Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Lyrical Ballads: Critical Perspectives Book

"Lyrical Ballads" have always been wedded to controversy. Though the judgments of the periodicals and the ensuing authorial reaction have long since been superseded by a plethora of scholarly interpretations, the debate still focuses on their elusive, paradoxical character. Are the poems traditional or experimental, a random collocation or an organized sequence? Patrick Campbell surveys the critical fluctuations of nearly two centuries while privileging recent approaches which have sought fresh perspectives on the volume - contextual, formalist and genre based, psycho-analytic, materialist, maverick. "The Ancient Mariner", "Tintern Abbey", "The Thorn" and "The Idiot Boy" accorded individual treatment. The author then offers a personal interpretation of all the remaining poems and considers the vexed issue of the unity of "Lyrical Ballads" from a fresh perspective.Read More