Download Preface to Lyrical Ballads

William Wordsworth Preface to Lyrical Ballads
by Zita Nyikes Year 2, Part time student
Lyrical Ballads = Beginning of the Romantic movement
- first published in 1798
- Lyrical Ballads is a collection of poems by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge together generated a revolution in English poetry
- it is classically considered to have marked the beginning of the Romantic movement in literature.
During the romantic period all literature was basically about feelings and that the role of the writer
was to recreate and explore feelings. They felt that mutually sympathetic feelings made people
more morally sensitive and at the same time gave pleasure
- the immediate effect on critics was modest, but it became and remains a landmark, changing the
course of British and American literature.
- it had a mixed critical reception, the first edition was a "sellout." Two years later, in 1800,
Wordsworth and Coleridge prepared a new, two-volume edition with additional poems, including
the long narrative poem Michael
- Lyrical Ballads of 1798, marked a significant turning away from the restraints of the classical
tradition in poetry and a turning toward a more experimental, more emotional lyricism
- joy and the loss of joy were popular topics
- as the reading public grew in number and in sophistication, a variety of journals, reviews, and
magazines developed the public taste
- the title: the two words in the title stem from different traditions in the history of poetry, and have
different characteristics. By combining them in the title, Wordsworth and Coleridge indicated that
they were involved in a fresh interpretation of old traditions.
Lyric: in ancient Greece it was a song to accompany music from a lyre. Later the
word was used for any short poem in which personal moods and emotions were
expressed. Nowadays the words of popular songs are called lyrics.
Ballad: is a poem or song which usually tells a story in the popular language of the
day, and has associations with traditional folk culture
-major poems
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
- opening poem; it is a supernatural story, with themes including guilt, punishment
and redemption, told in short verses with a strong rhythm and rhyme scheme
Michael (William Wordsworth)
- Michael is a tale in blank verse about a Grasmere farmer who loses his son and his
land in trying to pay off a debt. In many of his poems for Lyrical Ballads
Wordsworth explores the psychological effects of economic, physical and social
hardship.
personal
in his
Tintern Abbey (William Wordsworth)
- final poem; the poem opens with a personal experience and uses it to explore
themes such as Nature, memory, and imagination. The best of Wordsworth s
poetry, he moves outwards to include the whole of nature and human nature
imaginative vision.
Preface = manifesto of a new aesthetic sense
- enclosed to Lyrical Ballads in 1800 (revised 1802) to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads
- the announcement of the advent of a poetic revolution. Wordsworth and Coleridge created their
identities by rebelling against their predecessors. “Dead” forms vs. “new” direction and “new”
subject matter
- as a prefix is a “systematic defence of the theory upon which the poems were written”
- WW's theory:
- fitting to metrical arrangement a selection of the real language
- principal object
- “...incidents and situations from common life, and to relate
or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible, in a
selection of language really used by men”
- “...colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should
be presented to the mind in an unusual way (...) as far as
regards the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of
excitement”
- “I have wished to keep my Reader in the company of flesh and blood ...”
- Wordsworth's preface and Coleridge's Biographia Literaria were the manifestoes of a new
aesthetic sense. Everything written before seemed suddenly old-fashioned or stale
- the Preface is itself a masterpiece of English prose, exemplary in its lucid yet passionate defence
of a literary style that could be popular without compromising artistic and poetic standards. Yet it is
also vital for helping us to understand what Wordsworth and Coleridge were attempting in their
collection of verse, and also provides us with a means of assessing how successfully the poems
themselves live up to the standards outlined in the 'Preface'.
According to the Preface the themes in Lyrical Ballads
Low and rustic life
- “... because in that condition, the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can
attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language”
- condition of life our elementary feelings
- state of greater simplicity
- character of rural occupations, are more easily comprehended, and are more durable
- the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature
Language
- purified
- people's rank in society and the sameness and narrow circle of their intercourse, being less under
the influence of social vanity they convey their feelings and notions in simple and unelaborated
expressions
- is arising out of repeated experience and regular feelings
- more permanent and a far more philosophical language
- language somewhat more appropriate, it is to follow the fluxes and refluxes of the mind when
agitated by the great and simple affections of our nature
- personifications of abstract ideas are rare, do not make any natural or regular part of that language;
the language is cut off from “a large portion of phrases and figures of speech which from father to
son have long been regarded as the common inheritance of Poets”
- bring the language near to the language of men, and further, because the pleasure which I have
proposed to myself to impart is of a kind very different from that which is supposed by many
persons to be the proper object of poetry
- in liveliness and truth, fall far short of that which is uttered by men in real life, under the actual
pressure of those passions, certain shadows of which the Poet
flux and reflux: ár és apály
Poems:
- “I have said that each of these poems has a purpose.”
- purposes are e.g.
Idiot Boy and Mad Mother: maternal passion through many of its more subtle
windings
Forsaken Indian:
the last struggles of a human being, at the approach of
death, cleaving in solitude to life and society
We are Seven:
the perplexity and obscurity which in childhood attend
our notion of death
- general purpose to sketch characters under the influence of less impassioned feelings; the
characters's elements are simple, belonging rather to nature than to manners
forsaken: cserbenhagyott, elhagyott
subtle windings: finom kanyargás
perplexity: zavarodottság, tanácstalanság
obscurity: bizonytalanság
cleaving: ragaszkodás
Poet
- Poet speaks through the mouths of his characters
- “What is a Poet? (...) He is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endued with more lively
sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a
more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind; a man pleased with
his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in
him; delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the
Universe, and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them.”
- he describes and imitates passions
- his situation is slavish and mechanical, compared with the real and substantial action and suffering
- Poet brings his feelings near to those of the persons whose feelings he describes
- he slips into a delusion, and confounds his own feelings with the characters's feeling
- he modifies only the language which is suggested to him, by a consideration that he describes for a
particular purpose
- Poet speaks to us in his own person and character
- Poet is distinguished from other men by a greater promptness to think and feel without external
excitement
- New Role for the Poet: the poet's main qualifications are not in matters of craft or technique; he is
a poet because his feelings allow him to enter sympathetically into the lives of others and to
translate passions into words that please
endued: megáldott
volition: akarat
rejoice: örül, élvez valamit
impel: hajt, rábír, ösztökél
slavish: szolgai
delusion: érzékcsalódás, megtévesztés
confound:megzavar,összetéveszt
New Poetic Standard
- Wordsworth rejected the neoclassical theory of poetry, which arranged the different kinds of
literature in a hierarchy, each with its own appropriate subject matter and level of diction
- Wordsworth particularly rejected the elevated, artificial and unnatural poetic diction of the 18th,
which was based on reading rather than speech
- poetry is arranged in a sincere and simple language adapting prose language to poetic uses
- Wordsworth undermined the dignity of poetry and gave it a newer, broader sense
Poetry
- “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion
recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquillity
gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of
contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind. In this mood
successful composition generally begins, and in a mood similar to this it is carried on; but the
emotion, of whatever kind and in whatever degree, from various causes is qualified by various
pleasures, so that in describing any passions whatsoever, which are voluntarily described, the mind
will upon the whole be in a state of enjoyment”.
- poetry is the outcome of a creative process. The poet thinks about an emotional experience, the
emotion returns, and under the influence of this renewed feeling he writes the poem. Pleasure is the
state in which the poetic composition is written, and pleasure is also found in the result.
Source:
- Wordsworth, William. Preface to Lyrical Ballads
<http://www.english.upenn.edu/~jenglish/Courses/Spring2001/040/preface1802.html>
- <http://www.calvertonschool.org/waldspurger/pages/romantic.htm>
- <http://www.newi.ac.uk/rdover/words/ballads.htm#PREFACE>