SOURCE: Parrish, Stephen. “‘Leaping and lingering’: Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads.” In Coleridge's Imagination: Essays in Memory of Pete Laver, edited by Richard Gravil, Lucy Newlyn, and Nicholas Roe, pp. 102-16. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

In the following essay, Parrish examines Coleridge's understanding of the ballad form, both as seen through his collaboration with Wordsworth in Lyrical Ballads and through his notion of the supernatural.

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One of the most colourful volumes of literary scholarship ever given to the world is a study of the working of Coleridge's imagination, ‘an absorbing adventure along the ways which the imagination follows in dealing with its multifarious materials—an adventure like a passage through the mazes of a labyrinth, to come out at last upon a wide and open sky’. Now more than half a century old, The Road to Xanadu was composed in a style that has rather fallen out of fashion...