Poets compose new Lyrical Ballads to highlight social relevance of Romantics

Andrew Motion and Alice Oswald among contributors to new version of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s pioneering collection

The poems are full of waterfalls, frosty moors, sunlit summer days, crumbling cottages – and a focus on the real lives of “ordinary” people.

Two centuries after William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge pioneered the Romantic poetry movement, 23 of their best-known modern successors, including the former poet laureate Sir Andrew Motion, have contributed freshly minted pieces for a new version of the pair’s landmark collection, Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems.