SOURCE: Campbell, Patrick. “Lyrical Ballads: The Current of Opinion,” and “Criticism in Context, 1797-98.” In Wordsworth and Coleridge: “Lyrical Ballads,” pp. 1-14, 15-34. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991.

In the following excerpt, Campbell provides an overview of critical reaction to Lyrical Ballads from earliest responses to the 1990s. Campbell then sketches the social and political context in which the collection was published and explores the philosophical aspects of the collaboration between Wordsworth and Coleridge.

Contemporaneous Criticism: the Magazines

‘Up to 1820 the name of Wordsworth was trampled under foot’, thundered De Quincey. While that is the over-emotional reaction of a friend, it is none the less true that Lyrical Ballads, aimed at the solar plexus of reader complacency, initially attracted some erratic counters. Cottle feared that such blows would destroy the entire enterprise: ‘the severity of most of the reviews’ was ‘so great that its progress to oblivion, notwithstanding the merits which...