We did it! Out of the Faustian Aristocratic Age fire and into pure, straight up, uncut romanticism by way of Lyrical Ballads, the joint production of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Did Lyrical Ballads break new ground? … no. Did it shatter the poetic norms of British poetry all at once, brushing stuffy aristocratic heroic couplet satires into the dustbin of history? … no. Did it incite a literary revolution, breaking down the barriers for entry into the domain of poetry for the common British subject? … no. But it still was a major watershed production in the history of poetry in English, and though we deflate some expectations on this preliminary background episode on the historical context of the book, we do still recognize that Wordsworth and Coleridge made a major intervention on the function and purpose of poetry.

The Canon Ball is a member of the Agora podcast network. We’ve added a couple of great new shows to the network, like Pontifacts, a light hearted, only slightly blasphemous, papal history podcast that ranks the popes from Peter to Francis. And launching this month is Revolution 1, a podcast examination of the Tunisian Uprising and the Arab Spring that followed.

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