Lyrical Ballads ushered in a revolution in Romantic poetics despite its understated ‘Advertisement’ describing the majority of the poems in the collection as ‘experiments’ on the public’s taste.1 The volume was first published in 1798. The second edition of 1800 included a second volume of poetry largely by Wordsworth, and 1802 saw a revised and expanded Preface and minor revisions made to the existing poetry. The first edition was published anonymously as a joint enterprise between Wordsworth and Coleridge, and this decision helped to speed its critical success. But the sales were slow, and led to Sara Coleridge’s disconsolate though inaccurate sense that ‘The Lyrical Ballads are laughed at and disliked by all with very few excepted’.2 Although Robert Southey, a close friend of both poets, offered a disappointing response to the volume in the Critical Review,3 it garnered some excellent reviews. Despite the apparent tentativeness of describing the poems in the collection as ‘experiments’, even the first edition seems sure of its artistic principles, warning the reader to expect ‘feelings of strangeness and aukwardness [sic]’ (‘Advertisement’, Lyrical Ballads, p. 3).
The focus on marginalized, impoverished, and rustic figures in the poetry was both revolutionary and unsettling. Wordsworth and Coleridge took aim at accepted subject matter and ideas of poetic diction that they refused to merely inherit. Marrying moral and aesthetic beauty in the poetry, the 1802 Preface defines the poet as ‘the rock of defence of human nature; an upholder and preserver’ (‘Preface’, Lyrical Ballads, p. 106). Rather than cementing the view of Wordsworth as propounding his ‘egotistical sublime’,4 as Fiona Stafford points up, ‘Wordsworth is talking here of Poetry in the grandest and widest sense’.5 The Lyrical Ballads is a manifesto for the new kind of poetry typical of the Romantic period.
The 1798 single‐volume edition of Lyrical Ballads opens with The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere, Coleridge’s chilling and estranging ballad that deepens rather than solves its poetic enigma. The 1800 and 1802 editions, however, begin with ‘Expostulation and Reply’ and ‘The Tables Turned’, magnifying the combative tone of some sections of the Preface where Wordsworth takes aim against the ‘gaudiness and inane phraseology of many modern writers’ (‘Preface’, Lyrical Ballads, p. 96) as he asserts that ‘Poetry is the image of man and nature’ (‘Preface’, Lyrical Ballads, p. 105). What ‘Expostulation and Reply’ terms ‘wise passiveness’ (‘Expostulation and Reply’, 24) where the poet contemplates nature rather than looks for descriptions of nature in books, enacts, in miniature, the principles on which Lyrical Ballads rests. Wordsworth and Coleridge emphasize the immersion of poetry in nature without advocating any anti‐intellectual rejection of the poetic tradition. The simple metre and rhymes of ‘The Tables Turned’ are suggestive of the ballad metre without quite employing it, as in Spenser’s July eclogue from The Shepheardes Calender.6 The naturalness of the stanza lends itself to speech as Wordsworth calls upon poetic tradition to defend Nature as a means of moral guidance:
One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man;
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can. (‘The Tables Turned’, 21–4)
The poem becomes a kind of ‘impulse from a vernal wood’; the elegant simplicity of the diction underlines the naturalness promoted by the content.
Form and content work hand in hand in Lyrical Ballads as the preoccupations of the ‘Preface’ echo throughout the collection. ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill: A True Story’, praised by contemporary reviewers, traces the genesis of a curse similar to that of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, but here, Wordsworth removes the mysterious quality of Coleridge’s poem, opting instead to make explicit the warning against greed and disdain for one’s fellow man. The tetrameter adds verve and pace to the poetry, where the narrative and didactic quality of the poem is supported by its strong rhythms and rhyme. Goody Blake’s poverty and Harry Gill’s wealth and greed, and her revenge at God’s hands, are gleefully related by the narrator. This sense of social justice burns equally strongly in many poems in the collection, but ‘Simon Lee: The Old Huntsman’, while lacking the persecuting figure in ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill’, dwells on the misery of life for Simon and Old Ruth, the ‘poorest of the poor’ (‘Simon Lee’, 60), in contrast to Simon’s earlier life as a huntsman, ‘full of glee’ (‘Simon Lee’, 18). Slyly sending up his responsibilities as a narrator, the speaker mock‐apologetically comments, ‘How patiently you’ve waited’ (‘Simon Lee’, 70), going on to tell the story‐greedy reader to engage in more ‘silent thought’ (‘Simon Lee’, 74) so as to find ‘A tale in every thing’ (‘Simon Lee’, 76). The responsibility falls to the reader, with Wordsworth including a single incident for the reader to consider. Watching Simon Lee struggle to chop the root of an old tree, the narrator takes over and with one blow, cuts through the root which had caused the older man so much trouble. The final stanza affectingly describes Simon Lee’s thanks and praise and their effect on the narrator:
—I’ve heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds
With coldness still returning:
Alas! the gratitude of men
Hath oftner left me mourning. (‘Simon Lee’, 100–3)
The opposition of unkind and kind points up the possible callous response to kindness, but here, as Andrew Griffin writes, Wordsworth makes ‘an oblique, sad discovery of tragedy in gratitude’.7 Closing with a note of pathos after what promised to be a narrative poem thrusts the reader into an emotional situation that demands their engagement with Simon Lee’s and the broader situation. As Wordsworth affirms, ‘we have all of us one human heart’ (‘The Old Cumberland Beggar: A Description’, 146).
Despite Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s often positive view of nature and the countryside, Lyrical Ballads does not present rural life as entirely without problems. In ‘The Thorn’, Wordsworth reveals the claustrophobic nature of small town life. In his preface to the poem, Wordsworth offers a highly detailed account of the speaker who is introduced as a superstitious character who creates or magnifies an air of mystery in any given story. The poem itself, as narrated by such a character, is built on conjecture and questioning, where the almost neurotic speaker punctuates his insinuations with breathless asides such as ‘’Tis said’ (‘The Thorn’, XIII.137) and ‘some remember well’ (‘The Thorn’, XV.163). The almost pathological curiosity of the speaker suggests that the story reveals more about the psychological state of Martha Ray’s watchers than Martha Ray herself. Lacking sympathy and understanding beyond a thirst for knowledge, the speaker seems to be a poor interpreter who pieces together gossip even while pretending that he refuses to engage in such habits: ‘I cannot tell how this may be’ (‘The Thorn’, XXIII.243). Such lack of sympathy is not confined to ‘The Thorn’. The speaker of ‘We are seven’, in his attempt to reason with the little girl, reveals his lack of imagination in comparison to the richness of her inner world. Quizzing her on her family in the hopes of forcing her to recognize that ‘ye are only five’ (‘We are seven’, 36), the small girl’s responses are touching for her insistence that ‘we are seven’ (‘We are seven’, 63) despite the adult’s upbraiding tone. As she attempts to involve her dead siblings when she sings to them and plays by the side of their graves, death is a part of life in her imaginative framework.
The poems in Lyrical Ballads hold communion with one another; ideas, distinct poetic forms, and voices move from poem to poem as if to bind the collection. ‘The Nightingale, a Conversational Poem’, renamed ‘The Nightingale, written in April, 1798’ in the 1802 edition of Lyrical Ballads, is written in blank verse that wittily overturns poetic conventions in favour of poetic observations of nature. Quoting Milton’s description of the nightingale (‘“Most musical, most melancholy!”’ 13), Coleridge is less intent on mocking Milton (as his footnote makes clear) than poets who merely echo tired tropes. Turning to his son at the close of the poem, Coleridge hopes to ‘make him Nature’s playmate’ (‘The Nightingale, a Conversational Poem’, 92), one that will hear the nightingale’s natural joy rather than its famed melancholy. Coleridge’s fatherhood forms the theme for many of his poems, from ‘Frost at Midnight’ (not collected in Lyrical Ballads) to ‘Anecdote for Fathers’, which was collected in all editions.
The larger sense of using humour to challenge and remould perceptions is taken up by Wordsworth’s ‘The Idiot Boy’ where the love between parent and child is represented as the poem’s gentle wit celebrates rather than laments Johnny’s difference. The close of the poem, where Betty Foy, her son Johnny, and her ill neighbour, Susan Gale, are reunited, shows Johnny adopting a triumphal tone:
‘The Cocks did crow to‐whoo, to‐whoo,
And the Sun did shine so cold.’
—Thus answered Johnny in his glory,
And that was all his travel’s story. (‘The Idiot Boy’, 460–3)
Wordsworth refers to ‘Idiots’ in his letter to John Wilson defending his poem with a scriptural expression, ‘their life is hidden with God’ (Lyrical Ballads, p. 319). Though Susan and Betty cannot understand Johnny fully, Johnny is glorious in the moment of his explanation of his travels. Betty’s maternal love for Johnny shines from the poem, connecting it with ‘The Mad Mother’ and ‘The Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman’. ‘The Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman’, shot through with the pain of separation from her son and the lack of understanding from her peers, offers a pitiful portrait of the woman. However, ‘The Mad Mother’ and its empathy with its subject make the poem seem almost a personal lyric in its intimacy. ‘The Mad Mother’ melts into the first person after the opening stanza establishes her appearance and linguistic identity. The poem’s sudden move into her voice reveals the terrifying disorientation of the woman, with her obvious adoration of her child juxtaposed with the delusions she suffers, where she imagines ‘fiendish faces’ (‘The Mad Mother’, 23) and even ‘wicked looks’ (‘The Mad Mother’, 86) from her own son. As Hale Roberts points out, ‘no other poem in the 1798 Lyrical Ballads is so regular’,8 and such forced formal regularity, compared with the other, more natural and irregularly rhymed poetry in the volume, creates a dangerous sense of artificiality.
Such formal alertness is revealed in Wordsworth’s use of the Spenserian stanza in ‘The Female Vagrant’. Eschewing Spenser’s Faery Land, Wordsworth purges ornaments and its sometimes luxuriant artificiality from his stanzas to make the form serve down‐to‐earth, if often mysterious, narrative purposes. Avoiding the free enjambment preferred by later Romantic experimenters with the form, such as Byron in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage or Shelley in Adonais, Wordsworth makes his use of the form seem effortlessly natural. With a social conscience reminiscent of Oliver Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village,9 Wordsworth keeps aesthetic beauty firmly in play as he transfers the ‘nakedness and simplicity’ (‘Preface’, Lyrical Ballads, p. 109) of his style onto the difficult Spenserian stanza. The effect of the changing countryside and urbanization obliges the speaker to travel to the New World, where her family dies of the privations they suffer. On return to England, she is unfit to work, condemning her to vagrancy. Poverty, owing to the new order of a society that does not respect the importance of the ‘old hereditary nook’ (‘The Female Vagrant’, 17), claims her for a victim despite her inability to speak ‘the beggar’s language’ (‘The Female Vagrant’, 153). The distress of poverty in ‘The Last of the Flock’ makes the speaker, a father, become unnatural: ‘God cursed me in my sore distress; / I prayed, yet every day I thought / I loved my children less’ (‘The Last of the Flock’, 86–8). Insistently exposing the human cost of penury and war, Wordsworth’s attention to marginal figures forces the reader to feel with his speakers.
‘Lines Composed [originally ‘Written’] a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798’ (hereafter ‘Tintern Abbey’) is the final poem in the 1798 edition of Lyrical Ballads and the final poem of the first volume of the two‐volume 1800 and 1802 editions. Containing many of the themes that had driven the collection as a whole, ‘Tintern Abbey’ seems suspended between the past and the future, backward looking in its emphasis on the importance of memory which connects to Wordsworth’s sense of poetry as ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’ (‘Preface’, Lyrical Ballads, p. 111) and facing the future in its moving address to Dorothy which closes the poem. In ‘Tintern Abbey’, Wordsworth relates his maturation from his boyish ‘glad animal movements’ (‘Tintern Abbey’, 75) to his adult ‘sense sublime’ (‘Tintern Abbey’, 96) of the power of nature. Reaching a climax where he affirms his relationship with nature, the visionary yet democratic quality of the poem shines through with the strategic use of ‘we’, suggestive of every person’s capacity to feel that which the poet feels, to experience valuable moments when ‘We see into the life of things’ (50), a seeing made almost corporeal through the poem’s remarkable, pulse‐slowing control of rhythm:
Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye and ear, both what they half create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognize
In nature and the language of the sense,
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being. (‘Tintern Abbey’, 103–12)
The stately blank verse sounds the accents of passionate speech as the poetry affirms the influence of nature on Wordsworth’s life. The repeated phrase ‘of all’ emphasizes the bounty of nature which forms the centre and circumference of the poet’s moral sense. The ‘language of the sense’ subtly suggests nature as a poet, speaking to the poet and informing the poetry that Wordsworth creates. Jerome McGann argues that ‘Abundant recompense’ is a ‘cherished madness of [Wordsworth’s] heart’.10 Yet here the conviction of nature’s importance and its changing role in Wordsworth’s life brings out both the poem’s pathos and maturity.
‘Nutting’ and Michael: A Pastoral Poem, also written in blank verse, show how, by volume two, Wordsworth had understood the power of the form for uniting narrative and lyric elements. ‘Nutting’ paints a darkly potent portrait of a boyish vandal. Opening with the beauty of the day in question, ‘One of those heavenly days which cannot die’ (‘Nutting’, 3), the poem’s speaker engages in a ‘merciless ravage’ (‘Nutting’, 43) of what was a ‘virgin scene’ (‘Nutting’, 19) only to end the poem on a note of pain as he realizes that ‘there is a Spirit in the woods’ (‘Nutting’, 54). The uneasy eroticism that gives way to violence and then to empty pain offers a Fall like to Adam and Eve losing paradise, but Wordsworth keeps possible analogies implied rather than explicitly stated in ‘Nutting’. Such lightness of touch is vital to Michael: A Pastoral Poem, which relates the tale of Michael and his wife, Isabel, when they send their son, Luke, to work in London to raise money to avoid selling the land. As in The Brothers and ‘The Female Vagrant’, Wordsworth is concerned with the loss of land that divides families and fragments villages. Leading the reader to feel for Michael, the humble shepherd, Wordsworth’s poem has serious moral ends: ‘The two poems [The Brothers and Michael] that I have mentioned were written with a view to show that men who do not wear fine clothes can feel deeply’ (Letter to Charles James Fox, Lyrical Ballads, p. 308). But Wordsworth does not simply create poetry to propound a didactic message. Tracy Ware suggests the importance of the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac to Michael,11 as noted in our Introduction, and Wordsworth’s artistry builds empathy throughout the poem as the reader learns to feel deeply for Michael.
Critics have labelled Lyrical Ballads as either revolutionary or reactionary,12 but the poetry itself remains morally and aesthetically charged through its focus on marginalized figures, the self as half‐created by the natural world, and the sustained attention to form and metre and their effect on the reader. Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s new vision for poetry spoke to both the contemporary moment and future generations of reader; the ‘certain colouring of the imagination’ (‘Preface’, Lyrical Ballads, p. 97) that suffuses Lyrical Ballads continues to inspire.