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 aspect...Humble and rustic life was generally chosen,
because, in that condition, the essential passions of the heart find a better soil
in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a
plainer and more emphatic language; because in that condition of life our
elementary feelings co-exist in a state of greater simplicity, and, consequently,
may be more accurately contemplated and more forcibly communicated.^1
Crucially,“the feeling therein developed gives importance to the action and
situation, and not the action and situation to the feeling.”^2 That is, the
ordinary affairs of life are chosen as subject matters,notin order simply to
state information about them (such as median age of marriage, or average
income tax paid, say) but rather because these subject matters are objects of
forceful feeling, when feeling is healthy, and because here feelings can best
be understood(contemplated) and shared (communicated). Here the poet
serves as a kind of bootstrapping device through which people in general
may come themselves both to have more appropriate feelings toward the
stuff of ordinary life and to be more aware of those feelings: to be clearer
about their character and their appropriateness to their objects. The poet
feels more readily than do the rest of us, but nonetheless typically and on
our behalf.
The Poet is chiefly distinguished from other men by a greater promptness to
think and feel without immediate external excitement, and a greater power
in expressing such thoughts and feelings as are produced in him in that
manner. But these passions and thoughts and feelings are the general passions
and thoughts and feelings of men.^3
As a result of the poet’s expression ofourfeeling,“the understanding of the
Reader must necessarily be in some degree enlightened, and his affections
strengthened and purified.”^4
Wordsworth’s sense of the expressive task of the poet seems readily to
extend to other media of art. When Cervantes juxtaposes Don Quixote’s(^1) Wordsworth,“Preface toLyrical Ballads,”pp. 445–64 at pp. 446–47.
(^2) Ibid., p. 448. (^3) Ibid., p. 457. (^4) Ibid., p. 448.
76 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art