The chief thing that can be said for these critics is that they excel the moderns in scholarship. These learned men represent an almost extinct class, men who knew all the classics and all the books of Europe. They make us regret that the day of the man of learning is over, especially at a time when so many ignorant poets and critics and reviewers discuss and decide emphatically on many matters wherein a little learning is not a dangerous thing.
[52:A] "Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge." Wordsworth. "The atmosphere wherein all the arts exist is poetry." Wilhelm A. Ambros: _The Boundaries of Music and Poetry_.
PROSE THE NATURAL LANGUAGE OF THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY
Wordsworth believed that the language used by people in poetry should be that of the natural language of men under the influence of their feelings and that the diction of metrical poetry should differ in no wise from that of prose. Yet the only writers who use the natural diction of men are novelists, prose dramatists and short story writers, and, curiously enough, because they did not write verse, it has not often been suspected that these men were poets. Wordsworth's views are really proofs that poetry is found in prose, for the prose writers comply with his requirements of using in their compositions the natural conversation of men under the influence of natural feelings. They also comply with Wordsworth's definition of poetry, recording "emotions recollected in tranquillity."
Hazlitt has ably summed up the influence of the French Revolution on Wordsworth. Our poet did away with mythological references, with tales about legendary characters. He wrote about the emotions of the common people and introduced no far-fetched metaphors, nor made pedantic allusions.
Wordsworth, however, did not claim, as Coleridge thought he did, that the language of verse poetry must be that of ignorant people. Wordsworth never asserted that he wanted the poets to use the language of peasants, except when peasants were portrayed and represented as speaking. He simply protested against stilted, artificial language in verse poetry. He held the use of such language in verse poetry to be ridiculous, as it was in prose. He was not an exponent of prose poetry, even though he laid little stress on the importance of metre. As the authors of the article on Wordsworth in the _Encyclopedia Britannica_ state, the farthest he went in defense of prose structure in poetry was to say that if the words in verse happened to be in the order of prose, they were not necessarily prosaic in the sense of unpoetic. He did not (unfortunately) try to eliminate metre in poetry. He no doubt agreed with Coleridge's own defense of meter in the _Biographia Literaria_. He did not write against his own theory, for he always employed metre and--except in some ballads--a diction that was even literary.
