William Wordsworth (1770-1850), the chief of the three, and, perhaps, on the whole, the greatest English poet since Milton, published his _Lyrical Ballads_ in 1798. The volume contained a few pieces by his friend Coleridge--among them the _Ancient Mariner_--and its appearance may fairly be said to mark an epoch in the history of English poetry. Wordsworth regarded himself as a reformer of poetry; and in the preface to the second edition of the _Lyrical Ballads_, he defended the theory on which they were composed. His innovations were twofold: in subject-matter and in diction. "The principal object which I proposed to myself in these poems," he said, "was to choose incidents and situations from common life. Low and rustic life was generally chosen, because, in that condition, the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity...and are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature." Wordsworth discarded, in theory, the poetic diction of his predecessors, and professed to use "a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation." He adopted, he said, the language of men in rustic life, "because such men hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of language is originally derived."
In the matter of poetic diction Wordsworth did not, in his practice, adhere to the doctrine of this preface. Many of his most admired poems, such as the _Lines written near Tintern Abbey_, the great _Ode on the Intimations of Immortality_, the _Sonnets_, and many parts of his longest poems, _The Excursion_ and _The Prelude_, deal with philosophic thought and highly intellectualized emotions. In all of these and in many others the language is rich, stately, involved, and as remote from the "real language" of Westmoreland shepherds as is the epic blank verse of Milton. On the other hand, in those of his poems which were consciously written in illustration of his theory, the affectation of simplicity, coupled with a defective sense of humor, sometimes led him to the selection of vulgar and trivial themes, and the use of language which is bald, childish, or even ludicrous. His simplicity is too often the simplicity of Mother Goose rather than of Chaucer. Instances of this occur in such poems as _Peter Bell_, the _Idiot Boy_, _Goody Blake and Harry Gill_, _Simon Lee_, and the _Wagoner_. But there are multitudes of Wordsworth's ballads and lyrics which are simple without being silly, and which, in their homeliness and clear profundity, in their production of the strongest effects by the fewest strokes, are among the choicest modern examples of _pure_, as distinguished from decorated, art. Such are (out of many) _Ruth_, _Lucy_, _She was a Phantom of Delight_, _To a Highland Girl_, _The Reverie of Poor Susan_, _To the Cuckoo_, _The Solitary Reaper_, _We Are Seven_, _The Pet Lamb_, _The Fountain_, _The Two April Mornings_, _Resolution and Independence_, _The Thorn_, and _Yarrow Unvisited_.