Wordsworth and Coleridge - Lyrical Ballads

The poetic experiment led by Wordsworth and Coleridge

The two poets, Wordsworth and Coleridge, conceived this work as an experiment in poetry.
As a matter of fact, Wordsworth’s contribution was aimed to make verse out of the incidents of simple rustic life, in a language that was a selection from the phrases of ordinary speech.

Wordsworth was convinced that the passions exist in their purest form in simple rural life, and thus the humble activities of ordinary people could serve as poetic themes. As a result he wrote poems remarkable for their simplicity, both in subject-matter and in form.

He spent most of his life in the beautiful Lake District, where he found not only peacefulness and serenity, but the things he loved: lakes, valleys, waterfalls, trees, flowers and birds.
His poems are deeply felt responses to the beauties of nature while his thoughts proceed from external description to a moment of illumination as he reflects on the true nature of all the life he is observing.

The second edition of the Lyrical Ballads

On the other hand, the first edition was published two years before, in 1798.
Here the majority of ballads were written by Wordsworth and Coleridge contributed only with four ballads (The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, The Foster-Mother's Tale, The Dungeon, The Nightingale, Love).
Despite that, one of the Coleridge’s ballads, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, in seven parts, became very popular and was used as a source of inspiration by Mary Shelley in Frankenstein, especially in the first part of the novel where Victor remembers his life and Walton writes it down.

In this time laps, the poets included more poems by Wordsworth and a long preface, which eventually come to be considered the manifesto of the English Romantic movement.

In this innovative literary work, Wordsworth explained his own romantic perception and Coleridge's ideas about poetry, its language and its subjects. One of the central issues, which was meant to have a major influence on the development of English literature, was the lucid defence of their own work, seen as a break with the artificiality and over-elaborate style of 18th century poetry and its contrived poetic diction.

As a matter of fact, the Preface states that the poet is a men that speaks to other men.
That means that the author is not only a literate but also a communicator. So, the oral part of the poetry is as important as the written one.
Poetry was conceived as the highest form of Art that man could obtain and handle but if the poet considers himself a common human being that can be at the same level as the others, it implies that also the poetry itself can be within everyone's reach.