Did Wordsworth Lie about Lyrical Ballads?

Abstract

The aim of this essay is to reaffirm Wordsworth's literary and political integrity by proving the veracity of his claim that the poems in the Preface were experiments. It argues against the skepticism of the New Historicist position which holds that Wordsworth was always deeply conservative, even when considering his early work, Lyrical Ballads, and that, consequently, Wordsworth's claim that the Ballads is a literary experiment does nothing to guarantee his posthumous reputation as a poet with radical political ideas. This position on Wordsworth was compounded by Robert Mayo's groundbreaking argument that his poems are not new, especially if we compare them with the kind of poetry that was already being published in magazines, and thus the poet's claim can no longer be taken at face value. Theodor Adorn, however, views the meaning of experiment as a way of testing the unknown, a way of foregrounding unsanctioned technical procedures at a historical moment in literature as well as in music. Wordsworth's anxiety, shown in the Preface, about the experimental nature of these poems can be seen as genuine once we understand that he was addressing book readers, not magazine readers.