"The language too, of these men (that is
those in humble and rustic life) has been adopted ... because such men
hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of
language is originally derived, and because from their rank in society,
and the sameness and narrow circle of their intercourse, being less
under the influence of social vanity, they convey their feelings and
notions in simple unelaborated expressions." Social vanity--the armour
which we wear to conceal our deepest thoughts and feelings--that was
what Wordsworth wished to be rid of, and he chose the language of the
common people, not because it fitted, as an earlier school of poets who
used the common speech had asserted, the utterance of habitual feeling
and common sense, but because it is the most sincere expression of the
deepest and rarest passion. His object was the object attained by
Shakespeare in some of his supremest moments; the bare intolerable force
of the speeches after the murder of Macbeth, or of King Lear's
"Do not laugh at me,
For as I am a man, I think this lady
To be my child Cordelia."
Here, then, was one avenue of revolt from the tyranny of artificiality,
the getting back of common speech into poetry.
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