Wordsworth’s Language of Purpose

Like Sebastian, I was intrigued by Wordsworth’s apparent need to justify the aim of his work in the Preface to the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads. He pushes against the contemporary trend – from his perspective – of  “triviality and meanness both of thought and language” in poetry (175). He adamantly asserts that “purpose” (his italics) sets apart his own poetry, and the implication of this goal extends to his avoidance of using “poetic diction” in order to “bring [his] language near to the language of men,” and he goes to say, “I hope it will be found that there is in these Poems little falsehood of description, and that my ideas are expressed in language fitted to their respective importance” (178). Here, Wordsworth seems to imply a parallel between the “triviality” of poetic trends of his day and the “poetic diction” or “language.” It seems as though he seeks to create a poetic experience for the reader that employs more common or open access – if you will – language suggested by the phrase “language of men,” a dialect readily accessible to the breadth of mankind, a kind of democratic approach that cuts across ethnicity, class, education, and experience. In this way, he elevates the poetic effort of capturing human experience while equating the expression of that experience with accessible language or, in other words, diction common to everyday discourse. In fact, he even implies that, were he to elevate his language, this kind of hyped style would actually constitute a “falsehood of description.”

Though I do not have the greater context of poetry at the time in which Wordsworth is situating the 1800 Lyrical Ballads nor have I studied Wordsworth to any extent, it seems his parallel of common language and universal, transcendent human experience accessed through the very distinct circumstances of each character he explores – “Idiot Boy,” “Mad Mother,” “Forsaken Indian” – represents, not only an approach that expressly pushes back against Wordsworth’s contemporary literati, but attempts to realign cultural value of and judgment against individuals and societal divisions based on ethnicity, class, education, and experience. So, my question is, do we – the modern reader with more than two centuries of radical social change between us and Wordsworth – agree with and support this, or could this be seen as a dumbing down, another version of Ivory Tower condescension stemming from a kind of ignorant compassion on the part of Wordsworth? In other words, is this just another form – and we touched on this briefly in our last class discussion – of cultural appropriation through a kind of lingual projection in which he takes common diction and assigns it with this idea of authentic expression of human experience? In short, does his philosophy, his “purpose,” stand the test of time? And should it?