Richard Gravil, Wordsworth: 'Lyrical Ballads'

This book places Wordsworth’s revolutionary poetic practice, in Lyrical Ballads, in the context of a revolutionary age. It deals mainly with the 1798 edition, but also covers selected poems from 1800.

The Ebook

Part 1, Life, Times, Themes sets Lyrical Ballads in the context of Wordsworth life and his age, for instance Wordsworth in France.
Part 2, Literary Strategies, considers Wordsworth’s provocative theories of how poetry should work, and includes a treatment of the famous ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads, one of the great poetic manifestos.
Part 3 offers illuminating commentary and questions on the following poems: ‘We are seven’, ‘Anecdote for fathers’, ‘Lines left upon a Seat in a Yew-tree’, ‘To my sister’, ‘Lines written in Early Spring’, ‘Expostulation and Reply’, ‘The Tables Turned’;, ‘The Female Vagrant’, ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill’, ‘The Last of the Flock’, ‘The Mad Mother’, ‘The Complaint of a forsaken Indian Woman’, ‘The Convict’, ‘Old Man travelling’, ‘Simon Lee’, ‘The Idiot Boy’, ‘TheThorn’, ‘Tintern Abbey’, ‘Hart-leap Well’, ‘There was a boy’, ‘Nutting’, ‘The Lucy Poems’, ‘The Brothers’ and ‘Michael’. Part 4: Critical Reception discusses contemporary, Victorian and recent critical approaches to Wordsworth and includes an annotated guide to further reading.

Richard Gravil

Richard Gravil's books include Romantic Dialogues: Anglo-American Continuities, 1776–1862 (St Martin’s, 2000), Wordsworth’s Bardic Vocation, 1787–1842 (Palgrave, 2003), and collections of essays on Swift, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the Nineteenth-Century Novel. He is an experienced guide, and Convenor of the famous Wordsworth Summer Conference and Winter School in Grasmere.

Other Formats

In Paperback from Troubador.co.uk at £5.99:

Troubador paperback : Lyrical Ballads

A PDF edition is available to library subscribers from MyiLibrary.com