Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Perhaps more vividly than any other poetical work of the period, the Lyrical Ballads of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge documents Romanticism's impulse to merge artistic and social change. Featuring subjects from ‘ordinary life’, such as could be found ‘in every village and its vicinity’, the collection expresses Wordsworth's conviction, phrased years later in a letter, that ‘men who do not wear fine clothes can feel deeply’. For Wordsworth and Coleridge, this egalitarian depiction of emotion was part of a larger model of literary reform – even of revolution – that required the repudiation of eighteenth-century modes of feeling and expression. Lyrical Ballads views English poetry as an effete, exhausted institution desperately needing to be regrounded in ‘natural … human passions, human characters, and human incidents’. First published anonymously in 1798, the volume rejects alike the manipulative emotionalism of Sensibility and the studied aestheticism of neo-classical diction, instead aspiring to convey authentic human feeling by way of simple ballads and the ordinary language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society’. Further, it asserts that such ‘lower’ forms of diction, which generally had been shunned by university-educated poets, are in fact a valid medium for philosophical poetry. And while its most famous works, Coleridge's The Rime of ... log in or subscribe to read full text