Lyrical Ballads

William Wordsworth
1770-1850

I realize you probably didn’t read “Ode on Intimations of Immortality” or “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey” and say to yourself, “Wow! This is revolutionary, radical poetry.” For its time, however, this poetry was incredibly daring and progressive, a radical departure from what Wordsworth’s contemporaries thought poetry should be. It was pretty controversial stuff, and the collection it appeared in, Lyrical Ballads (1798), is considered one of the turning points of English literature.

Lyrical Ballads was a collaboration between Wordsworth and his friend, Samuel Coleridge, who both lived in England’s Lake District. Each writer contributed a number of poems to the collection (O.K., Wordsworth contributed more than Coleridge), and the first edition of the book was published anonymously.

Wordsworth and Coleridge’s goal in publishing Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth explained in a preface to a later edition of the book, was to write poetry that was written in “the language really used by men” and that contained “scenes from common life.” Again, when you read Wordsworth, you probably didn’t think “These poems are written in the language that people really use!! And the incidents portrayed in the poems are things that really happen all the time!!!”

Consider, though, the poetry of Alexander Pope: page after page of closed heroic couplets, with a multitude of allusions to Greek and Roman literature and history and culture, written in language that’s formal and ornate, and loaded down with words with many syllables. And then consider that Pope was the finest poet of the eighteenth century, so most of the poetry written during the eighteenth century was written by writers who were far less talented than Pope. It’s no wonder that Wordsworth and Coleridge wanted to try something new, and no wonder that some of the readers of Lyrical Ballads wondered if this was even poetry. Where are the closed heroic couplets? Why aren’t these poems based on classical models? Where are the references to Jove and Hercules? “Tintern Abbey” doesn’t even rhyme!!! It’s written in blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter)!! Scandalous!

Another change that Wordsworth addresses in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads is that ultimately these poems are about emotions. “I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” To the neoclassical mind, every word of that description is wrong. Poetry shouldn’t be spontaneous: it should be labored over carefully, and then only after years and years of studying classical models to find out the way it really ought to be written. It shouldn’t be about emotion, because emotions are subjective and unscientific and specific rather than general. If poets were to start writing about their emotions, how could there be any guarantee that their poetry would be able to appeal to people four or five centuries from now? And poetry certainly shouldn’t be an overflow of powerful emotions—that’s immoderate; it’s too extreme. Spontaneous overflows of powerful emotions aren’t poetic—they’re embarrassing lapses that may get you sent to an asylum until you’ve recovered your sanity or your decency.

Finally, the picture that Wordsworth presents of the poet in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads is remarkably different than the traditional neoclassical ideal.

“What is a poet? He is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than one supposed to be common among mankind; a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the Universe, and habitually compelled to create them where he does not find them. To these qualities he has added a disposition to be affected more than other men by absent things as if they were present; an ability of conjuring up in himself passions, which are indeed far from being those produced by real events yet (especially in those parts of the general sympathy which are pleasing and delightful) do more nearly remember the passions produced by real events, than anything which, from the motions of their own minds merely, other men are accustomed to feel in themselves.”

Notice that for Wordsworth the most important quality for a poet isn’t years of study of classical literature and years of practice at writing verse. Instead, for Wordsworth what distinguishes a poet from everybody else is emotional sensitivity. A poet is somebody who feels things more deeply than everybody else.

Notice that we still take most of these ideas about poetry for granted, two hundred years after Wordsworth came up with these thoughts. The vast majority of people in our culture don’t write poetry when they come up with a logical argument or want to make a point about our political system. Instead, they write poetry, if at all, when they have strong emotions that they want to share: when they’ve fallen in love, for example, or when they’re going through grief. Lots of poetry gets read at funerals; lots of poetry gets written when people are in love. Do people write much poetry when they want to express something besides a powerful emotion? Not so much.

We also tend to automatically assume that poets are emotionally sensitive. Try out these sentences: “That guy looks so rugged and manly—he must be a poet.” Or “Of course my dad can beat up your dad—my dad’s a poet!” To me, these statements sound kind of ridiculous: my stereotypical image of a poet isn’t of somebody who’s rugged. It may be that these stereotypes will change in my lifetime—I don’t think of rappers as being particularly sensitive. On the other hand, there’s probably a reason that 50 Cent doesn’t call himself a poet—our perception of poets still isn’t of somebody who’s streetwise and bulletproof.

One of the interesting aspects of “Tintern Abbey” (Norton 792) is that it comes across as though it were spontaneous, as though the poet were really speaking to us, not obsessively rewriting until everything in the poem is perfect. The poem begins with description of the natural scene around the poet—Wordsworth has returned to this spot after five years abroad, and he gives us some lovely physical description. In line 14, he writes, “Once again I see/These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines/Of sportive wood run wild.” He writes something, then seems to think of a better way to say it, but instead of crossing out what he’d written and putting in the better way to say it, he just says, “hardly hedge-rows” and moves on. It comes across as a spontaneous overflow. (Who knows, though: he might have worked on that line for days)

In the second section of the poem, Wordsworth says that even though he hasn’t been physically present on this scene for five years, he hasn’t forgotten it. The memory of the beautiful, tranquil scene has comforted him many times during the lonely hours in bustling cities, and that may have made him a better person:

feelings, too
Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man’s life,
His little, nameless, unremembered acts
Of kindness and of love. (Lines 30-35)

Not only that. The memory of this scene may have given Wordsworth what seems to be some sort of transcendent experience, something that sounds like an out of body phenomenon:

Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things. (43-49)

According to the critic M.H. Abrams, one of the characteristics of Romanticism is what he calls “Natural Supernaturalism”: many of the romantic thinkers have no faith in traditional religion, but they still have the desire to connect with something larger than themselves, to feel that there’s more to life than just the material, clockwork universe that Enlightenment thinkers described. As a result, they turn to nature for their religious experiences, finding in the natural world that sense of transcendence which they desire. “Natural Supernaturalism.” For Wordsworth, the memory of this natural scene seems to have given him a religious experience.

In the section of the poem beginning at line 58, Wordsworth thinks that he isn’t just enjoying the scene before him, but he’s also kind of refueling, preserving these memories for the future, when he’ll be in lonely rooms again and need to be refreshed. He also thinks of how his response to nature is different now than it was when he was younger:

Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first
I came among these hills; when like a roe
I bounded o’er the mountains, by the sides
Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,
Wherever nature led: more like a man
Flying from something he dreads, than one
Who sought the thing he loved. (66-72)

There’s a real sense of loss here: in line 83 and following, he describes it as “That time is past,/And all its aching joys are now no more,/And all its dizzy raptures.” He used to derive all this joy from the natural world, but all that has changed. A lot of Romantic poetry focuses on a sense of loss, especially what’s been lost as a result of time passing. When we’re young, we’re fresh and unspoiled and enthusiastic and spontaneous, but as we get older, we become a little less extreme. Romantic art and philosophy celebrates passion and enthusiasm and youth, but it views maturity with a sense of loss.

Wordsworth states that he isn’t going to mourn for his lost sense of passion; instead, he’s going to focus on the gifts maturity has brought him. Most critics, however, find that he does a better job of describing what he’s lost than what he thinks he’s gained. Notice that one of the things he’s gained is

a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. (95-102)

This could very well be a form of pantheism: humanity and nature and everything in the universe is connected by the same spirit. Again, Natural Supernaturalism.

A couple lines further down, there’s another interesting statement, starting at line 105: “all the mighty world/ Of eye, and ear,--both what they half create,/And what perceive.” Wordsworth seems to be alluding to theories of perception that are pretty common in Romantic thought, particularly the idea that perception is more important than reality. According to these theories, an observer doesn’t just passively receive perceptions of the outside world—she or he works with those perceptions to create a picture of the world. There’s probably something to it: if you go out your door after you’ve received a big fat check and somebody special has told you “I love you,” the world around you looks different than it does when you go out your door after you’ve received a ton of bills and somebody special has said, “I think we should see other people.” The reality around you may be exactly the same . . . but the day is completely different.

In the final section of “Tintern Abbey,” Wordsworth expresses another reason why he shouldn’t feel bad that he’s lost his youthful enthusiasm for nature: he’s looking on this scene with his sister, who still feels aching joy for the natural world, and he can experience that old pleasure vicariously through her. If you’re surprised to learn that his sister is with him in the scene, welcome to the club. A less spontaneous poet might have gone back and mentioned that she was with him in the first section of the poem . . . but that’s not what Wordsworth is going for.

The poem ends with Wordsworth talking about his sister thinking back on this moment sometime in the future, remembering the two of them together enjoying the beautiful scene and being comforted by her brother’s devotion to nature. Again, the focus isn’t so much on the beautiful scene in front of them as how they perceive it—how their emotional reaction differs from what it might have been in the past, and what they’ll think about it in the future. It’s not that Romantic poets are uninterested in nature and solely interested in their emotions—it’s just that they’re interested in examining their emotional reaction to everything.


Samuel Taylor Coleridge


Poor Coleridge. Married to a woman he didn’t really love out of a sense of obligation, secretly in love with the woman who will eventually be Wordsworth’s sister-in-law, addicted to opium he began taking as a treatment for rheumatism. He’s an important poet—he was probably a much more philosophical thinker than Wordsworth—but it’s interesting to wonder what he might have accomplished if he hadn’t made such a mess of his personal life.

“Kubla Khan” is a fragment of a poem—beautiful language and imagery taken from a dream of a far-off place, composed, according to Coleridge, in a dream. Honestly, this is one of those poems where the story behind the poem is as important as the poem itself. According to Coleridge’s explanation (Norton 813), he was at a farm-house, took some medication (interestingly, this happened before his opium addiction), fell asleep, and had a vivid dream in which he composed a poem. He woke up and started copying down the poem he’d written in his dream, when all of a sudden there’s a knock at the door, and when he goes to answer it there’s a person from Porlock there on business . . . and by the time he gets rid of the person from Porlock, the brilliant poem has vanished from his memory and he can’t recapture it.

The most interesting thing about this story, at least in my mind, is that Coleridge published the poem as it was, adding an introduction so readers would know the story behind the story. He didn’t try to finish the poem using talent and effort, and he didn’t just scrap the poem because it was only a fragment. Instead, he published a fragment of a poem.

This would have been unthinkable for a neoclassical poet, but it’s absolutely appropriate for a Romantic artist. Romanticism places such a high premium on inspiration and spontaneity that it’s far better to publish an inspired fragment than to complete a poem without inspiration. Publishing a fragment shows that you have integrity—even though you could conceivably work to complete this poem, you’ve chosen not to, because poetry that is uninspired and labored over isn’t poetry at all.

For discussion

- Wordsworth’s “Ode on Intimations of Immortality” and Coleridge’s “Dejection: an Ode” explore some of the same themes of loss that Wordsworth develops in “Tintern Abbey.” Discuss the similarities and differences between the three poems.