metalogos four

Some forward-looking poetics tend to the political and celebrate the recent cultural liberations, rightfully so. Yet they are certainly not democratic, but quite elitist in fact. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But the language of the privileged seems to me to be a problem. It’s been rarified. Oh certainly it ain’t quite quiet; it’s just good clean noise. But there’s no soul in that tune. Yet it doesn’t have to be that way. William Wordsworth thought not. His opening salvo for “Lyrical Ballads:”

It is the honourable characteristic of Poetry that its materials are to be found in every subject which can interest the human mind. The evidence of this fact is to be sought, not in the writings of Critics, but in those of Poets themselves.

The majority of the following poems are to be considered as experiments. They were written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure. Readers accustomed to the gaudiness and inane phraseology of many modern writers, if they persist in reading this book to its conclusion, will perhaps frequently have to struggle with feelings of strangeness and awkwardness: they will look round for poetry, and will be induced to enquire by what species of courtesy these attempts can be permitted to assume that title. It is desirable that such readers, for their own sakes, should not suffer the solitary word Poetry, a word of very disputed meaning, to stand in the way of their gratification; but that, while they are perusing this book, they should ask themselves if it contains a natural delineation of human passions, human characters, and human incidents; and if the answer be favorable to the author's wishes, that they should consent to be pleased in spite of that most dreadful enemy to our pleasures, our own pre-established codes of decision.

Maybe that’s why I’m thinking Bob Dylan may be traveling the right road, discovering and expanding on the Folk. Let’s not suffer that lonely word when we look at his lifetime achievement. He is in many ways Wordsworth’s heir. If not a prophet, then an angel.