A Natural Delineation of Human Passions: The Historic Moment of Lyrical Ballads

Most of the articles in A Natural Delineation of Human Passions originated in the Twelfth October Conference held in Leiden to celebrate the bicentenary of the publication of Lyrical Ballads. The first article, by the editor, An Historic Moment: ‘A Natural Delineation of Human Passions’ as a ‘New Morality’? , attempts to establish an historic and an historical context, both personal and political, for the six articles that follow, by Ake Bergvall, Myra Cottingham, C.P. Seabrook Wilkinson, James McGonigal, Jacqueline Schoemaker, and Suzanne E. Webster, which consider the themes of vagrancy and wandering in Lyrical Ballads, the expression of loss and compensation, and the consequences, both beneficial and perilous, for the language and rhetoric of poetry. Then three articles, by Annemarie Estor, Daniel Sanjiv Roberts, and Paul E.A. van Gestel, consider the ambience of science and philosophy in which Wordsworth and Coleridge strove to affirm the creative participation of poetry. After this, Jacqueline M. Labbe, Titus P. Bicknell, Robert Druce, and M. Van Wyk Smith discuss the parallel contributions of some of the more neglected contemporaries of the authors of Lyrical Ballads, not necessarily in English nor necessarily in England - Mary Robinson, Walter Savage Landor, Robert Bloomfield and Thomas Pringle. The volume concludes with an extended examination by Timothy Webb of the responses, both admiring and scornful, of the younger generation of Romantics to the legacy of Lyrical Ballads.