JOTTINGS ON LITERATURE

Definition is not all easy. Wordsworth defined poetry in many ways. He believes that poetry is a powerful feeling that gives immense pleasure both to the poet and the reader. It is not something that makes man happy. ‘Pleasure’ is much more than happiness. The pleasure that poetry offers makes man wise. Happiness does not. Pleasure offers a deeper understanding of the things around him including himself. It helps man to see life from a vantage point of view. And it reveals the harmony in nature.
Wordsworth says “Poetry is a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”. It does not mean that a poet write at the spur of the moment. He writes after prolonged meditation. Poetry is not an ‘emotional outburst’ so to speak. A poet ponders over for long on what leaves an impression on his mind. The poetic process is a kind of association of ideas. He says that continuous “influxes of feeling” is modified by our earlier impressions and feelings. Slowly and gradually we come to know what is really important to man. And we begin to see the world in a different way. This way of viewing life becomes quite ‘natural’ or our habit.
The important point to note is that a poem before it is written takes its shape in the poet’s mind. The incubation period is very long., ‘ten years’ says Wordsworth. Whatever impresses the poet does not make its appearance in the poem as it was. Reacting with the earlier impressions and feelings in the poet’s mind it loses its particular character and assumes a universal character. The new feeling is “kindred” to the feeling produced in the poet’s mind at first. In Wordsworth’s words the object of poetry is “truth not individual and local but general and operating and standing upon external testimony, but carried alive into the heart by passion”. Thus poetry is “the image f man and nature” says Wordsworth.
At another place Wordsworth says, “Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge”. Wordsworth does not say that science does not offer knowledge. It does. All the same the knowledge it offers is not complete. He believes that only poetry can offer absolute truth. The thinking of a poet is inclusive. A poet does not exclude anything from his field of interest. Everything that affects man interests him.
He goes on to say that the object of a scientist can be the objects of poet as well if the ordinary man is able to relate himself with science and its objects. In his words, “The remotest discoveries of Chemists, the Botanists, or Mineralogists will be as proper objects of the poet’s arts as any upon which it can be employed, if the time should ever come when these things shall be familiar to us as enjoying and suffering beings”.
He agrees with Aristotle’s view of poetry and states, “poetry is the most philosophic of all writings”. The truth the historian or the biographer is looking for is extremely difficult to find, for the obstacles in their way are innumerable. The only obstacle on the poet’s way is that what he writes must to be able to give immediate pleasure to the reader. The picture of the world painted by the poet is whole and is capable of giving pleasure to the reader.