WORDSWORTH ON POETRY AND IMAGINATION

KEY

1800

The ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads (1800)

1802

The revised ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads for the 1802 edition

1815

‘Preface’ to the Poems (1815)

1815 Supplement

‘Essay Supplementary to the Preface to the Poems’ (1815)

IF

‘Isabella Fenwick Notes’, 1843. The Fenwick Notes of William Wordsworth, ed. Jared Curtis (1993)

‘There is little need to advise me against publishing; it is a thing which I dread as much death itself.’ Letter to James Tobin, 6 March 1798

‘I think publications in which we formally & systematically lay down rules for the actions of Men cannot be too long delayed . . . I know no book or system of moral philosophy written with sufficient power to melt into our affections, to incorporate itself with the blood & vital juices of our minds, & thence to have any influence worth our notice . . .’ ‘Essay on Morals’ 1798 in Prose I

‘It has been said of poets as their highest praise that they exhausted worlds and then imagined new, that existence saw them spurn her bounded reign, etc. But how much of the real excellence of Imagination consists in the capacity of exploring the world really existing . . .’ Annotation in Wordsworth’s copy of ‘Paradise Lost’

‘It is the honourable characteristic of Poetry that its materials are to be found in every subject which can interest the human mind.’ ‘Advertisement’ to ‘Lyrical Ballads’(1798)

‘Words, a Poet’s words more particularly, ought to be weighed in the balance of feeling and not measured by the space which they occupy upon paper. For the Reader cannot be too often reminded that Poetry is passion: it is the history or science of feeling.’ Note to ‘The Thorn’ (1800)

‘Low and rustic life was generally chosen [for Lyrical Ballads], 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; because in that condition of life our elementary feelings co-exist in a state of greater simplicity, and, consequently, may be more accurately contemplated, and more forcibly communicated . . .’ 1800

‘For all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: but though this be true, Poems to which any value can be attached, were never produced on any variety of subjects but by a man, who being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility, had also thought long and deeply.’ 1800

‘it is proper that I should mention one other circumstance which distinguishes these Poems from the popular Poetry of the day; it is this, that the feeling therein developed gives importance to the action and the situation, and not the action and situation to the feeling.’ 1800

‘The end of Poetry is to produce excitement in co-existence with an overbalance of pleasure.’ 1800

‘ . . . the language of a large portion of every good poem, even of the most elevated character, must necessarily, except with reference to the metre, in no respect differ from that of good prose, but likewise . . . some of the most interesting parts of the best poems will be found strictly the language of prose, when prose is well written.’ 1802

‘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.’ 1802

‘Among the qualities which I have enumerated as principally conducing to form a Poet, is implied nothing differing in kind from other men, but only in degree.’ 1802

‘Aristotle, I have been told, hath said, that Poetry is the most philosophic of all writing: it is so: its object is truth, not individual and local, but general, and operative; not standing upon external testimony, but carried alive into the heart by passion . . .’ 1802

‘The Poet writes under one restriction only, namely, that of the necessity of giving immediate pleasure to a human Being possessed of that information which may be expected from him, not as a lawyer, a physician, a mariner, an astronomer or a natural philosopher, but as a Man.’ 1802

‘The Man of Science seeks truth as a remote and unknown benefactor; he cherishes and loves it in his solitude: the Poet, singing a song in which all human beings join with him, rejoices in the presence of truth as our visible friend and hourly companion. Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science.’ 1802

‘ . . . a great Poet ought . . . to a certain degree to rectify men’s feelings, to give them new compositions of feeling, to render their feelings more sane pure and permanent, in short more consonant to nature, that is, to eternal nature, and the great moving spirit of things. He ought to travel before men occasionally as well as at their sides.’ Letter to John Wilson, 7 June 1802.

‘ . . . if I were disposed to write a sermon . . . upon the subject of taste in natural beauty . . . all of which I had to say would begin and end in the human heart, as, under the direction of the divine Nature conferring value on the objects of the senses and pointing out what is valuable in them.’ Letter to Sir George Beaumont, 17 and 24 October 1805

‘ . . . to be incapable of a feeling of Poetry in my sense of the word is to be without love of human nature and reverence for God.’ Letter to Lady Beaumont, 21 May 1807

‘never forget what I believe was observed to you by Coleridge, that every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great or original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished; he must teach the art by which he is to be seen . . .’ ibid.

‘Every great Poet is a Teacher: I wish either to be considered as a Teacher, or as nothing.’ Letter to Sir George Beaumont [Feb. 1808]

‘Words are too awful an instrument for good and evil to be trifled with: they hold above all other external powers a dominion over thoughts . . . Language, if it do not uphold, and feed, and leave in quiet, like the power of gravitation or the air we breathe, is a counter-spirit, unremittingly and noiselessly at work to derange, to subvert, to lay waste, to vitiate, and to dissolve.’ Essays upon Epitaphs, III, 1810

‘ . . . the mighty difference between seeing & perceiving.’ ‘The Sublime and the Beautiful’, 1811–1812. Prose II

‘ . . . the mind gains consciousness of its strength to undergo only by exercise among materials which admit the impression of its power . . .’ The Convention of Cintra, 1809

‘ . . . the range of poetic feeling is far wider than is ordinarily supposed, and the furnishing new proofs of this fact is the only incontestable demonstration of genuine poetic genius.’ Letter to R. P. Gillies, 22 December 1814

‘[Imagination] recoils from everything but the plastic, the pliant, and the indefinite.’ 1815

‘Fancy is given to quicken and to beguile the temporal part of our Nature, Imagination to incite and to support the eternal.’ 1815

‘The appropriate business of poetry (which, nevertheless, if genuine, is as permanent as pure science), her appropriate employment, her privilege and her duty, is to treat of things not as they are, but as they appear; not as they exist in themselves, but as they seem to exist to the senses, and to the passions.’ 1815 Supplement

‘Thus the Poetry, if there be any in the work [The White Doe of Rylstone], proceeds whence it ought to do from the soul of Man, communicating its creative energies to the images of the external world.’ Letter to Francis Wrangham, 18 January 1816

‘ . . . even in poetry it is the imaginative only, viz., that which is conversant [with], or turns upon infinity, that powerfully affects me, – I mean to say that, unless in those passages where things are lost in each other, and limits vanish, and aspirations are raised, I read with something too much like indifference . . .’ Letter to W. S. Landor, 21 January 1824

‘ . . . the logical faculty has infinitely more to do with Poetry than the Young and the inexperienced, whether writer or critic, ever dreams of. Indeed, as the materials upon which that faculty is exercised in Poetry are so subtle, so plastic, so complex, the application of it requires an adroitness which can proceed from nothing but practice, a discernment, which emotion is so far from bestowing that at first it is ever in the way of it.’ Letter to William Rowan Hamilton, 24 September 1827

‘blank verse . . . is infinitely the most difficult metre to manage . . .’ Letter to Catherine Grace Godwin [Spring 1829]

‘words are not a mere vehicle, but they are powers either to kill or to animate.’ Letter to William Rowan Hamilton, 23 December 1829

‘If my writings are to last, it will I myself believe, be mainly owing to this characteristic. They will please for the single cause, That we have all of us one human heart!’ Letter to Henry Crabb Robinson [c. 27 April 1835]

‘Admiration & love, to which all knowledge truly vital must tend, are felt by men of real genius in proportion as their discoveries in Natural Philosophy are enlarged; and the beauty in form of a plant or an animal is not made less but more apparent as a whole by a more accurate insight into its constituent properties & powers.’ IF note to ‘This Lawn’