Preface to Lyrical Ballads by William Wordsworth
The "Preface to Lyrical Ballads" by William Wordsworth serves as a foundational statement for the Romantic poetry movement, outlining his innovative approach to poetry. In this preface, Wordsworth articulates his belief that poetry should draw from the experiences of common life, particularly in rural settings, where simple language can express profound emotions. He emphasizes the importance of engaging with the natural world to evoke feelings that resonate universally with readers. Wordsworth argues that poetry should not merely serve a moralistic purpose but should emerge from a "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings," refined through reflective meditation. This blend of emotion and contemplation results in artful poetry that aims to enhance readers’ appreciation for everyday beauty, countering the tendency to overlook the ordinary. Additionally, he advocates for a direct and accessible style of writing, stripping away unnecessary ornamentation to connect authentically with the audience. Ultimately, Wordsworth invites readers to approach his work with thoughtful and educated emotions, believing that this engagement will reveal the success of his poetic experiments.
Preface to Lyrical Ballads by William Wordsworth
Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of World Literature, Revised Edition
First published: 1800 (published in Lyrical Ballads, with Other Poems, 1800)
Type of work: Essay
The Work
The preface to Lyrical Ballads was written to explain the theory of poetry guiding Wordsworth’s composition of the poems. Wordsworth defends the unusual style and subjects of the poems (some of which are actually composed by Samuel Taylor Coleridge) as experiments to see how far popular poetry could be used to convey profound feeling.
There are three general reasons guiding the composition of the lyrical ballads. The first is in the choice of subject matter, which is limited to experiences of common life in the country. There, people use a simple language and directly express deep feeling. Their habit of speaking comes from associating feelings with the permanent forms of nature, such as mountains, rivers, and clouds. The challenge for the poet is to make these ordinary experiences interesting to readers; in other words, the poems attempt to take ordinary subjects and treat them in extraordinary ways. Doing so would cause readers to recognize fundamental truths of universal human experience.
The second reason guiding his poems is Wordsworth’s goal of emphasizing the purpose of poetry as art. This purpose is not a moralistic one; indeed, poetry comes from a “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” but it is disciplined by remembering those feelings in moods of peaceful meditation. The combination of feeling and meditation produces artful poetry with purpose. Specifically, the lyrical ballads have the purposes of enlightening readers’ understanding of basic human feeling, enhancing readers’ emotions, and helping readers to enjoy the common things of life. That is important, Wordsworth believes, because too many people seem to have a difficult time enjoying life. They need to search for the unusual, the strange, and the fantastic; they are missing the beauty of the world around them. People need to have more faith in their own imagination to provide the beauty and emotion that they are overlooking in the environment.
Moreover, Wordsworth believes that the style of the poems is important to capture and keep readers’ attention, or the other two reasons will fail. Wordsworth thought tricks of personification and artistic diction had dulled people’s feelings, and so he wanted to refresh poetry by eliminating ornamentation to return to basics. The strengths of good prose should also be the strengths of good poetry, he writes, and so poetry should be written as the language of a person who speaks directly to other people with the same basic feelings and experiences of all human beings. To this, meter can be added in order to control emotional excitement, as reflection can restrain spontaneous emotion.
Readers are urged to be thoughtful in judging the poems. They should judge with genuine feelings that have been educated by thought and long habits of reading from many good pieces of literature. Wordsworth ends by expressing his faith that such readers will recognize the success of his experiments in the poems that he calls lyrical ballads: poems that express a domination of feeling (lyrical) over form (ballads).
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