The purpose of Wordsworth’s ballads is to allow cosmopolitan readers to vicariously experience nature so that they can be revived from the mind-dulling aspects of modernity. To Wordsworth, good poetry should have a purpose other than superficial entertainment. This sort of poetry-along with modern industrialization and urbanization-dulls the minds of readers. Wordsworth feels that much of the poetry of his contemporaries is far too trivial and crude, relying on sensationalism to appeal to readers. This new class of poetry will also use the language of the common people, as this language carries a certain universality and permanence, having none of the fickleness of poetic diction. With friends like Coleridge, Wordsworth hopes to produce a new class of poetry, which will focus on “low and rustic life”-Wordsworth finds that the common people are less restrained and more honest because they are in constant communion with the beauty of nature. Wordsworth was alone in his effort he penned the Lyrical Ballads with the help of his good friend, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Unlike the highbrow poetry of his contemporaries, the late-Neoclassical writers, Wordsworth’s poems in Lyrical Ballads engage with the lives of the peasantry and are written in stripped-down, common language. In it, Wordsworth explains why he wrote his experimental ballads the way he did. Over the years, Wordsworth’s “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads” has come to be seen as a manifesto for the Romantic movement in England.

Preface to lyrical ballads text