ABSTRACT
William Wordsworth told Matthew Arnold 'that, for he knew not how many years, his poetry had never brought him in enough to buy his shoestrings'. Certainly among the French, whose poets contributed so much to the making of modern poetry, the few writers who were interested in English literature were not very interested in Wordsworth. To Wordsworth consciousness is a changing unity composed of a vast number of sensations, each virtually an entity in itself, yet merging with other sensations whose origins are beyond memory. There is no writer before Wordsworth who has such a complete understanding of the significance of childhood in human development. Wordsworth's assumptions, his hard-won discoveries and poetic modes are shared by virtually every European poet who comes after him, down to the present day. From Wordsworth to the present a profound sense of the individuality and, therefore, formlessness of every sensation shapes the creation of literary form.
