The "Honourable Characteristics of Poetry": Two Hundred Years of Lyrical Ballads

It can be argued that Lyrical Ballads is the most significant book of poetry published in the last 200 years. The reason for this is that the poems and their authors have influenced the generations of poets who have flourished in their wake, even to the end of the 20th century. Wordsworth and Coleridge cannot have understood the full importance of their little book when they saw it pass from the hands of their publishers into the hands of the public. Each of the contributors in this volume in the Romantic Circles Praxis Series helps us to see how the poems have continued to be important and relevant, especially with respect to American writers and readers.