The tact of the Greeks in matters of this kind was infallible. We may
rely upon it that we shall not improve upon the classification adopted
by the Greeks for kinds of poetry; that their categories of epic,
dramatic, lyric, and so forth, have a natural propriety, and should be
adhered to. It may sometimes seem doubtful to which of two categories a
poem belongs; whether this or that poem is to be called, for instance,
narrative or lyric, lyric or elegiac. But there is to be found in every
good poem a strain, a predominant note, which determines the poem as
belonging to one of these kinds rather than the other; and here is the
best proof of the value of the classification, and of the advantage of
adhering to it. Wordsworth's poems will never produce their due effect
until they are freed from their present artificial arrangement, and
grouped more naturally.
Disengaged from the quantity of inferior work which now obscures them,
the best poems of Wordsworth, I hear many people say, would indeed stand
out in great beauty, but they would prove to be very few in number,
scarcely more than a half a dozen.
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