“Last and pre-eminently, I challenge for this poet the gift of imagination in the highest and strictest sense of the word.  In the play of fancy, Wordsworth, to my feelings, is not always graceful, and sometimes recondite. . .  But in imaginative power, he stands nearest of all writers to Shakespeare and Milton; and yet in a kind perfectly unborrowed and his own.”

These are the grounds upon which Coleridge bases the poetic claims of Wordsworth.

Matthew Arnold, in the preface to his well-known collection of Wordsworth’s poems, accords to the poet a rank no less exalted.  “I firmly believe that the poetical performance of Wordsworth is, after that of Shakespeare and Milton, of which all the world now recognizes the worth, undoubtedly the most considerable in our language from the Elizabethan age to the present time.”  His essential greatness is to be found in his shorter pieces, despite the frequent intrusion of much that is very inferior.  Still it is “by the great body of powerful and significant work which remains to him after every reduction and deduction has been made, that Wordsworth’s superiority is proved.”

Coleridge had not dwelt sufficiently, perhaps, upon the joyousness which results from Wordsworth’s philosophy of human life and external nature.  This Matthew Arnold considers to be the prime source of his greatness.  “Wordsworth’s poetry is great because of the extraordinary power with which Wordsworth feels the joy offered to us in the simple primary affections and duties; and because of the extraordinary power with which, in case after case, he shows us this joy, and renders it so as to make us share it.”  Goethe’s poetry, as Wordsworth once said, is not inevitable enough, is too consciously moulded by the supreme will of the artist.  “But Wordsworth’s poetry,” writes Arnold, “when he is at his best, is inevitable, as inevitable as Nature herself.  It might seem that Nature not only gave him the matter for his poem, but wrote his poem for him.”  The set poetic style of The Excursion is a failure, but there is something unique and unmatchable in the simple grace of his narrative poems and lyrics.  “Nature herself seems, I say, to take the pen out of his hand, and to write for him with her own bare, sheer, penetrating power.  This arises from two causes:  from the profound sincereness with which Wordsworth feels his subject, and also from the profoundly sincere and natural character of his subject itself.  He can and will treat such a subject with nothing but the most plain, first hand, almost austere naturalness.  His expression may often be called bald, as, for instance, in the poem of Resolution and Independence; but it is bald as the bare mountain tops are bald, with a baldness which is full of grandeur. . .  Wherever we meet with the successful balance, in Wordsworth, of profound truth of subject with profound truth of execution, he is unique.”