THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

the poet and in a poem of his own addressed ‘To the Sons of Burns after visiting their Father’s Grave’ (‘Be
independent, generous, brave! Your Father such example gave’). His real tribute to Burns’s example lies, however, in
his own poetry of place, of character, and of relationships. Although Wordsworth’s contribution to Lyrical Ballads
(1798) consisted chiefly of his use of ballad form and in remoulding its traditional subjects, he also strove, as he later
argued in the celebrated Preface, to find an appropriate language. He had chosen to describe ‘humble and rustic life’,
he claimed, because in that condition ‘the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain
their maturity’ and because they ‘speak a plainer and more emphatic language’. Burns’s vernacular poems drew their
strength from the very vigour of a living dialect. For Wordsworth, no such alternative to ‘standard’ English seemed
appropriate to poetry, however radical his desire to break with the artificialities of the tradition he had inherited from
the poets of the eighteenth century. His viewpoint on ‘humble and rustic life’ may not be that of a ploughman, but it
does nevertheless demand an expression of passions and values which stand apart from those of an exclusively
aristocratic or urban civilization. It stands apart, too, from the language of the decorous shepherds of the pastoral
tradition. Wordsworth’s early poetry is radical not because it embodies revolutionary thought or theory, or because it
voices the complaints of the poor, but because it attempts to shift a literary perspective away from what he saw as
gentility and false sophistication. Burns’s work may have suggested a precedent for this radicalism, but the very
provinciality of its language militated against Wordsworth’s professed ambition to begin a process of literary reform
in the realization of which he might claim a place in a line of succession with Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton.
[p. 358]
In Book VIII of The Excursion (1814) Wordsworth records his impressions of a manufacturing district of northern
England, ‘a huge town, continuous and compact, | Hiding the face of earth for leagues ... O’er which the smoke of
unremitting fires | Hangs permanent’. It is against the physically ugly and socially challenging background of the
rapid pace of the industrialization of much of Britain in the closing years of the eighteenth century that we must judge
both his poetry and his ideas about what he aimed to achieve through his poetry. His birth and early education in the
mountainous north-western counties of England which contain the Lake District gave him, he believed, a particularly
acute sensitivity to wild nature and to the co-operative workings of humankind and nature. If he defined himself
through his perception of the natural, as opposed to the mechanical, world around him, he tended also to order his
political and social ideas according to the patterns of mutual responsibility he observed in rural as opposed to urban
contexts. His early poetry (or at least the portion of it that he was prepared to print) is marked by protest against
unnecessary or imposed suffering, injustice, incomprehension, and inhumanity, though he declined to publish his
radical Salisbury Plain (begun in 1793) and gradually revised the revolutionary aspects out of The Ruined Cottage of
1797 until it appeared neutrally enough as Book I of The Excursion seventeen years later. In the last poem printed in
the various editions of Lyrical Ballads (1798, 1800, 1802), ‘Lines Written a few miles above Tintern Abbey, on
revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July I3, 1798’, Wordsworth offers a self justifying explanation of his
partial retreat from politics. Here it is the sensations of remembered natural scenery, ‘felt in the blood, and felt along
the heart’, that bring ‘tranquil restoration’ to a once troubled soul, and the recall of the ‘still, sad music of humanity’
that makes for a chastening and subduing of restlessness. The intensity of his expressed love of nature and its
teachings seems to preclude other perceptions, particularly those related to the acute class division inherent in urban
industrialization, in the related depopulation of the countryside, or, most pressingly, in the explosion of social
questioning presented by the French Revolution. What Wordsworth elsewhere in his Preface to the Lyrical Ballads
calls ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’ is an emotion uniquely stimulated by nature and then related outwards, and
variously applied or illustrated, by moral and social incident. The understanding of society is essentially secondary to,
and derivative from, the primary and essential experience of a natural world still largely undamaged by human
mismanagement.
Although many of Wordsworth’s contributions to Lyrical Ballads describe tragic or unhappy incidents in an
unadorned language appropriate to the ballad form, other poems in the collection assert a happier, if passive,
responsiveness to place and to sensation. This passivity, expressed both in the form of dialogue (as in ‘Expostulation
and Reply’) or as a further injunctive response to a posed question (‘The Tables Turned’), entails turning from books
to nature as the teacher and as the giver of an ‘impulse from a vernal wood’ that may teach more
[p. 359]
‘than all the sages can’. ‘Tintern Abbey’, the longest poem, and the one which most obviously eschews the simplicity
of the ballad, both crowns the collection and gives it a direction beyond the purely narrative; it moves from a process
of telling or listening implied by a poem such as ‘The Thorn’ (with its insistent interplay of personal experience,
speculation, and hearsay) into introspection and meditation. But even here the solitary and secluded narrator implies a
listener in the form of the friend (Coleridge) and the sister (Dorothy) and the silent presence of a larger humanity