Wordsworth's Preface To Lyrical Ballads
This post is in reference to the questions asked here: http://dilipbarad.blogspot.com/2014/09/short-learning-video-on-wordsworths.html The publication of Lyrical Ballads, in 1798, marked a new beginning in the literary theory and criticism. The efforts for a Romantic revival were ongoing way before Wordsworth and Coleridge's contribution. However, we can say that their work marks the climax of the Romantic age. Just as any new literary theory, Romanticism was also met with a lot of censure from critics, so much so that Wordsworth's poems were often considered 'silly' and 'childish' things, composed of 'meanness of language and inanity of thought' as Coleridge mentions later in his Biographia Literaria. It was because of this reason that Wordsworth tried to defend his creed in the Preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads in 1801. Romanticism began as a reaction against the earlier Enlightenment ( Neo Classical) ideology of using clas...