Wordsworth had a belief that poetic style should be as simple and sincere as the language of everyday life, and that the more the poet draws on elemental feelings and primal simplicities the better for his art. He advocated the use of simple language in poetry. He said that poetry should be written in a “language really used by men in humble and rustic’’. He set himself to the task of freeing poetry from all its “conceits” and its “inane phraseology”. He made certain very effective and striking experiments in the use of simple language.
What William Wordsworth did... and why you should care
William Wordsworth was an English poet, a key figure of Romanticism, and the author of the most famous poem ever written about daffodils. Born in 1770, Wordsworth and his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge invented a new style of poetry in which nature and the diction of the common man trumped formal, stylized language. Their seminal 1798 poetry collection, Lyrical Ballads, helped to launch the Romantic era of English literature, in which writers sought to unite the tranquility of nature and the inner emotional world of men. Even in the nineteenth century, Wordsworth felt that the world was "too much with us"—too fast-paced, too noisy, too full of mindless entertainment. He wanted to create poetry that reunited readers with true emotions and feelings. When he wrote about a field of daffodils, he didn't want you just to think about it—he wanted you to feel those flowers, to feel the breeze against your skin and the sense of peace this sight brought to your soul.