Preface to Lyrical Ballads

“The principal object, then, which I proposed to myself in these poems was to choose incidents and situations from common life and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible, in a selection of language really used by men; and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual way; and further, and above all, to make these incidents and situations interesting by tracing in them, truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature: chiefly, as far as regards the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of general excitement” (286).

From the Introduction: “The Preface to Lyrical Ballads is a transitional work between the rhetorical/mimetic literary theory of the eighteenth century and the expressive theories of the nineteenth. As an argument it is at odds with itself” (283).

Wordsworth attacks “the poetic diction of the latter eighteenth century as artificial and meaningless” but praises “the values of the eighteenth century already revered” (283).

“Wordsworth, however revolutionary his style and subject matter, [was] defending his poetic practice in the most traditional terms as an attempt to ‘please many and please long’ by providing ‘just representations of general nature’” (284).

But, the Lyrical Ballads are “created less by representing what is in the outside world than by attending to the voice within [….] The poet is thus able to internalize something he has seen and experienced and call it up in himself as though he were participating in it” (284).