The focus of Lyrical Ballads on recovering an appropriate language for poetic discourse from the spoken language of ‘low and rustic life’ was seen by early reviewers as the indication of an implicit anti-institutionalism espoused by Wordsworth and Coleridge against the elitist neoclassical idea of poetic diction. This challenge has been related to the linguistic theories promoted during the 1790s by the radical John Horne Tooke, whose highly influential work, EPEA PTEROENTA or the Diversions of Purley—better known in its second edition published in 1798 by Joseph Johnson (also a publisher to the early Wordsworth and Coleridge)—was familiar to Wordsworth and Coleridge as well as the young De Quincey. John Barrell has traced the continuities between theories of the British Constitution and those of language in the eighteenth century in terms of the recognized bases of contract or of custom on which these theories were founded. For the major part of the century, linguistic as well as political power was understood to reside in metropolitan and propertied interests which tended to determine the standard of authority in both matters. Increasingly by the end of the eighteenth century, however, the authority of ‘polite’ language as of the constitution was being challenged by an ideal of commonalty which was defined in terms of popular traditions and usages rather than of a divinely dispensed order. Lyrical Ballads, like Tooke's work on which it draws, is set in the shifting scenario of linguistic theory which was an integral part of the changing notions of legal, social and political authority of the last decade of the eighteenth century.

One indication of De Quincey's suppression of the radical origins of his thinking on language may be gleaned from the significant variance between the evidence of the 1803 Diary and his later descriptions of his youthful literary leanings. While De Quincey was to emphasize the rather conventional exercises in classical translation for which he was early distinguished, there is no mention in his later writings of the ‘Arabian drama’ he evidently was working on in 1803, or of the other literary projects which assume such importance in the pages of the Diary (D, pp. 154; 176; 181–82).