robin H ood and Guy of Gis borne 57 .

5There a re thirty -two exam ples o f it in the thirteen Lyr ica l

Ballads .

°Exp0 5tula ti0 n and Reply 17 .

7 Lines Written inEar ly Spring 15- 16 .


Your lim bs they are alive .

1

The pony he is m ild and good .

2

Sham e on m e, Sir ! this lusty lam b,H e m akes m y tears to flow.

a

The owlet in the m oonlight a ir,H e shouts from nob ody knows where .

‘

The doctor he has m ade him wait.5

The babe I carry onm y arm ,

H e saves for m e m y precious soul.“

Alas ! alas ! that look so wildI t never,never cam e from m e.

The pecul iar manneri sm of style here i l lustrated was onethat Wordsworth took few pains to correct in the later

editions of these poems . The l ines ‘

H i s ancles, theyp

are

swoln and thick,’8 become

His body, dwindled and awry,Rests upon ankles swoln and thick.

In the l inesThe owlet in the m oonlight a irHe shouts from nobody knows where,9

he i s omitted ; and the l ine,‘And Susan she begins to fear,

i s changed to ‘And Susan now begins to fear .

’

The l ine,‘

H er face it was enough for m e,’1 1 i s a l tered by punctua

1 We Ar e S even 3 4.

2The I diot Bay 3 13 .

3The Las t of the F lock 17-18.

The I diot Boy 3 -4.

5I bid. 175.

6The M ad M other 47 -48.

7I bz

’

d . 87 -88.

SSim onLee 3 5.

The I diot Boy 4-5.

I bid . 187 .

The Thorn 20 0 .


between the two by redupl icating the subj ect. These two

types of reduplicationa re thus il lustrated and described byKel lner

Your husband he is gone to save far o ff,Wh ilst others com e to m ake him lose at hom e.

—Shakesped re.

She early left her sleepless bed,The faires t m aid of Tem

’

otda le.

—S‘cott.

‘

These instances i l lustrate two different psychologi cal pro

cesses, and accordingly two d ifferent constructions . In thefirst case, the subj ect i s foremost in the consciousness of

the speaker, and the other idea connected w ith it, Viz ., the

predi cate, is dimmed for a m oment, so that i t takes thespeaker some t ime to catch hold of i t again . In the secondcase, the speaker is so much under the impression of what

he i s going to predica te, that he forgets for a moment totel l the person addressed what he i s predicating about, and

it takes some tim e until he finds out his mistake . In bothcases there is a distinct pause between the two expressions

for the same subj ect ; in both cases the b earer has the

impress ion that there is some emotion at work in the mindof the speak er . Both these circumstances make the express ion a favorite figure of speech .

’1

This second type of redupli cation is also not uncommon inthe Lyrical Ballads

zz

1 H is torica l Outlines of Eng lish Syntax, p . 40 .

2Cf . the parody o f P eter Bell by John Ham iltonReynolds wh ich

appeared in 1819, just be fore Wordsworth’

s own poem o f that nam e.

( It is one o f the few parod ies o f Wordsworth wh ich really reproduce the poet’s m annerism s o f syntax . The o ft quoted parody byHorace Sm ith in Rejected Addr esses, for instance, has not caughtthe poet’s style at all. )

Now I arise, and away we go,My little hobby-horse and m e.

TH E LYRICAL BALLADS 157

I t stands erect, this aged thorn.

1

That he had d ied, that cruel fa ther !2

Alas ! ’

ti‘

s very little, all

Which they can do between them .

3

very similar

occurs when the interest in the predicate

obscures the object

” Alas ! I should have had him still,My Johh h y, till m y dy ing day .

4

Som etimes, however, the redupl ication is really due to a

qui ck mental convers ion of the subj ect into the obj ect .

Thy lip s, I feel them , baby .

5

And this poor thorn they clasp it round 6

But these a re only s imple examples of constructions thatoccur in more complicated forms—forms which often come

very near the l ine where the broken emotional syntax passesover into a more sustained intel lectual structure . The sug

gestion of sustained thought immediately converts

Fond lovers, yet not quite hob nob,

1The Thom 5-6 .

2I bz

'

d . 142- 143 .

3Sim onLee 55-56 .

4The I diot Boy 245-246 . Cf . Reynolds’ P eter Bell

And gathered leeches are to him ,

To P eter B ell, like gathered flowers .

5The M ad M other 3 3 .

The Thom 17 .

7The I diot Boy 299

-

3 0 0 .


Even he, o f cattle the m ost m ild,The pony had his share.

1

Him whom she loves, her Id iot Boy .

2

In these cases the pronoun seems to be used,not in a somewhat helples s and impulsive effort to keep hold of the sub

jec t, but with del iberate forethought . In thefir st quotation,‘ fond lovers’ i s in intentional apposition with ‘they’ in

the two others, the pronoun seems to be used to point forward to the substantive, which i s purposely withheld for a

moment, instead of being parenthetical ly inserted on secondthought . Such nice gradations suggest the more intel lectualuses to which Wordsworth ’

s practi ce in imitating the

untaught cadence of extemporaneous speech could be put .In the end i t gave him a fine and flexible instrument .

But i f the mind in which feel ing triumphs over thoughthas some difficulty in fusing the primary elements of. a

sentence into an organi c who le, it waxes increasingly helpless as it attempts to rel ate the larger units thus formed .

Often there i s no such attempt. The simple units are merelyplaced side by s ide, a s in a child

’s first reader : ‘I have acat. My cat i s white . My cat eats rats .

’

This i s a favoritemethod in the Lyrical Ballads

H er eyes are wild, her head is bare,The sun had burnt her coal-black hair ;Her eyebrows have a rusty stain,And she cam e far from over the m ain.

She has a baby on her a rm .

3

I m et a little cottage girl,She was e ight years old, she said .

4

I have a boy o f five years old,

His face is fa ir and fresh to see ;

1The I diot Boy 250 -251 .

2I bz

'

d. 16 .

3The M ad M other 1-5.

4We Ar e S even5-6 .

1 6 0 WORDSWORTH ,S THEORY OF POETI C DICTION

A closer relation between the independent assertions i s

attempted in the parentheti cal structure so frequent in con

versation . Instead of employing subordinate clauses andmodi fying phrases, the detail s a re inserted into the midst ofother statements, j ust as they occur to the mind, each in

the form of a complete l ittle sentence

His head he raised—there was in s ight,I t caught his eye, he saw it plainUpon the house-top, glittering bright,A broad and g ilded vane.

1

Tis now som e two and twenty years,S ince she (her nam e is M artha Ray )Gave with a m aiden’s true good—willHer com pany to StephenH ill.2

Sometimes, when a complex sentence i s almost achieved,the subordinate clause has a tendency to detach i tsel f andbecome independent, as in the fol lowing case :

There’s not a m other,no not one,But when she hears what you have done,Oh ! Betty she

’

ll be in a fright .

3

In thi s sentence the logical relation of the separate parts

might be expressed thus : ‘

There i s not a mother who will

not be in a fright when she hears what you have done.

’

But in hi s excitement, the speaker loses track of the rela

tion of the last clause to the fir st, and lets it emerge into

greater independence . The d i sposition to make each idea aseparate assertion is a lso Vis ible in the l ine,

In Johnny’s left-hand you m ay see

The green bough’

s m ot ionless and dead,4

1 Anecdote for F a thers 49—52.

2The Thom 1 15-1 18 . Cf . Chevy Chas e 89-90

‘Then bespake a squyar off Northom barlonde,Ric . Wy tharyntonwas his nam ,

’

etc .

3The Idiot Boy 24-26 .

4I bid. 88-89.

THE LYRICAL BALLADS 1 6 1

a s com pared with the m ore intel lectual and l iterary con

struction to which Wordsworth a ltered it

In Johnny’s left-hand you m ay see

The green bough m otionless and dead .

Som etimes, too, there is a connecting word used looselyto re fer to an idea in the m ind of the speaker not explicitlyexpressed :

She talked and sung the woods am ong,And it wa s in the English tongue .

1

Often relation is merely suggested rather than clearlyindicated

P roud o f herself, and proud o f him ,

She sees him in his travelling trimHow quietly her Johnny goes .

2

Even when a ,complex sentence is actually constructed,it is some’times necessary to bind the parts together by a

redupli cation not unl ike that employed in the j oining of

subj ect and predicate . As in the one case a pronoun was

u sed to refer to the substantive, so in this an adverb, po inting back to the subordinate conj unction, is inserted in the

pr1nC1pal islause

But when the ice our stream s d id fetter,Oh then how her old bones would shak e .

3

Now, though he knows poor Johnny well,Yet for his li fe he cannot tellWhat he ha s got upon his back .

4

But to l ist all the pecu l iarities of im pu lsive speech to be

found in the Lyrical Ballads is im possible . We m ight speak

of the flexible order of words—oi inversions, not arbitrary

2The M ad M o ther 9-1 0 .

2The I dio t Boy 99-1 0 1 .

2Goody B lake and H ar ry Gill 41-42 .

4The I diot Boy 124

- 126 .


and unid iomatic, as in the descriptive poems, but naturaland expressive ; of the tri ck of repeating adj ectives oradverb sl ; or o f repeating the noun w ith some addedm odifier2 ; of the use of a noun for an adj ective (

‘

H i s face

was gloom ; his heart wa s etc . but thi s wouldswel l our study to unwieldy d imensions . Just because

Wordsworth i s trying to write as m en talk—to register inthe syntax all the shi fting ideas and currents of emotion

it i s very difficult to class i fy his constructions . They con

form to no system . E ach sentence i s a living organi sm, a s

wayward and individual as other organisms in their

undi sciplined natural state .

In many cases the reader may wax impatient, and saywith Coleridge4 : ‘

I t i s indeed very possible to adopt in apoem the unmeaning repe titions, habitual phrases, andother blank counters, which an unfurnished or confusedunderstanding interposes at short intervals, in order to keephold of his subj ect, which is stil l slipping front

2 him, and

to give him time for recollection ; or, in mere aid of

vacancy, as in the scanty companies o f a country stage thesame player pops backwards and forwards, in order to prevent the appearance of empty spaces, in the process ion of

M acbeth, or Henry VIII . But what assi stance to the poet,or ornament to the poem, these can supply, I am at a loss toconjecture .

’

But th is i s one of the instances in which Co leridge’scriti cism is decidedly peevish . Whatever might have beenthe absolute value of these tricks of speech, as a prel iminaryinquiry into the sources of l iterary style, an experim ent

2Goody Blake and H arry Gill 1 0 1 ; Anecdote for F a thers 12

, 57 ;The Thom 5. 4 ; The I diot Boy 96 ; etc . Such repet ition is characteristic o f the ballads ; c f . Sir A ldih gar 147 :

‘Then woeful, woeful was her hart .

’

2The M ad M other 27-28 ; The I diot Boy 28-29 ; The Com plaint

of the F orsaken IndianWom an 3 6, etc .

3Cf . The I dio t Boy 254 :

‘

Tis s ilence a ll on every s ide.

’

4B . L . 2. 43 .


Two poor old dam es, as I have l’mowu .

1

There’s no one knows, as I have s old .

2

His hunting feats have him bere ftO f his right eye, as you m ay s ee .

3

Yet never had she,well or s ick,A s every m an who knew her says,

A p ile be forehand, wood or stick .

2

These and the l ike ar e obvious ly paralleled, not only in thehabits of rusti c story-tellers, but by the narrative devicesof the ballads

The sworde wa s scharpe and sore can byte,I tell you in ser tayue .

5

I wis, i f you the tr ou the would know,

There was m any a weep ing eye .

°

But it i s in the use of the ballad- repetition that Wordsworth sometimes fails most s ignally, but more often a chieves

his most or iginal artisti c success . This device of style i s eloquently defended in a note to The Thom in the volume of

180 0 7 :‘

There is a numerous class of readers who imagine

that the same words cannot be repeated without tautologyThis is a great error : virtual tautology is much o ftener

produced by different words when the meaning is exactly

the same. Words, a P oet’

s words more parti cularly, ought

to be weighed in the balance of feel ing, and not measured

by the space which they occupy upon paper . For the Readercannot be too o ften reminded that P oetry is passion: it i sthe history or science of feel ings . , Now every m an must

1 Goody B lake and H ar ry Gill 3 4.

2The Thorn 162 .

3Sim onLee 26 .

2Goody B lake and H arry Gill 53 -55.

5The Ba ttle of Otterboum e 1 0 9

-1 1 0 .

2The Rising in the Nor th 51 -52.

7Reprinted in the Ox ford ed ition, pp . 899-90 0 .

THE LYRICAL BALLADS 1 65

know that an attempt i s rarely made to com municate im pas

sioned feel ings without som ething of an accom panyingconsciousness of the inadequateness o f our own powers,or the deficiencies of language . During such efforts there

w il l be a craving in the mind, and a s long as it i s unsatisfiedthe Speaker wil l cl ing to the same words, or words of the

sam e character . There are also various other reasons whyrepetition and apparent tautology are frequently beauties of

the highest kind . Among the chief of these reasons is the

interest which the mind attaches to words, not only a s

sym bol s of the passion, but a s things, active and efficient,which are of themselves part of the passion. And further,from a

‘spirit of fondness, exultation, and gratitude, the

mind luxuriates in the repetition of words which appear

success fully to communicate its feel ings .

’

The strength and the weakness of this pos ition a re both

i llustrated in the Lyric al Ballads . Wordsworth did not

accurately distinguish between the cases where language

is really inadequate to express feel ing—where a normalhuman mind . i s helpless under an abnormal emotion—and

the cases in which the inadequacy is due only to the veryelementary powers of sustained thought or expression in

the persons whose psychological processes he chose to

im itate . In this instance, he forgot to apply the principle

that he himsel f found so fruitful—the principle that a ll

figures of speech must be jus tified by passion. In such

poem s a s The Las t of the F lock, The M od M other, and The

Com plaint of the F orsaken Indian Wom an, there is the

j u sti fying passion; and the recurring refrains are felt to

be as artistically effective a s they a re true to the feel ing

to be expressed . But too o ften the outward form existsw ithout a sufficient em otional or artisti c reason for it, a s

wi ll be seen. But even where the repetition does not haveits source in em otion, 1t is a legitim ate mode of emphas is,provided that it supplements, instead o f supplanting, the

emphasis that a proper selection and subordination o f


detail s can give . Such an emphas i s really exists in the

Reliques . The theme of the story i s generally so momen

tous, so melodramati c (being usually the danger of violent

death to some person or group of persons ) , and the outstanding circumstances so important, that the poet must

necessarily omit minor details . In the naive and rapidnarrative, the repetition gives a real ity to detail s that thehurried feel ings of the reader would neglect, or serves to

emphasize some really important situation . But in the

majority of Wordsworth ’s ballads the swi ftnes s o f move

ment i s lacking, and the slow and thoughtful reading thathe demands o ften makes the repetition unnecessary a s a

matter of narrative technique . An analys i s of the various

uses to which Wordsworth has put the ballad—repetitionwill make this clearer .

In the group of the philosophical poems, this device i sa lmost the only feature that Wordsworth’s thoughtful versehas in common with hi s naive models . The origina l patterno f such stanzas as the fol lowing i s obvious

Why,William , on that old grey stone,

Tbus for the length o f half a day,Why,William , sit you thus alone,And dream your t im e away ? 1

Up ! up ! m y friend and clear your looks,Why all this to il and trouble ?Up ! up ! m y friend, and quit your books,Or surely you’ll grow double.

These at once recall the familiar structure of the ballads

Here take her, Child o f Elle, he sayd,And gave her lillye wh ite hand ;

Here take m y dear and only child,And with her half m y land f’

1Expos tula tion and Reply 1-4.

2The Tables Turned 1-4.

2The Child of E lle 189—192.


are recalled in the stanza,

I f I these thoughts m ay not prevent,I f such be o f m y creed the plan,

Have I not reason to lam ent

What m anhas m ade o f m an?1

Here it wi l l be seen that the closing of the poem with a

recurrence to the thought w ith which it began, or which

forms the centre of it, i s an effective means of securing

unity, and of emphasiz ing the theme .

In the narrative poems the repetition is more frequent,and poss ibly less justifiable . In We ar e S even the repeti

tion of the words which form the title,w ith various m odifications—‘

Seven in all,’ ‘

Seven are we,’ ‘

Yet you are seven,’

‘

Seven boys and girl s are we,’ ‘

0 M aster, we are seven,’

‘Nay, we are seven’—i s the repetition o f the one essential

thought in the poem, and represents the obstinate cl inging

of the child’s mind to one idea ; and hence it is eff ective .

In Goody Blake and Harry Gill there is a s imilar effort to

emphas ize the theme, or rather the cl imax of the story byrepetition :

That everm ore his teeth they chatter,Chatter, chatter, chatter, st ill.

In The Anecdote for F a thers this i s hardly the case . Here,where the poet i s speaking in his own person, and i s notreiterating an important idea, the repetitious character of

the narrative portion simply shows a difficulty in gettingon—an unnecessary eddying of thought about something

that should not hold it so long

‘My little boy, wh ich like you m ore,’

I said, and took him by the a rm‘Our hom e by Kilve’s delight ful shore,Or here at Liswyn farm

1 Lines Written in E ar ly Spring 21 -24.

THE LYRICAL BALLADS 1 69

‘

And tell m e, had you rather be,’

I said, and held him by the a rm ,

‘

At Kilve’

s sm ooth shore by the green sea,

Or here at Liswyn farm

Here it is obvious that the second stanza really adds nothing

to the fir st—as Wordsworth recognized after Coleridge hadused this passage a s an example of the tendency to eddy

rather than to progress . In later editions he om itted the

first stanza, to the great improvement o f the poem.

But it i s in the lyrical poems where the repetition becomes

a refrain, that Wordsworth s attempt to make l iteraryar tifice an accurate r eflection of psychological processes i smost successful . Like other poeti cal devices, the refrainhas its origin in a characteristi c of impassioned feel ing .

The mind under the influence o f a great emotion is in tensely

preoccupied with a s ingle idea, or group o f associated ideas .

Around these all other ideas tend to circle ; in this every

train of thought begins and ends . When a new and alien

series of. im ages is suggested, the mind fo llows it but a

l ittle way, and then finds some m eans o f l inking it w iththe s ingle overwhelming feel ing . Generally, as Wordsworth noti ced, the idea is repeated again and again in the

same or very sim ilar words . But in many songs there isno effort whatever to tra ce the process by which the mind

returns to the refrain . It is merely added every t ime a t

the end of a stanza or set number of verses, whether it hasany real connectionwith them or not .

To m ake a natural, rather than an ar tificial, use of this

device is the aim of Wordsworth in all the poem s we havegrouped as lyri cs . Of these, The Thorn seem s the leasteffective . This is partly due to the intrusion o f the shadowyspeaker,who is neither an old skipper nor the poet him sel f,but something between, and who, m oreover, i s not tell inghis own story . The lyr ical elem ent is thus partly d issipated

1 Auecdote for F a ther s 29—3 6 .


before i t p ierces through the somewhat al ien medium to

the imagination of the reader . Nevertheless, in introducingthe refrain,

Oh m isery ! Oh m isery !Oh woe to m e ! O m isery !

Wordsworth has represented it as a natural result o f thetendency of the adhes ive mind o f the old seaman to

cling to the idea that has impressed him, and to repeat itin the same words—as wel l a s an expression of the feel ing

of the poor woman .

In The Las t of the F lock there i s a double refra in whichi s much more skil fully used . The speaker naturally beginswith the explanation,

Sham e onm e, Sir ! this lusty lam b,He m akes m y tears to flow.

To-day I fetched him from the rock ;H e is the las t of all m y flock,

which suggests the history of the flock . When he comes tothe account of hi s fifty comely sheep, the contrast betweenthe m emory o f these and the one last lamb in hi s arms

suddenly forces itsel f upon him, and he recurs to his firstthought, but expresses the thought in different words

This lus ty lam b of a ll m y s tor e

I s all tha t is a live

adding,And now I care not i f we dieAnd perish all o f poverty .

Thi s last reflection immediately suggests the rest of his

story, and he begins again . He had to sel l hi s flock one byone to buy hi s little chi ldren bread, he says . As he speaks,the woefulness of this takes possession of his m ind ; and,

accordingly, every added group of details natura l ly ends inthe reflection,

‘

For m e it was a woeful day,’ which becomes

the refrain :


For-ever left alone am I ,

Thenwhere fore should I fear to die ?

In the last lines the two refrains unite :

My poor forsaken child ! i f IFor once could have thee clo se to m e,

With happy heart I then should die,And m y last thoughts would happy be.

I feel m y body die away,I shall not see another day .

Here certainly the eddying o f thought i s used with wonderful arti sti c effect, as subtle as it i s beauti ful and patheti c .

In The M ad M other the repetition is sti l l more del i cate .

It i s used chiefly in a remarkable complex of rhymes,which

repeat and echo each other . The result i s a curious haunt

ing cadence . Every rhyme falls on the ear l ike a refrain,though few are aware in what thi s refrain- l ike qualityconsists .

To trace further Wordsworth ’s use of the real language

o f m en, and the psychologi cal processes behind it, i s perhaps unnecessary . A large book could be written on his

use of repetition a lone ; but the discussion of each single

example of every different usage would be more laborious

than edi fying . F rom the examples already cited it i s evi

dent that the language of the Lyrical Ballads is as muchthe result of conscious art a s the language of P aradise Los t.

I t was a del iberate and thorough appl i cation o f a theorywhich seemed strange enough to ‘ indolent reviewers,

’

but

which has much in common with the theory at the basi s ofthe

i

m ore scientific study of language for the last century .

1

l . Kellner, H is torical Outlines of English Syntax, p . 1 0 .

‘

In

the study o f English syntax, the vulgar talk cannot be overlooked,nay—but fo r the d ifficulty o f gett ing trustworthy m aterials—weought, in d iscuss ing the evolution of syntax, to start from the rust ictalk , j ust as a botanist, in dealing with the evolut ion o f the strawberry, will not take the a rtificial fruit, but the wild strawberry of

the wood a s the starting-po int o f his study .

’


Of course, 1n his exper im ent, Wordsworth made som e

artisti c mistakes, and fel l into several bad habits . A m an of

twenty- eight,‘

not much used to com position,’

is not l ikelyto produce poetry uni formly excel lent in workmanship . H e

is the less l ikely to do so when he has the misfortune to be

born in a bad age, and must rediscover poetic principles and

models for himsel f .

Among the evil resu lts of the experiment was the

unnecessary use of the various tags—‘

why should I fear tosay etc .

—which occas ionally fill hal f a line with nothinga t all and the loss of that energeti c forward movement so

characteristi c of his descript ive poems . The eddying repetitious narrative of the untrained speaker has its emotional

uses ; but it is not an ideal standard . The effect of a poem

should result, a s far as poss ible, from its inner structure .

Where there is a continual necessity for external bolsters

repetitions and appeals to the reader—ar t in its highest sense

does not exist . There is not a skil ful adaptation of means to

the attainm ent of a desired end .

Of this high impersonal a r t, where the means a r e con

cealed l ike the bony structure of a living organism, instead

o f shamelessly Haunted, Wordsworth was to give manyexamples . Indeed there a re som e exam ples of it in the

Lyrical Ballads—in The Complaiut of the F orsaken IndianWom an and The M ao

’ M other, for instance generally thear t in this col lection of poem s is not so obviou s a s it seem s .

But over against the trium phs we m ay place such a failurein structure as the ori ginal Sim on Lee, on which Wordsworth ’

s own alterations were the best poss ible cr iti cism .

In Sim onLee the poet is speaking in his own character,not that of a peasant or the garru lous old skipper in TheThom ; but he !is nearly a s helpless to m ass details, and

entirely to finish one thought before he proceeds to the next .

The following is the order in whi ch the details of S im on’

s

appearance were fir st givenz— ancient hunting feats—one

eye left -a cheek like a cher ry—loss of his master and


friends—oue eye left—a’isabled lim bs—loss of kindred

his wi fe—disabled lim bs—present attempts a t agri cultureancient hunting feats—his w i fe—his present attempts at

agri culture—his disabled lim bs . Here it i s apparent that

there is no contro l over the details, no attempt to group

them at all the mind of the poet circles round and roundamong them—advancing a little in the process, to be sure,but not in the fashion o f a wel l disciplined intel lect . I t willa lso be seen that in the nature of the case there i s nothing

to produce his apparent helplessness—no difficulty in the

simple facts, no passion to di sorganize the mind . I t was

simply a bad habit into Which his a ttempt to imitate the

methods o f untrained speakers had led him . This he

himsel f later realized . After numerous and perplexing

changes, the poem assumed i ts present form, in which‘

the

tra its and evidences of S imon’s early vigour are concentredwithin stanzas I - II I, while those of hi s sad decl ine are

brought together in stanzas IV—VI I, the contrast being

marked by the phrase,“But oh, the heavy change

’1

; and

a reasonable order is subst ituted for the chaos o f the fir stedition .

S imilar changes were introduced into The Thom . Of

course in thi s poem there is more reason for the repeti tion,because the writer i s speaking in the character of a talkativeold seaman,whose mind is overwhelmed by a terrible, tragi cstory . But even here Wordsworth later saw that he hadgone too far, and omitted several whol ly unnecessary andrepetitious stanzas, without a ltering the impress ion whichhe wished to convey. A s they stand in the Oxford edi

tion, Sim on Lee and The Thorn a re perhaps more reallytypical of Wordsworth’s best ar t in 1 798 than they werein the form which they fir st assumed . He has pruned theexcrescences w ithout destroying the essential character .

But a sti l l better criti cism of the style of the LyricalBallads is to be found in the second volume o f poem s added

1 Lyrica l Ba llads, cd. Hutchinson, note on Sim onLee.


Here, despite a few polysyl labic words, l ike tum ultuous,

habitation, etc ., the vocabulary i s not essentially changed ;but how different i s what Coleridge call s the ordonnance

of the style—the various and express ive syntax ! In the

first stanza of The Thom there are practical ly no conjunc

t ions ; no type of sentence i s employed save the s implest

independent clauses set s ide by s ide . Where subordinationand relation are implied, they are not expressed, as in thel ines,

1

it looks so old,

In truth you’d find it hard to say

How it could ever have been young,It look s so old and gray,

where the prose expression would be z ‘

I t looks so old andgray that in truth you would find i t hard to tel l how i t

could ever have been young .

’

The omiss ion of the con

j unction that, and the repetition of‘

it looks so old and

gray,’ give the characteri sti c eddying movement to the

verse, and a certain helplessness to the syntax . But in

M ichael there i s no such difficulty . Al l the necessary con

meeting ti ssue of conj unctions and demonstratives i s here ;and there i s a steady onward movement, with no repetition,no picking up of dropped stitches—so to speak. The poetsti l l

‘

talks’ to the reader ; there i s the tone, the manner,o f spoken language in the use of the second person, and

in such an expression as ‘

But courage !’ etc . ; but thespeaker is no longer an excited rusti c who finds his language sl ightly inadequate to the occas ion, and cannotkeep everything in hi s mind at once . He i s the spectatorab extra, calmly though sympathetically holding all the‘

details in his mind in their proper relation to each other,and setting them before the b earer steadily, and withouthaste .

A s im ilar improvement in the character of the morelyri cal style i s to be discovered in the beauti ful fragment,

2The Thom 1-4.


The Danish Boy, which employs a stanza alm ost exactly

like that of The Thom , and makes a s imilar attem pt to givea rom antic assoc iation to a parti cular spot by connecting it

with a hal f visionary figur e

Between two s ister m oorland rillsThere is a spot that seem s to lie

Sacred to flowerets o f the h ills,And sacred to the sky .

And in this sm ooth and Open dellThere is a tem pest-stricken tree ;A corner-stone by lightning cut,

The last stone o f a cottage-hut ;

And in this dell you see

A thing no storm can e’

er destroy,The shadow o f a Danish Boy .

1

But thi s does‘

not mean t hat Wordsworth hashis fir st attempt to make syntax fol low m ore accurately them ovem ent of thought . He has merely learned that the effectof extemporaneous speech may be conveyed without an

absolutely l itera l imitation of all its repetitions and inepti

tudes . In The Brothers, for instance, the character i stics of

the syntax of the Lyrical Ballads are retained, with further

im provements and variations but a t the sam e time there5 greater skill in the arrangement of details, and a realtinction of styl

The open ing 1s a model of exposition

These Tourists, Heaven preserve us l needs m ust liveA p rofitable li fe : som e glance alongRap id and gay, as i f the earth were air,And they were butterflies to wheel aboutLong as their sum m er lasted ; som e, as wiseUpon the forehead o f a j utting cragSit perch

’

d with book and pencil on their knee,And look and scribble, scribble on and look,Until a m an m ight travel twelve stout m iles,Or reap an acre o f his neighbor’s corn.

But, for that m op ing son o f IdlenessWhy can he tarry yonder ?

2The Danish Boy 1 - 1 1 .


Here the method o f procedure from the general to the

parti cular c ould hardly be bettered . There i s the statement

concerning the character of tourists in general the divis ion

of the genus into species ; and then the reference to the

parti cular individual who stands by himsel f . The sentence

structure, too, i s varied and flexible ; yet the tone of con

versation is maintained throughout, and the vocabulary i sstri ctly the vocabulary of ordinary speech . Of course,when the old vicar begins to tel l his story, he fal ls intothe peculiarities o f speech which we are wont to call

ungrammati cal ; but the progressive movement is not lost .The expressiveness of the deviations from standard syntax,marked by ital i cs, will be noti ced at once, as wel l as a fineantique qual ity in the language, which reminded Lamb ofShakespeare

That’s Walter Ewbank.

He had a s white a head and fresh a cheekAs ever were produc’d by youth and age

Engendering in the blood o f hale fourscore .

For five long generat ions had the heartO f Walter’s fore fathers o

’

erflow’

d the boundsO f their inheritance, that s ingle cottage,You s ee it yonder, and those few greenfields .

They toil’d and wrought, and still, from s ire to son,Each s truggled, and each y ielded as beforeA little—yet a little—and old Walter ,

They left to him the fam ily heart, and landWith other burthens than the cr0 p it bore.

Year a fter year the old m an st ill preserv’

d

A chear ful m ind, and bufi'

eted w ith bond,Interest and m ortgages ; at last he sank,And went into his grave be fore his t im e.

P oor Walter ! whether it was care tha t spurr’

d him

God only knows, but to the very last,He had the lightest foot in Ennerdale.

1

As The Brothers i s the best example of the real languageof m en attempted in the volume of 1 798, so Ruth i s a

1 The Brothers 20 0 -219 .


But, a s you have befor e been told

Th is Stripling, Sportive, gay and bold,

Had roam ed about with vagrant bandsOf Ind ians in the west .

1

Even so they d id ; and I m ay s ay

That to sweet Ruth that happy dayWa s m ore than hum an li fe .

2

A Barn her winter bed supplies,But t ill the warm th o f sum m er sk iesAnd sum m er days is gone,(And in this tale we all agr ee )She sleeps beneath the greenwood tree,And other hom e hath none.

2

They are merged in the general excel lence of the style,and seem a natural part of it .

Again, there is something peculiarly effective in the

occasional use of the ballad-repetition,

Ere she had wep t, ere she had m ourned,A young and happy ch ild,4

and the na ve, ballad- l ike, ending i s very beauti ful

F arewel l and when thy days are toldIll- fated Ruth !

'

in hallowed m ouldTby corpse shall

‘

buried be,

For thee a funeral bell shall ring,And all the congregat ion s ingA Christ ian p salm for thee.

5

1Ruth 1 0 9

-1 10 , 1 13-14.

2I bid. 1 0 0 -10 2.

3I bid. 199-20 4.

‘I bid. 221 -222. Ci. The Child of E lle 169-17 0

F air Em m eline s ighed, fair Em m eline wept,And all d id trem bling stand .

5I bid. 223

-228 .


Hence, as early as 180 0 , Wordsworth was already out

growing the Advert isem ent to the Lyrical Ballads, and withit the experimental period o f his career . Some traces o f

the original theory o f course rem ain, both in the hard

bits o f l iteral, matter—of- fact statement in poem s l ike Alice

F ell, and in his occas ional defense of so-cal led ‘prosaic’

l anguage . Certainly the or iginal theory continued to interest him unti l about 180 5, the last reprinting o f the LyricalBallads of 180 0 with thei r preface . But for the real sourceo f his poeti c diction hence forth we must look mainly to

his reading . In the volum es o f 180 7 the influence o f

Spenser and '

o f the E l izabethan library furnished by Lambis everywhere evident, especially the pure and quiet

cadences of the later E l izabethans, Daniel, Drayton, and

Beaumont . The sonnets, whi ch form so numerous and so

beauti fu l a part of his poetry after 180 0 ,we re written underthe im m ediate influence of M i lton. The noble and unique

language of the P r elude is created out of the apparently

unprom ising terminology of the philosophers, Hartley and

Darwin. No doubt the eloquent discourses of Coleridge

served a s an intermediary step in this alchemic transmuta

t ion . The poe try of 18 14- 18 16 was influenced by the

re—reading of Virgil and other Latin authors . There is a

pensive V i rgil ian graciousness of language in some o f his

too much neglected later poems, such as the EgyptianM aid .

The language of the later poems also reflects the stiff, buto ften deeply patheti c, Latin of early eccles iastical l iterature . F rom sources l ike these, not from the speech o f the

dalesm en, was the greater part of Wordsworth’s phra seology u ltimately derived .

But, after all, it was the theory suggested in the Adver

tisem ent which taught Wordsworth to make this use o f

books . Through his apparent repudiation of the language

o f books he entered into his l iterary inheritance . His

theory o f poetic diction served as a test by which he m ight

seek out the genuine metal of poetry, and appropriate it


to himsel f . He had al ready shown a dispo sition to test

and appropriate in hi s use o f borrowed phra ses in the

Descrip tive Sketches . But the touchstone, while good as

far as it went, had not been sufficient . He had learned to

j udge natural imagery u sed in poe try in accordance with

his own experience, and to include in hi s own work the

expressions which satisfied him . But he had not learned

to judge o f language and the psycho logy of human expres

sion . He merely took what pleased him, and what pleased

him was the strange, the original, the fantasti c . He had

no soc ial consciousness—no knowledge of the way in whichothers might react to the words that he used . The theoryof the Lyrical Ballads awakened in him thi s social con

sciousness . He wished to learnhow l iving m en spoke, how

they had a lways spoken. He learned to test hi s language

in a ccordance both with general usage and with a ctual psychology . This gave him a control '

over the resources of

his own tongue such as only the scholarly poets may have .

A fter 1 798 it is almost impossible to ca tch Wordsworth ina questionable use of a word or a sl ip of grammar . H i s

vocabulary has a pur ity and prec i s ion which neither M i ltonnor Tennyson, the sel f—cornscious arti sts in language, can

equal—however they may surpass him in splendor and

sonorous musi c . Hi s sentence—structure is remarkable alikefor i ts peculiar flexibility and for its stri ct observance of

grammar and idiom . He continues to read more and morein the field o f English l iterature, but w ith di scrimination ;at any moment he i s ready to give an account of the l iteraryfaith that i s in him . He had rediscovered the principles ofEngli sh poetry, and in so doing had di scovered himsel f .

It is in thi s discovery, not in any exper imental imitation

of the speech of Tom , D i ck, or Harry, that the true significance of Wordsworth’s theory o f poetic diction lies .


HAZ LITT,WILLIAM . Literary Rem ains . London, 183 6 .

HORACE QUINTUS FLACCU S . Ar s P oet ica . (Art o f P oetry, ed. Cook. )

Boston, 1892.

HUTTON, RICHARD HOLT. Essays, Theological and L iterary . London,1888.

JOHNSON, SAMUEL . L ives o f the English P oets ( cd. H ill) . Oxford,190 5.

JONSON, BEN . T im ber (ed. Shelling ) . Boston, 1892.

KELLNER, LEON . H istorical Outlines o f English Syntax . London and

New York, 1892.

P ETIT DE JULLEVILLE . H isto ire de la Langue et de la Litterature F rancaisedes Origines a 190 0 . P aris, 1897 .

LAMB, CHARLES . Works (ed . Lucas ) . London, 190 3 -190 5.

LAMB, CHARLES . Letters (ed. M acdonald ) . London, 190 3 .

LEGOU I S, EM ILE . The Early L i fe o f William Wordsworth . New York,1897 .

LIENEMAN, KURT . Die Belesenheit vonWilliam Wordsworth . We im ar,190 8.

LUCAS, E . V . The L i fe o f Charles Lam b . New York and London, 190 5.

MOORE, J. L. Tudor-Stuart V iews on the Growth, Status, and Dest inyo f the English Language. Halle, 191 0 .

POPE, ALEX ANDER . Work s (ed . Courthope and Elwin) . London, 187 1 -89.

P RATT,ALICE E . The Use o f Color in the Verse o f the English Rom ant icP oets . Ch icago, 1898.

QUINTILIAN,MARCUS FABIUs . Inst itutes o f Oratory ( tr . Watson) . Lon

don, 1891-92.

REYNOLDS, MYRA . The Treatm ent o f Nature in English P oetry betweenP ope and Wordsworth . Ch icago, 1896 .

ROBINSON, HENRY CRABB . D iary, Rem iniscences, and Correspondence(ed. Sadler ) . Boston, 1869.

SCOTT, JOHN . Critical Essays on Som e o f the P oem s o f Several EnglishP oets . London, 1785.

SHAIRP, JOH N C. Aspects o f P oetry. Boston and New York, 1892.

SM ITH, G. GREGORY . Elizabethan Crit ical Essays . Ox ford, 190 4.

SPENCE, JO SEPH . Anecdotes, Observat ions, and Characters o f Books and

Men. London, 1820 .

SP INGARN, JOEL E . Crit ical Essays o f the Sevententh Century. Ox ford,190 8.

WARTON, JOS‘

EPH . An E ssay on the Genius and Writ ings o f P ope. Lon

don, 1782.

WORD SWORTH, CHRISTOPHER . Mem o irs o f William Wordsworth ( cd.

Reed ) . Boston, 1851 .

B IBLIOGRAPHY 1 85

WORDSWORTH, CHRISTOPHER . Social Li fe at the English Univers it ies inthe Eighteenth Century . Cam bridge, 1874.

WORDSWORTH , WILLIAM . Lyrical Ballads . Bristol, 1 798. ( In the po s

sessmn o f M r s . Cynth ia Morgan St . John. )WORDSWORTH, WILLIAM . Lyrical B allads . London, 1798.

WORDSWORTH, WILLIAM . Lyrical Ballads ( ed. Hutch inson) . London,1798 .

WORDSWORTH, WILLIAM . Lyrical Ballads, with other P oem s . London,180 0 .

WORDSWORTH, WILLIAM . Lyrical Ballads, with P astoral and OtherP oem s . London, 180 2.

WORDSWORTH, WILLIAM . Lyrical Ballads . P hiladelph ia, 180 2 .

WORDSWORTH, WILLIAM . Lyrical Ballads, with P astoral and OtherP oem s . London, 180 5.

WORDSWORTH,WILLIAM . P oem s . London, 180 7 .

WORDSWORTH, WILLIAM . P oem s includ ing Lyrical Ballads and the Mis

cellaneous P ieces o f the Author, with add it ional P oem s, a newP reface and a Supplem entary E ssay. London, 1815.

WORDSWOR’

I‘

H ,WILLIAM . M iscellaneous P oem s . London, 1820 .

WORDSWORTH, WILLIAM . P oet ical Works . London, 1827 .

WORDSWORTH, WILLIAM . P oet ical Works . London, 183 6 .

WORDSWORTH,WILLIAM . P oet ical Works . London, 1840 -1 .

WORDSWORTH,WILLIAM . P oem s . London, 1845.

WORDSWORTH,WILLIAM . P oet ical Work s ( ed. Knight ) , includ ing a Li feo f Wordsworth. Ed inburgh, 1882-89.

WORDSWORTH, WILLIAM . P oet ical Work s ( ed. Dowden) w ith Mem o ir.London, 1892-93 .

WORDSWORTH, WILLIAM . P oet ical Works (ed. Hutchinson) . London,New York , 190 7 .

P rose Writ ings o f Wordsworth ( ed. Knight ) . London, 1893 .

Letters o f the Wordsworth F am ily from 1787 to 1855 (ed. Knight ) .

Boston and London, 190 7 .

Wordsworth’

s P re faces and E ssays on P oetry ( ed. A . J. George ) .

Boston, 1892 .

Wordsworth’

s Literary Criticism ( ed. Nowell C. Sm ith ) . London, 190 5.

WORDSWORTH, WILLIAM . P oems and Extracts Chosen by WilliamWordsworth for an Album presented to Lady Mary Lowther, Christm a s, 1819 . London, 190 5.

A Descrip t ion o f the Wordsworth and Coleridge Manuscripts in the

possess ion o f M r . T . Norton Longm an ( ed. W. Hale Wh ite ) . Lon

don and New York, 1897 .

Transactions o f the Wordsworth Society . Ed inburgh, 1882-87 .

INDEX OF PROPER NAMES

Add ison, 16, 3 9, 57, 58, 59, 6 1

Alfred, 152.

Ariosto, I 7, 1 1 1 .

Aristotle, 7, 23 , 58, 59, 129.

Arnold,Matthew, vi i, 2, 6 .

Ascham , 6, 7, 9.

Bagehot, xi, 2.

Beatt ie, 93 .

Beaum ont, John, 181 .

Beaupuy, 1 1 1 .

Bem bo, 17 .

Bernard o f Clairveaux, 3 6.

Blair, 49.

Bo ileau, 22, 3 3 , 3 4, 3 5, 55Boyer, 1 1 3 .

Bowles, 85, 87, 88, 99, 1 14, 1 18, 1 19,125.

Browne, Sir Thom as, 15, 22.

Burns, 3 , 61, 94, 1 18, 1 19.

Burger, 122, 123 , 124.

Byron, 14.

Caesar, 7 .

Cam p ion, 15.

Catullus, 1 1 3 .

Charles I I, 4.

Chaucer, 2, 4, 10 , 43 , 1 12, 1 17 , 1 3 9,140 , 144, 145, 148, 152.

Cheke, Sir John, 7 .

C icero, 7, 9, 1 1, 12, 1 1 3 .

Coleridge, VI I, VI I I, ix, x, xiv, 3 , 4,7 , I 3 , 14, I 6) 3 9, 52) 53 , 62, 66, 67 :68, 85, 86, 99, 1 0 2, 1 0 4, 1 0 7, 1 0 8,1 0 9, 1 1 0 , 1 12, 1 1 3 -140 , 141 , 144,148, 151, 152, 162, 169, 176, 181 .

Coleridge, Sara, xiv .

Collins, 62, 85, 87, 10 0 , 1 15.

Cooper, Lane, xi .Corneille, 23 .

Cowley, 7 , 16, 53 .

Cowper, 3 , 3 6, 3 9, 57, 6 1, 62, 88, 92,94, 1 18.

Daniel, Sam uel, 13 , 15, 181 .

Dante, 2.

Darwin, Erasm us, 1 0 2, 1 14, 1 15, 1 11 18, 1 3 0 , 181 .

Delille, 93 .

Dem osthenes, 1 1 3 .

Denham , 23 .

Dennis, John, 52, 129.

DeQuincey, xiv.DeVere,Aubrey, xi, x iv .

Donne, 7, 16 .

Dowden, xi .Drayton, 1 3 , 14, 15, 181 .

Dryden, xiv, 4, 6, 1 1, 1 3 , 2 1-24, 2

3 9, 41 ) 48) 49, 51, 554,57, 58, 60 , 6 1, 74, 10 0 , 1 12, 12

Dyer, 63 , 87, 99

E . K ., 5.

Elyot, Sir Thom as, 6.

Gard iner, Bishop, 6 .

Gasco igne, 8, 20 .

Gay, 40 .

Gilbert, Sir Hum phrey, 5.

Goldsm ith, 3 , 3 8, 54, 57 , 58, 6 1 .

Gray, 3 , 54, 57, 60 , 62, 92, 93 , 1 0

1 15.

Gunston, 46.

Ham ilton, William Rowan, 1 0 7 .

H arper,William M . , xi .H artley, 1 3 0 , 1 3 6, 181 .

Harvey, Gabriel, 6, 7, 8, I5.

H azlitt, xiv .

H enry VI II, 162.

Hom e, 93 .

Hom er, 19, 1 1 3 , 1 17 .

Horace, 8, 9, 1 1, 23 , 28, 3 6, 1 12, 1 1129.

Hutch inson, Thom as, xi, 144.

Hutton, R. H ., xi .

Jeffrey, 90 .

Johnson, Sam uel, 1 1, 23 , 3 0 , 3 1, 4

54, 58, 60 , 66, 123 , 1 3 3 .

Jonson, Ben, 1 3 , 14, 16, 21, 22, 25.

Julleville, P etit de, 22, 26 .

I .

V.

YALE STUDIES IN ENGLISH .

ALBERT S . COOK, EDITOR.

The Foreign Sources o f Modern English Versification.

CHARLTON M . LEWI S, Ph .D .

E lfric : A New Study o f his Li fe and Writings . CAROLINELOUI SA WH ITE, Ph .D .

The L i fe o f St . Cecelia, from M S . Ashm ole‘

43 and MS .

Cotton T iberius E . VI I, w ith Introduct ion, Variants, and

Glo ssary . BERTHA ELLEN LOVEWELL, Ph .D .

Dryden’s Dram at ic Theory and P ract ice. MARGARET SHERwoon, P h .D .

Stud ies in Jonson’s Com edy. ELISABETH WOODBRIDGE, Ph.D .

A Glossary o f the West Saxon Gospels, Lat in-West Saxonand West Saxon-Latin. MATT IE ANSTICE HARRI S, Ph.D.

Andreas : The Legend o f St. Andrew, translated from the

VI I I .

Old English, with an Introduction. ROBERT KILBURN ROOT,Ph .D .

The Class ical Mythology o f M ilton’s English P oem s .

CH ARLES GROSVENOR O scoon, Ph .D .

A Guide to the M iddle English M etrical Rom ances dealingw ith English and Germ anic Legends, and w ith the Cycleso f Charlem agne and o f Arthur. ANNA HUNT BILLINGS,Ph .D .

The Earliest L ives o f Dante, translated from the Italian o f

Giovanni Boccaccio and Lionardo Bruni Aret ino . JAMESROBINSON SM ITH .

A Study in Ep ic Developm ent . IRENE T . MYERS, Ph .D .

The Short Story . HENRY SEIDEL CANBY, P h.D .

K ing Alfred ’s Old English Vers ion o f St . Augustine’s Solilo

X IV .

quies, ed ited with Introduct ion, Notes, and Glossary .

HENRY LEE HARGROVE, Ph .D .

The P honology o f the Northum brian Gloss o f St . Matthew.

EM ILY HOWARD FOLEY, Ph.D .

YALE STUDIES IN ENGLISH 1 89

XV . Essays on the Study and U se o f P oetry by P lutarch and

Bas il the Great, translated from the Greek , with an Introduction. FREDERICK MORGAN P ADELFORD, P h .D .

XVI . The Translations o f Beowulf : A Critical B ibliography .

CHAUNCEY B . TINKER, Ph .D .

XVI I . The Alchem ist, by Ben Jonson, ed ited with Introduction,

XVI I I .

X IX .

XX .

XX I .

XXI I .

XXI I I .

XX IV.

X XV.

XXVI .

XXVI I .

XXVI I I .

XXIX .

XXX .

XXXI .

Notes, and Glossary . CH ARLES M . HATHAWAY, JR.

, Ph.D .

Cloth,The Express ion o f P urpose in Old English P rose. HUBERTGIBSON SHEARIN, Ph .D .

Class ical Mythology in Shakespeare. ROBERT KILBURN R0 0 1 ,Ph .D .

The Controversy between the P uritans and the Stage. ELBERTN. S . THOMP SON, Ph .D .

The Elene o f Cynewulf, translated into English P rose .

LUCIUS HUDSON HOLT, Ph .D .

King Alfred’s Old English Vers ion o f St . Augustine’s Soliloquies, turned into Modern English . HENRY LEE HARGROVE,Ph .D .

The Cross in the Li fe and Literature o f the Anglo-Saxons .

WILLIAM O . STEVEN S, Ph .D .

An Index to the Old English Glosses o f the Durham Hymna

rium . HARVEY W. CHAPMAN .

Bartholom ew F air, by Ben Jonson, edited with Introduction,Notes, and Glossary. CARROLL STORRS ALDEN, P h .D .

Select Translat ions from Scaliger’

s P oetics . FREDERICK M .

P ADELFORD, Ph .D .

P oetaster, by Ben Jonson, ed ited with Introduction, Notes,and Glossary . HERBERT S . MALLORY, Ph.D . Cloth,

The Staple o f News, by Ben Jonson, ed ited with Introduc

t ion, Notes, and Glossary . DEWINTER, P h .D .

Cloth, $2 .50 .

The Devil is an Ass, by Ben Jonson, edited w ith Introduction, Notes, and Glossary . WILLIAM SAVAGE JOHN SON,Ph .D . Cloth,

The Language o f the Northum brian Gloss to the Gospel o fSt . Luk e . MARGARET DUTTON KELLUM , Ph .D .

Epicoene, or the S ilent Wom an, by Ben Jonson, edited withIntroduct ion, Notes, and Glossary . AURELIA HENRY, Ph .D .

Cloth,

1 96 YALE STUDIES IN ENGLISH

XXXI I . The Syntax o f the Tem poral Clause in Old English P rose.

ARTHUR ADAM S, Ph.D .

XXXI I I . The Knight of the Burning P estle, by Beaum ont and F letcher,ed ited with Introduct ion, Notes, and Glossary . HERBERT S .

MURCH, Ph .D .

XXXIV. The New Inn,by Ben Jonson,ed ited with Introduct ion,Notes,and Glossary . GEORGE BREMNER TENNANT, Ph .D .

XXXV . A Glossary o f Wulfstan’

s Hom ilies . LORING HOLMES DODD,Ph .D .

XXXVI . The Com plaint o f Nature, translated from the Lat in o f Alainde Lille. D OUGLAS M . MOFFAT,M .A .

XXXVI I . The Collaborat ion o f Webster and Dekker. FREDERICK ERASTUS P IERCE, Ph.D .

XXXVI I I . English Nat iv ity P lays, ed ited with Introduction, Notes, andGlossary. SAMUEL B. HEM INGWAY, Ph .D . Cloth,

XXXIX . Concess ive Construct ions in Old English P rose. JOSEPHINEMAY BURNHAM , Ph.D .

The Tenure o f K ings and Magistrates, by JohnM ilton, ed itedw ith Introduction and Notes . WILLIAM TALBOT ALLI SON,Ph .D . 5.

X LI . Biblical Quotat ions inM iddle English Literature before 1 3 50 .

MARY W. SMYTH, Ph.D .

XLI I . The D ialogue in English L iterature. ELI Z ABETH MERRILLPh .D .

XLI I I . A Study o f T indale’s Genes is, com pared with the Genes is o f

Coverdale and o f the Authorized Vers ion. ELIZ ABETHWH ITTLESEY CLEAVELAND, Ph .D .

XLIV. The P resentat ion o f T im e in the Elizab ethanDram a . MABLEBULAND, Ph .D .

X LV. Cynthia’s Revels, o r the Fountain o f Self-Love, by Ben Jonson, ed ited with Introduction, Notes, and Glossary . ALEX

ANDER CORBIN JUDSON, Ph.D .

XLVI . Richard Brom e : A Study of his Li fe and Works . CLARENCEEDWARD ANDREWS, Ph.D .

XLVI I . The Magnet ic Lady, or Hum ors Reconciled, by Ben Jonson,ed ited with Introduct ion, Notes, and Glossary . HARVEYWH ITEF IELD P ECK, Ph .D.

XLVI I I . Genes is A ( som et im es attributed to Caedm on) translat ionfrom the Old English . LAWRENCE MASON, Ph.D .

wordsworths theory of poetic diction a study of the historical and personal background of the

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