The context is how poetry about the heroes of Ancient Greece is good because it is instructive for how to have good morals. However, such also distorts what it means to be good by showing how even if one does the right thing, one may still end up unhappy. According to Plato, the common man does not truly learn because he is not intellectual prepared enough to do so, since he lacks an educated and an inherent knack for intellectualism. Instead common men imitate, and “if [the common men] do imitate, they must imitate from childhood what is appropriate for them, namely, people who are courageous, self-controlled, pious, and free, and their actions” (395c). It is limiting to the common men to restrict what poetry is available to them, and by …show more content…
In one particular instance, he remembers, “His form hath flashed upon me, glorified/ By the deep radiance of the setting sun:/ Or him have I descried in distant sky, / A solitary object and sublime” where he frankly uses the word ‘sublime’ (Lines 268-272). Even though it is from the point of view of a child though the language is heavily elevated, Wordsworth offers a perspective on the common man’s life that would make it elevated in an intellectual way. For the lower classes, this is a benefit of poetry to their profession, one that memorializes them in history alongside great heroes of the typical poetry. Although the poem itself is not written by a common man, it stills shares their voice; and Wordsworth did try to utilize the speech of the common much more than his …show more content…
Its range is limited, and when exhausted, nothing remains but the crambe repetita of common-place, which at length becomes thoroughly wearisome, even to the most indefatigable readers of the newest new nothings.” (8) Essentially, Peacock explains how with poetry, there has been nothing new under the sun for some time, and therefore writing about the common even in the newest and most exciting ways still does not change the fact that these experiences are common. To write the experiences as anything other than what they are is to distort the truth. The implication is that even though the common man would be familiar with these experiences, to read about the experiences would be to mislead the common man; however, Peacock just stated that these experiences would have been common, so it stands that his faulty circular reasoning is one out of prejudice and elitism. This is proven further when he then goes out to point that poetry is a dying field of profession when compared to the new social sciences like studying the economy and politics of the