Wordsworth and Coleridge

Lyrical Ballads have always been wedded to controversy. Though the judgments of the periodicals and the ensuing authorial reaction have long since been superseded by a plethora of scholarly interpretations the debate still focuses on their elusive paradoxical character. Are the poems traditional or experimental a random collocation or an organised sequence? Patrick Campbell surveys the critical fluctuations of nearly two centuries while privileging recent approaches which have sought fresh perspectives on the volume - contextual formalist and genre based psycho-analytic materialist maverick.