Wordsworth’s monumental poetic legacy rests on a large
number of important poems, varying in length and weight from the
short, simple lyrics of the 1790s
to the vast expanses of The Prelude, thirteen books
long in its 1808 edition.
But the themes that run through Wordsworth’s poetry, and the language
and imagery he uses to embody those themes, remain remarkably consistent
throughout the Wordsworth canon, adhering largely to the tenets
Wordsworth set out for himself in the 1802 preface
to Lyrical Ballads. Here, Wordsworth argues that
poetry should be written in the natural language of common speech,
rather than in the lofty and elaborate dictions that were then considered
“poetic.” He argues that poetry should offer access to the emotions contained
in memory. And he argues that the first principle of poetry should
be pleasure, that the chief duty of poetry is to provide pleasure
through a rhythmic and beautiful expression of feeling—for all human
sympathy, he claims, is based on a subtle pleasure principle that
is “the naked and native dignity of man.”
Recovering “the naked and native dignity of man” makes
up a significant part of Wordsworth’s poetic project, and he follows
his own advice from the 1802 preface.
Wordsworth’s style remains plain-spoken and easy to understand even
today, though the rhythms and idioms of common English have changed
from those of the early nineteenth century. Many of Wordsworth’s
poems (including masterpieces such as “Tintern Abbey” and the “Intimations
of Immortality” ode) deal with the subjects of childhood and the
memory of childhood in the mind of the adult in particular, childhood’s
lost connection with nature, which can be preserved only in memory.
Wordsworth’s images and metaphors mix natural scenery, religious
symbolism (as in the sonnet “It is a beauteous evening, calm and
free,” in which the evening is described as being “quiet as a nun”),
and the relics of the poet’s rustic childhood—cottages, hedgerows,
orchards, and other places where humanity intersects gently and
easily with nature.
Wordsworth’s poems initiated the Romantic era by emphasizing
feeling, instinct, and pleasure above formality and mannerism. More
than any poet before him, Wordsworth gave expression to inchoate
human emotion; his lyric “Strange fits of passion have I known,”
in which the speaker describes an inexplicable fantasy he once had
that his lover was dead, could not have been written by any previous
poet. Curiously for a poet whose work points so directly toward
the future, many of Wordsworth’s important works are preoccupied
with the lost glory of the past—not only of the lost dreams of childhood
but also of the historical past, as in the powerful sonnet “London, 1802,”
in which the speaker exhorts the spirit of the centuries-dead poet John
Milton to teach the modern world a better way to live.
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