The 'Ode: Intimations of Immortality' was prefaced from 1815 on by an excerpt from a lyric written much earlier:

It would be difficult to better this as a characterization of Wordsworth's own poetic development. All the central preoccupations of his maturity are to be found in his earliest writing. It is as if he were born with his literary identity fully formed. Just how true this is has only recently been revealed, because until 1997 no comprehensive edition of the juvenilia had been published. Now, thanks to the labours of Jared Curtis and Carol Landon for the Cornell Wordsworth series edition of Early Poems and Fragments, 1785-1797, we can fully appreciate the achievement represented by Wordsworth's first long poem, The Vale of Esthwaite, completed when he was seventeen in 1787. His earliest verses, on the subject of 'The Summer Vacation', had been written three years before as a school exercise; inspiration would have come partly from his reading.

Thomas Bowman, the master of Hawkshead Grammar School, was among Wordsworth’s mentors, and lent his precocious charge copies of Cowper’s The Task, Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets, and Burns’ Poems when they were first published. Few facts testify so eloquently to Wordsworth’s good fortune in his teachers. Contemporary poetry formed no part of the school curriculum in those days, and would not do so until the twentieth century. Virgil and Horace, on the other hand, were on the syllabus, and Bowman must have understood that their influence fed directly into the literary mainstream of his own time. In retrospect it is possible to see how significant it is that Wordsworth was early reading Cowper, Smith, and Burns.