Lyrical Ballads by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Lyrical Ballads by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Long central to the canon of British Romantic literature, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth's Lyrical Balladsis a fascinating case study in the history of poetry, publishing, and authorship. This Broadview edition is the first to reprint both the 1798 and the 1800 editions of Lyrical Balladsin their entirety.

In the appendices to this Broadview edition, reviews, correspondence, and a selection of contemporary verse and prose situate the work within the popular and experimental literature of its time, and allow readers to trace the work's transformations in response to the pressures of the literary marketplace.

“Lyrical Ballads, the collection that, in many accounts, launched Romanticism, has often been reprinted, but never in a wholly satisfactory edition...Michael Gamer and Dahlia Porter, in yet another splendid Broadview edition, have provided the solution that scholars and students have longed for. This remarkable volume provides both the 1798 and 1800 volumes in full. But more than this; in eight appendices, they provide an astonishing wealth of extra material. ... This is a volume that will surely become a standard in the field, a vital tool in teaching and scholarship. ...[It is] more than one could possibly have hoped for.” — Year’s Work in English Studies (2010)

“An edition we’ve all been waiting for, as teachers and as scholars—containing more than one would have thought possible to include in one volume. Herein is all the contextual material one could wish for: reviews from periodicals, including Southey’s and Jeffrey’s famous articles; discussions in correspondence, including comments by Coleridge, Lamb, Southey and Dorothy Wordsworth; critical discussions from Biographia and “My First Acquaintance with Poets”; poetic sources by Burger, Charlotte Smith and Helen Maria Williams; verse responses by Southey, Mary Robinson; even a section detailing how the poems were rearranged in Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s Collected Works. All this plus the texts of poems excluded from the 1798 and 1800 editions, a handy appendix plotting the poems’ locations on maps of Britain and the Lakes, and a magisterial introduction.” — Tim Fulford, Nottingham Trent University

Michael Gamer is Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and the co-editor of The Broadview Anthology of Romantic Drama.

Dahlia Porter is Assistant Professor of English at Vanderbilt University.