Lecture+Notes+and+Discussion+for+Lyrical+Ballads

Dr. Lake's Lecture Notes for Lyrical Ballads
ENG 204 Lecture: Lyrical Ballads

Here’s what I’m going to talk about today. First of all, I will provide an overview of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s biographies. Then I will talk about Lyrical Ballads: specifically, I will discuss its relationship to the poetic conventions of the 1700s and its relationship to legend and the tradition of the ballad. Next, I will talk about some of the social and political contexts that Lyrical Ballads responds to. I will end by talking about the publication and reception history of the poems.


 * Biographical Information on Wordsworth**

Wordsworth was born in 1770 in the northwest part of England where the rural landscape is traditionally considered to be especially beautiful, called the Lake District. Wordsworth had three brothers and one sister; he was especially close to his sister, Dorothy, with whom he often lived and who also helped him write poetry and kept a diary of their experiences and Wordsworth’s thoughts and the process of his poetic compositions. Wordsworth’s family, like Austen’s, was not considered aristocratic, but they were wealthy enough to live comfortably and to education their children. When Wordsworth’s mother died in 1778, Wordsworth was sent to boarding school and separated from his sister who was sent to live with relatives. In 1787, Wordsworth began attending Cambridge where he became increasingly interested in both poetry and radical politics. Wordsworth was known for travelling and taking “walking tours;” in 1791, he visited Revolutionary France. There, he became involved with both a woman (fathering a daughter with her) and the revolutionaries; but because England was at war with France and because Wordsworth didn’t have any money, he returned to England in 1793.

In 1793, he began writing poetry in earnest, publishing //An Evening Walk// and //Descriptive Sketches//. He also met Colerdige that same year, but they didn’t form a friendship really until 1797; later, both Dorothy and Wordsworth would move so as to be Coleridge’s neighbours. Together, they all travelled to Germany and then worked on //Lyrical Ballads//, which was first published in 1798. In 1800, a much expanded version of //Lyrical Ballads// was published with almost twice as many poems and a new preface/manifesto on poetry (and Wordsworth was listed as the sole author). In 1802, a third edition was published; the preface this time had been significantly revised. The final edition of //Lyrical Ballads// was published in 1805. In 1802, Wordsworth married Mary Hutchinson. By most accounts, they had a happy marriage. There were five children, two of whom died, however, in 1812 (ages 6 and 4). Wordsworth published another collection of poetry in 1807, titled //Poems in Two Volumes//. Wordsworth hoped this would make him a renowned poet, but he ended up getting a government job, falling out with Coleridge, losing two children, and writing a travel guide called //A Guide to the Lake District// in 1810. Wordsworth’s next notable literary publication was //The Excursion//, published in 1814. Around 1820, critics started to change their mind about Wordsworth’s poetry which had, up until then, received only lukewarm praise. His reputation would steadily increase, even though he appears to have published little in the 20s, and 30s. Wordsworth and Coleridge would eventually repair their friendship in the 1820s; Dorothy would become sick and invalid; and in 1842, Wordsworth was made the poet laureate of England. Wordsworth died in 1850 (at the age of 80) and his daughter published what’s considered his masterpiece the same year: a long, autobiographical poem that Wordsworth worked on for most of his life titled, //The Prelude//.


 * Biographical Information on Coleridge**

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in 1772. His father was a local church leader and school mater; and Coleridge was part of a large family. When his father died in 1781, Coleridge was sent to boarding school. He began writing poetry and reading voraciously at an early age. In 1791, he went to Cambridge, like Wordsworth, although Coleridge never graduated (despite winning awards for his poetry) and their friendship didn’t blossom until 1797 (though they had met, briefly in 1795). Coleridge had other friendships with important Romantic writers, including Charles Lambs and Robert Southey.

Coleridge has always been considered a little more “out there” than Wordsworth: he once joined the army under a pseudonym, concocted a scheme for a utopian, alternative community in America, and suffered from bouts of depression and an opium addiction. He contributed fewer poems than Wordsworth to //Lyrical Ballads//, but his “Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner” received the most attention of all the poems. Coleridge wrote other, similarly haunting works, about the same time, including “Kubla Kahn,” “Christabel,” and “Frost at Midnight.” Around 1800, Wordsworth and Coleridge’s friendship began to sour alongside Coleridge’s marriage to Sarah Fricker. In 1802, he expressed his personal, philosophical, and literary anxieties in “Dejection: An Ode.” In 1804, Coleridge moved to Europe to take on a government post. He lasted there two years, and then from 1806 to 1810, went back and forth as a way to try and make money, control his opium addiction, and escape his deteriorating relationships, returning to England for good in 1810.

Meanwhile, Coleridge devised a number of literary schemes, so not only did he write poems (or often begin writing poems but didn’t finish them), he also founded literary magazines and instituted a series of lectures on Great Books. Coleridge was most famous in his own lifetime for the series of lectures which focused extensively on Shakespeare and Milton which he delivered upon returning to England between 1810 and 1812. In 1817, he published his //Biographia Litteraria//: a sort of how-to-read literature and what makes it awesome guide. He published a number of other works, mostly philosophical reflections and poems, patched up his friendship with Wordsworth, and then died in 1834.


 * Poetry Before //Lyrical Ballads//**

//Lyrical Ballads// is considered a watershed publication in the history of literature. Specifically, it marks a clear transition from the kinds of literature produced during the Enlightenment to the Romantic literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-centuries. In fact, much of what we understand today as “great” literature owes everything to the ideas of Romanticism and how Romanticism distinguished itself from the literature that had come before it.

I’ve talked about the differences between Romanticism and Enlightenment before, but it’s good to return to those differences. The literature of the 1700s before the publication of //Lyrical Ballads// emphasized reason, logic, politeness, moral virtues, and propriety. It was tightly controlled in terms of both its content and its forms (think, heroic couplets), and much of it was modelled on ancient literature written by Greeks and Romans.

But with the publication of //Lyrical Ballads//, a new kind of poetry was born: one that sought to describe an individual’s individual experience of wonderous, often confusing and enigmatic nature (rather than the scientific, encyclopaedic study of nature). Romantic poetry also emphasized genius and sparks of uniqueness and difference. Like Enlightenment poetry, it was interested in history and the ancients, but often because they seemed so unlike us rather than as models we should follow. And as Wordsworth notes, the forms of poetry changed: shorter and written in words and phrases that were more readable by more classes of readers. If Enlightenment poetry tried to invigorate your intellectual responses, Romantic poetry tried to bring about new and unique emotional responses. The new emphasis on nature, individual genius, everyday experiences and language, and intense emotional engagement can be seen in //Lyrical Ballads//, and, concurrently, so too does //Lyrical Ballads// work in different forms from earlier poems. Here is an example from a prominent Enlightenment poet, Alexander Pope. And here is an excerpt from Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey.” [powerpoint]

Wordsworth is responding to the poetry written by people like Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, and Samuel Johnson, to name just a few.


 * Lyrical Ballads and Legend and Ballad**

Wordsworth and Coleridge sought to emphasize their new form of poetry through both the lyric and the ballad – hence the title, //Lyrical Ballads//. A lyric is generally defined as a short-ish poem that features a single speaker who describes his/her thoughts and feelings as they evolve. It is an ancient form of poetry used by the Greeks and Romans. Odes could be lyrics, as could be elegies and sonnets; thus, the lyric takes many poetic forms. In the ancient world, lyrics were sung (while someone played a lyre) rather than spoken – hence, we call the words to a song....wait for it....lyrics! It was also the dominant poetic idiom in England prior to the eighteenth century, but had declined in popularity as longer, more impersonal poetic forms were privileged.

Ballads were similar insofar as they were also a historical genre and also sung to music. The ballad was an especially popular form in medieval England, usually as love songs. Ballads have a rather more set poetic form than lyrics: generally, they feature quatrains (four-line stanzas) with an ABCB rhyme scheme and 14 syllable lines, but the form is considerably fluid. They were easily memorized and recited, and were understood in the 1700s as an old, primitive form of poetry for transmitting oral histories. Bards used them in the past to celebrate important national events, entertain listeners with comedies or love stories, and to transmit memorable fables in song.

By writing Lyrical Ballads, then, Wordsworth and Coleridge are signalling their affinity for forms of poetry that predate the 1700s – a sense of history and mystery that these very poetic forms preserve as if the poetry itself can connect us to a moment in the past when times were simpler and people were more in tune both with nature and language. Their interest in the unrecorded, the unknown, and the everyday experience of powerful feelings is reflected, in short, in their choice to use forms of poetry that were outdated and underappreciated in the century before the publication of //Lyrical Ballads//.


 * Social and Political Contexts**

This can especially be seen in the preface to the second edition of //Lyrical Ballads// that was published in 1800 and in the appendix to the third edition of 1802 on poetical diction – both of which were written by Wordsworth as manifestos for a new kind of poetry. Wordsworth characterized the poems as “an experiment which, [he] hoped, might be of some use to ascertain, how far, by fitting to metrical arrangement a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation, that sort of pleasure and that quantity of pleasure may be imparted, which a Poet may rationally endeavour to impart.” He hoped that from //Lyrical Ballads//, “a class of Poetry would be produced, well adapted to interest mankind permanently, and not unimportant in the multiplicity and in the quality of its moral relations.”

For Wordsworth, then, poetry as it stood in 1798 did not “interest mankind” and did not espouse a “quality of...moral relations.” In short, he found that the “present state of the public taste in this country” was “depraved.” Such a state of things was particularly deplorable because “language and the human mind act and react on each other.” In other words, the “revolutions of literature” are mirrors to the revolutions “of society itself.”

And so //Lyrical Ballads// sought to change things in society by changing literary taste. For Wordsworth, this meant that he wanted to do the following things: focus on “incidents of common life” in order to see how those incidents revealed “the primary laws of our nature.” The “common life,” also called the “low and rustic life” by Wordsworth, offered a unique opportunity to see how humans really work. Common life equalled a “plainer and more emphatic language” because common people were simpler and more connected to nature, and they spoke directly about their experiences and feelings, unhindered by high-falutin’ forms of education or social niceties. Wordsworth felt that the poets who had come before him had “fickle tastes” and “fickle appetites of their own creation.” [aside about objects, perhaps]

This project was not just about poetry for Wordsworth, however. He worried that the poets of the 1700s participated in a wider social phenomenon that “blunt[ed] the...powers of the mind” so much so that individuals’ minds were reduced “to a state of almost savage torpor.” This could be seen even in lots of ways, Wordsworth claimed: from the “great national events which are daily taking place,” to the “encreasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies.” In other words, everything was going to pieces, and poetry had no small role in that fact.

So for Wordsworth, poetry was deeply connected to the everyday life of the common man and had profound implications on everything from national politics to what kinds of things a person found to be entertaining. What were the specific issues, however, that the common man faced in Wordsworth’s lifetime?

The most pressing issue would have probably been land enclosure, the French Revolution, and the rising tide of British imperialism.

Land Enclosure: Traditionally, there had been large plots of land in England that were known as commons: these were un-owned, or rather communally owned, tracts where farmers and peasants could grow crops and, primarily, graze their animals. Slowly but inexorably, this land was taken over by the government and then sold to members of the aristocracy who became the owners of the land and then rented it out for grazing and farming, making it increasingly difficult for poor individuals to get the crops and raise the livestock they needed to maintain their lifestyles. Although enclosure had been happening since the Tudor period, it picked up pace in the eighteenth century with the Inclosure Acts: a series of parliamentary laws that privatized wide swaths of publically owned land. A notable inclosure act occurred in 1773 with palpable effects on England’s poor. As Inclosure Acts continued apace in the nineteenth century (after the publication of //Lyrical Ballads//) it had the increasing effect of forcing people out of rural areas into urban areas where they took up low-paying factory jobs in a newly mechanized and urbanized economy, often with disastrous effects.

The French Revolution We’ve talked about it before, but it’s worth noting again that the French Revolution functions as a major social and political backdrop to //Lyrical Ballads//. Beginning essentially with the fall of the Bastille in 1793, the French Revolution marked a turning point in a new cultural and political interest in equality between the classes. Wordsworth was a notable early supporter of the French Revolution. He, however, felt deep, deep ambivalence about the movement after having witnessed its bloodshed and terror first hand before the publication of //Lyrical Ballads//.

Colonialism/Imperialism British imperialism was ongoing on two fronts: at home with the continually fraught relationship with Scotland and Ireland (after the Act of Union in 1707) and abroad – especially in India, Asia, and Africa. The colonial activities of Britain were fraught: from losing the American colonies in the 1770s, to the increased concern over slaves rights during the end and beginning of the nineteenth century. At the same time, colonialism allowed Britain’s greater access to wealth and commodities in ways that were historically and absolutely unprecedented. For Wordsworth, the most pressing issues of colonialism would be expressed in the “Foresaken Indian Woman,” but also in the insistent representation of disenfranchised groups of people in England who found themselves impoverished even in the wake of living in a country overwhelmed with the spoils of empire.


 * Publication and Reception History**

Lyrical Ballads originally received mixed reviews. Writing for the //Critical Review// in 1798, Robert Southey noted that the author [i.e. Wordsworth] “should have recollected that he who personates tiresome loquacity, becomes tiresome himself,” and he maintained that even though the “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” was supposed to be a ballad imitating older styles, he could “discover no resemblance whatever, except in antiquated spelling and a few obsolete words.” Southey did, however, find the “stanzas” to be “laboriously beautiful” even though they were “absurd and unintelligible.” He concluded that the “experiment” “has failed.” Similarly, another reviewer writing anonymously for the //Analytical Review// admitted that the readers of //Lyrical Ballads// “will look round for poetry, and will be induced to enquire by what species of courtesy these attempts can be permitted to assume that title.” In other words: these are not poems, thank you very much. And about the “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” the reviewer writes: “we are not pleased with it.” The reviewer for the //Monthly Magazine// found the work to be an “unusual success,” but it nevertheless remained an collection of a few “beautiful” “pieces” surrounded by “others [that] are stiff and laboured.” If this isn’t enough, the reviewer for the //New Annual Register// admitted that the poems were “the productions of an author of considerable talents” but that, on the whole, the poems were “unfortunate experiments, on which genius and labour have been misemployed.” The reviewer for the //New London Review// pulled no punches when he argued that, frankly, “The language of conversation, and that too of the lower classes, can never be considered as the language of poetry.” Writing for the //Monthly Review//, Charles Burney agreed, stating that “though we have been extremely entertained with the fancy, the facility, and (in general) the sentiments, of these [poems], we cannot regard them as poetry.” At least William Heath liked what he read and found that //Lyrical Ballads// had “genius, taste, elegance, wit, and imagery of the most beautiful kind” when he reviewed it for the //Anti-Jacobin Review//. Daniel Stuart agreed, writing for the //Morning Post// that the whole (except for “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”) was “a tribute to genuine nature.” The reviewer for the //Courier// found the author of //Lyrical Ballads// to be “one of the first poets of the age” and “earnestly recommend[ed] them to the earnest perusal of all our readers.”

As you can tell from this brief survey of reviews of //Lyrical Ballads//, reception was mixed. Some liked them. Some didn’t. Almost everyone found them compelling for some reason: it is great poetry, it isn’t poetry at all, etc. Interest in the collection steadily increased, however, and it became quickly the new model of poetry by the 1820s. It continues to be considered an important work in British literature, one that announces for everyone a sea change in what counts as poetry in the first place and what kind of important role poetry can play in our lives and in the lives of our cultures. It has never been out of print, and Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” alongside Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (the last and first poems of the original publication) are considered two of the most important poems in the English language today.