Romantic Musings 3

Wordsworth was a dick.

Well, ok. He was an egotist. And then he was a dick.

The preface to Lyrical Ballads is dense. So dense I didn’t, I can’t, even read all of it. And its kind of annoying. He just carries on with the same point. It’s a preface! What he wrote here should have been included in the book as “An Essay on Lyrical Ballads”. The preface should have just said “I’d like to thank everyone who got this book published, here are two paragraphs on its aims, now enjoy.”

The preface itself is innately egotistical, though. Wordsworth keeps referring back to himself. He keeps returning to the first person and his relation to the book, which I suppose makes sense, and maybe its just that I was always taught never to use “I” in a formal essay…but still. He basically seems to be saying “Look at me, I’m so cool, look at how cool I am, I’m fighting The Man and the Man’s poetic conventions, the Man can’t get me down, mainly because I’m so cool.” I exaggerate, but still.

Ok, so not the greatest prose week. Hopefully it’ll get better.