SOURCE: Parrish, Stephen Maxfield. “The Ballad as Pastoral.” In The Art of the “Lyrical Ballads,” pp. 149-87. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973.

In the following excerpt, Parrish maintains that in the Lyrical Ballads of 1798 and 1800, Wordsworth combined eighteenth-century traditions of the ballad and pastoral genres.

One nearly forgotten episode in the history of Lyrical Ballads points up with wonderful irony the tensions of that unequal balance between poetry of the supernatural and poetry of common life: if Coleridge had been able to finish “Christabel” Wordsworth would never have written “Michael.” The episode sprawled over the spring, summer, and autumn of 1800, coming to a climax in the first week of October. By this date Wordsworth had mailed off in a series of letters to his printer all his copy for the second volume of 1800, together with the celebrated “Preface” to be printed with Volume I.¹ While waiting for Coleridge to...