Simple rural people are less restrained and artificial in their feelings and their utterance, and those feelings are at one with their environment. Poets confer honour neither on themselves or their works by using a sophisticated diction. He argues that to separate poetry from ordinary speech is to separate it from human life. Wordsworth is arguing against the idea of ‘poetic diction’ current throughout the 18th c, the idea that some modes of diction were best avoided in poetry, but that other modes were especially suitable. The immediate object of his attack was the ‘gaudiness and inane phraseology’ and the ‘vague, glossy and unfeeling language’ of contemporary poets. The theme which dominates most of Wordsworth’s criticism, and which he pursues most consistently is his argument against poetic diction.
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