Key terms: Romanticism, individualism, Nature vs. nature, spontaneity vs. artifice
Sometimes today we think of Wordsworth in clichés: wandering lonely as a cloud, fields of daffodils, lots of pretty nature poems. But it's hard to underestimate what a tremendous impact his poetry and his literary theory had on his time--a time of revolutions in all aspects of life. Wordsworth was of working class stock, but a fortunate inheritance let him live and work as a poet. For most of his adult life, even after his marriage, he lived with his sister Dorothy, who saw to his comforts and arranged things so that he could have philosophical discussions with friends and neighbors like Coleridge and Southey and write his poems. Though his first volumes didn't sell well, once the first edition of Lyrical Ballads was published in 1798 he was regarded as a poetic superstar and his poems sold well. He was finally persuaded by Queen Victoria in 1843 to accept the position of Poet Laureate of England; this and a cushy, non-demanding government sinecure as a collector of stamp taxes guaranteed him the income to end his days in comfort and an increasing conservatism that caused some contempt among later Romantic poets.
Like many of the young Romantics, Wordsworth was greatly affected by the French Revolution, which he saw as an upwelling of democracy against the tyrannies of the past. In 1791 he traveled to Paris and had an affair with a young French Republican, Annette Villon, which led to the birth of an illegitimate daughter. (Wordsworth had intermittent contact with them in later years.) Returning to England, he proclaimed his world-weariness with the pollution and crowded environs of London, and with Coleridge moved to the Lake Country of England where he could be inspired daily by the sublime views of nature the countryside offered him. A big fan of Burke's Essay on the Sublime, Wordsworth and his sister often took long "rambles" across the countryside to expose the poet's sensibilities to the grandeur of nature; when he returned to Dove Cottage, their home, he would then plunge into reflective writing about the effects nature had on him. These led to works such as Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey and eventually to his long poetic autobiography, The Prelude: or The Growth of the Poet's Mind. (See especially lines 89-112 of Tintern Abbey for Wordsworth's reflections on hearing "the still, sad music of humanity(" in the presence of the sublime.) In Tintern Abbey the stanza of lines 23-50 explains the Romantic mode of seeing "into the life of things" through reflection. His view of nature is encapsulated in lines 103-112 as it connects nature with the development of the "moral sense" of the poet. (In Romantic poetry, Nature in its various forms--Spring, the West Wind, etc.--replaces the role of the Deity in earlier poetry because of this identification of Nature with the moral sense.)
It was while living in the Lake Country that Wordsworth developed the theories that he espoused in the preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads in 1802--the long argument about the proper subject for poetry being "emotion recollected in tranquility" (212). The short selections you have in the text from the Preface detail his poetics: the object of capturing simple, honest rustic life instead of some abstract generalizations or long-ago mythological subjects (p. 206); to try to imitate (but improve through artifice) the spontaneous language of ordinary people (205-206); and to capture "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" through individualized, personal poetry that celebrates the impact of nature on the senses of a perceptive observer-poet (206-207). (Note that this is the scientific observer of the 18th century, but metamorphosed into a different kind of observer.) It's interesting to compare his attitude toward the role of literary language and observation with what Dr. Johnson said in the Rambler on fiction.
In the Preface to Lyrical Ballads (most significant version is 1802), Wordsworth argues that the poet is a man who is more sensitive to the world around him than other men are; he is "affected more than other men by absent things...he has acquired a greater readiness and power in expressing what he thinks and feels" (210). He writes poetry that "is the image of man and nature" (211), which separates him from the empirical Man of Science, who must cleave to natural law and not feel the contribution of inspiration (211). (Note the change from the attitudes of Neoclassicism here.) In connecting poetry with the sublime, he breaks from the Neoclassical notion that literature should celebrate "General Nature" to argue that every work of nature is a worthy subject of contemplation. He's a particularist, where Pope and Johnson are interested in generalization. Yet if you look at what he says about using the "very [truest] language of man" and "avoiding poetic diction" (p. 208), you can still see the influence of the 18th century Plain Style.
Wordsworth's own poetry, as demonstrated in Lyrical Ballads, is revolutionary: he abandons the heroic couplet and the measured verse of neoclassical poets like Pope for individualized verse forms and line lengths, great freedom of invention, and an amazing power of imagery. He wrote all but four of the poems in Lyrical Ballads and almost all of them are still read today--for instance, the strange set of "Lucy" poems about a wild daughter of nature, who "liv'd unknown," whose death inspires her poet-lover to greater feeling. As the poem "Three years she grew" says, "She died, and left to me / This heath, this calm and quiet scene, / The memory of what has been, / And never more will be." There it is in a capsule--emotion recollected in tranquility (page 212). That is the classic definition of Romantic poetry--"the spontaneous overflow of powerful emotion....recollected in tranquillity."
Revolution also shapes Wordsworth's more conventional poetry, his sonnets (pp. 233-36). In them we see him railing against the Whig-driven commercialization of the new middle class ("The world is too much with us; late and soon, / Getting and spending, we waste our powers") and his disgust over the situation in London ("Milton! thou shoulds't be living at this hour: / England has need of thee: she is a fen"_). When Napoleon began (in the eyes of idealists) to pervert the Romantic, democratic ideals of the French Revolution by crowning himself Emperor, Wordsworth wrote a sonnet in which he "griev'd for Buonaparte" even as Beethoven did when he changed the title of Symphony no. 3 from "Bonaparte" to "Eroica" at the last minute. Even in his most simple-appearing lyrics like "My Heart Leaps Up" and "I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud," which are so familiar as to be clichés, he can connect the emotions he gathers from communing with nature to his sense of "natural piety."
In Wordsworth we see a real change in English poetic sensibilities. After he begins to publish, the poetry of individual, personal emotion becomes the dominant form of English poetry. And in Lyrical Ballads, he wrote perhaps the most important manifesto about the way poetry should be composed that has ever been published. Like his daffodils or not, he is a poet who cannot be ignored.