William Wordsworth produced some of the greatest English poems of the late 1700s and early 1800s and revolutionized English-language poetry. In contrast to the decorum of much 18th-century verse, he wanted to relate “situations from common life” in “language really used by men,” embodying “the spontaneous overflow of feelings…recollected in tranquility.” Wordsworth famously outlined these principles in the preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800), a collection of poems published with fellow English Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
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