Preface to Lyrical Ballads

“[…] fitting to metrical arrangement a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation [...]”

The quote emphasizes two important things about Wordsworth’s poetry: He uses everyday language adapted to poetic meter and rhythms, and he tries to express the strong emotions of human beings as they react to various life experiences. Moreover, Wordsworth emphasizes the formal aspects of poetry as vehicles of pleasure for the reader.

“[…] if the views with which [the poems] were composed were indeed realized, a class of Poetry would be produced, well adapted to interest mankind permanently […]”

Wordsworth argues that his method of writing poetry can become the basis of a new style that would be permanently popular with audiences. He hopes not only to write interesting poetry but in some measure to change the face of poetry itself.

“The principal object, then, proposed in these Poems was to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible in a selection of language really used by men, and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect […]”

Reemphasizing his practice of using everyday language in his poems, Wordsworth states further that he wants to go beyond the mundane by exploiting the realm of the imagination. He wants to present the subjects of his poems, which are ordinary in themselves and often taken from the sights and sounds of nature, in an unusual light that will surprise and stimulate the reader’s mind.