William Wordsworth: Preface to Lyrical Ballads


 * William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
 * Belonged to the British Romantic literary movement.
 * His writings focused on nature and the feelings and thoughts it expired within the author.
 * EXPRESSIVE!
 * Author centric
 * “…art manifested the artist’s sensibility…”
 * Beauty is created by each individual mind
 * Inspired by Kant on ideas of the mind
 * “Romantics agreed that the key faculty was the imagination…”
 * “Taking his degree in 1791, Wordsworth spent a year on the Continent absorbing the sights and the spirit of the French Revolution in its most idealist phase.” (304)
 * “Together, Wordsworth and Coleridge (mostly Wordsworth) wrote Lyrical Ballads (1798), the premier volume of English Romanticism” (304)
 * Chose to write on “low and rustic life” because there “the essential passions of the heart find a better soiling which they can attain their maturity, are under less restraint,” and because “the manners of rural life … are most easily comprehended are more durable.”
 * Lyrical Ballads was initially Wordsworth “imitating the manners, passions, and actions of rustic Englishmen for the delight and instruction for the delight and instruction of his audience,” but later portions shifter to the idea that “poetry is created less by representing what is in the outside world than by attending to the world within” (304)
 * Defined poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” (304)
 * Kant
 * Imagination! Has legitimacy
 * Whatever the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth!
 * Our reason doesn’t tell what is true, our imagination does.
 * Our emotions and feelings are more real wherememebered than they were when they occurred (hearing old song)
 * Poet becomes object he beholds, radical inaction between subject and observer. Not memesis.
 * Poet has no self he becomes what he writes about, he creates and it and it becomes him.
 * Poet has to have ability to truth outside the realm of the material
 * Mediated between materialism (science, reason) and value (faith, spiritual)
 * Romantics look to him as starting the period, for placing subjective over objective
 * Wrote revolutionary work on how the human mind perceives (not just objective reality, but that our consciousness creates what we see)
 * Mind more important than what we see