The solitary
Leech-gatherers, forsaken women, and walkers who teach by enduring.
Romanticism · Poetry collection · 1798
Lyrical Ballads
William Wordsworth
With Coleridge, Wordsworth proposes poems in the language of ordinary people and subjects drawn from common life. Feeling is revalued as knowledge.
Romantic lyric
Characters
The poet
A man speaking to men, as the preface famously insists.
Themes
Ordinary speech
A democratic claim for what poetry may sound like.
Nature and mind
Landscape is not scenery; it is an education of feeling.
Motifs
Thinking happens at the pace of feet on a road.
Spots of time that later sustain the adult mind.