Romantic Poetry

William Wordsworth and the Lyrical Ballads

• inspired by French Revolution - restricted government

• supporter of Revolution (‘A Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff’)

• 1793 Britain declares war on France, oppressive domestic atmosphere. 1793-95 - the Terror. Wordsworth supports France but feels betrayed by Terror. Fear of mob rule results, eventually, in a conservative position.

• Wordsworth claims to have had a mental breakdown. Evidence he was emotionally unsettled and depressed in early 1790s.

• 1797: annus mirabilis. Collaboration with Coleridge to produce Lyrical Ballads

Preface

• attempting to dismantle what was known before    

  • bound by rules and conventions, individuals imagination/experience overcomes

Subject matters; great heroes etc, are completely dismantled. Wordsworth’s work about common and direct experience, low subjects.

‘Incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as possible in a selection of language really used by men, and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect;’

Methods and Intentions; ‘For all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’

For Wordsworth, the stylistic and social projects of poetry are inexorably bound together. Lyrical Ballads makes a clear statement for the reconnection of poetic style to speech and ‘parole’ (language as actually used as a day-to-day)