William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth, a poet and one of the foremost founders of English Romanticism, is the author and narrator of the essay “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads.” Through the essay, Wordsworth criticizes the literature of Neoclassical…
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Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Wordsworth introduces Samuel Taylor Coleridge as “a Friend” who contributed several poems—The Ancient Mariner, “The Foster Mother’s Tale,” “The Nightingale,” “The Dungeon,” and “Love”—to Lyrical Ballads, and who shares the same Romantic…
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Late-Neoclassical Writers
According to Wordsworth, these writers diverted public interest from the “invaluable works” of writers like Shakespeare and Milton to their own “frantic novels, sickly and stupid German tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant…
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The Peasantry
Wordsworth considered the thoughts, feelings, and language of the peasantry to be ideal for poetry. In the Lyrical Ballads, he depicts “low and rustic life” because he believes the thoughts of the peasantry are…
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Minor Characters
Cosmopolitan Readers
Cosmopolitan readers are at once the subject of and the audience to the “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads.” They are the ones whose minds are being dulled by late-Neoclassical writers and industrialization, and they are the ones Wordsworth hopes to revive through his nature-centered ballads.
