SOURCE: Campbell, Patrick. “Lyrical Ballads: The Current of Opinion,” and “Criticism in Context, 1797-98.” In Wordsworth and Coleridge: “Lyrical Ballads,” pp. 1-14, 15-34. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991.

[In the following excerpt, Campbell provides an overview of critical reaction to Lyrical Ballads from earliest responses to the 1990s. Campbell then sketches the social and political context in which the collection was published and explores the philosophical aspects of the collaboration between Wordsworth and Coleridge.]

CONTEMPORANEOUS CRITICISM: THE MAGAZINES

‘Up to 1820 the name of Wordsworth was trampled under foot’, thundered De Quincey. While that is the over-emotional reaction of a friend, it is none the less true that Lyrical Ballads, aimed at the solar plexus of reader complacency, initially attracted some erratic counters. Cottle feared that such blows would destroy the entire enterprise: ‘the severity of most of the reviews’ was ‘so great that its progress to oblivion, notwithstanding the merits which I was quite sure they possessed, seemed ordained to be as rapid as it was certain’ (quoted in Smith, 1932, p. 29). These reactions say more about the prevailing state of periodical journalism and literary taste than about the actual poetry, but that in no way diminishes their significance both as cultural indicators and as first shots across the bows of an unfamiliar intruder. Nor should we forget that Wordsworth, in common with the other poets of the Romantic period, was ‘more strongly affected by this periodical criticism than have been any other important group of writers in the English-speaking world at any time’. The reminder comes from the Foreword to Donald Reiman's The Romantics Reviewed, a definitive nine-volume compilation containing facsimiles of all known contemporaneous reviews (1972, i, p. xxvii).

Reiman's collection is unlikely to be found outside major libraries. Less exhaustive but still illuminating are the following collections, which may prove easier to track down: M. P. Hodgart, and R. T. H. Redpath's Romantic Perspectives (1964); Graham McMaster's William Wordsworth (1972), which ranges over nearly two centuries of criticism; J. L. Hayden's Romantic Bards and British Reviewers (1978), which oddly includes only two early critiques; and J. de Jackson's volume on reactions to Coleridge's poetry in the Critical Heritage series (1970: CCH [Coleridge: The Critical Heritage]).

To read the early criticism is to realise that the basic facts about the reception of Lyrical Ballads are frequently over-simplified or even misrepresented. Within a year or so of publication, the 1798 edition cropped up in no fewer than nine reviews, all in different periodicals. While the great age of the literary periodical was yet to come—it coincided with the rise of the Edinburgh (1802) and the Quarterly (1809)—there were already in 1798 at least sixty different journals catering to the needs of a rapidly expanding reading public. Hodgart and Redpath (1964) quote the bookseller Lackington's estimate that in 1803 ‘four times as many books were being sold then as had been twenty years before’. Such a ‘spate of literary products’ was what the age demanded; it was ‘part and parcel of the rapidly expanding economy following on the industrial and agricultural revolutions’ (p. 18).

Opinions were what these arriviste readers wanted and what they got. Poems were good, bad or a bit of both; every reviewer saw his role as a critic in the Greek sense of the term, as a judge rather than as an enlightened interpreter. Assertions, often politically grounded, rarely sought corroboration in the text; some poems were not even identified in reviews. The approach was unashamedly belle-lettrist and subjective: irony and humour were the heavy-handed weapons; painterly and literary analogies provided a gauge of artistic worth and a reminder of the reviewer's erudition. Not that the views on poetry were straightforwardly Augustan anyway. Though recent analysts have often made this assumption, it was the work of minor, now forgotten poetasters such as Erasmus Darwin that was currently attracting most readers. His name features more than once in reviews of Lyrical Ballads.

One of the earliest responses, perhaps the first, was Southey's article in the Critical Review of October 1798. Friend and fellow poet, Southey was none the less writing for a Tory journal. Such divided loyalties probably explain both his acknowledgement of an exceptional talent and his objections to banality of subject matter. Using a fashionable analogy from fine art, he censures ‘The Idiot Boy’ for failing to emulate the exalted subject matter of Raphael, and finds in Flemish painting an equivalence for ‘the worthlessness of its design and the excellence of its execution’. But at least its stylistic virtues raise it above ‘the other ballads of this kind’, which Southey finds equally ‘bald in story, and … not so highly embellished in narration’. The Ancient Mariner is dismissed as lacking in unity and, in a possible conflation of the ballads of Bürger, Flemish art and the legend of the Flying Dutchman, branded as ‘a Dutch attempt at German sublimity’. He concludes by way of reference to the ‘Advertisement’ that ‘the experiment has failed, not because the language of conversation is little adapted to “the purposes of poetic pleasure”, but because it has been tried upon uninteresting subjects’ (Reiman, 1972, i, 308-10).

Faced with a series of ‘experiments’, Southey responded as most critics would have done—equivocally. That he was a friend but also pandering to a conservative readership doubtless created additional tensions. Yet this ‘mixed’ critique in fact became the model for subsequent reviewers, as did Southey's praise of ‘The Idiot Boy’ and his ill-judged dismissal of The Ancient Mariner. Two months later, the anonymous critic of the short-lived Analytical Review predictably echoed Southey's remarks in complaining of an ‘extravagance’ that was reminiscent of a ‘mad German Poet’ and a regretted absence of ‘the simplicity of our ancient ballad writers’ (Reiman, 1972, i, 8). Meanwhile the Monthly Mirror, ‘more a journal of “wit” than of “fashion”’ (Reiman, 1972, ii, 685), had published an unmemorable notice which, while preoccupied with applause for Darwin, did remark ‘sentiments of feeling and sensibility, expressed without affectation, and in the language of nature’. The review went on to inveigh against the ‘depraved taste for sonnets’ (a current vogue not reflected in Lyrical Ballads) and to quote ‘Lines Left … in a Yew-tree’, a meditation presumably more to the reviewer's taste.

One expects more of the Monthly Magazine, if only because it was the staunchly liberal journal in which the poets originally intended their efforts to appear—to help defray the costs of a projected walking-tour. But in truth the review (January 1799) fails to rise above hack journalism; its comment that ‘some of his pieces are stiff, but others are stiff and laboured’ better fits the reviewer's own efforts. Treated alongside Mr Cottle's Malvern Hills (who remembers that now?), the volume attracts a small notice at the end of a long review in which The Ancient Mariner is again singled out for opprobrium.

1799 spawned four other periodical reviews. The New Annual Register simply summarises current opinion without even bothering to name poems (‘with others we have been less satisfied’). The January issue of the short-lived New London Review toes the Southey line that ‘our poet seems to want nothing but more fortunate topics’, attacks the ‘inartificial and anti-poetical manner’ of ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill’, predictably applauds the poeticisms of ‘The Female Vagrant’ (an early and more modish contribution) and censures—guess what?—the inconsistencies of The Ancient Mariner. In a clinching theatrical flourish of the kind beloved by these reviewers, the note of moral censure is repeated: ‘If ever he disgusts by the meagreness and poverty of his composition, it is precisely where, aiming at simplicity, he copies the rudest effusions of our vulgar ballads’ (Reiman, 1972, ii, 793).

The intensity of the reviewers' reaction to such inappropriate subject matter is entirely predictable. As D. W. Harding has remarked about mainstream late-eighteenth-century writing,

the relevance of the lower classes, except perhaps as objects of compassion, had been denied or ignored; they were regarded negatively, as lacking cultivation, and any positive values that their way of life might express were disregarded in a period when the cultivated were preoccupied with order and elegance.

(1976, p. 44)

The note of an uncompromising puritanism is also sounded by Dr Burney in the June 1799 issue of the Monthly Review. But he at least initiates a systematic survey of individual poems that reveals, in Redpath's view, ‘intelligent and sensitive contact’ (1964, p. 53) and, in Reiman's, a willingness to miss ‘the point of almost every poem’ (1972, ii, 713). So much for the consistency of modern critics! Burney's artistic predilections for ‘lofty subjects’ and ‘polished measures’ are forthrightly expressed: can ‘doggrel’ verses, he inquires, equal ‘the sublime numbers of a Milton?’ (p. 713). But his blow-by-blow analysis of ballads that he deigns to call poetry at least offers nuggets of information, gestures in the direction of interpretation. That he quotes three of the least experimental poems is predictable; that he quotes then in full suggests that he is doing the authors a conscious service in providing a wider audience for their efforts. And his sniping comments on these all-too-gloomy ‘rustic delineations of low life’ reveal the workings of a lively and opinionated mind that at least feels for the victims if not for the poet. Why, he demands, did the author suffer ‘this poor peasant to part with the last of the flock’? And why is ‘Old Man Travelling’ an indictment of a war we can no more avoid (the Napoleonic campaign) than Hercules the shirt of Nessus? In commenting that the son in hospital ‘might have died by disease’, Burney clearly sets his stall against the anti-war sentiments of the poem's conclusion (p. 716).

The October number of the British Critic produced a strikingly new critical emphasis. Assuming, like his earlier brethren, that the poems ‘seem to proceed from the same mind’ (Reiman, 1972, i, 128), the reviewer hinted, inaccurately, at Coleridge's sole authorship. Significantly though, he (Francis Wrangham?) praised that very simplicity that Southey and company had found so irksome, attacked Erasmus Darwin (‘meretricious frippery of the Darwinian taste’) and very properly included the ‘Advertisement’'s authorial justification of the enterprise. His proposal that ‘The Ancient Mariner's antiquated words … might with advantage be entirely removed without any detriment to the effect of the poem’ (p. 128), conceivably prompted Wordsworth, already having grave misgivings about his friend's ballad, to edit out some archaisms and orthographical devices in the second edition.

This modest volte-face in taste, albeit still couched in the rounded periods of Augustan prose, deserves an extended quotation:

We fully agree with the author, that the true notion of poetry must be sought among the poets, rather than the critics; and we will add, that, unless a critic is a poet also, he will generally make but indifferent work in judging of the effusions of Genius. In the collection of poems subjoined to this introduction, we do not often find expressions that we esteem too familiar, or deficient in dignity; on the contrary, we think that in general the author has succeeded in attaining that judicious degree of simplicity, which accommodates itself with ease even to the sublime. It is not pomp of words, but by energy of thought, that sublimity is most successfully achieved; and we infinitely prefer the simplicity even of the most unadorned tale in this volume, to all the meretricious frippery of the Darwinian taste.

Such a revisionary assessment failed to stem Jeffrey's vituperative onslaught in the Edinburgh Review (October 1802), the opening fusillade in a sustained attack upon the ‘Lake Poets’. In a foreseeable political outburst against levelling poetry, and its ‘perverted taste for simplicity’, Jeffrey pokes fun at a poet who ‘commemorates with so much effect, the chattering of Harry Gill's teeth, tells the tale of the one-eyed huntsman … and beautifully warns his studious friend of the risk he ran of “growing double”’. His pragmatic aesthetic is that poetry should exalt the mind: ‘its standards … in common with religion … were fixed long ago’ and cannot be called in question; he is appalled that ‘for all sorts of vice in the lower orders of society’ the poets have ‘the same virtuous horror and the same tender compassion’ (Reiman, 1972, i, 418). One is tempted to ask, ‘What vice?’—the shooting of a bird, the gleaning of dead sticks from a neighbour's hedge? It is patently not the vices that Jeffrey objects to, but the sympathetic stress on poverty and suffering, the belief that the ‘ordinary’ (twice used disparagingly) can generate intense emotions in poetry.

I have mentioned this critical thunderbolt for what are, I hope, interesting reasons. True, it is not exactly contemporaneous: it came too late to influence either edition of the poems. But its confident scorn, though working against the softening of attitude towards Lyrical Ballads now becoming evident in the monthlies, seems to have erroneously persuaded modern commentators that Jeffrey's was the prevailing response. Better written certainly, it was hardly typical. Not that I subscribe to McMaster's assertion that Wordsworth's audience—one ‘fed by the eighteenth century; one to which neither Wordsworth's sentiment nor his humour was unacceptable’ (1972, p. 24)—took easily to his material. The evidence of these reviews is inconclusive. What is true is that, whether dissenting or establishment, Whig or Tory, these critics and their readers were still fixated in a neoclassical tradition which applauded reason and common sense. Poetry, a more rarefied commodity than prose, should exalt and instruct. Badly written poetry would not only fail to communicate; it might corrupt the dialect of the tribe. Since literature was, like all the arts, in essence, mimetic, it had to remain within the boundaries of the probable. Hence audience confusion in the face of a wildly disparate collection of poems asking to be considered as ‘experiments’. One of the reasons why ‘The Idiot Boy’ was so often singled out for mention was that its subject fell outside the acceptable parameters for poetry. It has become a modern critical cliché that this poem was, after ‘Goody Blake’ ‘the most highly esteemed’ (McMaster, 1972, p. 24), but in truth the reviewers were happiest on familiar terrain where poetic diction ruled—conversation pieces such as Coleridge's ‘The Nightingale’, the short, meditative poems, and above all ‘Tintern Abbey’.

That the reviewers barely mentioned these poems was sure proof of their acceptability. ‘Tintern Abbey’ provoked not a single adverse word. But the positive benefits of the reviews, in acquainting a much wider and more varied audience with Lyrical Ballads, are obvious. In this guise, the poems infiltrated many more households than did whole volumes of verse. These reviews quote six poems in full and there are substantial ‘extracts’ from ‘The Idiot Boy’, The Ancient Mariner (twice), ‘The Female Vagrant’ and ‘Tintern Abbey’. After such exposure, the stage was set for a more informed and less partisan treatment. James Montgomery's retrospective look at Lyrical Ballads in the Eclectic Review of January 1808 provided just that: a sensitive revaluation of the volume's fidelity to the ‘Preface’ and its theories. Again stressing the merits of ‘Tintern Abbey’, the reviewer pointed out that ‘for such tales as “The Last of the Flock” … “the real language of men” may be employed with pleasing effect’, but when the poet wants to ‘present ordinary things in an unusual way’, by casting over them “a certain colouring of imagination”, he resorts to ‘splended, figurative and amplifying language’ (Reiman, 1972, i, 335). Such an assessment of the volume has proved remarkably enduring.

VICTORIAN AND LATER CRITICISM: SOME TRENDS

The debate about Lyrical Ballads, which generated both the lively and diverse critiques of the magazines and the ‘Preface’ of 1800, spluttered intermittently during the ensuing decades. McMaster comments acutely that for many Victorians, including J. S. Mill, Wordsworth became ‘essentially normative, no longer the wild eccentric’ of some of the initial reviews, and an ‘anodyne … a form of spiritual convalescence for the inhumanity of Victorian materialism’ (1972, p. 170). That the volume was coming to be seen as central evidence in the case of young Wordsworth the poet therapist, was already evident in the nostalgic tone of the Critical Review of August 1807, which, while recalling the delights of ‘Tintern Abbey’ and ‘a few more pieces’ from the first edition, declared that the poet ‘has had the power to draw “iron tears” from our stony hearts’ (emphasis added). Hazlitt's percipient essay, no doubt mindful of Wordsworth's own statements, marked another turning-point, though sounding one note that only now has become recurrent: namely, the volume's ‘unaccountable mixture of seeming simplicity and real abstruseness’:

It is one of the innovations of the time. It partakes of, and is carried along with, the revolutionary movements of our age; the political changes of the day were the model on which he formed and conducted his poetical experiments. His Muse (it cannot be denied, and without this we cannot explain its character at all) is a levelling one. It proceeds on a principle of equality, and strives to reduce all things to the same standard. It is distinguished by a proud humility. It relies upon its own resources, and disdains external show and relief. It takes the commonest events and objects, as a test to prove that nature is always interesting from its inherent truth and beauty, without any of the ornaments of dress or pomp of circumstances to set it off. Hence the unaccountable mixture of seeming simplicity and real abstruseness in the Lyrical Ballads. Fools have laughed at, wise men scarcely understand, them. He takes a subject or a story merely as pegs or loops to hang thought and feeling on; the incidents are trifling, in proportion to his contempt for imposing appearances; the reflections are profound, according to the gravity and aspiring pretensions of his mind.

(1825, p. 132)

In the very year of publication, Lamb had found the blessing of the water-snakes deeply cathartic (‘stung me into high pleasure through suffering’ (letter to Southey, 8 November 1798), but twenty years passed before two reviews offered a powerful vindication of The Ancient Mariner. In 1818 the Monthly Magazine (no. 46) pronounced it ‘the finest superstitious ballad in literature’, passing on, in the process, the familiar charge of incoherence (‘only fit for the inmates of Bedlam’) to ‘Christabel’ (CCH, p. 435). More dramatically, in October 1819 Lockhart of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, both indulging ‘the fallacy of expressive form’ and conveying his own sense of kinship with the poet through a critical language of unalloyed transcendence, declared it ‘the wildest of all the creations of genius … the very music of its words is like the melancholy mysterious breath of something sung to the sleeping ear’. Lockhart admitted to ‘incoherence’, but it was that ‘of some mighty vision’, lovely and terrible by turns (CCH, p. 439). And not only did the critic glimpse a mystery; he also offered an extended reading of the poem's message: ‘Pain, sorrow, remorse, these are not enough; the wound must be healed by a heart-felt sacrifice to the same spirit of universal love which had been bruised in its infliction’ (p. 443). He concludes,

One feels that to him another world—we do not mean a supernatural, but a more exquisitely and deeply natural world—has been revealed, and that the repose of his spirit can only be in the contemplation of things that are not to pass away. The sad and solemn indifference of his mood is communicated to his hearer, and we feel that even after reading what he had heard, it were better to ‘turn from the bridegroom's door’.

(CCH, p. 445)

Such views have become commonplaces of modern criticism and have anticipated at last three independent approaches to interpretation: the poem as moral fable (‘sacrifice to universal Love’), as enigma (‘the prince of superstitious poets’) and as melody and music (‘master of the language of poetry’) (CCH, p. 436ff.). Leigh Hunt in the Examiner (21 October 1821) lent his voice to the moral seekers by abstracting from the poem a lesson for ‘those who see nothing in the world but their own unfeeling common-places, and are afterwards visited with a dreary sense of their insufficiency’ (CCH, p. 479). Such a debate was inevitably fuelled by the poet's own response to the celebrated strictures of Mrs Barbauld, a fellow poet who felt that the ballad ‘was improbable, and had no moral’ (Table Talk, 31 May 1830, quoted in CC [Coleridge: ‘The Ancient Mariner’ and Other Poems, a Casebook], p. 30). In replying that ‘the obtrusion of the moral sentiment so openly on the reader’ constituted its chief fault, Coleridge provided ammunition for recent critics who have arraigned a conclusion reeking of apostasy, a superfluous sop to conventional Christianity. Predictably no such opinions surfaced in Victorian England. Nelson Coleridge's Quarterly Review critique (August 1834) confirmed the poem's rehabilitation, making for it a claim, now a cliché, that it is ‘one of the most perfect pieces of imaginative poetry … in the literature of all Europe’, its only flaw ‘the miraculous destruction of the vessel’, which brings the ‘preternatural into too close contact with the actual framework of the poem’ (CC, p. 83).

Thus by the year of Victoria's accession, a period usually associated with the ebb-tide of English Romanticism, Lyrical Ballads had, both as a whole and in parts, achieved the kind of critical status scarcely anticipated by its creators. None the less criticism of the volume had a long way to go. It was still overwhelmingly evaluative or didactic, often couched in the expressive terms that many critics today find distractingly evasive, and it was still offering little in the way of close textual analysis. Nor, too close to events, did such early criticism regard Lyrical Ballads as a central document in the Romantic movement. Disturbingly different, yes; even unique; but hardly ‘embodying in symbolic form the whole mythological structure of romanticism in individual and general terms’ (CC, p. 16). Indeed, Wordsworth's contributions failed to cut much ice with the doyen of Victorian anthologists, F. T. Palgrave. Two ballads out of forty-one poems by Wordsworth in The Golden Treasury is a pretty poor return.

But certain données had been offered up. Though later nineteenth-century criticism is generally undistinguished, it at least asserts either the publication's overall significance or the value of some individual components. Swinburne followed Lockhart in seeing The Ancient Mariner as possessing ‘more of breadth and space, more of material force and motion, than anything else of the poet's’ (CC, p. 89). But the poem was becoming increasingly detached from its original context; not only Swinburne, but also Victorian belle-lettrists such as Pater and Watson, evaluated it against Coleridge's other masterpieces ‘Christabel’ and ‘Kubla Khan’.

On the other hand, Wordsworth's ballads were increasingly seen both as part of a grand design and as a product of that creative decade when almost all his best work was produced. The nineteenth century was in fact responsible for polarising opinion about Wordsworth, a polarisation which Abrams believed was initiated by the poet himself in two very different theoretical statements: the ‘Preface’ of 1800, from which he emerges as the simple affirmative poet of primal feelings, essential humanity and vital joy; and the ‘Essay Supplementary to the Preface’ of 1815, which confronts the reader with a complex poet of paradox, ambiguity and transcendence. These alternative routes to the poetry were followed respectively by Matthew Arnold (1879) and A. C. Bradley (1909). Taking his cue from the 1800 ‘Preface’ and thereby hinting at his own dissatisfaction both with the ratiocinative poetry of Victorian England and Wordsworth's later output, Arnold bore testimony to the poetry's expression of a ‘joy offered to us in nature, the joy offered to us in the simple, primary affections and duties’ (WC [Wordsworth: ‘Lyrical Ballads’, a Casebook], p. 71). In ‘this iron time’, Wordsworth reawakened our capacity to feel, to loose ‘our heart in tears’ and to respond to ‘the freshness of the early world’ (‘Memorial Verses’ [1850], ll. 43-57).

Such a view was infectious. As Humphry House (1955) remarks in ‘Wordsworth's Fame’, even Keble's hymns sometimes ‘point towards that [Wordsworthian] view of Nature as providing an automatic sort of psychotherapy’ (p. 39) that finds expression elsewhere in Tennyson's ‘The Two Voices’. More interesting still, House also observes that Wordsworth's use of ‘human beings as ethical symbols had a particular appeal in the age dominated by the conflict between philanthropy and doctrinaire utilitarianism’ (p. 42, emphasis added). Though his quoted example is the Leech Gatherer, one finds of course equally compelling paradigms of human fortitude in the aged and destitute figures of Lyrical Ballads.

Thirty years after Arnold, Bradley set out explicitly to supplement what he regarded as Arnold's valid but all-too-partial view. He offered a reading which has ultimately proved more enduring and which has permeated interpretations not only of the ‘sublime’ poetry but of the ‘simple’ ballads as well. Arguing that ‘the road into Wordsworth's mind must be through his strangeness and his paradoxes, and not round them’, Bradley saw him as quintessentially the poet of solitude and sublimity rather than the Arnoldian sympathiser with ‘small and humble things’ (1909, 1965 edn, p. 101). Valorising the Wordsworth of yew-trees rather than the Wordsworth of daffodils, he looked to a poet of vatic utterance that made him above all a mystic and visionary; ‘He apprehended all things, natural or human, as the expression of something which, while manifested in them, immeasurably transcends them.’ This transcendental reading of the poetry, coupled, it must be said, with a growing distaste for that dark 1798 world where suffering and misery are inevitable concomitants, and a changing taste for ‘wild’ landscape that accorded better with the ‘Lake’ poetry, led to a waning of critical enthusiasm for Lyrical Ballads and a resurgence of interest in the ‘sublime’ Wordsworth. One manifestation of this process is the failure of both the 1900 and 1972 editions of The Oxford Book of English Verse to include even one Wordsworth poem from Lyrical Ballads. Such a polarisation is also reflected in mid-twentieth-century appreciations that have privileged either Arnold's or Bradley's road to the poet, diverse approaches that have ‘yielded two Wordsworths’:

One Wordsworth is simple, elemental, forthright, the other is complex, paradoxical, problematic, one is an affirmative poet of life, love and joy, the other is an equivocal or self-divided poet whose affirmations are implicitly qualified (if not annulled) by a pervasive sense of mortality and an ever-incipient despair of life; one is the great poet of natural man … the other is a visionary or mystic who is ultimately hostile to temporal man and the world of sense. …

(Abrams, 1972, p. 4; 1984, p. 149)

While Abrams' entire summary is worth reading, we should bear in mind other side-effects. Bradley's notion of the philosopher poet, for example, has stimulated a whole sequence of learned disquisitions on philosophical indebtedness. What it does not explain is the movement away from preponderantly judicial ‘belle-lettrist’ criticism towards the kind of carefully researched and documented scholarship that characterises recent responses to Lyrical Ballads. That trend reflects something much wider: the enhanced status of literature as a subject for serious research in our institutions of higher education.

To return to Abrams' point, it is easy to spot the ‘two voices’, even within the pages of this slender study. In general, those critics who have accorded high praise to the volume in terms of its originality and simplicity have taken the Arnoldian prescription. Thus Helen Darbishire talks of Wordsworth's capacity to portray ‘simple men and women who are moved by the great emotions’ and sees Lyrical Ballads as the product of a personal rite of passage, ‘a sort of arctic expedition, into a region where life was reduced to its elements … his aim to penetrate the heart of man and the inner life of nature’ (1950, p. 61). Not surprisingly, her vote goes to the elemental ballads. Bateson, homing in on this ‘Wordsworth problem par excellence’ (1956, p. 3) none the less regards the ‘two voices’, like Hazlitt, as potentially complementary—the pathos and social realism of the ballad combined with the subjective and sublime element can produce great poetry. Unfortunately this potential for cross-fertilisation does not fecundate Lyrical Ballads.

Such Arnoldian perspectives which emphasis the ‘Preface’'s notion of ‘a man speaking to men’ are naturally alien to the letter of ‘New Criticism’—which discounts the intentions of the artificer. Nevertheless, analyses of individual poems in terms of structure, tone or the deployment of ironic masks owe much to ‘formalist’ perspectives. If the unique symbolic potentialities of The Ancient Mariner have stimulated the most celebrated essays (e.g. Warren, 1946; Burke, 1941), the ‘simple’ ballads have been increasingly seen, particularly in the United States, as deceptively complex structures, yielding rewarding secrets to discerning textual analysts. The blending of the ‘two voices’ in Lyrical Ballads, a sound to which Bateson was apparently deaf, is now finding an attentive audience.

Moreover, these disciples of the ‘problematic’ Wordsworth, while unearthing elaborate strategies in Lyrical Ballads, have also sensed a dialectic between consciousness and non-consciousness: ambiguities in the surface meaning that might afford clues to deep and unspoken preoccupations of the poet. Such a struggle on the part of the poet's consciousness (imagination) to escape the shackles of ‘not itself’ (nature) was, on Abrams' view, ‘a revived form of Bradley's neo-Hegelian approach to that poet’ (1984, p. 151).

De Man's ‘Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image’ (1960), in focusing on this conflict, has provided the probable stimulus for a number of displacement theorists (see Ch. 4, section on ‘Tintern Abbey’), though one might justifiably conclude that paradoxical or problematic readings of the ballads derive ultimately from Bradley or even Hazlitt. In the same way, the longstanding debate about their originality has only really gathered momentum since Mayo's 1954 essay called in question the ballads' right to be considered genuinely innovative and experimental. That is another major controversy that cannot be kept out of the pages of this book.

.....

THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL BACKGROUND

1798 was a year of violent political ferment, local as well as national. The Marxist critic E. P. Thompson reveals an England not only ‘engaged in a war of national defence’ but ‘suppressing Irish rebellion with a ferocity which outdistances the French terror’. Wordsworth and Coleridge were all too aware of its local manifestations—the creation of a new volunteer corps to defend the Somerset coast, which meant that ‘even the lanes around Stowey and Alfoxden resounded with tramping feet’ (1969, p. 167). That radicals were now under suspicion may explain the dearth of explicit political comment in Lyrical Ballads. The pacifist sentiments of ‘The Female Vagrant’ (1791-2) find only a muted echo in ‘Old Man Travelling’ (1798) and disappear entirely from the other Alfoxden contributions. Yet Browning's later slur, that the ‘lost leader’ turned Tory ‘just for a handful of silver’, is a long way from the facts of 1798. Critics are agreed that what the friends were turning their backs on were Jacobinism, Godwinian necessity, narrow sectarianism of any kind. In a self-consciously phrased letter of 10 March, Coleridge confessed, ‘I have snapped my squeaking baby-trumpet of Sedition and the fragments lie scattered in the lumber-room of Penitence. I wish to be a good man and a Christian, but I am no Whig, no Reformist, no Republican’ (CL [Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge], i, 238). Where politics do enter poetry is in the strident anti-Gallic rhetoric (a ‘blind’ and ‘adulterous’ country) of ‘France, an Ode’ (1798).

Here Coleridge also voices his growing conviction that liberty cannot ‘possibly be either gratified or realised under any form of human government’ but belongs to all individuals imbued with ‘the love and adoration of God in Nature’ (‘Argument’ to poem). Written during the same period (February-April 1798) and published in a quarto pamphlet later in the year with ‘Frost at Midnight’ and ‘Fears in Solitude’, all three poems register in Nicholas Roe's words ‘disturbing currents in Coleridge's political, personal, and creative life, even in this most fruitfully productive springtime’ (1988, p. 263). ‘Frost at Midnight’, wholly personal in its frame of reference, makes no mention of political events—for example, the French attack on Switzerland. But ‘Fears in Solitude’ is informed by Coleridge's ‘unregenerate awareness of political failure and isolation’, his sense that a jingoistic government and a people ‘clamorous for war and bloodshed’ together add up to impending disaster for the nation.

Throughout the poem Coleridge's awareness of a radical collapse of hope in France and Britain finds no compensating alternative that might resemble Wordsworth's great statements of belief in ‘Tintern Abbey’, or, indeed his own conclusion to ‘France: An Ode’.

(Roe, 1988, p. 265)

These poems were written at the very time when Lyrical Ballads was taking shape. Yet most commentators have bypassed them when assessing the impact of political events on the Coleridge of 1798.

R. J. White (1938), for example, regards the biblical allusions in the prose as firmer evidence of Coleridge's growing revulsion from the inhuman excesses of a revolution gone wrong. Carl Woodring's Politics in the Poetry of Coleridge (1961) cites sixteen analysts of Coleridge's political thought (including Coleridge!) but concludes that they generally draw on his poems ‘only for decoration’ (p. 36). Like Keats, the creative Coleridge seems allergic to politics. Since his political poems are in Woodring's opinion palpably inferior, perhaps we should be thankful that such partisan efforts are absent from Lyrical Ballads. But that is not to discount them as evidence of a key Coleridgean perspective during those crucial months.

Thompson in fact sees 1798 as the year when the ‘Jacobite’ poets began their ‘capitulation to the traditional paternalistic culture’ that was to prove ‘inimical to the source of their art’ (1969, p. 175). But Roe takes issue with such a ‘reductive paradigm’ in which radical commitment is succeeded by ‘withdrawal’ or ‘apostasy’, maintaining that the radical years were integral to each poet's later creative life, and especially Wordsworth's. In seeing ‘Tintern Abbey’ as illustrative of this process (the poem charts two experiences separated by five years), Roe joins forces with a number of recent commentators (Levinson, McGann, Simpson) who have attempted to return the poem to the political moment of its composition. The poem's subtitled date, ‘July 13, 1798’ is thus doubly significant: the eighth anniversary of the day Wordsworth reached French shores, the ninth of the eve of Bastille Day. While it means that the poem is inexorably linked to Wordsworth's own ‘awareness of revolutionary failure’ and to Coleridge's despair, it does propose ‘blessed’ compensations of a less political kind (Roe, 1988, p. 272).

Not that critics have ever doubted Wordsworth's social or political awareness. The prophetic outburst in the ‘Preface’ against the effects of a mechanistic urban life-style now breeding an unhealthy ‘craving for extra-ordinary incident’ (B& J, p. 249) left its mark on contemporaries such as Hazlitt who believed anyway that the political changes of the day had inspired in Lyrical Ballads ‘levelling’ poetry based on ‘a principle of equality’ (1825, 1954 edn, p. 132).

Yet, according to some recent commentators, there are worrying distortions in the Wordsworth picture. True, he rightly presaged a ghastly future in which the steady brutalisation of labour went hand-in-hand with exploitation by demagogues and opportunists; true, the ballads depict a world in which the poor and underprivileged are victimised. But for Simpson Wordsworth does ‘play up the pastoral motif’ in these poems (1979, p. 62); they depict a rural landscape that actually had more cattle than sheep, a world where Wordsworth's ‘mellowed feudality’ (PrW [The Prose Works of William Wordsworth], iii, 175) ignored the all-too-real presence of rapacious and enclosing landlords (who, incidentally, disappear from the verse after the ‘mansion proud’ and ‘proferred gold’ of the much earlier ‘Female Vagrant’). Indeed ‘The Last of the Flock’ appears to justify acquisitiveness.

Such critical views, which anticipate the later, conservative image of the poet, find fuller expression in Kenneth Maclean's pioneering Agrarian Age (1950). Skirting the much reconnoitred area of the poet's reaction to the ‘Satanic Mills’ of an emergent industrialism, he traces the sense of loss in Lyrical Ballads to the socio-economic changes wrought by the agrarian revolution. In local terms, this meant the decline of small proprietors, the ‘statesmen’ of the poetry and the emergence of a Lake Country chock-a-block with tourists and fair-weather migrants, ‘Rich Manchester merchants and Liverpool attorneys … putting up big summer homes that marred the entire side of a mountain’ (Maclean, 1950, p. 91). Maclean locates this deterioration in a factory system that ruined cottage industry, hastened the eclipse of the hand-loom and prompted sons to move to industrial centres in the quest for work. While the shift from water power to steam power saved a threatened landscape, ironically it made victims of its inhabitants. There is none the less, Maclean argues, an element of parochialism and even elitism in the poet's belief that these evils are solely ‘industrial and bourgeois’. The improving and enclosing landed class ‘were fully as responsible as the “cits” for the unfortunate condition of rural life’ (p. 95), a fact which Wordsworth chooses to ignore. Maclean reminds us that the ‘statesmen’ of poems such as ‘The Last of the Flock’ were frequently not freeholders but ‘copyholders’ compelled to serve their landlords on ‘boondays’ and pay fines when lord or tenant died. Wordsworth was ‘silently satisfied … that a touch of feudalism should remain in society, that independence should not be complete and entire’ (p. 101). While the Simpson—Maclean charge may be justified, we should remind ourselves that ‘The Female Vagrant’ offers a longer view. The pity is that the rapacious landlord of that poem is displaced in the ballads of 1798. In these the revolutionary stance is more-or-less abandoned.

BIOGRAPHICAL CONSIDERATIONS: COLLABORATION OR CONFLICT?

Lyrical Ballads was, of course, the outcome of a joint undertaking. Scholars are agreed about the basic events in the burgeoning friendship: the first meeting of the two poets in September 1795; Coleridge's enthusiastic response to Salisbury Plain in March/April of 1797; Coleridge's visit to Racedown in June 1797; Wordsworth's domestic move to Nether Stowey in order to be near his friend in July, and his longer stay at Alfoxden during the spring of 1798 when the bulk of the ballads were written and earlier poems vetted for possible inclusion. We know too that Wordsworth and Dorothy spent part of the summer conveniently close to Bristol, the better to see Lyrical Ballads through the press; that ‘Tintern Abbey’ was written in July following a visit to the Wye valley that retraced the steps of an earlier journey; and that a sharpening awareness of the poem's merits prompted its inclusion as the final contribution—both sequentially and chronologically—to the volume. Nor is the business of authorship in dispute: Coleridge's four poems included The Ancient Mariner in accordance with his brief to concentrate on ‘persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic’ (BL [Biographia Literaria], ch. 14).

But, ever since the revelation of a joint commitment, critics have argued the toss as to who was the prime mover in the enterprise, the really fecundating presence. Such a polarisation, as Mark Reed observes, can be dangerous inasmuch as it may ‘encourage a committed student consciously or unconsciously to take sides for or against one of the poets’ (CC, p. 119). Thus Walter Pater's late-Victorian pronouncement that Coleridge's friendship with Wordsworth was ‘the chief “developing” circumstance of his poetic life’ (CC, p. 100) has been countered by I. A. Richards' assertion that Coleridge was Wordsworth's ‘creator’ and responsible for ‘finding the style which Wordsworth was to advocate’ in the ‘Preface’ as well as uttering half of his thoughts and ‘designing Wordsworth's major poems for him’ (Coburn, 1967, p. 15).

The predictable process of critical qualification has followed in the wake of these sweeping claims. Indeed, four articles written within a few years of each other question the very idea of co-operation. Griggs (1951, repr. 1963) sees Wordsworth's egotism and self-reliance as a stumbling-block to mutual reciprocity. Coleridge could and did offer warm encouragement born of idolatry, and Wordsworth clearly benefited (p. 56). On the other hand, Griggs maintains, Wordsworth's condescension towards The Ancient Mariner ‘probably reacted more unfavorably upon Coleridge's creative power than has hitherto been suspected’, perhaps even precipitating his extraordinary announcement two years later, ‘I abandon Poetry altogether—I leave the higher and deeper kind, to Wordsworth’ (CL, i, 337; quoted in Griggs, 1963, p. 59).

Buchan's ‘The Influence of Wordsworth on Coleridge, 1795-1800’ (1963) further explores Griggs's thesis of incompatible temperaments. Echoing the conventional wisdom in highlighting the Alfoxden idyll as a ‘seedtime’, characterised by an amelioration of Wordsworth's sense of remorse and a growing sense of nature's healing agency after the traumas of a revolution and an affair gone wrong, he suggests that the poet was able to utilise ‘the trivial, commonplace events of the Alfoxden neighbourhood, such as an old huntsman's gratitude or the rumour of a dead child buried under a thorn tree’ and expand them into general truths about humanity (quoted in CC, p. 152). Coleridge, on the other hand, was temperamentally unable, once in the grip of reverie, to exploit these narrative materials (‘incidents of common life’) but instead produced ‘highly explosive symbols arising from deep in his mind’. Lured into a world of fantasy, he found there ‘stirring into vivid imaginative life a Virgil's Hades of ghostly shapes’. Temperamentally poles apart, the friends had now ‘reached the point of seeing the world outside and the world within very differently, and they would never agree on the relationship between them’ (p. 151).

This notion of a creative symbiosis, systematically and cordially fostered during those thirteen months and initiated by Coleridge's leap over the gate to greet his friends in June 1797, was already under fire from Stephen Parrish (1958), the first to take seriously Coleridge's retrospective avowal that ‘a radical Difference’ of opinion about ‘the language appropriate to poetry’ existed between them (letter to Sotheby, 13 July 1802, CL, p. 812). For Parrish the key word, re-emphasised in subsequent discussions, is ‘ventriloquism’, Coleridge's pejorative epithet for Wordsworth's self-confessed ability to project himself into his creations, for short spells of time ‘perhaps, to let himself slip into an entire delusion, and even confound and identify his own feelings with theirs’ (1802 ‘Preface,’ quoted in Parrish, 1973, p. 139). It was this clash of views and not the inherent differences stressed by Buchan that led Wordsworth to complain that the ‘principal person’ of The Ancient Mariner had ‘no distinct character’, and to take a quite different approach in his own ‘supernatural experiment’, ‘The Thorn’. Here Wordsworth made the terrible events of curse and murder not supernatural or even real, but only the products of the superstitious imagination. For Parrish this is solid evidence of a widening gulf in the friends' thinking. When Coleridge later committed his views to paper, he, for his part, asserted that ‘The Thorn’ was, like the curate's egg, both good and bad: good where ‘the poet's own imagination’ was involved and where passages were ‘spoken in his own character’; bad in those sections ‘exclusively appropriate to the supposed narrator’ (BL, ch. 17)—Wordsworth's ‘dramatic propriety’ versus Coleridge's ‘poetic propriety’ (Parrish, 1973, p. 140). But, since Wordsworth soon abandoned his experiments with dramatic monologues, we can assume that his partner's views had left their mark.

Reed's ‘Wordsworth, Coleridge and the “Plan” of the Lyrical Ballads’ (1965) is the most scholarly attempt to piece together events during the volume's gestation. Like Parrish and Buchan before him, he senses a widening divergence of aims. But what has obfuscated this division, according to Reed, is the retrospective attempt by both poets to ‘adjust and clarify’ (CC, p. 123) their own views concerning the circumstances of composition and the nature of their early relationship. For Reed the entire plan was very much Wordsworth's, a project ‘appropriated to himself as early as 30 April, 1798’ (p. 117) and acknowledged in Dorothy's reference to ‘William's poems’. Consequently his own pieces naturally dovetailed into the scheme, whereas Coleridge typically ‘accepted without hesitation a secondary role in the historic venture, too quickly ignoring distinct differences in aim and attitude between himself and his admired companion’ (p. 118). Like Griggs, Reed accounts Wordsworth's callousness more disturbing than the ‘generous weakness’ of Coleridge (p. 119), and accuses Wordsworth of an all-too-grudging recognition of his debt to the intellect of his collaborator. Even allowing for Coleridge's ‘nearly infantile dependence on Wordsworth's strength of personality’, the latter's myopia and insensitivity remain unforgivable.

Norman Fruman doubts that Wordsworth owed any ‘debt’ to Coleridge at all. Vividly subtitled ‘The Damaged Archangel’, his massive work (1972) questions many received opinions about Coleridge and not least the suggestion that he influenced the Wordsworth of Lyrical Ballads. The cast of their minds was ever completely different. Wordsworth distrusted ‘the synthesizer of other men's ideas’, privileging instead ‘radical originality’. Moreover, the ‘primary concerns’ of the 1800 ‘Preface’ ‘are not those which can be found in any of Coleridge's writings before he met Wordsworth’ (p. 288). ‘The introduction of ordinary folk into literature, without patronization, is one of the most original of Wordsworth's achievements. There is no hint of or even sympathy with this aim in any of Coleridge's writings.’ Indeed Fruman goes further than Reed in asserting that not only was Coleridge's role in the enterprise pretty slight, but that ‘nothing has gone further to obscure the actual historical situation into which Lyrical Ballads was born than the subsequent writings of Coleridge on the subject’ (p. 289).

We are a long way from Brett's conviction that Coleridge's ‘psychological self-awareness’, coupled with his belief that ‘all things are parts of a living whole’, was ‘the secret of the healing power Coleridge brought to Wordsworth’ in 1798 (1971, p. 177). Indeed, the traditional picture of complementary minds gently attuned—Coleridge's dream-like fancies anchored by Wordsworth's deep-rooted contact with the natural and the everyday—is clearly one which has undergone substantial revision in recent years.

THE PHILOSOPHICAL CONTEXT

In Table Talk Coleridge declared that ‘No man was ever yet a great poet without being at the same time a profound philosopher’ (1832, 1917 edn, p. 130). A self-styled metaphysician, he often spoke of his own plans for a magnum opus while conceding that Wordsworth possessed the genius of a great philosophical poet and that ‘since Milton no man has manifested himself equal to him’ (CL, p. 582). There was nothing new about such exalting of the thinker-poet, but the authors of Lyrical Ballads, both in their creative and expository statements, gave the debate a fresh impetus.

Although he confessed to a preference for Coleridge the thinker—talker, Hazlitt cajoled the reader round an assault-course of philosophers assimilated or rejected by the poet. Yet hopes that their presence would add weight to the verse proved illusory; he had to concede that Coleridge's one poem of authentic ‘genius’ generated its power from ‘wild, irregular, over-whelming imagination’ rather than profundity of message. On the other hand the strength of Wordsworth's early poetry did derive from a simple didacticism, its delivery of ‘household truths’ (1825, repr. 1954, p. 131). This touching belief in the consolatory message of the homely Lyrical Ballads became a commonplace of Victorian criticism, in which Wordsworth emerged as ‘the only poet who will bear reading in time of distress’ (Stephen, 1879, p. 218). But, while acknowledging that this ethic was ‘distinctive and capable of systematic exposition’, Stephen only hinted at specific debts. That task would become a preoccupation of later scholarship. Other commentators questioned the value of any extractable philosophy. For Arnold (1879), always seeking in poetry an answer to the question ‘How to Live?’, the Lyrical Ballads were the reality, the philosophy an illusion that needed to be dismissed out of hand before readers of Wordsworth could do him justice. Bateson epitomises modern adherents of the Arnoldian line, declaring that Wordsworth was ‘not primarily a thinker but a feeler’ whose ideas have only a ‘marginal relevance’ to the elucidation of the poetry (1956, p. 40).

None the less the sober seekers of influence have not gone away, undeterred by the psycho-pathological pronouncements that what count are ‘the half-conscious half-animal terrors and ecstasies, and not the discoveries of the intellect’ (Bateson, 1956, p. 40), or by the argument that Coleridge's philosophical dabblings were a monumental irrelevance in distracting him from the inspirational business of writing poetry. For Shawcross it is mere prejudice, easily rebutted, that his ‘speculative writings’ are ‘dearly purchased at the expense of more poetry of the type of … The Ancient Mariner’, a prejudice ‘not confirmed by the facts of his life’ (BL, 1907 edn, p. iv). How, one wonders, would Shawcross have reacted to Fruman's irreverent thesis in Coleridge, the Damaged Archangel (the phrase is Charles Lamb's) that there is no interaction in Coleridge's poetry between personal and received ideas since he has no ideas of his own, that he lacks any originality as a philosopher and that his unacknowledged kleptomania was not an occasional aberration but habitual and ingrained.

Not that the debt-collectors agree among themselves about the key influences. As Rader says, ‘the chasms which separate their interpretations are broad and deep’ (1967, p. 2). Rejecting Bradley's tendentious assumption that philosophy represents a world-view incompatible with poetry, most Wordsworthians pick out one or two pivotal influences. Thus his early biographer Legouis sees in the Wordsworth of Lyrical Ballads a son of Rousseau; Beatty finds evidence of a reaction against Rousseau and more especially Godwin in favour of Hartley and associationism. Maybe the authors (J. C. Maxwell and S. C. Gill) of ‘Wordsworth’ in the Oxford Bibliographical Guide are right in pronouncing, rather despairingly, that the truth about his philosophical debts ‘can never be decided with the finality that individual scholars would like’ (1971, p. 170).

However, Arthur Beatty's William Wordsworth: His Doctrine and Art (1922, 2nd edn 1927) remains a seminal work in the field, not only because it is the first closely argued attempt to forge links between the poetry and Hartley, but because it argues the demise of ‘Necessarianism’—the belief that men are made what they are by circumstances—during the creation of Lyrical Ballads. Dissenting from the Arnoldian position, which refuses to ‘grant any value to his philosophy or system of thought’, Beatty believes that Wordsworth studied life not only at first hand ‘but also its reflection in books’ (1927, p. 20). The key reflector for Beatty is David Hartley's Observations on Man, his Frame, his Duty, and His Expectations (1749): ‘the key reference is the allusion in the ‘Preface’ to the ways in which our feelings and ideas are associated in a state of excitement’ (B& J [Wordsworth and Coleridge, ‘Lyrical Ballads’ (Brett and Jones, eds.)], p. 247; emphasis added). Beatty summarises Hartley's basic position thus:

Like all systems of philosophy founded on that of Locke, all innate ideas are banished; and all mental states are derived from sensation. These sensations are the primary, ultimate and irresolvable facts of our mental life and are the result of our direct contact with external things: and they, through the powers of association, are transformed into the complexes of those forms of mental life which succeed those that partake of the simplicity and directness of sensation. According to Hartley, association is the law of the mind, as gravitation is the law of the physical world. He is the original exponent of the law of association … and we have abundant evidence that Wordsworth gave this law his full credence.

(1927, p. 109)

Placing Lyrical Ballads in the philosophical context of a waning Godwin and a waxing Hartley, Beatty shows how associationist ideas both permeate these poems and assist our interpretation of them. But, anxious not to overstate his case, he concedes the patchwork nature of the volume, that some poems—not all early—do deal with humanitarian issues close to Godwin's heart (e.g. ‘The Thorn’, ‘The Convict’, ‘Lines Left … in a Yew-tree’). On the other hand, some poems deliberately fly in the face of a Godwinian ethic that derided such human emotions as pity, filial devotion and family feeling. ‘The Idiot Boy’ and ‘The Mad Mother’ are thus founded on maternal passion, ‘Simon Lee’ on gratitude; ‘The Complaint of the Forsaken Indian Woman’ is ‘a picture of the soul in the face of death’, and its counterpart, ‘We Are Seven’, ‘a picture of the child's inability to understand what death is’. More positively and crucially Beatty discovers in Hartley's tripartite hierarchy of mental complexes linked by associative processes (‘sensations’, ‘sensible’ ideas, complex ideas), a ready-made formula that Wordsworth could and would relate to his own life. Thus ‘childhood’ is the age of sensation, ‘youth’ that of simple, ‘sensible’ ideas, ‘maturity’ that of intellectual concepts. Stated in these terms ‘the foundation of his greatest poems and of his most characteristic theories and teaching was complete’ (Beatty, 1927, p. 116).

Beatty's book has proved remarkably durable. While privileging the Hartley nexus (Beatty reminds us of Coleridge's enthusiasm and the christening of his first-born ‘David Hartley’, after the great master of Christian philosophy), it also evaluates other potential influences—Erasmus Darwin's theory of personification is rightly dismissed as inimical to Lyrical Ballads—and initiates the interpretation of ‘Tintern Abbey’ as an autobiographical ‘growth of mind’ which anticipates The Prelude and thus chimes with Hartleian notions of mental development. In short, it argues a convincing theoretical basis for Lyrical Ballads.

Stallnecht, on the other hand, emphasises no single philosophic debt and regards Hartley's imprint on the volume as ‘transcendentalized’ by the two poets (1958, p. 33). From Boehme, via Coleridge, comes the pantheistic theory of imagination so characteristic of Wordsworth (p. 43). Here he is at odds not only with Beatty but with the latest editors of Lyrical Ballads (1963), who trace ‘a renewed dependence upon Hartleian psychology’ to the 1800 ‘Preface’ and with it the beginnings of an artistic schism between the friends (B& J, p. xxxvii). More significantly, Stallnecht reveals two apparently conflicting traditions in Wordsworth's 1798 thought: ‘on the one hand the political theory of the French Revolution, on the other the faith of the mystical idealist’. These ideas prove briefly reconcilable before ‘the mystic overcomes the rationalist’ (1958, p. 67); both ‘tend towards egalitarianism; support freedom of conscience and of worship’, one through political independence, the other through liberty of the individual spirit (p. 66). The relevance to Lyrical Ballads of such dualistic thinking is obvious—though Stallnecht refrains, tantalisingly, from making precise connections. But he is unable to resist a stab at The Ancient Mariner, equating the shooting of the albatross with ‘reason's conquest of feeling’ (p. 151) and confounding the Mariner-Coleridge connection by arguing that it is Wordsworth's indulgence in analytical reasoning which destroys any capacity for communion between man and nature. The Mariner-Wordsworth's reintegration requires the benevolent intervention of the Hermit (Coleridge?) with his offer of a more enlightened religion. Such an interpretation anticipates that of Warren Stevenson (1983).

If Stallnecht is, like Beatty, better at detecting than interpreting, Piper's The Active Universe (1962) also fails, on its own admission, to allow literary critical intelligence enough play. When he does turn to Lyrical Ballads, he finds in ‘Lines Left … in a Yew-tree’ evidence of the ‘close interweaving of the two poets at this time’, a poetic embodiment both of the crucial Wordsworthian prescription of direct communication with nature through the free exercise of the imagination and what Piper concludes is the Coleridgean notion (derived from Hartley) of the three ages of man, about to become a cornerstone of Wordsworth's poetic faith. In The Ancient Mariner of March 1798 the Wordsworthian perspective dominates: the scientific knowledge that we associate with Coleridge in earlier poems is still there, but the poem derives its psychological unity from ‘its full realisation of the vital experience which the doctrine of the living universe offered the poet’ (Piper, 1962, p. 88).

Rader's Wordsworth: A Philosophical Approach (1967) takes issue with Piper over the ascendancy of Wordsworth's thinking in 1798. Not that this inflection was new. As early as 1889, Walter Pater had maintained that ‘Coleridge's philosophical speculations do really turn on the ideas which underlay Wordsworth's poetic practice’ (CC, p. 100). But, for Rader, Coleridge's philosophical position was ‘an indispensable key to the interpretation of Wordsworth's ideas’. Disagreeing also with Beatty (the Hartley spell was ‘not of long duration and was combined with quite different allegiances’—Rader, 1967, p. 11), he sides with Stallnecht in seeing Coleridge, with Wordsworth in tow, now moving in the direction of philosophical idealism. Hartley is now ‘transcendentalized by Coleridge, and at once modified and exalted by Wordsworth's own mystical experience’.

What appeals about Rader's work is its common-sensical insistence that Wordsworth's direct experience of life was by far the most important source of his ideas, that second to this was ‘the living presence of Coleridge’ even if his ideas were ‘an almost impenetrable thicket of philosophical allusions’ (1967, p. 10). Books and philosophies—‘these barren leaves’ of ‘The Tables Turned’—came a poor third. Such a view stresses the anti-rationalist cast of Wordsworth's mind, a view already explored by A. N. Whitehead in Science and the Modern World (1926). What impelled the early Wordsworth, in his opinion, was a moral repulsion to science's obsession with abstractions. But James Averill's Wordsworth and the Poetry of Human Suffering (1980) challenges Whitehead (and Beatty) by arguing that the ‘clear and solid evidence’ of mathematics and science (The Prelude, x. 904) was precisely what the poet did turn to in the spring of 1798, a change of direction manifested not in the birth of the great philosophical poem but in the ‘little cells, oratories, and sepulchral recesses’ of Lyrical Ballads (Averill, 1980, p. 158). Following Sheats in bringing Darwin into the argument, Averill notices that Beatty, ‘the major disseminator of the Hartleian view … mentions … Zoönomia not at all’ (p. 154n.), despite Wordsworth's own acknowledgement in the ‘Advertisement.’ For Averill, the various ballads portraying people in extremis owe a substantial debt to the key chapter in Zoönomia (1796) entitled ‘Diseases of Increased Volition’. And Darwin's conviction that scientific study might not only prove ‘an inexhaustible source of pleasurable novelty’ (Averill, 1980, p. 158) but also alleviate distress and even mitigate the effects of insanity would have given Wordsworth a compelling reason to read on. Fifty years later readers would be making the same claims for Lyrical Ballads!

E. D. Hirsch's Wordsworth and Schelling (1960) offers a very different kind of argument. His thesis is a development of Bradley's aperçu that Wordsworth's poetry is ‘an imaginative expression of the same mind which, in his day, produced in Germany great philosophies’ (1909, 1965 edn, p. 129). Granted that Wordsworth and Schelling did not know each other's work, the chronological closeness of Lyrical Ballads and Schelling's Ideen is, maintains Hirsch, symptomatic of ‘an astonishing spiritual closeness’. While it may not prove the existence of a ‘homogeneous Zeitgeist’ (1960, p. 2) it does lend credence to the view that Romanticism (as opposed to Lovejoy's ‘Romanticisms’) is a meaningful historical term. Granted such cultural conditions, great minds do think alike.

LITERARY INFLUENCES

No single article has done more to undermine the time-hallowed assumptions of full-blooded experimentation in Lyrical Ballads than Robert Mayo's ‘The Contemporaneity of the Lyrical Ballads' (1954). Uncompromising in forging firm links with the magazine poetry of the day, it provided an antidote to generations of critics (Elsie Smith, Oliver Elton, and so on) who had insisted on the image of ‘revolutionary’ poems in which the very excesses were new. Even for Wordsworthians such as Helen Darbishire who were happy to acknowledge the influence of the traditional ballads, meaning of course the kind of poems collected in Percy's Reliques, such ‘magazinish’ elements were alien to the spirit of the volume. Wordsworth himself paid his dues to Percy in the ‘Essay, Supplementary to the Preface’ (1815): ‘I do not think there is an able writer in verse of the present day who would not be proud to acknowledge his obligations to the Reliques; I know that it is so with my friends; and, for myself, I am happy in this occasion to make a public avowal of my own’ (PrW, iii, 78).

Wordsworth's comments probably reflect a calculated desire to convey an impression both of serious innovation and of respectable literary antecedence, for elsewhere he complains of the ‘trash which infests the magazines’ (letter to W. Mathews, 8 June 1794: EL [Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth. The Early Years, 1787-1805], p. 126), a judgement reinforced by Coleridge's condemnation of his own efforts as ‘miserably magazinish’ (PW [The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth], i, 141). Perhaps these pronouncements also explain early critical reluctance to seek connections between ‘magazinish’ material and the ballads and to privilege the links with Percy. But Mayo's conclusions have proved hard to dislodge, solidly based as they are on an exhaustive comparative analysis of magazine verse of the decade. He duly recognises Wordsworth's abhorrence of the ‘inane phraseology’ of fashionable poetasters, but insists that he ‘belonged to their generation’, read their offerings, ‘addressed himself to their audience’ and shared their interest in making money (WC, p. 80). Even the want of unity which Legouis and others have found in Lyrical Ballads is a reflection of the heterogeneity of the literary fashion, of that ‘confused and eddying flood of popular poetry’ (WC, p. 81) flowing through the five major magazines of the day. For Mayo, Lyrical Ballads faithfully mirrors the preoccupations of fashionable verse—nature, the simple life, humanitarianism, sentimental morality; ‘for nearly every character, portrait or figure there is some seasoned counterpart in contemporary poetry’ (WC, p. 87). Desertion and separation culminating in child murder (‘The Thorn’) or death (‘The Complaint of the Forsaken Indian Woman’), prostitution, loneliness and poverty (‘The Female Vagrant’), madness (‘The Mad Mother’) and personal loss (‘Old Man Travelling’) belong to the stock-in-trade of poems that Mayo plucks as evidence from the magazines. ‘The Last of the Flock’ recalls ‘The Dead Beggar’ of Charlotte Smith, victim of a reluctant parish charity, ‘The Female Vagrant’ ‘mendicant’ poems such as T. Lacey's ‘The Beggar Girl’. Both ‘The Convict’ and Coleridge's ‘The Dungeon’ echo contemporary pieces trumpeting the need for penal reform, and ‘Tintern Abbey’ is part of an extant tradition of topographical poetry. Even the maverick Ancient Mariner is ‘not completely unrelated to the anguished and homeless old sailors of the poetry departments’ (WC, p. 93). What for Mayo sets Lyrical Ballads apart from this plethora of versifying is its sheer excellence, its ‘intense fulfillment of an already stale convention’ (p. 84). Viewed casually the poems might ‘merge with familiar features of the landscape; read carefully they would give suddenly a tremendous impression of clarity, freshness, and depth’ (p. 111).

Mayo has his detractors. Some critics have seen fit to ignore his conclusions (twelve years later Margaret Drabble was still espousing the cause of Lyrical Ballads as ‘a revolution in poetry’, ‘completely new’ and ‘different in language, in intention and in subject matter’—1966, p. 21), but most subsequent commentators have discreetly modified rather than abandoned Mayo's arguments. Not so historicists who have asserted that his evaluative conclusion (quoted above) is unacceptably subjective and impressionistic in a way that undermines the careful, historically based scholarship that informs the rest of the article. And Jordan's Why the Lyrical Ballads? (1976), an even more painstaking analysis of contemporaneous minor verse, arrives at very different conclusions. The volume is not, in his estimation, either derivative or conventional. Indeed, its studied avoidance of topical themes (war, slavery, patriotism) and the faddish ‘genres’ of satire, sonnet and elegy is part of a deliberate search for that honesty and freshness that elevates these poems above their rivals.

Parrish's guarded reaction is more typical. While agreeing with Mayo that the originality of Lyrical Ballads resides more in excellence than in innovation, he feels, like Darbishire, that we ignore the role of the traditional ballad at our peril. Direct and moving renditions of tragic tales and ‘lyrical’ in their metrical impulsion, Wordsworth did find them irresistible.

Judith Page's ‘Style and Intention in Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads’ (1983) starts from a similar if more guarded position: the ballad is Wordsworth's point of departure for his literary enterprise because it is not a traditional literary mode. By returning to folk origins, Wordsworth begins his project to renovate English poetry with a form that predates the ‘influence of French neo-classicism on English taste’. But she is quick to make the qualification—like many before her—that to replicate ‘the naive consciousness—or unselfconsciousness—of the folk’ is not Wordsworth's aim; he is ‘a literary artist who values originality and not an antiquarian who wants to imitate the folk ballad’ (1983, p. 293). Indeed, to anyone familiar with the formal characteristics of the traditional ballad genre—Page lists ‘impersonal narration, formulaic diction, compression of events, stanzaic symmetry, parallelism, and repetition’ (p. 294)—Wordsworth discounts the first entirely and largely ignores the second in the endeavour to ‘subordinate external action to feeling’ (p. 296).

In the matter of literary provenance Parrish was one of the first of many to argue the pull of Bürger's German ballads—for him more evident in The Ancient Mariner than in the rustic pieces. His ‘Leaping and Lingering: Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads’ offers reinforcement of this view:

He was attracted to Bürger's poems as early as 1796, and we can tell what he liked in Bürger from the Bürgeresque features he incorporated in The Ancient Mariner. These included not only the magical haunting air of miracle and terror that supernatural events evoke, as in the ‘ghostile crew’, but what the Monthly Magazine (which published Taylor's translation in 1796) called in its March issue the ‘hurrying vigour’ of Bürger's ‘impetuous diction’ as in such lines as these:

To and fro they are hurried about;
And to and fro, and in and out
The stars dance on between.

(1985, pp. 109-10)

It was to alert its reader to this contagion that the Critical Review of October 1798 fired its opening salvo: the poem was merely ‘a Dutch attempt at German sublimity’ (B& J, p. 320).

Wordsworth's admiration for ‘German sublimity’ was beginning to pall by 1798. ‘Incidents’ were ‘among the lowest allurements of poetry’. Bürger provoked ‘a hurry of pleasure’ but no ‘recollection of delicate or minute feelings’, and no delineation of character beyond that of Bürger himself (letter to Coleridge, EL, p. 234). Parrish, one of those who emphasise Percy's influence on Wordsworth, none the less finds reverberations of Bürger's ‘impetuous diction’ in ‘The Idiot Boy’, where the verbal patterns of ‘Lenore’ are echoed, and ‘the macabre, terrifying midnight ride of Bürger's ghostly lovers’ is parodied in the ‘half comic, blundering ride of Wordsworth's idiot’ (WC, p. 133). More significantly, ‘Des Pfarrers Tochter von Taubenheim’ (‘The Lass of Fair Wone’ in Taylor's translation) profoundly metamorphosed though it be from sensational ballad to psychological study by the addition of an involved narrator and by Wordsworth's refusal to descend to explicit infanticide and ‘mould'ring flesh’, has left its mark on ‘The Thorn’.

Such specific conclusions about influence conceal the main burden of Parrish's earlier (1959) study. His abiding conviction that the ‘experiments’ were ‘primarily and distinctively experiments in dramatic technique’ (CWC, p. 154) has much exercised subsequent commentators. That single-minded assertion has initiated a whole series of examinations (by Danby, Hartman, Jacobus, Ryskamp and Sheats, among others) of those dramatic tensions between reader, narrator, poet and character that apparently reside in these poems.

Parrish is, however, on thin ice when exploring their ‘lyrical’ potentialities, a point taken up by Ryskamp (1965). Dredging up a definition of ‘ballad’ from the Encyclopaedia Britannica of 1797, he argues that its primary meaning of ‘song’ would have rendered the title Lyrical Ballads tautological, and justified its ultimate rejection by Wordsworth. Like Mayo, Ryskamp regards the ballads of the collection as ‘closer to the halfpenny ballads being hawked about the street than to the lyrical adaptations of Percy’ (1965, p. 360); in fact they are the least lyrical pieces in the volume. Nor are they pictorial, like Cowper's poetry. Eschewing an Augustan tradition in which artistic comparisons and painterly effects were common motifs both in poetry and its criticism, Wordsworth seeks dramatic tension and psychological subtlety via a process of self-revelation which is often unconscious (‘We Are Seven’ or ‘Anecdote for Fathers’). Such a Parrish-like conclusion is convincing enough; less secure is Ryskamp's thesis that the virtues of originality are chiefly encountered in non-balladic pieces such as the expostulatory poems or ‘Lines Left … in a Yew-tree’.

Ryskamp's reference to ‘halfpenny ballads’ aligns him with a school of thought that sees the influence of the broadside on Lyrical Ballads. Usually preoccupied with murders and other sensational news items, the broadside is also mentioned by Carl Woodring as one of four categories of ballad drawn on by the poet. But Linda Venis, basing her findings on sixty-seven chapbook poems of the decade 1790-1800, resists the ‘claimed connection’ between street verse and the Lyrical Ballads. Only two of these contemporary broadsides deal directly with the lives of humble people. Furthermore their ‘stale diction’, hyperbole and personification are quite at odds with Wordsworth's ‘cultural primitivism’. Venis concludes, as have many before her, that Wordsworth's real models were ‘humble men and women’, themselves the repository of profound thoughts and feelings (1984, p. 625).

The very thoroughness of recent full-length studies of the 1798 edition entails an unswerving commitment to this vexed issue of literary influence. In a chapter entitled ‘Magazine Poetry and the Poetry of Passion’, Jacobus (1976) concedes that Mayo has accurately demonstrated the ballads' links with the genres and themes of magazine verse. But she sees the fundamental difference between them not simply as one of quality (Mayo) or dramatic strategy (Parrish) or even psychological subtlety (Ryskamp), but as defined by Wordsworth's insistence that there must be a real engagement of authorial feeling, even to the point of a near-Keatsian empathy with the dramatic personae of the poems. Such as identification sets Lyrical Ballads apart from mere magazine stuff which, by employing ‘a literary idiom at odds with the distress it portrays' (Jacobus, 1976, p. 184), rejects such an intimate kinship between poet/reader and character. What could also be argued is that Wordsworth's early ballads (for instance ‘The Female Vagrant’) have not yet come to terms with this incompatibility of form and content.

In his essay ‘Wordsworth Revisited’, Hartman (1987) takes a similar line. If the volume was ‘a stumbling block for its generation’, it was not on account of a humble subject matter that did not differ markedly from the predominantly Christian sentiments of the magazines. Both ‘reflected the taste of a growing class of “bourgeois readers”’ (p. 7). But the poet's deliberately low-key, even flat, approach was in conscious reaction to magazine verses where ‘the manner helped to raise the matter’. Wordsworth disdained ‘this yeasty virtue of style’, prepared to disregard ‘that ironclad law of literary and social decorum’ which limited the [neoclassical] poets' role to “what [oft] was thought, but ne'er so well express'd”’ (p. 8). While agreeing about Wordsworth's conscious rejection of stylistic felicities, Marilyn Butler (1981) believes that such a stance in fact mirrors current artistic practice. Moreover, the poet's address to a wide public and not a narrow coterie is further proof of neoclassical tendencies.

It would be wrong to regard the critical debate about literary influence as polarising over the issue of originality versus eclecticism or, more specifically, the Reliques versus the magazines. In the genre of the folk ballad there was, in any case, much blurring of distinctions. Many ballad imitations or reworkings by poets were, as Butler points out, adulterated by an essentially modern sensibility, by those very excesses of ornamentation that Wordsworth criticised in the work of Percy or Bürger. And Jacobus, though arguing persuasively for additional debts to the exotic and primitive pastisches of Ossian, Collins and the dialect ballads of Burns, perceives in the central themes of Lyrical Ballads (nature, the self, the imagination) emanations from three eighteenth-century literary sources: Thomson, Cowper and Akenside. In a tightly argued and allusive chapter, Jacobus shows both Coleridge and Wordsworth enriching these existing traditions, adding self-revelation to Cowper's introspection, ‘meditative passion’ to Thomson's vision, and ‘the transforming power’ of imagination to Akenside's intellectuality and ‘passive receptivity’ (1976, pp. 57-8). The central impulse of Lyrical Ballads is embodied in this refurbishment of existing models, in ‘the attempt to provide a more significant literary experience than his readers were used to finding in the overworked themes and genres of their time’ (p. 208). By comparing a poem from Town and Country Magazine (1794) and Wordsworth's ‘Lines Written in Early Spring’, Glen arrives at similar conclusions. Whereas the popular verses are neatly conclusive and portray a natural world readily ‘assimilable to human attitudes and feelings’ (1983, p. 40), Wordsworth's speaker is separated from the scene he describes; the tone is one of unease and inconclusiveness. If, for Jacobus, Wordsworth's reworkings of existing models result in a greater richness and complexity of experience, for Glen they generate those very feelings of ‘strangeness and aukwardness’ that the poet predicted in the ‘Advertisement.’ Either way—and Humphry House similarly detects in the high seriousness of ‘The Nightingale’ a distillation of Cowper's poetic manner (1953, p. 71)—the ballads easily outdistance their models, either literary or popular, native or German.

Bibliography

This bibliography lists all the works cited in this book by author or editor and date, but excludes the primary texts and collections of criticism identified by an abbreviation. For these see the List of Abbreviations.

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———(1966b): Wordsworth (London: Evans).

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———(1976): The Critical Path (Bloomington: Indiana University Press).

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———(1964): ‘Of Trees and Men: The Unity of Wordsworth's “The Thorn”’, Essays in Criticism, xiv. Repr. in WC.

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———(1976): From Blake to Byron, Part ii (Harmondsworth, Middex: Penguin).

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———(1964): Wordsworth's Poetry 1787-1814 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press).

———(1987): The Unremarkable Wordsworth (London: Methuen).

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Hazlitt, William (1944): Lectures on the English Poets, World's Classics (London: Oxford University Press). (First published 1818.)

———(1954): The Spirit of the Age, World's Classics (London: Oxford University Press). (First published 1825.)

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House, Humphry (1953): Coleridge (London: Rupert Hart-Davis).

———(1955): All in Due Time (London: Rupert Hart-Davis).

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———(1922): William Wordsworth and Annette Vallon (London: J. M. Dent).

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———(1981): Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).

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———(1974): Wordsworth's Literary Criticism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul).

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———(1958): ‘The Wordsworth-Coleridge Controversy’, PMLA, lxxiii.

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———(1967): Wordsworth: The Chronology of the Early Years, 1770-1799 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press).

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Yarlott, G. (1967): Coleridge and the Abyssinian Maid (London: Methuen).

List of Abbreviations

B&J: Wordsworth and Coleridge, ‘Lyrical Ballads’, ed. R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963, reissued as a University Paperback 1968). This edition uses the text of the 1798 edition and includes the 1800 poems and Preface. Line references to the 1798 poems and page references to the 1800 Preface relate to this edition.

BL: S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (1817), ed. J. Shawcross, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907).

CC: Alun R. Jones and William Tydeman (eds), Coleridge: ‘The Ancient Mariner’ and Other Poems, a Casebook (London: Macmillan, 1973).

CCH: J. R. de J. Jackson (ed.), Coleridge: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970).

CL: Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. L. Griggs, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966-71).

EL: Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth. The Early Years, 1787-1805, ed. E. de Selincourt, 2nd edn, rev. Chester L. Shaver (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967).

FN: Notes dictated to Isabella Fenwick by William Wordsworth in 1843 and published in PW.

LL: Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth. The Later Years, 1821-1853, ed. E. de Selincourt, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939).

PrW: The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974).

PW: The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. E. de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952-9).

WC: Alun R. Jones and William Tydeman (eds), Wordsworth: ‘Lyrical Ballads’, a Casebook (London: Macmillan, 1972).