ABSTRACT
There are good reasons, then, for thinking that the English Romantics held a theory of literary kinds at least as ardently as the Augustans had done, and that they practised it more consistently. The case for supposing that they preferred the inchoate and the fragmentary can hardly be made on the evidence, certainly, and probably arises from a simple confusion of the English Romantics with the Germans. Wordsworth, as late as the 1815 Preface, was content with the traditional doctrine that there are 'laws and appropriate graces of every species of composition', and listed seven poetic forms, six of them classical and the seventh no more novel than the 'composite order' of Young's Night-Thoughts and Cowper's Task. The poet imitates Nature, as European critics had known since Aristotle; he imitates its inward essence, according to a later refinement which Coleridge held, 'that which is within the thing' or its natura naturans.
