SOURCE: Prickett, Stephen. “Unity and Diversity.” In Wordsworth and Coleridge: The “Lyrical Ballads,” pp. 22-50. London: Edward Arnold, 1975.

In the following excerpt, Prickett highlights several key poems of the Lyrical Ballads as contributing to the unity of this collection.

So much for the barebones story of the Lyrical Ballads. But what of the poems themselves? We have already seen how hard it was for contemporary readers and reviewers to grapple with the central paradox of this immodest collection of verses: that this diversity of themes and styles had a life and unity which depended on the very tensions of a tight-rope act in which the safety-net was first removed. If their point was to be made at all, ‘The Idiot Boy’, ‘The Mad Mother’, or ‘Simon Lee’ had to be about people or incidents that were trivial, trite, or grotesque. Moreover, they had to be part of the...