Childish Romantics: The Infantile Poetry of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Abstract

This thesis argues that early Romantic poetry appropriated contemporary children’s literature to develop innovative pedagogical approaches, encouraging readers to adopt a child’s psychological perspective for deeper engagement with moral lessons. Focusing on William and Dorothy Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, it highlights the significant yet often overlooked influence of writers such as Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Sarah Trimmer, and Lucy Peacock, who have frequently been mischaracterised as merely ‘didactic’ or ‘rational’. Although the Romantic poets later distanced themselves from these figures, their initial admiration and the impact of these children’s writers on seminal texts like Lyrical Ballads (1798), Poems, in Two Volumes (1807), and Peter Bell (1819) have been neglected. Romantic poems are deeply indebted to the linguistic forms, themes, and pedagogical strategies of these ‘rational’ writers, despite the poets’ subsequent disdain for their work. This study also examines the contributions of earlier children’s writers such as Isaac Watts and John Newbery, as well as the influence of nursery rhymes, to explore the interplay between pedagogical and aesthetic elements in early children’s verse and the poetry of the Wordsworths and Coleridge. Through detailed textual analyses of works like ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’ (1798), this thesis elucidates the didactic frameworks at play, particularly the use of infantile verse structures to position the speaker as a teacher and the reader as a child-like learner. It reveals the inherent tension between evoking a state of naivety and purity while simultaneously guiding the reader toward experience, uncovering the ambivalences and contradictions in the moral lessons presented to children at the time.