William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge Lyrical Ballads.
Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems is a collection of poems by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, first published in 1798 and generally considered to have marked the beginning of the English Romantic movement in literature. The immediate effect on critics was modest, but it became and remains a landmark, changing the course of English literature and poetry.
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Wordsworth Essay William Wordsworths description of his poetry in Preface to Lyrical Ballads gives the impression that it feel much like a modern newspaper to a reader; basic and with wide appeal. He emphasizes the idea of simplicity and familiarity of both topic and language, arguing the superiority of a poem that appeals to the common person.
In the beginning of Wordsworth’s “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” he addresses his predecessors and talks about poetry before his time. They who have been accustomed to the gaudiness and inane phraseology of modern writers, if they persist in reading this book to its conclusion, will no doubt, frequently have to struggle with feelings of strangeness and awkwardness (Stanza 4).
William Wordsworth was one of the founders of English Romanticism and one its most central figures and important intellects. He is remembered as a poet of spiritual and epistemological speculation, a poet concerned with the human relationship to nature and a fierce advocate of using the vocabulary and speech patterns of common people in poetry.
Both Coleridge and Wordsworth place a huge importance on the power of imagination in Lyrical Ballads as opposed to intelligence. This view explicitly rejects the prevailing theories of the time, for example that of philosopher John Locke who opposed wit and judgement, wit being the bringing together of ideas and judgement being the careful separation of ideas.
In the 1802 version of the preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth added that although his language was meant to seem realistic, he did add “a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual way” (245). In other words, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” is truthful in the way it describes the emotional, imaginative response to nature.