Meet my new frienemy, Thomas Love Peacock. First of all, can we pause and appreciate the amazingness of his name. Oh to be a Love Peacock. He looks a bit too boyish in this portrait for the name, don't you agree? Accordingly, the boy moved to London when he was 16, has no formal education after the age of 13, and writes things like this (! see below !) about my BFF, Wordsworth.
Let's review: the Lake Poets (mostly Wordsworth) are ignorant of every "high" form of knowledge (like history, society, and human nature) because they prefer to write about nature.*
But what happened, according to Mr. Love Peacock (yes! that name!), was that instead of truly writing nature, the Lake Poets actually obscured it with their "mysticisms and chimaeras." They made nature UNNATURAL.
Wordsworth in particular is guilty of importing ghosts and spectres of other writers into what are ostensibly realistic poems. Love Peacock describes these spectres as "phantastical parturition[s]." Ghost Babies. In other words, he accuses Wordsworth of letting his imagination run away with him... And in the terrible poetry of the Lake-Poets-generation (gen LP), this is only natural! (Like the process of parturition, in fact). For, "we know...there are no Dryads in Hyde-park nor Niads in the Regent's-canal. But barbaric manners and SUPERNATURAL interventions are ESSENTIAL TO POETRY" (The Works of Thomas Love Peacock, 334 ..emphasis mine, right). He goes on to say "while the historian and the philosopher are advancing in, and accelerating, the progress of knowledge, the poet is WALLOWING IN THE RUBBISH OF DEPARTED IGNORANCE AND RAKING UP THE ASHES OF DEAD SAVAGES TO FIND GEWGAWS AND RATTLES FOR THE GROWN BABIES OF THE AGE" (334).
Well, Mr. Love Peacock, we are fighting.
*pause to enjoy "Rhymesters." Probably the best insult ever leveled at anyone, ever.
