The co-authored book Lyrical Ballads published in 1798 by the poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge marked the beginning of Romanticism. Wordsworth’s Principles of Poetry in the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads has defined what is poetry and what is poet.

(1) Wordsworth held that “all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling”. He regarded individual sensation, i.e. pleasure, excitement and enjoyment, as the foundation of the creation and appreciation of poetry.

(2) Wordsworth advocated the use of “common speech”. The function of poetry lies in its power to give an unexpected splendor to familiar and commonplace things, to incidents and situations from common life.

(3) He argued against the hierarchy of the period which valued epic poetry above the lyric. In his poems Wordsworth aimed at simplicity and purity of language. The subject of his poems is the common people and common things in the common life. As a passionate lover for nature, his descriptions of various kinds of landscape are exquisite.