[CANCELED] Crash Course on English Poetry – Lyrical Ballads

In his preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, William Wordsworth warns that the reader will find few personifications of abstract ideas, for “in these Poems I propose to myself to imitate, and, as far as possible, to adopt the very language of men.” Against what expectation is Wordsworth writing and how does he pursue his poetic revolution? We start with the opening two poems of this second edition (“Expostulation and Reply” and “The Tables Turned”), a short poem on gossip (“The Thorn”), and a short poem which pleads for you to see past the lack of tale related (“Simon Lee, the old Huntsman”).

Though Wordsworth contributed the majority of poems and later preface to Lyrical Ballads, the work was a collaborative effort with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who contributed one of the book’s most famous poems: “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Alongside Coleridge’s cursed, albatross-carrying mariner, we will also read another short Wordsworth poem. The young girl in “We Are Seven” lacks the mariner’s overt supernaturalism, but is perhaps just as cursed—and just as willful.

Getting more into the work’s social concerns, Coleridge addresses in “The Dungeon” the impact of imprisonment on criminals, while Wordsworth in “The Old Cumberland Beggar” reacts to efforts to set the nation’s growing poor out of view, and in “Michael” to constraints on pastoral life. Expressing the value of natural scenes for which these poets are more widely known, these poems also demonstrate their deep perception of human concerns.

Across several poems in Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth writes of a lost love figure he calls Lucy. Of these, we will read “She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways” and “A Slumber did my Spirit Seal.” Again in the spirit of this collaborative collection, however, we will couple these poems of loss with another Wordsworth poem on untimely death (“Animal Tranquillity and Decay”) and a more hopeful reframing by Coleridge in “The Nightingale.”

Concluding both the first edition of Lyrical Ballads and the first volume of the second edition, “Lines written above Tintern Abbey” merges personal recollection with a poetically crucial desire for a better future for others. Near the start of Volume II, however, we return to untimely death—and echoing nature—with “There was a Boy.” Reading these poems side-by-side, we will gather our closing thoughts on Lyrical Ballads and where poetry goes from there.