Writing the Lyrical Ballad: Hybridity and Self-Reflexity

Abstract

The proposal that the Romantic period sees experimentation across genres and cultures is not a new one. The common tale of social upheaval resulting from the French Revolution and literary upheaval following the publication of Lyrical Ballads is fundamental to the critical understanding of the period, even if 1798 is no longer fully accepted as the “start date.” Wordsworth has always been central to this formulation: “Wordsworth in his early years was drawn into paths of speculation and experiment,” says David Bromwich in his justly celebrated study of the poetry of the 1790s.¹ For Bromwich, the experimentation was social and philosophical, centered on enduring questions about the interrelationships between authority, oppression, and cultural ownership. Crucially, “personal identity” is both expressive through poetry and “coherent and irreducible by analysis,” and Wordsworth’s experimental impulse lay in finding and working through a variety of “images of Wordsworth” (pp. x, 43). This reading chimes with the contemporary understanding, within natural history, that forms — whether species, classes, orders, or other words denoting coherent groups — were themselves “coherent and irreducible.” Once discovered, they were known; and once known, they were fixed. From at least the middle of the eighteenth century onward, naturalists, following Carolus Linnaeus and Georges Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, concentrated on finding difference and instituting order. Although Linnaeus and de Buffon diverged, with Linnaeus concentrating on “morphological differences” while de Buffon favored a more comprehensive understanding of interrelated aspects of being, their approaches required an acceptance of a neat and distinct web, rather than chain, of being.² The Wordsworth who may subdivide self-images but who maintains a self-focus functions as his own species, his poems as branches from the main stem of being.