Criticism > Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism > Lyrical Ballads, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Mary Jacobus (essay date 1976)


Lyrical Ballads, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Mary Jacobus (essay date 1976)

Mary Jacobus (essay date 1976)

SOURCE: Jacobus, Mary. “‘The Tragic Super-Tragic’ and Salisbury Plain.” In Tradition and Experiment in Wordsworth's “Lyrical Ballads” (1798), pp. 133-58. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976.

[In the following excerpt, Jacobus provides a detailed reading of Wordsworth's Salisbury Plain, noting that the poem is pivotal because it signals the poet's growing awareness of the realities of human suffering.]

Wordsworth's earliest attempts to portray suffering are clumsy and overstated, ‘The tragic super-tragic’, in contrast to the effective understatement of his later narrative poetry:

Then common death was none, common mishap,
But matter for this humour everywhere,
The tragic super-tragic, else left short.
Then, if a Widow, staggering with the blow
Of her distress, was known to have made her way
To the cold grave in which her Husband slept,
One night, or haply more than one,...

[The entire page is 11161 words long]

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