SOURCE: McEathron, Scott. “Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, and the Problem of Peasant Poetry.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 54, no. 1 (June 1999): 1-26.

In the following essay, McEathron discusses Wordsworth's appropriation and reworking of the popular “peasant poetry” phenomenon for use in the Lyrical Ballads.

One of the unwritten histories within Romanticism is that of the relationship between Wordsworth's rustic poetics and the so-called “peasant” and “working-class” poetry of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. That it remains unwritten is, in some ways, an indication that Wordsworth has continued to win the battle for historical self-positioning that was always so important to him. Though in recent years we have become increasingly wary of Wordsworth's passionate and vigorous declarations of originality, for the most part his own self-contextualizing essays—especially the 1800 “Preface to Lyrical Ballads”—continue to govern our sense that the appearance of his “levelling” Muse marked a radical break in British literary...