He was
trying to make his poetry as much unlike ordinary speech as he could; he
was for the moment a slave to a tradition, and none the less a slave
because it was the tradition of his own past.
Professionalism is a device for making expression easy; and it is one
used by the greatest artists sometimes because their business is to be
always expressing themselves, and even they have not always something to
express. But expression is so difficult, even for those who have
something to express, that they must be always practising it if they are
ever to succeed in it. Wordsworth, for instance, was a professed enemy
of professionalism in poetry; yet he, too, was for ever writing verses.
It was a hobby with him as well as an art; and his professionalism was
merely less accomplished than that of Milton or Spenser:--
Fair Ellen Irwin, when she sate
Upon the Braes of Kirtle,
Was lovely as a Grecian maid
Adorned with wreaths of myrtle.
Why adorned with wreaths of myrtle? Wordsworth himself tells us. His
subject had already been treated in Scotch poems "in simple ballad
strain," so, he says, "at the outset I threw out a classical image to
prepare the reader for the style in which I meant to treat the story,
and so to preclude all comparison." No one, whose object was just to
tell the story, would compare Ellen with a Grecian maid and her wreaths
of myrtle; but Wordsworth must do so to show us how he means to tell it,
and, as he forgets to mention, so that he may rhyme with Kirtle.
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