Preface of the lyrical ballads6/25/2023 ![]() ![]() What is liberty? The French Revolutionaries saw it as a freedom from a despotic regime. It is revolutionary because Wordsworth crafted it around three main ideals borrowed from the French Revolution – immortalized in that war’s infamous rallying cry, “Liberté, égalité, et fraternité ou la mort!” This liberty, equality, and fraternity (brotherhood) form the basis of Wordsworth’s treatise, a treatise that forever transformed the role of the poet and his poetry. By the third edition, however, this “Advertisement” had developed into a much longer Preface or, rather, a sort of “revolutionary manifesto about the nature of poetry” (Norton Anthology of English Literature, pg. ![]() To the first edition Wordsworth attached an “Advertisement” that briefly explained the purpose of the poems. In 1798, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (two of the leading poets of the Romantic literary movement in England) published a volume of their poems entitled Lyrical Ballads. ![]()
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