Lyrical Ballads (1798)

In July 1797, William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy took a house at Alfoxden in Somerset, four miles from the cottage where Samuel Taylor Coleridge had settled at Nether Stowey the previous winter. The two poets walked together almost daily through the Quantock Hills, and on a November tour toward Watchet they began planning a joint volume of verse. The division of labor suited their temperaments: Coleridge would handle the supernatural and strange, Wordsworth the lives and feelings of ordinary people rendered in plain speech. Joseph Cottle, the Bristol bookseller who had already backed Coleridge’s early work, published the result anonymously on 4 October 1798 under the title Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems. Five hundred copies were printed. A brief “Advertisement” introduced the poems as “experiments” testing how far the language of common life could serve the purposes of poetry. When a second edition appeared in 1800, expanded to two volumes with new poems, Wordsworth replaced the Advertisement with a full Preface arguing for poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” written in “a selection of language really used by men.” The ten poems gathered here draw from both editions.

The selection opens with two companion pieces composed in late May 1798. In “Expostulation and Reply,” a friend named Matthew chides the poet for sitting idle on a stone when he should be reading; in “The Tables Turned,” Wordsworth answers with open enthusiasm that the linnet’s song carries more wisdom than any sage. “Lines Written in Early Spring,” set near Alfoxden, measures the pleasure of birdsong and budding twigs against the grimmer thought of “what man has made of man.” “We Are Seven” records an adult’s failed attempt to convince a cottage girl that death has reduced her family; the child simply will not subtract. Four poems written during the winter of 1798–99 in Goslar, Germany, form part of the Lucy sequence, brief elegies for a figure whose identity Wordsworth never disclosed. “Strange Fits of Passion,” “She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways,” “Three Years She Grew,” and “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal” move from anxious premonition through grief to a stillness past consolation. “Michael,” added in the 1800 edition, tells in nearly five hundred lines the story of an aging Lake District shepherd whose son leaves for the city and does not return. “Tintern Abbey” closes the selection as it closed the original volume, composed on 13 July 1798 during a walking tour of the Wye Valley and written down only after Wordsworth reached Bristol.

Reviewers were not kind. Robert Southey, writing in The Critical Review in October 1798, called the subjects “uninteresting” and judged Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” an assemblage of stanzas that were “laboriously beautiful” but in connection “absurd or unintelligible.” The Analytical Review found the collection closer to “the extravagance of a mad German poet” than to the English ballad tradition it claimed to revive. Yet the five hundred copies sold, and a second edition followed in 1800 with Wordsworth’s name now on the title page. He and Dorothy had moved to Dove Cottage in Grasmere in December 1799, beginning the most concentrated stretch of composition in his career. Over the next decade he would produce the Immortality Ode, the Westminster Bridge sonnet, “The Solitary Reaper,” and the first completed version of The Prelude. All of that work grew from the ground cleared in these ballads and the Preface that accompanied them, a text that became the nearest thing English Romanticism produced to a statement of first principles.