When William Wordsworth published his ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads in 1800, he disparaged many things that had come to seem the signal attributes of poetry: elevated diction, personifications of abstract ideas and ‘phrases and figures of speech which from father to son have long been regarded as the common inheritance of Poets’ (LB 101). His aim in his poems, he said, was to justify his conviction that poetry could do without such elegances, and to describe ‘incidents and situations from common life. … In a selection of the language really used by men’ (97). He wrote in the conviction that poetry needed to tap into the most fundamental sources of pleasure, rather than the most refined, and identified his own writing more with the perceptions of rustic people than with those of professional poets. In particular, he singled out ‘the pleasure which the mind derives from the perception of similitude in dissimilitude’, which he instanced as ‘the life of our ordinary conversation’ (111). Conversation itself – what one person might actually say to another in the process of exchanging remarks in their different voices – might provide an example and a standard for poetry. Comparing lines from the ‘Babes in the Wood’ with some that Samuel Johnson had written in order to mock poetry using ‘language that closely resembles that of life and nature’ (113), he implicitly drew a distinction. Dr Johnson’s lines do not rise to the level of good poetry, because they do not rise to the level of conversation, something that one person might actually feel impelled to tell another.