The book that changed what poetry was allowed to be.

It appeared in 1798 as Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems. The first edition gathered twenty-three poems: nineteen by Wordsworth, four by Coleridge. Among them were Coleridge’s strange, haunted “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and Wordsworth’s “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey”.

Neither poet put his name on it. They were young, largely unknown, and did not assume their names would carry any weight. The critics, at first, were unmoved. The book’s importance came later, and slowly, until it was understood to be one of the decisive volumes in the language.

The two of them called it an experiment: an attempt to see whether poems written in “the real language of men”, about humble and rural lives, could give as much pleasure as the polished verse of the day. It could.

William Wordsworth (1770 to 1850) was a child of the Lake District, born at Cockermouth. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 to 1834) was the restless, speculative one. They met in the mid-1790s and became close, quickly.

The book came out of that friendship, not from either man alone. Through the spring and summer of 1798 the two families lived as neighbours in Somerset, and the poems took shape the way the best thinking still does: in long conversations, and longer walks. The work divided naturally between them. Wordsworth took the ordinary and the overlooked, and showed you the wonder already in it. Coleridge took the strange and the supernatural, and made it feel true. Each opened ground the other could not.

That is not a bad description of what we try to make room for, two centuries on: attention, company, and the walking that loosens both.

The verse of the eighteenth century prized formal, elevated, highly worked language. Wordsworth and Coleridge set themselves quietly against it. They wanted poetry drawn from common life and written in common speech, so that it might reach ordinary readers and move them. Their subjects were the humble and the overlooked: shepherds, mothers, old men, children, the poor, the forgotten. Their real subject was the inner life. Feeling and memory, not plot or grand event.

That is why the book is so often called the beginning of English Romanticism. Nearly everything the movement came to stand for is here in early form: the nearness of people and nature, the authority of feeling, the worth of the everyday, the pull of the imagination.

The 1798 edition opened with only a short notice. It was the second edition, in 1800, that carried the piece the book is now famous for: Wordsworth’s Preface, expanded again in 1802. It reads as a manifesto, though a calm one, for these poems and for poetry itself.

Ordinary life, he argued, is the best subject for poetry. Everyday language suits it best. Feeling matters more than plot. He called the poet “a man speaking to men”, and good poetry “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”. The phrases have shaped how English readers have thought about poetry ever since. They are also, more or less, a description of why we still gather people in small rooms to write.

The first edition was mostly written in Somerset. But the poets’ deepest bond is with the Lakes, and it began in earnest just after the book appeared.

In December 1799, Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy moved into Dove Cottage at Town End, Grasmere, where they stayed until 1808. He called Grasmere “the loveliest spot that man hath ever found”. Here, in a life he described as “plain living and high thinking”, he wrote much of his greatest work, and Dorothy kept her extraordinary Grasmere Journal.

Coleridge followed north. By 1800 he had moved his family to Greta Hall in Keswick, close by, and the two poets and their circle, later called the Lake Poets, were bound to this landscape for good. The fells, the water, the changing light: not a backdrop to the work, but part of its substance.

This is the country we walk. Not to look at it, but to think in it.

A few poems open the book well. Read them slowly, and aloud if you can. They were made to be heard.

From Wordsworth: “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey”, “The Tables Turned”, “Expostulation and Reply”. From Coleridge: “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, and the quieter “The Nightingale”.

If you would like a poem in your inbox now and then, alongside our own essays and letters, that is more or less what we do. Read at the pace of a walk.