simple

As Wordsworth himself shows in his comment about taking as much effort to avoid “poetic diction” as others do to produce it, the very “simplicity” of the Lyrical Ballads is complicated. Wordsworth seeks to reproduce passions in their original natural splendor, to portray them in purified form stripped of “untruths”. Wordsworth claims that in his “philosophic” poetry is universal self-testifying truth that is “carried alive into the heart by passion” and “gives strength and divinity”. Yet, he himself admits that regardless of whatever great imaginative and reflective powers the poet possesses, he can never feel with the depth of the genuine emotions. He reasons that the poet should therefore try to make parts of the poem “better than its original” in order to make up for its general inferiority. Does not this very motion of “simplifying” and “purifying” constitute yet another layer of artifice, of editing nature and placing it within the bars of one specific interpretation of how nature should be approached? It is true that as cgurall noted in translator, Wordsworth paints the poet as the translator that "attempts to exquisitely fit words in an order that expresses passion" and adds another layer between the reader and nature, but that process of translation seems one, to Wordsworth, where the poet's self is to be kept out. Wordsworth almost seems to deny the validity of the organic interface between individual observer and nature as a way to infuse meaning into the overwhelming and unapproachable inorganic universals that philosophers try to make sense of by clothing with imperfect but graspable terms of flesh, blood, and breath.

Of course, in practice, the narrators in poems such as We Are Seven and The Idiot Boy are distinctly organic and refreshingly untrustworthy, but that seems to be in direct opposition to the intentions stated in the preface.