Einfante

PREFACE TO LYRICAL BALLADS

The extract is taken from the Preface which is generally considered the Manifesto of Romanticism.

It is a text of literary criticism where William Wordsworth explains what the new form of poetry should be like.

In the text he says that the object, the aim of poetry, should be to make the incidents of common life interesting.

Poetry should deal with situations from simple rustic life and these should be transfigured by imagination.

The reason for his preferance for humble life follows from the assuntion the men are better when closed to nature, because they are far from the arificialities of civilization because the feelings of country people developed naturally and without restraint are uncomplicated, lasting and influenced by nature.

Poetry should use familiar simple language "the language really used by men"because humble, country people live in communion with the objects from which language originates and voices their feelings in a more immediate, forceful way.

Wordsworth explains in his Preface that Coleridge and he were trying to leave behind the specialized formal language of 18^th century poetry.

He mantaines that his poems are experimental attemps to get to metrical arrengements a selection of the real language of men in a sense of vivid sensations.

Together with the other romantic writers he wanted to draw upon the expresses power of ordinary speech instead of relying authomatically upon an artificial "uniquelly poetic way of using language". But, Wordsworth did not naively believe that the language of poetry could ever be a direct imitation of the language of the men in the streets or worker in the fields. He says that the real language of men must be selected by the poet that must be fitted to metrical arrengements and that it must be taken from men in a vivid sensation.

Real language, on the one hand, and its selection and trasformation by the poet's mind and craft on the other. What really interested Wordsworth and other romantic writers is not Nature for its       ??    , but Nature as affects the human life and personality.

In the romantic writers it is the relation between the mind and the natural world that is the central focus.

Wordsworth's definition of poetry confirms the enphacy on subjective emotions and personal experience (all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings).