Wordsworth's preface

Question:-1  What is a basic difference between the poetic creed of "classicism" and "romanticism"

Introduction 

                 The Classicism and the Romanticism are literary movements. The term Classicism refers to the admiration and imitation of Greek and Roman literature, art, and architecture. Order, maturity, harmony, balance and moderation are important qualities of Classicism. The Romanticism might best be described as anti-Classicism. This movement stressed human emotion and thoughts and emphasized the individual, the imaginative, the spontaneous, the emotional, the visionary, and the transcendental. Popular romantic authors include people like Burke, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Keats, Byron, Gordon, Burns, Southey, Cowper, Shelley, Scott, Goethe, Lamb, De Quincey, Carlyle, Bronte sisters and Jane Austen.

Definition 

             Classicism and Romanticism developed so gradually and exhibited so many phases that a perfect definition is not possible. In general, Classicism can be defined as a style in literature that draws on the styles of ancient Greece and Rome. Classicism is based on the idea that nature and human nature could be understood by reason and thought. It has attached much more importance to reason than imagination. More broadly, Classicism refers to the adherence to virtues including formal elegance and correctness, simplicity, dignity, restraint, order, and proportion. It is often opposed to Romanticism. The Romanticism can be viewed as an artistic movement, or state of mind, or both. It is a revolt against the Neoclassicism of the previous centuries and rebellion against established social rules and conventions.

Difference between classicism and romanticism 

 

[1] Views of Nature

             Toward the end of the eighteenth-century, Romanticism emerged as a response to Classicism. While the Classicists thought of the world as having a rigid and stern structure, the romanticists thought of the world as a place to express their ideas and beliefs. Classicists and Romanticists differed in their views of nature. Classicism was based on the idea that nature and human nature could be understood by reason and thought. On the other hand, Romanticists viewed nature as mysterious and ever changing.

[B] Reason and Imagination 

               Classicist and Romanticists also differed on their approaches towards reason and imagination. Classicism attached much more importance to reason than imagination because imagination could not be explained by their laws. The Romanticists, however, emphasized that reason was not the only path to truth. To the Romantic writers, imagination was ultimately superior to reason. Classicists thought that it was literature’s function to show the everyday values of humanity and the laws of human existence. The Romantics stressed the human potential for social progress and spiritual growth.”

Conclusion 

                 This discussion can be concluded by saying that both the movements played significant role in the development of literature. The classicism showed its strong effect in the field of writing in Augustan period. This ideal was followed by Dryden, Pope, Johnson and Swift. The term Romantic as a designation for a school of literature opposed to the Classic was first used by the German critic Schlegel at the beginning of the 19th century. From Germany, this meaning was carried to England and France. Wordsworth and other literary figures of the 19th century strengthened the Romanticism in England.

 

Questions:-2 Why does Wordsworth say What is poet?rather than Who is poet?

             Wordsworth in his "Preface" asks first "What is a poet?" He also asks several other questions about a poet. Then he ventures to answer them as his own. According to him, a poet is a man speaking to men. He is a man like other men. He has a social function to perform. He writes not only for his own pleasure but also for communicating his emotions and feelings to others. He tries his best to communicate them to the public. In this respect, Wordsworth says-----

      "The poet thinks and feels in the spirit of human passions." 

          A poet is a flesh and blood. His language should be the same to the language of common men. Thus the critic represents himself as a real lover of man.

           A poet must feel the pulse of the common man. He is the poet of common humanity but not for the poets only. In this respect, we can mention Edmund Spenser. He is called the poets' poet in the Elizabethan Age. When we go through his poetry, we feel that he does not write it for ordinary man but writes only for the poets and the elites. In the Neo-classical Period, we see that the poets composed poems in describing the decorated drawing room, coffee houses etc. Personifications of abstract ideas are salient features of the eighteenth century. There is no room for common people in their poetry. Wordsworth disapproves such tendency of the poets. He says-----

        "But poets do not write for poets alone but for men."

          He says that poets should not write only for poets. Poets have to write for only common men in common or rustic language.

          Wordsworth wants to say that there is no difference between a poet and a common man. A poet differs from an ordinary man not in kind but in degree. Because he has a comprehensive soul which rustic people do not have. He is endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness. He has a greater knowledge of human nature and a more comprehensive soul. He has a greater imaginative power. So he can feel and react emotionally to the events and incidents which he not directly experienced. He is affected more than other men by absent things as if they were present. He can share the emotional experiences of others and identify himself with the emotions of others. He can express the emotions of others easily. Moreover, a poet has a great power of communication. He can communicate even those thoughts and feelings which arise in him without any immediate external excitement.

            The man who has all these qualities cannot be similar to the rest of mankind. The totality of these differences is so significant as to constitute a difference of kind. A man is habitually impelled to create. This impelling is enough to institute a difference of kind. The difference between a poet and an ordinary man is similar to that between imagination and sensation. This difference is realised by realising emancipation from the accidents of space, time and casuality. A poet is pleased with his own passions and volitions. Here he is not active like the rest of mankind. He is self-satisfied and yet is more alive to life. He observes human activities. So he takes an unusual delight in communicating them in a mood of tranquillity.

           A poet has a greater readiness and power in expressing what he thinks and feels. This alone makes him a poet in the strict technical sense of the term. Thus he is capable of entering into the feelings of others. He identifies his own feelings with their feelings. In this sense, he has a more than usual organic sensibility. At the same time, he must have thought long and deeply. This deep thinking is no other than the process of recollections and contemplation.

            The Poet who has such qualities looks at the world in the spirit of love. He is always guided by the particular feelings. He develops sympathy and understand that man is organic to the universe. He binds together the vast human empire. In this respect, Wordsworth says------

     

"The poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time."

             A poet is not a particular passion or particular society. His feeling and knowledge are of universal category. He binds the whole human society with them. His world is vast and does not live in a desolate world. His feelings and his thoughts must not be mystical to the readers. He must think and feel as a man thinks and feels.

             In considering the nature and functions of a poet as Wordsworth has revealed in his famous critical essay, "Preface to the Lyrical Ballads", we may criticise him in some respects. He does not produce any well-knit definition of a poet here. He only ventures to identify some qualities or ideas of a man who intends to get himself included in the class of poets. Moreover, his concept of the language of a poet is worth criticising. T. S. Eliot says that " emotion recollected in tranquillity " is an inexact formula. Besides, Wordsworth himself often fails to maintain all these quatilities of a poet in his own poetry. Yet his initiation to explain the functions and qualifications of a poet is praiseworthy..

 Question :- 3What is Poetry?

           William Wordsworth says that he has selected incidents and situations of common life. He describes them by selection of incidents and situations of common life. He describes them by selection of language really used by men. In the past this ordinary life of the ordinary people has never been a subject of poetry. For the first time he democratizes poetry and gives a universal appeal to it. People living in the modern cities are very much artificial and far away from the simplicity of nature. Therefore, they don’t express the reality of human life. They suffer from social vanity. Artificiality predominates in them. But the villagers are very simple and free from social vanity. Wordsworth says that in Lyrical Ballads, humble and rustic life has been chosen as the theme of poetry because the essential passions of the heart find a better soul in which they can attain their maturity in the humble state of life. Wordsworth comments that humble and rustic life holds simplicity, serenity and tranquility. The rustic people express their feelings and emotion through simple, unelaborated and unsophisticated way. Their language is more passionate, more vivid and more emphatic. The language of the rustics, according to William Wordsworth is more philosophical and permanent than the language used by the city dwellers and the earlier poets.

              Poetry should express common human feelings and there should be no restriction in the expression of the experiences of the senses and sensibilities. Wordsworth defines poetry as the spontaneous overflow of the powerful feelings. It is the poet’s business to embody in their poetry the general passions of men. Wordsworth avoids the use of personifications of abstract ideas and serious diction in his poems so far as possible for making poetry intelligible to all types of readers. The language of his poetry is near to that of prose. The incidents of life, the natural objects around us and the common feelings of men as well as our sorrows and happiness, failure and success should get a ready appeal in poetry without false description. Wordsworth says, “Poetry sheds no tears, such as angels weep, but natural and human tears.” Another important idea of Wordsworth about poetry is that the function of poetry is to give pleasure to readers by presenting the incidents and situations of their lives in a fascinating and unusual way with a color of imagination. Therefore Wordsworth agrees with Aristotle, “Poetry is the most philosophical of all writings. The subject of poetry is general and operative truth which is its own testimony.” According to J. C. Smith, an eminent critic, “The nature of poetry will appear more clearly when we have considered its end or purpose, or the function of the poet in a civil society.”

          Wordsworth establishes a relation between man and nature in his poetry. Therefore he opines that poetry is the image of man and nature. It is an acknowledgement of the beauty of the universe. Poetry, to Wordsworth, is a powerful media of supplying knowledge and pleasure to mankind. He considers that man and nature are essentially adapted to each other. Therefore, man has emotional, philosophical, moral and spiritual connection to nature. The poet’s business is to describe human life in its very form and to establish a relationship between man and universe. So, Wordsworth says that poetry is the first and last of all knowledge- it is as immortal as the heart of ma.

Question:- 4 -Discuss Deffodils -i wandered lonely as a cloud with the reference to Wordsworth's poetic creed

Daffodils Summary by William Wordsworth About the Poet

          William Wordsworth was a 19th century literary stalwart and the most influential pioneer of English romantic poetry.He was born on 7th April, 1770 at Cockermouth, in Cumbria. He lost both his parents at an early age. He began to write poetry while he was at school. As a young man, Wordsworth developed a love of nature, a theme reflected in many of his poems. While studying at Cambridge University, Wordsworth spent summer holidays on a walking tour in Switzerland and France. He became an enthusiast for the ideals of the French Revolution

             In 1797, Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy moved from Dorset to Somerset, where he met and befriended Samuel Taylor Coleridge, another great poet of his generation. They collaborated on a collection of poems titled ‘Lyrical Ballads’, which included many of Wordsworth’s poems along with Coleridge’s long poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Brought out in 1798, this collection of poems marked the beginning of the Romantic Movement in English poetry

           In 1799, Wordsworth and Dorothy settled at Dove Cottage in Grasmere in the Lake District. In 1802, Wordsworth married a childhood friend, Mary Hutchinson. It was during his stay in Grasmere that Wordsworth wrote his poem, I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, in 1804. In 1813, Wordsworth moved from Grasmere to nearby Ambleside. In 1843, he became the poet laureat

         Wordsworth died on 23 April, 1850 and was buried in Grasmere churchyard. His great autobiographical poem, The Prelude was published after his death. The Excursion, Ode: Intimations of Immortalit

y from Recollections of Early Childhood, Tintern Abbey, She was a Phantom of Delight, The Solitary Reaper, Michael: A Pastoral Poem, The Leech Gatherer, The World is Too Much with Us are some of his other best-known poems that have established him as One of the most outstanding figures in the history of English literature.

Introduction of poem

            The poem ‘Daffodils’ or ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’ is one of the loveliest and best-known poems of William Wordsworth. The poem was written in the year 1802. It was first published in “Poems in Two Volumes” in 1807. The very starting line of the poem “I wandered lonely as a cloud” informs the poet’s profound sentiments of being left alone. It was actually the death of his brother John that led him to “loneliness.” The poem was thus not a result of imagination, but that of actual visualization

 Analysis of this poem  Daffodils 

               The poet or the speaker in this poem, says that, once while “wandering like a cloud floating above hills and valleys”, he came across a field of daffodils beside a lake. The dancing, fluttering flowers stretched endlessly along the shore, and though the shining waves of the lake danced beside the flowers, yet the daffodils outdid the water with their beauty.

      

             The poet says that the golden daffodils twinkled and stretched in a continuous line just like the stars in the Milky Way galaxy for putting a greater implication in indicating that the flowers are heavenly as the stars. He seems the endless view of the golden daffodils as a never-ending line. The poet’s exaggeration of the number of flowers by saying “Ten thousand saw I at a glance” indicates that he has never seen so many daffodils at once. The poet could not help to be happy in such a joyful company of flowers.

           He says that he stared and stared, but did not realize what wealth the scene would bring him. For now, whenever he feels “vacant” or “pensive” the memory strikes “that inward eye” that is “the bliss of solitude” and his heart fills with pleasure, “and dances with the daffodils.”