william wordsworth preface to lyrical ballads

His violent and neat literary opinions and his didactic prose and verse came to symbolize the retrenchment of reactionary forces and the kind of literary creation which amounted to a kind of 'apology' for the old ways. For Johnson, reason and common sense still prevailed over imagination and sentiment.

But the rules and fetters of neoclassicism still bound literature. The full emergence of the party system and cabinet government had taken place the empire grew, trade increased, and the middle class asserted new power. New forces were at work in England change and vitality were coming to the front. Johnson, while no romanticist, was, like Voltaire in France, scornful of neo-classicism's aims and methods and, through ridicule, hastened its undoing. Thematically, conditions in 'high' society furnished many of the plots and characters, and humble life tended to be contemptuously ignored.įrom about 1750 to 1790, literature came to be dominated indirectly by Doctor Samuel Johnson. Reason, indeed, was the prime source of inspiration emotion had to be subordinated to thought. They did not hold with simple tutelage at the hands of nature reason and good sense had to intervene. Their relationship to the natural environment was one of cautious imitation. They wrote and criticized according to what they considered the proper and acceptable rules of taste. By contrast, Shakespeare they found crude. They admired Virgil and Horace for correctness of phrase and polished urbanity and grace. The neo-classically oriented writers of the so-called Augustan Age (1701 to about 1750), Swift, Gay, Addison and Steele, Pope, and to a lesser extent Richardson and Fielding, chose Latin authors of the time of the Pax Romana (hence the name Augustan) as their models. What Burns, Blake, and Cowper, his contemporaries, wanted to do and could not, he did. It has been remarked that he was one of the giants almost single-handedly he revivified English poetry from its threatened death from emotional starvation. By way of understanding and appraisal, it must first be asked what Wordsworth set out to do and then to what degree he succeeded.

William wordsworth preface to lyrical ballads