Lyrical Ballads, With a Few Other Poems (1798)William Wordsworth Samuel Taylor ColeridgeOmniClassics · Literature
Lyrical Ballads, With a Few Other Poems (1798)
William Wordsworth Samuel Taylor ColeridgeOrdinary voices and uncanny encounters open new possibilities for poetry.
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About the book
This 1798 collection brings together poems by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge that test what subjects and language poetry can admit. A sailor's supernatural ordeal stands beside encounters with children, poor people, solitary travelers, and rural lives easily overlooked. Conversations and ballad rhythms make apparently simple events carry questions about suffering, imagination, belief, and the connection between human beings and nature. The volume moves from the disturbing world of the Ancient Mariner toward the reflective landscape and remembered experience of Tintern Abbey. Its introductory advertisement presents many of the poems as experiments in conversational language. Reading this early arrangement reveals the variety of those experiments before later editions expanded and reshaped the collection.
- Nature and memory
- Ordinary lives
- Poetic experiment
Why read it
Read it to experience the strange and the everyday sharing the same space in an influential early Romantic collection.
English text of the 1798 collection