ABSTRACT
I have just got through a new book of your friend Coleridge’s, his ‘Biographia Literaria,’ which I suppose you have seen. It contains an account of himself, which in many places is amusing enough; but it appears to me to be of considerable consequence from the critical parts of it, which will, I think, completely change the state of the question about the ‘Lake School.’ For to my astonishment I find it full of good sense and fair rational criticism, and containing a condemnation of all those parts of
Wordsworth, both of his theory and his practice, to which I should object – denying his whole theory about poetical diction and the resemblance of poetry to real life, and low life, and blaming almost all those poems which he has written upon his theory, condemning his prosaic style, his puerilities, his mystical and inflated language, and wonderments about the most every-day things, his matter of factness, his attachment to pedlars, his deification of children, and in short everything, or almost everything, that other people have made a pretext for laughing at the whole, he takes out and laughs at by itself.
