William Wordsworth was born on April 7th, 1770, in Cockermouth, Cumberland, England. Young William Wordsworth’s parents, Father - John and mother - Ann, died during his boyhood. Raised amid the mountains of Cumberland alongside the River Derwent, Wordsworth grew up in a rural culture, and spent a great deal of his time playing outdoor games, in what he would later remember as a communion with nature. In the early 1790s Wordsworth lived for a time in France, then in the grip of the violent Revolution; Wordsworth’s philosophical sympathies lay with the revolutionaries, but his loyalties lay with England, whose monarchy he was not prepared to see overthrown. While in France, William Wordsworth had a long affair with Annette Vallon, with whom he had a daughter, Caroline. A later journey to France to meet Caroline, now a young girl, would inspire the great sonnet “It is a beauteous evening, calm and free.

                             The publication of ‘Lyrical Ballads’ represents a moment for English poetry; it was unlike anything that had come before, and paved the way for everything that has come after. According to the theory that poetry resulted from the “spontaneous overflow” of emotions, as Wordsworth wrote in the preface, Wordsworth and Coleridge made it their task to write in the simple language of common people, telling concrete stories of their lives.

                         According to this theory, poetry originated in “emotion recollected in a state of tranquility”; the poet then surrendered to the emotion, so that the tranquility dissolved, and the emotion remained in the poem. This explicit emphasis on feeling, simplicity, and the pleasure of beauty over rhetoric, ornament, and formality changed the course of English poetry, replacing the elaborate classical forms of Pope and Dryden with a new Romantic sensibility. Wordsworth’s most important legacy, besides his lovely, timeless poems, is his launching of the Romantic era, opening the gates for later writers such as John Keats, Shelley, and Lord Byron in England, and Emerson and Thoreau in America.  

                             In the beginning of Wordsworth’s “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” he addresses his predecessors and talks about poetry before his time. “They who have been accustomed to the gaudiness and inane phraseology of modern writers, if they persist in reading this book to its conclusion, will no doubt, frequently have to struggle with feelings of strangeness and awkwardness (Stanza 4).” Wordsworth claims that’s his predecessors will have issues with his poetry based on simplicity and the language that he maintains throughout his poems. Unlike other poets his ideas lead straight to the point, and there are no completely abstract, innate or thought provoking ideas that can surmise from his poetry. 

                           Following the success of ‘Lyrical Ballads’ and his subsequent poem The Prelude, a massive autobiography in verse form, Wordsworth moved to the stately house at Rydal Mount where he lived, with Dorothy, his wife Mary, and his children, until his death in 1850. Wordsworth became the dominant force in English poetry while still quite a young man, and he lived to be quite old; his later years were marked by an increasing aristocratic temperament and a general alienation from the younger Romantics whose work he had inspired. Byron—the only important poet to become more popular than Wordsworth during Wordsworth’s lifetime—in particular saw him as a kind of sell-out, writing in his sardonic preface to Don Juan that the once-liberal Wordsworth had “turned out a Tory” at last. The last decades of Wordsworth’s life, however, were spent as Poet Laureate of England, and until his death he was widely considered the most important author in England. But the themes that run through Wordsworth’s poetry, and the language and imagery he uses to embody those themes, remain remarkably consistent throughout the Wordsworth canon, adhering largely to the tenets Wordsworth set out for himself in the 1802 preface to ‘Lyrical Ballads’. 

                           Many of Wordsworth’s poems deal with the subjects of childhood and the memory of childhood in the mind of the adult in particular, childhood’s lost connection with nature, which can be preserved only in memory. Wordsworth’s images and metaphors mix natural scenery, religious symbolism (as in the sonnet “It is a beauteous evening, calm and free,” in which the evening is described as being “quiet as a nun”), and the relics of the poet’s rustic childhood—cottages, hedgerows, orchards, and other places where humanity intersects gently and easily with nature. William Wordsworth’s poems initiated the Romantic age by emphasizing feeling, instinct, and pleasure above formality and mannerism.

                     ‘Lyrical Ballads’ is a collection of poems written by Samuel Coleridge and William Wordsworth, although you might hear some people refer to Lyrical Ballads simply as Wordsworth's because he contributed the majority of the poems.                                 

                        The collection, originally published in 1798, was a direct response to the ideas and styles found in the literature written between 1660 and 1798, a period commonly referred to as the Neo classical era. Lyrical Ballads was a clear and intentional challenge to this literary tradition. In fact, when Lyrical Ballads was originally published in 1798.  This Preface, written by William Wordsworth, was one of the first and most direct attempts to challenge the popular poetic practices of the 17th and 18th centuries and offer a new poetic theory to replace them. For this reason, Lyrical Ballads is used to mark the end of the Neo classical period and the beginning of the Romantic period of literature, the period of literature that lasts from about 1798 to 1850 and emphasizes nature, the imagination, and the importance of personal experience rather than scientific logic.

                         William Wordsworth and coleridge saw the problems introduced by the Industrial Revolution as evidence of the failures of Enlightenment philosophy and the Neo classical poetry that came out of it. This context is helpful to keep in mind when reading Lyrical Ballads, for many of its poems portray the return to a more natural lifestyle as a remedy to the problems created by the Industrial Revolution.  

                            In the 1800 Preface, Wordsworth claims that the rigid aesthetics of Neo classical poetry are arbitrary and distort the freedom and naturalness of poetic expression. His preface to the Lyrical Ballads became the symbol and the instrument of romantic revolt. The second edition of Lyrical Ballads appeared in two volumes in 1800 in Wordsworth's name alone. He describes poetry as the spontaneous overflow of emotions. Coleridge remarked that half the Preface was in fact the child of his own brain. In the beginning of Wordsworth’s “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” he addresses his predecessors and talks about poetry before his time. “They who have been accustomed to the gaudiness and inane phraseology of modern writers, if they persist in reading this book to its conclusion, will no doubt, frequently have to struggle with feelings of strangeness and awkwardness (Stanza 4).”                       

                             Thus, Wordsworth claims that’s his predecessors will have issues with his poetry based on simplicity and the language that he maintains throughout his poems.  Wordsworth and his predecessors can come to terms on one aspect that he maintains in his, “Preface to Lyrical Ballads”. He also believes that poetry can be on multiple topics and not restricted on one subject, which is totally true, as poetry has been arranged on multiple topics and not necessarily linked to the natural aspects that Wordsworth highly prescribes. Wordsworth criticizes some of his contemporizes and his predecessors style and diction claiming that, “ the reader will find that personifications of abstract ideas rarely occur in these volumes; and utterly rejected as an ordinary device to elevate style, and raise it above prose.

Conclusion:-

Thus, we can say that the chief aim of the poem in ‘Lyrical Ballads’ has been to choose “incidents and situations in the common life” and to relate them in a selection of language used by people.