Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism | Lyrical Ballads, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Jane Stabler (essay date 1998)

Jane Stabler (essay date 1998)

SOURCE: Stabler, Jane. “Guardians and Watchful Powers: Literary Satire and Lyrical Ballads in 1798.” In 1798: The Year of the “Lyrical Ballads,” edited by Richard Cronin, pp. 203-30. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998.

[In the following essay, Stabler discusses Lyrical Ballads in the context of British satirical writings against the perceived threat of Jacobinism.]

An enhanced sense of the dynamics of satire in the Romantic period may modify our understanding of the early reception of Lyrical Ballads. For a long time Lyrical Ballads was accepted uncritically as one of the originary texts of Romanticism. Readers followed William Hazlitt's ‘sense of a new style and a new spirit in poetry […] something of the effect that arises from the turning up of the fresh soil, or of the first welcome breath of Spring’.¹ Hazlitt was, of course, looking back on the experiment...

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