lyrical poetry - OUDL Home

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURYLYRICmusic of these poems and the one glittering beautifulsong in Zapoyla,A sunny shaft did I behold,From sky to earth it slanted,Coleridge's poetry is not essentially lyrical. He wasin blank verse and ode a rhapsodiser. Effusion is thename he gives to several of his early pieces, and it is agood description of most of his pieces outside the threegreat things which are dramatic rather than lyrical,though indeed Kubla Khan is the most entranced, themost musical of his effusions. He lacked the passion,the intensity of the lyrical poet. The best of his personalpoems—Dejection, "Friend of the wise," "TimeReal and I m aginary, Youth and Age—are elegiac effusions,Coleridge's in virtue of their tender, delicate music.IllSCOTT, BYRON, SHELLEY, KEATS, ANDSOME OF THE LESSER ROMANTICSTHE ballad which appealed to Wordsworth as the idealexpression of the simplicity and sincerity to which hewished to bring poetry back from "the bracelets, andsnuff-boxes, and adulterous trinkets" of poetic diction;which inspired Coleridge's one great dramaticand imaginatively complete poem; was also the sourceof Scott's poems, and so ultimately of the WaverleyNovels. But it was not quite the same aspect of theballad that "in the summer of 1793 or 1794" quickenedin his mind the long-dormant crektive impulse. Forthere were three things in the ballad that after the39