Lyrical Ballads is one of the most important collections of poetry in English literature and the central work of English Romanticism. It was written jointly by Wordsworth and Coleridge, though it first appeared anonymously in 1798.
Wordsworth contributed poems about everyday events written in ordinary language while Coleridge wrote poemsof an exotic or fantastic nature. The poems were presented as ‘experiments’ to see ‘how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purpose of poetic pleasure’.
No major poet had ever used the events and the language of the ordinary person as subjects for serious poetry. It was such a revolutionary idea.
‘Wordsworth’s famous Preface is considered the English Romantic manifesto.
A ‘democratic’ kind of poetry accessible to all men; poetry is the ‘ overflow of feelings originating from ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’.
Wordsworth thought that the new urban and industrial society created by the Industrial Revolution threatened the capacity of man to live in harmony with the environment.
Most of Wordsworth’s poems in Lyrical Ballads deal with nature. This Word can mean several things for Wordsworth.
Nature as the countryside. Mountains, rivers, lakes, woods and so on, are often opposed to the noise and confusion of the town.
« Nature asa source of inspiration . The relationship that joins man to nature. In nature we can discover moral and spiritual values
Nature as a life force, man seems to communicate with nature in a literal sense. God is present in nature and not separable from it