SOURCE: Stabler, Jane. “Guardians and Watchful Powers: Literary Satire and Lyrical Ballads in 1798.” In 1798: The Year of the “Lyrical Ballads,” edited by Richard Cronin, pp. 203-30. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998.

In the following essay, Stabler discusses Lyrical Ballads in the context of British satirical writings against the perceived threat of Jacobinism.

An enhanced sense of the dynamics of satire in the Romantic period may modify our understanding of the early reception of Lyrical Ballads. For a long time Lyrical Ballads was accepted uncritically as one of the originary texts of Romanticism. Readers followed William Hazlitt's ‘sense of a new style and a new spirit in poetry […] something of the effect that arises from the turning up of the fresh soil, or of the first welcome breath of Spring’.¹ Hazlitt was, of course, looking back on the experiment of Lyrical Ballads with a desire to make its ‘breath’ part of the...