Book excerpt: Murderers, crazed widows, beggars, betrayed women—such are the pitiful figures who appear throughout Wordsworth's early narrative poetry. Analyzing the poet's use of pathos from the two volumes of Lyrical Ballads through the completion of The Prelude, James H. Averill argues that, for Wordsworth, the poetry of human life is inevitably the poetry of anguish and loss. Averill examines the relation of the poet to his human subjects, exploring the questions of tragic response and sentimental morality, the literary uses of human misery, and the pleasures of tragedy. In Wordsworth and the Poetry of Human Suffering, James H. Averill enriches our understanding and our appreciation of the peculiar power of Wordsworth's poetic vision.