Preface to Lyrical Ballads

Meter is the arrangement of words in rhythmic lines in poetry. In Wordsworth’s time, it was generally assumed that poetry would adhere to established, regular metrical schemes and patterns such as iambic, dactylic, etcetera.

Wordsworth believes that his poetry will interest the public by virtue of “the multiplicity and quality of its moral relations” (14). He states this idea twice, toward the beginning and at the conclusion of the essay. Wordsworth was concerned in much of his poetry with how the natural environment could teach moral lessons and heal society of its ills and injustices, exemplified for him in the events of the French Revolution. Wordsworth’s poems emphasize the importance of duty and morality, and he wrote that one of the functions of poetry was to help people “to become more actively and securely virtuous” (Letter to Lady Beaumont).

The word “nature” had many meanings to Romanticist artists and holds a number of senses in the “Preface.” In all, the word appears 21 times, showing the importance of the term to thinkers of the 18th and 19th centuries.

In its widest sense, “nature” denotes the vast order of causes and effects in the universe, of which humankind is a part. More narrowly, “nature” can refer to the physical environment and scenery that humans inhabit—mountains, trees, animals, rivers. “Nature” can also mean the essential qualities of a person or thing, e.g., “human nature.” It is in this sense that Wordsworth’s poetry seeks to express “the primary laws of our nature” (3). He also speaks of “nature” in the sense of the essential quality of all things, or the way things are, when he argues that poetry should imitate nature without dressing it up in artificial language (12). The principle that art “imitates nature” originated in ancient Greco-Roman thought and was still widely held in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Wordsworth alludes to the meaning of “nature” as physical environment and scenery when he speaks of rural life as an ideal subject for poetry (3). Additionally, “nature” is sometimes taken to mean everything aside from humankind, as when Wordsworth states that humans and nature are “adapted to each other” and that nature is the object of our studies (10).

Poetry is literary work in metrical form or literary work in which language is chosen and arranged for its meaning, sound, and rhythm. The “Preface” is essentially a defense of certain ideas about purpose and style in poetry.

Prose is the ordinary form of spoken and written language, without deliberate metrical structure, as distinguished from poetry or verse. Wordsworth’s ideas about the similarity and differences between poetic and prose style form an important part of his discussion in the “Preface.”