3. Lines 66ff. contain Wordsworth's famed description of the three stages of his growing up, defined in terms of his evolving relations to the natural scene: the young boy's purely physical responsiveness (lines 73?74); the postadolescent's aching, dizzy, and equivocal passions?a love that is more like dread (lines 67?72, 75?85: this was his state of mind on the occasion of his first visit); his present state (lines 85ff.), in which for the first time he adds thought to sense.
4. This line has a close resemblance to an admirable line of Young, the exact expression of which I cannot recollect [Wordsworth's note, 1798 ff.]. Edward Young in Night Thoughts (1744) says that the human senses 'half create the wondrous world they see.'
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TINTERN ABBEY / 26 1
Nor perchance, If I were not thus taught, should I the more Suffer my genial spirits5 to decay: For thou art with me here upon the banks
us Of this fair river; thou my dearest Friend,6 My dear, dear Friend; and in thy voice I catch The language of my former heart, and read My former pleasures in the shooting lights Of thy wild eyes. Oh! yet a little while
120 May I behold in thee what I was once, My dear, dear Sister! and this prayer I make, Knowing that Nature never did betray The heart that loved her; 'tis her privilege, Through all the years of this our life, to lead
125 From joy to joy: for she can so inform The mind that is within us, so impress With quietness and beauty, and so feed With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,7 Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
130 Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all The dreary intercourse of daily life, Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold Is full of blessings. Therefore let the moon
135 Shine on thee in thy solitary walk; And let the misty mountain-winds be free To blow against thee: and, in after years, When these wild ecstasies shall be matured Into a sober pleasure; when thy mind 140 Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms, Thy memory be as a dwelling-place
For all sweet sounds and harmonies; oh! then, If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief, Should be thy portion,' with what healing thoughts inheritance, dowry
145 Of tender joy wilt thou remember me, And these my exhortations! Nor, perchance? If I should be where I no more can hear Thy voice, nor catch from thy wild eyes these gleams Of past existence8?wilt thou then forget
iso That on the banks of this delightful stream We stood together; and that I, so long A worshipper of Nature, hither came Unwearied in that service; rather say With warmer love?oh! with far deeper zeal
155 Of holier love. Nor wilt thou then forget, That after many wanderings, many years Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs,
5. Creative powers. ('Genial' is here the adjectival tongues' and with 'dangers compassed round' form of the noun genius.) (lines 26-27). 6. His sister, Dorothy. 8. I.e., reminders of his own 'past existence' five 7. In the opening of Paradise Lost 7, Milton years earlier (see lines 116?19). describes himself as fallen on 'evil days' and 'evil
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26 2 / WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
And this green pastoral landscape, were to me
More dear, both for themselves and for thy sake!
July 1798 1798
Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802) To the first edition of Lyrical Ballads, published jointly with Coleridge in 1798, Wordsworth prefixed an 'Advertisement' asserting that the majority of the poems were 'to be considered as experiments' to determine 'how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure.' In the second, two-volume edition of 1800, Wordsworth, aided by frequent conversations with Coleridge, expanded the Advertisement into a preface that justified the poems not as experiments, but as exemplifying the principles of all good poetry. The Preface was enlarged for the third edition of Lyrical Ballads, published two years later. This last version of 1802 is reprinted here.
Although some of its ideas had antecedents in the later eighteenth century, the Preface as a whole deserves its reputation as a revolutionary manifesto about the nature of poetry. Like many radical statements, however, it claims to go back to the implicit principles that governed the great poetry of the past but have been perverted in recent practice. Most discussions of the Preface, following the lead of Cole- ridge in chapters 14 and 1 7 of his Biographia Literaria, have focused on Wordsworth's assertions about the valid language of poetry, on which he bases his attack on the 'poetic diction' of eighteenth-century poets. As Coleridge pointed out, Wordsworth's argument about this issue is far from clear. However, Wordsworth's questioning of the underlying premises of neoclassical poetry went even further. His Preface implicitly denies the traditional assumption that the poetic genres constitute a hierarchy, from epic and tragedy at the top down through comedy, satire, pastoral, to the short lyric at the lowest reaches of the poetic scale; he also rejects the traditional principle of 'decorum,' which required the poet to arrange matters so that the poem's subject (especially the social class of its protagonists) and its level of diction conformed to the status of the literary kind on the poetic scale.
When Wordsworth asserted in the Preface that he deliberately chose to represent 'incidents and situations from common life,' he translated his democratic sympathies into critical terms, justifying his use of peasants, children, outcasts, criminals, and madwomen as serious subjects of poetic and even tragic concern. He also undertook to write in 'a selection of language really used by men,' on the grounds that there can be no 'essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition.' In making this claim Wordsworth attacked the neoclassical principle that required the language, in many kinds of poems, to be elevated over everyday speech by a special, more refined and dignified diction and by artful figures of speech. Wordsworth's views about the valid language of poetry are based on the new premise that 'all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings'?spontaneous, that is, at the moment of composition, even though the process is influenced by prior thought and acquired poetic skill.
Wordsworth's assertions about the materials and diction of poetry have been greatly influential in expanding the range of serious literature to include the common people and ordinary things and events, as well as in justifying a poetry of sincerity rather than of artifice, expressed in the ordinary language of its time. But in the long view other aspects of his Preface have been no less significant in establishing its importance, not only as a turning point in English criticism but also as a central document in modern culture, Wordsworth feared that a new urban, industrial
