ABSTRACT
When placed beside Sexual Inversion, the Lyrical Ballads modulates into Symonds’s “key of blue.” Bringing inversion to bear on the highest poetry demands that we permit no sanctuary, not even iambic pentameter, from the pressure of sexuality. Wordsworth’s poems, in the Lyrical Ballads, were to treat “ordinary life,” and Coleridge’s, “supernatural” subjects. The Lyrical Ballads begins with a narrator equally sadistic and inseminating. His power to hurt and to heal sets forth a moral on which the poets’ collaborative enterprise depends: passive submission to a partner’s authority bears fruit. But the apprenticeship that one must serve to another’s authority entails, at first, silence. Wordsworth’s men are degenerate because they resemble his friend’s dread creation, the Ancient Mariner, a word hoarder, a Silas Marner who counts and recounts but hesitates to spend. Coleridge’s eye subdued Wordsworth, who saw no profit in being mesmerized; the Lyrical Ballads unfolds his resistance to the experience of being inseminated by a man.
