The first volume of these Poems has already been submitted to general perusal. They ushered in an era that lasts to this day. Wordsworth’s “Prefix,” and Lyrical Ballads as a whole, altered the course of English poetry: together they opened poetry to everyday life, common language, psychology and individual personality. For Wordsworth, the right kind of poetry both “strengthens” and “purifies” the mind of its readers, and part of his project is to ensure that those readers can understand the poetry they need. In his “Prefix,” Wordsworth proposes that poetry should in fact be something completely different: it should make ordinary life interesting, and it should do so in simple language, “the very language of men.” Wordsworth makes startlingly new and democratic claims regarding poetry’s subject matter, language, and style in the “Prefix,” but he also tries to assert the importance of poetry and poets in a newly industrialized and increasingly urban world. Poetry before Lyrical Ballads was predominately epic or satiric-concerned with mythic heroes or literary Londoners-and it was usually written in heroic couplets and the highest possible diction. Acknowledged as one of the main founders of English Romanticism, his long and tumultuous partnership with Samuel Taylor Coleridge produced the movement’s founding document, Lyrical Ballads (1798), and Wordsworth’s introduction to the second edition, “Observations Prefixed to Lyrical Ballads” (1802), succinctly states the revolutionary agenda the two pursued. Still, at the time of his death in 1850, William Wordsworth was already a literary legend. He married a childhood friend, Mary Hutchinson, in 1802 and his later life was sedate and secure, and some have argued that his poetry suffered as a result. Most of Wordsworth’s major works were written between meeting Coleridge and the completion of his masterpiece, The Prelude, in 1805. Helped by an unexpected legacy, and tended to by Dorothy, Wordsworth entered into a remarkably productive period with Coleridge, which only increased after his return to the Lake District in 1799. It was not until he befriended Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1795, following his return to England, that Wordsworth’s career began in earnest. As a young political radical, he embarked on a walking tour of Europe which took him into the middle of the French Revolution. He was orphaned at a young age and separated from his siblings, including his beloved sister Dorothy. Though profoundly affected by the countryside he grew up in, his youthful experiences were far from serene or bucolic.

William Wordsworth was born in 1770 in Cumberland, England, near the center of the Lake District.

Preface to the lyrical ballads text