Lyrical Ballads

We rely on your support to help us keep producing beautiful, free, and unrestricted editions of literature for the digital age. Will you support our efforts with a donation ? Lyrical Ballads is a collection of poems by William Wordsworth and his friend and contemporary Samuel Taylor Coleridge . A hugely influential work, Lyrical Ballads is generally acknowledged to have started the Romantic movement in English literature—a period marked by a departure from the stiff and unapproachable poetry of earlier times, and by a focus on readable, relatable verse written in everyday language. Many of Wordsworth's poems focus on the natural world and the down-to-earth people of the country, another far departure from the rational and dry literature of old. Romanticism was one of the largest sea changes in modern English literature, and Lyrical Ballads was its catalyst. This ebook edition is based on the 1805 edition of Lyrical Ballads , and features the famous poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner , "Tintern Abbey," "Expostulation and Reply," "Lucy Gray," and many others. William Wordsworth (died 1850) was one of the most distinguished authors of the Victorian age. Their work has endured across generations and continues to be read and studied worldwide. Poetry has always been the most concentrated and powerful form of literary expression. The verse collected in Lyrical Ballads represents a high point of the poetic tradition, offering language of beauty and precision that speaks to the deepest levels of human experience.