Abstract
An enhanced sense of the dynamics of satire in the Romantic period may modify our understanding of the early reception of Lyrical Ballads. For a long time Lyrical Ballads was accepted uncritically as one of the originary texts of Romanticism. Readers followed William Hazlitt’s ‘sense of a new style and a new spirit in poetry […] something of the effect that arises from the turning up of the fresh soil, or of the first welcome breath of Spring’.1 Hazlitt was, of course, looking back on the experiment of Lyrical Ballads with a desire to make its ‘breath’ part of the ‘spirit of the age’. But if we suspend, for a moment, Hazlitt’s narrative of vernal growth, it may be possible to reveal the equally characteristic relationship between the Lyrical Ballads and the mud-slinging of contemporary satire. Robert Mayo placed Lyrical Ballads firmly in its literary context in his 1954 article The Contemporaneity of Lyrical Ballads’.2 Mayo illustrated how in its movement towards ‘“nature”’ and ‘“simplicity”’ Lyrical Ballads followed ‘a new orthodoxy’ of late eighteenth-century poetry rather than creating an entirely fresh poetic mode.3 Mayo’s article does not identify satire among the other ‘way-worn paths’ used by Wordsworth and Coleridge, but many of the characteristics of the volume he mentions (‘heterogeneity’, ‘unevenness’, ‘miscellaneousness’, ‘the sense of particularity’) are generic to satire.4
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Notes
William Hazlitt, ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’, in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, edited by P. P. Howe, 21 vols (London: J. M. Dent, 1930–34; hereafter ‘Howe’), XVII, 117.
Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin, edited by Charles Edmonds (London: Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1890
Myrddin Jones, ‘Gray, Jaques, and the Man of Feeling’, in RES, XXV, 97 (1974), 39–48 (39).
See ‘Wordsworth as Satirist of His Age’ in The Age of William Wordsworth: Critical Essays on the Romantic Tradition, ed. by Kenneth R. Johnston and Gene W. Ruoff (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 1987).
The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. by Ernest De Selincourt, 2nd edn, revised by Chester L. Shaver, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), I, 169–70. The reference to Horace is to Odes IV.2.27: Wordsworth compares himself to a small bee (or wasp) labouring to create poetry as opposed to the addressee of the poem who, in the context of Horace’s Ode, is more suited to sing of great civic events.
Beattie, Essays (Edinburgh: William Creech, 1776), p. 662.
See Rene Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism 1750–1950, 7 vols (London: Jonathan Cape, 1955–91), I, 244–5. Schiller classifies satire as a sentimental mode and claims that it ceases to be poetry if it descends to invective or libel; likewise satire ceases to be poetry if it falls into ‘pleasantry’.
The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. by Kathleen Coburn, Bollingen Series (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1957; repr. 1980), I, 171; 174.
For a detailed exploration of radical and conservative implications in the language of Lloyd’s and Lamb’s poetry, see David Fairer, ‘Baby Language and Revolution: the Early Poetry of Charles Lloyd and Charles Lamb’, The Charles Lamb Bulletin, 74 (April 1991), 33–51; hereafter Fairer.
Robert Southey and S. T. Coleridge, Omniana or Horae Otiosiores ed. by Robert Gittings (Arundel, Sussex: Centaur Press, 1969), p. 119
Marcus Wood discusses Coleridge’s later loathing of parody: see Radical Satire and Print Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 120.
Joseph Cottle, Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey (Highgate: Lime Tree Bower Press, 1970), p. 162.
Romantic Parodies 1797–1831, ed. by David A. Kent and D. R. Ewen (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1992), p. 33.
Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin, p. 275. For a recent introduction to the technique of parody in this publication, see Graeme Stones, ‘Parody and the Anti-jacobin’, The Wordsworth Circle, XXIV, 3 (Summer 1993), 162–6.
Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. by Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956–1971) I, 357–8
Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, ed. by Mark Philp, 7 vols (London: William Pickering, 1993), IV, 161–2.
Thomas J. Mathias, The Pursuits of Literature: A Satirical Poem in Four Dialogues With Notes, 8th edn (London: T. Becket, 1798; hereafter Pursuits of Literature), p. 12.
For the importance of physical objects in literature of sensibility see Jerome J. McGann, The Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 26–32
David Fairer, ‘The Sentimental Transfer: Transient Meanings in Mackenzie and Sterne’, in Translating Life: Studies in Transpositional Aesthetics, ed. by Shirley Chew and Alistair Stead (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1998).
Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin, p. 3. For competing discourses about social fabric see Claude Rawson, Satire and Sentiment 1660–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 168–77.
Steven E. Jones, Shelley’s Satire: Violence, Exhortation, and Authority (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1994), p. 14.
William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads (1798), facsimile edition (Oxford and New York: Woodstock Books, 1990), p. iv
Review in appendix to Lyrical Ballads, ed. by R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones (London: Methuen, 1963; repr. 1971; hereafter ‘Brett and Jones’), pp. 321–3 (322).
Quoted in Romantic Bards and British Reviewers: A Selected Edition of the Contemporary Reviews of the Works of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats and Shelley, ed. John O. Hayden (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), p. 8.
Marilyn Butler, ‘Satire and the Images of Self in the Romantic Period: The Long Tradition of Hazlitt’s Liber Amoris’ in English Satire and the Satiric Tradition edited by Claude Rawson, assisted by Jenny Mezciems (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), pp. 209–25 (211).
Gilbert Higher, The Anatomy of Satire (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1962), pp. 78–9. Danby’s reading is quoted from Wordsworth: Lyrical Ballads Casebook, ed. by Alun R. Jones and William Tydeman (London: Macmillan, 1972; repr. 1984), p. 202.
In a panel discussion at the ‘Romantic Crossings’ NASSR Conference in Boston, Massachusetts, in November 1996, Kenneth Johnston suggested that Wordsworth may be the ‘bashful genius, in some rural cell’ invoked in ‘New Morality’. If this is so, it strengthens the case for Lyrical Ballads as a long-awaited riposte to jacobin ‘falsehood’. See Kenneth Johnston, The Hidden Wordsworth: Poet, Lover, Rebel, Spy (London and New York: W. W. Norton, 1998).
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Stabler, J. (1998). Guardians and Watchful Powers: Literary Satire and Lyrical Ballads in 1798. In: Cronin, R. (eds) 1798: The Year of the Lyrical Ballads. Romanticism in Perspective: Texts, Cultures, Histories. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26690-6_11
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