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maintain that the secrets of Wordsworth’s actual art of poetry, and his own particular understanding of‘imagination’, during the crucial formative years of his poetic career, are to be found in conceptsdefined in the works of Cicero and Quintilian in which the ‘power’ of oratory is combined with the‘knowledge’ of philosophy to produce poetic language that is intended to have ‘moral’ or ‘political’designs on it readers. 12My argument relies on appreciating the extent to which Wordsworthcommitted himself to the values of the English Republicans after he returned from France andabandoned his earlier, overly enthusiastic, attachment to the French cause. Of the various recentstudies of Wordsworth’s involvement in politics in the 1790s, John William’s Wordsworth: RomanticPoetry and Revolution Politics places the greatest stress on the fact that Wordsworth’s engagementwith English republican ideals also committed him to a classical humanist ideology more suited to theEnglish seventeenth century than the eighteenth. Nicholas Roe’s Wordsworth and Coleridge: TheRadical Years treats the same period and adds further historical detail. But Roe, unfortunately, largelydiscounts Wordsworth’s own philosophical and political views while foregrounding the commonlyheld belief that he owed all his serious thought to Coleridge’s influence. Where William’s identifiesWordsworth’s classical republican sympathies, Roe identifies Wordsworth as a radical sympathetic toThomas Paine’s understanding of ‘natural rights’ 13 The most detailed study arguing for Wordsworth’sdebt to the English Republicans was made earlier, however, by Leslie Chard in DissentingRepublican: Wordsworth’s Early Life and Thought in their Political Context.Chard proposes that Wordsworth studied the works of the English Republicans on his returnfrom France – the works of such ‘Great men’ as, ‘Sydney, Marvel, Harrington / Young Vane andothers who call Milton friend’. He would have been introduced to the significance of their writingswhile still in France by Beaupuy and other members of the Girondists, who drew heavily on Englishrepublican political theory. 14 His knowledge of these writers led, in turn, to his acknowledgement ofthe authority of the ‘original’ works of the Roman republicans, and a sense of history that wastimeless. My hypothesis pictures Wordsworth deeply engrossed in Cicero’s works and reading hisway, in Latin, into the mind of a man he imagined as someone who could be considered acontemporary – especially since he appeared to be confronting the same timeless ‘moral questions’that preoccupied Wordsworth during his retirement at Racedown. His renewed interest in Cicero, whohe would have earlier read at school, came at a time when he had rejected Godwinian philosophy andwas needing to find some more certain foundation for all moral concepts – having found Godwin’s12 Thomas De Quincey credits his later distinction between the literature of knowledge and the literature ofpower with an understanding of ‘power’ that he obtained from his ‘many years conversation with MrWordsworth’. He also suggests that Wordsworth defined a new sense of the word in 1798. CollectedWritings of Thomas De Quincey. Ed. Mason. X 48.13 For Roe’s discussion of Wordsworth’s lack of any ‘unifying philosophic intention’, his seeming debt to Paine,and his reliance on Coleridge for a ‘sustaining philosophy of the One Life’ see The Radical Years pp. 34-6.Roe follows Jonathan Wordsworth’s belief in Wordsworth’s debt to Coleridge’s concept of ‘the One Life’closely. ‘The One Life offered a vision of universal participation, a transcendent justification of Paine’ssystem of principles as universal as truth and the existence of man. It simultaneously permitted theinternalization of those principles as functions of individual thought and feeling.’ Roe goes on to propose that‘Wordsworth explores this inward translation of regenerative possibility in his description of ‘The Pedlar’’.While I am indebted to Roe for the historical detail that he has provided in his study, I propose a radicallydifferent reading of Wordsworth’s philosophy, his plans for his poetry, and the role of his Pedlar.14 Brissot had been a regular visitor to England, engaging in dialogue with English republicans.27