‘Willingness for the Everyday’: Ordinariness and Agency in Three Romantic Prefaces

Taking its cue from Stanley Cavell's framing of Romanticism as a ‘quest of the ordinary’, this essay revisits the amplification of the category of the ordinary in the English literature of the Romantic era. Focusing on a specific genre, the preface to poetry, it examines the construction of poetry as a special case of that category in three Romantic prefaces: Wordsworth's ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads (1800) Hazlitt's prefatory lecture ‘On Poetry in General’ in his Lectures on the English Poets (1818) and Shelley's ‘Preface’ to Prometheus Unbound (1820). By tracing and comparing the conceptual bases of these prefaces, it attempts to nuance and discriminate their differing versions of ordinariness. Variations notwithstanding, the reciprocal characterisation of poetry and ordinariness, at the heart of the poetics of three major Romantic writers, is shown to be fundamental also to their arguments for agency and their resistance to what Cavell calls ‘the drive to the inhuman’.