And Then There Were Three

From author to appearance, purpose to publisher, the creation of the Lyrical Ballads was far from simple. Though the blank-verse Tintern Abbey is one of the “other poems” hidden in the back of just one edition of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ballads, the pastoral ode best represents the Wordsworthian anxiety that casts a shadow over the entire, complex publication of the Lyrical Ballads.

Tintern Abbey was not meant to be a part of the Lyrical Ballads, but was added at the last minute, when the poems were already in the printing press (Moorman). Though hasty and not quite fitting, Wordsworth’s final addition to the first volume of the Lyrical Ballads became its most illustrious installation. Though both the Lyrical Ballads and Tintern Abbey eventually found their own wide audiences, the single poem did not fit with the purpose of the whole.

Wordsworth and Coleridge set out to conduct an experiment. Coleridge’s short ballads were radical because they were, in his own words, “directed to persons and characters supernatural or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth.” Wordsworth’s mission was the opposite: “to give charm of novelty to things of every day” (cited by Rannie). Though Wordsworth’s 1798 Advertisement and Prefaces of 1800 and 1802, and Coleridge’s 1817 Biographia Literaria explain the experiment clearly and directly, their initial intention for publication was nothing like the volumes of poems that were eventually produced.

The idea for a joint effort eventually came out of the Wordsworth and Coleridge’s partnership on The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. While Coleridge produced the bulk of the poem, its conception and a few revisions can be attributed to Wordsworth. Though this poem eventually gave birth to the Lyrical Ballads, initially, in January of 1798, debt-ridden Coleridge was going to publish it on its own in Richard Phillips’s Monthly Magazine (Jordan). This plan was soon abandoned for a collaboration with Bristol publisher Joseph Cottle.

As Coleridge was deciding what to do with his new poetry, Wordsworth was finishing a tragic play called The Borderers. When the play was rejected by the Covent Garden Theater, he vowed to work solely on a lengthy thoughtful poem—nothing like the short, sharp ballads that were soon to come (Jordan).

A joint effort was mentioned here and there, along with other ideas for ways in which Coleridge and Wordsworth could package their new works. Coleridge was more insistent on the joint publication than Wordsworth was. In fact, Wordsworth was reluctant to publish at all and declared, “It is a thing which I dread as much as death itself” (cited by Jordan). However, money problems forced both poets to take action.

Initially, Wordsworth was going to publish his works Salisbury Plain and Tale of a Woman for 20 guineas. However, Cottle offered William 30 guineas for his part in a collaboration with Coleridge. Though Wordsworth was reluctant first, Cottle’s “eagerness to serve” (Jordan) helped create the collection and his aid in providing Wordsworth with requested books and advanced payments encouraged the poet to publish the proposed volume. In essence, Wordsworth’s desperate need for money, particularly to fund a trip to Germany with the Coleridges and his sister, propelled the production of the Lyrical Ballads.

When the plan finally gelled in March of 1798, Wordsworth started rapidly churning out the short poems that would make up the bulk of the Lyrical Ballads. As Dorothy Wordsworth told her friend, Mary Hutchinson, on March 5, “his faculties seem to expand every day, he composes with more facility than he did, as to the mechanism of poetry, and his ideas flow faster than he can express them” (Jordan).

In late March, in the middle of this production, Coleridge visited the Wordsworths with his completed Ancient Mariner. When Cottle came to spend a week with the two poets in late May, they all agreed that Coleridge’s supernatural ballad would lead off their collection of poems. Cottle returned to Bristol with The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in hand, as well as an agreed upon title for the whole collection, the Lyrical Ballads.

After Cottle left, Coleridge wrote him a letter further explaining the mission of the Lyrical Ballads:

We deem that the volumes offered to you are to a certain degree one work, in kind tho’ not in degree, as an Ode is one work-& that our different poems are as stanzas, good relatively rather than absolutely:-Mark you, I say in kind tho’ not in degree.—(cited by Jordan)

The Lyrical Ballads gained a specific and radical purpose that Wordsworth and Coleridge would have to defend. Thus, Wordsworth began to show deep concern for his hard work and its revolutionary mission. The primary poet often visited Bristol over the next few months to oversee the production of the poems (Rannie). As the purpose of the work specified, so did the appearance. Coleridge also demanded, with Wordsworth’s support, that there be “18 lines per page” and “the lines closely printed” (cited by Jordan). So, Wordsworth made sure that these details, along with the arrangement of the ballads, were in concert with his and Coleridge’s wishes.

Wordsworth made his last visit to Bristol before the poems went to the press on July 2, after packing up his belongings from Alfoxden and dropping them off with the Coleridges in Nether Stowey. On the tenth of July, rather than find a place to stay for a few days, William and Dorothy went out exploring along the valley of the River Wye. They crossed the Severn Ferry and walked to Tintern Abbey, averaging about twenty miles per day. From there, they headed

along the river through Monmouth to Goodrich Castle, there slept, and returned the next day to Tintern, thence to Chepstow, and from Chepstow back again in a boat to Tintern, where (they) slept, and thence back in a small vessel to Bristol. (cited by Butler and Green)

From this excursion came Wordsworth’s famed pastoral poem, Tintern Abbey. Though the poem did not use the language of the common man but rather the “diction of transcendental beauty” (Jordan), nor did it fit in as a “stanza” in the poetic volume, its presence is intrinsic to the completion of the Lyrical Ballads. Wordsworth obviously believed in its necessity, as he ran the poem to Bristol from Tintern Abbey on July 13, composing the last twenty lines as he descended the into the city, in order to ensure its place within the Lyrical Ballads (Moorman).

It is unclear whether Tintern Abbey’s position as the last poem in the volume was placed purposely or was subject to mere timing. Regardless, its situation suits it well. Tintern Abbey provides a step back from compact tales about fictional characters and returns to Wordsworth himself. It gives insight into all of the Lyrical Ballads by revealing Wordsworth’s personal transformation throughout the development of the collection. Wordsworth said, in a note accompanying the 1800 publication of the Lyrical Ballads, “Not a line of Tintern Abbey was altered, and not any part of it written down until I reached Bristol” (cited by Moorman). The poem is pure Wordsworth. The stuttering (“these hedgerows—hardly hedgerows”) and inconsistency (there is no actual mention of the abbey or the river in the poem) that resulted from Wordsworth’s improvisational technique is representative of Wordsworth’s inability to accept completion, as is evident by the two subsequent editions of the Lyrical Ballads. Unlike the 1798 and 1800 editions, the 1800 and 1802 editions were essentially the same. Wordsworth could have simply reissued the poems in 1802, but his perfectionism prevented him from republishing without first dissecting and reworking each poem. Evidence of this scrutiny remains on his copious manuscripts that were crossed-out, reworked, and underlined to illegibility. Even the fair copies of his poems were covered with “interlining” and “marginalia” (Gill). With Tintern Abbey, he started with the idea of writing on his visit to the Wye (as can be extrapolated from the title) and ended up with a poem about himself and his desire to leave an impression on his audience. Though within the poem, his audience is only his sister, the success of the Lyrical Ballads gave Wordsworth the power to speak to the world.

The Lyrical Ballads, though, were not instantly successful. In March of 1799, Sara Coleridge commented, “The Lyrical Ballads are not esteemed well here, but the Nightingale and the River Y (Wye; i.e., Tintern Abbey)” (cited by Butler and Green). Due to the consequential “heavy sale”(Jordan), after Cottle printed about 500 copies, he handed the job over to James and Arthur Arch of London. However, evidence points to the fact that the kindly Cottle had not even finished printing the ballads before he decided to get rid of them. He could have been tipped off by an early viewing of Robert Southey’s criticism that Cottle knew would eventually hurt the sale. It is also possible that, going into the project, Cottle already had plans to make more money by owning the copyright to the ballads, but not publishing them.

One piece of evidence pointing to Cottle’s desire to avoid public association with the ballads and to eventually get rid of his duty to them is in his title page:

LYRICAL BALLADS WITH A FEW OTHER POEMS BRITSOL: PRINTED BY BIGGS AND COTTLE, FOR T.N. LONGMAN, PATERNOSTER-ROW, LONDON: 1798.

The fact that Cottle adds “For T.N Longman” indicates that he had hoped that Longman, a London bookseller, would publish it, or at least serve as an agent. Cottle’s behavior was not all that surprising. He had gone through a similar process of handing off his publishing duties with Southey’s Joan of Arc and had been successful (Jordan). However, what is surprising about the changing hands is the fact that neither Wordsworth nor Coleridge was informed of the changes.

On September 15, Wordsworth was already in Germany, on the trip that the revenue of Lyrical Ballads would allow him to take. The poems were probably published on that same day in Bristol, but all the way into October, Wordsworth was unaware of their fate. From Germany, Wordsworth wanted to try to boost sales, so he slipped behind Cottle’s back to find a new publisher in London, where there was a better market, completely unaware that Cottle had already done the same to him.

In early October, as Wordsworth tried to set up a deal with Joseph Johnson of Saint Paul’s Church Yard in London, advertisements were appearing in various daily magazines, announcing the anonymous publication of the Lyrical Ballads by J. and A. Arch. Hence, Cottle’s maneuvering prevented Wordsworth’s deal from going through.

At their release, the Lyrical Ballads were widely criticized, but particularly by the upper-class that was offended by the common language of the anonymous poet, who was not worthy of such recognition. Even though Tintern Abbey did not posses this same “flaw,” it was still looped into some of the criticism and pegged by the Monthly Review as “somewhat tinctured with gloomy, narrow, and unsociable ideas” (cited by Jordan).

Although critics initially did not favor the Lyrical Ballads, the volume was subject to popular success. By April 1800, the sales rose high enough to inspire Wordsworth to put out a second edition. The 1800 volume was hardly anything like the original. Wordsworth put his name to the project and completely edged out Coleridge—a fate that was evident ever since Wordsworth’s disregard of Coleridge when adding Tintern Abbey to the first edition. He added a Preface in place of the Advertisement, in which he also took away the supernatural aspect of his experiment to focus solely on evoking mystical emotions from common experiences. Wordsworth had lost his appreciation for privacy and disdain for publishing, and threw himself whole-heartedly into the Lyrical Ballads as a money-making machine. Wordsworth proved to be financially-savvy, as his two nineteenth-century, manufactured editions brought in a total of eighty pounds (Jordan).

Wordsworth accrued a greater income from forging his desire to limit his audience by publishing in the Courier and the Morning Post. However, many the poems published in newspapers and magazines were submitted by Coleridge along with his own works. When Wordsworth did submit himself, it was under the pressure of the owner of the newspapers, Daniel Stuart, to whom Wordsworth was in debt. (Woof). Wordsworth never intended for his poems to reach such a wide audience as they did within the newspapers. However, the present dispersal of the poems would have been completely incomprehensible. From volumes upon volumes of edited and re-released Lyrical Ballads to a comprehensive website dedicated to the collection, complete within images of original manuscripts (Graver), the Lyrical Ballads have worked their way into the minds of millions, and, despite its placement within the volume, Tintern Abbey is at the forefront.

REFERENCES

Gill, Stephen. William Wordsworth: A Life. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989.

Graver, Bruce and Ronald Tetreault. Editing Lyrical Ballads for the Electronic Environment. 1998. Romanticism on the Net. 4 March 2003. <http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scat0385/electronicLB.html>.

Jordan, John E. Why the Lyrical Ballads? London: University of California Press, 1976.

Moorman, Mary. William Wordsworth: The Early Years, 1770-1803. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957.

Rannie, David Watson. Wordsworth and His Circle. London: Methuen & Co., 1907.

Woof, R.S. Wordsworth’s Poetry and Stuarts Newspapers: 1797-1803. 1962. University of Virginia. 4 March 2003.<http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-sb? id=sibv015&images=bsuva/sb/images&data=/texts/english/bibliog/SB&tag=public&part=10&division=div>.