William Wordsworth once explained the focus of his poems in Lyrical Ballads by saying this: "The principal object, then, proposed in these poems was to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible in a selection of language really used by men." Explain the significance of this quote and describe how it relates to the characteristics of lyrical poetry, including its different forms, such as odes.

"The principal object, then, proposed in these Poems was to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible in a selection of language really used by men, and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect; and, further, and above all, to make these incidents and situations interesting by tracing in them, truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature: chiefly, as far as regards the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement."

That's Wordsworth's full quote. This means that the principle features of Wordsworth's idea of poetry are that its subject matter should be incidents from common life; that the language of poetry should be the language of common men; that poetry is the product of an excited state of imagination; and that the essential theme of poetry is the representation of these events in such a way as to show how they represent the common laws of nature.

Wordsworth meant to break the idea that poetry had to be trascendental and meaningful as the Romantics thought it had to be. That poetry was for few people therefore he tried different forms, like odes, using a language of "common men".