『서정담시집』, 실험적이었는가?

Was Lyrical Ballads Experimental?

Traditionally, William Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads had been regarded as the beginning of British Romanticism on the ground that it was completely new, compared with the previous poems. Wordsworth's argument that those poems were experiments and materially different from the poems generally approved had been accepted as true. However, after Robert Mayo argued that his poems were not completely new, compared with the magazine poetry of his time, many critics began to doubt Wordsworth's claim about his experimental poems. Those critics who believe that the poet was not politically radical even in his youth tend to be skeptical of his integrity as a poet due to his apparently false claim. My argument is that when Wordsworth addressed his readers in the Advertisement and the Preface of Lyrical Ballads, his intended readers were not magazine readers but book readers, for whom the poems were experiments indeed. In Wordsworth's time, what book readers expected was very different from what magazine readers did. Therefore, his claim, I argue, that his poems were experiments was true and it is wrong to regard him as a political conservative in spite of his radical poems shown in Lyrical Ballads.