dramatists and short stories writers, and, curiously enough, because they did not write verse, it has not often been suspected that these men were poets. Wordsworth's views are really proofs that poetry is found in prose, for the prose writers comply with his requirements of using in their compositions the natural conversation of men under the influence of natural feelings. They also comply with Wordsworth's definition of poetry, recording "emotions recollected in tranquillity."Hazlitt has ably summed up the influence of the French Revolution on Wordsworth. Our poet did away with mythological references, with tales about legendary characters. He wrote about the emotions of the common people and introduced no far-fetched metaphors, nor made pedantic allusions.

Wordsworth, however, did not claim, as Coleridge thought he did, that the language of verse poetry must be that of ignorant people. Wordsworth never asserted that he wanted the poets to use the language of peasants, except when peasants were portrayed and represented as speaking. He simply protested against stilted, artificial language in verse poetry. He held the use of such language in verse poetry to be ridiculous, as it was in prose. He was not an exponent of prose poetry, even though he laid little stress on the importance of metre. As the authors of the article on Wordsworth in the Encyclopedia Britannica state, the farthest he went in defense of prose structure in poetry was to say that if the words in verse happened to be in the order of prose, they were not necessarily prosaic in the sense of unpoetic. He did not (unfortunately) try to eliminate metre in poetry. He no doubt agreed with Coleridge's own defense of meter in the Biographia Literaria. He did not write against his own theory, for he always employed metre and--except in some ballads--a diction that was even literary.

Though both Wordsworth and Coleridge were not overawed by the necessity of metre in poetry, they believed in its use, and were opposed to prose poetry. Coleridge, however, wrote a prose poem The Wanderings of Cain and some of his essays are prose poetry. Coleridge also devoted an entire chapter in his Biographia Literaria to the defense of metre as a vehicle for poetry. He attributes the origin of metre to the fact that the mind makes a conscious effort to hold passion in check by fettering it with regular numbers. On the contrary, this conscious check is due to imitation of old examples, to fear in defying the critics, for the natural language of passion is irregular rhythm, and it is impatient of being confined in regular, artificial numbers. Coleridge thinks the effect of metre is "to increase the vivacity and 

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