SOURCE: Pfau, Thomas. “‘Elementary Feelings’ and ‘Distorted Language’: The Pragmatics of Culture in Wordsworth's ‘Preface to Lyrical Ballads.’” New Literary History, no. 24 (1993): 125-46.

In the following essay, Pfau provides a revisionist reading of the “Preface” to the Lyrical Ballads, looking past the traditional connotations of the Romantic verbiage that Wordsworth employs and finding “a landmark document in romantic cultural and social theory.”

Few texts of the romantic period are more firmly anchored in the curricular and pedagogical agenda of current romantic studies than Wordsworth's “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” a circumstance as commonplace as it is puzzling given what, for the past half century, criticism has found to say about that text. For notwithstanding its own, high-profile investment in a pedagogy concerned with reshaping the sensibility underlying both the production and reception of poetry, Wordsworth's text has almost universally been regarded as marked by internal tensions, inconsistencies, discontinuous argument...