Wordsworth and Coleridge's new poetry published in a volume called Lyrical Ballads was so new and strange that Wordsworth was " advised . . . to prefix a systematic defense of the theory upon which the Poems were written."

• "The principal object, then, proposed in these Poems was to choose incidents and situations from common life . . ."
• Described in "a selection of language really used by men . . ."
• To allow a "certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect . . ."
• To make these ordinary things "interesting by tracing . . . the primary laws of our nature . . ." -- truth.
• To "make up a complex feeling of delight . . . with powerful descriptions of the deeper passions . . ." conveying the sense of "excitement."

Wordsworth's technique in writing poetry: He states that "poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of re-action, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind."