Lyrical Ballads
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First published anonymously in 1798, Lyrical Ballads brought together William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in a collection that helped inaugurate English Romanticism. Its poems turn away from the grand diction and formal conventions of eighteenth-century verse towards the language of ordinary people, the emotional force of everyday experience and the mysterious life of the imagination. Wordsworth finds poetry in rural encounters, childhood memories and the quiet presence of nature, while Coleridge ventures into the uncanny and supernatural, most famously in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, with its haunted voyage and terrible reckoning. Together, the poets reveal how the commonplace can become extraordinary, and how the imagination can transform both familiar landscapes and the darkest corners of human experience.
Expanded in a second edition in 1800, with Wordsworth’s influential preface setting out a new understanding of poetry and its language, Lyrical Ballads became a defining statement of the Romantic movement. Its emphasis on feeling, memory, nature and the dignity of ordinary life challenged established literary hierarchies and helped reshape the course of English poetry. The collaboration between Wordsworth and Coleridge was not without its differences, yet their shared experiment remains remarkable for the breadth of its vision, moving from quiet lyric reflection to supernatural terror. More than a landmark in literary history, the collection invites readers to rediscover the extraordinary within the everyday.
From the book
“We are Seven.”
— William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads
On Lyrical Ballads
“The first great work of the English Romantic movement.”
— A commonly used critical description of the collection