SOURCE: Barstow, Marjorie Latta. “The Lyrical Ballads.” In Wordsworth's Theory of Poetic Diction, pp. 141-82. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1917.

In the following excerpt, Barstow discusses Wordsworth's experimental use of the language of common individuals in Lyrical Ballads, noting that his attempt to reflect psychological states through diction was not successful.

Although Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction had a sounder basis in literary tradition and in psychology than an ignorant world of letters was prepared to admit, his own application of it, in its first extreme form, was very limited in time and in extent. Only in the “Advertisement to the Lyrical Ballads” of 1798 does he say that he means to employ the ‘language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society’; and only in this volume does he actually succeed in doing so. But even here he makes use of this language simply as an...