Mohammed Alhamili

Dr. Porter

ENGL 6410

April 18, 2016

Lyrical Ballads

 Composition, Publication and Reception History

Composition:

William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were in their twenties when they met for the first time in the summer of 1795. In the beginning they were not acquainted enough with each other to suggest working on grand work such as Lyrical Ballads.  However, two years later Coleridge “leapt over a gate and bound down the pathless field” on a journey from Nether Stowey to Racedown cottage in Dorset to visit Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy(Butler 3). On June 28, Coleridge with his wife Sarah came back to take Wordsworth and his sister to visit Nether Stowey, which eventually becomes their permanent home  when they “found a house for rent just  four miles from Stowey, Alfoxden House” (Butler 3). The composition of Lyrical Ballads was initiated throughout the tours that Wordsworth and Coleridge took together. In a note appended to The Ancient mariner Coleridge asserts that  the “delightful walk from Nether Stowey to Dulverton, with Wordsworth and his sister, in Autumn of 1797,” when “this poem was planned, and in part composed”” (Butler 5). During that time “for more than a year Coleridge was with Wordsworth almost daily and frequently for weeks to gather,” which made their friendship grow to an extent that Coleridge regarded Wordsworth as “the greatest man he ever known and compared his work, favorably, to that of Schiller and Shakespeare,” and then later on Wordsworth described himself and Coleridge as “predestin’d, if two beings ever were, to speak the same delight” (Butler 3). Their original plans were to produce something worth of five pounds, but their plans shifted to something better a volume of poems. Coleridge was enthusiastic about their work that he even before finishing the project told the “world of poems chiefly on supernatural subjects taken from common life but looked at, as much as might be, through imaginative medium” (Butler 4). The design of the volume was not a thing that they thought through, but it came as they were progressing in their poem writing, “the volume was explicit in the memories of both aging authors than in the realities of the youthful composition” (Butler 5). Coleridge, in the Biographia Literaria, retrieve how they divided “their labor between supernatural and the everyday” which become later on the “influential concept in the literary history” (intro5). He explains “it was agreed, that my endeavors should be directed to person and characters supernatural or at least romantic… Mr. Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose to himself as his object, to give the charm novelty to things of everyday” (Butler 5).

Publication:

Lyrical Ballads was first published on 4 October, 1798 as a single volume (Porter40). It was published anonymously, since it was “considered as experiments” as it was explained in the advertisement to the first edition 1798:

IT is the honourable characteristic of Poetry that its materials are to be found in every subject which can interest the human mind. The evidence of this fact is to be sought, not in the writings of Critics, but in those of Poets themselves. The majority of the following poems are to be considered as experiments. They were written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure. Readers accustomed to the gaudiness and inane phraseology of many modern writers, if they persist in reading this book to its conclusion, will perhaps frequently have to struggle with feelings of strangeness and awkwardness.

After the failure of the first edition and the massive criticism of the poems as Cottle puts it “the poems had not sold ill,” Wordsworth decided to abide by the general test of the readers to be able to sell his poems (Porter 27). Therefore, Wordsworth, on October 1799, took the copyrights from Cottle to modify Lyrical Ballads and advertise for it in more appealing method that will bring some positive reviews from critics and general readers. In the first year of the nineteenth century, the first edition of Lyrical Ballads was sold out. Furthermore, Wordsworth and Coleridge received an offer of 80 pounds from Longman to publish a second edition. The second edition, which was published 1801, had major change in the order and the poems:

            Part of this change is confirmed by Wordsworth own generic demarcation for these           poems: five are dubbed “pastorals” (“The Brother,” “The Oak and Broom,” “The pet          Lamb,” “The idle Shepherded Boys” and “Michael”); five are collected under the         heading Poems on the Naming of Place  and the remaining seven could sit easily under either rubric. (Porter 28).

Reception:

During his journey to Germany, Wordsworth was awaiting the news of Lyrical Ballads reception. He received letters from Mrs. Coleridge telling him about the reception: “The Lyrical Ballads are not esteemed well here, but the Nightingale and the River Y” (Butler 21). Wordsworth’s reaction to the news denotes his high expectation from such a work, “I am afraid there has been some sad mismanagement in the case” (Butler 21). Therefore, Wordsworth asked Cottle to “transfer all copies and rights to Johnson” which he did not do. After a while of delay, Cottle responded to Wordsworth inquiries about the sale of Lyrical Ballads as the poems “have not sold ill” (Butler 22).

            After this conduct Wordsworth decide to change his role as a writer to become an editor and a publisher at the same time. He went back and looked at the essential problems that led to the poor and critical reception of the book. He “ascribed the problem to two causes; first the Ancient mariner… and secondly the unfavorable notice of most of the reviews”:

            From what I can gather it seems that the Ancyent Mariner has upon all been an injury to    the volume, I mean the old words and the strangeness of it have deterred readers from going on. If the volume should come to a second Edition I would put in its place some             little things which would be more likely to suit the common taste (Porter 17).

Almost all the reviews in the first publication were tearing down the Ancyent Mariner:

            Reviews described Coleridge’s work as “the strangest story of a cock and a bull we ever saw in paper. (Charles Burney in The Monthly Review), as “absurd, or unintelligible,” “a Dutch attempt at German sublimity” “of a little merit” and so on… (Butler 23).

“Even Charles Burney’s extended notice in the long lived and liberal Monthly Review, while praising the “Nightingale,” still voice doubts over the ballads can be called poetry”  (Porter 24).

However, the work is “declared by a twentieth century editor to be ‘the most important poetic publication in the English language since the appearance of Paradise Lost’” (Butler 3).Finally, Lyrical Ballads “status reached its peak in the 1960s and 1970”(Porter 34).

Work Cited

Wordsworth, William, James Butler, and Karen Green. Lyrical Ballads, and Other Poems,           1797-1800. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992. Print.

Wordsworth, William, Samuel T. Coleridge, Dahlia Porter, and Michael Gamer. Lyrical     Ballads 1798 and 1800. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2008. Print.