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Elective English—IV

Notes “The Solitary Reaper”
“Elegiac Stanzas”
“Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802”

“London, 1802”
“The World Is Too Much with Us”
Guide to the Lakes (1810)
“To the Cuckoo ”

The Excursion (1814)
Laodamia (1815, 1845)
The Prelude (1850)

9.4 Writing Style

William 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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