Quotes we looked at from Wordsworth's preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800):

They who have been accustomed to the gaudiness and inane phraseology of 
many modern writers, if they persist in the reading of this book to 
its conclusion, will, no doubt, frequently have to struggle with 
feelings of strangeness and awkwardness: they will look round for 
poetry, and will be induced to inquire by what species of courtesy 
these attempts can be permitted to assume that title.

....
 
The principle object, then, which I proposed to myself in these poems 
was to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate 
. . . them . . . in a selection of language really used by men . . . .
 

and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain colouring of 
imagination
 

and, above all, to make these incidents and situations interesting by 
tracing in them . . . the primary laws of our nature. . .
 

 . . . poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it 
takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity

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