Lyrical Ballads

In 1798 English poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth published Lyrical Ballads, a collection of poems that sparked a revolution in literature and signaled the beginning of English Romanticism. The work included such famous pieces as Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” as well as many controversial poems written in common, rather than formal, language—or what Wordsworth would describe in a later edition as “the language really used by men.” With Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth and Coleridge were attempting to democratize the art of poetry.

The first edition, which was published anonymously, contained 23 poems: 19 by Wordsworth and 4 by Coleridge. Subsequent editions credited the collection to “W. Wordsworth,” though Coleridge’s work was still included, along with new poems, mostly penned by Wordsworth. He also added prefaces of increasing length that served as manifestos of his and Coleridge’s theories about poetry. (Coleridge is identified in the prefaces merely as “a Friend.”) Perhaps the most famous of these is Wordsworth’s definition of poetry (in the 1800 edition) as the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.”

Background: An era of revolution

Wordsworth and Coleridge met in 1795, and their Lyrical Ballads sprung from an era of radical ideas about democracy and human rights. Only a few years before their first meeting, English-American writer and political pamphleteer Thomas Paine had published Rights of Man (1791–92), a best-selling book that defended the French Revolution and republican principles. Both Wordsworth and Coleridge were sympathetic to the ideals of the revolution (and Coleridge had once attempted to form a utopian community with fellow poet Robert Southey), but they became disenchanted with such ideals when the Revolution devolved into war and the politically motivated purges of the Reign of Terror.

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Yet their sympathies for revolution are evident in the poems they began writing in 1797, many of which were included in Lyrical Ballads. By this time the two men had become neighbors, both living in Somerset, England, and had formed a creatively nourishing friendship. Coleridge was about 25 and Wordsworth 27. A third member of this friendship was Wordsworth’s sister, Dorothy, who was one year younger than her brother. The three of them often took long walks together, after which Dorothy recorded her observations of nature in her journals. Her writings inspired her brother, who meanwhile regularly conversed with Coleridge to develop their theories about poetry.

Essentially, both men wanted to write poems that reflect commonplace experiences and emotions and use everyday language, rather than poems written in “elevated” or formal language. For Coleridge, this meant developing an informal mode of poetry in which he used a conversational tone and rhythm. Wordsworth, who had formerly written long poems of social protest addressing heady topics, began crafting short lyrical and dramatic pieces. He wrote portraits of rural people that were intended to illustrate basic truths of human nature, as well as tributes to his sister or, later, a vista of daffodils (a scene first recorded in Dorothy’s journals). In an “Advertisement” that was penned by Wordsworth to introduce the poems of the first edition of Lyrical Ballads, these pieces are described as “experiments.” Wordsworth’s introduction also cautions readers who may be accustomed to “the gaudiness and inane phraseology of many modern writers” and, with a hint of sarcasm, admits:

Readers of superior judgment may disapprove of the style in which many of these pieces are executed[;] it must be expected that many lines and phrases will not exactly suit their taste. It will perhaps appear to them, that wishing to avoid the prevalent fault of the day, the author has sometimes descended too low, and that many of his expressions are too familiar, and not of sufficient dignity.

Publication and purpose

It was Coleridge who suggested that Lyrical Ballads be published anonymously. “Wordsworth’s name is nothing—to a large number of persons mine stinks,” he wrote to their publisher. Indeed, up to this time Wordsworth’s poems had yet to attract much attention, while Coleridge’s radical political views had only inspired controversy and criticism.

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Even the collection’s title made a statement. “Lyrical” references the lyric, a classical form of poetry featuring verses that were typically sung to the accompaniment of music. In addition, lyric poetry is noted for its expression of intense personal emotion, instead of an objective tone. Similarly, “Ballads” signifies a poetic form associated with song. Moreover, ballads are passed down through oral tradition instead of formal learning. Readers were expected to encounter poems that represented the experiences and vernacular of middle- and working-class people, not the polished artistic conventions of the upper classes.

Coleridge, the son of a vicar and school headmaster, certainly considered himself one of the people; in a letter to a friend in 1797, he wrote that the blood in his veins was “uncontaminated with one drop of gentility.” However, the Wordsworths’ interaction with working people and the poor was mainly limited to observation. “Tintern Abbey” offers an example of how this distance played out in William’s poetry. At the time it was written, poverty in the United Kingdom was a major social problem, such that there were people living among the ruins of the real-life abbey in Monmouthshire, Wales. But in Wordsworth’s poem, poverty receives only glancing comment in the lines:

With some uncertain notice, as might seem
Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods,
Or of some Hermit’s cave, where by his fire
The Hermit sits alone.

And yet, rather than epics about kings, queens, knights, deities, or events and figures from famous events in history, Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s poems adamantly focus on familiar rustic types and humble figures who live close to nature: mothers, laborers, prisoners, sailors, shepherds, farmers, and hunters. The most controversial poem in the collection was Wordsworth’s “The Idiot Boy,” about a child with an intellectual disability. Its controversy would stem in part from its so-called “vulgar” (i.e., common and colloquial) language and “lowly” subject matter.

—Why bustle thus about your door,
What means this bustle, Betty Foy?
Why are you in this mighty fret?
And why on horseback have you set
Him whom you love, your idiot boy?

In an 1818 lecture the poets’ friend, William Hazlitt (who was one of the first people to read the poems of Lyrical Ballads before it was published) said of the collection’s authors and choice of subject matter:

They were surrounded, in company with the Muses, by a mixed rabble of idle apprentices and Botany Bay convicts, female vagrants, gipsies, meek daughters in the family of Christ, of ideot boys and mad mothers…They claimed kindred only with the commonest of the people: peasants, pedlars, and village-barbers were their oracles and bosom friends.

Reception and subsequent editions

Lyrical Ballads had an initial printing of 500 copies and was met with a mixed reception. One of its harshest critics was Robert Southey, Coleridge’s former collaborator. Their friendship had come to a bitter end after the failure of their utopian scheme. In the October 1798 issue of The Critical Review, Southey called the poems’ subjects “uninteresting.” Of his ex-friend’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Southey wrote, “Many of the stanzas are laboriously beautiful; but in connection they are absurd or unintelligible.…Genius has here been employed in producing a poem of little merit.” His opinion of “The Idiot Boy” was especially backhanded: “No tale less deserved the labour that appears to have been bestowed upon this. It resembles a Flemish picture in the worthlessness of its design and the excellence of its execution.”

Stung by Southey’s comments, Wordsworth suspected that he was aware that the poems had in part been published for money and that he was trying to hurt the book’s sales. Wordsworth wrote to his publisher, “If he could not conscientiously have spoken differently of the volume, he ought to have declined the task of reviewing it.”

Another review, published in the New London Review, reeked of the snobbery that Wordsworth and Coleridge sought to vanquish in their poems. The journal’s critic wrote, “The language of conversation, and that too of the lower classes, can never be considered as the language of poetry.”

Nonetheless, the poets found some champions of their work, in particular Mary Robinson, the poetry editor of the Morning Post. She not only promoted Wordsworth’s poems in the newspaper but also published a volume of her own poetry, titled Lyrical Tales, that was blatantly imitative of his style.

In 1800 a second edition of Lyrical Ballads was published, followed by editions in 1802 and 1805. In these some poems were replaced by new pieces, and the original order of them was changed. Most of the new poems were composed by Wordsworth, and these included several of his famous “Lucy” poems, such as “Strange Fits of Passion Have I Known” and “She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways.”

List of poems in the 1798 edition of Lyrical Ballads

The poems included in the collection’s first edition, in their original order, are:

• “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Coleridge (styled as “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere”)
• “The Foster-Mother’s Tale, a Dramatic Fragment” (Coleridge)
• “Lines Left Upon a Seat in a Yew-Tree Which Sands Near the Lake of Esthwaite, on a Desolate Part of the Shore, Yet Commanding a Beautiful Prospect” (Wordsworth)
• “The Nightingale; a Conversational Poem, Written in April, 1798” (Coleridge)*
• “The Female Vagrant” (Wordsworth)
• “Goody Blake, and Harry Gill, a True Story” (Wordsworth)
• “Lines Written at a Small Distance from My House, and Sent by My Little Boy to the Person to Whom They Are Addressed” (Wordsworth)
• “Simon Lee, the Old Huntsman, with an Incident in Which He Was Concerned” (Wordsworth)
• “Anecdote for Fathers Shewing How the Art of Lying May Be Taught” (Wordsworth)
• “We Are Seven” (Wordsworth)
• “Lines Written in Early Spring” (Wordsworth)
• “The Thorn” (Wordsworth)
• “The Last of the Flock” (Wordsworth)
• “The Dungeon” (Coleridge)
• “The Mad Mother” (Wordsworth)
• “The Idiot Boy” (Wordsworth)
• “Lines Written near Richmond, upon the Thames, at Evening” (Wordsworth)
• “Expostulation and Reply” (Wordsworth)
• “The Tables Turned; an Evening Scene, on the Same Subject” (Wordsworth)
• “Old Man Travelling; Animal Tranquility and Decay, a Sketch” (Wordsworth)
• “The Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman” (Wordsworth)
• “The Convict” (Wordsworth)
• “Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour, July 13, 1798” (Wordsworth)

*Some copies of the first edition feature “Lewti, or the Circassian Love-Chant,” a previously published poem that Coleridge pulled at the last minute out of concern it would reveal the book’s authorship. Most copies include “The Nightingale” instead.