The Lyrical Ballads were fist published in 1798 and consisted of a compilation of poems by Romantic Poets William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The collection was an enormously important contribution to the world of literature both in its entirety, as well as by virtue of the individual poems that it contained – such works as Coleridge's Rime Of The Ancient Mariner and Wordsworth's 'Tintern Abbey'. But despite the quality and popularity of the poems themselves, perhaps the Lyrical Ballads' greatest legacy lies in its Preface added by Wordsworth to the second edition published in 1800.
The original 1798 publication of Lyrical Ballads was issued with an 'Advertisement' by Wordsworth, designed to prepare the reader for the unorthodox style of poetry the work contained. The 'Advertisement' consisted of several paragraphs which openly condemn the “gaudiness and inane phraseology of many modern writers” and asks instead that readers “consent to be pleased in spite of that most dreadful enemy to [their] pleasures: [their] own pre-established codes of decisions.” (Wordsworth, 1798). The Preface added in 1800 however is a much longer apology of the Poet's own style and was in fact expanded once again for a further edition in 1802.
In essence the Preface is Wordsworth's poetic manifesto. The most obvious point that Wordsworth makes in it relates directly to the style and technique used in writing the poems themselves, as well as to the subject matter or focus of the poems which resides in common, everyday scenes of rural life and folk.
The principle object, then, which I proposed to myself in these poems, was to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them throughout, as far as was possible, in a selection of language really used by men, and at the same time to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual way. (Wu: 1994: p357)
It must be kept in mind that though a reader of today may find nothing unusual in the style employed throughout the Lyrical Ballads, the simplicity of language and the depiction of ‘common' people, places and events used by Wordsworth, was in open opposition to the poetic convention of his day. Readers were used to a complex and often artificial (at leat to Wordsworth) poetic code. Early critics were harsh in their evaluation of the Lyrical Ballads declaring the subject matter ‘shocking' and the style ‘unpoetical'.
The fact that Wordsworth chooses for his characters men, women and children from a rural setting, as opposed to the more cosmopolitan characters of his contemporaries, leads to another important facet of his poetry which he expounds in his Preface; Wordsworth held a remarkably close affinity to nature. He argued that one who lives close to nature (as he himself did for most of his life residing in the English Lake District), lives closer to the well-spring of human-nature. Many of Wordsworth's poems are autobiographical in as far as they display a love and deep appreciation of the natural environment as experienced by the poet himself. However even more than a simple aesthetic appreciation of nature, Wordsworth believed that there a was an element of the Divine to be found in nature, which held a tremendous potential to mould and even to instruct the minds of men who live in its midst and to conjure a depth of emotional response unattainable outside of nature. Wordsworth set out in his Preface to convey that “poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.”(Wu, 1994, pp299)
It is this emphasis on the emotion behind his poetry that separates Wordsworth's writings from those of his contemporaries. It is this too that he sees as being the primary objective of the poet. Indeed, a large portion of his Preface forms a direct response to the question “What is a poet?”. Although the language is gendered, the answer given by Wordsworth forms a summary of the methods and passions held by the poet and communicated with such lasting effect to his contemporaries, as well as those literary men and women who, over following 200 years have built upon his extraordinary vision:
What is a poet . . . he is a man speaking to men – a man (it is true) endued with more lively sensibilities, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind; a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him, delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the universe, and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them. (Wu, 1994, p 360)