Selected Critical Essays [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION When Wordsworth wrote his Preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads in 1800, he was reluctant to write "a systematic defence of the theory upon which the poems were based," because the poems should speak for themselves immediately, without argument, or at least without a "systematic" argument extended beyond the limits of a short preface. Nevertheless, the innovations of his style required an explanation to the reader, and the Preface has become famous as the manifesto of the romantic movement in English poetry. With the eloquent additions made in 1802, it deserves its high reputation, though it aroused the private protests of Coleridge in letters to Sotheby and Southey, which he was later to amplify in Biographia Literaria, and the public protests of the reviewers, soon to be headed and dominated by Francis Jeffrey, editor of the Edinburgh Review. Coleridge's Biographia Literaria is both a development of his dissent from Wordsworth's theories of poetry and a defence of the poems, which he thought were exposed unnecessarily to Jeffrey's attacks by the theoretical errors in the Preface. Perhaps, then, the Biographia Literaria, however belated, is the true manifesto of romantic poetry. The Preface dealt chiefly with the style of lyric poetry— condemning a "poetic diction" found only in poetry in favor of a diction common to poetry and prose (in Lyrical Ballads, especially the prose of rustic speech), and justifying metrical forms for a diction identical with that of prose. Since lyric poetry cannot depend upon the development of character in action, like drama, this emphasis upon the language and metre of poetry was inevitable. But Wordsworth was too great a poet, not merely in Lyrical Ballads, but in other unpublished poetry which he had already composed in 1802, to treat the forms of poetry in such a manner that technique would seem to be an end in itself rather than a means to an end. Though somewhat unsystematically, he states, or implies, a general poetic vu