@article{oai:icu.repo.nii.ac.jp:00000092,
 author = {Simons, Christopher E. J.},
 issue = {41},
 journal = {人文科学研究 （キリスト教と文化）, Humanities: Christianity and Culture},
 month = {Mar},
 note = {In the Preface to the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads (1800), his first
sustained piece of literary criticism, William Wordsworth establishes both
stylistic and social objectives for English poetry. Wordsworth rails against
the poor literary taste of his times, including ʻfrantic novels, sickly and
stupid German Tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in
verse.ʼ This paper considers the specific meaning of Wordsworthʼs attack
on ʻidle and extravagant stories in verse,ʼ in the context of the history of
narrative poetry in English literature, and Wordsworthʼs own narrative
ballads. The paper begins by considering how to evaluate Wordsworthʼs
criticisms of idleness and extravagance on a poetic level, and subsequently
develops four criteria by which a narrative poem can be judged as idle or
extravagant: if it lacks ʻworthʼ to the reader and society beyond mere
diversion and entertainment; if its characters and action encourage
idleness in the reader by imitation; if the poem lacks narrative and
psychological realism; and if it contains excesses of language, description,
and digression. The paper then applies this critical model to four
narratives from four periods of English poetry: Sir Gawain and the Green
Knight, Chaucerʼs The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale; Popeʼs The Rape of the
Lock; and finally, Wordsworthʼs Peter Bell. The paper demonstrates that
each of these poems fails Wordsworthʼs critical test and is ʻidle and
extravagantʼ to some degree, usually through the explicit design of the
poet. The paper concludes that while carefully constructing his own
poetical and social aims for narrative poetry in the Preface, Wordsworth
fails to concede that many of the greatest narrative poems in English
literature meet his conditions for ʻidle and extravagant stories in verse.ʼ Yet
Wordsworthʼs own narrative poems achieve a balance between the festive
morality of Gawain, and Chaucerʼs salacious language in The Canterbury
Tales, by using stylistic extravagance to create a portrait of everyday
human life which heightens the psychological realism, and hence the
moral impact, of his ballad narratives.},
 pages = {31--70},
 title = {ʻIdle and Extravagant Stories in Verseʼ: 400 Years of Narrative Poetry from Sir Gawain to Wordsworth},
 year = {2013}
}