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Title: Lyrical Ballads (1798 First Edition)
Author: William Wordsworth & Samuel Taylor Coleridge
First published: 1798
Dates read: 18. 07. – 10. 08. 2023
Category: poetry, first-time read, classics, library book, 20 Books of Summer 2023
Rating: 3/5
The book in five words or less: influential but overhyped

My thoughts:

Would you believe it when I say that I made it through an entire English degree without reading this collection? Well, I did. It’s not like I didn’t study poetry; it just wasn’t this particular collection. Given that I am quite interested in other variants of Romantic literature (most importantly French, German, and Scottish), it seemed natural that I fill that Ballads-shaped gap in my education eventually, and besides, I read The Rime of the Ancient Mariner earlier this year and quite liked it. Unfortunately, the collection that poem was first published in turned out to be rather a mixed reading experience.  

I think – and I say this with the utmost respect for the conceptual revolutionariness of the Lyrical Ballads when they were first published – most of the poems just aren’t all that good. On a poetological level, I get where Wordsworth and Coleridge were coming from: an opposition to more classically influenced poetry of the period, an interest in more mundane and occasionally supernatural subjects, and a willingness to experiment. Alas, given the importance of this deviation for the history of English poetry, the actual quality of the collection itself may have been a bit oversold.

I do lay that blame primarily at the door of William Wordsworth, since he was responsible for the arrangement of the poems in all subsequent editions of the collection, and because Samuel Taylor Coleridge only contributed four of the twenty-three poems, one of which is the aforementioned Rime of the Ancient Mariner (which Wordsworth moved from the beginning to the middle of the collection for the second edition because he thought its style and length off-putting to potential readers. Tellingly, Rime was my favourite poem in the entire collection.). Thus, what I have to say about the style, language, and subject matter of the poems primarily concerns Wordsworth.

My main impression, and one that kept building up over the course of the collection to a point where I could no longer ignore it, is that I was never quite sure what Wordsworth was doing with his choice of form, rhyme, and meter. There were several instances – one in almost every poem – where the rhymes, syllable lengths, and meter felt just a tiny bit off. That would be fine as a stylistic device if I had gotten the impression that Wordsworth was doing it on purpose, for example for emphasis or to introduce a new idea. Except that, nine times out of ten, there seemed to be no point to these deviations whatsoever. I don’t know if he was trying to imitate rural or working-class speech (and if he did, whether I really like that), or if it was pretend simplicity all along, but the rhymes and meter made me stumble quite a lot in ways that took me out of the flow of reading the poems. (I do not believe that poetry has to have rhyme and meter; it’s more that Wordsworth decided it did but then didn’t stick with his choices consistently.)

As for narrative and subject matter – well, a lot of the poems are, quite frankly, a bit boring. I will say that Wordsworth is best when he writes about powerful emotions experienced in or in relation to nature, but sadly that is not what the majority of the Lyrical Ballads are about. Most of the poems are about poor, rural, and/or working-class people telling stories of suffering, which the poet records as an outside observer. I do not vibe with this kind of romanticisation of rural life and working-class people either emotionally or politically, and I’ve definitely seen pastoral and deceptively simple and folksy poetry done more interestingly (by Robert Burns and Clemens Brentano, among others).

Overall, Rime of the Ancient Mariner is by far the most memorable piece in the collection, with The Dungeon, another Coleridge, and Tintern Abbey coming in as seconds. I can’t say that I regret reading Lyrical Ballads, but if I’m quite honest, I’ll likely have forgotten most of the poems in about a week. I think I just prefer my poetry to give me a little more to think about than Wordsworth has to offer, and in the absence of complex wordplay or structural intricacies, I at least need a suitably dramatic subject matter to tide me over. Unfortunately, most of the poems in Lyrical Ballads did not offer that.

Read if you like: narrative poetry, landscape and nature writing, a comprehensive education in the history of English poetry, the poets’ later works