Wordsworth's love of freedom and independence is an ingredient in nearly all his best poetry. In his passages of highest elevation, when the language becomes richly connotative and evocative, the individual at the center stands untrammeled in the open air. Merely to take the subject of liberty was not, of course, to eliminate the chance of mediocre verse—Wordsworth forced undistinguished rimes on liberty as on other subjects—but on this subject, inevitably frequent, and with this impulse, present in all the happiest moments of his life, he achieved his furthest creative reaches. Without any effort to review or to discuss the chronological development of his ideas on political liberty, or to examine his political or social views at all, the following pages attempt to cast some light on the way ideas and feelings of personal liberty operate in Wordsworth's poems. The first section treats these ideas and feelings necessarily with some reference to chronological changes and to inter-weavings with love of political liberty; but the emphasis, as in Section ri on the range and variety of Wordsworth's libertarian imagery, is on his continuing interest in individual freedom.