ABSTRACT
The Wordsworth that seems to emerge from the poems of 1797-1807 is a poet trying to discover what it is to be a living mind. He is interested in the parent principle of responsiveness, and, equally, in the balancing activity of consolidation. To accept Wordsworth's poetry we must accept his 'active universe' and the possibility of interaction between it and its indwellers. Lyrical Ballads is devoted mainly to pointing out the dislocation between man and nature. Wordsworth considered 'The Apotheosis of the Animal' to be his finest imaginative conception. Wordsworth's Doe is a subtler creation than Lawrence's stallion. In the animal and the girl together Wordsworth was striving to define a natural catholicity, a catholicity deeper than what the Priory could express, yet also one which the ruined shrine would approve even if the congregation meeting there each Sunday could not understand it.
