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FRossetti - Wordsworth's analysis
by FRossetti - (2009-05-20)
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Analysis of Wordsworth's Views of Poetry and the Poet

 

Now I am going to analyze the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, by W. Wordsworth. In the exctract the poet talks about the subject of poetry, her language, the identity of the poet and his creative act.

The text starts with a declaration of intents where he says what kind of poetry the poet should use. The subject of poetry is to write common life next to an easy language because language has to communicate. Next to language there should be imaginaition. If the poet uses the "language really used by men", he will create an image of the thing into people's minds. Poets use the colour of imaginatio in order to make unusual, usual things and to make incidents and situations interested. But is Wordsworth's text we find a contraddiction. He says that the poet "is a man speaking to men", this means that he should use a "plainer and come emphatic language". At the same time he says that poets are set apart from the rest by his ability to feel deeply and to articulate his thoughts and feelings. So at first Wordsworth puts the poet in the same position of men, but then he says that he is superior. Another important feature of poets is that they have "a disposition to be affected more than other men by his absent things as if they were present. So the poet is able to recall a past situation because he is in great contact with the situation. There is complicity between the poet and the piece of common life that had happened. At the end of the Manifesto, the writer says that poetry takes her origin "from emotions recallected in tranquillity". In conclusion Wordsworth thinks that poets should write with a very easy language because they speak to men, and that poem is a form of literature that not all people are able to write.