Book contents
- The Cambridge Companion to ‘Lyrical Ballads’
- The Cambridge Companion to ‘Lyrical Ballads’
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Chronology
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part I Part and Whole
- Part II Subjects and Situations from Common Life
- Part III Feeling and Thought
- Chapter 8 Silence and Sympathy in Lyrical Ballads
- Chapter 9 Domestic Affections and Home
- Part IV Language and the Human Mind
- Part V A Global Lyrical Ballads
- Guide to Further Reading
- Index
Chapter 9 - Domestic Affections and Home
from Part III - Feeling and Thought
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 February 2020
- The Cambridge Companion to ‘Lyrical Ballads’
- The Cambridge Companion to ‘Lyrical Ballads’
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Chronology
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part I Part and Whole
- Part II Subjects and Situations from Common Life
- Part III Feeling and Thought
- Chapter 8 Silence and Sympathy in Lyrical Ballads
- Chapter 9 Domestic Affections and Home
- Part IV Language and the Human Mind
- Part V A Global Lyrical Ballads
- Guide to Further Reading
- Index
Summary
That the language of ‘domestic affections’ and ‘home’ has a much wider register, and ideological reverberation, than a reference to any immediate domicile and family is reflected everywhere in Lyrical Ballads, localised in rural districts though its poetry and prefaces may be. In 1790, Edmund Burke excoriated the French Revolution’s degradation of home and domestic affections in historical and national terms. He celebrated the antithesis to new France in traditional England, where ‘conservation’, ‘transmission’ and ‘inheritance’ of ‘property’ operate on one ‘principle’, founded on the ‘method’ and ‘pattern of nature’. The Burkean state endures as a family settlement, ‘a permanent body composed of transitory parts’, a home for national domestic affection beating ‘in a just correspondence and symmetry with the order of the world’.
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- The Cambridge Companion to 'Lyrical Ballads' , pp. 152 - 170Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020