Clips from Pandaemonium, Film on Wordy and Coleridge

Frost at Midnight and Coleridge and the Wordsworth talk poetics:

Context for Lyrical Ballads: Percy's Reliques (+short reading assignment)

In the eighteenth century, the English evince a rising interest in their own literary past.  Antiquaries gathered old songs from various provinces, effectively converting local oral culture into a national literate one.  No publication was more important in this development than The Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (also called "Percy's Reliques"), edited by Bishop Thomas Percy (1st ed., 1765).  The book was celebrated, reprinted several times during the remainder of the century.

Wordsworth and Coleridge were both profoundly impacted by this book, particularly by its manifold displays of the ballad form (more on this form this week).  Prior to reading Coleridge's "Rime," please read "Sir Patrick Spens" (printed as "Sir Patrick Spence" in Percy) a very popular poem that appeared in Percy's book: http://www.exclassics.com/percy/perc15.htm

Wednesday's Reading: Coleridge's Rime (1798 text)

Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere" was the first poem printed in the first edition of the history-of-English-poetry-altering collection Lyrical Ballads (1st ed., 1798), that book being our concern for the next few class sessions.  Wordsworth's "Lines" (aka "Tintern Abbey") was the last poem.  We'll talk more about the poem's fate on Wednesday.  For now, it's important to note simply that Coleridge revised the poem several times, including reducing its number of archaisms in the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800) and adding marginal glosses in the widely anthologized edition of 1817 (that's the one in your textbook).

We'll be reading the 1798 edition, which can be found at the following link... PLEASE PRINT IT OUT: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/9622/9622-h/9622-h.htm#poem1

(If that link for some reason fails to serve its purpose, use this site: http://www.wordsworth.org.uk/history/index.asp?pageid=154 )