andrew elfenbein Yet if Romantic poets steered away from markedly strange English, they did not exactly embrace standardization Indeed, since the standardizers’ prototypical mode was prose, doing so would have meant artistic suicide Instead, Romantic poets continued to experiment with new possibilities for English, but more subtly than late eighteenth-century poets had done Their English can be thought of as a brilliant interlanguage that combines the prescriptions of standardized English with certain select archaisms (such as the widespread use of “thou” and its associated verb forms for the second-person singular), and distinctive personal twists In all cases, these interlanguages situate the poets in relation not only to linguistic debates but also to political ones Through their English, Romantic poets explore the larger question of what role the poet can have in the nation, if poetry is no longer a privileged site for producing the national language Their poetry transforms a loss of authority into a new source of freedom in which to explore the public role of poetry and to question if it had one at all Of all Romantic poets, William Wordsworth most explicitly confronted the newfound status of prose as the privileged medium for standardized English He famously claimed in his “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads that “some of the most interesting parts of the best poems will be found to be strictly the language of prose when prose is well written.”20 By insisting on the value not simply of prose, but of prose when it was “well written,” Wordsworth linked his ideas to those of writers like Hugh Blair, who had defined well-written prose at length Blair held up Joseph Addison as an ideal, and offered as a model such Addisonian sentences as these: This [sense of beauty] consists either in the gaiety or variety of colours, in the symmetry and proportion of parts, in the arrangement and disposition of bodies, or in a just mixture and concurrence of all together Among these several kinds of Beauty, the eye takes most delight in colours.21 These sentences are not simply grammatically correct: they also follow certain dictates of style The vocabulary is heavily Latinate; the sentence structure favors parallel phrases; and the sentences retain a trace of Latin periodicity by saving their climax for the end These stylistic traits link Addison’s English to a particular social network: an urban elite of educated gentlemen who had learned Latin and whose English was heavily influenced by the classics By invoking prose when it was “well written” in his Preface, Wordsworth sets the reader up for Latinate, neatly turned English like Addison’s What he produces is something quite different, as this excerpt from Michael suggests: 86 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008