lyrical poetry - OUDL Home

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURYLYRICto a simpler, more poignant diction and a more plangentrhythm. Southey in his ballads made conscioususe of the trisyllabic effect which played so importanta part in releasing verse from its too regular march,but despite this there is no real music in Southey'sballads. The creators of a new spirit and a finer musicwere the two poets of the Lyrical Ballads of 1798.The title describes, I suppose, what they, or Wordsworth,felt was the effect they were aiming at or hadachieved. The poems were to be ballads, not of theheroic, historic type of Chevy Chase and Sir PatrickSpens, but the simpler, more homely and familiar, evendoggerel type, an exceptional example of which, TheBabes in the Wood, Addison had commended andWordswoith himself was to cite in the Preface to the1800 edition—the kind of ballad which had circulatedin broadsheets and which, Andrew Lang declared, "inpassing through the hands of the printers and poorscholars who prepared them for the press became dull,long-drawn, and didactic." "Dull, long-drawn, anddidactic" Wordsworth was willing they should still be,so long as they were simple and sincere. A poemsuch as The Thorn is to be read, he tells us in a note,as the composition of "a captain of a small tradingvessel, for example, who, being past the middle ageof life, had retired upon an annuity, or small independentincome, to some village or country town ofwhich he was not a native, or in which he had notbeen accustomed to live. Such men, having nothingto do, become credulous and talkative from indolence."But Wordsworth's poems would not have outlived thescorn evoked by his attempts to reproduce dramaticallythe garrulous style of the broadsheet ballad, if therehad not been something more even in some of these31