Lyrical Ballads, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge - The Spectator (essay date 1890)
The Spectator (essay date 1890)
SOURCE: “Lyrical Ballads.” The Spectator 64 (April 5, 1890): 479-80.
[In the following review, the anonymous author praises Edward Dowden's reprint edition of Lyrical Ballads, asserting that Wordsworth's literary influence has been more enduring than that of Coleridge.]
This reprint of the first edition of the joint production of Wordsworth and Coleridge is valuable, of course, more as setting up a visible monument of a great era in the history of English literature, than for its restoration of a few obsolete readings of some of the most remarkable poems in the English language. There is something gratifying in possessing and physically handling a volume identical with that which our grandfathers or great-grandfathers read without in general being at all aware that it was the signal of a greater change in the tendencies of English poetry, and (one may almost say) of English faith so...
[The entire page is 1872 words long]
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