This could be relevant to that other long standing thread. Thought I'd
put a fresh face on it.
When I was a student at college (teacher's training college in North
London in the 70's) we had a long session once when we were confronted
side-by-side by Wordsworth's host of yellow things poem and the same
event as recorded in Dorothy's Notebooks. Of course I knew the poem
but I had never read any of the Notebooks before. Anyway, I was one of
the small minority in the class who preferred the event as recorded by
Dorothy in the notebook. My response was genuine, I wasn't trying to
be clever or different. It's a long time ago but it really stuck in my
mind. I wish I could remember the reasons I gave for my preference -
all I know is that it had something to do with the directness and
relatively unmediated joy that Dorothy's account recorded and how that
seemed to show, for me, a closer and more honest relationship between
language and reality, compared with the far more conscious
construction of the poem. In years to come I often got the same
feeling, as given to me by the notebook account, in certain C20
American poetry, beginning probably with Williams and then the
Objectivists.
Cheers
Tim A.
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