by William Wordsworth (1800)
The
principal object, then, proposed in these Poems was to choose incidents and
situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout,
as far as was possible in a selection of language really used by men, and,
at the same time, to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination,
whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect;
and, further, and above all, to make these incidents and situations interesting
by tracing in them, truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of
our nature: chiefly, as far as regards the manner in which we associate ideas
in a state of excitement.