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In an effort to be able better to justify description in poetry, Wordsworth redefines poetry as recollected emotion.
This recollected emotion, as R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones say in their Introduction to Lyrical Ballads, ‘needs some
empirical event to have caused it, therefore, describing this event (or scene) recreates the emotion (or something
like it) and, therefore, is poetic’. 20 According to this view, for poetry to exist it must be based upon a memory, which
in turn is based upon an experience, which in turn is based upon the senses, which in turn are based upon
phenomena. ‘Every poet has to work with the world of the senses’, Maurice Bowra says, ‘but for the Romantics it
was the instrument which set their visionary powers in action’ (Emphasis added). 21 In light of this, the following
statements made by Wordsworth become more meaningful:
But habits of meditation have, I trust, so prompted and regulated my feelings, that my descriptions of
such objects as strongly excite those feelings, will be found to carry along with them a purpose
(Emphasis added). 22
[The poet considers man] as looking upon this complex scene of ideas and sensations, and finding every
where objects that immediately excite in him sympathies which, from the necessities of his nature, are
accompanied by an overbalance of enjoyment (Emphasis added). 23
The objects of the Poet’s thoughts are every where; though the eyes and the senses of man are, it is true,
his favourite guides, yet he will follow wheresoever he can find an atmosphere of sensation in which to
move his wings (Emphasis added). 24
[Of the general passions and feelings of man] And with what are they connected? Undoubtedly with our
moral sentiments and animal sensations, and with the causes which excite these; with the operations of
the elements, and the appearances of the visible universe; [. . .] These, and the like, are the sensations
and objects which the Poet describes, as they are the sensations of other men, and the objects which
interest them (Emphasis added). 25
In these assertions, we see an extreme concentration upon the objects of the “real” world as catalysts for producing
poetry. This marks a considerable departure from the operating procedures of seventeenth-century poets who ‘even
at their most lucid, never allowed an interest in the actual nature of objects to prevail over the “profound
sensuousness” of the meanings they intended to convey’. 26 The result of this is that the poem becomes, as M. H.
Abrams clearlyrecognises,
essentially the internal made external [. . .] embodying the combined product of the poet’s perceptions,
thoughts and feelings. [. . .] The paramount cause of poetry is not [. . .] the effect intended upon the
audience; but instead an efficient cause-the impulse within the poet of feelings and desires seeking
expression. 27
Wordsworth is concerned with the idea of the poet as teacher whose sole function is to deliver “truth” to an
unquestioning audience. The poet is someone who, by some mysterious and nebulous gift of insight, has access to the
hidden world of truth that lies covered beneath the veil of language. Wordsworth unmistakably articulates this in the
Preface to Lyrical Ballads:
He is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endued with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm
and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than
are supposed to be common among mankind; a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and
who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar
volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the universe, and habitually impelled to create
them where he does not find them. 28
Wordsworth felt himself equal to this calling and his developing theories on poetics were, ‘a clearing ground for his
own work, [. . .] with what happens, or should happen, in the poet’s mind in the act of composition’. 29 His main
consideration was whether he, the poet, had sufficiently described his state of mind. 30
One of the outcomes ensuing from this view of poetic language was that it enabled the rise in Britain in the late
1950s of The Movement. The Movement reacted against what it considered excessive imprecision in the poetic
language of the New Apocalypse poets of the 1940s, especially with regard to its metaphorical style. Referring to the
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