Offending Wordsworth
OK, I’m tired and emotional, and I’m not enjoying this at all, but I’m writing about the Romantic Subject in the final chapter of my thesis, and have felt compelled to re-read Wordsworth’s Preface to the Lyrical Ballads. My way of coping is to cut and paste the most egregious examples of Eighteenth Century excess for your delectation.
It has therefore appeared to me, that to endeavour to produce or enlarge this capability is one of the best services in which, at any period, a Writer can be engaged…. The most effective of these causes are the great national events which are daily taking place…
OK call me cynical, but was that an application to be made Poet Laureate, or what?
The invaluable works of our elder writers, I had almost said the works of Shakespeare and Milton, are driven into neglect by frantic novels, sickly and stupid German Tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse.
“Sickly and stupid German Tragedies”: What? Like Goethe?
there can be little doubt but that more pathetic situations and sentiments, that is, those which have a greater proportion of pain connected with them, may be endured in metrical composition, especially in rhyme, than in prose.
Right. You’re talking about Daffodils, aren’t you?
Hence I have no doubt, that, in some instances, feelings, even of the ludicrous, may be given to my Readers by expressions which appeared to me tender and pathetic.
Oh yeah.
OK, done now. Well at least it wasn’t as bad as reading his poetry…
(Quotations taken from an online version of the Harvard Classics edition, available at http://www.bartleby.com/39/36.html.)
Your Comments
Wendy writes:
daffodils are pretty though…;)
Posted: 2 03 2009 - 22:31 | Permanent link to this comment
Catriona writes:
Wordsworth’s a bit of a prat, no doubt. But he had a specific ideological purpose in writing his preface to the Lyrical Ballads—and I’m sort of with him on Goethe. I mean, Faust is one thing—although the whole Romantic obsession with “closet dramas” (rather than writing plays that could actually be performed) and the associated contempt for the drama/theatre as an artform is an irritating aspect of the period—and Fantasia was pretty cool (I hope he got a writing credit for that on imdb.com) but have you read The Sorrows of Young Werther? That one is a real drag.
Of course, the real issue I have with Wordsworth is that this starts the whole “primacy of creative writing above all other forms of writing” argument—and in the writing courses, we do still get students whom we struggle to interest in academic forms of writing because they see them as inferior to the “creative” forms, as restricted, mechanical, and unoriginal.
And it’s largely down to bloody Wordsworth.
I mean, you don’t see Daniel Defoe thinking, “Yeah, Robinson Crusoe is worth much more—in an unquantifiable, abstract way—than the roughly nine-hundred non-fiction articles currently attributed to me by almost certainly overenthusiastic attribution scholars,” do you?
Posted: 3 03 2009 - 10:13 | Permanent link to this comment