Becoming artists of ourselves: Wordsworth on the 'savage torpor' of modern life
Some further thoughts on Wordsworth's 'Preface' to the Lyrical Ballads
William Wordsworth’s radical overturn of the subject matter and diction of poetry did not emerge out of nowhere. In his ‘Preface’ to the Lyrical Ballads, he lays out his poetic agenda: to illuminate the human condition in order to give his readers greater agency and self-understanding. And he did this by focusing on real-life situations and ordinary people, using the diction that people actually use in their common lives. Wordsworth said he aimed to:
‘…chuse [sic] incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible, in a selection of language really used by common men; and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain colouring of the imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual way; and, further, and above all, to make these incidents and situations interesting by tracing in them, truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature: chiefly, as far as regards the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement.’
However, this was not merely an aesthetic exercise. It was not about democratising language and poetics simply because it makes us feel better. It was a direct response to the anxieties and dehumanising pressures of contemporary life. Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge came of age, and matured into their powers as poets, in the wake of the French Revolution, and at a time when the Industrial Revolution was beginning to be felt in people’s lives. The certainties and social principles that had controlled Western Europe for centuries had been shaken to their foundations. While all this brought a new equality between people and improved the economic means of survival, it also brought political chaos and new forms of poverty and social misery that would have been unthinkable only decades earlier. Add to this the fact that Britain and France were on the verge of years of war, and you can see the moral crisis that Wordsworth was responding to.
Wordsworth writes that modernity creates a ‘savage torpor’ through the massing of men in cities, numerous wars, revolutions and upheavals, mass communication and the rise of popular and trivial literature. All this serves to keep us bogged down in silly, gossiping emotions and excitements which narrow rather than enlarge our natural powers. It leaves human beings in a ‘degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation’, rather than the state of contemplation that is best suited to properly shaping our instincts and moral awareness.
We can only really understand Wordsworth’s anxieties about modernity if we understand better his view of poetry’s power to illuminate how we as human beings actually think and create meaning. What he means, in the passage quoted above, about the ‘primary laws of our nature’ and ‘the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement,’ is that heightened, poetic experience is really something fundamental to human development. We become fully moral and self-determining persons through exactly the states of ‘vivid sensation’ that characterise Wordsworth’s own poetry. He writes:
‘For the human mind is capable of being excited without the application of gross and violent stimulants; and he must have a very faint perception of its beauty and dignity who does not know this, and who does not further know, that one being is elevated above another, in proportion as he possesses this capability. It has therefore appeared to me, that to endeavour to produce or engage this capability is one of the best services in which, at any period, a Writer can be engaged….’
Poetry then is a corrective to all the forces that obscure this fact about human nature—namely that we are capable of being self-determining beings, that we are the origins of our own meaning-creation and dignity. Such things do not come handed down to us from authority, but emerge out of our true nature, when it is allowed to free itself from convention and falsity. This is why Wordsworth spends so much time in the ‘Preface’ discussing the relationship between the poet and ordinary people. It is a difference only by degree. The poet is special only in reflecting back to humanity the way people naturally achieve their own creative genius through intense experiences. And it is also for this reason that Wordsworth is at such pains to argue against ‘poetic diction’—that is the use of heightened language as if poetry was about matters unrelated to common life. For Wordsworth, the challenge of the poet was to show just how poetic ordinary life is, not to indulge in visionary rhetoric that is removed from normal experience.
For this reason, we must also be cautious, too, of projecting back onto Romanticism a modern view of political egalitarianism. It is too convenient now to see his democratisation of poetic language as an instance of being anti-hierarchy, or the result of a suspicion of heightened diction in itself. Wordsworth was certainly a radical. But like all Romantics, Wordsworth was also a spiritual visionary. His aim was not to reduce poetic experience down to the profane and material, but to raise up the world of ordinary life to the level of the sacred. Wordsworth wanted to exoticise the normal, rather than demystify the spiritual.
It is important to note this, because today we smugly congratulate ourselves for being emancipators and liberators when all we are doing is debunking. This is the opposite of Romantic radicalism—which was not merely a political agenda. As Wordsworth wrote, his view of poetry was informed by ‘a deep impression of certain inherent and indestructible qualities of the human mind, and likewise of certain powers in the great and permanent objects that act upon it, which are equally inherent and indestructible…’ By illuminating how these process actually play out in common life, the poet acts as ‘the rock of defence of human nature’ and he 'binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society.’ For this reason, poetry at its best serves as an antidote to the forces which ‘blunt the discriminating powers of he mind.’