Lyrical Ballads

Lyrical Ballads 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. Coleridge's four poems in the first edition, about a third of its length, included The Rime of the Ancient Mariner; the other nineteen were Wordsworth's. The poets set out to overturn what they considered the learned, highly sculpted forms of 18th-century English poetry and to write in common, everyday language. Wordsworth's preface to the 1800 edition became known as the manifesto of Romanticism.