Online published on 21 November, 2013.
As Wordsworth points out in his Preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1802), his poetry is about the fundamentally ambiguous nature of all profound human experience, or, as he puts it, the "fluxes and refluxes of the mind," and Wordsworth's technical achievement in communicating this truth is an important and somewhat neglected aspect of his art. Thus in the poetry, as in the theory, Wordsworth explores the paradox of a poetic art in which the contradictory functions of emotion and thought, of spontaneous overflow and intellectual discipline, are integrated into a meaningful and purposeful whole. In his poetry, as perhaps in that of no other English poet, one sees a mystical, joyful affirmation of the universe subjected simultaneously to a moral and intellectual scrutiny.
