According to William Wordsworth poetry is the powerful overflow of spontaneous feelings. Wordsworth describes his main intention to write Lyrical Ballads is to choose incidents from real life and add a colour of imagination so that ordinary things may be represented in an unusual fashion.

1. THE PREFACE TO LYRICAL BALLADS

3. The chief aim in the composition of poems in
the Lyrical Ballads has been to choose
“incidents and situations from common life”
and at the same time throw over them a
colouring of imagination, whereby the
ordinary things would be presented to the
mind in an unusual aspect.

4. The preface to Lyrical Ballads was mainly written to explain
the theory of poetry guiding Wordsworth’s composition of
the poems. Wordsworth defends the unusual style and
subjects of the poems (some of them may have been
actually composed by Samuel Taylor Coleridge) as
experiments to see how far and accurately popular poetry
could be used to convey profound feeling.
In the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth wanted to
express his theory of poetry. The Preface is therefore a
justification of that theory and of the themes and styles of
the poems in Lyrical Ballads.

21. In his "Preface" to the Lyrical Ballads (1802), William Wordsworth lays out many of the
ideas often associated with Romanticism in English poetry. Some of those ideas have been
mentioned here :
•an emphasis on the "real language" actually spoken by human beings, especially human
beings from the lower rungs of society.
•an emphasis on "vivid sensation," or heightened emotion and perception.
an emphasis on using poetry to provide "more than common pleasure.“
•an emphasis on "incidents and situations from common life
•an emphasis on using “imagination” to “throw a certain coloring over” descriptions of
such incidents and situations so that ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an
unusual way . . . in order to make these incidents and situations interesting by tracing in
them . . . the primary laws of our nature: chiefly, as far as regards the manner in which we
associate ideas in a state of excitement.
•an emphasis on poetry as a “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” but also on the
poet as a person who has “thought long and deeply”
•a rejection of the kinds of “arbitrary and capricious habits of expression” traditionally
used in conventional poetry

22. REFERENCES
1. www.google.com
2. wikipedia
3. www.slideserve.com
4. www.enotes.com
5. www.literarism.blogspot.in