JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to New Literary History.TW v IHEN Hazlitt in The Spirit of the Age said that Wordsworth had made poetry democratic, had taken it off stilts, he put his finger on Wordsworth's essential contribution to modern poetry. "Mr. Wordsworth's genius," says Hazlitt speaking with the authority of a contemporary, 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. "It is," Hazlitt comments, "one of the innovations of the time. It partakes of, and is carried along with," he says thinking of the French Revolution, the revolutionary movement of our age: the political changes of the day were the model on which he formed and conducted his poetical experiments. His Muse ... is a levelling one. It proceeds on a principle of equality, and strives to reduce all things to the same standard. It is distinguished by a proud humility....Hence the unaccountable mixture of seeming simplicity and real abstruseness in the Lyrical Ballads. Fools have laughed at, wise men scarcely understand them.'Hazlitt explains the innovations of Lyrical Ballads-the point of which, as indicated in the Preface, is this: that poetry is not determined by a formal structure, by meter or rhyme, nor by a special kind of subject matter and language. Poetry, in other words, is not determined by external signs but by a kind of mental operation that Wordsworth and Coleridge called "imagination." Imagination is democratic because it can turn any subject matter poetic through This content downloaded from 195.78.108.60 on Thu, 12 Jun 2014 11:13:51 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions NEW LITERARY HISTORYintensification and transformation. Imagination operates best through a plain style that allows intensification to take place, that does not rely on the artificial elevation of rhetoric. It operates best on realistic material that requires transformation, and helps us believe that the transformation really does take place.What we have here is a magic realism-the natural supernaturalism of the plan according to which Wordsworth and Coleridge cooperated on Lyrical Ballads. According to the plan as Co...