Guardians and Watchful Powers: Literary Satire and Lyrical Ballads in 1798

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.4KeywordsRomantic PeriodPersonal ApplicationYoung WriterHuman MiseryAmbiguous PresentationThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.