"Every great poet," he said, "is a teacher; I wish either to be considered as a teacher or as nothing."
And he avowed that the purpose of his poetry was "to console the afflicted; to add sunshine to daylight by making the happy happier; to teach the young and the gracious of every age to see, to think and feel, and therefore to become more actively and securely virtuous."
"Love had he found in huts where poor men lie,
His daily teachings had been woods and rills,
The silence that is in the starry sky,
The sleep that is among the lonely hills."
"Wordsworth," says John Campbell Shairp, "was the first who, both in theory and practice, shook off the trammels of the so-called poetic diction which had tyrannized over English poetry for more than a century. This diction of course exactly represented the half-courtly, half-classical mode of thinking and feeling. As Wordsworth rebelled against this conventionality of spirit, so against the outward expression of it. The whole of the stock phrases and used-up metaphors he discarded, and returned to living language of natural feeling, as it is used by men, instead of the dead form of it which had got stereotyped in books. And just as in his subjects he had taken in from the waste much virgin soil, so in his diction he appropriated for poetic use a large amount of words, idioms, metaphors, till then by the poets disallowed. His shorter poems, both the earlier and the later, are, for the most part, very models of natural, powerful, and yet sensitive English; the language being, like a garment, woven out of, and transparent with, the thought."
Other Poems to be Read: We are Seven; The Pet Lamb; To a Highland Girl; Laodamia; Matthew; The Fountain; The Wishing Gate; To the Small Celandine; "Three Years She Grew"; "She was a Phantom of Delight"; At the Grave of Burns.
References: Shairp's Studies in Poetry and Philosophy; Hazlitt's English Poets; De Quincey's Miscellaneous Works; Literature and Life, by E. P. Whipple; Wordsworth (English Men of Letters), by Goldwin Smith; Yesterdays with Authors, by James T. Fields; Among My Books, Second Series, by J. R. Lowell; Matthew Arnold's Introduction to the Poems of William Wordsworth.
