60 Great Books - 7 - Bauman Rare Books “Emotion Recollected In Tranquility”: The Important Lyrical Ballads, With Wordsworth’s Famous Preface, The Manifesto Of The Romantics 5. WORDSWORTH, William and COLERIDGE, Samuel Taylor. Lyrical Ballads, with Other Poems. London, 1800. Two volumes. Small octavo, modern full brown morocco. $12,500. Second, definitive, and first complete edition of this touchstone of English Romanticism, containing the first appearance of Wordsworth’s landmark Preface, defining his revolutionary theory of poetry, “his revolt against 18th-century artificiality” (PMM), bound by Zaehnsdorf. In the 1798 one-volume first edition of Lyrical Ballads the poets rejected the classical principles of beauty and formal style, choosing instead to elevate the lives of ordinary men and women, and to write in the language of ordinary people. Amazingly, that edition was such a financial disaster that Longman, upon purchasing the printer’s rights from Joseph Cottle, valued it at “nothing” and sent it back to Wordsworth for revision. This is a mixed edition containing the first edition of Volume II and the preferred second edition of Volume I, containing for the first time Wordsworth’s famous Preface, in which he argues that poetry “takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” It should provide access to the emotions contained in memory, and promote “the worth and dignity of individual man.” Moreover, its first principle should be pleasure— through a rhythmic and beautiful expression of feeling— as all human sympathy is based on a subtle pleasure that is “the naked and native dignity of man.” Wordsworth’s Preface became the revolutionary manifesto of the Romantic poets and is now considered to mark the beginning of the Romantic Movement in English literature. Volume I bound without errata and leaf of advertisement. PMM 256. Wise, 6-8. Title pages neatly rehinged. Fine condition, attractively bound. “No poems have ever indicated so exquisite a perception of the beauty of the outer world or a more passionate love and reverence for that beauty.” –Thomas Babington Macaulay
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