The Function of the Author and the Poetic Experiments in Lyrical Ballads of 1798

1798년 『서정민요집』의 저자의 기능과 시적 실험

This paper aims at assessing the significance of Lyrical Ballads of 1798, the agreed inaugurator of English Romanticism, in terms of such key concepts as poetic "experiments," "conversation," and the authorial function. The 1798 volume marks an interesting incidence in which an author with no tangible substantiality can wield his authorial function over his works. The volume is signed without the named proper noun-its author is neither William Wordsworth nor Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The figure of the author in this case is realized by the poems he writes; he produces, and is produced by, his works-a fact that constitutes part of the poetic experiments manifested in the Advertisement. Working under this reciprocal production, the Author of the 1798 volume and his poems are collectively aiming at establishing a new class of poetry and an interpretive community. The notion of "conversation" is a key element in the thematic, stylistic ties among individual poems. Poems of the 1798 volume effect multi-layered, "blended" voices. Readers are expected to draw out the topological interweaving among poems through the practices of dialogic reading. In this light, the sequential necessity of "The Rime" and "Tintern Abbey" should be emphasized. They are stitched together in a logic of textual placement and the transition from one to the other is never arbitrary. Most of all, they are working under the same authorial function, complementing each other, and addressing the same poetic project in different textual locations. As an inaugural work of English Romanticism, Lyrical Ballads of 1798 in fact makes so many things happen and yet again anticipates something yet to come with elusiveness. The value of this poetic experiments should be judged not only by what is claimed in it, but what it sets out to do and "how far" it will be performed, as implied in the Advertisement. The efficacy of the volume, more than anything else, is dependent upon the performative power of words.