Wordsworth's youthful political radicalism, unlike Coleridge's, never led him to rebel against his religious upbringing. He remarked in 1812 that he was willing to shed his blood for the established Church of England, reflected in his Ecclesiastical Sketches of 1822. This religious conservatism also colours The Excursion (1814), a long poem that became extremely popular during the nineteenth century. It features three central characters: the Wanderer, the Solitary, who has experienced the hopes and miseries of the French Revolution, and the Pastor, who dominates the last third of the poem.[33]
Wordsworth's poetic philosophy
Behler[34] has pointed out the fact that Wordsworth wanted to invoke the basic feeling that a human heart possesses and expresses. He had reversed the philosophical standpoint expressed by his friend S. T. Coleridge, of 'creating the characters in such an environment so that the public feels them belonging to the distant place and time'. And it is true that this philosophical realization by Wordsworth allowed him to choose the language and structural patterning of the poetry that a common man used every day.[35] Kurland wrote that the conversational aspect of a language emerges through social necessity.[36] Social necessity posits the theme of possessing the proper knowledge, interest and biases also among the speakers. William Wordsworth has used conversation in his poetry to let the poet 'I' merge into 'We'. The poem "Farewell" exposes the identical emotion that the poet and his sister nourish:
"We leave you here in solitude to dwell/ With these our latest gifts of tender thought;
Thou, like the morning, in thy saffron coat,/ Bright gowan, and marsh-marigold, farewell!" (L.19–22).
This kind of conversational tone persists all through the poetic journey of the poet, that positions him as a man in society who speaks to the purpose of communion with the very common mass of that society.[37] Again; "Preface to Lyrical Ballads" [1] is the evidence where the poet expresses why he is writing and what he is writing and what purpose it will serve humanity.
