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Abbey"]. In this form the 'Lyrical Ballads' were published." Lyrical they hardly were, in any current meaning of that word; they were narrative. But they were ballads as the word was then understood. The two cardinal points of poetry that Coleridge says they had in view in this partnership production were both believed to be special marks of the ballad; the charm of homeliness and simplicity, and the spell of the supernatural and romantic. Bishop Percy's "Reliques of Ancient English Poetry," 1765, had created a taste for the traditional poetry of humble folk. Spreading to Germany and uniting there with the sentimental sensationalism of the eighteenth century, this taste found expression in Burger's "Lenore," which in turn had a powerful influence in England, five distinct translations of it appearing in 1796. Of the distinction so much insisted on by later analysts of the true popular ballad--its communal origin, its impersonality, its freedom from adornment, its lack of conscious art--the Englishman of Coleridge's time took no account. "The Ancient Mariner" is not a ballad in the sense in which "Sir Patrick Spens" or "Young Waters" is a ballad. It is in the highest degree a work of conscious and individual art. It is rather to be classed, like "Christabel," as a romance. But it was conceived and written under the influence of the "ballad revival," and bears many marks of that influence both in its general structure and in its details of workmanship. Much of the archaic diction and antique spelling, as well as the ruder grotesquerie, that in the first edition proclaimed its relation to the pseudo-balladry of the time disappeared in the later editions. But the archaisms, the "unpoetical" diction, and especially the disregard of tense coherence in the poem as we now have it, contribute greatly to the atmosphere of romance--as of a story removed alike from the commonplace experience of every day and from familiar literary conventions--which it was Coleridge's intention to produce. By a few devotional ejaculations--"Heaven's Mother send us grace!" "To Mary Queen the praise be given!"--we are made to feel that the Ancient Mariner lived before the Reformation, in the ages of wonder and faith. Repetition, as in many stanzas of Part IV., is a device caught from the folk-ballad and modified to produce the effect of a spell, which is so strong a mark of the poem. The abrupt opening, the unannounced transitions in dialogue, th
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