Classic Poem

Occasion of the Lyrical Ballads, and the objects originally
proposed--Preface to the second edition--The ensuing controversy, its
causes and acrimony--Philosophic definitions of a Poem and Poetry with
scholia.


During the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbours, our
conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry,
the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence
to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty
by the modifying colours of imagination. The sudden charm, which
accidents of light and shade, which moon-light or sunset diffused over
a known and familiar landscape, appeared to represent the practicability
of combining both. These are the poetry of nature. The thought suggested
itself--(to which of us I do not recollect)--that a series of poems
might be composed of two sorts. In the one, the incidents and agents
were to be, in part at least, supernatural; and the excellence aimed
at was to consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic
truth of such emotions, as would naturally accompany such situations,
supposing them real. And real in this sense they have been to every
human being who, from whatever source of delusion, has at any time
believed himself under supernatural agency. For the second class,
subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life; the characters and
incidents were to be such as will be found in every village and its
vicinity, where there is a meditative and feeling mind to seek after
them, or to notice them, when they present themselves.

In this idea originated the plan of the LYRICAL BALLADS; in which it was
agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters
supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our
inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to
procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension
of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. Mr.
Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose to himself as his object,
to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a
feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind's attention
to the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the
wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for
which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude,
we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither
feel nor understand.

With this view I wrote THE ANCIENT MARINER, and was preparing among
other poems, THE DARK LADIE, and the CHRISTABEL, in which I should have
more nearly realized my ideal, than I had done in my first attempt. But
Mr. Wordsworth's industry had proved so much more successful, and the
number of his poems so much greater, that my compositions, instead of
forming a balance, appeared rather an interpolation of heterogeneous
matter. Mr. Wordsworth added two or three poems written in his own
character, in the impassioned, lofty, and sustained diction, which is
characteristic of his genius. In this form the LYRICAL BALLADS were
published; and were presented by him, as an experiment, whether
subjects, which from their nature rejected the usual ornaments and
extra-colloquial style of poems in general, might not be so managed in
the language of ordinary life as to produce the pleasurable interest,
which it is the peculiar business of poetry to impart. To the
second edition he added a preface of considerable length; in which,
notwithstanding some passages of apparently a contrary import, he was
understood to contend for the extension of this style to poetry of all
kinds, and to reject as vicious and indefensible all phrases and forms
of speech that were not included in what he (unfortunately, I think,
adopting an equivocal expression) called the language of real life. From
this preface, prefixed to poems in which it was impossible to deny the
presence of original genius, however mistaken its direction might
be deemed, arose the whole long-continued controversy. For from the
conjunction of perceived power with supposed heresy I explain the
inveteracy and in some instances, I grieve to say, the acrimonious
passions, with which the controversy has been conducted by the
assailants.

Had Mr. Wordsworth's poems been the silly, the childish things, which
they were for a long time described as being had they been really
distinguished from the compositions of other poets merely by meanness of
language and inanity of thought; had they indeed contained nothing more
than what is found in the parodies and pretended imitations of them;
they must have sunk at once, a dead weight, into the slough of oblivion,
and have dragged the preface along with them. But year after year
increased the number of Mr. Wordsworth's admirers. They were found too
not in the lower classes of the reading public, but chiefly among young
men of strong sensibility and meditative minds; and their admiration
(inflamed perhaps in some degree by opposition) was distinguished by its
intensity, I might almost say, by its religious fervour. These facts,
and the intellectual energy of the author, which was more or less
consciously felt, where it was outwardly and even boisterously denied,
meeting with sentiments of aversion to his opinions, and of alarm at
their consequences, produced an eddy of criticism, which would of itself
have borne up the poems by the violence with which it whirled them round
and round. With many parts of this preface in the sense attributed
to them and which the words undoubtedly seem to authorize, I never
concurred; but on the contrary objected to them as erroneous in
principle, and as contradictory (in appearance at least) both to other
parts of the same preface, and to the author's own practice in the
greater part of the poems themselves. Mr. Wordsworth in his recent
collection has, I find, degraded this prefatory disquisition to the end
of his second volume, to be read or not at the reader's choice. But he
has not, as far as I can discover, announced any change in his poetic
creed. At all events, considering it as the source of a controversy,
in which I have been honoured more than I deserve by the frequent
conjunction of my name with his, I think it expedient to declare once
for all, in what points I coincide with the opinions supported in that
preface, and in what points I altogether differ. But in order to render
myself intelligible I must previously, in as few words as possible,
explain my views, first, of a Poem; and secondly, of Poetry itself, in
kind, and in essence.

The office of philosophical disquisition consists in just distinction;
while it is the privilege of the philosopher to preserve himself
constantly aware, that distinction is not division. In order to obtain
adequate notions of any truth, we must intellectually separate its
distinguishable parts; and this is the technical process of philosophy.
But having so done, we must then restore them in our conceptions to
the unity, in which they actually co-exist; and this is the result of
philosophy. A poem contains the same elements as a prose composition;
the difference therefore must consist in a different combination of
them, in consequence of a different object being proposed. According to
the difference of the object will be the difference of the combination.
It is possible, that the object may be merely to facilitate the
recollection of any given facts or observations by artificial
arrangement; and the composition will be a poem, merely because it is
distinguished from prose by metre, or by rhyme, or by both conjointly.
In this, the lowest sense, a man might attribute the name of a poem to
the well-known enumeration of the days in the several months;

"Thirty days hath September,
April, June, and November," etc.

and others of the same class and purpose. And as a particular pleasure
is found in anticipating the recurrence of sounds and quantities,
all compositions that have this charm super-added, whatever be their
contents, may be entitled poems.

So much for the superficial form. A difference of object and contents
supplies an additional ground of distinction. The immediate purpose
may be the communication of truths; either of truth absolute and
demonstrable, as in works of science; or of facts experienced and
recorded, as in history. Pleasure, and that of the highest and most
permanent kind, may result from the attainment of the end; but it is not
itself the immediate end. In other works the communication of pleasure
may be the immediate purpose; and though truth, either moral or
intellectual, ought to be the ultimate end, yet this will distinguish
the character of the author, not the class to which the work belongs.
Blest indeed is that state of society, in which the immediate purpose
would be baffled by the perversion of the proper ultimate end; in which
no charm of diction or imagery could exempt the BATHYLLUS even of an
Anacreon, or the ALEXIS of Virgil, from disgust and aversion!

But the communication of pleasure may be the immediate object of a work
not metrically composed; and that object may have been in a high degree
attained, as in novels and romances. Would then the mere superaddition
of metre, with or without rhyme, entitle these to the name of poems? The
answer is, that nothing can permanently please, which does not contain
in itself the reason why it is so, and not otherwise. If metre be
superadded, all other parts must be made consonant with it. They must be
such, as to justify the perpetual and distinct attention to each
part, which an exact correspondent recurrence of accent and sound are
calculated to excite. The final definition then, so deduced, may be thus
worded. A poem is that species of composition, which is opposed to works
of science, by proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not truth;
and from all other species--(having this object in common with it)--it
is discriminated by proposing to itself such delight from the whole, as
is compatible with a distinct gratification from each component part.

Controversy is not seldom excited in consequence of the disputants
attaching each a different meaning to the same word; and in few
instances has this been more striking, than in disputes concerning the
present subject. If a man chooses to call every composition a
poem, which is rhyme, or measure, or both, I must leave his opinion
uncontroverted. The distinction is at least competent to characterize
the writer's intention. If it were subjoined, that the whole is likewise
entertaining or affecting, as a tale, or as a series of interesting
reflections; I of course admit this as another fit ingredient of a poem,
and an additional merit. But if the definition sought for be that of a
legitimate poem, I answer, it must be one, the parts of which mutually
support and explain each other; all in their proportion harmonizing
with, and supporting the purpose and known influences of metrical
arrangement. The philosophic critics of all ages coincide with the
ultimate judgment of all countries, in equally denying the praises of a
just poem, on the one hand, to a series of striking lines or distiches,
each of which, absorbing the whole attention of the reader to itself,
becomes disjoined from its context, and forms a separate whole,
instead of a harmonizing part; and on the other hand, to an unsustained
composition, from which the reader collects rapidly the general result
unattracted by the component parts. The reader should be carried
forward, not merely or chiefly by the mechanical impulse of curiosity,
or by a restless desire to arrive at the final solution; but by the
pleasureable activity of mind excited by the attractions of the journey
itself. Like the motion of a serpent, which the Egyptians made the
emblem of intellectual power; or like the path of sound through
the air;--at every step he pauses and half recedes; and from the
retrogressive movement collects the force which again carries him
onward. Praecipitandus est liber spiritus, says Petronius most happily.
The epithet, liber, here balances the preceding verb; and it is not easy
to conceive more meaning condensed in fewer words.

But if this should be admitted as a satisfactory character of a poem,
we have still to seek for a definition of poetry. The writings of Plato,
and Jeremy Taylor, and Burnet's Theory of the Earth, furnish undeniable
proofs that poetry of the highest kind may exist without metre, and even
without the contradistringuishing objects of a poem. The first chapter
of Isaiah--(indeed a very large portion of the whole book)--is poetry
in the most emphatic sense; yet it would be not less irrational than
strange to assert, that pleasure, and not truth was the immediate object
of the prophet. In short, whatever specific import we attach to the
word, Poetry, there will be found involved in it, as a necessary
consequence, that a poem of any length neither can be, nor ought to be,
all poetry. Yet if an harmonious whole is to be produced, the remaining
parts must be preserved in keeping with the poetry; and this can be
no otherwise effected than by such a studied selection and artificial
arrangement, as will partake of one, though not a peculiar property of
poetry. And this again can be no other than the property of exciting a
more continuous and equal attention than the language of prose aims at,
whether colloquial or written.

My own conclusions on the nature of poetry, in the strictest use of the
word, have been in part anticipated in some of the remarks on the Fancy
and Imagination in the early part of this work. What is poetry?--is so
nearly the same question with, what is a poet?--that the answer to the
one is involved in the solution of the other. For it is a distinction
resulting from the poetic genius itself, which sustains and modifies the
images, thoughts, and emotions of the poet's own mind.

The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man
into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other
according to their relative worth and dignity. He diffuses a tone and
spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it were) fuses, each into each,
by that synthetic and magical power, to which I would exclusively
appropriate the name of Imagination. This power, first put in action by
the will and understanding, and retained under their irremissive, though
gentle and unnoticed, control, laxis effertur habenis, reveals "itself
in the balance or reconcilement of opposite or discordant" qualities:
of sameness, with difference; of the general with the concrete; the idea
with the image; the individual with the representative; the sense of
novelty and freshness with old and familiar objects; a more than usual
state of emotion with more than usual order; judgment ever awake and
steady self-possession with enthusiasm and feeling profound or vehement;
and while it blends and harmonizes the natural and the artificial, still
subordinates art to nature; the manner to the matter; and our admiration
of the poet to our sympathy with the poetry. Doubtless, as Sir John
Davies observes of the soul--(and his words may with slight alteration
be applied, and even more appropriately, to the poetic Imagination)--

Doubtless this could not be, but that she turns
Bodies to spirit by sublimation strange,
As fire converts to fire the things it burns,
As we our food into our nature change.

From their gross matter she abstracts their forms,
And draws a kind of quintessence from things;
Which to her proper nature she transforms
To bear them light on her celestial wings.

Thus does she, when from individual states
She doth abstract the universal kinds;
Which then re-clothed in divers names and fates
Steal access through the senses to our minds.

Finally, Good Sense is the Body of poetic genius, Fancy its Drapery,
Motion its Life, and Imagination the Soul that is everywhere, and in
each; and forms all into one graceful and intelligent whole.