ABSTRACT
Wordsworth shows a predilection not only for the word image but for the word form, and, to a less extent, the word shape. The images of nature which the mind receives and stores are the colours and the forms of visible landscapes. The attention shifts from landscape to objects, to picture, to image and back to objects. In other words the poetry is incipiently paradoxical; and for this reason and not merely because Young used an expression that is partly recalled in Tintern Abbey it points forward to Wordsworth. Wordsworth turns now to the more important document for the purposes: The Pleasures of The Imagination. Shape the last word of the trilogy is used by Akenside as a synonym for nearly all the separate meanings of image' and form'. The contradictions inherent in sense-perception are sometimes exploited by Young in a mamier that is arresting but lacking in poetic tact.
