Why the Lyrical Ballads? - John E. Jordan

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Résumé :
Why the Lyrical Ballads? illuminates the background, making, and distinctive character of Wordsworth's 1798 experiment by tracking a recurrent common resonance across poems, prefaces, and critical contexts. John E. Jordan's lucid study resists a single, neat thesis...

Biographie:
an ethics of empathy that draws readers into Betty Foy, Goody Blake, and the Idiot Boy without condescension...

Sommaire:
instead it pursues the book's many why's--why simplicity, why ballad form, why ordinary lives--and shows how they converge on Wordsworth's drive to universalize experience. Using the famous sense sublime passage from Tintern Abbey as a reflective lens (while pointedly treating the poem as a late, framing add-on to the first edition), Jordan locates the poet's commitment to permanence: elementary feelings, durable manners, and language adequate to the mind of man. He follows Wordsworth's self-declared aim to make poetry the history or science of feelings, clarifying the poet's paradox: passion rendered with the objectivity and communicability of a record, even as language strains toward what feels incommunicable. The result is a compelling portrait of a project that eschews topicality for the typical, elevates the everyday through various commonality, and seeks joy--not sentimentality--as the connective tissue between individual life and the one great Life.

Jordan's chapters map how this universalizing impulse shapes form and method: the ballad's lyric-narrative braid...