ABSTRACT
William Wordsworth is the first European poet to make a thoroughgoing attempt to represent feeling from the inside, to be vividly aware of feeling as having an outside and an inside. The purpose of the poems in Lyrical Ballads is, he declares, 'to follow the fluxes and refluxes of the mind when agitated by the great and simple affections' and to trace 'the primary laws of our nature'. Moods become objects in Wordsworth's poetry and so does language. The poems of 'Moods of My Own Mind' may appear unremarkable to us because our poetry is founded upon the same assumptions. De Selincourt comments in his 'Preface' to The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth that 'the classification and order in which Wordsworth arranged his poems will not stand logical examination'. In the 'Preface' of 1815 Wordsworth specified that his chronological sequence terminated 'with Old Age, Death and Immortality'.
