New Directions: The Ruined Cottage

Abstract

The next two chapters consider a collection of poems, the Lyrical Ballads, first published in 1798, and a single poem, The Ruined Cottage, that remained in fragmentary form from 1797 until 1814, when it was published under another name as the first Book of The Excursion. Lyrical Ballads is universally recognised as Words-worth’s first major poetic achievement; The Ruined Cottage is by comparison a ghost text. The discussion in both chapters will be guided in part by speculation on the significance of each for Wordsworth, and by considering how literary criticism subsequently came to regard them. In their introduction to the Cornell edition of Lyrical Ballads (1992), James Butler and Karen Green make the point (in common with a good many other recent Wordsworth scholars) that the Ballads were not a carefully planned aesthetic experiment. The lengthy Preface which Wordsworth added to the second augmented edition of 1800 (and then proceeded to expand for subsequent printings) most certainly did elevate the collection to the level of a coherently organised anthology, one which has now been recognised as a defining document for the study of English Romanticism. In addition to the Preface, Coleridge’s reminiscences of the origins of Lyrical Ballads in his Biographia Literaria (1817) are often referred to as confirmation of the fact that there was a carefully worked out plan for putting together a collection of contrasting poems.1KeywordsLiterary CriticismAesthetic ExperimentParadise LostFragmentary FormHigh Social StandingThese 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.