1st Edition

An Analysis of William Wordsworth's Preface to The Lyrical Ballads

By Alex Latter, Rachel Teubner Copyright 2018
    92 Pages
    by Macat Library

    92 Pages
    by Macat Library

    Central to the creative process of the Romantic poets that followed him, Wordsworth’s Preface to the Lyrical Ballads has been both a gift and a thorn in the side of critics for over a century. Readers find themselves drawn back to the essay repeatedly as they seek to untangle the ideas and contradictions within it. The Preface is a statement of Wordsworth’s poetic vision and offers an explanation of the poetic process behind the poems, which fused the rusticity of the ballad form with the psychological introspection of modernity.

    But to the generation of Romantic writers that emerged in its wake, the Preface announced a new understanding of the creative process and of the high purposes of poetry: to reveal the human condition, and to awaken in its readers the profoundest emotions and the most enduring truths of existence.

    Ways in to the Text 

    Who was William Wordsworth? 

    What does Preface to the Lyrical Ballads Say? 

    Why does Preface to the Lyrical Ballads Matter? 

    Section 1: Influences  

    Module 1: The Author and the Historical Context 

    Module 2: Academic Context 

    Module 3: The Problem 

    Module 4: The Author's Contribution 

    Section 2: Ideas 

    Module 5: Main Ideas 

    Module 6: Secondary Ideas  

    Module 7: Achievement 

    Module 8: Place in the Author's Work 

    Section 3: Impact  

    Module 9: The First Responses  

    Module 10: The Evolving Debate 

    Module 11: Impact and Influence Today 

    Module 12: Where Next?  

    Glossary of Terms 

    People Mentioned in the Text 

    Works Cited

    Biography

    Dr. Alex Latter completed his PhD at the Contemporary Poetics Research Centre at Birkbeck, University of London, where his thesis looked at postwar British poetry. He is the author of Late Modernism and The English Intelligencer: On the Poetics of Community (2015).

    Rachel Teubner is a PhD candidate at the University of Virginia. She teaches courses in Christian thought and in religion and literature, and is the author of A Macat Analysis of T.S. Eliot’s The Sacred Wood (Routledge, 2014).