Introduction

Abstract

Hazlitt’s comments on Wordsworth’s ‘genius’ imply that he is of his age but only of his age, that he was relevant only to his own era. From our privileged viewpoint here over 175 years on, we can say that he was only partly correct. Wordsworth was certainly the man of his moment, but he speaks to all eras — a poet speaking to mankind.

Mr Wordsworth’s genius is a pure emanation of the Spirit of the Age. Had he lived in any other period of the world, he would never have been heard of. … He takes the simplest elements of nature and of the human mind, the mere abstract conditions inseparable from our being, and tries to compound a new system of poetry from them. … Hence the unaccountable mixture of seeming simplicity and real abstruseness in the Lyrical Ballads. Fools have laughed at, wise men scarcely understood them.

(William Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age, 1825)

[Mr Coleridge] … the sleep walker, the dreamer, the sophist, the word hunter, the craver after sympathy, but still vulnerable to truth, accessible to opinion because not sordid or mechanical.

(William Hazlitt, ‘The Letter Bell’, 1830)