Recommendations
Books Like Lyrical Ballads
Best books to read after Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge
Readers who love Lyrical Ballads — the founding text of English Romantic poetry, with the Ancient Mariner and Tintern Abbey — will enjoy these works of Romantic poetry, visionary writing, and the great tradition of poetry that transformed English literature in the nineteenth century.
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Buy on AmazonThe Prelude
by William Wordsworth
Wordsworth's masterpiece and the logical next step after Lyrical Ballads — the autobiographical poem that extends the concerns of the Ballads (nature, childhood, memory, imagination) into a vast architectural structure; the Prelude is what Lyrical Ballads was moving toward.
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Buy on AmazonThe Rime of the Ancient Mariner
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The greatest poem in Lyrical Ballads — if the collection sent you to Coleridge, the Rime demands its own reading: with Gustave Doré's illustrations, with the Gloss Coleridge added in 1817, and in the context of the other major Coleridge poems ('Kubla Khan,' 'Christabel,' 'Dejection').
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Buy on AmazonDon Juan
by Lord Byron
The Romantic long poem most different from Wordsworth's — Byron's comic epic is the anti-Prelude, attacking the solemnity and self-importance of Wordsworth's 'egotistical sublime' (Keats's phrase) with wit, satire, and narrative energy; reading both shows the full range of the Romantic movement.
- 4Buy on Amazon
The Odes of John Keats
by John Keats
The most concentrated achievement of Romantic poetry — Keats's Odes develop the concerns of Lyrical Ballads (the relationship between imagination and natural experience, the beauty of transient things) in the more compressed and intense form of the ode; essential reading in any sequence of Romantic poetry.
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Buy on AmazonSongs of Innocence and of Experience
by William Blake
Blake's visionary lyrics run parallel to Wordsworth and Coleridge rather than descending from them — Songs of Innocence (1789) predates Lyrical Ballads (1798) and represents a different but equally radical recasting of what poetry could do and say; essential for understanding the full range of the Romantic moment.
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Buy on AmazonBiographia Literaria
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Coleridge's prose masterpiece and the critical companion to Lyrical Ballads — his account of the collaboration with Wordsworth, his theory of the imagination, and his critiques of Wordsworth's poetic practice are the foundational documents of Romantic criticism.
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Buy on AmazonPrometheus Unbound
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
Shelley's Romantic lyrical drama takes the Promethean energy of Romantic poetry to its most visionary extreme — the liberation of humanity through the imagination; a natural companion to the Lyrical Ballads' redemptive vision of nature and the mind.
- 8Buy on Amazon
Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems
by John Keats
The 1820 collection that contains Keats's greatest narrative poems alongside the Odes — 'The Eve of St. Agnes' is the most perfect of English Romantic narrative poems; the whole volume shows Romantic poetry at its height of sensuous beauty.
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