Personal Perspectives: The ‘Other’ Lyrical Ballads

Abstract

It seems that whenever we pick up a book or article on Lyrical Ballads we encounter paradox. Hazlitt, whose remarks retain their freshness and percipience to this day, began the fashion by divining in the revolutionary origins of the volume a reaction to ‘servile imitation and tamest commonplace’, generating verse of ‘the utmost pitch of singularity and paradox’ (1818, 1944 edn, p. 247). Arnold felt that the route to Wordsworth’s psyche lay through his ‘paradoxes’. More recently Beer has confessed that the power of Lyrical Ballads remains ‘something of a puzzle’ (1978, p. 56), and Hartman has referred us to the ‘paradox’ of a mind unwilling to transcend natural fact (1964, p. 39). Colin Clarke has even gone so far as to entitle his study Romantic Paradox (1962).