For a brief space in March of 1798, perhaps no more than a weekend, a two-poem book was envisaged by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge that could have changed the course of English poetry, and perhaps of English moral philosophy as well. Since the volume they finally did publish in September of that year, the first edition of Lyrical Ballads, also changed the course of English poetry, we need not regret that they did not pursue their temporary notion of publishing Coleridge's “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” together with Wordsworth's “The Ruined Cottage.” But if these two poems had appeared together then, the moral-philosophical dimension of their enterprise would have been much clearer than it is in Lyrical Ballads, either in its anonymous first edition, whose brief “Advertisement” presents the poems mainly as a language experiment, or in its still more famous second edition. The latter has Wordsworth's name alone on the title-page, and contains a long preface, at once aggressive and defensive, that does indeed raise many points about the relation of poiesis to morals, asserting that poetry is more centrally concerned with representing feelings than actions. But it does this in language that is rarely straightforward, because it uses the rhetoric of poetics to discuss – and disguise – its authors’ motives of political doubt and social guilt.

All editions of Lyrical Ballads contain “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” but none contains “The Ruined Cottage,” which was not published until 1814, as Book I (“The Wanderer”) of The Excursion, a heavily revised version that substitutes Christian categories of explanation for the radically open-ended explorations of human moral responsibility that Wordsworth was willing to pursue fifteen years earlier.