In Our Time - Lyrical Ballads

Episode Date: March 8, 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 HawleyProfessor of Eighteenth-Century Literature at Royal Holloway, University of LondonJonathan BateProvost of Worcester College, OxfordPeter SwaabReader in English Literature at University College London.Producer: Thomas Morris.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, in September 1798, the Bristol firm of Biggs and Cottle printed a small volume of poetry entitled Lyrical Ballads with a few other poems. The book made no mention of the two young poets who had collaborated in its composition,

William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. One early reviewer wrote, In spite of their occasional vulgarity, affectation and silliness, the poems are undoubtedly characterized by a strong spirit of originality, of pathos and natural feeling. Wordsworth and Coleridge were trying to do something entirely new. They wanted to eradicate formality from poetry and to revitalise the form with ordinary speech in everyday situations.

Lyrical ballads contains some of the best-known work by both men, including the rhyme of the ancient mariner and Tintan Abbey. Its four editions made Wordsworth and Coleridge famous and are often seen as a major turning point in English literature. With me to discuss the lyrical ballads at Judith Hawley, Professor of 18th Century Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London, Jonathan Bate, provost of Worcester College, Oxford, and Professor of English Literature at Oxford,

and Peter Swarve, leader in English literature at University College London. Jonathan Bate, Wordsworth's 20,000. 28, when lyrical ballads were published, can you give us, I'm sorry, but fairly brisk run down of his early life? Okay, so he's born in 1770, in Cockermouth in the Lake District. His father works for a local aristocrat. His mother dies when he's eight, so he's sent off to a little village school at a place called Hawkshead,

where he begins to develop his love for the landscapes of the Lake District. Then at 13, his father dies, and it's very important that he's an orphan. he's very close to his sister Dorothy, but they're separated because of the parents' death. He goes to Cambridge, doesn't really get on very well. But a key moment in his life occurs when in the summer vacation, when he's 20, he goes on a walking tour to the Alps

and walks straight into the French Revolution. 1789, of course, was a storming of the Bastille. So the French Revolution is a key fact in the background there. He comes back, doesn't really find work, doesn't have much money, starts writing a bit of poetry, goes down to the West Country, meets up with Coleridge, that becomes a crucial friendship, is reunited with Dorothy.

And when we get to 1798, when lyrical ballads is written, they're down in Somerset, Wordsworth and his sister are renting a house, Coleridge is living nearby. Can we just go back to that expedition to France? He went to Cambridge, he started very strongly, not only was he separated from his sister, one year younger, but four brothers.

They were farmed out to different families, so the family is completely split up, which mattered a lot to him. And as you say, the Lake District began. He writes of it in terms of the bosom, and it becomes a sort of mothering influence. That's called so there. Never mind, it's a bit California,

but let's leave it at that for the moment. When you went to France, he's in the revolution, and it took him into a radical view of politics for a while that influenced what he did in the next few years. Can you just emphasise out a little bit more, Jonathan? Yeah, that's really important because he goes more than once. So he first goes on that walking tour

and has a real sense of new hope in politics in life. But then he goes back the following year, stays in France, and he actually meets a French girl. They have an affair. She gets pregnant. And he becomes very close to a man called Michel Bopuis there, who was a real sort of radical activist. So he's very much swept up in the new revolutionary ideas of the age.

However, on his way back home, he passes through Paris shortly after the September massacres, the brutal massacre of aristocrats. So he sees how revolution turns to violence. So from that early stage, he has a very sort of ambivalent idea. He's in favour of the radical politics, but he also sees the terrible end that can come from them. And these two things play out over the next few years. but let's hold on to Wordsworth, the Democrat, as he became known, in small circles when he came back. He wasn't very well known about anything at all, and he had enough hour then it was relatively known a child, Caroline,

which was not made public until 1915. Judith Hawley, let's send a Coleridge, who was a couple of years younger than Wordsworth. Can you tell us a bit about his background? His background is similar in that he was born in the countryside, he was born in Devon, and he lost a parent at a crucial moment. his father, who was a vicar and schoolmaster, died when he was nine, and his family decided to send him to Christ's hospital, which was a charity school for orphans.

And this was a matter of kind of shame, really, for the family, that he should be sent away to school, which wasn't really appropriate for somebody who wasn't orphaned. He had this experience of being separated from his family, like Wordsworth, and also of never really fitting in and never really being appreciated. He had very good schooling, but he was also very drawn to his own subjects. He read a lot of philosophy and theology from quite an early age, also a lot of imaginative literature. So he didn't really follow the school curriculum, so he was sometimes punished for not having kept up with his studies.

The same sort of thing happened when he went to Cambridge. He went to Cambridge in 1790. He was at Jesus College, and he did actually hear about Wordsworth, from Wordsworth, brother Christopher, so he knew that there was this clever young poet. But also he felt that he didn't really fit in at Cambridge. He didn't like the curriculum. He won prizes for poetry in his first year, but after that his studies went pretty much awry. In fact, his whole life became rather a mess. He had several kind of personal crises. He became interested in both international politics, the French Revolution and local politics. The sort of internal battles within the university system

came up against trouble with authority. He was also in love with someone at this time. He just didn't know what to do with his life. And he brought into debt too. And at several points he kind of ran away from Cambridge. At one point he went to London and joined up under the assumed name of Silas Tompkins Cumberbatch and was prepared to fight against the French,

though he did in many ways, Lightworth would support the ideals of the French Revolution. When he finally left Cambridge, he went like Wordsworth on walking tours. He's a great walk over long distances. Walking and talking were very important in his life. And he ended up in the West Country, not sure what he's going to do,

but setting up radical newspapers, thinking about becoming a freelance lecturer. Well, just as I did with John and actually, it's to go back to the French Revolution again because this, it's difficult, often I think, to imagine the past. And this was a colossal impact on everybody in this country when it turned into a war, but before then on the intellectuals,

because this was, Europe was an intellectual flame. It was a furnace, and these young men were seizing it and going one way or another. Can you just tell us a bit more? And he was very rebellious at Cambridge. He got the equivalent of sent down. He got in, as you say, great debt. He went with a lot of prostitutes.

He was all over the place, but still being thought of as a brilliant young man. He was a brilliant young man. With a group of friends, he used to meet in the evenings and discuss the latest political pamphlet. And his friend would say, well, there's no point as actually buying these pamphlets because Colerich had got them in the morning, read them and learnt them off by heart.

He really did involve himself. He lived in his mind much more than most people. So the ideas were crucial to him, these ideas of freedom. So what did he take from the French Revolution? He took a sense of social and experimentation, and this is something he tried to put into place in his life. His relationship with Coleridge and Dorothy wasn't also a kind of social experiment. He also met Robert Sothe when he was wandering in the West Country

and formed an idea of setting up a pantisocracy, a kind of democracy, really, a democratic experiment where 12 young men and women would go out to America and form an ideal community. So there's some real utopian thinking that he gets in the French Revolution. And he sort of married in order to do it, didn't he? That's right. Suddenly had married one of the Fricker sisters. So he married the other one, which is a bit of a pattern in his life.

You know, falling in love with his best friend's sister-in-law. It becomes a bit of a problem for him. So there's political experiment, but also this sense of social experiment. Through living your life in a certain way, you're acting out these ideals. We can talk about the panisocracy for a moment to do because, again, we're talking about high idealism, very, very, very bright young men. Aemeless as well. I mean, they wanted to be poets, but they didn't know how to make any sort of living.

So the pandisocracy was more than just a little idea. They worked it all out. They worked it all out. On the banks of the Susquehanna. That's right. So Sothe and Coleridge worked it out while they're in retreat from Cambridge, and they thought of 12 young men and 12 young women. They fell into difficulty when they had to decide,

well, does that mean that can we all bring servants? And are the servants part of this democracy, or are they of a lower class? And the scheme also came awry when he went back to Cambridge and started telling his idealistic friends about it and they just picked so many holes in the idea that it was put to bad really. Peter Swab, so we've got these two people coming, one from the north, one from the south-west,

they went to Cambridge, although they didn't meet, and there's enough similarities. They land up in the West Country, thank goodness, neighbours, thank goodness, and Coleridge leaps over the fence when he goes to see Wordsworth and his sister renting this cottage. Can you tell us,

us about that meeting and what came from it? Yes, Wordsworth and Coleridge had met briefly in 1795 and then corresponded in 1796, but the story really begins in 1797 when Wordsworth briefly visits Coleridge in Somerset and then Coleridge comes to see Wordsworth and Dorothy in Dorset. As you say, he leaps over a fence and bounds down a partless field and they always remembered that as a, kind of emblem of his warmth and of affectionate impulse, and it was a kind of emblem and herald of how the friendship would turn out. After three weeks with Wordsworth and Dorothy, Coleridge prevailed on them to come and stay near him and his family.

He was married with a small child near Nether Stowe, and he arranged a rental of a cheap rental of a fairly large house nearby. And in a way to follow up what Judith was saying, The Pantic Cretic notion is coming ever closer to home, that it starts in an idea in North America, then Coleridge is planning to set that up with Salih in Wales. And in a way, Coleridge, with the tremendous charm and charisma he had at the time, managed to create these kind of communities around him or various like-thinking, high-minded people, who, again, following up the French revolutionary point,

they were all identified with progressive and indeed dangerously radical politics and a government spy was sent who called them a set of violent Democrats, which had been much truer two or three years earlier than it was in 1797, but it shows in a way how high the political temperature was at the time that that could be the case. And so we have these, they had a very, for this spell, they had an extraordinary powerful intellectual affection, and a friendly, a friendship affection, didn't they? They lived in each other's pockets.

Can you just tell a little bit more? Because it really is important how close they were. Coleridge and... And there's Dorothy, though. There's Worzworth and Dorothy in Coleridge. And Sarah, Fricker, his wife, doesn't get much of a mention, but she was a formidable woman, I think, and the little Hartley, Larl Hartley, their child.

And then the others who came in and out. Yes, it's a culture that puts a high value on male friendship. and Coleridge, especially in previous friendships with people like Charles Lamb, Charles Lloyd and John Thelwell, the ardor and intensity of his correspondence is, you know, is very striking. It's very high-minded, I think. With Wordsworth, it's a little bit like Lennon and McCartney meeting. You know, they're both partly orphans.

They have a strong, creative affinity, and they meet at this terribly important moment in each other's lives. For Coleridge, Wordsworth is. someone by whom he said he felt fully understood. I'm afraid with a little bit of a glance at perhaps his wife not doing that for all her merits. For Wordsworth... You didn't understand her very well either, frankly, did he?

No, indeed. No, especially as time went on, and that's part of this story of a kind of defection from the family to the Wordsworth circle. Wordsworth, in a way, the recognition that he received from Coleridge, who, even in 1796, thought him the best of... poet of the age, you know, remarkably kind of prescient judgment.

I think after some years of uncertainty and wandering for wordsworth in political journalism and other fields, Coleridge validated his sense of his vocation as a poet, that's what he should do, that nothing mattered more than poetry, and it gave him a direction for the rest of his life. And there was his Coleridge admired words of great, consistent high-mindedness, his fruged, living, his concentration, Wordsworth has dazzled as so many people were, but understood more than was dazzled by Coleridge's range of brilliance. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, at this point, Wordsworth had published a couple of Loco descriptive poems, but poems about his travels

in 1793, the Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches, but he wasn't tremendously known, and his career thereafter, he had some important unpublished work, but Colerner, but Colerner, is much more the known and recognised figure, especially as a political journalist and also as a poet who'd had a book out in 1796, a collaboration with Lamb and Lloyd. He was a collaborator by nature. Okay, well, so that's the background.

Jonathan Bate, we're coming to the writing and the liturical balance. How did it come about? Why did they want to do it? Can you just talk about it? Yeah, so we've got them together, 1797, 1798. They're writing all sorts of work, thinking about different ways of publishing it. There's quite a few long poems they're both writing. But then they decide they want to go to Germany.

Germany, a place where there's an enormous amount of new thinking going on. Kodridge has come into a little bit of money from a patron, the Wedgwood family, Wedgwood pottery. But Wordsworth hasn't got any money. So they decide, in order to finance the trip to Germany for the Wordsworth, for William and Dorothy, they need to get a book into print. So they put together a collection of mostly short poems that Mostly Wordsworth has been writing in these months, early 1798, and they get it published.

But Wordsworth hasn't really got quite enough poems to make up a full volume. So they include a handful of Coleridge's poems. one of the poems that they've been working on together discussing the idea for it and then Kola Ridge writing it is the famous Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner. And that's a good long poem, so that would fill up a fair bit of a volume, then a whole bunch of short lyrics by Wordsworth. They're still right up to the last minute debating which poems to put in, so they go on a, the Wordsworth go on a walking tour up the Y Valley,

and he writes a wonderful poem, just a little bit upstream from the ruin of Tintan Abbey. And that's put in at the very, very last minute. Lyrical Ballads was almost published without Tintan Abbey. So the book ends up a real sort of mishmash anthology, beginning with the ancient mariner, ending with Tintan Abbey, and with a bunch of other poems in the middle, published in 1798, although actually by the time it comes into print,

they've set off to Germany. It has an advertisement, a two or three page intro, where they state their aims and then in the second volume their words really states its aims and the aims plus the poems are one of the big changing factors in literature in the English language

but in this first one can you just give us two or three sentences from what he calls the advertisement? Yeah, so this is like a short manifesto for what they're trying to do one thing they're trying to do is to get away from what he calls the giddy and inane phraseology

of existing poetry. This was an age, when poets tended not to call a fish a fish, but to call it a member of the Finney tribe. So getting rid of that kind of circumlocution. And so goes on, you know. Peretic. You have writers like that now, no.

Peretic elevation. They want a selection of the real language used by men, but the language used by men and women in a state of vivid sensation. I think that phrase vivid sensation is very important because what they're saying is, Poetry needs to be about strong feeling, powerful feeling. And then the other thing they want to say is we want to write poems about ordinary people, middle-class people, lower-class people.

And, of course, that element ties in with the linking of them to democratic and revolutionary ideas. Also, Julia Thorley, they described it as experimental. Yes, it's an experiment to ascertain how far the language of the middle and lower classes is adapted to their purposes of poetic pleasure. Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, we've had the Pantysocracy as an experiment in living, and now they're seeing that their poetry can live in a new way with new subject matter and a new language coming from that subject matter. And they really push it, don't they? They are saying, in the advertisement they say,

we know you won't like this. Yes. But hold on, keep reading, because this isn't what you're used to, but what you're used to is inane. Yes. Yes, the taste of the ages is corrupt. And I think we must distinguish between this advertisement, which was really only one page in 1798, and then the much longer preface that comes in the two-volume publication of 1800,

where they really push it. This title, lyrical ballad, which is a wonderful title, is contradictory, isn't it? It's almost an oxymoron. The lyric and the ballad cut in two different directions. They're both forms of song, in a way, but they come from very different places. The lyric is a classical genre,

and it would originally have been a song sung to the liar. So it has high culture associations and it's also becoming associated with personal expression, the voice of the poet and the poet's own feelings. The ballad, on the other hand, also a song, but it's a song of the common people, and it's very often narrative, and it also has a specific form and meter.

It's a four-line stanza with alternating lines of four and three syllables and rhyming on alternate lines. So bringing the two together, you get something quite different. I think this is also part of their experiment. They're choosing the kinds of songs that the middle and lower classes would have sung,

often about themselves, but they're elevating them into a new, much more subjective and higher poetic form, a more complex, sophisticated poetic form. Peter Swar, can we push these comments about language a little bit further? Can you even maybe give us some examples about the language of the lyrical ballads, which is proving the points that Judas has been making?

Yes, well, some of the poems are given by, you know, dramatically imagined speakers, you know, as a note about one of them being an old sea captain, and some of the time we shouldn't think of the speaker as being words with himself, but as somebody who speaks in a particularly kind of sometimes bald and daring and a mode from oral culture. For instance, in the thorns and lines that became notorious, he says, I've measured it from side to side, tis three foot long and two foot wide,

which wordworth was much derided for. I think they're great lines because the narrator is obsessed by the idea that everything looks like and is the size of the grave of a baby that was strangled. but they're not very dignified lines. Or again, in a wonderful poem, The Idiot Boy, in which the narrator is a very high-spirited, buoyant, slightly buffoonish kind of figure. It's a very free and comic poem,

even though Wordsworth is not generally thought of that way. I think Coleridge helped him be comic sometimes. It has lines like the Owlitz Hoot, the Owlitzker, and Johnny's lips, they bur, bur, bur, bur, and on he goes beneath the moon. Johnny is the idiot boy, a kid with Down syndrome of the title. And it's one of the poems where people were offended in a way that the poet was giving his own poetic speech to somebody who could have been brought so much socially lower,

problematic out of it. This ruffled feathers, didn't it, this plain language. When you realise that in the poem, which I didn't know when I read it was at school, Later, this was a child with Down syndrome and the mother was in a frantic, almost hysterical, having to send him on a message that he wasn't capable of going on, really, while she went and tried to help somebody who was very, very ill.

The tension underneath that is terrific. Can you realise the boy was lost and ecstatically happy at the same time on this moonlit ride? It's a wonderful poem in that the boy is both a figure of some kind of poetic inspiration in that his happiness and his goodness and his good, transcend any explanation and there are a kind of oneness with this world with which

he's mysteriously in harmony. But at the same time, it's a story of his incapacity and of suffering and difficulty. When I say it's a comic poem, it's not so much that it's full of laughs, but that Wordsworth has imagined a world in which

things will work out all right. That's one of the natures of comedy, that it's forbearing and forgiving and in a way, in a much less tragic way than some of the poems, it's celebrating a harmony between human lives and natural world. I think one of the wonderful things that 1798

Wordsworth Lyrical Ballads poems do is show you different ways of looking at the world, looking at the world through different eyes, and particularly those of children. So at the end of that poem, the Down syndrome boy says, off his moonlit ride, the cock did crow to woo to woo,

the sun did shine so cold, sort of seeing the owl as the cock, the nightbird as the daybird, the sun and the moon. And there's a sense the boy sees natural phenomena whole, whereas we as adults divide things up. And the same thing happens in this other wonderful poem, We Are Seven, where the narrator encounters this little girl in a churchyard. How many are you in your family? And she says, well, there's seven of us. There's three of us here at home and two away at sea and two there below the ground. And the adult says, well, wait a minute, if two are dead, you're five.

And she says, no, we're seven. She doesn't see a division between the living and the dead. She sees everything whole. And it is that child's eye view that both led to the poems being mocked, but also mean that they are extraordinarily original. We're going to move on to say. But we can't not say a few words about the rhyme of the Asian mariner and Tintanavi, which might be one of the greatest poems

that words other than anybody else actually wrote with the lines that are extraordinary. To have two absolute women, I'm sorry to be so coarse. It is extraordinary, isn't it? These two young fellas. You're right, No, Vin. I mean, you know, if we list that, the heart doesn't.

It will turn up with two of the great poems in the English language in this little slim volume. They've knocked together to make a bit of cash to go abroad. Wonderful. Tintanabi, I always think Tintanabby must be one of the few other poems because it isn't really a lyrical ballad. It is a deeply philosophical reflection about memory, about the relationship between humankind and environment,

about the way in which we're shaped by our surroundings, but also by the people that are close to us, because one of the crucial things about that poem is that the memory of the place is more dear to Wordsworth because his dear sister, Dorothy, is with him. And that sense of the community, and again and again, this idea of friendship and sort of family comes back in these poems. In that short poem, he goes from, it tells,

it's gone back to, it's very simple, isn't it? It goes back down this river, has been there before. He's with his sister and she's got the eyes he had before. It's very simple. It's not all that long. Then he goes from just describing it to profound notions about the relationship between mankind and nature. It just swoops in. Judith.

It's a poem that still makes, every time I read it, I want to read it out loud, and it makes the hairs in the back of my neck stand up. He's meditating on his past and, looking at this natural scene and think about the people who live in nature. He has these wonderful moments like, for I have learnt to look on nature, not as in the hour of thoughtless use,

but hearing oftentimes the still sad music of humanity. It's like that vision of wholeness that Peter Swab mentioned, written in The Idiot Boy, and you find it both in the very simple, but also in the most sophisticated philosophical aspects. Peter. Yeah, it's the claims that were, Words makes for his relation to nature in that, I think, are also, it was a very celebrated poem,

and I think they struck people as being remarkable that other 18th century poets had talked about harmony between man and nature and kind of, you know, that being a sign of the divine order. But Wordsworth talks about nature as the anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, the guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul of all my moral being. They're extraordinarily high-pitched, claims that of in a way he's thinking of himself as a prodigal son who's wandered in these 1790s moments and nature has rescued him but it's the soul of all his moral being

along though with that sense of a tremendously high and redeeming relationship there's a constant worry that it's provisional and not to be relied on and it's a poem about nature never did betray the heart that loved her he said And that word betray is rather striking. It brings into question the idea that it's not something you can count on, that because nature is alive, the relationship is changing,

and Wordsworth's feelings about it are always kind of checked by the provisional. But the idea of looking in for moral teaching and for learning, it's encapsulated in again in the political balance in expostulation and reply, in one stanza, one impulse from a Bernal Ward may teach you more of man than, moral evil and of good, and all the sages can. The moral evil and of good. We've got to move on. And we haven't, we haven't got to, I mean, everybody knows,

Ryan Biotr. Second edition, Jonathan, I'm sorry to ask you to do the sprint, but there you go. Publisten 8,100, this is the great preface. This, as much as the work themselves at the time, alerted people, especially other young poets, something new was going on. And they had to take, pay attention to this. Yeah, I mean, the preface is now,

think of it very much as the manifesto of the romantic movement. As you say, time is short, but two key phrases in it, wonderfully sort of paradoxical. One, the idea, all good poetry comes from the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. I mean, that's a kind of encapsulation of what we now call romanticism. But also, Wordsworth goes on to speak of emotion recollected in tranquility. So there's that sense that you have the moment of inspiration, the powerful feeling. That's what gives you the germ of the poem. But to create a good poem, you need that little bit of distance. You need the emotion recollected in tranquility. Recollection is going to be an absolutely crucial theme for Wordsworth. And Judith Fawley, we've missed out a third person,

and that's Dorothy Wordsworth, and it isn't over-remanticizing, it isn't political correctness. Wordsworth relied on her a very great deal for, as an emotional reservoir, for companionship, but also from what she wrote in her diary and what she said. He took stuff from her diary, very straightforwardly, most daffodils is the obvious one, and turned it into poetry, or didn't just copy it out of it. Anyway, and Coleridge was also profoundly impressed by her,

so can you put Dorothy in there? Dorothy is very much the third term. Wordsworth and Dorothy loved each other. They simply loved each other, whatever kind of love it was. It was a very powerful love. Corridge loved her too. I think. And it's interesting that

both courage and words with, and other people who knew Dorothy in these early years use the same word for her. They kept referring to her wild eyes. And it doesn't mean that she's crazy, though sadly later on she does lose her wit, but that she's wild like nature. She's absolutely in touch with

nature. And in her on these long walks and conversations and then later on in the journal she started to keep from those early days in Somerset, her records of her perceptions of nature became crucial to both of them. Now, phrases recur from her journals

and they reappear in poems by both words with and courage. It's hard to say exactly that words were in the oven evening would pick up her journal and say, what can I take from your journal and turn it into a poem? But it's that sense of her as a reservoir of responses to nature. And possibly the phrases come out of conversations between the three of them.

But he always returns to her as this kind of source of what's good. Peter Swarpe, the second edition we've talked two years later. Can you just develop a little from what Jonathan Bates said? What are the major differences between these two editions? Well, there's some textual ones in the second edition is attributed to William Wordsworth and it becomes a collection by him with some poems by a friend.

The ancient mariner is, it was in archaic spelling, it was ancient with a Y and Mariner with an E at the end, but he modernises it partly because it had been criticised. But I think in a way the most important thing that happens is that when Wordsworth and Dorothy and Coleridge go to Germany, as was spoken of earlier, it inaugurates for Wordsworth. It's kind of thought from abroad of what home meant.

And volume two of the poems is much more about the Lake District. Volume one is more set in the West Country. Volume 2 has poems like the brothers and Michael and the famous Lucy poems that are set in the lakes and that in a way prepare for the Wordsworths and the Colerages to live there together. I think the other thing to say about the second volume is how much more it's about death and memorialisation.

It's about many, many of the poems are dealing with the fact of mortality and that mortality isn't the final or devilism. otherstating news in human life? Yeah, I mean, I think the return to the Lake District is crucial. This is the moment when Wordsworth really feels at last he's gone home. He's found his home. There's a really important sequence he includes in the second volume,

the 1800 volume, a series called Poems on the Naming of Places, which just take very, very particular little local places around Grasmere where he's made his home at Davk Cottage and the associations of those places with this, group of friends and family. And we have his greatest poem by Dawn and the shepherd, whose son goes to London, leads a dissolute life he'd never heard from again

and Michael never lifted up a single star and so on. And you have the lucid bones which are extremely mysterious and again extraordinary simple. He manages that doesn't he? He gets simplicity and profundity in such a short space. Judith Hawley, can you tell us how this collection was received? Well the 1798 single volume edition received about 10 reviews, most of which were positive. Only three of them weren't positive.

A lot of the poems in that first edition were on themes which were appearing in other poems at the same period. A lot of people were writing about simple folk, but not necessarily in this profound way. It's the prefaces of 1800 and the revised preface in 1802 which really kick up a fuss. And also these poems on the nameings of places, people can't really understand so much what's going on. The responses are very mixed. There are people who love them. John Wilson writes a fan letter to words saying how great it is.

A lot of people do like them. But the two volume prelude, sorry, two volume, lyrical ballads, people come back to again and again as a problem. There's a famous review by Francis Geoffrey, not actually of the lyrical ballads. That's 1807.

But it looks back to the advertisement of 1798, which got up people's nose is this experiment about the middle and lower classes. And it really, the later volumes were much more controversial than the first edition.

Could be argued that Francis Jeffery's Savage Review in the Edinburgh Review was the best thing that happened because it meant that the poets who hated that particular kind of reviewer with reason. It steeled of their sinews

to rally around a man who became for a while their champion, which was by Shelley and Keats. And not just a man. Jeffrey coined the phrase the lake school. So you now have this whole, this class of poets, this group, a coterie. And that's what you need for a revolution.

I think that's the crucial thing that Jeffrey does, doesn't he, he coins the idea of the lake poets. And it's interesting, the language he uses in writing about Wordsworth Coderidge, Salvey. He keeps calling them a brotherhood or a fraternity. And what's happening there, of course, is in a way, it's going back to the political point. Remember the three principles of the French Revolution, liberty, equality. The one we maybe forget about is fraternity. But all these ideas of the brotherhood of Wordsworth and Coleridge, it's in that respect that it remains a revolutionary project.

And also by 1807, the mood, the temper of the country has moved on. I mean, France was an inspiration for young people because of liberty and fraternity. We were at war with them. We were building all sorts of fortifications along the South Coast. We were frightened that Napoleon was going to come and get us, really. I mean, people dreamt of, had nightmares about him and so on. Peter Saul. In a way, you know, Jeffrey belatedly takes up the challenge of the preface to the lyrical ballads,

which he calls it an act of hostility. And in a way he's retaliating with a sort of counter-manifesto that poetry shouldn't visit the lower and middle orders of society in rustic life, that actually social hierarchy is unproblematic and that it's merely stroppy, and duchily continental of these seditious and indeed punicious poets to be writing in ways that express both a foolish discontent that's so problematic in times of war and he also talks about it as a perverse system of affected simplicity. We are talking about influence, Jews Hollywood.

We're talking about a very few, even by the standards of the day, a few sales, 500 of the first, as I understand. And although they're in four editions, they're very small editions. It was the faith of a couple of publishers and it was the faith of a few readers that kept it knocking along for quite a while. Yes, that's right.

I mean, most people during this period are reading long satires or religious poems. They're not reading slim volumes of lyrics about country folk. The importance of the lyrical ballads really comes into being later in the 19th century

and in retrospect, where now it seems very much that the preface is a manifesto, that this is a school of poets, and that there's such a thing as romanticism with the capital R, but that's really much later. Can we, Jonathan,

can we actually find a defining area in which this influence had its influence? What a clumsy question. But you know what I'm saying? Why did Keats and Shelley and others like them, and to a certain extent, the early baron, like Wordsworth so much at that time, want to, you know, adore him and follow him and so on.

Well, I think the place to start on this, Marvin, is your friend and mine, William Hazlitt, who as a young man, stayed... My first acquaintance with Perth. Yeah, he stayed with Wordsworth and Cohnridge when these poems were being written. He was an ardent young man, and he said it was like the dawning of spring,

hearing these poems being read aloud. Haslett went on and became the centre, of a new radical literary culture during the Regency period, Keats goes to Haslitt's lectures, everybody's reading Haslitt's essays. And one of those essays, called my first acquaintance with poets, is for listeners, it's the best possible introduction to why those lyrical ballads poems seemed so new,

so extraordinary to any young person interested in ideas and poetry. So it's these few people, particularly has getting hold of the right end of the stick, and hitting the public with it that drove them towards the poetry? I think so, absolutely. Peter Swam. I think it's also an inspiration for the next generation of great poets, partly in a way through the attacks that reconstitute Wordsworth and Coleridge's great voices of freedom, even though they seem to have moved to the right there.

So, you know, Keats's Isabella, for instance, is a late lyrical ballad, or Shelley's Mask of Anarchy might be thought that way, and Shelley's Alastore is like the Immortality Ored, which is like Tintan Abbey. Even Byron has a phase when he looks to nature for the same kinds of meanings as Wordsworth. And I think the philosophical intensity

with which they look to nature for a sense of what's ultimate and meaningful in human life. And also as a contradiction to reason which is turning to terror in the French Revolution as they see it. I think that's right, isn't it? In a way, the culture of the feelings

is something which is put forward in lyrical ballads as a profoundly unifying thing that we have all of us one human heart, even the strange derelict characters who feature in this collection. There's mad mothers, idiot boys, the stricken, the forsaken, the destitute, that it becomes a big influence,

I think, on the Victorian novel too, and on Dickens and George Eliot, the sense of the wisdom and depth in children and in other outsiders. How, Jude, just to pursue this as we, how does, as it were, the derisory these like poets from you,

turn into the remorse? romantic movement, which is the crucible for so much that happens, and he's still happening in English literature. Well, again, this idea, the romantic movement is partly a retrospective construction, because although Byron and Shelley are interested in early Wordsworth, they wouldn't class themselves with him. They're not sympathetic to Wordsworth much later on. So some of it is, I don't mean in any way to devalue what they were doing and what they were

saying the wonderful poems, but in some ways it is a Victorian construction once we move into a much more industrialised age and a much more utilitarian philosopher, you have people like John Stuart Mill who was having a nervous breakdown read Wordsworth and it brought him back to life again

the sense of Holmes. It became his therapy. And I think that's that sense of they themselves become the reservoir of good feeling much later on. And again not wanting to devalue them, but they become part of the school curriculum and the university curriculum,

which keeps them going in a way that they wouldn't have done if we look and see what people were really reading at the time. Well, we didn't even get around to the ancient mariner properly. And well, there's another program, though, Jonathan. I think we can catch a one, well, there's three of you. We'll see you. Thank you very much, and there for burbling. Thank you very much to Jonathan Bates, Judith Hawley and Peter Swarb.

Next week we'll be talking about Vitruvius, who wrote about Roman architecture about 2,000 years ago. Thank you for listening. Thank you for listening to this Radio 4 podcast. If you've enjoyed it, you might like to try others like it, such as Start the Week or Thinking Aloud, which are both available from the Radio 4 website.