Lyrical Ballads

"So the first book—perhaps a bit of an unexpected choice—is Lyrical Ballads by William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. This is a fascinating book in so many ways. One thing that’s so unusual about it is that it is a book of poems by more than one author. Why did Wordsworth and Coleridge decided to produce this, together? Well, basically, it was because they regarded themselves as having something to say, something to contribute that went way beyond the sphere of pleasing or thought provoking in a purely literary sense. The Lyrical Ballads was a kind of manifesto for a new way of doing poetry. The form of the poetry was very shocking at the time and they were also bringing a new point to poetry. And that point is what really brings this very close to eco-philosophy. What they tried to do in the Lyrical Ballads was to produce a sort of poetic manifesto for thinking about nature in a different way, in a more serious way, than was customary at the time. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter We know this as one of the great statements of the philosophy, or ideology, of Romanticism, which is a point of view, a perspective on the world that I believe needs to be taken incredibly seriously. Romanticism has been viewed over the last couple of centuries, most of the time, as a middle class indulgence or something. As something which is nice, but really can’t be the main way to live one’s life. Wordsworth and Coleridge , were among those who were really serious about it, saying, ‘Look, this should be something like the basis of life’, which obviously brings it very, very close to philosophy. They thought that what we call Romanticism should be the way that we live, the way that we orient ourselves towards the world. And, they thought, if we are missing the kinds of things that they were trying to get at, that were present in their poems, they thought, in a certain sense, we were missing everything. You could think of the Lyrical Ballads as a confrontation with the emerging spirit of industrialism. At the very time they were writing these poems, the Industrial Revolution was really taking off in England. They were seeking to resist that, but to resist it actively, and to sketch a live alternative. I think they do it absolutely brilliantly and profoundly. Sometimes in Britain, we tend to venerate and get excited about speakers of German or French or other languages more than we do speakers of English. And that can happen with Romanticism, as well. I think these poems are astonishingly fine in the main, I think they’re really important. They were brought together by these two authors in the prime of their talent and I think they still have something to teach us now. Yes. I’d like to read out a little passage from the final poem in the book. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that it is the final poem. It’s ‘Lines written above Tintern Abbey’ by Wordsworth. I could have picked many poems from the book, most of them by Wordsworth, or I could have picked something else, perhaps something from Wordsworth’s amazing narrative poem, ‘The Prelude’, which points in much the same direction. But this is a particularly powerful passage. And I think it’ll be clear, as I read it, how this is philosophically relevant. Here we go: “…And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense, sublime Of something far more deeply interfused…” This idea of interfusion, I think, is something which philosophers could take some notice of. “…Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean, and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things…” So there’s some kind of sense there, which you might connect in a way with philosophical Idealism, of a central importance to the human mentality, and the fusing of it with the world. And then the poem continues with this line, “…Therefore am I still A lover of the meadows and the woods, And mountains; and of all that we behold From this green earth, of all the mighty world Of eye and ear,—both what they half create And what perceive;…” I think this is very lovely, these final lines I read, “both what they half create/ And what perceive”. Somehow our minds and our senses are involved in the creation of what they perceive and don’t merely perceive it—nor do they merely create it. There’s a kind of active interfusion. And that, I think, is part of what Wordsworth was seeking to give us in this poem. It’s striking of course that these poems are poems about the countryside, about the Lake District and, in this case of Tintern Abbey, in Wales. They’re rural scenes, places of great beauty. Let’s start with nature. Is nature everything? I’d say yes and no. I think it’s really important that the word ‘nature’ is used in different ways in different contexts. There is a really important use of the word ‘nature’ often made by philosophers, where it’s simply everything, and it’s opposed only to the supernatural, or the non-existent. But I think it’s important to remember that there’s another sense of the word ‘nature’, which is not that, which is nature as opposed to culture, or nature as opposed to the urban environment. There’s an important use for that concept of nature, as well. I’ve argued previously, that actually, it’s not a coincidence that we have these two senses of nature, and I think we can’t do without either of them. Am I implying that we can’t think in the kind of way that Wordsworth does about cities and so forth? No, not at all. And in that context, of course, it’s really interesting that another of the great poems in the Lyrical Ballads is ‘Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September, the Third 1802’. It’s a splendid poem, which begins: “Earth has not anything to show more fair, Dull would he be of soul who could pass by A site, so touching in its majesty: This city now doth, like a garment, Wear the beauty of the morning…” There you have Wordsworth doing that, bringing the spirit of Romanticism into the heart of the city; but does that mean in turn, that we just simply have to accept that it all comes together as a package, and we have to just roll over and accept industrialisation and accept all its consequences? I don’t think it does means that either. I think that there’s a dialectical relationship, if you will, between these two senses of nature. And what Wordsworth and Coleridge try to give us is a sense of the beauty of wild nature and rural nature, a sense of the same thing sometimes in cities, but also a sense, often by a sort of implied contrast, of where these things can go wrong. I think that they did start to go wrong in some pretty serious ways, during the Industrial Revolution. I think it would obviously be absurd to say simply, ‘It would have been better if the Industrial Revolution hadn’t have happened.’ But I don’t think it’s totally absurd to say something like, ‘Imagine if the industrial revolution had happened a lot more slowly, or a lot more carefully, or a lot more selectively.’ Among other things, we wouldn’t be in the situation that we are in now, where we have to contemplate the possible destruction of our civilisation and even of our species, this century. That’s part of what’s motivating the choices of my books here today. What if we were able to think philosophically and in ways that inform philosophy, through literature and other sources, that might make it less likely that we head down this path to mutual self-destruction? What Wordsworth and Coleridge offered us—and I think it did have some consequence—is a sense of, or a way of being in the world, which wouldn’t just take for granted nostrums of so-called progress, thinking that there’s nothing to do in the face of industrialisation bar roll over and accept it. This has, of course, been often a defensive or rear-guard action, but it’s a rear-guard action which has had some real effects. Here’s an interesting question: would you have had organisations like the National Trust , if you hadn’t had poets like Wordsworth and Coleridge? Now obviously, that’s an impossible counterfactual question to answer. But it seems to me that one might at least speculate that ideas and practices such as those embedded in amazing organisations like the National Trust, or later, the National Parks, don’t come from nowhere; they come from a certain kind of cultural milieu, or a certain kind of sense of what’s possible and what’s important. The lines are not going to be direct. It would be very difficult to write an impact case study for Wordsworth. But I think there are likely to be real connections there and perhaps quite deep and significant connections. And my thought is that we need to go back to some of these writers and thinkers and see their relevance now that the consequences of rampant, reckless industrialism are much plainer to see. I see people like Wordsworth and Rabindranath Tagore, who we’ll come on to in a minute, as visionaries and people with a cultural and philosophical influence who need to be listened to now if there is going to be a future."

"Sure. This is a book written when they’re both living in Somerset. They’ve decided they want to go visit Germany because Germany is—as it will be for a large amount of the nineteenth century—where progressive, avant-garde thoughts are being thought. If you want to be on the edge of modernity, Germany is the place to go, and German is the language you need to read. Wordsworth never learns German properly, but Coleridge does, and it totally changes his life as a thinker. He becomes totally immersed in contemporary German thought and is never the same again. (Wordsworth implies in various places that he thinks it ruined him—but that’s a different story.) Anyway, there they are in Somerset; they’re going on long walking tours every day, and they’re loving each other’s company. It’s not just a diad, it’s a triad; Dorothy Wordsworth is also a part of this incredibly creative and exciting and dynamic friendship. Of course, there’s also Mrs. Coleridge and some little Coleridges around, but they didn’t really fit into the excitement of this new relationship. By the time Lyrical Ballads is published in 1798, they’ve been in each others’ pockets for about a year. Wordsworth hasn’t written much until the spring of 1798, and then he starts again. But Coleridge has written some of the best things he ever writes, including ‘The Ancient Mariner’, the first part of ‘Christabel’, ‘Frost at Midnight’, and other bits and pieces. So why Lyrical Ballads ? Well, obviously, to go to Germany they needed to raise some money—and ballads were very voguish. So if you wrote a really good ballad, especially if it had a supernatural quality to it—something a bit Gothic—then you could sell it to a magazine and make a bit of money. That’s how they thought they could subsidise the trip to Germany. They planned what in retrospect we can now see was ‘The Ancient Mariner’ on a walk along the North Somerset coast in November 1797. Wordsworth remembers, almost half a century later, the planning of the ballad. “Having listened to Coleridge talk for the last six months, Wordsworth finally starts to write poetry again.” They must have planned it in some high spirits. Wordsworth soon realises that they’re not going to be able to collaborate on it, and he just leaves it to Coleridge to write. Coleridge writes, and writes, and writes, and after six months, ‘The Ancient Mariner’ emerges, at least in its first form—and that’s the first poem in Lyrical Ballads . The most exciting poems by Wordsworth in that volume are written in the spring (often his most productive period). Having listened to Coleridge talk for the last six months, he finally starts to write poetry again. He writes some of his most extraordinary poems like ‘The Thorn’ and ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gil’. But Coleridge’s presence in Lyrical Ballads is ‘The Ancient Mariner’, which dominates the first part of the book. The book in 1798 is published anonymously. The reason for that is no one knows who Wordsworth is anyway, says Coleridge in a letter at the time—if he put his name on the title-page, they’ll just get into trouble, because “my name stinks.” What he means is that Coleridge had quite a large reputation, especially in the southwest of England and London, not for poetry but for radical politics. He was known as a sympathiser with French revolutionary ideas, which in a very qualified way he was: he didn’t sympathise with French atheism, but he did sympathise with certain aspects of French republicanism. I suppose the two poets must have thought that putting his name on the title page would just be a provocation to hostile reviewers to attack his Jacobin radicalism. One thing that changes is that Wordsworth’s name appears on the title-page, but not Coleridge’s. It becomes a two-volume work with lots and lots of new poems, almost all of them by Wordsworth. ‘The Ancient Mariner’, which was the opening number in the 1798 volume, gets shuffled to towards the end of volume one in the 1800 volume. Wordsworth’s taken over, really—I don’t think in a particularly hostile way, but he’s just been extremely productive, and has written some of the poems for which he’ll be remembered as long as he’s remembered. The hidden poignant Coleridgean story for the 1800 Lyrical Ballads is that Coleridge’s big contribution was supposed to be ‘Christabel’—but it becomes clear that he can’t finish it. In the end, rather than publish it as a fragment, it’s decided that they won’t publish ‘Christabel’ after all. This of course leaves a bit of a gap in volume two. To fill it, Wordsworth sits down and writes ‘Michael’. It must be one of Wordsworth’s greatest poems, but it arises out of Coleridge’s inability to bring ‘Christabel’ to a conclusion."