Concepts in Wordsworth and Eliot

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 convent

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of the textual artifact as Eliot sees it amounts to his refutation of Wordsworth's claim for the poet's uniquely sensitive habit of mind. Indeed, if Eliot is right and Wordsworth wrong on that point, then in theory Wordsworth's claim of poetic jurisdiction over the whole of the universe is valid only according as the individual poet possesses a competently habituated sensibility. This points in the direction of equating the poet's sentiment, however degenerate, with the integrity of poetic emotion. If that is the case, then the most vulgar of popular verse could be considered high art. That, indeed, appears to be the reason Wordsworth distinguishes between "Babes in the Wood" and doggerel (Wordsworth 313). And Eliot is not having it. The tone of his essay suggests that where a poet's sentiment is coeval with poetic creation, vulgarity and degeneration of very poetic form are inevitable. On the other hand, the emotive and sentient range possible when the emotion conveyed in a poem is distinguished from what is felt by a poet is theoretically limitless. When Eliot says that the "difference between art and the event is always absolute" (501), he is not asserting that the poet cannot take the whole universe as his subject but rather t
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Approximate Word count = 1992
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)

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