Epic and Lyric Poetry
Book I: Childhood and Wordsworth’s Purpose
Thus far, O friend, did I, not used to make
A present joy the matter of my song,
Pour out that day in measured strains...
From the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads:
I answer that the language of such Poetry as I am recommending is, as far as possible, a selection of the language really spoken by men; that this selection, wherever it is made with true taste and feeling, will of itself form a distinction far greater than at first would be imagined, and will entirely separate the composition from the vulgarity and meanness of ordinary life; and, if metre be superadded thereto, I believe that a dissimilitude will be produced altogether sufficient for the gratification of a rational mind.
Stealing a Boat
…for many days my brain
Worked with a dim and undetermined sense
Of unknown modes of being. In my thoughts
There was a darkness—no familiar shapes
Of hourly objects, images of trees,
Of sea or sky, no colours of green fields,
But huge and mighty forms that do not live
Like living men moved slowly through my mind
By day, and were the trouble of my dreams.
The Power of Imagination: Book VI
Imagination! lifting up itself
Before the eye and progress of my Song
Like an unfathered vapour; here that Power
In all the might of its endowments, came
Athwart me; I was lost as in a cloud,
Halted, without a struggle to break through.
And now recovering, to my Soul I say
‘I recognize thy glory’. In such strength
Of usurpation, in such visitings
Of awful promise, when the light of sense
Goes out in flashes that have shewn to us
The invisible world, doth Greatness make abode,
There harbours whether we be young or old.
Our destiny, our nature, and our home,
Is with infinitude, and only there;
With hope it is, hope that can never die,
Effort, and expectation, and desire,
And something evermore about to be.
Reason and Revolt in the French Revolution: Book X
What there is best in individual Man,
Of wise in passion, and sublime in power,
What there is strong and pure in household love,
Benevolent in small societies,
And great in large ones also, when called forth
By great occasions, these were things of which
I something know, yet even these themselves,
Felt deeply, were not thoroughly understood
By Reason…
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!
Reason and Imagination
There comes (if need be now to speak of this
After such long detail of our mistakes),
There comes a time when Reason, not the grand
And simple Reason, but that humbler power
Which carries on its no inglorious work
By logic and minute analysis
Is of all Idols that which pleases most
Spots of Time
The Best Power
I seemed about this period to have sight
Of a new world, a world, too, that was fit
To be transmitted and made visible
To other eyes, as having for its base
That whence our dignity originates,
That which both gives it being and maintains
A balance, an ennobling interchange
Of action from within and from without:
The excellence, pure spirit, and best power
Both of the object seen, and eye that sees.