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passage, in The Prelude that follows immediately after this declaration of his capability, Wordsworthformally acknowledges the role played by ‘Education’ working in tandem with ‘Nature’.In the Preface he then describes the relationship of this former ‘Work’ to ‘The Recluse’ as thatof an ‘ante-chapel…to the body of a gothic church’. His other published ‘minor pieces’ are likened to‘little cells, oratories, and sepulchral recesses’ as they too are seen to contribute to the grand andunified structure of his mature poetic enterprise – one that he hopes will both ‘please’ and ‘benefit hiscountrymen’. 9 Having described something of the genesis of The Excursion – as well as revealing thathe has not been idle as a poet, over the past seven years – Wordsworth concludes his introductoryremarks by making the point that he does not offer any guidance as to how the poem should be read –he makes no further comment about his philosophy, or his poetic theory, or his art:It is not the Author’s intention formally to announce a system: it was more animating to himto proceed in a different course; and if he shall succeed in conveying to the mind clearthoughts, lively images and strong feelings, the Reader will have no difficulty in extractingthe system for himself. (PW V 2)It would have been clear to Wordsworth’s classically educated readers that the ‘system’ beingused in The Excursion, was based on rhetorical principles that owed much to Ciceronian oratory, withits aims to ‘instruct’, ‘please’ and ‘move’ the minds of its auditors; and that the poem’s form, as aphilosophical disputation, was derived from the example of Cicero’s philosophical works. Cicero haddrawn, in turn, on Aristotle’s use of appeals to logos, ethos and pathos, the three pisteis that Aristotledefined in his Rhetoric, and which Cicero adopted and adapted to his own ends in his work. Thecorrelation between ‘clear thoughts’ and appeals to logos, and that between ‘strong feelings’ andappeals to pathos, is relatively clear. That Wordsworth should link ‘lively images’ with appeals toethos is not so self-evident. But when ‘lively images’ are also considered as ‘imaginations’, andWordsworth’s commentary on his poetic art in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads is taken into account, his‘system’ becomes clearer – but only if his classical concerns with ‘imagination’ and with ‘imagery’are both recognised and understood. I argue here that they have not been, and that this is primarily dueto the uncritical assumptions of those who continue to read Wordsworth’s works, and his appreciationof ‘imagination’, according to Coleridge’s commentary on Wordsworth’s theory in BiographiaLiteraria. Wordsworth was concerned with concepts of ethos as they related to both the moralcharacter of his ideal poet, and the imaginative means by which he delivered his ‘message’ to hisreader.Having looked at Wordsworth’s commentary about his poetic aspirations in 1814, it is alsouseful to look at an earlier discussion of his poetic aims, as expressed in the letter to Lady Beaumontin May 1807 after the publication of Poems in Two Volumes. In the letter he famously defended hisnew poetry against the ignorance of the reading public who he described as lacking sufficientimagination to appreciate his art. He refers to the ‘pure absolute honest ignorance, in which allworldlings of every rank and situation must be enveloped, with respect to the thoughts, feelings, and9 See Kenneth Johnston, Wordsworth and The Recluse, for a detailed analysis of the approximate plan andchronology of The Recluse.97