THE PREFACE TO LYRICAL BALLADS

The chief aim in the composition of poems in the Lyrical Ballads has been to choose “incidents and situations from common life” and at the same time throw over them a colouring of imagination, whereby the ordinary things would be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect.

The preface to Lyrical Ballads was mainly written to explain the theory of poetry guiding Wordsworth’s composition of the poems. Wordsworth defends the unusual style and subjects of the poems (some of them may have been actually composed by Samuel Taylor Coleridge) as experiments to see how far and accurately popular poetry could be used to convey profound feeling.

In the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth wanted to express his theory of poetry. The Preface is therefore a justification of that theory and of the themes and styles of the poems in Lyrical Ballads.

In his "Preface" to the Lyrical Ballads (1802), William Wordsworth lays out many of the ideas often associated with Romanticism in English poetry. Some of those ideas have been mentioned here :

•an emphasis on the "real language" actually spoken by human beings, especially human beings from the lower rungs of society. •an emphasis on "vivid sensation," or heightened emotion and perception.an emphasis on using poetry to provide "more than common pleasure.“•an emphasis on "incidents and situations from common life•an emphasis on using “imagination” to “throw a certain coloring over” descriptions of such incidents and situations so that ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual way . . . in order to make these incidents and situations interesting by tracing in them . . . the primary laws of our nature: chiefly, as far as regards the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement.•an emphasis on poetry as a “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” but also on the poet as a person who has “thought long and deeply”•a rejection of the kinds of “arbitrary and capricious habits of expression” traditionally used in conventional poetry

REFERENCES

1. www.google.com2. wikipedia3. www.slideserve.com4. www.enotes.com5. www.literarism.blogspot.in