Coleridge and Wordsworth: Lyrical Ballads

LT202 Week 3

Coleridge and Wordsworth: Lyrical Ballads

Today’s lecture is about one of the most significant collections of poetry in English literature: a collection of poems that marks a watershed, or key point, in the development of modernity, first published towards the end of the French Revolutionary decade in the year 1798: Lyrical Ballads. (I hope you have enjoyed reading the poems, or that you will enjoy them in the next few days. They are wonderful, mostly short examples of Romantic poetry). Lyrical Ballads is regarded as a fundamental text to English Romanticism, a literary, artistic and philosophical movement that occurred alongside similar movements in Germany, France, and Italy between the Enlightenment and the Victorian Period, and mainly between the American War of Independence and the passing of the first Great Reform Act in 1832. Although a collaborative project by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads was first published anonymously in London in 1798 following the circulation of a private ‘test’ edition earlier in that year which was published in Bristol. The private edition deserves mentioning, not least because it was printed by the Dissenting publisher Joseph Cottle, whilst the London, official first public edition was published by J. Arch. Bristol at the end of the eighteenth-century was not only a port connected with the slave trade and its produce, but also –conversely - a centre where reformers and radicals gathered. I will say more about publishers later.

Lyrical Ballads ran through three further editions after 1798, published respectively in 1800, 1802 and 1805. Whereas the first edition contained 23 poems (the privately circulated volume had 24), the successive editions contained many more. You can compare the different editions on line at the Romantic Circles electronic editions archive (the link is provided on ORB and Moodle). Indeed, the second edition and other editions ran into two volumes whilst the first was a small, unassuming single book. Besides an increase in the number of poems, Wordsworth added his name (but not Coleridge’s) to the second and subsequent editions along with a lengthy essay that he wrote theorizing what constituted good poetry and the basic conditions for poetic composition. That essay is usually referred to as “The ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads,’ or even simply as “Wordsworth’s Preface.” I will spend a few moments talking about it, because it is a philosophical treatise and one of the most important theoretical studies of the nature of poetry in English literature. In the “Preface,” Wordsworth explains “why I have chosen subjects from common life, and endeavoured to bring my language near to the real language of men.” He further argues that“all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings . . . by a man who being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility had also thought long and deeply.”Reflection during moments of tranquility, on the everyday events of life and the intense feelings of love, sympathy, loss and pain that produce, in such a way that original feelings are recreated to be contemplated at a distance of time, is the key to the “Preface.”That privileging of the philosophical power of the ordinary man’s life and imagination is one of the most modern aspects of Lyrical Ballads and of Romanticism. I have long thought of Lyrical Ballads as a collection that re-democratizes poetry by dispensing with the idea that a high education is necessary. A heightened sense of feeling and the ability recapture moments of epiphany through thought are the only necessary qualities for a poet, according to Wordsworth. Johnny Foy, the Idiot Boy, is a poet when he produces ecstatic speech - after a poem in which he can only make noises that Wordsworth captures phonetically (Burr, burr—now Johnny’s lips they burr, / As loud as any mill):

Now Johnny all night long had heard
The owls in tuneful concert strive;
No doubt too he the moon had seen;

For in the moonlight he had been
From eight o’clock till five.

And thus to Betty’s question, he
Made answer, like a traveller bold,
(His very words I give to you,)
“The cocks did crow to-whoo, to-whoo,
“And the sun did shine so cold.”

The Idiot Boy was one of the poems in the first edition of Lyrical Ballads. The “Preface’ was in many ways a response to criticism that had followed publication of the first edition, an attempt to explicate the poems in retrospect. Indeed, the “Preface” is like a retrospective manifesto not only for Lyrical Ballads and Wordsworth’s poems more generally, but for Romanticism itself. The extra materials in the second and subsequent editions of Lyrical Ballads - the added poems and the Preface - were mainly by Wordsworth. Lyrical Ballads therefore reallyneeds to be understood as a collaborative venture and a developing and unfolding series, rather than as a single book. The balance shifts from a joint venture towards Wordsworth after the first edition. The fluid nature of the volume’s composition - we might describe it as an organic process - is one of the reasons why it is so important to English Literature. The revision of the series through those four main editions is itself a manifestation of modernity - both a symptom and a cause of change - because that processes that made successive editions possible was brought about by material improvements in printing technology in the late eighteenth century that made it cheaper, easier, and quicker to revise books.

The poems in Lyrical Ballads were themselves experimental, as mentioned in the Advertisement that preceded them in the first edition:

“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 purposes of poetic pleasure.”

(Advertisement to Lyrical Ballads 1798).

Above all, though, Lyrical Ballads announced its experimental nature up front, even before reader read those lines from the Advertisement. The title itself promised something unusual: Lyrical Ballads. Readers could not but expect something different from what they were used to, even though the apparent forms of the poems acknowledged tradition rather than rejecting it. Let’s look at the title for a moment: just what are Lyrical Ballads? Lyrical poetry and ballads are traditionally quite different forms of verse, traceable to different origins in classical literature, then passing across and down through folklore. Lyrical poetry is concerned with feeling, emotion and thought, whilst ballads -a narrative poetic form - tell a story. Lyrical poetry in the Western Tradition evolved from ancient Greek poetry as far back as Sappho and a group of other lyricists in the 7th century BC, in which the feelings and passions of individuals were the main subject matter rather than the exploits and deeds of heroes that comprised the narratives of heroic and epic poetry. Indeed, lyric poetry arose as a counterpoint to the narratives of epic and heroic poetry. The choruses in Greek drama tend to be lyrical in style, as they reflect the thoughts with which the audience can identify rather than the narrative that the play drives along. Both forms of poetry derive from oral traditions, and there lies the common ground between them. Both forms were originally sung or chanted, and they had passed down through the centuries into the folklore forms of songs (lyrical) and ballads. Lyrical poems may have elements of narrative, and ballads may describe feelings and thoughts, but Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s equal weighting of the two forms - Lyrical Ballads - must have suggested to readers in 1798 and the early 1800s a rather unusual reworking of traditional forms. The Advertisement that I have already mentioned is very important, as it anticipates those new forms and prepares readers for something quite unusual.

You must have noticed in your reading of Lyrical Ballads that some of the poems look like more or less like ballads - “The Rhyme of the Ancyent Marinere,” “Goody Blake and Harry Gill,” “Lines Written at a Small Distance from my House,” “Simon Lee the Old Huntsman,” “We are Seven” and “The Idiot Boy,”for example - whilst others bear no formal resemblance to ballad form - “ The Foster Mother’s Tale,” “Old Man Travelling,” “Complaint of Forsaken Indian Woman,” and “Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” for example. In all of these cases, however, elements of ballad form are both present and changed. Even the most ballad-like of the poems are profoundly concerned with the feelings and imagination of individuals. The poems all privilege the imagination of the poet and an individual subject or interlocutor (the narrator or a character in the poem). “The Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman” imagines the last thoughts of a dying woman, as she regrets having to leave her child to others to raise. The narrative is full of symbolic meaning, and sympathy is the key to the poem - as is shown in these last lines:

My fire is dead, and snowy white

The water which beside it stood;

The wolf has come to me to-night,

And he has stolen away my food.

For ever left alone am I,

Then wherefore should I fear to die?

My journey will be shortly run,
I shall not see another sun,
I cannot lift my limbs to know
If they have any life or no.
My poor forsaken child! if I
For once could have thee close to me,
With happy heart I then would die,
And my last thoughts would happy be.
I feel my body die away,
I shall not see another day.

Note that the woman - a fictitious narrator - thinks sympathetically of her child, and the love that she will no longer be able to give it, rather than of the physical pain of her own death. Her love for her child is expressed simply, yet in proportions that are overwhelming. Such an expression of sympathy and love in the most dire of situations is a typically Romantic trope which, in its turn, elicits the sympathy of the reader for the fictional Indian woman and, by association, for everyone who must die and leave loved ones behind in the world.

“We are Seven,” another of the poems, privileges the imagination of a child,which is set against the apparent realism and wisdom of the adult interlocutor who tells the story. But Wordsworth gives the little maid has the last word, as she adamantly insists that if her dead brother and sisters have lived, they cannot ‘unexist.’ The interlocutor becomes increasingly frustrated, and again the reader is drawn to sympathize with the maid in a poem that is ultimately uplifting because optimistic in appalling circumstances (the death of siblings, however commonplace in the late eighteenth century is represented in the poem as intensely personal).

They poems in Lyrical Ballads emphasize the value of events concerning ordinary people and their lives - even the Rime of the Ancyent Marinere, with all its gothic imagery and supernatural suggestion, is the tale of a seemingly common sailor. Such celebrations of the power of the imagination, and the attempt to take poetry back to simple events which are closer to nature, are key features of what we call Romantic writing. Sympathy for the poor and the unfortunate in society is a key aspect of the poems, as is the remembrance of past events years after they happen. That, indeed, is the theme in the poem that is usually considered the most difficult for students, but which is one of the most important poems in the English language, Lines Written a few Miles above Tintern Abbey. Consider these lines from the opening of that poem, looking at the way in which they emphasize the passing of time and the motif of return:

Five years have passed; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a sweet inland murmur.—Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
Which on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion ; and connect

The landscape with the quiet of the sky.

The day is come when I again repose

Here, under this dark sycamore, and view

These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts,

Which, at this season, with their unripe fruits,

Among the woods and copses lose themselves,

Nor, with their green and simple hue, disturb

The wild green landscape.

Motifs of remembrance that mark the passing of time, seeing changes that have occurred over five years through the imaginative lens of the poet’s memory on which they are impressed, are features that we associate with Romantic writing. The anxiety that marks the fragmentary nature of memory is a commonplace feature of modernity and modern literature. Change itself seems a small matter in the early lines of Tintern Abbey. The narrator continues:

Once again I see / These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines / Of sportive wood run wild

But the poem soon becomes a philosophical reflection on the way that time affects our lives, our consciences, and the way we understand the very nature of existence. The narrator (remember that this poem by Wordsworth was first published anonymously) thinks with sadness not only about what has been lost to him personally, but on the tragedies that mankind more generally suffers. He cannot fully remember what he once was, but can only recapture a series of emotions and moments of feeling:

I cannot paint

What then I was. The sounding cataract

Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,

The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,

Their colours and their forms, were then to me

An appetite: a feeling and a love,

That had no need of a remoter charm,

By thought supplied, or any interest

Unborrowed from the eye.—That time is past,

And all its aching joys are now no more,

And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this

Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur: other gifts

Have followed, for such loss, I would believe,

Abundant recompence. For I have learned

To look on nature, not as in the hour

Of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes

The still, sad music of humanity.

This is obviously profoundly lyrical poetry, although there is a narrative element attaching to the plot of passing time and the revisiting of place. Still later in Tintern Abbey, these early feelings of melancholy and loss turn to joy and wonder as the poet senses with exhilaration that he is part of the grand scheme of creation that has been unfolding since time began and will go on unfolding into eternity:

A presence that disturbs me with the joy

Of elevated thoughts ; a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean, and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things.

Finally, there is the return to nature, the everyday world that is around the poet, and the desire to share his experience with the dear companion (in this case, Wordsworth’s beloved sister Dorothy is the friend addressed). The effect is similar to catharsis, although not quite the same, but the protagonist is the ordinary man, the poet himself:

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

. . .

wilt thou then forget

That on the banks of this delightful stream

We stood together; and that I, so long

A worshipper of Nature, hither came,

Unwearied in that service: rather say

With warmer love, oh! with far deeper zeal

Of holier love. Nor wilt thou then forget,

That after many wanderings, many years

Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs,

And this green pastoral landscape, were to me

More dear, both for themselves, and for thy sake.

I will continue to explain why all of these features were so important to Romantic writing and to Modernity throughout the rest of this lecture, with reference to more of the poems that demonstrate the experimental nature of Lyrical Ballads.

Lyrical Ballads is now recognized as one of the founding works of Romanticism, although Coleridge and William Wordsworth would not have recognized it as such. They could not have done so, because in 1798 the Romantic movement was still very new (you can read more about Romanticism in the several general books we have in the library). What is modern about Romanticism? That is not a straightforward question to answer, because Romantic writing took various forms. However, a common feature amongst Romantic writers is the privileging of the individual mind as the place where freedom of thought is located, and a corresponding interest in the natural world as a conduit for imaginative thought. Romantic saw the natural world not in terms of landownership and property, but as a counterpoint to the mind-numbing corruption of city life and commercialism. In another poem, Wordsworth wrote: “The World is too much with us / Late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers/ little we see in nature that is ours.” Nature for the Romantics contained the spirit of a creative power - God, in the case of Wordsworth and Coleridge who both help deeply rooted Christian beliefs. That is why the Ancyent Mariner is redeemed when, after his mindless act of violence against a sinless creature (the Albatross, which can be read symbolically as an allegory of Christ) he sees beauty in the lowliest of all creatures, the sea-snakes that he has previously found so hideous. In a moment of involuntary emotion, he blesses them unawares and experiences spontaneous feelings of joy and redemption.