Why the Lyrical Ballads?: The Background, Writing, and Character of Wordsworth's 1798 Lyrical Ballads

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; 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...