Wordsworth's preface and endnotes in the first volume defend against criticisms levelled at the 1798 Lyrical Ballads, and they also link its lyrical ballads genre, ethos and tone to the new pastoral poems and emotional place-keeping maintained by the second volume. In contrast to the first volume's sparse (reprinted) footnotes, headnotes and subtitles, the second volume includes several poems with prose supplements that engage with the vogue for touring the English Lake District and exploring its local histories. As a tour guide and editor Wordsworth takes readers of the first volume on a geographical, metaphorical and affective journey into the second volume, which involves prose that juxtaposes the pleasures of reading his poems with picturesque touring in northern England. Many of Wordsworth's prose notes comment on the landscape, customs and people in the Lake District, but primarily they serve as directions for how readers can travel meaningfully through his poetic collection. While these scattered notes do not detail a systematic way of reading the poems in the 1800 volumes, they do ask readers to reflect on, adjust and amend their interpretations of individual and multiple poems.

As Stephen Parrish and David Duff have demonstrated, Wordsworth's experiments with the pastoral genre heavily mark the poetry and prose in the 1800 Lyrical Ballads. Building on Parrish's incisive work about Wordsworth's ‘pastoral ballad’, Duff argues that Wordsworth's paratextual and bibliographic changes to ‘The Brothers’ – alterations were made to its half-title page, subtitle, or accompanying footnote nearly every time the poem was published – reveal how completely the 1800 volumes were bound up with Wordsworth's efforts to class his poems as a reinvigorated brand of pastoral poetry.