The Poet as Critic: The Preface (1800)

Abstract

It could be easily argued that authorial criticism has no place in this survey. The Preface to Lyrical Ballads is, after all, more self-justification that self-criticism; Coleridge’s Biographia Literararia (1817) has the knowing air of being wise after the event. None the less such exclusion would be to deny the significance and uniqueness of the poets’ comments both to their contemporaries and to us, now able to evaluate them as documents both precipitating and reflecting a crisis in English poetry. Not only do they provide a crucial gloss on the creative chore of producing innovative poems; they have also helped determine the direction which poetry in general has since taken. And, though the Preface was written to accompany the second edition (1800), it does have a powerfully retrospective function in confronting the original reviews of the 1798 volume. Indeed, some perceptive recent commentators have chosen to focus on the prose statements rather than the ballads themselves.