Lyrical Ballads is an experimental poetry collaboration project from 1798 that was coauthored by William Woodsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Woodsworth began developing poetry in a way that would reflect the livelihoods of people in rustic environments. He was very interested in the idea of ballads which were poetry that told stories about people with messages. The most common example of this in modern day is music as ballads play a big role in music writing. This also goes back to the era of medieval times and religious mythology as ballads told stories of many well-known figures such as Jesus Christ and Robin Hood. Their goal was also to have a language that mimicked the way these people communicated as to compared to the more modern poetic styles at the time compared to the elegant and posh way that the upper class would speak.
Woodsworth believed that there were extraordinary aspects in ordinary life and wanted to show this in his writing. Coleridge essentially was the reverse of this and wrote about ordinary aspects of extraordinary life. Their most well known pieces in the collection “The Idiot Boy” (The story of a mentally disabled boy and the story his life tells which is genuine and relatable in the real world) and “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (A ghost sea adventure story that eventually inspired a song by English metal band Iron Maiden) respectively both highlight how well they represent these ideas. The writers believed that both of these styles would balance each other out and make people think deeper about poetry and realize there is more power to it than meets the eye. There was also the idea that at the time the poems were written in support of the French government during the Revolution but at this point in time it is more speculation if anything. The most important aspect was that the two writers worked hard to help bring poetry to a more public audience of average everyday nonfiction and combine it with the whimsical and adventurous side of fiction and without them poetry possibly might not be as impactful to the literary world as it is today. Despite negative reviews building up to the release of the full collection, it has since gone on to be considered important pieces of literary history and for good reason.