These Beauteous Forms: William Wordsworth on the Nature of Poetry and Emotion

On the cusp of the nineteenth century, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge published The Lyrical Ballads, a compilation of their experimental poetry. It was a reaction to the formal, Victorian poetry of the time; in his famous Preface, Wordsworth expressed a belief that the "humble and rustic life" (Searle 86) was a fitter subject for poetry than what was chiefly being written at the time. He also famously declared that "all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" (Searle 86). For this reason, Ballads is often considered to be the one of the earliest romantic works, expressing the sentiments that would later characterize an entire generation. Writers like William Blake, the Shelleys, Lord Byron, and John Keats gloried in the sumptuous overflow of unbridled passion, confirming Charles Baudelaire's definition of the philosophy as "...situated neither in choice of subject nor exact truth, but in a way of feeling" ("Romanticism").

After the romantics came the modernists, whose philosophy, in the words of nineties author J.G. Ballard, "lacked mystery and emotion, was a little too frank about the limits of human nature and never prepared us for our eventual end" (Ballard). Modernism in art and literature reflected modernist philosophy in the rest of the world; it was marked by radical social change based on humanist principles. Many modernist writers, such as Ezra Pound and Y.B. Yeates, "either flirted with fascism or openly espoused it" (Keep). This triumph of the cerebral over the carnal is evident in modernist literary theory. In his essay "Tradition and Original Talent," modernist poet T.S. Eliot briefly expressed his theory on balladry: "poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape these things" (Searle 125).