Lyrical Ballads is a collection of poems by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, first published in 1798 and considered to have marked the beginning of the English Romantic movement in literature. The collection is famous for the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, which has come to be known as the manifesto of Romanticism. The poems in Lyrical Ballads are written in the vernacular of the middle and lower classes, and they focus on simple, uneducated country people as the subject of poetry, which was a signal shift to modern literature. The collection is also known for its focus on nature and the return to the original state of nature, in which people led a purer and more innocent existence. The poems in Lyrical Ballads were experiments to see how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure. The collection was a challenge to conventional tastes both in politics and literature, and it presented the reading public with fare that seemed starkly new.