ABSTRACT
The literature of the ordinary, whether in Wordsworth or in Stevens or in Ford, works against itself in end to transform ordinary materials that it records or articulates or celebrates or imagines or invents. The many qualities that Wordsworth describes to poet in these paragraphs are, he declares, nothing differing in kind from other men, but only in degree. The point is emphasised repeatedly in these supplementary pages: the poet both is and is not the same as an ordinary man, both is and is not ordinary. Writing almost two hundred years apart, both the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth and the contemporary American novelist Richard Ford attempt to express and to theorise the ordinary in opposition to what, towards the beginning of his 1986 novel The Sportswriter, Ford's narrator, Frank Bascombe, calls the lie of literature. The Sportswriter, on the novel as a work of literature that isa rejection of literature. Perhaps people shouldn't make too much of this.
