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Coleridge's Interpretation of Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Don H. Bialostosky
Don H. Bialostosky*
Affiliation:
University of Washington, Seattle
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Abstract

Although Coleridge’s interpretation of Wordsworth’s Preface has shaped subsequent understanding of Wordsworth’s meaning, Coleridge was out not to clarify but to refute Wordsworth. His discussion of the Preface repeatedly shifts the positions to which it objects and misleadingly distinguishes between what the Preface can legitimately be taken to mean and what it probably does mean. It distorts Wordsworth’s account of his choice of subjects and his comments on poetic language. Although intelligible meanings can be discovered for Wordsworth’s remarks about “the real language of men” and the lack of “essential difference” between the languages of verse and prose, Coleridge’s exegesis reduces them to absurdity. The position he offers in opposition to the one he draws from the Preface closely resembles the one Wordsworth actually put forward there. The real agreements and disagreements between Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s views are more interesting than those to which Coleridge’s interpretation has called attention.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 93 , Issue 5 , October 1978 , pp. 912 - 924
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1978

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References

Notes

1 Wordsworthian Criticism: A Guide and Bibliography (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1961), pp. 37–38.

2 For Coleridge's statement of the problem see Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Shawcross, 2 vols. (1907; rpt. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965), i, 50–52. His declaration that the problem is solved expresses the same view of his enterprise (ii, 95). Subsequent references to the Biographia are given in the text, by volume and page number only.

3 See “Wordsworth,” in The English Romantic Poets: A Review of Research and Criticism, ed. Frank Jordan, 3rd ed. (New York: MLA, 1972), p. 113. Thomas M. Raysor sees Wordsworth's assertion about “the language of prose” as a “main thesis of the Preface” (“Coleridge's Criticism of Wordsworth,” PMLA, 54 [1939], 498). W. J. B. Owen has more recently tried to account for Wordsworth's argument in terms of a division under the heads of “the real language of men” and “the language of prose” (Wordsworth as Critic [Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1969], pp. 3–26).

4 Coleridge's chapters on Wordsworth have won praise from his defenders as well as from his detractors and have persuaded most historians of criticism. Raysor calls them “the finest critical essay in English literature” (p. 497), and Norman Fruman finds it necessary, even in the midst of a generally damning essay, to cite them as “by far the best of Coleridge's works” (Coleridge, the Damaged Archangel [New York: Braziller, 1971], p. 106). George Saintsbury's view that Coleridge was “one of the finest critics of the world” while Wordsworth had “by no means all, or even very many, of the qualifications of a critic” has been commonly accepted since he first voiced it (A History of Criticism, 3 vols. [New York: Dodd and Mead, 1906], iii, 206). René Wellek's judgment that Wordsworth “left himself wide open to Coleridge's refutation” is still another reflection of Coleridge's success, especially since Wellek is ordinarily no uncritical friend of Coleridge's (A History of Modern Criticism, 4 vols. [New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1955], ii, 132). Most recently, George Watson has been so convinced that Wordsworth was “badly out of his depth as a critic” that he credits Coleridge with providing notes for the Preface itself (The Literary Critics [London: Chatto and Windus, 1964], pp. 105–06). Watson gets the idea from Coleridge, who called the Preface “half a child of my own brain” in an 1802 letter to Southey (Letters, ed. E. H. Coleridge, 2 vols. [Boston: Houghton, 1895], ii, 386).

5 For some of the questions raised, see Shawcross' notes to his edition of the Biographia Literaria; also Arthur Beatty, William Wordsworth, 3rd ed. (1922; rpt. Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1962), p. 66; Alexander Brede, “Theories of Poetic Diction in Wordsworth and Others and in Contemporary Poetry,” in Papers of the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts and Letters, ed. Eugene S. McCartney and Peter Okkelberg (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1931), xiv, 537–56; Marjorie Barstow Greenbie, Wordsworth's Theory of Poetic Diction (1917; rpt. New York: Russell, 1966), pp. 7, 134; James Logan, pp. 37–38; and John Crowe Ransom, “William Wordsworth: Notes toward an Understanding of His Poetry,” in Wordsworth Centenary Studies Presented at Cornell and Princeton Universities, ed. Gilbert T. Dunklin (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1951), pp. 91–92.

6 “Wordsworth's Prefaces of 1800 and 1802,” in Lyrical Ballads, ed. R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones (1963; rpt. London: Methuen, 1971), pp. 244–45. All subsequent page references to the Preface are given in the text. I use the 1802 readings throughout and do not follow Brett and Jones in italicizing the 1802 variants.

7 My interpretation of Wordsworth's reasons for choosing low and rustic subjects is in fundamental disagreement with Owen's interpretation (pp. 7–13). Owen, like Coleridge, omits Wordsworth's statement about his “principal object” from the passage as he interprets it and argues against the views this omission seems to produce.

8 The Mirror and the Lamp (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1953), p. 110.

9 Wordsworth's Theory of Poetry (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 39–40.

10 David Hartley, Observations on Man, introd. Theodore L. Huguelet (1749; rpt. [2 vols, in 1] Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1966), i, 297.

11 After this essay reached the publisher, I discovered that Gene W. Ruoff arrives at this distinction in terms of the difference between “semantics and syntactics ... [which] form the primary domain of classical philology, the tradition of language study in which Coleridge's poetics is steeped,” and pragmatics, “the area of meaning which is most crucial in speaking situations” and which is central, as he sees it, for Wordsworth (“Wordsworth on Language: Toward a Radical Poetics for English Romanticism,” The Wordsworth Circle, 3 [1972], 204–11). He develops this view of Wordsworth's enterprise into the important thesis that Wordsworth's contributions to the Lyrical Ballads “are experiments both in communication and in the idea of community.”

12 Shawcross notes this but makes nothing of it (ii, 276, n. to p. 42, l. 20).

13 Abrams and Heffernan, for example, feature these phrases throughout their interpretations and criticisms of the Preface.