literary criticism isa ty ba

Write an essay of about 500-600 words on Wordsworth’s Lyrical

Ballads

William Wordsworth was the founder of the Romantic Period along with

his close friend Samuel T. Coleridge. They believed in the ideas of the

power of imagination and loved writing about nature. He along with

Coleridge wanted a change in the style of poetry-writing and published

The Lyrical Ballads in the year 1798 thus, giving birth to the Romantic Age.

The Romantic period lasted till 1832 and made poets like Lord Byron, John

Keats, P.B. Shelley famous. In Preface to the Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth

makes it clear that the ballads were an experiment that he hoped the

audience would like. He wanted to know if the common language could be

used for poetry and poetic pleasure. In his writings, Wordsworth does not

follow the traditional style of poetry writing used by the Neo-classical

poets of the time but instead prefers the common day-to-day language of

the people. He focused on individual feelings and had a humanitarian

outlook towards the society. According to Wordsworth, “poetry is the

spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling recollected in tranquility.”

The lyrical ballad mostly comprises poems written by Wordsworth while a

few are a contribution by Samuel Coleridge. Few of the most famous

poems from the book are the Rime of the Ancynt Marinere, Anecdote for

Fathers, We are Seven among the others.

In Rime of the Ancynt Marinere (written by Coleridge), an old Mariner

narrates an old tale to a guest going for a wedding. In the tale he tells that

when they first began sailing, everything went well until an Albertose flew

by. He killed the bird believing that it brought along a storm. The storm

was so strong that the ship got carried away by the wind to the freezing

shores of Antartica and then kept tossing here and there because of the

storm. Many of his crew members had died because of the cold and intense

thirst (The Rime of the Ancynt Marinere, 115-118). At the end, the narrator of

the tale- the old mariner, is saved and is back home. Yet he is still troubled

by his guilt of killing an element in nature that he decided to narrate his

tale to everyone he met even when they were all irritated with the story.

However, the listener of the tale wakes up the next day as “a wiser and a

sadder man.”

Wordsworth in We are Seven and Anecdote for Fathers shows that a child’s

innocence can teach us a lot. In their innocence they have reached at a state

of mind where they are optimistic even in their sad situation. The little girl

in We are Seven is so hopeful that she will see her dead siblings again.

Young Edward prefers to live a free life on the shore of Kilve rather than

spending his life in a scientifically advanced surrounding where

everything is controlled. In this poem, Wordsworth emphasizes the

importance of the life they lived before the industrial revolution, the life of

freedom and peace where the father of Edward grew up in and is trying to

suppress his longing for the shores of Kilve by thinking good of the Liswyn

farm (9-12).

In his poem Expostulation and Reply, Wordsworth was so immersed in

nature that he chose to learn and sink in his thoughts of nature and fell in

love with it every day. Wordsworth answers his annoyed friend that one

can learn more from nature than other scholarly education thriving at the

time (Wordsworth, 10-16).

(579 words)

References:

 Brett, R.L and A.R. Jones., editors. Lyrical Ballads: Wordsworth &

Coleridge. Routledge, 1991.

 Wordsworth, William. Preface to lyrical ballads. Biggs and Co. Bristol.

1800.

 https://www.enotes.com/homework-help/what-major-themes-lyrical-ballads-

629220#:~:text=The%20basic%20themes%20of%20Lyrical%20Ballads%20are%20nature,quote%

20another%20eNote%20%28which%20you%20can%20find%20here%29%3A

 https://lyricalballadssfu.wordpress.com/the-mad-mother/

 https://www.cram.com/essay/William-Wordsworth-Expostulation-And-Reply-

Analysis/PKQ6WP53GZKW#:~:text=In%20Expostulation%20and%20Reply%2C%20William%20W

ordsworth%20is%20responding,of%20the%20time%20such%20as%20reading%20and%20writin

g.

 https://www.supersummary.com/lyrical-ballads/summary/

 https://poemanalysis.com/william-wordsworth/we-are-

seven/#:~:text=Summary%20of%20We%20Are%20Seven%20We%20Are%20Seven,seem%20to

%20understand%20that%20her%20siblings%20have%20died.

 https://ibwrittenworksamples.blogspot.com/2013/02/commentary-on-anecdote-for-fathers-

by.html

 https://www.bibguru.com/g/mla-edited-book-

citation/#:~:text=%20To%20cite%20an%20edited%20book%20in%20a,year%20of%20publicatio

n%20as%20presented%20in...%20More%20

 https://www.lib.uchicago.edu/media/images/Lyrical_Ballads_With_Other_Poems.ori

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My ISA of Literary Criticism or lit-crit as we called it back when I was pursuing my third year in BA at Carmel College, Goa. I don't remember the marks I scored for this though this took me back to 2020-2021, the year I was in the final year of BA.