Paul Schleifer

Neoteric means “modern; new; recent.” It sounds like a new word, a neologism, because it is one you’ve probably never heard before, but according to www.etymonline.com, it entered the language in the “1590s, from Late Latin neotericus, from Greek neoterikos “youthful, fresh, modern,” from neoteros, comp. of neos “new.” Although etymonline doesn’t say so, terikos is Greek for territorial, so given that, it seems that neoteric means “new territory.”

Speaking of “new territory,” today is the 248^th birthday of William Wordsworth. Wordsworth was, of course, one of the two founders of the Romantic Movement in English poetry, along with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Wordsworth and Coleridge were friends who, for a brief time, lived quite close to each other in the Lake Country of western England. They talked about their idea of what poetry should look like, and they came out with a volume of poetry by the two of them, entitled Lyrical Ballads (1798). Two years later, Wordsworth came out with a revised version of Lyrical Ballads with just his name on it and with a Preface that reads like a manifesto.

In the Preface, Wordsworth writes: “The principal object, then, proposed in these Poems was to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible in a selection of language really used by men, and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect; and, further, and above all, to make these incidents and situations interesting by tracing in them, truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature: chiefly, as far as regards the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement” (http://www.bartleby.com/39/36.html).

Again he writes: “There will also be found in these volumes little of what is usually called poetic diction; as much pains has been taken to avoid it as is ordinarily taken to produce it; this has been done for the reason already alleged, to bring my language near to the language of men; and further, because the pleasure which I have proposed to myself to impart, is of a kind very different from that which is supposed by many persons to be the proper object of poetry.”

And again: “What is a Poet? to whom does he address himself? and what language is to be expected from him?—He is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind; a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him.”

This is all new territory, at least in 1800. Wordsworth is reacting to the dying gasps of the NeoClassical movement in poetry that had dominated the 18^th century. So while Wordsworth’s poetry may not seem incredibly like new territory to us, reading it in the 21^st century, in its time it was nearly revolutionary.

While the most famous poem of the Lyrical Ballads is the one we now call simply “Tintern Abbey,” I’m going to share one of the lesser-known ones, “The Dungeon.”

And this place our forefathers made for man!
This is the process of our love and wisdom,
To each poor brother who offends against us—
Most innocent, perhaps—and what if guilty?
Is this the only cure? Merciful God?
Each pore and natural outlet shrivell’d up
By ignorance and parching poverty,
His energies roll back upon his heart,
And stagnate and corrupt; till changed to poison,
They break out on him, like a loathsome plague-spot;
Then we call in our pamper’d mountebanks—
And this is their best cure! uncomforted
And friendless solitude, groaning and tears,
And savage faces, at the clanking hour,
Seen through the steams and vapour of his dungeon,
By the lamp’s dismal twilight! So he lies
Circled with evil, till his very soul
Unmoulds its essence, hopelessly deformed
By sights of ever more deformity!

With other ministrations thou, O nature!
Healest thy wandering and distempered child:
Thou pourest on him thy soft influences,
Thy sunny hues, fair forms, and breathing sweets,
Thy melodies of woods, and winds, and waters,
Till he relent, and can no more endure
To be a jarring and a dissonant thing,
Amid this general dance and minstrelsy;
But, bursting into tears, wins back his way,
His angry spirit healed and harmonized
By the benignant touch of love and beauty.

 

In 1798, this kind of verse was definitely neoteric.

 

The image is William Wordsworth at 28 by William Shuter.