Literature – ‘On Coleridge and Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads’ – 1798

I. Before Romanticism
• What happened before the period ‘British High Romanticism’ (≠Low romanticism).
• “Lyrical Ballad”: 1798 <– Before that, it was the Enlightenment, characterized by a neo-classical
style.
• 1690-1780: 18th centuries – Progress. The moment of history of Western man, everybody can live,
feel, see, a betterment of their condition of life. If everybody can feel that change, it is because there
is a stability. Things are smooth.
• 17th centuries: Maths, philo, thinkers
> Plenty of theories. With these thoughts: Mathematization of the Wester World.
- Body, world, minds, everything is majored because of progress.
• 18thc: The will just goes on. Everything that had been thought could be applied (=moment of
application of technology).
• All these applications produce to Pierre Chaunu (=Historian), called the ‘Vital Revolution’.
• 18thc: in ‘Happy England’ (= England: + advances country)
- life expectancy average: 32 yo.
≠ to in other continents where the condition of living are pretty hard (25  30 yo)
• 17thc: 25% of children died before 1 yo. 50% children died before their majority.
• Enlightenment: 10 years of life, people can become adult and pass knowledge to children.
 Pop increasing, doubled in Europe.
• High Romanticism: Beginning of the 19thc, 1802;
- 1st time, urban population is superior to rural population.
• Vital revolution  Chaunu  ‘Happy England’ due to an English specificity, leading to the name of
‘Empiricism’, is what High Romanticism question.
= 1st year LLCE.
= Characterized the 19thc
= bl.uk
= Consists in everyone looking at experiencing their surroundings
‘Don’t take anybody’s work for granted’ – motto the royal academy of science
 Nullius in Verba / 5 senses, experience the world and form the experience, you can produce
sciences.
• Scientific method  Induction  Empirist method
• Method that provelled before, come from the continent  Cartesian Method (Descartes) 
Deduction  Think within a theory.

POETICS
• William Cowper: ‘What kind of place’ – ‘what was newt to be done’ – ‘conforts abate’ – ‘In a word I
had a dreadful deliverance’.

• Title in our essay – Right it well  Rule:

-- Container: Series, netfliw, collection of short, novel, newspaper, plays poems, essays…
-- Content: Name of an episode poem, essaies, short stories, within cotation, marks, chapters,
articles, episode…

• What makes a poem a poem? The unit line. Not the language, nor the subject.
• Iambic: Rhythm
• Matter  What makes a peom a poem  Somethin which lead to something interested / Material
presence in the text.
• Good ≠ Bad poetry

• Material presence:
- Dark trace in the poem
- White margins is what constitute a poem
“But never more they saw the Man” (/) “…’’
Show that the line had broke
If you cut word: “[…]” they saw the man
Line  A distinct unite, in fact, it is a language in poetry.
• Language of rhymes + Beates + … = Poem

• WORDSWORTH, William & Samuel Taylos COLERIDGE, “Preface” (1800) to Lyrical Ballads (1798),
R.L. Brett at A.R. Jones, eds, London & NY: Routledge, (1991) 2005 – 19 & 20 p 310-311
- Not the same rhymes
- 19: Arrêt sur image
- 20: movement, deplacement

- « Is this break (break line) that make the matter interested?
 Create & bring the interest. Cut the poem from everything bonal and self-evidence
 What is around, enframe the lines

• P.1 du booklet: The void is redoubled by the presentation of poetic line and the last syllables
 important, much bigger, resonable
• Cutting into lines is what has given poetry its name; because poetry is ‘verse’
- 1st verse: A line
- Poetry: A verse / poetry
& Because the lines are so important, poets repeat over and over again. Lines are cut and within the
lines, there are cut.

Punctus elevatus Punctus Depressus

Ceasure (cut within the cut) ≠ grammatical

TD:
Neo-classical: Neo-classicism is both an artistic movement, and a stylistic period that emerged
around 1750 in the Europe of Enlightenment.
Its heyday was around 1780 until 1800 and the decline of its influence began around 1810 with
the competition of Romanticism. The movement, born in Rome at the time of the rediscovery of
Pompeii and Herculaneum, spread throughout Europe and the United States through the writings
of theorists whose main representative is the archaeologist and art historian Johann Joachim
Winckelmann.
Neo-classicism is characterized by the desire to return to the roots of art, which the theorists
believed to be of ancient origin, in Greek, Etruscan and Roman art. It spreads first to architecture,
then to painting, sculpture, and graphic and decorative arts. The most representative artists of this
period are the architects Robert Adam and the duo Percier and Fontaine,

Neo-humanism, an ecologically and spiritually centered humanism, widens the perspective of

traditional humanism and gives importance to all living beings. Neo-humanism holds that all
living beings have intrinsic or existential value, regardless of their utility to human beings.

The Enlightenment is a philosophical, literary and cultural movement in 18th-century Europe

(1715-1789) that aims to move beyond obscurantism and promote knowledge. Philosophers and
intellectuals encourage science through intellectual exchange, opposing superstition, intolerance
and abuse of churches and states. The term "Enlightenment" has been enshrined in use to bring
together the diversity of manifestations of this set of objects, currents, thoughts or sensibilities
and historical actors.

Aspects of Wordsworth's Poetry in the "Elegiac Stanzas"

William Wordsworth’s late poem “Elegiac Stanzas” brings together a number of ideas and motifs
that had already been present in his poetry up to that point: the nature of memory and perception,
the theme of substitution, and Wordsworth’s preoccupation with joy and pleasure. These ideas
appear in various forms in Wordsworth’s poetry preceding the “Elegiac Stanzas,” sometimes in ways
that seem contradictory, and which moreover are set forth in ambiguous language that allows for
multiple interpretations. There is, in other words, no point in his prior writings in which Wordsworth
definitively explains these ideas. Any attempt to present, for example, Wordsworth’s conception of
memory as something uniform and complete unto itself, must necessarily be an abstraction,
something constructed out of the common strands that underlie the different appearances of this
idea in his poetry. Nonetheless, the “Elegiac Stanzas” attest to a change in Wordsworth’s
poetry. They definitely form, as the title suggests, an elegy, although to multiple things rather than one
thing in particular, and one of the things being elegized is Wordsworth’s old way of writing poetry.

“Elegiac Stanzas” was inspired by a painting by Sir George Beaumont of Peele Castle - which
Wordsworth lived by briefly - in a storm. Wordsworth begins the poem by noting how different his
own memory of the castle was from Beaumont’s. In contrast to the tumult of Beaumont’s painting,
Wordsworth remembers Peele Castle in a state of unshakeable peace. He describes how, had he
been a painter, the painting he would have produced would have been very different:

Ah! THEN, if mine had been the Painter’s hand

To express what then I saw; and add the gleam

The light that never was, on sea or land,

The consecration, and the poet’s dream;

I would have painted thee, thou hoary Pile

Amid a world how different from this!

Beside a sea that could not cease to smile;

On tranquil land, beneath a sky of bliss (13-20).

The fact that Wordsworth adds “the gleam / The light that never was, on sea or land, / The
consecration, and the poet’s dream” to his painting suggests that something as it is retrospectively
represented in an image is not the same as that thing when it was perceived. An image of
something is not identical to that thing as it was when it was initially experienced, but a
reconstruction in which selected aspects of it are woven together in a new way, guided by “the poet’s
dream.” Peele Castle as depicted in Wordsworth’s hypothetical painting is therefore not a
representation of it in a particular moment in time, but a representation of it as it never actually
existed, a little like Wordsworth’s own description of a painting that never was or will be. This does not
mean, however, that Wordsworth is trying to make an argument for the primacy of perception over
subsequent memory. On the contrary, throughout the poem refers to his own impressions of Peele
Castle as he was observing it as though they were already “images”: he notes how whenever he
would look at it, the “Image” (8) of the castle would still be there, and says that it seemed to be “A
picture…of lasting ease” (25). These lines seem to suggest that our perceptions of objects are
always already “images,” that our senses do not give us immediate access to things but rather
represent them us to in a way that is different from how they are in themselves. Our perceptions,
then, also show us things as they never were.

The idea that our senses alter the objects they perceive is not new to Wordsworth’s poetry. In these
lines, Wordsworth acknowledges that our senses “half create” the objects they perceive, but in such
a way that points to earlier experiences. The fact that Wordsworth recognizes aspects of an earlier,
now inaccessible phase of his life in the present creates a sense of continuity in his life that protects
against feelings of fragmentation and loss. The feeling of relief Wordsworth experiences is also a
moment of truth, reinforcing the link between these two things that recurs throughout the poem: he
says, for example, that “with an eye made quiet by the power / Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
/ We see into the life of things” (47-9), implying that joy gives us a more true perspective on things,
or that knowledge of the truth produces happiness.  In the “Elegiac Stanzas,” in which Wordsworth
refers to his perception of Peele castle as a “fond illusion” (29), and seems to disavow his former
self: “Farewell, farewell the heart that livers alone, / Housed in a dream, at distance from the Kind! /
Such happiness, wherever it be known, / Is to be pitied; for ‘tis surely blind” (53-6). In the “Elegiac
Stanzas,” our tendency to form “images” of the objects we perceive leads not toward a higher
understanding, but to further confusion.

The way in which Wordsworth is preoccupied with images rather than things in themselves is
symptomatic of a tendency in his poetry toward a kind of substitution. The central event in the
“Elegiac Stanzas” is ostensibly the death of his brother, the cause of the change in worldview
the poem describes. It would therefore be reasonable to expect that the “elegiac” mode promised in
the title would be borne out in an elegy to him. Yet, aside from one reference – “Then, Beaumont,
Friend! Who would have been the Friend, / If he had lived, of Him whom I deplore” (41-2) –
Wordsworth’s brother is not mentioned at all in the poem. Instead, Wordsworth spends the entire
poem lamenting the fact that he no longer views the world in the way he once did. In other
words, one result of the death of his brother comes to stand in for that death itself and is
mourned in its place. This sort of substitution occurs constantly in Wordsworth’s poetry. Often it occurs
when Wordsworth is attempting to recapture something he is no longer capable of doing;

The experience of happiness in others, then, in a sense acts as a substitute for his own
happiness. In the “Elegiac Stanzas,” however, the relationship between the death of
Wordsworth’s brother and the thing being substituted for it, the death of Wordsworth’s old way
of seeing the world, is more ambiguous. Rather than being simply something put in the place of the
death of his brother that functions in its place, the passing away of Wordsworth’s visionary capacity
becomes, to some extent, conflated with it: in lines like “A deep distress hath humanised my soul” (36)
and “The feeling of my loss will ne’er be old” (39), it is impossible to say which of these two
“distresses” and “losses” he is referring to. Far from being a simple relationship of something’s
result standing in for its cause, the two losses of the “Elegiac Stanzas” become indistinguishable, not
so much substituted for one another as amalgamated into one entity.

Another distinct feature of Wordsworth’s poetry is the way he is preoccupied to a large extent with,
as we have seen, pleasure, and more generally physical sensation, rather than abstract
things. This is apparent in the “Elegiac Stanzas” in the way Wordsworth talks about his loss in terms
of strength: he says that “A power is gone, which nothing can restore” (35) and acknowledges that his
loss may have some value in that it will bring him “fortitude” (57). The preoccupation with the
question of strength is in keeping with Wordsworth’s earlier poetry, but in those poems strength is
always associated with pleasure, often experienced on a visceral level, that induces a state of calm
in him. It is difficult to say what exact relationship Wordsworth is positing between these things, but
they are always grouped together. The “Elegiac Stanzas,” however, represent a turning away from
Wordsworth’s earlier drive toward relief experienced on a sensuous level, as shown in the last
stanza: “But welcome fortitude, and patient cheer, / And frequent sights of what is to be borne! / Such
sights, or worse, as are before me here. - / Not without hope we suffer and mourn” (57-60). Whereas
previously Wordsworth strove only toward a state of pleasurable equilibrium, in the “Elegiac Stanzas”
Wordsworth begins to see value in “suffering” and “mourning,” a “fortitude” against sights like
those depicted in Beaumont’s painting. What is available to him now is not a tranquil suspension
of tension, but a kind of serene yet sad acceptance of tension.

However, what Wordsworth’s newfound acceptance of “mourning” will be like, and what kind of
poetry it will produce, ultimately remains ambiguous and not yet fully formed. The poem, as we have
seen, relies heavily on the old motifs of Wordsworth’s work, but in such a way as to show that they are
no longer adequate for his purposes, or at least will have to be changed. The poem is situated at a
transitional point. It laments the passing of what Wordsworth used to think, and the way he used
to write, while at the same time welcoming a new way of seeing the world, albeit one he can not
yet fully articulate: it grieves an inaccessible past while welcoming a future that is half-understood. It is
simultaneously an elegy to Wordsworth’s old writings and his first attempts at creating a new kind of
poetry, but one that is still in the process of constructing itself from the remains of his old work.