Lyrical Ballads, 1798-1998 - A Special Issue of Romanticism On the Net

It is now over forty years since Robert D. Mayo published his essay on 'The Contemporaneity of Lyrical Ballads', arguing that the experimental novelty claimed so eloquently by the volume's 'Advertisement' was, in fact, illusory, and that the ballads were just the sort of thing any reader of magazine verse at the end of the eighteenth century would be used to. In her influential survey, Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries (1981), Marilyn Butler was heard similarly dismissing 'the belief, still widely held, that Wordsworth's contribution to the Lyrical Ballads of 1798 represent an altogether new kind of poetry'. Of course, no poetry is ever 'altogether new', and there is no doubt that the 'Advertisement', like the later 'Prefaces', is at least as much an episode in the history of publicity as it is in the history of poetry (to use Leavis's phrase). But despite the revisionary ambitions of such historically-minded critics, and the undoubted justice of their case, the 1798 Lyrical Ballads seems oddly resistant to all attempts to relieve it of its momentous character: 1798 remains one of those indisputably memorable dates of literary history (though it was hardly noticed at the time), and the small volume must have a good claim to being the most famous single book of poems of all, Shakespeare's Sonnets being its only serious competitor. The occasion of the Lyrical Ballads bicentenary comes around as more than just another welcome opportunity to commemorate romantic literature and thought. We have had many such occasions recently, making it, if not exactly bliss to be alive, then at least a happy time for conference-goers. But the Lyrical Ballads bicentenary feels like something with much more to do with us than does, say, the anniversary of Political Justice, or of Wollstonecraft's Vindication, both of which otherwise promise a contemporary relevance so loudly. It is an unlikely volume to launch a revolution: the utter contingencies of the project, and the nonce quality of the book that happened to happen, are very well known; and the discrepancy between 'Advertisement' and many of the poems that follow it (including 'The Ancient Mariner') are obvious to anyone. But then it is the the strangely hybrid quality of the volume, catching between covers the tangle of common pursuit and cross-purposes that characterised the Wordsworth-Coleridge partnership, that make it seem so much more closely involved with the possibilities open to the literary intelligence now than, say, Blake or Byron or Keats, each of whom recent anniversaries and birthdays have similarly brought to mind. To speak of LyricalBallads as somehow the foundational work of English Romanticism is, of course, to create an historical myth, possible only to one wise after the event. But perhaps Lyrical Ballads makes itself exemplarily romantic in our eyes precisely because it contains the radical difference that Coleridge would later discern between himself and Wordsworth - and go on to detect, as well, within the mysteriously double-minded genius of Wordsworth alone. Such difference persists through succeeding literary generations as a provision of imaginative possibilities, between which choices are to be made. Such difference persists, as well, to shape the conflicts of our contemporary critical schools - largely thanks, no doubt, to the lasting influence of Coleridge, 'father of modern criticism', whose self-examinatory mulling over that difference animates the Biographia Literaria. We could express the kinds of difference in many ways: as the democratic injunction to use language of men against the 'elitist' insistence on the special languages of art; as a preference for subjects drawn from the everyday versus an adherence to subjects romantic or supernatural; as an …