Anyone who has taken a survey course in English Literature learns of the historic importance of this slim volume of poetry by Wordsworth and Coleridge. Wikipedia puts it this way:
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.
I downloaded a free Kindle copy the other day. An introduction written at the time shows that the poets were aware that they were doing something different:
Readers of superior judgment may disapprove of the style in which many of these pieces are executed it must be expected that many lines and phrases will not exactly suit their taste. It will perhaps appear to them, that wishing to avoid the prevalent fault of the day, the author has sometimes descended too low, and that many of his expressions are too familiar, and not of sufficient dignity.
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| William Wordsworth |
A revolution in the rhetoric of poetry had begun, and the rest (as they say) is history.
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