In the year 1800, William Wordsworth wrote that “all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” Scholars, teachers, and students quote this sentence often, and it has become part of the standard understanding of Romanticist literature.
This sentence is also wildly false.
Aside from the ambiguity of what “good poetry” might be, in contrast to other poetry, the alleged spontaneity of poetry in general, and Romanticist poetry in particular, is a standard motif in the self-advertisement of Romanticism. Like much self-advertisement, it is at least exaggerated, and more likely simply wrong.
Romantic poetry, both in its British and in its German incarnations, routinely features rigorous structures. Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” is structured in multiple ways: the number of syllables per line, the stress on the various syllables in the form of an iambic foot, the division of the poem’s twenty-four lines into four stanzas of six lines each, and the strict rhyme scheme. A close reading will reveal yet more ways in which the poem is calculated. A stricter poetic structure is difficult to imagine.
The same is true of Romanticist poetry from Germany: Goethe’s “wild” poetry is meticulously planned.
Wordsworth was a smart man. Why would he write about poetry as a spontaneous overflow of emotion, when it is a premeditated and numerically determined product? He might have written this for various reasons.
His famous statement might have been a continuation of the self-advertisement of the Romanticist movement. Romanticism needs its readers to believe that such poetry is an unplanned eruption of uncontrollable emotions. In fact, Romanticist poetry is carefully planned to appear unplanned, strictly controlled in order to appear uncontrollable, rationally calculated to appear irrational. Perhaps Wordsworth was delivering the standard Romanticist trope in order to encourage his audience to continue buying his books.
A second, and more honorable motive, might be that Wordsworth wrote what he wrote because it didn’t mean it in the way in which it is often understood. A careful reading of the context in which Wordsworth’s famous sentence finds itself may illuminate a slightly different meaning.
The text from which the famous quote comes is the preface to one of his own books. Introducing his book to the reader, he comments about his colleagues, the other writers who were part of the British literary scene at that time. He writes:
I cannot, however, be insensible to the present outcry against the triviality and meanness, both of thought and language, which some of my contemporaries have occasionally introduced into their metrical compositions; and I acknowledge that this defect, where it exists, is more dishonourable to the Writer’s own character than false refinement or arbitrary innovation, though I should contend at the same time, that it is far less pernicious in the sum of its consequences.
Seeking to differentiate himself from some of the less than desirable practices of these other writers, he explains that his writings have purposes, unlike the texts produced by those other authors:
From such verses the Poems in these volumes will be found distinguished at least by one mark of difference, that each of them has a worthy purpose. Not that I always began to write with a distinct purpose formerly conceived; but habits of meditation have, I trust, so prompted and regulated my feelings, that my descriptions of such objects as strongly excite those feelings, will be found to carry along with them a purpose.
In defending and promoting his poems, Wordsworth argues that his writing is shaped by his “meditation” — the opposite of an irrational eruption of passion. He further boasts that he has “regulated” his feelings — again in contrast to wild uncontrollable emotions. Indeed, the very claim that his poems have “purpose” entails that they are subjugated to a higher purpose, and therefore are disciplined.
Then comes his famous generalization about “all good poetry” — yet in the same sentence, he argues that such poetry is product of “thought” — thought being the antipode of feeling.
If this opinion be erroneous, I can have little right to the name of a Poet. For all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: and though this be true, Poems to which any value can be attached were never produced on any variety of subjects but by a man who, being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility, had also thought long and deeply.
By using the word “purpose,” Wordsworth is indicating that his writing is premeditated, and therefore the antithesis of a “spontaneous” outburst of emotion.
Why, then, does he insist on writing about this alleged spontaneity?
The spontaneity that he describes is not an unregulated eruption, but rather the reaction or response of a trained intellect. It is a spontaneity born of training and intellect.
Wordsworth tells the reader that the feelings are not raw and wild, but rather “modified and directed.” By training and practice, “by the repetition and continuance” of such discipline, people obtain the mental habit of connecting their feelings to “important subjects.”
After being subjected to such rigorous training, the intellect of the would-be poet will be such that it automatically or reflexively composes verse in a way, and about such subjects, as Wordsworth indicates.
For our continued influxes of feeling are modified and directed by our thoughts, which are indeed the representatives of all our past feelings; and, as by contemplating the relation of these general representatives to each other, we discover what is really important to men, so, by the repetition and continuance of this act, our feelings will be connected with important subjects, till at length, if we be originally possessed of much sensibility, such habits of mind will be produced, that, by obeying blindly and mechanically the impulses of those habits, we shall describe objects, and utter sentiments, of such a nature, and in such connexion with each other, that the understanding of the Reader must necessarily be in some degree enlightened, and his affections strengthened and purified.
The reader might consider the example of an athlete, whose long hours of training allow him to react quickly and automatically — spontaneously — in a game. This act may seem spontaneous, but it is the product of long and arduous training.
Or likewise also the example of someone who has learned an affected and highly technical way of speaking — perhaps a lawyer or a physicist, or one who has learned a foreign language. That individual will react quickly — spontaneously — in a conversation, but that reaction is the fruit of a long process of mental discipline.
When Wordsworth, then, writes that “all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” he was indicating, not a natural and untamed spontaneity, but rather an automatic reaction, a learned reflex, instilled into the mind by training and discipline. An examination of the disciplined structure of Wordsworth’s own texts supports this reading.
