To what extent does Lyrical Ballads represent a new departure for British poetry and poetics?
The period in which Coleridge and Wordsworth were writing was that of the politically charged atmosphere of the late eighteenth century as the revolutions of both America and France affected the consciousness of the time. Coleridge and Wordsworth shared sympathies which allied them as political radicals and two of the most important writers in England. It was this intimacy as enthusiastic supporters of the revolution that led them to collaborate on the revolutionary Lyrical Ballads, published in 1798, helping to inaugurate the Romantic era in England. While disenchanted with the revolution’s betrayal of its origins they retained strong demographic beliefs, manifested in their collaborative work. With this merging of artistic and social change, their revolutionary ideals prescribed a rejection of contrived higher-class sensibilities and acceptance of basic human passions and characters. As a new movement, the Lyrical Ballads incorporate a certain amount of instability in their contrivance of an unexplored poetic territory. This instability provides a continued link to the revolutionary consciousness which generated the Lyrical
The diction of the ballads is representative of the simple and impulsive aspect of tone and judgement in the stories. Their poetry resulted not from contrived and manufactured narrative incidents but from the ‘spontaneous overflow’ of emotions, as Wordsworth wrote in the preface. Wordsworth privileged natural speech over poetic register and thus managed to incorporate simple themes without elaborate symbolism. In The Tables Turned, Wordsworth expands,
Example Essays Home
