Lyrical Ballads

In Our Time

BBC

History

4.6 • 9.2K Ratings

🗓️ 8 March 2012

⏱️ 42 minutes

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Summary

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Lyrical Ballads, the collection of poems by William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge first published in 1798. The work was conceived as an attempt to cast off the stultifying conventions of formal 18th-century poetry. Wordsworth wrote that the poems it contains should be "considered as experiments. They were written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purpose of poetic pleasure."Lyrical Ballads contains some of the best-known work by Coleridge and Wordsworth, including The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Tintern Abbey - and is today seen as a point of radical departure for poetry in English.With:Judith HawleyProfessor of Eighteenth-Century Literature at Royal Holloway, University of LondonJonathan BateProvost of Worcester College, OxfordPeter SwaabReader in English Literature at University College London.Producer: Thomas Morris.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use
0:05.4	Please go to bbc.co.uk forward slash radio for I hope you enjoy the program
0:12.4	Hello in September 1798 the Bristol firm of Bigs and Kotl
0:17.2	Printed a small volume of poetry entitled Lyrical Ballads with a few other poems
0:21.8	The book made no mention of the two young poets who had collaborated in his composition William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Colouridge
0:29.2	One earlier reviewer wrote in spite of their occasional vulgarity
0:33.6	Affectation and silliness the poems were undoubtedly characterized by a strong spirit of originality of
0:39.8	Pathos and natural feeling
0:42.3	Wordsworth and Colouridge were trying to do something entirely new
0:45.5	They wanted to eradicate formality from poetry and to revitalize the form with ordinary speech and everyday
0:52.4	situations Lyrical Ballads contains some of the best known work by both men including the rhyme of the ancient
0:58.5	Mariner and Tinton Abbey
1:00.7	Its four editions made Wordsworth and Colouridge famous and are often seen as a major turning point in English literature
1:06.7	With me to discuss the Lyrical Ballads, Adjudith Hawley, Professor of 18th Century Literature,
1:11.9	Adroyal Holloway, University of London, Jonathan Bait, Provost of Worcester College Oxford,
1:16.8	and Professor of English Literature at Oxford, and Peter Swab, leader in
1:20.9	Rida in English Literature at University College London, Jonathan Bait, Wordsworth's 28 when Lyrical Ballads were published
1:28.5	Can you give us, I'm sorry, the only rush, run down a bit early life
1:32.8	Okay, so he's born in 1770 in Cochamouth in the late district
1:37.9	His father works for a local aristocrat
1:40.6	His mother dies when he's eight
1:43.1	So he's sent off to a little village school at a place called Hawkshead where he begins to develop his love for the landscapes of the late district
	...

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