Dialogue and Monologue in the 1798 Lyrical Ballads :: 1798 Lyrical Ballads Bicentennial Essays

Dialogue and Monologue in the 1798 Lyrical BalladsCommemorating the bicentennial of the 1798 Lyrical Ballads implies something closely the intensity levels innovations as healthy as its continuity. It is no longer possible to believe that Romanticism started here (as I at least was taught in school). Even if we cannot claim 1798 as a flexible joint in literary history, though, there is something appealing about celebrating the volumes attitude to newness, as well as the less contentious fact of its enduring importance to readers of Romantic-period poetry. What maven risks, of course, is the currently ubiquitous accusation that one is repeating the self-representations of an inappropriately authoritative version of Romanticism, as my school-teacher certainly was (though none of us knew it at the time). There is thence something innately Wordsworthian about the bicentennial, with its celebration of the endurance of a single past event. We recognise this rhetoric of revisitation a nd futurity it is the language spoken by the affirming instance of Lines written above Tintern Abbey, the concluding statement of the 1798 volume. The poem reads rather like the recitation of a liturgy. Wordsworth recollects his own faith by restating it, and in doing so he discovers its truth and its guarantee of continuity in this moment there is life and food / For time to come years (ll. 65-6). However sceptical readers have become about the Wordsworthian-Coleridgean creed, the monumental quality of the volume is not entirely a figment of a literary history in search of Great Traditions Tintern Abbey writes its own futureand the future of Lyrical Ballads 1798 as a wholeas well as writing Wordsworths (and Dorothys). We may no longer assent to the idea of 1798 as a new beginning, but we still have to accommo involution the volumes own assertions about continuity and change.Perhaps the temptation to go on marking the date arises from the presence of these assertions. Even without the extended prefaces of the later editions, the 1798 Lyrical Ballads is a strikingly self-conscious collection. It opens and closes with a pair of manifestos. The Advertisement announces a new poetic practice Tintern Abbey bears find oneself to the final achievement of imaginative, moral and domestic security. Together, these two documents act like a set of quotation marks. They frame the stylistic and rhetorical character of the volume as a whole within another kind of voice, instructing, guiding, and (re)assuring. However we choose to take the grand Romantic