|
|
In other words, as poets they became detached from the culture around them. Their work could not easily be located in any discursive mode of the time; it was seldom explicitly political or occasional poetry, as so much prior verse had been. Wordsworth, in eschewing lofty subjects and formal styles, characterized himself as “a man speaking to men.” In fact his very singularity put greater demands on elite readers, who could no longer be assured of the significance of poems about poor country folk or Wordsworth’s walks in the country. For this reason, early critical reception of Lyrical Ballads was mainly hostile.
The triangular relationship among God or the muses, the poet as receiver, and the reader as beneficiary was now lopsided, with an increased emphasis placed on the poet himself. Milton or Spenser possessed great skill, but nonetheless stood in the same relationship to God as the reader. In Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth dispensed with fancy language, which should have democratized his poetry. It probably did make the poetry more accessible to more people, since Lyrical Ballads sold well in spite of the poor notices. By adopting a populist style, Wordsworth emphasized his own personal genius, since he did not need the formality of poetic language and subject matter—he needed only his own thoughts. This complicated the muse-poet-reader relationship, subordinating the reader to the Romantic genius, who became a sort of fetishized figure, loved or derided by the public.
Avant-garde American poetry, while it draws from a range of literary sources (many of them Continental) has its philosophical roots in English Romanticism. The Romantic focus on the poet and on the act of writing persisted as twentieth-century poets retreated from the general audience that once greeted Lyrical Ballads and formed a balkanized network of groups and schools. These groups were formed with the assistance of the critical community; in some cases, the critics may be said to have christened a particular style or literary cohort almost without the consent of the poets themselves. Romantic and early modern criticism, also, began to view the poem in an objectified manner, beginning with the magisterial presence of Matthew Arnold.