Lyrical Ballads With Other Poems, 1800, vol 1 | Page 6

and universal passions of men, the
most general and interesting of their occupations, and the entire world
of nature, from which I am at liberty to supply myself with endless
combinations of forms and imagery. Now, granting for a moment that
whatever is interesting in these objects may be as vividly described in
prose, why am I to be condemned if to such description I have
endeavoured to superadd the charm which by the consent of all nations
is acknowledged to exist in metrical language? To this it will be
answered, that a very small part of the pleasure given by Poetry
depends upon the metre, and that it is injudicious to write in metre
unless it be accompanied with the other artificial distinctions of style
with which metre is usually accompanied, and that by such deviation
more will be lost from the shock which will be thereby given to the
Reader's
associations than will be counterbalanced by any pleasure
which he can derive from the general power of numbers. In answer to
those who thus contend for the necessity of accompanying metre with
certain appropriate colours of style in order to the accomplishment of
its appropriate end, and who also, in my opinion, greatly under-rate the
power of metre in itself, it might perhaps be almost sufficient to
observe that poems are extant, written upon more humble subjects, and
in a more naked and simple style than what I have aimed at, which
poems have continued to give pleasure from generation to generation.
Now, if nakedness and simplicity be a defect, the fact here mentioned
affords a strong presumption that poems somewhat less naked and
simple are capable of affording pleasure at the present day; and all that
I am now attempting is to justify myself for having written under the
impression of this belief.
But I might point out various causes why, when the style is manly, and
the subject of some importance, words metrically arranged will long
continue to impart such a pleasure to mankind as he who is sensible of
the extent of that pleasure will be desirous to impart. The end of Poetry
is to produce excitement in coexistence with an overbalance of pleasure.
Now, by the supposition, excitement is an unusual and irregular state of
the mind; ideas and feelings do not in that state succeed each other in

accustomed order. But if the words by which this excitement is
produced are in themselves powerful, or the images and feelings have
an undue proportion of pain connected with them, there is some danger
that the excitement may be carried beyond its proper bounds. Now the
co-presence of something regular, something to which the mind has
been accustomed when in an unexcited or a less excited state, cannot
but have great efficacy in tempering and restraining the passion by an
intertexture of ordinary feeling. This may be illustrated by appealing to
the Reader's own experience of the reluctance with which he comes to
the re-perusal of the distressful parts of Clarissa Harlowe, or the
Gamester. While Shakespeare's writings, in the most pathetic scenes,
never act upon us as pathetic beyond the bounds of pleasure--an effect
which is in a great degree to be ascribed to small, but continual and
regular impulses of pleasurable surprise from the metrical
arrangement.--On the other hand (what it must be allowed will much
more frequently happen) if the Poet's words should be incommensurate
with the passion, and inadequate to raise the Reader to a height of
desirable excitement, then, (unless the Poet's choice of his metre has
been grossly injudicious) in the feelings of pleasure which the Reader
has been accustomed to connect with metre in general, and in the
feeling, whether chearful or melancholy, which he has been

accustomed to connect with that particular movement of metre, there
will be found something which will greatly contribute to impart passion
to the words, and to effect the complex end which the Poet proposes to
himself.
If I had undertaken a systematic defence of the theory upon which these
poems are written, it would have been my duty to develope the various
causes upon which the pleasure received from metrical language
depends. Among the chief of these causes is to be reckoned a principle
which must be well known to those who have made any of the Arts the
object of accurate reflection; I mean the pleasure which the mind
derives from the perception of similitude in dissimilitude. This
principle is the great spring of the activity of our minds and their chief
feeder. From this principle the direction of the sexual appetite, and all
the passions connected with it take their origin: It is the life of our
ordinary conversation; and upon the accuracy with which similitude in

dissimilitude, and
dissimilitude in similitude are perceived,