Wordsworth and Coleridge: Lyrical Ballads : Critical Perspectives

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 Though the judgments of the periodicals and the ensuing authorial reaction have long since been superseded by a plethora of scholarly interpretations, the debate still focuses on their elusive, paradoxical character.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.