Lyrical Ballads | Criticism

This literature criticism consists of approximately 35 pages of analysis & critique of Lyrical Ballads.
This section contains 9,115 words
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SOURCE: McEathron, Scott. “Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, and the Problem of Peasant Poetry.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 54, no. 1 (June 1999): 1-26.

In the following essay, McEathron discusses Wordsworth's appropriation and reworking of the popular “peasant poetry” phenomenon for use in the Lyrical Ballads.

One of the unwritten histories within Romanticism is that of the relationship between Wordsworth's rustic poetics and the so-called “peasant” and “working-class” poetry of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. That it remains unwritten is, in some ways, an indication that Wordsworth has continued to win the battle for historical self-positioning that was always so important to him. Though in recent years we have become increasingly wary of Wordsworth's passionate and vigorous declarations of originality, for the most part his own self-contextualizing essays—especially the 1800 “Preface to Lyrical Ballads—continue to govern our sense that the appearance of his “levelling” Muse marked a radical break in British literary...

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This section contains 9,115 words
(approx. 31 pages at 300 words per page)
Buy the Critical Essay by Scott McEathron
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Critical Essay by Scott McEathron from Gale. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.