...heightening causes the scenes and situations of life to be tinctured with "a certain coloring of the imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect." This estrangement of the ordinary, the transformation of the familiar into the unfamiliar,...

...1801). Wordsworth's explanation is well known: the poems were to make the incidents of common life interesting 'by tracing in them, truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature . . . Low and rustic life was generally chosen because in that situation the essential passions of...

...preface, William Wordsworth declares his intent to make the incidents and situations of common life "interesting by tracing in them, truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature" (Wordsworth and Coleridge 238-39). His claim for "interest" in his work, however, appears to stimulate...

...his poems in the Lyrical Ballads. Wordsworth also speaks of throwing over the language of such people 'a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary...should be presented to the mind in an unusual way'. Again, we need to ask whose imagination is performing this process of covering and colouring. And again...

...reminds us that poetry tries, for its goal, "at the same time, to throw over them a certain coloring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual way . . ." Presumably this secondary task is accomplished by unusual language. The question then is not...

...Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth. looks in one direction, proposing to make "the incidents of common life interesting by tracing in them, truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature" (ed. Owen, 156). Percy Bysshe Shelley looked the opposite way, regarding the poets themselves as lawgivers....

...selection of language really used by men. and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain coloring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect. Yeats took a similar view when, in "The Trembling of the Veil" in his Autobiography, he had...

...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,...should be presented to the mind in an unusual way. Contrasts between the Augustan and Romantic ages are helpful but there are always exceptions to such...

...strives for a language "whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect; and, further, and above all, to make these incidents...not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature" (71; italics mine). Here what is novel shocks us out of our complacency precisely because it lays bare...

...the "humble and rustic," and there "to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to ... throw over them a certain colouring of imagination,...things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect."14 Similar ideas were part of the fabric of German thought as welL Novalis described the need...