Preface to Lyrical Ballads

Considered one of the founders of English literary Romanticism, Wordsworth was born in 1770 in Cumberland, in the Lake District of northern England. The landscape of this area, with its combination of “beauty and fear,” would influence his Romanticist ideas about nature. An indifferent student at St. John’s College, Cambridge, Wordsworth found more inspiration from travels in Revolutionary France, where new republican ideas would become a key influence on his thinking.

Wordsworth’s “marvelous year” is considered to have been 1797 to 1798, during which he met the fellow English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834). With Coleridge’s influence, Wordsworth abandoned the long, narrative poems he had been writing in favor of short lyric and dramatic poems cast in simple language and describing human nature and the natural environment. The two poets jointly published their poems in the 1798 collection Lyrical Ballads, which opened with Coleridge’s long narrative “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and closed with Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey.”

With Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth (who wrote all but four of the poems in the book) is considered to have inaugurated the English Romantic movement. Romanticism exalted the power of nature, emotion and the imagination, and individual human experience. Wordsworth believed that poetry should be understood and appreciated by everyone and eschewed ornate diction—an idea he defends in his “Preface.” For him as for many Romanticists, following classical rules of literary composition was less important than expressing sincere feeling in a spontaneous way.

In his later career, Wordsworth’s poetry became more ambitious and grandiose, treating elegiac themes in a loftier poetic diction; many of his pieces in this period were cast in the traditional forms of the ode and sonnet. However, the period from his meeting of Coleridge in 1797 until 1808 is now generally recognized as his “great decade” which produced his best and most influential work. Wordsworth died in 1850 in Westmoreland, England.