Why the Lyrical Ballads?

Why the Lyrical Ballads? illuminates the background, making, and distinctive character of Wordsworth’s 1798 experiment by tracking a recurrent “common resonance” across poems, prefaces, and critical contexts. John E. Jordan’s lucid study resists a single, neat thesis; instead it pursues the book’s many “why’s”—why simplicity, why ballad form, why ordinary lives—and shows how they converge on Wordsworth’s drive to universalize experience. Using the famous “sense sublime” passage from Tintern Abbey as a reflective lens (while pointedly treating the poem as a late, framing add-on to the first edition), Jordan locates the poet’s commitment to permanence: “elementary feelings,” “durable” manners, and language adequate to “the mind of man.” He follows Wordsworth’s self-declared aim to make poetry “the history or science of feelings,” clarifying the poet’s paradox: passion rendered with the objectivity and communicability of a record, even as language strains toward what feels incommunicable. The result is a compelling portrait of a project that eschews topicality for the typical, elevates the everyday through “various commonality,” and seeks joy—not sentimentality—as the connective tissue between individual life and the one “great Life.”

Jordan’s chapters map how this universalizing impulse shapes form and method: the ballad’s lyric-narrative braid; an ethics of empathy that draws readers into Betty Foy, Goody Blake, and the “Idiot Boy” without condescension; and a prosody that aspires to “elevated thoughts” in “superior metrics.” Along the way, the book re-situates Wordsworth among contemporaries (novel yet not idiosyncratic), engages the 1800/1802 Prefaces, and parses the poet’s abiding anxiety over the “deficiencies of language.” Why the Lyrical Ballads? will reward scholars and students of Romanticism, poetics, and intellectual history who want a precise account of how a revolutionary volume made the ordinary intelligible—and memorable—by turning feeling into form without sacrificing the universality that gives it lasting power.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1976.