SOURCE: Liu, Yu. “Revaluating Revolution and Radicalness in the Lyrical Ballads.” Studies in English Literature 36, no. 4 (autumn 1996): 747-61.

In the following essay, Liu examines the influence of the French Revolution on Wordsworth's poetry in Lyrical Ballads, suggesting that he attempted to work out his personal and political response to revolutionary ideas through his poetry.

Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads has been treated consistently in the past thirty years or so as both a consequence and an expression of deterministic history.¹ In particular, the inspirational origin and the motivational impetus of that poetic project are now generally accepted as inextricably intertwined with a personal reversal from high hopes for the social and political upheavals of France in the early 1790s to bitter disappointment and even despair in the mid-1790s. Yet what is retrospectively so interesting and enlightening about the Lyrical Ballads of 1798 is how the poet did not come across...