ABSTRACT
Romanticism following Augustanism was the second great upheaval in the history of post-Renaissance English poetry. Its manifesto was the Preface (1800) to the Lyrical Ballads (1798) in which Wordsworth made a number of radical claims regarding the nature and function of poetry. He stated that ‘there neither is, nor can be, any essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition’. He did not mean that there should be no stylistic difference between poetry and prose: indeed it could be claimed that the metrical and stylistic variety of Romantic verse emphasized rather than clouded this difference. He meant that, especially during the Augustan period, poetic language had become largely predictable, both in stylistic terms (dominated as it was by the closed couplet) and in terms of the issues, topics and frames of reference of poetic discourse. In 1798 prose was the vehicle for the exploration of the new philosophies of the Enlightenment and the new freedoms of the age of revolution. The novel, with its ability to absorb the complexities of non-literary discourses, had stolen the march on poetry as an aesthetic means of articulating, in Wordsworth’s terms, ‘the real language of men’ and accommodating the ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’.
