And so much of the effect _can_ thus be reproduced, that it
is often possible to believe for a time that the problem has been
solved. Pope, to take the instance which was prominent in
Wordsworth's mind, was, by general admission, a poet. But his
success seemed to depend on imitable peculiarities; and Pope's
imitators were so like Pope that it was hard to draw a line and say
where they ceased to be poets. At last, however, this imitative
school began to prove too much. If all the insipid verses which they
wrote were poetry, what was the use of writing poetry at all? A
reaction succeeded, which asserted that poetry depends on emotion
and not on polish; that it consists precisely in those things which
frigid imitators lack. Cowper, Burns, and Crabbe, (especially in his
_Sir Eustace Grey_), had preceded Wordsworth as leaders of this
reaction. But they had acted half unconsciously, or had even at
times themselves attempted to copy the very style which they were
superseding.
Wordsworth, too, began with a tendency to imitate Pope, but only in
the school exercises which he wrote as a boy. Poetry soon became to
him the expression of his own deep and simple feelings; and then he
rebelled against rhetoric and unreality and found for himself a
director and truer voice, "I have proposed to myself to imitate and,
as far as is possible, to adopt the very language of men.
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