Background to Lyrical Ballads

Lyrical Ballads

I)       The Ballad and the “Folk”

A)    Ballad Revival

i)        As early as 1711, Joseph Addison devotes to the ballad “Chevy Chase” the kind of attention formerly reserved for “serious” literature

ii)      Richard Hurd’s Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762) claimed that the age of realism, reason, and “good sense” had sacrificed much feeling and a “world of fine fabling”

iii)    Thomas Percy collects and “improves” local ballads, published in 1765 as Reliques of Ancient Poetry

(a)    “Sir Patrick Spence” is characteristic

(1)   medieval tale

(2)   ballad stanza

(3)   much repetition of words, phrases, whole lines

(4)   musical effects—steady meter, syncopation and so forth

(5)   archaic language and spelling

(6)   interest in the supernatural

iv)    James MacPherson—Fingal (1762): The purported native epic of the Celtic bard Ossian; completely fabricated, but even when revealed as a fabrication the poems remained immensely popular

v)      Thomas Chatterton’s “Rowley” poems (1769): late Medieval ballads supposedly authored by the 15^th century monk Thomas Rowley; fraud discovered in 1778, eight years after Chatterton took his own life, swallowing poison and dying in abject poverty in London at the age of 17

vi)    Robert Burns: wrote in Scots dialect (sometimes); singled out as “striking example of native genius bursting through the obscurity of poverty and the obstructions of laborious life”

(a)    tenant farmer and poor

(b)   became in his words “absolutely crazed” with collecting traditional songs

(c)    his poems often exploit existing genres, showing not an illiterate bard, but a well-read student of English poetry

(d)   his themes involve power and powerlessness, love, and the occasional earthiness of a pub drinking song

1.      The image of the poor, underappreciated poet who uses his native skills was memorably impressed on the public imagination by Wordsworth in “Resolution and Independence” (see line 43-49, page 546)

2.      We can also see in Burns, Scott and MacPherson (all Scotsmen) and a figure like Thomas Moore (an Irishman), a yearning for a native culture, a nationalist desire for difference in the face of powerful London culture.

II)    Lyrical Ballads

A)    In 1797, Wordsworth and Coleridge conceived the idea of a jointly produced volume of poetry (to finance a walking tour)

i)        Originally published anonymously

ii)      sold steadily and earned some favorable reviews

iii)    Advertisement prefixed to volume claimed the poems were “experiments” intended to “ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure”

iv)    Advertisement also announces the volume’s radicalness—saying it would challenge readers’ “pre-established codes of decision”

B)    Following the initial “success” Wordsworth issues a new edition in 1800, a two volume affair with the first volume being essentially the 1798 Lyrical Ballads and the second being Wordsworth’s own poems. He also added a lengthy preface vindicating his poetic practice.

i)        This expanded edition sold well and called for a third edition (1802) (a fourth published in 1805)

C)    The “Preface”

i)        Incidents from common life (434)

(a)    throw a certain colouring

(b)   Why rustic life?

(c)    Language purified—of what?

ii)      Spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings (435)

(a)    feelings over actions (436)

(b)   not “gross and violent stimulants” but to enlarge our capability to feel real feeling (436)

(1)   the evil of present times (436)

iii)    The Language of Poetry

(a)    no personifications or like devices (436-437)

(b)   avoid “poetic diction” (language that is overtly poetical” (437)

(1)   avoid clichés  (437)

(2)   “have at all times endeavored to look steadily at my subject” and so no falsehood of description—why is this important? (437)

(c)    language of poetry like that of prose (438)

iv)    What is a Poet?

(a)    Man speaking to men (439)

(b)   Empathetic—negative capability (?)—slip into “delusion” and become the subject to feel what the subject must feel (439)

(c)    High calling of the poet—“Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science” (441)

v)      Emotion Recollected in Tranquility (443)

(a)    Sympathetic identification with subject

(b)   imaginative re-creation of scene, feeling, character

D)    Jeffrey’s review (468) was in response to the third edition (1802)

i)        Jeffrey claims they are not original

ii)      He equates simple language with vulgarity (469-470)

iii)    Jeffrey’s key assumption: “The language of the higher and more cultivated orders may fairly be presumed to be better than that of their inferiors”—but what is meant by “better”? (470)

iv)    Also a class argument: “The love, or grief, or indignation of an enlightened and refined character, is not only expressed in a different language, but is in itself a different emotion from the love, or grief, or anger, of a clown, a tradesman, or a market-wench” (470)

v)      But finally a political argument: “A splenetic and idle discontent with the existing institutions of society, seems to be at the bottom of all their serious and peculiar sentiments. Instead of contemplating the wonders and the pleasures which civilization has created for mankind, they are perpetually brooding over the disorders by which its progress has been attended” (471)

E)      “Simon Lee”

i)        Simple language

ii)      variation of ballad stanza

iii)    Use of feminine rhymes—falling off at the end of the lines, produces a mild comic or light effect

iv)    Simon Lee’s story—68 lines of description

v)      Turn to the reader for 12 lines—part of the LB project—“you would find / A tale in everything”

vi)    Emphasis on “silent thought” key—this is the wise passiveness that will come up later

vii)  What is the “action” of the poem? Is the action important? No. Later in the Preface, Wordsworth will claim that “the feeling therein developed gives importance to the action and the situation and not the action and situation to the feeling.”

viii)            So what is the feeling developed by this poem?

III) Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, Upon Revisiting the Banks of the Wye, July 13, 1798

A)    Form

i)        blank verse—iambic pentameter

ii)      Ode-like without the technical structure of an Ode—high impassioned language

iii)    Yet language almost conversational; but elaborate, much higher, philosophical; but not “poetic” in the traditional sense (i.e. without tricks, personifications, apostrophes, etc.)

iv)    Not allusive—figuration more real

v)      Five verse paragraphs

(a)    First sets the scene

(b)   Second—removes from scene to show use of memory

(c)    Third—short questioning which gives over to affirmation

(d)   Fourth—back to here; the story of development which culminates in the “now” of the poet

(e)    Fifth—turn from memory to the present, from the scene to the poet’s “second self” (i.e. Dorothy)

B)    Landscape/Nature

i)        What is the relationship between the landscape and the speaker?

ii)      What was he like when young? What was wrong with his relationship with Nature?

iii)    What has happened to change him? What is his new attitude?

iv)    What has he learned? Where did he get this knowledge?

v)      How do we get this knowledge?

vi)    Is the invocation of Nature a withdrawal from the social/political?

(a)    homeless becomes hermit

(b)   hedgerows become little lines of sportive wood run wild

(c)    date—revolution but shaped into “still, sad music of humanity”

C)    Development

i)        How many “versions” of the speaker are present in the poem?

(a)    Speaker—present time of the poem

(b)   Poet in the city—next most previous time

(c)    Poet at some point in time matured (“learned to look on nature”)

(d)   Poet when he visited in 1793 (“Five summers . . .”)

(e)    Poet as young man (17? that would be about 1787)

ii)      How do we know who we are? where we came from?

iii)    What was wrong with the earlier visits?

iv)    How is he better now?

D)    Memory

i)        What does memory do?

ii)      Where does “continuity” come from? (the connection to “one life”)

iii)    We would see a “tale in everything”

E)     Restoration/Redemption

i)        Nature restores/refreshes; food for after-thought (“when oft upon my couch I lie / In vacant or in pensive mood” / They flash upon the inward eye / Which is the bliss of solitude”)

ii)      Also the “still, sad music of humanity” and a “presence that disturbs me”—these thoughts redeem the physical world from its appetite, lust, animal passion, reason, the domination of the senses, because it is only through the senses that one can eventually go beyond them (imagination provides access to Nature but also eventually overcomes Nature)

iii)    Worshipper—deeper zeal of holier love

iv)    Turn to Dorothy—who is redeemed? Can we be?

IV)    General Concerns

A)    Reforming the Reader

i)        the turn to the reader in “Simon Lee” shifts the burden of understanding onto the reader’s capacity for “silent thought”—we will be judged not by our knowledge but by our ability to respond

ii)      this occurs as a kind of sacred initiation into secret knowledge; first we must be humbled then exalted

iii)    The experiment of LB then challenges readers to become sensitive and skilled enough to fill in the gaps, understatements and misdirections

(a)    The difficulty of the poems stems not from allusiveness or complexity of language, but from an audacious minimalism—good reading depends not on good education but on the qualities of your soul

iv)    As seen in Tintern Abbey, Wordsworth more concerned with the observing self than the landscape that the self observes (recall the shift to “I” in Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind")