Expression and mimesis in the Romantic poetry of the first generation: W. Wordsworth and S. T. Coleridge.

Abstract

The origin of English Romanticism coincides with the publication of the Lyrical Ballads of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The Ballads are preceded, in the second edition of 1800, by a Preface, which represents a real manifesto of romantic poetry. The Preface marks a real revolution in the previous poetic overview, combining two different points of view of common poetics. The Preface highlights the necessity of focusing poetry on the expression of incidents and situations from common life, abandoning the traditional poetic diction, considered pompous, contrived, and distant from the everyday language. The aim of this revolution is to achieve a language as close as possible to the language spoken by ordinary people, in order to create a connection with true and authentic people, places, and feelings. The most important function of poetry is to develop and refine the sensibility of the reader, through the pleasure that reading a poem can produce. Wordsworth and Coleridge’s poems are read and analyzed considering the principles explained in the preface and the passage from a form of Platonic mimesis to a form of Aristotelian mimesis. Accomplished a process of transformation from mimetic poetry to expressive poetry, poetry will evolve even to a different configuration with the relation to reality and truth, which is not only the reality as such but an imagined reality.