Putting the Poetry in Order: Poems in Two Volumes (1807)

Abstract

In the course of the last four chapters Wordsworth has become a poet of divided aims. Lyrical Ballads sets him in the public eye as a gifted but awkward poet. He is the author of short, unusual lyric pieces, of curiously obtuse narrative poetry like ‘The Idiot Boy’ and ‘The Thorn’, a poet who could excite sympathy and even admiration with ‘Tintern Abbey’, and after 1800 a poet on his way to becoming a laughing-stock in the reviews for his commitment to an eccentrically ‘simple’ style of poetry. While this is happening, and taking his career as a poet with it, he is also striving to compose The Recluse, an epic philosophical poem intended to stand alongside Milton’s Paradise Lost as a work of universal significance.

My apprehensions come in crowds;

I dread the rustling of the grass;

The very shadows of the clouds

Have power to shake me as they pass …

(‘The Affliction of Margaret’ Poems 1807, 91, 64–7)