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Dramatic Technique in the Lyrical Ballads
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
The publication in 1954 of Robert Mayo's admirable paper, “The Contemporaneity of the Lyrical Ballads,” has made it seem incautious if not foolhardy to claim novelty of theme or technique for the volume of 1798. As Mayo appears to have shown, the Lyrical Ballads conformed in nearly all respects to the patterns prevailing in magazine poetry of the 1790's; the volume's “originality” lay less in any innovations it attempted than in the freshness and intensity with which it developed already familiar conventions. As for the “experiments” alluded to in the 1798 Advertisement and the 1800 Preface, they were, as the comments of Coleridge and others seem to confirm, largely experiments in language alone, and wholly within the boundaries of popular taste.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1959
References
1 PMLA, LXIX (June), 486–522.
2 Early Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth (1787–1805), ed. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford, 1935), p. 250.
3 Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. de Selincourt and H. Darbishire, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1940–49), ii, 385—hereafter cited as PW.
4 Unpub. letter to Longman, 18 Dec. 1800, in the N. Y. Pub. Lib.; Early Letters, p. 327 (misdated 1803); “Essay, Supplementary to the Preface” (PW, II, 425–426).
5 Ed. J. Shawcross, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1907), ii, 43–44.
6 See my summary of this dissent, “The Wordsworth-Coleridge Controversy,” PMLA, LXXIII (Sept. 1958), 367–374.
7 See de Selincourt's notes in PW, i, 330–333, and G. W. Meyer, Wordsworth's Formative Years (Ann Arbor, 1943), pp. 151–152.
8 See Florence Marsh, Wordsworth's Imagery (New Haven, 1952), pp. 60–61.
9 See Charles W. Stork, “The Influence of the Popular Ballad on Wordsworth and Coleridge,” PMLA, xxix (1914), 300.
10 Univ. of Wisconsin Stud. in Lang. and Lit., No. 11 (Madison, 1920), pp. 21–57.
11 Note to “The Thorn” (PW, ii, 513).
12 “Essay, Supplementary to the Preface” (PW, ii, 427). See also the variant endings to “The Ruined Cottage” (PW, v, 400–404), where Wordsworth attempted to define the beneficial effects left by a story of suffering.
13 To John Wilson, June 1802 (Early Letters, p. 298).
14 Lines 217–221 of the 1798 version; see PW, ii, 73.
15 See J. L. Lowes, Road to Xanadu (Boston and New York, 1927), pp. 336, 485, 545–546.
16 Lyrical Ballads by William Wordsworth and S. T. Coleridge: 1798. I have used the 2nd ed. (London, 1907).
17 They are included by Charles J. Smith, “Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Growth of a Theme,” SP, LIV (Jan. 1957), 53–64. See also W. Strunk, Jr., “Some Related Poems of Wordsworth and Coleridge,” MLN, xxix (Nov. 1914), 201–205.
18 I quote Wordsworth's share of the poem from Coleridge's transcript of it, printed in Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. H. Coleridge, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1912), I, 269–275.
19 See the note he prefixed to the poem in Sibylline Leaves, repr. in ibid., pp. 267–269, n.
20 Peter Bell, as Wordsworth explained in his prefatory letter to Southey, dated 7 April 1819, “was composed under a belief that the Imagination not only does not require for its exercise the intervention of supernatural agency, but that, though such agency be excluded, the faculty may be called forth as imperiously, and for kindred results of pleasure, by incidents within the compass of poetic probability, in the humblest departments of daily life” (PW, ii, 331). In “Goody Blake and Harry Gill,” Wordsworth “wished to draw attention to the truth that the power of the human imagination is sufficient to produce such changes even in our physical nature as might almost appear miraculous” (1800 Preface [PW, ii, 401, n.]). “The Thorn,” written “to exhibit some of the general laws by which superstition acts upon the mind” (1800 note [PW, ii, 512–513]), is narrated by a man who, though “utterly destitute of fancy,” possesses “a reasonable share of imagination, by which word I mean the faculty which produces impressive effects out of simple elements.”
21 See my reading of the poem, “‘The Thorn’: Wordsworth's Dramatic Monologue,” ELH, xxiv (June 1957), 153–163.
22 In his brilliant, wide-ranging book, The Poetry of Experience (London, 1957), Robert Langbaum conjectures that Wordsworth could only have meant “lyrical in the sense of subjective,” and goes on to read some of the poems of 1798 as incipient or partial dramatic monologues (Ch. i, “The Dramatic Lyric and the Lyrical Drama”). Wordsworth must have meant lyrical in this sense, but he talked about it in the primary sense of musical (or metrical); the two senses of the word seem to have been closely related in his mind, perhaps through their common connection with passion.
23 E. L. Griggs, ed. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Vols. I and ii (Oxford, 1956), I, 438.
24 As Coleridge reported to William Taylor, 25 Jan. 1800, quoting letters Wordsworth had written in Germany (ibid., I, 564–566).
25 27 Feb. 1799 (Early Letters, pp. 216–223).
26 “A Letter to a Friend of Robert Burns,” printed in Alexander Grosart, ed. Prose Works of William Wordsworth, 3 vols. (London, 1876), ii, 12, 14.
27 See Lowes, pp. 331, 336.
28 Found in H. B. Wheatley's edition of the Reliques, 3 vols. (London, 1885), ii, 209–213.
29 See de Selincourt's note, PW, ii, 486.
30 A detail not in Wordsworth's source, Samuel Hearne's Journey (1795). It is worth noting that the overflow stanzas from this poem (PW, ii, 475–476) accord perfectly to the poem's expressed design, four of them showing the forsaken woman “cleaving” to the society of her friends, the fifth showing her grasping poignantly after symbols of life. But none mentions the child: had they been retained they would have blurred the focus Wordsworth evidently resolved to fix—on the woman's bereaved motherhood.
31 As Legouis suggested; see de Selincourt's note, PW, ii, 476.
32 For the Critical Rev., reprinted in Elsie Smith, Estimate of William Wordsworth (Oxford, 1932), pp. 30–33.
33 Southey's note can be found in his complete Poetical Works (London, 1866), p. 149.
34 As he told Cottle on 24 June 1799 (Early Letters, p. 227).
35 PW, iii, 443, Fenwick note.
36 PW, ii, 493, Fenwick note.
37 Wordsworth's note of 1827 (PW, ii, 493).
38 F. W. Bateson, e.g., in Wordsworth: A Re-interpretation, 2nd ed. (London, 1956), p. 151.
39 Wordsworth to Charles James Fox, 14 Jan. 1801 (Early Letters, p. 262).
40 See his remarks to Crabb Robinson in Coleridge's Miscellaneous Criticism, ed. T. M. Raysor (London, 1936), p. 394.
41 For an analysis of the dramatic qualities of these poems, see O. J. Campbell, “Wordsworth Bandies Jests with Matthew,” MLN, xxxvi (1921), 408–414.