Wordsworth on Lyrical Ballads

Abstract

Lyrical Ballads is a poetic collection by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, first published in 1798 and marked as the start of the English Romantic movement. Here we published the two volumes of the second edition from 1800, in which Wordsworth included additional poems and a preface detailing the pair's avowed poetical principles. The immediate effect of the 1798 volume was modest, but over time it has become a landmark and changed the course of English literature and poetry. Wordsworth contributed most of the poems to this volume but those by Coleridge include perhaps his most famous - "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner". Wordsworth and Coleridge set out to radically change the stuffy, learned and highly structured forms of 18th century English poetry in an effort to bring the true beauty of poetry to ordinary people by writing in everyday language. An emphasis was placed on the vitality