ABSTRACT

The political significance of using the plain and emphatic language is made clear when, in an outburst against new taxes destined to fund the war with France, the radical William Frend demands that his readers attend to the 'real language of men' — and women. The last poem in the 1798 edition of Lyrical Ballads, 'Tintern Abbey', shares many of its preoccupations with 'Lines left upon a Seat' and 'The Female Vagrant'. In May and June 1794, Wordsworth wrote to his friend William Mathews to discuss the place of political debate in the journal the two men were proposing to publish, declaring himself 'of that odious class of men called democrats', and arguing that their journal should not be among those 'written to maintain the existence of prejudice and to disseminate error'. Wordsworth's purpose seems to be to reflect on how much poetry could throw off inauthenticity to become genuinely part of a common culture, a 'natural and unalienable inheritance'.