Lyrical Ballads Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Heather Glen

Critical Essay by Heather Glen

SOURCE: Glen, Heather. “Morality through Experience: Lyrical Ballads 1798.” In Vision and Disenchantment: Blake's “Songs” and Wordsworth's “Lyrical Ballads,” pp. 224-59. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

In the following excerpt, Glen compares selected poems from the 1798 Lyrical Ballads with William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience.

But since a certain inequality of situation is necessary, and the present inequality, apparently more than that necessity requires, I am only desirous that the shade of distinction should rather be relieved than darkened; that in the picture of human life, the poor should not be ignominiously degraded in the background, merely to render the drawing picturesque, but that they should generously be represented on the canvas, with that dignity and importance to which they are really entitled.

(From The Cabinet, by a Society of Gentlemen, no. 1, October 1794)

However disconcerting their original readers may have found them, the poems of Lyrical...
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