LYRICAL BALLADS Also available from Routledge: A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE Second Edition Harry Blamires ELEVEN BRITISH POETS* An Anthology Edited by Michael Schmidt WILLIAM WORDSWORTH Selected Poetry and Prose Edited by Jennifer Breen SHELLEY Selected Poetry and Prose Edited by Alasdair Macrae * Not available from Routledge in the USA Lyrical Ballads WORDSWORTH AND COLERIDGE The text of the 1798 edition with the additional 1800 poems and the Prefaces edited with introduction, notes and appendices by R.L.BRETT and A.R.JONES LONDON and NEW YORK First published as a University Paperback 1968 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Second edition published 1991 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Introduction and Notes © 1963, 1991 R.L.Brett and A.R.Jones All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Wordsworth, William 1770–1850 Lyrical ballads: the text of the 1978 edition with the additional 1800 poems and the prefaces. —2nd edn 1. English poetry I. Title II. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 1772–1834 III. Brett, R.L. (Raymond Laurence) IV. Jones, A.R. (Alun Richard) 821.7 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Wordsworth, William, 1770–1850. Lyrical ballads/Wordsworth and Coleridge; the text of the 1978 edition with the additional 1800 poems and the prefaces edited with introduction, notes, and appendices by R.L.Brett and A.R.Jones. p. cm Originally published: London: Methuen, 1968. Originally v published in series: University paperbacks: UP277. Includes bibliographical references and indexes. I. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1772–1834. II. Brett, R.L. III. Jones, A.R. IV. Title PR 5869.L9 1991 821'.7–dc20 91–13985 ISBN 0-203-41387-3 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-72211-6 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-06388-4 (Print Edition) Contents Foreword viii Foreword to the 1991 edition xii A selected bibliography and list of xiii abbreviations Introduction xviii Lyrical Ballads, 1798 Advertisement 7 Poems 9 Lyrical Ballads, 1800 Love 117 Poems, Volume II 123 Preface 1800 version (with 1802 233 variants) Notes to the poems 259 Appendix A: Text of Lewti; or, the Circassion Love- 307 Chant Appendix B: Wordworth’s Appendix on Poetic 311 Diction from 1802 edition of Lyrical Ballads Appendix C: Some contemporary criticisms of Lyrical 317 Ballads vii Index of titles 341 Index of first lines 343 Foreword For many years now the student of Lyrical Ballads has had to rely either upon the edition of H.Littledale, first published in 1911, or upon that of G.Sampson, first published in 1903.1 However, Littledale reproduces the 1798 poems only, while Sampson’s edition is an exact reprint of the 1805 text, though it gives the readings of earlier versions. In any case both appeared too early to draw upon the great amount of scholarly work on Wordsworth and Coleridge completed since that date. The letters of Wordsworth and his sister, and those of Coleridge, have since appeared in the admirable editions prepared respectively by Professor de Selincourt and Professor E.L.Griggs; and Professor de Selincourt has also given us the Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth. E.K.Chambers and Mrs. Mary Moorman have provided excellent biographies of the two poets; Miss Kathleen Coburn has made available a wealth of hitherto unpublished material in Coleridge’s Notebooks; and there has been a stream of critical studies. A new edition not only profits from this scholarship but makes it possible to provide the student with an up-to-date bibliography of this work. The present edition owes much to the work of Miss Helen Darbishire and Professor E.de Selincourt, the editors of the Oxford English Texts edition of Wordsworth’s Poetical Works and to the work of E.H.Coleridge, the editor of the Oxford edition of Coleridge’s Poems. Their editions stand as monuments of scholarship which cannot be rivalled or superseded, but, nevertheless, they do not conveniently provide the student with 1 Cf. also Lyrical Ballads, with a few other poems, N.Douglas, London, 1926 (Facsimile of 1798 ed.). ix Lyrical Ballads as it first appeared to the public. The Oxford Wordsworth, rightly for its purpose, uses the grouping of the poems and the text chosen by Wordsworth himself for the 1850 edition. Similarly, the Oxford Coleridge uses the 1834 text. Only by a certain editorial labour can the reader achieve from these the text and grouping of the poems as they were originally published. The aim of the present volume is to make available to the reader the text of Lyrical Ballads as it appeared in print in 1798 and 1800, together with the variant readings of the 1802 and 1805 editions. We have incorporated in the text the Errata which were issued with the first two editions, but otherwise we have reproduced the poems exactly as they were first published. We have endeavoured in the text and by means of notes to provide a history of the poems from 1798 to 1805, after which Wordsworth’s poems were merged in the 1815 and subsequent editions of his collected works and Coleridge’s contributions were transferred to his Sybilline Leaves of 1817 and to later collections of his poetry. Lyrical Ballads was originally published in September, 1798.1 The title-page bore the Bristol imprint and the book was printed by Biggs and Cottle of Bristol for T.N.Longman of Paternoster Row, London. While the 1798 volume was in the press it occurred to the authors that one of the poems, Lewti; or, the Circassian Love- Chant, might disclose the secret of the authorship, for it had been published in The Morning Post for April 13th, 1798, and was known to be by Coleridge. The sheets containing this poem were, therefore, cancelled and The Nightingale substituted. A few copies of the volume with Lewti found their way on to the market, but most copies contain The Nightingale. We have given the text of The Nightingale where it appeared in the majority of copies and reprinted Lewti in Appendix A. Soon after publication Cottle sold the whole of the remaining copies of the first edition, which had numbered five hundred copies, to Messrs. J. and A.Arch of Gracechurch Street, London. This firm issued the book with a new title-page which bore a London imprint. 1 Cf. ‘The Publication of the “Lyrical Ballads”’, R.W.Daniels, Modern Language Review, vol. xxxiii, 1938, pp. 406–410, and ‘The Printing of Lyrical Ballads, 1798’, D.F.Foxon, The Library, 5th Series, vol. ix, 1954, pp. 221–241. x The second edition of the poems was published in two volumes which bore the date 1800, though they were not issued until January 1801. Only the first volume bore the words Second Edition on the title-page, for the second volume had entirely new contents and was regarded as a first edition. The poems in the first volume were the same as those of the 1798 edition which contained The Nightingale, except that The Convict was omitted, Coleridge’s poem Love was added, and Lines Written near Richmond was divided into two separate poems. The order of the poems was changed in this first volume, the titles of some poems altered, and substantial changes made in the text. We have given details of these changes in footnotes to the 1798 text. In addition to the poems, we have also reprinted the Advertisement with which Wordsworth prefaced the 1798 poems, and the Preface which took its place in the 1800 edition. The alterations and additions which Wordsworth made to this Preface in the 1802 edition of the poems are given in footnotes to the 1800 text. We have also reproduced in Appendix B the text of Wordsworth’s Appendix on Poetic Diction which first appeared in the 1802 edition. It is curious that despite the industry of scholars there is still no practical edition of Lyrical Ballads to which students may refer. In the attempt to fill this gap, we have thought it unnecessary to produce a variorum edition of the poems; the history of individual poems is well enough documented in the collected works of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Our main concern has been to make the poems readily available as a unique body of poetry— in all its freshness and naïvety— relying on the original texts of 1798 and 1800 to make their own impact. For this reason we have indicated only what we consider to be the significant variants between the texts and tried to keep the text as clear and unencumbered as possible. We have, for the most part, ignored the various trivia such as changes in capitalisation and punctuation as being likely to obscure the text so far as the average reader is concerned. In noting variants we have recorded only the text in which the change first appeared so that the reader may assume that if no subsequent emendation is recorded the variant stands in the subsequent texts also. We are convinced that it is as a body of poetry that Lyrical Ballads first influenced the course of English poetry and that it is as a body of poetry that it should be studied.