Common missions in Wordsworth’s Preface to The Lyrical Ballads and John Wesley’s Preface to the Methodist Hymns

In this chapter, the author examines the views and practice of John Wesley and William Wordsworth, so far considered separately, in order to emphasis what she believe to be an affinity in the moral and literary objectives of the two men. She offers a comparative analysis of the defenses of their poetic method with reference to Wesley’s 1779 Preface to A Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People Called Methodists, and Wordsworth’s Preface to The Lyrical Ballads. Wesley’s aim is naturally more doctrinally specific than Wordsworth’s broadly moral design, his new, more comprehensive collection of hymns being designed to make generally accessible ‘all the most important truths of our most holy religion’. The central commitment to truth which governed Wesley and Wordsworth’s communicative theory and practice was emphatically asserted. Wordsworth and Wesley’s reformative claims for their verse challenged contemporary perceptions of the essentially recreational function of poetry.