![]() ![]() The topics covered include the following: The ‘Preface’ covers a number of issues and is wide-ranging in its survey of the place of the Lyrical Ballads on the contemporary literary scene. ![]() Yet it is also vital for helping us to understand what Wordsworth and Coleridge were attempting in their collection of verse, and also provides us with a means of assessing how successfully the poems themselves live up to the standards outlined in the ‘Preface’. The ‘Preface’ is itself a masterpiece of English prose, exemplary in its lucid yet passionate defence of a literary style that could be popular without compromising artistic and poetic standards. In his ‘Preface’ to the 1798 edition of the Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth presented his poetic manifesto, indicating the extent to which he saw his poetry, and that of Coleridge, as breaking away from the ‘artificiality’, ‘triviality’ or over-elaborate and contrived quality of eighteenth century poetry. ![]()
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