The first edition of Lyrical Ballads was published in 1798. The collection was produced by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge and is widely regarded as a foundational publication of English Romanticism.
The volume challenged prevailing poetic fashions by placing ordinary people, rural life, emotion, and natural speech at the centre of serious poetry. Wordsworth supplied most of the poems, while Coleridge contributed four, including “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” which opens the collection. Wordsworth’s “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” is another major poem in the first edition.
The 1798 volume was issued as Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems. Its immediate critical impact was limited, but its long-term influence was enormous. Wordsworth and Coleridge’s experiment helped shift English poetry toward personal feeling, imagination, nature, and the language of everyday life.
A frequent date mix-up concerns the 1800 edition. That later edition expanded the collection and introduced Wordsworth’s important “Preface,” which was revised again in 1802. Because the Preface became a major statement of Romantic poetic theory, readers sometimes mistakenly identify 1800 or 1802 as the original publication date.