My dude Wordsworth

I suddenly had a weird epiphany. Right now, right here, sitting at this computer, I realized something. The Romantics were right. Are right. About poetry. 

(If they were going to be right about anything, it would have to be poetry, I think.)

I can never remember who said what. "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." That's a good one. Coleridge? Shelley? The other Shelley?

The one in particular that they were correct about was this: "Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful emotion: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity." And I realized the full truth of this just now, years after I first read it. When I first read this line, I was definitely ready to fire back with examples in myself where the best words I thought I could give came up at the time the emotions were being experienced. When I was sad, I wrote about being sad, and I called that poetry. I wrote out my anger and expelled it, and that was what I called poetry. I even tried to capture trembling joy, to bottle it up as it came to me and save it for later. That, I thought, was how one does poetry. 

I don't think I was completely wrong. There is something to be said for the first flush of fountaining phrases. You can save them for later, at least. 

But to craft something from a position of some distance lends a new perspective. It gives you the chance to try to recreate those feelings in yourself from a cold start. It lets you react as a stranger would. It makes you try to figure out what sent you to that place of overwhelming feeling in the first place. It forces you to confront the why and what of a feeling, not just its magnitude.

Recollecting emotions in tranquility isn't easy, but I think, maybe, I'd like to try.