Poetry and Emotions Theme Analysis

Emotions are of utmost importance to Wordsworth when it comes to poetry. “For all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” he writes in his “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads.” However, Wordsworth is careful to point out that depicting emotion requires prior thought and acquired skill on the part of the poet. The poet should be able to successfully observe and depict the thoughts and feelings that people have when they are in “a state of excitement,” meaning the stimulation people experience in a given situation. In this way, when a poet successfully composes a poem, that poem should have a noticeable effect on its reader, as it is relatable. In the “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads,” Wordsworth argues that in order to compose a successful and impactful poem, the poet must immerse themselves in a sort of process for poetic creation, which includes observing the subject matter, recollecting his or her emotions, contemplating those emotions, reviving those emotions in a composition, and, finally, enjoying the pleasure that his or her poetry creates.

For Wordsworth, a worthy poet must be able to convey his or her own emotional sensibility to the reader. Wordsworth claims that emotions and thoughts are strongly intertwined: “For our continued influxes of feeling are modified and directed by our thoughts, which are indeed the representatives of all our past feeling.” The poet must be able to understand this connection, as someone who often thinks of the relationship between thoughts and feelings will become more emotionally sensitive and aware. Then, when one such sensitive person communicates his or her thoughts, the listener, “if he be in a healthful state of association, must necessarily be in some degree enlightened, and his affections ameliorated.” In other words, when a poet successfully communicates their emotions, readers will be vicariously enlightened. Because the poet is tasked with successfully conveying that “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” to his or her readers, the poet must engage in a process that allows him or her to find the right words to express himself or herself. But first, the poet must be uncommonly aware of emotions: the poet needs to have “a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind.” Such a sensibility allows the poet to “slip into an entire delusion, and even confound and identify his own feelings with [those of the people he describes].” In this way, a poet must be a sharp observer and must be able to contemplate and process the emotions that came with his or her observations.

The Wordsworthian poet ought to recollect their emotions “in tranquility" so that what he or she composes will not be momentary, but timeless. Wordsworth claims that “the poet is chiefly distinguished from other men by a greater promptness to think and feel without immediate external excitement, and a greater power in expressing such thoughts and feelings as are produced in him in that manner.” The purpose of this is so that the poet can better communicate their thoughts and feelings to others: “in order to excite rational sympathy, he must express himself as other men express themselves.” The Wordsworthian process for poetic creation involves not just contemplating emotions “in tranquility,” but contemplating those emotions until “by a species of reaction the tranquility gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.” In other words, the poet should calmly process the emotions he or she initially experienced without distraction, until he or she feels in touch with those emotions again. Then, the poet may begin composing. This process allows the poet to create a distance between the initial emotion and the reader, in a way that tempers “the painful feeling which will always be found intermingled with powerful descriptions of the deeper passions,” and thus leads to greater pleasure. The process for poetic creation has so refined the poet’s composition, Wordsworth adds, that it will carry an enduring rather than momentary pleasure for its readers.

For Wordsworth, the essence of poetry comes in the form of a profound rendering of emotions, which helps the reader understand themselves better. As Wordsworth writes in his “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads,” the important thing is “that the feeling therein developed [in a poem] gives importance to the action and situation and not the action and situation to the feeling”—poetry, in Wordsworth’s eyes, hinges on emotion even more so than the actual event or situation it’s describing.