ABSTRACT
William Wordsworth's new style is the result of his discovering new subjects for poetry, the new material of his own life. A poet writing after Wordsworth might have justified such a decision as being an innovation and closer to experience. Wordsworth uses three techniques to expand the sentence: he adds, modifies and repeats. Wordsworth uses long sentences to merge separate experiences and he interprets experiences by the manner in which he re-constructs them. De Quincey shows Wordsworth thinking in terms of moments and combining two very specific experiences in order to derive psychological principles. Wordsworth's work habits, moreover, were not such as to provide very much material for the study of his punctuation. A number of letters survive from Wordsworth to the printers Biggs and Cottle in Bristol that show his concern with the second edition of Lyrical Ballads. The language of Yew-Trees is active, but unlike Milton, Wordsworth is not primarily interested in reporting action or actuality.
