Published in 1798, Lyrical Ballads changed the direction of English poetry. It contains twenty-three poems composed by William Wordsworth (1770-1850) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) during the period of their youthful and intimate friendship. Wordsworth's imagination dwelt on nature, using revolutionary language that abandoned traditional poetic diction and addressed the reader in the plain, colloquial speech of the day. His poems in this volume brought a candour and directness to poetry, nowhere more powerfully than in 'Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey'. Coleridge was fascinated by the numinous and the metaphysical, and his poems here include 'The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere', one of the most popular mock-ballads in English literature. In these works, the two poets exercised new energies and opened up new themes, exploring the interplay between the solitary imagination and the unfettered elements of nature. This edition prints the poems in the form in which they first appeared, allowing readers to experience their impact and power. It also includes a note on the textual history by Michael Schmidt.