Tripping Along the Stumbling Blocks of Writing.
Why this Blog- The Victorian Times Writer. short story: Melusina and the Honor Amongst Thieves. An easy way to see how right he was is to try and name his contemporaries – how many can most people manage? I’m willing to bet that there aren’t so many names which come readily. He knew what he was doing when he spurned the common consensus on writing verse. The grandiosity of language has never really slipped from poetry – not even now, when certain individuals prefer to dazzle with show rather than delve deep into their feelings and express something real. Wordsworth – even at his weakest moments – still towers above many poets who like to think of themselves as superior. Of course, there is a second reading of the poem which could suggest supernatural aspects at play (they aren’t dead, they are… other) which gives me cause to grin a sly grin and nod whenever the supposed deficiencies are highlighted. I like most of Wordsworth’s work, and this particular poem still stands as a dark and clever look at the way in which death is appropriated into the everyday by children. How common is it to hear a person say, “I myself do not object to this style of composition or this or that expression, but to such and such classes of people it will appear mean or ludicrous.” This mode of criticism, so destructive of all sound unadulterated judgment, is almost universal: I have therefore to request, that the Reader would abide independently by his own feelings, and that if he finds himself affected he would not suffer such conjectures to interfere with his pleasure.” Perhaps stung by earlier criticism of his work, he also stated, “I have one request to make of my Reader, which is, that in judging these Poems he would decide by his own feelings genuinely, and not by reflection upon what will probably be the judgment of others. For all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: but though this be true, Poems to which any value can be attached, were never produced on any variety of subjects but by a man, who being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility, had also thought long and deeply.” If in this opinion I am mistaken, I can have little right to the name of a Poet. Not that I mean to say, that I always began to write with a distinct purpose formally conceived but I believe that my habits of meditation have so formed my feelings, as that my descriptions of such objects as strongly excite those feelings, will be found to carry along with them a purpose. He continued, ” From such verses the Poems in these volumes will be found distinguished at least by one mark of difference, that each of them bas a worthy purpose. incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature.” He stated, “The principal object, then, which I proposed to myself in these Poems was to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible, in a selection of language really used by men and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual way and, further, and above all, to make these incidents and situations interesting by tracing in them, truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature: chiefly, as far as regards the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement. In the second edition of The Lyrical Ballads published in 1801, William Wordsworth included a preface in which he appealed for sincerity of language over the grandiose diction common in poetry at that time. 
One, because Wordsworth seemed to be in sympathy with the supernatural beliefs of the young girl rather than the rationalist views of the narrator and secondly, because they claimed a little girl could not possess the intellectual capability of expressing her views on death and the afterlife. Indeed, for many years critics faulted the poem. He warned, “It will make you everlastingly ridiculous.”
“And when the ground was white with snow,Īfter reading the poems Wordsworth had selected for the first edition of The Lyrical Ballads, friend James Tobin approved of them all except for, We are Seven. “Twelve steps or more from my mother’s door, “Their graves are green, they may be seen,” After Coleridge completed his Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Wordsworth was inspired to write a poem based on a young girl he had met during a walk six years prior: The two men had decided to publish a book of poetry together. In 1798, Wordsworth was staying with Samuel Coleridge at Alfoxden. William Wordsworth, English Romantic poet (7 April 1770 – 23 April 1850)
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