is the view, which seems consistent with the contemporaneous emergence of Romanticism, that "all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" (304) that the poet creates good poetry according as he or she has "a disposition to be affected more than other men by absent things as if they were present [and] and ability of conjuring up in himself passions" (307) appropriate to poetic production. The poet's ability to train himself to a habit of mind and technical competence that opens him to the greatest rush of feeling, to lose himself as it were in "an entire delusion, and even confound and identify his own feelings" (308) with the objects of poetry, is the source of good poetry. Wordsworth's characterization of the poet's craft is the discipline of "emotion recollected in tranquillity" (312). The emotion so informs the tranquil moment of poetic creation that good poetry must result.
This whole enterprise is only--or anyway more--possible in connection with the rustic subjects of Lyrical Ballads. But toward the end of his essay Wordsworth says that "all knowledge," whether natural, scientific, aesthetic, or philosophical, comes within the poet's purview, and further, that the poet, by reason of his unique sensitivity, is uniquely qualified to enter into, or more exactly to allow entry into him, the characters and environment of the poetic subject, and point the poet in the direction of a creation that will "excite thought or feeling in the reader" (Wordsworth 313).
The particular claims made by Wordsworth regarding proper poetic sensibility and praxis are specifically and programmatically refuted by Eliot. Good poetry, Eliot says, is not created in a great rush of feeling and the unique talent that a poet has for se
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