Lyrical Ballads

Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems is a collection of poems written by William Wordsworth with Samuel Taylor Coleridge and originally published in 1798.

Despite little initial success, it gradually gained notoriety and influenced English literature. Its publication initiated the Romanticism movement in England.

The vast majority of the poems were the work of William Wordsworth. For his part, Coleridge collaborated with four poems, although of great length.

Most of the poems were written, as an experiment, to find out how valid the language spoken by the middle and lower classes of society was for use in poetry. This caused the critics of the time not to accept this collection of poems, as it used a language and tone radically different from what had been done so far.

However, for Wordsworth, the important thing is not the language itself but the emotions conveyed by his work.