"[339]
Here is evidence of a retreat towards a safer position, though Wordsworth
seems to have remained unconvinced at heart, and for many years longer
clung obstinately to the passages of bald prose into which his original
theory had betrayed him. In 1815 his opinions had undergone a still
further change, and an assiduous study of the qualities of his own mind
and of his own poetic method (the two subjects in which alone he was ever
a thorough scholar) had convinced him that poetry was in no sense that
appeal to the understanding which is implied by the words "rationally
endeavor to impart." In the preface of that year he says, "The
observations prefixed to that portion of these volumes which was
published many years ago under the title of 'Lyrical Ballads' have so
little of special application to the greater part of the present enlarged
and diversified collection, that they could not with propriety stand as
an introduction to it." It is a pity that he could not have become an
earlier convert to Coleridge's pithy definition, that "prose was words in
their best order and poetry the _best_ words in the best order." But
idealization was something that Wordsworth was obliged to learn
painfully. It did not come to him naturally as to Spenser and Shelley and
to Coleridge in his higher moods.
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