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 1797-98, 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.