﻿WORDSWORTH Ml XD 



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tery is gone. Hence we know there is something inade:inate in 

 Pope 's deism, more inadequate, perhaps, than no explanation of the 

 mystery at all. The poets that follow Pope did not attempt any 

 deeper interpretation. They devoted themselves to the external 

 charm of a great variety of scenes. They saw many things, and 

 some things poetically. They saw in the beauty of nature signs of 

 man 's relation to God. They dealt in the obvious and com^entional 

 way with the lessons of nature. But thought, except in the guise 

 of logical reasoning, and as it may be expended on arrangement 

 and form, is largely absent from English poetry for a hundred 

 years after Milton. 



AVordsworth brought back to poetry the element of poetical 

 thought, the power of thinking in images, of forming ideas and 

 images simultaneously; and this was owing to the new vision he 

 had — rather vague at first, but growing steadily clearer — of the 

 function of poetry as a great interpreter of nature, an interpreter 

 comparable, on the side of thought, to philosophy. 



To understand the growth of this conception of poetry in his 

 mind — which is essential to our further discussion of his art — it 

 is necessary to recall that it began with him not as an inspired 

 vision, but as a rather academic theory. Had he had from the first 

 an inspired vision of his function as a poet, he would probably never 

 have written his first prefaces to the ' Lyrical Ballads ; ' though on 

 the ground that he thoroughly believed it to be part of a poet's 

 function to cultivate the taste by which he is to be appreciated, we 

 may believe that he would have written something like his final 

 judgment in the matter there argued. Wordsworth's theory grew 

 rapidly clearer, but at first it was not clear and to the end reminis- 

 cences of fogginess remain in it. To begin with, he swung too vio- 

 lently from one extreme to the other. His early poems, which he 

 published in 1793 immediately after his return from France, are 

 for the most part trivial exercises in description, done in the couplet 

 of Pope and decked out with the worst of Thomson's verbiage. 

 ^The Evening Walk' and 'Descriptive Sketches' are so full of the 

 artificial phrases of that poetic diction which Wordsworth later 

 ridiculed, that Professor Legouis, in pointing out some twenty vari- 

 eties of such diction, concludes that, with the possible exception of 

 certain poetry of the Delia Cruscan school, we have yet to meet 

 with a poem of any value 'in which may be found so large a propor- 

 tion of fantastic conceits as are collected and crowded together in 

 the twelve hundred lines published by Wordsworth in 1793.'^ 



^ 'The Early Life of William Wordsworth.' p. 147. 



