  This is the first in a series of papers in which we study vertex-algebraic
structure of Feigin-Stoyanovsky's principal subspaces associated to standard
modules for both untwisted and twisted affine Lie algebras. A key idea is to
prove suitable presentations of principal subspaces, without using bases or
even ``small'' spanning sets of these spaces. In this paper we prove
presentations of the principal subspaces of the basic A_1^(1)-modules. These
convenient presentations were previously used in work of
Capparelli-Lepowsky-Milas for the purpose of obtaining the classical
Rogers-Ramanujan recursion for the graded dimensions of the principal
subspaces.
