In his preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth briefly touches upon the principle of “the pleasure which the mind derives from similitude in dissimilitude” (610) in relation to poetry and even gender. He also tells us that “Poetry is the image of man and nature." He also describes how the poet will “bring his feelings near to those of the persons whose feelings he describes." Yet Wordsworth also stipulates, “he will supply the principle on which I have so much insisted, namely, that of selection; on this he will depend for removing what would otherwise be painful or disgusting in the passion."
Question: Since pain and disgust are as much part of the human experience as love and beauty, how does Wordsworth reconcile his poetics of the “image of man” and the “persons whose feelings he describes,” if he insists that anything “painful or disgusting” must be edited out? Since memory is both easily corrupted and highly subjective, is Wordsworth's depiction of the way in which memory functions, as described in both the Preface and Tintern Abbey, realistic or believable?