Mr. Arnold’s arrangement of the Poems, in his volume of Selections [4], is extremely interesting and valuable; but, as to the method of grouping adopted, I am not sure that it is better than Wordsworth’s own.  As a descriptive title, “Poems of Sentiment and Reflection” is quite as good as “Poems akin to the Antique,” and “Poems of the Fancy” quite as appropriate as “Poems of Ballad Form.”

Wordsworth’s arrangement of his Poems in groups was psychologically very interesting; but it is open to many objections.  Unfortunately Wordsworth was not himself consistent—­in the various editions issued by himself—­either in the class into which he relegated each poem, or the order in which he placed it there.  There is tantalising topsy-turvyism in this, so that an editor who adopts it is almost compelled to select Wordsworth’s latest grouping, which was not always his best.

Sir William Rowan Hamilton wrote to Mr. Aubrey de Vere in 1835 that Dora Wordsworth told him that her father “was sometimes at a loss whether to refer her to the ‘Poems of the Imagination,’ or the ’Poems of the Fancy,’ for some particular passage.”  Aubrey de Vere himself considered Wordsworth’s arrangement as “a parade of system,” and wrote of it, “I cannot help thinking that in it, he mistakes classification for method.” [5] I confess that it is often difficult to see why some of the poems were assigned by their author to the realm of the “Fancy,” the “Imagination,” and “Sentiment and Reflection” respectively.  In a note to ‘The Horn of Egremont Castle’ (edition 1815) Wordsworth speaks of it as “referring to the imagination,” rather than as being “produced by it”; and says that he would not have placed it amongst his “Poems of the Imagination,” “but to avoid a needless multiplication of classes”; and in the editions of 1827 and 1832 he actually included the great ‘Ode’ on Immortality among his “Epitaphs and Elegiac Poems”!  As late as 27th September 1845, he wrote to Professor Henry Reed,

“Following your example” (i. e. the example set in Reed’s American edition of the Poems), “I have greatly extended the class entitled ‘Poems of the Imagination,’ thinking as you must have done that, if Imagination were predominant in the class, it was not indispensable that it should pervade every poem which it contained.  Limiting the class as I had done before, seemed to imply, and to the uncandid or observing did so, that the faculty, which is the ‘primum mobile’ in poetry, had little to do, in the estimation of the author, with pieces not arranged under that head.  I therefore feel much obliged to you for suggesting by your practice the plan which I have adopted.”

Could anything show more explicitly than this that Wordsworth was not perfectly satisfied with his own artificial groups?  Professor Reed, in his American edition of 1837, however, acted on Wordsworth’s expressed intention of distributing the contents of “Yarrow Revisited, and Other Poems” amongst the classes.  He tells us that he “interspersed the contents of this volume among the Poems already arranged” by Wordsworth. [6]