Top six Family Feud answers for “things that are mixed”: 1) Cocktails, 2) Dough/Batter, 3) Salads/Veggies, 4) Nuts, 5) Sound, 6) C.S. Lewis’s feelings about Romanticism.
In The Discarded Image—a primer in the lexical, imaginative, scientific model of the universe in the Middle Ages—he makes several references to Coleridge’s ideas about the faculties of the human mind (imagination, intellect, rationality, will), all of which bespeak his admiration, yet ultimate disagreement with Coleridge. To put it simply, Lewis believed that, while the Romantic movement produced beautiful art and poetry, there was one flaw that stunted its greatness: The best poetry draws us out of our own lives and into the world of universal experience; Romantic poetry—or better said, Romantic poetics (i.e. ideas about what poetry is and how it should be made)—often does the opposite, by focusing obsessively on the poet's own feelings and experiences.
But Lewis had a special place in his heart for Wordsworth, and for the next couple of days, I’d like to explore that relationship. In Poetry and Prose in the Sixteenth Century, there are five references to Wordsworth (who of course lived some 250 years after the poets examined therein): One of them—really only interesting to a scholar of early modern stylistics—cites a line from Wordsworth as a late-stage example of a trend for directly addressing subjects by surname in poetry (a trend slowly fading by his time); three of them mention Wordsworth not to sing his praises by comparison, but rather sing the praises of his sixteenth-century predecessors for approaching the grandeur of his poetry; and then there is a comparison of Wordsworth to the Elizabethan playwright John Lyly, both of whom Lewis claims have one work in which they—like honest Homer—nod; but which also has the unfortunate effect of being one of the things best known about each of them:
Euphues itself is related to Lyly’s literary career rather as the Preface of the Lyrical Ballads is related to Wordsworth’s; each marking a temporary aberration, a diversion of the author from his true path, which by its unfortunate celebrity confuses our impression of his genius.
Lyrical Ballads is a tag-team collection of poems, first published anonymously in 1798, by Wordsworth and Coleridge. It’s where Wordsworth's “Tintern Abbey” and Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” were first set to print. The Preface Wordsworth wrote for the second edition (1800) is his longest sustained statement of a philosophy of poetry.
The first argument he makes is a sort of multi-premise syllogism (Lewis certainly agreed with it; I agree, as well; and if your feet were held to the fire, I bet you’d agree, too—though you might find two of the premises hard to swallow):
Premise 1: Language changes. See part 2—and duh!: As I’ve already noted, this is often, though not always, the result of people adopting the same set of arbitrary behaviors).
Premise 2: People’s minds change. Also duh!: As I’ve once again already noted, this, too, can be a matter of people adopting the same set of arbitrary behaviors; but that’s actually just individuals using the easiest heuristic—following along—to answer the ever-present existential question, “What should I do?”
Premise 3: Those two factors—Changing language and changing minds—have a dynamic relationship (“revolutions not of literature alone but likewise of society itself,” writes Wordsworth1). That is, people change their language to match their values. But also, people prioritize and reprioritize what they value because trends in language influence what they’re paying attention to.
Conclusion 1/Premise 4: Therefore, fluctuating public tases in language are formed by the interplay of language and values. (This is the first premise that you might not like accepting. Taste is the equivalent of opinions, and neither of them enjoys a particularly high status in public, well, opinion: “Opinions are like assholes,” and all that. But also, people feel entitled to have subjective opinions that can’t be right or wrong: “De gustibus non est disputandum,” and all that. This is the space in between the purposive and the arbitrary where the trickster is always making and remaking the world.
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