Knowra Lyrical Ballads Lyrical Ballads A poetry collection by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, first published anonymously in 1798 and expanded in later editions. Its plain language and ordinary subjects helped establish English Romantic poetry.
William Wordsworth : An English Romantic poet whose writing often drew on memory, nature, and ordinary life. He contributed most of the poems and later articulated the collection’s poetic aims.
Preface to Lyrical Ballads : William Wordsworth’s critical introduction, first added to the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads. It explains Wordsworth’s theory of poetic language and the collection’s intended experiments.
Romanticism : An artistic and intellectual movement emphasizing imagination, emotion, nature, and individual experience. The collection helped establish poetic practices associated with Romanticism.
Neoclassical poetry : Poetry shaped by classical models, formal balance, decorum, and public or moral themes. Wordsworth’s preference for common speech and humble subjects challenged its standards of poetic decorum.
The Nightingale: A Conversation Poem : Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1798 poem that challenges the association of the nightingale with melancholy. It offers a conversational, nature-centered poem unlike the volume’s narrative ballads.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge : An English poet, critic, and philosopher whose work helped shape British Romanticism. His poems supplied the collection’s supernatural and imaginative counterpoint to Wordsworth’s ordinary subjects.
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner : Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s narrative poem about a mariner’s supernatural voyage and its aftermath. Its supernatural plot exemplifies Coleridge’s contribution to the volume’s range of subjects.
William Wordsworth's theory of poetry : A poetic theory that favors ordinary subjects, natural speech, and emotion recollected in tranquility. The preface’s claims became a lasting point of reference in debates about poetic language.
Augustan poetry : Eighteenth-century English poetry associated with wit, satire, classical imitation, and polished couplets. Its polished conventions provide a prominent backdrop to the collection’s plainer poetic language.
The Female Vagrant : William Wordsworth’s narrative poem about a woman driven into poverty and displacement. Its attention to social suffering shows the collection’s engagement with lives outside elite society.
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