ABSTRACT
Two hundred years ago, a brace of young poets, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, scandalised polite society when they published the first edition of their poetic manifesto, Lyrical Ballads (Brett and Jones 1991). Inspired, in part, by the emancipatory euphoria that accompanied the unfurling of the French Revolution, and containing such never-to-be-forgotten (once-learnt-by-rote) classics as Tintern Abbey and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Lyrical Ballads ushered in a whole new era of Western culture, commonly known as romanticism or the romantic movement (Day 1996). True, Wordsworth and Coleridge didn’t actually employ the term ‘romantic’ (Furst 1971). The word and its cognates, what is more, were in widespread use prior to 1798 (Sanders 1996). Indeed, the originality of Lyrical Ballads has also been called into question, as has the extent of the controversy surrounding its publication (Ashton 1996). Nevertheless, it is generally acknowledged that, thanks in no small part to Wordsworth and Coleridge, the dog days of the eighteenth century witnessed a revolution in aesthetics, in sensibility, in thought. Not only did this represent, as Berlin (1991:209) rightly records, ‘the largest shift in European consciousness since the Reformation’, but romanticism is still with us in the shape of our own great ‘-ism’, our -ism in excelsis, the nulli secundus of -isms, postmodernism (Elam 1992; Livingston 1997; Readings and Schaber 1993).
