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IXDIAXA UXIYEESITY STUDIES 



Five years later Wordsworth had gone to the other extreme, and 

 the exaggerated simplicity of some of the 'Lyrical Ballads' (which 

 were published anonymously) was accounted for by contemporary 

 critics on the ground that the author was unable to write anything 

 more elevated. 



Wordswortli's theory of his function as a poet, and of his proper 

 diction was temporarily unbalanced by this change, this too com- 

 plete conversion. In democratic and revolutionary fervor he deter- 

 mined to choose subjects from low and rustic life, and then apply- 

 ing social rather than poetic principles to the art of writing poetry 

 about such subjects, he tried to adopt also the language of low and 

 rustic life. He did not at first recognize either in theory or in prac- 

 tice that 'what was needed to cure a false diction Avas not that 

 of the lower classes any more than that of the higher, but a pure 

 diction" — a diction, let me add, such as he already has in the 

 'Lyrical Ballads' when he forgets his theory. As Mr. Henry Dana 

 has pointed out in an essay, as yet unpublished, from which I have 

 just quoted, and as Professor Dowden and other critics have re- 

 marked, Wordsworth constantly changed his theory and his prac- 

 tise till he reached a far more conventional and, at the same time, 

 poetical point of view. This process is one of the fundamental 

 things in his genius, a thing Crabbe had been unable to teach him, 

 for though Crabbe 's diction is not affected it is not pure. The 

 change in Wordsworth's attitude is seen by a comparison of the 

 prefaces of various editions of the 'Lyrical Ballads.' These pref- 

 aces are ordinarily printed in their final form with no attention to 

 the changes and amplifications they underwent from one edition of 

 his poems to another. Even in the recent volume of 'Wordsworth's 

 Literary Criticism, ' the editor, Mr. N. C. Smith, late fellow of New 

 ■College, prints the preface of 1802 as that of 1800, which was some 

 twTnty-four pages shorter. In this, however, he only follows the 

 custom of practically all the complete editions of Wordsworth, old 

 or new, though Mr. Dowden, in 1891, had pointed out this mistake, 

 and showed the changes Wordsworth made in his poetical theory 

 from 1798 to 1802. 



The 'Advertisement.' as the preface of 1798 is called, reads in 

 part as follows : ' It is the honourable characteristic of Poetry that 

 its materials are to be found in every subject which can interest the 

 human mind. * * * The majority of the following poems are to 

 be considered as experiments. They were written chiefly with a 

 view to ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle 

 and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic 



