Reading Order
Lyrical Ballads Reading Order
Lyrical Ballads (1798; expanded 1800) by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge is one of the most important single volumes in the history of English poetry — the book that launched the English Romantic movement, and whose 1800 preface (by Wordsworth alone) remains the most important statement of Romantic poetic principles in English. The volume opens with Coleridge's 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' (the most ambitious poem in the collection, a Gothic supernatural narrative in the ballad form) and includes Wordsworth's 'Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey' (the most profound meditation on memory, nature, and the growth of consciousness in Romantic poetry) and many of Wordsworth's ballad-experiments in the language of ordinary people (the 'Simon Lee,' 'We Are Seven,' 'The Tables Turned,' 'Expostulation and Reply'). The collaboration was both productive and lopsided: Coleridge's contribution was one extraordinary poem and fragments; Wordsworth's was most of the rest. The famous preface to the 1800 edition — which argues that poetry should be written in 'the real language of men,' that its subject should be 'the permanent forms of nature,' and that the great subject of poetry is the relationship between the human mind and the natural world — redefined what English poetry could do and remains the foundational document of Romantic literary theory. Read alongside the Romantic poets who followed (Keats, Shelley, Byron), Lyrical Ballads is the root of the tradition.
Where to start
Lyrical Ballads (1798/1800) — the Penguin Classics edition edited by R.L. Brett and A.R. Jones (1963; revised 2005) is the best scholarly edition with the original texts and essential notes; the Routledge edition of the same editors is the most widely used in teaching. Read in order: 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' first, then Wordsworth's contributions in sequence, ending with 'Tintern Abbey.' Read the 1800 Preface after the poems, not before.
Complete Lyrical Ballads Book List
- 1Buy
Lyrical Ballads (Penguin Classics)
William Wordsworth and S.T. Coleridge (ed. R.L. Brett and A.R. Jones)·2005·The standard scholarly edition — Brett and Jones's introduction is the definitive account of the collection's genesis (the Wordsworth-Coleridge collaboration in Somerset, 1797–98) and the 1800 Preface's argument; essential notes on each poem. - 2Buy
The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (ed. E.H. Coleridge)·1912·The standard complete Coleridge — for readers who want to go beyond 'The Ancient Mariner' to 'Kubla Khan,' 'Christabel,' and 'Dejection: An Ode'; these three poems together show what Coleridge at his best achieved. - 3Buy
William Wordsworth: The Major Works (Oxford World's Classics)
William Wordsworth (ed. Stephen Gill)·2008·The best single-volume Wordsworth — includes all the Lyrical Ballads, The Prelude (1805), the Immortality Ode, 'Resolution and Independence,' and the major sonnets; Gill's introduction is the most authoritative short account of Wordsworth's career. - 4Buy
Biographia Literaria
Samuel Taylor Coleridge·1817·Coleridge's prose masterpiece and the critical companion to Lyrical Ballads — his account of the collaboration with Wordsworth, his definition of the imagination, and his critiques of Wordsworth's theory and practice are the most important Romantic critical texts; chapters 4 and 14 are essential. - 5Buy
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: A Graphic Novel
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (illus. Ed Young)·2011·For readers who find the original poem initially opaque — Ed Young's illustrations make the visual world of the poem accessible; a bridge to the text, not a substitute.
Lyrical Ballads — Frequently Asked Questions
What is in Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge?
Lyrical Ballads (1798) opens with Coleridge's 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' (a Gothic supernatural ballad about a sailor who shoots an albatross and must wander the earth telling his story as penance) and includes twenty-two poems by Wordsworth — ballad-experiments in 'the real language of men' about ordinary rural people and experiences ('Simon Lee,' 'We Are Seven,' 'The Tables Turned') — and ends with Wordsworth's 'Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey,' his great meditation on memory, nature, and the growth of consciousness. The 1800 second edition added a famous Preface by Wordsworth that remains the foundational statement of Romantic poetics.
What does Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads argue?
Wordsworth's Preface to the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads argues that poetry should be written in 'the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation' — as opposed to the artificial 'poetic diction' of the eighteenth century. Its subject should be 'incidents and situations from common life' (the rural poor, children, solitary wanderers) rather than aristocratic heroes; the mind of the poet, responding to 'the permanent forms of nature,' provides the deep subject of the poem; and 'emotion recollected in tranquillity' (not immediate passion) is the proper psychological source of poetry. This argument — that ordinary people and natural experience are proper subjects for serious poetry — redefined English literature for the century that followed.
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