George Campbell's Philosophy of Rhetoric and Wordsworth's ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads

Abstract

TO the question ‘What is a Poet?’ William Wordsworth gives two answers in his famous 1800 preface. The short answer, that ‘He is a man speaking to men’, is well known and evokes an entire tradition of plain-speaking egalitarianism. The second, and longer, answer takes the form of a caveat grounded in epistemological assumptions about poets and poetry. It holds that while not differing in kind from others the poet does differ in the degree to which he apprehends and employs experience. This difference, it turns out, is considerable and includes ‘a disposition to be affected more than other men by absent things as if they were present; an ability of conjuring up in himself passions, which are indeed far from being the same as those produced by real events, yet … do more nearly resemble the passions produced by real events, than anything which, from the motions of their own minds merely, other men are accustomed to feel in themselves.’ Wordsworth completes the equation by describing this ‘disposition’ as it issues through the poet's ‘greater readiness and power in expressing what he thinks and feels, and especially those thoughts and feelings which, by his own choice, or from the structure of his own mind, arise in him without immediate external excitement.’1