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24 - Wordsworth and Coleridge: Lyrical Ballads and other poems

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2011

Michael O'Neill
Affiliation:
University of Durham
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Summary

It is widely believed that Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge was one of those rare books which was a significant publishing event in itself and which also changed the course of English poetry. Penguin Books have reinforced this general belief by issuing the 1798 edition in the same series as Burns’s Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, Housman’s A Shropshire Lad and Yeats’s The Tower. Another recent reprint adopts a similar perspective and insists on the volume’s innovative and radical credentials by prefacing the introduction with two strongly expressed quotations: first an apparently unqualified endorsement by an unidentified critic in The Guardian: ‘[it] must have come on like punk rock to a public groaning under the weight of over-cooked Augustanisms’; and, secondly, a description from the Courier Mail: ‘a grenade hurled against the Establishment’. Yet a third publisher compromises the latest edition of a judicious, scholarly and carefully balanced book by printing on its cover, without explanation or apparent reservation, exactly the same passage from The Guardian.

While all three publishers are justified in recognising the special force of Lyrical Ballads (which in its way was a great deal more innovative and revolutionary than any of its companions in the Penguin list), the implications of such apparently unqualified endorsements could easily be deceptive. To begin with, the collection’s title was a great deal less daring and original than most readers assume.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2010

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References

Barfoot, C. C. (ed.), ‘A Natural Delineation of Human Passions’: The Historic Moment of ‘Lyrical Ballads’ (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), pp. 209–14.
Brett, R. L. and Jones, A. R.Lyrical Ballads, second edition, Routledge Classics (London: Routledge, 2005).
Butler, James and Green, KarenSee Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems, 1797–1800, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), pp. 598–601.
Coburn, Kathleen ed. The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, et al., 2 vols. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957), vol. I.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, Table Talk, ed. Woodring, Carl, 2 vols. (London and Princeton: Routledge and Princeton University Press, 1990), vol. I, pp. 272–3.Google Scholar
Griggs, Earl Leslie, ed. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), vol. II, pp. 707, 714.
Jones, Alun R. ed. Wordsworth’s Poems of 1807, (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987), pp. 157–8.CrossRef
Langbaum, Robert A., The Poetry of Experience: The Dramatic Monologue in Modern Literary Tradition (New York: Norton, 1963).Google Scholar
Lowes, John Livingston, The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination, revised edition (London: Constable, 1930).Google Scholar
Mason, Michael, ed. Lyrical Ballads, second edition (1992; London: Pearson Longman, 2007).
Mayo, Robert, ‘The Contemporaneity of the Lyrical Ballads’, PMLA, 69 (1954), pp. 486–522.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Owen, W. J. B. and Smyser, Jane Worthington ed. The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), vol. III, pp. 70–1.CrossRef
Parrish, Stephen Maxfield ed. (‘This Lime-Tree’). See also Coleridge’s ‘Dejection’: The Earliest Manuscripts and the Earliest Printings, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988).
Selincourt, Ernest de, ed. The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, 2nd edn, revised by Moorman, Mary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), vol. II, pp. 145–6.Google Scholar
Selincourt, Ernest de, ed. The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth 1787–1805, 2nd edn, revised by Shaver, Chester L. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), vol. I, pp. 352–8.Google Scholar
Woof, Robert ed. William Wordsworth: The Critical Heritage, vol. 1., 1793–820, (London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 2001).CrossRef

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