PREFACE TO LYRICAL BALLADS

 The Lyrical Ballads came into existence in 1798 through the joint effort of Wordsworth and Coleridge. The volume opens with Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ and closes with Woodsworth’s ‘Lines Written about Tintern Abbey’. The volume has 23 poems but of which only four were written by Coleridge. The poems are illustrative of the characteristics of the romantic movement and are justifiably regarded as a great landmark in the history of English Literature.

By way of preface to the first edition of Lyrical Ballads, 1798, Wordsworth contributed a short ‘Advertisement’ that occupied only two pages of the present volume. In the second edition published in 1800, he supplied in its place a ‘Preface’ of considerable length of poetry in general and the principles of hi sown art. He thoroughly revised this preface for the third edition in 1802 and added to it substantially. It must therefore be dated 1800-1802. Late in life he again revised it; but the changes he then made, effect expression rather than matter.

Through his preface, Wordsworth tells us what he proposed in those poems, i.e., ‘to choose incidents and situations from common life and to relate or describe them throughout, as far as it was possible in a selection of language really used by men’.

‘Humble and rustic life was generally chosen, because in that condition, the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint and speak a plainer and a more emphatic language’.

Besides, ‘Being less under the influence of social vanity, they convey their feelings and notions in simple, unelaborated expressions’, consequently such language is ‘a more permanent and a far more philosophical language’.

Wordsworth then goes on toe discuss the issue of style. He says, ‘the reader will find that personifications of abstract ideas rarely occur in these volumes… They are, indeed a figure of speech occasionally prompted by passion and I have made use of them as such; but have endeavored utterly to reject them as a mechanical device of style, or as a family language, which writers in meter seem to lay claim to by prescription’.

Later on he goes on to say that language of a large portion of every good poem even of the most elevated character must be necessarily accept with reference to the meter, in no respect differ from that of good prose but likewise that some of the most interesting parts of best poems will be found to be strictly the languages of prose when prose is well written’.

Wordsworth next seems to clarify what is meant by the word poet to Wordsworth, ‘He is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endowed with more likely sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind; a man pleased with his own passions and violations and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him… To these qualities he has added a disposition to be effected more than other men by absent things as if they were present’.

Wordsworth also tries to bring out the dependence of man on nature. ‘He considered man and nature as essentially adapted to each other and the mind of man naturally the mirror of the fairest and the most interesting properties of nature’.

With regard to science he says, ‘the man of science seeks truth as a remote and unknown benefactor; he cherishes and loves it in its solitude, the poet, singing a song in which all human beings join with him, rejoices in the presence of truth as our visible friend and hourly companion. Poetry is the breadth and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassive expression which is in the countenance of all science… Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge. It is as immortal as the heart’.

At the close of the preface Wordsworth states that it is for the reader to see how far these things have been attained in the poems published in the lyrical ballads and more importantly whether it was worth attaining.

Describing the origin of lyrical ballads in his Biographia Literaria, Coleridge points out the kind of poetry the two poets had aimed at. In the poems of Coleridge the character and incidents ‘were to be imparted, at least supernatural’, yet, ‘possessing such human interest and assemblance of truth as to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith’. Wordsworth on the other hand was to deal with persons and objects of everyday life in such a way as to give them ‘the charm of novelty’ and to excite a feeling similar to the supernatural, by awakening the mind from ‘the lethargy of custom and directing it to the loveliness and wonder of the world before us’.