So, what's special about Wordsworth as a poet? He's often thought of as a radical innovator, even if most of the things he does are not in themselves new. There were other 18th-century poets who wrote about non-exalted subject-matter (ploughmen and peasants, not nymphs and goddesses) and chose their language from the registers of everyday prose; other poets were not afraid to use ballad form when they had a story to tell; other poets wrote in the first person and didn't claim to be objective observers of universal truths; other poets found a pathway to the sublime and transcendent through their experience of the natural world. Just think about Gray, Burns and Goldsmith, for example.

But Wordsworth did all these things more richly, assertively, naturally, consistently and sympathetically than his predecessors. And got richly and assertively mocked for it by critics, like Francis Jeffrey of the Edinburgh Review, who felt that it was ridiculous for a serious poet to waste his time on leech-gatherers, idiot boys, Alice Fell, and aged beggars. Which is ironic, because it is precisely that slightly sentimental sympathetic involvement with the real human stories behind individual suffering that made him so popular with many Victorian readers. (It's also interesting that many of these poems about lower-class "characters" come directly from Dorothy's notes - easy enough to imagine that it was she who inspired him to talk to the people they met when they were out and about and discover their stories.)

The poems about the poet's encounters with nature (Daffodils, skylarks, cuckoos, rainbows, etc.) are more difficult to take seriously, because they have been so cheapened by over-exposure. When we see the line "I wander'd lonely as a cloud", we don't think about clouds, we think of the jokes and parodies and perversions of this line that we all know - I think the first thing that comes to my mind is the 1980s Heineken commercial ("Refreshes the poets other beers cannot reach..."). And I don't see how anyone can still take "My heart leaps up" seriously... But they do often have an unexpected power if you can somehow persuade yourself to read them as though for the first time - that worked for me with "To a skylark", when I suddenly found myself thinking about it as though it had been written by Gerald Manley Hopkins. Which it could easily have been, had Wordsworth not got there first, with something that comes very close to GMH's "sprung rhythm". And "Westminster Bridge" is still as nearly perfect as an English sonnet can be, even if you've heard it badly recited a thousand times. So, there's still plenty in this book that isn't as predictable as you thought it was going to be... ( )