philosophers had devoted much energy to demonstrating that human nature must be everywhere the same, because it everywhere derived from individuals' shared sensory experience of an external world that could be objectively represented. As the century went on, however, philosophers began emphasizing?and poets began developing a new language for?individual variations in perception and the capacity the receptive consciousness has to filter and to re-create reality. This was the shift Words- worth registered when in the Preface he located the source of a poem not in outer nature but in the psychology of the individual poet, and specified that the essential materials of a poem were not the external people and events it
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represented but the inner feelings of the author, or external objects only after these have been transformed by the author's feelings. Wordsworth in 1802 described all good poetry as, at the moment of composition, 'the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.' Other Romantic theories concurred by referring to the mind, emotions, and imagination of the poet for the origin, content, and defining attributes of a poem. Using a metaphor that parallels Wordsworth's 'overflow,' and that Wordsworth would revive in a late poem, Mary Robinson and Coleridge identified some of their key poems of the 1790s as 'effusions'?ardent outpourings of feeling. Coleridge subsequently drew on German precedents and introduced into English criticism an account of the organic form of literary works; in this account the work is conceptualized as a self-originating and self-organizing process, parallel to the growth of a plant, that begins with a seedlike idea in the poet's imagination, grows by assimilating both the poet's feelings and the materials of sensory experience, and evolves into an organic whole in which the parts are integrally related to each other and to the whole.
In keeping with the view that poetry expresses the poet's feelings, the lyric poem written in the first person, which for much of literary history was regarded as a minor kind, became a major Romantic form and was often described as the most essentially poetic of all the genres. And in most Romantic lyrics the 'I' is no longer a conventionally typical lyric speaker, such as the Petrarchan lover or Cavalier gallant of Elizabethan and seventeenth-century love poems, but one who shares recognizable traits with the poet. The experiences and states of mind expressed by the lyric speaker often accord closely with the known facts of the poet's life and the personal confessions in the poet's letters and journals. This reinvention of the lyric complicated established understandings of the gender of authorship. It may not be an accident, some critics suggest, that Wordsworth in the Preface defines poetry as 'the real language of men' and the Poet as a 'man speaking to men': Wordsworth, who began to publish when women such as Robinson and Charlotte Smith occupied the vanguard of the new personal poetry, might have decided that to establish the distinctiveness of his project he needed to counterbalance his emphasis on his feelings with an emphasis on those feelings' 'manly' dignity. This is not to say that women writers' relationship to the new ideas about poetry was straightforward either. In one of her prefaces Smith says that she anticipates being criticized for 'bringing forward 'with querulous egotism,' the mention of myself.' For many female poets the other challenge those ideas about poetry posed might have consisted in their potential to reinforce the old, prejudicial idea that their sex?traditionally seen as creatures of feeling rather than intellect?wrote about their own experiences because they were capable of nothing else. For male poets the risks of poetic self-revelation were different?and in some measure they were actively seized by those who, like Coleridge and Shelley, intimated darkly that the introspective tendency and emotional sensitivity that made someone a poet could also lead him to melancholy and madness.
It was not only the lyric that registered these new accounts of the poet. Byron confounded his contemporaries' expectations about which poetic genre was best suited to self-revelation by inviting his audience to equate the heroes of Childe Harold, Manfred, and Don Juan with their author, and to see these fictional protagonists' experiences as disclosing the deep truths of his secret self. Wordsworth's Prelude represents an extreme instance of this tendency to
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self-reference. Though the poem is of epic length and seriousness, its subject is not, as is customary in an epic, history on a world-changing scale but the growth of the poet's mind.
The Prelude exemplifies two other important tendencies. Like Blake, Cole- ridge in early poems, and later on Shelley, Wordsworth presents himself as, in his words, 'a chosen son' or 'Bard.' That is, he assumes the persona of a poet-prophet, a composite figure modeled on Milton, the biblical prophets, and figures of a national music, the harp-playing patriots, Celtic or Anglo- Saxon, whom eighteenth-century poets and antiquarians had located in a legendary Dark Ages Britain. Adopting this bardic guise, Wordsworth puts himself forward as a spokesman for civilization at a time of crisis?a time, as Wordsworth said in The Prelude, of the 'melancholy waste of hopes o'erthrown.' (Spokesman is appropriate here: almost always, the bardic poet- prophet was a distinctively male persona.) The Prelude is also an instance of a central literary form of English, as of European, Romanticism?a long work about the crisis and renewal of the self, recounted as the story of an interior journey taken in quest of one's true identity and destined spiritual home and vocation. Blake's Milton, Keats's Endymion and Fall of Hyperion, and, in Victorian poetry, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh also exemplify this form. Late in the period there are equivalent developments in prose: spiritual autobiographies (Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater) undergo a revival, at the same time that Lamb and Hazlitt rediscover the essay as a medium of self-revelation.
Spontaneity and the Impulses of Feeling Wordsworth defined good poetry not merely as the overflow but as the 'spontaneous overflow' of feelings. In traditional poetics, poetry had been regarded as supremely an art?an art that in modern times is practiced by poets who have assimilated classical precedents, are aware of the 'rules' governing the kind of poem they are writing, and (except for the happy touches that, as Pope said, are 'beyond the reach of art') deliberately employ tested means to achieve premeditated effects on an audience. But to Wordsworth, although the composition of a poem originates from 'emotion recollected in tranquillity' and may be preceded and followed by reflection, the immediate act of composition must be spontaneous?arising from impulse and free from rules. Keats listed as an 'axiom' a similar proposition?that 'if poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.'
Other Romantics voiced similar declarations of artistic independence from inherited precepts, sometimes in a manner involving, paradoxically, a turn from the here-and-now toward a remote, preliterate, and primitive past. If the ancient bard was a charismatic figure for many Romantics, this was in part because imagining the songs he might have sung made it easier to think about an alternative to the mundane language of modernity?about a natural, oral poetry, blissfully unconscious of modern decorums. (Though they chafed against this expectation, writers from the rural working class?Burns and later John Clare?could be expected, by virtue of their perceived distance from the restraint and refinement of civilized discourse, to play a comparable role inside modern culture, that of peasant poet or natural genius.) When, after Waterloo, writers like Byron, Hunt, and the Shelleys traveled to Italy, taking these bardic ideals with them, they became enthralled with the arts of the improvisatore and improvisatrice, men and women whose electrifying oral performances of
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poetry involved no texts but those of immediate inspiration. One of the writers who praised and emulated
