study questions

Some Questions for Wordsworth and Coleridge

(adapted from A. J. Drake's Teaching Resources)

Wordsworth’s "Preface to Lyrical Ballads" (1800, 1802)

1. How does Wordsworth, in delineating the "principal object" of his poems, describe the language he claims to have selected for them? How does he describe the language used by "many modern writers"?

2. What sorts of "incidents and situations" does Wordsworth claim to have chosen for his poems? Why does he choose situations from "humble and rustic life," and what is the presumed state of the "essential passions of the heart" for those who live in the countryside?

3. What is the relationship of the "essential passions of the heart" to language and to to the "beautiful and permanent forms of nature"?

4. In explaining the purpose of his poems, Wordsworth declares that "all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: but ... Poems to which any value can be attached, were never produced on any variety of subjects but by a man ... who had also thought long and deeply." What effect does the language following "but" have upon the first part of Wordsworth's statement about expression?

5. What meditative process leading to composition does Wordsworth outline immediately following the statement quoted in question 4?

6. What, according to Wordsworth, is the relationship in his poems between feeling and action (i.e. dramatic action)?

7. According to Wordsworth, "one being is elevated above another in proportion as he possesses" what capability?

8. What are some of the causes, "unknown to former times," combining to reduce men's minds "to a state of almost savage torpor"?

9. What does Wordsworth think of the distinction between the language of prose and metrical composition? Why? How does he deal with the issue of meter in poetry?

10. What are some of the characteristics of the poet? What is his relationship to his "own passions and volitions"? What is the relationship between his feelings and the "goings-on of the Universe"?

11. What sort of truth does poetry give? How is this truth communicated? To what tribunal does it appeal?

12. What sort of "song" does the poet sing, according to Wordsworth, and what effect does it have for "the vast empire of human society"? How does Wordsworth conceive of the relationship between "man and nature," and between "the mind of man" and the "most interesting qualities of nature"?

13. Why, according to Wordsworth, can't "the Man of Science, the Chemist and Mathematician" accomplish the same thing for human society? What is the difference, that is, between the kind of knowledge science can give us and the kind poetry provides?

14. How, in Wordsworth's view, is the poet "chiefly distinguished from other men"? What characterizes his "passions and thoughts and feelings"? With what are they connected?

15. Poetry is defined by Wordsworth as a spontaneous what? From what does poetry take its origin? Then what happens? In what mood is "successful composition" carried on?

 

Coleridge’s "Shakespeare's Judgment Equal to His Genius"

1. What exactly is the "dangerous falsehood" about Shakespeare that Coleridge seeks to combat? How exactly is the title of this essay a refutation of that falsehood?

2. What is the necessary relationship between the "spirit of poetry" and the "rules"? Are these rules imposed from without, in mechanical imitation of the ancients?

3. How is a literary work like a "living body"? What characterizes the organization of a literary work (i.e., an embodiment of the creative "spirit of poetry")?

4. Is true genius formless? Lawless? What sort of power defines genius?

5. How does Coleridge describe mechanical form? How does he describe organic form?

From Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, Chapters XIII, XIV and XVII

1. What Coleridge calls, in Chapter XIII, the "secondary imagination" is the creative imagination of the artist. How does he describe the relationship of this power to the world of objects? What characterizes all objects as objects, and how does the secondary imagination differ? What does it do to the world of objects?

2. How is a poem distinguished from a work of science? What is the special nature of poetic pleasure?

3. What is the relationship of parts to parts in a "legitimate poem"?

4. How does a genuinely satisfactory poem engage the reader's attention with respect to its parts? With respect to the whole?

5. What are some of the "opposite or discordant qualities" balanced or reconciled by imagination?

6. Would you use the metaphor of a mirror or the metaphor of a lamp in explaining Coleridge's theory of the relationship between the secondary or creative imagination and the world of objects? Between the creative mind and the world of appearances? Explain.

7. What are Coleridge’s specific objections to Wordsworth’s “Preface”? Do you agree with Coleridge’s argument?