Lyrical Ballads, With A Few Other Poems

Lyrical Ballads (1798 and 1800) constituted a quiet poetic revolution, both in its attitude to its subject-matter and its anti-conventional language. Those volumes and Wordsworth's and Coleridge's other major poems were central to the Romantic period and remain classic texts in our own time. Wordsworth focuses on 'the essential passions of the heart' and achieves a penetrating insight into love and death, solitude and community. Coleridge explores a more fantastic and dreamlike imagination and also writes poems of quiet, conversational meditation. Both poets look with a fresh and visionary eye at the human and the natural world. They examine the condition of men and women at the extreme edge of society; they are also subtle analysts of their own minds and the processes of introspection and memory.