William Wordsworth Book Report

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The River Derwent

Wordsworth revolutionized English poetry. The past was over; capital-R Romanticism had arrived. But what was the big deal?

Wordsworth said, over and over again, that he would write in “the real language of men.” The fancy-pantsy poetic language of his predecessors, the “gaudiness and inane phraseology of many modern writers,” all that’s out. In his poems the language would be plain. His poems, if recited on the streetcorner, could be mistaken for just some guy talking.

But what seems natural in one age, in a later age may appear stilted and artificial, and from this common fate Wordsworth also suffers. Near the beginning of “Tintern Abbey” (one of his most well-regarded poems) we read

The day is come when I again repose
Here, under this dark sycamore, and view
These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard tufts,
Which, at this season, with their unripe fruits,
Among the woods and copses lose themselves,
Nor, with their green and simple hue, disturb
The wild green landscape.

But the “real language of men” rarely “reposes.” The real language of men is not so well-populated as this passage with adjectives and strings of subordinate clauses and prepositional phrases. In the real language of men, plots of ground lose themselves among the woods; they do not “among the woods lose themselves.” The real language of men doesn’t go on and on so. But Wordsworth has simply been defeated by his own success. If Wordsworth is out-realed by, for example, these lines from Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall”:

I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.

it is only because Wordsworth showed the way. The fair comparison is not to what came after, but to what came before, and in that comparison, Wordsworth wins:

In these deep solitudes and awful cells, 
Where heav'nly-pensive contemplation dwells, 
And ever-musing melancholy reigns; 
What means this tumult in a vestal's veins? 
       (Alexander Pope, “Eloisa to Abelard,” lines 1-4)

In his choice to write as people really talk, Wordsworth was both supremely confident and extremely insecure.¹ His and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads was published in 1798, and to the second edition, which appeared in 1800, Wordsworth felt the need to add a Preface, which he expanded in 1802. He had been advised to provide “a systematic defence of the theory upon which the poems were written,” but to do this, he was “unwilling”; instead he deigned to provide “a few words of introduction.”