Fans of British Writers discussion

Here's the thread where we'll discuss all things related to Lyrical Ballads by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1798), our group's annual common read for this year. (We officially started the read on July 1, so this post is a little belated.) As the first major poetry collection in the Romantic style to be published in England, this book has a landmark significance in British literature, despite its relatively short length. (I'm reading it in the 1969 edition of the Oxford Univ. Press printing, edited by W. J. B. Owen of Canada's McMaster Univ.

I forgot as well, Werner!
I'll blame on the super hot weather we've been having!
I love poetry so I know I'm going to enjoy this book.

Actually, I didn't forget; I've just been mostly offline recently (and not reading much either), since until this past Sunday we had family visiting from Australia. So I only started reading this collection a couple of days ago.

Most of the 23 poems in the 1798 edition are by Wordsworth. According to his preface to the 1800 edition, the four here that are by Coleridge are (in modern spelling) "The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner," "The Foster-Mother's Tale," "The Nightingale," and "The Dungeon." (The 1800 edition also included Coleridge's "Love.") Of these 23, I've previously read "The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner," "We Are Seven," and "Tintern Abbey." However, I don't really remember the latter one very well.

I think I've read The Rime of the Ancient Mariner at least five times!

Rosemarie wrote: "I think I've read The Rime of the Ancient Mariner at least five times!"

I've read it more than once, the first time back in around 1967 in the anthology English Poems From Chaucer to Kipling, which was my first systematic introduction to British poetry. That collection was one I read for pleasure, and "The Ancient Mariner" was one of my favorites there; but I also read that particular poem as part of the curriculum in high school, and when I was teaching British Literature as a home-schooling parent. Since my poetry reading has been relatively scanty (I like it, but like fiction better; so over the years, I've neglected the former for the latter), until I started reading Lyrical Ballads, my only acquaintance with Wordsworth's work, and still less acquaintance with Coleridge's, was from that anthology and a couple of textbooks.

So far, I'm enjoying Lyrical Ballads, but my reading hasn't been in order. I started with Owen's Preface and Introduction, but wound up at first skimming and then putting the latter aside for later; then I read Coleridge's poems first, followed by Wordsworth's in order up into "The Convict," but leaving "The Idiot Boy" aside temporarily because of its length, and skipping the two poems I'd read previously. (If I'd read any of the other 18 in this group before, I believe I would have remembered them.)

My copy is on the way to our local library branch-I'm looking forward to when it arrives. I love poetry!

Rosemarie wrote: "I love poetry!"

I've appreciated it since I was a kid, despite my preference for fiction; and for a number of years, to ensure that I don't neglect it, I've made a point of reading at least one book of poetry a year. (This will be a year that I read two. :-) )

Is anyone else joining in this read besides Rosemarie and me?

So far, I've finished all of the poetry in this collection, but I still want to read, or at least skim, editor Owen's Commentary, which he chose to place near the end of the book, instead of commenting in footnotes which would have been easier to follow, and Wordsworth's preface (which is included here as the Appendix) to the 1800 edition. I expect to finish early next week, but won't be able to write my review until at least July 25. (The weekends are when I can do my reviewing, and I'll be offline next weekend.)

Wikipedia has extensive and informative articles on both Wordsworth (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William... ) and Coleridge (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_... ). I haven't read either of these in detail (though I hope to investigate them more). But I did learn one interesting (at least to me) fact: though the British literature textbooks I'd previously read gave the impression that Wordsworth was a Deist, rather than a Christian, in reality he was a committed (and religiously conservative) Anglican all of his life, and expressed his faith in both statements and writings. His Christian behavior wasn't always perfect --he had, for instance, an out-of-wedlock daughter, whom he acknowledged and supported, born in 1792-- but none of us can claim that ours is, either. (The idea of Divine forgiveness is at the heart of Christian faith.) His oldest son John, born in 1803, became an Anglican priest.

That segues into an interesting background point for one of the poems here, "Anecdote for Fathers." Although the experience it recounts is real, the "boy" referred to there, according to notes on his poems that Wordsworth dictated in 1843, was a foster rather than a biological son. The lad's actual father was the poet's friend Basil Montagu, who entrusted the boy's care to Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy for several years.

I finished the book this evening --or, at least, read/skimmed as much of this edition's added features as I'm going to. They're very disappointing and difficult to refer to, and I absolutely don't recommend this Oxford Univ. Press printing for that reason. But I'll go into that in more detail when I write my review. :-(

That's the version I have. I'm going to read just the poems; none of the commentary.

That's probably not a bad decision, Rosemarie!

My plans to be out of town and offline this weekend changed at the last minute, so I was able to write my four-star review of this collection earlier than I'd expected. That link is here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... .

Thanks for the link.

I read the 1798 version of the poems and the additional poem added in the 1802 version, Love. I'm not reading the same poems twice.
I found The Female Vagrant especially moving. It made me think of a more modern Irish poem, Old Woman of the Roads, by Padraic Colum(one of my favourite poems).
I'll be reading Volume 2 as well,

Lines written near Tintern Abbey reminded me of The Prelude by Wordsworth.
A number of years ago, I read HOME AT GRASMERE and found it a worthwhile read.

Out of curiosity, I've just looked over the two British Literature textbooks I'd previously read (and had already checked over the table of contents for English Poems from Chaucer to Kipling --it's a public domain work that has PDFs online), to see what else, if anything, I had actually read by these two authors prior to starting on this collection. In Coleridge's case, the only other poem by him that I've read is "Kubla Khan" (which isn't included here); I apparently read that one in high school, but don't remember it at all well.

Of the Wordsworth poems that are in this book, it turns out that I must have read "The Tables Turned" at least twice, apparently read "Lines Written in Early Spring" in high school, and would have read "Expostulation and Reply" when I was homeschooling our girls. However, none of those stuck in my memory either. All three of the above books have short scatterings of other poems by him; but the only one of them that really made a lasting impression was "The World Is Too Much with Us."