On its face, “A Complaint” hardly seems revolutionary. Indeed, for a contemporary reader, Wordsworth’s plaint about a profound love that is now gone looks like conventional poetry; read aloud with its careful rhythm and dutiful rhymes, it scans like a conventional poem. Given its ornate and clever metaphors that fuse a fountain with a well, and given its elegant syntax, it even reads like conventional poetry. The poem also explores the complicated emotional trauma of a hypersensitive poet willing to lay bare the most intimate of his emotions.

The emotional aspect of the poem, however, is exactly what makes the poem revolutionary. For a contemporary reader, that a poem shares the innermost emotions of the poet seems conventional. At the time of its publication, however, the poem epitomized a sea-change in the cultural perception of poetry and its function, a radical upending of more than a century of principles that had shaped what was for the British people the very essence of their cultural identity. This was not a sage poet handing down wisdom or delighting in lampooning humanity’s foible with snarky irony and cutting wit.