# Biographia Literaria; or, Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions/Volume 2/Chapter 18

Chapter XVIII.
I conclude therefore, that the attempt is impracticable; and that, were it not impracticable, it would still be useless. For the very power of making the selection implies the previous possession of the language selected. Or where can the poet have lived? And by what rules could he direct his choice, which would not have enabled him to select and arrange his words by the light of his own judgement? We do not adopt the language of a class by the mere adoption of such words exclusively, as that class would use, or at least understand; but likewise by following the order, in which the words of such men are wont to succeed each other. Now this order, in the intercourse of uneducated men, is distinguished from the diction of their superiors in knowledge and power, by the greater disjunction and ​separation in the component parts of that, whatever it be, which they wish to communicate. There is a want of that prospectiveness of mind, that surview, which enables a man to foresee the whole of what he is to convey, appertaining to any one point; and by this means so to subordinate and arrange the different parts according to their relative importance, as to convey it at once, and as an organized whole.
Now I will take the first stanza, on which I have chanced to open, in the Lyrical Ballads. It is one the most simple and the least peculiar in its language.
The words here are doubtless such as are current in all ranks of life; and of course not less so, in the hamlet and cottage, than in the shop, manufactory, college, or palace. But is this the order, in which the rustic would have placed the words? I am grievously deceived, if the following less compact mode of commencing the same tale be not a far more faithful ​copy. "I have been in a many parts far and near, and I don't know that I ever saw before a man crying by himself in the public road; a grown man I mean, that was neither sick nor hurt," &c. &c. But when I turn to the following stanza in "The Thorn:"
And compare this with the language of ordinary men; or with that which I can conceive at all likely to proceed, in real life, from such a narrator, as is supposed in the note to the poem; compare it either in the succession of the images or of the sentences, I am reminded of the sublime prayer and hymn of praise," which Milton, in opposition to an established liturgy, presents as a fair specimen of common extemporary devotion, and such as we might expect to hear from every self-inspired minister of a conventicle! And I reflect with delight, how little a mere theory, though of his own workmanship, interferes with the processes of ​genuine imagination in a man of true poetic geuius, who possesses, as Mr. Wordsworth, if ever man did, most assuredly does possess,
"The Vision and the Faculty Divine."
One point then alone remains, but that the most important; its examination having been, indeed, my chief inducement for the preceding inquisition. "There neither is or can be any essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition." Such is Mr. Wordsworth's assertion. Now prose itself, at least, in all argumentative and consecutive works differs, and ought to differ, from the language of conversation; even asreading ought to differ from talking. Unless therefore the difference denied be that of the mere words, as materials common to all styles of writing, ​and not of the style itself in the universally admitted sense of the term, it might be naturally presumed that there must exist a still greater between the ordonnance of poetic composition and that of prose, than is expected to distinguish prose from ordinary conversation.
There are not, indeed, examples wanting in the history of literature, of apparent paradoxes that have summoned the public wonder as new. and startling truths, but which on examination have shrunk into tame and harmless truisms; as the eyes of a cat, seen in the dark, have been mistaken for flames of fire. But Mr. Wordsworth is among the last men, to whom a delusion of this kind would be attributed by any one, who had enjoyed the slightest opportunity of understanding his mind and character. Where an objection has been anticipated by such ​an author as natural, his answer to it must needs be interpreted in some sense which either is, or has been, or is capable of being controverted. My object then must be to discover some other meaning for the term "essential difference" in this place, exclusive of the indistinction and community of the words themselves. For whether there ought to exist a class of words in the English, in any degree resembling the poetic dialect of the Greek and Italian, is a question of very subordinate importance. The number of such words would be small indeed, in our language; and even in the Italian and Greek, they consist not so much of different words, as of slight differences in the forms of declining and conjugating the same words; forms, doubtless, which having been, at some period more or less remote, the common grammatic flexions of some tribe or province, had been accidentally appropriated to poetry by the general admiration of certain master intellects, the first established lights of inspiration, to whom that dialect happened to be native.
Essence, in its primary signification, means the principle of individuation, the inmost principle of the possibility of any thing, as that particular thing. It is equivolant to the idea of a thing, whenever we use the word idea, with philosophic precision. Existence, on the other hand, is distinguished from essence, by ​the superinduction of reality. Thus we speak of the essence, and essential properties of a circle; but we do not therefore assert, that any thing, which really exists, is mathematically circular. Thus too, without any tautology we contend for the existence of the Supreme Being; that is, for a reality correspondent to the idea. There is, next, a secondary use of the word essence, in which it signifies the point or ground of contra-distinction between two modifications of the same substance or subject. Thus we should be allowed to say, that the style of architecture of Westminster Abbey is essentially different from that of Saint Paul, even though both had been built with blocks cut into the same form, and from the same quarry. Only in this latter sense of the term must it have been denied by Mr. Wordsworth (for in this sense alone is it affirmed by the general opinion) that the language of poetry (i.e. the formal construction, or architecture, of the words and phrases) is essentially different from that of prose. Now the burthen of the proof lies with the oppugner, not with the supporters of the common belief. Mr. Wordsworth, in consequence, assigns as the proof of his position, "that not only the language of a large portion of every good poem, even of the most elevated character, must necessarily, except with reference to the metre, in ​Page:Biographia literaria; or, Biographical sketches of my literary life and opinions (IA biographialitera03cole).pdf/72 ​Page:Biographia literaria; or, Biographical sketches of my literary life and opinions (IA biographialitera03cole).pdf/73 ​Page:Biographia literaria; or, Biographical sketches of my literary life and opinions (IA biographialitera03cole).pdf/74 ​Page:Biographia literaria; or, Biographical sketches of my literary life and opinions (IA biographialitera03cole).pdf/75 ​Page:Biographia literaria; or, Biographical sketches of my literary life and opinions (IA biographialitera03cole).pdf/76 ​Page:Biographia literaria; or, Biographical sketches of my literary life and opinions (IA biographialitera03cole).pdf/77 ​Page:Biographia literaria; or, Biographical sketches of my literary life and opinions (IA biographialitera03cole).pdf/78 ​Page:Biographia literaria; or, Biographical sketches of my literary life and opinions (IA biographialitera03cole).pdf/79 ​Page:Biographia literaria; or, Biographical sketches of my literary life and opinions (IA biographialitera03cole).pdf/80 ​Page:Biographia literaria; or, Biographical sketches of my literary life and opinions (IA biographialitera03cole).pdf/81 ​Page:Biographia literaria; or, Biographical sketches of my literary life and opinions (IA biographialitera03cole).pdf/82 ​Page:Biographia literaria; or, Biographical sketches of my literary life and opinions (IA biographialitera03cole).pdf/83 ​Page:Biographia literaria; or, Biographical sketches of my literary life and opinions (IA biographialitera03cole).pdf/84