It is a measure of the stature of William Wordsworth among his younger contemporaries that he would find himself subject to innumerable challenges over the early years of the nineteenth century. What upset the second generation of Romantic poets – Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and, to some extent, John Keats – was the contrast between Wordsworth’s middle-aged political conservatism and his earlier democratic beliefs, expressed in and through the bold poetic experiments in his and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads (1798). It was a contrast the younger generation took personally and publicly as a form of betrayal, and one such challenge was Shelley’s ‘To Wordsworth’:

POET of Nature, thou hast wept to know
That things depart which never may return:
Childhood and youth, friendship and love’s first glow,
Have fled like sweet dreams, leaving thee to mourn.
These common woes I feel. One loss is mine
Which thou too feel’st, yet I alone deplore.
Thou wert as a lone star, whose light did shine
On some frail bark in winter’s midnight roar:
Thou hast like to a rock-built refuge stood
Above the blind and battling multitude:
In honoured poverty thy voice did weave
Songs consecrate to truth and liberty, –
Deserting these, thou leavest me to grieve,
Thus having been, that thou shouldst cease to be.