routledge+history+of+literature+in+english

232 The Romantic period 1789–1832
speaking voice in conversation. The exclamation marks, the use of
italics for emphasis, the steady pace of the rhythm, all serve to express
a quiet speaking voice revealing intimate thoughts.
While some critics have judged that Wordsworth’s later poetry (for
example, long poems such as The Excursion) lacked the vitality of his
earlier work, Coleridge complained that poetic inspiration had deserted
him and he wrote no poetry during the last thirty years of his life.
Instead he dedicated himself to philosophy and to literary criticism. In
1817 he published Biographia Literaria, which contains important
discussion of the workings of the poetic imagination and reveals the
extent of his thinking about the nature of literature. It has become one
of the most influential of works of criticism. Together with Wordsworth’s
Preface to Lyrical Ballads, it also reveals another aspect of the modern
writer: almost simultaneously the writer produces both literary work
and self-conscious critical reflections on that work and on literature in
general. In more ways than one, the Romantics are genuine forerunners
of the Modern movement in literature and the arts.
LANGUAGE NOTE
The ‘real’ language of men
Remuneration! O that’s the Latin word for three farthings.
(William Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost)
I heard among the solitary hills
Low breathings coming after me, and sounds
Of undistinguishable motion, steps
Almost as silent as the turf they trod.
(William Wordsworth, The Prelude)
In the Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800; revised 1802) Wordsworth
makes the first theoretical argument in the history of English poetry
for a radical review of the language of poetry. His argument is that
conventional poetic diction should be replaced by a language closer
to the everyday speech of ordinary people. It is an essentially democratic
statement, arguing that ordinary words should be admitted into the
society of the poem. Wordsworth and Coleridge wanted to purify and
renew the language of poetry. From a different starting point Pope