Oral tales reflected communal values, but magazines supported by advertising were likely to reflect the social, political, and ethical ideas or preferences of those who wrote, edited, and distributed them. New “delivery systems” changed not only the content but also the cultural function of literature. The combination of increased education and literacy, a ready commercial market, and the need for professional authors to make money, and the aesthetic possibilities offered by producing short works of tight narrative and emotional unity produced the new genre we now call the short story. Technological developments in printing and reproducing pictures gave impetus to newspapers and illustrated magazines, which provided outlets for short works of many kinds-essays, reviews, articles, poems, and short stories. But industrialism also produced the means by which authors could earn a living through the sale of hundreds or even thousands of copies of a single work. Romanticism coincided, especially in England and North America, with the coming of industrialism, and was in many ways a reaction against the ugly realities of cities and the assaults on nature that industrialism caused. Personal history and observation were assumed to be universally interesting, relevant, and full of meaning. With few exceptions, they found the self an inexhaustible source of material. Carrying out Wordsworth's proposal in the preface to Lyrical Ballads, they wrote familiarly, even intimately, of their own memories, dreams, and emotional histories. As the reading public grew in number and in sophistication, a variety of journals, reviews, and magazines different kinds of periodicals created outlets for poets and essayists to develop and mold public taste. Joy and the loss of joy were popular topics. They felt that mutually sympathetic feelings made people more morally sensitive and at the same time gave pleasure. The images and phrases of their poems passed into the common poetic discourse of the 19th century, bringing about such a change in taste that earlier poets were largely ignored or devalued.ĭuring the romantic period poets and prose writers tended to share the assumption that all literature was basically about feelings and that the role of the writer was to recreate and explore feelings. The reading public's taste in poetry was shaped for the rest of the century by the ideas of 'what poetry really is,' as stated by Wordsworth and Coleridge. Everything written before seemed suddenly old fashioned or stale.

Their combined volume, the Lyrical Ballads of 1798, marked a significant turning away from the restraints of the classical tradition in poetry and a turning toward a freer, more experimental, and more emotionally charged lyricism. The Englishmen William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge together generated a revolution in poetry.

Preface to the lyrical ballads text