Wordsworth: Preface to Lyrical Ballads
William Wordsworth was born on 7 April, 1770, in Cockermouth, Cumberland, England.The theory he produced, and the poetics he invented to embody it, caused a revolution in English literature. Developed throughout his life, Wordsworth’s understanding of the human mind seems simple enough today, what with the advent of psychoanalysis and the general Freudian acceptance of the importance of childhood in the adult psyche. But in Wordsworth’s time, in what Seamus Heaney has called “Dr. Johnson’s supremely adult eighteenth century,” where Wordsworth could be closer to his friend and fellow poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Together, Wordsworth and Coleridge began work on a book called Lyrical Ballads, first published in 1798 and reissued with Wordsworth’s monumental preface in 1802. The publication of Lyrical Ballads represents a landmark moment for English poetry; it was unlike anything that had come before, and paved the way for everything that has come after. According to Wordswor