WORDSWORTH’S answer to the question “What is a poet?” would be one of the most important pieces of English prose, if it had no other merit than that of suggesting the reasons for the position he assumed when against the general judgment of his contemporaries he attempted to illustrate poetry as the simple and natural expression of what is of all things in man, the most natural, the least artificial—the intuitions and emotions of which, when they are unperverted, reason is properly the servant. As his method was a protest against the artificiality of the school of Pope, a needless quarrel and much bitterness resulted. The solution of the whole difficulty seems to be that verse is not necessarily poetry because it is simple, and that it may easily cease to be poetry by becoming too highly artistic in its forms of expression. Wordsworth himself wrote a good deal of more or less metrical prose, generally of a good literary quality, in illustrating his theories of simplicity, just as disciples of Pope wrote in intolerably good metre much that was neither prose nor poetry, nor in any true sense literature. But over and above all this, poetry is what Wordsworth calls it—“the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science,” “the first and last of all knowledge”—“as immortal as the heart of man.”

  Born in Cumberland, England, April 7th, 1770, Wordsworth became Poet Laureate in 1843 and died April 23d, 1850. With Coleridge and Southey, he established the Lake School of English poetry as a protest against the formalism of Pope. The radical revolution in the mode of poetical expression which followed may have been due to such conscious effort as that of the Lake Poets, but no doubt the influence of the intense and wholly unartificial melody of the verse of Robert Burns would have finally brought about the same result even had no theory of opposition to Pope been formulated. It is curious that while the sonnet has the reputation of being a highly artificial form of versification, Wordsworth’s theories of simplicity and naturalness are illustrated in his sonnets more pleasingly than in either the “Prelude” or the “Excursion.”