Lyrical Ballads

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Title page of the first edition. Lyrical Ballads.jpg
Title page of the first edition.

Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems is a collection of poems by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, first published in 1798 and generally considered to have marked the beginning of the English Romantic movement in literature. [1] The immediate effect on critics was modest, but it became and remains a landmark, changing the course of English literature and poetry. The 1800 edition is famous for the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads , something that has come to be known as the manifesto of Romanticism. [2]

Contents

Most of the poems in the 1798 edition were written by Wordsworth, with Coleridge contributing only four poems to the collection (although these made about a third of the book in length), including one of his most famous works, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner .

A second edition was published in 1800, in which Wordsworth included additional poems and a preface detailing the pair's avowed poetical principles. [3] For another edition, published in 1802, Wordsworth added an appendix titled Poetic Diction in which he expanded the ideas set forth in the preface. [4] A third edition was published in 1802, [5] with substantial additions made to its "Preface," and a fourth edition was published in 1805. [6]

Content

Wordsworth and Coleridge set out to overturn what they considered the priggish, learned, and highly sculpted forms of 18th-century English poetry and to make poetry accessible to the average person via verse written in common, everyday language. These two major poets emphasise the vitality of the living voice used by the poor to express their reality. This language also helps assert the universality of human emotions. Even the title of the collection recalls rustic forms of art – the word "lyrical" links the poems with the ancient rustic bards and lends an air of spontaneity, while "ballads" are an oral mode of storytelling used by the common people.

In the 'Advertisement' included in the 1798 edition, Wordsworth explained his poetical concept:

The majority of the following poems are to be considered as experiments. They were written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purpose of poetic pleasure. [7]

If the experiment with vernacular language was not enough of a departure from the norm, the focus on simple, uneducated country people as the subject of poetry was a signal shift to modern literature. One of the main themes of "Lyrical Ballads" is the return to the original state of nature, in which people led a purer and more innocent existence. Wordsworth subscribed to Rousseau's belief that humanity was essentially good but was corrupted by the influence of society. This may be linked with the sentiments spreading through Europe just prior to the French Revolution.

Poems in the first edition (1798)

Poems marked "(Coleridge)" were written by Coleridge; all the other poems were written by Wordsworth. In the first edition (1798) there were nineteen poems written by Wordsworth and four poems by Coleridge.

Poems in the second edition (1800)

Poems marked "(Coleridge)" were written by Coleridge; all the other poems were written by Wordsworth.

Volume I

  • Expostulation and Reply
  • The Tables Turned; an Evening Scene, on the Same Subject
  • Old Man Travelling; Animal Tranquillity and Decay, a Sketch
  • The Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman
  • The Last of the Flock
  • Lines Left upon a Seat in a Yew-tree which Stands Near the Lake of Esthwaite
  • The Foster-Mother's Tale (Coleridge)
  • Goody Blake and Harry Gill
  • The Thorn
  • We are Seven
  • Anecdote for Fathers
  • Lines Written at a Small Distance from My House and Sent Me by My little Boy to the Person to whom They Are Addressed
  • The Female Vagrant
  • The Dungeon (Coleridge)
  • Simon Lee, the Old Huntsman
  • Lines Written in Early Spring
  • The Nightingale, written in April 1798. (Coleridge)
  • Lines Written When Sailing in a Boat at Evening
  • written Near Richmond, Upon the Thames
  • The Idiot Boy
  • Love (Coleridge)
  • The Mad Mother
  • The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (Coleridge)
  • Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey

Volume II

For the 1800 edition Wordsworth added the poems that make up Volume II. The poem The Convict (Wordsworth) was in the 1798 edition, but Wordsworth omitted it from the 1800 edition, replacing it with Coleridge's "Love". Lewti or the Circassian Love-chaunt (Coleridge) exists in some 1798 editions in place of The Convict. In the 1798 edition the poems later printed as "Lines Written When Sailing in a Boat at Evening" and "Lines Written Near Richmond, Upon the Thames" form a single poem, "Lines Written Near Richmond, Upon the Thames, at Evening".

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The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is the longest major poem by the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, written in 1797–98 and published in 1798 in the first edition of Lyrical Ballads. Some modern editions use a revised version printed in 1817 that featured a gloss. Along with other poems in Lyrical Ballads, it is often considered a signal shift to modern poetry and the beginning of British Romantic literature.

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Poetic diction is the term used to refer to the linguistic style, the vocabulary, and the metaphors used in the writing of poetry. In the Western tradition, all these elements were thought of as properly different in poetry and prose up to the time of the Romantic revolution, when William Wordsworth challenged the distinction in his Romantic manifesto, the Preface to the second (1800) edition of Lyrical Ballads (1798). Wordsworth proposed that a "language near to the language of men" was as appropriate for poetry as it was for prose. This idea was very influential, though more in theory than practice: a special "poetic" vocabulary and mode of metaphor persisted in 19th century poetry. It was deplored by the Modernist poets of the 20th century, who again proposed that there is no such thing as a "prosaic" word unsuitable for poetry.

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"The Idiot Boy" is a poem written by William Wordsworth, a representative of the Romantic movement in English literature. The poem was composed in spring 1798 and first published in the same year in Lyrical Ballads, a collection of poems written by Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, which is considered to be a turning point in the history of English literature and the Romantic movement. The poem investigates such themes as language, intellectual disability, maternity, emotionality, organisation of experience and "transgression of the natural."

Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.

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The Preface to Lyrical Ballads is an essay, composed by William Wordsworth, for the second edition published in 1800 of the poetry collection Lyrical Ballads, and then greatly expanded in the third edition of 1802. It came to be seen as a de facto manifesto of the Romantic movement.

Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.

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"She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways" is a three-stanza poem written by the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth in 1798 when he was 28 years old. The verse was first printed in Lyrical Ballads, 1800, a volume of Wordsworth's and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poems that marked a climacteric in the English Romantic movement. The poem is the best known of Wordsworth's series of five works which comprise his "Lucy" series, and was a favorite amongst early readers. It was composed both as a meditation on his own feelings of loneliness and loss, and as an ode to the beauty and dignity of an idealized woman who lived unnoticed by all others except by the poet himself. The title line implies Lucy lived unknown and remote, both physically and intellectually. The poet's subject's isolated sensitivity expresses a characteristic aspect of Romantic expectations of the human, and especially of the poet's condition.

Raymond Laurence Brett was Professor of English at University of Hull and a friend of Philip Larkin. He produced an edition of Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads which went through two further editions. Some of his many other publications are listed below.

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William Wordsworth was an English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their 1798 joint publication, Lyrical Ballads. His early years were dominated by his experience of old Trafford around the Lake District and the English moors. Dorothy Wordsworth, his sister, served as his early companion until their mother's death and their separation when he was sent to school.

"We are Seven" is a poem written by William Wordsworth and published in his Lyrical Ballads. It describes a discussion between an adult poetic speaker and a "little cottage girl" about the number of brothers and sisters who dwell with her. The poem turns on the question of whether to account two dead siblings as part of the family.

The Nightingale: A Conversation Poem is a poem written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in April 1798. Originally included in the first edition of Lyrical Ballads, which he published with William Wordsworth, the poem disputes the traditional idea that nightingales are connected to the idea of melancholy. Instead, the nightingale represents to Coleridge the experience of nature. Midway through the poem, the narrator stops discussing the nightingale in order to describe a mysterious female and a gothic scene. After the narrator is returned to his original train of thought by the nightingale's song, he recalls a moment when he took his crying son out to see the Moon, which immediately filled the child with joy. Critics have found the poem either decent with little complaint or as one of his better poems containing beautiful lines.

"Dejection: An Ode" is a poem written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1802 and was published the same year in The Morning Post, a London daily newspaper. The poem in its original form was written to Sara Hutchinson, a woman who was not his wife, and discusses his feelings of love for her. The various versions of the poem describe Coleridge's inability to write poetry and living in a state of paralysis, but published editions remove his personal feelings and mention of Hutchinson.

"A slumber did my spirit seal" is a poem that was written by William Wordsworth in 1798 and first published in volume II of the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads. It is part of a series of poems written about a mysterious woman named Lucy, whom scholars have not been able to identify and are not sure whether she was real or fictional. Although the name Lucy is not directly mentioned in the poem, scholars nevertheless believe it to be part of the "Lucy poems" due to the poem's placement in Lyrical Ballads.

The Task: A Poem, in Six Books is a poem in blank verse by William Cowper published in 1785, usually seen as his supreme achievement. Its six books are called "The Sofa", "The Timepiece", "The Garden", "The Winter Evening", "The Winter Morning Walk" and "The Winter Walk at Noon". Beginning with a mock-Miltonic passage on the origins of the sofa, it develops into a discursive meditation on the blessings of nature, the retired life and religious faith, with attacks on slavery, blood sports, fashionable frivolity, lukewarm clergy and French despotism among other things.

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References

  1. See Lyrical Ballads (1 ed.). London: J. & A. Arch. 1798. Retrieved 13 November 2014. via archive.org
  2. Bushell, Sally (2020), Bushell, Sally (ed.), "Wordsworth's 'Preface': A Manifesto for British Romanticism", The Cambridge Companion to 'Lyrical Ballads', Cambridge Companions to Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 15–31, ISBN   978-1-108-41632-0 , retrieved 8 August 2023
  3. Wordsworth, William (1800). Lyrical Ballads with Other Poems. Vol. I (2 ed.). London: Printed for T.N. Longman and O. Rees. Retrieved 13 November 2014.; Wordsworth, William (1800). Lyrical Ballads with Other Poems. Vol. II (2 ed.). London: Printed for T.N. Longman and O. Rees. Retrieved 15 November 2014. via archive.org
  4. Wordsworth, William (1802). Lyrical Ballads with Pastoral and other Poems. Vol. I (3 ed.). London: Printed for T.N. Longman and O. Rees. Retrieved 15 November 2014. via archive.org
  5. 3rd edition
  6. 4th edition
  7. "Lyrical Ballads". The Wordsworth Trust. 2005. Archived from the original on 10 December 2007. Retrieved 18 March 2006.