Lyrical ballads

Wordsworth's book of questions

pp. 63-75

in: Peter Larkin, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012

Abstract

Lyrical Ballads can be considered as Wordsworth's "book," not in order to complete the process of removing Coleridge from it, begun by Wordsworth himself in its later editions, but to suggest that the questions we encounter there and witness as a part of narrative experiment constitute a peculiarly Wordsworthian "book of questions," including the poems he did not write himself. Such a "book" would not have been possible without Coleridge's participation. Not only did Coleridge become a burden to the public acceptance of Lyrical Ballads in Wordsworth's eyes but his "The Ancient Mariner" took on the more burdened side of this questioning process. The strategy of questioning here called Wordsworth's "book of questions' required not only the varying voices within Wordsworth's own poems but also the distinct, almost alien voice that Coleridge discovered in his "The Ancient Mariner," the poem that was to open the "book." I take the phrase "book of questions' from a series of writings published by Edmond Jabès during the 1960s and 1970s. It is worth noting that contemporary reaction to Jabès was to raise the question of genre, much as did the earliest critics of Lyrical Ballads. Le Livre des Questions has been described as a "mosaic of fragments, aphorisms, dialogues, songs and commentaries," terms not wholly inapplicable to Lyrical Ballads itself.¹