Lyrical Ballads, With a Few Other Poems (1798) E-Book

William Wordsworth

• Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

In the seminal collection 'Lyrical Ballads, With a Few Other Poems (1798),' the transformative power of nature and the celebration of ordinary life are masterfully articulated through a medley of poetic forms. This anthology marks a pivotal moment in literary history, heralding the Romantic era with its profound exploration of emotion and imagination. The range of styles, from the meditative to the narrative, underlines the collection's rich diversity. Combined, they offer a tapestry of expression rooted in both simplicity and deep philosophical inquiry, highlighted by remarkable pieces that continue to resonate through the ages. Curated by literary pioneers William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, this anthology unites their innovative voices under a common vision. Both poets sought to push the boundaries of poetic tradition, eschewing the excess of the preceding era for themes infused with personal experience and a reverence for the natural world. The collection is emblematic of the broader Romantic movement's quest for authenticity and emotional depth, encouraging a shift in how poetry was perceived and experienced by both writers and readers. This collection is an invaluable addition to any reader's library, presenting an unparalleled opportunity to engage with the dawn of Romantic poetry. 'Lyrical Ballads' invites readers to immerse themselves in the lush diversity of thought and style, offering an educational journey that enriches and challenges existing paradigms. As a beacon of poetic evolution, this volume not only facilitates an understanding of Romanticism's origins but also nurtures an appreciation for the timeless dialogue between man and nature, thought and emotion, that it so eloquently inspires. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - An Introduction draws the threads together, discussing why these diverse authors and texts belong in one collection. - Historical Context explores the cultural and intellectual currents that shaped these works, offering insight into the shared (or contrasting) eras that influenced each writer. - A combined Synopsis (Selection) briefly outlines the key plots or arguments of the included pieces, helping readers grasp the anthology's overall scope without giving away essential twists. - A collective Analysis highlights common themes, stylistic variations, and significant crossovers in tone and technique, tying together writers from different backgrounds. - Reflection questions encourage readers to compare the different voices and perspectives within the collection, fostering a richer understanding of the overarching conversation.

Leseprobe

William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Lyrical Ballads, With a Few Other Poems (1798)

Enriched edition. Exploring Nature, Imagination, and Human Experience in Romantic Poetry

In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience.

Introduction, Studies and Commentaries by Liora Halberg

Edited and published by Good Press, 2022

[email protected]

EAN 4057664151414

Table of Contents

Introduction

Historical Context

Synopsis

Author Biography

Lyrical Ballads, With a Few Other Poems (1798)

Analysis

Reflection

Introduction

Table of Contents

Curatorial Vision

Lyrical Ballads, With a Few Other Poems (1798) brings together William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in a deliberate union of narrative ballad, conversational meditation, and reflective lyric. The selection privileges poems where ordinary lives, rural settings, and elemental scenes become sites of philosophical inquiry. Across titles such as We Are Seven, The Idiot Boy, The Female Vagrant, and The Nightingale, the through-line is an ethics of attention: feeling and thought cultivated through close listening to nature and to marginalized voices. The aim is to foreground how song, story, and conversation recalibrate sensibility, transforming common incidents into occasions for renewed perception.

These works are placed together to trace a movement from raw encounter to reflective memory. Early narrative pressures in Goody Blake, and Harry Gill, Simon Lee, and The Last of the Flock present moral friction in local communities; later meditative frames in Lines Written in Early Spring, Lines Left upon a Seat in a Yew-Tree, and Lines Written Near Richmond deepen that friction into thought. The numbered sequences—from I. through XXIII.—underscore experiment and serial attention. The curatorial aim is to make audible a spectrum of listening: conversational poems, dramatic fragment, sketch, and grand river meditation answering one another across shifts in scale.

Another purpose is to juxtapose social extremity with restorative or questioning views of the natural world. The Female Vagrant, The Convict, Old Man Travelling, and The Mad Mother stage dispossession, punishment, age, and mental anguish. In counterpoint, The Nightingale, Lines Written at a Small Distance from My House, and Lines Written Near Richmond attend to sound, light, and evening calm. Lyrical episodes, like Anecdote for Fathers and We Are Seven, tie ethical reflection to childhood speech. The collection’s design places these tonal poles in proximity, encouraging readers to consider how empathy and observation evolve when sorrow meets attentive delight.

Unlike encountering these poems separately, their gathering here emphasizes an arc from experiment to culmination. Expostulation and Reply and The Tables Turned form a pedagogical hinge, aligning inquiry and instruction. The Thorn and Lines Left upon a Seat in a Yew-Tree distill place into moral resonance, which then expands into the riverine vista of Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey. By sequencing ballads with conversations and meditations, the arrangement illuminates how description, story, and memory form a shared method. It privileges dialogue between the two authors as an artistic engine rather than isolated achievement.

Thematic & Aesthetic Interplay

Throughout the volume, recurring emblems build a conversation about perception and care. The yew-tree seat becomes a station of meditative withdrawal; the thorn a knot of rumor and grief; the nightingale a test of listening; the Wye a measure of time and return. These images travel between poets and genres, altering tone as they go. Lines Written in Early Spring and The Nightingale each calibrate sound and feeling, while Lines Written Near Richmond and Old Man Travelling temper motion with stillness. The result is an interplay where landscape, voice, and memory refine one another across contrasting frames.

Ethical dilemmas echo throughout. Goody Blake, and Harry Gill interrogates the relation between need, property, and retribution, resonating with the pastoral austerity of The Last of the Flock. The Convict and The Dungeon assemble opposing visions of punishment and reform, while The Mad Mother and The Idiot Boy probe caretaking, dependence, and communal perception. Anecdote for Fathers and We Are Seven question how authority listens to childhood. Expostulation and Reply, paired with The Tables Turned, weighs bookish learning against experiential wisdom. Each work shapes a moral field where sympathy must be earned, tested, and kept from collapsing into sentimentality.

Formal contrasts establish dialogue as much as theme. The Foster-Mother’s Tale, a dramatic fragment, sets narrative within voice-on-voice exchange, while The Nightingale adopts a fluid conversational mode. Sketches like Old Man Travelling compress biography into a few strokes, against which the extended meditation of Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey unfolds time as memory. Lines Left upon a Seat in a Yew-Tree and The Thorn anchor place with refrains and apostrophes. Between terse sequence markers—I. to XXIII.—and richly patterned lyrics, the collection moves between spareness and abundance, refusing a single register of feeling or form.

Influence within the volume is mutual and generative. The Nightingale challenges conventional melancholy attached to the bird, a stance that resonates with the affirmative natural music in Lines Written in Early Spring. We Are Seven’s arithmetic of kinship anticipates the skeptical pedagogy dramatized in Anecdote for Fathers. The Thorn’s insistence on rumor and repetition intensifies the storytelling pressure that also animates Simon Lee. The Dungeon’s indictment of confinement sharpens the ethical scrutiny of The Convict. Such crossings show two poets testing shared materials—song, tale, landscape—to discover how language might change conduct through altered habits of attention.

Enduring Impact & Critical Reception

These poems continue to matter because they reposition who and what poetry attends to. By centering rural labor, childhood speech, wandering, illness, imprisonment, and quiet evening scenes, the collection enlarges the field of dignity. Its idiom favors conversation, story, and plain description without renouncing reflection. That balance speaks to current concerns about social care, environmental perception, and the place of memory in ethical life. The shaping presence of Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey models how recollection can steady action. Read together, the works propose a humane acoustics: feeling becomes thoughtful when listened to carefully.

General recognition has long cast this collaboration as transformative for English verse, not through doctrine but through practice. Its conversational experiments widened what could count as poetic subject, while the ballads reclaimed story as a vehicle for inquiry. Later poets and artists have drawn on these modes, adapting the attentive walk, the dialogic scene, or the moral tale to other media. Teachers return to We Are Seven, The Idiot Boy, and The Thorn to explore perception, grief, and community. The Nightingale and Lines Written in Early Spring remain touchstones for thinking about sound, mood, and nature’s invitations to thought.

The volume’s social conscience continues to animate debate. The Convict and The Dungeon serve as points of entry for discussions about punishment, rehabilitation, and the power of environment. The Mad Mother and Old Man Travelling invite attention to care, vulnerability, and the dignity of constrained lives. Anecdote for Fathers and We Are Seven enrich conversations about childhood knowledge and adult authority. Meanwhile, Lines Left upon a Seat in a Yew-Tree and Lines Written Near Richmond nourish the literature of place. These poems show how observing a lane, a river, or a seat can recalibrate feeling without spectacle or doctrine.

Finally, the collaboration’s inward turn reaches forward. Lines Written at a Small Distance from My House links domestic nearness with imaginative reach; Lines Written in Early Spring and The Nightingale refine the senses as moral instruments; and the closing river meditation gathers memory as a resource for conduct. The sequence frames a durable method: attend, recount, reflect, and return. When the ballads of hardship, like The Female Vagrant and The Last of the Flock, stand beside reflective pieces, sympathy acquires patience. The collection endures not as a monument, but as a living practice of re-seeing ordinary life.

Historical Context

Table of Contents

Socio-Political Landscape

In 1798 Britain, the poems appeared amid war with revolutionary France, a monarchy anxious about contagion from republican ideas, and a government extending surveillance and prosecution of dissent. Emergency legislation curtailed assembly and sharpened treason definitions, while juries and informers policed speech. The Irish rebellion intensified fears of insurrection. Against this backdrop, the volume’s initial anonymity protected its authors and drew attention to its themes of conscience and liberty. Pieces such as The Convict and The Dungeon press on penal power, while reflective works cultivate inner sovereignty—an ethical counterweight to the coercive climate surrounding publication and reception.

Rural Britain was being remade by enclosure, parish relief experiments, and volatile grain prices, displacing customary livelihoods and crowding the roads with the poor. The Female Vagrant voices dispossession’s human cost; The Last of the Flock dramatizes household economies in distress; and Simon Lee and Goody Blake, and Harry Gill expose frictions between laboring people and gentry expectations. Vagrancy statutes, wage supplementation, and parish settlement rules shaped life chances and mobility, resonating with the poems’ attention to wandering, begging, and local belonging. The collection’s rural settings are not escapist retreats, but sites where law, charity, and resentment visibly reorder communities.

Wartime taxation, naval mobilization, and bread shortages compounded hardship. Press gangs and militia musters shadowed coastal and riverine communities, while the price of provisions rose after successive poor harvests. Old Man Travelling; Animal Tranquillity and Decay sketches the muted dignity of an aged wayfarer touched by war. Lines Written Near Richmond, upon the Thames, at Evening registers urban prosperity and unease on a river crucial to commerce and defense. Meditative pieces like Lines Written in Early Spring and Lines… above Tintern Abbey pursue inward stability amid geopolitical turbulence, framing personal recollection as a counterhistory to alarms, debts, and conscriptions.

Imperial expansion structured horizons at home. The Atlantic slave trade remained legal; the East India Company deepened its reach; and frontier wars reshaped ideas of indigeneity and loss. The Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman imagines survival and abandonment in a colonial borderland, refracting imperial violence through intimate suffering. We Are Seven converses with mortality in a parish churchyard, where global demography meets childhood resilience. The Convict evokes carceral geographies—hulks, gaols, and remote punishments—while The Dungeon condemns spectacle and solitary confinement. Together, the collection’s voices register race, empire, and punishment as everyday pressures, not merely distant policy abstractions.

Gender hierarchies, family law, and the culture of sensibility framed emotional life. Coverture limited women’s property rights; bastardy regulations policed sexuality; and parish oversight scrutinized motherhood. The Mad Mother presents maternal devotion under duress, while The Thorn examines communal judgment around a woman’s sorrow and rumor. Anecdote for Fathers and We Are Seven stage negotiations between adult authority and children’s knowledge. Such poems neither sermonize nor sensationalize; they dramatize how empathy and conversation become political, challenging rigid expectations about obedience, reason, and feeling. Domestic sorrow and endurance emerge as critiques of legal and ecclesiastical power acting within households.

Publication relied on shifting patronage and market channels. Provincial booksellers and printers facilitated the 1798 volume, outside metropolitan coteries that often mediated reputation. Anonymity invited readers to weigh form and subject over name-recognition, yet it also shielded potentially suspect projects in a period of prosecutions. Cheap formats and ballad meters signaled accessibility to readers beyond elite subscription networks. At the same time, loyalist reviewing and informal censorship discouraged overt radicalism. In this milieu, pieces like Expostulation and Reply and The Tables Turned articulate a pedagogy rooted in common experience, defying the credentialed gatekeeping of universities, clubs, and salons.

Intellectual & Aesthetic Currents

The collection stands at a hinge between Enlightenment rationalism and emergent Romantic idealism. Expostulation and Reply opposes bookish authority with experiential knowledge, while The Tables Turned insists that nature instructs more persuasively than disputation. Coleridge’s The Nightingale adapts conversation as a philosophical form, correcting inherited clichés through observation and sympathy. Lines… above Tintern Abbey models reflective self-scrutiny that joins sensation to memory, forging an ethic beyond mere utility. Rather than rejecting reason, these poems relocate it within feeling, habit, and the social imagination, seeking a civic intelligence grounded in attention to landscapes, neighbors, and the subtle education of time.

Wordsworth and Coleridge experiment with diction that courts the ordinary. We Are Seven, Anecdote for Fathers, and Goody Blake, and Harry Gill cultivate speech rhythms approximating conversation, pared of neoclassical ornament. The Foster-Mother’s Tale, designated a dramatic fragment, adopts a voice-driven mode that privileges storytelling over elaborate description. This aesthetic wagers that truth emerges from common idiom and psychological fidelity, not from elevated periphrasis. By foregrounding speakers whose grammar, superstition, or stubbornness complicate authority, the collection theorizes a democratic poetics: the “real language” of nearby people can sustain philosophical reflection without becoming prosaic or merely documentary.

Landscape aesthetics inform the collection’s forms. The Wye valley, the Lake District, and hedged farmlands supply prospects shaped by the picturesque and the sublime, yet moderated through ethical scrutiny. Lines left upon a seat in a yew-tree and Lines Written in Early Spring convert sightseeing into moral inwardness. In The Nightingale, Coleridge overturns the stock emblem, insisting on attention instead of allegory. The Thorn probes how place, memory, and rumor create a charged topography. These poems test whether beauty can teach, and whether habitual looking can become a discipline for justice as much as for delight.

Scientific and industrial change subtly enters the background. Steam-powered mills, improved canals, and agrarian “improvements” alter labor rhythms and habitats, a pressure registered in The Female Vagrant’s uprooting and in the uneasy quiet of Lines Written Near Richmond. Curiosity about sensation, habit, and association informs depictions of memory and attention across the volume. The Idiot Boy treats cognitive difference without resorting to clinical taxonomy, while The Dungeon argues that light, air, and community heal better than mechanical punishment. Rather than celebrate or reject technology wholesale, the poems test its human measures, weighing utility against mental health and ecological continuities.

The volume participates in a revival of balladry and tale-telling that revalues oral culture. Simon Lee relies on the ethics of recognition between teller and listener; Goody Blake, and Harry Gill carries the cadence of a “true story,” blurring report and parable; and The Thorn stages communal narration as it spirals around conjecture. Print recovers and reshapes forms associated with fairs, kitchens, and inns, embedding them in a literary experiment that tests sympathy’s reach. This move unsettles hierarchies between high and low art, installing memory, rumor, and proverb as engines of reflection rather than curiosities from a vanishing past.

Theatre and music offer nearby models for rhythm and address. The Foster-Mother’s Tale bears a stage sensibility, cueing an audience through pauses, questions, and embedded narration. Several lyrics adopt refrain-like structures that invite communal participation, echoing song and hymn. At the same time, the conversational mode in The Nightingale and the measured cadences of Lines left upon a seat cultivate a voice intimate enough for the parlour yet serious enough for public argument. By absorbing performative techniques without spectacle, the collection advances a humane rhetoric: persuasion through shared time, attentive listening, and patterns memorable enough to travel by heart.

Legacy & Reassessment Across Time

Reception shifted as war intensified and as subsequent editions appeared. Initial responses mixed admiration for freshness with suspicion of covert politics, especially around The Convict and The Dungeon. Publishing the volume anonymously foregrounded experiment over reputation, but it also fed rumors about intention. Later authorial framing clarified aims and rearranged contents, softening explicit confrontations with penal power. Meanwhile, Lines… above Tintern Abbey quickly attracted notice as a signature achievement, drawing attention away from socially abrasive pieces. The collection’s reputation thus formed through alternating emphasis on meditative inwardness and its unflinching portraits of poverty, displacement, and institutional cruelty.

Across the nineteenth century, readers increasingly prized consolation, piety, and domestic virtue in these poems. Schoolroom selections normalized We Are Seven and Lines Written in Early Spring, while controversial pieces were neglected or simplified. Wordsworth’s long public career, culminating in laureateship, further encouraged reverent interpretations that emphasized duty and serenity. Coleridge’s later reflections on imagination reframed The Nightingale’s conversational experiment as philosophically ambitious. Yet the radical textures never vanished: The Female Vagrant, The Last of the Flock, and Old Man Travelling continued to trouble complacent moralizing, reminding audiences that gentleness in style could still carry social critique.

Twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholarship widened the frame. Close-reading movements elevated Lines… above Tintern Abbey as a paradigm of meditative lyric, yet historicist approaches restored The Convict, The Dungeon, and Goody Blake, and Harry Gill to debates about law, poverty, and charity. Ecocriticism found early environmental ethics in the Wye and Esthwaite poems; disability studies reconsidered The Idiot Boy; and feminist critics revisited The Mad Mother and The Thorn. Post-colonial inquiry complicated The Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman, probing representation and pity within imperial contexts. Ongoing textual scholarship has stabilized copy-texts and clarified authorial revisions across editions.

Reprints, illustrated editions, and musical settings carried the poems beyond the page. The dramatic textures of The Foster-Mother’s Tale and the monologic intensity of The Mad Mother invited stage and broadcast adaptations, while the cadences of We Are Seven and The Nightingale encouraged choral and solo arrangements. With copyright expiration, reliable academic editions and open-access platforms multiplied, enabling global classrooms to teach the 1798 selection entire rather than excerpted. Archival preservation of manuscripts and notebooks has grounded pedagogy in material culture. Commemorations of journeys to the Wye and Esthwaite have fostered literary tourism that doubles as environmental education.

Today, the volume’s insistence on attention to ordinary lives meets debates about inequality, migration, criminal justice, and ecological precarity. The Female Vagrant speaks to displacement; The Convict and The Dungeon to restorative possibilities; and Lines… above Tintern Abbey to sustainable attachment. Digital dissemination has restored the original 1798 constellation, complicating narratives built on later selections. Classrooms and communities test the poems’ claims by walking rivers, mapping parish histories, and listening across generations. Ongoing arguments about sentimentality versus critique sharpen readings of We Are Seven and Anecdote for Fathers, ensuring the collection remains a living forum for ethical inquiry.

Synopsis

Table of Contents

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (Parts I–VII)

An old sailor detains a wedding guest to recount a sea voyage cursed after he kills an albatross, enduring supernatural trials and lifelong penance as a warning about violating nature.

THE FOSTER-MOTHER'S TALE, A DRAMATIC FRAGMENT.

A woman tells of a visionary boy reared by a recluse, whose estrangement from society ends in disappearance, casting a spell of mystery and pity.

LINES LEFT UPON A SEAT IN A YEW-TREE WHICH STANDS NEAR THE LAKE OF ESTHWAITE, ON A DESOLATE PART OF THE SHORE, YET COMMANDING A BEAUTIFUL PROSPECT.

An address to a deserted seat becomes a cautionary portrait of a misanthrope who fled human contact, urging readers toward active sympathy with nature and humankind.

THE NIGHTINGALE; A CONVERSATIONAL POEM, WRITTEN IN APRIL, 1798.

A friendly nighttime walk prompts a rejection of the nightingale’s stock association with melancholy, celebrating instead living nature, friendship, and a child’s fresh responses.