Lyrical Ballads

When Wordsworth and Coleridge published this slim volume in 1798, they set out to make poetry from ordinary speech and ordinary lives, and English verse was never quite the same afterward. The collection opens with Coleridge’s haunting ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ and closes with Wordsworth’s ‘Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey,’ two poems that still anchor the Romantic tradition. In between come lyrics about shepherds, wandering children, and the quiet workings of memory and nature. The 1800 edition added Wordsworth’s famous Preface, a defense of writing in the real language of men. This free PDF and EPUB edition brings together the poems that launched Romanticism in Britain.