Ordinary Life and Everyday Language Theme Analysis

Throughout his “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads,” Wordsworth emphasizes the importance of depicting ordinary life using everyday language in a poem. According to Wordsworth, using ordinary life as subject matter allows the poet to better explore human nature and reveal truth. This simple, prose-like language not only corresponds well with ordinary life—it’s closer to the way that normal, everyday people speak—but also is more universally intelligible: its simplicity and honesty create a sense of permanence, making it accessible for readers across time and place.

In order to show why his method of tackling ordinary subjects through ordinary language is so important and impactful, Wordsworth reveals the pitfalls of not using that approach. He suggests that poets who don’t rely on ordinary language “separate themselves from the sympathies of men.” To Wordsworth, a poet must be close to their reader and pull that reader in—a poet who tries to fluff up his or her poem with jargon or lofty language alienates the reader and has trouble connecting to their lived experience. In addition, veering away from ordinary life and plain language means that poems may be less enduring. Wordsworth argues that many poets “indulge in arbitrary and capricious habits of expression in order to furnish food for fickle tastes and fickle appetites of their own creation.” While poems centering around everyday life and expressed through simple language will live on, poems that don’t do those things will essentially only have fifteen minutes of fame. Wordsworth also points out that he’s “abstained from the use of many expressions, in themselves proper and beautiful, but which have been foolishly repeated by bad Poets till such feelings of disgust are connected with them as it is scarcely possible by any art of association to overpower.” Here, Wordsworth is explaining how certain words and phrases, though they may sound beautiful, can grow stale and trite over the years—so much so, that even the best poet can’t “overpower” the sour, spoiled flavor those words and phrases have taken on.

Wordsworth argues that what makes common scenes from ordinary life so impactful in poetry is that they speak clearly to human nature and are also enduring. Wordsworth makes it clear that his “principal object” is “to choose incidents and situations from common life […] and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination […] and above all, to make these incidents and situations interesting by tracing in them […] the primary laws of our nature.” Wordsworth wishes to depict ordinary things—albeit in an interesting way through using his imagination—so that his readers may better understand human nature. Along these lines, Wordsworth claims that “low and rustic life was generally chosen, because in that condition, the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language.” Wordsworth believes that there is a certain degree of universality to rural life: things are “more easily comprehended” because they are “more durable.” In other words, rural life is the most easily relatable and timeless.

Wordsworth also emphasizes that he wants to use “a selection of language really used by men”—that is, language that mirrors the way everyday people (the peasantry) talk as they go about their lives—because of its purity and universality. For Wordsworth, society has corrupted language. Instead of buying into the lofty language and rigid poetic forms that society deems proper, Wordsworth chooses to use the stripped-down, ordinary language of a commoner. He explains that common people speak more truthfully because they aren’t swayed by “social vanity,” and it is this unadorned truth—the “simple and unelaborated expressions” of everyday people—that Wordsworth is after. Furthermore, Wordsworth claims that “such a language, arising out of repeated experience and regular feelings, is a more permanent, and a far more philosophical language, than that which is frequently substituted for it by Poets.” Not only is everyday language truer, it’s also more enduring. To Wordsworth, everyday language means that it’s stripped bare of the poetic devices that many believe to be part and parcel to poetry. He writes: “Except in a very few instances the Reader will find no personifications of abstract ideas.” Although personification has its place in certain poems, Wordsworth doesn’t rely on the device because his goal is “to imitate, and, as far as possible, to adopt the very language of men, and I do not find that such personifications make any regular or natural part of that language.” Along the same lines, Wordsworth also avoids excessively poetic diction. He explains, “I have taken as much pains to avoid it as others ordinarily take to produce it; this I have done […] to bring my language near to the language of men.” That Wordsworth has tried just as hard to filter out that which other poets try so hard to infuse into their poems emphasizes just how serious Wordsworth is about reflecting everyday life with the language to match.

Towards the middle of his “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads,” Wordsworth writes, “I wish to keep my Reader in the company of flesh and blood, persuaded that by so doing I shall interest him.” While Wordsworth means that readers won’t find many instances of personification or lofty, abstract ideas floating around in the ensuing ballads, his statement here also speaks to his overarching goal: to write in plain, unadorned language about everyday people and things—“flesh and blood”—in order to convey the human experience in a way that is true and enduring.