A History of English Literature

Nature, especially inanimate Nature--of mountains, woods and fields,
streams and flowers, in all their infinitely varied aspects. A wonderfully
joyous and intimate sympathy with them is one of his controlling impulses.
But his feeling goes beyond the mere physical and emotional delight of
Chaucer and the Elizabethans; for him Nature is a direct manifestation of
the Divine Power, which seems to him to be everywhere immanent in her; and
communion with her, the communion into which he enters as he walks and
meditates among the mountains and moors, is to him communion with God. He
is literally in earnest even in his repeated assertion that from
observation of Nature man may learn (doubtless by the proper attuning of
his spirit) more of moral truth than from all the books and sages. To
Wordsworth Nature is man's one great and sufficient teacher. It is for this
reason that, unlike such poets as Keats and Tennyson, he so often views
Nature in the large, giving us broad landscapes and sublime aspects. Of
this mystical semi-pantheistic Nature-religion his 'Lines composed above
Tintern Abbey' are the noblest expression in literature. All this explains
why Wordsworth considered his function as a poet a sacred thing and how his
intensely moral temperament found complete satisfaction in his art. It
explains also, in part, the limitation of his poetic genius. Nature indeed
did not continue to be to him, as he himself says that it was in his
boyhood, absolutely 'all in all'; but he always remained largely absorbed
in the contemplation and interpretation of it and never manifested, except
in a few comparatively short and exceptional poems, real narrative or
dramatic power (in works dealing with human characters or human life).
In the second place, Wordsworth is the most consistent of all the great
English poets of democracy, though here as elsewhere his interest is mainly
not in the external but in the spiritual aspect of things. From his
insistence that the meaning of the world for man lies not in the external
events but in the development of character results his central doctrine of
the simple life. Real character, he holds, the chief proper object of man's
effort, is formed by quietly living, as did he and the dalesmen around him,
in contact with Nature and communion with God rather than by participation
in the feverish and sensational struggles of the great world. Simple
country people, therefore, are nearer to the ideal than are most persons
who fill a larger place in the activities of the world. This doctrine
expresses itself in a striking though one-sided fashion in his famous
theory of poetry--its proper subjects, characters, and diction. He stated
his theory definitely and at length in a preface to the second edition of
'Lyrical Ballads,' published in 1800, a discussion which includes
incidentally some of the finest general critical interpretation ever made
of the nature and meaning of poetry. Wordsworth declared: 1. Since the
purpose of poetry is to present the essential emotions of men, persons in
humble and rustic life are generally the fittest subjects for treatment in
it, because their natures and manners are simple and more genuine than
those of other men, and are kept so by constant contact with the beauty and
serenity of Nature. 2. Not only should artificial poetic diction (like that
of the eighteenth century) be rejected, but the language of poetry should
be a selection from that of ordinary people in real life, only purified of
its vulgarities and heightened so as to appeal to the imagination. (In this
last modification lies the justification of rime.) There neither is nor can
be any _essential_ difference between the language of prose and that
of poetry.
This theory, founded on Wordsworth's disgust at eighteenth century poetic
artificiality, contains a very important but greatly exaggerated element of
truth. That the experiences of simple and common people, including
children, may adequately illustrate the main spiritual aspects of life
Wordsworth unquestionably demonstrated in such poems as 'The Reverie of