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Political Justice wanting. Retiring to Racedown in the Autumn of 1795 Wordsworth embarked on asustained period of study, and it seems that he turned to the voice of ancient authority for guidance.At this critical period in his life his classical mind was busy dreaming Roman imaginations rather thanRomantic ones, as he contemplated his world through the eyes of an ‘ancient spirit’ that was not dead,but still living in the minds of true republicans. 15 Wordsworth’s ‘sense of history’ (and of politics andsociety) in the formative years of his poetic career, when he was defining his theory of poetry, wasdefined by his classical republican, civic humanist, ideals. His imagination was inspired by classical‘truths’ rather than engaging in Romantic dreams. Having been acquainted with Cicero’s politicalworks on account of his republican sympathies, I argue that he extended his knowledge of Cicero’swritings to include those on oratory and philosophy while he was at Racedown.During this period he was also working towards defining a new theory of poetry and a newpoetic identity, one to replace his earlier enthusiastic belief that he might attain success as a vates poet– as some kind of bard or druid. Up until this time, he had hoped to be able to produce poetry with theaid of his ‘strong imagination’, which he thought sufficient to provide him, as a ‘chosen son’, with‘poetic numbers’ that might come ‘spontaneously’. But after the ‘crisis’ of his ‘strong disease’(Prelude 1850: XI. 306), when he had realised that his imagination had been too strong, he was forcedto re-think his role as a bard. 16 During his time at Racedown he worked at defining a new identity forhimself as a very different kind of poet, whose activities were more political than prophetic, and basedon his eloquence rather than the effusive utterance idealised by Coleridge. In a gradual process oftransformation, Wordsworth’s ideal poet is represented firstly by the Pedlar in Ms B of The RuinedCottage, whose character is described as that of a naturally eloquent Stoic. Then, in 1799, animportant transformation occurs as Wordsworth decides to define his own life history in the ‘Two-PartPrelude’, according to the developmental narrative he had earlier described for the Pedlar. Hisseparation from Coleridge enabled him to further develop ideas that had already been expressed in‘The Ruined Cottage’, in ‘Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey’ and in the ‘Advertisement’ that headded to Lyrical Ballads shortly before leaving for Germany. By 1800 Wordsworth’s Poet hasbecome more of a rhetor than an orator, as Wordsworth again politicised his work, having recognisedthe limitations of the Pedlar’s character as, primarily, that of a poet of Nature. The definition of thismore moral, or political, role for ‘the poet’ is not so clear in the 1800 preface to Lyrical Ballads, but itis made more transparent (at least to classically educated readers) in 1802 when Wordsworth defines‘the Poet’ as ‘a man speaking to men’; a man who is also endowed with exceptional abilities as both athinker and as an orator – a ‘man’ modelled on the Ciceronian ideal of the educated orator who cancombine ratio and oratio.In De Oratore, in which Cicero described his ideal orator, he also stressed Aristotle’sfundamental appreciation, in the Politics, that it is the act of speaking that enables ‘man’ to become a15 Wordsworth encountered that ‘ancient spirit’ in the character of the Sailor’s Mother, whose ‘mien and gait’was ‘like a Roman Matron’.16 On Wordsworth and Bardism, see Richard Gravil’s Wordsworth’s Bardic Vocation 1797-1842.28