Lyrical Ballads: The Current of Opinion

Abstract

‘Up to 1820 the name of Wordsworth was trampled under foot’, thundered De Quincey. While that is the over-emotional reaction of a friend, it is none the less true that Lyrical Ballads, aimed at the solar plexus of reader complacency, initially attracted some erratic counters. Cottle feared that such blows would destroy the entire enterprise: ‘the severity of most of the reviews’ was ‘so great that its progress to oblivion, notwithstanding the merits which I was quite sure they possessed, seemed ordained to be as rapid as it was certain’ (quoted in Smith, 1932, p. 29). These reactions say more about the prevailing state of periodical journalism and literary taste than about the actual poetry, but that in no way diminishes their significance both as cultural indicators and as first shots across the bows of an unfamiliar intruder. Nor should we forget that Wordsworth, in common with the other poets of the Romantic period, was ‘more strongly affected by this periodical criticism than have been any other important group of writers in the English-speaking world at any time’. The reminder comes from the Foreword to Donald Reiman’s The Romantics Reviewed, a definitive nine-volume compilation containing facsimiles of all known contemporaneous reviews (1972, I, p. xxvii).