LYRICAL BALLADS

(1798), collection of poems by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth; its appearance is often designated by scholars as a signal of the beginning of the English Romantic movement. The work included Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey, as well as many controversial common-language poems by Wordsworth, such as The Idiot Boy. The Preface to the second edition (1800) contains Wordsworth's famous definition of poetry as the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings and his theory that poetry should be written in the language really used by men.