It may be that this chapter will appear to make too much of the word ‘things’. After all, in common usage ‘things’ and ‘objects’ are more or less synonymous, and with that understanding the chapter might as well have been called ‘The Power of Objects in Lyrical Ballads’. What follows is written in the belief not only that there is a distinction between things and objects but that Wordsworth attends carefully to the distinction, and that it is helpful to think of Lyrical Ballads as an exploration, at certain moments, of the imagination’s way of seeing objects primordially – of seeing them, that is, as things. Much of the time, to be sure, things and objects are as interchangeable in Wordsworth’s vocabulary as they are for most of us. But sometimes there is a difference, an important difference that helps to explain the frequent vagueness of his language in his more ecstatic moments (in contrast, for example, with the precise niceties of Coleridge even in such moments), a vagueness disagreeable to his detractors, yet perhaps the very quality his admirers relish most when they find him most affecting. There will be no need here to pause over his vagueness, let alone subject it to stylistic analysis; rather, it will be taken for granted as his way of expressing the power of things, all things in their unity, including the senses in which humans too are things.

If this topic should seem either too piecemeal or too self-evident to include in a general volume on romantic criticism, it may help to recall that for René Wellek the status of neoclassical criticism among the Romantics is the crucial issue that makes the second volume of his History of modern criticism possible: ‘I think we must recognize that we can speak of a general European Romantic movement only if we take a wide over-all view and consider simply the general rejection of the neoclassical creed as a common denominator.’ But possibly this claim only deepens suspicion. Arthur Lovejoy had famously argued that no criterion of any kind was common to all Romanticisms, and Wellek, who wrote his equally famous rebuttal of Lovejoy while at work on volume two, would have been especially eager at that time to uphold the legitimacy of broad period definitions. Can the exceptions, we may ask – Byron and Chateaubriand, for example – ever be acceptably rationalized from any standpoint, not just Lovejoy's?

Nevertheless, whatever one might feel moved to say on other occasions, this is clearly not the place for the postmodern insistence that only an atomism vastly exceeding even Lovejoy's can do justice to the complexity of literary history (and in any case, Musset had already said that about ‘Romanticism’ in 1824!). One must do what one can, aided in this case by the easily overlooked precision of Wellek's claim: we can try at first to agree, tentatively, that what the spirit of the Romantic age rejects is the neoclassical, not necessarily the Classical or the texts of antiquity, and proceed from there. It may finally be possible to show, however, that there is something even more telling, more truly characteristic and self-defining, albeit more varied, about the Romantic reception of Classical antiquity itself.

The prominence accorded to I. A. Richardsin the present volume is owing in large part to his having pioneered and encouraged the scrupulous, verbally oriented teaching and reading of literature which has been standard practice in English and American secondary schools and colleges since the 1930s. Among academic critics the theoretical aspects of the Richards legacy have been passed along – with some alteration – through the writings of the American New Critics and such related figures as Kenneth Burke, R. P. Blackmur, and Richards's student William Empson. It is only if one emphasises his influence on the anonymous practice of classroom teaching, however, that one realises his full historical importance; and in so doing one brings to the fore his remarkably broad range of interests, which include linguistics, psychology, philosophy, and the theory of education.

Ironically enough from his own point of view, it was just when the influence of his early work on the theory of literary interpretation came most to be felt and admired, in the 1930s and 1940s, that Richards himself turned away from literary issues and diffused his attention across the much broader field of language and communication in general; and while his later work found new readers among such unified field theorists as the Encyclopedists of Unified Science, the General Semanticists, the United World Federalists, and the promoters of Basic English, Richards's original readers among the literary critics, who were devoted to what John Crowe Ransom liked to call the ‘special ontology of the poem’, tended to lose interest.

‘My attitude in writing it was that of an honest man erecting the ignoring of “tact” into a point of honour.’ Thus, with the word ‘tact’ in ironic quotes, William Empson looks back on Seven Types of Ambiguity in the 1947 ‘Preface’ to the second edition. There is a remarkable self-awareness in this sentence, which concedes that there may have been an element of pose, perhaps of defensiveness - of tact, in short - in the author's cultivation of expository insouciance. Just where he was most slapdash and most offensive to scholarly method, just there, he says, he imagined himself to have been most honourable. Thus he confirms what we knew instinctively, that his unbuttoned rhetoric embodied the tactless tact of the gentleman's fireside conversation, ‘using tact about the assertion of class’ (1951, p. 205). But decidedly the conversation of a Dissenting Gentleman: the person Arthur Mizener in 1938 called ‘the revolutionary critic in the guise of a correspondent of the T.L.S.’ (1938, p. 58). In Empson's style as in his chosen subject, the bluff squire, with his keen English nose for nonsense, almost completely obscures another character who is deeply sympathetic with Romantic attitudes. (It is as though Percy Shelley were to disguise himself as the father who had threatened to disown him.) The tension between these personae is what I wish to emphasize in this essay.