...of an 'idiot Boy'," Wordsworth participates in the degeneration of English verse, and becomes a bard "Who, both by precept and example, shows / That prose is verse, and verse is merely prose. ..." In later apologizing to Coleridge for these charges, Byron regretted the "generality" that blunted...

...Wordsworth on this point: "the dull disciple of thy school, / That mild apostate from poetic rule ... / Who, both by precept and example shows / That prose is verse, and verse is merely prose ... / ... All who view [in Wordsworth's "Idiot Boy"] the 'idiot in his glory' / Conceive the bard the...

...warns his friend 'to shake off toil and trouble, 240 And quit his books, for fear of growing double;'4 Who, both by precept and example, shows That prose...demonstration plain, Poetic souls delight in prose insane; 245 And Christmas stories tortured into rhyme Contain the essence of the true sublime. Thus, when he...

...that many readers of his English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809) would enjoy his gibe at the poet Who, both by precept and example, shows That prose is verse, and verse is merely prose. The Romantic writers' considerable preoccupation with poetic language, their fascination with what...

...Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809). The 'simple Wordsworth' is the 'mild apostate from poetic rule', who 'both by precept and example, shows / That prose is verse, and verse is merely prose'. And Leigh Hunt's Feast of the Poets (1815) parodied Wordsworth contemplating a straw and then gazing...