The Preface to Lyrical Ballads became a manifesto of the lyrical movement of Romanticism in England. One of the fundamental provisions of Wordsworth's theory is the rationale for the need to bring poetry closer to nature. For Wordsworth, the main thing is to bring the hero and poetic language closer to the most natural forms. Because of this, ordinary villagers who have retained natural spiritual impulses and the simplest feelings, and sometimes even mentally underdeveloped people, become heroes. Their language - the language of everyday life - is more eternal, philosophical, natural than the artificial, whimsical language of poetry. The poet claims that there is no significant difference between the language of prose and the language of poetry. By bringing the language of his works closer to the language of everyday speech, the poet strives to give the reader the opportunity to come into contact with true life.

The poet is convinced of the superiority of creative imagination over the rationalism of enlightenment. In this regard, the key position becomes the role of the poet in society. The poet appears, on the one hand, to be the same person as everyone else, on the other hand, he is able to reproduce what is born in his soul, and thereby the poet is likened to a prophet, a mediator between the world of spirit and reality. The poet differs from other people in his greater strength of experience and ability to express his thoughts and feelings. The poet’s task is seen as mediation between the human world and the natural world. True poetry is a spontaneous outpouring of strong feelings. But the creative act is not limited to intuitive creativity; poetry is also the fruit of the poet’s deep thoughts.

Thought, the romantic poet believes, becomes the result of a previously experienced emotion; it directs and refracts feelings and experiences. All this makes it possible not to draw a line between poetry and philosophy: following Aristotle, the principle of the philosophical nature of poetry is affirmed.

Wordsworth attached almost the main importance to poetry in the process of comprehending reality. Poetry is the beginning and crown of all knowledge; it is as immortal as the human heart.

21. The concept of nature in Wordsworth's poetry.

“Guilt and Sorrow” 1793-1794 is Wordsworth’s first work, in which he reflected the tragic course of the industrial and agrarian revolution for the peasants and the entire people. The most terrible consequence For the poet, these events represent the spiritual impoverishment of a person embittered by poverty and lawlessness.

In Wordsworth's poetry, the image of a beggar walking along endless roads often appears. Undoubtedly, this image was suggested to the poet by the harsh reality, when the entire social structure was radically changing: the yeomanry class, the free peasantry, disappeared, many rural workers were forced to leave their homes in search of work. Hence the image of the “abandoned village”.

Of particular note is Wordsworth's landscape poetry. He knew how to convey the colors, movements, smells, sounds of nature, he knew how to breathe life into it, make it worry, think, talk with a person, share his grief and suffering. “Lines written near Tintern Abbey”, “Cuckoo”, “Like clouds of a lonely shadow”. “My Heart Rejoices”, “Yew Tree” - these are poems in which the most beautiful views of the Lake District are forever fixed and glorified. The yew tree, rising alone among the green meadows, is a symbol of the history of its native place. In the middle of the century, warriors made bows from its branches to fight the Goths and Gauls. The poet perfectly conveys the rhythm and movements of the wind, the swaying heads of golden daffodils, that emotional mood that evokes in the author’s soul a reciprocal feeling of joy and involvement in the secrets and power of nature: Like the clouds of a lonely shadow, / I wandered, gloomy and quiet, / And I remembered in that happy day/ A crowd of golden daffodils,/ In the shade of branches by the blue waters/ They danced in a circle.

The image of a child in Wordsworth's poetry.

In the ballad “We Are Seven,” the poet meets a girl who tells him about the death of her brother and sister, but when asked how many children are left in the family, she answers that there are seven, as if considering them alive. The understanding of death is inaccessible to a child’s consciousness and, since the girl often plays on the graves of the dead, she believes that they are somewhere nearby. Among the poems on a rural theme, “The Ruined Hut” (1797-1798) deserves special mention. Among lit. The sources for this work are Goethe's The Wanderers and Goldsmith's The Forsaken Village. At the center of the story is the story of the soldier’s widow Margarita, in whose arms children die one by one. Margarita’s confession resonates in the soul of a lonely wanderer, looking for shelter, eager to share loneliness and sadness with someone. The natural state of a person, close to nature, is often close to dementia in Wordsworth, as in the poem “The Feeble-Minded Boy.” The poet manages to incredibly accurately convey the spiritual nobility of simple hearts, to penetrate even into the foggy dreams of a disabled child. The poet strives to reflect as accurately as possible natural experiences born in a consciousness uncorrupted by the influence of civilization.

March 04 2011

Wordsworth was born in a small town located in Cumberland County. Wordsworth's father was a lawyer. After graduating from the Khokhshid Drama School, he entered Cambridge. At the university, he immediately attracted the attention of teachers with his outstanding abilities in the field of science. After the first examination session he topped the list the best students. Wordsworth's successes in mathematics were especially significant. But the prospect of completely dedicating himself to academic science obviously did not appeal to him. Soon everything will be yours free time he began to devote himself to the study of literature to the detriment of other subjects.

In 1790, Wordsworth decided to travel around Europe. His stay in France was especially long. Ideas French Revolution had a significant influence on him during this period. Here in France he met Annette Vallon, the daughter of a surgeon from Blois, with whom he fell in love and who bore him a daughter. V. learned about the birth of his daughter while already in England. In 1793 he published two poems “ An evening walk” (“An Evening Walk”) and “Descriptive Sketches”, where I tried to express my impressions of the trip. That same year, Wordsworth wrote a “Letter to Bishop Landaff” in defense of the French Revolution, which remained unpublished during the poet’s lifetime. In 1795, Wordsworth received a small inheritance after the death of one of his friends. This money allowed him to give himself completely literary creativity. Together with his sister Dorothy, the poet's devoted friend and assistant throughout his life, he stayed at Racedown. In the same year, Wordsworth met S. T. Coleridge and soon moved to live in Olfoxden to be closer to his new friend. The result of the friendship of the two poets was the appearance of the collection “Lyrical Ballads”, the first edition of which appeared in 1798 in Bristol, and the second, significantly expanded, in 1800.

Coldridge later spoke about the origins of the idea for the book in “ Literary biography"(1817): "In the first year that we became neighbors with Mr. Wordsworth, our conversations often touched on the two cardinal points of poetry, its ability to awaken the sympathy of the reader by matching the truth of life and its ability to make it interesting by the fickle colors of the imagination ... This idea gave birth to " Lyrical ballads,” in which, as was agreed, I was to direct my efforts to images and characters that were supernatural or at least romantic... Mr. Wordsworth, for his part, set out to provide a note of novelty to the everyday and to awaken feelings similar to the perception of the supernatural, awakening consciousness from the lethargy of everyday life and directing it to the perception of the beauty and mystery of the world...” According to the original plan, both poets were supposed to write approximately the same number of poems for the collection, but it so happened that it was composed mainly of the works of Wordsworth.

"Lyrical Ballads" became an important milestone in the development of English literature, literary historians often begin counting the romantic period in English culture with this work. Both Wordsworth and Coleridge were well aware of the innovative nature of this book, which is partly due to the fact that Lyrical Ballads was published anonymously. The authors did not want the poems from the new collection to be in any way associated in the reader's mind with their earlier and more traditional works. Wordsworth tried to show the essence of the creative experiment and justify its legitimacy in the “Preface to Lyrical Ballads.”

The novelty of the poetry collection, according to Wordsworth, lies in the treatment of new topics and the use of new language. Unlike contemporary authors focused on the poetry of classicism, Wordsworth is not attracted to sublime and significant objects: “... the main task of these poems was to select cases and situations from Everyday life and to retell or describe them, always using, as far as possible, the everyday... We have chosen, first of all, scenes from simple rural life, because in these conditions the natural impulses of the soul find a favorable basis for maturation, are subject to less restriction and are narrated in a simpler and more expressive language ; since under these conditions our simplest feelings manifest themselves with greater clarity and, accordingly, can be more accurately studied and reproduced more clearly...” V. believes that “there is not and cannot be a significant difference between the language of prose and the language of poetry” and therefore does not need any then a “special” language, as the creators of the previous era believed. Likewise, there cannot be “special” poetic themes. Poetry borrows its themes from life, it turns to those subjects that excite a person and resonate in her heart. And for Wordsworth - not a schema-monk who secludes himself in an ivory tower, but “who talks to people.”

At the same time, Wordsworth does not believe that the poetic is accessible to everyone. There are many ideas expressed by Wordsworth in the “Preface to Lyrical Ballads” - about the need for a poet to perceive the everyday and ordinary as something surprising and sublime, about imagination, about the relationship between feeling and mind in poetry, etc. give reason to consider the “Preface...” the first manifesto of Romanticism in English.

In his poems, which were included in the collection “Lyrical Ballads,” Wordsworth tried to adhere to the principles that he personally expressed in the “Preface...” to the book. Most of them are devoted to the life of peasants or other representatives of the lower classes. The poetic language is clear, most words are borrowed from everyday vocabulary, the poet avoids using unusual comparisons or very complex metaphors.

In several poems the heroes are children. Thus, in the poem “We Are Seven” he talks about a meeting with a peasant girl:

No, like children: the world is not peace -
They are already twisting and turning...
Well, like from those stupid years
Do they understand death?..
And how many of you are there? Answer me;
There are two in heaven... Right?
There are only five of them... No, sir, no.
There are seven of us. - And how is this, how?
Two are no longer among the living,
God has a place for them. -
She's not hearing my words,
One thing repeats: - We are all seven,
We are seven, we are seven, we are seven!
(Translated by G. Grabovsky)

Wordsworth later claimed that such a meeting took place with him in real life. When asked how many children there are in the family, the girl replied: “There are seven of us.” When the author learned that two children - a brother and a sister - had died and were buried in a local cemetery, he tried to convince the girl that she was counting incorrectly, but she continued to repeat: “There are seven of us.” The verse does not contain any deep philosophical truths, and the poet does not try to convince the reader that the child’s view of the world is inherent in some kind of mysticism inherent in nature itself; it simply shows a child in whose mind there is no such thing as death yet. And this feature children's consciousness only highlights the pessimism and fear of the world of an adult, in whose consciousness the category of death becomes one of the central ones.

Another of the "Lyrical Ballads", "The Idiot Boy", became well known in large part due to the criticism with which the poet's contemporaries attacked it. Many readers were shocked by the very idea of ​​making lyrical hero mentally disabled boy. The prevailing thought was that the depiction of mentally handicapped people in literature could only evoke a feeling of disgust in the reader, so it was considered unaesthetic. True, Wordsworth himself had no intention of shocking the tastes of the reading masses. Crazy heroes appear in his other poems in the collection (“The Thorn”, “The Mad Mother”).

The destructive influence of civilization on the peaceful, patriarchal life of peasants became the theme of such poems as “Michael”, “The Brothers”, “The Reverie of Poor Susan”, etc. .

The second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800) was expanded to include new poems, mainly those of Wordsworth. If the first edition was dominated by poems created in the ballad genre, then the second edition noticeably increases the number of poetic works with more clearly expressed lyricism. True, in the collection of Coleridge and Wordsworth it is very difficult to distinguish between ballads and lyrical poems themselves. The essence of the poetic experiment of the two authors was to embody the characteristics of each genre into one whole. They tried, using a simple four-line stanza of a ballad, to recreate the subtle and varied experiences of a person, to combine analysis with the movement of the plot. And yet, when compared, it is clear that in the second edition the number of poems in which the author-narrator gives way to an author who is more inclined to introspection, more attentive to the impulses of his own soul, has increased.

Need a cheat sheet? Then save - » Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads. Literary essays!

Wordsworth was born in a small town located in Cumberland County. Wordsworth's father was a lawyer. After graduating from the Khokhshid Drama School, he entered Cambridge. At the university, he immediately attracted the attention of teachers with his outstanding abilities in the field of science. After the first examination session, he topped the list of the best students. Wordsworth's successes in mathematics were especially significant. But the prospect of completely dedicating himself to academic science obviously did not appeal to him. Soon he began to devote all his free time to the study of literature to the detriment of other subjects.

In 1790, Wordsworth decided to travel around Europe. His stay in France was especially long. The ideas of the French Revolution had a significant influence on him during this period. Here in France, he met Annette Vallon, the daughter of a surgeon from Blois, with whom he fell in love and who bore him a daughter. V. learned about the birth of his daughter while already in England. In 1793, he published two poems, “An Evening Walk” and “Descriptive Sketches,” where he tried to express his impressions of the trip. That same year, Wordsworth wrote a “Letter to Bishop Landaff” in defense of the French Revolution, which remained unpublished during the poet’s lifetime. In 1795, Wordsworth received a small inheritance after the death of one of his friends. This money allowed him to devote himself completely to literary creativity. Together with his sister Dorothy, the poet's devoted friend and assistant throughout his life, he stayed at Racedown. In the same year, Wordsworth met S. T. Coleridge and soon moved to live in Olfoxden to be closer to his new friend. The result of the friendship of the two poets was the appearance of the collection “Lyrical Ballads”, the first edition of which appeared in 1798 in Bristol, and the second, significantly expanded, in 1800.

Coldridge later recounted the genesis of the idea for the book in his Literary Biography (1817): “In the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I became neighbors, our conversations often touched upon the two cardinal points of poetry, its power of awakening the sympathy of the reader by its correspondence to the truth of life, and its ability to do its interesting fickle colors of imagination... This idea gave birth to the plan for “Lyrical Ballads”, in which, as agreed, I was to direct my efforts to images and characters that were supernatural or, at least, romantic... Mr. Wordsworth, with his On the other hand, the goal was to provide a note of novelty to the everyday and awaken feelings similar to the perception of the supernatural, awakening consciousness from the lethargy of everyday life and directing it to the perception of the beauty and mystery of the world...” According to the original plan, both poets were supposed to write approximately the same number of poems for the collection, but it so happened that it was composed mainly of the works of Wordsworth.

“Lyrical Ballads” became an important milestone in the development of English literature; literary historians often begin counting the romantic period in English culture with this work. Both Wordsworth and Coleridge were well aware of the innovative nature of this book, which is partly due to the fact that Lyrical Ballads was published anonymously. The authors did not want the poems from the new collection to be in any way associated in the reader's mind with their earlier and more traditional works. Wordsworth tried to show the essence of the creative experiment and justify its legitimacy in the “Preface to Lyrical Ballads.”

The novelty of the poetry collection, according to Wordsworth, lies in the treatment of new topics and the use of new language. Unlike contemporary authors focused on the poetry of classicism, Wordsworth is not attracted to sublime and significant subjects: "... the main task of these poems was to select incidents and situations from everyday life and retell or describe them, constantly using, as much as possible it is possible, everyday... We chose, first of all, scenes from simple rural life, since in these conditions the natural impulses of the soul find a favorable basis for maturation, are subject to less restriction and are narrated in a simpler and more expressive language; since under these conditions our simplest feelings manifest themselves with greater clarity and, accordingly, can be more accurately studied and reproduced more clearly...” V. believes that “there is and cannot be a significant difference between the language of prose and the language of poetry” and therefore poetry does not need in some “special” language, as the creators of the previous era believed. Likewise, there cannot be “special” poetic themes. Poetry borrows its themes from life, it turns to those subjects that excite a person and resonate in her heart. And for Wordsworth, the poet is not a schema-monk who secludes himself in an ivory tower, but “a man who talks to people.”

At the same time, Wordsworth does not believe that poetic creativity is accessible to everyone. There are many ideas expressed by Wordsworth in the “Preface to Lyrical Ballads” - about the need for a poet to perceive the everyday and ordinary as something surprising and sublime, about imagination, about the relationship between feeling and mind in poetry, etc. give reason to consider the “Preface...” the first manifesto of romanticism in English literature.

In his poems, which were included in the collection “Lyrical Ballads,” Wordsworth tried to adhere to the principles that he personally expressed in the “Preface...” to the book. Most of them are devoted to the life of peasants or other representatives of the lower classes. The poetic language is clear, most words are borrowed from everyday vocabulary, the poet avoids using unusual comparisons or very complex metaphors.

In several poems the heroes are children. Thus, in the poem “We Are Seven,” the author talks about a meeting with a peasant girl:

No, like children: the world is not peace -

They are already twisting and turning...

Well, like from those stupid years

Do they understand death?..

And how many of you are there? Answer me;

There are two in heaven... Right?

There are only five of them... No, sir, no.

There are seven of us. - And how is this, how?

Two are no longer among the living,

God has a place for them. -

She doesn't hear my words,

One thing repeats: - We are all seven,

We are seven, we are seven, we are seven!

(Translated by G. Grabovsky)

Wordsworth later claimed that such a meeting happened to him in real life. When asked how many children there are in the family, the girl replied: “There are seven of us.” When the author learned that two children - a brother and a sister - had died and were buried in a local cemetery, he tried to convince the girl that she was counting incorrectly, but she continued to repeat: “There are seven of us.” The verse does not contain any deep philosophical truths, and the poet does not try to convince the reader that the child’s view of the world is inherent in some kind of mysticism inherent in nature itself; it simply shows a child in whose mind there is no such thing as death yet. And this feature of children's consciousness only sets off pessimism, fear of the world of an adult, in whose consciousness the category of death becomes one of the central ones.

Another of the "Lyrical Ballads", "The Idiot Boy", became well known in large part due to the criticism with which the poet's contemporaries attacked it. Many readers were shocked by the very idea of ​​​​making a mentally disabled boy a lyrical hero. The prevailing thought was that the depiction of mentally disabled people in literature could only evoke a feeling of disgust in the reader, so this topic was considered unaesthetic. True, Wordsworth himself had no intention of shocking the tastes of the reading masses. Crazy heroes appear in his other poems in the collection (“The Thorn”, “The Mad Mother”).

The destructive influence of civilization on the peaceful, patriarchal life of peasants became the theme of such poems as “Michael”, “The Brothers”, “The Reverie of Poor Susan”, etc. .

The second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800) was expanded to include new poems, mainly those of Wordsworth. If the first edition was dominated by poems created in the ballad genre, then the second edition noticeably increases the number of poetic works with more clearly expressed lyricism. True, in the collection of Coleridge and Wordsworth it is very difficult to distinguish between ballads and lyrical poems themselves. The essence of the poetic experiment of the two authors was to embody the characteristics of each genre into one whole. They tried, using a simple four-line stanza of a ballad, to recreate the subtle and varied experiences of a person, to combine analysis with the movement of the plot. And yet, when compared, it is clear that in the second edition the number of poems in which the author-narrator gives way to an author who is more inclined to introspection, more attentive to the impulses of his own soul, has increased.

Coleridge and Wordsworth "Lyrical Ballads" - an anonymous collection of poetry from 1798," />

Coleridge and Wordsworth

"Lyrical Ballads" (Lyrical Ballads) is an anonymous collection of poetry from 1798, which is one of the most important watersheds in the history of English poetry. The vast majority of poems were written W. Wordsworth, however, the collection opens with a long poem S. T. Coleridge"About the old sailor."

To finance a joint trip to Germany, the young poets Coleridge and Wordsworth, who lived nearby in Somerset and spent a lot of time in each other's company, agreed to prepare and anonymously publish a collection of poems that would reflect their views on literature. The name was explained by the fact that, according to a preliminary agreement, Wordsworth was supposed to write “lyrics” on topics from everyday life, and Coleridge - “ballads” on exotic subjects. For various reasons, the latter did not complete the planned poems “Kubla Khan” and “Christabel”. Since the collection includes only four of his poems, the “lyrical” (that is, Wordsworthian) component in the book noticeably prevails over the “ballad”, narrative one.

The collection ends with Wordsworth’s elegy “Tintern Abbey,” written spontaneously just before publication, which eventually became a textbook. She went down in the history of English literature as “an example of a sensitive and thoughtful perception of nature, in which landscape and lyrical emotions are intertwined into an inextricable whole.”

The second, much expanded edition of 1800 included, among other things, poems written by Wordsworth in Germany about the mysterious Lucy. They were translated into Russian Georgy Ivanov And Samuel Marshak. While the first edition did not contain any indication of authorship, the second edition was published as an essay by Wordsworth.

Meaning

Despite its high artistic merit, the book initially did not cause much resonance. The first edition sold out very slowly until the attention of the general public to the originality of “Lyrical Ballads” was attracted by such popular journalists as Hazlitt, who met both authors during the period of their work on the collection.

The popularity of "Lyrical Ballads" in the early years of the 19th century actually buried English classicism and its poetic techniques. Coleridge and Wordsworth contrasted ready-made poetic recipes with spontaneity of feeling and traditional “high calm” with language everyday communication. Like other representatives of English pre-Romanticism, the authors profess the Rousseauian cult of nature, but go further than their predecessors. The heroes of Wordsworth's poems are unremarkable characters who have never been sung in poetry before, such as, for example, the village fool.

Literary controversy

The treatment of such mundane subjects in poetic form baffled the collection's first reviewers. Find common denominator for the rural elegies of Wordsworth and the archaic meter of The Ancient Mariner it was difficult. The authors of the literary review especially zealously took up arms against the daring youth Edinburgh Review, who ironically dubbed Wordsworth’s circle “lake poets.”

To clarify his intentions, Wordsworth prefaced the second edition of the collection with a preface, which is usually regarded as a manifesto of the Lake School. In the 1802 edition this preface was supplemented by an essay on the language of poetry ( Poetic Diction). In these writings, Wordsworth defines his task as follows:

Coleridge outlined his point of view on the poetic program of the Lyrical Ballads years later in the 14th chapter of his aesthetic treatise Biography Literaria(1817). The poet argues that the purpose of art is a kind of narrative magic, which he defines with the phrase "the reader's voluntary suspension of disbelief" ( suspension of disbelief), which has become popular in the English-speaking world.