Emancipation, Education and Empire

Abstract

This chapter starts with the symbolic date of 1798, for that year saw the publication of the Lyrical Ballads which contained poems quite different from those that had appeared in English up until then, and included a preface which attacked the assumptions of previous attitudes to language, though it was primarily aimed at poetic diction. In this preface Wordsworth, who was the author, criticised the artificiality of the diction of the poems which had been written in the eighteenth century and suggested that poetry ought to replicate the real language of men. This did not mean that he used colloquial language, but he provided the impetus to make poetic language, particularly dialogue, take account of contemporary speech and to make the speech of its characters less stilted. Equally, the subjects of his poetry were not going to be ideas and abstractions, but lives and emotions of real people. He moved away from the abstract to the concrete. For Wordsworth real people included ordinary people from the country, children and members of classes other than the sophisticated urbanites who had been the principal participants in poetry up till then. In this way Wordsworth signalled the break with the Augustan period and the onset of Romanticism which focused attention on the spirit of the folk in language, particularly as represented in dialect and in earlier poetry, and on the supernatural and the unusual. Old romances and ballads sprang once more into literary prominence. If the poems that Wordsworth included in the Lyrical Ballads were not too outrageous for contemporaries in their language, their subject matter was certainly different because they dealt seriously and sympathetically with people who had hitherto not been regarded as proper subjects for poetry, other perhaps than in satire. Clearly if poetry was to deal with people who were rustic and on the fringes of decent society, and to represent their speech in straightforward language, it would call into question some of the assumptions about polite language and its restriction to those who were educated. Or rather it would widen the range of language and what might be considered acceptable usage. It was, however, the poems by Coleridge in the anthology which particularly attracted attention, because a poem like The Rime of the Ancient Mariner was written in a language that no one could consider polite. For the impact it made we need to remember that the previous hundred years or so had witnessed attempts to purify the language and to set boundaries around what was permissible in polite speech and formal writing. It was one thing for novelists like Fielding to introduce characters into their novels from lower life or from the distant country who could speak in a way that allowed the readers to enjoy it either with scorn or with condescension. It was quite another matter to read in poetry, which was considered the highest expression of literary art, language that had been banned from polite writing, apparently for ever. It is hardly surprising that this poem should attract considerable antipathy because it seemed to undermine all that had been won in the previous century.