The Epiphanic Mode in Wordsworth and Modern Literature

is a pure emanation of the Spirit of the Age. Had he lived in any other period of the world, he would never have been heard of.... His homely Muse can hardly raise her wing from the ground.... He has "no figures nor no fantasies," . . . neither the gorgeous machinery of mythologic lore, nor the splendid colors of poetic diction. His style is vernacular: he delivers household truths. He sees nothing loftier than human hopes; nothing deeper than the human heart.... He takes the simplest elements of nature and of the human mind, ... and tries to compound a new system of poetry from them.