“Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquility gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.” - William Wordsworth
My Brit Lit professor made a big deal of this passage from Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads (found in our Norton Anthology, of course). I remember him asking us in class to make sense of this quote. One student, a girl who had an answer to everything, raised her hand and commented on her own experience with poetry, saying that she felt her poetry was best when she took her feelings the moment she felt them and wrote them into words.
The professor let her finish her thought, then said, “That’s good, but I don’t think that’s quite it” in that voice that meant we were missing something important.
I timidly raised my hand, one of only two times I voluntarily offered my opinion during that class. The professor nodded at me and I said, “I think the most important part of this passage is the ‘recollected in tranquility’ part.”
“Good,” he said. “Why do you say that?”
“Well, I don’t know, when I’m right in the middle of going through something and I try to write it into poetry, it usually ends up pretty crappy. It’s when I take the time to process what I’m feeling and then write a poem from it that it accurately describes how I feel in a ‘pretty’ way.”
I got a verbal pat-on-the-back from my professor and became the brief envy of every other student in the class for my stumblingly, accidentally eloquent response and since then, I haven’t been able to get the phrase “recollected in tranquility” out of my mind.
This came up obliquely in a conversation I had with a friend the other day. I think I was trying to explain why I’m not seeking to publish any of my work at the moment and I managed to stutter out something about how I’m still working through all of my issues and that results in writing that doesn’t mean anything to anyone but me. I wish I had had the presence of mind (and the ability to say things like this without seeming overly pretentious) to say what I was actually thinking, which was, “Recollected. In. Tranquility.”
I have this immense desire to share my story, to tell the world what really goes on in the lives of missionary kids, to open up and peel apart my experiences for anyone to see, but so many of my emotions haven’t yet reached that tranquil state that Wordsworth wrote about. I’m processing twenty-two years of life and yes, I mostly do this through my writing, but that doesn’t mean that what I write is good yet.
Maybe someday soon I’ll find that tranquility.
