Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems (1798)

In 1798, two young poets committed an act of literary revolution. Wordsworth and Coleridge published a collection of poems written not in the elevated, artificial language of tradition, but in the speech of common people - fishermen, servants, beggars, the poor. The critics were scandalized. How dare they? But the book that enraged the establishment became the birth certificate of English Romanticism. Here you will find the haunting "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," Coleridge's terrifying ballad of a sailor cursed to wander the seas with dead men for crew, and Wordsworth's transcendent "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey," which invented the interior voice we now take for granted in poetry. Here too are poems about a poor woman who steals fire from a rich man's hearth, a leech-gatherer wandering the moors, a boy killed by lightning. What unites them is a radical claim: that ordinary human life, ordinary human feeling, is worthy of the highest art. The 1800 preface that Wordsworth added to the collection remains one of the most influential statements about what poetry is and what it's for. This is the book that taught poetry to speak in its own voice.