With Blake, William Wordsworth is one of the most important exponents of English Romanticism. Like him, W. makes child the subject of his poem, raising his communion with nature.

The nature is the centre of W’s poetic, inspired by the landscape of Lake District, where he is born and grow up. He considers nature not only as the countryside, opposite to the town, but also as a source of pleasure, inspiration and life-force. This power is the consequence of the presence of God, which often seems to be the same thing as nature. For this thought, W. is accused of pantheism but he deny it.

All these themes are developed in the Lyrical Ballads, born in 1789 by the collaboration with Coleridge. They include the famous preface, which is considered as the Romantic Manifesto, because it describes the major ideas of this movement, like the choice of ordinary subjects and ordinary language, as a way to create a poetry accessible to all men. The poet is only a man with more imagination (secondary imagination, only for the poet, different by the primary, accessible to all men), a “man speaking to men”. In this way the poetry becomes a “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”; for these ideas Wordsworth is considered the teacher of “how to enjoy the simple tastes of life”.