“Collaboration” is an especially relevant term in discussing the exchange between William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the composition of such poems as “The Three Graves,” “The Wanderings of Cain,” and even images and lines in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” The Lyrical Ballads, both poets insist, was a shared labor, in spite of disparities in each poet's account of how that labor was shared. “Dialogue” may be a more flexible term, intended here to describe, at a more spontaneous level, the shared excitement and frustration that attended their convictions about poetic imagination and the creative process. Even in a more casual sense, dialogue, in contrast to conversation, may designate a content specific discourse. To the extent that this dialogue is conducted in letters and poems, it is scripted dialogue and the interlocutors adhere to established roles.

Their dialogue commenced at their meeting in Nether Stowey at the end of March 1797. Both poets confessed a diminished creativity when the other was not present to stimulate the poetic impulse. The contents of the dialogue grew painful and poignant. Five years after it had first commenced the dialogue became burdened with emotional distress. On January 28, 1802 Dorothy Wordsworth wrote in her journal that Wordsworth was sleepless and dispirited. On the following day she wrote that Wordsworth continued unwell after another sleepless night, and both were alarmed at the arrival of “A heart-rending letter from Coleridge.” They were so alarmed by the report that Wordsworth was ready to travel to London. Coleridge's letter of that date is missing, but the contents were probably similar to the report that he had posted to William Godwin the week before (January 22, 1802): “I was struggling with sore calamities, with bodily pain, & languor—with pecuniary Difficulties —& worse than all, with domestic Discord.”

Perhaps both a cause and effect of his desperate attraction to Sara Hutchinson, Coleridge's arguments with Sara Fricker Coleridge had rendered the marriage intolerable. Wordsworth, too, was caught in a marital crisis. He had been separated from Annette Vallon since December 1792, having left Orléans shortly before the birth of his daughter.