Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

for readers and listeners; it was a poetic diction. Wordsworth planned to publish a book with Coleridge that would be called
Lyrical Ballads
, which appeared in the year 1798. This date is important in the history of English literature and in the history of European literature because it is a deliberately romantic document. That is, it came long before the works of Hugo and others.
    When Wordsworth spoke with Coleridge, they agreed to divide the themes of the volume into two groups. One would deal with the poetry of common things, of common episodes, the common vicissitudes of every life. And the other, assigned to Coleridge, would deal with poetry of the supernatural. But Coleridge was very lazy, and he took opium, he was an opium addict like the great poetic-prose writer DeQuincey, and when it was time to publish the book, Coleridge contributed only two compositions, and Wordsworth had written all the rest. 2 And the book appeared with Wordsworth’s signature, and it was said that the other two compositions were written by a friend who preferred not to be named.
    A few years later a second edition appeared with a polemical preface by Wordsworth. In this preface, Wordsworth explains his theory of poetry. Wordsworth said that when a person acquires a book of poems, he hopes to find certain things in the book. And if the poet does not meet these expectations, if the poet disappoints, then the reader can think one of two things: he can think that the poet is indolent, incompetent, or he can think that he is a big fraud for not fulfilling his promise. Then Wordsworth talks about poetic diction. He says that all or almost all contemporary poets are looking for it. That he has taken as much pains to avoid it as others take to find it. Hence, the absence of poetic diction, of phrases like “soft Zephyrs,” of mythological metaphors, etcetera, which have been deliberately excluded. And he says that he has sought plain language, more or less like spoken language but without its stuttering, hesitations, repetitions. Wordsworth thought that the most natural language was spoken in the countryside, because he thought that most words have their origins in natural things—we speak of the “river of time,” for example—and that language is preserved in a purer state where people are constantly seeing the fields, mountains, rivers, hills, dawn, dusks, and nights. But, at the same time, he did not want to include any dialectical elements into his language. So, poems like
Leaves of Grass
, by Whitman, from 1855, or
Barrack-Room Ballads
, by Kipling, orSandburg’s contemporary poetry, would have horrified him.
    Nevertheless, poetry written afterward is the result of Wordsworth, who said that poetry has its origin in the overflow of powerful feelings produced by the agitation of the soul. Then the objection could have been made: if this is the case, it would be enough for a woman to leave a man, for a man’s father to die, for poetry to be produced. And the history of literature shows that this is not the case. A person who is very emotional cannot express himself well. Wordsworth brings to bear here his psychological theory of the origins of poetry. He says that poetry comes from emotion recollected in tranquility. Let’s imagine one of the subjects I mentioned: a man who is left by a woman he loves. At that moment, the man can sink into despair, can try to resign himself, can try to distract himself, drink alcohol, anything. But it would be very strange for him to sit down to write a poem. On the other hand, some time passes, a year, let’s say. The poet is now more serene, and then he recalls all he has suffered, that is, he relives his emotions. But this second time, not only is he the author who remembers exactly what he suffered, what he felt, what made him despair, but he is also the spectator, a spectator of his past
I
. And that moment, says Wordsworth, is the most suited to the production of poetry, the moment of the feeling recalled and relived in tranquility. Wordsworth also wanted for there not to be any feelings in the poem other than those required by the subject, by the poet’s primary impulse. That is, he totally rejected what are called the ornaments of poetry. That is, Wordsworth thought it was fine to write a poem about the emotion brought about by dawn in the mountains or in a city. But he thought it was bad to interweave a landscape or a description in a poem about another subject—the death or loss