The Literature Book

110

See also: Songs of Innocence and of Experience 105

W

illiam Wordsworth

(1770–1850) and Samuel

Taylor Coleridge (1772–

1834) were two of the “Lake Poets,”

so called because they lived and

wrote in the inspirational setting

of England’s Lake District. The

friends collaborated on the Lyrical

Ballads, a collection of Romantic

verse with the ambition (stated

in the preface of the book’s second

edition of 1800) to “follow the fluxes

and refluxes of the mind when

agitated by the great and simple

affections of our nature.” In part

a reaction to the acute rationalism

of the industrial age, English

Romanticism (c.1790s–1830s) took

human experience, imagination,

nature, and individualistic freedom

as its inspiration.

Democratizing poetry

Lyrical Ballads starts with “The

Rime of the Ancient Mariner,”

Coleridge’s seven-part ballad with

otherworldly overtones: it was

agreed that supernatural poetry

with a “semblance of truth” would

be this writer’s remit. Wordsworth’s

brief was to give “the charm of

novelty” to everyday life and

awaken the reader to the loveliness

of the familiar. Both writers

believed that poetry should be

written in transparent, unadorned

language for the general populace,

with simple meter and rhyme, and

chose subject matter consistent

with this democratizing impulse:

the lives of uneducated rustic

folk, whose emotions were pure

and universal. Poems dealing

with royalty or lofty allegory were

replaced with themes of poverty,

crime, and madness.

Purity and reflection

Some of Wordsworth’s poems focus

on children, whom he thought lived

closer to nature and form a bond

with it—childhood being a time

of innocence, impulse, and play.

Most of the poems are deeply felt

rather than deeply thought, but

two have a more reflective manner:

Coleridge’s “The Nightingale,”

a conversational poem, and

Wordsworth’s “Lines written a

few miles above Tintern Abbey.” ■

POETRY IS THE BREATH

AND THE FINER SPIRIT

OF ALL KNOWLEDGE

LYRICAL BALLADS (1798–1800),

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH AND

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

IN CONTEXT

FOCUS

The English

Romantic poets

BEFORE

1794 William Blake’s Songs

of Innocence and of Experience

marks the early phase of

Romanticism, anticipating the

esteem placed by Wordsworth

on the purity of childhood and

giving a voice to society’s

marginalized figures.

AFTER

1818 Percy Bysshe Shelley’s

sonnet about the statue of

Ozymandias points to a

Romantic interest in the

insignificance of man.

1819 Romantic poetry’s link

with intoxicants, death, and

the imagination is expressed

in John Keats’s poem “Ode

to a Nightingale.”

1818–1823 Lord Byron’s Don

Juan—cynical, subversive,

and witty—undermines his

earlier Romanticism.

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