ABSTRACT
William Wordsworth's version of an authentic language for poetry stands forth with a great deal of moral and logical integrity. Wordsworth's version of an authentic language for poetry stands forth with a great deal of moral and logical integrity. The continuities and discontinuities between the arguments of Wordsworth's poems and the recoverable details of life in the Lake District are not always open to conclusive proof, but they are occasionally so, and always pertinent to any explanation of the poetry of displacement. Wallace Douglas argues that the real character of the remote parts of the Lake counties was primitive and backward, so that the old ways of life were disappearing more from their own inner contradictions than from outside pressures. The preface to Lyrical Ballads was probably written in the Lake District, and the ideals that it puts forward are significantly formed by the poet's sense of the effects of a marginal subsistence culture.
