In Defense of 'Spontaneity'

Is poetry a mechanical art? It is a question to readers as well as to passionate writers. Of late, we are confronted with criticisms on the Poetic path drawn by William Wordsworth. He is criticized for saying that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. What Wordsworth meant is that poetry is the unison of the communicating extremes of society and the attentive sense of a poet. A mere urge of becoming celebrity cannot make a good poet. Here spontaneity means the socially carved out urge at the individual level. Language is not an individually formed organ. It exists in and through all the corners of life. Hence social meanings intrudes individual's thoughts, and create a nascent space of mediation of both. This creation willl urge the writer to express the artwork back to the society. Thus the creative process becomes reciprocal.

Neither the knowledge of idioms nor an extravagant use of words in isolation can sound poetic in totality. Wordsworth stresses this point. Poetic language in an individual mind take shape when the images of social life create enduring feelings and thoughts on a personal level. So Words and Mind are transformed to a kind of social entity in a poet. The variance of this transformation is necessitated by the disruptions in the social life. It never happens out of acceptance of a mechanical way of life. Thus both at the individual level and the social level , poetry communicates through socially defined words and a receptive mind. This can be a praise or negation of the way of life. Whatever be the purpose of the artwork, it cannot spare the social medium called language. And this engagement brings randomness and thus a spontaneity at the individual level. Being a poet influenced by the tides of French revolution and rising waves of commoner's life in England, Wordsworth naturally proclaims the spontaneity more forcefully. Our reading on a subdued terrain of social life should not miss this point.