But if his talk of pleasure sounds a little out of date, Wordsworth’s insistence on the social and political importance of “experimental” poetry still echoes in academic accounts of such verse (and prose) in the last decade. How are you, my dear William? What brings you to experimental poetry? Oh, pleasure, pleasure! What else should bring one anywhere? It’s still harder not to read them as historical artifacts, relics of an aesthetic and a psychology that Poe, Dostoevsky, Lautreamont, and Freud, among so many others, have debunked, and which research into the brain’s endorphin reward-system has yet to revise and reinscribe into general repute. It’s hard for me not to play Oscar Wilde to these earnest pronouncements. “We have no sympathy,” the poet tells us, even with those in pain, “but what is propagated by pleasure” likewise “we have no knowledge, that is, no general principles drawn up from the contemplation of particular facts, but what has been built up by pleasure, and exists in us by pleasure alone” (166-7). Such pleasure is not, he hastens to add, “a matter of amusement” or mere “ taste.” Rather, the “immediate pleasure” that the Poet is to supply is an “homage” to “the grand elementary principle of pleasure, by which knows, and feels, and lives, and moves.” The pleasure of poetry testifies to the beauty of the universe and the dignity of man it inculcates the linked Romantic values of social comradeship and natural inquiry. The “experiment” of Lyrical Ballads was published, he tells his readers in the “Preface,” in the hope that it “might be of some use to ascertain, how far, by fitting to metrical arrangement a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation, that sort of pleasure and that quality of pleasure may be imparted, which a Poet may rationally endeavour to impart” (153). George Washington the pleasures of experimental poetry important? 1 William Wordsworth certainly thought so.
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