The digital Lyrical Ballads, co-edited by Bruce Graver and Ron Tetreault, was originally launched on Romantic Circles in 1998. The project was hosted on a separate server, not on the main server space for Romantic Circles maintained by the Maryland Institute of Technology (MITH), and so the project disappeared even before the transition of Romantic Circles from the University of Maryland to the University of Colorado.(1) During the summer of 2024, the Director of Romantic Circles, Thora Brylowe, organized a meeting between Laura Mandell and Bruce Graver in order to discuss the possibility of reviving the edition.
Reader, it was possible. You can now, as of April 1, 2026, access the new digital Lyrical Ballads, edited by Bruce Graver, technical editor, Laura Mandell. This digital edition presents all 25 copies of Lyrical Ballads illustrating various states of the first four editions (1798-1805), including a pirated edition printed in Philadelphia.
Rapid changes in the evolution of digital media threaten the loss of all digital scholary work, a bane for scholars attempting to create editions that endure. ALL the work of carefully copying and recording features of these copies of Lyrical Ballads could very easily have been lost. But Dr. Graver encoded information about these 25 copies by following the recommendations of the Text Encoding Iniative Consortium (TEI). While the base code he used was SGML which is no longer recommended for use by the TEI guidelines for creating digital editions, the promise of TEI has proved true: the TEI tags that Dr. Graver used did in fact preserve his meticulous editorial work. The image to the left reveals ALL that remained of the original digital edition before we began working to re-launch. It was all we needed.
With pride in Bruce's willingness to adhere to standards developed by leaders in the field of digital editing, Romantic Circles presents to you the revived digital Lyrical Ballads, currently living on a static server and in code format that will make preservation for the future most possible and likely.(2)
Please do email us when you find errors or confusing ambiguities; unbound by print, we can make corrections and adjustments. And we so much appreciate any input by the user community, promising that we have designed this work to last.
1. The old site is still visible via the Wayback Machine, portions of it saved by Library of Congress.
2. We are adhering to principles articulated by the Endings Project at the University of Victoria.
