Experimenting with the Blog

The syllabus encourages novel use of the blog. So here's a post-apocalyptic poem I wrote while readying Alas Babylon and listening to one of my favorite bands.

Out of the Darkness, I held a Record

Capital C, Capital C, Capital R

Concussed by Hope run the course of Decay

The others looked on with Twilight Eyes

The Greatest Music of an Era Past

Was sure to strike a change in their Lives

So let the midnight Special Shine a light on me

And forgot good and well

The torment of the fire’s spell

Also, don't ask what twilight eyes are. I don't know. 

I am a fan of The Preface

Although many people found the preface to be somewhat unnecessary and even contradictory to the Lyrical Ballads, I found to be helpful. To know the authors intentions in writing a work and the process gives one greatest insight into the work itself. I sometimes struggle with interpreting the true meaning of a piece, and the preface really broke it down. I realize that it was rather long and wordy, as WORDSworth often is, but overall I appreciated it. It gave something more to the poems that would have been lost otherwise. It is also neat, since Wordsworth lived so long ago, to hear directly from him his writing process and intentions instead of figuring it out yourself.

Sidenote- I have very much enjoyed reading the Lyrical Ballads.

Lyrical Ballads 1798

Lyrical Ballads Presentation:1798

Lyrical Ballads 1798 Edition
William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge
An Incredibly Brief Overview of Wordsworth’s Life

Born on April 7, 1770 in Cockermouth, Cumbria, England
His mother died when he was 8. This shaped much of his literary work
His love for poetry was formed in grammar school
Before his final semester at Cambridge, Wordsworth took a walking tour of Europe, which influenced many of his poems and political views.
After experiencing part of the French Revolution, Wordsworth became in the plight of the “common man”.
Wordsworth fathered a child out of wedlock during his tour of France. In 1802, Wordsworth returned and married Mary Hutchinson. Together they had 5 children. Wordsworth spend many of his remaining years in Rydal Mount in England. After the death of Wordsworth daughter Dora in 1847, he seemed to lose all interest in composing poetry.
He died on April 23, 1850.

Another Incredibly Brief Overview of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Life

Born on October 27, 1772
His father married twice and had fourteen children. Coleridge was the youngest
His father wanted him to be a clergyman. Coleridge enrolled in Jesus College, University of Cambridge in 1791 and aimed for a career in the Church of England.
Coleridge suffered from chronic rheumatic pain. His doctor prescribed him laudanum.
Coleridge married Sarah Fricker in 1795. It was a very unsuccessful marriage, and Coleridge spent most of the marriage apart from his wife.
In 1795 Coleridge met William Wordsworth, who influenced much of his literary work.
In 1808, Coleridge moved in with Wordsworth and his wife. Coleridge moved out two years later because a comment Wordsworth made about his dependability. Coleridge later moved in with James Gillman and stayed there until he died from heart and lung problems.

Wordsworth and Coleridge Together

They met in 1795 after Coleridge witnessed Wordsworth hoping over a fence to walk across a field to get home 

They were in close contact for over a year. Taking long walks through the wilderness to discuss their poetry and literature with one another. When the two were getting ready to publish Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth assumed editorial control over the publication. He cut Coleridge’s poem Christabel and demanded full author’s credit

Lyrical Ballads

Published in 1798 by Bristol by Joseph Cottle. It was also sold to John and Arthur Arch of London and republished by them.
It was published anonymously.
It contained four of Coleridge’s poems.
This edition sold out in two years.
Wordsworth and Coleridge both said the poems were intended to be experimental
Wordsworth believed poetry did not have to be comprised of elevated subjects. He thought poetry could be about ordinary people and their ordinary lives. Wordsworth said poetry is not a person observing from a distance, but a “a man speaking to a man”.

Critics and Scholars

Lyrical Ballads faced mostly negative criticism in it’s early stages.
Reviews thought the subject material was bland and uninteresting.
Reviewers claimed that The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner was unreadable because of it’s “murky philosophical theme”.
The critic Francis Jeffery was so enraged by Wordsworth style of poetry he began an intense campaign against poets he claimed came from the “Lake School Of Poetry”.
The negative criticism hindered the initial success. Eventually Lyrical Ballads took off.

More Critics and Scholars

Scholars believe it to be the jumping off point of Romanticism because of its experimentation of form and the content of the poetry.

—William Wordsworth Presentation: Lyrical Ballads, 1800 Volume II —“Old Man Travelling"

Biographical Info

—William Wordsworth was a major English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with the 1798 joint publication Lyrical Ballads.

—Born: April 7, 1770, Cockermouth

—Died: April 23, 1850, Ambleside

—Siblings: Dorothy Wordsworth

—Education: St John's College, Cambridge, Hawkshead Grammar School, University of Cambridge 

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Wordsworth and Coleridge

—1795 - Moves to Dorset with his sister Dorothy and meets Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the two become close friends.

—1797 - Friendship with Coleridge: Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy move closer to Coleridge. For a year, the two poets are in daily contact with one another, a period that proves to be a vital creative period for both of them. Wordsworth produces the poem "Tintern Abbey," and Coleridge writes "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." They collaborate on a groundbreaking collection of poetry.

—1798 – Wordsworth and Coleridge publish Lyrical Ballads, a collection of poems written in "language really used by men," free of the "gaudiness and inane phraseology of many modern writers."34 The book sparks the Romantic Age of English literature. In a preface to the second edition, Wordsworth warns the audience that they will either love or hate his new style of poetry.

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Images

Lyrical Ballads, 1800 Volume II

About the 1800 Edition 2nd vol of “Lyrical Ballads”

—In the second, two-volume edition of 1800, Wordsworth... expanded the Advertisement into a Preface which justified the new poetry not as experiments, but as exemplifying the principles of all good poetry... The Preface deserves its reputation as a revolutionary manifesto about the nature of poetry... [It serves] not only as a turning point in English criticism but also as a central document in modern culture" (Norton Anthology of English Literature).

—Contains all the poems in the first edition plus one additional poem in the first volume, and the first printing of the forty-one new poems in the second volume.

—Written in Grasmere, England along with the work written in Germany.

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Publication

—Published by Joseph Cottle and Biggs of Bristol firm.

—This time the authors could not oversee the printing process because they were in the Lake District.

—They hired chemist, Humphry Davy to assist with the editing and printing. However, he did little as he was unfamiliar with the poets’ intentions with regards to the printing inquiries and was ill much of the autumn of 1800.

—Wordsworth’s communication with the printer was through letters in which he requested that the arrangement of the poems be changed after the printing process had already begun and even tried to change the title of the volume. The most significant change was the withdrawal of Coleridge’s Christabel, and was substituted by Wordsworth Michael.

—Biggs and Cottle had canceled the first print run mentioning Christable in the “Preface” delaying the publication of the new edition.

—Delays meant that Longman could not distribute the volumes in time to take advantage of the 1800 Christmas trade, and Biggs and Cottle had to rush "Michael" through the press. Inevitably, they made a big mistake: fifteen lines of the poem, crucial to the plot, were omitted, and Wordsworth complained that the volume "is throughout miserably printed," while Coleridge fumed over "an infamous Blunder of the Printer" (Butler & Green 26-31, 123-125; Healey 6).

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1798 & 1800 Editions of “Old Man Travelling”

— In the 1798 edition, lines 17-20 are in quotation marks and spoken by the old man rather than paraphrased by the narrator.

—Title in the 1798 edition is Old Man Travelling; Animal Tranquility and Decay, A Sketch.

—In the 1800 edition, removes the quotation marks from lines 17-20 so that they are spoken by the narrator.

—Title in the 1800 edition was shortened to “Animal Tranquility and Decay: A Sketch”

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Reception

—The immediate effect on critics was not well received overall, but it became and remains a landmark, changing the course of English literature and poetry.

—Not a best seller but sold well overall and extended in four editions between 1798-1805.

—1798 edition was not a large run, about 200 copies were sold within two years.

—The reviews were mostly favorable and the poems were reprinted many a times in magazines and miscellanies.

—1800 edition included an addition of a preface, second volume and an additional 227 pages of newly composed verse (all by Wordsworth).

—George H. Healey, "bibliographically the most complex of all Wordsworth's books.”

Current auction price for “Lyrical Ballads”

—WORDSWORTH, William; and COLERIDGE, Samuel Taylor. Lyrical Ballads. London: T. N. Longman and O. Rees, 1800. Small octavo, contemporary full calf with original red and green morocco labels. Two volumes. Housed in custom half-leather box. $14,000.

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Sources

How Revolutionary Was Lyrical Ballads (1798-1800)?

ojs.ub.gu.se/ojs/index.php/njes/article/download/262/259

http://wordsworth.classicauthors.net/

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The "1798 Lyrical Ballads" and the Poetics of Late Eighteenth-Century Book Production Alan D. Boehm ELH , Vol. 63, No. 2 (Summer, 1996), pp. 453-487

Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30030228

http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/LB/preface.html#history

http://www.manhattanrarebooks.com/lyrical.htm

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Wordsworth's Method

I’m a philosophy major, so excuse me for brining this up…but…Wordsworth’s approach to spontaneity is strikingly similar to Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological program. I’m pretty new to phenomenology, but, the general idea, as I understand it, is to focus on a phenomenon, which could be anything, and painstakingly describe the reciprocal relationship it has with human consciousness, the goal being to deduce the most fundamental essence of that phenomenon. According to Husserl, this is the only way for us to know anything with certainty. It reduces things down to their concrete existences, their concrete essences. Wordsworth seems to be aiming at the very same goal, only with respect to our emotional experiences rather than external phenomenon. I assume Wordsworth’s desire is to take his readers back to the very phenomenon of experience through this hyper analytic methodology.

I like my poetry, and my writing, as unclouded as possible. In other words, I think accessible writing is generally good writing. This doesn’t preclude depth. Dostoyevsky’s style is accessible and easy to follow, but thematically, his novels push the envelope quite far. So I naturally think Wordsworth’s approach is more than a little forced. 

Old Man Travelling

Since everyone else is writing on the Prelude, I figured I try my hand at this poem and how the difference between the two versions changes the poem.
The poem is strange- it's all about observing this old man that is traveling past the speaker. The only interaction the speaker has is when his curiosity is piqued and asks the old man (15) where he is off to. This is one of two major changes between the 1798 and the 1800 version. The first directly quotes old man, whereas the latter version has the speaker retelling what the old man has said to him.
The only other change is that of the title: Old Man Travelling, Animal Tranquility and Decay, A Sketch. In 1800, Wordsworth decided to leave off "Old Man Travelling." Besides making the subject less obvious, it really points out something I didn't even pay much attention to on the first poem- Animal Tranquility and Decay. It seems to me that the nature of this man, as if he were a part of the countryside, is the real point. Line 1-2 point out that not even the birds that are pecking along the road pay attention to him; he might as well be another bird hopping along, searching.

AH! I just discovered that in 1798- his son is dying in the hospital versus 1800 he is lying in the hospital. This leads me to conclude that in the first (1798) he wants to see his son before the son dies, and different kind of journey than what I envision for the second  (1800) where his is going to his son, who in the hospital cannot travel to his father, the old man can say his goodbyes before nature final takes its toll on him. That would make a better case for the tranquility that has settled on the old man in his decay as he makes his final journey.

The Preface- A Failure?

The Preface in the end is a long justification for the writing of many of Wordsworth and Coleridge's poems that prefaces his poetry. It is my opinion that the Preface would have been better served by being placed after the poems as an Afterword instead. An old professor of mine once told me that, "If you have to argue for the merits of your essau as an intellectual exercise before the writing of the work,  you probably need a new topic." While the same does not exactly apply here, the general idea does. Wordsworth and Coelridge should have trusted their work to explain itself, and then offered an explanation after the works. By placing The Preface as a Preface, I think it undermines their work as a whole.

EDIT: Changed the title from Prelude to Preface. I've been reading The Prelude, and had a bit of a Freudian Slip in the title.

Wordy Wordsworth

In my opinion Wordsworth spent far too much time trying to explain his poetry. A paragraph or two would have sufficed quite nicely. However, with that being said, I do feel as though I have a better grasp of what Wordsworth was trying to accomplish by writing his poems. I found it very interesting that he said his poems do indeed have a specific purpose and that the subject is "indeed important!", exclamation mark included. The Preface helps the reader to understand what Wordsworth considered the most important aspects of poetry. He mentions several times that the language of his poems differs from the language of most other poems. By pointing this out, Wordsworth is trying to push the reader to view his poetry differently than the way they read many other works.

Wordsworth's Organization Skills

As far as Appendix E states, Wordsworth cared a lot more about the proper organization of his own books of poetry. After 1805, Wordsworth and Coleridge started separating their work into their own collections and organizing in different ways. It sounds like Coleridge didn't care as much as Wordsworth did about showing the audience the inner workings of his reasons for organizing in such a way. Coleridge may have organized much more than the table of contents showed, but he did seem to let the audience know. Wordsworth likes to spell everything out for his audience in a sense, as with what the preface was about, but I find this much better than the preface as a way of telling, in a sense, what each set of poems is about. I also noticed Wordsworth didn't include The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in his 1815 collection yet Coleridge did in his 1817 collection. What was the reasoning behind it? After the collaboration was over, did Coleridge make it more his own than Wordsworth, resulting in Wordsworth not caring to publish it? It isn't mentioned outside the context of Coleridge in this appendix. With such an important poem, it seems worthy of explanation, but there could an obvious reason I'm oblivious to.

The Preface

Nothing in this post will say anything that the other posts haven't already said. I found the preface to be long, convoluted, and irritating. It took him a page and a half to answer one question! However, I can understand why he wrote it. And reading this isn't going to turn me off of reading anything of Wordsworth again (meaning poems). Desdemona was right in my opinion, poetry should speak for itself. However, I don't think any writer  in this time period would just let their work of art stand by itself without explaining it. I mean to say that prefaces seem to be common for this time period.

I, like many of the posts below, am not a fan of The Prologue. I do not understand the reasons why Wordsworth would revoke the creative license of his audience. I mean, I understand why he did it; he wanted to clearly (although whether The Prologue is clear is debatable) explain not only his process, but the intention behind his poetry. But the reader no longer has an individual reading. I feel a very close connection with Wordsworth's Prologue to Bowles' idea of the picturesque. He believed that it was something to be taken generally, and that the parts of the whole were not as important as the whole itself. I feel like Wordsworth comes across with this mindset, that his general concept of the poem (political themes, for example) is more important than any other individual reading that the poem could be interpreted in. It makes me feel as if Wordsworth had little to no faith in not only his audience, but in his poetry.
But The Prologue wasn't all bad. I really liked how Wordsworth explained the differences between poetry and prose and why he chose to convey his message through poetry in the first place. But I find it ironic that he eventually resorts to a very prose-like prologue to convey what he felt poetry was better at conveying.

The Preface

I've never read a preface to poetry before so I thought it was interesting. I found it pretty wordy and it seemed long considering it was a preface to poetry. It helped picture where Wordsworth was coming from, but I wouldn't have read it if we hadn't been assigned to.

"The Preface" is counter-productive

After re-reading the preface, I feel like exploring Wordsworth's supposed "process of composition," since it was the hardest for me to pinpoint what his process actually entails. From what I could gather, it consists of 4 parts: perception/inspiration, recollection, analyzing that recollection and finally writing about that perception. According to Wordsworth, it's during this recollection phase that you can analyze your inspiration and realize the emotion you felt, but by doing this, doesn't that take away from the spontaneous aspect of emotion? If you sit and contemplate your emotions before writing about them, the end result is probably different from that of the original one. This brings up numerous inquiries, such as how spontaneous is Wordsworth experience at Tinturn Abbey if he sat and pondered this emotion for several hours, maybe even days? How accurate is the emotion he felt in that moment at Tinturn Abbey if he had to put his emotions into context? It's like waking up from a dream and attempting to recollect it later on: chances are, if you don't write down what you just experienced as you awoke, you're going to miss some key elements. And that's how I feel reading now reading the Lyrical Ballads with the preface.

The Preface

I am not particularly a fan of The Preface. I think that it takes too much time trying to explain specific details, when in reality poetry is usually open to different meanings and interpretations. The way that Wordsworth dumps information out is a little bit overwhelming. It was also difficult for me to interpret. The sentence structure is very long and it takes too long to get to the sentence's meaning. I really agree when Desdemona Cranshaw when she said that poetry needs to speak for itself. Wordsworth did not need to take the time to clarify his intent to the general public.

Preface and "True Meaning"

Often, when I tell people about what I'm studying, they immediately begin complaining about that one English teacher in high school who bugged them all about "what the author really meant here." For once, with Wordsworth's preface, this is something that we can actually revert to when we are lost on what a poem or a passage "really means." I am of the firm belief that more often than not, people (myself included) tend to read further into something than is actually necessary. While we may glean new and exciting information or theories about our subject, it may not always be pertinent to the author's original intent. For once, that engineer that lives a few doors down could be right in saying, "What if the author just meant exactly what he said?" With Wordsworth's Preface, we have so much more insight than with most other major works and it allows us to move in a more positive direction than usual.

Preface

I can't decide if Wordsworth's explanations of his poems in the preface are good or not. On one hand, I can see why an author would WANT to explain himself. I think every English lit major can relate to the experience of pulling "symbolism" and meaning out of texts without any evidence whatsoever that the author actually intended any of what we find in literary texts to be there in the first place. Although, if every author explained his or her work, then there probably would be no such thing as a lit major! I think it's more interesting to read a text and create meaning and find symbolism on your own, but if I was an author it would probably drive me crazy when people just came up with wacky theories about what I really meant in my writing. On the other hand, that could be very entertaining.... I just don't know! 

Authorial Intent

Authorial intent is a captivating and almost controversial subject. How much does an author really contribute to the meaning of his own work? With so many diverse opinions, most likely the question will never be sufficiently answered. Many readers want to solely rely on their interpretation of the text, and while this is one way of approaching a work, it sometimes does not seem completely satisfactory.  I have heard arguments both admonishing the author's input and praising it.  While I can understand that readers can pick up on elements of a work that an author did not intentionally include, it does not make sense to remove him from the process completely.  I can only imagine creating a novel or poem, making a point that I thought was really important and having the public completely skip over it or change it into something else. I can't say I wouldn't write a preface myself.

The Preface And All Its Feelings

In my group on Tuesday, we were talking about whether The Preface helped or hindered the interpretation of Wordsworth's poems.  One of my group members said he was working far too hard to explain himself and why he chose the subject matter and form for his poetry in Lyrical Ballads.  As much as I love Wordsworth's poetry, The Preface does seem to be a little much.  It is an interesting read, despite the fact that you have to use a bulldozer to dig for the meaning of it all.  By taking the time to explain himself in such a long way, Wordsworth sort of takes away the audience's own interpretation of Lyrical Ballads and forces his intentions down their throats. I love art and literature because it allows a spectator of reader to develop their own individual understanding of it.  Wordsworth was a great poet, but he needed to chill out, step back, and let his poetry speak for itself.

Questions on the Preface

We'll start class on Thursday by finishing with this group work on Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800); be sure to bring the work you've already done and remember your group members. Answer these questions based on Wordsworth's statements in the Preface. Give a page number and paraphrase his statement.

 

1. What does he say the poems are aimed to achieve?What was he trying to do, according to the preface?

 

2. Why, according to the Preface, are many of the poems about poor or disenfranchised people (an abandoned pregnant woman, a crazy old mariner, a poor old lady who collects wood to keep herself warm in the winter, a dying Indian)?

3. What exactly distinguishes these poems from “popular poetry”? What is wrong with popular poetry? On a related topic, what, according to Wordsworth, is wrong with the *style* in which most poems are written?

4. How does he describe the poet’s process of composition? How are good poems produced, according to Wordsworth? What do you find unusual about this process as he describes it?

 

5. For Wordsworth,what is the point of writing in meter, of writing poetry, when there is no “essential difference” (179) between poetry and prose? If both poetry and prose convey powerful sentiments, what is the purpose of breaking ideas into lines with meter and rhyme?

6. What is the point of this document? Why do you think he wrote it? [Here, you might think about the answers to the previous five questions and speculate from them]