Poet’s Corner: Wordsworth’s Preface 1

22 July 2026

(28 August 2015) I cannot leave the ‘elder Romantics’–Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge–without looking at what these poets had to say about their own poetry, in particular, Wordsworth and Coleridge. In the 1790s, Wordsworth met Coleridge in the Lake Country, where the two had many long conversations about poetry and what they thought it ought to be. The result of these conversations was the 1798 “Lyrical Ballads,” published anonymously and containing poems of this new style (like Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”). As a result of its success, Coleridge went off to Germany, to study philosophy, while Wordsworth stayed behind. A second edition was called for, and, without consulting Coleridge, Wordsworth edited the collection, moving Coleridge’s “Ancient Mariner” from first to last, adding both a preface and some of his latest poems.

In this preface, Wordsworth tried to describe what they intended with their new poetry, calling it “an experiment,” to see “how far, by fitting to metrical arrangement a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation.” He later tells the reader that he would “choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible in a selection of language really used by men, and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain coloring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect.” This move is what separated the Romantics from the previous generation of poets, like Alexander Pope, who used “poetic language” to describe high concepts, things important to the nobility and beyond the common people. Wordsworth (and Coleridge) wanted to write poetry that would appeal to all, not about noble subjects, but those common, using everyday language (within the limits of good sense!). Wordsworth believed that in this move the poet would be getting back to nature, so to speak, for he felt that there were greater passions to be found in the everyday.

Wordsworth goes on to define “good poetry” as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: and though this be true, Poems to which any value can be attached were never produced on any variety of subjects but by a man who, being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility, had also thought long and deeply.” In these feelings, Wordsworth thought to discover those things of most import to all, and so he took this as a starting point for his poetry. We looked at a couple of examples of these more “organic” poems in “The Solitary Reaper,” and “Resolution and Independence,” and saw both the common woman reaping in a field, and the old leach gatherer, eking out a living by moving from pond to pond and collecting leaches to be sold to doctors. None in Wordsworth’s day could argue with the idea that these characters, and others like them, were anything but ‘common!’

On Friday, we will continue this discussion, looking at more of what Wordsworth wrote about both poet and poetry in this preface before turning to Coleridge’s response & clarification, published in 1815 in his “Biographia Literaria.” Until then, good reading!