In 1798, Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge published a collection of poetry that would be titled Lyrical Ballads. Coleridge contributed four poems, including The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, while the rest of the volume was made up of lyrics written by Wordsworth. In 1800, the second edition was released. It included additional poems by Wordsworth, including three of the Lucy poems, as well as “Lucy Gray.” Wordsworth also expanded “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads,” an essay that soon became the theoretical touchstone for a new aesthetic and literary movement called Romanticism (See: Further Reading & Resources).

The ideas set forth in this work influenced several of Wordsworth’s contemporaries, as well as the younger generation of poets, including Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats. As a deliberate response to the predilections of the previous generation, such as borrowing forms and subjects from classical literature, Wordsworth advocated that ordinary life is the best subject for poetry, that poetry should be written in everyday language for more accessibility, and that it should come out of personal feeling. All of these ideas can be seen in “She dwelt among the untrodden ways.”

The philosophy of Romanticism as laid about by Wordsworth consists of the following tenets: Poetry should be spontaneous in form, and form can be experimental; mankind is in communion with, and part of, nature, which reflects the self; the commonplace in language and experience should be glorified; there is beauty in the supernatural, myth, folklore, and magic; that desiring things beyond human limits is not a sin, but a glory and a triumph; that change is certain and inevitable, so it is better to follow moral self-rule than immoral societal rule.