The first person to claim that Wordsworth’s “Preface” is “half a child of my own Brain” was, of course, Coleridge. It is less original than has sometimes been thought, however, in that many of its aesthetic, psychological, and sociological presuppositions are quite commonplace, especially in the numerous writings on aesthetics in English which appeared during the eighteenth century, based often on the associationist psychology of Locke and Hartley or on the primitivistic theories of culture and literature which are characteristic of the Scottish “Common-sense” philosophers (112). As Owen and Smyser put it: The Preface to Lyrical Ballads is Wordsworth’s best known critical work, and his most original essay in aesthetics in the sense that it often appears to be the result of his introspective examination of his own poetic processes. Recent research, however, reveals that there is almost nothing original in the “Preface”. A manifesto of a movement purporting to usher in a new trend in poetry is expected to offer at least a few original ideas.
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