WORDSWORTH AND COLERIDGE
Dryden’s best pages of criticism tempt one, in brief, to agree with him in declaring that “Poets themselves are the most proper, though I conclude not the only critics.” The critical writings of Wordsworth and Coleridge confirm us in that opinion. Wordsworth is less facile than Dryden, and he does not range so far. Coleridge, by natural endowment one of the greatest of literary critics, is desultory and indolent. But the two men, when focusing their masterly powers upon the defense and interpretation of that mode of Romantic poetry in which their own creative energies were for a time absorbed, produced criticism which has affected the whole subsequent development of English literature. Coleridge’s lecture on “Poesy or Art,”〖H. C., xxvii, 255ff.〗 for instance, is full of those flashes of penetrative insight which reveal the born critic: Art “is the power of humanizing nature”; “passion itself imitates order”; “beauty is the union of the shapely with the vital”; “the subjects chosen for works of art should be such as really are capable of being expressed and conveyed within the limits of those arts.” Wordsworth’s “Preface”〖H. C., xxxix, 267ff., 292ff., 311ff.〗 to his epoch-making early poems should be read in connection with Coleridge’s comments in the “Biographia Literaria,” and in the light of the well-known fact as to the proposed division of labor between the two young poets in the composition of the “Lyrical Ballads.” Coleridge intended to treat supernatural objects as if they really existed. Wordsworth wished to find in natural objects elements of novelty and surprise, that is, the romance of everyday experience. The two methods blended of course, like the colors at the extreme edges of the spectrum. Wordsworth’s successive statements of his purpose emphasize now his use of “the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes,” as if it were mainly a question of poetic diction; then he stresses the necessity of truth to “the primary laws of our nature,” and debates the æsthetic question of “the association of ideas in a state of excitement”; finally, he qualifies his first utterances by pointing out that the diction should be a “selection of language really used by men,” and that the incidents and situations treated by the poet should have “a certain colouring of the imagination.” Such criticism as this, if accompanied by close study of the verbal alterations which Wordsworth made in the text of his poems as his theories changed, is in the highest degree stimulating and profitable.