Timeline
William Wordsworth - Lyrical Ballads, published 1798
Wordsworth and Coleridge collaborated in publishing the Lyrical Ballads while Wordsworth provided the Prefaces to the first three editions which set out the theory.
He believed the volume possessed a revolutionary, experimental character which had a number of key aspects against which the success of the poems may be measured. The "principal object" was to choose "incidents and situations from common life" and to "relate or describe them...in...language really used by men".
"Low and rustic life" was thought best for illustrating the basic laws of human nature because there the "essential passions of the heart", the "elementary feelings", have a simple, more emphatic and mature expression, less effected by "social vanity", become more permanent because "arising out of repetition and regularity".
Repetition of word and image is a significant technique of many poems in the collection. In the Preface to the 1802 edition he offered his famous definition of good poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings".