Critical Analysis

Abstract

Few poets complain so much as Wordsworth about the difficulty of making language do what he wanted. Near the beginning of The Prelude he contrasts ‘the mind’s internal echo’ with the ‘imperfect sound’ of the actual language. He is not alone in this complaint. In Poetry in the Making, Ted Hughes speaks about words as ‘tools with which we try to give some part of our experience a more or less permanent shape outside ourselves’ but ‘far from ideal for their job’. Philip Larkin, in The Pleasure Principle, calls writing poetry a ‘highly contradictory activity … the conscious organization of an unconscious impulse’, and names three stages in writing a poem: the initial obsessive idea the ‘emotional concept’, the tremendously hard work of getting this idea into words, and then the individual reading of the poem. This last again connects with Wordsworth and his definition of a poet: ‘a man speaking to men’.