A Critical Analysis Of William Wordsworth's Poetry

Prior to the 19th century, the emphasis of literary art, specifically poetry, was defined by the neoclassical poets who held literature to reason, logic, and rationality. This school of thought ran until 1785, when romantic poets stretched the previous conventions and began to set new thoughts of what constituted as literature in this new epoch. Deemed the “romantics”, their idea of poetry allowed for the free flow of sentiment, encouraging a response from the soul, not the brain. In these romantic poems, the poets were allowed to create vivid images using simple, middle-class language, with fewer descriptions for a lack of vanity. William Wordsworth 's preface in Lyrical Ballads published in 1802, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge 's Biographia

The neo-classical poets who came before him did not call on whims or imagination, but rather on intellect and rules. They believed well-educated, scholarly allusions, were to be presented to the world as true literature that defined society. William Wordsworth’s revolutionary subject heavily strays from this. His conception of poetry hinges on one revolutionary subject: the common man. Wordsworth 's claims that poetry should be understandable to individuals living in the real

Wordsworth takes a revolutionary stance on the importance of emotion when writing poetry. Wordsworth makes the point that “poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility” (cite). This statement forms the basis for Wordsworth’s explanation of the process of writing poetry. To begin, the poet should experience a transcendent moment, an instance of the sublime. One should leave this experience so overwhelmed by the senses that they are incapable of writing the true beauty of this event. In order to do so, there needs to be a personal distance from the experience, a step back where the emotions are recollected in tranquility. After the step back, the poet can reconstruct their emotions and what happened to himself. There is no real structure to this, no time regulations or specific vocabulary one must use to write with. With this, Wordsworth sets the scene of the romantic period with the lack of lofty, poetic diction, which in his mind is not related to the language of real