A collection of poems that exemplifies the romantic aesthetic ideas, capturing their unique beauty through the revolutionary exploration of "emotion recollected in tranquility," the Lyrical Ballads by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, is curated with notes on the text by Michael Schmidt in the classic Penguin editions. Published in 1798, the Lyrical Ballads is a brilliant collaboration containing twenty-three poems by two artists, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge - two significant figures of English Romanticism. The volume heralded a new approach to poetry and expresses the poets' thoughts on humanity's relationship with the forces of the world. Coleridge's contribution includes the nightmarish vision of "The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere" and the imaginative poetic dialogue "The Foster-Mother's Tale," as well as the melancholy "The Nightingale." Wordsworth with "We are Seven" depicts the innocent optimism of a child in the face of stark mortality, while "Goody Blake and Harry Gill" and "Simon Lee" celebrate the simplicity and strength perceived in country folk, and "Tintern Abbey" explores the healing powers of nature.
This Penguin Classics edition allows readers to recover the full impact and force of the Lyrical Ballads, including notes on the history of the text by Michael Schmidt. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) has been criticized as a political traitor, an opium addict, and a plagiarist, whose ruined career left only a handful of magical early poems. However, his defining influence on the imagination is now generally recognized, and his position, alongside William Wordsworth (1770-1850), as two great forebears of the English Romantic spirit is assured. A great innovator, Wordsworth has permanently expanded the scope of English poetry both in subject matter and treatment.
