Language of common man in Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads :
The father of English Romanticism, William Wordsworth, is credited not only with the restoration of Nature in the realm of poetry but also with the establishment of the common man’s language as the acceptable poetic diction, and this significant shift has been taken place with the publication of Preface to Lyrical Ballads in 1802. The chief objective of Wordsworth was to bring about a revolution in the tradition of refined and sophisticated neoclassical diction in order to make poetry pleasant and appealing to all.
What Wordsworth understands by poetry is the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.. recollected in tranquility”, and this primary emphasis on genuine feeling demands for a diction equally spontaneous and original, vibrating with the liveliness of man and nature. He considers the language of common man to be perfect for man to man communication and shuns the grandiloquence and ornamentation of the neoclassical diction since they don’t go with the simplicity and originality of nature and life. Calling the poet “a man speaking to man,” he points us away from both George Herbert’s divine interlocutor and Thomas Wyatt’s courtier. He opens poetry up to common speech,an opening that eventually worked its way into such openings as Charles Olson’s Projective Verse: “the HEAD by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE / the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE.”
He finds the source of his poetic diction in the humble and rustic life ” because in that condition, the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity.” He argues that the common people always communicate with the best objects from which the best part of human language is originally derived. Their limited intercourse displaces the risk of the corroding influence of social vanity. They are very close to nature, and consequently, feel and express more precisely,simply, passionately, vividly and forcefully. The eighteenth century poets wrote for the fickle and depraved public taste,separating themselves from the language of the common man, while the Romantic poet “thinks and feels in the spirit of human passions”.
Wordsworth has avoided the use of personification of abstract ideas – so much characteristic of the neoclassical age – in his poems. His purpose is to imitate the language really used by men. Moreover, he thinks that a poet is a man like other men, possessing some extra feeling and expressive faculty and a comprehensive soul. He writes not only for his own pleasure but also for communicating his emotions and feelings to others : ” poets do not write for poets alone but for men.” Since a Romantic poet is reflecting the ups and downs, smiles and tears of common men amidst the trials and tribulations of ordinary life, a language identical to the colloquial version will be more suitable rather than an ornate one, which might sound hypocritical.
It’s noteworthy that Wordsworth himself has not been an ardent follower of his common man’s diction in some of his poems and his idea that there shouldn’t be any essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition is challenged by Coleridge. In spite of these shortcomings, we must appreciate him for his advocacy of poetic sensibility – an emphasis on idea – instead of Aristotelian expressionism – an emphasis on plot centered action.
