Five-minute digest
Lyrical Ballads
Summary
Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems, published anonymously in Bristol and London in the autumn of 1798, is often called the book that began English Romantic poetry. It contains twenty-three poems: four by Coleridge and the rest by Wordsworth. A short Advertisement explains that most of the poems are experiments, written to find out how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure, and warns readers used to the gaudiness and inane phraseology of modern writers that they may find the poems strange. The volume opens with Coleridge's Rime of the Ancyent Marinere, in a deliberately old-fashioned spelling, followed by his Foster-Mother's Tale, The Nightingale, a conversation poem, and The Dungeon. Wordsworth's poems are mostly short ballads and lyrics about ordinary country people: Simon Lee, the old huntsman too weak to cut a root; We Are Seven, in which a little girl insists that her dead brother and sister still count among her family; Goody Blake and Harry Gill; The Thorn; The Last of the Flock; The Idiot Boy, about a mother's love for her disabled son; and The Female Vagrant, a story of war and poverty. Lines Written in Early Spring laments what man has made of man; Expostulation and Reply and The Tables Turned urge a friend to leave his books and let nature be his teacher. The book ends with Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, Wordsworth's great meditation on memory and nature. Reviewers were puzzled by its plainness, and the Mariner was thought obscure, but the volume sold, and a second edition in 1800 added Wordsworth's famous Preface. For students it shows two kinds of Romantic poetry side by side: Coleridge's supernatural made credible and Wordsworth's ordinary made new, just as Coleridge later described in Biographia Literaria.
Top Lessons
The dignity of ordinary people
Wordsworth writes about poor old men, a little girl, a shepherd and a mother with a disabled son. Ordinary lives are worthy of poetry.
Nature as teacher
The Tables Turned says one impulse from a vernal wood may teach more of man than all the sages. Students should test this claim.
Two kinds of poetry
Coleridge makes the supernatural believable; Wordsworth makes the everyday wonderful.
Verified Quotes
Frequently cited
“One impulse from a vernal wood May teach you more of man; Of moral evil and of good, Than all the sages can.”
“--We murder to dissect.”
Frequently cited
“What man has made of man.”
“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 purposes of poetic pleasure.”