Romantic poetry and the standardization of English Upon the Forest-side in Grasmere Vale There dwelt a Shepherd, Michael was his name, An old man, stout of heart, and strong of limb His bodily frame had been from youth to age Of an unusual strength: his mind was keen, Intense and frugal, apt for all affairs, And in his Shepherd’s calling he was prompt And watchful more than ordinary men.22 Next to the spectacular experiments of writers like Chatterton and Burns, Wordsworth’s poetry seems studiously ordinary He avoids strange or unusual words, flashy rhetorical devices, and loud deviations from standard grammar His vocabulary is not aggressively Anglo-Saxon like Chatterton’s, or Scots like Burns, but combines words with varying etymological roots, all of which had long been in the language Yet if Wordsworth resists the dazzle of late eighteenth-century experiments with English, his poetry is still far from what his contemporaries might have considered prose when it was “well written.” Unlike Addison’s neatly analytical sentences, Wordsworth’s are loosely organized piles of attributes In particular, eighteenth-century standardizers insisted that a good writer should “dispose of the capital word, or words, in that place of the sentence, where they will make the fullest impression,” usually near the beginning or end.23 A sentence following such a prescription might read as follows: “An old shepherd named Michael, who had a stout heart and strong limbs, dwelt upon the forest-side of Grasmere Vale.” Rather than writing such a sentence, Wordsworth breaks down information into discrete units that he lists: “There dwelt a Shepherd, Michael was his name, / An old man, stout of heart, and strong of limb.” He creates a slow-moving, almost rambling sentence quite unlike the tight, precise prose most admired by eighteenthcentury authorities His meter even contracts the pronunciation of the words “bodily” and “unusual” as if to give them a casual, unassuming tone Moreover, despite Wordsworth’s desire to bring poetry closer to prose, Michael includes constant reminders that it is not actually prose Most obviously, it does not look like prose because of the way the lines are arranged, and the pulse of the iambic pentameter meter distinguishes it from prose rhythms In addition, Wordsworth freely shifts conventional word order, as when he concludes with “he was prompt / And watchful more than ordinary men” instead of “he was more prompt and watchful than ordinary men.” Forms of rhetorical amplification elevate the diction: “body” becomes “bodily frame”; “unusually strong” becomes “of an unusual strength.” The strong rhythmic alliteration of a phrase like “stout of heart, and strong of limb” stands out against the prose-like rhythms elsewhere While such 87 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008