Feedback
Corrections? Updates? Omissions? Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login).
Thank you for your feedback

Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.

In 1798 English poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth published Lyrical Ballads, a collection of poems that sparked a revolution in literature and signaled the beginning of English Romanticism. The work included such famous pieces as Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” as well as many controversial poems written in common, rather than formal, language—or what Wordsworth would describe in a later edition as “the language really used by...