Anglo-American Studies,

MA,2ND year, 1st semester

Multicultural Education
PARASCHIV (CARAION) ALINA-MONICA

TRADITION AND INNOVATION IN

WILLIAM WORDSWORTHS
LYRICAL BALLADS

Early life
William Wordsworth, son of John and Ann
Cookson Wordsworth, was born on 7 April
1770 in Cockermouth, Cumberland.
He had a close relationship with his brothersRichard, John and Christopher, and especially
with Dorothy, his sister, who offered William
a consistent support throughout his life. This
intense lifelong friendship between them is
vividly recalled in various passages of the
Prelude and in shorter poems such as the
sonnet
Adress
from
the
Spirit
of
Cockermouth Castle.

Wordsworth experiences connected to

Hawkshead, where he and his brother
Richard
attended
school,
would
provide him with a store of images
and sensory experience that he would
continue to draw on throughout his
poetic career, but especially in the
great decade of 1798 to 1808.
During this period, starting with his
first trip to France and Switzerland, he
formed his early political opinions,
especially his hatred of tyranny.

Wordsworth had been an instinctive

democrat since childhood, and his
experiences in revolutionary France
strengthened and developed his
convictions, passion for democracy
and sympathy for ordinary people.
Though he remained a strong
supporter of the French Revolution, as
he turned his attention to poetry, he
developed, through the process of
poetic composition, his own theory of
human nature.

Wordsworths collaboration with

Coleridge
In 1794 and 1795 Wordsworth divided his
time between London and Lake Country, and
in September 1795 William and Dorothy
settled at Racedown Lodge in Dorset, where
they would live for two years.
During this period, Wordsworth met Samuel
Taylor Coleridge, another radical young man
with literary aspirations.
The
two
men
started
an
important
collaboration and Wordsworth, in order to be
closer to Coleridge, even moved to Alfoxden
House, near the village of Nether Stowy.

Lyrical Ballads
One of the most influential
and paradigm-changing texts
of British literature is William
Wordsworths
Preface
to
Lyrical Ballads, with Pastoral
and Other Poems, which was
anonymously published in
1798 in collaboration with
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and
it is often labeled to have
determined the turning point
from the Age of Sensibility
towards the Romantic Period.

 This

is the original front

cover of a London first
edition
of
Lyrical
Ballads, 1798 edition,
by William Wordsworth
and
Samuel
Taylor
Coleridge.
Lyrical
Ballads is now seen as
a key Romantic text,
but at the time it was
reviewed badly and did
not sell many copies.

Lyrical Ballads was a clear and

intentional challenge to the literary
tradition. In fact, when it was originally
published in 1798, critics were sharply
divided on whether the collection was
innovative and brilliant or a complete
failure. Eager to help their readers and
critics better understand the work,
Wordsworth and Coleridge reprinted the
volume in 1800 with additional poems
and a longer Preface that carefully
outlined their new theory of poetry.

This Preface, written by Wordsworth, was

one of the first and most direct attempts
to challenge the popular poetic practices
of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries and offer a new poetic theory to
replace them.
It
is
a
polemical
statement
of
Wordsworths beliefs about poetry and
poetic language. The preface in all its
versions is highly discursive, the poet
thinking aloud in an attempt to
formulate ideas about poetry based on
poems he has already written.

Wordsworth argues that poetry should be

written in the natural language of common
speech, rather than in the lofty and
elaborate dictions that were then considered
poetic.
He argues that poetry should offer access to
the emotions contained in memory. And he
argues that the first principle of poetry
should be pleasure, that the chief duty of
poetry is to provide pleasure through a
rhythmic and beautiful expression of feeling,
based on a subtle pleasure principle that is
the naked and native dignity of man.

Recovering the naked and native dignity of

man makes up a significant part of
Wordsworths poetic project and his style
remains plain-spoken and easy to understand
even today, though the rhythms and idioms
of common English have changed from those
of the early nineteenth century.
Due to the fact that the poems in the volume
radically differ in form, style and subject
matter from the established conventions it
can therefore be argued that Lyrical Ballads,
together with its Preface, is the Romantic
Manifesto of the British Literature.

The Romantic Period

Lyrical Ballads is used to mark the
beginning of the Romantic period of
literature, that lasts from about 1798 to
1850
and
emphasizes
nature,
the
imagination and the importance of personal
experience rather than scientific logic. The
intense emotion is seen as an authentic
source of experience, placing new emphasis
on apprehension, horror and terror and
especially on sublime and beauty of nature.

Wordsworths poems initiated the Romantic era by

emphasizing feeling, instinct, and pleasure above
formality and mannerism. More than any poet before
him, Wordsworth gave expression to inchoate human
emotion.
Many of his poems (including masterpieces such as
Tintern Abbey and the Intimations of Immortality
ode) deal with the subjects of childhood and the
memory of childhood in the mind of the adult in
particular, childhoods lost connection with nature,
which can be preserved only in memory.
Wordsworths images and metaphors mix natural
scenery, religious symbolism (as in the sonnet It is a
beauteous evening, calm and free, in which the
evening is described as being quiet as a nun), and
the relics of the poets rustic childhoodcottages,
hedgerows, orchards, and other places where
humanity intersects gently and easily with nature.

For Wordsworth, nature comforts man in sorrow, it is a

source of pleasure and joy and all the genuine poetry
takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.
He focuses on the essential passions of the heart
and achieves a penetrating insight into love and
death, solitude and community.
Coleridge explores a more fantastic and dreamlike
imagination and also writes poems of quiet,
conversational meditation.
Both poets look with a fresh and visionary eye at the
human and the natural world. They examine the
condition of men and women at the extreme edge of
society; they are also subtle analysts of their own
minds and the processes of introspection and
memory.

Conclusion
Due to the fact that Wordsworth combined
innovative literary views and aesthetic ideas, such
as depicting things as they seem in contrast to as
they are, Lyrical Ballads became a pioneering
literary work.
Together with the rejection of contemporary poetic
diction and literary hierarchy, Wordsworth and
Coleridge encountered a mixed reception from the
general public.
Functioning as a starting point for the Romantic
period, it gave new meaning to poetry , employing
the idea of using the poem as a means to get feeling
and emotion across, which results in familiarity for
the reader.

This serves as an explanation for

the popularity of Romantic poetry as
a whole and the rise of the lyric as a
revalued genre, indicating that the
Lyrical Ballads with its Preface,
proved to be an excellent manifesto
for Romantic literature.

Bibliography:
The

Norton Anthology of Theory and

Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York.
London. W.W.Norton.2000

William

Wordsworth. Preface to Lyrical

Ballads, with Pastoral and Other Poems

Wordsworth

and Coleridge: "Lyrical Ballads"

(1800) and Other Selected Poems