David, all I can do is to appeal to your sense of logic. 

If we accept that Lyrical Ballads was influential in changing poetical 
language (not the form of poetry, just the language) from a more 
artificial one to a more plainer one. And if we accept that the majority 
of mainstream poetry since has been written in this sort of language, 
then we have to conclude that Lyrical Ballads has been more influential 
than the poets you mention who came after Wordsworth. 

I use Lyrical Ballads as a “synonym” for Wordsworth.





On Sun, 30 Aug 2009 11:14:42 -0700, David Latane 
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>It's perhaps relevant that the sonnet sequence that William Carlos 
Williams destroyed en route to becoming "modern" was explicitly 
described by him as "Keatsian." 
>For what it's worth in an article published some time ago I did some 
counting of the direct mentions of Romantic poets by later poets, using 
the C-H Full-text English Poetry Database. In the first third of the 
century, as one might expect, Byron and Wordsworth have many more 
mentions--the difference being that many more of Wordsworth's are 
derogatory or satiric. By the end of the century both Shelley and Keats 
are more often apostrophized by poets than either Wordsworth and 
Byron. Amy Lowell didn't write a biography of Wordsworth. 
>Jeffrey makes good points about Wordsworth's didacticism--though 
they were made memorably by Keats in a famous letter--but it's 
precisely W's didactism that made him a Victorian (d. 1850) for the 
youngsters of 1900; Keats for them was a thing of beauty and joy 
forever.
>This discussion has sent me back to the lovely discussions of 
Romantic language and modernism in The Pound Era ("The Invention of 
Language" and "Words Set Free"). Kenner juggles British Romantics, 
French symbolistes, Poe, Whitman with masterful ease.
>David Latané
>
>
>