Book contents
- The Cambridge Companion to ‘Lyrical Ballads’
- The Cambridge Companion to ‘Lyrical Ballads’
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Chronology
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part I Part and Whole
- Chapter 1 Wordsworth’s ‘Preface’: A Manifesto for British Romanticism
- Chapter 2 Collaboration, Domestic Co-Partnery and Lyrical Ballads
- Chapter 3 Coleridgean Contributions
- Chapter 4 Lyric Voice and Ballad Voice
- Part II Subjects and Situations from Common Life
- Part III Feeling and Thought
- Part IV Language and the Human Mind
- Part V A Global Lyrical Ballads
- Guide to Further Reading
- Index
Chapter 4 - Lyric Voice and Ballad Voice
from Part I - Part and Whole
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 February 2020
- The Cambridge Companion to ‘Lyrical Ballads’
- The Cambridge Companion to ‘Lyrical Ballads’
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Chronology
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part I Part and Whole
- Chapter 1 Wordsworth’s ‘Preface’: A Manifesto for British Romanticism
- Chapter 2 Collaboration, Domestic Co-Partnery and Lyrical Ballads
- Chapter 3 Coleridgean Contributions
- Chapter 4 Lyric Voice and Ballad Voice
- Part II Subjects and Situations from Common Life
- Part III Feeling and Thought
- Part IV Language and the Human Mind
- Part V A Global Lyrical Ballads
- Guide to Further Reading
- Index
Summary
If the first readers of Lyrical Ballads were perplexed by the title of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s anthology, this was not immediately clear in the initial flurry of critical reviews. Where commentators were either pleased or irritated by the collection as a whole, there was little to indicate that they were at all flummoxed by the concept of ‘lyrical ballads’. In his ‘Advertisement’ to Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth had informed his readers that the poems contained therein should be considered ‘experiments’ (LB 3), and he was at pains in the ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads to elucidate the innovative poetics of the anthology. Yet neither he nor Coleridge felt it necessary to clarify their unusual title. This was despite the fact that the lyric tradition in the Western canon, and the ballad form, connoted very different – sometimes seemingly incommensurate – histories, conventions, and aesthetic and social connotations.
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- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to 'Lyrical Ballads' , pp. 66 - 84Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020