So, to repeat: One necessary milestone for Wordsworth in the Lyrical Ballads was to create the tastes by which people should enjoy his poetry. Most of that work had to be done by the poems themselves. He had to put the language out there and hope people would learn to like it. But he also felt compelled to defend his style—without being pedantic or pushy—since it was (at least he thought) so unusual. That’s what the Preface was for.
There he argues that poetry should be written in a language that is accessible and should describe situations that are recognizable to ordinary people: “Low and rustic life was generally chosen because in that situation 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.”1
Complete the idiomatic rhetorical antithesis below by filling in the parts of speech—or just predicting it from context. There’s only one right answer. The solution is below, but you won’t need it!
That’s what he says his poems do. ____ (relative pronoun without an antecedent) ____ (plural pronoun) ________ (adverb) __ (verb) __ (verb) _______ (adjective) ______ (noun).2
But that’s begging a larger question I’m trying to address (though not necessarily answer); the question that will bring us back to textual scholarship (after which you can finally find out who was behind that signature from part 3), to wit:
“Do poems3 do different things from what their authors set out to do with them?”
Well, let’s put it this way: From where I sit, on a barstool at my kitchen counter, in 2023, if I heard someone talk like this, it would be pretty weird:
Sturdy he seemed, though he was sad; / And in his arms, a lamb he had.
The word choice feels natural, but this is a favorable selection. Turning to the next poem in the book, gloomy boughs and dampening spirits and dissolute tongues are phrases that code pretty strongly as “I’m writing with a feather, my curly locks are shimmering, and my eyes are gazing longingly up to the heavens.”
Then there’s the weird Yoda syntax: When downstairs I come, my coffee to make, address my wife like this I do not.
Finally, as for the situation: Meeting a dude walking down the street carrying a lamb in his arms is not a run-of-the-mill experience for most people. I will say that in the German suburb where I live, my neighbor keeps two donkeys in his back yard, and I greet the three of them every day on their morning walk. That seems comparable. So I guess I’m giving this one to Wordsworth?
Drawing attention to the contingency of poetic interpretation over time cuts both ways: On the one hand, it points up the impossibility of perfectly locking down a poem’s meaning. To really feel at home with Wordsworth’s writing—and have a good sense of a) how successfully he meets his goal of using “a plainer and more emphatic language” and b) how effective that goal was among his contemporaries—I’d need access to a diachronic dictionary like the OED (and it would need to have plenty of literary citations, but also attestations from all different stripes: journalistic writing, advertisements, correspondence, etc.—which it does).
I’d also need multiple corpora of English from the turn of the nineteenth century, so that I could get a grip on not only the diction but also the syntax, as well spelling and punctuation usage of that era. And just like the dictionary, the corpora would also need to cite language in different registers. And for good measure I’d need bags of darjeeling to dip into liters of espresso—and possibly a prescription for methylphenidate.
On the other hand, who would go to such lengths if they didn’t feel like they’d miss out on something essential about Wordsworth’s poetry by not doing it? Make no mistake: I’m reducing that proposition to the absurd. You can’t just up and start interpreting language at whim.
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