Murderers, crazed widows, beggars and betrayed women - these are the pitiful figures who appear throughout Wordsworth's early narrative poetry. Analysing Wordsworth's use of pathos, from the two volumes of Lyrical Ballads to the completion of The Prelude, Averill explores questions of sentimental morality, the literary uses of human misery and the pleasures of tragedy, and argues that the poetry of human life is for Wordsworth inevitably the poetry of anguish and loss. Scruffy jackets.