Conclusion: the Deployment of the New-Modelled Lyric by Wordsworth

Abstract

At the end of the eighteenth century, in the work of William Wordsworth, ethos-occasioned poetics attained the ‘Romantic’ form in which it finally became the first-person epiphanic narrative. Wordsworth is the poet who brings the new ethos-occasioned poetics to complete hegemony. By showing the tremendous debt Wordsworth’s poetry owes to the mid-eighteenth-century innovators, I hope to suggest (in a necessarily brief manner) how the rules and limits of the poetics first deployed by the great mid-eighteenth-century innovators became the predominant (though by no means the only) poetics of most of the nineteenth century.

One is ashamed to be pleased with the works of one knows not whom.

Henry MacKenzie, The Man of Feeling

It is indeed true, that the language of the earliest Poets was … the language of extraordinary occasions …

William Wordsworth, 1802 Appendix, Preface to the Lyrical Ballads