imitators were so like Pope that it was hard to draw a line and say
where they ceased to be poets. At last, however, this imitative
school began to prove too much. If all the insipid verses which they
wrote were poetry, what was the use of writing poetry at all? A
reaction succeeded, which asserted that poetry depends on emotion
and not on polish; that it consists precisely in those things which
frigid imitators lack. Cowper, Burns, and Crabbe, (especially in his
_Sir Eustace Grey_), had preceded Wordsworth as leaders of this
reaction. But they had acted half unconsciously, or had even at
times themselves attempted to copy the very style which they were
superseding.

Wordsworth, too, began with a tendency to imitate Pope, but only in
the school exercises which he wrote as a boy. Poetry soon became to
him the expression of his own deep and simple feelings; and then he
rebelled against rhetoric and unreality and found for himself a
director and truer voice, "I have proposed to myself to imitate and,
as far as is possible, to adopt the very language of men.... I have
taken as much pains to avoid what is usually called poetic diction as
others ordinarily take to produce it." And he erected this practice
into a general principle in the following passage:--

"I do not doubt that it may be safely affirmed that there neither is,
nor can be, any essential difference between the language of prose
and metrical composition. We are fond of tracing the resemblance
between poetry and painting, and, accordingly, we call them sisters;
but where shall we find bonds of connexion sufficiently strict to
typify the affinity between metrical and prose composition? If it be
affirmed that rhyme and metrical arrangement of themselves
constitute a distinction which overturns what I have been saying on