(“Prelude,” Bk. VI, ll. 109-112) In these lines we have summed up one of the main Romantic indictments against the practice of the “classical” poets, who were too wont to regard the language of poetry as a mere collection or accepted aggregate of words, phrases, and similes, empty of all personal feeling and emotion.[251] Wordsworth, too, in this passage not unfairly describes the sort of atmosphere in which diction of the stock eighteenth century type flourished. The neo-classical interpretation of the Aristotelian doctrine of poetry as an imitation had by the time of Pope and his school resulted in a real critical confusion, which saw the essence of poetry in a slavish adherence to accepted models, and regarded its ideal language as choice flowers and figures of speech consecrated to poetry by traditional use, and used by the poet very much as the painter uses his colours, that is, as pigments laid on from the outside. That this doctrine of imitation and parallelism directly encourages the growth of a set poetic diction is obvious; the poet’s language need not be the reflection of a genuine emotion felt in the mind: he could always find his words, phrases, and figures of speech in accepted and consecrated models. The reaction against this artificial diction is fundamental in the Romantic revolt from another cause than that of poetic form. The stock poetic language, we have seen, occurs mainly in what may be called the “nature” poetry of the period, and its set words and phrases are for the most part descriptive terms of outdoor sights and sounds. Among the many descriptions or explanations of the Romantic movement is that it was in its essence a “return to Nature,” which is sometimes taken to imply that “Nature,” as we in the twentieth century think of it, was a sudden new vision, of which glimpses were first caught by James Thomson, and which finally culminated in Wordsworth’s “confession of faith.” Yet there was, of course, plenty of “nature poetry” in the neo-classical period; but it was for the most part nature from the point of view of the Town, or as seen from the study window with a poetical “Thesaurus” at the writer’s side, or stored in his memory as a result of his reading. It was not written with “the eye on the object.” More fatal still, if the neo-classical poets did look, they could see little beauty in the external world; they “had lost the best of the senses; they had ceased to perceive with joy and interpret with insight the colour and outline of things, the cadence of sound and motion, the life of creatures.”[252]