The purpose of this research is to compare and contrast from a Marxist standpoint the concepts of the poet articulated in Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads and Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent." The plan of the research will be to set forth in general terms the presentation of central argument in each essay and then to discuss in detail their views of the poet's relationship to poetic materials and the completed poem, how their concepts of the poet are related to their political commitments and their position in history, and how the dramatic difference in aesthetic perspective can be accounted for.
Two strands of thought inform Wordsworth's view of poet's relationship to the materials of poetry. First, there is the matter of departure from previous wisdom regarding the comportment and presentation of poetry as deriving from something approximating a rarefied poetic realm. The decision to "choose incidents and situations from common life" (303) is presented as a decision for closeness to nature and the "elementary feelings" of the rustic, which Wordsworth implies have been refined out of the prospective readership of Lyrical Ballads. In effect, Wordsworth argues, poetry, more exactly "what is usually called poetic diction" (305), has become so artificial and overblown that it is divorced from human experience. In particular, Wordsworth is at pains not to not personify abstract ideas, which appears to mean that he will not adopt the medieval/classical convention of allegory as the principal mode of expression meant to "elevate the style, and raise it above prose" (Wordsworth 305). In making a claim for treatment of the personalities, environment, and subjects of everyday life, Wordsworth implicitly criticizes the poetic sensibility of the preceding age, which often takes the form of epic and often takes as its subject the classical theogony or a highfalutin moral abstraction.
Wordsworth's second strand of thought ...