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Lyrical Ballads

Duration:
45 minutes
First broadcast:
Thursday 08 March 2012

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Lyrical Ballads, the collection of poems by William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge first published in 1798. The work was conceived as an attempt to cast off the stultifying conventions of formal 18th-century poetry. Wordsworth wrote that the poems it contains should be "considered as experiments. They were written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purpose of poetic pleasure."

Lyrical Ballads contains some of the best-known work by Coleridge and Wordsworth, including The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Tintern Abbey - and is today seen as a point of radical departure for poetry in English.

With:

Judith Hawley
Professor of Eighteenth-Century Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London

Jonathan Bate
Provost of Worcester College, Oxford

Peter Swaab
Reader in English Literature at University College London.

Producer: Thomas Morris.

  • FURTHER READING

    M. H. Abrams, ‘The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition’ (1st pub. New York: Oxford University Press, 1953, lots of reprintings)

    Rosemary Ashton, ‘The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’ (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996)

    Jonathan Bate, ‘Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition’ (London: Routledge, 1991)

    Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Biographia Literaria’ (1817), esp. Chapter 14

    Richard Cronin, ‘Romantic Victorians: English Literature, 1824-1840’ (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002)

    David Bromwich, ‘Disowned by Memory: Wordsworth’s Poetry of the 1790s’ (University of Chicago Press, 1998)

    Stephen Gill, ‘William Wordsworth: A Life’ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989)

    Mary Jacobus, ‘Tradition and Experiment in Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads 1798’ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976)

    Michael Mason (ed.), ‘Lyrical Ballads’ (Longman Annotated Texts, 2007)

    Jon Mee and David Fallon (ed.), ‘Romanticism and Revolution: A Reader’ (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011)

    Stephen Parrish, ‘The Art of the Lyrical Ballads’ (1973)

    Seamus Perry, ‘Samuel Taylor Coleridge’ (London: British Library Press, 2003)

    David Simpson, ‘Wordsworth’s Historical Imagination’ (Routledge Kegan and Paul, 1987)

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