'
The two lines in italics are discordant. But again it is no question of
language in itself; it is an internal discrepancy between the parts of a
whole already debilitated by metrical insecurity.
Coleridge's second point against Wordsworth is 'a _matter-of-factness_
in certain poems.' Once more there is no question of language. Coleridge
takes the issue on to the highest and most secure ground. Wordsworth's
obsession with realistic detail is a contravention of the essential
catholicity of poetry; and this accidentality is manifested in
laboriously exact description both of places and persons. The poet
sterilises the creative activity of poetry, in the first case, for no
reason at all, and in the second, because he proposes as his immediate
object a moral end instead of the giving of aesthetic pleasure. His
prophets and wise men are pedlars and tramps not because it is probable
that they should be of this condition--it is on the contrary highly
improbable--but because we are thus to be taught a salutary moral
lesson.
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