Criticism > Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism > Lyrical Ballads, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Stephen Parrish (essay date 1985)


Lyrical Ballads, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Stephen Parrish (essay date 1985)

Stephen Parrish (essay date 1985)

SOURCE: Parrish, Stephen. “‘Leaping and lingering’: Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads.” In Coleridge's Imagination: Essays in Memory of Pete Laver, edited by Richard Gravil, Lucy Newlyn, and Nicholas Roe, pp. 102-16. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

[In the following essay, Parrish examines Coleridge's understanding of the ballad form, both as seen through his collaboration with Wordsworth in Lyrical Ballads and through his notion of the supernatural.]

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One of the most colourful volumes of literary scholarship ever given to the world is a study of the working of Coleridge's imagination, ‘an absorbing adventure along the ways which the imagination follows in dealing with its multifarious materials—an adventure like a passage through the mazes of a labyrinth, to come out at last upon a wide and open sky’. Now more than half a century old, The Road to Xanadu...

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