Wordsworth says in his “Preface to Lyrical Ballads” that poetry is “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” These feelings, he suggests, are best expressed in the “language really used by men.” The language of ”low and rustic” life, as he calls it, when used to describe incidents and situations from common life, and then thrown over with a little color of imagination and creative presentation are key to uncovering “those elementary feelings” which burst forth in states of excitement. Now I really have no idea what “real” and “common” language Wordsworth is describing here. I don’t really know anyone, except possibly English majors or Romantic enthusiasts, who walk around saying “I wandered lonely as a cloud/That floats on high o’er vales and hills.” I take his point that poetry about common life, incidents, objects, etc. can be extremely effective in awakening the mind to the beauty of the world around us because it can make the every day supernatural. The emotional response from reading “I wandered lonely as a cloud…when all at once I saw a crowd,/A host, of golden daffodils” is much more affective than “I saw some clouds and daffodils on my walk.”
Coleridge, although good friends with Wordsworth, seems to agree that Wordsworth was trying a little too hard to develop his poetic recipe for success. In Biographia Literaria, Chapter 17, Coleridge objects to Wordsworth’s idea that ”the proper diction for poetry in general consists altogether in a language taken, with due exceptions, from the mouths of men in real life” (Coleridge’s words). He says: “I object, in the very first instance, to an equivocation in the use of the word ‘real.’ Every man’s language varies according to the extent of his knowledge, the activity of his faculties, and the depth or quickness of his feelings. Every man’s language has, first, its individualities; secondly, the common properties of the class to which he belongs; and thirdly, words and phrases of universal use.” Coleridge points out an important inconsistency in Wordsworth. In poems such as “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” Wordsworth, as characteristic of the Romantic movement, focuses on the individual’s experience and revelation. In his talk about “real” language or “common” language he forgets individuality.
So, why does it matter that Wordsworth makes this blunder? For Coleridge, it meant that Wordsworth was subjecting poetic language, which is anything but common, to the ordinary. In order to discover truth and beauty through pleasure, according to the Romantic tradition, there has to be an extraordinary. It is hard to be excited by the ordinary. The Poet, himself, according to Wordsworth, is “endued with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind” (Preface to Lyrical Ballads). If the poet is limited to the common, the ordinary, he or she ceases to be a poet.
