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Lyrical Ballads (Routledge Classics)

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Lyrical Ballads is a collection of experimental poems that tried to unite the high, introspective, monumental style of the lyric with the low, earthy, narrative style of the traditional English ballad. The result of such an experiment is a poem easy and pleasing to read, but containing hidden depths and subtleties that can be explored for a lifetime. Though avant garde in its time, these lyrical ballads have become part of the canon read by many highschool students: "The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner", "Strange Fits of Passion I Have Known", and "Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey" are all here, along with many other treasures that sometimes get left out of the textbooks and anthologies (I'm especially fond of the very funny and sweet long poem, "The Idiot Boy"). If you want to get a sample of what these poems are like, just google any of the titles I've listed above and you can read them for yourself.

Since the good people at Routledge aren't trying to cram an extremely large amount of poetry into this book, the font is a perfect size and there is ample room for notes in the margins. It contains very good supplementary material, including Wordsworth's famous "Preface". The introductory material, notes, and appendices are all very useful and interesting. One slightly irksome point was that you won't find the individual poems listed in the table of contents; instead they are listed in the indexes at the back of the book, first by title and then by first line. It takes a little getting used to, but ultimately it's not a big deal.

If you're looking for a good edition of the Lyrical Ballads, if you just want a good introduction to Wordsworth and Coleridge (though I should point out that most of these are by Wordsworth), or if you like good poetry in general, then you can't miss with this book.