A modest 1798 poetry book quietly launched English Romanticism
Critics barely reacted when Wordsworth and Coleridge published Lyrical Ballads in 1798. Yet the slim volume, written in plain speech about ordinary country people, is now treated as the starting gun of the Romantic movement, and its 1800 preface became the closest thing Romanticism has to a manifesto.
The collection was a partnership, though a lopsided one. Of the 23 poems in the first edition, Wordsworth wrote nineteen and Coleridge just four. Those four still filled roughly a third of the pages, largely because one of them was The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
The two poets wanted to break with the polished, erudite and heavily crafted verse of eighteenth-century England. Their aim was poetry an average person could follow, built from everyday speech and valuing the way poor people actually talked about their lives. In a short advertisement for the first edition, Wordsworth described most of the poems as experiments testing whether conversational language could give poetic pleasure. Even the title carried the argument: lyrical nodded to ancient rustic bards, while ballads were the storytelling form of common folk. Choosing uneducated rural people as subjects was arguably a bigger leap toward modern writing than the choice of vocabulary.
Behind the style lay a philosophy. Wordsworth shared Rousseau's view that humans are good by nature and spoiled by society, so many poems look back toward a simpler, more innocent life close to nature, an outlook tied to the mood sweeping Europe before the French Revolution.
The book kept changing. A second edition in 1800 added a second volume of Wordsworth poems and the famous preface; later printings in 1802 and 1805 expanded it, including an appendix on poetic diction. Wordsworth also dropped his poem The Convict, whose attack on capital punishment and prison conditions was politically touchy, and put Coleridge's Love in its place.
Source: Lyrical Ballads
