How does Wordsworth portray real people in The Lyrical Ballads?
Lyrical Ballads, and in particular the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, is considered a central work of Romantic literary theory. In it, Wordsworth discusses what he sees as the elements of a new type of poetry, one based on the "real language of men" and the work itself avoids the poetic diction of much eighteenth-century poetry, whose most famous exponent was John Milton in Paradise Lost, which benefitted from drastic overuse of verbose Latinate vocabulary. He felt this wasn’t an accurate reflection of real people, and sought to portray them through using language which they used. In the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth famously described poetry as the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings from emotions recollected in tranquility”, and wrote to justify - in theoretical terms - his practice of writing a new and "experimental" poetry, one whose language is "fitting to metrical arrangement a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation." He rejected the Miltonic approach to poetry, and instead favoured much more Anglo-Saxon words, for their gritty implications – appropriate for a publication in which most of the poems are focused around everyday people and situations. Unsurprisingly, these are very pastoral poems, many of which solely include narrative. Although this may seem mundane for such a famous poet, this was Wordsworth’s statement of protest against the style of the time, and his digression instead led to a new style of poetry in which living language is valued highly, as it allows a sense of man speaking to man, and is a more accessible style of poetry than his predecessors’.
