In the 1805 Prelude Wordsworth offers a retrospective account of how he decided on the form and content of the kinds of rambling stories that make up Lyrical Ballads. Rejecting books of moral philosophy, Wordsworth takes to the “public road” on which he hopes to gather an estimate of

Why should an encounter with a stranger on the public road become the empirical paradigm of social knowledge, and the social contract? Not only is the project itself – essentially, the rendering of freedom as sheer mobilization – an historically contingent response to philosophical, political, and economic abstractions of “man”, but the poem presents this project in characteristically Wordsworthian terms. Repeating the word “man”,Wordsworth allows repetition itself to substantialize the abstraction. Indeed, the passage might fairly be paraphrased by the tautology “Man is … man.“ For even as he then proceeds to list the attributes of this positive “man,” Wordsworth can offer at best a negative litany: man is not an abstraction, not a shadow, etc. Moreover, the finally positive definition–“the man of whom we read” (87)–has an entirely recursive logic, especially in the context of Wordsworth' previous renunciation of books of moral philosophy: the man of whom we read is the word “man” of whom we read in the subsequent lines of the poem.