Review 'Must have come on like punk rock to a public groaning under the weight of over-cooked Augustanisms.' - The Guardian Must have come on like punk rock to a public groaning under the weight of over-cooked Augustanisms. - The Guardian Product De*ion "... must have come on like punk rock to a public groaning under the weight of over-cooked Augustanisms." The Guardian "The majority of the following poems are to be considered as experiments. They were written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure." --William Wordsworth, from the Advertisement prefacing the original 1798 edition When it was first published, Lyrical Ballads enraged the critics of the day: Wordsworth and Coleridge had given poetry a voice, one decidedly different to what had been voiced before. For Wordsworth, as he so clearly stated in his celebrated preface to the 1800 edition (a
