It was necessary to do this in order to reconnect poetry with the
sympathies of men, and make it again a true utterance instead of the
ingenious exercise in putting together words, which it had become.
In projecting this abandonment of the received tradition, it may
be thought that Wordsworth was condemning the Miltonic system of
expression in itself. But this was not so. Milton's language had
become in the hands of the imitators of the eighteenth century sound
without sense, a husk without the kernel, a body of words without the
soul of poetry. Milton had created and wielded an instrument which was
beyond the control of any less than himself. He used it as a living
language; the poetasters of the eighteenth century wrote it as a dead
language, as boys make Latin verses. Their poetry is to _Paradise
Lost_, as a modern Gothic restoration is to a genuine middle-age
church. It was against the feeble race of imitators, and not against
the master himself, that the protest of the lake poet was raised.
He proposed to do away with the Miltonic vocabulary altogether, not
because it was in itself vicious, but because it could now only be
employed at secondhand.
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