'Poetry Should Be Great and Unobtrusive'

“An intelligent reader finds a sort of insult in being told: I will teach you how to think upon this subject.”

That’s about the time I close the book and put it back on the shelf. What bothers me most about bullies is their presumption that not only am I wrong but it’s their divine right to set me straight. It was drummed into me as a newspaper reporter that you never sermonize readers, never instruct them in how to sanitize their thoughts and clean up their opinions. Present the facts and walk away. Readers are big boys and girls who don’t need a nanny.

The sentence quoted above is from a chutzpah-laced letter Charles Lamb wrote to William Wordsworth on Jan. 30, 1801. Lamb had read the recently published second edition of Lyrical Ballads, and generally likes the new poems Wordsworth has included. But he objects to “The Old Cumberland Beggar”: “[T]he instructions conveyed in it are too direct and like a lecture: they don’t slide into the mind of the reader while he is imagining no such matter.”

Wordsworth, of course, disregarded Lamb’s observation. His later, longer, meditative poems are often marred by an enthusiasm for preaching. Lamb goes on:

“This fault, if I am right, is in a ten-thousandth worse degree to be found in Sterne and many many novelists and modern poets, who continually put a signpost up to show where you are to feel. They set out with assuming their readers to be stupid. . . . There is implied an unwritten compact between author and reader: I will tell you a story, and I suppose you will understand it.”

Lamb’s criticism of Wordsworth’s pushiness is hardly unique. In his Feb. 3, 1818 letter to John Hamilton Reynolds, Keats asks:

"It may be said that we ought to read our contemporaries, that Wordsworth, etc., should have their due from us. But, for the sake of a few fine imaginative or domestic passages, are we to be bullied into a certain Philosophy engendered in the whims of an Egotist? . . . We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us, and, if we do not agree, seems to put its hand into its breeches pocket. Poetry should be great and unobtrusive . . .”