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INDIANA UXIVEESITY STUDIES 



most uneven of poets. Yet for this paradox we perhaps know him 

 the better. The sharp contrasts of his style, resulting, enable us to 

 perceive more definitely what his poetic purposes Avere and how 

 he developed them out of the ideas of his day ; perhaps they admit 

 us to points of view from which even his highest genius is not 

 inscrutable. 



Certainly a fundamental reason why the groAvth of his mind is 

 closely traceable is that he both preserves the past and merges Avith 

 the future. We can place him clearly and definitely in the history 

 of thought. He had his roots in the eighteenth century and he 

 ahvays grcAv from them. He effected the greatest change in the 

 poetical vieAv of life ; and though less ' revolutionary ' than Bryon or 

 Shelley, more nearly than they does he seem to consummate the 

 transition from the old to the ncAv. It is from this point of vieAV, 

 his relation to the tendencies of his age, that Ave shall first consider 

 him. 



The typical characteristic of descriptiA^e poetry in WordsAA^orth 's 

 youth Avas derived from a strong sense of fact, from faithfulness 

 to the eye Avithout reflection. A surface realism, Avhich had 

 affected nearly every form of literature in the eighteenth century^ 

 came at last to dominate even poetic description of nature. CoAvper 

 and Crabbe mark the end of Arcadian pastoral. Poets, AA^ho there- 

 after proposed to describe humble and rough life, Avould have to 

 make it humble and rough. The Golden Age Avas past in the 

 English countryside, and the problem of being both true to nature 

 — not to the ancients — and poetical succeeded. I have lifted the 

 veil , says Crabbe, the veil of pastoral revery ; you cannot replace it. 



Crabbe, hoAA^ever, AA^hile destroying illusion, saAv little further into 

 reality than its vivid surfaces. Merely lifting the veil, through 

 Avhich the poetic eye had so long looked at nature, did not bring 

 to him, nor could it have brought to any complete realist of that 

 day, a great poetic vision of nature — not even a great philosophical 

 analysis of its meaning. After Milton, no poet until WordsAA^orth 

 can be spoken of as a man of vision, one to catch either on the fabric 

 of the veil or in bare reality something of the mystery of nature 

 and something of the secret. Pope had attempted to explain nature 

 in a system, after the manner of a critic, not of a poet. 

 He had contemplated nature abstractly Avith an analytic mind, 

 and had perceived in the order of things an illustration of a phase 

 of deism. His poem, Avithin itself, made a narroAV, logical, interest- 

 ing, though unlikely, interpretation of man's relation to the uni- 

 A^erse. In its oAvn light, that is, it is all as plain as day. The mys- 



