![]() ![]() The “Preface to Lyrical Ballads” represents nothing short of a revolution in the theory of poetry. In this regard, Wordsworth says, the primary business of poetry is the articulation of truth. In other words, the poet, through his sensitivity, is able to capture strong emotion in his poetry and through it make those emotions available to the reader. ![]() This empathetic ability is combined in the poet with the ability to translate these feelings into language that is both evocative and pleasurable. A poet, Wordsworth says, is a man with heightened sensitivity to the passions of life and, in particular, who is able at times to imagine the feelings of common people as his own. Wordsworth sees his poetry as the “metrical arrangement” of the “real language of men,” and he believes that its subject matter should be drawn from “common life.” The function of poetry is to reveal the “essential passions” underlying experience and to guide the reader into those habits of mind that enable him to perceive the inherent beauty in nature and everyday life.Īnother purpose of the preface is to define the qualities that make a poet, and defend the new poetic forms in Lyrical Ballads from criticism. The crucial differences have to do with language and subject. ![]() In so doing, the Preface articulates how the poetry of the Romantics broke with the classical tradition of seventeenth- and eighteenth- century poetry. Wordsworth’s purpose is to explain the aesthetic concepts behind his poetry (and, to a lesser extent, that of Coleridge). ![]()
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