ABSTRACT
This chapter concerns the rhetorical strategy, Wordsworth uses in the 'Preface' to establish his concepts of the poet and lyric poetry as standards of health. He enforces the equation of his poetry and his poetic persona with health by establishing nature and ethical interiority as unassailable categories whose definitions he can present as common sense. Wordsworth opens his famous critical argument in the 'Preface' to Lyrical Ballads on the importance of the lyric by denying that he is doing anything other than allowing his poetry to speak for itself. The implication in Wordsworth's assurance of having looked steadily at his subject is that he has indeed maintained healthy ethical governance by watching over the lower faculties with the higher ones. Coleridge repeatedly tries to delineate a critical framework on par with that Wordsworth presents in the 'Preface'. Two of the Biographia, Coleridge provides the measure of healthy poetry that will serve as his framework for the poet's lyrics.
