Romanticism's rejection of classical generic convention in the language and form of poetry was a great boon for women writers. While Thomas de Quincey, lamenting his brilliant mother's lost talents, extols the hidden genius of women letter-writers, he still unthinkingly boasts of his own prowess in Greek and Latin, learned while a public school-boy, and a mark of privilege rarely available to women and girls in the nineteenth century. While De Quincey may have followed the Wordsworths to Dove Cottage, he apparently did not share Samuel Coleridge and William Wordsworth's egalitarian notions of language, whereby poetry was redefined, in the famous Preface to Lyrical Ballads (2nd edn, 1800) as the words of ‘a Man speaking to Men’. This new definition brought poetic language back into the common sphere, linking it once more with its roots in oral culture, where, in spite of such an apparently masculist formulation, it was soon taken up by a broadening band of women poets. Among these, of course, were some who, like Elizabeth Barrett herself, were privileged enough to have gained access to an education in the classics, however unsystematic that might have been, and who had been able to draw on that knowledge in producing their poetry.